What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[Stavros]

Interstellar. Despite the worm holes, neutron stars, frozen-cloud-planets, mind boggling tesseracts and a multitude of other costly special effects, Machenzie Foy’s wide and joyous smile is the only wondrous thing in this film. Unfortunately, her character isn’t given many opportunities to smile.

Just out of interest, Trish, do you have a particular favourite 'science fiction' film -broadly used to cover science and space -but also one that doesn't take such liberties with science as to be absurd?

[Instrumental]

For me, that movie would be Contact.

Any who, I saw Birdman last night. It was an amazing film. The style was unique and I especially loved the dialogue and cinematography. Oh and the drum score was wicked.

[fireblad]

Nightcrawler

[Stavros]

For me, that movie would be Contact.

Any who, I saw Birdman last night. It was an amazing film. The style was unique and I especially loved the dialogue and cinematography. Oh and the drum score was wicked.

Thanks Instrumental, I have heard of the film but never seen it, so I shall, as you Americans say, 'check it out'.

[Stavros]

Mr Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
JMW Turner (1775-1851) is regarded as one of the greatest painters that Britain has produced, and Mike Leigh has given him two and half hours of loving attention with a film of exquisite beauty.

However, Leigh assumes that the audience is aware of Turner's status, but in making this assumption feeds the curious fact that the Turner so beloved of contemporary Britain (perhaps the world) is the Turner of the late paintings most of which were never seen in his lifetime, whereas Turner's reputation in his own time, was based on the paintings of his youth derived from classical and biblical subjects which are of little interest today. Such was the popularity of Turner that by the time he was 23 he had more orders for paintings than he could complete. He had learned his craft with Joseph Wyatt, yet did not create a studio to meet his customers' demand with an army of assistants but relied on his father's support and that of his housekeeper, Hannah Danby played with aching sympathy in the film by Dorothy Atkinson.

Turner was a working class lad born in Covent Garden in the centre of London to a barber and wigmaker; his mother was the daughter of a butcher. After giving birth to JMW, she produced a girl, who died, whereupon the mother went mad and was committed to an asylum. We don't really know if this accounts for JMW's appalling treatment of women, evident throughout the film most notably in the painter's indifference to the fate of the woman who bore him two girls, and the sister of Hanna Danby who in addition to her housekeeping provides him with occasional sexual relief.

The film is thus set between the 1830s and Turner's demise by which time the top ten hits of his youth had been replaced with what became Turner's obsession with light and colour, presented most often in seascapes for which he was widely ridiculed by the Royal Society of which he was considered an eccentric if gifted member, though there is a telling, if wordless performance in the film by Constable who clearly envied Turner's skills with light and colour. Look more closely and you will note that Turner had an aversion to the colour green (as, I believe, is true of Leonardo da Vinci).

In the film, Turner rents a room in Margate and having bedded the landlady, decides to buy a house for them both in Chelsea, while maintaining his other house and Ms Darby. In reality, Turner did not rent but purchased at least four houses on the Thames to indulge his obsession with sunrise and sunset.

Indeed, Leigh's strength is in presenting a man utterly consumed by painting, it was in truth the only thing that mattered to him. Leigh passes over Turner's youth, his passion for the poetry of his contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Byron and Goethe whose Theory of Colour fascinated him. He does not touch on the French Revolution, Napoleon or the Wars which prevented Turner form travelling in Europe until 1819 when he made a profoundly important journey through France and Switzerland to Italy -some of Turner's watercolours of Venice are amongst his finest works. Leigh also fails to register that Turner's fabulous painting, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her berth to be broken up (1839, and Turner was famous for his long titles), and also Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) depict Turner's loathing of the industrial revolution, they were not endorsements of it.

Leigh does not present Turner as a modernist, but a traditionalist, and I think this is correct. Turner was obsessed with light which is why so much of his later work looks abstract, but is not -form is not abandoned, it is absorbed by light. Thus Leigh reproduced Turner's (allegedly) last words: The sun is god.

For all its faults, and assumptions, this is a beautiful film, driven by character rather than plot -there is no narrative as such- -which in spite of Timothy Spall's spellbinding performance, fails to confirm that it is possible to make a truly great feature film about an artist as there have not been any so far. I recommend the film, but with the warning that is is rather long, the music is mostly a whining oboe one can do without, but with superb photography.

[trish]

Just out of interest, Trish, do you have a particular favourite 'science fiction' film -broadly used to cover science and space -but also one that doesn't take such liberties with science as to be absurd?

Contact is interesting in that it questions some of the basic assumptions of what’s taken to be scientific methodology. It points out that not all experience is open to public inspection and that some experiments are so costly they can only be performed once.

My favorite is 2001, basically for its optimism about the future of humankind, and the infinitude of the universe. However this doesn’t meet your absurdity avoidance criteria.

I’m not sure there are many that meet that criteria. Perhaps Europa Report, which I streamed about a year ago. My memory of it is that it wasn’t absurd, but it wasn’t a transformative work of fiction either.

Most fiction, and most of all science fiction, requires some suspension of disbelief. Some of the things in Interstellar that might strike one as absurd are not; e.g. the time-dilation the astronauts experienced on the planet with a low orbit around a spinning, massive black-hole. What was absurd (among other things) was the idea that is would be easier to terraform any one of those unfriendly planets than to rescue Earth from climate catastrophe.

Absurd science fiction films (not necessarily about space and time) that I like include

The Day the Earth Caught Fire
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Blade Runner,
Matrix (the first one)
Jurassic Park
Alien (the first one)
Evolution (the amusing one with David Duchovny)

[fred41]

"Metro Manila"...on Netflix.

I thought this was a very good movie about desperation.

[Odelay]

Mr Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
JMW Turner (1775-1851) is regarded as one of the greatest painters that Britain has produced, and Mike Leigh ...

Thanks for the review, Stavros. I try to catch most of Mike Leigh's movies. It's interesting when he strays from his modern english drama/comedy stories to ones outside this genre, like Topsy Turvy. I'll be looking for this one in the theatres.

[Yasmin Lee Fan]

I watched First Blood last night. To me this is the best of the Rambo movies. After this one they turned him into a superhero. The scenes where he takes out all those guys in the woods was very well done and has been copied by everybody since. Most recently in The Equalizer.

[Stavros]

My favorite is 2001, basically for its optimism about the future of humankind, and the infinitude of the universe. However this doesn’t meet your absurdity avoidance criteria.

Kubrick was a pessimist, I am surprised you cannot see this, as he loads every film with his one-dimensional loathing of the human race, seeing it as a machine that lies, robs and kills, that is incapable of love and compassion- two feelings that are banned from his films. The closing scene of the film is one of the lowest points in cinema: the bleak image of a foetus travelling back to earth to begin yet again life's utterly pointless journey through time, with the opening of Also Sprach Zarathrustra played yet again to emphasise that nothing has changed since the ridiculous and insulting episode The Dawn of Man that begins the film. One passes over with as little comment as is needed on his collaboration with that disgusting pederast, Arthur C. Clarke.
Kubrick's main interest in film was in the technology, and it shows in some his films which are technologically outstanding, Barry Lyndon being his best film, if you can take the relentless sarcasm and the view that humans only exist to hurt each other. Kubrick may be the most over-rated 'great director'.

For the record, my favourite film in which people travel into space is Danny Boyle's Sunshine, even with its hysterical ending. Superior to the turkeys on your list. And a Happy Thanskgiving to you too!!