What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Madeleine 1950 with Ann Todd

I'll give any David Lean directed movie a shot and was not disappointed here. While, yes, a lessor effort for Lean, it's still a solid movie with Lean's ability to make you feel the characters' emotions on full display. It takes about forty minutes to get going as it plods (sorry, it does) through a lot of character and story buildup - Todd, an upper-class, young Victorian woman, shows little interest in her parents' chosen suitors as she's conducting an illicit affair "below stairs" with a "not-acceptable" Frenchman. However, the movie powers forward as soon as the affair is exposed - owing to the Frenchman's death - which is either a suicide or murder at the hands of Todd.

The movie then shifts into "Trail of the Century" mode as a morally outraged family and country come down upon the emotionally-stronger-than-expected, lithe shoulders of Todd. While set in the 1850s and filmed in 1950 - thus full of dated views and styles - the general human desire to learn about - wallow in - a scandal feels very today as, despite all our "advancements," when, oh say, a CEO is "exposed" for having and affair, the same public titillation and schadenfreude, just adjusted to 2019 norms, is on display.

I'll leave it there as the trial and verdict are fun to experience fresh, but two quick last points. One, it's impressive that 41-year-old Todd plays an in-her-early-20s woman convincingly as she, simply, doesn't look her age (like Jean Arthur, Todd seems to have been touched from above at birth to not show age). Two, I'll close where I began - any David Lean directed movie is worth at least one viewing and this one, despite its slow start, is one I'll want to see again.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Let There Be Light, the John Huston documentary about the treatment of returning WW2 vets who were suffering from what we would now call PTSD. In the film they occasionally use the term battle neurosis.

 

[belfastboy]

Finally Netflix offers "LaLa Land" and I am willing to watch...not willing to rent it. I actually liked it.....a bit. In the beginning I had the urge to switch it off as I disliked both characters but at my wife's urging I hung in. The characters grew on me and in the end I did care for them...even getting a bit verklempf at the ending. Much better movie than I anticipated but not deserving of the hype. A decent, fun little movie. As my wife said; the dance scenes would have been more enjoyable if they had actors that actually knew how to dance.

 

[scottyrocks]

As I've been kind of obsessed lately with Humphrey Bogart/Phillip Marlowe/Raymond Chandler, I've been doing searches that involve all three.

What that led me to was a 1975 version of Farewell My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum. Not Bogart, and not black and white, but I was very pleasantly surprised, regardless.

I had seen the 1978 version of The Big Sleep with Mitchum and was way less than impressed, but a compilation review that included both films encouraged me to give FML a try. I just watched it and I was not disappointed.

FML (1975] is a faithful rendition of the novel, even more so than either Murder My Sweet (1944] or the (still fantastic] mishmash that was the 1946 version of The Big Sleep, compared to the novel it was based on.

Filmed in 1975, it was in color, but other than that, all the noir elements were there. I want to see if I can turn off the color on my computer and watch it again in black and white; it was that good.

All that being said, now I want to see about obtaining some burgundy grosgrain ribbon, and putting it on one of my gray fedoras, as Mitchum's hat was done up that way and looked damn good.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Blue Gardenia 1953 staring Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Southern, Raymond Burr and pre-Superman George Reeves

• A solid film noir, overall, with a kinda weak ending, but not weak enough to undo the overall enjoyment of the movie

• The quick plot summary (modest spoiler alert, but nothing you won't learn in the first thirty or so minutes) is that Baxter, a young telephone operator, owing to having just received a break-up letter from her serving-over-seas boyfriend, agrees to a date with playboy and photographer Burr which turns into a drunken event, back-to-his-apartment pawing and pressure, an unclear fight, Burr dead and a confused Baxter back at her apartment passed out. After that, it's all about Baxter trying to piece the night together, in part, with the (maybe) help of a reporter (Conte) looking for a story while the police investigation (led by Reeves) moves forward in the background

• Odd to see Raymond Burr as a licentious calendar-girl photographer and all-around ba***rd
  • In our #MeToo age, the movie is interesting as a window into how another time looked at dating norms
    • As always, history doesn't fit into a neat box but shows a society with some views that were modern, some dated (and wrong to us) and some just different from how we think about things today

• It's also a fun time travel to the early '50s with great shots of office towers, a phone company, diners, tiki bars, cars, apartments and clothes.
  • This time travel is at least a third of the fun I get out of these good, not-great old movies

 

[Zombie_61]

Currently watching the Rocky marathon on BBC America; at the moment, the climactic fight in Rocky II. I'm not sure how much longer we'll stick with it, but it's good to see Lou Filippo again (the referee in the climactic fights in I, II, and III) because I worked with him for 12 years. He was a boxer, referee, and judge in real life (he was the judge who scored the 1987 Sugar Ray Leonard/Marvin Hagler fight in Hagler's favor), President of the World Boxing Hall of Fame from 1993 until his death in 2009, and the Customer Service supervisor at the last company I worked for.

 

[Fading Fast]

Currently watching the Rocky marathon on BBC America; at the moment, the climactic fight in Rocky II. I'm not sure how much longer we'll stick with it, but it's good to see Lou Filippo again (the referee in the climactic fights in I and II) because I worked with him for 12 years. He was a boxer, referee, and judge in real life (he was the judge who scored the 1987 Sugar Ray Leonard/Marvin Hagler fight in Hagler's favor), President of the World Boxing Hall of Fame from 1993 until his death in 2009, and the Customer Service supervisor at the last company I worked for.

A few different channels on our cable system have been running Rocky marathons over the past month or so (the movies' owner must have offered an attractive package deal). While the cheese factor is pretty high (a bit in the first movie, but much more so in each subsequent one), they are still entertaining but nothing more. I'm not proud of myself, but I can get sucked in and find myself watching bits and pieces of the movies while rooting for Rocky to beat fill-in-the-blank. There are worse ways to pass a few hours (but I can only barely make it through IV and then I stop as, V, from a distance memory is horrible even on the cheesy-entertainment scale).

 

[scottyrocks]

The Blue Gardenia 1953 staring Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Southern, Raymond Burr and pre-Superman George Reeves

• A solid film noir, overall, with a kinda weak ending, but not weak enough to undo the overall enjoyment of the movie

• The quick plot summary (modest spoiler alert, but nothing you won't learn in the first thirty or so minutes) is that Baxter, a young telephone operator, owing to having just received a break-up letter from her serving-over-seas boyfriend, agrees to a date with playboy and photographer Burr which turns into a drunken event, back-to-his-apartment pawing and pressure, an unclear fight, Burr dead and a confused Baxter back at her apartment passed out. After that, it's all about Baxter trying to piece the night together, in part, with the (maybe) help of a reporter (Conte) looking for a story while the police investigation (led by Reeves) moves forward in the background

• Odd to see Raymond Burr as a licentious calendar-girl photographer and all-around ba***rd
  • In our #MeToo age, the movie is interesting as a window into how another time looked at dating norms
    • As always, history doesn't fit into a neat box but shows a society with some views that were modern, some dated (and wrong to us) and some just different from how we think about things today

• It's also a fun time travel to the early '50s with great shots of office towers, a phone company, diners, tiki bars, cars, apartments and clothes.
  • This time travel is at least a third of the fun I get out of these good, not-great old movies

I have always been appalled by the way men treat women in these types of movies. I have felt this way since the first time I was exposed to films such as this, in the 1960s, when 'The 4:30 Movie' was a staple in the house, on every day while my mom was puttering in the kitchen.

 

[Fading Fast]

I have always been appalled by the way men treat women in these types of movies. I have felt this way since the first time I was exposed to films such as this, in the 1960s, when 'The 4:30 Movie' was a staple in the house, on every day while my mom was puttering in the kitchen.

I was raised to treat people as you wanted to be treated and that when you took a woman on a date, you were responsible for her safety. While that sounds dated and (I'm sure) offensive to some modern thinking, it is how I was raised. Hence, the outright abuse these women endured in movies like this was - like crime or murder or cheating - yes, wrong and bad, but also, jarring.

That said, IMHO, movies were never templates for living, but just a window into life. You saw the good, the bad, the ugly - the mundane. In the end, movies are like life in that you have to choose what you think is right and wrong. What shocked me in "The Blue Gardenia" was not just the almost date rape, but seeing good guy (to me seeing him as Perry Mason, in repeats, and as Iron Sides growing up) Burr play a scummy character.

However, and I'd have to see it again to quote lines, it was nice to see male characters also denouncing Burr's behavior (not just his physical abuse but also his pushiness, his smarminess with women). As noted in my first comments, the past is never black and white nor (usually) as terrible or as great as we want to remember or believe.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

On Saturday night, the Missus and I watched A Slight Case of Murder, with Edward G. Robinson, off of the TCM streaming app. Hilarious in parts, with Damon Runyon's stage-to-screen dialogue rattled off at blinding speed. Definitely worth a watch. Keep the subtitles on so that you catch the one-liners.
Then, in a complete change of pace, Paths of Glory, on Amazon Prime Video. My wife had never seen this film and watched aghast, which was the intent from the start.
The picture quality was impressive, one of the sharpest prints of the film I recall. I'm wondering if someone paid to upgrade it prior to releasing to Prime.

 

[Fading Fast]

Goldfinger 1964

• While I've seen bits and pieces of it a billion times, this is the first time in at least a decade (maybe two) that I watched it from beginning to end

• Every Bond thing is here and each one is Bond perfect:
  • The car - if it's a cliche today, it earned it by its perfectness (ditto for Bond's 3-piece suit in Kentucky)
  • One freakin' gorgeous girl after another (& some of them kicking butt); Tania Mallet gets my vote for #1, but it's not easy to choose
  • THE Bond theme song of all Bond theme songs
  • Beautiful settings - Miami looks super cool, Switzerland; old-world gorgeous and Kentucky; horse-country rich
  • Spy technology
  • Connery
  • An evil genius with an evil-genius plan
  • A few genuinely great Bond quips "he's quite mad you know" (delivered perfectly to sow doubt in Ms. Galore's mind)
  • Great names - the aforementioned PG and Oddjob and, of course, Auric Goldfinger
  • Bond one-upping his boss M (see cognac tasting scene)

• Sure it's all fake or exaggerated - playing golf with Goldfinger, covering a girl with gold paint to kill her, Oddjob getting hit in the face (hard) with a gold bar and just laughing it off, the US Government intentionally letting Goldfinger's team get into the vault at Fort Knox when they know the plan ahead of time - and on and on, but it doesn't matter - this is a wonderful fantasy film and, while it works in a retro, fun way today, at the time, it had to be incredible and fresh and new and enjoyable and amazing in a "let's go see that one again" way.

• I saw it on Netflix and the print was incredible - it looks almost HD as it was that crisp and detailed

 

[Seb Lucas]

Yep - everything you say and that theme. It's like the Platonic archetype for the Bond genre. It is also like watching a piece of somewhat kitsch but immaculately executed mid century modernism.

 

[NattyLud]

Speaking of cultural changes and Bond movies, I have recently tried to watch a few installments since they appeared on netflx. I hadn't seen them since I was much younger and remember having loved them. Now, I find them nauseating and I couldn't make it through. Similar to re-watching the Indy films, they're so hokey and daft that they're not even fun as I remembered them to be. The implausible action feats can be forgiven since these are just comic books on film, but the whole bedding-women-within-moments-of-meeting-them routine is foul, particularly in those films where Moore and Connery are senior citizens. I wonder where the 'fun' of shoot-em-up cinema comes from, where dozens or hundreds of faceless people are dispatched with style to the delight of the audience. A couple redeeming and still-enjoyable bits include Jaws, Walken's maniacal Max Zorin, the fantastic Switzerland pursuit scenes in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Tanya Roberts.

Speaking on the whole treatment of women thing noticeable in older films, I don't this to be off-putting at all. To me it is a fascinating view of a different world, where *everyone* was treated differently [than they would be today], everyone necessarily had different mindsets, and were held to different standards. I find that people had their places and were appreciated in ways that seemed natural at the time, given the realities. Conversely, I find many things happening now regarding changes to how gender and relationships are viewed to be fairly unnatural and forced, yet I accept them as being part of the culture.

 

[scottyrocks]

Speaking of cultural changes and Bond movies, I have recently tried to watch a few installments since they appeared on netflx. I hadn't seen them since I was much younger and remember having loved them. Now, I find them nauseating and I couldn't make it through. Similar to re-watching the Indy films, they're so hokey and daft that they're not even fun as I remembered them to be. The implausible action feats can be forgiven since these are just comic books on film, but the whole bedding-women-within-moments-of-meeting-them routine is foul, particularly in those films where Moore and Connery are senior citizens. I wonder where the 'fun' of shoot-em-up cinema comes from, where dozens or hundreds of faceless people are dispatched with style to the delight of the audience. A couple redeeming and still-enjoyable bits include Jaws, Walken's maniacal Max Zorin, the fantastic Switzerland pursuit scenes in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Tanya Roberts.

Speaking on the whole treatment of women thing noticeable in older films, I don't this to be off-putting at all. To me it is a fascinating view of a different world, where *everyone* was treated differently [than they would be today], everyone necessarily had different mindsets, and were held to different standards. I find that people had their places and were appreciated in ways that seemed natural at the time, given the realities. Conversely, I find many things happening now regarding changes to how gender and relationships are viewed to be fairly unnatural and forced, yet I accept them as being part of the culture.

 

[Worf]

"Us" - Jordan Peele's sophomore effort is a good scary fun. No where near as groundbreaking as "Get Out" but he say's it wasn't meant to be. This is just a scary, scary movie. The first 2 thirds are riveting, the end kinda falls apart with the big reveals not being given enough time or explanation but that didn't ruin it for me at all. There's also some social commentary at the end but you're not hit over the head with it... You more have to figure it out for yourself.

Worf

Sorry for my absence but I was vacationing in Belize... soon to be my winter home if all goes right!

 

[belfastboy]

Madeleine 1950 with Ann Todd

I'll give any David Lean directed movie a shot and was not disappointed here. While, yes, a lessor effort for Lean, it's still a solid movie with Lean's ability to make you feel the characters' emotions on full display. It takes about forty minutes to get going as it plods (sorry, it does) through a lot of character and story buildup - Todd, an upper-class, young Victorian woman, shows little interest in her parents' chosen suitors as she's conducting an illicit affair "below stairs" with a "not-acceptable" Frenchman. However, the movie powers forward as soon as the affair is exposed - owing to the Frenchman's death - which is either a suicide or murder at the hands of Todd.

The movie then shifts into "Trail of the Century" mode as a morally outraged family and country come down upon the emotionally-stronger-than-expected, lithe shoulders of Todd. While set in the 1850s and filmed in 1950 - thus full of dated views and styles - the general human desire to learn about - wallow in - a scandal feels very today as, despite all our "advancements," when, oh say, a CEO is "exposed" for having and affair, the same public titillation and schadenfreude, just adjusted to 2019 norms, is on display.

I'll leave it there as the trial and verdict are fun to experience fresh, but two quick last points. One, it's impressive that 41-year-old Todd plays an in-her-early-20s woman convincingly as she, simply, doesn't look her age (like Jean Arthur, Todd seems to have been touched from above at birth to not show age). Two, I'll close where I began - any David Lean directed movie is worth at least one viewing and this one, despite its slow start, is one I'll want to see again.

I noted your review and damned if it didn't show up on TCM within a day or two. We watched it last night. Thank you, what a great movie. And yes, I think we shall watch it again. That she was 41 during the shoot is amazing.
I did mention to my wife (as I kissed her forehead goodnight) that from this day forward I have an expectation to be treated same as the father in the movie......well you know how that turned out.

 

[Zombie_61]

The Highwaymen (2019). Retired Texas Rangers Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) are commissioned to hunt down and kill Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Instead of the usual "They're young, they're in love, they rob banks" angle, this story is told from the law enforcement perspective. Good performances, but it's a by-the-numbers movie with some factual inaccuracies and pure fabrications thrown in here and there, and those already familiar with the story of Bonnie and Clyde probably won't learn anything new by watching it.

 

[Fading Fast]

I noted your review and damned if it didn't show up on TCM within a day or two. We watched it last night. Thank you, what a great movie. And yes, I think we shall watch it again. That she was 41 during the shoot is amazing.
I did mention to my wife (as I kissed her forehead goodnight) that from this day forward I have an expectation to be treated same as the father in the movie......well you know how that turned out.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it - that's great. Like you, I'm looking forward to seeing it again. It's crazy that Ann Todd was that old as that violates one of my axioms which is - nearly everyone looks about his or her age and nearly everyone thinks he or she looks younger than his or her age. Like you, I have a better chance of flying like Superman than running our house the way Todd's father in the movie runs his (the buttoning-of-his-boots scene was stunning) - different times.

 

[sal]

The Young Lions with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift

 

[Bushman]

Finally got around to seeing Crimes of Grindelwald and Greenbook. Both were very enjoyably, though I feel like Crimes of Grindelwald very much falls victim to "middle movie syndrome." It sets up too much and answers too little.

Greenbook I loved, and it was very deserving of Best Picture.