Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Jul 18, 2009
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Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai: Dumb / Great

A loner lives quietly in the hood, studying the way of the Samurai. He's contracted by a member of the mob (to whom he owes a debt of life) to kill another member of their ranks. After the contract is completed, the same mob tries to kill him.

Yes, I know this film is 25 years old, and up until a couple of days ago, I'd prided myself on having avoided it all these years. Then, my girlfriend picked it for a movie night, so I sucked it up. From top to bottom, it was just really silly. The scene with the nigh 40-year-old, out-of-shape black dude swinging a samurai sword on a rooftop sealed it for me; I checked out. It was painfully slow with too many LONG montages of him stealing cars and driving around at night in between parts of substance. Then the mob guys turn nearly every scene they're in into a comedy, a jarringly stark contrast to the overtly somber and introspective tone we get in every scene Whitaker is in. Shockingly, it got largely positive reviews? Must be because of the soundtrack because it's a banger, easily the best/only redemptive part of the whole movie.
Don't think this is supposed to be an action movie though. It's about a bunch of sad old guys in a sad old world playing pretend really. It's not a coincidence that all the mobsters are dudes who are in their 60's wheezing about and meeting up in ramshackle backrooms. Similar to what Jarmush did with Dead Man, which is a Western, but instead of capable frontiersmen and stoic cowboys we get a bunch of bumblefucks not really knowing what they're doing.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Rewatched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. God that movie's great, 9/10. It's so creative and visually distinct. I'm tempted to say it feels like a throwback, but it honestly feels like something wholly of here and now. It's one of those movies that makes you go "They don't make 'em like they used to... but they never made them like this before." It's somehow still delightful, almost 2 years after release, that the movie has not just one, but two all time classic villains in one movie. Death and Jack Horner aren't just properly villainous, they're having so much fun being villains. Jack Horner especially feels refreshing in how unrepentantly and gleefully straight up evil he is. He's almost a deconstruction of a deconstruction when he starts getting all weepy about his backstory, but then it immediately turns out he's just a narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniac. While Death doesn't have as much screentime, his scenes are all fantastic, and the way the visuals are used to make him genuinely scary and ominous is so creative.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Rewatched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. God that movie's great, 9/10. It's so creative and visually distinct. I'm tempted to say it feels like a throwback, but it honestly feels like something wholly of here and now. It's one of those movies that makes you go "They don't make 'em like they used to... but they never made them like this before." It's somehow still delightful, almost 2 years after release, that the movie has not just one, but two all time classic villains in one movie. Death and Jack Horner aren't just properly villainous, they're having so much fun being villains. Jack Horner especially feels refreshing in how unrepentantly and gleefully straight up evil he is. He's almost a deconstruction of a deconstruction when he starts getting all weepy about his backstory, but then it immediately turns out he's just a narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniac. While Death doesn't have as much screentime, his scenes are all fantastic, and the way the visuals are used to make him genuinely scary and ominous is so creative.
It feels like a throwback in the sense that there's an actual sense of threat. The movie isn't afraid to actually scare kids, particulary regarding Death. Him saying "I'm Death. Straight. Up." is a line that nowadays would get axed during production, because hey, we don't want to confront parents or scare the kids. I often see youtube videos about certain kids movies from the 80's and 90's with the caption "This is a kids movie?!" and it always gets my hackles up a bit. Like kids can only consume the most toothless material. I'm not trying to come off as 'things were better than', because overal kids movie are better now than they were in the 80's and 90's, but the classic movies from that era that have stood the test of time did so because they knew how to capture real tension.

The Last Wish feels like a nice marriage between the teeth and guts of the 80's/90's, and the more sophisticated storytelling of the aughts.
 

thebobmaster

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Rewatched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. God that movie's great, 9/10. It's so creative and visually distinct. I'm tempted to say it feels like a throwback, but it honestly feels like something wholly of here and now. It's one of those movies that makes you go "They don't make 'em like they used to... but they never made them like this before." It's somehow still delightful, almost 2 years after release, that the movie has not just one, but two all time classic villains in one movie. Death and Jack Horner aren't just properly villainous, they're having so much fun being villains. Jack Horner especially feels refreshing in how unrepentantly and gleefully straight up evil he is. He's almost a deconstruction of a deconstruction when he starts getting all weepy about his backstory, but then it immediately turns out he's just a narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniac. While Death doesn't have as much screentime, his scenes are all fantastic, and the way the visuals are used to make him genuinely scary and ominous is so creative.
I'd actually argue that Death isn't even a villain as such. He's doing his job, and he has a special enmity towards Puss that makes him enjoy doing his job on Puss in particular, but that's understandable from his point of view given that he respects people who cherish their lives, and Puss has done completely the opposite not just once, but 8 times. And Jack Horner...yeah, he's how you make a completely two-dimensional, unrepentant villain amazingly entertaining. "What have I done to deserve this?" *everyone stares* "I mean what specifically?!"
 

Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Coup de Chance

Woody Allen's 50th film is a French remake of Match Point with a shifting perspective: first act belongs to the cheating spouse, second act is the cuckhold, third act goes to the mother in law.

Like Match Point it's a rumination on morality and dumb luck (lit. "Stroke of Luck"), but with a more comedic tone despite the higher body count. There's also a bourgeois vs boheme discourse, reflecting the same point that Woody's made in the preceding 49 movies: every conscious choice in life is about relationships and a form of self-destruction.

Blue Jasmine being canonically his last "great movie", this is how I'd rank the following ones:

The pretty good ones: A Rainy Day in New York, Rifkin's Festival, Coup de Chance.

The mediocre ones: Magic in the Moonlight, Irrational Man, Wonder Wheel.
 
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McElroy

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Venom: Final Jam
5/10
It's not too bad at any point, but apart from the sexy symbiotes I doubt this will stay in my mind for long. I remember chuckling at some quip or two... I can't remember which. Names like "Knull" and "Paine" are infinitely funny though haha. If you know them.

Does the movie lean on being ridiculous cheese even at the "most serious" moments? A question for the ages.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
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Venom: Final Jam
5/10
It's not too bad at any point, but apart from the sexy symbiotes I doubt this will stay in my mind for long. I remember chuckling at some quip or two... I can't remember which. Names like "Knull" and "Paine" are infinitely funny though haha. If you know them.

Does the movie lean on being ridiculous cheese even at the "most serious" moments? A question for the ages.
I enjoyed last dance for what it is. My brother and I love the shit out of this movie and the previous two movies. I won't lie, the serious moments in this movie actually work.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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I'd actually argue that Death isn't even a villain as such. He's doing his job, and he has a special enmity towards Puss that makes him enjoy doing his job on Puss in particular, but that's understandable from his point of view given that he respects people who cherish their lives, and Puss has done completely the opposite not just once, but 8 times. And Jack Horner...yeah, he's how you make a completely two-dimensional, unrepentant villain amazingly entertaining. "What have I done to deserve this?" *everyone stares* "I mean what specifically?!"
I was about to add the caveat that Death is technically an antagonist, not a villain, but I thought it was getting a bit pedantic. I think everyone's going to be referring to him as a villain in the future, in the "movie villain" sense.

It feels like a throwback in the sense that there's an actual sense of threat. The movie isn't afraid to actually scare kids, particulary regarding Death. Him saying "I'm Death. Straight. Up." is a line that nowadays would get axed during production, because hey, we don't want to confront parents or scare the kids. I often see youtube videos about certain kids movies from the 80's and 90's with the caption "This is a kids movie?!" and it always gets my hackles up a bit. Like kids can only consume the most toothless material. I'm not trying to come off as 'things were better than', because overal kids movie are better now than they were in the 80's and 90's, but the classic movies from that era that have stood the test of time did so because they knew how to capture real tension.

The Last Wish feels like a nice marriage between the teeth and guts of the 80's/90's, and the more sophisticated storytelling of the aughts.
I suppose, but IMO what sets The Last Wish further apart are its animation style and themes. You'll be hard pressed to find something as turbo-ADHD and stylized in western animation from any era prior to the mid-2010s. The Madagascar movies might come close, but not in terms of scale. Thematically TLW is basically about middle age burnout. It doesn't go for the typical "how Puss got his groove back" route, instead settling for a story about accepting change, coming to terms with one's mortality, and maybe asking if the glory days really were as glorious as you remember them. I'd be hard pressed to think of a movie with such distinctly grownup themes prior to the 2000s.
 
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CriticalGaming

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Gladiator 2:

This movie tries very hard to tie itself into the original film to sort of justify why the sequel exists. It continues the story by focusing on the heir to Rome Lucious the boy in the first movie. Which immediately undermines Maximus' sacrifice of killing Comadus, which supposedly made the boy safe. Apparently it didn't so fast forward 16 years where a crazy brothers have somehow become Emperor of Rome and Lucious is living a life in Northern Africa somewhere.

That is until Rome invades and Lucious' wife is killed and he is taken to become a Gladiator, thus setting up the film under much the same plot as the first movie with the roles sort of shuffled a little bit.

Gladiator 2's biggest struggle is that it has a hard time justifying that it exists in the first place. They try to weave crazy Emperors, and a General that is planning a rebellion against them (a plot that doesn't really go anywhere), and Lucious battling his way to revenge against the same General who took his wife from him.

There are a lot of plots that run through the game, but some of them get forgotten until they suddenly are rushed to resolution. Overall the movie is too busy and it drags when it shouldn't, and rushes when it shouldn't. It's an okay movie, but it doesn't justify itself being a sequel or even existing. I think it would have done better being an original historical movie rather than trying to tie itself to a movie from 20 years ago.

6/10
 
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thebobmaster

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Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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I feel the need to bring up a further point about Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which is Ralph Fiennes' performance as Victor Quartermaine. Fiennes straight up kills it: he's slimy and arrogant, while also being properly villainous and menacing, yet also funny. He's so bombastic and vibrant in the role that I would love to see some behind the scenes footage. We all know Fiennes is a world class actor, but 1. he's mostly known for playing calm and collected characters while Quartermaine is a literal cartoon villain, and 2. screen actors being good voice actors is by no means a given. As far as I can tell, Fiennes' only major voice acting role prior to Curse had been Prince of Egypt, and while he is fantastic in that, a 7-year gap between voice roles is nothing to scoff at. I'd guess that because he got his start in theater (like most well known british actors), that type of acting prepares you better for voice acting, since you have to project and enunciate a lot more and can't rely on mics and sound systems. Fiennes is so effortlessly entertaining and embodies the role so perfectly that I'm willing to put him up there with Jeremy Irons as Scar or Hailee Steinfeld as Spider-Gwen as one of the best voice acting performances ever.
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Ladyhawke (1985)

80's fantasy movie directed by Richard Donner of Superman fame.

Ladyhawke is the story of the cursed romance between disgraced knight Navarre, played by Blade Runner 's Rutger Hauer and his lover Isabeau, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. The evil bishop of Aquila made a pact with the devil that turns Navarre into a wolf by night and Isabeau into a hawk by day. Escaped thief Mouse (Matthew Broderick) ends up joining them in their quest to break the curse and get revenge.

There is something very interesting to fantasy movies before the gold standard of the Lord of the Rings trilogy had been established and Dungeons and Dragons became something average people are aware of. Without the iconography of epic fantasy fully realized, they were this weird, kind of experimental, genre that took from pulp novels, fairy tails, arthurian myth and European folk tales to different degrees with vastly different results.

Ladyhawke is certainly at the most airport paperback novel end of the spectrum, a pulpy cross between supernatural romance and swashbuckling adventure that neither leans into the melodrama, nor the adventure of it quite enough to fully capture the appeal of either. Between Matthew Broderick 's character who is established as the main protagonist, yet ends up serving as little more than an audience insert and Rutger Hauer being cast as a tragic romantic hero In a way that simply doesn't play to his strengths as an actor, I found Ladyhawke to be a rather dull and unremarkable movie.

There's some fun stuff in there, mostly in the performances of the supporting cast. Leo McKern as a drunk old priest and John Wood as a sneering evil bishop were enjoyable to watch and the movie has a jarring but strangely catchy funky synthesizer score, courtesy of Alan Parson, that really elevates some of its sequences, especially in the first act. Some nice visuals too, this gets a lot of mileage out of otherwordly pink skies and green fields. Not fully naturalistic but also not leaning fully into studio artifice.

Overall, though, this just didn't really do it for me. This just never gets corny and sentimental enough to work as a tragic romantic melodrama (and Rutger Hauer really wouldn't have been the right lead for that...) and it never gets exciting and adventurous enough to work as an action adventure. Much like it's two romantic leads, it exists in a transitional twilight where the two almost but not quite meet. There is also the fact that it very much feels like a movie relying on the strength of its premise, the sort of archetypal appeal of its whole cursed lovers setup, to the point it never feelt the need to write a satisfying narrative outline around it. The whole climax and resolution just fell really flat to me. Somehow Princess Bride, a parody of this sort of movie, hit the actual dramatic beats more effectively than this straight faced approach.

It's a valid attempt at a fantastical romance adventure movie but it just doesn't quite get there. It's kind of interesting to think that one year later, Highlander came out which I feel goes for a broadly similar flavour of fantasy cheese but executes it much more effectively and compellingly. Ladyhawke is probably one of the less remembered products of this era of fantasy, compared to trailblazers like Conan or Excalibur or indeed Highlander and I can't in good conscience say it deserves better. It's not iconic or well executed enough to warrant being considered a genre classic. There's likeable stuff in there but for me it never added up to anything genuinely remarkable.
 

thebobmaster

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You ever have that feeling watching a movie that everyone loves, and when you finally get around to it, you get the reason everyone loves it?

Yeah, I just went through the opposite of that in every way.

 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Legend (1985)

Fantasy movie directed by Ridley Scott, right off the heels of Blade Runner and starring a young Tom Cruise and Mia Sara.

This movie is... interesting. When I wrote about Ladyhawke, I wrote that it's somewhere in the middle between naturalistic and stylized. Legend completely embraces the stylized approach. This has all the super elaborate sets and costumes and lighting of something like Blade Runner even though it is, make no mistake, a movie that's not remotely as good as Blade Runner.

Legend is about Princess Sara and her boyfriend Jack. After Sara commits the sin of... petting a unicorn, a dark winter falls over the unnamed fairy tale kingdom they live in and she falls into the clutches of evil demon Lord Darkness and his Goblin minions. Jack goes on a quest to save her, accompanied by a whimsical fellowship of elves, dwarves and fairies.

And that really is the defining word here, "whimsical". Legend, more than anything else, feels like some sort of live action Disney Princess movie, musical numbers and all. It presents this heightened, almost dreamlike, fantasy world that never exactly feels real or lived in the way Blade Runner 's dystopian Los Angeles or Alien's Nostromo does but more like a very detailed painting come to life. The defining aesthetic of Legend is unapologetic kitsch, between its goofy costumes and puppets and sugary sweet score. It's honestly one of the best examples of how older fantasy movies were struggling to find the right tone.

Is Legend going for something epic? Something cutesy? Something kind of dark? Something adventurous? At the end of the day, it is a bit of everything and it's charming as it is very silly. There's some incredibly fun stuff in there, especially in some of the over the top performances. David Bennett as elf boy Gump is hilarious but Tim Curry as the villain is the absolute star of the show. When he's first introduced we only get to hear his voice and Tim Curry of course stands as one of the all time great evil british men, but once he actually appears on screen... well, it needs to be seen to be believed. The costume he's wearing as arch devil Darkness is absolutely iconic. To borrow my own phrasing, I think I described him as "Chernobogdanoff". It really is amazing.

What I'm saying is, this movie is fun. I'd hesitate to say it's actually good because... I don't think this can be considered a good screenplay or a well paced story by any stretch of the imagination. Not really. But it has a lot of silly and entertaining bits that add up to a fairly good time. Let me put it this way, it's a movie where very little time passes without something fun happening. Either a memorable dialogue or an interesting visual set piece or a goofy side character... it never gets dull.

It's an interesting movie, really. It's just impressive to see this level of craft and production value invested in something so... camp. It's a ridiculous glam rock fairy tale that feels very much unlike the grittier, more naturalistic approach of something like Conan or Ladyhawke. Incredibly stylish, almost expressionistic and flamboyant. While I don't think it's up there with Sir Ridley's best (Matter of fact, if anything it serves as a reminder that he was never very good at telling a strong script from a weak one) it's honestly worth watching. If only for Tim Curry's costume and performance.
 
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thebobmaster

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