Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Ellis in Freedomland (1952) Recommended to me by Citizen Rules. I watched this on Youtube. This is like an all star, feature length commercial. It's kind of fun to hear big name stars of that time playing appliances. There is some amusing dialogue. A really unusual film unlike anything I have ever seen. Worth checking out for the unusualness of it all.

It is also available from the Internet Archive!

https://archive.org/details/ellis-in-freedomland-1952

Any movie with Lucille Ball voicing a laundromat can't be all bad!

Mask - 6/10

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Forget it, it's Chinatown.

This is one of those documentaries that exists with seemingly good intentions and yet its underlying message is ultimately one that is profoundly harmful to the disabled community.

In case you haven't heard, Blink follows a Canadian family on a year-long trip around the world, where they visit over a dozen exotic countries, mostly very far from Canada, to allow their children to experience their ultimate dreams.

And what is the cause for the year-long excursion? The parents have recently learned that 3 out of their 4 kids have retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary condition resulting in macular degeneration that gradually destroys peripheral vision and severely limits night vision.

At this point, you might be thinking that the parents have got the right idea - and, admittedly, to the extent that they would otherwise feel powerless to help their disabled kids, it does seem to be coming from a good place.

But the documentary absolutely sends the wrong message out there, because I'm pretty sure that the overwhelming majority of parents of kids with RP - and adults with RP as well - do not have the resources to just take a year off and go traveling to exotic destinations all over the world.

And while it's true that there is currently no treatment for RP, a lot of specialists have been working hard for a long time to come up with a cure - something that, very possibly, might involve gene therapy. Is it a sure thing that a viable treatment is likely within our lifetime? Possibly not, but that's just all the more reason to support greater funds be spent on the necessary research.

Granted, that might make for a less commercial documentary, and that's definitely not something that National Geographic would likely want; the documentary that exists is one that is both sincere and also calculated to produce the maximum emotional response from the viewer.

Sure, one definitely can only wish that these kids - as well as people with RP all over the world - might someday benefit from a cure for the condition. But until that time comes, maybe it would be better to actually try to find a working treatment so that affected people don't have to live in constant fear of untreatable blindness.

By IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59721712

The Professor and the Madman - (2019)

I seem to be watching a lot of films with tortured post-production histories - Professor and the Madman is the true-life story about the writing of the first ever Oxford English Dictionary, which happened to be a much harder project than you'd at first consider. It took decades, and wasn't even completed by the time the two historical figures in this film - James Murray (Mel Gibson) and Dr. William Chester Minor (Sean Penn) - died. The latter of those two was stark raving mad, but just happened to have a knack for the English-language research needed for the project. At one stage - in a scene that rocked me to my core - he cuts own his doo-dad off. James Murray is as sane and reasonable as Dr. Minor is bonkers, but the two form a close friendship which lasts until events overtake it. It's a movie about obsessions - because who else but the obsessed could devise a system where a large group of dedicated readers read every English-language book ever published in all of history and extract every unique and definable word in them. By the time it was published, the dictionary had approximately 400,000 words in it, and over a million citations. I thought the story about Dr. William Chester Minor was fascinating, but the Mel Gibson parts of the movie and the minutiae over making the dictionary were a little dry and dull. In the end it was an okay but average movie, despite the fact that all the people involved in making it had come to hate the thing by the time all the lawsuits were settled and it was finally released, 3 years later than it was scheduled to be. It also features Natalie Dormer as Eliza Merrett, a woman who falls in love with Dr. Minor, despite the fact that he senselessly killed her husband in a fit of paranoia, Eddie Marsan as Broadmoor guard Muncie and Steve Coogan as the kindly academic ally to James Murray, Frederick James Furnivall.

6/10

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Set in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, Death and the Winemaker follows a young winemaker (Kacey Mottet Klein) that finds himself smitten by love. But when Death (Virginie Meisterhans) itself comes to claim his bride, he's determined to do whatever it takes to protect her. But what happens when you trick Death itself?

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Good movie & well acted. I watched it twice. Dark very dark. Polish cinema.

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

Cronin, 2023





This flick got quite a bit of positive press, and my wife loves stuff like this, so we fired this up to continue along on our 31 films in 31 days challenge. I enjoyed the 2013 reboot well enough, which was basically a scene for scene remake of Raimi's original that added gallons of blood to the affair. I thought it was good, but not great - it stripped away a lot of the charm and roguish creativity of the original. That said, it's several orders of magnitude better than Evil Dead Rise.

The cold open has us in a familiar setting: a few teens or perhaps college-aged kids hanging out at a cabin in the woods. We are treated so several wink-wink callbacks to the first film to let us know we are in the Evil Dead universe. Look, this whole meta style that pervades many of today's films is getting tiresome. I have half a rant formulated in my head concerned this much larger and massively widespread problem, but I will save that for a later date or perhaps an essay. Anyway, without any background whatsoever, one of the characters is possessed. This is without even a single scene with this character, and she is asleep at the time with her back turned, so we haven't even seen her face yet. Mayhem ensues, people die and then a title card slams down saying "One Day Earlier." I am not a huge fan of this structure, but whatever, I guess it's time to see how these characters ended up in a cabin in the woods with a deadite.

Nope. Instead we are introduced to a different family living in a dilapidated building in LA - a building in such bad shape it is scheduled to be condemned - with everyone living there set to be evicted soon. After some sort of silly scenes of exposition and a minor earthquake, one of the kids ends up finding the Necronomicon in an abandoned bank (???), along with some dusty vinyl records. Of course, the kid is a DJ, so he pilfers the vinyl and the book, which bite him and causes him to bleed on the cover, starting an ancient blood ritual (lol). After reading the book and getting totally freaked out by the imagery, he does what any bright youngster would do, he tosses the demonic vinyl on the record player. Haven't these kids ever seen a horror movie?

The film foregoes building any tension or suspense, instead just cranking things up to 11 right away with scene after scene of ultraviolence, much of it perpetrated on young children. Aside from the deadite makeup, this film stops feeling like an Evil Dead film very quickly, instead plunging into slick, overproduced generic horror territory. The constant excessive violence becomes almost unintentionally comical after a while, and is so relentless I found myself checking the clock several times to see how much of this nonsense was left to endure. It all ends as one would expect, I felt absolutely nothing for any of the characters, especially the two older sisters and their laughably bad sibling rivalry over of all things a derogatory nickname. Really, really dumb stuff.

Before I forget, because the film makers clearly did: there is a tacked on scene at the end with one of the kids from the cabin at the beginning of the film that reveals one of the kids lived in the building. Why they included either scene is beyond me, as they are totally extraneous and disconnected from the main narrative. None of the characters in the family ever interact with this person. I guess they wanted to reuse a key scene from the original film, - one that features a ticking clock - so they concocting a silly side plot in order to have an excuse to show an old clock in a cabin in the woods.

Fans of excessive gore and violence may get more out of this film that I did, but I found it to be in poor taste - a total miss for me.

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Anastasia: Once Upon a Time (2020) Watched on Tubi. This is a teen fantasy/comedy with an unusual plot: Anastasia Romanov escapes through a portal when her family is threatened by Vladimir Lenin, and she finds herself in the year 1988, befriended by a young American girl. This is bad, but I like it. The story is questionable at best, but it is not intended to be historically accurate or taken seriously. This is an intentionally silly movie. It has an unusal and interesting cast and I really liked the two main girls. They were quite charming and lovely. I liked the costumes too. The score was pretty bad though. In spite of its flaws and potentally problematic plotline, I had fun with this.

The WB machinery seems to be cranking out cinematic garbage with increasingly frightening regularity. That alone is way scarier than anything in this so-called movie, which went straight to streaming despite having once been scheduled for a theatrical release.

The 2-hour version that was unceremoniously dumped to streaming is reportedly a heavily edited cut of a much longer 3-hour version. It's hard to imagine what, if anything, could have been improved by an extra hour of material, given the available evidence.

The movie fails to be at all scary, despite having a pretty good and charismatic cast headed by Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh and Alfre Woodard, and some good locations (much of it was reportedly filmed in Ipswich, Massachusetts).

Don't be surprised if WB eventually coughs up a 3-hour version of this, should the present cut draw up even a teensy bit of interest. But also, don't expect it to be any good.

I love this movie, I think Cher should have gotten an Oscar nomination for it.

Ich War Neunzehn - 7/10

Faye - 7/10
2024 documentary on Faye Dunaway.

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, 2024)

I have a big Mike Leigh gap in film—the only other movie of his I’d seen prior to this was Vera Drake. Nothing intentional about this, I just hadn’t gotten around to them. Anyway, my impression is that this is much more of a prototypical Mike Leigh film than Vera Drake was—it focuses mainly on a woman, Pansy (played terrifically by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who is from the jump fearful, bitter, and angry, a tyrant of misery who dominates the lives of those around her, especially her husband and son, who have largely withdrawn from the fight. Her main tether to the community of the world is her younger sister Chantelle, whose life and outlook are almost polar opposite of Pansy’s. Much of the film is actually quite comic—Pansy is humorless but witty and no one is spared her verbal rapier—but there is always pain and suffering underneath the humor. What makes the film work is Leigh and his actors’ commitment to humanity of the characters. Pansy is unlikeable, but not a caricature; acknowledging her pain doesn't flatter us, it is just the act of seeing a person.

8/10



On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2024)

Nyoni’s second feature (following I Am Not a Witch, which I have not seen) is also a drama mixed with comedy and also deals with family trauma. The trauma here is different, about family secrets commingled with grief and denial, centered around a young woman, Shula (Susan Chardy in her first film), who is caught between her generation and that of her elders, as well as between modern and traditional ways. Although the setting is Zambia and many of the cultural details are different from Western ones, the way that people deal (or don’t deal) with pain and harm will be very familiar to all of us. The film is beautifully made, and the sound design stands out as a way to get inside the characters’ feelings, often in contrast to what’s happening around them. A challenging but rewarding experience.

8/10

The Ceremony (1971)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

By Tino Avelli - https://images.static-bluray.com/pro...52_2_large.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66698801

Violent City - (1970)

This sizzling Italian thriller sees a hard-edged Charles Bronson play contract killer Jeff Heston - who has fallen in love with Vanessa Shelton (Jill Ireland), whereupon he'll get burned over and over and over again as she betrays him numerous times. I guess even the most streetwise crime masters have that one person in their life they go so goo-goo over that they constantly want to believe them. This poliziotteschi (spaghetti crime) film starts with an absolutely epic car chase through the narrow streets of Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands, and ends with a dazzlingly dramatic set-piece which has much flair to it. Telly Savalas co-stars as crime kingpin Al Weber, and since director Sergio Sollima thought much of his contemporaries he of course got Ennio Morricone to score this - adding a certain completeness to it. I have to say it has the feel of a proto-Tarantino genre film, with snappy dialogue and the like. The film was also shot in New Orleans - taking advantage of everything on offer there. The version I watched has had previously excised scenes and shots reinserted into it, but still dubbed in Italian (with subtitles) - so I've only seen the non-chopped up Violent City. There's a lot to like about it, and I'm really glad I came across it.

7/10


By https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eez9acppc...LA-Affiche.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71290925

Leila's Brothers - (2022)

A really powerful drama that gives you an experience of what family means to average, everyday Iranians, and what it takes these days for a not-so-well-off family in Iran to survive. Great stuff. Top drawer Iranian cinema. Full review here, in my watchlist thread.

9/10

Empire of Passion (1978)

The whole "From the creators of The Conjuring Universe" plug always turns me off, because I don't have a lot of respect for The Conjuring Universe, and as such, by implication, I don't have a lot of respect for what they're advertising either. I'm not at all surprised that this version of Salem's Lot failed to be at all scary - it's a trend you could bet your house on.