Play It Again, Sam (Herbert Ross, 1972) 6/10
The Boys in the Band (William Friedkin, 1970) 6/10
Fortunat (Alex Joffé, 1960) 6/10
Two great stars from the opposite spectrum come together and create great chemistry. During the German occupation of France a posh bourgeois woman (Michèle Morgan) and her two children are in great danger when her husband, working for the Resistance, is captured by the Nazis. Trapped on the wrong side of the Demarcation line, they are provided an escape route by an old school teacher (Gaby Morlay). She gets a simple minded drunk poacher (Bourvil) to take them across the river into the French-controlled Zone to wait out the War. Posing as a couple the two gradually find themselves growing close as they befriend a jewish family living next door. A film about hope and love in the midst of a terrible war raging around two lonely people.
Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) 10/10
After a string of very funny light comedies capped by the Oscar winning "Annie Hall", Woody Allen came up with this stark and very bleak drama. Clearly an homage to his idol, Ingmar Bergman, the film with it's series of opening static shots as the camera views the interior of a beach cottage - a look at a sofa placed against a window, a quick shot of pottery on the fireplace and a look at the dining room through half-open french doors - is reminiscent of the films of the great Swedish director. Although in truth the drama that follows evokes plays by Eugene O'Neill with flashes of Anton Chekov. The film works brilliantly due to the choices made by Allen - a small cast of 8, sparse production design with everything in a muted colour palette and most especially the brilliant lighting by Gordon Willis who keeps depressed and isolated characters in shadows while upbeat characters are brightly lit. Using light in this dramatic way the film highlights every mood that a character is feeling. The film's pivotal character is an interior designer (Geraldine Page), a perfectionist with strongly critical views, whose carefully laid out life suddenly falls to pieces when her husband of many years (E. G. Marshall), a wealthy lawyer, calmly announces at the dining table that he wants a trial separation and later in the story introduces a vivacious divorcée (Maureen Stapleton) he's met on a cruise whom he wants to marry. The couple have three grown-up daughters - a successful poet (Diane Keaton) married to an alcoholic would-be writer (Richard Jordan), an aimless neurotic (Mary Beth Hurt) living with a congenial filmmaker (Sam Waterston) and a pretty but vapid actress (Kristin Griffith). The news of the parents' separation, divorce and father's remarriage effects the daughters but devastates their mother who first remains in denial and then attempts suicide. Page, in the role first offered to Ingrid Bergman - who ironically had to turn down the offer because she was about to shoot her first film with Ingmar Bergman - gives a remarkable performance. There is a stunning stillness about her character which Allen drew out of the actress after many arguments as Page always had a tendency to be very mannered - the scenes of her silently fiddling with a painting on the wall, fidgeting with a vase on a table and insisting on placing a particular chair in a spot where it blends into the overall colour scheme (all pale blues, beige and whites) are beautifully performed by the star. Allen does allow her a scene of hysteria inside a church which is also performed with great subtlety as she first loses control, knocking down candles, but quickly composes herself as she runs down the aisle. In complete contrast to her is the second wife - loud, happy, friendly, slightly vulgar and dressed in dramatic reds and black. Stapleton sharply stands out not only amongst the overall colour scheme of the entire film but as an antidote to all the other repressed and morose characters. Check out her red camisole during the dramatic scene on the beach as she vividly stands out in contrast to the pale yellow sand and the grey crashing waves. Though every other character is fragile, they all revolve around mother Geraldine Page, the least stable of an unstable clan. This is the only film amongst Allen's other dramas without a single joke. It is played dead serious, and hence is incredibly jarring, which is exactly what makes it one of his most affecting films. Allen was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction and screenplay as were Page and Stapleton for their superb contrasting performances. The film is a masterpiece and a must-see.
Killers of Kilimanjaro (Richard Thorpe, 1959) 5/10
Typical film in the African-safari genre, this B-film has wonderful widescreen photography by Ted Moore. Otherwise its a standard adventure film more or less on the lines of "King Solomon's Mines" as a group takes a trip deep into the African wilds led by an engineer (Robert Taylor) who is building a railway track. Along on the trip are his assistant (Anthony Newley) - the comic relief - the lone white woman (Anne Aubrey) in search of her missing father and fiancé and a young stowaway (John Dimech - who would play the boy Peter O'Toole shoots in "Lawrence of Arabia"). The boy happens to be the son of the local slave trader (Grégoire Aslan) who puts obstacles in the way of the group. Colourful location scenery with obligatory shots of assorted animals along with an ageing but still robust Robert Taylor make this a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes even though it's all very familiar.
Curse of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou, 2006) 8/10
As in all of Yimou's epic films its the spectacular imagery that stays with you - the stunning cinematography and the detailed production design and costumes (nominated for an Academy Award), with its swirl of dramatic colours - the vibrant reds, yellows, blues and greens. Bloodshed is very much part of every plot as savage violence shatters royal families very much like in the tragedies of Shakepeare's plays. This intense family melodrama, set in the Imperial court of the Tang dynasty in ancient China, plays like grand opera. The beautiful Empress (Gong Li), who has been having an affair with her step son, is slowly being poisoned by the all-knowing Emperor (Chow Yun-Fat). Her own two sons by him are loyal to her. Meanwhile the Prince is in love with the court physician's daughter and plans to run away with her. When he rejects the further sexual advances of the Empress a chain of events is set in motion by her which also involves the physician's wife who holds a terrible secret from the Emperor's past. The resulting palace intrigue ends in a stupendous battle leading to fratricide and filicide. As in all such films the martial arts action set pieces come off rudimentary but still manage to maintain a sense of awe as the graceful balletic movements by the soldiers appear hypnotic. Most Western critics found the film to be an over-the-top soap opera hiding inside a veneer of colour and spectacle. It is all that and more and perfectly in keeping with the kind of entertainment public in the East looks for. Quiet drama one can always find within the privacy of one's own home. At the cinema the audience looks for wild entertainment. And Yimou knows just how to provide it.
The Boys in the Band (Joe Mantello, 2020) 8/10
Matt Crowley's hit 1968 Off-Broadway play was first filmed in 1970 and then years later revived to great acclaim on its 50th anniversary on Broadway in 2018. This screen remake has the entire cast from the Broadway revival reprise their roles. A group of gay friends gather at the New York City apartment of Michael (Jim Parsons) to celebrate the birthday of their morose, ageing friend Harold (Zachary Quinto). They are later joined by the host's married college friend and a young cowboy stud who is a gift for the birthday boy. As the evening wears on and the host gets drunk he turns on his married friend who has insulted one of the guests and goads him into coming out of the closet. What starts out as a humourous evening full of laughter suddenly turns nasty as every guest ends up revealing hidden skeletons. Ground breaking play was the first to openly present gay characters and treat them with sensitivity. Through the bittersweet but often hilarious dialogue and the intentionally self homophobic and low esteemed characters the play brought to the masses a frank look at gay relationships. The entire cast is superb with Zachary Quinto playing Harold with a jarringly mannered affectation gleefully passing thorny quips at his friends as they all disolve, one by one, into quivering hysteria. The constantly swooping camera manages to make the cramped apartment set seem vast.
Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Military Wives (Peter Catteneo, 2020) 5/10
Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) 8/10
The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957) 8/10
An itinerant rural worker (Peter Finch) finds his unfaithful wife (Elizabeth Sellars) in bed with her lover (George Rose), beats him up, takes his young daughter (Dana Wilson) and goes back travailling the outback on the lookout for jobs. Heartwarming story as the two bond and meet an assortment of people from his past - a loveable drunken lug (Niall MacGinnis), a woman (Rosemary Harris) he had an affair with, her angry father (Russell Napier) and a jovial couple (Sidney James & Tessie O'Shea) who take them in when the child falls sick. The child is the "shiralee", an Irish or Aboriginal word meaning "swag", or metaphorically, a "burden." The plot turns sentimental and melodramatic when the child has an accident and his wife tries to gain custody of the daughter. Finch is superb as the wild and furiously independent swagman and is matched by feisty Dana Wilson who stands by her father through thick and thin. Memorable film was shot on location in the outbacks of New South Wales.
Blackbird (Roger Michell, 2020) 6/10
A family gathering centered around the upcoming planned death of a matriarch (Susan Sarandon) makes for a rather morbid and predictable drama. Variations of this plot have come before as long-simmering family toxicity rises to the surface causing consternation and hilarity. A woman, suffering from ALS, plans to end her life on the weekend she has asked her close family members to gather by her side. Her husband (Sam Neill), quietly grieving, is a doctor. The older uptight daughter (Kate Winslet), stuck in a dull marriage to a nerd (Rainn Wilson), is judgemental and controlling. The younger "troubled" daughter (Mia Wasikowska), upset at the upcoming proceeding, arrives late with her lesbian lover harbouring secrets of her own. Both sisters have been perpetually at war with each other and never see eye to eye. Also invited is the dying woman's oldest friend (Lindsay Duncan) whose presence is silently resented by the older daughter. As the weekend progresses prickly issues surface causing emotional outbursts resulting in yet more skeletons crawling out of the woodwork. Remake of Billie August's Danish film "Silent Night" is manipulative as it wrings tears and laughter in equal measure. The entire cast works beautifully together - though it is a bit of a stretch to accept Winslet as the dowdy daughter - with Sarandon sublime as the warm brave woman who insists on handling her life her own way. The highlight of the film is the magnificent house this maudlin drama plays out in. The beach front property is supposed to be in Connecticut but is actually located in Chichester, England. With its honey-toned natural lighting adding to the general fakeness of the whole enterprise the film still manages to score points even though it smells of stale deja vu.
Raat Akeli Hai (Honey Trehan, 2020) 5/10
On the eve of his marriage to a much younger woman an old man is found shot and bludgeoned to death. A wily small-town cop (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) discovers a house full of depraved suspects amongst the family members. Incest, paedophilia, murder, abortion, kidnapping, extramarital sex are just some of the issues the cop has to sift through to find the murderer. Whodunit takes on the mantle of Agatha Christie's "Hercule Poirot" with the cop gathering all the suspects in one room at the end before announcing the complicated manoeuvres that led to the killing. Siddiqui is great fun to watch as the fearless and relentless cop even though the plot seems rather contrived.
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) 9/10
Exquisitely produced adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about old and rigid New York society during the gilded age. Scorsese touches on his favorite city once again but this time he sees a very different aspect of it - a world of wealth where people's polished lives are controlled by tightly held rigid rules even though underneath runs a silent streak of machinations. Wharton's vivid description of how the rich lived is brought to the screen with impeccable detail as the camera of Michael Ballhaus glides like a snake through oppulent drawing rooms filled with lovely period furniture, glancing along the way at delicate crystal ornaments on display around the rooms, perfect crockery and cutlery laid out on dining tables - Dante Ferretti's production design along with Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar winning costumes are beyond exemplary as they help to create a world that no longer exists. An eclectic cast of character actors - Alec McCowen, Geraldine Chaplin, Richard E. Grant, the outstanding Miriam Margolyes, Mary Beth Hurt, Stuart Wilson, Michael Gough, Siân Phillips, Alexis Smith, Jonathan Pryce and Robert Sean Leonard (narration by Joanne Woodward) - play the assorted family members who gravitate around the three main protagonists forming the tragic social love triangle. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), a promising young lawyer and heir to one of the prominent families, is engaged to the highly sheltered and beautiful May Welland (Winona Ryder) which is considered in society to be the perfect match. Into their lives arrives her cousin the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) who has left her husband after a scandal and who continues to flout the rules of society with her european sensibility and forward ways. Archer falls in love with her and has to decide if he should live in a passionless marriage with a woman who fits into society versus living with the woman whom he loves but who is deemed an outcast by society. This sense of loss, sadness, resignation, repressed longing and spiritual suffering is presented by Scorsese with elegant authority.
2 States (Abhishek Varman, 2014) 6/10
Overlong but fun film about the trials and tribulations of marrying someone outside the comfort of your own "community" (a clash between Tamil & Punjabi). The obvious comedic and heartache elements aside, the film is a success due to the extraordinary chemistry of the two young stars - Arjun Kapoor and especially Alia Bhatt who is the most natural actress to emerge on the Bollywood scene in a long while. Her smile lights up the screen exactly how decades ago the great Madhuri Dixit managed to charm audiences. I'm glad to see that her last film, Highway, was not a fluke and she has the makings of a great star. Also worth a mention is the great South Indian star, Revathy, who has a marvelous moment in the spotlight as she sings in front of an audience. A wonderful rom-com. But yes, it goes on too long.
La donna più bella del mondo/ The World's Most Beautiful Woman (Robert Z. Leonard, 1956) 6/10
Lollobrigida sings opera and she has a fantastic voice. Fluffy screen biography - Mario Monicelli was one of the script writers - of Italian soprano, Lina Cavalieri (Gina Lollobrigida), and her rags to riches story from an orphan working the music halls to the toast of the opera world in Paris, Rome and New York. Along the way she falls in love with the Russian Prince Alexander Bariatinsky (Vittorio Gassman) who is not given permission by the Tsar to marry her. The crooked end of the love triangle is jealous Doria (Robert Alda), her tutor, who relentlessly pursues her, even resorting to murder. The film's highlight is a duel sequence between the leading lady and another singer. Superb production values and cinematography by Mario Bava. And the film's title perfectly fits the ravishing leading lady dressed to her teeth in gowns designed by Vittorio Nina Novarese.
The Lady and the Highwayman (John Hough, 1988) 6/10
Old fashioned romantic adventure, based on Barbara Cartland's book "Cupid Rides Pillion", is a rip-roaring boddice ripper from the old-school Gainsborough films of the 1940s. Swashbuckling tale of romance, betrayal and jealousy is set in England during the Restoration of King Charles II (Michael York). His jealous mistress (Emma Samms) sets the plot in motion when she views a young lady (Lysette Anthony) at court and suspects that she is making a play for the King. However, the young lady, instead, loves the mysterious highwayman (Hugh Grant) who rescued her from the lecherous man (Ian Bannen) she was forced to marry. The intrigues come fast and furious as the two lovers find themselves condemned to die in the Tower of London. An incredible cast of British character actors support the young leads - Claire Bloom, Oliver Reed - hamming it up as the dastardly villain, Sir John Mills, Bernard Miles, Christopher Cazenove, Robert Morley, Gareth Hunt. Lavishly produced by Lord Lew Grade with the use of actual castles for sets thus giving the film an exotic flavour.
Vie privée / A Very Private Affair (Louis Malle, 1962) 8/10
Malle perfectly captures the trauma and boredom of a star trapped in the limelight as paparazzi hound her private life into oblivion. The main character could be any number of stars who experienced fame and lived to regret it but with Brigitte Bardot playing the part the story takes on a very personal look at the private and public life of a star. She was then the world's most famous sex symbol, having taken over the mantle from Marilyn Monroe, and faced not only much adulation but also hatred as the press and public fêted her and also called her a whore. The screenplay - autobiographical in nature with regards to some incidents and details - charts the rise to stardom of a young woman (Brigitte Bardot) - from budding ballerina to a full fledged movie star - and her attempts to escape from the stalking mobs of fans. An Italian opera director (Marcello Mastroianni), her friend's former husband, attempts to shield her from the ravages of fame. Malle uses saturated colours as Henri Decae's dazzling cinematography lovingly captures not only Bardot in all her glory but the visual splendors of Lake Geneva, Paris and Spoleto. The only thing amiss in the production is the shocking lack of chemistry between the two sex symbols - Bardot & Mastroianni. The stars did not get along on set and the film got mostly bad reviews. Watching it today, 58 years on, the film remains spot-on as it scathingly reveals the downside of celebrity which through the years we have witnessed many famous people go that route - while Burton and Taylor enjoyed the relentless attention, it took on a tragic overtone for Princess Diana. The film creates echoes of both.
Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979) 2/10
One more in a long series of disaster films that graced the screens during the 1970s. This was also one of many that got hideous reviews but its no worse than many that came during the later decades. The formula remained the same. Hire an A-list cast and put them in the middle of a catastrophic event and root for the most ridiculous character to die in gruesome fashion. Here we have a 5-mile long meteor hurtling towards earth and the American and Russian governments join hands to destroy the giant boulder mid-air in space using missiles which had initially been placed by the two countries facing each other. An American scientist (Sean Connery), with a strong Scottish accent, and his Russian counterpart (Brian Keith) attempt to join hands to avert the disaster that threatens to obliterate mankind. Helping the two men converse is a translator (Natalie Wood) who is basically the female lead but with nothing much to do except look elegant even when covered from head to toe in slimy green mud. As the smaller meteor showers begin to hit earth we get to see Hong Kong drown in a huge tidal wave, a gigantic avalanche hits Europe and New York gets decimated by the first wave of the meteor shower - the World Trade Center Twin Towers are the first to implode in an eerie image of things to come. An eclectic supporting cast - Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Richard Dysart, Joseph Campanella - play assorted government officials while Henry Fonda, as the U.S. President, makes an impassioned speech. The surviving cast take shelter in a subway station below Manhattan but almost drown in a flood of flowing mud. The effects, which were nominated for an Academy Award, are shoddy beyond belief. Wood, who was of Russian origin, took on this thankless role because it was the first time in her career that she got to play a Russian speaking the language fluently on screen. Too bad she speaks english with an accent that sounds exactly like the spanish accent she put on years earlier in "West Side Story". Truly a disaster of a film.
The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978) 1/10
So much talent and all wasted in this turd of a film. America appears to be permanently jinxed if Hollywood is to be believed as yet once more disaster strikes courtesy of Irwin Allen. Killer African bees are on a rampage and out to get the crème de la crème of Hollywood stars playing assorted boring characters - a scientist (Michael Caine), a doctor (Katharine Ross), a General (Richard Widmark), a soldier (Bradford Dillman), a wheel-chair bound doctor (Henry Fonda) who fatally experiments with an antidote drug, a country bumpkin (Slim Pickens), a pregnant café waitress (Patty Duke), a sassy tv reporter (Lee Grant), an inventor of poison pellets (Richard Chamberlain), a nuclear power plant manager (José Ferrer) and a trio of geriatrics - a small-town mayor and drugstore owner (Fred MacMurray), a school superintendent (Olivia de Havilland) and a retiree (Ben Johnson) - involved in a love triangle. Ross gets stung and hallucinates, a nuclear power plant explodes, a runaway train crashes and falls down a mountain, assorted cars crash and blow up, a familiy at a picnic get stung to death and the bees attack helicopters making them crash. The silly denouement involves the discovery that the bees are attracted to the sound of an alarm siren as it resembles the mating sound of the Queen Bee. Needless to say the swarm is then lured towards the call of the siren, doused in oil and zapped with missiles over the Gulf of Mexico. Absurd and extremely tacky film inexplicably even
managed to get an Academy Award nomination for costume design. The production used 15-22 million bees and of the huge cast only screen legend Olivia de Havilland got stung. Absolute crap and one of the worst films of all time.
Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) 8/10
The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957) 8/10
An itinerant rural worker (Peter Finch) finds his unfaithful wife (Elizabeth Sellars) in bed with her lover (George Rose), beats him up, takes his young daughter (Dana Wilson) and goes back travailling the outback on the lookout for jobs. Heartwarming story as the two bond and meet an assortment of people from his past - a loveable drunken lug (Niall MacGinnis), a woman (Rosemary Harris) he had an affair with, her angry father (Russell Napier) and a jovial couple (Sidney James & Tessie O'Shea) who take them in when the child falls sick. The child is the "shiralee", an Irish or Aboriginal word meaning "swag", or metaphorically, a "burden." The plot turns sentimental and melodramatic when the child has an accident and his wife tries to gain custody of the daughter. Finch is superb as the wild and furiously independent swagman and is matched by feisty Dana Wilson who stands by her father through thick and thin. Memorable film was shot on location in the outbacks of New South Wales.
Blackbird (Roger Michell, 2020) 6/10
A family gathering centered around the upcoming planned death of a matriarch (Susan Sarandon) makes for a rather morbid and predictable drama. Variations of this plot have come before as long-simmering family toxicity rises to the surface causing consternation and hilarity. A woman, suffering from ALS, plans to end her life on the weekend she has asked her close family members to gather by her side. Her husband (Sam Neill), quietly grieving, is a doctor. The older uptight daughter (Kate Winslet), stuck in a dull marriage to a nerd (Rainn Wilson), is judgemental and controlling. The younger "troubled" daughter (Mia Wasikowska), upset at the upcoming proceeding, arrives late with her lesbian lover harbouring secrets of her own. Both sisters have been perpetually at war with each other and never see eye to eye. Also invited is the dying woman's oldest friend (Lindsay Duncan) whose presence is silently resented by the older daughter. As the weekend progresses prickly issues surface causing emotional outbursts resulting in yet more skeletons crawling out of the woodwork. Remake of Billie August's Danish film "Silent Night" is manipulative as it wrings tears and laughter in equal measure. The entire cast works beautifully together - though it is a bit of a stretch to accept Winslet as the dowdy daughter - with Sarandon sublime as the warm brave woman who insists on handling her life her own way. The highlight of the film is the magnificent house this maudlin drama plays out in. The beach front property is supposed to be in Connecticut but is actually located in Chichester, England. With its honey-toned natural lighting adding to the general fakeness of the whole enterprise the film still manages to score points even though it smells of stale deja vu.
Raat Akeli Hai (Honey Trehan, 2020) 5/10
On the eve of his marriage to a much younger woman an old man is found shot and bludgeoned to death. A wily small-town cop (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) discovers a house full of depraved suspects amongst the family members. Incest, paedophilia, murder, abortion, kidnapping, extramarital sex are just some of the issues the cop has to sift through to find the murderer. Whodunit takes on the mantle of Agatha Christie's "Hercule Poirot" with the cop gathering all the suspects in one room at the end before announcing the complicated manoeuvres that led to the killing. Siddiqui is great fun to watch as the fearless and relentless cop even though the plot seems rather contrived.
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) 9/10
Exquisitely produced adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel about old and rigid New York society during the gilded age. Scorsese touches on his favorite city once again but this time he sees a very different aspect of it - a world of wealth where people's polished lives are controlled by tightly held rigid rules even though underneath runs a silent streak of machinations. Wharton's vivid description of how the rich lived is brought to the screen with impeccable detail as the camera of Michael Ballhaus glides like a snake through oppulent drawing rooms filled with lovely period furniture, glancing along the way at delicate crystal ornaments on display around the rooms, perfect crockery and cutlery laid out on dining tables - Dante Ferretti's production design along with Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar winning costumes are beyond exemplary as they help to create a world that no longer exists. An eclectic cast of character actors - Alec McCowen, Geraldine Chaplin, Richard E. Grant, the outstanding Miriam Margolyes, Mary Beth Hurt, Stuart Wilson, Michael Gough, Siân Phillips, Alexis Smith, Jonathan Pryce and Robert Sean Leonard (narration by Joanne Woodward) - play the assorted family members who gravitate around the three main protagonists forming the tragic social love triangle. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), a promising young lawyer and heir to one of the prominent families, is engaged to the highly sheltered and beautiful May Welland (Winona Ryder) which is considered in society to be the perfect match. Into their lives arrives her cousin the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) who has left her husband after a scandal and who continues to flout the rules of society with her european sensibility and forward ways. Archer falls in love with her and has to decide if he should live in a passionless marriage with a woman who fits into society versus living with the woman whom he loves but who is deemed an outcast by society. This sense of loss, sadness, resignation, repressed longing and spiritual suffering is presented by Scorsese with elegant authority.
2 States (Abhishek Varman, 2014) 6/10
Overlong but fun film about the trials and tribulations of marrying someone outside the comfort of your own "community" (a clash between Tamil & Punjabi). The obvious comedic and heartache elements aside, the film is a success due to the extraordinary chemistry of the two young stars - Arjun Kapoor and especially Alia Bhatt who is the most natural actress to emerge on the Bollywood scene in a long while. Her smile lights up the screen exactly how decades ago the great Madhuri Dixit managed to charm audiences. I'm glad to see that her last film, Highway, was not a fluke and she has the makings of a great star. Also worth a mention is the great South Indian star, Revathy, who has a marvelous moment in the spotlight as she sings in front of an audience. A wonderful rom-com. But yes, it goes on too long.
La donna più bella del mondo/ The World's Most Beautiful Woman (Robert Z. Leonard, 1956) 6/10
Lollobrigida sings opera and she has a fantastic voice. Fluffy screen biography - Mario Monicelli was one of the script writers - of Italian soprano, Lina Cavalieri (Gina Lollobrigida), and her rags to riches story from an orphan working the music halls to the toast of the opera world in Paris, Rome and New York. Along the way she falls in love with the Russian Prince Alexander Bariatinsky (Vittorio Gassman) who is not given permission by the Tsar to marry her. The crooked end of the love triangle is jealous Doria (Robert Alda), her tutor, who relentlessly pursues her, even resorting to murder. The film's highlight is a duel sequence between the leading lady and another singer. Superb production values and cinematography by Mario Bava. And the film's title perfectly fits the ravishing leading lady dressed to her teeth in gowns designed by Vittorio Nina Novarese.
The Lady and the Highwayman (John Hough, 1988) 6/10
Old fashioned romantic adventure, based on Barbara Cartland's book "Cupid Rides Pillion", is a rip-roaring boddice ripper from the old-school Gainsborough films of the 1940s. Swashbuckling tale of romance, betrayal and jealousy is set in England during the Restoration of King Charles II (Michael York). His jealous mistress (Emma Samms) sets the plot in motion when she views a young lady (Lysette Anthony) at court and suspects that she is making a play for the King. However, the young lady, instead, loves the mysterious highwayman (Hugh Grant) who rescued her from the lecherous man (Ian Bannen) she was forced to marry. The intrigues come fast and furious as the two lovers find themselves condemned to die in the Tower of London. An incredible cast of British character actors support the young leads - Claire Bloom, Oliver Reed - hamming it up as the dastardly villain, Sir John Mills, Bernard Miles, Christopher Cazenove, Robert Morley, Gareth Hunt. Lavishly produced by Lord Lew Grade with the use of actual castles for sets thus giving the film an exotic flavour.
Vie privée / A Very Private Affair (Louis Malle, 1962) 8/10
Malle perfectly captures the trauma and boredom of a star trapped in the limelight as paparazzi hound her private life into oblivion. The main character could be any number of stars who experienced fame and lived to regret it but with Brigitte Bardot playing the part the story takes on a very personal look at the private and public life of a star. She was then the world's most famous sex symbol, having taken over the mantle from Marilyn Monroe, and faced not only much adulation but also hatred as the press and public fêted her and also called her a whore. The screenplay - autobiographical in nature with regards to some incidents and details - charts the rise to stardom of a young woman (Brigitte Bardot) - from budding ballerina to a full fledged movie star - and her attempts to escape from the stalking mobs of fans. An Italian opera director (Marcello Mastroianni), her friend's former husband, attempts to shield her from the ravages of fame. Malle uses saturated colours as Henri Decae's dazzling cinematography lovingly captures not only Bardot in all her glory but the visual splendors of Lake Geneva, Paris and Spoleto. The only thing amiss in the production is the shocking lack of chemistry between the two sex symbols - Bardot & Mastroianni. The stars did not get along on set and the film got mostly bad reviews. Watching it today, 58 years on, the film remains spot-on as it scathingly reveals the downside of celebrity which through the years we have witnessed many famous people go that route - while Burton and Taylor enjoyed the relentless attention, it took on a tragic overtone for Princess Diana. The film creates echoes of both.
Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979) 2/10
One more in a long series of disaster films that graced the screens during the 1970s. This was also one of many that got hideous reviews but its no worse than many that came during the later decades. The formula remained the same. Hire an A-list cast and put them in the middle of a catastrophic event and root for the most ridiculous character to die in gruesome fashion. Here we have a 5-mile long meteor hurtling towards earth and the American and Russian governments join hands to destroy the giant boulder mid-air in space using missiles which had initially been placed by the two countries facing each other. An American scientist (Sean Connery), with a strong Scottish accent, and his Russian counterpart (Brian Keith) attempt to join hands to avert the disaster that threatens to obliterate mankind. Helping the two men converse is a translator (Natalie Wood) who is basically the female lead but with nothing much to do except look elegant even when covered from head to toe in slimy green mud. As the smaller meteor showers begin to hit earth we get to see Hong Kong drown in a huge tidal wave, a gigantic avalanche hits Europe and New York gets decimated by the first wave of the meteor shower - the World Trade Center Twin Towers are the first to implode in an eerie image of things to come. An eclectic supporting cast - Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Richard Dysart, Joseph Campanella - play assorted government officials while Henry Fonda, as the U.S. President, makes an impassioned speech. The surviving cast take shelter in a subway station below Manhattan but almost drown in a flood of flowing mud. The effects, which were nominated for an Academy Award, are shoddy beyond belief. Wood, who was of Russian origin, took on this thankless role because it was the first time in her career that she got to play a Russian speaking the language fluently on screen. Too bad she speaks english with an accent that sounds exactly like the spanish accent she put on years earlier in "West Side Story". Truly a disaster of a film.
The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978) 1/10
So much talent and all wasted in this turd of a film. America appears to be permanently jinxed if Hollywood is to be believed as yet once more disaster strikes courtesy of Irwin Allen. Killer African bees are on a rampage and out to get the crème de la crème of Hollywood stars playing assorted boring characters - a scientist (Michael Caine), a doctor (Katharine Ross), a General (Richard Widmark), a soldier (Bradford Dillman), a wheel-chair bound doctor (Henry Fonda) who fatally experiments with an antidote drug, a country bumpkin (Slim Pickens), a pregnant café waitress (Patty Duke), a sassy tv reporter (Lee Grant), an inventor of poison pellets (Richard Chamberlain), a nuclear power plant manager (José Ferrer) and a trio of geriatrics - a small-town mayor and drugstore owner (Fred MacMurray), a school superintendent (Olivia de Havilland) and a retiree (Ben Johnson) - involved in a love triangle. Ross gets stung and hallucinates, a nuclear power plant explodes, a runaway train crashes and falls down a mountain, assorted cars crash and blow up, a familiy at a picnic get stung to death and the bees attack helicopters making them crash. The silly denouement involves the discovery that the bees are attracted to the sound of an alarm siren as it resembles the mating sound of the Queen Bee. Needless to say the swarm is then lured towards the call of the siren, doused in oil and zapped with missiles over the Gulf of Mexico. Absurd and extremely tacky film inexplicably even
managed to get an Academy Award nomination for costume design. The production used 15-22 million bees and of the huge cast only screen legend Olivia de Havilland got stung. Absolute crap and one of the worst films of all time.
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Lenz (1982) Alexandre Rockwell 3/10
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008) Josh Safdie 6/10
The Second Child (1979) Phillip Garrel 4/10
Alexander: Again and Forever (1989) Youssef Chahine 4/10
Sivas (2014) Kaan Müjdeci 5/10
The Artful Penetration of Barbara (1969) Tinto Brass 6/10
The Howl (1970) Tinto Brass 2/10
The Goddess of Fortune (2019) Ferzan Ozpetek 7/10
Deadly Sweet (1967) Tinto Brass 2/10
Repeat viewings
Toto the Hero (1991) Jaco Van Dormael 9/10
True Confessions (1981) Ulu Grosbard 7/10
Pat and Mike (1952) George Cukor 7/10
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008) Josh Safdie 6/10
The Second Child (1979) Phillip Garrel 4/10
Alexander: Again and Forever (1989) Youssef Chahine 4/10
Sivas (2014) Kaan Müjdeci 5/10
The Artful Penetration of Barbara (1969) Tinto Brass 6/10
The Howl (1970) Tinto Brass 2/10
The Goddess of Fortune (2019) Ferzan Ozpetek 7/10
Deadly Sweet (1967) Tinto Brass 2/10
Repeat viewings
Toto the Hero (1991) Jaco Van Dormael 9/10
True Confessions (1981) Ulu Grosbard 7/10
Pat and Mike (1952) George Cukor 7/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Mr Jones (Agnieszka Holland, 2019) 5/10
The Virtuous Sin (George Cukor & Louis J. Gasnier, 1930) 5/10
Rollover (Alan J. Pakulla, 1981) 4/10
Amnesia (Barbet Schroeder, 2015) 8/10
A Good Woman is Hard to Find (Abner Pastoll, 2019) 7/10
Gritty revenge thriller which starts off like a Ken Loach kitchen-sink drama. A young widow (Sarah Bolger), whose husband was murdered, lives an almost hand-to-mouth existence, with her two kids in a bleak Irish town. Her son has become mute after witnessing the stabbing of his father and the police are antipathic in their resolve to find the murderer. When out of the blue a drug dealer breaks into her house with a stash of stolen cocaine she decides to take the matter into her own hands which involves a large hammer and a chainsaw. Matters turn even more grim when the local mob boss turns up on her doorstep looking for the man who stole his drugs. Fast moving drama has a fantastic performance by Sarah Bolger as the sad and lonely woman who is absolutely sick of being treated like dirt - by police officers, a social worker, the drug dealer, even her own mother - who are constantly assessing her appearance and parenting skills with barely veiled disapproval. She snaps. But in a good way, discovering hidden courage within herself. Her priority is the safety of her children and she will do anything to protect them. The screenplay, with shades of extreme black humour, goes for the jugular as she calmly confronts the mob leading to not only blood-soaked mayhem but making this into a strong feminist fantasy.
Varian's War (Lionel Chetwynd, 2001) 5/10
The human interest story, revolving around the persecution of jews during the War, is one of the few genres that has been consistent on Hollywood's roll call of film projects. This is about one of only five Americans who actively helped jews escape the Nazi blight in Europe. Varian Fry (William Hurt), a journalist, ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The film was criticized for its publicity machine calling Fry the "American Schindler". Fry made up a list of prominent intellectuals and artists and tried to get them out of Marseilles by using forged travel documents. Helping him was another American (Julia Ormond) and a forger (Alan Arkin). The artists he helps are Alma Mahler (Lynn Redgrave), Marc Chagall, his wife, Hannah Arendt and others. Since these are famous people, forged travel documents are not enough to save them, so Fry takes them over the Pyrenees into Spain. Plodding film plays havoc with actual events and is not helped by Hurt with his annoying stop-motion style of dialogue delivery and body movements which becomes a distraction.
Orca: The Killer Whale (Michael Anderson, 1977) 4/10
Absurd rehash of "Jaws" which mixes elements from "Moby Dick". When a fisherman (Richard Harris) kills a pregnant killer whale and the unborn calf, its mate seeks revenge and comes after him causing death and destruction. Typical film in the genre which revolves around various set-pieces involving the Orca destroying boats and houses, chomping on an old sailor (Keenan Wynn) and biting off the leg of a student (Bo Derek in one of her early roles). Adding glamour to the proceedings is Charlotte Rampling as a scientist pissed-off at Harris for starting the whole mess. She studies killer whales and is around to pontificate about the mammal's high intelligence versus the fisherman's stupidity. Will Sampson is around to throw in a few of his own ancient Native-American theories about the revengeful nature of a wronged Orca. A showdown takes place amongst icebergs in the province of Labrador with the whale systematically picking off every human on the fisherman's boat finally leaving him and the scientist to confront the animal. Both Harris and Rampling look uncomfortable going through the motions. Hope they got a hefty paycheck for their troubles. Like John Williams' iconic score signalling the appearance of the shark in "Jaws", there is an attempt by Ennio Morricone to create suspense via his jangling score each time the whale goes into attack mode. Silly but watchable film.
Der letzte Mann / The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924) 10/10
Murnau's masterpiece is unique as it is one of the very few silent films with no intertitles. The film uses its spectacular imagery to tell the story with help from the production design by Edgar G. Ulmer, the expressionistic art direction by Robert Herlth & Walter Röhrig, the editing and the stunning lighting and camera movements of Karl Freund. At the center is the magnificent performance by Emil Jannings who uses his facial expressions and body movements to create the tragic central figure. A proud, ageing door attendant (Emil Jannings) of a posh hotel is suddenly demoted due to his frailty and assigned another job as a washroom attendant. Devastated at the turn of events he hides the fact from his friends and family but is discovered by a neighbour and soon faces scorn, ridicule and rejection by everyone. Classic film from the famous UFA studio in Berlin is a revealing look at German culture and identity. The film uses costume - the uniform worn by the door attendant - as a strong motif to explain its importance to the Germans. At the start Jannings is seen proudly wearing a resplendent doorman uniform with braids and huge shiny buttons which is not only his identity but also a means by which he is recognized and given respect. When he is later stripped of the uniform Jannings physically wilts in shame as his robust and vast body literally shrinks on screen. This typical German phenomena of the obsession with uniforms would soon take on a powerful and scary twist when the Nazis came to power. So much of their projection and strength lay in the power of their uniforms with the scarlet swastika on arm bands making a huge statement. The film's epilogue deviates from the natural course of how the story should have actually ended but was shot to show hope in a country still reeling under the effects of WWI. Tragically sad, profoundly affecting film is one the masterpieces of World Cinema and a must-see.
Herr Tartüff / Tartuffe (F. W. Murnau, 1925) 8/10
Molière's 17th-century play about the perils of hypocricy is given a fresh twist as a film-within-a-film. An old man, under the strong influence of his evil housekeeper, intends to disinherit his grandson. The young man disguises himself as an actor and coerces her into showing them a moving picture version of the play Tartuffe. The film within relates the story of a man (Werner Krauss) under the strong influence of Tartüff (Emil Jannings), a charlatan posing as a pious man, who has already robbed him of huge amounts of money. The man's wife (Lil Dagover) suspects him and tries to prove to her husband the evil man's intentions. The story has a fascinating subtext - that religion may implicate the act of seeing, where indoctrination blinds us from being able to see clearly the world around us. This is the problem when we put faith in something or somebody too willingly. And this remains all too relevent today as religion is often used as a means to brainwash people into submission. This is an inventive treatment of Moliere’s work, giving the age-old story a fresh look.
A Hazard of Hearts (John Hough, 1987) 5/10
Gothic intrigue, based on the boddice ripper by Barbara Cartland, is silly beyond belief, but the delightful cast are game and camp it up shamelessly. A compulsive gambler (Christopher Plummer) loses all, including his nubile daughter (Helena Bonham Carter), to an evil Lord (Edward Fox). With her honour in his hands at last greed gets the better of him and he loses her and the estate to young Lord Vulcan (Marcus Gilbert) on the gambling table. The young girl arrives at his house and is confronted by his bitchy mother (Diana Rigg) who is also a compulsive gambler running a secret smuggling operation on the side. It all ends with several dead bodies followed by a duel to the death between the hero and villain. It is all very dull and only made bearable by the superb cast also including Fiona Fullerton as another nubile lady vying for the hero's affections, Anna Massey and Eileen Atkins as maids and Stewart Granger as the hero's "dead" father who makes a sudden appearance. The film harks back to all the classic Gainsborough British productions of the 1940s which made huge stars of James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger, Phyllis Calvert and Patricia Roc.
The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007) 6/10
Schrader revisits his own "American Gigolo" in this tale about hypocricy and murder in the upper echelons of Washington D C. The "walker" of the title is a wealthy and flamboyant gay real-estate agent (Woody Harrelson) who is a popular escort to politicians' wives as he accompanies them to cultural events and social occasions which their husbands are too busy to attend. He is a good friend to a number of matrons (Lauren Bacall - who gets all the witty lines - Lily Tomlin, Marybeth Hurt) with whom he spends time gossiping and playing canasta. His close friend, the wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) of an important politician (Willem Dafoe), walks into her lover's house for a quick tryst and finds him stabbed to death. She asks her escort buddy to cover up for her in order to protect the career of her ambitious husband. He finds himself under investigation as the prime suspect in the murder case and all his once close friends start treating him like a pariah. Schrader's film is less about the murder and instead delves deep into the examination of the vipers operating in Washington society. The escort realizes how people he once trusted use and abuse each other. The vengeful, anti-liberal, homophobic administration pursues Carter and his young lover as they both try to find the murderer. This is a neat little mystery-thriller, superbly acted by a wonderful cast, in particular Harrelson with sly turns by both Ned Beatty and Liky Tomlin as another senator and his wife. The film is smartly designed and surprisingly filmed in London and the Isle of Mann which substitutes for the real Capitol - a few exterior shots of Washington are used to set the scene.
The 2nd (Brian Skiba, 2020) 1/10
Extremely stupid film that seems to have stitched together bits and pieces from different films in the terrorist genre. A Green Beret (Ryan Phllippe) is confronted by a group of terrorists when he goes to pick up his son from school. They are after the boy's girlfriend, the daughter of a Supreme Court judge who they plan to kidnap in order to force the judge's hand on a Second Amendment vote. Caspar Van Dien is the robot-like leader of the gang who he takes on through boring fight sequences. The screenplay appears to have been written by some amateur. Trashy film which should be avoided.
Shock and Awe (Rob Reiner, 2017) 6/10
The Bush Adminstration, trying for sometime to push out Saddam Hussain from Iraq, uses the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq citing the presence of weapons of mass destruction. The "theory" was to set up a Western-style democracy in the Middle East which would magically proliferate and wind up protecting Israel. Finding the whole idea prepostrous from the get-go are two journalists working for the American media company Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau. Both Warren Strobel (James Marsden) and Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) are skeptical about the President's claim that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. They are backed by their editor, John Walcott (Rob Reiner), and also helped by Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones), a correspondent, columnist and Military Affairs consultant for the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers. As the American government goes into a war frenzy these journalists observe their reputable colleagues at other top tier newspapers mistakenly perpetuate falsehoods fed by the war machine led by Donald Rumsfeld. Straightforward account of the events, as they played out, is purposely presented like a documentary by Reiner so that the homegrown public "get it" and see what their government is capable of. A romantic sub-plot between Strobel and a neighbour (Jessica Biel) goes nowhere although Reiner uses her as a mouthpiece explaining Muslim history in a few words. The film starts with a young African-American soldier, in a wheel-chair, bluntly asking a commitee why the country went to war which resulted in his injury which took place literally within the first few hours of his arrival in Iraq. A flashback involving the journalists' investigation leads to the answer which eventually resulted in a million dead Iraqis and thousands of dead American soldiers. The deception eventually came out some years later with the journalists finally winning awards for their work. Reiner's film is a good account of how the majority of the American public gets conned by their government and which sadly continues to this day looking at the kind of President who has been elected to power today.
A Study in Terror (James Hill, 1965) 6/10
When the Whitechapel district in the East End of London is beset with a spate of murders, Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) is summoned to solve the mystery. Jack the Ripper is on a rampage gruesomely butchering prostitutes in the area. Holmes and the trusted Dr Watson (Donald Houston) find themselves confronted with the mystery of a Lord's missing son, his facially scarred wife (Adrienne Corri) and a number of suspects - a local doctor (Anthony Quayle), a black mailing tavern owner (Peter Carsten), the Lord's younger son (John Fraser) and his girlfriend (Judi Dench). Low budget but handsome production is an effective horror film with an usually wonderful cast including in smaller roles Barbara Windsor & Kay Walsh as a prostitutes, Cecil Parker as the Prime Minister, Robert Morley as Holmes' pompous brother Mycroft, Georgia Brown as a saloon singer and Frank Finlay as a police Inspector. Although based on the Conan Doyle characters this is an original story which was later remade as "Murder By Decree".
Unbelievable (Lisa Cholodenko, Michael Dinner & Susannah Grant, 2019) 8/10
The 2008–2011 Washington and Colorado serial rape cases is presented as a methodical police procedure alternating the events spread out across two states and during different time periods. In 2008 a young girl (Kaitlyn Dever) in Washington claims she is repeatedly raped by a man at knife-point who also photographed her. The police and her foster parents find certain inconsistencies in her report and she is coerced into recanting the rape saying she lied or imagined it. She is ostracised by her school mates and suffers mental anguish as visions of the rape keep playing in her mind. In 2011 a Colorado detective (Merritt Wever) investigating a rape case suspects it could be a serial rapist which is confirmed when another rape case being investigated by a second detective (Toni Collette) has many similar traits. Riveting thriller moves slowly but holds interest due to the remarkable performances by the three leads. Wever and Collette, playing vastly contrasting characters, are interesting to watch as they start off viewing each other with trepidation. As the case moves along and they decide to join hands they both find much to like in each others' working methods. Emmy nominated for Best Miniseries and for Collette's funny foul-mouthed performance.
Failure to Launch (Tom Dey, 2006) 5/10
It must have been a very boring Saturday because I actually found this fluffy rom-com amusing. Mom (Kathy Bates) and Dad (Terry Bradshaw) want their irresponsible 35-year old son (Matthew McConaughey) to get the hell out of their house. He is very comfortable at home as Mom does his laundry, feeds him and he gets to bring the girls he wants to dump into his bedroom for sex letting them know that his parents are in the room next door. Finally desperate they hire an intervensionist (Sarah Jessica Parker) who is an expert at weaning dependent bachelors out of their parents' home. Things don't quite go according to plan. McConaughey and Parker make a cute couple but most of the laughs come courtesy of the supporting cast led by the always reliable Bates. A pre-stardom Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha are funny as his equally parent-dependent friends and Zoey Deschanel is ascerbic as her close friend who catches the eye of the nerdy Bartha. Silly premise is no different to the screwball comedies of the 1930s as the two stars here make a go of it.
He's Just Not That Into You (Ken Kwapis, 2009) 2/10
A fantastic cast flounders in this silly film based on a best selling self-help book for chicks. The book (and the film) purpots to explain (to women) the meaning of signals received from men after a first date, during a relationship or otherwise. Signals very obvious to men but extremely difficult for women to comprehend. The film offers a series of vignettes as it follows the lives of various men and women. Ginnifer Goodwin is the pathetic desperado waiting forever for a guy to call back when he clearly wants nothing to do with her after their one and only date. Jennifer Aniston has been in a live-in relationship with Ben Affleck for seven years and has spent the last five years wondering why he avoids the subject of marriage. Jennifer Connelly is married to Bradley Cooper who falls hard for Scarlett Johansson. Drew Barrymore wonders why she always discovers that the men she likes turn out to be gay. The women whine while the men evade. Almost like real life. Almost. Boring film.
Watchmen (Nicole Kassell, Stephen Williams, Steph Green, Andrij Parekh, David Semel & Frederick E.O. Toye, 2019) 6/10
Convoluted sequel to Alan Moore's graphic novels is strictly for fans while I found it a fascinating, but tough slog to sift through all the scientific mumbo jumbo in the story set in an alternative history - Nixon survived Watergate, Vietnam is the 51st State of the USA, an apocalypse involving a large jelly fish destroyed most of New York (and the world?) and in the present time Robert Redford (the actor?) is the United States President who
provides reparations to those affected by racial violence as white supremists attack the police force who are forced to don masks to keep their identities hidden. The story tackles race with enormously justified fury - the opening episode has a black cop killed viciously by a supremist which, along with many moments throughout, references a lot of actual past and present-day shit going on in the United States. Fighting on the side of the Tulsa police force is ex-cop Sister Night (Regina King) - born and raised in Saigon, married to Captain Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) with (unexplained) three white children. Her grandfather (Jovan Adepo), a rookie black cop during the 1940s, dabbled on the side as Hooded Justice, a sort of black version of Superman, who enjoys a sexual relationship with blonde and blue-eyed Captain Metropolis. The character is played by a wheelchair-bound Louis Gossett Jr., in the scenes set during the present. It all gets incredibly surreal during the scenes involving an eccentric vigilante (Jeremy Irons) who lives like an aristocratic lord of a country manor and who likes to play gruesome games. Also around is his daughter (Hong Chau) conceived via artificial insemination. Don Johnson is a white cop with a secret life on the side who's lynching sets the plot in motion and brings the FBI to town led by the acerbic Jean Smart. The Emmys went beserk and nominated this for Best Limited Series, both Irons and King in the lead acting categories and Abdul-Mateen, Adepo, Gossett Jr., and Smart in the supporting acting categories, plus a bushel of technical nods. Interesting for sure but not the second coming as many critics hailed it.
The Virtuous Sin (George Cukor & Louis J. Gasnier, 1930) 5/10
Rollover (Alan J. Pakulla, 1981) 4/10
Amnesia (Barbet Schroeder, 2015) 8/10
A Good Woman is Hard to Find (Abner Pastoll, 2019) 7/10
Gritty revenge thriller which starts off like a Ken Loach kitchen-sink drama. A young widow (Sarah Bolger), whose husband was murdered, lives an almost hand-to-mouth existence, with her two kids in a bleak Irish town. Her son has become mute after witnessing the stabbing of his father and the police are antipathic in their resolve to find the murderer. When out of the blue a drug dealer breaks into her house with a stash of stolen cocaine she decides to take the matter into her own hands which involves a large hammer and a chainsaw. Matters turn even more grim when the local mob boss turns up on her doorstep looking for the man who stole his drugs. Fast moving drama has a fantastic performance by Sarah Bolger as the sad and lonely woman who is absolutely sick of being treated like dirt - by police officers, a social worker, the drug dealer, even her own mother - who are constantly assessing her appearance and parenting skills with barely veiled disapproval. She snaps. But in a good way, discovering hidden courage within herself. Her priority is the safety of her children and she will do anything to protect them. The screenplay, with shades of extreme black humour, goes for the jugular as she calmly confronts the mob leading to not only blood-soaked mayhem but making this into a strong feminist fantasy.
Varian's War (Lionel Chetwynd, 2001) 5/10
The human interest story, revolving around the persecution of jews during the War, is one of the few genres that has been consistent on Hollywood's roll call of film projects. This is about one of only five Americans who actively helped jews escape the Nazi blight in Europe. Varian Fry (William Hurt), a journalist, ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The film was criticized for its publicity machine calling Fry the "American Schindler". Fry made up a list of prominent intellectuals and artists and tried to get them out of Marseilles by using forged travel documents. Helping him was another American (Julia Ormond) and a forger (Alan Arkin). The artists he helps are Alma Mahler (Lynn Redgrave), Marc Chagall, his wife, Hannah Arendt and others. Since these are famous people, forged travel documents are not enough to save them, so Fry takes them over the Pyrenees into Spain. Plodding film plays havoc with actual events and is not helped by Hurt with his annoying stop-motion style of dialogue delivery and body movements which becomes a distraction.
Orca: The Killer Whale (Michael Anderson, 1977) 4/10
Absurd rehash of "Jaws" which mixes elements from "Moby Dick". When a fisherman (Richard Harris) kills a pregnant killer whale and the unborn calf, its mate seeks revenge and comes after him causing death and destruction. Typical film in the genre which revolves around various set-pieces involving the Orca destroying boats and houses, chomping on an old sailor (Keenan Wynn) and biting off the leg of a student (Bo Derek in one of her early roles). Adding glamour to the proceedings is Charlotte Rampling as a scientist pissed-off at Harris for starting the whole mess. She studies killer whales and is around to pontificate about the mammal's high intelligence versus the fisherman's stupidity. Will Sampson is around to throw in a few of his own ancient Native-American theories about the revengeful nature of a wronged Orca. A showdown takes place amongst icebergs in the province of Labrador with the whale systematically picking off every human on the fisherman's boat finally leaving him and the scientist to confront the animal. Both Harris and Rampling look uncomfortable going through the motions. Hope they got a hefty paycheck for their troubles. Like John Williams' iconic score signalling the appearance of the shark in "Jaws", there is an attempt by Ennio Morricone to create suspense via his jangling score each time the whale goes into attack mode. Silly but watchable film.
Der letzte Mann / The Last Laugh (F. W. Murnau, 1924) 10/10
Murnau's masterpiece is unique as it is one of the very few silent films with no intertitles. The film uses its spectacular imagery to tell the story with help from the production design by Edgar G. Ulmer, the expressionistic art direction by Robert Herlth & Walter Röhrig, the editing and the stunning lighting and camera movements of Karl Freund. At the center is the magnificent performance by Emil Jannings who uses his facial expressions and body movements to create the tragic central figure. A proud, ageing door attendant (Emil Jannings) of a posh hotel is suddenly demoted due to his frailty and assigned another job as a washroom attendant. Devastated at the turn of events he hides the fact from his friends and family but is discovered by a neighbour and soon faces scorn, ridicule and rejection by everyone. Classic film from the famous UFA studio in Berlin is a revealing look at German culture and identity. The film uses costume - the uniform worn by the door attendant - as a strong motif to explain its importance to the Germans. At the start Jannings is seen proudly wearing a resplendent doorman uniform with braids and huge shiny buttons which is not only his identity but also a means by which he is recognized and given respect. When he is later stripped of the uniform Jannings physically wilts in shame as his robust and vast body literally shrinks on screen. This typical German phenomena of the obsession with uniforms would soon take on a powerful and scary twist when the Nazis came to power. So much of their projection and strength lay in the power of their uniforms with the scarlet swastika on arm bands making a huge statement. The film's epilogue deviates from the natural course of how the story should have actually ended but was shot to show hope in a country still reeling under the effects of WWI. Tragically sad, profoundly affecting film is one the masterpieces of World Cinema and a must-see.
Herr Tartüff / Tartuffe (F. W. Murnau, 1925) 8/10
Molière's 17th-century play about the perils of hypocricy is given a fresh twist as a film-within-a-film. An old man, under the strong influence of his evil housekeeper, intends to disinherit his grandson. The young man disguises himself as an actor and coerces her into showing them a moving picture version of the play Tartuffe. The film within relates the story of a man (Werner Krauss) under the strong influence of Tartüff (Emil Jannings), a charlatan posing as a pious man, who has already robbed him of huge amounts of money. The man's wife (Lil Dagover) suspects him and tries to prove to her husband the evil man's intentions. The story has a fascinating subtext - that religion may implicate the act of seeing, where indoctrination blinds us from being able to see clearly the world around us. This is the problem when we put faith in something or somebody too willingly. And this remains all too relevent today as religion is often used as a means to brainwash people into submission. This is an inventive treatment of Moliere’s work, giving the age-old story a fresh look.
A Hazard of Hearts (John Hough, 1987) 5/10
Gothic intrigue, based on the boddice ripper by Barbara Cartland, is silly beyond belief, but the delightful cast are game and camp it up shamelessly. A compulsive gambler (Christopher Plummer) loses all, including his nubile daughter (Helena Bonham Carter), to an evil Lord (Edward Fox). With her honour in his hands at last greed gets the better of him and he loses her and the estate to young Lord Vulcan (Marcus Gilbert) on the gambling table. The young girl arrives at his house and is confronted by his bitchy mother (Diana Rigg) who is also a compulsive gambler running a secret smuggling operation on the side. It all ends with several dead bodies followed by a duel to the death between the hero and villain. It is all very dull and only made bearable by the superb cast also including Fiona Fullerton as another nubile lady vying for the hero's affections, Anna Massey and Eileen Atkins as maids and Stewart Granger as the hero's "dead" father who makes a sudden appearance. The film harks back to all the classic Gainsborough British productions of the 1940s which made huge stars of James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger, Phyllis Calvert and Patricia Roc.
The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007) 6/10
Schrader revisits his own "American Gigolo" in this tale about hypocricy and murder in the upper echelons of Washington D C. The "walker" of the title is a wealthy and flamboyant gay real-estate agent (Woody Harrelson) who is a popular escort to politicians' wives as he accompanies them to cultural events and social occasions which their husbands are too busy to attend. He is a good friend to a number of matrons (Lauren Bacall - who gets all the witty lines - Lily Tomlin, Marybeth Hurt) with whom he spends time gossiping and playing canasta. His close friend, the wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) of an important politician (Willem Dafoe), walks into her lover's house for a quick tryst and finds him stabbed to death. She asks her escort buddy to cover up for her in order to protect the career of her ambitious husband. He finds himself under investigation as the prime suspect in the murder case and all his once close friends start treating him like a pariah. Schrader's film is less about the murder and instead delves deep into the examination of the vipers operating in Washington society. The escort realizes how people he once trusted use and abuse each other. The vengeful, anti-liberal, homophobic administration pursues Carter and his young lover as they both try to find the murderer. This is a neat little mystery-thriller, superbly acted by a wonderful cast, in particular Harrelson with sly turns by both Ned Beatty and Liky Tomlin as another senator and his wife. The film is smartly designed and surprisingly filmed in London and the Isle of Mann which substitutes for the real Capitol - a few exterior shots of Washington are used to set the scene.
The 2nd (Brian Skiba, 2020) 1/10
Extremely stupid film that seems to have stitched together bits and pieces from different films in the terrorist genre. A Green Beret (Ryan Phllippe) is confronted by a group of terrorists when he goes to pick up his son from school. They are after the boy's girlfriend, the daughter of a Supreme Court judge who they plan to kidnap in order to force the judge's hand on a Second Amendment vote. Caspar Van Dien is the robot-like leader of the gang who he takes on through boring fight sequences. The screenplay appears to have been written by some amateur. Trashy film which should be avoided.
Shock and Awe (Rob Reiner, 2017) 6/10
The Bush Adminstration, trying for sometime to push out Saddam Hussain from Iraq, uses the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq citing the presence of weapons of mass destruction. The "theory" was to set up a Western-style democracy in the Middle East which would magically proliferate and wind up protecting Israel. Finding the whole idea prepostrous from the get-go are two journalists working for the American media company Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau. Both Warren Strobel (James Marsden) and Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) are skeptical about the President's claim that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. They are backed by their editor, John Walcott (Rob Reiner), and also helped by Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones), a correspondent, columnist and Military Affairs consultant for the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers. As the American government goes into a war frenzy these journalists observe their reputable colleagues at other top tier newspapers mistakenly perpetuate falsehoods fed by the war machine led by Donald Rumsfeld. Straightforward account of the events, as they played out, is purposely presented like a documentary by Reiner so that the homegrown public "get it" and see what their government is capable of. A romantic sub-plot between Strobel and a neighbour (Jessica Biel) goes nowhere although Reiner uses her as a mouthpiece explaining Muslim history in a few words. The film starts with a young African-American soldier, in a wheel-chair, bluntly asking a commitee why the country went to war which resulted in his injury which took place literally within the first few hours of his arrival in Iraq. A flashback involving the journalists' investigation leads to the answer which eventually resulted in a million dead Iraqis and thousands of dead American soldiers. The deception eventually came out some years later with the journalists finally winning awards for their work. Reiner's film is a good account of how the majority of the American public gets conned by their government and which sadly continues to this day looking at the kind of President who has been elected to power today.
A Study in Terror (James Hill, 1965) 6/10
When the Whitechapel district in the East End of London is beset with a spate of murders, Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) is summoned to solve the mystery. Jack the Ripper is on a rampage gruesomely butchering prostitutes in the area. Holmes and the trusted Dr Watson (Donald Houston) find themselves confronted with the mystery of a Lord's missing son, his facially scarred wife (Adrienne Corri) and a number of suspects - a local doctor (Anthony Quayle), a black mailing tavern owner (Peter Carsten), the Lord's younger son (John Fraser) and his girlfriend (Judi Dench). Low budget but handsome production is an effective horror film with an usually wonderful cast including in smaller roles Barbara Windsor & Kay Walsh as a prostitutes, Cecil Parker as the Prime Minister, Robert Morley as Holmes' pompous brother Mycroft, Georgia Brown as a saloon singer and Frank Finlay as a police Inspector. Although based on the Conan Doyle characters this is an original story which was later remade as "Murder By Decree".
Unbelievable (Lisa Cholodenko, Michael Dinner & Susannah Grant, 2019) 8/10
The 2008–2011 Washington and Colorado serial rape cases is presented as a methodical police procedure alternating the events spread out across two states and during different time periods. In 2008 a young girl (Kaitlyn Dever) in Washington claims she is repeatedly raped by a man at knife-point who also photographed her. The police and her foster parents find certain inconsistencies in her report and she is coerced into recanting the rape saying she lied or imagined it. She is ostracised by her school mates and suffers mental anguish as visions of the rape keep playing in her mind. In 2011 a Colorado detective (Merritt Wever) investigating a rape case suspects it could be a serial rapist which is confirmed when another rape case being investigated by a second detective (Toni Collette) has many similar traits. Riveting thriller moves slowly but holds interest due to the remarkable performances by the three leads. Wever and Collette, playing vastly contrasting characters, are interesting to watch as they start off viewing each other with trepidation. As the case moves along and they decide to join hands they both find much to like in each others' working methods. Emmy nominated for Best Miniseries and for Collette's funny foul-mouthed performance.
Failure to Launch (Tom Dey, 2006) 5/10
It must have been a very boring Saturday because I actually found this fluffy rom-com amusing. Mom (Kathy Bates) and Dad (Terry Bradshaw) want their irresponsible 35-year old son (Matthew McConaughey) to get the hell out of their house. He is very comfortable at home as Mom does his laundry, feeds him and he gets to bring the girls he wants to dump into his bedroom for sex letting them know that his parents are in the room next door. Finally desperate they hire an intervensionist (Sarah Jessica Parker) who is an expert at weaning dependent bachelors out of their parents' home. Things don't quite go according to plan. McConaughey and Parker make a cute couple but most of the laughs come courtesy of the supporting cast led by the always reliable Bates. A pre-stardom Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha are funny as his equally parent-dependent friends and Zoey Deschanel is ascerbic as her close friend who catches the eye of the nerdy Bartha. Silly premise is no different to the screwball comedies of the 1930s as the two stars here make a go of it.
He's Just Not That Into You (Ken Kwapis, 2009) 2/10
A fantastic cast flounders in this silly film based on a best selling self-help book for chicks. The book (and the film) purpots to explain (to women) the meaning of signals received from men after a first date, during a relationship or otherwise. Signals very obvious to men but extremely difficult for women to comprehend. The film offers a series of vignettes as it follows the lives of various men and women. Ginnifer Goodwin is the pathetic desperado waiting forever for a guy to call back when he clearly wants nothing to do with her after their one and only date. Jennifer Aniston has been in a live-in relationship with Ben Affleck for seven years and has spent the last five years wondering why he avoids the subject of marriage. Jennifer Connelly is married to Bradley Cooper who falls hard for Scarlett Johansson. Drew Barrymore wonders why she always discovers that the men she likes turn out to be gay. The women whine while the men evade. Almost like real life. Almost. Boring film.
Watchmen (Nicole Kassell, Stephen Williams, Steph Green, Andrij Parekh, David Semel & Frederick E.O. Toye, 2019) 6/10
Convoluted sequel to Alan Moore's graphic novels is strictly for fans while I found it a fascinating, but tough slog to sift through all the scientific mumbo jumbo in the story set in an alternative history - Nixon survived Watergate, Vietnam is the 51st State of the USA, an apocalypse involving a large jelly fish destroyed most of New York (and the world?) and in the present time Robert Redford (the actor?) is the United States President who
provides reparations to those affected by racial violence as white supremists attack the police force who are forced to don masks to keep their identities hidden. The story tackles race with enormously justified fury - the opening episode has a black cop killed viciously by a supremist which, along with many moments throughout, references a lot of actual past and present-day shit going on in the United States. Fighting on the side of the Tulsa police force is ex-cop Sister Night (Regina King) - born and raised in Saigon, married to Captain Manhattan (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) with (unexplained) three white children. Her grandfather (Jovan Adepo), a rookie black cop during the 1940s, dabbled on the side as Hooded Justice, a sort of black version of Superman, who enjoys a sexual relationship with blonde and blue-eyed Captain Metropolis. The character is played by a wheelchair-bound Louis Gossett Jr., in the scenes set during the present. It all gets incredibly surreal during the scenes involving an eccentric vigilante (Jeremy Irons) who lives like an aristocratic lord of a country manor and who likes to play gruesome games. Also around is his daughter (Hong Chau) conceived via artificial insemination. Don Johnson is a white cop with a secret life on the side who's lynching sets the plot in motion and brings the FBI to town led by the acerbic Jean Smart. The Emmys went beserk and nominated this for Best Limited Series, both Irons and King in the lead acting categories and Abdul-Mateen, Adepo, Gossett Jr., and Smart in the supporting acting categories, plus a bushel of technical nods. Interesting for sure but not the second coming as many critics hailed it.
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Precious Doll
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Antigone (1992) Daniele Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub 4/10
Isadora's Children (2019) Damien Hanivel 2/10
Why Don't You Just Die! (2019) Kirill Sokolov 4/10
Amnesia (2015) Barbet Schroeder 4/10
Destiny (1997) Youssef Chahine 5/10
Wendy (2020) Penh Zeitlin 1/10
An American Pickle (2020) Brandon Trost 4/10
Les Nautes Solitues (1974) Philippe Garrel 2/20
The Devil All the Time (2020) Antonio Campos 1/10
Fiore (2016) Claudio Giovannesi 4/10
The Hands of Orlac (1945) Robert Wiene 5/10
Repeat viewings
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) Mike Leigh 8/10
The Grey Fox (1982) Phillip Borsos 7/10
Meantime (1983) Mike Leigh 7/10
Secret Ceremony (1968) Joseph Losey 7/10
Isadora's Children (2019) Damien Hanivel 2/10
Why Don't You Just Die! (2019) Kirill Sokolov 4/10
Amnesia (2015) Barbet Schroeder 4/10
Destiny (1997) Youssef Chahine 5/10
Wendy (2020) Penh Zeitlin 1/10
An American Pickle (2020) Brandon Trost 4/10
Les Nautes Solitues (1974) Philippe Garrel 2/20
The Devil All the Time (2020) Antonio Campos 1/10
Fiore (2016) Claudio Giovannesi 4/10
The Hands of Orlac (1945) Robert Wiene 5/10
Repeat viewings
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) Mike Leigh 8/10
The Grey Fox (1982) Phillip Borsos 7/10
Meantime (1983) Mike Leigh 7/10
Secret Ceremony (1968) Joseph Losey 7/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
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Precious Doll
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
The Beautiful Person (2008) Christophe Honroe 4/10
House of Seven Belles (1979) Andy Milligan 5/10
Revisited (2009) Krzysztof Zanussi 2/10
Alexandria...Why? (1979) Youssef Chahine 6/10
Tehran: City of Love (2019) Ali Jaberansari 6/10
Hyenas (1992) Djibril Diop Mambety 7/10
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Dean Parisot 4/10
Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) Roberto Minervini 1/10
Inversion (2016) Behnam Behzadi 5/10
Cuties (2020) Maïmouna Doucouré 5/10
My Friend Victoria (2014) Jean-Paul Civeyrac 4/10
Repeat viewings
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) Stephen Herek 7/10
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) Peter Hewitt 6/10
The Last Wave (1977) Peter Weir 8/10
Knife in the Head (1978) Reinhard Hauff 8/10
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) Paul Bartel 7/10
House of Seven Belles (1979) Andy Milligan 5/10
Revisited (2009) Krzysztof Zanussi 2/10
Alexandria...Why? (1979) Youssef Chahine 6/10
Tehran: City of Love (2019) Ali Jaberansari 6/10
Hyenas (1992) Djibril Diop Mambety 7/10
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Dean Parisot 4/10
Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) Roberto Minervini 1/10
Inversion (2016) Behnam Behzadi 5/10
Cuties (2020) Maïmouna Doucouré 5/10
My Friend Victoria (2014) Jean-Paul Civeyrac 4/10
Repeat viewings
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) Stephen Herek 7/10
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) Peter Hewitt 6/10
The Last Wave (1977) Peter Weir 8/10
Knife in the Head (1978) Reinhard Hauff 8/10
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) Paul Bartel 7/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
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Big Magilla
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- Location: Jersey Shore
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Ruthie Ann Miles won her category.Reza wrote:The King and I: From the London Palladium (Gary Halvorson, 2018) 7/10
Rogers & Hammerstein's famous musical is filmed live on stage at the London Palladium and is a version of the Tony winning Broadway revival. Kelli O'Hara is strong-willed Anna, the British governess who arrives in Siam to teach the children of the King (Ken Watanabe). She initially clashes with the stubborn King but later their relationship changes as he begins to admire her feisty nature. Meanwhile she teaches the brood of kids and finds a friend in the King's first wife (Ruthie Ann Miles). The production has stunning costumes and of course the memorable score - "Hello Young Lovers", "A Puzzlement", "Getting to Know You", "We Kiss in a Shadow", "Something Wonderful", "I Have Dreamed" and the joyful highlight of "Shall We Dance" when Anna dances with the King. O'Hara is superb, has a marvelous singing voice and deservedly won a Tony award. Watanabe looks like he is having great fun and is also very good although he cannot quite erase the memory of Yul Brynner in his signature Tony and Oscar winning role. Both Watanabe and Ruthie Ann Miles were also nominated for Tony awards. This version preserves on film a memorable stage production.
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Les Femmes de l'ombre / Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008) 7/10
Old fashioned, exciting WWII drama has a whiff of a "Nancy Drew" adventure but scores points for showing a group of female espionage agents in a genre usually dominated by male heroics. The film is a tribute to the bravery of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret British World War II organisation also known as "Churchill's Secret Army". Men and women were inducted to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. The screenplay follows a group of women led by a member of the French Resistance (Sophie Marceau) who escapes to Spain after her husband is shot, is rescued by the British and given a new assignment. A British agent/geologist, caught by the Nazis while surveying the Normandy beaches for the secret Allied landings, has to be rescued from the Nazi headquarters in Paris. Joining her on the mission are a commando group consisting of a cabaret dancer (Marie Gillain) expert in the art of seduction, an explosives expert (Déborah François), a cold-blooded killer and prostitute (Julie Depardieu), her brother (Julien Boisselier) and joining them in France is a jewish radio operator (Maya Sansa). The mission is partially successful as the team, at the last minute, are ordered to assassinate Colonel Heindrich (Moritz Bleibtreu) who has captured her brother and plans on taking him to meet Rommel as proof of the secret Allied landings. The film works because the protagonists are not simple caricatures but very real with conflicted motives and developing characters. Wartime Paris is beautifully recreated and the suspenseful action scenes are well staged with some truly uncomfortable and graphic torture sequences. Marceau is excellent as the steely-eyed sharpshooter and Bleibtreu is equally good as the cold blooded patriotic Nazi who also manages to show glimpses of tenderness. A thrilling "girl's own" adventure film.
The King and I: From the London Palladium (Gary Halvorson, 2018) 7/10
Rogers & Hammerstein's famous musical is filmed live on stage at the London Palladium and is a version of the Tony winning Broadway revival. Kelli O'Hara is strong-willed Anna, the British governess who arrives in Siam to teach the children of the King (Ken Watanabe). She initially clashes with the stubborn King but later their relationship changes as he begins to admire her feisty nature. Meanwhile she teaches the brood of kids and finds a friend in the King's first wife (Ruthie Ann Miles). The production has stunning costumes and of course the memorable score - "Hello Young Lovers", "A Puzzlement", "Getting to Know You", "We Kiss in a Shadow", "Something Wonderful", "I Have Dreamed" and the joyful highlight of "Shall We Dance" when Anna dances with the King. O'Hara is superb, has a marvelous singing voice and deservedly won a Tony award. Watanabe looks like he is having great fun and is also very good although he cannot quite erase the memory of Yul Brynner in his signature Tony and Oscar winning role. Both Watanabe and Ruthie Ann Miles were also nominated for Tony awards. This version preserves on film a memorable stage production.
Women of Valor (Buzz Kulik, 1986) 5/10
Highly fictionalized film about the Bataan death march during WWII in the Philippines. A group of captured nurses and American soldiers are made to walk by the invading Japanese to a prisoner-of-war camp where they were interned for three years and where many died. The story is related in fashback by a head nurse (Susan Sarandon) who lobbies an American Congressional subcommittee for awards of valor for many of the brave women who died at the camp. Shot on authentic locations the nurses go through harrowing experiences as they are mistreated, beaten and raped. Kristy McNichol, Alberta Watson and Valerie Mahaffey play other nurses who band together to try and survive. The screenplay is an amalgamation of actual events that happened to female prisoners and related by the ones who survived. Actually no nurse ever walked on a death march but the film purports to give tribute to the Army and Navy nurses who fell prisoners to the Japanese. The subject has been filmed many times before with "A Town Like Alice" in 1956 one of the best.
The Girl Rush (Robert Pirosh, 1955) 3/10
A gambler's daughter (Rosalind Russell) mistakenly believes she has a share in a Las Vegas casino which is in fact owned by a Latin lothario (Fernando Lamas). They both clash instantly leading to the inevitable finalé. Silly film was Russell's first musical and was probably made to cash in on her recent Tony winning performance in the Broadway musical "Wonderful Town". She is too old (at 48) in the role but sings, dances and acts with her usual gusto. The film is stolen by the supporting cast - Eddie Albert, Gloria DeHaven, James Gleason, and especially Marion Lorne as daffy "Aunt Clara" which she played years later as a different character but with the exact same befuddled persona in her Emmy winning role on tv in "Bewitched". Roz gets to wear elaborate Edith Head gowns as she clowns it up.
Mimi (Paul L. Stein, 1935) 3/10
A consumptive dance hall singer (Gertrude Lawrence) inspires a starving painter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Tragic romance set in the Latin Quarter of Paris is a straight dramatic version of Puccini's "La Boheme" and gets a loud very theatrical production with the cast playing to the gallery. Operatic snatches from the opera are occasionally thrown in as background music although Lawrence gets to sing only one song. One of stage star Lawrence's rare film appearances is a rather dull drama despite authentic atmosphere.
The Ruling Voice (Rowland V. Lee, 1931) 4/10
A ruthless racketeer (Walter Huston) who has made his fortune through nefarious means is made to see sense when his daughter (Loretta Young) rejects him. He tries to change his ways but his partners won't let him. Stiff early talkie is a typical Warner Brothers production showing crime does not pay but ends up with death and destruction. Huston is very good and all his best scenes are opposite Doris Kenyon as the socialite he admires. Young, in an early role, continues to climb up the Hollywood ladder while the underrated David Manners is the rich boyfriend who stands by her when the going gets tough. Although the film's abrupt ending is jarring it still manages to tackle a tough issue, a staple in many films made by the studio during that period.
Old fashioned, exciting WWII drama has a whiff of a "Nancy Drew" adventure but scores points for showing a group of female espionage agents in a genre usually dominated by male heroics. The film is a tribute to the bravery of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret British World War II organisation also known as "Churchill's Secret Army". Men and women were inducted to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and later, also in occupied Southeast Asia) against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. The screenplay follows a group of women led by a member of the French Resistance (Sophie Marceau) who escapes to Spain after her husband is shot, is rescued by the British and given a new assignment. A British agent/geologist, caught by the Nazis while surveying the Normandy beaches for the secret Allied landings, has to be rescued from the Nazi headquarters in Paris. Joining her on the mission are a commando group consisting of a cabaret dancer (Marie Gillain) expert in the art of seduction, an explosives expert (Déborah François), a cold-blooded killer and prostitute (Julie Depardieu), her brother (Julien Boisselier) and joining them in France is a jewish radio operator (Maya Sansa). The mission is partially successful as the team, at the last minute, are ordered to assassinate Colonel Heindrich (Moritz Bleibtreu) who has captured her brother and plans on taking him to meet Rommel as proof of the secret Allied landings. The film works because the protagonists are not simple caricatures but very real with conflicted motives and developing characters. Wartime Paris is beautifully recreated and the suspenseful action scenes are well staged with some truly uncomfortable and graphic torture sequences. Marceau is excellent as the steely-eyed sharpshooter and Bleibtreu is equally good as the cold blooded patriotic Nazi who also manages to show glimpses of tenderness. A thrilling "girl's own" adventure film.
The King and I: From the London Palladium (Gary Halvorson, 2018) 7/10
Rogers & Hammerstein's famous musical is filmed live on stage at the London Palladium and is a version of the Tony winning Broadway revival. Kelli O'Hara is strong-willed Anna, the British governess who arrives in Siam to teach the children of the King (Ken Watanabe). She initially clashes with the stubborn King but later their relationship changes as he begins to admire her feisty nature. Meanwhile she teaches the brood of kids and finds a friend in the King's first wife (Ruthie Ann Miles). The production has stunning costumes and of course the memorable score - "Hello Young Lovers", "A Puzzlement", "Getting to Know You", "We Kiss in a Shadow", "Something Wonderful", "I Have Dreamed" and the joyful highlight of "Shall We Dance" when Anna dances with the King. O'Hara is superb, has a marvelous singing voice and deservedly won a Tony award. Watanabe looks like he is having great fun and is also very good although he cannot quite erase the memory of Yul Brynner in his signature Tony and Oscar winning role. Both Watanabe and Ruthie Ann Miles were also nominated for Tony awards. This version preserves on film a memorable stage production.
Women of Valor (Buzz Kulik, 1986) 5/10
Highly fictionalized film about the Bataan death march during WWII in the Philippines. A group of captured nurses and American soldiers are made to walk by the invading Japanese to a prisoner-of-war camp where they were interned for three years and where many died. The story is related in fashback by a head nurse (Susan Sarandon) who lobbies an American Congressional subcommittee for awards of valor for many of the brave women who died at the camp. Shot on authentic locations the nurses go through harrowing experiences as they are mistreated, beaten and raped. Kristy McNichol, Alberta Watson and Valerie Mahaffey play other nurses who band together to try and survive. The screenplay is an amalgamation of actual events that happened to female prisoners and related by the ones who survived. Actually no nurse ever walked on a death march but the film purports to give tribute to the Army and Navy nurses who fell prisoners to the Japanese. The subject has been filmed many times before with "A Town Like Alice" in 1956 one of the best.
The Girl Rush (Robert Pirosh, 1955) 3/10
A gambler's daughter (Rosalind Russell) mistakenly believes she has a share in a Las Vegas casino which is in fact owned by a Latin lothario (Fernando Lamas). They both clash instantly leading to the inevitable finalé. Silly film was Russell's first musical and was probably made to cash in on her recent Tony winning performance in the Broadway musical "Wonderful Town". She is too old (at 48) in the role but sings, dances and acts with her usual gusto. The film is stolen by the supporting cast - Eddie Albert, Gloria DeHaven, James Gleason, and especially Marion Lorne as daffy "Aunt Clara" which she played years later as a different character but with the exact same befuddled persona in her Emmy winning role on tv in "Bewitched". Roz gets to wear elaborate Edith Head gowns as she clowns it up.
Mimi (Paul L. Stein, 1935) 3/10
A consumptive dance hall singer (Gertrude Lawrence) inspires a starving painter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Tragic romance set in the Latin Quarter of Paris is a straight dramatic version of Puccini's "La Boheme" and gets a loud very theatrical production with the cast playing to the gallery. Operatic snatches from the opera are occasionally thrown in as background music although Lawrence gets to sing only one song. One of stage star Lawrence's rare film appearances is a rather dull drama despite authentic atmosphere.
The Ruling Voice (Rowland V. Lee, 1931) 4/10
A ruthless racketeer (Walter Huston) who has made his fortune through nefarious means is made to see sense when his daughter (Loretta Young) rejects him. He tries to change his ways but his partners won't let him. Stiff early talkie is a typical Warner Brothers production showing crime does not pay but ends up with death and destruction. Huston is very good and all his best scenes are opposite Doris Kenyon as the socialite he admires. Young, in an early role, continues to climb up the Hollywood ladder while the underrated David Manners is the rich boyfriend who stands by her when the going gets tough. Although the film's abrupt ending is jarring it still manages to tackle a tough issue, a staple in many films made by the studio during that period.
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Mamá cumple 100 años / Mama Turns 100 (Carlos Saura, 1979) 7/10
Saura brings back characters first seen in his scathing 1973 political satire "Ana y los lobos". In that film Ana (Geraldine Chaplin) goes to work as a nanny to three small girls in an upper class family ruled by a matriarch with three sons. All three men flirt with her, pursue her with aggression and at the end rape and murder her. In this sequel, which shifts its tone towards farce, Ana is alive and arrives with her husband at the same mansion to participate with the family the matriarch's upcoming birthday. The old woman (a superb Rafaela Aparicio) is turning 100, in good spirits, but mourning one dead son and another who has run off leaving his wife and three daughters. Her third eccentric son lives with her and is obsessed with trying to fly on a hang glider with an eye on getting into Ana's pants. The farce turns into a black comedy as the old woman is embezzled by her family, her sons plan on killing her for the inheritance and one of the young girls is in an incestuous relationship with her eccentric uncle. Meanwhile the old lady develops telepathy and asks the nanny for help who in turn is facing problems of her own as her husband is having an affair with her old ward (Amparo Muñoz) who has now grown up to be a stunning beauty. Saura also makes digs at the generation gap and impotence all the while maintaining a surreal mood throughout. This was the last collaboration between Saura and his off-screen companion Geraldine Chaplin. After 8 films together, all dealing in some way or another with the oppressive Franco regime, they called it quits on their relationship, both on and off camera, which came just a few years after Franco's death and the restoration of monarchy in the country. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Film category.
Maîtresse / Mistress (Barbet Schroeder, 1976) 9/10
Schroeder, in this intriguing and very titillating film, takes us on a journey into a world of pleasure derived through pain. A petty thief (Gerard Depardieu) breaks into an apartment and discovers a neon-lit room full of surprises. The roof suddenly opens up, a steel ladder descends and down walks a woman (Bulle Ogier) wearing a short blonde wig, dressed in a tight leather outfit with thigh-high boots with 6-inch stiletto heels. She proceeds to a dark corner of the room and starts whipping a cowering tied-up naked man who moans with pleasure. This is the bewildered thief's introduction to the world of masochistic sex and to the hip dominatrix who, with an ultra-cool head, plays mistress to her slaves. She is a single mother and is in this business, by choice, to make money. Depardieu's character is used as a means to explain to the audience what this world is all about. The couple form a relationship and as he questions her about her "profession" we get to see what its all about as she includes him in a passive way during her encounters - she directs him to whip and fondle a naked woman while her husband, also tied-up, watches. Rich men and women, often leading very normal sex lives with their husbands, wives or partners, pay to get an extra sexual kick by being beaten, tortured and humiliated. Schroeder presents the sex acts in a very matter-of-fact way as if its any job. The sexual role-playing fantasies are oddly asexual with the emphasis more on a complex combination of submission and power. Clients are masked and tied up with leather belts or chains, are tortured with different instruments, bottoms are slapped and whipped, nipples are pierced, a penis is hammered down with a nail onto a plank of wood, a woman is made to go down on all fours and ridden like a horse. These scenes, while shocking, are nowhere as horrific as an episode at a butcher's where a horse is hit in the forehead with a blunt instrument and after it falls down in a dead faint is lifted upside down by chains and its throat slashed and a fountain of blood pours out with the still live animal wildly flaying its legs in agony. Now that's real pain and cruelty. To carry his sick "joke" even further Schroeder follows this brutal scene with a grinning Depardieu sitting at a table and eating horse steak. The relationship between the two starts deteriorating when he starts feeling jealous of a man she has business dealings with and he sees large amounts of cash changing hands. He assumes the man is her pimp and decides to confront him. The performances of both leads - Ogier is particularly mesmerizing - carry the film. Too bad Schroeder fumbles at the film's end which appears to be something out of J. G. Ballard's novel "Crash", the story about symphorophilia, which is specifically about car-crash sexual fetishism with protagonists becoming sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. Fascinating film is a must-see.
The Caper of the Golden Bulls / Carnival of Thieves (Russell Rouse, 1967) 7/10
Jules Dassin's hit caper film "Topkapi" set the tone for a spate of similar adventure thrillers that came in its wake during the 1960s - Ronald Neame's "Gambit", William Wyler's "How to Steal a Million" and Peter Collinson's "The Italian Job" among many others. The films had a set formula - an international cast of stars, comic character actors, an exotic location and a tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Sandwiched in between was this film about a bank robbery in the Spanish city of Pamplona with its famous running of the bulls during the San Fermín festival as its backdrop. A retired bank robber (Stephen Boyd) is coerced by his former Italian lover and partner (Giovanna Ralli) to undertake one more heist. Reluctantly he agrees after she blackmails him and soon all three of their old partners are in town to plan the perfect heist. Forcibly joining them is his current lover (Yvette Mimieux) who plans to keep an eye on him especially with the seductive Italian bombshell back in his life. Jaunty film makes up for its lack of originality by keeping things moving at a fast pace with the delightful cast having a ball. Boyd, while no Cary Grant, is suitably debonair and has his hands full with not only the complicated robbery but also creating sparks with both his leading ladies. Ralli, dressed in fancy Edith Head duds, is great fun as the clever sexpot trading barbs with Mimieux who holds her own during their funny showdowns. The equally delightful Vito Scotti, Walter Slezak and Clifton James play assorted characters aiding and abetting the robbers. Rollicking and amusingly inventive film is helped by superb on-location photography by Harold E. Stine and a lovely score by Vic Mizzy.
Mulan (Niki Caro, 2020) 8/10
If you cross a fairy tale with a Zhang Yimou film and give it a David Lean/Akira Kurosawa-like epic quality you get the latest Disney live-action remake of one of their animated classics. All the songs from the animated version are gone as is the wisecracking dragon (voiced by Eddie Murphy). Instead we get a witch and the mythical phoenix bird (a sign of peace and prosperity in Chinese culture). The main plot remains the same - Mulan (Yifei Liu), a free spirited young girl, dons male garb and enlists in the army. Since she has no brother she takes this step so that her aging father is spared getting killed in battle. She undertakes training with other young men while trying to hide her secret - there is a running joke about her body odour since she evades bathing with the other men. The enemy is led by Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), leader of a renegade group, who wants to attack the Imperial City and kill the Emperor (Jet Li). Helping him is a witch (Gong Li) who can transform into an eagle. In order to use her full god-given powers (chi), Mulan needs to expose her true self to her comrades (and to herself) which results in her banishment by the Commander (Donnie Yen) even though he knows that her bravery saved them all during a battle. When the Witch tries to seduce her over to the darkside she returns, warns her comrades and gets to lead the soldiers into battle. The film looks spectacular with epic set pieces and battle scenes with dazzling and vibrant shades of colour bathing all the New Zealand locations where the film was shot. Caro superbly stages all the battle scenes and is also adept at wringing laughs during the comedic moments as well as handling the dramatic moments. Pity the film cannot be seen on the large screen as it went straight to a streaming platform due to the Covid crisis although it plays quite well on the small screen as well. This is a wonderful production with outstanding sets and costumes, a strong female character and an important message about loyalty towards family. Not to be missed.
Saura brings back characters first seen in his scathing 1973 political satire "Ana y los lobos". In that film Ana (Geraldine Chaplin) goes to work as a nanny to three small girls in an upper class family ruled by a matriarch with three sons. All three men flirt with her, pursue her with aggression and at the end rape and murder her. In this sequel, which shifts its tone towards farce, Ana is alive and arrives with her husband at the same mansion to participate with the family the matriarch's upcoming birthday. The old woman (a superb Rafaela Aparicio) is turning 100, in good spirits, but mourning one dead son and another who has run off leaving his wife and three daughters. Her third eccentric son lives with her and is obsessed with trying to fly on a hang glider with an eye on getting into Ana's pants. The farce turns into a black comedy as the old woman is embezzled by her family, her sons plan on killing her for the inheritance and one of the young girls is in an incestuous relationship with her eccentric uncle. Meanwhile the old lady develops telepathy and asks the nanny for help who in turn is facing problems of her own as her husband is having an affair with her old ward (Amparo Muñoz) who has now grown up to be a stunning beauty. Saura also makes digs at the generation gap and impotence all the while maintaining a surreal mood throughout. This was the last collaboration between Saura and his off-screen companion Geraldine Chaplin. After 8 films together, all dealing in some way or another with the oppressive Franco regime, they called it quits on their relationship, both on and off camera, which came just a few years after Franco's death and the restoration of monarchy in the country. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Film category.
Maîtresse / Mistress (Barbet Schroeder, 1976) 9/10
Schroeder, in this intriguing and very titillating film, takes us on a journey into a world of pleasure derived through pain. A petty thief (Gerard Depardieu) breaks into an apartment and discovers a neon-lit room full of surprises. The roof suddenly opens up, a steel ladder descends and down walks a woman (Bulle Ogier) wearing a short blonde wig, dressed in a tight leather outfit with thigh-high boots with 6-inch stiletto heels. She proceeds to a dark corner of the room and starts whipping a cowering tied-up naked man who moans with pleasure. This is the bewildered thief's introduction to the world of masochistic sex and to the hip dominatrix who, with an ultra-cool head, plays mistress to her slaves. She is a single mother and is in this business, by choice, to make money. Depardieu's character is used as a means to explain to the audience what this world is all about. The couple form a relationship and as he questions her about her "profession" we get to see what its all about as she includes him in a passive way during her encounters - she directs him to whip and fondle a naked woman while her husband, also tied-up, watches. Rich men and women, often leading very normal sex lives with their husbands, wives or partners, pay to get an extra sexual kick by being beaten, tortured and humiliated. Schroeder presents the sex acts in a very matter-of-fact way as if its any job. The sexual role-playing fantasies are oddly asexual with the emphasis more on a complex combination of submission and power. Clients are masked and tied up with leather belts or chains, are tortured with different instruments, bottoms are slapped and whipped, nipples are pierced, a penis is hammered down with a nail onto a plank of wood, a woman is made to go down on all fours and ridden like a horse. These scenes, while shocking, are nowhere as horrific as an episode at a butcher's where a horse is hit in the forehead with a blunt instrument and after it falls down in a dead faint is lifted upside down by chains and its throat slashed and a fountain of blood pours out with the still live animal wildly flaying its legs in agony. Now that's real pain and cruelty. To carry his sick "joke" even further Schroeder follows this brutal scene with a grinning Depardieu sitting at a table and eating horse steak. The relationship between the two starts deteriorating when he starts feeling jealous of a man she has business dealings with and he sees large amounts of cash changing hands. He assumes the man is her pimp and decides to confront him. The performances of both leads - Ogier is particularly mesmerizing - carry the film. Too bad Schroeder fumbles at the film's end which appears to be something out of J. G. Ballard's novel "Crash", the story about symphorophilia, which is specifically about car-crash sexual fetishism with protagonists becoming sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. Fascinating film is a must-see.
The Caper of the Golden Bulls / Carnival of Thieves (Russell Rouse, 1967) 7/10
Jules Dassin's hit caper film "Topkapi" set the tone for a spate of similar adventure thrillers that came in its wake during the 1960s - Ronald Neame's "Gambit", William Wyler's "How to Steal a Million" and Peter Collinson's "The Italian Job" among many others. The films had a set formula - an international cast of stars, comic character actors, an exotic location and a tongue-in-cheek atmosphere. Sandwiched in between was this film about a bank robbery in the Spanish city of Pamplona with its famous running of the bulls during the San Fermín festival as its backdrop. A retired bank robber (Stephen Boyd) is coerced by his former Italian lover and partner (Giovanna Ralli) to undertake one more heist. Reluctantly he agrees after she blackmails him and soon all three of their old partners are in town to plan the perfect heist. Forcibly joining them is his current lover (Yvette Mimieux) who plans to keep an eye on him especially with the seductive Italian bombshell back in his life. Jaunty film makes up for its lack of originality by keeping things moving at a fast pace with the delightful cast having a ball. Boyd, while no Cary Grant, is suitably debonair and has his hands full with not only the complicated robbery but also creating sparks with both his leading ladies. Ralli, dressed in fancy Edith Head duds, is great fun as the clever sexpot trading barbs with Mimieux who holds her own during their funny showdowns. The equally delightful Vito Scotti, Walter Slezak and Clifton James play assorted characters aiding and abetting the robbers. Rollicking and amusingly inventive film is helped by superb on-location photography by Harold E. Stine and a lovely score by Vic Mizzy.
Mulan (Niki Caro, 2020) 8/10
If you cross a fairy tale with a Zhang Yimou film and give it a David Lean/Akira Kurosawa-like epic quality you get the latest Disney live-action remake of one of their animated classics. All the songs from the animated version are gone as is the wisecracking dragon (voiced by Eddie Murphy). Instead we get a witch and the mythical phoenix bird (a sign of peace and prosperity in Chinese culture). The main plot remains the same - Mulan (Yifei Liu), a free spirited young girl, dons male garb and enlists in the army. Since she has no brother she takes this step so that her aging father is spared getting killed in battle. She undertakes training with other young men while trying to hide her secret - there is a running joke about her body odour since she evades bathing with the other men. The enemy is led by Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), leader of a renegade group, who wants to attack the Imperial City and kill the Emperor (Jet Li). Helping him is a witch (Gong Li) who can transform into an eagle. In order to use her full god-given powers (chi), Mulan needs to expose her true self to her comrades (and to herself) which results in her banishment by the Commander (Donnie Yen) even though he knows that her bravery saved them all during a battle. When the Witch tries to seduce her over to the darkside she returns, warns her comrades and gets to lead the soldiers into battle. The film looks spectacular with epic set pieces and battle scenes with dazzling and vibrant shades of colour bathing all the New Zealand locations where the film was shot. Caro superbly stages all the battle scenes and is also adept at wringing laughs during the comedic moments as well as handling the dramatic moments. Pity the film cannot be seen on the large screen as it went straight to a streaming platform due to the Covid crisis although it plays quite well on the small screen as well. This is a wonderful production with outstanding sets and costumes, a strong female character and an important message about loyalty towards family. Not to be missed.
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Relic (2020) Natalie Erika James 1/10
Padatik (1973) Mrinal Sen 6/10
Two Family Home (2000) Raymond De Felitta 4/10
Ek Din Achanak (1989) Mirnal Sen 7/10
A Whisker Away (2020) Jun'ichi Satô & Tomotaka Shibayama 5/10
Ava (2020) Tate Taylor 1/10
Le Révélateur (1968) Philippe Garrel 4/10
The Structure of Crystal (1969) Krzysztof Zanussi 6/10
Cheaters (1984) Barbet Schroeder 4/10
Ema (2019) Pablo Larrain 7/10
Antareen (1993) Mirnal Sen 5/10
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Charlie Kaufman 4/10
News From Planet Mars (2016) Dominik Moll 6/10
The Kindness of Strangers (2019) Lone Scherfig 1/10
Repeat viewing
A Place in the Sun (1951) George Stevens 10/10
Padatik (1973) Mrinal Sen 6/10
Two Family Home (2000) Raymond De Felitta 4/10
Ek Din Achanak (1989) Mirnal Sen 7/10
A Whisker Away (2020) Jun'ichi Satô & Tomotaka Shibayama 5/10
Ava (2020) Tate Taylor 1/10
Le Révélateur (1968) Philippe Garrel 4/10
The Structure of Crystal (1969) Krzysztof Zanussi 6/10
Cheaters (1984) Barbet Schroeder 4/10
Ema (2019) Pablo Larrain 7/10
Antareen (1993) Mirnal Sen 5/10
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Charlie Kaufman 4/10
News From Planet Mars (2016) Dominik Moll 6/10
The Kindness of Strangers (2019) Lone Scherfig 1/10
Repeat viewing
A Place in the Sun (1951) George Stevens 10/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Brutti, sporchi e cattivi / Ugly, Dirty & Bad (Ettore Scola, 1976) 9/10
Scola's extraordinary film is an homage to Vittorio De Sica's "Miracolo a Milano" and like it is set in an overcrowded tenement slum. The film opens with an amazing circular shot inside a shack full of countless human beings living in squalor. The owner of the shack is a one-eyed patriarch (Nino Manfredi) who lives with countless children, grandchildren and a wife he beats and refers to as a whore. He sleeps with a gun guarding a packet containing money which his family wants to steal. While waiting for him to die the colorful family meanwhile keep busy doing eclectic jobs in order to survive - one is a beggar and thief, one a male prostitute, a young girl dolls up daily to go get herself photographed for pornographic magazines which her mother proudly displays to the jeering young men in the tenement. Their lives are seen as a contrast to the teeming city just a stone's throw away. Matters come to a head when the old man befriends a prostitute with huge breasts, has his way with her under a billboard and calmly brings her back to the shack hoping to make her part of the extended family. This is the last straw for his enraged wife who plots with the family to kill him but the old man has a few tricks of his own up his sleeve. The intensely grotesque imagery on display is shocking but hilarious and a strong indictment against European society for being comfortable while citizens close to them live like savage animals. Manfredi is magnificent as the slightly deranged drunkard but is matched by every actor around him playing assorted characters each of whom has a life of intense poverty to blame for their weirdness and shocking behaviour. The film's outstanding production design is a revelation. Scola won a well-deserved prize for his direction at the Cannes Film Festival.
Les Aventuriers / The Last Adventure (Robert Enrivo, 1967) 6/10
Three losers - an engineer (Lino Ventura), a pilot (Alain Delon), an artist (Joanna Shimkus) - all fail their individual goals but form a deep friendship. Deciding to go treasure hunting they hire a boat and go deep sea diving off the coast of Africa. When a shady person (Serge Regianni) informs them of actual treasure they manage to find it but then find themselves pursued by gunmen looking for the loot. Slapdash adventure film has the three delightful leads forming a strong bond of friendship which even sudden tragedy does not break. The film memorably uses Fort Boyard, the remains of an old island fort on the Western coast of France, during the film's action packed shootout. The film's success at the boxoffice was due to Delon's star presence although Ventura outacts him and is the soul of the story.
To the Victor (Delmer Daves, 1948) 5/10
Typical Warner Bros intrigue set in post-War Paris. An American war hero turned black marketeer (Dennis Morgan) helps lady in distress (Viveca Lindfors in her Hollywood debut) who is the wife of a collaborator and on the run from men out to kill her. A turbulent romance follows with the two ending up on a battle-strewn Normandy beach. This film has a rather tired and disjointed screenplay by Richard Brooks although the two stars try to make a go of it. Location filming also a plus.
Les Tontons Flingueurs (Georges Lautner, 1963) 3/10
A change of pace for Lino Ventura who, although staying within the crime genre, plays it completely for laughs. A huge success at the boxoffice which I didn't really get. The droll french humour does not translate through the english subtitles. An ex-gangster (Lino Ventura) is summoned to the death-bed of his mentor and gets handed over the criminal empire to be looked after his death which happens soon after. There is an added catch as he is also asked to keep a close eye on his ditsy and nubile daughter. Soon he is upto his neck with problems starting with one of the resentful gang members (Bernard Blier), the shenanigans of the girl and the violent retaliation of a rival criminal gang who have not taken too kindly to his new assignment. Slow, dreary film is totally bereft of laughs which french audiences seemed to find and were apparently much thrilled by.
Dangerous Secrets / Brief Ecstasy (Edmond T. Griéville, 1937) 4/10
Corny B-film is set around a love triangle. An old Professor (Paul Lukas) is visited by an old student (Hugh Williams) who turns out to be the former lover of his much younger wife (Linden Travers). Old fashioned melodrama has a loud score that punctuates every dramatic moment as the young lovers contemplate running away together. The film has a few interesting directorial touches - a superbly edited sequence set in a nightclub when the young couple go on their first outing together which is shot with the couple seated together and the other patrons of the club are superimposed on the couple along with the shadow of a woman who is performing a song. Contrived film has a couple of fiery moments involving the jealous Mrs Danvers-like old maid (Marie Ney), secretly in love with the Professor, who hysterically accuses the young couple of being indiscreet.
The Contract (Bruce Beresford, 2006) 5/10
Despite the pedigree - the two leads and the director - this is a strictly routine chase film. While on a camping trip in the wilderness an ex-cop (John Cusack) and his teenage son come across a handcuffed man (Morgan Freeman) and a dying cop. The man is a deadly hitman who was being taken to prison but who escaped after a car crash. Stuck in an awkward situation they decide to take the crook and deliver him to the cops. Unfortunately for them the crook's four partners are in close pursuit and give chase. Lifeless thriller with the actors merely going through the motions and all the action set-pieces predictable and shot without flair. The film had a troubled shoot with Beresford realizing that the screenplay didn't make much sense and after the film was shut down by the producers, Beresford finished it using his own money. The film's spectacular backdrop is courtesy of Bulgaria where most of the outdoor scenes were shot. Disappointing film although it is a treat to see Freeman play the bad guy.
Sphinx (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1981) 2/10
This big budget thriller comes off like a "Nancy Drew" mystery with silly dialogue and absurd situations. Based on the book by Robin Cook the film was supposed to follow in the success of the writer's previous thriller "Coma" which this film is almost a repeat of with just the location shifting from a hosital in Boston to the ruins of Cairo and Luxor in Egypt. The film's huge budget somehow translated into this tacky looking film. An egyptologist (Lesley-Anne Down) makes a stupendous discovery when she happens to come across clues about a long-lost tomb containing a Pharaoh’s riches. Every possible mystery cliché in the book befalls the spunky heroine as she is chased by murderous men, gets knocked around, falls down dark tunnels and is attacked by bats. Can she trust the men who offer to help - an oily journalist (Maurice Ronet) and an Arab policeman (Frank Langella) with whom she has a fling? The only man worth her time is an old Arab played of all people by Sir John Gielgud - you can almost see the great actor grinning his way to the bank, one of numerous absurd roles he took on in movies for the moolah. It's a small cameo appearance but even in that short time, and despite the ridiculousness of his casting, the actor brings a moment of much needed grandeur to the film. I will avoid mentioning the hilarity of his last moments in the plot. The film gave Lesley-Anne Down her first opportunity to carry a big budget studio production by herself. It was also her last as the film rightfully bombed big time. One of the most beautiful actresses on screen here is reduced to looking ugly thanks to the ridiculous mullet hairstyle she sports. Implausible, convoluted, unrelentingly silly film with sluggish pacing. Schaffner is also to blame as his efforts seemingly only entail to ensure his leading lady screams, jumps, weeps and basically be in hysterics at annoyingly frequent intervals just to remind people they are watching a thriller.
The Victors (Carl Foreman, 1963) 8/10
Sprawling all-star WWII film with a strong anti-war message. The screenplay, adapted from a collection of short stories, is a series of vignettes - interspersed with Pathé-style newsreels both real and fake - as it follows a group of American infantry soldiers moving from Britain in 1942 to the fierce battle during the Italian Campaign to the Normandy invasion and on to occupied Berlin which is under an uneasy peace at the end of the War. Foreman does not depict any battle scenes, only showing a few skirmishes, and instead concentrates on the soldiers forming brief liaisons with local women. A soldier (Vince Edwards) is sympathetic towards a young mother (Rosanna Schiaffino) who misses her husband who is on the African front and could be dead. A Sergeant (Eli Wallach) has a hard time controlling his soldiers from looting and drinking and gets to spend one night in a comfortable bed in the home of a french woman (Jeanne Moreau) who is petrified of the falling bombs. A naive Corporal falls in love with a violinist (Romy Schneider) at a bar but she mocks him by taking up with a sleazy pimp (Michael Callan). Another Corporal (George Peppard) falls in with a chic and sophisticated black marketeer (Melina Mercouri) who urges him to desert and stay on with her. When he refuses she tells him she hopes he dies. A young scared soldier (Peter Fonda) befriends a small dog which his friends kill. When the war ends the jilted Corporal falls in love with a local German girl (Elke Sommer) in the Russian Zone of Berlin. He provides her family with imported goods and looks out for her sister (Senta Berger) who has been sleeping around with Russians. The film's ironic ending has him in a chance encounter with a drunken Russian soldier (Albert Finney) which does not end well. Foreman gives the film a realistic overview showing all the soldiers tired, weary and wondering why they are stuck so far from home fighting a war created by others. The film's most haunting moment is set next to a frozen lake as the group watch a Private being executed for desertion. The film has outstanding production design - a mixture of stunning locations and studio sets - and stark black and white cinematography by Christopher Challis. Forman's film makes strong points about the futility of war in which both victors and the vanquished are losers.
The Great Waltz (Andrew L. Stone, 1972) 5/10
MGM's remake of its own 1938 classic was hilariously ill-timed as it came out when bloated musicals had already proved to be a disaster at the boxoffice. Deciding to make such an old-fashioned film when New Hollywood, with its gritty "real" subjects, had already made a strong inroad was the height of folly for the studio and it was a resounding flop. Actually it is not that bad. The Strauss music is a major plus along with opulent sets and costumes and stunning Vienna locations including scenes set on the Danube unlike the classic version which was shot entirely inside the studio. The plot follows the life of Johann Strauss (Horst Buchholz), the rivalry with his father, Strauss Sr (Nigel Patrick), the relationship with his ambitious mother (Yvonne Mitchell) and his marriage to the much older "Jetty" Treffz (Mary Costa), a celebrated mezzo-soprano who was the mistress of Baron Tedesco (Rosanno Brazzi). Stone's ill-advised direction lets the film down as he presents it like a Broadway musical - the songs are mostly forgettable - but Buccholz is quite good ageing realistically as the film progresses. Mary Costa, the famous operatic soprano, is superb especially when singing. She was nominated for a Golden Globe award
Dernier domicile connu / Last Known Address (José Giovanni, 1970) 6/10
Bleak police procedural about a demoted Paris police inspector (Lino Ventura) who is relegated to a small town and assigned to catch sex offenders in cinemas. He is accompanied by an easy-going rookie (Marlène Jobert) who acts as bait at the theatres. Out of the blue they are assigned to search for a murder witness who has been in hiding for the last five years. The trial of the Mob Boss, suspected of the murder, is upcoming and it is imperative the witness be found. The search becomes dangerous when the Mob henchman appear and beat up the inspector. Through a stroke of luck the witness, a widower, is found but he is accompanied by his small daughter suffering from a chronic liver disease. Traditional setup of the plot gets a fresh kick with Ventura's tough and weary persona and his chemistry with lovely Jobert. The film has strong noir overtones - a scene involving a savage beating suddey creeps up after the plot has been bubbling along - and the ending is appropriately disturbing. Most of the film is shot out on the streets of Paris with Étienne Becker's lovely cinematography capturing both the beauty and seedy aspects of the city.
Panic in Year Zero! (Ray Milland, 1962) 8/10
A nuclear attack devastates Los Angeles, New York, London, Rome and Asia. A family from L.A. - Dad (Ray Milland), Mom (Jean Hagen), Son (Frankie Avalon) & Daughter (Mary Mitchell) - out on a camping trip, witness the flashes of light and gigantic mushroom cloud and decide to play it safe by hiding in a remote cave as the fleeing population starts getting violent towards each other in a frenzy to stay alive. Milland directs this gripping thriller about a terrifying situation which goes from bad to worse when three psychotic thugs arrive, rape the daughter which results in the family retaliating in kind and more. Film depicts a human being's propensity towards savagery when the last ditch effort to survive becomes inevitable. The fake studio setting which substitutes for the countryside cave and its surroundings is a minor distraction as the dramatic screenplay puts the family through one nightmare after another. Low budget film from producer Roger Corman and American International Pictures was a boxoffice hit and one of the best films to depict mankind's moral collapse in the wake of the Cold-War threat. Amazing use of gun power in this film. Teen heart-throb Avalon subsequently appeared in a number of films for the studio.
Una lucertola con la pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Lucio Fulci, 1971) 6/10
The unhinged daughter (Florinda Bolkan) of a respected attorney (Leo Genn) suffers from vivid hallucinations and disturbing dreams. She sees herself running through a sea of naked human bodies, being chased by a large duck, making love to her comely neighbour (Anita Strindberg) followed by stabbing the woman to death. When the neighbour is found murdered exactly as in the dream, a cop (Stanley Baker) tries to pin the crime on her while her father tries to build a case for her defense. Did she really commit murder or was it done by other suspects - two crazy hippies and her smug husband (Jean Sorel) who is involved in an affair with another woman. Extremely talky film has the predictable blood and gore which was director Fulci's trademark. There is a spectacular sequence set inside a huge derelect church as a man with a knife chases the terrified Bolkan. Fulci also throws in an homage to Hitchcock during this set piece using bats to attack his leading lady. Despite the dubbing the cast is uniformly excellent with nobody playing to the gallery. Bolkan is especially fine and does not overdo the hysteria despite most of her scenes requiring her to be either overwrought or in deadly danger. There is a typical off-kilter score accompanying the mayhem by Ennio Morricone.
Stranger in the House (Pierre Rouve, 1967) 8/10
Murder mystery based on the 1940 novel by Georges Simenon places the story during the 1960s which also provides a look into the clash between different generations and the proverbial British class structure. A once respected barrister (James Mason), now an alcoholic wreck after his wife left him, lives in a decrepit old mansion with his teenage daughter (Geraldine Chaplin). While he ignores his daughter she runs around with a spoilt group of rich friends (and her struggling greek immigrant boyfriend) partying all night and breaking into places for a lark. When they all sneak on board a ship they find a sailor (Bobby Darin) who also joins their group and they all meet in the girl's attic playing games with each other. When the sailor is found shot dead in one of the rooms of the mansion, the girl's boyfriend is accused of the murder. The plot is set up to allow the drunk barrister to rise up, defend the accused and make amends with his estranged daughter. Mason is magnificent as the drunk and his arc in the story is very similar to the one played by Paul Newman years later in Sidney Lumet's "The Verdict". The film is peppered by quirky supporting characters - the boyfriend's ethnic (greek) washer-woman mum (Megs Jenkins), the barrister's adulterous sister (Moira Lister), a boistrous witness (Yootha Joyce). Darin, sticking out like a sore thumb as the victim, seems to be on a James Cagney kick playing the part like a cocky gangster. Director Rouve, who had just recently worked on Antonioni's "Blow-Up", gives the film sort of the same touch during the scenes involving the young actors as they frolic across London adhering to the newly found sexual permissiveness of the swinging 60s. The older members of the cast are presented in a stiff formal manner harking back to the style of the 40s & 50s. The script makes biting observations about British class structure and delves into other areas such as sexual harassment, impotence and homosexuality. An obsure gem that showcases one of Mason's outstanding performances.
Les pianos mécaniques / The Uninhibited (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1965) 8/10
A gregarious lesbian cafe owner (Melina Mercouri), a homosexual art critic (Hardy Krüger) and an alcoholic womanizing writer (James Mason) form an interesting love triangle in the small Spanish coastal town of Cadaqués. The rather melodramatic couplings caused a furor for the fascist Spanish government in Spain and the film was severely censored. Shot in french by the acclaimed Spanish director, Juan Antonio Bardem ( the uncle of current superstar Javier Bardem), the film comes to life in the scenes between Mason and young Didier Haudepin who plays his precocious son and a mischievous observer of the adults busy in their sexual games with each other. Also memorable is Mercouri, once more playing a lifeforce, as the jaded optimist who holds full control over the inhabitants of the town and the men and women who come in and out of her bed. The film ends on a good note as we get to hear her distinctive and delightful throaty laugh. The beauty of the Catalonia countryside and the quaint little town are added pleasures. Georges Delerue's jaunty score accompanies all the adult heavy breathing on show.
Calle Mayor / Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956) 9/10
Bittersweet tale about a woman's opression was made at the height of Francoism in Spain. The shooting was disrupted during a student protest rally when Bardem, a communist, was jailed. He had to shift the location shoot from the Northern provincial town of Palencia and so the scenes set in the town square and its surroundings were shot in Logroño. The plot, based on the play by Carlos Arniches, revolves around a nasty prank. A group of idle middle-aged friends decide that as a joke one of them should seduce a spinster. The one who is chosen to be the seducer is Juan (José Suárez), the youngest and best looking of the group. His target is to be 35-year old Isabel (Betsy Blair) who lives with her widowed mother on Calle Mayor. He begins to court her and she is thrilled and falls in love. During a gala dance at the local club she expects him to announce their engagement but he desperately wants to get himself away from the muddle. The film, with its vivid neo-realist trappings, is a scathing attack at small-town prejudice and hypocricy. Betsy Blair, recently divorced from Gene Kelly and under attack by the communist witch hunt in America where she was blacklisted, moved to Europe to continue her career. Under Bardem's direction she gives a sensitive performance not unlike the one in "Marty" for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She would go onto work with Antonioni ("Il grido) before settling down in London when she married the Czech-born director Karel Reisz. The film proved to be a huge stepping stone for José Suaŕez as he became a huge star in Europe.
La venganza / Vengeance (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1958) 8/10
A man (Jorge Mistral) spends 10 years in jail for a murder he did not commit. When he returns to his village his sister (Carmen Sevilla) urges him to seek revenge on the dead man's brother (Raf Vallone) who she suspects snitched to the police and framed him. With no jobs around and to avoid starvation both brother and sister offer to join a group of harvesters who are about to leave for the Po Valley to harvest wheat. The leader of the group of labourers is the very snitch they suspect of the murder. Matters become complicated when the woman starts falling in love with the snitch. This was a highly personal project for Bardem as within the framework of a revenge story the screenplay primarily deals with social criticism of many issues during the Franco regime - strikes, unemployment and especially labour exploitation. Fernando Rey has a small part some years before he became a huge star. The stunning location filming was done on the vast fields of the Spanish province of Castilla-La Mancha. This was the first Spanish film to receive an Academy Award nomination in the Foreign Film category.
Scola's extraordinary film is an homage to Vittorio De Sica's "Miracolo a Milano" and like it is set in an overcrowded tenement slum. The film opens with an amazing circular shot inside a shack full of countless human beings living in squalor. The owner of the shack is a one-eyed patriarch (Nino Manfredi) who lives with countless children, grandchildren and a wife he beats and refers to as a whore. He sleeps with a gun guarding a packet containing money which his family wants to steal. While waiting for him to die the colorful family meanwhile keep busy doing eclectic jobs in order to survive - one is a beggar and thief, one a male prostitute, a young girl dolls up daily to go get herself photographed for pornographic magazines which her mother proudly displays to the jeering young men in the tenement. Their lives are seen as a contrast to the teeming city just a stone's throw away. Matters come to a head when the old man befriends a prostitute with huge breasts, has his way with her under a billboard and calmly brings her back to the shack hoping to make her part of the extended family. This is the last straw for his enraged wife who plots with the family to kill him but the old man has a few tricks of his own up his sleeve. The intensely grotesque imagery on display is shocking but hilarious and a strong indictment against European society for being comfortable while citizens close to them live like savage animals. Manfredi is magnificent as the slightly deranged drunkard but is matched by every actor around him playing assorted characters each of whom has a life of intense poverty to blame for their weirdness and shocking behaviour. The film's outstanding production design is a revelation. Scola won a well-deserved prize for his direction at the Cannes Film Festival.
Les Aventuriers / The Last Adventure (Robert Enrivo, 1967) 6/10
Three losers - an engineer (Lino Ventura), a pilot (Alain Delon), an artist (Joanna Shimkus) - all fail their individual goals but form a deep friendship. Deciding to go treasure hunting they hire a boat and go deep sea diving off the coast of Africa. When a shady person (Serge Regianni) informs them of actual treasure they manage to find it but then find themselves pursued by gunmen looking for the loot. Slapdash adventure film has the three delightful leads forming a strong bond of friendship which even sudden tragedy does not break. The film memorably uses Fort Boyard, the remains of an old island fort on the Western coast of France, during the film's action packed shootout. The film's success at the boxoffice was due to Delon's star presence although Ventura outacts him and is the soul of the story.
To the Victor (Delmer Daves, 1948) 5/10
Typical Warner Bros intrigue set in post-War Paris. An American war hero turned black marketeer (Dennis Morgan) helps lady in distress (Viveca Lindfors in her Hollywood debut) who is the wife of a collaborator and on the run from men out to kill her. A turbulent romance follows with the two ending up on a battle-strewn Normandy beach. This film has a rather tired and disjointed screenplay by Richard Brooks although the two stars try to make a go of it. Location filming also a plus.
Les Tontons Flingueurs (Georges Lautner, 1963) 3/10
A change of pace for Lino Ventura who, although staying within the crime genre, plays it completely for laughs. A huge success at the boxoffice which I didn't really get. The droll french humour does not translate through the english subtitles. An ex-gangster (Lino Ventura) is summoned to the death-bed of his mentor and gets handed over the criminal empire to be looked after his death which happens soon after. There is an added catch as he is also asked to keep a close eye on his ditsy and nubile daughter. Soon he is upto his neck with problems starting with one of the resentful gang members (Bernard Blier), the shenanigans of the girl and the violent retaliation of a rival criminal gang who have not taken too kindly to his new assignment. Slow, dreary film is totally bereft of laughs which french audiences seemed to find and were apparently much thrilled by.
Dangerous Secrets / Brief Ecstasy (Edmond T. Griéville, 1937) 4/10
Corny B-film is set around a love triangle. An old Professor (Paul Lukas) is visited by an old student (Hugh Williams) who turns out to be the former lover of his much younger wife (Linden Travers). Old fashioned melodrama has a loud score that punctuates every dramatic moment as the young lovers contemplate running away together. The film has a few interesting directorial touches - a superbly edited sequence set in a nightclub when the young couple go on their first outing together which is shot with the couple seated together and the other patrons of the club are superimposed on the couple along with the shadow of a woman who is performing a song. Contrived film has a couple of fiery moments involving the jealous Mrs Danvers-like old maid (Marie Ney), secretly in love with the Professor, who hysterically accuses the young couple of being indiscreet.
The Contract (Bruce Beresford, 2006) 5/10
Despite the pedigree - the two leads and the director - this is a strictly routine chase film. While on a camping trip in the wilderness an ex-cop (John Cusack) and his teenage son come across a handcuffed man (Morgan Freeman) and a dying cop. The man is a deadly hitman who was being taken to prison but who escaped after a car crash. Stuck in an awkward situation they decide to take the crook and deliver him to the cops. Unfortunately for them the crook's four partners are in close pursuit and give chase. Lifeless thriller with the actors merely going through the motions and all the action set-pieces predictable and shot without flair. The film had a troubled shoot with Beresford realizing that the screenplay didn't make much sense and after the film was shut down by the producers, Beresford finished it using his own money. The film's spectacular backdrop is courtesy of Bulgaria where most of the outdoor scenes were shot. Disappointing film although it is a treat to see Freeman play the bad guy.
Sphinx (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1981) 2/10
This big budget thriller comes off like a "Nancy Drew" mystery with silly dialogue and absurd situations. Based on the book by Robin Cook the film was supposed to follow in the success of the writer's previous thriller "Coma" which this film is almost a repeat of with just the location shifting from a hosital in Boston to the ruins of Cairo and Luxor in Egypt. The film's huge budget somehow translated into this tacky looking film. An egyptologist (Lesley-Anne Down) makes a stupendous discovery when she happens to come across clues about a long-lost tomb containing a Pharaoh’s riches. Every possible mystery cliché in the book befalls the spunky heroine as she is chased by murderous men, gets knocked around, falls down dark tunnels and is attacked by bats. Can she trust the men who offer to help - an oily journalist (Maurice Ronet) and an Arab policeman (Frank Langella) with whom she has a fling? The only man worth her time is an old Arab played of all people by Sir John Gielgud - you can almost see the great actor grinning his way to the bank, one of numerous absurd roles he took on in movies for the moolah. It's a small cameo appearance but even in that short time, and despite the ridiculousness of his casting, the actor brings a moment of much needed grandeur to the film. I will avoid mentioning the hilarity of his last moments in the plot. The film gave Lesley-Anne Down her first opportunity to carry a big budget studio production by herself. It was also her last as the film rightfully bombed big time. One of the most beautiful actresses on screen here is reduced to looking ugly thanks to the ridiculous mullet hairstyle she sports. Implausible, convoluted, unrelentingly silly film with sluggish pacing. Schaffner is also to blame as his efforts seemingly only entail to ensure his leading lady screams, jumps, weeps and basically be in hysterics at annoyingly frequent intervals just to remind people they are watching a thriller.
The Victors (Carl Foreman, 1963) 8/10
Sprawling all-star WWII film with a strong anti-war message. The screenplay, adapted from a collection of short stories, is a series of vignettes - interspersed with Pathé-style newsreels both real and fake - as it follows a group of American infantry soldiers moving from Britain in 1942 to the fierce battle during the Italian Campaign to the Normandy invasion and on to occupied Berlin which is under an uneasy peace at the end of the War. Foreman does not depict any battle scenes, only showing a few skirmishes, and instead concentrates on the soldiers forming brief liaisons with local women. A soldier (Vince Edwards) is sympathetic towards a young mother (Rosanna Schiaffino) who misses her husband who is on the African front and could be dead. A Sergeant (Eli Wallach) has a hard time controlling his soldiers from looting and drinking and gets to spend one night in a comfortable bed in the home of a french woman (Jeanne Moreau) who is petrified of the falling bombs. A naive Corporal falls in love with a violinist (Romy Schneider) at a bar but she mocks him by taking up with a sleazy pimp (Michael Callan). Another Corporal (George Peppard) falls in with a chic and sophisticated black marketeer (Melina Mercouri) who urges him to desert and stay on with her. When he refuses she tells him she hopes he dies. A young scared soldier (Peter Fonda) befriends a small dog which his friends kill. When the war ends the jilted Corporal falls in love with a local German girl (Elke Sommer) in the Russian Zone of Berlin. He provides her family with imported goods and looks out for her sister (Senta Berger) who has been sleeping around with Russians. The film's ironic ending has him in a chance encounter with a drunken Russian soldier (Albert Finney) which does not end well. Foreman gives the film a realistic overview showing all the soldiers tired, weary and wondering why they are stuck so far from home fighting a war created by others. The film's most haunting moment is set next to a frozen lake as the group watch a Private being executed for desertion. The film has outstanding production design - a mixture of stunning locations and studio sets - and stark black and white cinematography by Christopher Challis. Forman's film makes strong points about the futility of war in which both victors and the vanquished are losers.
The Great Waltz (Andrew L. Stone, 1972) 5/10
MGM's remake of its own 1938 classic was hilariously ill-timed as it came out when bloated musicals had already proved to be a disaster at the boxoffice. Deciding to make such an old-fashioned film when New Hollywood, with its gritty "real" subjects, had already made a strong inroad was the height of folly for the studio and it was a resounding flop. Actually it is not that bad. The Strauss music is a major plus along with opulent sets and costumes and stunning Vienna locations including scenes set on the Danube unlike the classic version which was shot entirely inside the studio. The plot follows the life of Johann Strauss (Horst Buchholz), the rivalry with his father, Strauss Sr (Nigel Patrick), the relationship with his ambitious mother (Yvonne Mitchell) and his marriage to the much older "Jetty" Treffz (Mary Costa), a celebrated mezzo-soprano who was the mistress of Baron Tedesco (Rosanno Brazzi). Stone's ill-advised direction lets the film down as he presents it like a Broadway musical - the songs are mostly forgettable - but Buccholz is quite good ageing realistically as the film progresses. Mary Costa, the famous operatic soprano, is superb especially when singing. She was nominated for a Golden Globe award
Dernier domicile connu / Last Known Address (José Giovanni, 1970) 6/10
Bleak police procedural about a demoted Paris police inspector (Lino Ventura) who is relegated to a small town and assigned to catch sex offenders in cinemas. He is accompanied by an easy-going rookie (Marlène Jobert) who acts as bait at the theatres. Out of the blue they are assigned to search for a murder witness who has been in hiding for the last five years. The trial of the Mob Boss, suspected of the murder, is upcoming and it is imperative the witness be found. The search becomes dangerous when the Mob henchman appear and beat up the inspector. Through a stroke of luck the witness, a widower, is found but he is accompanied by his small daughter suffering from a chronic liver disease. Traditional setup of the plot gets a fresh kick with Ventura's tough and weary persona and his chemistry with lovely Jobert. The film has strong noir overtones - a scene involving a savage beating suddey creeps up after the plot has been bubbling along - and the ending is appropriately disturbing. Most of the film is shot out on the streets of Paris with Étienne Becker's lovely cinematography capturing both the beauty and seedy aspects of the city.
Panic in Year Zero! (Ray Milland, 1962) 8/10
A nuclear attack devastates Los Angeles, New York, London, Rome and Asia. A family from L.A. - Dad (Ray Milland), Mom (Jean Hagen), Son (Frankie Avalon) & Daughter (Mary Mitchell) - out on a camping trip, witness the flashes of light and gigantic mushroom cloud and decide to play it safe by hiding in a remote cave as the fleeing population starts getting violent towards each other in a frenzy to stay alive. Milland directs this gripping thriller about a terrifying situation which goes from bad to worse when three psychotic thugs arrive, rape the daughter which results in the family retaliating in kind and more. Film depicts a human being's propensity towards savagery when the last ditch effort to survive becomes inevitable. The fake studio setting which substitutes for the countryside cave and its surroundings is a minor distraction as the dramatic screenplay puts the family through one nightmare after another. Low budget film from producer Roger Corman and American International Pictures was a boxoffice hit and one of the best films to depict mankind's moral collapse in the wake of the Cold-War threat. Amazing use of gun power in this film. Teen heart-throb Avalon subsequently appeared in a number of films for the studio.
Una lucertola con la pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Lucio Fulci, 1971) 6/10
The unhinged daughter (Florinda Bolkan) of a respected attorney (Leo Genn) suffers from vivid hallucinations and disturbing dreams. She sees herself running through a sea of naked human bodies, being chased by a large duck, making love to her comely neighbour (Anita Strindberg) followed by stabbing the woman to death. When the neighbour is found murdered exactly as in the dream, a cop (Stanley Baker) tries to pin the crime on her while her father tries to build a case for her defense. Did she really commit murder or was it done by other suspects - two crazy hippies and her smug husband (Jean Sorel) who is involved in an affair with another woman. Extremely talky film has the predictable blood and gore which was director Fulci's trademark. There is a spectacular sequence set inside a huge derelect church as a man with a knife chases the terrified Bolkan. Fulci also throws in an homage to Hitchcock during this set piece using bats to attack his leading lady. Despite the dubbing the cast is uniformly excellent with nobody playing to the gallery. Bolkan is especially fine and does not overdo the hysteria despite most of her scenes requiring her to be either overwrought or in deadly danger. There is a typical off-kilter score accompanying the mayhem by Ennio Morricone.
Stranger in the House (Pierre Rouve, 1967) 8/10
Murder mystery based on the 1940 novel by Georges Simenon places the story during the 1960s which also provides a look into the clash between different generations and the proverbial British class structure. A once respected barrister (James Mason), now an alcoholic wreck after his wife left him, lives in a decrepit old mansion with his teenage daughter (Geraldine Chaplin). While he ignores his daughter she runs around with a spoilt group of rich friends (and her struggling greek immigrant boyfriend) partying all night and breaking into places for a lark. When they all sneak on board a ship they find a sailor (Bobby Darin) who also joins their group and they all meet in the girl's attic playing games with each other. When the sailor is found shot dead in one of the rooms of the mansion, the girl's boyfriend is accused of the murder. The plot is set up to allow the drunk barrister to rise up, defend the accused and make amends with his estranged daughter. Mason is magnificent as the drunk and his arc in the story is very similar to the one played by Paul Newman years later in Sidney Lumet's "The Verdict". The film is peppered by quirky supporting characters - the boyfriend's ethnic (greek) washer-woman mum (Megs Jenkins), the barrister's adulterous sister (Moira Lister), a boistrous witness (Yootha Joyce). Darin, sticking out like a sore thumb as the victim, seems to be on a James Cagney kick playing the part like a cocky gangster. Director Rouve, who had just recently worked on Antonioni's "Blow-Up", gives the film sort of the same touch during the scenes involving the young actors as they frolic across London adhering to the newly found sexual permissiveness of the swinging 60s. The older members of the cast are presented in a stiff formal manner harking back to the style of the 40s & 50s. The script makes biting observations about British class structure and delves into other areas such as sexual harassment, impotence and homosexuality. An obsure gem that showcases one of Mason's outstanding performances.
Les pianos mécaniques / The Uninhibited (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1965) 8/10
A gregarious lesbian cafe owner (Melina Mercouri), a homosexual art critic (Hardy Krüger) and an alcoholic womanizing writer (James Mason) form an interesting love triangle in the small Spanish coastal town of Cadaqués. The rather melodramatic couplings caused a furor for the fascist Spanish government in Spain and the film was severely censored. Shot in french by the acclaimed Spanish director, Juan Antonio Bardem ( the uncle of current superstar Javier Bardem), the film comes to life in the scenes between Mason and young Didier Haudepin who plays his precocious son and a mischievous observer of the adults busy in their sexual games with each other. Also memorable is Mercouri, once more playing a lifeforce, as the jaded optimist who holds full control over the inhabitants of the town and the men and women who come in and out of her bed. The film ends on a good note as we get to hear her distinctive and delightful throaty laugh. The beauty of the Catalonia countryside and the quaint little town are added pleasures. Georges Delerue's jaunty score accompanies all the adult heavy breathing on show.
Calle Mayor / Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956) 9/10
Bittersweet tale about a woman's opression was made at the height of Francoism in Spain. The shooting was disrupted during a student protest rally when Bardem, a communist, was jailed. He had to shift the location shoot from the Northern provincial town of Palencia and so the scenes set in the town square and its surroundings were shot in Logroño. The plot, based on the play by Carlos Arniches, revolves around a nasty prank. A group of idle middle-aged friends decide that as a joke one of them should seduce a spinster. The one who is chosen to be the seducer is Juan (José Suárez), the youngest and best looking of the group. His target is to be 35-year old Isabel (Betsy Blair) who lives with her widowed mother on Calle Mayor. He begins to court her and she is thrilled and falls in love. During a gala dance at the local club she expects him to announce their engagement but he desperately wants to get himself away from the muddle. The film, with its vivid neo-realist trappings, is a scathing attack at small-town prejudice and hypocricy. Betsy Blair, recently divorced from Gene Kelly and under attack by the communist witch hunt in America where she was blacklisted, moved to Europe to continue her career. Under Bardem's direction she gives a sensitive performance not unlike the one in "Marty" for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She would go onto work with Antonioni ("Il grido) before settling down in London when she married the Czech-born director Karel Reisz. The film proved to be a huge stepping stone for José Suaŕez as he became a huge star in Europe.
La venganza / Vengeance (Juan Antonio Bardem, 1958) 8/10
A man (Jorge Mistral) spends 10 years in jail for a murder he did not commit. When he returns to his village his sister (Carmen Sevilla) urges him to seek revenge on the dead man's brother (Raf Vallone) who she suspects snitched to the police and framed him. With no jobs around and to avoid starvation both brother and sister offer to join a group of harvesters who are about to leave for the Po Valley to harvest wheat. The leader of the group of labourers is the very snitch they suspect of the murder. Matters become complicated when the woman starts falling in love with the snitch. This was a highly personal project for Bardem as within the framework of a revenge story the screenplay primarily deals with social criticism of many issues during the Franco regime - strikes, unemployment and especially labour exploitation. Fernando Rey has a small part some years before he became a huge star. The stunning location filming was done on the vast fields of the Spanish province of Castilla-La Mancha. This was the first Spanish film to receive an Academy Award nomination in the Foreign Film category.
Last edited by Reza on Sun Sep 06, 2020 6:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
La Musica (Marguerite Duras & Paul Seban, 1967) 7/10
Duras directs and adapts her own short two-character play for the screen which is quite a relentless exercise in despair. A long-separated couple arrive in the small provincial town where they once lived in order to pick up their divorce decree. They circle each other and discuss their past revealing incidents that the other was unaware of - she was unfaithful to him and tried to commit suicide while he confesses that he tried to murder her. Through the encounter both realise they have fallen in love with each other again even though they are at present involved with other partners. Both Hossein and Seyrig, looking incredibly chic with her 1930s blonde bob, suffer with great style and sincerity. Since this is Duras we get a lot of arty inflections throughout with the actors photographed against blank walls, walking through corridors or reflected in mirrors. To open up the play Duras introduces a third character - a young hitch-hiker (Julie Dassin) who meets the man at the start as he sits in a café waiting for his wife to arrive. He discusses his life as they wander about the town and this third character appears to be one of the husband's long ago infidelities mentioned in the play which he could be recalling as he waits. It's a sequence that seems totally superfluous and seems added on in order to increase the film's running time. Sacha Vierney's sharply lit black and white cinematography compliments both actors as they bare their souls under the harsh light.
Les cousins / The Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959) 8/10
French New Wave drama was Chabrol's second film and which won him the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The story is a cynical look at french youth revelling in their cruel and callous behaviour. An enigmatic, gregarious but cruel young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) invites his naive provincial cousin (Gerard Blain) to come stay with him in Paris. He introduces the shy young man to his wild friends and exposes him to a life of wild parties. Both are law students and while the hedonist claims he can pass his exam without opening any book the other man works studiously in order to pass his exam and make his mother proud. Matters between the two cousins come to head over a girl leading to the shocking finalé. Chabrol, a true Hitchcock fanatic, used a lot of the Master's tricks and sense of the macabre in his films throughout his career. Chabrol and his collaborator, the great cinematographer Henri Decaë, create visually stunning images with the camera in constant motion during scenes set during an orgy and during the tense moments involving a gun. With the film's success - the first amongst the New Wave directors - Chabrol went on to create many thrillers with almost all having a strong link to Hitchcock's style of film making.
Sabrina (Billy Wider, 1954) 10/10
Charming Audrey Hepburn, the witty script by Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman, a platinum blonde William Holden, the extremely offbeat casting of Humphrey Bogart when Wilder's original choice - Cary Grant - refused the part, a jaunty romantic score and Hepburn's iconic costumes for which Edith Head won an Oscar even though Givenchy designed most of them. This heady mix combined to create a perfect romantic comedy. The film was based on Samuel Taylor's Broadway play, "Sabrina Fair", which had been a huge success for Margaret Sullavan, but Paramount cast Audrey Hepburn whose followup film this was right after "Roman Holiday" for which she had won the Oscar. The plot was straight out of Bollywood - young woman (Audrey Hepburn), a chauffeur's daughter, gets involved with both sons of her father's employer. Madly in love with the younger son (William Holden), a much-married loveable cad, she also attracts the attention of the older more sedate brother (Humphrey Bogart). Who will she end up with? Wilder's astute direction prevents it from becoming fluff - there are many small witty moments scattered throughout - and he superbly guides the cast to give their best despite the many problems on set between the three stars. Hepburn, Wilder, the screenplay, production design and cinematography were all nominated for Academy Awards. Edith Head won for the film's costume designs. Classic film is a must-see.
La ragazza e il generale / The Girl and the General (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1967) 5/10
During WWI an Italian private (Umberto Orsini), separated from his unit, captures an Austrian General (Rod Steiger) who plays a cat-and-mouse game in his attempts to escape. Wandering around the Austro-Italian border they come across a farm girl (Virna Lisa) who joins hands with the private and together they plan to deliver the General to the Italian army in exchange for a reward. Silly comedy-drama has the three characters fighting each other for every morsel of food while the private tries to have his way with the pretty woman. They keep running into and avoiding Austrian and German troops while searching for the Italian lines which appears to be across a dangerous minefield which they attempt to cross along with a donkey. The only surprise in this rather pointless film is a total lack of hamminess in Steiger's performance which is extremely rare.
Le désordre et la nuit / The Night Affair (Gilles Grangier, 1958) 8/10
This film mixes elements of noir from the 1940s and the stylistic movement that emerged in France during the early 1930s known as "poetic realism". The tone here is bolder, sharper and a lot more unforgiving, with characters jaded and in despair more than what one saw in Hollywood noirs. A drug-addicted nightclub singer (Nadja Tiller) is a suspect in a murder case. The cop (Jean Gabin), investigating the case, gets emotionally involved with the suspect after she seduces him and he tries to get her off drugs and capture the drug ring responsible. The film's main set piece is a Parisian nightclub where the star attraction is Hazel Scott, the critically acclaimed Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist, singer and actor who gets to sing two songs. Wonder what the politically correct junta today would think about Gabin calling her a "negress"? She is black so that word refers to her colour in french but viewing the scene today that word sounds jarring. Gabin is superb as the old cop involved with a much younger woman - he has great chemistry with Tiller. Danielle Darrieux, as another suspect, is also very good although her part is underwritten. The film is superbly shot by Louis Page and helped in great part by the jazz-influenced soundtrack which creates the wonderful 1950s atmosphere.
Miroir (Raymond Lamy, 1947) 8/10
A much respected businessman (Jean Gabin) by day leads a double life at night when he transforms into a cool-headed, shrewd gangster. He is the model citizen during daytime giving money to the poor, helping nuns restore their cloister and a hero to his son (Daniel Gelin). At night his life revolves around nightclubs and gambling joints as he keeps a tight control on his criminal activities. Eventually his two worlds collide with a spectacular shootout in a cemetary. Gabin gives a charismatic star performance, elegantly dressed, and as with most of his films completely dominates the proceedings. Portrait of a two-faced man is in many ways a lot like the Don Corleone character from "The Godfather". One of many hidden gems from the golden period of French cinema.
La corona negra / Black Crown (Luis Saslavsky, 1951) 10/10
Deliriously over-the-top film noir with enough striking images to populate several melodramas. The intricate plot, based on a short story by Jean Cocteau, uses amnesia as the backdrop to create dazzling imagery via surreal dream sequences - the most vivid scene in the film comes during the hysterical opening set in a desert with a woman (María Félix) trapped between several pairs of waving arms buried in the sand. She is a widow, dressed in black, and found drunk in a cafe by a poor engineer (Rossano Brazzi). He takes her home but she disappears the next morning after getting frightened by a dwarf. She later returns and tells him she has no memory and for some reason her past scares her. The mystery deepens when another man (Vittorio Gassman) suddenly appears and tells her she was his lover while married to her rich husband whose diamonds they planned to steal. He and his friends demand she return the jewels but she cannot remember. It is also discovered that her husband was stabbed to death. Did she kill him or did her lover stab him with a pair of scissors? Dense plot unravels slowly as the woman gradually pieces together her memory. Adding to her confusion are peripheral characters who she comes into contact with - two nuns who appear to know her and two maids who read her future through cards and find themselves perplexed with the outcome which they try to change. The stunningly beautiful Mexican star-diva María Félix - who resembled Hollywood's Linda Darnell - gives a highly emotional performance which is helped in great part by the dramatic use of light and shadow flickering across her face. She makes a formidable femme fatale and gets able support from both her young Italian leading men. One of numerous hidden gems from Mexican cinema and a must-see.
Abenteuer in Wien / Adventures in Vienna (Emil E. Reinert, 1952) 8/10
Post-War Vienna gets another workout after Carol Reed's classic "The Third Man" in this extremely rare Austrian film noir. The unhappy wife (Cornell Borchers) of a possessive and jealous concert pianist (Francis Lederer) plans to run off with her American lover to the United States. A taxi driver (Gustav Fröhlich), who has no identity papers, picks up the American at the train station and while he is helping his ride with his suitcases he returns to his taxi to find the man shot dead by the jealous husband who was following him. Finding himself trapped he decides to take on the identity of the dead man and escape the country. Unfortunately the woman, who was supposed to run off with her lover, identifies him as an imposter. In order to deflect the murder from himself the husband claims to the police that the accused is not in fact an imposter and his own wife is ill and delusional. Realizing the husband's involvement in the murder his wife and the taxi driver plan on catching the flight out of Austria together but are confronted by both the police and the angry husband who are hell bent on stopping them. Superb film uses every noir trope to create atmosphere. The film is mostly shot at night with shadowy lighting adding to the film's menacing atmosphere. This was the first post-war film collaboration between Austria and Hollywood and along with this Austrian version in the German language a second English version was also shot simultaneously. Francis Lederer appeared in both versions as the cunning jealous husband. Here the great German star Gustave Fröhlich is a standout as the accused man who suddenly finds he has a chance at freedom even if it comes at a terrible cost.
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) 10/10
This film asks how far should one be willing to go in defiling oneself personally for the greater good of humanity. As with most of Hitchcock's films there is romance, intrigue, suspense and betrayal but more than that it is about a love triangle in which a woman feels compelled to get married to a man she abhors out of duty to her country even though she loves someone else. A disgraced woman (Ingrid Bergman) - she is the daughter of a Nazi sympathiser convicted of treason - is approached by a U.S. government agent (Cary Grant) to prove her patriotism to the United States by infiltrating her father's former colleagues in Brazil to get information on their activities. She is to approach a wealthy industrialist (Claude Rains) who was also her former lover. As the two spies gear up for the job both fall in love. When her former lover proposes marriage she decides to go for it instead of blowing her cover. The plot turns sinister when she discovers the gang is involved in producing uranium which is kept in wine bottles in the cellar. When her role as a spy gets exposed she is kept prisoner and slowly poisoned by her husband and his domineering mother (Leopoldine Konstantine). The film became famous for two memorable scenes. The two stars embrace and kiss but since censorship did not allow a kiss to last beyond a few seconds on screen the director found a way around it and the "kiss" lasted almost two and a half minutes on screen making it one of the most erotic love scenes in film history. The second memorable scene in the film involves a tracking shot by the camera during a suspense filled moment with an overhead long shot of dozens of guests at a party with the camera swooping down to an extreme close-up on a key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. This was the first of two screen pairings between Grant and Bergman and they made a sizzling team - he is his usual cool sophisticated self while she plays against type in a role that is basically that of a "call girl" which censors at the time labeled as a "party girl". Suave Claude Rains steals every scene as the sympathetic but mother-fixated Nazi who is dismayed to discover that the woman he loves has betrayed him. The film is superbly photographed by Ted Tetzlaff in crisp black and white and is a rare Hitchcock film where the plot not only has suspense but is basically a story about romance that is almost doomed. Both Claude Rains and Ben Hecht's screenplay were nominated for Academy Awards.
Endless Night (Sidney Gilliat, 1972) 5/10
Agatha Christie often regurgitated important plot points and we get a love triangle and murder seen before in the far more exotic setting of Egypt in "Death on the Nile". Here we get breathtaking shots of the English countryside in Middlesex, on the Isle of Wight and on the Amalfi coast in Italy. A poor chauffeuer (Hywel Bennett) charms a naive but rich American heiress (Hayley Mills), gets married to her and they both build a house in the countryside which was always his dream. Problems arise when her supicious step-mother (Lois Maxwell) and uncle (George Sanders) intervene. Also causing consternation for the husband is his wife's former companion and best friend (Britt Ekland) who unexpectedly arrives. There is the obligatory murder with everyone a suspect including an architect (Per Oscarsson) and an old eccentric soothsayer (Patience Collier) who warned the young couple not to move into their new house as it would bring them bad luck. Psychological thriller - Christie wrote the book in 1971 - is very different to the writer's far more exotic-set murder thrillers which she wrote decades before. It is also jarring to see a nude Britt Ekland during a sex scene in a "wholesome" Christie story but which was probably added with an eye towards the boxoffice during the less permissive 1970s when such scenes became more common place.
C'eravamo tanto amati / We All Loved Each Other So Much (Ettore Scola, 1974) 8/10
Thirty years in the lives of three close friends which is also a lesson in Italian history. Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Nico (Stefana Satta Flores) and Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) bond as leftist partisan soldiers in 1944 during WWII. As the years go by they discover that life as civilians is often full of disillusionment. Antonio is a goofy medical orderly and political activist, Nico is a radical film buff who leaves his wife and child and moves to Rome and Gianni is an opportunistic bourgeois lawyer. Into their lives comes Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli), a ditsy aspiring actress, who is loved at different times by all three friends causing friction between them. Scola's rambling film, with long flashbacks shot in black and white, is also an ode to Italian cinema as we see Luciana play a bit part in "La Dolce Vita" with Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni in cameo appearances as director and star of the film being shot. There are also excerpts shown from "The Bicycle Thief" with a cameo appearance by Vittorio De Sica the director. A funny highlight is Nico seducing Luciana while explaining the editing technique of the "Odessa Steps" sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potempkin" while they sit on the Spanish Steps. The film is stolen by Giovanna Ralli as Gassman's bird-brained fat wife who transforms into a chic hysteric and Aldo Fabrizi as her crooked industrialist father. Funny but downbeat film shows that despite gaining maturity all three men have basically remained the same - tired and worn out.
Duras directs and adapts her own short two-character play for the screen which is quite a relentless exercise in despair. A long-separated couple arrive in the small provincial town where they once lived in order to pick up their divorce decree. They circle each other and discuss their past revealing incidents that the other was unaware of - she was unfaithful to him and tried to commit suicide while he confesses that he tried to murder her. Through the encounter both realise they have fallen in love with each other again even though they are at present involved with other partners. Both Hossein and Seyrig, looking incredibly chic with her 1930s blonde bob, suffer with great style and sincerity. Since this is Duras we get a lot of arty inflections throughout with the actors photographed against blank walls, walking through corridors or reflected in mirrors. To open up the play Duras introduces a third character - a young hitch-hiker (Julie Dassin) who meets the man at the start as he sits in a café waiting for his wife to arrive. He discusses his life as they wander about the town and this third character appears to be one of the husband's long ago infidelities mentioned in the play which he could be recalling as he waits. It's a sequence that seems totally superfluous and seems added on in order to increase the film's running time. Sacha Vierney's sharply lit black and white cinematography compliments both actors as they bare their souls under the harsh light.
Les cousins / The Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959) 8/10
French New Wave drama was Chabrol's second film and which won him the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The story is a cynical look at french youth revelling in their cruel and callous behaviour. An enigmatic, gregarious but cruel young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) invites his naive provincial cousin (Gerard Blain) to come stay with him in Paris. He introduces the shy young man to his wild friends and exposes him to a life of wild parties. Both are law students and while the hedonist claims he can pass his exam without opening any book the other man works studiously in order to pass his exam and make his mother proud. Matters between the two cousins come to head over a girl leading to the shocking finalé. Chabrol, a true Hitchcock fanatic, used a lot of the Master's tricks and sense of the macabre in his films throughout his career. Chabrol and his collaborator, the great cinematographer Henri Decaë, create visually stunning images with the camera in constant motion during scenes set during an orgy and during the tense moments involving a gun. With the film's success - the first amongst the New Wave directors - Chabrol went on to create many thrillers with almost all having a strong link to Hitchcock's style of film making.
Sabrina (Billy Wider, 1954) 10/10
Charming Audrey Hepburn, the witty script by Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman, a platinum blonde William Holden, the extremely offbeat casting of Humphrey Bogart when Wilder's original choice - Cary Grant - refused the part, a jaunty romantic score and Hepburn's iconic costumes for which Edith Head won an Oscar even though Givenchy designed most of them. This heady mix combined to create a perfect romantic comedy. The film was based on Samuel Taylor's Broadway play, "Sabrina Fair", which had been a huge success for Margaret Sullavan, but Paramount cast Audrey Hepburn whose followup film this was right after "Roman Holiday" for which she had won the Oscar. The plot was straight out of Bollywood - young woman (Audrey Hepburn), a chauffeur's daughter, gets involved with both sons of her father's employer. Madly in love with the younger son (William Holden), a much-married loveable cad, she also attracts the attention of the older more sedate brother (Humphrey Bogart). Who will she end up with? Wilder's astute direction prevents it from becoming fluff - there are many small witty moments scattered throughout - and he superbly guides the cast to give their best despite the many problems on set between the three stars. Hepburn, Wilder, the screenplay, production design and cinematography were all nominated for Academy Awards. Edith Head won for the film's costume designs. Classic film is a must-see.
La ragazza e il generale / The Girl and the General (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1967) 5/10
During WWI an Italian private (Umberto Orsini), separated from his unit, captures an Austrian General (Rod Steiger) who plays a cat-and-mouse game in his attempts to escape. Wandering around the Austro-Italian border they come across a farm girl (Virna Lisa) who joins hands with the private and together they plan to deliver the General to the Italian army in exchange for a reward. Silly comedy-drama has the three characters fighting each other for every morsel of food while the private tries to have his way with the pretty woman. They keep running into and avoiding Austrian and German troops while searching for the Italian lines which appears to be across a dangerous minefield which they attempt to cross along with a donkey. The only surprise in this rather pointless film is a total lack of hamminess in Steiger's performance which is extremely rare.
Le désordre et la nuit / The Night Affair (Gilles Grangier, 1958) 8/10
This film mixes elements of noir from the 1940s and the stylistic movement that emerged in France during the early 1930s known as "poetic realism". The tone here is bolder, sharper and a lot more unforgiving, with characters jaded and in despair more than what one saw in Hollywood noirs. A drug-addicted nightclub singer (Nadja Tiller) is a suspect in a murder case. The cop (Jean Gabin), investigating the case, gets emotionally involved with the suspect after she seduces him and he tries to get her off drugs and capture the drug ring responsible. The film's main set piece is a Parisian nightclub where the star attraction is Hazel Scott, the critically acclaimed Trinidadian-born jazz and classical pianist, singer and actor who gets to sing two songs. Wonder what the politically correct junta today would think about Gabin calling her a "negress"? She is black so that word refers to her colour in french but viewing the scene today that word sounds jarring. Gabin is superb as the old cop involved with a much younger woman - he has great chemistry with Tiller. Danielle Darrieux, as another suspect, is also very good although her part is underwritten. The film is superbly shot by Louis Page and helped in great part by the jazz-influenced soundtrack which creates the wonderful 1950s atmosphere.
Miroir (Raymond Lamy, 1947) 8/10
A much respected businessman (Jean Gabin) by day leads a double life at night when he transforms into a cool-headed, shrewd gangster. He is the model citizen during daytime giving money to the poor, helping nuns restore their cloister and a hero to his son (Daniel Gelin). At night his life revolves around nightclubs and gambling joints as he keeps a tight control on his criminal activities. Eventually his two worlds collide with a spectacular shootout in a cemetary. Gabin gives a charismatic star performance, elegantly dressed, and as with most of his films completely dominates the proceedings. Portrait of a two-faced man is in many ways a lot like the Don Corleone character from "The Godfather". One of many hidden gems from the golden period of French cinema.
La corona negra / Black Crown (Luis Saslavsky, 1951) 10/10
Deliriously over-the-top film noir with enough striking images to populate several melodramas. The intricate plot, based on a short story by Jean Cocteau, uses amnesia as the backdrop to create dazzling imagery via surreal dream sequences - the most vivid scene in the film comes during the hysterical opening set in a desert with a woman (María Félix) trapped between several pairs of waving arms buried in the sand. She is a widow, dressed in black, and found drunk in a cafe by a poor engineer (Rossano Brazzi). He takes her home but she disappears the next morning after getting frightened by a dwarf. She later returns and tells him she has no memory and for some reason her past scares her. The mystery deepens when another man (Vittorio Gassman) suddenly appears and tells her she was his lover while married to her rich husband whose diamonds they planned to steal. He and his friends demand she return the jewels but she cannot remember. It is also discovered that her husband was stabbed to death. Did she kill him or did her lover stab him with a pair of scissors? Dense plot unravels slowly as the woman gradually pieces together her memory. Adding to her confusion are peripheral characters who she comes into contact with - two nuns who appear to know her and two maids who read her future through cards and find themselves perplexed with the outcome which they try to change. The stunningly beautiful Mexican star-diva María Félix - who resembled Hollywood's Linda Darnell - gives a highly emotional performance which is helped in great part by the dramatic use of light and shadow flickering across her face. She makes a formidable femme fatale and gets able support from both her young Italian leading men. One of numerous hidden gems from Mexican cinema and a must-see.
Abenteuer in Wien / Adventures in Vienna (Emil E. Reinert, 1952) 8/10
Post-War Vienna gets another workout after Carol Reed's classic "The Third Man" in this extremely rare Austrian film noir. The unhappy wife (Cornell Borchers) of a possessive and jealous concert pianist (Francis Lederer) plans to run off with her American lover to the United States. A taxi driver (Gustav Fröhlich), who has no identity papers, picks up the American at the train station and while he is helping his ride with his suitcases he returns to his taxi to find the man shot dead by the jealous husband who was following him. Finding himself trapped he decides to take on the identity of the dead man and escape the country. Unfortunately the woman, who was supposed to run off with her lover, identifies him as an imposter. In order to deflect the murder from himself the husband claims to the police that the accused is not in fact an imposter and his own wife is ill and delusional. Realizing the husband's involvement in the murder his wife and the taxi driver plan on catching the flight out of Austria together but are confronted by both the police and the angry husband who are hell bent on stopping them. Superb film uses every noir trope to create atmosphere. The film is mostly shot at night with shadowy lighting adding to the film's menacing atmosphere. This was the first post-war film collaboration between Austria and Hollywood and along with this Austrian version in the German language a second English version was also shot simultaneously. Francis Lederer appeared in both versions as the cunning jealous husband. Here the great German star Gustave Fröhlich is a standout as the accused man who suddenly finds he has a chance at freedom even if it comes at a terrible cost.
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) 10/10
This film asks how far should one be willing to go in defiling oneself personally for the greater good of humanity. As with most of Hitchcock's films there is romance, intrigue, suspense and betrayal but more than that it is about a love triangle in which a woman feels compelled to get married to a man she abhors out of duty to her country even though she loves someone else. A disgraced woman (Ingrid Bergman) - she is the daughter of a Nazi sympathiser convicted of treason - is approached by a U.S. government agent (Cary Grant) to prove her patriotism to the United States by infiltrating her father's former colleagues in Brazil to get information on their activities. She is to approach a wealthy industrialist (Claude Rains) who was also her former lover. As the two spies gear up for the job both fall in love. When her former lover proposes marriage she decides to go for it instead of blowing her cover. The plot turns sinister when she discovers the gang is involved in producing uranium which is kept in wine bottles in the cellar. When her role as a spy gets exposed she is kept prisoner and slowly poisoned by her husband and his domineering mother (Leopoldine Konstantine). The film became famous for two memorable scenes. The two stars embrace and kiss but since censorship did not allow a kiss to last beyond a few seconds on screen the director found a way around it and the "kiss" lasted almost two and a half minutes on screen making it one of the most erotic love scenes in film history. The second memorable scene in the film involves a tracking shot by the camera during a suspense filled moment with an overhead long shot of dozens of guests at a party with the camera swooping down to an extreme close-up on a key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. This was the first of two screen pairings between Grant and Bergman and they made a sizzling team - he is his usual cool sophisticated self while she plays against type in a role that is basically that of a "call girl" which censors at the time labeled as a "party girl". Suave Claude Rains steals every scene as the sympathetic but mother-fixated Nazi who is dismayed to discover that the woman he loves has betrayed him. The film is superbly photographed by Ted Tetzlaff in crisp black and white and is a rare Hitchcock film where the plot not only has suspense but is basically a story about romance that is almost doomed. Both Claude Rains and Ben Hecht's screenplay were nominated for Academy Awards.
Endless Night (Sidney Gilliat, 1972) 5/10
Agatha Christie often regurgitated important plot points and we get a love triangle and murder seen before in the far more exotic setting of Egypt in "Death on the Nile". Here we get breathtaking shots of the English countryside in Middlesex, on the Isle of Wight and on the Amalfi coast in Italy. A poor chauffeuer (Hywel Bennett) charms a naive but rich American heiress (Hayley Mills), gets married to her and they both build a house in the countryside which was always his dream. Problems arise when her supicious step-mother (Lois Maxwell) and uncle (George Sanders) intervene. Also causing consternation for the husband is his wife's former companion and best friend (Britt Ekland) who unexpectedly arrives. There is the obligatory murder with everyone a suspect including an architect (Per Oscarsson) and an old eccentric soothsayer (Patience Collier) who warned the young couple not to move into their new house as it would bring them bad luck. Psychological thriller - Christie wrote the book in 1971 - is very different to the writer's far more exotic-set murder thrillers which she wrote decades before. It is also jarring to see a nude Britt Ekland during a sex scene in a "wholesome" Christie story but which was probably added with an eye towards the boxoffice during the less permissive 1970s when such scenes became more common place.
C'eravamo tanto amati / We All Loved Each Other So Much (Ettore Scola, 1974) 8/10
Thirty years in the lives of three close friends which is also a lesson in Italian history. Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Nico (Stefana Satta Flores) and Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) bond as leftist partisan soldiers in 1944 during WWII. As the years go by they discover that life as civilians is often full of disillusionment. Antonio is a goofy medical orderly and political activist, Nico is a radical film buff who leaves his wife and child and moves to Rome and Gianni is an opportunistic bourgeois lawyer. Into their lives comes Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli), a ditsy aspiring actress, who is loved at different times by all three friends causing friction between them. Scola's rambling film, with long flashbacks shot in black and white, is also an ode to Italian cinema as we see Luciana play a bit part in "La Dolce Vita" with Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni in cameo appearances as director and star of the film being shot. There are also excerpts shown from "The Bicycle Thief" with a cameo appearance by Vittorio De Sica the director. A funny highlight is Nico seducing Luciana while explaining the editing technique of the "Odessa Steps" sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potempkin" while they sit on the Spanish Steps. The film is stolen by Giovanna Ralli as Gassman's bird-brained fat wife who transforms into a chic hysteric and Aldo Fabrizi as her crooked industrialist father. Funny but downbeat film shows that despite gaining maturity all three men have basically remained the same - tired and worn out.
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Precious Doll
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
I don't have any real for Nolan but have enjoyed some of his previous films notably The Dark Knight & Inception.
I really lost interest during Tenet because the whole damn enterprise becomes too convoluted with all this time travel incorporated into the storyline. I simply couldn't get engaged and that none of the actors have very much to do and the dialogue is tedious, when you can actually understand what is being send made the whole affair an unnecessary chore.
There is a great action set piece around the middle of the film and that is really the only good thing I can say about the film. I'm sure it has been constructed to get people to go back again and pull the pieces together but once was enough for me.
I really lost interest during Tenet because the whole damn enterprise becomes too convoluted with all this time travel incorporated into the storyline. I simply couldn't get engaged and that none of the actors have very much to do and the dialogue is tedious, when you can actually understand what is being send made the whole affair an unnecessary chore.
There is a great action set piece around the middle of the film and that is really the only good thing I can say about the film. I'm sure it has been constructed to get people to go back again and pull the pieces together but once was enough for me.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
I’m pretty reluctant in spending money to see this.Precious Doll wrote: Tenet (2020) Christopher Nolan 2/10
How does this movie rank alongside the other Nolan movies Precious? Care to elaborate?
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Precious Doll
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Re: Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings
Military Wives (2020) Peter Cattaneo 1/10
Our Mothers (2019) Cesar Diaz 6/10
Breath of Life (2010) David Roux 4/10
Pity (2018) Babis Makridis 4/10
Antigone (2019) Sophie Deraspe 5/10
Bell Canto (2018) Paul Weitz 1/10
Henri (2013) Yolande Moreau 2/10
Dogs (2016) Bogdan Mirica 5/10
Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! (2016) Anna Broninowski 8/10
Corpus Christi (2019) Jan Komasa 7/10
Tenet (2020) Christopher Nolan 2/10
Hanezu (2011) Naomi Kawase 4/10
And Then We Danced (2019) Levan Akin 7/10
Suzaku (1997) Naomi Kawase 5/10
I Am Woman (2020) Unjoo Moon 4/10
You Will Die at Twenty (2019) Amjad Abu Alala 4/10
Assassin(s) (1997) Mathieu Kassovitz 5/10
Our Mothers (2019) Cesar Diaz 6/10
Breath of Life (2010) David Roux 4/10
Pity (2018) Babis Makridis 4/10
Antigone (2019) Sophie Deraspe 5/10
Bell Canto (2018) Paul Weitz 1/10
Henri (2013) Yolande Moreau 2/10
Dogs (2016) Bogdan Mirica 5/10
Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! (2016) Anna Broninowski 8/10
Corpus Christi (2019) Jan Komasa 7/10
Tenet (2020) Christopher Nolan 2/10
Hanezu (2011) Naomi Kawase 4/10
And Then We Danced (2019) Levan Akin 7/10
Suzaku (1997) Naomi Kawase 5/10
I Am Woman (2020) Unjoo Moon 4/10
You Will Die at Twenty (2019) Amjad Abu Alala 4/10
Assassin(s) (1997) Mathieu Kassovitz 5/10
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)