Last Movie You Watched

[71 dB]

I have been watching some movies on Youtube

THE DAY TIME ENDED (John "Bud" Cardos, 1979) IMDb rating 3.6/10

A really bad movie with astonishingly poor plot and acting. Still, sometimes it is fun to watch movies this crappy. Nothing jumps out as bad when everything in a movie is bad.


MOONTRAP (Robert Dyke, 1988) IMDb rating 4.8/10

A better movie but not a particularly good one. Again, it is fun to watch movies like this as brainless pop-corn entertainment.


METEOR (Ronald Neame, 1979) IMDb rating 5.1/10

The best movie of these three by far. Imo this is better than the IMDb rating suggests. This one looks like a catastrophe flick from 1974 and is filled with stars: Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Martin Landau, Henry Fonda,... ...the last making a small but great role as the president giving me strong Joe Biden vibes. This was only 360p on Youtube and the picture was soft. The special effects were quite dated even for a 1979 movie. It would be cool to have a 50th anniversary version of the move in 2029 with the effects redone with modern effects (but tastefully of course). Of course that won't happen, not when the IMDb score is only 5.1/10.

[Mister Sharpe]

I had this reaction to his more recent film Peterloo, where the villains are almost comically mustache-twirling in their villainy.

Thank you, Brian, though very sorry to hear this as we were looking forward to that film, so relevant to the times. Despite the occasional fail, Leigh is something of a family member here; my daughter's favorite movie of all time is Topsy-Turvy and we prize All or Nothing, Secret and Lies, Happy-go-Lucky and others, many of which we own on Criterion. 

[Brian]

Except...they were working from the public statements and private writings of all those actual people.

Todd made the same complaint about Peterloo a while back and I asked him if his own words/opinions were put into a script if any audience would believe people say and believe such things, that surely it must be a cheap caricature.

Hmmm...I meant the acting rather than writing, but perhaps (and we are also seeing this in our present day) people with such villainous intent are not capable of appearing subtle in their visual presentation and manner of speech...?

[Brian]

Thank you, Brian, though very sorry to hear this as we were looking forward to that film, so relevant to the times. Despite the occasional fail, Leigh is something of a family member here; my daughter's favorite movie of all time is Topsy-Turvy and we prize All or Nothing, Secret and Lies, Happy-go-Lucky and others, many of which we own on Criterion. 

Oh, I still think you should try it! Especially agreed on Secrets and Lies, which is likely in my personal top 10.

[Mister Sharpe]

Hmmm...I meant the acting rather than writing, but perhaps (and we are also seeing this in our present day) people with such villainous intent are not capable of appearing subtle in their visual presentation and manner of speech...?

Now that's entertainment! (Thanks, will see it soon).

[Karl Henning]

This is a test.

[Karl Henning]

This is a test.

It was also a placeholder. I tried adding text (what I attempted to post a few days ago.)

[Karl Henning]

It was also a placeholder. I tried adding text (what I attempted to post a few days ago.)

But when I added that text and tried to save, I got hung up on "Loading."

[Karl Henning]

Confirmed that I cannot post more than a sentence. 

[Mister Sharpe]

Can I post more than Karl can?  (I swear I can hear "Anything you can do, I can do better" in the background, except for composing, playing the clarinet, sight reading, leading a choir, etc...) But, as the man falling from a ten-story window said (asked by a guy from a fifth floor window how he was doing), "So far, so good!"

[Karl Henning]

Can I post more than Karl can?  (I swear I can hear "Anything you can do, I can do better" in the background, except for composing, playing the clarinet, sight reading, leading a choir, etc...) But, as the man falling from a ten-story window said (asked by a guy from a fifth floor window how he was doing), "So far, so good!"

I'm one of the chaps holding the trampoline!

[71 dB]

Confirmed that I cannot post more than a sentence.

Can you circumvent that by omitting periods or is there a limit of characters you can use per post?

[Karl Henning]

Can you circumvent that by omitting periods or is there a limit of characters you can use per post?

Undetermined. 

[71 dB]

Undetermined.

Perhaps you should try and make it unundetermined? 

[Karl Henning]

Here's a test per the suggestion of our @71 dB sentences sans periods I've watched two Christopher Nolan movies and a 1935 Anna Karenina of all of which I wish to say more A good long interval having elapsed I watched Batman Begins again I had forgotten just how good it is Garbo is the title character in the Tolstoy adaptation Fredric March plays Count Vronsky with whom she has a scandalous affair and Basil Rathbone plays Alexei Karenin the aggrieved husband who refuses her a divorce and access to their son Sergei

[Karl Henning]

Perhaps you should try and make it unundetermined? 

I don't know why it should have worked, but work it did. 

[Karl Henning]

And because it was at the Library so that re-watching was easy, I revisited The Dark Knight Rises which back when I first watched the Christopher Nolan trilogy put me off. A combination of it trying to do too much (a very labored "Robin Begins" sub-plot, and what's the point of there being a Robin with Batman out of the picture?) Bane is one of those impossibly omniscient super-villains which brings us back to comic book fantasy in spite of the $multi-million effort to sell us realism And in spite of Bruce Wayne's knees being shit he not only dons the cowl anew, but rebuilds himself in prison and makes his way up out of the pit We've gone from willing suspension of disbelief to complete sedation of reason. Where it's good, it's very good, but I have no patience for the whole enchilada 

[Cato]

An anecdote about acting: Mrs. Cato was watching an interview with an actress named Cristin Milioti, of whom we know nothing.

She was nominated for an acting award for a show tangential to the Batman villain The Penguin.

I did not listen to most of the interview, but caught a comment, in which the actress said that she always prefers to put on disguises for roles, so that she is at least somewhat unrecognizable.

"That is real acting!"

I was reminded of reading something which the famous silent-movie actor Lon Chaney once said, that he would never perform a role without changing his appearance in some way.

e.g. For his last movie, The Unholy Three, he played several characters and each one had a different voice.




Last week we saw a strange movie, which should be shown in every Child Psychology 101 course!



A grade-school girl, whose mother recently died, sketches cartoons of monsters devouring anyone who crosses her too much.

Through an unexplained paranormal phenomenon, the monsters one day come to life!   

Funny and yet also an exploration of the pain a child feels upon the death of a parent.

Wink-wink references to earlier movies (e.g. King Kong ) add to the fun.

[DavidW]

Why is Karl writing odd posts?

I watched Thunderbolts, an actual good Marvel movie, bravo! A movie where we learned that the real enemy is mental illness.

[Cato]

An anecdote about acting: Mrs. Cato was watching an interview with an actress named Cristin Milioti, of whom we know nothing.

She was nominated for an acting award for a show tangential to the Batman villain The Penguin.

I did not listen to most of the interview, but caught a comment, in which the actress said that she always prefers to put on disguises for roles, so that she is at least somewhat unrecognizable.

"That is real acting!"

I was reminded of reading something which the famous silent-movie actor Lon Chaney once said, that he would never perform a role without changing his appearance in some way.

e.g. For his last movie, The Unholy Three, he played several characters and each one had a different voice.

I should mention two more things: there is a movie in which Lon Chaney did not use special make-up and simply used his own face.

Tell It To The Marines from 1926.



There is also a silent version of The Unholy Three (1925).

I have never seen it, but a good number of people find it better than the sound version from 1930, despite the absence of Lon Chaney doing various voices.  Tod Browning directed the silent version, so perhaps that is the difference.