What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[jamiethewild]

I spy !!!

[Prospero]

Both of those were also good anti-war films Dan... but I still hold All Quiet' to be a pinnacle achievement.

[danthepoetman]

Both of those were also good anti-war films Dan... but I still hold All Quiet' to be a pinnacle achievement.

I remember being very impressed by the Erich Maria Remarque novel, many years ago. I’ve only seen the old Lewis Milestone cinematic version of 1930. I think there was another in the 70s, but I assume you’re talking about the most recent one? the one from this year, by Mimi Leder? Is it that good? I’ll check it out!

[Prospero]

Nope - I'm talking about the Lewis Milestone. Okay it shows its age - and in the end the book is finer - but it is magnificent. But I've not seen the more recent one.
The trouble with modern war films is that - by and large - they cannot resist the sentimental. Look at Finding Private Ryan or Warhorse. The last was nauseatingly sweet. (There are honourable exceptions - The Thin Red line and Platoon for instance).

[danthepoetman]

It is a great movie. It’s remarkable how the unspeakable horror of the trench war has inspired only the little few to express it, and especially in literature, I find, but in such cases so pathetically and vividly (Celine’s “Journey to the end of the night” for instance, or Blaise Cendrars’ “The Cut hand”). And there’s much less historical accounts on it also compared to what was published on WW2. As if the men who had seen it were hardly able to even talk about it…

[Prospero]

There are the great English poets of world war one of course (Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brook, Robert Graves etc) - and many fine novels including Pat Baker's powerful Regeneration trilogy. (Will check out the Cendrars' poem - thanks)

[Stavros]

Fracture (2007)
I saw this on tv last night; the story is great for a film, or would be if it let the killer go loose, just to rub it in. The film is let down by another truly dismal performance from Ryan Gosling, so laid back he falls over his eyelashes, and someone should have told him to stop using his hands in so melodramatic a fashion in the trial scene. What his reputation is based on I do not know. I am not sure if Anthony Hopkins has left Hannibal Lecter behind, his 'evil' persona is by now repetitive and boring. And why a Maori actor is pretending to be American I don't know, his accent was wooden. Major disappointment.

[Dino Velvet]

The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzoi, Corbucci; Nineteen Sixty-Eight)

Another western that broke the mould. The film is allegedly based on a true incident in Snow Hill, Utah, although I couldn't fnd a record of it. It pits a form of good against evil -there is a long-running conflict between Mormon immgrants from the east and a local landowner who has prevented them from settling -by resorting to crime to feed themselves, the community has become criminalised and thus a feast for bounty hunters. At the core of the film is an attempt by Utah state to impose law and order on Snow Hill; and the contest between two bounty hunters: Silence -a Mormon I assume, whose throat was cut when his parents were murdered by bounty hunters so he couldn't describe what happened; and Tigrero (sometimes Loco) who becomes his -and everyone else's, nemesis.

The strengths of the film are the dazzling snowy landscapes (filmed in the Dolomites), and the unusually harsh ending, possibly the bleakest in any kind of western. In this film, Silence may refer to Death, but would be a Christ-like figure were he not so violent himself. Apparently, the Sherriff, played by an American actor called Frank Wolff (who committed suicide sometime after the film) had a ferocious row with Klaus Kinski before the film.

The weakness is the dubbing, which was never a strong point in Italian films, but which gives it a detached feeling, so that one is alienated by sound, as well as by the nihilistic violence. It is particulary hard when Kinski's actual voice was quite different from the dubbed one.

There is a discussion of the film here:
http://www.spaghetti-western.net/ind...Silence_Review

That was some ending, huh?

[thekretch]

From Gaspar Noe, who did Irreversible, one of my other favorite flicks.

[Dino Velvet]

From Gaspar Noe, who did Irreversible, one of my other favorite flicks.

Have the Blu-ray and still need to see that. Really like Irreversible and I Stand Alone is pretty good too.