What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[BellaBellucci]

Gamechange.

SARAH PALIN 2016 BITCHEZ!!!

~BB~

[Stavros]

Anyways........................sometimes you need to lighten up Stavros. Look at a thing for exactly how it is presented to you and not try to read anything more into it!

Indeed, I am working my way through the box set of Herge's Adventures of Tin-Tin when I am on my exercise bike: lightening more than just my intellect, I hope!

[phillyguy21]

The last movie I saw in theaters was The Hunger Games. The last movie I watched for the first time in its entirety was Inception, which I caught on HBO. I know I am super late on that one, but I am not the biggest movie buff out there.

[loren]

watched Open Range last night

[Prospero]

Yes reactions to humour vary greatly, I find Jackie Mason hilarious, for example; I have watched Morecombe and Wise waiting for something to make me laugh but its impossible yet they are treated like gods in British comedy. Woody Allen doesn't make me laugh, but more than that I have already described his films as I see them. Malick hasn't yet made a comedy, neither did Tarkovsky, does that diminish Tarkovsky's reputation? But Malick makes films about the American experience, mostly -what does Allen make films about? Himself? I don't know what it is his reputation rests on.

Exactly. Your opening sentences prove my point perfectly. But the fact that Terence Malick or Tarkovsky have never made comedies doesn't in any way diminish their achievement. They make film which explore, in depth, issues of the human condition. In the case of Takovsky this has prouced some masterpieces. Woody Allen's comedies, by contrast, are funny (in the casse of the best - he had a 15 year period of making utterly dismal films) which are primarily about the Jewish New York experience. I don't try or expect to extrapolate something universal about the human condition from them. But at his best his films repay regular reviewing. Radio Days is my favourite and the magnificent opening to Manhattan.

I think one of the difficulties here is that "film" is a medium which embraces the most cynical pieces of profit making product - mass entertainment - and films which aspire to the condition of high art.

[Stavros]

Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966)

The English painter JMW Turner once remarked I paint what I see, not what is there. The philosophical ruminations on photography that have exercised minds has tended to focus precisely on whether or not photography is more truthful/realistic than painting, and nobody can decide conclusively, especially when it turns out famous photos may have been staged, others doctored, and so on. So the idea of what is real and important is central to Antonioni's film set in 'Swinging London'. A professional photographer idles into a park, takes some random shots then realises he has shot something he didn't at first see, and which he isn't sure is there. He confirms what he saw, loses the photographs, then the evidence: it is there, it isn't there. There is a record, there isn't a record. Antonioni's tedious, pseudo-Marxist critique of 'bourgeois society' that began with the trilogy of the 1960s (L'avventura, La Notte, L'eclisse) has by 1966 dissolved into nihilism. He cannot decide what is important, and seems to conclude that nothing is. I can't decide if this film is clever, artistic and subtle, or if it is just empty. The 1960s fashion doesn't look out of date, the colour is rich and vibrant, and it features one of the greatest ever guitarists, Jeff Beck who was instructed by Antonioni to smash his guitar (the director had wanted The Who but they were in the US I think). The broken guitar frame becomes instantly symbolic: the crowd fight over it as if it were precious: the photographer walks off with it, then throws it away on Oxford St. Another man picks it up, and also throws it away.
The more Antonioni I revisit over the years the less I think of his films -by contrast, Bergman, Ozu and Bresson improve with age.

[jamesedwards]

Battleship that was off the chain!!!! I also saw Contraband, and Underworld.

[HbgDon]

Justice League: Doom
Thor
The Muppets

[robertlouis]

Beautiful Lies (De vrais mensonges), an inconsequential but genuinely funny light comedy which the French seem to do so well.

Stavros, a question, if I may: The Arts Cinema in Cambridge - one of the increasingly few civilised venues to see movies in - is about to show Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse. Is it worth my folding, plus fuel and the exorbitant parking costs in Lion Yard?

[Psuman80]

AVENGERS - won tickets to an advanced screening last Wednesday.

No spoilers I promise - but it will live up to the hype. It is an incredible movie - well done, not too many cliche moments and each character has the right amount of screen time for that balance of not too much/not too little. Also - they spend ALOT of time fighting each other at first.