What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Romance on the High Seas with Doris Day and Jack Carson. A fun, frivolous piece in gorgeous Technicolor.

I just watched it too - you're spot on. It felt like a 1930s screwball comedy moved to the late '40s and shot in color.

Oscar Levant played the same character in every movie I've seen him in, but he plays his one character well and it's perfectly suited for screwball comedy.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Oscar Levant, by all accounts, actually was that guy in real life. Listen to enough of his appearances on "Information Please" and you'll know what I mean.

 

[belfastboy]

"Loving Vincent" It was a WOW for me....I regret not seeing it on the big screen of a theatre. Incredibly creative and brilliantly executed. I was even touched by the story even in its animated delivery...who da thunk!

 

[Fading Fast]

Oscar Levant, by all accounts, actually was that guy in real life. Listen to enough of his appearances on "Information Please" and you'll know what I mean.

Some people look and feel as if they are from a different time period. Levant looks and feels, to me (and you know this stuff better than I do), like he would have fit right into Vaudeville. He looks and feels as if he was born fifty years after he should have been.

 

[Fading Fast]

...An Apartment for Peggy (1948) with Jeanne Crain and William Holden. Utterly delightful. Fluffy, yes, and a bit propagandist in post-WW2 America, but I loved it.

Agreed. In an era when most Americans went to the movies every week, this one felt like a solid movie-of-the-week effort - nothing more except for the star power of both William Holden and Edmund Gwenn (a very enjoyable and talented character actor).

Also, it does provide an interesting (albeit, as you imply, mainly sanitized) window into how America's colleges - who, up until now, mainly catered to America's scions - were adjusting to, via the GI Bill, an influx of millions of everyday Americans.

Lastly, the movie proffered quite the robust philosophical argument for the benefits of teaching - of being an educator - despite being a position of modest compensation and social status. One thing I love about old books and movies, you learn how very little is new and how most of our current debates have been going on a long time.

 

[AmateisGal]

Agreed. In an era when most Americans went to the movies every week, this one felt like a solid movie-of-the-week effort - nothing more except for the star power of both William Holden and Edmund Gwenn (a very enjoyable and talented character actor).

Also, it does provide an interesting (albeit, as you imply, mainly sanitized) window into how America's colleges - who, up until now, mainly catered to America's scions - were adjusting to, via the GI Bill, an influx of millions of everyday Americans.

Lastly, the movie proffered quite the robust philosophical argument for the benefits of teaching - of being an educator - despite being a position of modest compensation and social status. One thing I love about old books and movies, you learn how very little is new and how most of our current debates have been going on a long time.

I found Edmund Gwenn to be absolutely charming in this! A far cry from the menacing role he plays in Foreign Correspondent.

 

[Fading Fast]

I found Edmund Gwenn to be absolutely charming in this! A far cry from the menacing role he plays in Foreign Correspondent.

For whatever reason, I've seen him in more movies in the last few months than, probably, the last five years. He was in all those movies for a reason - he's a talented and versatile actor.

 

[AmateisGal]

Avengers: Infinity War last night. Daughter and I are huge fans, so of course we had to go ASAP.

It was incredible. Tugged on ALL the emotions.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The Front Page (1931) with Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou. The wise cracks come at you fast and furious. Fun to catch the lines that showed up in His Gal Friday ("Madam, are you referring to me?") and compare how Adolphe and Cary deliver them.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Front Page (1931) with Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou. The wise cracks come at you fast and furious. Fun to catch the lines that showed up in His Gal Friday ("Madam, are you referring to me?") and compare how Adolphe and Cary deliver them.

Agree completely - fun movies to compare. I very recently watched them all but back to back and posted these comments: http://www.thefedoralounge.com/thre...ovie-you-watched.20830/page-1251#post-2401146

 

[Doctor Strange]

On Dangerous Ground - an interesting 1951 noir with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, directed by Nicholas Ray. Music by the great Bernard Herrmann... though not his best work: more like his quickly knocked out Twilight Zone episode scores than his classic feature scores.

Ryan is a hard-boiled police detective in a radio car prowling the city at night who's become too nihilistic and violent from spending all his time with cops and criminals. In order to get him out of the city to cool down, he's sent by his chief (Ed Begley) to investigate a murder "upstate" (*) in the snowy mountains. His exposure to Lupino's blind heroine eventually causes his weakened humanity to reassert itself. I particularly liked the contrast of the dark nighttime city and the bright snowy country: it fit with the character's psychological journey.

(* I think the city was supposed to be New York... but if so, there are no mountains anything like these "70 miles upstate"!)

 

[Doctor Strange]

Avengers: Infinity War last night. Daughter and I are huge fans, so of course we had to go ASAP.

It was incredible. Tugged on ALL the emotions.

My son and I went yesterday. While I'm primarily blown away - this is the movie that my inner 12 year-old comics geek has been hoping for for 50 years! - I have some mixed feelings.

First, a complaint common to nearly all comic book films: Though all the battle scenes are awesome, I'd have preferred 15 minutes less CGI-overkill action and more character interaction. Some pretty important MCU characters essentially just had cameos. Marvel/Disney (as opposed to DC/Warners) understands that we are more invested in the characters than the action, and the first meetings and interactions that were there were great... but I wanted more!

And while I totally expected a dark but hopeful, Empire Strikes Back ending (it's no secret that next year's Avengers IV was being called Infinity War, Part 2 for a while, so I expected a cliffhanger)... I didn't expect them to go THAT dark! You know, a lot of little kid Marvel fans are going to be crying at the end, and it'll be rough on their parents!

But overall, this is a massively impressive, unique achievement, the culmination of the 18 previous MCU films' backstories that does a remarkable job of serving its giant cast and story. And it represents the third of Marvel's key comics innovations of the silver age successfully ported to the screen. (1 - The "more realistic" "heroes with problems" characterizations. 2 - The shared universe, with careful continuity between storylines and callbacks to earlier events. 3 - The mega-crossover event, with all hands on deck and characters from vastly different places/stories joining forces.)

And for hardcore MCU fans: I'm very curious to see how they will handle the game-changing finale of this film in Agents of SHIELD (which did include a "Did you see what's happening in New York?!?" line in Friday's episode) and the Netflix series. Not to mention the next feature, Ant Man and the Wasp. (The film after that, Captain Marvel, is set back in the nineties, so it won't be a problem.)

 

[Fading Fast]

"Seven Days in May" from 1964 and chockablock with stars like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Frederic March, Eva Gardner (starting to look a bit less sparkly) and Edmond O'Brien (definitely looking less sparkly).

It's a well-done political propaganda film that works because of incredible star power (these are actors who know their craft - can own a scene, bring passion, pull it back and do it time and again), intense-and-smart dialogue and a story that carries you along despite a plot full of flaws and questionable moments of believability.

The other thing it has is style - a very early '60s "this is an intense political drama" style that clearly had its moment as can be seen in other movies like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Fail Safe." Its echo of a documentary brings a verisimilitude and a sense of immediacy to the story. And kudos to the decision (or budget constraint) to film it in B&W which adds to both its real-life documentary feel and general atmosphere of seriousness bordering on doom.

While the political propaganda is thick, biased and, at times, heavy handed (having the President of the United States deliver a "heart felt" monologue while, literally, embracing a flag displaying E Pluribus Unum" won't win any subtlety awards), if you let that go and just enjoy the style, the acting and the passion - it's an enjoyable movie.

 

[sal]

Watching The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Ingrid Bergman

 

[green papaya]

THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT (1967) starring DON KNOTTS

Roy (Don Knotts), a perpetually terrified 35-year-old man-child, still lives with his parents. He plays an astronaut at a local fairground, but his father (Arthur O'Connell) wants him to be a real astronaut and lands him a place at NASA. On arrival, Roy discovers he's just a janitor, but he keeps up the charade, which eventually gets him fired. When NASA wants to send someone unqualified into orbit to one-up the Russians, however, they send Roy into space, where things invariably go wrong.

 

[1mach1]

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2.

Again.

 

[Edward]

We're off the see Infinity War tonight.
We'd have gone sooner, but I've been in Beijing, and Herself wanted to wait until I got back.

Watched a few films myself on he plane on Saturday:

Three Billboards outside Epping, Missouri, which I really enjoyed.

Justice League, which was..... okay. Lacked the pizzazz of the Marvel cinematic offerings, and despite what I'm sure they spent on it, it looked a bit cheap. Wonderwoman was great (I've not seen her solo film yet). Superman's costume looked ridiculous without the red underpants - I know they were probably shooting for the DC equivalent of dumping the yellow spandex, but somehow they made it look even worse. Affleck wasn't bad, though he made a better Bat than a Wayne. (Notably, he was already one of the few actors to have played a major role as both a DC and a Marvel character, though this was more directly a DC role than playing George Reeves on set as Superman.) I did not care for the characterisation of The Flash at all - they'd have been much better served with the kid who does it on the TV show. Two people playing the same character is one thing, though this was more like two different characters with the same name. Aquaman, though - finally, a credible version of that character. The on the page version was always awful.

The Greatest Showman - a retelling of an over-simplified and quite bland version of the PT Barnum story. Great performances and lovely choreography all round, but weak music - bland and forgettable. The subplot of the interracial relationship was twee, and felt weak and underwritten. I'd much rather it had been cut. Barnum's obsession with the opera singer and the climax of that all felt weak and underwritten too. The freakshow was well done, though. Overall, I think they'd have been much better served doing a remake of the Broadway Barnum than this.

Battle of the Sexes - the story of Billy Jean King's exhibition tennis match against Bobby Riggs in 1973, and a quasi-biopic of BJK. Rather a good little film, possibly the pick of this bunch.

 

[AmateisGal]

Latin Lovers with Lana Turner and Ricardo Montalban. It was okay...kind of slow-moving. But Ricardo...SWOON!

 

[Fading Fast]

Latin Lovers with Lana Turner and Ricardo Montalban. It was okay...kind of slow-moving. But Ricardo...SWOON!

Haven't seen it and I know that, in his day, Montalban was a sex symbol, but to me he's always that guy in the white suit with a bad toupee on "Fantasy Island," so it's hard to unring that bell when I see the younger version.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Tomorrow is Forever" from 1946 with Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles and George Brent

As a movie, it's slow-burning melodrama with plot flaws, over sentimentality, a hundred coincidences and political propaganda all shamelessly on display, but somehow it still manages to engage.

[Spoiler alert] It's the story of a young pregnant bride who - after her husband, presumably, dies in WWI - remarries and raises her first husband's soon-to-be-born son as the son of her second husband. Then, we flash forward twenty years to when her first husband, who was crippled and disfigured, but not killed, in the war, returns under an assumed identity from Europe to work in her second husband's employ (I warned you about the plot).

From there, with war breaking out again, parallels to the first war forces all the buried emotions and tucked-away family history to the surface in one tearjerking scene after another. I'll leave the rest for first-time viewers, but know that the melodrama never stops right through to the end.

Despite all that or, maybe, because of it, it's not the story that engages you, it's Orson Welles. Poor Welles, what do you do when you start your Hollywood career above the top? After "Citizen Kane" (no original thinking here on my part), Welles was doomed unless he was going to somehow make "the greatest movie ever made," twice, or maybe three times.

Instead, he made a mishmash of movies that, if you stop thinking about "Kane" (don't think about the giant elephant in the room, go on, try), reveals a talented actor with immense star power - a presence that demands attention form the viewer. Without "Kane," Welles would have had a more natural career arc resulting in, IMHO, him being remembered as a first-class actor and not the guy who made "Kane" and then, by comparison, floundered.

In this movie, playing the maimed WWI vet and long-lost husband, his talent is on display in one scene-stealing moment after another. While Colbert is the headlining star on paper, it's all Welles when he's on screen and it's all about waiting for him when he isn't.

Meanwhile, George Brent does his usual sleepwalking-through-a-movie thing. But it doesn't matter as Welles singlehandedly elevates this overwrought movie to an interesting curio display his talent. That's the only reason to watch, but it's a really good one.