Last Movie You Watched

[NJ Joe]

Escape From Planet Earth, with the young'uns.  Had a nice little snooze.

[CaughtintheGaze]

Footloose
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Matrix Revolutions

[snyprrr]

Footloose
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Matrix Revolutions

ok, so you listen to death metal, and watch... footloose???

[Karl Henning]

Last night:

The Princess Bride
And "Who Was That Man I Saw You With?" from the Tara King season of The Avengers

[Todd]

Looper.  Not bad, though it could have been better had the X-Men angle been dropped entirely.  There are some nice conceits (eg, the time travel torture scene), and it was fun to watch Jeff Daniels, of all people, play a heavy.  Looks like Joseph Gordon Levitt's best time travel movie, but it's Bruce Willis' second best, by a noticeable margin.

[Octave]

ok, so you listen to death metal, and watch... footloose???

Black metal. 

[Octave]

[LOOPER is] Bruce Willis' second best, by a noticeable margin.

What's his first-best?  I am not a fan, but I'm happy to have a number of good-to-really-good movies movies pop into my head when Willis is mentioned, though probably half of these benefit from existing for me as fond childhood memories, as well they should.  Speaking of which and of which, I just (finally!) saw MOONRISE KINGDOM (Wes Anderson, 2012), which I really enjoyed after overcoming an irritation with [what I thought was] Anderson Twee, which by the end seemed like half the vestigial spirit of his old and hopefully waning style, and half part/parcel of the themes of the story.  The production design [art direction?] was just wonderful, typical for all Anderson movies and one of the things I love the most about his pictures.  The last image/fade of the picture was actually kind of heartbreaking to me in the way that the appended "happy" ending to Capra's LOST HORIZON was heartbreaking, and not entirely differently.  I loved the use of Britten throughout, which somehow seemed risky to me; also liked the Hank Williams and Francoise Hardy.

Also had a similar experience with MY FAIR LADY (George Cukor under the ruthless machinations of Jack Warner, 1964), which I watched and basically only enjoyed for Cukor, certainly not for Audrey Hepburn's dreadful twee mugging; about half way through, at the [bourgeois] Aston racetrack, I think I started to really enjoy the movie as a paced story with some charming writing and acting, even from Hepburn.  I might even have liked her in the first half retroactively, which is a neat trick.  The shots of flowers, the elegant and invisible camera movement, fantastically inert facades one after the other [actually made it a fine double-bill with MOONRISE KINGDOM], vivid 70mm Technicolor [not sure how they presented this for home video, it might have been restored/rendered like a 35mm print], Andre Previn at the baton.  Still hated the songs, mostly.

Also THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (Nagisa Oshima, 1970).   I really don't recommend it, but I had a similar experience with it as with the two films above, with interest ramping up and overcoming some clumsy dubbing and apparently sub-Bressonian, inert nonprofessional acting.  Oshima is certainly like that for me: his movies make me uncomfortable, irritable, unhappy, but usually get more and more fascinating as I keep watching. Of course, I've also revisited almost none of them, thus far.  This one, with its moebius-strip plot, gave me the creepy sensation of watching the origin of so-called J-horror and/or Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies; it sometimes gave me the feeling I get watching Michael Haneke's CACHE, though the two films are incredibly different; the similarities between them are more substantial at the level of feeling than voyeur/scopophilia/archive-frenzy thematics.  Music (mostly really unfortunate sub-BITCHES BREW ambient jazz noodling with occasional tape noise) by Toru Takemitsu.

[Karl Henning]

What's his first-best?

I should guess that Todd means Twelve Monkeys, which is wonderful, and sui generis.

[Todd]

I should guess that Todd means Twelve Monkeys, which is wonderful, and sui generis.

Indeed.

[Brian]

it was fun to watch Jeff Daniels, of all people, play a heavy.

This is the first thing I've read that has made me want to watch the film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks exactly like a black-and-white film star. I hope someone's courageous enough to give him a role in a b&w noir-type movie.

[TheGSMoeller]

This is the first thing I've read that has made me want to watch the film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks exactly like a black-and-white film star. I hope someone's courageous enough to give him a role in a b&w noir-type movie.

That would take a studio to be courageous enough to fund a B&W noir-type film. I for one agree with you, and would welcome a noir-film, and even more B&W films, with no CG, no explosions, no Vampires, a film that relies on a good script with well-developed characters and....sorry, I went into fantasy world for a minute.

[Karl Henning]

No vampires? Now, that's just crazee talk.

[George]

This is the first thing I've read that has made me want to watch the film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks exactly like a black-and-white film star. I hope someone's courageous enough to give him a role in a b&w noir-type movie.

They did already (7 years ago, in fact.) It's called Brick. And it's damn good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_%28film%29

[CaughtintheGaze]

Black metal.

Indeed. The place I work at on the weekends wanted to watch it. Plus John and Kevin are awesome.

[Geo Dude]

Watching Dr. Strangelove for the first time now.

[Karl Henning]

Watching Dr. Strangelove for the first time now.

Great fun.

[Geo Dude]

Great fun.

Indeed.  The humor translates well even to a young fellow such as myself.   And some of the themes and satire remain relevant.  When the officer speaks of the importance of ending the commie threat and comes up with conspiracy theories about them I'm reminded of some people I know who think that the US should (literally) nuke the Middle East.

[Octave]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks exactly like a black-and-white film star. I hope someone's courageous enough to give him a role in a b&w noir-type movie.

They did already (7 years ago, in fact.) It's called Brick. And it's damn good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_%28film%29

+1 for BRICK, which was a terrific movie, though it is possible that the ultra-stylized dialogue could drive one up the wall.  (I loved it, in fact it was the highlight of the film for me; but I'd also just come off a Chandler/Hammett jag.  I thought the dialogue as original and more strange and musical than even a great picture like OUT OF THE PAST, with a nice early film performance by Issur Danielovitch.)

I don't remember BRICK actually being in b&w, though....am I forgetting some scenes?  There was this dream trope involving what looked like a big black trash bag swallowing up the screen, used maybe two or three times....that was really striking.  I know I'll want to see that one again.  I totally see the classic-film connection in Gordon-Levitt's face and wiry body and in the way he moves.  He also seems atypical of young Hollywood stars and child-actor survivors in the sheer amount of energy he seems to put into this "community art" type DIY website/label/etc of his; even though I don't think I'd like most of what they end up producing, it's a pretty cool endeavor.

I also recently watched two Spalding Gray monologue films, GRAY'S ANATOMY and AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE, mainly because they were among the handful of Steven Soderbergh projects that I've not yet seen.  Part of the attraction was also my affection for Gray's small performance in Soderbergh's KING OF THE HILL, which was an endearing and well-made "small movie" with exceptional Depression-era period flavor.  I don't think I like Gray's monologue style much at all, and GRAY'S ANATOMY just seemed terrible; gimmicky staging just could not save him from a chain of shaggy-dog stories that never seemed to amount to a damn thing.  EVERYTHING was better because Soderbergh's editing decisions were the connective tissue, not a bunch of lighting and "dramatic" filigree.  Still, I got the impression that Gray was a perpetual dinner guest cum drama-monster who could not turn off the endless petty patter, reminding me of Slavoj Zizek's self-mocking comment that he is afraid that if he stops talking, he'll stop existing.  I seems like Gray hopped aboard the "tell your story" zeitgeist, somewhat ahead of the curve, but stripped it of politics, certainly of identity politics; now that that sensibility is everywhere (reality TV and its spawn), it almost seems like Gray was a high-profile opportunist hijacker, not inventor, of a promising ~new dramatic-monologue/autobiography/personal-essay performance form.  I remember SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA being more interesting but still not exactly interesting; I remember wishing that someone less into self-promotion had done it.

[George]

I don't remember BRICK actually being in b&w, though....

It was color, but otherwise pretty much what Brian was asking about, so I figured I'd mention it.

[snyprrr]

The Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, a dark, violent satire of the "me" culture of Ronald Reagan's 1980s, is certainly one of the most controversial books of the '90s, and that notoriety fueled its bestseller status. This smart, savvy adaptation by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) may be able to ride the crest of the notoriety; prior to the film's release, Harron fought a ratings battle (ironically, for depictions of sex rather than violence), but at the time the director stated, "We're rescuing [the book] from its own bad reputation." Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) overcome many of the objections of Ellis's novel by keeping the most extreme violence offscreen (sometimes just barely), suggesting the reign of terror of yuppie killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) with splashes of blood and personal souvenirs. Bale is razor sharp as the blank corporate drone, a preening tiger in designer suits whose speaking voice is part salesman, part self-help guru, and completely artificial. Carrying himself with the poised confidence of a male model, he spends his days in a numbing world of status-symbol one-upmanship and soul-sapping small talk, but breaks out at night with smirking explosions of homicide, accomplished with the fastidious care of a hopeless obsessive. The film's approach to this mayhem is simultaneously shocking and discreet; even Bateman's outrageous naked charge with a chainsaw is most notable for the impossibly polished and gleaming instrument of death. Harron's film is a hilarious, cheerfully insidious hall of mirrors all pointed inward, slowly cracking as the portrait becomes increasingly grotesque and insane. --Sean Axmaker

[asin]B000H5TVJY[/asin]

off-topic: I didn't know Bale was a child actor. interesting