Last Movie you Watched?

Avarice wrote:

Just came back from the latest attempt at Jane Eyre. Nicely done and ditching the 'I can see again!' ending was wise. Don't think modern audiences would buy that.

I've heard decent things about the new JANE EYRE. May give it a look one of these days.

Mr. Brown wrote:

The chemtone colors of the beginning and the ending were used to connect the two.

Dude what's chemtone? Is that like chemtrails?

Looked it up. Oh, something about acid stains. I take it Jack the Ripper worked on TAXI DRIVER.

Harmsway wrote:

I've heard decent things about the new JANE EYRE. May give it a look one of these days.

I've heard it's quite good. But for 'horribly disfigured' read 'has grown a beard'.

Sharky wrote:

Mr. Brown wrote:

The chemtone colors of the beginning and the ending were used to connect the two.

Dude what's chemtone? Is that like chemtrails?

Yeah, just like that.

WHAMMY!

Ravenstone wrote:

Harmsway wrote:

I've heard decent things about the new JANE EYRE. May give it a look one of these days.

I've heard it's quite good. But for 'horribly disfigured' read 'has grown a beard'.

Props did a nice line in milky 'vile jelly' contacts, but, yeah, Mr Rochester is far too good looking. As for his mad bint in the attic, she's a considerable improvement over 99% of what passes for women these days. Shurely shome mishtake.

Seve wrote:

trevanian wrote:

Seve wrote:

Mulholland Drive

MULHOLLAND was originally supposed to become a TV series, and when that didn't happen, Lynch had essentially a leftover open-ended pilot. Hence there were lots of lil things llke the diner folk you mention, plus Robert Forster, who would probably have been regular characters (if you can call anybody in a Lynch film regular.)

Story is that Lynch had a dream and used that to come up with the ending as it now stands, calling back the principals to do a goodly amount of shooting (most all of act 3, I guess.)

I remain convinced that Naomi Watts' scene with Chad Everett is entirely responsible for her ensuing career. Can't imagine she'll ever hit notes so clearly, and get something so damned RIGHT.

suddenly it all falls into place!
interesting
thanks for posting

I couldn't make heads to tails of this film when I first saw it years ago, so I googled for an explanation and found one that made sense. I can't remember the details. But there is a point in the film where one of the characters is simply dreaming and then it all fits.

Seve wrote:

Mulholland Drive
interesting film

watching it last night I thought it was developing into an excellent suspense thriller until the third act (about the time the two women went to the night club) when it ceased to make much sense to me and by the end I was very disappointed
Lynch's trademark atmospheric technique was there and lots of intriguing threads and characters were introduced but in the end many were left unresolved from my perspective, which I found frustrating and disappointing
it reminded me of Twin Peaks by the same director where much the same thing happened
what looked like it would become a rich carpet ended up as only an interesting coil of rope

however by morning, after sleeping on it, the situation had become clearer and I at least understood the main thrust of the film (at least I think I do)
the perky blond in the first half of the movie is a figment of the dark haired ones imagination, traumatised as she was by the attempted hit followed by the car accident, accompanying her on her journey toward the truth and recovery of her senses and memory
the same blond in the second half of the movie was the girl the dark haired one had a relationship with, the jilted lesbian lover who had tried to have her killed and then committed suicide
finding her body was the trigger for the dark haired girl to adopt a blond disguise and go to the nightclub to collect the blue box, although how she knew to do this is not clear to me
scenes in the first half of the movie featuring the perky blond on her own, are actual scenes from the life of the blond in the second half of the movie, before she met the dark haired girl
that's my theory anyway…
which is a kind of a dirty trick played by the director on the audience purely to mislead them
and the dissatisfaction with the unresolved threads still holds
for example the two guys in the diner who went out back, what was that about? we never found out

I couldn't make heads or tails of this film when I first saw it years ago, so I googled for an explanation and found one that made sense. I can't remember the details. But there is a point in the film where one of the characters is simply dreaming, and then it all fits.
This film did put both Naiomi Watts and Laura Harring on the map for me.

My only thought is that Watts' wank is mighty strange.

I read once that only a sadist could get turned on by that. What utter bollocks.

Normally I don't think of masturbation as self abuse, but Watts comes pretty close.

Supposedly Lynch made her do that scene at gunpoint, and, whatever she's up to, pleasure ain't the principle.

More like the principle's stapler. :x

My personal favourite's gotta be RAMBLING ROSE. Laura Dern's a pro. A sorely neglected entry in the wider canon of masturbation in cinema.

Picked up the Bad News Bears, 2005 with Billy Bob Thorton. I like sports and sports movies so I thought I should finally get around to seeing this. Was not dissapointed. The baseball scenes were extremely well done. Thornton himself actually played in the Kansas City Royals minor-league system before injuries derailed his career.

Its a rather ribald update on the Walter Matthau/Tatum O'Neal 70's original which was kind of risque for its time as well. The kids are pretty foul mouthed, and Thornton's, washed-up former-pro ball-player, is a real reprobate, so it's more of a mature teen to adult film.

Great for a laugh if you like baseball.

Speaking of, I will be passing on Moneyball until it hits blu-ray. I could not stomach a real-life moron like Brad Pitt, passing himself off as modern-day big league baseball manager. I respect the game of baseball too much, to sit through a likely ego-driven, overly dramaticized performance by Pitt in such a role. The trailers are a real turn-off.

Moneyball itself is not half as interesting as the filmmakers, I'm sure will try and make it out to be. Yes the Oakland A's played decent baseball under money-ball but they were never a threat to win a title during this phase.

I think the combo of a dick like Pitt playing a folksy baseball manager, along with likely undue reverence by the filmmakers to the Moneyball concept, might be enough to make me vomit in the theatre. Not pleasant.

Better off to sample at home, where I can keep a pail handy.

Sharky wrote:

A sorely neglected entry in the wider canon of masturbation in cinema.

The Devils and The Exorcist may have led impressionable young ladies to believe a crucifix is a necessary piece of equipment. In fact there are many options. I prefer a Dyson Turbo.

Avarice wrote:

The Devils and The Exorcist may have led impressionable young ladies to believe a crucifix is a necessary piece of equipment.

Or a charred femur in the case of THE DEVILS. I think a simple misinterpretation of the phrase getting "getting boned."

Apparently there was a screening of the film uncut in the East London Film Festival back in May, introduced by Ken Russell. Sadly it was sold out.

Not a movie to watch with your girlfriend, I warn future generations.

trevanian wrote:

G section wrote:

Victim (1961)
Dir. Basil Dearden

A mightily impressive work, at least from a directorial point of view.

Without even trying, we wound up seeing a lot of Dearden films in the last couple of years. I didn't know his name, but all of a sudden (probably on a netflix page) I went a-ha!

For me, he has a stretch roughly akin to Frankenheimer's MANCHURIAN to SECONDS or THE FIXER run, where from the late 50s into the mid 60s he is absolute gold, plussing up okay material and making better stuff really shine.

It runs cold after that nifty ALTERED STATES precursor MIND BENDERS with Mary Ure and Bogarde, but I'm thinking of looking into his earliest films to see what other gems may be out there.

I think there's a Criterion box for him. I've looked at it for possible items from Netflix.

Makeshift Python wrote:

WHAMMY!

It's called Sex Panther by Odeon. It's illegal in nine countries... Yep, it's made with bits of real panther, so you know it's good.

Avarice wrote:

Sharky wrote:

A sorely neglected entry in the wider canon of masturbation in cinema.

The Devils and The Exorcist may have led impressionable young ladies to believe a crucifix is a necessary piece of equipment. In fact there are many options. I prefer a Dyson Turbo.

One more argument in favor of that Dyson guy playing Q ... Imagine a Q with gadgets that can be improvised into sex toys (well, I guess most of them could be, depending how desperate and twisted one happened to be.)

Avarice wrote:

Normally I don't think of masturbation as self abuse, but Watts comes pretty close.

Supposedly Lynch made her do that scene at gunpoint

That's more Werner Herzog's line of direction, I think.

But I remember a story the TWIN PEAKS dwarf once told about Lynch. The actor asked him for some help, motivation, and the context for a fantasy scene he was playing, and Lynch told him there is no context -- like, nothing ever happened before this moment, and nothing is going to come out of it afterward. The guy eventually decided this was a great piece of direction, but to me, I think I'd be happier with George Lucas' feeble style of instructions ... y'know:

faster, more intense.

(come to think of it, those might be Lynch's words to Watts.)

TRUE GRIT. At last, a film from the Coens that doesn't carry the smug and irritating whiff of an elaborate private joke at the viewer's expense. Solid entertainment, with some fine cinematography, although it's never more than watchable fluff, and I'll be darned if I understood more than three or four words from Jeff Bridges throughout.

TETRO. The Buenos Aires backdrop is interesting (one wonders whether TETRO would be half as compelling were it set in New York or London), and Coppola covers it in retro visuals (I thought this flick was set in the 1940s or 1950s until a character mentioned her hatred of George W. Bush) and captures it in striking B&W images. TETRO is never less than gorgeous to look at (indeed how it failed to get a nomination for the Best Cinematography Oscar is beyond me), and much of it is a delightful display of (arguably) a master director paying affectionate tribute to those masters who inspired him - for instance, one key scene looks and feels very reminiscent of another in 8½, and without being simply a tired steal from it. It's great to see a film imbued with the spirit and visuals of directors like Antonioni, Bertolucci and Fellini, and it's also great to see Coppola in his seventies recapturing some of his CONVERSATION/GODFATHER II classic form. It's terrific, too, that a flick like this can even get financed in this day and age. All these things are wonderful. But is TETRO up there with the best of Coppola's efforts from way back in the day? Well, no. Sadly, it suffers from a script that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and, worse, offers us not a single character to care about (in spite of good supporting performances by Alden Ehrenreich and Maribel Verdú - by contrast, Vincent Gallo and Klaus Maria Brandauer are hammy and one-note). True, I failed to spot the big twist coming, so props to Coppola and co. for that, but even so TETRO more or less falls flat as a work of engaging drama. Its characters are too uninteresting and unsympathetic, and its screenplay too melodramatic and overwrought. It's more than worth seeing as an exercise in style, but ultimately it cannot hold a candle to the best of "arthouse" cinema to which it's so heavily indebted, or indeed to the best of Coppola.

George Lucas' feeble style of instructing actors didn't lead to anything outstanding, though. Mark Hamill might be a perfect example.

I'm curious to know how Hopper was instructed to act in BLUE VELVET. Though, I can imagine he did just fine on his own.

Yeah, all of Mark Hamill's best performances have been under other directors.

And usually in the field of voice acting.

Mr. Brown wrote:

The ending connected to the beginning, according to Schrader. I recall him saying (in the DVD commentary) that Travis gets off as the hero the first time, but when it happens again, it's not going to turn out that way. The chemtone colors of the beginning and the ending were used to connect the two.

yes, they say that in "the making of", but I don't know that that message comes across in what they filmed
one little "what if" musical queue at the end is not enough to convey that to me
Travis life continues and there will be further cross roads and choices on the journey, which may turn out well or not, but are not predetermined by any irrevocable "psychosis"

to me Travis, in his intentions and beliefs, is a pretty normal person, it's just his social skills have slipped out of alignment
part of him is running away from his war experiences, distracting himself by filling his life with the constant activity of a mundane job and tiring himself physically in a desperate effort to avoid facing up and trying to make sense of them, while another part of him still craves the normal human needs of friendship and love

personally I found him a very sympathetic character

Sharky wrote:

Seve wrote:

Taxi Driver
watched the movie then the making of doco I was surprised how negative the views of the writer, director and actors were toward the main character all of them considered him a psychopath and a ticking time bomb who would eventually go on another killing spree one even described him as "almost despicable" whereas I considered him to be a relatively normal man who has been disoriented, disillusioned, dislocated and disconnected from mainstream society by his war experiences a man at a cross roads in his life who could go either way who somewhat by chance ends up taking the road toward redemption and recovery, rather than the one toward damnation when his rage is diverted toward the skanks who exploit underage girls in the sex trade, rather than the aspiring political candidate the positive affirmation he receives as a result, in particular the letter from the family inviting him back into society the way he seems to be more comfortable in the final scenes, with the other taxi drivers, one of the guys rather than on the fringe the way Cybil Shepherd's character's reappearance signals her reappraisal and unspoken apology to him personally I found it a positive ending

Talk about a long sentence.

if it helps, just think of it as blank verse