What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[dc_guy_75]

"Primer" on Netflix.

A movie about time travelling made for $7k.

I still don't know wtf happened.

[Prospero]

Oh and "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." Straight in the dustbin with the DVD of this after viewing. Puerile, cliched and dreary. The worst sort of cosy british comedy. Only Judi Dench emerges with any dignity from this shambolic mess - and she should have known better than to sign-up.

[Prospero]

"Beasts Of The Southern Wild" which has a six year old girl called Quvenzhané Wallis, in the main role as a little girl with a dying father in a strange community in the Bayous of Louisiana. Odd film. No real narrative almost like a dream She is tipped for an Oscar and deserves it. But the film is puzzling.

[Stavros]

Tarantino's latest little game with gore and history... "Django Unchained'. and of course the title references "Hercules unchained' with Primo Carnera, if I recall rightly.

Now that I didn't get -even though I saw Hercules Unchained..er..some time ago and yes, Primo Carnera is in it as a giant. But the more I think of it, what IS the connection, other than the word 'unchained'...?

[Stavros]

Puss in Boots (2011)
Changed my view of Humpty Dumpty anyway...

[CORVETTEDUDE]

"zero dark thirty"

[Prospero]

Re: "Unchained" Like many moments in Tarantino the reference is all - like the silly moment where the main character has his horse do a little dance. s I say can't recall if that is roy rogers or Gene Autry but again, what's the point....

Ken Russell sometimes played the same game. There is a moment in his Mahler which has the composer gazing listlessly at a character dressed exactly like Tadzio from the film version of "Death in Venice." (Presumably because it had used Mahler's 5th Symphony in the soundtrack.)

[Stavros]

Over the last year I have been returning to films I first saw in the 70s and 80s and have been surprised at those which have failed the test of durability -Kubrick, Antonioni and Pasolini are the outstanding casualties.

Three impressive trilogies then:
Andrzej Wajda's first major offerings: A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), Ashes and Diamonds (195.
All three films are set in the last years of the war, or just after it, and concern the rivalry between Polish Communists and Nationalists; A Generation now looks primitive but in the circumstances this is excusable, and its apparent naivete is offset by Wajda's early experiments with light, which become a key factor in Kanal (which for some reason I didn't realise contains a luminous performmance by Vladek Sheybal whom for years I thought was an Hungarian). Ashes and Diamonds must be one of the top 100 films ever made -the script, the acting, the lighting, the mise-en-scene confirm the huge importance of Wajda to the development of eastern European cinema after 1945.

The Bill Douglas Trilogy: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (197. I didn't believe the bleak poverty of these autobiographical films when I first saw them, but a childhood friend in the documentary on the dvd confirms that his childhood really was that bad; and reflects the grim reality of Douglas's childhood in Newcraighall outside Edinburgh in the 1930s -he even managed to film in the old miner's dwellings before they were torn down in the 1970s. It is hard to think of films which concentrate so much on the images you see; with virtually no dialogue this is minimalist cinema-making, yet the accumulative effect is profound: Jamie/Douglas lives a loveless, careless, hungry, apparently hopeless life, even later when in the RAF in Egypt he cannot express himself -yet he wants to be an artist and the final image of the trilogy, of apple trees in bloom is a moment of radiant hope -and the truth is that Douglas did escape the rank poverty of his childhood to become an artist, dying at the shockingly early age of 57. Perhap the greatest tragedy is that both the actors playing Jamie, and his half-brother (in real life his cousin) died in the 1980s as a result of the heroin epidemic that swept Edinburgh in the late 1970s and 1980s. Jamie, played by Steven Archibald, was filmed a few weeks before his death, a melancholy footnote to the trilogy:


I also saw his film Comrades (1986), about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the first part of which is superb, the second half less so. Oddly, I don't think he fared well with a large budget.

Finally, the Glauber Rocha trilogoy: Black God, White Devil (1964), Land in Anguish (1967), Antonio das Mortes (1969). Rocha's films are the most difficult to assess; occasionally brilliant, the sound is often terrible, yet he attempts to situate Brazil in the context of military rule, local history, capitalism -vs- marxism and the results are mixed. Nevertheless, at his best he had a fantastic eye, but the films can look dated.

[fred41]

"Primer" on Netflix.

A movie about time travelling made for $7k.

I still don't know wtf happened.

Haven't watched that yet...but if you like that type of thing, you might want to give the Spanish film "Timecrimes" (also on Netflix) a look.
It's a well made little film that will certainly pass the time and shouldn't leave you feeling cheated.

[Christina Fox]

A GOOD day to DIE HARD... The new die hard movie....it was TERRIBLE...Im done going to the movies