Last Movie You Watched

[Brahmsian]

Die Hard & Die Hard 2 (Neither Home Nor Alone)
It's a Wonderful Life
The Bishop's Wife
A Charlie Brown Christmas
The Lion in Winter

Some excellent ones there, chère Karl

[SonicMan46]

Die Hard & Die Hard 2 (Neither Home Nor Alone)
It's a Wonderful Life
The Bishop's Wife
A Charlie Brown Christmas
The Lion in Winter

Hi Karl - some great choices!  +1  Dave

[Karl Henning]

Cheers, gents!

[George]

\

Got this as a present today. Plan to dig into it soon!

[Karl Henning]

\

Got this as a present today. Plan to dig into it soon!

Dolcissimo!

[Karl Henning]

Scrooge (1951)
Moonstruck

[George]

[SimonNZ]

I found the second and third installments in the series to be pale imitations of the first, but this last one gets closer to some of the original magic.

And Steve doing a perfect Werner Herzog impression was an unexpected delight.


also watched:



love Astair and especially Rodgers and this has many classic tunes, but the story was an appalling mess, even by the standards of these things

[Todd]

The Midnight Sky.  A non-WW holiday release.  George Clooney was given a big budget movie to direct and he delivers a masterclass in mediocrity.  Two films in one, with Clooney himself playing a lone scientist who stays behind in the arctic during an evacuation after some undefined cataclysm befalls humanity, and a space survival story as the crew of a spaceship tries to return to earth while so many terrible things are happening.  The action in the arctic isn't so badly done, though it is really rather predictable, and the way that the film ties the action on the ground to the action in space is more than a bit hokey.  The action in space is basically Battlestar Galactica meets Gravity, and it looks like Alfonso Cuarón left a big impression on Clooney as the latter attempts to rip off some of the cinematic magic the former conjured in their collaboration, but Cuarón is a rather better director.  As one kinda, sorta neat touch, Clooney uses a scene from the Gregory Peck flick On The Beach while one of Peck's grandsons plays a young version of George Clooney's character.  The film looks decent, but it feels like three hours rather than two. 

[SurprisedByBeauty]

A few more films have accumulated over the last weeks:


With/For the kid:
Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas

The 2000, Jim Carey version.

Could have been worse, since my 10-year old step-daughter has a generally abominable taste in cinematic matters. :-)

The Help


African American women of the 60s say it how it really is, all thanks to an enthusiastic young white woman who makes this her career move.
Lovely performances; a sign of the times that critics needed to find a way of poopooing this darling film for its naive aspects.
I cringed preemptively, twice, not even knowing there had been a controversy... but that's only because the 60s in Mississippi
were cringe-worthy, even at their best. So in that sense, it's actually a very successful film.

And now we're on to a classic I've never seen:

Lawrence of Arabia


Any controversies here, too? 

[Karl Henning]

Return to Oz

[steve ridgway]

The Longest Day (1962).

I'd forgotten it was in black & white, which wasn't a problem, but although the action scenes were exciting it showed its age with attempts at humour and contrived dialogue to explain what was going on. Overall still absorbing, spectacular and informative though, the time went quickly. Strange as it may seem to others, epic war films are part of the Christmas tradition here.

[Karl Henning]

Watch and let watch.

[Madiel]

Capernaum



A boy living a life of severe poverty in Lebanon is in jail and suing his parents. The film flashes back to show he got there. Kind of good, frequently a bit depressing without being completely awful. Impressive child acting (how did they get that toddler doing those things?).

[SimonNZ]

A Hidden Life

I loved The New World and admired much about The Tree Of Life, but with each subsequent film I've found Malick's patented style of shooting enough footage for ten films, picking random shots based solely on their prettiness, random-editing them together and laying over it all an airy and often banal voice-over to border on self-parody rather than the "poetry" he's clearly aiming for and heavily undermine what might have been far more interesting if the storytelling matched the needs of each specific story.

[Wanderer]

Two eternal classics and perennial favourites: Fellini's La Strada & de Sica's Bicycle Thieves.

[Wanderer]

Another favourite today, de Sica's Shoeshine (Sciuscià).
Orson Welles said about this film: "In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer. But what de Sica can do, that I can't do. I ran his Shoeshine again recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disap­peared; it was just life." Another review posited that "...if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty." I cannot say I disagree with either view.

[Karl Henning]

Two eternal classics and perennial favourites: Fellini's La Strada & de Sica's Bicycle Thieves.

Nice!

[SonicMan46]

Last few nights, some more holiday films, both streamed on my Apple TV:

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) w/ Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, and Johnathan Pryce - short synopsis below but much more at the link.  We first watched on streaming release three years ago - decided on a digital purchase ($4 vs. $10) because I want to watch again - what an amazing imaginative mind Dickens had in coming up w/ these characters and the story - highly recommended as a companion to the movie 'The Christmas Carol', whichever version you prefer.

Holiday Affair (1949) w/ Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, and Wendell Cory - background synopsis below (see link for more). A menage a trois w/ Mitchum in a different role from his usual at that time, and does quite well in the romantic comedy (he went on to make other comedy movies) - a very young and ravishing Janet Leigh and her precocious son (played by Gordon Gebert, who was 8 y/o at the time).  Recommended especially for Mitchum fans who want to see him in other that his 'specialty' then, i.e. film noir.  Dave

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a 2017 Christmas biographical comedy drama film directed by Bharat Nalluri and written by Susan Coyne. Based on the 2008 book of the same name about Charles Dickens by Les Standiford; the joint Irish/Canadian production stars Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, and Jonathan Pryce, and follows Dickens (Stevens) as he conceives and writes his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. (Source)

Holiday Affair is a 1949 romantic comedy film directed and produced by Don Hartman and starring Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh. It was based on the story Christmas Gift by John D. Weaver, which was also the film's working title. The film allowed Mitchum to briefly depart from his typical roles in film noir, Western films and war films, and his casting was intended to help rehabilitate his image following a notorious marijuana bust. Turner Classic Movies has frequently aired the film during the Christmas season, and it has become a minor holiday classic. (Source)

 

[ritter]

Just back from watching Pedro Almodóvar's The Human Voice, starring Tilda Swinton.



Almódovar's short—his first English language film—is an adaptation and updating of Jean Cocteau's monodrama La voix humaine (known to music lovers because of Francis Poulenc's operatic version of 1959); it's quite effective and visually arresting, and Swinton is excellent in her rôle. It's "very Almodóvar" in it aesthetics, and also has some typical self-references (the filmmaker already used Cocteau's play for some passages of his early La ley del deseo, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was originally supposed to conclude with the telephone call that is The Human Voice, but then that sequence vanished (as the director himself acknowledges in a short address to the Spanish audience before the start of the film proper).

With this I've seen the play and the opera (in a clever staging by Gerardo Vera here in Madrid some 25 years ago, in which we got the play in Spanish translation—with Cecilia Roth—immediately followed by Poulenc's version with a wonderful Felicity Lott), and now Almodóvar's screen version.