Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Cleopatra (1934, Cecil B. DeMille) - B+

Hot on the heels of re-watching my long-loved The Ten Commandments, I saw this Cecil B. DeMille film streaming on Criterion and couldn't resist. I absolutely love the melodramic and emotionally charged poetic hyperbolic dialogue in this film. The story and writing is a bit of a mess as it seems to borrow from multiple sources including Shakespeare's Julius Cesar and other stuff, but I think DeMille was a fan of piecemealing multiple sources and adding his own flair to the mix or whatever he thought would make exciting cinema.

Talk about opulence! Cecil B. DeMille is a man who sure enjoyed both spectacle and the female form and this film... maybe one of the very last that got away with stuff before the Hayes Code was in full effect, has plenty of both.

Even though the narrative is slightly awkward and feels hastily edited together with some bizarre pacing and the acting is just... well, not great, this film is a wild hoot and just fun and neat to see. Claudette Colbert who is a great actress and right at home in screwballs seems completely miscast in this film and the tone changes don't entirely work.

Still, I really loved this thing despite its multiple flaws. Wow, just wow. Cecil B. DeMille taking it up to 11.

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The third Cloverfield movie is called The Cloverfield Paradox. It’s about a space station and it was shadowdropped during the Super Bowl.

John Goodman gave me chills in this

Absolutely, and I think it makes for a good double feature with Russell Crowe's Unhinged

Really liked Unhinged too

The Hustler - 1961

Enjoyed it. Newman was great as always. Thought Minnesota Fats was a cool character. The pool hall stuff I really dug. I bought The Color Of Money so I wanted to get this under my belt first. I just didn't really care for the love interest in the flick. Just thought she was sort of a flimsy character and I didn't much care for the performance either. Also, shallowly speaking, that hair do sucked on her lol.

As the movie went along she just got more and more important and I thought really? I get what they were trying to do with her, I just wanted scenes with her to be over with. Then the pay off at the end wasn't great...don't want to spoil anything. I think if it had less of her and more of the pool hall or attacked her character different it would have elevated the movie. It was fine enough but think it had potential to be even better. Maybe the sequel executed it better. I get why Newman won an Oscar for his character/performance. (in the sequel)

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I came here to do two things, drink some beer and kick some ass, looks like we are almost outta beer - Dazed and Confused

101 Favorite Movies (2019)

had high hopes for this and it had promise early but there's sadly just not much in the second half and the dialogue is nearly inaudible.

Vermiglio (2024) - Italy's submission at this Oscars for the best international film... nice photography (loved moments like a little kid's POV from under the chair) and the use of classical music evoke a sense of nostalgia and just an era that is gone. I was in tune with it for the first hour, but then struggled to finish it (where the story goes is just not interesting as I find every character but Lucia and her dad - the town's teacher - not compelling in the least)...... 6/10.

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Longlegs (2024)



I find it pretty amazing that a film overcooked with different but somewhat related themes can be so sluggish and uneventful.
It's like Exorcist III without all the fun stuff.
Even the dread and atmosphere this film is obviously going for falls flat because it isn't attached to anything specific apart from the crime cases being discussed in painfully lacklustre dialogue. I never got the impression that any of the characters believed in this story.
It ends with a rushed explanation that still doesn't make much sense and it also doesn't elevate what has happened before.

Watched this with a young friend who’s never seen this before. One of the best movies of the Eighties!

Mark

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The Molly Maguires - (1970)

Working in coal mines during the 19th Century seems crazy - it halved your life expectancy, was particularly dangerous backbreaking work, and those running the show often cheated and exploited their labour force (as if the whole deal wasn't bad enough.) The Molly Maguires were a group of Irish coal miners who formed a secret society that fought back with violence and sabotage. Richard Harris stars in this movie as Detective James McParlan, sent in undercover to gain employment in a Pennsylvanian coal mine and make contact with the group. The exploitation that went on is illustrated when James gets to the head of the queue in the pay office after a week's soul crushing work - it's added up to $9.24, but then a list of deductions wipes out $9 of that pay, and he ends up with 24 cents for the week. Sean Connery is "Black Jack" Kehoe - leader of a local chapter of the Molly Maguires and Ancient Order of Hibernians, who befriends and recruits James despite his suspicions. The Molly Maguires quietly came and went in 1970, but I liked it and thought it a well-rounded film with some nicely shot scenery by the amazing James Wong Howe and a super score from Henry Mancini. It was nominated for an Oscar for it's art direction. There's serious money up there on the screen (which amounted to a big loss for Paramount), and the film opens with a fantastic 15-minute pre-credit sequence which shows the work the coal miners were doing, the Maguires setting up charges to blow an entire mine to smithereens and the crew leaving - it ends up focused on Sean Connery walking away from the towers and mining buildings as they explode, and it's really "bravo!" stuff, setting up a whole lot of anticipation regarding the conflict to come. It's not perfect - I'm thinking that the screenplay is it's weakest link, but Connery and Harrison are fine and the subject matter compelling and interesting. Another fine chapter regarding the lowly workers fight for fairness, decency, respect and equality instead of being exploited, and how the law is inevitably on the side of those who have money and power - for it's those people who make the rules in the first place.

7/10

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Rise of The Planet of The Apes - (2011)

2nd watch. 7/10

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Solondz, 1995





Continuing along on catching up with unseen films from Holden's Top 100 of the 90s, next up was 1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse. I am a big fan of coming of age flicks, so I am unsure how I missed this. I think what ended up happening is that I managed to conflate this with film with Party Girl, the Parker Posey flick that was released a couple of years later.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is a dark comedy featuring a kid that is such a misfit that ever her parents make fun of her. It's the forgotten middle child concept taken to extremes. Some of the jokes most certainly wouldn't fly today - this film shares DNA with stuff like heathers, which is a breed of film that doesn't get made anymore. Heather Matarazzo nails the lead perfectly.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this, and certainly got some laughs out of it, but I doubt it will make my ballot.

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Cringe. This was bad. Glad she finally got married & had a baby, but, boy, I found it hard to finish this. Not to mention they killed off Hugh Grant.

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

Very good indie movie. Really enjoyed it. And I have a huge crush on Lewis Pullman.

3rd Rewatch...Frances McDormand won her second (and probably most deserving) Oscar for her performances in this emotional mine field of a movie playing Mildred Hayes, an angry and bitter divorced mom of two whose daughter was brutally raped and murdered a year ago. When she hasn't heard anything from the sheriff about her daughter in seven months, she spends $5000 to erect three huge billboards on the road outside of town demanding answers from the sheriff (Woody Harrelson). who is dying of cancer. This explosive and raw motion picture provides constant surprises, never going exactly where you expect it. McDormand is a revelation and Sam Rockwell won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his open sore of a performance as Harrelson's deputy. A one of a kind motion picture experience that will leave the viewer limp.

Umpteenth Rewtach...This 1964 film version of the classic Lerner and Lowe Broadway musical that won eight Oscars, including Best Picture. Based on the Shaw play Pygmalion this is the story of a phonetics professor named Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison, reprising his Broadway role) who agrees, on a bet to turn a cockney flower girl named Eliza Dolittle (Audrey Hepburn, taking over the role originated on Broadway by Julie Andrews), into a lady by teaching her to speak properly, but allows the young lady to get under his skin. This is textbook on how to bring a stage musical to the screen, one of the very rare screen adaptations of a stage musical where the score was pretty much not tampered with. Rex Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar for his flashy turn as Henry Higgins (though, if the truth be told, that award should have gone to Peter Sellers for Dr. Strangelove) and though Hepburn is enchanting as the transformed Eliza, I never really buy the cockney girl part of her character. She also loses demerits for her singing being dubbed by Marni Nixon. Julie Andrews did get sweet revenge for losing this role by winning Best Actress that year for Mary Poppins while Hepburn wasn't even nominated. BTW, on my list of favorite movie costumes, Cecil Beaton's breathtaking Oscar winning creations for this film clocked in at #1.

2nd Rewatch...This brassy big budget look at PT Barnum (not to be confused with the 1980 Broadway musical starring Jim Dale and Glen Close) works thanks to a terrific score by the composers of the score for La La Land and a flashy performance by Hugh Jackman in the starring role that leaps off the screen. Also have to give a shout out to Keala Settle as the Bearded Lady.

1st Rewatch...Leslie Caron's enchanting performance in the title role earned her her first Oscar nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress. She plays a 16 year old French orphan who lands a job at a carnival where she becomes romantically involved with to very different men. Marcus the Magnificent (Jean Pierre Aumont) is a womanizing magician with a very clingy and possessive wife (Zsa Zsa Gabor) and Paul (Mel Ferrer) is a very bitter former dancer whose dance career was ended by an injury that forced him to become a puppeteer and can only communicate with Lili through his puppets. Charles Walters who directed many Hollywood classics like Summer Stock. Please Don't Eat the Daisies and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, received his only Oscar nomination for Best Direction for his work here. Despite the slight ick factor because her leading men are way too old for her, Caron is just luminous here.

1sdt Rewatch...This fact-based story of fighting redneck justice pissed me off more this time than the first time I watched it. Michael B Jordan plays Bryan Stevenson, a recent Harvard law school graduate who has decided to devote his career to helping people who are already on death row and decides to take on the case of Johnny D (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) who is to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. I let my anger about what happens in this movie affect my rating and am upping my original rating.