What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[green papaya]

GASLIGHT (1944)

Years after her aunt was murdered in her home, a young woman moves back into the house with her new husband. However, he has a secret that he will do anything to protect, even if it means driving his wife insane.

 

[Doctor Strange]

A Most Violent Year - a recent film with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain about a turf war between heating oil companies in 1981 NYC. Isaac's protagonist reminded me of Nucky on Boardwalk Empire: a businessman operating in a criminal environment who insists he's not a gangster and has his own code of ethics... but he's just a step away from being a gangster. The film is well made and well acted... but it felt more to me like an HBO awards-bait production than a theatrical film.

 

[Fading Fast]

Walking in Central Park earlier in the week, my girlfriend and I saw a movie being filmed and snapped these pics of this couple boating (we were kept at a pretty good distance and even with zoom, this is as close as we could get). They kept going around and around in a circle as they were providing background for a shot on the shore.

I don't know the name of the movie or anything else about it, but hopefully, someone here will see it when it comes out and we'll be able to connect it back to this scene. I didn't catch it in the shot, but the man was wearing suspenders.

Regarding the title of this thread, this is the "last movie we watched" if only a very tiny bit of it and before it was released .

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^

Now filming in NYC.



P.S.
2nd photo: There’s a face staring in the background by the wilderness.
Hope it’s part of the film!

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Good catch, but I assume they just CGI out things like the face, etc.

Edit add: Grabbing a sandwich during the work day back in about '08, I was walking by Bryant Park in NYC (42nd and 6th) and saw Amanda Seyfried in a scene from what became "Letters to Juliet." It's one of the few times - despite the many movies I've seen being filmed in NYC - when I saw the star of the movie and tied the movie back to the scene I saw.

 

[2jakes]

Only actor that I spoke with at Universal Studios that had
no notions of conceit was James Garner.
A friendly easy-going person.
Mr. Garner had stopped by to take a look at a movie scene.
The movie was “Paradise Alley” with Sylvester Stallone.


This was the time I asked the hair-dresser,
"why is Sly wearing long hair & earring for a movie set
in the ‘40s?"

Her reply...
” Listen sweetie, you go right ahead and ask him, not me!”

I didn’t.


My brother was with me.
"Hey Rocky”, he told him.
(The place got spooky quiet...thought for sure we would be kicked out of the set.)

Sly just mumbled, “yo!” and went on with his lines.

From “my times in tinseltown” when I was going to school
at LA.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Room 237, about the making of Kubrick's The Shining, with assorted fanatics/experts explaining their crackpot theories of what it's "actually" about... These include the Holocaust, Kubrick's coded reveal that he had faked the Moon landing TV coverage for NASA, the genocide of Native Americans, etc.

Rather than presenting talking heads, the film makes clever use of footage from other Kubrick films (Paths of Glory, 2001, Barry Lyndon, etc.) and others (like Capricorn One for the Moon stuff) as part of its investigations. There's also an interesting sequence where they simultaneously run the film forwards and backwards to indicate its structure and how its foreshadowing and revelations balance each other.

But for me, by far the most interesting things to note by folks who've freeze-framed the film countless times are how the huge Overlook Hotel set - explored in detail throughout the film, notably in Danny's big wheel rides - includes utterly impossible (and different, in different instances) connections from one part of the hotel to the other. And also shot-to-shot differences (e.g., during Jack's interview with GM at the beginning, a chair behind him in one shot is missing in the next shot; the rug pattern under Danny's big wheel also changes between shots; Jack's typewriter is the same brand but a different color at different times) that are clearly not continuity errors, but were done deliberately to evoke a subconscious sense of something "off" about the place and characters.

Worth a view if you're a Kubrick buff.

 

[belfastboy]

Watched "Norman" last night. Richard Gere newest pic. Not usually a fan of his but his is a very good movie and Gere is brilliant. Just may be his finest performance, a master class in acting

 

[Worf]

"To the Bone" - Netflix film about teenage eating disorders, primarily anorexia. To be honest, in a world with people starving to death every day due to war, climate change etc... I have little natural sympathy for folks who deliberately starve themselves to death. I know it's in the DSM and it's a mental disorder or compulsion but with all the other greater tragedies going on daily does THIS problem need a movie?. Both my parents survived the Great Depression, and food for Blacks in the rural South was never plentiful to begin with. Those stories and others make these disorders tough to fathom and even tougher to empathize with. Still I watched the film and found the story and acting compelling.. Nice to see Keanu Reeves without a gun in his hand. I'm sure if you know someone with this problem you might find my feelings disturbing or non P.C. but that's how I feel. Still worth a watch on its own though the film is far from perfect.

Worf

 

[AmateisGal]

Becoming Cary Grant on Showtime. Very nice documentary, using a lot of home movie footage Grant took himself. Also explores his treatment of LSD in the 1950s.

 

[AmateisGal]

View attachment 79191

GASLIGHT (1944)

Years after her aunt was murdered in her home, a young woman moves back into the house with her new husband. However, he has a secret that he will do anything to protect, even if it means driving his wife insane.

I need to watch this sometime considering I was a victim of gaslighting from my ex-husband.

 

[Fading Fast]

"To the Bone" - Netflix film about teenage eating disorders, primarily anorexia. To be honest, in a world with people starving to death every day due to war, climate change etc... I have little natural sympathy for folks who deliberately starve themselves to death. I know it's in the DSM and it's a mental disorder or compulsion but with all the other greater tragedies going on daily does THIS problem need a movie?. Both my parents survived the Great Depression, and food for Blacks in the rural South was never plentiful to begin with. Those stories and others make these disorders tough to fathom and even tougher to empathize with. Still I watched the film and found the story and acting compelling.. Nice to see Keanu Reeves without a gun in his hand. I'm sure if you know someone with this problem you might find my feelings disturbing or non P.C. but that's how I feel. Still worth a watch on its own though the film is far from perfect.

Worf

My dad, a depression era kid, simply couldn't process / understand / wrap his head around anorexia when it first seemed to get public attention in the '70s (I didn't get it at first either because, as a boy, I simply ate everything in sight, so it was extremely difficult for me to grasp initially). He wasn't being mean (nor was I), it was just very hard for someone with his life experiences - where having enough food was a genuine struggle and concern for many years - to comprehend and sympathize with what (in many cases) were middle class girls effectively starving themselves to death.

As it was a pretty big '70s thing for awhile, my memory is he bucketed it in the same category as drug and alcohol addictions - something he had genuine sympathy for, but also saw it in a different category from diseases like cancer or MS. He was a tough man who expected a lot of himself and others, but he had enough friends who had suffered addictions that he "got it."

I've known several women who have it and while I don't fully understand it - it's real, it's painful and it can be life destroying. And as with all addictions - it's brutal to the person's family and friends as you see it destroying the person, but your efforts to help sometimes just don't work. I - like my dad - do see it in a different category from those diseases you have all but no control over, but I only have sympathy (with bouts of frustration) for those suffering from it. I saw a beautiful, healthy, smart, engaging and successful young woman all but destroy her life over it (and to this day she still struggles and never really got life back on track, but has found a modus vivendi that pulled her out of the worst of it).

And here's the really hard thing, IMHO, about it - many alcoholics and drug addicts have successfully beaten their addictions by total abstinence, but that is not an option for an anorexic. They have to learn to manage eating every day as if (imperfect analogy, I know) an alcoholic had to drink socially every day but not let it get out of control.

 

[HanauMan]

For some reason I watched Europa Report but it was pretty terrible. A group of scientist fly to Jupiter and land on the moon Europa. They then all get killed off by a squid living in the sea under the ice. Yawn.....

 

[2jakes]

To Hand and Have Not,

A favorite Bogie film that I’ve watched so many times, I now have started collecting
the posters on the walls. Liqueur Mombin is on the list to find.

 

[AmateisGal]

Hello, My Name is Doris. Sally Field is utterly delightful as an eccentric middle-aged spinster who develops a crush on a guy much younger than her. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

The First Wives Club with Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton. Oh, how I wish I could do to my ex-husband what these ladies did to their cheating exes! Unfortunately, my ex doesn't have a penny to his name. Ha!

 

[Doctor Strange]

Union Pacific, Cecil B. De Mille's epic western from "best Hollywood year ever", 1939, that's co-credited with reviving the western as a classy genre - it was released only two months after John Ford's Stagecoach.

Uh... no. This one doesn't hold up. It is a watchable but not-good film. It's loaded with embarrassments like bad train model work, unbelievable characterizations, Native Americans as faceless evil savages, period-wrong hats and guns, and Barbara Stanwyck's simply awful Irish accent. Everything in it is too broad and obvious. That said, it's a De Mille picture and I couldn't look away. And it's a trip to see Robert Preston and Anthony Quinn - who I always think of as stars of the 60s - working so many years earlier.

 

[BlueTrain]

In real life, Indians and settlers often knew one another by name, especially earlier when it was mainly hunters and trappers who were the ones in contact with the Indians. That shouldn't imply they were friendly with one another, however.

As far as drinking and alcoholism, I don't know that I have ever known any alcoholics. But when I was little, in the 1950s, I did know a couple of men who were weekend drunks now and then. They would be staggering, falling down drunks on the way back from the tavern. But the rest of the time, they were sober. Not enough material for a movie, though.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Hondo (1953), with John Wayne, Geraldine Page, Lee Aaker (later "Rusty" on the TV Rin Tin Tin), and screenloads of Apaches. I'd never seen it all the way through before, though I've read the story by Louis L'Amour. One of Wayne's best performances. (My only quibble with the script is that, after Sam the dog is dispatched by one of the Apaches, no one including Hondo Lane ever mentions him again. Would it have been so terrible to have a small moment where Hondo mutters that he misses "the damn dog"?)

 

[Benzadmiral]

A Fedora Lounge feast: The Zookeeper's Wife, with a memorable performance by Jessica Chastain as half of a married couple who run a large zoo in Warsaw on the eve of WWII, and their heroism in hiding, and smuggling out of Poland, something like 300 Jews over the course of the war. Not only is it done without CGI -- the animals, including two elephants, a hippotamus, a bison calf, a young camel, and at least one lion cub, are real -- but the costumes are vividly vintage. It's not a cheerful film throughout most of its length; after all, Nazis, you know. (If they hadn't existed, filmmakers would have had to invent them for use as villains.) But it's ultimately a positive film.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Ladies in Lavender" 2004

• Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as two sisters living along on the coast of England in the '30s who help and befriend a young foreign man who, literally, washes up on their shore
• Character-driven story as the two sisters lives are re-energized by the injection of youth and purpose while it also pulls some old tensions and frustrations to the surface
• Beautifully filmed with wonderful period details
• Not slow, but moves slowly and only works if you like period pieces that are character driven and well acted - I do, so I did

"Leonie" 2010

• Story of Leonie Glimour - early pioneer in education / American woman who had a stormy relationship with her Japanese husband / mother of famous artist Isamu Noguchi
• I wanted to like this one - there's more than enough good biography here for an engaging story - but it never found its focus as it jumped around her life without developing a narrative arc or consistent point of view about Leonie

"A Lost Lady" 1934

• Barbara Stanwyck plays a young woman who loses her fiancee to an accident and then marries a much older man (Frank Morgan) that she doesn't love but who is deeply in love with her and treats her with kindness and gentleness
• All's going okay - he's beyond happy in their marriage and she's settling in to contentment, but then she has an affair and blows it all up
• The rest I'll leave out if you haven't seen it, but the reason to watch this one is for Stanwyck and Morgan who elevate this silly melodramatic material to watchable, but nothing more

"Maid's Night Out" 1938

• Two upper-class people - Joan Fontaine and Allan Lane - through a series of mixups, believe the other is, respectively, a maid and milkman, which creates challenges as they begin to fall in love despite family resistance and other goofy contretemps
• This is what happened when they tried to make male-female rom-coms after the code was enforced - the movies became "screwball" and silly because they couldn't deal with relationships in a mature manner
• Despite that, this one is okay in part because Fontaine is talented, engaging and strikingly beautiful and the story is handled lightly enough that you just ride along for its fast - only a bit over an hour - run