Last Movie You Watched

[Cato]

Also for the Day: Planes, Trains & Automobiles.

John Candy: "Oh, I thought it would be much worse than this!  They can buff this out in no time!" 

[San Antone]

Moonstruck



Moonstruck is a 1987 American romantic comedy film directed by Norman Jewison and written by John Patrick Shanley. It stars Cher as a widowed Italian-American woman who falls in love with her fiancé's hot-tempered, estranged younger brother, played by Nicolas Cage. The supporting cast includes Vincent Gardenia, Olympia Dukakis, and Danny Aiello.

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I forgot how good this movie is; among my top five films. Note perfect, IMO.

[Karl Henning]

Moonstruck



Moonstruck is a 1987 American romantic comedy film directed by Norman Jewison and written by John Patrick Shanley. It stars Cher as a widowed Italian-American woman who falls in love with her fiancé's hot-tempered, estranged younger brother, played by Nicolas Cage. The supporting cast includes Vincent Gardenia, Olympia Dukakis, and Danny Aiello.

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I forgot how good this movie is; among my top five films. Note perfect, IMO.

Love this one inordinately. 

[Madiel]

Barton Fink



Back to the Coen Brothers for another one I'm pretty sure I haven't seen before. Um... I think I'd remember this one.

John Turturro spends large parts of the movie looking alarmed or distressed by his surroundings, often with good reason. He's great at it. And I was enjoying this quite a lot. It's got plenty of elements of Coen Brothers style, some of it is gorgeously shot (that hotel foyer). And then...

Then it becomes rather unhinged. Which is not in and of itself a problem, but it just doesn't feel earned. I think there are Coen Brothers films with quite wacky things in them and the wackiness feels like it fits.  Here it feels like they haven't learned how to do it. Well actually they had because Raising Arizona was made before this. But here, it ends up being completely outrageous and it doesn't seem like the level of outrageousness is justified.

I did think to myself there was a version of this where the plot twist isn't quite so over the top and it still works, but I'm not so sure that's right. It's like the movie gives you the impression it's about one thing - a writer with serious problems actually writing - but then decides it wants to be about something completely different for 20 minutes or so before declaring that this was somehow necessary for the writer to be able to write again.

I suppose there's a version of this where a chunk of this is just deranged fantasy in Fink's head, but there's only so far that reading can take me. In the end I just conclude that it's not as good as many of their other films, Palme d'Or or no Palme d'Or. Having recently seen Hail, Caesar!, which is another film about movie-making and even set in a similar time period to this one, and which had its share of wacky elements... I think it just shows that by Hail, Caesar! they knew better how to critique the movie business.

[Karl Henning]

Barton Fink



Back to the Coen Brothers for another one I'm pretty sure I haven't seen before. Um... I think I'd remember this one.

John Turturro spends large parts of the movie looking alarmed or distressed by his surroundings, often with good reason. He's great at it. And I was enjoying this quite a lot. It's got plenty of elements of Coen Brothers style, some of it is gorgeously shot (that hotel foyer). And then...

Then it becomes rather unhinged. Which is not in and of itself a problem, but it just doesn't feel earned. I think there are Coen Brothers films with quite wacky things in them and the wackiness feels like it fits.  Here it feels like they haven't learned how to do it. Well actually they had because Raising Arizona was made before this. But here, it ends up being completely outrageous and it doesn't seem like the level of outrageousness is justified.

I did think to myself there was a version of this where the plot twist isn't quite so over the top and it still works, but I'm not so sure that's right. It's like the movie gives you the impression it's about one thing - a writer with serious problems actually writing - but then decides it wants to be about something completely different for 20 minutes or so before declaring that this was somehow necessary for the writer to be able to write again.

I suppose there's a version of this where a chunk of this is just deranged fantasy in Fink's head, but there's only so far that reading can take me. In the end I just conclude that it's not as good as many of their other films, Palme d'Or or no Palme d'Or. Having recently seen Hail, Caesar!, which is another film about movie-making and even set in a similar time period to this one, and which had its share of wacky elements... I think it just shows that by Hail, Caesar! they knew better how to critique the movie business.

I don't go back to this one much.

[Karl Henning]

John Candy: "Oh, I thought it would be much worse than this!  They can buff this out in no time!" 

IMO, Hughes' best work.

[Cato]

IMO, Hughes' best work.

Oh yes, as good as Ferris Bueller is, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles goes beyond it, somewhat because of Steve Martin and John Candy.

I finally found one of my favorite Brian De Palma movies from the 1970's at a very low price: a satire on the Rock- 'n'- Roll Industry, including its tendency, even back then, to alter the incompetent singing of rock bands electronically.

The movie also satirized the audience for such music...which possibly explains why the movie did not do well at the box office!     


The Phantom of the Paradise

This pretty well sums it up!

[Madiel]

Phantom Thread



A fine film indeed. Has breakfast ever been used as psychological warfare this well?

Excellent acting from the 3 central characters. I mean, what else do you expect from Daniel Day-Lewis, and Vicky Krieps has been good in everything I've seen her in (apparently this is regarded as her breakout role), but in some ways it's Lesley Manville that really shines. She's such a perfect match for Day-Lewis' character as his sister.

Then there's a very nice score with its fair share of chamber music (yay!), and of course the dresses which I can enjoy even as a person who basically knows nothing about dresses.

[Karl Henning]

Revisited Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge.

[Iota]

Phantom Thread



A fine film indeed. Has breakfast ever been used as psychological warfare this well?

Excellent acting from the 3 central characters. I mean, what else do you expect from Daniel Day-Lewis, and Vicky Krieps has been good in everything I've seen her in (apparently this is regarded as her breakout role), but in some ways it's Lesley Manville that really shines. She's such a perfect match for Day-Lewis' character as his sister.

Then there's a very nice score with its fair share of chamber music (yay!), and of course the dresses which I can enjoy even as a person who basically knows nothing about dresses.

A great film from an extraordinary director, I agree with everything you say. Lesley Manville is a remarkable actor, I haven't ever seen her in anything where she doesn't shine. She creates such memorable and real characters.

[Todd]

Deadpool & Wolverine.  This is the first Marvel movie I've watched since Deadpool 2.  I've burned out on superhero movies in general, but this series benefits from self-awareness, fourth wall breaking, profanity, and gory violence.  The story is hot garbage, but the sarcastic and other jokes, the sheer vulgarity, and the violence is sufficient to make it a decent enough time waster. 

Evidently, the movie cost over $500 million to make, and garnered north of $100 million in UK tax rebates.  (How anyone can justify that type of tax rebate is beyond me.)  I sure didn't see that money in the basically all CGI output.  If I didn't know better, I'd be tempted to think that costs were artificially inflated for tax rebate purposes.

[Madiel]

Amadeus



It's a very long time since I've seen it, but there were snippets in at least one of the Mozart documentaries I've been watching more recently. And I managed to finish it while it was freely available with 18 minutes to spare.  **

Apparently it was restored just last year, certainly it looked and sounded pretty good. In terms of how it holds up, well, it's interesting to see what's accurate and what's not but I was actually quite surprised how much of it is accurate given the way people criticise the film. Probably the worst thing is F Murray Abraham's make-up as the elderly version of Salieri. The opera sequences tend to be highlights. I think the best scene of all though is the one where Salieri acts as Mozart's scribe composing the Requiem.

**Watching this at all was a late switch. A bunch of movies expire at midnight tonight on the local SBS network. Barton Fink and Phantom Thread among them. I was planning to watch something else rather than Amadeus but the other film I picked turns out to still be available on a different service, so I can view that later.

[VonStupp]

Wicked (2024)
Ariana Grande, Cynthia Arivo
Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

Hadn't seen this yet, but my daughter is going to the theatre with friends this week to see Part II, so I thought we would watch Part I. I haven't seen the stage musical either.

While this is based off of Gregory Maguire's book, that read was a dark, political look at Oz with very mature themes. The musical seems the antithesis of the book, one I picked up in the 90s.

Can I say I am tired of taking classic characters and fleshing out their backstory? Can't Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of The West just be an evil character? Does she need a moral quandry to guide her actions? Does Glinda the Good Witch of the North need to have been a prissy, air-headed Elle Woods-type character in her youth? Do I need moments of discovery finding pieces of Elphaba's iconic witch costume (nor do I need to know her first name)?

Sorry for the rant; it must have been building up. I know some enjoy characters being fleshed out in deeper dimensions and given motivations, but for me it takes away from what the mind's imagination is capable of all on its own. I wonder if I would have been more kindly to the stage production?

VS

[Karl Henning]

I could have predicted this: after seeing EOM Reacts show: revisiting Jas Cameron's Terminator.

[JBS]

Wicked (2024)
Ariana Grande, Cynthia Arivo
Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

Hadn't seen this yet, but my daughter is going to the theatre with friends this week to see Part II, so I thought we would watch Part I. I haven't seen the stage musical either.

While this is based off of Gregory Maguire's book, that read was a dark, political look at Oz with very mature themes. The musical seems the antithesis of the book, one I picked up in the 90s.

Can I say I am tired of taking classic characters and fleshing out their backstory? Can't Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of The West just be an evil character? Does she need a moral quandry to guide her actions? Does Glinda the Good Witch of the North need to have been a prissy, air-headed Elle Woods-type character in her youth? Do I need moments of discovery finding pieces of Elphaba's iconic witch costume (nor do I need to know her first name)?

Sorry for the rant; it must have been building up. I know some enjoy characters being fleshed out in deeper dimensions and given motivations, but for me it takes away from what the mind's imagination is capable of all on its own. I wonder if I would have been more kindly to the stage production?

VS

Tbh, Glinda as played by Billie Burke always struck me as being somewhat prissy and airheaded.


But Glinda as she appeared in the original Baum books was anything but airheaded. And she's the Witch of the South, not the North.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glinda

Billie Burke had a long career, on stage, radio, movies, and television, and appeared in several other movies you may have seen, including Father of the Bride, Dinner at Eight, Topper, and The Man Who Came To Dinner.
She was the wife (after 1932, the widow) of Flo Ziegfeld.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Burke

[VonStupp]

And she's the Witch of the South, not the North.

I did get my cardinal directions seriously wrong there.
VS

[JBS]

I did get my cardinal directions seriously wrong there.
VS

No. You didn't. Baum made her Witch of the South, but MGM and everyone following in MGM's footsteps put her in the North.

[Karl Henning]

an I say I am tired of taking classic characters and fleshing out their backstory? Can't Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of The West just be an evil character?

Wait till you read my novella fleshing out Sauron's backstory! In other words, a bleeping hearty "Yes!"

[Number Six]

We Were Here (2011)

A powerful documentary about the AIDS pandemic era in San Francisco. The film talks to 5 people who were there and intimately touched by the disease. Their reminiscing is interspersed with vintage photos, news reports, and home videos. Sad and beautiful.

[Number Six]

I also watched a weird Godard 1968 piece called Sympathy for the Devil.

It partly follows The Stones in the studio, as they develop the song. But it's also interspersed with weird political vignettes about black power, marxism, and a weird scene in a comics/magazines/porn store where people make their selections and then sieg -- the proprietor is reading aloud from Mein K.

The Stones stuff is pretty cool, and some of the other segments are kind of interesting. But the whole thing is slow slow slow. Maybe it's all too avant garde for my conventional mind.