What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Right now, I think I'm going to watch a Christmas classic maybe. Just don't know what yet.

Either of afore Dickens is ticket; yet the Wizard of OZ fits shoe quite well as a family event film.
Honourable mention The Sound of Music, also not a ''yule'' but eminently serviceable as family heirloom view.
In similar vein Home Alone, original is another topper family fare.
White Christmas holds a faded allure and noticed time worn but still decent show.
A more distant Showboat with Ava Gardner and Bert Lahr of cowardly lion OZ fame as riverboat captain
is another family classic that stirs soul with resonance and character so lacking today's film.

 

[bolted]

This movie was made from actual footage, and pictures of WWI. Then Colorized 15minutes in by producer Peter Jackson, of ‘Lord of the Rings’ production notoriety

Did they have cameras and filming back then in the 1915-1920 ERA?(thereabouts) Talkies maybe?

This movie, "Some Will Never Grow Old”.
This movie is footage, no actors. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Mostly male youth who wanted to leave home and start their lives.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) ⭐ 8.2 | Documentary, History, War

1h 39m | R

www.imdb.com

This movie was quashed by main stream media, and their supporters -
Had you ever heard about producer Peter Jacksons WWI movie? ...after his Lord Of Rings movie?

It’s also heavily edited, it started out a 3 hour plus production on the big screen, and was only -iirc- 2 weeks, 4 days a week.
Then pulled.
Thats 8 showings.......only.

If I recall it was on Amazon prime free, it’s out there.
Have a good year!

 

[Worf]

This movie was made from actual footage, and pictures of WWI. Then Colorized 15minutes in by producer Peter Jackson, of ‘Lord of the Rings’ production notoriety

Did they have cameras and filming back then in the 1915-1920 ERA?(thereabouts) Talkies maybe?

This movie, "Some Will Never Grow Old”.
This movie is footage, no actors. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Mostly male youth who wanted to leave home and start their lives.

http://[URL]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/

[/URL]

This movie was quashed by main stream media, and their supporters -
Had you ever heard about producer Peter Jacksons WWI movie? ...after his Lord Of Rings movie?

It’s also heavily edited, it started out a 3 hour plus production on the big screen, and was only -iirc- 2 weeks, 4 days a week.
Then pulled.
Thats 8 showings.......only.

If I recall it was on Amazon prime free, it’s out there.
Have a good year!

I saw this in the theatre years ago and reviewed it then. Stalwart documentary, haunting and chilling. Not exactly "holiday fare" but a stunning example of what a director can do when allowed free reign to explore a passion he or she loves dearly!

Worf

 

[Edward]

Christmas Day viewing for me included Brannagh's 'Belfast'. Beautiful picture; indeed, the only sour note is the presence of Van Morrison all over the soundtrack. Other than that awfulness, however, it is a superb picture.

 

[Doctor Strange]

An outstanding film in gorgeous (digital) b/w with fine performances. Branagh's a dependably good director even in his most commercial films, but in dealing with his own childhood, he's even better.



I didn't have a problem with the Van Morrison soundtrack, but then I don't have any personal connection to this subject like you do, Edward.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Re They Shall Not Grow Old, no, they didn't have film-sound recording in the Great War.

Jackson had lip readers view the silent footage to determine what the men were probably saying, then had voice actors record it. It's the main thing that separates this documentary from the many in recent years that have colorized wartime documentary footage to make "<whatever> In Color". That, and the ultra-high quality of the film restoration and the subtlety of the coloring. This was a labor-of-love project for Peter Jackson, brought off with all his filmmaking skill.

And I don't think it was "quashed" in release, it's just a subject that 99% of the modern audience has less than zero interest in. Its brief theatrical run probably didn't come anywhere near breaking even against its production costs.

It's a brilliant project that's a must-see for anybody even vaguely interested in WWI!

 

[Fading Fast]

Re They Shall Not Grow Old, no, they didn't have film-sound recording in the Great War.

Jackson had lip readers view the silent footage to determine what the men were probably saying, then had voice actors record it. It's the main thing that separates this documentary from the many in recent years that have colorized wartime documentary footage to make "<whatever> In Color". That, and the ultra-high quality of the film restoration and the subtlety of the coloring. This was a labor-of-love project for Peter Jackson, brought off with all his filmmaking skill.

And I don't think it was "quashed" in release, it's just a subject that 99% of the modern audience has less than zero interest in. Its brief theatrical run probably didn't come anywhere near breaking even against its production costs.

It's a brilliant project that's a must-see for anybody even vaguely interested in WWI!

I've had this one on my to-be-seen list since it came out. You are motivating me to see if I can find it. I think it is hard to understand the world today if you don't having a working understanding of WWI and WWII, but as you note, few today care about WWI at all.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I just checked: it's available on Amazon, but no longer on Prime. It was included with Prime until recently.

 

[Fading Fast]

I just checked: it's available on Amazon, but no longer on Prime. It was included with Prime until recently.

Thank you, that was nice of you to do. I'll wait a bit as sometimes it will become part of Prime again.

 

[bolted]

I've had this one on my to-be-seen list since it came out. You are motivating me to see if I can find it. I think it is hard to understand the world today if you don't having a working understanding of WWI and WWII, but as you note, few today care about WWI at all.

I’m glad to have re-lite interest in histories history.
I’m a history focused individual, recalling the adage “Those than forget history are damed to repeat it''.

It can be debated that WWII became a product of WWI, but I’d rather not.

Additionally in the threads theme I’d suggest watching “Unacknowledged”, by Dr Steven Greer.

Watch Unacknowledged: An Exposé of the World's Greatest Secret online – Prime Video

Dr. Steven Greer present brand new, top secret evidence supporting Extraterrestrial contact including witness testimony, classified documents, and UFO footage while also exploring the consequences of ruthlessly enforcing such secrecy.

www.primevideo.com

That is currently free on Amazon Prime 12/26/23.
Believe what you may, this created a huge USA congressional hearing 6/12/23-7/1/23.

The vast amount of the testimony by retired service contractors(Lockheed Martin-Skunkworks-Rand-Raython-Northrupt-Tamaco-EXX-etc.) and numerous other private branches of the previously scoffed at in the military and Air Force contingencies world wide. All quashed by the mass media at the behest of ruling government agencies.

The meteoric I.T upswings since WWII(1945-today) are unparalleled in world histories timeline.
We’re just not that smart, certainly draw your own conclusions.

I forget the name of the theory: Fermi-paradox? questioning the space and time reverences to space, time, and humans as apex predators.
I’ll look it up: https://www.space.com/25325-fermi-paradox.html
Good luck!

 

[Doctor Strange]

Briefly, some recent films I've caught on streaming/cable...

Maestro - The new Leonard Bernstein biopic is pretty good, if far more focused on his marriage than his music. I have never been impressed with Bradley Cooper as an actor or director, but he does well here, and Carey Mulligan is a shoo-in for Best Actress nominations. And it's beautifully shot on FILM, 99% of it in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and 50% in b/w... which I of course LOVE.

Asteroid City - Longtime Loungers will recall that I once loved Wes Anderson's films, but he lost me about three or four releases ago. Again, I felt about this one exactly like I did about the last one: Anderson has fallen so far down his personal obsessions that his films have nothing remotely to do with recognizably human characters. It's all about the symmetrical compositions and cool production designs, reusing his stock company actors, clever obscure music cues, and games with different aspect ratio and film stock looks for different time periods or the supposed media. But stories with any relevance to the lives of actual human beings? Nope.

Barbie - Speaking as a male geezer with no personal relationship to Barbie... 75% meh, 25% brilliant. Some of it (like the entire Will Ferrell Mattel plotline) should have been left on the cutting room floor. But when it finally gets to making its serious points, about how difficult is to be a woman in the "real world", it's very wise. Gerwig and Baumbach cleverly draw you in with the cute pastel overkill... then deliver the kind of real-world human life understanding that now eludes Wes Anderson.

 

[The one from the North]

Briefly, some recent films I've caught on streaming/cable...

Maestro - The new Leonard Bernstein biopic is pretty good, if far more focused on his marriage than his music. I have never been impressed with Bradley Cooper as an actor or director, but he does well here, and Carey Mulligan is a shoo-in for Best Actress nominations. And it's beautifully shot on FILM, 99% of it in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and 50% in b/w... which I of course LOVE.

Asteroid City - Longtime Loungers will recall that I once loved Wes Anderson's films, but he lost me about three or four releases ago. Again, I felt about this one exactly like I did about the last one: Anderson has fallen so far down his personal obsessions that his films have nothing remotely to do with recognizably human characters. It's all about the symmetrical compositions and cool production designs, reusing his stock company actors, clever obscure music cues, and games with different aspect ratio and film stock looks for different time periods or the supposed media. But stories with any relevance to the lives of actual human beings? Nope.

Barbie - Speaking as a male geezer with no personal relationship to Barbie... 75% meh, 25% brilliant. Some of it (like the entire Will Ferrell Mattel plotline) should have been left on the cutting room floor. But when it finally gets to making its serious points, about how difficult is to be a woman in the "real world", it's very wise. Gerwig and Baumbach cleverly draw you in with the cute pastel overkill... then deliver the kind of real-world human life understanding that now eludes Wes Anderson.

Talkin'bout Asteroid City, I am sorry but I have to agree. I've enjoyed many Anderson movies but lately he's seem focused more being Wes Anderson than making interesting films. A good friend of mine, a true filmfreak, said that Asteroid City looks like AI was made to make a Wes Anderson movie. I think that pretty well sums that up.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Asteroid City needs a Taylor Swift break up song at least.

 

[Fading Fast]

Sky Devils from 1932 with Spencer Tracy, George Cooper, William Boyd and (thank God) Ann Dvorak


As great a star as Spencer Tracy would become, he and costar George Cooper were miscast as the male leads in Sky Devils, a farcical look at WWI. The picture needed a true vaudevillian comedy team like Wheeler and Woolsey to pull off its hijinx and screwball comedy.

With Tracy and Miller and, later Tracy and William Boyd, trying to carry the farcical humor, though, the picture doesn't work, in particular because Tracy's character is outright dislikable in a not-at-all-funny way.

At the open, Tracy and Cooper are civilian lifeguards during WWI who don't know how to swim, which qualifies as funny in 1930s farcical humor. In one scene, Tracy grabs credit for a rescue done by an Army sergeant played by William Boyd.

Trying to avoid the draft, Tracy and Cooper - through a series of coincidences that have them encountering Boyd again and again - wind up in the army's flight training school where their anti-authority antics land them in the stockade.

They escape, meet up with a couple of cute women, one played by Ann Dvorak. Then Tracy and Boyd - Boyd at first was trying to arrest Tracy - end up AWOL together as they both pursue Dvorak.

All along, there are a lot of pratfalls and slapstick jokes where Tracy comes off as an arrogant jerk. The long climax has Tracy and Boyd back at the airfield where they become heroes for a minute as they accidentally but successfully bomb a German munitions depot.

Finally, with Tracy and Boyd, along with Dvorak (don't ask how she got there), now captured by the Germans, it's Cooper's turn to stumble into action. The conclusion has one more insanely silly and stupid twist as is the wont of these farces.

To enjoy a picture like this you have to embrace, or at least appreciate its style of humor, which here includes men in drag, men in manure piles, men knocking each other down, men wolf-like chasing women and a lot of physical pranks like a man getting tossed by an airplane propeller.

In the hands of deftly skilled vaudevillians, farce is still a tough sell today because modern humor is very different. But with an open mind, it can be appreciated. The problem here is the story isn't great, the humor isn't great and Tracy is unsuited for the material.

Tracy is one of the most-likable actors of all time; it's part of his personal brand, but here he is thoroughly dislikable and in a not-humorous way. Cooper and Boyd would probably be okay seconds, but they can't make up for what Tracy doesn't have.

The one highlight, though, is Dvorak who shows a talent for this style of comedy. Her bedroom scene with Tracy, he's AWOL and trying to hide in her bedroom from the MPs, is maybe the only genuinely funny scene in the movie and all because of Dvorak.

The movie's one other redeeming feature is some good flying sequences that had to be amazing in the early 1930s. They are still impressive today when you realize there was no CGI and flying was still new and very dangerous.

Sky Devils is greatly in need of a restoration, but until all the other better movies are restored, which is a long list, this one can wait, just like you can wait for that to happen before bothering to see it.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Over holidays family yuletide Christmas celebratory, I can recall speaking film with married youngsters
discussing traditional versus modern skewered romance film, and the dearth of really good grist out there
today. I immediately carpe diemed my cue to pitch my lad Steverino in Tommy Crown with ice blonde goddess Faye Dunaway. Then I savaged without mercy its uttlerly heavy handed slipshod Brosnan-Russo redo.
I added two choice morsels-The Sand Pebbles, another Stever with Candice Bergen; also the Manhattan heart
breaker The Way We Were with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford. The latter offers very splendid New York
City scenes set WWII era and post war hustle bustle. Added Highsmith's Carol, redubbed from The Price of Salt
starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Kyle Chandler as cuckold joker discard off a lesbian road show.
Truly excellent ''Driving Miss Daisy.'' Todd Haynes directed this 1941 Studebaker romp romance that ended just
perfectly back in Manhattan.

 

[bolted]

I just found ‘They Shall not Grow Old” free.
Along with Unacknowledged*, both free for Netflix members.
If it helps.
I’m just now realizing this sites international leaning.
Seems UK based, just an oversight on my part.

Additionally I’d suggest two other new release movies.

“Lucy”-2023, and NYAD-2022, about a retiring major female sports-castor swimming the channel.
Thats Cuba to FLA here. Near 100miles open ocean.



Good luck!

 

[p51]

My wife and I went to see "The boys in the boat" on Christmas Day.
Aside for a very British train and station standing in for the Seattle depot, it was a good film.

 

[Fading Fast]

I just found ‘They Shall not Grow Old” free.
Along with Unacknowledged*, both free for Netflix members.
If it helps.
I’m just now realizing this sites international leaning.
Seems UK based, just an oversight on my part.

Additionally I’d suggest two other new release movies.

“Lucy”-2023, and NYAD-2022, about a retiring major female sports-castor swimming the channel.
Thats Cuba to FLA here. Near 100miles open ocean.



Good luck!

Watched "They Shall Not Grow Old" on Netflix last night. Thank you for the heads up.

It is as good as all of you said it is. I've seen a lot of WWI documentaries and movies, but never felt this "close" to being there.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

It's unanimous - Christmas Movie Season has been extended at Le Shellhammer Palais du Christmas Movies. Final date TBD, or when we watch the last movie on the traditional rotation.

Recently it was It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). It made my grandpa heart happy when the grandkids, who really are kids, wanted IHO5A without prompting from the grown-ups.

Waiting in the wings are A Christmas Story and Scrooge, the 1951 Alastair Sim version. Incomprehensibly, the Muppet Christmas Carol has been shunted aside by everyone but me.

Not a Christmas movie at all, but the Missus and I watched Whistling in the Dark (1941) with Red Skelton, Conrad Veidt, Ann Rutherford, and quite a few more. It says it was based on a play. Red plays Wally Benton, radio star of the crime show The Fox. Veidt is a scam artist who runs a "spiritual haven" while fleecing rich folks. Through a Hollywood plot device that certainly tried the patience of even 1941 audiences, Veidt wants Red to devise a murder scheme connected with obtaining an inheritance.

Girlfriend Rutherford and the show's sponsor's daughter are kidnapped with The Fox and spend the greater part of the movie coming up with a sure-fire homicide scheme and then short-circuiting it at the same time. Noticeable was the heavy emphasis on punchy insult zingers directed at Red's program and his semi-chicken demeanor when dealing with the kidnapping thugs. The quips fly faster than a ping pong ball in a hurricane.

 

[Fading Fast]

Three Godfathers from 1936 with Chester Morris, Lewis Stone and Walter Brennan


Three Godfathers is a moving Western that riffs on the birth of the Baby Jesus tale to deliver a Christmas movie with an equal dose of grit and charm.

Three bandits meet up in a small but thriving desert town, New Jerusalem, to rob the bank. Their leader, played by Chester Morris, is a cold-blooded killer.

Lewis Stone plays an older, college-educated bank robber whose life clearly took a wrong turn somewhere. Finally, Walter Brennan plays an illiterate drifter who seems to just go along with what the "smarter" ones tell him to do.

After robbing the bank and shooting the bank's president - this is no "crooks with hearts of gold where nothing really bad happens" story - the three bolt into the desert on horseback. They plan to hit two known watering holes on their escape to a distant town.

The first planned watering hole is denatured, so parched, they push on to the second hole only to learn that it has dried up. There they find a dying mother and her baby son. The next morning, the mother and all the horses are dead.

Cultured Stone - he reads Shakespeare and Schopenhauer - and illiterate but intellectually curious Brennan want to take the baby with them. To agree, Morris makes Stone give him his share of the heist to "buy" the few cans of milk left for the baby.

Stone, wounded during the robbery, and Brennan see saving the baby as just the right thing to do. They may be robbers, even killers, but they realize the value of a baby's life. The only thing to say for Morris at this point is that he doesn't stop them.

Low on water and now on foot, the men, with Stone carrying the baby, set off to return to New Jerusalem. As the extreme desert conditions wear the men down, every drop of water or sip of milk becomes as valuable as gold, with only the baby not pulling his weight.

Director Richard Boleslawski understood that the power in his story was having each man, out in the desert, face his "come to Jesus" moment alone as, eventually, everyone does in life.

Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, and Walter Brennan all show, in this one, why they had decades of professional staying power in a business that is not known for its career longevity.

There is a lot of religion and philosophy packed into this short movie. Stone quotes the famous "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" Shakespearean soliloquy to explain his sacrifice, while Morris struggles to find the words to pray when he's in the proverbial foxhole.

Three Godfathers isn't subtle, but it is effective. If you are religious, the parallels to the birth of Christ and the tenets of Christianity are obvious and moving.

If you aren't religious, you'll still be affected by the eternal questions of morality and sacrifice that every man or woman faces at some point in his or her life.

The budget is small, the sets are obvious and there is only one action scene early on, but Three Godfathers is a powerful Christmas movie. Its creative narrative and talented acting have you thinking anew about the enduring story of the birth of Christ.