Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Aren't you a fan of The Northman?

 

Das Boot: The Director's Cut

All 208 minutes. What a voyage. There are some gorgeous shots on the surface, and the music is stirring. Love all the food hanging all over the sub. All the extra personal stuff helps you get attached to the crew and hope for their safety. I had forgotten about that ending, though.

 

Best submarine film.

 

Das Boot is great.

 

I was very happy to catch the theatrical reissue

 

Napoleon Dynamite
2004

Breezy, silly, humorous, and highly quotable. It's not everyones style of humor, but I sure get a kick out of it everytime I see it. Good cast. Definitely a one of a kind movie.

Stay for the post credits scene.

Benny and Joon
1993

This a thoughtful, tender, and humorous film about a young woman who struggles with mental illness and who is cared for by her brother who seems to leave no time for himself aside from caring for Juniper and working as a mechanic.

Sam, played by Johnny Depp, arrives in their home after Joon looses at cards with one of Benny's friends who put "Sam" in the pot as it were, and Sam brings much hope, joy, and laughter into their lives with his quirky obsession with classic comedians like Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin whom he brilliantly imitates much to the delight of Joon and everyone who sees his "performances." Depp is pretty adorable in the role and it was refreshing to watch a movie without any cgi, swearing, gunfire, etc...

Benny and Joon is a slow paced and thoughtful character study that deals with a complex and painful issue in a generally peaceful and light way.

It was a really neat bonus to hear Chris Cornell singing Pushing Forward Back in one scene in which Sam is cleaning the kitchen.
This is a good movie.

Coincidentally, I believe both of these films are 98 minutes.

 

Mara Maru. A sunken-treasure adventure-noir hybrid, Mara Maru is the rare late-period Errol Flynn film that’s actually decent. Not spectacular, but decent. Flynn plays a salvage captain in the Philippines whose partner is murdered over a treasure that went down with their old PT boat during the war. He teams up with a bunch of blatantly shady characters chasing the treasure, led by Raymond Burr, to recover it, while rekindling an uneasy romance with his partner’s widow, whom he used to go with. It’s got just enough atmosphere, with its unique diving-for-treasure-in-the-Philippines setting, and just enough star power from Flynn, to get away with the fairly generic script and deliver the requisite thrills.

 

Scream (2022)

The latest film of the franchise features a new cast (as far as I know, I can't recall if I've seen any of the sequel films and these kids are far too young to have been in the original of course) along with legacy characters including Dewey, Gale, and Sidney). There's really not much to say about this film that wouldn't have been said in the previous half dozen films or however many sequels there's been. A new killer is running amok around the town of Woodsboro, and there's some kind of motive towards this that keeps you guessing as to who could it be. It's not scary of course. When I think of legit scary movies that would keep me up at night, I'd think Hereditary or Summerland; or the paranormal activity movies. This movie is all about cheesy dialogue and really dull characters you don't really care about. I liked the original Scream because it was a novelty of it's time. This movie just takes the same idea saturated already a half dozen times prior. Bringing back the legacy characters doesn't help. The only thing I did appreciate were the Easter Eggs and obviously nods to Wes Craven.


One question the movie didn't seem to answer,

Spoiler

how did Sidney know that Sam was Billy's biological daughter? Was it just because she looks a little like him?

 

"Hey Amleth, who do you feel like murdering today?"

"Whoever I feel like murdering, gosh."

 

But it's still classified in the horror genre, right? That's the only reason I was comparing it to some of those others of the last twenty years.

 

In a way, it was partially my criticism of it; I mean you suggested it's meant to be satire. I thought that was reserved for the parody films like the Scary Movie franchise. My point is that I'm just not sure what the Scream films are supposed to be. I mean yeah, it makes fun of itself pretty much throughout the film; but at the end of the day you'd assume people expected to be somewhat thrilled and a little scared. I felt neither with this one.

 

Mr Malcolm's List (2022)

If you appreciate quality movie making, you should definitely check this one out. A slight variation on Jane Austen romantic stories, this one stands out for having a cast that's primarily made up of POC; the gorgeous and very charming Frieda Pinto delivers a standout performance as the heroine of the story.
Very happy to have watched this one in a theater and looking forward to revisiting when it's available for home viewing.

 

Lightyear. I can totally see why this is Andy’s favourite movie.

 

The films have actually kind of gone for different kinds of horror, I think. I find the first one quite horrifying in terms of, especially, that opening kill with Drew Barrymore and then the climax in the kitchen is very disturbing. The second one is less horrifying, but a bit scarier. Like the sequence with Dewey and Gail in the . . . whatever building? News building? Whatever, you know the one with the one way windows and the sound-proof rooms. That's scary. The third one . . . is just nothing really. Fourth one is more into the disturbing nature of the killer and their motivations. I found the brutality of the new one pretty unsettling. That opening for instance, but there are several moments where the camera just lingers on the violence until we just watch the characters die. Those moments are unsettling. But I genuinely cared about the characters in the new one. Sounds like you just didn't connect to them. Like the opening was as horrifying as it was to me because I genuinely didn't want that character to die and isn't she the one who just gets like four or five brutal stabs to the back while she's laying on the ground face-down? I mean, ****. Anyway, mileage may vary; I tend to not find the Scream movies that scary, outside of a few moments here or there. I do find some of them very disturbing and I feel like they tend to both have better characters and tend to actually linger on the deaths in a more disturbing way than most slashers.

Look, am I going to do a full franchise review retrospective in October this year? May . . . be. Like 70% probable? I need to do it; every one of those films is interesting to talk about, even the third one which is actually more interesting to talk about than to watch.

 

Face/Off. This may be the most insane action movie ever made. Absolutely nothing that happens makes any sense, starting from the premise that Nicolas Cage and John Travolta switch faces, and everything is kept at an incredibly high pitch of operatic madness for the entire movie. John Woo has crafted a two-and-quarter-hour bubble in which realism has absolutely no purchase. It’s ridiculous and stupid and often in absurdly bad taste, full of icky moments like Travolta-as-Cage ogling Travolta’s daughter. It’s also way more fun than it has any right to be.

This is a good-bad movie for bad movie connoisseurs. It may have the single most impressive collection of absolutely insane Nicolas Cage facial expressions of any film ever made. It has Cage playing at maximum intensity as an absurdly theatrical villain, and then it has Travolta doing a Cage impression for most of the movie (Cage does not bother doing a Travolta impression, even though he is playing Travolta for most of the movie, because Cage is constitutionally incapable of being anyone but Nicolas Cage). It has absurdly flamboyant John Woo action sequences, full of sideways leaps and fireworks explosions and doves fluttering and shattering glass and all the other exquisitely overdone choreography you expect. It has ludicrous dedication to its themes about family and the straightest face any movie this campy could ever put to its madness. It has a bunch of stuff left over from being a sci-fi script that it doesn’t even bother to change. It has a scene where the villain gives the hero’s daughter life advice and a butterfly knife. It has Thomas Jane with a giant permed frizzy hairdo. It opens with Cage dressed as a priest, dancing like a lunatic and grabbing a choir girl’s ass. It even has a deliciously ironic scene in which Danny Masterson gets his ass beat for attempted sexual assault.

Every moment of this film is completely bug**** crazy, in a “how did they ever think this was what audiences would go for?” way. It’s an absolutely terrible film. But it is perfectly executed as unhinged good-bad-movie fun.

 

The Lost Weekend. In the golden age of Hollywood, films were made to be crowd-pleasers. Comedies, thrillers, war movies, family movies, musicals, they were made to make the audience go home happy. This is not a movie to make anybody happy. Billy Wilder crafted a dark, confrontational portrayal of alcoholism, a problem rampant at the time, but a subject Hollywood preferred to play for laughs. Ray Milland plays a self-loathing alcoholic who descends into a spiral of desperation and degradation over a long weekend binge, and the film doesn’t pull its punches until the requisite hopeful ending, but even there Wilder doesn’t go too far. It’s a drama that still stands up, a serious, aggressive film with a potent message.

 

@Rogue1-and-a-half : All these words. Blacklist is still on the air, you know. You could still review it. Elizabeth is waiting.

 

Official Competition (2022)

As a huge fan of Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, this movie was a complete, absolute, and total delight to watch. The idea of Cruz playing an arrogant and annoying world-renown film director already sold me on the idea for the movie since I first watched the previews.
And yet the trailer itself barely gives you any idea for what you can expect out of this rollercoaster of a movie that deftly defies expectations as it navigates a sea of dramedy and pitch-black humor, with many unexpected and delightful twists and turns along the way that are not for the faint of heart.
This is definitely like a Sunset Blvd. for the 21st century. Highly recommended.