Rate The Last Movie You Saw

is that david bowie documentary?

it’s a movie.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Mikey Madison excellent in this over-long comedic movie. Raised in LA, but manages a Brooklyn accent very well. Loads of f-bombs & extreme nudity. Didn’t think much of the lead Russian actor who over-acted in the extreme.

Set in the mid-90s, Longlegs follows Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI agent that is tracking down a serial killer that's murdering entire families in Oregon. Harker is incredibly skilled as an investigator, but is a bit of an introvert and socially awkward. This might come from her religious upbringing, which has led to a strained relationship with her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt).

Perkins showed a lot of promise with his debut film, The Blackcoat's Daughter. This one has a similar eerie and dreadful vibe. His direction is very impressive with some nice framing and patient camera work, all of which contribute to an atmosphere of uneasiness that just gets under your skin from the very first scene, which is our introduction to the titular serial killer.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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1st Rewatch...Vincente Minnelli directed this stylish melodrama about a soldier/writer named Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) who returns to his hometown and attempts to mend the broken relationship with his brother (Arthur Kennedy) while pursuing a romance with an icy schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) and keeping a pathetic floozie named Ginny Moorhead (Shirley MacLaine) at arm's length after she followed him home. Sinatra offers one of his strongest performances and works well with Dean Martin as Bama Dillert, Dave's gambling buddy who never takes off his hat, but MacLaine totally steals the show here in a performance that earned her her first Oscar nomination.

September 7, 2025
BABYGIRL (Halina Reijn / 2024)

September 14, 2025
THE LAST SHOWGIRL (Gia Coppola / 2024)

I have to say that my last two visits to the local theater have been pretty rewarding. I really enjoyed these films a great deal. Granted, I don't really have much to say about them, because frankly I've become rather fatigued at the prospect of trotting out yet more redundant synopses or offering up an all-out unpacking of every single movie I see at the local theater on this particular site. (Nothing personal, you understand.) But I will just say that I liked both films a lot, and I thought that Nicole Kidman and Pamela Anderson were both very impressive in the leads. (Kidman is never a surprise in this regard, but I found Anderson's performance very powerful and affecting.)

The thing that struck me the most about Babygirl was how weirdly sympathetic the character of Samuel was, as well as the subtlety of Harris Dickinson's performance. He's one of those "X-ray mind" characters that in a more conventional film could quite easily tilt into out-and-out villainy. (Other examples of this type would include Hannibal Lecter and the outlaw Ben Wade in the 3:10 to Yuma movies.) Samuel is obviously quite immature, and of course part of the tension surrounding the character's affair with Kidman is whether or not he'll spill the beans on that relationship. He could do so at any time, of course, but there is a strong ambiguity about his motivations. First of all, would he actually go that far? Is he exercising this power over Kidman because he's an immature brat, or is it that in his unfiltered perceptions he senses that on some level Kidman wants him to hold this power over her and merely obliges her out of an instinctual empathy? There's a lot of food for thought here, and any two people going to see this film could walk away with two completely different takes on the story, characters and subject matter. And frankly, that's how more movies should be.

I just turned 51 last year, and believe me, the older I get, the more strongly I identify with a character like Shelly Gardner, the aging Vegas showgirl played by Pamela Anderson. Because the older you get, the more it seems like the rest of the world completely passes you by, and everything you've come to know and believe (or tell yourself) about life, politics, art, entertainment or even simple aesthetic sense seems to become less and less valid. When we're young, we think we know where it's at, what's hip or what's cool, what's beautiful, and then as time marches on and younger people come along with far different ideas, it all seems to become less relevant. And that's just the non-physical side of the aging process! Gia Coppola's film - and Kate Gersten's script - perfectly capture this sense. As with Babygirl, the filmmakers have taken a much less traveled route, because this could just as easily have turned into some kind of post-Sunset Boulevard "aging diva" melodrama and over-egged the pathos. But this movie manages to keep things real, and it never seems like the movie is ridiculing or even pitying its main character. (Once again, kudos to Anderson!) Even Jamie Lee Curtis as Shelly's older waitress friend and former colleague Annette, as gaudy and blowzy a relic as she is, still feels very real and relatable when she could just as easily have been made into a grotesque.

Weirdly enough, while watching The Last Showgirl, I was sort of reminded of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), another slice-of-life approach to the tale of an aging, over-the-hill entertainer. One might say that Aronofsky's own female counterpart to that movie was 2011's Black Swan, but that one was a bit more fantastical and hallucinatory and dealt with creative demons in the world of ballet, which was a much more "high art" realm. Granted, The Last Showgirl is much less high-stakes, life-or-death than either of those Aronofsky films, but I was strongly reminded of The Wrestler and felt like it explored very similar territory.

Well... That certainly went on a lot longer than I thought it would! (It always does. Once I get rolling it's hard to stop, no matter how often I tell myself I'm going to keep things brief.)

P.S. The movies I'm most looking forward to seeing in the future:
Presence / Black Bag
Back-to-back collaborations between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp! (And anyway, how could I possibly resist a movie that shares its title with the most underrated Led Zeppelin album?)

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"Well, it's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid" - Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, High Plains Drifter (1973)

"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours" - Bob Dylan, Talkin' World War III Blues (1963)

And my latest news on the home video front...



Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino / 2009)

A major milestone here: Quentin Tarantino's first Arrow Video title! Yeah, I already got the DVD and the Blu-ray for this, but I figured this brand spanking new 2-disc 4K UHD version - which dropped just yesterday - simply had to be worth a triple-dip. And you know what? It was! The picture quality looks absolutely gorgeous, and it's got a new commentary (from Tim Lucas) plus a number of extremely informative video essays and featurettes. I would highly recommend it, but I would advise getting it through Barnes & Noble, as Amazon seems to have already sold out of this one!

As much as I genuinely love Inglourious Basterds, It's always put me in a kind of weird moral and ethical quandary in terms of how to regard it. And believe me, it's got nothing to do with its hyper-violent, action/exploitation approach to World War II, the Nazis and the Holocaust. That I'm cool with! Without giving spoilers to those who haven't seen the movies, I'll just say that my problem with Inglourious Basterds is the same one I've got with Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from 2019. Granted, I understand that we're dealing in the realm of fiction here, no matter the extent to which it deals with real people and events, and a fair amount of license should be granted. Even in the case of "true stories," characters and events are always being either compressed or newly created outright. But I do think that playing too fast and loose with history, to the point of completely changing the outcome (or even simply the nature of the outcome), is questionable at best, and perhaps even dangerous at worst, given how many impressionable dolts there are among the American populace. (Not necessarily a 2024 election dig here, but y'know, if the shoe fits...) Granted, Tarantino is a very intelligent creative force, and I'm inclined to give him a bit of leeway here because his intentions are good. Part of his agenda here would seem to be in cutting historical and cultural boogeymen like Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson down to size, disempowering them (or people like them), making them look small and pathetic, and giving greater agency and humanity to their victims. (This issue is dealt with in a few of the new video essays on the new Arrow release.) But I still tend to think that such an out-and-out, blatant change of history is generally ill-advised unless you've got a plutonium-powered flying DeLorean or a starship making a slingshot around the sun to put it in a more fantastical context.

Thank you! That was really deep and beautiful. I personally can only claim to catch a glimpse (being non-binary) of the scariness that trans people face every day.

Antes Que Cante el Gallo is basically a coming of age film for Carmín. Early in the film, we see her get her first period; but that's the least of her worries. The film opens with her mother breaking the news to her that she's moving to the US to look for better opportunities, forcing Carmín to stay with her strict grandmother, who also has to learn to handle an angsty teenager. To complicate things, Carmín's father Rubén (José Eugenio Hernández) has just been released from prison and has come to live with them again.

This is my second watch of this film and even though I loved it the first time, it undoubtedly improved for me. There is some really impressive work here, both technically and story-wise. From the gorgeous direction from Arí Maniel Cruz and the cinematography from Santiago Marí Benet to the music from Eduardo Cabra. From the nuanced and layered script from Kisha Tikina Burgos to the complex relationships portrayed between the three leads.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

Smoke (1995)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

El Sur (1983, Erice) - C+

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Member since Fall 2002
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In this short, co-directed by Arí Maniel Cruz and Benito Martínez Ocasio (Bad Bunny), our lead character reminisces about the past and ways to hold on to that past, and the ways we were, while the Puerto Rico around him is changing. The situation presented in his way to the bakery and inside might be a bit exaggerated (but not that much), but there are always good people, millions of Puerto Ricans, that against all changes, come up front and say "we're still here..."

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

True Stories (1986)

4 out of 5

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By Copyrighted by Paramount Pictures, Inc.. Artists(s) not known. - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048728/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=25318671

To Catch a Thief - (1955)

That was all very nice. Cary Grant - charming, handsome and debonair no matter what he wears, and nearly as tanned as he was in An Affair to Remember. That guy took sunning himself to a whole new level. Hitchcock managed to capture some stunning scenery and make it all look like it was incidental to what was going on. The story was fine for what it was. I never ended up being able to make much of a connection with Grace Kelly. The biggest drawback to this whole attractive-looking, well-filmed and made movie was how little else I found to it. The suspense, considering this is Hitchcock, was lacking a little. I had more fun listening to Grant deliver his lines. A fine piece of work though, no matter how great it is as a whole.

6/10


Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=25318671

Liv & Ingmar - (2012)

Watching Liv & Ingmar kind of reminded me about my relationship with my ex-partner, except for the fact that I'm not a world-renowned filmmaker. It's a special kind of thing to have, and I think it's a good thing to have a documentary that explores this kind of relationship. They're hard to find. For those really interested in Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann, their films and love in general. Helps to have Ingmar Bergman's films to use to express emotions and events - although I'm not a huge fan of when documentaries use films in that manner.

6/10

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This is probably watch #10, give or take, so if you want a proper review you can check my previous one here. For now, I'll just add that watching this in theaters was as spectacular as I expected it to be. Amazing experience!

Grade:

Ian Bonhôte & Peter Ettedgui, 2024





When I was seven years old, my parents brought me to see Superman: The Movie at the cinema. This was just a year after Star Wars, when the pop culture surrounding blockbuster fantasy or adventure films was at its apex, so the hype and anticipation were palpable, affecting all but the stodgiest of people. My mother was a huge sci-fi and adventure fan, even if her husband at the time (my step-father), didn't have much interest in films of books of that nature. Alas, even he was excited to see the film, because Superman was one of the few exceptions, with him having grown up as a big fan of the original television show. He had even admitted to having a Superman comic book collection when he was a kid.

In those days, you would get tot he theater as early as possible, only to be greeted with a line going all the way around the building and sometimes over into the strip mall parking lot next door. This was certainly the case here, as my parents wanted to see the film on one of the larger screens in Tucson at the time, which was the El Dorado theater.



Pretty sure that pic was taken during the initial Star Wars run, but you get the picture. I hated this process, and this was always the case for the massively hyped flicks back then. Alas, we finally made it in, and plopped down in our seats, which were fairly close to the front. The film started and the credits seemed to go on forever. People started cracking jokes that the credits would end up being longer than the film. Then... we saw a man fly. I recall the theater erupting into cheers many times during the film. Christopher Reeve's undeniable charisma just absolutely captured everyone in the theater. He was Superman.

This documentary celebrates the life and accomplishments of this remarkable man. The film wisely explains his tragic accident early, and then uses archival footage to fill in the periods of his career and later activism instead of attempting to build tension over time leading up to his accident, which I think would have been in poor taste. The film does a good job of portraying the gravity of his injuries and its effects on his family and friends, not to mention himself, while still managing to highlight Christopher's indomitable will and resilient spirit.

As one world expect, there are some truly heartbreaking moments here as his family describes the trials and tribulations of the years post-accident. Watching their father struggle to survive through the years as his hope for a recovery began to dwindle, all the while tirelessly advocating for his foundation for research into spinal injuries, something they continue to do to this day. While Reeve played a hero on screen, I was struck many times by his wife Dana's herculean constitution and dedication: A true hero if I have ever seen one. Anyone who knows the recent history of the Reeve family knows Dana's sad fate as well, which only heightened the sense of sadness as I watched.

This was a difficult watch, but it ended up being one of my favorite films of the year; it's too bad it received such a limited release. Track it down and watch it if you can. As I said, it's not an easy watch, but watching this film is of course nothing compared to the struggles faced by the Reeve family during the years following Christopher's accident. While it is an overall sad film, I also found parts of it quite uplifting, and I came away understanding that while Mr. Reeve played Superman on screen, he was truly also a super man.

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I forgot I watched this a couple of weeks ago. So sad.

That's interesting, as I'd have thought falling asleep in those chairs woulld've been very uncomfortable. My neck would've been killing me when I woke up.

How ya doing'?

Even as a kid I had no interest in this.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Du levande [You, the Living] (2007)

Written and Directed by Roy Andersson

The second movie of the Swedish absurdist black comedy-drama trilogy, first film being Songs from the Second Floor (2000).
These films are absolute cult, I can say. Roy Andersson has created an unique series. It is very depressing and very funny at the same time, that's a crazy thing.
+
8.5/10

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.