Last Movie Watched Thread

You're history's greatest monster.

Species (1995) & Species II (1998)

Would I love to see the dump trucks full of money they drove to the actors’ houses to appear in this tripe. Seriously: Ben Kingsley, Forrest Whittaker, Marg Helgenberger, and Alfred Molina in a movie chockablock with paper-thin characters, illogical motivations, and dialogue that sounds like they made it up on the fly. Natasha Henstridge, meanwhile, acquits herself just fine in a cheesecake role, credibly playing an alien learning about the world, as does an unrecognizably young Michelle Williams playing the child version of the character.

H.R. Giger was a visual consultant and you can tell his work in the Brain Salad Surgery-ish dream sequences. Some of the ’95-era CGI is decent but, hoo boy, is the creature animation in the climax ever not. Also, for a Hollywood sci-fi flick, there’s an odd choice in showcasing antiquated technology with most of the characters driving old beaters and the TVs seemingly dating from 1980.

II is a superior sequel (not that there was any sunlight under the bar from the first one) in that it achieves some semblance of dumb fun, like a trashier but more entertaining version of the X-Files movie from that year. The dialogue is still amateur hour but it blessedly ditches most of the CGI for viscous practical effects. Unlike Roger Donaldson, director Peter Medak actually has a feel for horror mayhem (The Changeling is a classic and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the sheer insanity of The Ruling Class).

This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967) - Even though Coffin Joe died in the last movie he gets better in the opening to this sequel and right away sets to work trying to find the perfect God-hating woman to grant him immortality via bearing him a son. It all goes about as well as these things go for Coffin Joe: he torments women with spiders and kills them with snakes, murders a dude and frames someone else for it, decapitates someone and splits another dude’s head with an axe, and even goes on a wild technicolor trip to hell before the town gets tired of his shit and gather up their torches and pitchforks.

The dialogue mostly mostly consists of Joe bellowing about hating God and the fact that he’ll be immortal once his son is born, but no one’s watching these movies for masterful writing; they’re watching them because they’re chockablock with creepy weirdness.

WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
A Hulu documentary about WeWork, the real estate company that rented out hip work spaces and then got valued like a tech company because investors are in a mad rush to find the next Steve Jobs. Sort of like HBO's Theranos documentary, this one gets bogged down a lot in profiling the CEO, a person we are continually told is charismatic, which I guess is the reason why supposedly smart investors and employees believed them when they lied nonstop for years. Seemed like a smarmy, new-age salesmen to me, but no one asked me to invest millions of dollars in the company. Anyway, story is certainly interesting. The company is super cult-y and would like to have heard more from the employees (and more about the weird off shoot companies like WeLive, their adult-dorms, and WeGrow, their private schools). Overall, I liked it well enough. It sounds like there are some more comprehensive podcasts I should seek out, so I'll probably do that. For some reason, I am down to watch these ridiculous "tech" companies implode.


Godzilla vs Kong
I shouldn't have had to work this hard to follow why a big monkey was punching a big lizard, but, I guess someone had a screen writing template built by AI's after feeding them the scripts to the Transformers movies. Mostly the whole thing was total nonsense that went so fast it barely mattered. Then the monkey punches the lizard and millions of people are killed and the world economy collapses in the wake of the total decimation of Hong Kong - who had apparently just spent millions of dollars to outline all their buildings in neon lights so they look like Tron. The CGI was fine. But the CGI is almost always fine now. It's like praising a big budget movie for having the actors in focus. A low bar to clear. There are many actors in this who I like. Kyle Chandler is hanging with Kong again. He has like 5 lines. I hope he bought a boat with his money. Rebecca Hall is probably the best human in the movie. She seems like almost a real person but has no character arc. I hope she bought a boat, too. Brian Tyree Henry deserved better than paranoid podcaster who runs around with children. I think he's supposed to be the comic relief. I hope he got boat money. Millie Bobby Brown doesn't pop anyone's head with her mind powers. I guess she was in the last one that I didn't see. Probably already bought a boat so I hope she made enough money on this one to invest in her future after Stranger Things ends. Julian Dennison from Hunt for the Wilderpeople is in this, too. He is used here about as well as Deadpool 2. I hope he bought a boat and named it Skux Life. Alexander Skarsgard shows up as a disgraced scientist who wrote a failed book about the Hollow Earth where the giant monsters come from. Anyway, he is immediately put in charge of a massive military operation to save the world from a rampaging Godzilla. I can only assume because he is a tall, handsome Swede. He doesn't need boat money. He already did that Tarzan movie that everyone forgot about. Hopefully he can buy himself a role in a movie that doesn't also star gorillas.

In closing, turns out Godzilla vs Kong was pointless spectacle. Seems like it could have been simplified but cutting out half the characters, but you can't have a franchise without incomprehensible lore.

That sequence was also the litmus test to compare when we got our first Blu-Ray player and had both versions of Wall-E.

DVD = Sprays of giant white triangles.
BD  = Beautiful sprays of mist!

Thanks!  I have a very bad track record of starting review threads and then almost immediately abandoning them, and I also don't want to pressure myself into doing lengthy write-ups of these films, which would only further induce me to abandon the project, so I think I'll just stick with posting my thoughts about these films on this thread.  

What I think I might do, though, is link to previous reviews on subsequent posts for the project.  That way if anyone wants to see what I reviewed for any specific year, they can just click on the appropriate link and it'll take them to the post.  I'll just hide the links under a spoiler tag so as not to bother people with an ever increasing list of hyperlinks on all my posts to this thread.

The only thing that I think will probably stick with me a couple weeks from now is the fact that the hero guy cut the Battletruck owner's eyeball out with the handle to a fire extinguisher inside the Battletruck during the final battle(truck).

Continuing with my "watch a film from every year in the history of cinema" project.



1905: The Weavers directed by Yanaki and Milton Manaki - A lot of the earliest films I watched didn't tell a story, and are interesting primarily for the novelty of depicting moving images of people from the late 19th and early 20th Century. The Weavers is another one of thdse films, and probably the last such film I will cover. It's noteworthy for its claim to being the first known film made in the Balkans, and it's simply a minute-long film of the directors' grandmother weaving, and it would appear that most of the original footage is lost, because I was only able to find a 16-second version. But what's really noteworthy is the fact that said grandmother was supposedly born in the 18th Century, which if true, is kind of incredible. However, while the woman in the video is clearly very elderly, I keep coming across the claim that she was 114 years old, which seems extremely unlikely, given how incredibly rare it is for a person to live that long even today. I had trouble finding out too much about the film, although on the Talk page for the clip's Wikipedia article, someone does question the veracity of the claim that the grandmother is 114 years old. Regardless, it's neat to see someone who was clearly alive in the early 19th Century at the very least, weaving at an old-timey loom, although I'm excited to finally be getting to the point in film history where I can feel confident that the rest of the films I watch for this project will be telling some sort of narrative or at least have some sort of artistic aim.

1906:  The Consequences of Feminism directed by Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché - Another film with a connection to a cinematic first.  In this case, director Alice Guy-Blaché is frequently regarded as the first female film director.  As with a lot of these things, I don't know if it's technically true or not, but it seems pretty indisputable that she was the first female director of note, and that she went on to inspire the likes of Eisenstein and Hitchcock.  When a film from the early 20th Century has a title like The Consequences of a Feminism, it's the sort of thing that would prompt most people today to assume that it's probably either incredibly ahead of its time or extremely reactionary.  Personally, I'd say it's a little of both.  It's a short comedic film depicting a world where the roles of men and women have been reversed.  Men are engaged in domestic affairs, watching after children, sewing, and the like, and women spend a lot of time going around sexually harrassing men and getting drunk at bars.  I had trouble finding out a ton about it, but it's ostensibly making fun early 20th Century feminism's aims, and additionally a lot of the humor has aged rather poorly (men acting in stereotypically feminine ways, role reversals of women aggressively coming on to men, etc).  But it's also pretty clear that, whatever Alice Guy-Blaché's actual opinions on feminist movements of the time, and perhaps more importantly, whatever she felt comfortable explicitly saying about gender roles at the time, that the film implies an extreme dissatisfaction with the actual gender roles in early 20th Century France.  The behavior exhibited by women towards men in the film is creepy, aggressive, and abusive, which indicates that's how the director views men's behavior towards women in the real world.  And in that respect, it feels really ahead of its time, essentially making the sort of complaints about misogyny that wouldn't feel out of place coming from a feminist today.  As I said, I don't think the humor has aged very well, and this sort of role-reversal conceit itself also feels hackneyed and dated today, but I'm willing to cut Guy-Blaché some slack, because this is a 115 year old movie, and frankly, there's genuinely great films made decades later with material that feel just as dated in the year 2021.  And from a technical perspective, it's probably one of the better films I've reviewed thus far.  The acting is a little hard to judge, both because it relies on a lot of humor that doesn't really land for modern audiences, and because it's that sort of early silent film style of acting, but unlike a lot of the earlier films I've watched for this, it's clear that the actors do realize that film is its own format, they're sort of figuring out how that's going to work in an entirely visual medium, and on the whole, I think they're more successful than most of the films I've watched for this project to date.  On the whole, while not as creative or technically innovative as something like The Impossible Voyage, this is one of the better films I've watched for this so far, and at some point I'll probably search out more of Alice Guy-Blaché's work, but for now, it's time to move on to 1907, with:

1907:  The Haunted Hotel directed by J. Stuart Blackton - There are a shitload of movies about haunted buildings from the early days of cinema, so it was probably fitting for me to review one of them.  This one is noteworthy for its use of early stop motion animation (in addition to live action sequences).  The film is about a traveler stopping at a hotel (which is basically just a homely cottage), and being baffled, irritate, and terrified by supernatural goings-on.  From a technical perspective, it's genuinely really cool.  I love old-timey horror stuff that isn't actually remotely scary, the kind of stuff where you wouldn't be surprised to see an extremely fake looking prop bat flapping around on a wire.  Unfortunately, there aren't any extremely fake-looking prop bats flapping around on wires in this film, but it's very much of that genre.  I kind of expected the stop-motion animation to be extremely crude, but it actually provides some of the most impressive material in the film.  Like, there's a scene where a knife floats in the air and proceeds to cut slices of bread for the hotel guest, and instead of just chopping straight through the bread it realistically saws off slices in a way that's more realistic to how a person actually cuts bread, but that would have required more care than J. Stuart Blackton would have actually needed to put into something made in 1907.  The film was very popular at the time, and it's easy to see why.  Stop motion animation would get more sophisticated with time, but it's a fairly simple technique that (imo) holds up better than most old effects, and there's not an enormous gulf between this and, like, work done by Harry Harryhausen over half a century later.  As with a lot of really old silent film shorts, this one is tonally all over the place (I think that's another thing that filmmakers hadn't quite figured out yet).  There are moments that are probably meant to wow audiences with their technical achievements, moments that are meant to be comic (there's a part where the hotel guest tries to kick a floating sheet out of the air, misses, and lands on his ass, where actor Paul Panzer really commits to the bit, and consequently it really works as a piece of physical comedy), and moments that are probably meant to be genuinely scary (as at the end where the visitor is taken away by a giant demon who looks a bit like Freddy Kruger).  This movie kind of kicks ass and is easily my favorite of the four reviewed in this post.

1908:  The Assassination of the Duke of Guise directed by Charles le Bargy and André Calmettes - This is a French historical drama about the real-life murder of Duke Henri of Guise by members of King Henry III's entourage in 1588.  It was an attempt to make cinema worthy of being considered proper art.  There are professional stage actors (including co-director le Bargy, who plays Henry III and was a member of the Comédie-Française), the screenplay was written by respected dramatist Henri Lavedan, and much attention was paid to set design.  And as far as that goes, the acting is better than most films up to that time, the sets are indeed pretty great, and the film is a competently told serious story.  The most noteworthy thing about The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, however, is that it is among the first films to have its own score, and it was written by the famous French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.  There's not a lot of information about Saint-Saëns' creative process in writing this score, but he did apparently write it having seen the film and write the score to correspond with the action that was taking place on screen.  It works really well as a score, and frankly as its own piece of music; I liked it a lot.  I think it's by far the best thing about the movie.  That said, it's clear that the people involved with making this movie were still figuring out how to put a narrative story to film.  The movie has a deliberate pace that's probably a bit too slow a lot of the time given that we don't actually get to hear what the characters are saying.  The acting, too, is more akin to that of a stage play than a film, although its clear from the physicality of the performances that the actors are trying to compensate for the fact that this is an entirely visual medium.  Ultimately, I think we should all be glad that people started viewing film as a medium for serious capital-A Art, because this has given us a lot of great films, but there's also a certain elitism to this idea as well.  While I think Saint-Saëns' score is genuinely excellent, and the film itself is perfectly fine, there's no way that I would consider this to be an artistic achievement on par with the best work of Georges Méliès, or even something like The Haunted Hotel.  So while I appreciate what le Bargy and Calmettes are trying to do, and think that a lot of what doesn't work about this film is more due to people still figuring out how to make art using the medium of film rather than their own shortcomings as artists, I wouldn't consider The Assassination of the Duke of Guise to be a crowning achievement of its era.

Hopefully I'll return to cover the next several years in cinema in a few days.  And here's a link to my first post for this project, covering the years 1888 to 1904.

Thus far, I've mostly been using Wikipedia to find films from specific years.  They have a series of articles titled "[Year] in Film", and these articles have lists of noteworthy movies that were released in any given year.  It's possible that, as I continue with this project, I may use other sources, but for now, that is my source for finding movies.

As to why I'm choosing particular films, part of it is that I didn't have a ton of choices when it came to finding surviving films by a director I hadn't yet watched, or at least that was the case with 1800s movies (there's a couple of years where Wikipedia was only listing films by a couple of different directors, for instance).  As the lists on the Wikipedia articles grow longer, I'm using the admittedly flawed heuristic of "Does this movie link to its own Wikipedia article?" in helping me to choose which movies from a particular year are worth watching.  When a film is noteworthy for being innovative in some way, or in exhibiting some recent innovation in filmmaking, that can be a reason why I'll choose it (like I watched a movie about Santa Claus from the early 1890s pretty much solely on the basis of learning that it was, if not the first, then one of the first examples of showing two different shots on a screen at once).  I'm hoping, as this progresses, to try to vary up the types of movies that I'm watching in terms of genre, language, where they were made, etc, so like, I'll probably watch a Hollywood screwball comedy at some point, but I'm not going to just watch only Hollywood screwball comedies for ten years straight in the 1930s and 40s, for instance.  I also haven't really gotten that far into film history yet, but looking ahead, I think a big part of what will help me decide on a movie will be watching movies that are regarded as all time great films that I haven't seen yet (like, I think when I get to the 1920s, I'll probably be watching Haxan, Battleship Potemkin, and Joan of Arc, all really famous films that I've never seen), and that's a big part of why I started this project in the first place, in that I wanted to finally get around to watching a bunch of really noteworthy older films that I'd always planned to watch, but very rarely ever actually sought out.  And finally, sometimes I just see a movie, read up about it a little bit on Wikipedia, and think "Hey, that sounds interesting," and there's not much more to my choice of movie than that.

Also, while I haven't seen any movies by most of these directors, I'll just clarify that my rule is technically it needs to be a movie I've never seen before, and I can't repeat directors for the movies I watch for the project itself, not that I can't have seen any movies by the directors (not that it really matters, since this is an entirely arbitrary and self-imposed set of rules in the first place).  But I'd seen, like, a few Méliès films before, for example, just not The Impossible Voyage.

Yeah, once I get to the post public domain era, it's going to be tougher, and I'm going to also have to start restricting myself to movies that are on streaming services I'm subscribed to.  That being said, the Criterion Channel has a bunch of older movies (and slightly off topic, it also tends to have a bunch of movies made in languages other than English or French as well).  Unfortunately, it appears that the Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada.  I think HBO Max is also supposed to have a pretty decent selection of older films.  But yeah, just to take Netflix as an example, they have an absolutely massive library of films at any given time, but a ton of it is just mediocre-to-bad movies from my own lifetime that I don't think anyone is particularly interested in.  I know they don't pay too much for these films, and I can't imagine that it would be that expensive to spend on a larger selection of older films, but I guess they just assume that the majority of their viewers won't be interested in that, so they don't bother?  I dunno.

Deathsport (1978) - This movie’s got it all: David Carradine in a loincloth swinging around an acrylic sword, mutants, boobs, a soundtrack that features Jerry Garcia noodling around on a guitar, motorcycles, explosions, full frontal nudity, more explosions, and even a decapitation. Unfortunately it’s missing anything even coming close to a plot or a decent script but whatever. Shit blows up and guys ride fast on dirt bikes, or death machines in the parlance of this movie, and that's good enough for me on a Friday night.

The House of Ghosts (1907) - A trio of dopes go into a clearly haunted house to get out of the rain and several minutes of ghoster based slapstick follows. None of it is particularly scary or funny but there’s a bit where a haunted knife cuts up some sausage and bread via surprisingly well done stop animation that’s kind of cool. It seems to share the plot of The Haunted Hotel that Roy Batty's Pet Dove reviewed a few days back, right down to the stop animation haunted knife cutting up bread and a weird giant ghost hauling folks off at the end. I wonder if one was a copy of the other or if this was a Deep Impact/Armageddon situation where two dudes independent of each other ended up making very similar movies.

Alien Intruder (1993) -  Billy Dee Williams recruits a crew of hardened criminals to travel into space with him on a salvage mission. Success is unlike but if they manage to succeed and live then they’re free men when they return to Earth. None of the convicts seem keen on joining Billy Dee in space so he sweetens the deal: every weekend they’ll get to use a VR fuck simulator. Everyone quickly signs up. Unfortunately the fuck simulator has a virus that causes everyone to be super horny for said virus (the titular Alien Intruder I suppose) and fight each other. Truly a terrifying premise made all the more frightening by the fact that this movie is taking place a year from now in the space-aged year of 2022...

The Regeneration (1915) - An orphan grows up to become a gangster before giving it all up for the love of a good woman in this 1915 silent film. Surprisingly decent action with a couple scenes that wouldn’t have felt all that out of place in a more contemporary action flick. I also liked that the film would, on multiple occasions, cut to some random weird looking individual for a reaction shot. Not a main or secondary character just like a big fat guy or a dude with gin blossoms on his nose who was standing there. That being all being said I think the thing that I most enjoyed about this film is the fact that it taught me that at the time it was made people routinely carried around a pailful of booze that they drank from and that the pail’s sole purpose was a dedicated booze pail.

I'm From Hollywood (1989) - I saw this account of Andy Kaufman’s foray into the whacky world of professional wrestling years ago and for whatever reason decided to watch it again today. As a documentary this is pretty barebones but if you like old territorial wrestling shit the footage they offer up here is absolutely fantastic especially for the pre-YouTube era it was made in. But YouTube exists now so I’m probably going to spend the rest of the afternoon using it to watch old Memphis wrestling matches because of this.

The Astronomer's Dream (1898) - I think my favorite thing about Méliès movies is the fact that every time there’s a scientist or astronomer in one they always look like a goddamn wizard. We got another wizard/man of science in this one: an astronomer who falls asleep and dreams of a giant moon eating all his stuff before moon babes show up that the astronomer-wizard is horny for. In the end he wakes up disappointed that there are no moon babes about. We’ve all been there I’m sure.

Mädchen in Uniform (1931) - Most of the movies I watch are utter schlock filled with explosions and/or kung fu. This had neither and yet somehow moved me more than any karate based explosion ever could. I don’t know why the story of a girl falling madly in love with her school teacher and then drunkenly declaring that she loved her after a school play would, as the youths say, hit me in the feels quite like it did but it did.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) - I watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and holy shit did it rule ass! Someone described it as Miyazaki doing a Final Fantasy game as a movie which it pretty much was and it was great because of it. I don't know if I'd put it above Monoke (it was lacking in the dismemberment department) but holy shit was this awesome. Planes, guns, warrior princesses, bugs, post-apocalypse, chocobos; this movie had it all. If you like the ALL-ACTION Miyazaki as much or more than the boring slice of life with a side-order of whimsy Miyazaki you'll love this one. But if quiet introspection is more your jam this one might not be for you. 9.893 thumbs way the fuck up!

Danemon Ban: The Monster Exterminator (1935) - A very Max Fleischer-esque animated short from Japan. I saw it without subtitles or any real knowledge of Japanese but even so the story was pretty straightforward: Danemon Ban goes with his big-ass club to a haunted house to bust some ghosts but they end up shaving his head. The ghosts turn out to be those raccoon-dog deals we got over here in Asia. They dance around in celebration of fucking up Danemon Ban’s hair but Ol’ Danemon Popeyes out of the ropes they tied him up with and merks the shit out of them all with his big-ass club. Danemon then gets some reward and that’s pretty much it.

As a historical curio this was pretty neat but as a work of art it’s nothing all that special. It’s not as good as the Western stuff it was aping or different enough to really be considered it’s own unique style of animation. As a horror story outside of one of the head shaving ghosts transforming from a Betty Boop looking Japanese maiden into a melted faced ghoul was pretty good but the rest of it is goofy comedy stuff. Worth checking out if your interested in the history of anime but otherwise not really worth bothering with.

The Stolen Lump (1929) - Another old-timey animated short from Japan. I thought this one was stylistically a lot better than Danemon Ban. The story was your basic “Don’t try to con supernatural beings or you’ll end up with double goiters” morality play. Truly a tale as old as time...