Last Movie Watched Thread

Yes.

eg.
Captain America


Homicide: Life on the Street


The West Wing


Office Space


The Americans

X-Men Apocalypse

The first half of the movie is genuinely fun and so much more energetic than a lot of the most blockbusters I've seen recently. So it's pretty disappointing how the second half of the movie is such an underwhelming mess.

Welcome To Leith

Documentary in which a funny little White Supremacist ding-a-ling buys up some land in a godforsaken town, the better to build a little community of wingnuts. The gears of local politics eventually creak into action.

Green Room

More Nazis, this time in the softly-spoken menacing form of Patrick Stewart. Good, very taut, and probably as gory as you've been led to believe. The cast is uniformly excellent, and the club reeks with a scuzzy bad news vibe, reminding me of a betting shop I was unfortunate enough to find myself in once in the Dingle district of Liverpool - still the most loweringly threatening atmosphere I've ever encountered.

Carnage 

I was fully expecting to hate this film as it looked like another entry in the 'shrill, smarmy yuppie assholes being shrill and smarmy' subgenera. And while the film definitely checks a lot of those boxes... I dunno, I really liked it. It helps that the cast is so talented, but I also think the fact that all the characters in the film reminded me of the parents of people I went to high school with, it gave a familiarity that is amusing to watch (it helps that it's been a long time since I was in high school). 

Plus, any film where Kate Winslet's character shouts 'I'm glad our son kicked the shit out of your son and I WIPE MY ASS WITH YOUR HUMAN RIGHTS!' will definitely get a few good chuckles out of me. 

American Psycho 

One of my favorite dark comedies and I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen today! It was impressive to see just how well the film has aged; the undercurrent of dread is palpable, the satire hasn't lost any of its bite, and all the performances, particularly Christian Bale's fantastic turn as the pathetic and terrifying Patrick Bateman, are excellent. A huge part of this is because Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner found the humor that was buried deep in the novel, and by removing Bret Easton Ellis' effant terrible repulsive excesses, have fashioned one of the best cinematic takedowns of male vanity and entitlement I've seen. Better still, by so carefully balancing the disturbing and the hilarious, they have created a film that is oddly touching: Bateman may be loathsome but there is still a touch of humanity in his inhumanity. 

For additional reading fun, her is an excerpt from an interview with Turner:

I don't have anybody in real life to geek out with over this, but DANIEL DAY LEWIS, PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON, 1950s FASHION, AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

X-Men Apocalypse - I loved it, Mrs B thought it was okay. Quicksilver was the BEST, Nightcrawler was pretty great too.

Which empire?

While Mulholland Drive is still my favorite film of his, I have a huge soft spot for Lost Highway and I wish it received more love. It's one of the most deeply creepy films I've seen and the fact Lynch was so heavily inspired by the OJ Simpson trial (and Robert Blake's real-life murder trial) only adds to the creepiness. 

Room 237

In his short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", Jorge Luis Borges writes "There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless."  It's a quote that was rarely far from my mind while watching Rodney Ascher's documentary on various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining.  Stanley Kubrick is the kind of director whose fastidious perfectionism, striking visual style, and incredibly intelligent yet frequently enigmatic films have inspired a ton of analysis, and I'm sure that a lot of that analysis is brilliant and could teach me a thing or two about film in the process.  But, on the whole, the analyses presented in Room 237, while of a scope that indicates a lot of time invested in the ideas, and occasionally intriguing, seem very confidently presented for being so wildly speculative.  The theorist with the most plausible idea, that The Shining is about genocide committed against American Indians, could very well be onto something, and yet, this is a film about a hotel built on an ancient Indian burial ground; the presence of a bunch of imagery associated with American Indians is only to be expected, and it's a horror film, so of course there's talk of murder and moral culpability.  Additionally, this is a film which, in spite of making considerable alterations to the source material, does not appear to have done much in the way of altering King's misguided and tone-deaf tropes regarding minorities, what with the "magical negro" trope in Scatman Crothers' character, so I somewhat doubt that the whole thing is some ultra-subtle narrative about American imperialism and the genocide of native peoples.  Not to mention that this guy's best evidence is generally pretty ambiguous.  He points out that there are cans of Calumet Baking Powder in the one food pantry and says that since a calumet is a peace pipe the first appearance of Calumet Baking Powder where you can make out the full word "Calumet" represents peace treaties signed with American Indian peoples, and then in the later appearance of several Calumet Baking Powder cans all turned in such a way that one cannot read the full word "Calumet" on any of them, that represents all the peace treaties that the United States have broken with American Indian peoples.  And that's interesting and all, but it's equally plausible that Kubrick at one point while in pre-production or whatever the planning part of a movie is called was like "So anyway, Native American imagery, I want that for this film, because it's on the site of an Indian burial ground, and furthermore, when you're stocking the pantry, I want Calumet Baking Powder, and I want you to be able to read the full label the first time you see it because it'll represent how this job represents a peace treaty and a new beginning of sorts in Jack Nicholson's rocky marriage with Shelley Duvall, but then the second time you see the Calumet, you can't read the full label, and it shows how that new promise by Jack Nicholson has been broken.  Get it, I'm using the Native American imagery to make really subtle symbolism, because I'm Stanley goddamn Kubrick, the perfectionist director, and I do this sort of thing."  Or, more likely, Kubrick just told his person who procured props for him "No no no, stupid, don't get Rumford baking powder, get Calumet, it's got a Native American guy on the can."  There are interesting points made by the guy who thinks that the film is about the Holocaust, but for the most part they feel like even more of a stretch than the American Indian genocide analysis.  The person who thinks that the film is explicitly about the myth of the Minotaur also makes some interesting points, but I also feel that if Kubrick specifically wanted to make the film about that specific myth he would have included a much more obvious depiction of a Minotaur than a silhouette of a skier on a poster that appears for a couple of seconds.  I'd totally buy the idea that the architecture of the hotel deliberately doesn't make sense, and it definitely feeds into the maze imagery presented by the hedge maze thing, but I think that's probably just more of a haunted house staple than it is an explicit framing of the film as a modern day retelling of the myth of the Minotaur.  And I'm not sure why the guy who keeps pointing stuff out about the structure of the film is even being interviewed apart from the fact that his superposition of the film played forwards and backwards looks cool, but I'm pretty sure that the film is not supposed to be the mirror image of 2001 or whatever.  2001 is a film about Kubrick's conflation of biological evolution with the "evolution" of human technology, so yes, things get more advanced as the movie progresses.  The Shining is not a film about "devolution", or some return to an atavistic nature, it's about some guy who tries to murder his family.  They're about two very different films that just happen to have two very different outcomes for their protagonists: Whathisname the Astronaut Guy becomes an Omnipotent Space Fetus, and Jack Nicholson's abusive tendencies are horribly exacerbated by a magic haunted hotel, that's all.  But all of this over-analysis pales in comparison to the real reason I watched this film.  I first wanted to watch Room 237 when I learned that there was some idiot in it who thought that the film was an oblique confession on the part of Kubrick that he had faked the moon landing.  I figured that was going to be hilariously ridiculous.  And it was hilariously ridiculous!  There's nothing the least bit plausible about anything the guy says, but it's incredibly amusing that he's so goddamned confident that a random argument between Nicholson and Duvall is supposed to be about Kubrick's wife finding out about him faking the moon landing.

As for what I thought about the documentary, it's an alright film, but Rodney Ascher ostensibly doesn't want to offer an opinion about the analyses.  But at the same time, one of the theorists is a guy who thinks the moon landing was faked.  Pseudoscientific conspiracies aren't the sort of thing that merit neutrality; giving this guy a chance to spread this conspiracy without making it clear that it's patently false is the same sort of shit that leads to stuff like news outlets booking anti-climate change guests to debate with climate change experts as if global warming is still a thing that is up for debate.  So Ascher is really just legitimizing a claim which is patently false.  One needn't (and shouldn't) take a neutral stance about the assertion that 2+2=5.  Also, Ascher presumably didn't have to do much to make this film other than procure the rights to include footage from a bunch of Kubrick films and some other films, and play them in a meaningful montage over the voices of the theorists, so you'd think he could have at least made it a bit more clear as to who was talking at any given, or explained what sort of film analysis experience, if any, the various theorists had.  As it was, when someone was just making some generic comment about how brilliant they thought Kubrick was, it was hard to discern which of the same-y sounding dudes was talking at any given time.  

The Borges story that I quoted at the beginning of this comment is about a fictional analysis of a fictional 19th/20th Century author's attempt to create write his own version of Don Quixote, which is textually identical to Cervantes' original.  The narrator's analysis is full of sycophantic praise of the author's new Don Quixote, and the ridiculous conclusions that he comes to about the supposed greater richness of this identical copy speaks to how critical analysis all too often makes absurd assertions based off of the most tenuous of evidence.  And perhaps that's the best way to think of Room 237, as a work about self-important, questionable analyses of an adaptation of a novel.  In that same Borges story, the narrator goes on to write "Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst."  And a director as cryptic and revered as Kubrick is bound to have more than a few fans whose takeaway from his films is based on seeing some sort of deep, subtle symbolism that isn't really there regarding whatever it is that interests them, and perhaps it is Rodney Ascher's goal to demonstrate this to the viewer.  Ultimately, though, I don't have that much faith in the documentary, so I think I'll file this one under the "Are These Conspiracy Theories Legitimate Or Not?  Yay False Equivalency!" genre, along with The I'm Jonathan Frakes and I've Abandoned All Professional Integrity as a Reasonable Human Being to Narrate a Show About How Alien Conspiracies Are Probably True In Return for a Nice Paycheck Conspiracy Hour, with Host Jonathan Frakes.  B-

This weekend I saw four movies, two new, two old, all for the first time!

No Country for Old Men - yes, I'm late to the party - back in 2008, it seems like everyone was either Team No Country or Team There Will Be Blood, debating over which bleak western filmed next to each other was better. Now that I've finally seen both, ...well it's apples and oranges, isn't it? There's a certain coldness to both of them, but in Paul Thomas Anderson's case, it's because his directing style tends toward the cold/clinical - in pacing, framing, rhythm. In the Coens' case, I think it's because they're pessimistic about human nature in general. They're a perfect fit for the book, and it's pretty amazing how closely the tone of the film matches the tone of the novel.

Did somebody on here recently say that Anton Chigurh was the most laughably bad assassin in movies? I thought I remembered somebody saying that. Bardem's performance reminded me of my college roommate, which...eek. Glad I survived college.

No Country made for a bizarre double-feature pairing with MacGruber, which also starts with people with trucks getting shot in the desert. There's been a critical/commentariat renaissance of opinion for MacGruber recently, so I decided to try it. Sorry, guys. It sucks. I laughed three times and smiled two additional times in 90 minutes, for an average Humor Response every 18 minutes. My biggest laugh was when MacGruber told Val Kilmer that he was going to set the record for most of his own dick in his mouth. As a general rule, acknowledging genre tropes is not enough to get a laugh. Yeah, I recognize that you are copying a common action movie scene. But I'm not going to laugh at your imitation unless it contains actual goddamn jokes. Val Kilmer has fallen hard since the days of Top Secret! to be in this. Powers Boothe was great, though, and I don't know who the hell Ryan Philippe is (was he in Band of Brothers?) but he was definitely the most amusing actor in this terrible, unfunny movie.

Then came Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman's terrific new Jane Austen movie. A lot of great wit here - most of it Austen's, but some of it invented for the movie from the same cloth, and so clever you can't tell the difference. (I had just read the novel.) Xavier Samuel was a pretty dull protagonist, but everyone else here is on fire, from Kate Beckinsale (so hilarious! and, uh, so hot) to basically every daffy old husband. Tom Bennett steals the show, though. I would happily watch a 90 minute movie of just Tom Bennett, in character as Sir James, explaining all 12 commandments. Very accomplished fake-1700s music from the composer, and lively costuming. The pacing/rhythm was a little clunky, because of the nature of the source material, but it's not a big problem.

Finally, The Lobster. Oh boy. What to say? This thing is - I've never seen a movie like this, that's for sure. By the end, my friend and I were genuinely uncomfortable. It's a pretty pessimistic movie, and I'm surprised that the writer/director is married to the actress who plays the maid, since it seems like his view is that true love always contains some element of deception, either deceiving yourself or deceiving your lover. Only Léa Seydoux's parents, in a tiny part, seem like a genuinely honest, happy couple with a healthy idea of love. I left the theatre with a lot of questions.

Really, really accomplished filmmaking technically (using almost all natural light - suck it, Inarritu), carefully selected classical soundtrack, extremely good performances from every single cast member, from the famous (John C. Reilly!) to the obscure (the lady with no feelings). I love the confidence of the storytelling and the originality - I love a movie where I have absolutely no idea what the hell will happen next (see: Whiplash). But be warned: The Lobster is a scary-ass downer.

Oh good, I was starting to wonder if I just didn't get MacGruber, which would be sad considering how dumb a movie it is.  God bless Will Forte and his little weirdo heart, but that movie is terrible.

I also didn't get the urge to compare NCFOM and TWBB in '08.  They are very different movies, it wasn't exactly a Volcano vs. Dante's Peak situation.

Chloe 

Good schlocky fun that, like its eponymous character (beautifully played by Amanda Seyfried), is deceptively smarter than it looks. The film is part of the erotic thriller/domestic melodrama genre that was hugely popular in the late 80s/early 90s, and so many of the hallmarks are there: photogenic, but fractured family, opulent house, lush clothing, all photographed to look like something out of a pristine designer's catalogue (or as my mum would call it, 'home pornography'). What separates the film from its ilk and makes it rise despite the occasionally clunky dialogue and inherent silliness of its premise is the sensitive way it approaches attraction as being divorced from sexual orientation. Oh sure, the pulpiness is fun in and of itself, but there are suggestions that are far deeper and more complex and make the film more enjoyable. It's far from a masterpiece; in fact, I would call it trash. But, it's trash with ideas and it works better than expected. 

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Is this the next big dot in the dotted-line Jungcraft project synthesizing Slenderman? First we go find The Thin Man from Metropolis (1927) then, much later, we encounter mirror-faced spook from Meshes (1943). Watched this after Lost Highway (1997) viewing this weekend. For those interested, get on Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953, released in 1981) for those wanting a bit more than what is offered in The Serpent and The Rainbow (1983).