Last Movie Watched Thread

Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) - Decent heist movie with samurais and snipers and princesses and shit. Thinking about getting into Lupin as a franchise because of this.

First Blood (1982) - The Rambo movies recently showed up on Netflix so I gave this one a watch after not having seen it in close to 20 years. This movie ruled so much ass! Why don’t they make 90 minute action flicks anymore?

I feel validated! Validated!

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) - It’s weird how after an entire movie where Rambo wrecked shop on a small town because he was a man broken by war returned to a country that hated him he’s now a super patriot blowing up Soviets in the jungle because it’s 1985 and gunned down Soviets is what Americans want in their movies. The entire thing really kind of comes across like America as a nation telling themselves that they could have won in Vietnam if they really wanted to. Hell, Rambo goes so far as to straight up ask, “Do we get to win this time?” before accepting the mission. Yes Rambo, you do but only after single handedly destroying most of Vietnam. It’s a lot more boneheaded than it’s predecessor but as far as 80s action flicks go there’s a reason this spawned so many imitators.

I have a lot of blind spots when it comes to the history of cinema, particularly when it comes to older movies.  In order to partially rectify that, I have decided to watch one film from each year in the history of film.  My rules are that each entry needs to be a feature-length film that I've never seen before and I cannot repeat directors, although I'm going to put off the feature-length requirement until I get to the 1920s.  Here's what I've watched so far.

1888:  Accordion Player directed by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince - The concept of "the first film" is arguably kind of subjective.  In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge used 12 cameras hooked up to wires tripped by a galloping horse to create a series of sequential images of said horse that basically functioned as a moving picture, but it involved multiple cameras and an incredibly contrived set-up, so it's fair enough to argue that this isn't a real film.  In 1887, Louis Le Prince shot a 16-frame sequence of images of a man walking around a street corner using a single camera, but said camera had 16 separate lenses, one for each frame shot.  By 1888, though, he'd developed a camera that could shoot 16 frames in rapid succession using a single lens, and it is on these grounds that Accordion Player and another short called Roundhay Garden Scene, presumably shot on the same day, can be considered the first two films in history.  Starting my project in 1888 means that I'm essentially going to be watching a few films that don't really qualify as art or entertainment, because these early films by Le Prince were so short that one barely has time to comprehend what's happening on screen before they're over.  Accordion Player shows Le Prince's son playing the accordion.  The quality of the approximately two-second film is, unsurprisingly, extremely low, although I'm sure a part of that it's over 130 years old.  And that fact, that it is presenting life more than a quarter of a century before the outbreak of World War I, is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, apart from it's being one of the first two films.  Most of the next few films are similar to this one in their brevity and lack of narrative, so I'm going to try to breeze through my descriptions of them.

1889:  Hyde Park Corner directed by William Friese-Greene - This is a quick clip of a man, a car, and a horse-drawn carriage on a street.  As with Accordion Player, the quality of the film is still very low, however, while the former film was developed on a glass plate, this was developed on celluloid.   

1890:  London's Trafalgar Square directed by William Carr Croft and Wordsworth Donisthorpe - This shows people and vehicles making their way through Trafalgar Square in London.  As with the previous two films, this is extremely short.  The frame is circular.  It's shot from a greater distance from its subjects than Hyde Park Corner, and as such I found it a bit more interesting in that it shows a bunch of people going about their business in the distant past.  My main reaction to this film, however, is that Wordsworth Donisthorpe is a very good name.

1891:  Je vous aime directed by Georges Demeny - This is a close up of a man's face as he says the words "Je vous aime."  I think it's cool that the director was presumably trying to capture the mechanics of speech in as minute of detail as possible, although the technology wasn't really up to the task at the time, given the very low frame-rate.  

1892:  Pauvre Pierrot directed by  Charles-Émile Reynaud - This appears to be both the earliest surviving animated film, as well as the first known film to use film perforations.  It's about a woman's two rival suitors.  When the second suitor shows up, the first guy plays some old-timey slapstick pranks on him.  It's not exactly a riveting narrative, and it's perhaps a bit of a stretch to even call it "animated".  Rather than creating the illusion of motion, Pauvre Pierrot's frame-rate is such as to merely suggest the idea of motion to the viewer.  I also don't find the visual style itself particularly appealing, but I'm not saying this to bash it.  It was probably inevitable that something like this would precede the first fully animated films, Reynaud was working in an essentially entirely new medium, and I imagine this film must have been incredibly labor intensive to make.

1893:  Rabbits directed by Étienne-Jules Marey - This consists of various clips of rabbits hopping about, and their reactions to being dropped onto the ground (much like cats, they're pretty good at landing on their feet).  Marey would make a more famous film of cats landing on their feet the next year.  This is neat in that it's studying the mechanics of how animals move.  Although the frame-rate is very low, it is essentially the intellectual forbear of those extremely slow-motion videos that demonstrate the mechanics of a cat drinking water, or the individual wingbeats of a hummingbird.

1894:  Annie Oakley directed by William K.L. Dickson - This shows the famous sharpshooter Annie Oakley demonstrating her precision shooting skills by shooting at some stationary targets and thrown disks.  It's neat, but it also demonstrates the shortcomings of film at this time, as I can barely tell that she's hitting those disks. 

1895:  Boxing Kangaroo directed by Max Skladanowsky - A guy boxes with a real kangaroo for a few seconds.  Skladanowsky shoots the pair against a white background, which was a wise choice, as this makes the action of this very early film footage easier to follow.  Mildly uncomfortable to watch though, as the kangaroo was a circus kangaroo, I guess, and it looks kind of pissed.

1896:  The Kiss directed by William Heise - An actor and an actress kiss.  This film apparently caused a scandal at the time.  The couple were portrayed by actual professional actors, and the clip benefits from it; they do a good job of acting like they have a lot of affection for one another, but it hardly constitutes a narrative.  This is the first known kiss recorded on film, and consequently can arguably be called the first ever romance film.

1897:  The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight directed by Enoch J. Rector - This is the first known feature film.  It shows an actual boxing match.  The few minutes of the film that survive are not in great shape.  I had trouble distinguishing between the two fighters, and I'm not a big fan of boxing.  Beyond its historical significance, I didn't find much to appreciate about it.

1898:  Santa Claus directed by George Albert Smith - This is an approximately one minute narrative about Santa Claus visiting a house on Christmas Eve and leaving presents for the children.  By the standards of the 1890s, it's pretty technically impressive, and features the first known example of parallel action in film, as the film shows the interior of the house and also an inset of Santa making his way across the roof.

1899:  Kidnapping by Indians by the Mitchell and Kenyon film company - There's a lot of films that claim to be cinematic firsts.  There are claims that this is the first Western, which is why I chose to watch it.  Some people dressed in some vaguely old-timey garb are ambushed by Native Americans, who are dressed in even more historically inaccurate clothes.  A gunfight where people repeatedly miss one another at point blank range ensues, and the Native Americans are scared off.  It's pretty racist, although probably no more so than any number of later Westerns.  It's also not very good.  This was from the very early days of film of course, but there's nothing technically interesting going on here, and the action is incredibly artificial even by the standards of the time.  There were genuinely cool short narrative films being made by 1899; this is not one of them.

1900:  Sherlock Holmes Baffled directed by Arthur Marvin - Sherlock Holmes finds a robber in his house.  Holmes tries to apprehend the intruder, who keeps teleporting away from him, and makes off with a sack of loot.  This was mildly amusing, but mainly because it's clearly just profiting off the use of the name of Sherlock Holmes when it is clearly not a mystery film and bears no resemblance to any Holmes story.  Cool grift, Arthur Marvin!  I love that you could just completely lie about the subject of a movie back in fin de siècle America.  This is the first film to feature Sherlock Holmes, at least nominally. 

1901:  The Countryman and the Cinematograph directed by Robert W. Paul - Some guy from the country (I guess?) watches some films projected onto a screen, and reacts to them as though what were on the screen were real.  He gets scared because he thinks the train is going to come out of the screen and kill him like everyone thought was going to happen to them back in those days, which isn't tremendously good comedy, but I appreciate the metafictional aspect of it, even if it's a bit heavy-handed.  This is the sort of shit Tarantino would've probably been doing if he were like a century older than he actually is.

1902:  The Little Match Seller directed by James Williamson - A small child living on the streets of some city lights matches and imagines that she is living in a nice house sitting in front of a roaring fire and enjoying a large meal.  Then she freezes to death and her ghost ascends to Heaven.  It's based off of an extremely didactic Hans Christian Anderson story.  This is a pretty simplistic narrative, but it does a good job of utilizing what would then have still been impressive special effects.

1903:  The Great Train Robbery directed by Edwin S. Porter - Some outlaws violently rob a train and are subsequently hunted down and killed.  This is a well-known film, and it's undoubtedly the most ambitious film I'd watched for this project up to this point.  A lot of the film is shot on location.  It's not realistic by modern standards, but Porter was clearly aiming for realism, and it shows.  It's technically very impressive for the time.  It ends with a close up of one of the robbers, who pulls out his gun and repeatedly fires at the camera, in a sequence which is not part of the actual narrative but rather a thematic commentary on the violence the film.  It's perhaps a bit heavy-handed by modern standards, but it was probably pretty novel at the time.  That said, I would have gotten pretty bored with it if it had been much longer than it was.

1904:  The Impossible Voyage directed by Georges Méliès - That's right, it's finally time for Georges Méliès!  One of the reasons I made myself a rule that I couldn't watch more than one film by any single director for this project was that I would have probably spent the bulk of the mid-1890s through the early 1910s just watching Méliès films.  Georges Méliès is best known as the director of the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, which is famous for its image of a rocket ship lodging itself in the eye of the Man in the Moon.  His movies consisted of a lot of very short bizarre clips that were basically just an excuse to experiment with various special effects, but also included more ambitious stuff like The Impossible Voyage.  This is the longest film I've watched for this project to date, at about 20 minutes.  It's about members of the Institute of Incoherent Geography taking absurdist trips to the surface of the sun and the bottom of the ocean, and it absolutely kicks ass.  Méliès is possibly the first director to develop as unique a visual style as that presented here.  It's extremely weird and I think this strange fever dream of a movie fucking rocks.  Méliès is easily my favorite silent film director because his films are genuinely a lot of fun to watch in addition to being technically daring and innovative for their time.  

Anyway, in the future, I will be posting about far fewer films at one time, and my thoughts about most of these entries will probably be a bit more substantive than what I've posted here.

Late "duh" answer: Groundhog Day

OK, so this is the one reason I'm annoyed Quibi failed - there were shows on Quibi which had a gimmick wherein there were separate sets of footage depending whether your phone was held vertically or horizontally, which seems like such a fascinating (and possibly irritating?) gimmick!

This Quibi is presented in whatever orientation your phone happens to be at to preserve the integrity of Jeffrey Katzenberg's creative vision.

Nudeviking, how joyous it must have been to first view this film. I saw it first about 12 years ago. Check out The Loveless, if you're needing some more brooding Willem Dafoe as a biker.

The early 80s looked like Michael Pare was going to be a huge star. And then... (I'm looking at IMDB, and he has an amazing number of credits, but I've barely seen any of them after 1984).
Also, I had no idea there was nudity in this film. I saw it a half dozen times when I was in high school, but probably only on commercial TV.

Sledgehammer Fight!

I 100% love this idea and ask that you make it a separate thread. 

They don't ever show her face though right? Just like her hands and lips.

Nudeviking, so to answer your question about Dafoe and The Loveless (1981). He is wearing a lot of leather. It's Kathryn Bigelow's first feature film. The film's content and import compares to The Wild One (1953). Co-director/producer Monty Montgomery works with David Lynch as a producer throughout the later 80s and early 90s, with Wild at Heart being their crowning achievement together. The flick occurs in the 1950s in Georgia or Florida. The biker gang is heading to Daytona. Which, as you may recall as a North American citizen, is a top-tier motorcycle event that's just past one month ago for this calendar year.