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

Caught part of Raise the Titanic a bit earlier but it was my favorite part. I came in when they were dropping the explosives to blast the ship off of the ocean floor and stayed til the ending.

 

Death On the Nile
2022

Branagh's adaptations are good, the best part being his directing. Much time is spent with glorious establishing shots and creative use of the camera; you can tell they were having fun creating unique shots. The score is really nice too, a mix of some terrific blues songs and a traditional suspense score. They made good use of their money making this film look opulent and gorgeous in a classical way.

I also rewatched Branagh's Murder On the Orient Express which I had seen in the theater back in 2017. It's also good, but I actually prefer his version of Death On the Nile more.

And I also prefer the original versions of both of these films, yet the newer adaptations are quite entertaining and look stunning.

 

I thought Passengers was pretty good. But that was really a **** move by Pratt's character. You're completely destroying her life because she's hot and you're lonely. She should have shot him out the air lock. I liked the android bartender character.
Godzilla vs the Smog Monster. 1971 Or Godzilla vs Hedora, but I grew up with the other name. What a completely bizarre movie, and I love it. Part ecology message (a lot of cities probably were at their most polluted during the early 70's before people realized how bad it was getting and starting passing emissions laws and safety measures). It's really dark, but also really silly. Godzilla flies backwards with his atomic breath at one point. A very unique movie in the Godzilla series, as Godzilla fights a giant tadpole like creature who emits deadly fumes. If you like guys in a suit fighting you will like it, otherwise you might want to stick to the later entries. The lighting in the DVD is very poor, almost to the point of it being hard to see in some night scenes. I don't know if the Blu Ray has cleaned this up.

 

Camera Buff. Films about filmmaking often aren’t all that great. Camera Buff is an exception. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film reflects on the power of film, but also the difficulties of pouring yourself into art and the challenges of expressing the truth in the censored, secretive, labyrinthine world of communist Poland.

Jerzy Stuhr plays a factory worker and devoted family man who buys an 8mm camera to record home movies of his newborn daughter. The camera is a total novelty and extravagance in his small town, and his fascinated friends, neighbors, and coworkers are delighted, while Stuhr finds himself enraptured by the process of recording anything that catches his fancy. The factory boss has him film a celebration, and the movie gets entered in an amateur film festival, and Stuhr is off on a career as an amateur filmmaker. Film’s power to record and reveal the life of his world captivates him, but his obsession also pulls him in, away from the family who initially inspired it. His wife has been implacably hostile to his hobby from the very beginning, seemingly regarding it as an unwelcome intrusion for him to have any interest apart from her, but as he gets more and more enraptured by his art, it genuinely has a deleterious effect on his family. His observations of small corruptions and uncomfortable details in his town also bring him afoul of the boss, who wants to manage the content of all his filmmaking so it reflects properly.

It’s a rich, subtle film that reflects some of Kieslowski’s own frustrations while telling a universal story about a devotion to art opening up new worlds to an ordinary man but also putting pressures on his previously content life. It’s thoughtful, well-made, and quite well performed.

 

No Hard Feelings 2023

stars Jennifer Lawrence . it's described as a sex comedy. I don't know what to make of this, Lawrence needs money and answers an ad for a rich couple who need help bringing their introverted son out of his shell. And she goes at this task rather full-on kinda pushing him to have sex with her, but he doesn't want to be pressured into it.

it's kinda like a John Hughes movie.
There's also a weird nude scene - they go skinny-dipping and some kids try stealing their stuff so JL comes out of the water fully nude and starts attacking them.

 

Black Swan. 2011 movie starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. First time I've rewatched this film since seeing it at the theater when it came out. It's a well constructed movie with a strong psychology element. It's rather quirky, so probably not everyone's cup of tea, but if you like something different give it a try. Its on Disney+.

 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) – George C. Wolfe

White folk don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there.

In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, acclaimed playwright August Wilson used the real life blues-singer, and self-proclaimed “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey as an entry point into a fascinating and compelling exploration of all manner of compelling ideas: racial prejudice; cultural appropriation; art vs. commerce; the layers of privilege within racial subgroups; the struggle between pleasing an audience and expressing oneself; and the ever-simmering violence that seems to lurk just beneath the surface of all of these issues. The play, adapted into a film here by screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson and director George C. Wolfe, takes place in 1927; the play was originally performed in 1982; the film was released in 2020; I’m reviewing it in 2023. As I write this review today, we stand almost a century from the day the play is set, but the issues discussed here are vital and compelling and weighty . . . in 1927, 1982, 2020, today. And I think the film does a tremendously good job exploring these themes and ideas.

One of the reasons the film is able to explore these issues as well as it does really is the strength of the performances here. The script is excellent, don’t get me wrong, but the movie could easily slip into feeling didactic or overly talky in general. The performances, however, breathe real life into these characters, making them feel like real people, not just mouthpieces for ideas. Viola Davis, as always, is nothing short of riveting as Rainey. She has relatively little screen time, but she owns every second of it. Her singing voice is dubbed in most of the time, but the one scene where she does her own singing is one of the best scenes in the film, a seductive, sensual scene between Rainey and her young girlfriend. There’s an earthy desire to that scene that really knocked me out. That same kind of sweaty sensuality can be found in Chadwick Boseman’s performance as the doomed trumpeter Levee; he’s straining with all his might at every bond that is holding him back and nearly bursting with all the raw emotion he’s barely keeping at bay at every second. He’s a tormented man and we only discover how tormented as the film progresses. We think we’ve seen Boseman at his best when he’s given a lengthy, tortured monologue about his mother’s gang rape by a group of white men, but we’re not even close to his finest acting in this film. Late in the film, his rage finally explodes in a blasphemous rant where he dares God, not to face him, but to “turn your back on me” and it’s a performance of such raw intensity that it’s absolutely jaw-dropping. Boseman’s death at such a young age is already a tragedy without bringing the acting into it, but if Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom proves anything, it proves that Boseman was only getting better as an actor – this is certainly his best performance by a mile. Able support is given to these two lead performers by a solid ensemble, especially from the always excellent Colman Domingo and Glynn Turman as two of the other members of Rainey’s band.

As with a lot of play-to-film adaptations, Wolfe doesn’t do a whole lot to re-envision the play in a more cinematic way, but the fact that this entire film essentially takes place in two rooms is a feature, not a bug. One of the central themes is expressed by the difference between the luxurious room where Rainey records and the shabby locker room in the basement where the band members wait impatiently for their moment to be called up to the higher status room. There’s a recurring motif of Boseman’s Levee attempting to open a jammed door in the basement room and, if that symbolism is a little on the nose, it still works and goes to my point. This isn’t a “thriller” by any means, but it is, in its own way, a very suspenseful film. As these characters bounce off each other in these close, hot rooms, you can feel the tension rising and the sweat starting to drip. It’s a taut movie and it has a well-executed ticking clock in the premise of whether or not this dysfunctional group of people is going to manage to even record a single song or not. Anyway, I loved this movie; I think it nails its atmosphere perfectly, features two absolutely monumentally great performances and explores the wealth of themes and issues it has at its disposal with sharp and smart writing. It’s a movie with a lot on its mind that also has a raw, beating heart of exposed emotion and that’s about the best you can say. 4 stars.

tl;dr – Davis & Boseman are monumentally great in this adaptation of a sharp, incisive and raw August Wilson play; gripping, tense, filled with ideas but character based. 4 stars.

In a bit of cross-thread promotion, I led up to watching this movie by listening to a couple of compilation albums of the real Ma Rainey's music. You can find reviews (shorter than this one) for both of those CDs over in the Album thread, so if you want to hear what I think of Rainey's real music as well as this fictional portrayal, you can find that there.

 

El Condor. Some movies are good not so much because they’re high-quality as because they’re fun. El Condor is the latter. It’s a violent, pulpy exploitation Western, low-end yet well made.

Jim Brown stars as a prisoner who escapes with a plan to steal the Emperor Maximilian’s vast treasure hoard from the titular fortress. To do it, he’ll need an army, which means he recruits boozy, disheveled, shady, comic prospector Lee Van Cleef. Van Cleef has excellent relations with the local Apaches, and they make for a formidable, unexpected army.

It’s a loose, funny, action-packed movie with some clever sequences, good chemistry between the very funny Van Cleef and the stoically tough Brown, and a genuinely fantastic ending. It is very much a B-movie, but it is the kind that is fundamentally sound in the ways that matter and full of good little bits. Highly enjoyable 70s pulp.

 

The Peter Ustinov & Albert Finney versions of Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express are engrained in my mind, they have been standards on UK TV for the last 40+ years. However I really like what Branagh did with his versions. They look really good and you're right, some of the shots are very unique in both films. Really looking forward to seeing the latest Branagh Poirot film set in Venice.

 

The Haunted Mansion (2023)

Oddly when it ended on Disney+ the credits shrink to a smaller window and a picture of Padme and Anakin filled the screen with text saying ‘Because you watched the Haunted Mansion checkout Attack of the Clones.’

I do not see the connection.

I like the music from the ride The Haunted Mansion and it’s used well. It’s probably my favorite ride at a Disney Park. Lots of nodes to the ride.

The movie is okay but the cast elevates it to being much more enjoyable than it has any right to be. The ensemble of comedic leads basically playing what they’re know for but playing off each other is fun.

Lastly seeing Rosario Dawson play a human after seeing her as Ashoka for 7 weeks was refreshing and shows how much she disappears into her Star Wars role.

If you’re looking for a new fun and fast paced Halloween movie this is worth a viewing.

 

I'm still shocked to this date the academy didn't give the Oscar to Boseman. It was his last but also better performance.

 

The difference between this one and the Eddie Murphy one is that this one has some genuine frights (not R-rated or anything like that), while the 2003 version was a comedy with supernatural elements. That one was more funny than scary (especially when Eddie Murphy's character was trying to get directions from the singing busts).

The similarity: Master Gracey died in both films as a result of the villain's manipulations, although it was intentional on the villain's part in this one, while the Ramsley didn't intend it in the original.

 

Say what you will about Toho's giant monster movies but they definitely didn't play it safe -- while plenty are formulaic, there are some weird/trippy/crazy elements to many, and GODZILLA vs THE SMOG MONSTER is definitely bizarre even by Godzilla movie standards!

 

The Academy itself was shocked, I think. The fact that they went through the whole thing of reshuffling the awards to put Best Actor at the end and then he didn't win is about as solid evidence as I've ever seen that the whole thing isn't rigged. They were clearly banking on him winning and making for a big emotional moment to close out the night. And I think I would agree that I would have given it to him. Hopkins is really fantastic in The Father; it's kind of astonishing that after this long of a career, Hopkins is still capable of genuinely disappearing into a role, but that's what he did in The Father. I kind of forgot I was watching Anthony Hopkins. So, it's not an easy choice between the two in my opinion and I'm not upset that Hopkins won by any means. But Boseman really is a force of nature. That "turn your back on me" meltdown is just astonishing. He's really great all through the movie, but that's the moment that probably solidifies him as the best of the nominees.

That was an amazing year overall though. Gary Oldman, Riz Ahmed & Steven Yeun were all also absolutely great in their roles as well. Like I wouldn't have been mad to see any of the five win that year.

 

Lots of Bond on Prime now. Starting For Your Eyes Only. Should be my last Moore to see.

Oh WOW I wasn’t expecting that particular villain again and it was absolutely ridiculous jollifying absurdity epicsauce watching the opening few minutes play out. My side hurts from loln

Omfg this Lotus!!!! SPLAT!

 

Same here. Should be another good one.
He puts a lot of care into his movies.

Been wanting to watch some David Suchet Poirot stories now too; I haven't seen many of those. I think they used to be on PBS, but I need to look were is best to stream them.

 

I saw the latest one. It's loosely based on Halloween Party and they've made a lot of changes.

 

BritBox has every season.

 

The Phantom Menace
I enjoyed it. It's my favorite of the prequels, it has an amazing score and some very nice world building. But the decision to focus on Jar Jar and his not funny antics was not really a good decision, and Maul was underused. Still an entertaining film.

 

The Boston Strangler. What is the point of a true-crime movie that wildly fictionalizes its crimes? Why not just make an inspired-by movie instead of putting real names on what are essentially fake characters, most notably the believed perpetrator (Tony Curtis’s Albert DeSalvo is portrayed as the classic but thoroughly nonsense “multiple personality” schizophrenic, which is both fictional in the sense that DeSalvo was never diagnosed as such and fictional in the sense that this phenomenon does not actually exist)? The answer is probably money and attention, but that’s not a particularly satisfying answer.

If you just got rid of the names and let the fictional story be fiction, you would have a decent crime procedural, in which cops led by genteel prosecutor Henry Fonda do the legwork and run down all the red herrings trying to catch a killer who is terrorizing a town. Richard Fleischer directs it with pizzazz, making heavy use of split-screen images and generally delivering a visually innovative thriller. The performances are fine. The problem is just that the movie is totally full of it when it comes to the facts of the story, which makes the attempt to exploit the sensational murders for film rather off-putting.

 

Just finished For Your Eyes Only. I liked this movie but it start to feel a tad to long sequence wise on the sub, then cliff climbing bits. Other than that damn good movie. I loved the beginning and ending. They pulled a Moonraker ending phone call bit just with Margaret Thatcher instead of the Queen and the parrot was excellent comedy gold.

I think my next unwatched is License to Kill and I’m so looking forward to being back with my favorite Bond.

Lots of 80’s faces! Surprised to see a very young Benecio Del Toro.

 

Santa Fe Trail. This is one weird movie. For one thing, it’s called Santa Fe Trail to sell itself as a Western, but it has almost nothing to do with the Santa Fe Trail; it’s an appalling but comically bizarre Civil War fanfic by a Virginian scriptwriter in which quite nearly every single fact is wrong.

It has a bunch of future Civil War generals of wildly differing actual classes graduating as part of one West Point class and getting assigned to Fort Leavenworth, where they battle the evil John Brown (Raymond Massey), and J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan) vie for the affections of Olivia de Havilland. Now, there is room for legitimate criticism of Brown, who supported a fantastic cause in abolition but was something of a bloody fanatic about it. But this is not that; it’s the usual postwar Southern fantasy in which wicked abolitionist maniacs brought on the Civil War. Its confident pro-Southern viewpoint is almost comically idiotic, except that it’s so obnoxious. Brown is depicted as the greatest villain of the nineteenth century, a man so wicked his own son dies after turning on him and admitting it’s best that his father dies so that his evil cause dies with him (as is par for the course, the movie gets wrong which son died in Kansas, where, when, and how).

It’s a spectacularly dumb, bad movie that just does not work. It’s got a competent cast that also includes the likes of Alan Hale and Van Heflin (as the abolitionist-mercenary villain). There are solid moments, like the real fear Flynn brilliantly projects when he’s captured. But it’s a film rendered thoroughly unsalvageable by a terrible script and even worse premises. Not even worth curiosity.

 

Predators. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, given Predators’ mixed reputation, but I thought it was pretty good. The concept is a very simple action premise: a bunch of killers awake as they’re parachuted into a jungle, and come to realize that they’ve been abducted and dropped into a “game preserve” on an alien planet for Predators to hunt them. You’ve got loner ex-special ops mercenary Adrien Brody, Israeli sniper Alice Braga, cartel hitman Danny Trejo, African rebel soldier Mahershala Ali, death row inmate Walton Goggins, Yakuza enforcer Louis Ozawa, minigun-toting Russian commando Oleg Taktarov, and mild-mannered doctor Topher Grace. Anyone who’s ever watched a movie should realize as soon as Grace’s ordinary-guy schtick kicks in that he’s a serial killer.

It’s a pretty good cast, and though the characters are fairly thin types, they’re good enough to work with. The trick of pulling everybody onto another planet lets the film lean a little more into the sci-fi element and play around with worldbuilding that is more hints than exposition. You have other alien species, crashed spaceships, space “hunting dogs,” scavenging survivor Laurence Fishburne, some kind of internal Predator conflict between clans. Its biggest limitation is that it’s very much an action movie; it doesn’t have time for the building tension of Predator but gets straight into the business of blasting away.

Between that and the less flavorful characters (Brody is better than you might think as a terse, frankly selfish merc, but there’s just no substitute for Arnie), there just isn’t the magic of Predator. But it’s a solid action movie, with some creative sequences and fun battles, and the use of three Predators instead of one allows a bit more to happen before the final showdown. In a film where the final survivors and things like the Grace twist are very predictable, you need a bit of unpredictability wherever you can get it. It’s a worthwhile, entertaining riff on the original, which is more than you can say for the sequels on either side of it.

 

Predators was supposed to be the original sequel starring Arnold but he didn't sign on.

 

I'm sorry I didn't realize Walton Goggins was in that. I may have to watch it too.