Movies: Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Cinema at the End of the World Edition

[kihei]

I just wanted to respond to your comment on how none of them attempt a French accent. I always found that outlook silly. If they were French people, they'd be speaking French. Having a French accent whilst speaking English doesn't change the fact they are speaking English, haha. So, for me, if it is not the actual language with subtitles, I don't mind if people just speak in whatever accent they sound best in, even if ahistorical as is the case here.

It doesn't bother me much either. But I think there is a sizeable exception to the general rule. Engtlishmen playing Americans in Hollywood movies need to come up with some sort of mid-Atlantic accent at least. Just one example--I'm trying to imagine Benedict Cumberbatch speaking with his normal English accent in The Power of the Dog and, man, that would be distracting as hell coming out of the mouth of a Montana rancher.

 

[Spawn]

The Sparks Brothers. A delightful and likable look at a delightful and likable pair of musical weirdos (who actually don't seem that weird). Hard not to get swept up in Edgar Wright's clear love of the subject. Visually playful. Charming.

I took this one in a few months ago. The Sparks ended up one of my top 5 most listened to artists on Spotify this year

I had never even heard of them lol.

Delightful and charming is a great way to describe both the documentary and the two of them.

 

[kihei]

Drive My Car (2021) Directed by Ryusuke Yamaguchi 8B

Usuke, a middle-aged theatre director and actor discovers that his wife, with whom he still has a sexy, loving and professionally beneficial relationship, is having recreational sex with one of his proteges. He chooses not to confront her directly, but then after a while she tells him she wants to have a little chat. He dawdles, gets home late, finds her dead of natural causes, a hemmorage. Now he is left with the task of sorting through all these incredibly complex emotions and feelings that seem to go in every possible direction all at once. The rest of this three-hour movie is about how Usuke gets through the next two years of his life. His efforts take him to a theatre troupe in Hiroshima where he will direct Chehkov’s Uncle Vanya, an emotionally charged production that Yusuke chooses to star the young protégé who betrayed him.

This inadequate summary may sound like it has the potential for purple-prose melodrama of the gaudiest kind, but really nothing could be further from the truth. The narrative is much, much closer to Ingmar Bergman territory, minus the Freudian overtones, than to any kind of cliché excess. In fact, I would say this movie is in the class of such 21st century masterpieces as Amour, Loveless and A Simple Life or at least very close to it. Drive My Car is so well-directed and organized, the characters are so particular and detailed, that the movie goes by much faster than its seemingly daunting three-hour running time. Soul-shredding emotions have seldom been handled with the subtlety and insight that is evident here. For me, Drive My Car was a deeply involving experience that speaks to both heart and mind.

Sidenote: Drive My Car is the second excellent movie to be made from a Murakami story which uses a Beatles tune for its title, the other being Norwegian Wood. No this doesn’t have cosmic significance but I think it is kind of cool.

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Best of '21 so far

1, The Power of the Dog, Campion, US
2. Drive My Car, Yamaguchi, Japan
3. The Cloud in Her Room, Zheng, China
4. Bergman Island, Hansen-Love, France
5. Identifying Features, Valadez, Mexico
6. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, Jia, China
7. Red Moon Tide, Patino, Spain
8. The Green Knight, Lowery, US
9. There Is No Evil, Rasoulof, Iran
10. The Year of the Everlasting Storm, Panahi, et al, various countries

 

[ProstheticConscience]

The Last Lovers Left Alive

with Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and *zombies*.

Tom is Adam, a flop-haired, mopey, super-secret indie musician who lives in a dilapidated mansion in Detroit that's crammed full of vintage guitars, old, analog tape decks, and enough artfully eclectic decor to give the Discovery channel a nine inch boner. He has a helper who brings him old instruments he can instantly date, and he's getting ready to release some swinging tunes online...anonymously of course. He's not happy, though. Clearly depressed, full of ennui. So he calls his wife Eve (Swinton), who's slinking around Tangier and scoring A1 stuff from Christopher Marlowe...wait, what? Oh...they're vampires. Eve is still reveling in artsy fartsy bohemian ecstasy, but Adam's getting mopey again. No worries...he does this every few centuries.

Interesting riff on vampire life. Imagine the most tedious vinyl record snobs you know, then imagine them armed with roughly a thousand years of knowledge, connections and refinement. That's Adam and Eve. The name-dropping never stops, from Galileo to Tesla to Shakespeare and back to Jack White and the bowels of Detroit. I even recognized the abandoned baroque theatre that's been turned into a car park from an old Top Gear episode. There's some family tension when Eve's sister Ava turns up and we learn even vampires have obnoxious little sisters to deal with. Not that there's much vampire stuff happening...although the blood popsicles were a nice touch.

If Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston became vampires, they'd probably be exactly like this. They're what everyone working on their manuscript at Starbucks at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning would aspire to.

We wear our sunglasses at night...so we can...so we can...

 

[Mr Jiggyfly]

Power of the Dog - (2021)

There is a pure and clear message about toxic masculinity here, but the ending, while a surprise to many I’ve spoken to, was foreshadowed within the first 60 seconds of the movie.

Campion’s style is to respect her audience and use the power of suggestion, so don’t expect a grand finale that leaves hand on cheek, mouth agape.

The best way to describe this movie would be with the deliberate pacing of There Will Be Blood, mixing in a subtle tease of Brokeback Mountain and American Beauty.

If you enjoy dialogue heavy films with a purpose, and a big side heaping of ambiguity, this will be right up your alley.

 

[kihei]

Power of the Dog - (2021)

There is a pure and clear message about toxic masculinity here, but the ending, while a surprise to many I’ve spoken to, was foreshadowed within the first 60 seconds of the movie.

Campion’s style is to respect her audience and use the power of suggestion, so don’t expect a grand finale that leaves hand on cheek, mouth agape.

The best way to describe this movie would be with the deliberate pacing of There Will Be Blood, mixing in a subtle tease of Brokeback Mountain and American Beauty.

If you enjoy dialogue heavy films with a purpose, and a big side heaping of ambiguity, this will be right up your alley.

I thought that instantaneous foreshadowing was a ballsy move, making it come so early that most of the audience probably didn't even register it until the end of the movie if then. It was the move of a great magician.

 

[Mr Jiggyfly]

I thought that instantaneous foreshadowing was a ballsy move, making it come so early that most of the audience probably didn't even register it until the end of the movie if then. It was the move of a great magician.

Big time.

Even though I pretty much knew what was coming, I was thrown off track and expected a couple of different endings - so job well done.

I also have to mention that while Cumberbatch was the show stealer, Plemons really impressed me.

He has that subtle and genuine way about him. Shades of Philip Seymour Hoffman I think.

 

[x Tame Impala]

It's about suspension of disbelief. When the American actors in this movie spoke, they sounded like they normally do, which made them seem to me like the actors that they are instead of the characters that they were playing. Even though they still would've been speaking in English, trying to get into character with their voices would've put some separation in my mind between the two and helped me to suspend disbelief and buy into the story more. Also, it's not like I minded it so much on its own, but combined with the modern dialogue and hairstyles, it was a bit too much anachronism for me to not be distracted by it.

Totally disagree and I wish more films skipped the forced-accent bit. I remember watching the movie "Eagle" with Channing Tatum, it's set in Rome sometime during the height of their reign. Most of the actors have American-ish accents and instead of separation, it felt refreshing. There's no need to pretend with phony accents IMO and it actually makes me more immersed because i can relate to the characters more.

Just my 2 cents

 

[x Tame Impala]

"Pig" with Nicholas Cage was simple, short, and rewarding. I've been recommending it to my friends and they've all loved it so far

 

[kihei]

Benedetta (2021) Directed by Paul Verhoeven 6A

Director Paul Verhoeven follow up to his controversial, polarizing Elle (thumbs way, way up for me) is a disappointment. Benedetta is an historical drama, a sort of sexier update of Ken Russell's The Devils. Benedetta is a young novice who comes to her convent as a child but quickly picks up on the power structure of the place. When now a young woman, she begins to have visions--the question becomes are they genuine or is she play acting with a sinister design. Benedetta's skeptical Mother Superior (played with acidic zest by Charlotte Rampling) ain't so sure Benedetta is on the up and up. Benedetta's life is also made more complicated by a passionate affair she is having with another nun. The line between religious ecstasy and sexual excitement seems to be a very thin one. And, surprise, surprise, power even corrupts the most zealous. The problem here is that although all this rolls by entertainingly enough, Verhoeven never does settle on an attitude about Benedetta. She is alterantely innocent and evil, naive and shrewd, open and guarded, Many of the sex scenes seem to want to make a statement about freedom, but ultimately they only play like somewhat classier "sexy nuns" porn tropes. So Benedetta is a mess, but it is an awfully watchable mess. Therefore it gets a mild recommendatiion.

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[sdf]

If I were the director of the film, I would not add sex scenes there, this is some stupid idiocy that completely knocks the viewer out of the mood to follow the story, and looks like something that only a pretentious fool would do with his auditory

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I thought that instantaneous foreshadowing was a ballsy move, making it come so early that most of the audience probably didn't even register it until the end of the movie if then. It was the move of a great magician.

Magic was the word that came to mind to me as well while watching it. It's so precisely and expertly assembled you don't realize the actual game being played until it's nearly done. And it's not even like it's a gimmicky or twisty movie ... it's just so absorbing you're not getting caught up in a lot of those details in the moment.

 

[OzzyFan]

Cemetary Man (1994)
2.85 out of 4stars

"A cemetery man must kill the dead a second time when they become zombies. The town politicians won't listen to him, so Francesco is on his own. One day, he falls for a beautiful woman whose husband has recently died -- but their affair is tragically interrupted by zombies, sending Francesco into a tailspin of madness and woe."
A bizarre dry dark comedy horror with an existential tone. From a pure emotional standpoint, it succeeds in the darkest of ways with visuals and one liners with the driest of veins. There are even little tid bits of this spread throughout the movie which you may miss if you aren't paying close attention. As quoted in the film "We all do what we can not to think about life". I'd say on the whole it closely ties to a pessimism philosophy (Schopenhauer maybe), that all life is repetitive boredom and happiness/pleasure/satisfaction is short and fleeting, yet something we never endingly look forward to in a state of constant suffering. A love and death metaphor based on the movie's Italian title, where we are metaphorically dying when we aren't in a state of love/pleasure, there are no inbetweens. And love/pleasure is fleeting, no matter how hard we try or what we do, it's not meant to last for one reason or another. There are more metaphors at play related to this theme and not, one along the lines of killing the brain so that you no longer are suffering but are also never going to be happy, just in a mindless ignorant neutral state (or maybe death is our peace).

Saw (2004)
2.80 out of 4stars

"Two strangers awaken in a room with no recollection of how they got there, and soon discover they're pawns in a deadly game perpetrated by a notorious serial killer."
A horror mystery thriller. Far and away, it's the premise and the twist that make this so memorable. The story is good, not great, and it does suffer a bit from the "people making illogical decisions in a horror movie" cliche, but it's still solid tense fun with memorable visuals, and a plot that spurned 8 sequels. It gets criticized for it's similarities to Se7en, and rightfully so, but it's definitely different enough to stand on it's own, and warrant due acclaim.

C'mon C'mon (2021)
3.15 out of 4stars

"Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) and his young nephew (Woody Norman) forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they are unexpectedly thrown together in this delicate and deeply moving story about the connections between adults and children, the past and the future, from writer-director Mike Mills."
This actually had a lot more to say and food for thought than I thought it would. Where to start. I'll just go with the big picture here. The big picture is about parenting and children, and the learning process on both sides and how the relationship is a lot more complementary than the one sided way it appears on paper. Parenting here is seen as something unpreparable that is constantly evolving in some respects and has been successful in different length from pre-historic times to now irregardless of style and background. That's me generalizing on something that is shown as a complex emotional journey with ups and downs, wondrous joys, unforeseen problems, difficult and even thought provoking discussions, deep personal connections, and where it's ok to be wrong and conflicted about decisions one makes. Children are never endingly energetic, curious, imaginative, emotional, mood swingy, smarter than you think they are, chaotic, and worth every second of your time if you're a parent. And it all felt true to life with excellent performances. There's more to be explored on this, but that's enough of the main concept and I know that I haven't properly captured all of it in this paragraph.

Encanto (2021)
2.95 out of 4stars

"A young Colombian girl has to face the frustration of being the only member of her family without magical powers."
Not sure how profitable it is/going to be, but it's unquestionably another successful family focused colorful animated musical from Disney. The visuals are great, the messages/lessons are relatable, and the journey is fun. It's no bar setter imo like Frozen or Moana, but still great. All the special powers of each family member were utilized greatly, albeit when you think deeper about them some have disturbing qualities. Like hearing things miles away means you hear everything in town and in your house including a lot of things you shouldn't or don't want to hear as a child growing up, emotions controlling the weather is going to cause some disastrous events, being able to change one's physical appearance into anyone in the world can have serious consequences and create serious problems, and seeing the future obviously has it's negatives. And if I had to nitpick a bit more, a couple of the songs were sung at an overly quick pace and the coherence on what they were explaining was a bit muddled.

House of Gucci (2021)
2.25 out of 4stars
"When Patrizia Reggiani, an outsider from humble beginnings, marries into the Gucci family, her unbridled ambition begins to unravel their legacy and triggers a reckless spiral of betrayal, decadence, revenge, and ultimately...murder."

Well, it's messy and not as good as it should be or could be in almost every way . There are some noteworthy things though. Lady Gaga still shows that she has acting chops that should not be ignored. Jared Leto's performance, accent, and lines are very funny at times, not always purposefully though. Most of the cast is solid. Irons is getting old, and Pacino is even older. And that was one hell of a dysfunctional family and business during this time period.

 

[Pink Mist]

Azor (Andreas Fontana, 2021)

When the business partner of a Swiss private banker goes missing in Argentina while closing a deal, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), travels from Geneva to Buenos Aires to replace his partner. This is the 1980s in Argentina when disappearances of inconvenient people to the ultra elite was the norm. As Yvan hears more and more of the whispers of mass disappearances, and the corruption of the elite who serve as his clients in the country, he slowly becomes corrupted by these shadowy forces – or was he already corrupt? Azor is a very slow burn thriller that feels influenced by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or a John le Carré novel but about Argentina’s Dirty War and the corrupt world of high finance. Beautifully shot and a solid performance by Rongione (who I knew I recognized but couldn’t place where from – later realized he was in a bunch of Dardenne brothers films), it’s hard to believe that this is Fontana’s first film as it is an incredibly composed and confident first feature. I highly recommend it.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Last Lovers Left Alive

with Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and *zombies*.

Tom is Adam, a flop-haired, mopey, super-secret indie musician who lives in a dilapidated mansion in Detroit that's crammed full of vintage guitars, old, analog tape decks, and enough artfully eclectic decor to give the Discovery channel a nine inch boner. He has a helper who brings him old instruments he can instantly date, and he's getting ready to release some swinging tunes online...anonymously of course. He's not happy, though. Clearly depressed, full of ennui. So he calls his wife Eve (Swinton), who's slinking around Tangier and scoring A1 stuff from Christopher Marlowe...wait, what? Oh...they're vampires. Eve is still reveling in artsy fartsy bohemian ecstasy, but Adam's getting mopey again. No worries...he does this every few centuries.

Interesting riff on vampire life. Imagine the most tedious vinyl record snobs you know, then imagine them armed with roughly a thousand years of knowledge, connections and refinement. That's Adam and Eve. The name-dropping never stops, from Galileo to Tesla to Shakespeare and back to Jack White and the bowels of Detroit. I even recognized the abandoned baroque theatre that's been turned into a car park from an old Top Gear episode. There's some family tension when Eve's sister Ava turns up and we learn even vampires have obnoxious little sisters to deal with. Not that there's much vampire stuff happening...although the blood popsicles were a nice touch.

If Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston became vampires, they'd probably be exactly like this. They're what everyone working on their manuscript at Starbucks at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning would aspire to.

We wear our sunglasses at night...so we can...so we can...

This is all true and I still think it's a great film.

 

[Osprey]

If I were the director of the film, I would not add sex scenes there, this is some stupid idiocy that completely knocks the viewer out of the mood to follow the story, and looks like something that only a pretentious fool would do with his auditory

If you were Paul Verhoeven, you wouldn't add sex scenes? If you wouldn't add sex scenes, you wouldn't be Paul Verhoeven!

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

If you were Paul Verhoeven, you wouldn't add sex scenes? If you wouldn't add sex scenes, you wouldn't be Paul Verhoeven!

I choose to believe Paul Verhoeven has said this exact thing at least once in his life.

 

[Osprey]

Black Book (2006) - 6/10 (Liked it)

In 1944 occupied Holland, a Jewish resistance fighter (Carice van Houten) goes undercover to sleep with a high-ranking Gestapo officer and maybe also free some imprisoned colleagues. It's sexy, violent and Dutch, so of course it's from Paul Verhoeven. He takes every opportunity to show off van Houten's assets. I'm referring to her acting and singing abilities, of course. I liked the sets, costumes and general look of the film, which appear authentically 1940s and without relying on CGI. It was interesting to get a Dutch perspective on WWII, since most films about resistance to the Nazis take place in France or Germany. The plot has many twists and turns. It reminded me quite a bit of 1992's Shining Through, a similar thriller about a female spy infiltrating the Nazis, only with a lot more nudity and violence because Verhoeven. His films are often criticized for being excessive, but they're certainly never boring. Even though its runtime is also excessive, it went by without ever dragging. It's a fairly good WWII spy thriller if you can stand 2.5 hours of subtitles. It's on Prime Video.

 

[sdf]

If you were Paul Verhoeven, you wouldn't add sex scenes? If you wouldn't add sex scenes, you wouldn't be Paul Verhoeven!

When I typed that I wasn't seen it's his movie

 

[Puck]

Belfast, Directed by Kenneth Branagh, 7.0

Good movie, I had heard many good things after it won TIFF this year. I read The Guardian review and it was gushing 5 stars but I had more reservations and gave it a 7.0 here (which is still very good). It's a love letter from Branagh to his native Belfast and the film is written palatably for an intended audience in England. It's more a sentimental movie about his family seen through his eyes as a naive young boy and not a hard hitting political drama about the Troubles. Which is fine. The cinematography is well done but little things bugged me like the Van Morrison music soundtrack (maybe because he has come out as an anti-vaxxer lately, I don't know); the Grandmother (Judy Dench) looked 20 years older than the Grandfather (Ciarán Hinds) but I guess they really wanted Dench there in the film); and some scenes like the baseball pitch from Dad to unarm the bad guy was unrealistic, but then again, it is seen through the eyes of a naive boy. I have many other niggles that left me uneasy and unwilling to declare it a masterpiece like some but overall this is good Oscar bait. Ciarán Hinds (Grandfather) has some of the best comedic lines in the film.

Very good movie but I hesitate to call it a masterpiece like some (maybe my expectations were too high)

p.s. sidebar - It must be the new normal for a Director to also be writer of their film. It seems like a huge number of films credit the Director for writing or creating their own project? For instance, I checked Kihei's top ten and every Director of those films are credited for also writing the movie. The main winners at TIFF are mostly written and directed by the same. I checked over 40 films at the Venice Film Festival this year and all but a few credit the Director as also the writer. Even Frank Hebert's Dune gives Denis Villeneuve a screenplay writer credit. I guess most Directors have input (interfere) with the movies, they are awarded a writing credit? But a lot of content out there in 2021 are still original Directors creations and personal projects. (I was going to call Belfast Branagh's vanity project but thought against it when I saw just how many films are the Directors' creations these days, the new normal I guess)

 

[kihei]

View attachment 487503
p.s. sidebar - It must be the new normal for a Director to also be writer of their film. It seems like a huge number of films credit the Director for writing or creating their own project? For instance, I checked Kihei's top ten and every Director of those films are credited for also writing the movie. The main winners at TIFF are mostly written and directed by the same. I checked over 40 films at the Venice Film Festival this year and all but a few credit the Director as also the writer. Even Frank Hebert's Dune gives Denis Villeneuve a screenplay writer credit. I guess most Directors have input (interfere) with the movies, they are awarded a writing credit? But a lot of content out there in 2021 are still original Directors creations and personal projects. (I was going to call Belfast Branagh's vanity project but thought against it when I saw just how many films are the Directors' creations these days, the new normal I guess)

In the '50s and '60s almost all the great European and Asian directors that I can think of wrote or significantly contributed to the scripts of their movies: Ray, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Bunuel, Fellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Kubrick, virtually the entire French New Wave and American John Cassavetes.

Oddly enough when the hugely influential "auteur" theory emerged in France and the US in the late '50s, for the most part it excluded writer/directors despite its name. The early theory uses "auteur" as a designation of respect for those largely American directors who had little control over the scripts or productions of their movies but who nonetheless made movies with a distinct style and personality anyway, directors like Ford, Hitchcock, Curtiz, Murnau, Wyler, Hawks, Preminger, and a lot of "B" movie lesser lights like Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, and early Douglas Sirk. For these guys you could tell within five minutes that they were the director of the movie that you were watching because their approach and style was so distinctive. Ironically John Huston, a director of many highly respected movies (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, Key Largo, The African Queen, The Red Badge of Courage), was oddly enough excluded for years from the "auteur" pantheon because his movies were so different--he had no specific style, a no-no with the auteurs.

Today, the term auteur directors now covers writer/directors, too, which makes a lot more sense to me. You basically have the '50s and '60s to thank for that.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Oddly enough when the hugely influential "auteur" theory emerged in France and the US in the late '50s, for the most part it excluded writer/directors despite its name.

And Oddly x2, the concept of "film d'auteur", in French, mainly applies to these films where the director also is the screenwriter, despite the author notion that the director should be considered as the author above the screenwriter(s). That concept more so than the author notion applies to my own instinctual appreciation of a director too - and it's absolutely nothing new to do things that way.

 

[Puck]

It's that time of the year again when the "Best of Year" lists come out. I always like the IndieWire list, mostly art-house/independents. They favour the 'auteurs' I guess. I like discovering the flicks I've never heard about. You won't find much Marvel or Bond here.

The 25 Best Movies of 2021 | IndieWire

 

[Spring in Fialta]

despite the author notion that the director should be considered as the author above the screenwriter(s).

I have no doubt as to whether they can be equal, but above, is, I think, an absurd notion.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

I have no doubt as to whether they can be equal, but above, is, I think, an absurd notion.

Oh, I don't think it's absurd at all. 30 directors could direct the same script and you'd have 30 completely different films - the language is visual/auditive. Just like 30 writers could write 30 different books about the same basic story - the original anecdote wouldn't matter much in the results.