Last Movie Watched Thread

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Haven't re-watched it since the theater. I never would have guessed it would be better than the original, but it really is in most ways. Better villain in Ego, better theme of family, more time with Drax.

Bernie A Command performance from Jack Black, and Richard Linklater's best movie.

Shane Had never actually seen this, and Wifemate was in the mood to cross some AFI greats off the list. Now I understand what Warren Beatty was talking about as inspiration for Bonnie and Clyde: the gunshots might as well have been cannon fire, and the cuckold (much as I hate to use the term) tension is amazingly subtle. Great western. Love the depiction of children. I can't believe that the actress who plays the wife and mother was over 50 when this was filmed (8 years older than the father, as a matter of fact).

Dark Phoenix What happened with this movie? Hard to say other than "a lot of the production changed". It didn't follow the Mr. Sinister stinger at the end of X-Men Apocalypse, and it couldn't even keep the focus on Jean Grey and Scott Summers - it's actually Jean Grey and Charles Xavier. This movie is defined by two things: indecision of what it wants to be, and what the audience expects from X-Men movies. There's the tension as to who cares about Jean the most (the kid from Ready Player One is no James Marsden), what the phoenix force is really about (aliens this time, but not the ones fro the comics), and what drives the darkness (aliens, or Xavier's lies Jean like in X-Men 3). What the audience expects from these movies but doesn't get is a lot of let's you n' him fight mutant battles (half of one), a hostile government (mutants are welcome since when?), cool mutant cameos (some guy with dreads and Dazzler, that's it), a coherent villain team (seriously, the alien crew abilities and vulnerabilities are as undefined as possible), and a timely Quicksilver music video (why bother setting this in 1992 without some Nirvana or something?).  At least Sophie Turner can act, and Nightcrawler gets another great showing in a scene on par with the X2 intro.

Spider-Man: Far From Home Again, first time watching since the theater. Still pretty great. The Tom Holland movies really do a terrific job evoking the comics while making concessions to contemporary settings and the way things tend to work in the MCU. They're also actually funny, instead of just full of quips. And the final post-credits stinger is the best.

Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

I did manage a few guffaws during its runtime. Surely, I could have done better than that! But these are the plague times. The big "wow" for me in this one was the Mariners v. Angels game as the third act. Also noted was Montalban's limp and Houseman's turn as a driving instructor.

Floyd Diabolical Barber , totally with you on The Crazies. I watched it on TCM some 15 years ago. It's a most composed Romero. He really was a marvel of a filmmaker. Of all his work, I dig this one, Martin, and Season of the Witch most. Also, nice YouTube playlist. The Junior Brown medley was tight. Only rarely would I pause on TNN's Prime Time Country when it was on.

Going through gifts and never-opened impulse bargain-bin purchases to see what I can get rid of when people feel more willing to spend on random shit from amazon.com used listings, so last night I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked, Criterion edition, both discs clean and booklet too. “A darkly humorous trip through London’s seedy underground,” the box said. About twenty minutes in I was asking myself, “am I going to really finish this?” Shrugged and said to myself yes. Actually made me a bit nostalgic—I remember going (mostly alone) to random theaters for bleak and artsy late-night movies on the northwest side Chicago in very London-ish weather, and it brought home some of the ambience of those streets and that occasional “what did I pay for?” feeling.

Anyway it is a very good film, and the frontloading of so much sexual violence does kind of innoculate you for the rest of it, to a degree. David Thewlis’s Johnny is an erudite (self-taught or educated? could go either way) and very talkative Mancunian fleeing down to London. He goes (and later returns) to his ex’s house, chatting and more with his roommates, and you see a lot of his pathologies there. He’s pretty clearly an emotional and physical sadist, but Thewlis is compelling enough that you see why people are taken in, and you are too. He goes out onto the streets of London, mostly encountering and interacting with people lower than him, or who Johnny thinks are lower. The hinge of the whole story is when Johnny starts a rapport with a similarly-minded, but gentler-mannered, security guard, getting into a conspiracy theory battle of wits where Johnny has the upper hand to guard’s more conventional, small-minded conspiracies. There’s also a parallel plot with the ex’s highborn and much more basically sadistic landlord, who sort of looks like a shrunken-head version of Peter Capaldi.

Darkly funny, kind of, but more cosmic-funny than laughter-funny. The film starts off jarring, then you get into its rhythm, but that rhythm’s so blunt it gets hard again halfway through—Johnny goes from someone more interesting than he first seems to someone whose erudition just masks our initial, bad first impression, even if we know better why he is that way. It’s very good movie but kind of a hard watch.

It is quite evocative, though. The light-colored but grayish lower-middle through upper-class apartments Johnny passes through felt very familiar to me—all pale-colored in a very early nineties way, reminding me a bit of houses I’d been in as a small child and as real, lived-in versions of those apartments from the endlessly-reran-on-PBS British sitcoms from the same era. There’s a sublime emptiness to the guard’s building. The dark and damp streets of London, populated by the losers of Thatcher’s society, seemed very familiar to me from Chicago. I kind of expected a grimier, working-class version of After Hours in this, and I think in some ways it kind of is, but it exchanges that film’s proto-gentrifying high eccentricity for the less entertaining, but more real, less entertaining eccentricity of those being pushed under.

Fitzcarraldo: Discovered this was on Amazon prime, and I had always intended to follow up Aguirre, the Wrath of God by watching this one. Unfortunately, it does suffer a little in the almost necessary comparison. It was good, but not as good, and when I watch a two and a half hour movie to see a boat going over a mountain, I expect more than thirty minutes of the movie to be about the boat going over the mountain. Also, since a character's nickname was Orinoco Paul, I ended up with that Enya song going through my head every time he came on the screen, although you cannot really blame the movie for that.

I don't understand why this isn't a good thing.

There's a MST3K version of the same movie, which I've never watched.  I'm kind of curious why they decided to redo/update it, and what the differences are.  But not quite curious enough to resubject myself to Sumuru again so soon.