Rate The Last Movie You Saw

The Witches (1990)

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I took a dip into Spy Thriller territory yesterday - the initial wobbly Frederick Forsyth/John le Carré/Alistair MacLean adaptations. I used to enjoy reading these novels in my early teens.


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The Odessa File - (1974)

I remember reading this a lifetime ago. I also remember cheating in English class by pretending to read it for an assignment when I'd actually already read it, and feeling guilty when the teacher lauded my achievement of roaring my way to the halfway point of the novel while I was actually only pretending to read it for the first time having recently already read it. I thought to myself "I'm probably pretending to read this too fast." It really didn't matter, because my family were moving to the country before the assignment was due. My conversation with the teacher probably went something like this :

"So, you going to finish reading The Odessa File?"

"Yeah. I'm going...it's great...it's a great....yeah, I'm going to read it..."

"You seem to have been roaring through that. I thought you'd finish it in days, but since then you've slowed down considerably."

"Yeah. I mean it was really...I had a...lately...."

"Anyway, make sure you finish it! It has a great ending."

"Oh yeah. That's a....I mean it really....I'm loving it...."

Awkward guilty conversations still haven't improved for me.

But the movie! The movie is only a little bit boring in places - there's an investigative phase where you don't really feel Peter Miller's (Jon Voight - with a German accent) life is in danger, but he does a lot of travelling around and questioning person after person - I feel like the adaptation is nearly too faithful to the book, and that an action scene or two could have been invented - this runs 130 minutes, and we have to wade through a feature's worth of investigation before the life-risking and exciting stuff starts to up the ante. (The poster hints at the film's most famous moment, half way through when Miller is pushed in front of a subway train.) It's dogged and faithful in ways that don't translate really well to cinema, but it redeems itself somewhat with a really satisfying ending (Maximilian Schell really kills it as an unapologetic former SS officer trying to claim Germany's economic successes are somehow related to the killing off of inferior Germans during Hitler's reign - slimy and calculating while Miller holds a certain ace up his sleeve.) I liked it okay enough.

6/10


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The Looking Glass War - (1970)

Just look at that slightly tarnished poster for The Looking Glass War - how many original intact posters are out there? I mean, it's pretty obscure, right? Anyway, this movie had moments where it soared, but unfortunately as a whole it's a little clunky. America's answer to Alain Delon, Christopher Jones, features as lead character Leiser - A Polish misfit recruited and forcefully molded into a spy for a shadowy group of British spooks. One of them, John Avery, is played by a young Anthony Hopkins. This doesn't play the whole spy genre straight and instead delights in unusual scenes where characters do things you'd never expect them to do - especially Leiser, who unravels as soon as he crosses the border into Soviet-dominated East Germany. I'd love to rate it solely on it's great moments - but the overall package is disjointed. There no sense of rhythm or pace, or sense of a satisfying whole. Despite that, I really enjoyed my time with The Looking Glass War. Hopkins is really good in this. Christopher Jones looks great - and it's a shame he quit acting on the cusp of superstardom (some say part of the reason for that was the murder of close friend Sharon Tate.)

6/10


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When Eight Bells Toll - (1971)

Okay, When Eight Bells Toll sucked. All the more amazing to think that this was meant to knock James Bond off his perch immediately after the retirement of Sean Connery from his iconic role. Yes - Philip Calvert (played gamely by Anthony Hopkins) was supposed to supersede James Bond. Producers Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin were so sure they were onto a winner that they commissioned more Calvert novels from Alistair MacLean (my DVD is telling me it's Alistaire MacLain - but it's not - who was in charge of designing that DVD cover?) Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like James Bond - Philip Calvert. "The name's Calvert? Philip Calvert?" Care for a brandy old chap? Anyway, he's a superspy sent to find out where a bunch of pirated ships with gold bullion on them went - and I don't know if he has a license to kill, but he does kill so many people before declaring "This is the only logical place to purposely sink a ship!" and by Jove, he's right somehow. So he kills everybody except for the luscious big-breasted baddie who he amazingly gives a bar of gold to and sends on her way. Hey - if you do Philip Calvert you get concessions. He's having to compete with James Bond - he needs all of the sexual help he can get. What really makes this a third-rate James Bond rip-off is the horrible location we're stuck with for the duration - a cloudy, rock-strewn ugly Scottish coast with nothing remotely cinematic to wow us with. In the meantime Calvert breaks necks, shoots, stabs, drowns and rams his boat into as many people as he can in-between bouts of bedding the lady with the big boobs who he knows is a baddie but can't resist. No quips - just Hopkins and his curt "I don't have dandruff!" which may have become Philip Calvert's famous catchphrase.

4/10

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I just watched this one:

I quite liked it. I guess Mary Philbin was a bigger star than Conrad Veidt when even the titular character's actor doesn't even get top billing.

Anyway it's a solid film. Man Who Laughs doesn't have really anything wrong with it, aside from a few narrative character blunders, and the Iron Maiden, which were stylistic choices more than anything, and I wouldn't say it's the best at anything either. Still, from start to finish, I was engaged and entertained and enthralled.

The character of Gwynplaine, the titular Man Who Laughs, is the visual inspiration for DC's Joker. The characters weren't that similar from my minimal knowledge of Joker. I can see the striking visual similarities though.

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The Man Who Laughs has some of the most haunting and horrifying images in cinema, and it's a truly great silent film. They just don't make em' like that these days... well maybe Robert Eggers who is doing some amazing things with the genre and style of filmmaking, oh and of course Guy Maddin. But yeah, The Man Who Laughs is legit.

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Yeah the imagery is great. I love the visuals. It's a fine film. I know that wasn't in depth but I've not felt well all day and I'm starting to feel crappy again.

Addendum; I thought the drama was really good along with the visuals. I think my biggest gripe is the characters made some poor decisions, even though they were crucial to the story. I wasn't quite sure why Ursus waited for Gwynplaine to come out of prison when he went into prison so why would he come out an hour later? I don't know. The writing I guess needed some tightening. It works overall even with some nit picks.

Gwynplaine's shame for the permanent smile was done really well though, which worked with how people reacted and responded to it. I liked that aspect.

Overall Man Who Laughs is great with very little reason to complain. I just have issue with some of the plot armor, which I suppose is because I watched it in 2024 when it came out in 1928. Yes I believe that makes a difference.

Collateral

9/10

Limite (1931)
I don't really know what to give it, but 9 seems as good as anything.
I don't really know what was happening, and being honest I dozed off in parts of it. But that's really the kind of film that it is. With its beautiful score and mesmerising and often haunting images, you just let it drift you gently down river, and you float along with it.
The images are stunning, as is the fluidity of the movement. Years ahead of its time in that respect. Terrifically played by the small cast.
The director was only 22 when he made this, but never made another film in spite of being clearly a movie genius. It's one where I don't have the knowledge to understand or explain exactly what the movie is (which may be in part because it was reassembled during restoration, and with a missing scene), but where I know what I've seen is genius, and one of the greatest and most vital silent movies.

My wife wasn't feeling well last night, so she went to bed early. I put this on, because she is terrified of heights and will never watch it when I try to put it on.


Mann, 2022





Didn't expect much from this one. I hadn't heard much about it, but it had a decent aggregate so I gave it a shot. It ended up being a tight little thriller that was put together in a well-paced and economical way. It borrows from a couple of other films with its allegory, but still uses its resources effectively to generate some pulse-pounding scenes and it ends up delivering its message fairly well. Obviously some CGI is used, but it manages to be convincing for most of its run time that these people are really 2,000 feet off the ground.

I would think this film's effectiveness with hinge on how much each viewer is affected by extreme heights. As I mentioned, my wife wouldn't even watch it. I am not terrified of heights, but they do sometimes make me a bit uneasy, and several scenes in this film had my palms sweating.

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The Iron Claw - (2023)

Efron's wig was a little too distracting. Nothing really stands out, but it's not bad. 6/10

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1st Rewatch...Some terrific performances keep this slightly raunchy variation on Meet the Parents watchable. The film stars Bryan Cranston as the owner of a small printing company in the midwest who, along with his wife (Megan Mullally) and son, has been invited by his college student daughter (Zoey Deutch) to fly to California to spend Xmas with her and her boyfriend. The family is thrown when they learn the boyfriend, Laird Mayhew (James Franco) is a tech billionaire who lives on a massive estate with live animals wandering the grounds and a dead buffalo encased in urine in his living room. I like the idea of making the prospective son-in-law a billionaire, but this guy has no filter, no sense of personal space, ad has a mouth like a sailor. He also does all the wrong he does for all the right reasons and the eventual bonding of him and dad is a much longer journey than need be. There's a scene involving a paperless bathroom and Xmas party that go on way too long but both Cranston and Franco do a lot of wrong for the right reasons but it takes too long to untangle. Cranston is properly anal as dad and Franco's breezy performance is a lot of fun. Also liked Keegan-Michael Key as Franco's assistant and Kaley Cuoco as the voice of Franco's Siri. There are laughs, but it takes too long to get where it's going.

That's a lot of cleavage. Really though the movie looks good. I still need to watch it. I had it on loan from the library and never got around to watching it. It was when I barely had the opportunity to use the TV. I should request it again. Yeah it sounds like a simple yet effective film.

I loved it.

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I didn't really get to talk about the movie's use of 3D the last time I wrote about this - so I'm just going to say that while there's nothing particularly great about the use of 3D in the latest Venom installment, I'm nonetheless glad they bothered with a conversion.

As a first-time director, Kelly Marcel probably was a bit over her head mastering the complex stuff that's involved in a CBM with a lot of VFX - and it's clear she didn't really know how to make great use of 3D.

Still, I'm positive the 3D IMAX version is way more fun than the regular version probably is, since any kind of additional "distraction" helps to make up for the somewhat lazy writing that's in display here - and the overall deliberate cheesiness of the whole trilogy, which probably reaches new heights in the third movie.

There's a lot of things that could probably have been greatly improved by a quick consultation from a talented script doctor - but it's just as well that the trilogy has now seemingly concluded, without crashing at the box-office but clearly showing signs that perhaps it's a good time for Sony to move on and do something different.

Great point. I myself, right or wrong, do tend to be more forgiving... VERY forgiving with the writing and plot when it comes to silent films, just because the medium of film was so new and it wasn't really until some great filmmakers burst onto the scene in the 1930s with early "talkies" such as Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and so on that dialogue, continuity, plot elements, etc took focus in using film as a medium of storytelling.

But that's just it. With the silent films, I can easily forgive "poor writing" or elements in the story that maybe aren't explained well or don't match up quite right with continuity or lack of explanation for what's happening on screen because first and foremost in silent films I'm looking at images, atmosphere, tone/mood, and a consistency in overall theme and the story at a macro 10,000 foot in the air view as opposed to the granular minutia. A truly great silent film that I watched for the first time last year, and to be honest, one I had never heard of is called Seventh Heaven. There's some plot inconsistencies in that too, but it's a great A+ film for me. The same thing with some of the other great silent pictures such as Greed, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Sunrise.

If I can get behind the characters, tell them apart, marginally understand what's happening in the story, even if I can't explain every single scene or how and why we got there, I'm perfectly OK with that. Silent film is about emotion, tone, and being absorbed into an entirely unique and otherworldly realm of storytelling. And it's great.

Here's a very rough copy of Seventh Heaven that someone uploaded on youtube. The version I saw was much clearer:

Is that the Michael Mann film with what is perhaps the single greatest two seconds of gunplay on film?

That's certainly fair enough. I get what you mean. Man Who Laughs really has very little negatives even if we include some minor story gripes. Most of the story gripes I have are still done today as well. I liked Man Who Laughs quite a lot, and I could see some silent tropes.

I'm not trying to sound like I disliked the film. It's great and I liked it a lot. I did consider watching it again in a few months now that I know what to expect and see what I think of it upon rewatch. Silent films have a different style, to which you alluded, which is a bit of an adjustment. It's not a bad thing though.

I thought that was Heat...

The Last Hurrah (1958, John Ford) - A - Ranks up there with A Face in the Crowd as one of the great political satires of the 1950s.