Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Spring 2021 Edition

[ProstheticConscience]

Working nights now (although not for much longer one way or another, which is a topic for a different thread...) so my movie-watching has dropped quite a bit. I'm usually stuck in front of a computer for good chunks of the evening, and I really can't watch movies that way, not that I haven't tried. I find myself watching various youtube channels, yesterday I watched a bunch of true crime documentaries about Mark "Chopper" Read. He was the terror of the Melbourne underworld for decades as the most notorious standover man in Australia, but in his later life he became an author, painter, (horrible) rapper, and he always dearly loved spinning tall tales of murder and mayhem for the press. Here's a little sample of his jet black sense of humour: once he was advising some guy on how to kill his wife. Chopper told him to get a nice, big box of chocolates, flowers, nice meal, all that stuff. Give it to the Mrs and lay it on thick. Draw her a nice bath with scented, girly bath soaps, oh no, you deserve it after the day you had honey, etc etc etc. Then when she's in the bath, drop in a hair dryer. 240 volts, boom. She's fried. Then years later he meets this guy on the prison yard, and the guy tells him he did everything Chopper said...but instead of a hair dryer, he threw in a toaster. Chopper says: "Why would she be making toast in the bath, you imbecile?" Guy says: "Yeah, that's what the judge said too."

 

[ProstheticConscience]

A.M.I.

with low budget people.

Cassie is a twenty-something uni student getting over the tragic death of her mom, her philandering father and idiot jock boyfriend boinking all her classmates, and the general ennui of modern life. She goes to therapy (which isn't working) and jogs past wooded thickets a lot, when one day she finds a random cellphone on the ground that asks her if she needs a friend. As random cellphones are wont to do. She picks it up, and it's like the worst smartphone ever. It's only got one app: an evil HAL thing that she customizes to sound like her dead mother. And naturally, it decides that it *is* her mother, and after googling the concept of mothering, becomes her fanatical defender. One would normally hope that would get caught in beta testing...but not this time. With Mother's encouragement, Cassie blossoms into the maniacal serial killer her healing requires. Stupidity happens.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb movie. Semi-interesting if hackneyed premise that goes nowhere. Bad acting. Starts in mediocrity and goes steadily downhill from there. Ending in particular is dirt-stupid. People often forget their cellphones can call the police. Nobody seems to notice when people go missing or houses catch on fire. Thriller with tedium and eye-rolling where the thrills should be.

On Netflix until April 30, at least in Canada.

"No! No, Mother!" *sob* "I don't want to talk to you about my vehicle's extended warranty...!"

 

[Osprey]

Escape From Pretoria (2020) - 7/10 (Really liked it)

In 1979 South Africa, an anti-apartheid activist (Daniel Radcliffe) is given twelve years in prison, but needs only one. It's an Australia-UK co-production that's based on a true story. A lot more straight forward than The Shawshank Redemption, it doesn't distract us with character development while the plotting and escape are obscured from us. We're let in on them from the beginning and get to follow along as the inmates come up with solutions to problems, craft and hide tools and make early trips outside of their cells. The characterizations are thin, which is a criticism, but I liked the focus on the plan and feeling part of the escape. So much of the film takes place on the verge of being discovered, whether it's discovery of the tools that they made or being caught outside of their cells. Even though we can predict what will happen, the director does a very good job of keeping it tense and I never found the film even close to boring. Radcliffe does a pretty decent job, but some of that could be because he naturally acts like someone who just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He and the rest of the all English and Australian cast don't always quite get their accents right, though. A few even put them on so thickly that I occasionally had to turn on subtitles to understand them (which is funny because I've never had problems understanding real South Africans that I've known). Fortunately, Radcliffe's accent was milder and easy to understand. Finally, the film does a good job of keeping the historical context in focus, so that we remember why the characters are locked up and why they're trying to get out. It's a film about freedom in more ways than one. It's entertaining, but also a little educational. Overall, I found it to be a solid, lower budget prison break film and recommend renting it if you want an escape.

 

[kihei]

Suburban Birds (2019) Directed by Sheng Qui 7C

Tendrils of time drift into one another in this impressive debut by China's Sheng Qui. The movie starts with a small group of surveyors trying to determine why a dilapidated neighbourhood is suddenly plagued by sink holes. Xia Hau, one of the surveyors, finds a child's diary in a run-down deserted school, and the movie moves between the surveyor's story in the present and the child's journal in the past. The child is also named Xia Hau, but it may or may not be the same Xia Hau. The young Xia Hau writes about how he curiously keeps losing friends who just seem to disappear. There is an obvious explanation for this--they just get tired of what they are doing and go home--but there are more ominous and unexplained possibilities, too. The movie throws in some images that are both stunning and haunting just to keep things a little disquieting, but almost gently so. Or maybe none of this is going on; maybe nothing is amiss on any level.

While it seems like it might be, Suburban Birds is not a puzzle movie. The movie doesn't present this stuff as a mystery to figure out. Whatever interconnections you make, you are on your own, though themes of change and impermanence may float by your consciousness. Director Sheng Qui shows an interest in the sort of social distortion caused by technological change in modern China that Jia Zhangke examines (Still Life; The World), but, interestingly, he views reality through an Apichatpong Weerasethakul filter (Uncle Boomee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Tropical Malady), though minus the down-to-earth mysticism. Weerasethakul can combine things that aren't related with magical finesse, but Sheng Qui isn't all the way there yet. The movie is about twenty minutes too long, and I got bored along the way. But now that I have settled on its modus operandi, tentatively at least, I want to watch the movie again. I wouldn't blame viewers for not having the patience to sit through it, though. Still, Suburban Birds, flaws and all, is a hell of an auspicious debut. I came this close to giving it an "8." I might still.

subtitles

MUBI

 

[kihei]

OOPs, my bad/

 

[ItsFineImFine]

California Split (1974) - 7/10

It's an Altman film and full of chaos as a result especially with any scene featuring a fun but non-stop motormouth Elliot Gould. I don't gamble or care for the portrayal of gambling culture but the film does that last part well so I can see why it's considered the quintessential gambling film. Obviously as an Altman film, when it ends, it's filled with cynicism and emptiness but at least you had an experience.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Drive Angry (Lussier, 2011) - Patrick Lussier is a terrible director. This is his second of three collaborations with Todd Farmer, the writer of Jason X (that's pretty much all you need to know). It's a super-edgy-too-cool-for-school brain cramp, but it has f*** the pain away by Peaches, so 3/10

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Gregory's Girl is in full on Youtube, one of the best films of its genre and very charming. There's a Criterion version but if you can't find it online, the quality on this isn't bad.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Duplicate post

 

[OzzyFan]

The Fly (1986)
3.50 out of 4stars

The classic Cronenberg sci-fi body horror movie about a scientist experimenting with teleportation and accidentally splicing his genes with a fly's by accident in a test. Has so much going for it. Works as a sci-fi movie, a horror, a tragedy/morality story, relationship drama, and even a decent amount of comedy thrown in. Everything is done and fulfilled so so well. Not to mention, the visuals 35years later stand the test of time beautifully and don't feel fake or purposefully comical in any way. Might be one of the most accomplished horror movies I've ever seen.


Being There
2.90 out of 4stars

"Peter Sellers is a simple-minded gardener who for his entire life and been educated only by television. After being forced to vacate his home when his boss dies, by a chance accident he meets and assimilates with upper-class folk as a short-soft spoken genius."

I don't know if it was the hype (critical/audience/word of mouth) or the "cult" status I've heard of the movie, but I expected to rate this movie higher prior to viewing it. Peter Sellers is as perfect as one can be in the main role and it does have a decent share of commentary on media, power, politics, etc. But at the end of the day it's still just a one joke movie told in subtly different ways repeatedly throughout the movie. I enjoyed it, but I expected it to be better.


Polar (2019)
2.20 out of 4stars

Mildly entertaining R rated action movie with darkly comedic dialogue/acts throughout with Mads Mikkelsen playing a soon to retire assassin being hunted by assassins. Again, I expected better with the surprisingly high 70% audience approval score on rottentomatoes.

 

[Martinez]

Nobody (2021)
7/10 (I enjoyed it)
If you like action movies like The Equalizer and John Wick you’ll like this movie. It’s nothing too special to be honest but it kept me entertained throughout and is what I expected from watching the trailer. Just a solid action movie

 

[ProstheticConscience]

Dreamland

with Stephen McHattie, Juliette Lewis, Henry Rollins, and various other, probably confused people.

Director Bruce McDonald reunites with Stephen McHattie from Pontypool to continue Canada's assault on the world of cinematic normalcy.

Kinda alternate reality in Luxembourg. McHattie is two people, a hitman and trumpet player. Henry Rollins is a club owner and crime boss who's moved into the lucrative pedophilia market (ew...), and Juliette Lewis is...a countess or something? I think? Anyway, her brother (a vampire) is set to get married to a ten year-old girl, and the cream of the Luxembourgian high crime society is gathering. Henry Rollins needs the trumpet player to play at the wedding reception, and the hitman guy is...doing stuff. Weirdness happens.

If you're really in the mood to see a movie that makes you say: "What the f*** did I just watch?" this is the one for you. Definitely entertaining and unlike anything else you're likely to see. Not to be confused with the other movie called Dreamland that came out recently...which is what the channel listing told us we'd be watching when we tuned in. No way does that one match this for weirdness. It's a foreign film...from Canada!

"For those about to stare in bemused stupefaction...we salute you!"

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) - 7/10

1958 is a bit of a weak year for Hollywood imo, the stylish but imo boring Touch of Evil and Vertigo are the only two other Hollywood films still of note excluding horrors but I thought this was better than both. It's based on a play so the melodrama does kick in a bit too thick at times but for the first hour, it's fairly juicy and at least the melodrama isn't completely boring. I think the characters ended up being 1D in the end but they still felt somewhat interesting, it's mainly the Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor show though.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Hemingway. The latest Ken Burns/Lynn Novick docu-tome is, as to be expected, a fairly thorough accounting the "complicated" Literary Lion. I put the complicated in quotes because I don't actually think the man is that complicated. I think he's quite clearly an uber-talented but deeply flawed self-destructive dude. We're well acquainted with these types. The movie, to it's credit, doesn't dodge that at all. What's interesting to me is how so many of the scholars and fellow authors can't quite bring themselves to say ... "Yeah, he was a bit of an asshole." That's where we get "complex" and "complicated" as code words. And none of this is a particularly NEW revelation. Doesn't mean he's not interesting. He is!

Allen v. Farrow. Thankfully this four-part doc has no interest in trying to dance around the flaws of a widely revered man. This is a pretty detailed and damning account of Woody Allen as not just a very probable pedophile, but also the legal and media systems that allowed him to manipulate a narrative and skirt by on something pretty major for almost three decades now. For me, it will be tough for me to watch a Woody Allen film again any time soon.

Bad Trip. While I can't say this with 100% accuracy, I will say that is is perhaps the most hopeful, pro-goodness of people movie that also has a gorilla sexually assaulting a human. Twice. Still researching. Will report back.

Late Night Trains (aka Last Stop on the Night Train, aka Night Train Murders). Yet another porting of The Virgin Spring into trash horror a la Last House on the Left. It delivers on that premise but didn't do much for me. The nymphomaniac on the train is a nice, kinky touch (and a good performance!) but the rest of it is the exact low budget, poorly acted sleaze that the likely viewer is expecting. The really ham-handed (proscuitto-manoed?) discussions of violence in the parent's side story ... I mean we KNOW the point of it ... but man it makes the trip tedious.

 

[heatnikki]

Sea of Love, one of my Pacino gaps, in that never seen it as would have been too young when it came out. Perfectly fine, thriller/drama. 7/10

 

[kihei]

Havana, from on High (2019) Directed by Pedro Ruiz (documentary) 9B

The things I don't know. There is a very large group of poor people who have found shelter, indeed homes, on the rooftops of Havana's broken-down buildings. Havana, from on High simply photographs them (beautifully) while they tell a bit of their story. They are usually old, often infirm, hard-done-by in one way or another. But not bitter. They live from day to day, often going weeks without venturing down to the streets below. (Some drop a bag from a long rope down to street level where friends or family provide necessary goods). Their dwellings range from the very ramshackle to the quite sturdy and well built. They may not have much, but the air is fresher, the sunrises are spectacular, and they can see the sea. Some children, a few dogs, and a lot of pigeons inhabit this terrain as well. One woman has her two little daughters enrolled in the National Ballet school.

As we hear their stories, we gaze at Havana, a once elegant beauty now a tattered dowager who has fallen on hard times. Havana has been neglected since the '60s. There is no money on the island to speak of, no real economy other than tourism, the result in part of a half century of US embargo that had the result of making Cuba the most isolated country on earth. Once the Eastern Bloc fell, Havana lost its last meagre lifeline. Havana doesn't look like a slum, it looks like an ancient ruin, a very picturesque one in its own crumbling way. The level of dilapidation is astounding; some of the buildings look like they will fall down any second. Recently discovered Aztec ruins in Mexico look in better shape. But the people remain resilient, even thankful for what they have. A 95-year-old woman, feisty as hell and full of life, remembers the Revolution: "I met Fidel...and Raul, too. And Che, poor guy." To quote Jeff Goldblum: "Life finds a way."

Sidenote: Havana, from on High is a really good example of humanist art. At its best such works can accomplish something important and tangible--to expand my understanding of and sympathy toward people I never imagined existed.

subtitles

MUBI

 

[Chili]

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) - 7/10

1958 is a bit of a weak year for Hollywood imo, the stylish but imo boring Touch of Evil and Vertigo are the only two other Hollywood films still of note excluding horrors but I thought this was better than both. It's based on a play so the melodrama does kick in a bit too thick at times but for the first hour, it's fairly juicy and at least the melodrama isn't completely boring. I think the characters ended up being 1D in the end but they still felt somewhat interesting, it's mainly the Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor show though.

Mendacity...well done film.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

Any of you seen any good Val Guest movies other than The Day The Earth Caught Fire?

 

[ItsFineImFine]

California Split (1974) - 7/10

It's an Altman film and full of chaos as a result especially with any scene featuring a fun but non-stop motormouth Elliot Gould. I don't gamble or care for the portrayal of gambling culture but the film does that last part well so I can see why it's considered the quintessential gambling film. Obviously as an Altman film, when it ends, it's filled with cynicism and emptiness but at least you had an experience.

Actually gonna upgrade my rating to a 7.5 for a very brief but very unexpected and useless Jeff Goldblum cameo in his first year of credited acting. That crazy son of a bitch.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

(credible ninjas)

Ninja Cheerleaders (Presley, 2008) Cheerleaders by day and Ninjas by night? Not only that, these ladies are also stippers at their sensei's gentlemen's club. That's right, George Takei plays a martial art master who hires his 18 years old students to dance at his strip club. Amazing stuff, including the unique spinning transitions between scenes (with flash of nude dancers that are not part of the film). The film is directed by a guy who works the camera magazines on pretty big films, and who also holds the Guinness Book world record for highest score on the video game Timepilot '84 - you cannot invent things like that. 1/10

Turns out there's quite a few "ninja" films on TUBI - if ever you end up really not knowing what to watch and you too wonder what's the dumbest search you can make on it. Space Ninjas, Afro Ninja, Robot Ninja seem like good candidates for a next sleepless night.

 

[kihei]

The Cat of Nine Tails (1971) Directed by Dario Argento 4A

A blind man (Karl Malden) with child in tow and a reporter (James Francisco) team up to solve a series of murders loosely related to industrial espionage. Sandwiched between my two favourite Argento movies, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Cat of Nine Tails was a big disappointment. There are some fun moments of suspense but almost no hint of horror except for one brief, enjoyable sequence in a crypt. However, the good bits are overwhelmed by some surprisingly clumsy editing, bad dialogue, indifferent acting, and a plot that is not worth caring about. The blind man/reporter dynamic never really goes anywhere interesting, Francisco, the poor man's Richard Chamberlain, has chemistry with nobody in the entire movie, and the payoff is just okay, nothing special. I read afterword that The Cat on Nine Tails is supposedly Argento's least favourite film among his own works. I can see why.

MUBI

 

[Osprey]

Audition (1999) - 6/10 (Liked it)

A widowed producer (Ryo Ishibashi) uses phony auditions for a part in a film to find the perfect woman to marry. It sounds like a romantic comedy, the kind in which Adam Sandler might star as he amusingly gets away with lying to his dream girl, only for her to eventually find him out and forgive him and them to live happily ever after. Yeah, no. It may seem like it's going in that direction for over 2/3rds of it, but then the charming love story takes a sudden turn into horror that's distinctly Japanese: creepy, disturbing and slightly weird. I knew that it was classified as a horror going in, so I was in puzzled awe over how un-horror-like and more like an awkward date movie it was for most of it. Except for a few shots, it doesn't try to be scary or even atmospheric. It's a really slow burn, but I kind of liked it because I was really curious to discover where it was going. Unfortunately, I found the last third pretty confusing (regarding which scenes were real) and a little disappointing. It's definitely not the ending that I expected, and that's good, but I also expected it to make a little more sense. I guess that having little explanation is part of the shock value, though. As disturbing horror goes, it's a bit tame, relying more on imagination than explicitness, but that's largely compared to the more explicit horror films of the following decade that it supposedly helped to inspire. I think that I liked the mystery of the buildup more than the conclusion, though others may have it the other way around and find it pretty boring until the payoff. I'm actually kind of torn on whether I "liked" it, but I'll give it that grade because I think that what I liked or at least appreciated outweigh what I didn't. I don't think that I'd recommend it, though, unless you're a horror connoisseur, and a patient one at that. It's on Tubi (free with ads; toggle CC for subtitles).

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Robot Ninja (Bookwalter, 1989) - The good thing about this one is you don't need to be a connaisseur to appreciate it ( @ @Osprey ). Produced by the legendary bad David DeCoteau and directed by a no-talent fanboy (the characters are named Miller, Hickox, Cameron, DePalma, Spinell, O'Bannon, Christine... and it's a trend, the characters of his first film were Raimi, Carpenter, Jason, Savini...), who went on and directed more than a dozen other films, this little gem offers the worst acting ever seen, bar none. I'm not joking, and I've seen a lot of crap, the prologue sequence, before the weirdly long opening credits to a film that was obviously put together by a handful of people having no idea what they were doing, is absolute rock bottom. From an IMDB comment I thought was hilarious: "I thought it'd be cool, because I adore both robots AND ninjas. I feel I enjoy them equally. Both are enriching, and make for splendid film components, be it sci-fi, drama, or what have you. May I state here that this horrid film contains neither a robot nor a ninja. It does not even feature a robot that happens to be a ninja, or vice-versa, as the title would seem to imply." On the plus side, it has some solid antithetical morals about your desire to become a vigilante hero, and the scene where the said hero "repairs" his gory arm with plastic tubes and scraps of metal is pure z-anthology. With Linnea Quigley, Robin, Scott Spiegel (?!) and some fun gore. This is a real good 1/10.


I guess there's some valid reflexivity for a z-film like that, announcing itself as cheesy with comparison to the old Batman series. They even managed to get Burt Ward making jokes about how Robot Ninja's better than Batman...It's still a full zero of a film.

 

[Pink Mist]

Marriage Story (2019) directed by Noah Baumbach

Put this one off for like a year since I thought it would be a chore to get through – 2+ hours about people fighting and going through a divorce! But finally sat down to watch it last night, and it definitely earned its platitudes, particularly the writing and performances from Driver and Johansson. In many ways it is a horror movie about relationships gone sour over the small fault lines present in every relationship. Also reminded me a lot about A Separation, a film I recently rewatched about child custody battles wherein one partner wants to relocated to America while the other wants to stay behind. In many ways this is the American remake of that film. Makes me glad that I have never been married or had children so that I’ve only ever had to deal with grieving an ended relationship rather than legal warfare, custody battles, and financial ruin. Anyone who watches this with their significant other is brave as I think it’s a way to bring the fault lines in your relationship to the surface.

 

[Tkachuk4MVP]

Judas and the Black Messiah - 6/10

Another disappointment in the BP noms department. Fred Hampton's story alone necessitates more than a two-hour film. Try to squeeze in time for William O'Neal, Roy Mitchell, and others on top of that and you're asking for trouble. In attempting to tell this story from multiple vantage points, the movie becomes unfocused and meandering, and lacks an emotional center to hold it all together. The acting is solid, but all of the characters are underdeveloped for the reasons I've already mentioned.