Which means, tragically, no formal charges were ever laid or if they did they went nowhere for, well insert your own reasons here I guess.
Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched
- Thread starter Th3Ch33s3Cak3
- Start date
Yeah, maybe, maybe the gap in his resume was because he got reported around that time (2018, I think), and people didn't want to work with him til it died down. But otherwise, nope, long and successful career.
I had a very nice weekend rewatching movies that I remembered liking from Blockbuster 15 or 20 years ago, and hadn't seen since.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Kind of a perfect movie. Starts with one hell of a battle, ends with another great battle and in between you get some wonderfully detailed historical slice-of-life in a series of vignettes that hit the peaks of comedy and tragedy without ever feeling corny or melodramatic. I like that kind of honesty. Characters do reprehensible stuff, sometimes for the wrong reasons, sometimes for the absolutely correct ones. The movie doesn't judge, or rather doesn't necessarily punish for them. It also doesn't go easy with the harshness of living standards or personal relationships. But it also has a sense of humor in the way characters sort of abandon themselves to their fate. Some great set-pieces, practical stuff and very bleak effects/makeup. The ending plays rent-free in my head regularly.
Caché (2005)
All of Haneke's movies are a bummer. I mean they're great but boy they make you miserable. All of them center on a bourgeois middle-aged couple named Georges and Anne, or their German equivalent; all of them are cold, clinical, indifferent and make Kubrick feel like Santa Claus. In this, the couple starts receiving videotapes in their doorstep that show footage of their house. In the videos, they see themselves walk in and out of their home. They also appear to pass the camera and even look at it without knowing it. What the hell? They also start getting childish yet intimidating drawings of kids and chickens vomiting blood or getting their throat slashed.
I wanted to rewatch this for three reasons: first, it's one of those movies that greatly benefits from a second viewing. Not because it helps elucidate the mystery (how, who, why) but because it frees you from trying to work everything out like it's a puzzle and you can just wallow in it. Second, I wanted to confirm with a partner that the very last shot of the movie is brilliantly designed to hide something in plain sight that apparently nobody ever catches in a first viewing. And third, I wanted to indeed confirm how dreary and realistic that one scene still looks. The lone clip doesn't really do it justice. Consider this is buried at the tail end of a 2 hour French movie of bored adults having stale dinner party chit chat and watching security cam footage.
Seven Samurai (1954)
Everybody knows the spiel. It's been remade a million times under different banners - westerns, comedies, animation, sci-fi, war movies - but this is where it's at. It's an incredibly breezy three and a half hours (plus intermission) that does everything absolutely the right way. A problem is quickly illustrated and made insurmountable; no need to make the bandits particularly hateful or metonymical of a greater evil. You're with the farmers because they're so pathetic. Four are quickly dispatched to the city to recruit samurai - which they hold in contempt simply because they're so helpless without them, and isn't that a great trait to develop - and you can already make their clashing personalities without even having to know their names. You spend long enough with them that they start feeling like the protagonists, and empathize with their plight.
Enter Kambei, who starts the trend of heroes being introduced at the climax of an otherwise irrelevant mission, and doest the math for the farmers: they need at least 7 samurai to defend their village, including him. Toshiro Mifune eventually becomes the heart of the movie as the wayward seventh samurai (he's the only one given a backstory, which is relayed piecemeal when something naturally jogs his memory, and not frontloaded in flashbacks) but Kambei is the grand architect of the story, and everything from the recruitment of the other samurai to the defense of the village is motivated by his strategic planning. Teamwork is great when it doesn't get you killed, but ultimately my fascination with the movie is that it's driven by such an intelligent, resourceful character yet the movie doesn't have to cheat to escalate the risks. It's also why I love The Thing (1982), with which it shares an empty sense of victory.
Mississippi Burning (1988)
Speaking of empty sense of victory, Mississippi Burning is about the FBI investigating the disappearence of three social activists - two white, one black - in a backwater Mississippi county in 1964. This really happened. The movie is essentially what the movie adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon bent over backwards to not do, which is portray the FBI as the heroes while focusing on their eleventh hour arrival to sniff out the systematic genocide of a peoples. Something that was very much an open secret yet nobody appeared to give a damn about it until it became a bif ole political thing blown out of proportion by the media. Which the Mississippi ghouls of course blamed for their own racist crimes. See, the real problem was them Hoover boys come down South to stir shit out of proportion.
Stars Gene Hackman as the cheery, benevolent version of Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle and Willem Dafoe as a preppy Edmund Exley type, younger but technically Hackman's boss. And Brad Dourif, Frances McDormand, R. Lee Ermey, Michael Rooker, Stephen Tobolowsky... hell of a cast. If I have a single criticism for the movie is that I wish there was more buddy cop stuff going on between them. For my taste, Hackman is way more prevalent and proactive than Dafoe, who kinda falls back into the limelight and becomes the face of the bureaucratic part of the process. The script is also a little spotty on just how ok Dafoe is with Hackman's loose cannon methods - he'll agree to one thing in one scene, then immediately chastise Hackman for going along in the next. Lastly, love the score.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Kind of a perfect movie. Starts with one hell of a battle, ends with another great battle and in between you get some wonderfully detailed historical slice-of-life in a series of vignettes that hit the peaks of comedy and tragedy without ever feeling corny or melodramatic. I like that kind of honesty. Characters do reprehensible stuff, sometimes for the wrong reasons, sometimes for the absolutely correct ones. The movie doesn't judge, or rather doesn't necessarily punish for them. It also doesn't go easy with the harshness of living standards or personal relationships. But it also has a sense of humor in the way characters sort of abandon themselves to their fate. Some great set-pieces, practical stuff and very bleak effects/makeup. The ending plays rent-free in my head regularly.
Caché (2005)
All of Haneke's movies are a bummer. I mean they're great but boy they make you miserable. All of them center on a bourgeois middle-aged couple named Georges and Anne, or their German equivalent; all of them are cold, clinical, indifferent and make Kubrick feel like Santa Claus. In this, the couple starts receiving videotapes in their doorstep that show footage of their house. In the videos, they see themselves walk in and out of their home. They also appear to pass the camera and even look at it without knowing it. What the hell? They also start getting childish yet intimidating drawings of kids and chickens vomiting blood or getting their throat slashed.
I wanted to rewatch this for three reasons: first, it's one of those movies that greatly benefits from a second viewing. Not because it helps elucidate the mystery (how, who, why) but because it frees you from trying to work everything out like it's a puzzle and you can just wallow in it. Second, I wanted to confirm with a partner that the very last shot of the movie is brilliantly designed to hide something in plain sight that apparently nobody ever catches in a first viewing. And third, I wanted to indeed confirm how dreary and realistic that one scene still looks. The lone clip doesn't really do it justice. Consider this is buried at the tail end of a 2 hour French movie of bored adults having stale dinner party chit chat and watching security cam footage.
Seven Samurai (1954)
Everybody knows the spiel. It's been remade a million times under different banners - westerns, comedies, animation, sci-fi, war movies - but this is where it's at. It's an incredibly breezy three and a half hours (plus intermission) that does everything absolutely the right way. A problem is quickly illustrated and made insurmountable; no need to make the bandits particularly hateful or metonymical of a greater evil. You're with the farmers because they're so pathetic. Four are quickly dispatched to the city to recruit samurai - which they hold in contempt simply because they're so helpless without them, and isn't that a great trait to develop - and you can already make their clashing personalities without even having to know their names. You spend long enough with them that they start feeling like the protagonists, and empathize with their plight.
Enter Kambei, who starts the trend of heroes being introduced at the climax of an otherwise irrelevant mission, and doest the math for the farmers: they need at least 7 samurai to defend their village, including him. Toshiro Mifune eventually becomes the heart of the movie as the wayward seventh samurai (he's the only one given a backstory, which is relayed piecemeal when something naturally jogs his memory, and not frontloaded in flashbacks) but Kambei is the grand architect of the story, and everything from the recruitment of the other samurai to the defense of the village is motivated by his strategic planning. Teamwork is great when it doesn't get you killed, but ultimately my fascination with the movie is that it's driven by such an intelligent, resourceful character yet the movie doesn't have to cheat to escalate the risks. It's also why I love The Thing (1982), with which it shares an empty sense of victory.
Mississippi Burning (1988)
Speaking of empty sense of victory, Mississippi Burning is about the FBI investigating the disappearence of three social activists - two white, one black - in a backwater Mississippi county in 1964. This really happened. The movie is essentially what the movie adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon bent over backwards to not do, which is portray the FBI as the heroes while focusing on their eleventh hour arrival to sniff out the systematic genocide of a peoples. Something that was very much an open secret yet nobody appeared to give a damn about it until it became a bif ole political thing blown out of proportion by the media. Which the Mississippi ghouls of course blamed for their own racist crimes. See, the real problem was them Hoover boys come down South to stir shit out of proportion.
Stars Gene Hackman as the cheery, benevolent version of Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle and Willem Dafoe as a preppy Edmund Exley type, younger but technically Hackman's boss. And Brad Dourif, Frances McDormand, R. Lee Ermey, Michael Rooker, Stephen Tobolowsky... hell of a cast. If I have a single criticism for the movie is that I wish there was more buddy cop stuff going on between them. For my taste, Hackman is way more prevalent and proactive than Dafoe, who kinda falls back into the limelight and becomes the face of the bureaucratic part of the process. The script is also a little spotty on just how ok Dafoe is with Hackman's loose cannon methods - he'll agree to one thing in one scene, then immediately chastise Hackman for going along in the next. Lastly, love the score.
Ah, the good old days of anime on VHS, when you had nothing to go on other than the box art and dub was the standard.
A ★★★★★ review of Perfect Blue (1997)
"This blood...Rumi, is it real?" The plot of this film follows Mima (Junko Iwau), a former idol singer who has decided to switch career paths to become an actress. Working on a television drama called Double Bind, under the direction of Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji), things start to get weird for...letterboxd.com
This is probably my favourite looking Satoshi Kon movie, though it's actually the one where he couldn't stick to his signature style.
Slow day at work, so let me elaborate on that.
Set in a dystopian cyberpunk 2017, Sam Treadwell lives in a world where urban dating culture has become so overly dehumanized, that people bring along lawyers to write up contracts for one night stands and are required to provide documentation of their performance when attempting to hook up at bars. Accordingly, Sam has a robot, model Cherry 2000, to act as a substitute wife, capable of satisfying him sexually and preparing lackluster looking hamburgers but not very much more. When his Cherry 2000 unit breaks down due to water damage, he secures her memory storage (a tiny CD) and ventures to the desert town of Glory Hole, Nevada to enlist the help of fiery redheaded survivalist Edith Johnson (Melanie Griffith) to venture into the lawless wastelands surrounding a ruined Vegas to retrieve a new body for Cherry 2000. On his journey they run afoul a brutal wasteland gang based around reviving the 80's upper middle class suburban lifestyle.
It's not quite as good as I made it sound but honestly, it's pretty good. Between some audacious 80's science-fiction set design, that seems to be going for some low budget cross between Blade Runner, Mad Max and Brazil, equally audacious 80's science-fiction fashion and Sam Treadwell looking and Melanie Griffith acting like they're high most of the time, this is definitely up there with some of the cult classics of 80's action cheese.
Make no mistake, it's a lot closer to Albert Pyun than Paul Verhoeven (In case you wanna know, this was directed by a guy named Steve de Jarnatt, who made one other movie named Miracle Mile and otherwise only worked on a couple of television series) and the action is certainly a lot more conceptually ambitious than it is actually well choreographed or shot. Where the movie is full of gonzo world building, the plot plays out more or less exactly the way you'd expect. One of the highlights is definitely Tim Thomerson as brutal and infectiously positive gang leader Lester, who's both very much in on the joke, and absolutely running away with it.
Overall though, it was some surprisingly elaborately constructed tongue in cheek fun, that presents the more zany, more colourful side of 80's cyberpunk. There is actually a good bit of this movie in some of the goofier parts of the Fallout games, or for that matter, the Borderlands games. Also a testament to how little comedy in regards to technology and relationships has changed, making it one of those things that simultaneously feel ahead of their time, and exactly of their time.
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A ★★★★★ review of Dead & Buried (1981)
"You can try and kill me, Dan. But you can't. You can only make me dead." The plot of this film follows a police officer named Dan Gillis (James Farentino) investigating a series of murders in a town called Potter's Bluff. While the first murder was initially set up to look like an accident, the...
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King Rat (1965)
From James Clavell's (Shogun) debut novel about a Japanese POW camp in Singapore. It's about men in desperate circumstance surviving and trying to balance their values against that. Main characters are an American dude who uses his questionable morals and savvy to be the only one in the camp living in relative comfort, and a Brit who befriends him and tries navigates all that (also effectively the stand-in for Clavell).
George Seagal plays the American and I've never watched a movie with him that young, I know him from 70s and 80s comedies primarily. The movie is pretty good though it is a classic example of "the book is better than the movie" because it's harder to capture nuance in relationships. They also removed some subplots but considering one of them about the gay/trans prisoner would have been hard to watch from today's perspective so I'm glad they skipped it.
I have been meaning to read Shogun for like 20 years and instead of just reading that I decided to get all of Clavell's "Asian saga"- 6 novels, mostly extremely long, that are about Brits messing about in Asia. But I'm reading them in release order so next will Tai-pan and then Shogun, and I'm watching the movies and TV shows based on them afterward.
From James Clavell's (Shogun) debut novel about a Japanese POW camp in Singapore. It's about men in desperate circumstance surviving and trying to balance their values against that. Main characters are an American dude who uses his questionable morals and savvy to be the only one in the camp living in relative comfort, and a Brit who befriends him and tries navigates all that (also effectively the stand-in for Clavell).
George Seagal plays the American and I've never watched a movie with him that young, I know him from 70s and 80s comedies primarily. The movie is pretty good though it is a classic example of "the book is better than the movie" because it's harder to capture nuance in relationships. They also removed some subplots but considering one of them about the gay/trans prisoner would have been hard to watch from today's perspective so I'm glad they skipped it.
I have been meaning to read Shogun for like 20 years and instead of just reading that I decided to get all of Clavell's "Asian saga"- 6 novels, mostly extremely long, that are about Brits messing about in Asia. But I'm reading them in release order so next will Tai-pan and then Shogun, and I'm watching the movies and TV shows based on them afterward.
They’re doing a big budget limited series of Shogun this year on one of the streaming services. Looks really good.
Sisu (2022)
An old Finnish prospector fights off a convoy of nazis who're after his gold on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
That's it. That's the entirety of the plot. Seen here: an old Finnish prospector fucking decimating a bunch of nazis who're after his gold, almost entirely on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
If you thought The Raid or Hardcore Henry had thin plots, watch Sisu. This makes the John Wick movies feel like The Silmarillion. To summarize: there's an old man, a dirt road and a bunch of nazis on that road. The movie ends when the nazis are no longer on that dirt road. Or rather strewn across it.
Things that I liked about Sisu:
- A bunch of fucking nazis get decimated.
- A Bowie knife goes through a nazi's head, so the pointy bit is sticking out on the other side.
- The old man uppercuts another nazi with his own gun and fires, sending his helmet flying off.
- At one point the old man throws a landmine at a nazi, exactly hitting him in the head with the bit that makes the landmine go boom.
- At another point the old man sets himself on fire, warding off attack dogs long enough to jump into the safety of a lake.
- The nazis get tired of waiting for him to resurface so one by one they dive after him. This is great news for the old man. One by one he slashes their throats and sucks out the oxygen escaping from their open tracheas. You won't see that in no dollar show.
- He actually cashes in all the gold in the end. No bullshit "The gold was the friends we made along the way" takeaway.
Things I didn't like about Sisu:
- I wish he'd killed even more nazis.
- All the dudes playing the nazis are clearly actually Finnish or thereabouts, which tempered my glee in watching them fucking die.
- Structurally it would've been more satisfying to reveal what a badass the old dude was AFTER the nazis fuck around and find out, and not before.
- I realize the movie's clearly on a budget but I got a little tired of that dirt road. Could've used more variety. Mad Max: Fury Road kept refreshing and finding ways of making that desert look interesting.
An old Finnish prospector fights off a convoy of nazis who're after his gold on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
That's it. That's the entirety of the plot. Seen here: an old Finnish prospector fucking decimating a bunch of nazis who're after his gold, almost entirely on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
If you thought The Raid or Hardcore Henry had thin plots, watch Sisu. This makes the John Wick movies feel like The Silmarillion. To summarize: there's an old man, a dirt road and a bunch of nazis on that road. The movie ends when the nazis are no longer on that dirt road. Or rather strewn across it.
Things that I liked about Sisu:
- A bunch of fucking nazis get decimated.
- A Bowie knife goes through a nazi's head, so the pointy bit is sticking out on the other side.
- The old man uppercuts another nazi with his own gun and fires, sending his helmet flying off.
- At one point the old man throws a landmine at a nazi, exactly hitting him in the head with the bit that makes the landmine go boom.
- At another point the old man sets himself on fire, warding off attack dogs long enough to jump into the safety of a lake.
- The nazis get tired of waiting for him to resurface so one by one they dive after him. This is great news for the old man. One by one he slashes their throats and sucks out the oxygen escaping from their open tracheas. You won't see that in no dollar show.
- He actually cashes in all the gold in the end. No bullshit "The gold was the friends we made along the way" takeaway.
Things I didn't like about Sisu:
- I wish he'd killed even more nazis.
- All the dudes playing the nazis are clearly actually Finnish or thereabouts, which tempered my glee in watching them fucking die.
- Structurally it would've been more satisfying to reveal what a badass the old dude was AFTER the nazis fuck around and find out, and not before.
- I realize the movie's clearly on a budget but I got a little tired of that dirt road. Could've used more variety. Mad Max: Fury Road kept refreshing and finding ways of making that desert look interesting.
A ★★★★½ review of The Last Unicorn (1982)
"There never is a happy ending because nothing ever ends.” The plot of this film is focused on the titular character (voiced by Mia Farrow). Upon learning that she is the last unicorn known to exist, with the others having mysteriously disappeared, she sets out on a quest to find them. Along the...
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That movie fucking destroyed me. I read a comic adaptation years ago that included some extra bits that were a little more off kilter - although apparently present in the novel - that while I was glad for, I felt were better off omitted from the movie. But yeah this film is just, rip your heart out and stomp it sad.A ★★★★½ review of The Last Unicorn (1982)
"There never is a happy ending because nothing ever ends.” The plot of this film is focused on the titular character (voiced by Mia Farrow). Upon learning that she is the last unicorn known to exist, with the others having mysteriously disappeared, she sets out on a quest to find them. Along the...
Also its amazing just how often this song gets covered. Like holy shit.
One of the comments on the "Master and Commander" youtube clip you shared says we need to watch this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe_(TV_series) as there hasn't been a historical drama of this caliber in 20 years since. Of course, being a Treckie, I love this movies and the parallels to the OG series. And that is based upon a series of books. Sharpe is as well. I'll do some searching for it. I'm thinking it is possibe Sean Bean stars in something in which he doesn't almost immediately die! EDIT:
Eh, I prefer the Hornblower series myself. Apparently both Master and Commander and Hornblower are based on books inspired by the same real person.
Sharpe tends to get a bit cliched. Though, Nigel Kneale, best known for pioneering British horror sci-fi, wrote one ep, and put Aztecs in because why not?
I just watched the opening of episode 1 in which Sharpe uses a musket rifle to shoot a man off a horse a football field away and then uses a flintlock pistol to neatly shoot a man in the head and I'm thinking, "weren't the weapons of the time monstrously inaccurate regardless of who was doing the shooting?" Hornblower ever do shows/movies about the character? May be much more worthwhile.
Ah, yeah, I meant the 8 part Hornblower series (each ep was 2hrs), starring ioan Gruffudd, I've not read the books.
Yeah that's what kick-started my James Clavell thing. Depending on how fast I read I may be coming into that show with both the book and the old 80's series fresh in my head
I'm assuming since your pros objectively outnumber your cons, you liked it? It's never really clear when your reviews aren't overtly negative whether you liked a movie or not.
I really liked and respected Sisu. Partly because "sisu" is a word often bandied about in regards to my favorite Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas, but I mostly enjoyed it because it was no nonsense. Its simplicity befitted the lead character: a man just going about his business who doesn't want to be fucked with (for a good reason,) and a group of hatemongers fucked around and found out that reason. It didn't prattle on with globetrotting, or with complicated espionage threads, etc. It was just a simple, graphic film that felt like it did a lot with a little. Maybe not "a lot," but certainly enough, particularly given I can think of too many big budget affairs that have done the exact opposite for me.
Sisu was f***ing rad. I like me my hoity-toity awards-bait middle-brow and indy stuff sure but if a movie's gonna be action and blood then give it to me straight doc.
This might help explain its simplicity -
Jalmari Helander was originally going to direct a comedic sci-fi film "Jerry and Ms Universe" in Canada. When it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he quickly wrote Sisu (2022) in the fall of 2021. The film's budget is around $6 million.
The movie mostly works as pseudo-historical violence porn since ironically, Finland was actually aligned with Germany and their occupation was peaceful while Barbarossa was underway. It wasn’t until the inevitability of them losing the war was clear that they were pressured into an alliance with the Soviet Union. Neither side wanted the Lapland war. Germany even allowed civilians to evacuate freely along the roads they controlled, and it happened rather efficiently since many of them were made to facilitate escape routes to Norway.
When the deadline approached for German troops to be expelled from Finland, Stalin gave the ultimatum of either the Finns forcing them out or having his troops do it themselves. They didn’t want the Soviets inside their borders so the fighting escalated. Eventually Soviet troops arrived anyways. Most of the fighting took place at Tornio and Petsamo with Germany resorting to slash and burn tactics. Even then Finnish casualties stood at about 1,000 with the German side a bit more than double.
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I've watched the entire Sharpe series a few times and let me tell you, the reason Sean Bean dies in almost every other thing he is in is because it is the balancing of the scales for all the utterly improbable shit he survives in Sharpe. As they say "Richard Sharpe, a man so badass being played by Sean Bean couldn't kill him".
And while the shooting he does can seem a little absurd, its worth noting that Sharpe is part of a Rifles regiment back when that actually meant something. Because he and his men all use the Baker Rifle, which true to the name, contained rifling, rather than the smoothbore barrel of the Brown Bess Musket the regular infantry used. His guys are all called Chosen Men and they're basically crack marksmen who's job was to roam the battlefield alone or in small groups as skirmishers and harass the enemy.
Anyway, the show is worth a watch because A) its really good, and B) its fun to play 'spot the future famous person'. Just, allow for the fact that its budget did not allow for the battles it sometimes portrays to be correctly to scale. Oh and expect the sword play to get a little stupid. But the Ioan Gruffudd Hornblower series is really good too. They're basically brother shows since they're roughly the same period, just one is about the army infantry and the other is about the royal navy.