What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Touchofevil]

Some Hitchcock off and on today on TCM. The Wrong Man looked particularly interesting. I stumbled onto it midway through. Some great shots of the real world in the background.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The other night it was Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) with Edna Mae Oliver as school teacher turned sleuth Hildegarde Withers. Six films with Withers were made from 1932 to 1937, with Oliver in the first four. Partially filmed on Catalina Island, we get to see the huge ballroom of the casino and the grounds of a local hotel. James Gleason flies out from New York to work on the case. A twist at the end caught us completely flat-footed.
Last night it was Bells Are Ringing (1960) with Judy Holliday and Dean Martin, dir. by Vincent Minelli. It was entertaining, but not to the degree that we would watch it again. Even with CinemaScope, Metrocolor, stereo sound, and Betty Comden and Adolf Green's story and lyrics, not to mention music by Jule Styne, we felt maybe the stage play was better.

 

[MisterCairo]

Friday night movie night, girls' time to pick, so it was Coraline, the creepy stop motion flick from about 2008, one of our eldest favourites.

 

[Fading Fast]

Some Hitchcock off and on today on TCM. The Wrong Man looked particularly interesting. I stumbled onto it midway through. Some great shots of the real world in the background.

I was doing some work with it muted in the background and noticed those incredible location shots of and around New York - really good cinematography and amazing time travel for us today. My distant memory of the movie is it's a good, solid effort, but not great.

 

[Harp]

Friday night movie night, girls' time to pick...

Sweet. Lucky man Cairo.

 

[Touchofevil]

Although it is on tonight, I will not torture Lady ToE with Rear Window. We have seen it so many times and even though I still enjoy it, she no longer does. It is a pretty good flick.

 

[Edward]

Last night pulled up Yesterday on the Netflix. A low-profile British film directed by Danny Boyle a couple of years ago. Follows a young man who, after a freak global incident, discovers he is the only person who remembers the Beatles. From struggling singer-songwriter, he becomes an overnight global sensation by taking credit for writing all the Beatles songs he can remember. In many respects it's an undemanding and predictable romcom, but it has some nice performances and Danny Boyle's direction serves it well. Ed Sheeran plays himself in a slightly less wooden (and much less egregious manner) than his infamous Game of Thrones cameo; he sends himself up rather well in this, actually, and while I don't care for his music, I do appreciate people being able to laugh at themselves. The plot does have a lot of fun with the notion of fandom, what it is to really love music when other people just don't seem to get it, how things might be slightly differently if something huge to you disappeared, but otherwise mostly the world just carried on as was. They get the balance of how odd it would seem in one way if the Beatles disappeared versus how little significant change it would make to the world just spot on. (Oasis disappearing is a cute gag.) By no means essential cinema, but a pleasant enough bit of fluff if you want something undemanding for a couple of hours. The performances of the Beatles songs in the film are also a lot of fun - energetic and well done, but not just cloning the Beatles sound. One for not only Beatles fans but anyone who also was ever "the fan" of any band among your otherwise indifferent friendship group. Bonus points for the ending which maintains consistency with the tone throughout and provides a neat plot resolution without ever resorting to "and it was all a dream".

 

[Edward Reed]

His Girl Friday (1940)
Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy and Gene Lockhart.
Very fast paced wit and banter with almost easy to miss one-liners and its non stop! Great writing, great acting and fantastic directing! One could surmise that Steven Spielberg must have studied this film in film school as you can see his takeaway on scene setups with multiple characters all talking at the same time with rapid, overlapping dialogue....a treatment that Spielberg certainly applied to many of his own films.
Production of His Girl Friday was delayed because the frequent improvisation and numerous ensemble scenes required many retakes. The actors were encouraged to be aggressive and spontaneous, creating several moments in which the characters break the fourth wall.
Absolutely delightful film. highly recommend!
The plot centers on a newspaper editor named Walter Burns who is about to lose his ace reporter and ex-wife Hildy Johnson, newly engaged to another man. Burns suggests they cover one more story together, getting themselves entangled in the case of murderer Earl Williams as Burns desperately tries to win back his wife. The screenplay was adapted from the 1928 play The Front Pageby Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. This was the second time the play had been adapted for the screen, the first occasion being the 1931 film also titled The Front Page.
His Girl Friday was #19 on American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Laughs and was selected in 1993 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film is in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed, though the play it was based on is still under copyright.

 

[MisterCairo]

Although it is on tonight, I will not torture Lady ToE with Rear Window. We have seen it so many times and even though I still enjoy it, she no longer does. It is a pretty good flick.

Pretty good?

JUST pretty good?

Duel at dawn, sir.

 

[MisterCairo]

Last night pulled up Yesterday on the Netflix. A low-profile British film directed by Danny Boyle a couple of years ago. Follows a young man who, after a freak global incident, discovers he is the only person who remembers the Beatles. From struggling singer-songwriter, he becomes an overnight global sensation by taking credit for writing all the Beatles songs he can remember. In many respects it's an undemanding and predictable romcom, but it has some nice performances and Danny Boyle's direction serves it well. Ed Sheeran plays himself in a slightly less wooden (and much less egregious manner) than his infamous Game of Thrones cameo; he sends himself up rather well in this, actually, and while I don't care for his music, I do appreciate people being able to laugh at themselves. The plot does have a lot of fun with the notion of fandom, what it is to really love music when other people just don't seem to get it, how things might be slightly differently if something huge to you disappeared, but otherwise mostly the world just carried on as was. They get the balance of how odd it would seem in one way if the Beatles disappeared versus how little significant change it would make to the world just spot on. (Oasis disappearing is a cute gag.) By no means essential cinema, but a pleasant enough bit of fluff if you want something undemanding for a couple of hours. The performances of the Beatles songs in the film are also a lot of fun - energetic and well done, but not just cloning the Beatles sound. One for not only Beatles fans but anyone who also was ever "the fan" of any band among your otherwise indifferent friendship group. Bonus points for the ending which maintains consistency with the tone throughout and provides a neat plot resolution without ever resorting to "and it was all a dream".

The best line was the put down from the Kate McKinnon character, telling the lead he was "cute but too round" or something to that effect.

 

[Edward]

The best line was the put down from the Kate McKinnon character, telling the lead he was "cute but too round" or something to that effect.

Yes, she was superb in this - a very knowing satire on a certain type of industry bod without it ever slipping too far into the absurd.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Sandpiper from 1965 with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint and Charles Bronson


I have to stop watching Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor movies as they aren't very good, at least the four or so I've seen (one was okay). But like driving by an accident scene, once I take a quick look, I continue watching. To be fair, they made eleven movies together, so I might just not have seen the good ones yet.

In The Sandpiper, Taylor is a "free-spirited" artist who has been kinda sorta homeschooling her (in the language of the day) illegitimate nine-year-old son. After the boy has a few incidents with the law, the state intercedes and places him in a nearby Episcopalian school run by Reverend Richard Burton.

This is the setup for the Reverend, representing traditional culture and values, to "clash" with Taylor, representing late-'60s-hippie culture and values. It's also the setup for Burton, married for twenty-plus years to nice wife Eva Marie Saint, to have an affair with Taylor.

Problematically, Elizabeth Taylor is playing a free-spirited twenty-something year old, but she's actually thirty something and looks closer to forty something. This isn't being picky or mean-spirited, as much of the movie pivots on several middle-aged men lusting after her youth and beauty. If an actress is representing the youth movement of a time, the actress should herself look youthful.

The story itself is painfully dated with both sides of the cultural divide coming across as cliched and two dimensional. Much of the dialogue feels like speeches from this very political period masquerading as conversation. A problem many screenwriters in our very political modern times also have.

Rather than making the audience sympathetic to their affair, Burton and Taylor are unlikable characters in a small way. They don't do great evil, just selfish little things that hurt others. I don't think it was the intent, but instead of their affair looking like some great love, it comes across as shabby and self-absorbed. Instead of making the "new" free love look liberating and fresh, it looks immature and narcissistic.

Hollywood was trying to show traditional Christian morality banging (ha-ha) into the flower-power generation. But The Sandpiper is too heavy handed, plodding and miscast to be anything more today than just a dated melodrama. It does have some beautiful scenic shots of the California coast though.


N.B. #1 In addition to Taylor, another awkward casting decision is Charles Bronson as Taylor's hippie artist friend. Even with long hair and a counterculture wardrobe, nothing about Bronson's mien reads bohemian.

N.B. #2 The titular sandpiper is a wounded bird that Taylor nurses back to health, refuses to cage (so that it learns trust) and then sets free. Got it - see the heavy handed symbolism? Sigh.

 

[Harp]

^^^Liz looks the part-trapsed around You Tube this weekend during the local Chicago monsoon rain,
caught the snippet where Charles is sculpting her topless and Dick walks in scene. No complaints from this corner.
However, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, sometimes those two hit if off, sometimes not.

But Liz always scores a run.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Man, The Sandpiper is a real piece of junk. I would have warned you to skip it. I only saw it because I was the right age when it played on TV a couple of years after it was made.

Like several other Taylor/Burton films, the story and the direction (hence acting) are bad. (The worst, IMHO? Boom!) In the case of Virginia Woolf, they were working from a solid play with a great director (Mike Nichols - his first feature film!)

 

[Harp]

In the case of Virginia Woolf, they were working from a solid play with a great director (Mike Nichols - his first feature film!)

Albee recall from college theatre class, a bit of Beckett, maverick writ; Woolf considered his best shot.
Cannot remember any major prizes earned.

 

[Fading Fast]

Man, The Sandpiper is a real piece of junk. I would have warned you to skip it. I only saw it because I was the right age when it played on TV a couple of years after it was made.

Like several other Taylor/Burton films, the story and the direction (hence acting) are bad. (The worst, IMHO? Boom!) In the case of Virginia Woolf, they were working from a solid play with a great director (Mike Nichols - his first feature film!)

Albee recall from college theatre class, a bit of Beckett, maverick writ; Woolf considered his best shot.
Cannot remember any major prizes earned.

"Woolf" was the movie I was referring to when I noted one of the Burton-Taylor movies I've seen is good.

As bad as it is, for some reason, I couldn't stop watching "The Sandpiper." As noted, it was accident-scene gazing.

 

[Harp]

As bad as it is, for some reason, I couldn't stop watching "The Sandpiper." As noted, it was accident-scene gazing.

Liar. You were Liz gazing.

 

[Fading Fast]

Liar. You were Liz gazing.

I am not shy at all about admitting the stars I find attractive. Liz in the '50s, yes; Liz in the '60s, no - too sloppy, she looks slatternly to me (and that's with Hollywood trying to clean her up for the movie). I found Eva Marie Saint much more attractive in this one, especially as it looks like she bathes and brushes her teeth daily.

Taylor and Burton seem, overall, to make better movies apart. "Night of the Iguana" is an excellent Burton film, just as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is for Taylor. But they were such a celebrity couple in their day - such tabloid fodder - the the idea of them in a film together had to be attractive from a box-office perspective. Growing up in the '70s, they were in the newspaper gossip pages all the time.

Heck, here it is fifty-plus years later and I watch these movies, in part, because they are Taylor-Burton movies.

 

[Harp]

Taylor and Burton seem, overall, to make better movies apart. "Night of the Iguana" is an excellent Burton film, just as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is for Taylor.

Thought Ava Gardner stole Iguana. Ava played against Burton better than Liz; though Virginia Woolf is rightly a classic.
...Saw Liz and Burton together here live in Chicago twenty-five years ago, forgot the play embarrassed to admit,
may have been a reprise of Woolf but doubtful on that. Same ol' chemistry between those two but the right vehicle
absolutely required.

 

[Touchofevil]

Pretty good?

JUST pretty good?

Duel at dawn, sir.

It is one of my favorite and most watched movies. I have it on my iPad just in case I get a hankerin’ to watch it.