Last Movie You Watched.

ASTERIX & CLEOPATRA

Does not measure up to the original comic book.

ALL THAT JAZZ.

Together with APOCALYPSE NOW, this one really elevated 1979 for me, helping offset THE BLACK HOLE, METEOR, MOONRAKER and (at that time) the first Trek movie.

I really couldn't decide whether I liked the Coppola or the Fosse best, saw both of them several times in the theater, just knew that one of them had to win best picture. But then again, this took place during the two decades when none of my choices for best picture actually won (and damned few were even nominated) -- a dry spell spanning from after THE STING to THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. So of course ... KRAMER VS KRAMER won. Still have a hard time getting my head round that one!

JAZZ is still the only Fosse movie I've seen all the way through, though I've tried CABARET and LENNY a couple times. Am a big fan of Lenny Bruce, and really imagine that I'd have loved the movie if Cliff Gorman had done it instead of Hoffman, who I often find off-putting.

I think it is one of the best films about the art of creation, as well as delivering significant snazziness throughout. Def my fave Scheider, even over JAWS.

ATJ is truly a terrific film. The concluding number, the Everly Brothers' "Bye, Bye Love," as done by Scheider and Ben Vereen, may, when combined with the dance choreography, be the greatest musical moment I've ever seen on screen. Kubrick, BTW, claimed ATJ was the greatest film ever made.

PS--What a solipsistic prick Fosse was.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

ATJ is truly a terrific film. The concluding number, the Everly Brothers' "Bye, Bye Love," as done by Scheider and Ben Vereen, may, when combined with the dance choreography, be the greatest musical moment I've ever seen on screen. Kubrick, BTW, claimed ATJ was the greatest film ever made.

PS--What a solipsistic prick Fosse was.

Didn't know that about Kubrick, thanks!

What still blows me away is how that end number design-wise is just kind of a zero-budget filmmaking approach since they no longer had budget to build the set as designed ... it's a tribute to how art direction and cinematography and JUST the right lighting can transform an iffy build from mylar strips into a phantasmagorical (is that really a word, or the right word?) visual experience.

On that same subject, several months back I interviewed the production designer who did the last season of the PICARD show, and he was faced with building a set out of nothing when the money was gone, and he could hardly believe that his crew didn't 'get it' when he said they'd have to do it Roger Corman style, with 'found' stuff instead of having everything built out. He eventually got them up to speed on this notion (which any zero-budget filmmaker would have understood immediately) and was able to cobble together a kind of bridge set for Amanda Plummer's character, using the same kind of ingenuity I remember having to employ when doing my zero-budget super-8 stuff.

I used to hoard discarded Hallmark store card racks for years, finding they took paint wonderfully well to look battleship-grey on one side and metallic chrome on the other, so you could create at least two different shipboard environments with the same materials by simply turning them over. I found that microfiche (look it up if you don't know the word) was wonderful to provide display graphics when backlit, and they scaled wonderfully, so you could use them in a full-scale set or in a miniature set (something I'd often do when you only had a bit of a scene but needed spectacle ... you'd set up a coffee table sized model of a control room behind an actor in a medium closeup and wallah, instant awesome production value.) Translucent sunglass racks made for great massive engine cores, especially with a tube light dropped inside, creating a miniature version of something like the Enterprise engine in the first TREK movie or the towers containing humans used as batteries in THE MATRIX.

There were various plastic casings used to display aa, aaa and 9volt batteries that I used a lot as well. You can see some of these on the colony walls in ALIENS, and another style that seems to have been bolted onto Lance Guest's forearms as part of his spacesuit in THE LAST STARFIGHTER, so I wasn't the only one who saw instant production value in these tidbits.

Honestly, I find an annoying sameness to most high-tech spacecraft interiors done in the last decade or so, where there isn't really much in the way of functionality because they're too busy trying to make it look slick or gaudy. I saw a still of a set on STRANGE NEW WORLDS where they basically just stuck too-small plastic plant-ons over lights deployed behind set walls, so you had this glow coming around each mounted object, and all I could think was, 'this looks like a mistake' because it seemed like they were so desperate to have more glowy stuff that they didn't care that it looked like a fitting mismatch. I think the recent reliance on LED lighting has contributed to this trend, and really wish they could work more incandescent sources in, because having everything so perfectly controlled lighting-temperature wish is homogenizing things in a visually blah fashion to my eye.

Scarcity, restriction and austerity often call forth the greatest human achievements, while largess produces sloth and carelessness.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Scarcity, restriction and austerity often call forth the greatest human achievements, while largess produces sloth and carelessness.

Man, that needs to be the header on any piece comparing the first two TREK movies.

Plus, the funkier the solution, the more fun it is to get it done that way, which is paraphrasing director Phil Kaufman's response to the 'put the computers away and throw the airplane model out the window and film that' approach to doing FX for THE RIGHT STUFF.

Following on from above, just came across a brand new and pretty good interview with Kaufman focusing on THE RIGHT STUFF. https://www.vulture.com/article/how-philip-kaufman-made-the-right-stuff-movie.html

Never actually seen TRS or any of the Trek flicks. And there are a great many other similarly famous films I haven't watched.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Never actually seen TRS or any of the Trek flicks. And there are a great many other similarly famous films I haven't watched.

I've picked up a number of second-hand Criterions during my tenure at Goodwill (my day job) in an attempt to get caught up on classics I somehow missed, but it has turned more into an acquisition thing than a viewing thing. I've got several Kurosawas that I still haven't watched, along with a silent called PANDORA'S BOX that sounds fascinating, but I don't seem to ever get round to putting them in the machine.

ASTERIX AND THE VIKINGS

Same goes for this one. Not bad, but miles away from the quality of the source material.

trevanian wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Never actually seen TRS or any of the Trek flicks. And there are a great many other similarly famous films I haven't watched.

I've picked up a number of second-hand Criterions during my tenure at Goodwill (my day job) in an attempt to get caught up on classics I somehow missed, but it has turned more into an acquisition thing than a viewing thing. I've got several Kurosawas that I still haven't watched, along with a silent called PANDORA'S BOX that sounds fascinating, but I don't seem to ever get round to putting them in the machine.  

I'm guessing you've got a warehouse full of DVDs.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

trevanian wrote:

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Never actually seen TRS or any of the Trek flicks. And there are a great many other similarly famous films I haven't watched.

I've picked up a number of second-hand Criterions during my tenure at Goodwill (my day job) in an attempt to get caught up on classics I somehow missed, but it has turned more into an acquisition thing than a viewing thing. I've got several Kurosawas that I still haven't watched, along with a silent called PANDORA'S BOX that sounds fascinating, but I don't seem to ever get round to putting them in the machine.  

I'm guessing you've got a warehouse full of DVDs.

We started limiting space for books a couple decades back (part of my dumb idea that since I don't want to be disappointed by books, I tend not to read anything I don't already know I like), and that has gotten to be a lot less space as the movie volume went up (at least in the 90s I couldn't store movies on the bookshelf, because those laserdiscs wouldn't fit, and we had a big case for them that doubled as a coffee table.) I honestly don't know how many dvds and blus I have at this point, though I do keep an alpha list of each and a notation for year when I watch any of them (it's amazing how certain comfort movies can feel like, 'haven't seen that in years' and you actually rewatched it THIS year.)

There are some that I never watch all the way through but still watch parts of very regularly ... that's true for most of the Moore films, but also for specials like THE ANDERSONVILLE TRIAL, which I think is a really good presentation (except for Shatner, who is just channelling Kirk the whole time when he should have been trying to emulate his director George C. Scott, who did the role a decade earlier) but I tend to only watch one sustained scene featuring Shat, Jack Cassidy and a downright amazing Cameron Mitchell ... it blows me away every time, and I probably watch it three or four times a year. Same for the final scenes in a TV pilot called THE QUESTOR TAPES, which I saw when I was 12 or so and set a standard for 'antagonist of moral stature' that I still don't see getting bettered after 50 years, with John Vernon delivering something beyond his usual solid baddie.

M3GAN ('unrated' version)- an orphaned young girl is taken under her aunt's wing. The aunt happens to work for a toy company and needs someone to test their prototype AI doll with, which is fine until said doll begins to exceed its 'protect the child' programming ...

Enjoyable horror (that pulls off being both creepy and knowingly daft) that will do absolutely nothing to ease your fears about technology, lol.

DESPICABLE ME

I do not care for the sequels, but this first one is brilliant.

DRACULA

This Browning version from the early 30s with Lugosi used to be one of my favourites. Lugosi is an efficient Dracula and the sets are amazing, especially the castle. Good photo as well, but this time I noticed the stilted dialogue, the poor acting and the amputated cuts more than ever before.

FRANKENSTEIN

I liked this a lot better before. Some great scenes, but the flaws just seem bigger now.

CJB wrote:

The Barbie timing was fortuitous for the meme aspect, but I doubt Oppenheimer is a movie many will revisit.

Phantom Commander wrote:

CJB wrote:

The Barbie timing was fortuitous for the meme aspect, but I doubt Oppenheimer is a movie many will revisit.

I bought it, so will see it again at some point, but I agree with Salome that it is not a top five Nolan.

I found it a strange experience. It was a thoroughly well-acted piece, right down to the smallest supporting roles (though having some very recognizable faces in those small parts was also at times distracting). Yet all of that fine acting was in service of writing that was strangely mediocre at times. My overall impression was of a film that I waited to launch into a higher level for three hours, only it never did.
It is strange that this has become his biggest non-superhero/comic book movie box office success.
I suppose the Barbenheimer meme effect will have had some part to play in that.

NAPOLEON

Fine, historical drama as well as a tragic love story. Phoenix is a perfect Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby is a dish. Like a Kubrick film, every frame in this could be a painting. As far as historic dramas from Scott go, I did not enjoy it quite as much as The Duel, but far better than Robin Hood. Well worth a watch.

Phantom Commander wrote:

NAPOLEON

Fine, historical drama as well as a tragic love story. Phoenix is a perfect Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby is a dish. Like a Kubrick film, every frame in this could be a painting. As far as historic dramas from Scott go, I did not enjoy it quite as much as The Duel, but far better than Robin Hood. Well worth a watch.

What? No Samuel L. Jackson as Napoleon? Mor ub dat whi priblidge..

I can understand that rage, PK.
Interesting that Kubrick wanted Nicholson as Napoleon. Another Joker.

THE INVISIBLE MAN

I loved this Wells story as a kid, it really caught my imagination. This 30s adaptation however, is abysmal.

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

Maybe this is where the silly notion that the monster is named Frankenstein stems from. I dig the score and the photo here, and there are more interesting things going on than in the first one.

Planet Of The Apes (original) - my first time watching this, believe it or not. Chuck Heston in possibly his most famous 'sci-fi action man' part, Jerry Goldsmith cutting loose on the score, a very neat 'evolution the other way round' scenario, a lovely 'See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil' visual gag, pioneering make-up and of course that kicker of an ending were the highlights for me.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Planet Of The Apes (original) - my first time watching this, believe it or not. Chuck Heston in possibly his most famous 'sci-fi action man' part, Jerry Goldsmith cutting loose on the score, a very neat 'evolution the other way round' scenario, a lovely 'See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil' visual gag, pioneering make-up and of course that kicker of an ending were the highlights for me.    

Heston's Taylor has the potential to be the most interesting sf protagonist ever. His disgust with the human race is certainly borne out by the ending, and his ironic laugh at the sight of that little American flag after the crash is just so right, it almost makes me wish they'd done the movie without the apes (it's sort of like ALIENS in that way, I like the characters so much I wanted to see them on a storyline that didn't require all that.)

I was itching to see the Planet of the Apes movies as a kid in the 70s (had read the comics), but when i finally got to see them as an adult, I was mildly  disappointed.

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
I did not like this much on first watch, but seeing it again now, I enjoyed it  much more. The score and the photo combine to give it a very special mood. The story itself is fine, not great, and the characters are almost like carricatures of the genre. A middling Universal horror of the age. My favourites are probably The Mummy and Phantom of the Opera.