Thread: What was the last film you watched?

Moonrise Kingdom. Great movie! Perhaps one of my favorites.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748122/

Nacho Libre

Originally Posted by Lenfer

Love this movie.

One of the best movies ever made starring Audrey (perhaps the most pure innocent lovely face during the golden age of Hollywood)... Think I was 18 or 19 when I saw it for the first time. Love it too!

No film at the time, but I'm watching this, since Lenfer mentioned Audrey Hepburn:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067227/
last night I watched 'merchant of the four seasons'..
and had a toast to 'the love of my life''

(douglas sirk meant it this way)

Went to see Looper...with Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Good idea, but I guess I must stop going to the flicks at the end of a working week...


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

On Netflix, The Ninth Gate, with Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Frank Langella. I liked all the actors involved, and the story seemed to start off with some real promise. However, as is often said, "the devil is in the details", as I thought the final parts of the film were a bit muddled and disconnected. Depp and Langella, though, are two great actors nonetheless.

I've been watching a lot of streaming movies via Hulu Plus, almost entirely from their prodigious Criterion Collection library, which is amazing, particularly for the many things not available on DVD (at least not in N. America, and/or for rental, which is how I view most of my movies). I wish I could recommend H+ wholeheartedly, but I must say that the streaming performance can be pretty patchy, with lots of halting and stuttering (it seems that many others have had this experience as well); fortunately, even though it's pretty terrible when it happens, it doesn't happen often enough for me to drop the service entirely. Recently enjoyed:

1. THE ORGANIZER (Mario Monicelli, 1963) - A pungent mixture of comedy and neo-neo-realist destitution, with a brilliant use of silences and "dead" spaces in the action, and some sumptuous b&w photography that makes even the muck seem epic, with the frame behaving with controlled eccentricity in a delightful way that only sometimes calls out for attention. (If I'd had access to the DVD or BR as rentals, I'd probably have seen it that way.) Not at all heavy on sentimentality---Italocommunist or otherwise---but still suffused with feeling, including a latent outrage throughout. Nobody needs to be told this, but Marcello Mastroianni is a comic marvel; and here he is frumpy, hungry, possibly opportunistic and naive, possibly courageous, lost in wire-rimmed goggles, gnomic. Many potent metaphors in free circulation here, tastefully and ambivalently deployed, as Monicelli seems to not be sort to grind out tracts, even if his sympathies do take a stand; sophisticated farce, or tragicomedy. Monicelli seems to be most famous, at least outside Italy, for BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET. I need to see more of his films!

2. THE CREMATOR (Juraj Herz, 1969) - The psychotic transformation of a monoloquacious, Orientalist crematorium director in late-30s Czechoslovakia, from pompous man to Party animal. It is funny, and the comic rhythms of the film (as with THE ORGANIZER) are eccentric and memorable; though once he starts having fantasies (hallucinations?) of being the Dalai Lama, you realize that things have been a lot more scary than funny for many minutes already. "Black comedy" might not even quite be the right phrase. It would be interesting to know what Herz was really talking about in 1968-9, as it seems like the subtext, if there is one, seems as much '68 as '39.

3. Some others in brief:
- INDIA MATRI BHUMI (Rossellini) - not sure why this documentary-ish film is so praised, but since I often don't care for Rossellini's films at first, I think I might warm up to it.
- L'AMORE (Rossellini) [two three-reeler showpieces for Anna Magnani, the first based on a Jean Cocteau piece, the second written or co-written by a Federico Fellini...I wasn't sure either of these was totally successful, but watching Magnani is a treat in itself, and there is certainly the presence of a Rossellini-esque [?] drive towards revelation, in terms of the _feeling_ of the two films]
- VICTIM (Basil Dearden) [homophobia noir, but also more generally a pretty fine melodramatic meditation on a kind of "structural violence" (to cop a term from Paul Farmer or Iris Marian Young)...maybe something that melodrama has always been good at, in the guise of "forbidden love" etc]
- BITTER RICE (Giuseppe de Santis, 1949) [Italian neo-realism, and beautifully rendered...I only know De Santis from his collaboration, with a number of others, with Luchino Visconti on OSSESSIONE, an adaptation of James M. Cain]

Also watched a Billy Wilder I'd never seen before, his wartime FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943), only his third film as a director. Really enjoyable, with Erich von Stroheim doing an extra-ugly/pompous/weirdly-charming gentleman Rommel. A light entertainment, but with toned-down performances compared to the later, manic Wilder (which I also like very much), and really excellent photography, with a baroque shadow scheme in full effect.

Originally Posted by Chrythes

It's quite technically impossible to film a movie that is 86 minutes long in one take. The film cameras could shoot as long as 10 minutes before changing the film, digital cameras can shoot without a break for about 40 minutes.

I think this is not true, as Alexander Sokurov's RUSSIAN ARK (2002) was an 86-minute unbroken take (I have also seen it listed as 96 minutes), straight to hard disk, albeit apparently without direct sound. I'd be interested to know if this stunt has been essayed since then, as it seems like DV has developed at a rapid pace, with mostly crud to show for it (noisy green-screen CGI with lousy, lazy sense of lighting, etc). I found Sokurov's film, of course, to be much more than a stunt; more like a long, fluid gesture with amazing choreography. It was so rich, it was frustrating, as are others of his pictures that I've found rather less compelling. I'm overdue to see it again! I still remember music---Glinka at one point?---drifting through some of the museums' rooms like audible perfume.

I just saw Argo and loved it!

Originally Posted by samurai

On Netflix, The Ninth Gate, with Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Frank Langella. I liked all the actors involved, and the story seemed to start off with some real promise. However, as is often said, "the devil is in the details", as I thought the final parts of the film were a bit muddled and disconnected. Depp and Langella, though, are two great actors nonetheless.

The Ninth Gate and Ed Wood are my Depp faves. Hoping his career isn't on the wane. What's all that pirate crap about?

Langella was incredible in his younger years. The 12 Chairs, Diary of a Mad Housewife, for instance. What was that Whoopie relationship all about?

Originally Posted by Vaneyes

What's all that pirate crap about?

Originally Posted by Lenfer

Thank you, Lenfer, I should have guessed. How naive of me. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.

@ Vaneyes, I also thought he was great as the police inspector Abberline in the movie From Hell, about the Jack The Ripper murders.