Last Movie Watched Thread

Same thing happens when I'm late to my family's Thanksgiving dinner.

I think it would really strain credibility when your Wolverine is like 6' 2". It would totally break the emersion.

They did that in X3!

Fire and Ice (1983)

Like, uh, where is the original footage of Cynthia Leake for this?

Well, a loose collection of fun scenes has always been the best anyone could hope for from all but a Fox X-Men movie.

Enjoyable trash melodrama. Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten are a miserable married couple who want to murder each other at Niagara Falls, if only the pesky hotel guests next door wouldn't stop getting in the way. Great bright Technicolor look, amazing use of the Niagara Falls scenery, some quaint humor. Ultimately, as a drama, it fails because neither Monroe nor Cotten deliver on acting. She isn't given a lot of work to do, and he is given too much: he's asked to play a violent psycho, throwing things and destroying rooms, but he's just too gosh-darned sane and meek as an actor to make it work. (And he doesn't have Hitchcock to urge him onto the genuine creepiness he shows in Shadow of a Doubt.) It feels like you're watching a nice guy be completely irrational, rather than a true villain.

Anyway, it's still a super fun watch because it's visually so great. The huge falls themselves, the thrilling climactic scene where two characters are at risk of going over the falls' edge, the bright green springtime colors, Marilyn Monroe in her pajamas...



This is a 50-minute documentary about Serbian culture in the US. Though it achieves real depth from its documentation of the political and economic oppression of decades past - they interview mine workers who suffered under the robber barons! - it's mostly just a big ol' hoot full of cool music, funny interview subjects, folk dancing, and kindly thoughts. The brother from the folk band is a real highlight in all his performances and interviews. A little bit sentimental and wonderful.



First things first: Glen Powell is the next Brad Pitt. Charming, naturally funny, has acting range, hot but a little bit odd lookin', and absolutely magnetic on the screen no matter what he is doing - this dude's a star. Adria Arjona: kinda ditto, actually. You can't take your eyes off them.

The first 43 minutes of this movie are an almost exactly true reprise of the Texas Monthly article about the real Gary Johnson (not the libertarian), who really did teach psychology, have cats named Id and Ego, and double as a fake hit man who helped the police catch dozens of wannabe bad guys. He even really busted a teenage kid who tried to pay him in video game cartridges.

But halfway through, the movie transitions to pure Hollywood. As a person who'd read the original article, I was worried about this. But the movie is so charmingly dumb that I rolled with it. It's a dumb movie written and directed by smart people. You know: it's funny, cool, super well-made, horny, twisted, and also completely ridiculous. There's a nice reference to No Country for Old Men. The montages of people he busts are all loads of fun, and feature tons of cool character actors. You can't think about the plot too hard because it's such a close divide between actual true story and absurd fantasy. (The ending is especially absurd.) But the plot goes dark enough and the ride is fun enough that I had a good time. Plus, moving the setting from Houston to New Orleans allowed them to build a stacked soundtrack full of bangers. Perfect afternoon movie with a beer. Certainly, in my unplanned double feature of Movies Where an Accidental Visitor Tries to Prevent a Married Couple From Murdering Each Other in a Gorgeous Tourist Landmark, this is the better-made of the two.

Managed to squeeze in a viewing of Deadpool / Wolverine and thoroughly enjoyed it. Glad I avoided spoilers - that one cameo when they get to the wasteland was worth the price of admission.

Also, it's a better Borderlands movie than Borderlands. Which isn't saying much, even if it is true.

Paul (2011)

"Friends, or more than friends?", is a subtextual question playfully asked a number of times in this film. Frosty square-pegging of round holes in the American Southwest. Rogen as alien feels much like Rogen as local. It did get made. It was released and distributed. Congratulations to all getting this in the can, whatever can that may be.

My father-in-law was an extra on this and you can see him for a split-second. His truck is prominently featured in the town square scenes.

My wife and I watched the 2004 Hideaki Anno live-action Cutie Honey movie and I had a quasi-religious experience not unlike watching a Wachowski Sisters movie. It is a movie that looks like the inside of my brain. The exact blend of silly, goofily horny, and sincere that I adore.

It’s been a while so there’s a fair number, splitting into three:

Prospero’s Books. Wow, like nothing else I’ve ever seen in a good way, a moving Renaissance book or painting in the best possible way (mostly), taking real advantage of the capabilities of film as a visual language. It does help if you remember the plot of The Tempest, though. It’s the story told from the point-of-view of the puppet master, which is a bigger adjustment than you’d think (especially if you don’t remember all the politics of the play and are going off Forbidden Planet to remember the plot). It also loses its momentum around the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand. If you look at a painting of a feast you can control how much attention you give to certain parts. Here you’re forced to look at each entrée and gift for a certain amount of time and that’s just not interesting.

The Desperate Hours. A gangster played by Humphrey Bogart holds up an Indianapolis household. Unfortunately the energy’s more Indianapolis than Bogart (and he’s slowed down too—Bogart’s not ancient but it’s also not surprising he only has a couple of years left).

Bernie. Head-and-shoulders above Hit Man

Fist of Fury. Is it weird I was disappointed in this? Enter the Dragon is a masterpiece, Way of the Dragon a solid action-comedy, and Bruce Lee in concession-era Shanghai? That should rock, right? The fights are good—that’s obviously not nothing—but there’s nothing really engaging around them, so they’re just setpieces, not expressions of culminations of anything. I guess it’s understandable because of budget and available actors—there’s a reason they only fight the Japanese plus one white guy, who’s disappointingly “Russian” instead of British/French/American—but concession-era Shanghai is such a big setting, and so primed to be fucked up by Bruce Lee, that I probably went in with impossible expectations.

Dìdi. We might be in entering the age of aughts nostalgia It’s interesting that the character’s a about five years younger than me because so it’s odd to see stuff I remember slightly shifted (e.g. I also had no idea MySpace and AIM held on that long among the sub-college crowd). It’s good but one of the cringiest films I’ve seen in a while—Chris’s character makes choices orders (plural) of magnitude worse than I did as an early adolescent. It was also strange to see Joan Chen here so close after seeing The Last Emperor, though she’s definitely aged well (she’s roughly my mother’s age, so she’s playing someone now who was about my mother’s age in 2008).

Dìdi also made me realize my Chinese has held up better than my French, so…

Old (2021)

The first Shyamalan for me since The Visit, which I thoroughly enjoyed and it reinforced my theory that he's a good filmmaker if you force limitations on him. But this is a return to the M. Night trademarks of, um, old: idiosyncratically awful dialogue, otherwise quality actors (Gael Garcia Bernal, Thomasin McKenzie, Rufus Sewell) giving the stiffest performances, key dramatic scenes inexplicably shot from 50 feet away. And even for Shyamalan these are unbelievably stupid twists; scores of missing people all went to the same resort yet nobody had ever put it together before now. Like The Happening, it's undeniably a wretched movie but the stupidity is on a level that circles back to almost brilliant.  

The Endless (2017)

Despite opening with a Lovecraft quote, the premise on this sci-fi more resembles early Weird Fiction writer (and key Lovecraft influence) Algernon Blackwood, specifically “The Willows”. Indie filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead direct and play characters with the same names, a pair of brothers who were raised by a culty commune but who fled at some point. A decade later, they temporarily return to the farm based on their unsatisfying lives in the big city and find some time-loop based strangeness afoot. While a bit overlong and stodgy-paced, there’s a refreshing lack of villainy in any character and the dynamic of the brothers (the neurotic control-freak Justin and the sweetly childlike Aaron) feels lived-in. Worth a view.