Last Movie You Watched

[Karl Henning]

Separately, oh lawd:  how did I not know that was Christopher Lloyd, in (erm) The Search for Spock?

[Jaakko Keskinen]

I partly dislike that 1946 version of Great Expectations. The actor of Jaggers, my favorite character in the book, was not good.

[SonicMan46]

I partly dislike that 1946 version of Great Expectations. The actor of Jaggers, my favorite character in the book, was not good.

Just looked up the actor mentioned above - Francis L. Sullivan (1903-1956) - he has an impressive film/TV credit listing on IMDB, right up until his early death; interestingly, he played the same character in a 1934 film of the same name - I've not seen the earlier movie.  Dave

 

[Cato]

Concerning Dunkirk, apparently one reviewer dislikes the nearly complete absence of historical context, and really dislikes the absence of Winston Churchill from the story:

From today's (July 21, 2017) Wall Street Journal :

Salient excerpts:

...Director Christopher Nolan...has said he wanted to avoid making a film "not relevant to today's audiences" and that he didn't want to get them bogged down in "politics."

This says more than Mr. Nolan intended about his estimate of today's moviegoers—whose capacities, he fears, would not be equal to a film involving images of a historic figure. There were other worries. Mr. Nolan didn't want to make a film that could be seen as old-fashioned, he informed his interviewer. It appears further that the director wanted to avoid taxing today's film audiences with any specifics about the foe that had the British Expeditionary Force fighting for its life on those beaches. ...

...  Mr. Nolan explained.  "We don't see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy." All true. Though there are quite a number of enemy planes, bombers smashing the troops on the beach. The bare glimpse Mr. Nolan mentions is of the insignia identifying the nation to which those planes belong. Who could it be?

For, as Mr. Nolan has told us, he considers Dunkirk "a universal story . . . about communal heroism." Which explains why this is—despite its impressive cinematography, its moving portrait of suffering troops and their rescuers—a Dunkirk flattened out, disconnected from the spirit of its time, from any sense even of the particular mighty enemy with which England was at war...

..."universal" (is) a tip-off—the warning bell that we're about to lose most of the important facts of that history, and that the story-telling will be a special kind—a sort that obscures all specifics that run counter to the noble vision of the universalist.

No wonder those German Stukas and Heinkels bombarding the British can barely be identified as such. Then there is Mr. Nolan's avoidance of Churchill lest audiences get bogged down in "politics"—a strange term for Churchill's concerns during those dark days of May 1940. One so much less attractive, in its hint of the ignoble and the corrupt, than "communal" and "universal"—words throbbing with goodness. Nothing old-fashioned about them either, especially "universal"—a model of socio-babble for all occasions...

...There was, for Churchill, no acceptable accommodation with Hitler. He knew the disastrous impact on British morale of any word of talks or arrangements with the Nazis. They would instead hear from their new prime minister only the iron determination to defeat the enemy, the confidence that it would be done—which had not a little to do with the strengthened spirit of the British public. They had been asked to fight for victory at all costs, and most knew why they must—among them those pilots of small boats braving German fire to rescue the army...

...Left out of this saga is any other sense of the importance of Operation Dynamo, the unexpectedly successful rescue of 338,000 soldiers who could, instead of being marched off to captivity by that barely visible enemy—call it Nation X—return to an England desperate for manpower...

...All this falls into the category of facts, irrelevant history, that Mr. Nolan would consider wrong for today's audiences. To the very end no image of Churchill defiles the sanctity of this film's safe space. One of the final scenes does present an exhausted evacuee returned from Dunkirk, reading aloud to himself from a newspaper of Churchill's most famous address, of June 4, 1940. The "We shall never surrender" speech is spoken by a young soldier, making it all reassuringly relevant—no trace of the man himself.... 

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dumbing-down-of-dunkirk-1500592065

I will be interested in hearing the opinions of our members from Europe, especially those in Great Britain.

[kishnevi]

Not having seen the movie of course, but if its focus is on the actual "Operation Dynamo" and the BEF, there would not be much room for Churchill. He was in London, and had been PM for barely two weeks, starting on May 10.  Before then he was in charge of the Admiralty, certainly important but not PM.

A completely different note:. I just stumbled over this rather curious parallel to that closing shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/23/six-nazi-spies-were-executed-in-d-c-white-supremacists-gave-them-a-memorial-on-federal-land/

[kishnevi]

Another review of Dunkirk, which suggests Nolan was not trying to narrate the story of Dunkirk, but to depict the actual experience of the soldiers.

http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/21/movie-review-dunkirk

If Nolan wanted to convey "the fog of war" those nebulous glimpses of German military power would fit in. 

[aligreto]

Bless the Child....

[Autumn Leaves]

Latest viewing:



Watched this today - I'm quite out of touch with the latest movie news/releases and didn't realize this sequel had been made until today.
Didn't have any expectations about the film (I guess I sort of assumed it wouldn't likely be up to the standard of the original) - After a bit of a slow start it kind of took off and I found this most enjoyable indeed.
All the original cast were roped in for the Movie and put in good performances.
I have the first movie in my collection and may break it out for a re-watch soon.

[aligreto]

Latest viewing:



Watched this today - I'm quite out of touch with the latest movie news/releases and didn't realize this sequel had been made until today.
Didn't have any expectations about the film (I guess I sort of assumed it wouldn't likely be up to the standard of the original) - After a bit of a slow start it kind of took off and I found this most enjoyable indeed.
All the original cast were roped in for the Movie and put in good performances.
I have the first movie in my collection and may break it out for a re-watch soon.

Good stuff. I have the original but I have not seen the sequel.

[Autumn Leaves]

Good stuff. I have the original but I have not seen the sequel.

It was much better than I expected! - worth a watch perhaps? .

[aligreto]

It was much better than I expected! - worth a watch perhaps? .

Will do; thank you 

[Karl Henning]

Not for the first time, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (You know, I still have not watched “The Space Seed.”) While I certainly enjoy the movie entirely, I may never understand how it was that Chekov survived that creature.

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[Karl Henning]

Not for the first time, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (You know, I still have not watched “The Space Seed.”) While I certainly enjoy the movie entirely, I may never understand how it was that Chekov survived that creature.

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You know, I'm not crazy about Horner's music here.

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[Karl Henning]

Oh, one more thing ...

Saavik is female, yes? Why does Spock address her as "Mr. Saavik"? As an authority convention?

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[Bogey]

You know, I'm not crazy about Horner's music here.

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Karrrrrrrrrrrrl!
One of Horner's best,...at least for me.  Great movie as well!

[Karl Henning]

No surprise, here: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.  Can't help myself: I like this one every bit as much as II. For itself, I mean, though I do enjoy the termination of some loose ends from II. I don't mind that the Vulcan commander is a less Supreme Villain in comparison to Khan. I enjoy the contrast between Saavik (a somewhat different character than in the prior movie, quite apart from the two different actresses) as the "true-to-nature," purely logical Vulcan, and the other Vulcans—the mysterious child enduring his growing pains, and the bereaved Sarek—living a bit beyond Logic's pale.

Again, the major imperfection (as I see it) in both movies is the alien character of Horner's score, which (in more than one cue) feels unseemly close to a John Williams pastiche.



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[Karl Henning]

Karrrrrrrrrrrrl!
One of Horner's best,...at least for me.  Great movie as well!

Love the movie! I fear we are at odds viz. the score 

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[SimonNZ]

Route Irish (Ken Loach, dir. 2010)

[Karl Henning]

Karrrrrrrrrrrrl!
One of Horner's best,...at least for me.  Great movie as well!

Love the movie! I fear we are at odds viz. the score 

To try to explain a bit better:

The music did not bother me (i.e., I did not feel otherwise than that it belonged) when I first watched the two movies, which would have been while I was at Wooster, the time of their initial release.  The source of my recent problem, as it were, is that I am finally watching the series itself, and the show's atmosphere is very well enhanced by Alexander Courage's score;  in contrast, Horner served up (understand that I am in something of the position of a hostile witness ) what strikes me as boilerplate space-swashbuckling music.

The discussion is apt to veer towards ethics when the subject is Horner's work  but neither are we in the position to disentangle the composer's role and choices, from the demands of the production ("Give us something just like Star Wars...")  There is a well-loved tune in Star Wars (itself related interestingly to a Leitmotiv from The Ring) which Horner manages to echo in The Wrath of Khan, and, why yes, he brings it back at a key dramatic moment in The Search for Spock.

Mind you, while the springboard here has been my expression a degree of disappointment at the artistic effect of the character of Horner's score, I am not (presently ) concerned with the ethics angle.  The broader question of reference/appropriation has been uppermost in my mind as I continue (at last) work on White Nights—though to be sure, all the material is my own—as I find use in these later scenes for material already exposed.

[James]

Night of the Living Dead
1968 ‧ Science fiction film/Drama film ‧ 1h 37m

A disparate group of individuals takes refuge in an abandoned house when corpses begin to leave the graveyard in search of fresh human bodies to devour. The pragmatic Ben (Duane Jones) does his best to control the situation, but when the reanimated bodies surround the house, the other survivors begin to panic. As any semblance of order within the group begins to dissipate, the zombies start to find ways inside -- and one by one, the living humans become the prey of the deceased ones.

[asin]B001CHG054[/asin]