what was the last movie you watched?
- Thread starter Folsom Al
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So - overall a good movie. The plot was a bit better for this one overall, but still had some holes here and there. You could see parts where he incorporated some bits from Titanic and Abyss, but the flick was absolutely beautiful to watch. Lots of action - it didn't feel like a 3+ hour movie to me. They definitely left it open somewhat for a sequel.
If you liked the first one, catch it.
If you liked the first one, catch it.
Yep both very funny. I'm actually a big movies/films buff but I dont stay too current, I happened to see Banshees on a list of best films of 2022 n saw the actors n wanted to watch it immediately because I enjoyed In Bruges. Perhaps its recency bias but I do think Banshees is slightly better.
The other movie from that best-of-'22 list that really caught my eye is the Speilberg one - The Fablemans. I'll watch that soon n post here about it.
The other movie from that best-of-'22 list that really caught my eye is the Speilberg one - The Fablemans. I'll watch that soon n post here about it.
I'm not sure how I feel about Glass Onion yet. I loved Knives Out. Every role was perfectly cast, every joke and plot twist landed. The humor in Glass Onion is broader -- verging more toward screwball -- and after one viewing I felt a little conflicted about it. Every scene with Janelle Monae in it was sparkling though. Maybe Rian Johnson set the bar too high for me with Knives Out but I also had similar reservations about his second movie The Brothers Bloom. I like his writing better when the comedy and drama are a little more evenly balanced. It might grow on me over time.
I actually did enjoy Glass Onion more the second time. It's playfulness in tone and plot structure is much more apparent when I'm not seeing it through the filter of Knives Out, which I couldn't help but do the first time.
Also I'm just writing to say that I went to see Babylon before it left the theater for good and I think it might be the worst movie I've ever seen. I can't think of a single good word to say about it. 5 minutes into this thing I was already praying for it to end and it's over 3 hours long! It's so bad that I'm forced to re-evaluate Whiplash and La La Land in my head and question if they were actually as good as I remember or if they're equally tone deaf and I was just reading subtlety and nuance into them because I identified with their young artist milieu.
Also I'm just writing to say that I went to see Babylon before it left the theater for good and I think it might be the worst movie I've ever seen. I can't think of a single good word to say about it. 5 minutes into this thing I was already praying for it to end and it's over 3 hours long! It's so bad that I'm forced to re-evaluate Whiplash and La La Land in my head and question if they were actually as good as I remember or if they're equally tone deaf and I was just reading subtlety and nuance into them because I identified with their young artist milieu.
I have a lot of folks in my circle not like Knives Out that raved about Glass Onion. I liked both. I was surprised more people don't feel like you but I guess I shouldn't since it seems like the latter was made to have more mass appeal and maybe it was easy to project some of the characters to some folks who are main characters in my twitter universe.
Knives Out feels like it was written for a more movie-literate audience both in it's casting and in how long it makes you wait before really delivering the goods. That's not to say Glass Onion is somehow worse in comparison, just that it has more surface appeal with the casting, location, and lighter tone. Glass Onion by design is bigger, flashier, and less subtle -- but also great. I think I was only disappointed with it that first time through because Knives Out is a sublimely well-written dark comedy which keeps it's funniest punchlines hidden in subtext and good dark comedy is so rare that I greedily wanted more of the same.
The best way I can think to illustrate the differences in atmosphere between the two films is all in the introduction of Benoit Blanc.
In Knives Out, Blanc lingers silent in the shadows, soaking in the testimonies, only making his presence known with a solitary piano key strike to prompt the police detective to ask a specific pointed question regarding the night of Harlan’s death. Blanc doesn't speak until drawn out directly by each witness, and when he does it is lathered in subtext and nuance, each response meticulous in its meaning.
In Glass Onion he’s sitting in a cramped bathtub with a Shriners’ fez inexplicably on his head, while playing Among Us on his laptop with some celebrity friends in a video chat, when Hugh Grant tells him there’s a box at the door.
I enjoyed both, but that should tell you the decidedly different “feel” of the films.
In Knives Out, Blanc lingers silent in the shadows, soaking in the testimonies, only making his presence known with a solitary piano key strike to prompt the police detective to ask a specific pointed question regarding the night of Harlan’s death. Blanc doesn't speak until drawn out directly by each witness, and when he does it is lathered in subtext and nuance, each response meticulous in its meaning.
In Glass Onion he’s sitting in a cramped bathtub with a Shriners’ fez inexplicably on his head, while playing Among Us on his laptop with some celebrity friends in a video chat, when Hugh Grant tells him there’s a box at the door.
I enjoyed both, but that should tell you the decidedly different “feel” of the films.
I watched two movies this week that go straight into my top 100:
The Leopard -- An Italian film from 1963 starring Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian prince with Alain Delon as his hot-headed nephew and would-be revolutionary and Claudio Cardinale as the daughter of a wealthy landowner that catches their eye. It's a historical epic with huge vistas, battle scenes portraying the early days of revolution that would ultimately lead to the unification of Italy, costumes and set designs for days and jaw-dropping cinematography but it's the understated and subtle performances of the leads (particularly Lancaster) which really resonated with me. As portrayed in the film, the prince knows that the aristocracy he represents is going to disappear and he accepts that his time is coming to an end with dignity and grace. It's more of a meditation on mortality than a political treatise but the film does carve out some of it's runtime to discuss political philosophy in a refreshingly mature manner.
Martin Scorsese included this in a list of his 10 favorites once and I hadn't heard of it so I tracked it down. I think it compares favorably to Lawrence of Arabia -- another character study biopic framed as historical epic which was released just the year before. There's not a lot of action here though -- the piece de resistance is not a battle scene but an extended formal dinner party. It doesn't make sense when you read about it, but this is a very leisurely paced 3 hour film and by the time you get to that dinner party sequence, all of the moments of characterization are paid off so well that a simple waltz has the dramatic sweep of a climactic battle. I wonder if this is what Marty had in mind when he named his seminal concert film with The Band in 1976 "The Last Waltz"?
Kiss Me Deadly -- I finally got around to watching one of the signature 1950s noirs and now I'm embarrassed it took me this long because it was so good! I'm not familiar with the Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane. Apparently they were more widely read than Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade novels, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, and even Ian Fleming's James Bond novels at the time this movie was made. A lot of this will be very familiar to anyone who dabbles in detective fiction or film noir. We have a wisecracking private eye who gets lured into all sorts of tough situations by seductive and dangerous women, a mystery box which everyone seems to want without knowing what it is, gritty street-level black and white photography (mostly in and around the historic Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles before it was gutted and turned into the concrete Jenga block it is today), and one of the most audacious show-stopping ending scenes in film history -- a scene so good that Steven Spielberg basically lifted it and plopped it into the climax of one of his best-known movies. I won't tell you which one, but you'll know it when you see it.
This isn't exactly a recommendation... I love the film noir genre and pretty much anything with a detective as the protagonist has to be actively bad to draw my ire so I had a good idea that I would like this going in. It's a pretty niche film (well, in a modern context it is) that I would only recommend to fans of the genre but this one does have the added wrinkle of working a cold war era nuclear paranoia theme into what would otherwise be pretty standard detective pulp and that gives it some added interest as an ethnographic study. It's not complex or profound and parts of the plot don't even make sense (which is itself a genre convention) but it is very entertaining and it ends with a bang.
The Leopard -- An Italian film from 1963 starring Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian prince with Alain Delon as his hot-headed nephew and would-be revolutionary and Claudio Cardinale as the daughter of a wealthy landowner that catches their eye. It's a historical epic with huge vistas, battle scenes portraying the early days of revolution that would ultimately lead to the unification of Italy, costumes and set designs for days and jaw-dropping cinematography but it's the understated and subtle performances of the leads (particularly Lancaster) which really resonated with me. As portrayed in the film, the prince knows that the aristocracy he represents is going to disappear and he accepts that his time is coming to an end with dignity and grace. It's more of a meditation on mortality than a political treatise but the film does carve out some of it's runtime to discuss political philosophy in a refreshingly mature manner.
Martin Scorsese included this in a list of his 10 favorites once and I hadn't heard of it so I tracked it down. I think it compares favorably to Lawrence of Arabia -- another character study biopic framed as historical epic which was released just the year before. There's not a lot of action here though -- the piece de resistance is not a battle scene but an extended formal dinner party. It doesn't make sense when you read about it, but this is a very leisurely paced 3 hour film and by the time you get to that dinner party sequence, all of the moments of characterization are paid off so well that a simple waltz has the dramatic sweep of a climactic battle. I wonder if this is what Marty had in mind when he named his seminal concert film with The Band in 1976 "The Last Waltz"?
Kiss Me Deadly -- I finally got around to watching one of the signature 1950s noirs and now I'm embarrassed it took me this long because it was so good! I'm not familiar with the Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane. Apparently they were more widely read than Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade novels, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, and even Ian Fleming's James Bond novels at the time this movie was made. A lot of this will be very familiar to anyone who dabbles in detective fiction or film noir. We have a wisecracking private eye who gets lured into all sorts of tough situations by seductive and dangerous women, a mystery box which everyone seems to want without knowing what it is, gritty street-level black and white photography (mostly in and around the historic Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles before it was gutted and turned into the concrete Jenga block it is today), and one of the most audacious show-stopping ending scenes in film history -- a scene so good that Steven Spielberg basically lifted it and plopped it into the climax of one of his best-known movies. I won't tell you which one, but you'll know it when you see it.
This isn't exactly a recommendation... I love the film noir genre and pretty much anything with a detective as the protagonist has to be actively bad to draw my ire so I had a good idea that I would like this going in. It's a pretty niche film (well, in a modern context it is) that I would only recommend to fans of the genre but this one does have the added wrinkle of working a cold war era nuclear paranoia theme into what would otherwise be pretty standard detective pulp and that gives it some added interest as an ethnographic study. It's not complex or profound and parts of the plot don't even make sense (which is itself a genre convention) but it is very entertaining and it ends with a bang.
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Interesting. I haven't seen the film, but I read the book and was mostly unimpressed - though the author did manage to pull off the last few pages nicely. Perhaps it translates better to film for whatever reason.
Definitely a great movie. Apparently the film had very little if anything to do with the book - a very "free" adaptation. I kind of wish they hadn't dropped the comma from the title as it gives a somewhat different interpretation.
If you hadn't knocked out Kiss Me Deadly before last week, then there's a chance you haven't gotten around to my favorite of the somewhat lesser-known noirs: In A Lonely Place. Not a bombastic film like KMD, and it doesn't focus on the detective in the case, but rather on Bogart's Dix Steele, who is the primary suspect in a murder, as the audience (and his new flame) are unaware of whether he is guilty or not. Worth getting around to if you haven't.
Definitely a great movie. Apparently the film had very little if anything to do with the book - a very "free" adaptation. I kind of wish they hadn't dropped the comma from the title as it gives a somewhat different interpretation.
If you hadn't knocked out Kiss Me Deadly before last week, then there's a chance you haven't gotten around to my favorite of the somewhat lesser-known noirs: In A Lonely Place. Not a bombastic film like KMD, and it doesn't focus on the detective in the case, but rather on Bogart's Dix Steele, who is the primary suspect in a murder, as the audience (and his new flame) are unaware of whether he is guilty or not. Worth getting around to if you haven't.
For The Leopard, the story itself isn't remarkable. I think I appreciated it mostly for its cinematic qualities. It's a 10 out of 10 movie for me visually. There's one shot in particular, a close up of Burt Lanaster with fireworks going off in the background, that is just a remarkable piece of art in itself. The movie also does a great job of communicating its theme without over explaining anything. The combination of massive spectacle with subtle characterization is what floored me. That's a very hard trick to pull off.
And I absolutely love In A Lonely Place! I saw it for the first time at the TCM film festival in LA so it was a film print on a big screen. As I alluded to before, I put together a Top 100 list over the last week because I've been revisiting some of my favorites and thinking about starting a movie themed podcast and I'm also about to turn 40 so it just felt like a good time to reflect...
According to my list, In A Lonely Place is currently my 15th favorite movie of all time so that was spot on as a recommendation!
And I absolutely love In A Lonely Place! I saw it for the first time at the TCM film festival in LA so it was a film print on a big screen. As I alluded to before, I put together a Top 100 list over the last week because I've been revisiting some of my favorites and thinking about starting a movie themed podcast and I'm also about to turn 40 so it just felt like a good time to reflect...
According to my list, In A Lonely Place is currently my 15th favorite movie of all time so that was spot on as a recommendation!
I put together a Top 100 list over the last week because I've been revisiting some of my favorites and thinking about starting a movie themed podcast