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What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

Retro Rob

Familiar Face
Messages
81
Location
Lost in the Past
Casablanca and Rear Window

I just purchased the Casablanca DVD set. I hadn't seen the movie in years, it really is great. Ingred Bergman is stunning. Ive been really interested in her career since I found out she had an affair with the war photographer Robert Capa (my avatar). Their affair inspired Hitchcock to write Rear Window,the story of an aging war photographer (James Stewart) that refuses to marry the beautiful socialite (Grace Kelly), another great move that was on AMC this week.
 

Hondo

One Too Many
Messages
1,655
Location
Northern California
HBO: BERNARD AND DORIS

In 1987, a middle-aged Irish butler fresh out of rehab arrived on the doorstep of tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Bernard Lafferty faced an uphill battle convincing his notoriously demanding boss to keep him on staff. A mere six years later, he was inheriting her fortune. Oscar(R)-winner Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking) and Oscar(R)-nominee Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient) deliver riveting performances in this intimate HBO Films drama that tells the hypothetical story of these two disparate characters who went on to form the unlikeliest of friendships.

Excellent story from HBO and work by Sarandon and Fiennes
 

Lady Day

I'll Lock Up
Bartender
Messages
9,087
Location
Crummy town, USA
Patrick Murtha said:
Elephant, Gus Van Sant, 2003 -- Notorious as Van Sant's take on the Columbine massacre, this film (which deservedly won the Palme d'Or and Best Director at Cannes) defies expectations. The carnage only occupies the last 15 minutes of an 80 minute film, and the director cuts away from the violence as often as he shows it. Of course the film is horribly upsetting, but that is because Van Sant and his actors (all improvising) create such an overwhelming sense of life as it is lived that when the violation comes, it is devastating. The "floating" Steadicam following the characters, a technique that takes after Kubrick's The Shining and Van Sant's own earlier Gerry, imparts a feeling of imminence that I find utterly mesmerizing.

This ones been in my Netflix cue for over a year, so glad its finally on DVD, and sounds compelling as well! Thanks for the review. Im not a big Van Sant fan, but I do find some of his work watchable.

LD
 

Marlowe P.

One of the Regulars
Messages
136
Location
Portland, Or
Margot at the Wedding...
I dug Squid and the Whale a bit more and this movie was similar. Over-educated pretentious people doing horrible things to their kids. While the kids are just biding their time till they will either abuse copious amounts of drugs or enter therapy or both.
It did renew my love for Jack Black (born out of High Fidelity) I hope he keeps going in this direction and steers clear of School of Rock-esque cutesy stuff.
 

Quigley Brown

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,745
Location
Des Moines, Iowa
I finally caught 'The Last King of Scotland' last night. Forrest Whitaker got his Oscar for his role as Gen. Idi Amin in this film. There are some scenes that are hard to digest...*yucky*
 

Doctor Strange

I'll Lock Up
Messages
5,252
Location
Hudson Valley, NY
I caught a screening of There Will Be Blood at my local 1930 movie palace that's now an arts center.

Frankly, I didn't like it at all. The characters were two-dimensional, the writing was stilted, the music was totally inappropriate and distracting, and the film's ultimate point was obscure. The third act was a total mess: I was left wondering what we were supposed to think at the conclusion.

Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis gave another fascinating, riveting performance. But overall I found that the film's alleged brilliance to be absurdly hyped, and I was seriously underwhelmed.
 

BegintheBeguine

My Mail is Forwarded Here
Quigley Brown said:
I finally caught 'The Last King of Scotland' last night. Forrest Whitaker got his Oscar for his role as Gen. Idi Amin in this film. There are some scenes that are hard to digest...*yucky*
Like the ones where all the beautiful women were so hot to jump into bed with the scrawny doofus doctor? Those brought up my popcorn. Ah, no, on second thought I think I know which ones you mean.
Forrest Whittaker was brilliant.
 

Quigley Brown

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,745
Location
Des Moines, Iowa
BegintheBeguine said:
Like the ones where all the beautiful women were so hot to jump into bed with the scrawny doofus doctor? Those brought up my popcorn. Ah, no, on second thought I think I know which ones you mean.
Forrest Whittaker was brilliant.

I meant some scenes were hard for 'someone else' to digest...
 

Patrick Murtha

Practically Family
Messages
651
Location
Wisconsin
Over the past few days I've watched Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933) and Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959).

Design for Living apparently bears only a general resemblance to the Noel Coward play (that Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne starred in on Broadway). Ben Hecht boasted of having re-written Coward line for line. The homoerotic overtones that the play is famous for are largely missing from trhe film's love triangle of Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins. Those three fine actors, on display here in the bloom of youth, are gorgeous to watch, but the film left me a little cold because I only found it intermittently funny, and because the behavior of the characters is dislikably inconsiderate and self-serving, so I had no one to pull for. The typical pre-Code sexual candor is of course refreshing and honest.

Room at the Top gets four stars from Leonard Maltin, and deserves them. This adaptation of John Braine's novel, part of the "British New Wave" of "angry young man" and "kitchen sink" drama that swept the literary, dramatic, and cimematic worlds in the Fifties and early Sixties, is grittily absorbing every step of the way as it traces the rise of an ambitious, somewhat unscrupulous but not altogether hatable provincial lad, portrayed brilliantly by Laurence Harvey. Simone Signoret won a deserved Oscar as his older mistress, and Donald Houston and Hermione Baddeley glow in their smaller roles. One potential period confusion is that although the film is definitely set in 1947 (which the logic of the plot demands), it has the feel (wardrobe-wise and otherwise) of the late Fifties when it was made.
 

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