Last Movie You Watched.

Chronicle - 'found footage' superhero-esque flick in which 3 high-school seniors develop telekinesis after discovering a mysterious object underground. After using their powers for pranking etc at first, things take a dark turn when 'cameraman' Andrew (Dane DeHaan) starts to use his in 'apex predator' ways. Fairly enjoyable, and at a brisk 80 minutes doesn't outstay its welcome.

Dog Soldiers - tremendously entertaining action-horror in which squaddies on manevoures in the Scottish Highlands are besieged by a pack of werewolves. With Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd and Liam Cunningham.

Eugenie de Sade.

Written and directed by Jess Franco based on the Marquis de Sade novel. So a great little family film to be enjoyed with the relatives during any holiday season or get together.

You might enjoy this if you haven't seen it already, Sarai -

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180073/

Blunt Instrument wrote:

You might enjoy this if you haven't seen it already, Sarai -

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180073/

Thank you! I'll definitely check that one out.

I remember renting and watching it in what must have been the dying days of VHS, eep.

Wake Wood - reasonably creepy Irish horror about a couple who lose their young daughter via a dog attack and upon moving to the titular small town by way of dealing with their grief discover that there is a ritual by which she can be 'brought back' for 3 days, with warnings of serious consequences if they breach the terms of said ritual. With Aidan Gillen and Timothy Spall.

The Shadow - fun, pacy action-adventure based on the 30s pulp hero, whose influence on the likes of Batman is apparent. Alec Baldwin is suitably dark 'n' dashing in the title role and alter-ego Lamont Cranston, John Lone grandstands as Genghis Khan's last living ancestor with an eeeevil plot, Penelope Anne Miller makes for a suitably easy-on-the-eye love interest, Ian McKellen adds class as her father and Tim Curry hams it up as a comic villain. Stirring Jerry Goldsmith score, too.

I adore the 1994 Shadow. It's my favorite of the pulp action revival films of the 90's and supremely underrated. It stays mostly faithful to the pulps and the radio version and has a great cast, nice production design, an AMAZING DTS soundmix and one of Jerry Goldsmith's best scores.

So of course it didn't do well due to absolutely mediocre marketing and didn't get its richly deserved sequel. I missed it in theaters as a kid and didn't get to see it until years later on video where I was immediately hooked.

Can't help wondering how the once-proposed Sam Raimi version would've panned out. Very much enjoyed his first 2 Spider-Man films.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

Love Lisbeth...wish I had some of her skills. I mean, I have used bruteforce tools to 'crack' a couple of adult sites when I was young and wild lol... but she is a pro.

Raimi tried forever and I think finally gave up a few years back. I always assumed it would have been a bit like DARKMAN which is essentially the film he made at first because he couldn't get THE SHADOW rights.

Darkman's a lot of fun too. Some fantastic action and stuntwork achieved on what obviously wasn't the biggest of budgets.

(The new) Child's Play (2019)

A bit hard to get used to this 'new look' Chucky after a fairly long string of older movies with the previous doll. Worth a watch but nothing to really crow about....

Anna



I didn't really go into this with huge expectations.

This is essentially an updated yet inferior version of Besson's own "Nikita".

The best thing about it is Helen Mirren.

The idea is that Besson returned to the genre which made his career to save his production company after the disastrous performance of "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" but with a worldwide take of under 30 million USD for "Anna", even that might have failed.

He must have been hoping for a lot more, it isn't even that long ago that his "Lucy" raked in 463 million USD worldwide.

^ Just happened to download that a couple days ago, will watch it over the weekend

Lucy deserved box-office more akin to Anna's, IMO. Even for a flick with a sci-fi element, ScarJo becomes something so preposterous I was actually angry.

Noah (2014)



so uninspired and lifeless, I wonder why Aronofsky even made this

That one came and went without any presence or hold. Haven't seen it but always thought the trailers for Noah looked a little bland.

Bland sums it up perfectly for me and that was the last thing I expected from Aronofsky taking on such an unlikely project. There isn't even anything particularly wrong with it but any director could have turned that out in terms of impact. It looks fine, acting is fine but he just didn't really do anything with it and I felt there were so many ways he could have went and didn't. It just all felt rather pointless which it really shouldn't have with me as it's a subject that I've always been quite interested in and passionate about. There are so many of those cheaply made religious films out there that below the surface have so much more heart. Seems all the more odd as it was a project he had wanted to do for many years and a story that fascinated him since childhood. My expectations could have just been too high expecting something like The Passion of the Christ but I still wouldn't recommend it. 

Daybreakers - fairly enjoyable action-horror set in 2019 (ha!) in which vampires have taken over and are imprisoning the human race and draining them of blood to ensure a steady supply. With Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill.

Hobo With A Shotgun - splattery 'grindhouse' tribute shoot-em-up in which Rutger Hauer is the titular hobo who, after arriving in a town and finding it in the grip of a criminal scumbag and his sons, teams up with a 'tart with a heart' and sets about cleaning up the place. Deliberately OTT funtimes.

Fascination (1979)

Extra Ordinary - Irish supernatural comedy about a driving instructor who used to help out her paranormal investigator father but when a blunder of hers got him killed, she abandoned the spooky stuff ... but it's not long before she's drawn back into it. For the most part, a very funny film.

The Last Stand - a 2013 flick with Arnie's first lead role in ten years, here he plays the sheriff of a small US/Mexico border town through which a murderous fugitive is going to attempt to flee. Naturally, Ahnult is having none of it.

A pretty fun 105 minutes, with decent action and some nice gags. Also stars Forest Whittaker and Johnny Knoxville.

Amongst a rash of films on my days off, we'll cherry pick A Bridge Too Far first

usually try watching it this time of year being the anniversary and this year is the seventy-fifth. Still doesn't alter the fact that Montgomery's plan was overly ambitious and doomed to fail from the off. The film does a decent enough job in the time allotted to show the plan's failure and everything else. From an early age this made me a fan of Hardy Kruger (occurs, it's the only film I've seen of his in his native language -others being films like One that Got Away, Hatari, Wild Geese and so on).
Though perhaps not a film, like Longest Day, Battle of Britain etc, that singular performances would be awarded an award like an Oscar or some such, there's some in there that I always like. One of Connery's finest performances, not tub-thumping noteworthy but he does his bit to capture Urquhart and none more so than that final scene with Browning (his expression when he hears the geese 'laughing' as they fly away prior to meeting Browning).
Gene Hackman as Sosabowski. I've not read about Hackman and how he prepared for the role or what he thought about it, but again, a credible job of capturing a man who until recently was maligned by some and set up as a scapegoat by folk as early as the aftermath of the battle.
Or the human roadblock scene, Addison's Dutch Rhapsody going full tilt and ending with that shot of the German halftrack firing away.

and then, 633 Squadron.

It's a film that it's best not to look at too seriously. Not when you consider that the actors boast 1960s hairstyles, post war Land Rover's pepper the scene, dodgy model work and the same Messerschmitt Me108 shooting up the Mossies…
...it's a bit of fun nowadays. Robertson is good, Harry Andrews does his bit well and John Meillon is the hidden delight of the film as Gilibrand. The model work does let things down a bit -like Battle of Britain later it employed a fair amount of real aircraft (less than BoB ended up using) but unlike BoB it resorted to models a that when they blew up were quite obviously models (what few models BoB employed looked alright for the most part. Only one Heinkel when it broke apart on the sea was quite clearly a patchwork model) and the fact the Germans ever used the same fighter seems to rob the film of some kind of excellence. (But then Battle was hindered by only having 3 working Hurricane's and the same handful of Spanish built 109's and He111's).

Trivially, where Robertson and Maria Peschy fish is where Bond and Trench, er, punt in FRWL. Dontchyaknow.

I must confess I'm glad sometimes that I don't know quite enough about whichever historical era is being depicted onscreen to be able to spot any but the most glaring anachronisms, because it can throw you out of what you're watching.

For example ... apparently a reference to a child's hair being 'as golden as an Oscar' in a recent episode of Peaky Blinders was wrong, because the episode was set around 5 years before the Oscars were first coated in gold. News to me!

I gleaned some of my u/s knowledge from IMDB but there's bits you can make out if you pay close enough attention. I remember somebody picking the oddest one in Battle of Britain, that Robert Shaw's house bore a 1960s-era doorbell! Of all things.

See, I stopped watching Peaky Blinders a while back so I wouldn't have known about that.

Just makes me think of Cheers when Cliff and Norm go to see films at the cinema just to pick out the oddities and anachronisms.

"How else do you explain Julius Caesar wearing Nikes!?"