What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[MisterCairo]

Same reason they won't do a female Bond or anything else that will upset the incels; it's not what their core audience want.

If one is opposed to making the Ian Fleming male character female, one is an incel?

I am opposed to making the male character of James Bond, 007, a female one.

So, this married father of two who lost it at 17 would take you task on that.

You can do better.

PS - if I need further street cred, I am a het male who absolutely loves the film Atomic Blonde, starring the very female Charlize Theron, in a female character created independently of any need to "re-imagine" a male character in female form.

Best fight scene I have ever seen.

If one spends two thirds of a second thinking about it, it is a fairly patronising and misogynistic approach to character development - making the male a female.

Again, you can do better than name calling, Barkeep.

Mr. C

 

[Harp]

View attachment 366423
A Place in the Sun from 1951 with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr


It all comes down to this: guilt in the heart versus guilt in deed. Everything in A Place in the Sun really exists to magnify that one question: thought versus action.

Young, poor and poorly educated Montgomery Clift, raised by Evangelists, is given a modest job in his wealthy uncle's large manufacturing concern. Despite being warned not to date the female employees, especially since he is related to the owners, Clift begins an affair with mousy factory girl Shelley Winters.

Clift, despite being almost cripplingly shy, manages to make an impression on his uncle who begins to promote him inside the company, while introducing him to "proper" society outside of work.

Enter into Clift's life, Elizabeth Taylor, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and leader of the young, fast set. They quickly fall in love: she's attracted to his shy outsider aura, which is so different from the capped-toothed boys of her world, while she is his, well, place in the sun.

She is breeding, wealth, looks, connections and society; everything he's never had. The darnedest thing has happened though, Winters is pregnant. It turns out the factory mouse is tenacious and she's not letting go of Clift one bit.

As Clift tries to put off Winters (think bull and bullfighter), Taylor and he fall deeper in love as Clift's uncle offers him a management role. With everything he's wanted right in front of him, Winters digs in, now, demanding Clift marry her.

What to do, what to do? Slowly, almost by accident, Clift begins to contemplate murder. It's not an excuse, but Winters has become so shrewy and demanding that she inadvertently pushes him toward it.

It all comes down to an isolated moment, in a rowboat, on a lake, at night. Clift doesn't bonk Winters (he was thinking about it, though), but the boat accidentally goes over and she hits her head. In this pivotal moment (think the jouncing of the tree limb in A Separate Peace), does Clift try to save her or not? It's also an eerie premonition of Chappaquiddick.

(Spoiler alert) Clift is found guilty and sentenced to death. In his cell, about to take his final walk, Clift is still struggling with his potential guilt. The priest then asks him if, when he was in the water and maybe had an opportunity to save Winters, whom was he thinking of?

The priest goes on, "Were you thinking of the other girl [Taylor]? Then...in your heart was murder." From a religious point of view, maybe true, I guess; from a legal point of view, that is probably closer to manslaughter.

A Place in the Sun is all about guilt in the heart versus guilt in deed, but it tosses the question back to the viewer: did Clift commit murder, manslaughter or something else because he wanted his place in the sun?


N.B. #1 This deeply sad movie is made sadder by the fact that, other than for a set of unique circumstances, Clift would have gone through life as a moral, law-abiding man.

N.B. #2 Nineteen-year-old Taylor is a slip of a beautiful young girl in A Place in the Sun. This begs the question, what did she do to herself in the next nine years that made twenty-eight-year-old Taylor, in Butterfield 8, look closer to forty. She must have done some hard living in her twenties.

View attachment 366424

Another homer. I haven't seen this but I did read A Separate Peace which included a deliberate jostle
of a tree branch, premeditated murder, and the subsequent story with its concluding mea culpa.
Whether Clift might have saved Winters, his intent was seemingly evident; although because the boat
accidentally tipped over, I would need to watch the film as to the legal entanglement that brought
him to death row.

 

[Alex Oviatt]

CNN's Lost Sons--very interesting, very well done.

 

[Edward]

If one is opposed to making the Ian Fleming male character female, one is an incel?

I am opposed to making the male character of James Bond, 007, a female one.

So, this married father of two who lost it at 17 would take you task on that.

You can do better.

PS - if I need further street cred, I am a het male who absolutely loves the film Atomic Blonde, starring the very female Charlize Theron, in a female character created independently of any need to "re-imagine" a male character in female form.

Best fight scene I have ever seen.

If one spends two thirds of a second thinking about it, it is a fairly patronising and misogynistic approach to character development - making the male a female.

Again, you can do better than name calling, Barkeep.

Mr. C

No, not name-calling at all - certainly not anyone on here. Simply the fact that those are the types one always sees on the comments pages of the popular press in the UK howling that "the woke are going to ruin Bond by making him a woman!" no matter how many times the Broccolis come out and insist they will never do that. It's been everywhere this last couple of weeks here in the UK, really since the Premier especially. They come not to bury Daniel Craig, but to argue over who his successor will be.... The "Might be a woman!" trope is always pulled to bits in these things, even more reliably than was the case with Doctor Who. (The difference being they have done that - well, in my opinion - but certainly not without controversy.)

I'm sort of indifferent, really. A female 007 would be an interesting concept if Bond retired or they assigned that code number to another agent. I think there have been several 003s, and at least two 006s from memory; I can't see any internally consistent case against there being a different holder of the 007 designation in that universe. That said, I wouldn't need them to necessarily take on the Bond mantle as well. It's an interesting thought-exercise because it does always seem to lead to the conclusion that Bond is a man out of his own time. I found it more interesting in many ways that they chose to recognise that in the Craig era rather than keep the pretence of contemporaneousness going the way they had, and flailing about with it. All done and said, I think Bond has just had its day artistically, but it'll be kept going on for as long as it still makes money. Of course, I was pretty much of that mindset for a number of years by the time Brosnan gave up; I'll be interested to see if they can pull another surprise Craig twist. I didn't by any means rate all of his films, but the ones I didn't like didn't, to be fair, their issues weren't that it had become a bit of a parody of itself and not knowing what to do with it as they had been for Brosnan. Not Brosnan's fault by any means, he's a very decent actor.

Atomic Blonde was a superb film... part of me would love to see a sequel, part of me doesn't want them to make one in case it's not as good. The biggest problem an explicitly female Bond would face if they did do it the decision to cast a woman would inevitably overshadow the merits or otherwise of the film itself, which I suspect is the biggest consideration they have in terms of the financial side of brand management.

The closest I've probably seen to a contemporary female Bond type was in Salt with Angelina Jolie. That worked well to.. Less uber-stylised, but fun.

The "Bond" I really want to see brought to the screen is Mark Gatiss' Lucifer Box - half Bond, half Oscar Wilde, with adventures set in the 1890s, 1920s, and 1950s... Another, very different character again.

 

[Edward Reed]

Vivacious Lady (1938) James Stewart & Ginger Rogers…
boy oh boy Ginger Rogers sure knew how to turn on that Good Girl/Sassy Girl charm!
A very basic and simple love story elevated to perfection with Stewart’s and Rogers’s performance. Ginger is captivating. Her sense of cute humor and flirty playfulness is intoxicating!

 

[Doctor Strange]

A Danish historical drama film from 2012, A Royal Affair.

A late-1700s story about the "mentally ill" King Christian VII (Mikkel Folsgaard), his English-born queen (Alicia Vikander), and the court physician who loves them both (Mads Mikkelsen).

An interesting bit of European history that I didn't know.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Blade Runner - FC, simple DVD.

As much, as I miss the voice-overs, I miss the 1982's german synchro even more! The old german synchro is still top-notch.

 

[Fading Fast]

Johnny O'Clock from 1947 with Dick Powell, Lee J. Cobb, Nina Foch, Ellen Drew, Thomas Gomez and Evelyn Keyes.


There are a surprising amount of very good, but not-well-known movies "out there." I found Johnny O'Clock on the Movies! channel (with painfully long commercials, but the DVR pretty much solved that problem).

It's a bit of a quirky, yet solid noir that colors inside the genre's lines, but executes its story and characterizations so well, you don't mind the "haven't I seen this story in other movies before" feeling.

Johnny O'Clock, played by Dick Powell, is the smooth gangster who is a junior partner in a gambling casino. He's the guy with the cool clothes, flashy car, hotel penthouse apartment and pretty girls with blonde hair.

Out of the shoot, he's being pursued by police inspector Lee J. Cobb - smart, relentlessly persistent and morally offended by the Powells of the world. Cobb is both Powell's foil and the Greek chorus as he keeps popping up at key times to ground the story and to remind us, and Powell, that gangsters usually don't live long lives.

The story - only sometimes a bit hard to follow - is basic: another junior partner in the casino is trying to squeeze Powell out by playing up to the senior partner, Thomas Gomez.

Gomez and Powell go way back and act like friends, but in a wonderfully nuanced performance, we see that Gomez - heavy and (his description of himself) "greasy -" harbors a deep immigrant-inspired jealousy of super-smooth Powell.

Increasing the pressure, the business relationship of the three partners is squirreled by too many overlapping women - Ellen Drew, Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes (all looking incredible) - causing a lot of hurt feelings and passion for revenge amongst the men.

Refreshingly, none of the women are cardboard molls or accessories, as each has a strong personality and backstory that makes this noir movie a relationship-driven drama. For its day and genre, it includes a strong woman's angle.

With Powell's position being challenged, the rest of the movie is Powell trying to hold on, people getting knocked off, "business" alliances shifting and women switching men or having affairs, all while inspector Cobb continues his metronomic efforts to bring the whole lot of them down.

Director Robert Rossen didn't go hard-core noir - so you don't get too many shadows, rainy nights, dark alleys, etc. - yet, the brighter screen doesn't diminish from the sense that Powell's is not a good world to be in.

It ends how it has to end (minor spoiler alerts) with a big confrontation between the partners, which is less about dollars than women, as stealing a man's money is one thing, but stealing his girlfriend cuts deeper.

Then it's a few shootouts, a police chase and Powell forced to choose between a woman, money and freedom - the cool guy with the fancy suits finally has to pay the piper.

Some movies are enjoyable because of their originality, others, like (the stupidly named) Johnny O'Clock, are enjoyable because they bring fresh life to an old story with smart execution and well-drawn, engaging characters. There's nothing really new in Johnny O'Clock, but you care about what happens to the people in it, which is the one thing almost all good movies have in common.


N.B. Nina Foch is one of my favorite lesser-known Golden Era actresses. She never truly hit it big, but pops up time and again in smaller roles bringing a cool verve. Look for her in one of the best movies about business ever made, Executive Suite, where she plays the quintessential executive secretary.

 

[Edward]

Blade Runner - FC, simple DVD.

As much, as I miss the voice-overs, I miss the 1982's german synchro even more! The old german synchro is still top-notch.

They do dubs very well in Germany in terms of the voices; I remember twenty odd years ago watching Escape from LA on German TV in Berlin, and the voice actor playing Steve Buscemi's role in particular really nailed it, a perfect voice and delivery that really chimed with the visuals. Really 'got' Buscemi's performance.

 

[Trenchfriend]

They do dubs very well in Germany in terms of the voices; I remember twenty odd years ago watching Escape from LA on German TV in Berlin, and the voice actor playing Steve Buscemi's role in particular really nailed it, a perfect voice and delivery that really chimed with the visuals. Really 'got' Buscemi's performance.

Same to me on Blade Runner. The original voices doesn't match the atmosphere, the new german synchro, too. But the old german synchro nailed it. And this way, I freakin' love the voice-overs. Brings the melancholic deepness perfectly.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name called Joe, dir. Sergio Leone. Forgotten how bloody it was. For the handful that don't know, the plot is a re-imagined Yojimbo, with many plot points and characters imported wholesale. Made Rowdy Yates a star.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), dir. Fritz Lang, with "scenarios" by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Leapin' lizards, what a movie. Dense visuals, melodramatic acting, a supervillain the likes of which I had not seen, and a combo of Saturday morning serials and police procedural. Wow.

 

[Fading Fast]

She Couldn't Say No from 1940 with Eve Arden and Roger Pryor


Before television, going to the movies was a different experience than today. You'd go to see, yes, the main feature, but also a newsreal, maybe a cartoon and/or a serial short and, if a "double bill," a B movie as well. It all ran in a continuous loop where people often came in, in the middle, watched all the way through until the loop got back to where they came in and, then, they left.

It was, oddly, a version of old-style TV before TV. You could kill an evening watching a variety of shows of varying quality, but your options were limited. Understood that way, the B movie can be seen as the forerunner of the 1960s-1990s TV drama: an hour-long show with simple plots where the fun was seeing some actors you like and not being particularly challenged.

That's where a movie like She Couldn't Say No comes in. It's an hour long with a simple plot that you pretty much figure out in the first ten or so minutes. From there, you're just letting the light entertainment float by as you laugh at the occasional joke, enjoy the actors and feel good that you were "right" about where it was going all along.

Eve Arden is a lawyer quietly pining away for her lawyer boss, Roger Pryor, whom she hopes will notice and marry her one day. They then end up on the opposite sides of a case where an older woman is suing an older man for a breach of promise over an eight-year-old proposal of marriage. Arden hopes all Pryor needs is some spark, like a marriage-proposal lawsuit case, to make him realize he wants to marry her.

That's the set up and you kinda know, as the case is argued, Arden's boss will see the parallels to his life with Arden. Being a light-hearted movie (spoiler alert), once all the misunderstandings are straightened out in court, the older couple happily reunite, which is the cue for Pryor to realize he wants to marry Arden: gift, wrapping paper, ribbon, bow, done.

For perpetual character/supporting actress Eve Arden, it's fun to see her in a lead role, even if only in a B movie that asks her to carry all its silliness on her back, which she does with verve and ease. Arden's performance shows she had everything needed to be a leading lady except, unfortunately, enough leading-lady looks. That's why she was a supporting actress in A movies or a star in B movies like She Couldn't Say No, the 1930s and 1940s equivalent of a TV drama.

 

[Harp]

^Wonder what consideration was tendered for an eight-year proposal???

I always liked Eve Arden. I believe she was in Grease with Joan Blondell.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Five Came Back (1939)

Not be confused with the same-named excellent documentary about the directors during the war, this is an RKO melodrama directed by John Farrow with Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, C. Aubrey Smith, John Carradine, etc.

The year after Stagecoach, a similar planeload of mixed characters (ex-prostitute, anarchist being extradited for execution and the cop traveling with him, young son of a crime lord and the button man accompanying him, aged professor and his wife, famous wealthy couple eloping...) heading for Panama City makes a crash landing in the South American jungle. Can the crew repair the plane and escape before the local headhunters find them? Even if they can, the plane can't carry all 11 of them on just one engine...



This isn't a good movie, but not only was it remade a couple of times, it inspired a bunch of stuff. Obviously, Flight of the Phoenix, but also any number of who'll-survive plane and ship dramas for the next two decades, and ultimately the disaster movies of the seventies. That's the way it plays: get to know these miscellaneous characters, then guess who's not gonna make it out alive.

It's mainly interesting as a curiosity, because it's hard to take it seriously with the obvious soundstage jungle sets, everyone still looking like movie stars after weeks in the jungle, and some VERY questionable plot points ("If we all work together we should be able to clear enough of the jungle for a runway in a couple of days." Sure.) The cinematography is good, some of the acting isn't bad - though Chester Morris is a block of wood - and Lucy looks fabulous.

 

[MisterCairo]

Halloween II, original sequel if you know what I mean. Not bad, nowhere near as good as the first, but it was interesting it takes place literally at the second the first leaves off.

 

[Zombie_61]

Halloween II, original sequel if you know what I mean. Not bad, nowhere near as good as the first, but it was interesting it takes place literally at the second the first leaves off.

I went to see Halloween II with a few friends on it's opening weekend in 1981. To this day the only thing I remember about it is a scene of a young boy being taken to the hospital ER with a razor blade sticking out of, and blood dripping from, his mouth, perpetuating the urban legend that people were putting razor blades in apples and giving them to children who visited their house on Halloween looking for candy. My rather obvious disinterest is the reason Halloween II was the last movie I watched from the original franchise. I have seen both of the revival/reboot movies written and directed by Rob Zombie, but wasn't much more impressed with them than I was with John Carpenter's versions. I'm really more of a Jason Voorhees fan, though I don't know why.

 

[Fading Fast]

Saboteur from 1942 with Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd


In Saboteur, Hitchcock does propaganda and does it darn well in a story that rips across the country from a military airplane factory in California, to the launch of a battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to a climatic good-guy-versus-evil-Nazi fight to the death on the Statue of Liberty.

It opens with the sabotage of a West Coast airplane factory where all-American laborer Robert Cummings is falsely accused of the crime. He escapes police custody, picks up girl-next-door Priscilla Lane and, then, goes in search of the real saboteur.

Cummings and Lane discover a Nazi sabotage ring operating at a high level in American society, headed up by the urbanely slimy Otto Kruger. (In real life, Kruger was born in Toledo Ohio, but he was cast quite often as the evil Nazi; Shakespeare wasn't always right about the name-and-rose thing.)

Cummings and Lane move from west to east, sometimes fleeing the Nazi cabal, sometimes in its capture, but always running from the police who still think Cummings is the factory saboteur.

Once east, Cummings and Lane get captured again by the Nazi ring, but use that time to learn its plan to blow up a Navy ship about to be launched. It's a few more close escapes, a last minute dash to the Navy Yard, following by the final chase scene to the very symbolic Statue of Liberty where Nazi evil, at least this sleeve of it, meets its death.

It's good straight-forward Hitchcock shot through with WWII propaganda. A couple of times, all action stops so that Cummings and Kruger can debate the strengths of the competing systems. Kruger avers, "The competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours [sarcastically referring to his cover as an American]. They get things done."

Cummings retorts, not with nuance, but with blunt simplicity, "The world's choosing up sides; we'll fight and we'll win." Sometimes nothing beats a matter-of-fact approach. There are plenty of other obvious metaphors - a German child smashing a brand new toy and Lane's grandfather discussing the need for trust in your fellow American - as subtlety is not propaganda's metier.

Cummings and Lane are well cast in this one - it might be Cummings' best role - as their (for that time) all-American good looks and unabashed virtue, versus Hitchcock's usually more complex heroes, has an American innocence perfect for this effort. Of course, America will win with clean cut, sincere kids like these fighting all those shady looking Nazis. Hey, propaganda is, what propaganda is.

Many consider Saboteur an okay but not great Hitchcock movie and that's probably true, but only because the great Hitchcock films set the bar so high. Taken on its own terms, it's a darn good action-adventure spy thriller with a bunch of wholesome American war propaganda woven in when that was all but a movie requirement.


N.B. Saboteur is basically a dry run for Hitchcock's later masterpiece North by NorthWest. In both movies, an innocent man is falsely accused, goes on a cross-country quest, with a blonde in tow, to prove his innocence, only to wind up defending America against an evil adversary in a fight to the death atop a national monument. Hitchcock had an impressive talent for refining his own efforts in his subsequent films.

 

[Harp]

Saboteur made a vivid impression when I saw it as a kid, the climactic scene alone is a
masterpiece. And all without computer graphic enhancement, just honest cinematic/directorial genius.

 

[Trenchfriend]

"Un Flic/The Chef" (1972). Alain Delon & Richard Crenna.

 

[MisterCairo]

So we have officially bookended the Covid movie going drought with Daniel Craig films.

The last movie we saw in theatres before things shut down was Knives Out.

Last night we took in Craig's last outing as James Bond, No Time to Die.

We all really enjoyed it. This was Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Canada, yet the theatre was almost empty, and I mean the whole complex, not just the Imax screen we were at. Perhaps still early days as things open up, but a shame this long-delayed film is taking a hit.

This is a long one, over 2.5 hours, but it was for us a ride worth the effort. Your Bond mileage may vary, but we will certainly miss Craig in the role he frankly saved.