Last Movie You Watched Part II, Electric Bugaloo

[Jim Kelly]

I watched the 2018 movie that was originally called KEEPERS but they changed the title to THE VANISHING. I think KEEPERS is a much better title (pretty clever) and avoids the confusion with other movies called THE VANISHING. I had seen Mark Kermode review it and that piqued my interest. Directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, it stars Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan and Connor Swindells. Those three actors carry the bulk of the movie.

It's supposed to be based on a true historical event, but not really. The actual vanishing of the men with the same names as the characters happened in 1900, while the movie takes place in more recent times (although exactly what year I couldn't guess). And the movie offers a fanciful explanation for the vanishings, whereas there's probably a pragmatic reason for what happened to the three real life lighthouse keepers. So on that account, I think the movie doesn't play fair--and exploits what could have been an innocent accident for it's more gruesome plot.

But I have to give it to those three actors who all put in a great performance. It just didn't leave me feeling in good spirits by the end. It seems like all movies about lighthouses are rather grim and not cheery.

[Captain Smith]

The John Wick 3 just didn't make it for me. It's silly to document it n detail as it is a personal evaluation. I'll just say the gun fights - which used to be fun, started to border on the ridiculous. Previous ones, like Collateral with Tom Cruise, had some reality. Folks have tried to duplicate Collateral (obviously, not with real people targets) and found that 30% of competitive shooters could beat Tom's time. The gun fights in Wick3 moved into Star Trek Red Shirt / StarWars Stormtrooper silliness. Too bad. I also thought that the head of the secret organization being a character from Aladdin was silly and condescending to everyone.

[Jim Kelly]

Watched MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2017). Wasn't interested in seeing it when it came out, because I knew it would depress me. But after seeing Michelle Williams' acceptance speech on the Emmys, I was in the mood to watch a Michelle Williams movie. Boy, was I misled by all the promotion for MANCHESTER BY THE SEA. She was barely in it. I kept waiting for the big scene--but there wasn't really any.

I respect the director for not giving a big happy resolution to the plot, but at the same time I wanted some kind of cathartic moment. The characters never talk, when a few words might clear the air. I found that the movie was all about the men and the women were sidelined. The women are often literally the furniture in a scene. One could have made a whole movie about the Michelle Williams character or Gretchen Mol's character. Instead, every female character only has purpose in relation to one of the male characters in the movie.

[Speed Force League Unlimited]

Bird Box

This movie is garbage. The main reason I saw it is cause I like Sandra Bullock movies, and this is one I hate.

[Soubhagya]

I've seen pretty much all of Tarkovsky's movies and my favourite one is NOSTALGHIA (1983), which he made in Italy (unlike his other Russian movies), but I would be at a loss to explain the plot of the movie. I found this movie quite inspiring and it seemed like being in Italy and not having to make a movie for the Soviet Union had freed Tarkovsky to explore more of his spirituality. Yet I felt let down by his final movie, THE SACRIFICE (1986), which is just as Swedish and NOSTALGHIA is Italian. The sacrifice in NOSTALGHIA is self-abnegating while the sacrifice in THE SACRIFICE is self-indulgent.

It seems like every male director has a fetish. In Tarantino's case it's feet; for Tarkovsky it was the back of a woman's head, with the hair gathered in a bun. I think this was something to do with his mother, who must have had her hair that way. The first Tarkovsky movie I saw was MIRRORS (1975), which is loosely autobiographical, and you can see there his obsession with his mother and the back of her head.

Interesting. I have seen three of his films. Mirror, Stalker and Solaris. Out of the rest of his films i thought The Sacrifice sounded the most interesting. Maybe i shall look for Nostalghia next. Tarkovsky is a weird director. Its hard to recommend his films to someone unless he or she is a film buff. I thought Solaris was a slow film. And then i watched Stalker. Man if someone else was doing such a film i would say the director is trolling the audience. Challenging the audience to go to sleep while he is having a laugh. I loved Mirror and Solaris though. And Stalker is quite interesting to revisit sometime.

[Soubhagya]

Watched a couple of films within the last week.

Jurassic World: I am unable to see why this one gets a lot of hate. I really liked it. It was fun. At the same time i have to admit its among the dumbest films i have watched. The characters are so stupid. The plot is stupid. But i had a lot of fun watching it.

Far From Home: When i watched it in the theaters i did not like it that much due to a mid film twist as i was enjoying the character a lot till then. And the last action sequence seemed a bit easy, even though it was great action. Now i enjoyed it a lot more.

Stalker: A sci-fi film from Russian film director Tarkovsky. I don"t think i have seen a film like this. A long and slow film with a lot of interesting ideas. I wish to see it more, if nothing, just for the 'atmosphere'. I don't think i can explain what that really means, but i think the director almost makes the viewer a character in the movie. He does not cut the uninteresting parts and so its as if we are inside the zone: An unexplained site created by a meteorite crash, which is cordoned off by the military and said to have a room which can make wishes come true.

Suspiria: The original by Daria Argento. I think the plot and characters are a bit simplistic. But it is pure eye candy. I haven't a horror movie which looks so beautiful. Most films aren't this beautiful. Music is also great. While it has some great horror scenes i did not find it very scary. But a very good movie. It would very easily slide into a list of my favorite horror films. Loved it.

[Jim Kelly]

NOSTALGHIA is slow, but it's kind of like a meditation. THE MIRROR (or MIRRORS as I call it, because that's what it was when I first saw it) is probably the hardest Tarkovsky movie to understand, because a lot of it is just camera movements and switching film stocks within scenes--so you're constantly trying to figure out where it is and what is happening. Ironic that this was the first of his movies I saw.

Peter Greenaway movies are also quite difficult. But a lot of fun.

Watched another DVD that I got as a gift and was still in the plastic because I never wanted to see it. TROY from 2004. I remember feeling insulted when I got this DVD as a present. Whoever gave it to me must have got it from the bargain bin and didn't respect me enough to give me a good movie. I assumed it was pretty bad from all the press it got at the time.

It's actually not as bad as I expected. Although, for me, having read the ILIAD and studied ancient Greek literature at university, the liberties that the movie takes are quite galling. It makes it seem like the Trojan War took less than a month; whereas, the thing about that war is that it dragged on for years and years with neither side winning an advantage for long. It's the tedious human misery and the constant loss of life over a prolonged period that made it such a compelling drama for the Greeks.

The movie is directed by Wolfgang Petersen, from a screenplay by David Benioff. And you can see how Benioff would go on to do GAME OF THRONES--taking liberties with another literary work. There are even GOT alumni in the movie like Sean Bean and Julian Glover.

That Benioff doesn't care about the original material is shown by the significant characters he kills off--which means that some of the greatest Greek dramas could never have happened, if those characters truly did die when they did. And he gives more significance to Rose Byrne's character, just so her relationship with Brad Pitt can seem a romantic love story with Achilles--when really it's the relationship of a slave to her rapist.

But I admired how most of the movie was filmed in actual locations, with physical sets and thousands of extras. It had a greater sense of reality than if it had been done with a lot of CGI--the way current movies are done. However, some of the sets looked they had just been built and the plaster wasn't even dry--Troy didn't have that lived-in look.

[Arfguy]

Watched a lot of stuff on Netflix, while on vacation:

Instant Family
The Blind Side
Sinister
Ip Man 2 & 3

Also watched: Flight of the Phoenix (2004)

[Captain Smith]

Dark Phoenix - pretty crappy. The deviance from the original story was a bore. Just another Jean mildly flips out.

[Speed Force League Unlimited]

Mortal Engines

An interesting movie with terribly constructed story and confused internal logic.

Watched a lot of stuff on Netflix, while on vacation:

Instant Family
The Blind Side
Sinister
Ip Man 2 & 3

First one is the only movie in this list I have not seen nor heard of. I liked the rest of these movies to varying degrees.

[Arfguy]

Well, I'm Canadian, so maybe Netflix movies catalogue may differ a little from yours. Instant Family is a family comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, about a couple who adopt 3 kids. I had watched it once by myself and really loved it. When I went on vacation to visit my sister, she wanted to watch something and I recommended Instant Family. She liked it a lot.

Just watched Warrior on Blu-ray a couple of nights ago and Jack Reacher while it was on TV.

[Jim Kelly]

Watched WICKER PARK (2004) directed by Paul McGuigan, starring Josh Hartnett, Diane Kruger, Rose Byrne. But after watching that, I found out it's a remake of the French movie, L'APPARTEMENT (1996) written and directed by Gilles Mimouni, starring Vincent Cassell, Monica Bellucci, Romane Bohringer. So I watched that, also.

The American movie is almost exactly the same as the French one--with the same scenes and even sometimes the same visuals and shots--except for the very end where the two movies diverge significantly. There's a mystery, several twists and lots of flashbacks--which I can't talk about without spoiling the movie, although I figured out most of the mystery a third of the way through the American version--and maybe that's just because I've watched so many movies by now, I know all the tricks. However, the French movie truly surprised me at the end, because I was expecting it to turn out exactly like the remake and it pulled the rug right out from under me.

The original version has the feeling of a Hitchcock film, with the way it's shot and the soundtrack (that sounds like Bernard Hermann but it's actually Peter Chase doing a good impersonation). And the American remake has some inventive cinematic techniques--the flashbacks are indicated in a split screen effect and there are several other uses of split screen and shots with multiple images of the same character (as in reflections or video screens), which all together supports the ideas of the movie about how we all have multiples personas. The American movie ends in a romantic way, where the French one is very unromantic, and yet because of the cinematic style, the dialogue and the acting, I didn't really believe the remake was romantic.

Apparently, the remake of L'APPARTEMENT went through several directors (even Spielberg) before it came to McGuigan. It's strange that, in the end, it remained so similar to the French, with the exception of the story's conclusion. And maybe they changed the ending because they knew that American audiences wouldn't accept such a disconcerting conclusion--they had to give audiences what they wanted. Yet McGuigan so subtly suggests that not everything is as we think it should be, that maybe the final shot isn't really romantic after all.

It's interesting and sometimes annoying that American audiences are so insulated that they never watch foreign language movies, nor even British movies, and those movies have to be remade to be seen in the U.S.A.

[Kirby101]

Mortal Engines

An interesting movie with terribly constructed story and confused internal logic.

I saw this last night. I agree with your assessment. It seemed like a movie of story ideas and character sketches with really good video game effects. I know it is based on a novel. not a game. But it had the feel of a game world, rather than some cinematic post apocalypse.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Rocky (1976)

I dug it.

[Kirby101]

The Wind Rises. Sweet and sad and masterful. Not what I expected, except I expected greatness from Miyazaki. And it was.