What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[robertlouis]

I was being generous, I think your choice of words is superior.

But we both agree on Ms Lawrence. She's good in everything she does, but her performance in Winter's Bone was so true that it transcends all she's done since.

[Stavros]

Yes it was a fine performance, but so too was her performance in Silver Linings Playbook. Hard to choose between the two, but I prefer the latter.

[Prospero]

"Midnight in Paris" - a Woody Allen movie from a couple of years ago. Nice contrivance - a time travelling American who, as midnight tolls, slips into a imousine from the 1920s and goes to soirees to meet Hemingway, Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, etc. The main character speaks just like Woody Allen and is given the same kind of nebisch persona that Allen used to play when he was younger. Quite amusing and actually better now than when i first saw it a couple of years ago.

[Stavros]

Prospero, if you are interested there is a long rebuttal in the Daily Beast to the allegation that Woody molested Mia Farrow and Andre Previn's adopted daughter Soo-Yin when she was 7, an allegation that surfaced again recently. I don't care for Allen's films which as I think I have mentioned before are often set in New York but never include Black or Gay people, perhaps because they are so thin on the ground in that city. In addition, the link has two articles on Philip Seymour Hoffman -one with clips from his films, the other on the heroin he might have been taking when he died; and an hilarious video from Brigham Young University on how young men should struggle to control their urge to masturbate....enjoy!!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...e-warfare.html

[broncofan]

http://iranian.com/posts/view/post/27775

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...0-minutes.html

The first article I think is a re-print of the article Stavros is talking about. I couldn't find it through the daily beast link he put up but I'm sure it's there. The second link is to the Daily Beast with a video of Woody Allen discussing the accusation in the early 90's. Although I almost always believe abuse victims (>90%), I am not sure about this accusation given the reports of the psychologists and Mia Farrow's obsessive behavior. Of course, if he molested her daughter Dylan that would be good reason to be obsessive; but a lot of her son's twitter comments, which she has dutifully re-posted have tended to be mocking comments about his relationship with Soon Yi Previn. On the issue of Soon Yi they can't seem to figure out whether to call her a victim or treat her as the seductress who dissolved Mia and Woody's relationship.The video in the second link is very interesting. Woody claims that after the abuse allegations she asked to be in a new movie of his. I'm not saying I buy it hook, line, and sinker either but I'm interested to hear what his response will be to the allegation being re-initiated.

[Stavros]

they moved it here
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...t-so-fast.html

[Prospero]

Stavros, I like your ironic remark regarding the absence of gay and black people from Woody Allen movies. But regarding the allegations against him this is in keeping with the moral panic that has erupted in the UK - with a growing list of celebrities accused of molesting minors, some very young indeed. Many of the cases are still proceeding.

I am not sure i do always believe the accusations of abuse. It's an easy thing to claim and hard to prove or disprove. The mud usually sticks. Teachers are particularly vulnerable to such accusations (Powerfully treated in a Danish film that came out a couple of year ago called "The Hunt.")

Yes - I do enjoy Allen's films - those from his early years especially. He went through a couple of decades of making very poor films indeed. The one i watched the other evening and his most recent were better - though not up to his best.

However I can separate this from the allegations made against him. I have no idea about their veracity. if proven then he would have to be seen as a pretty disgusting character. His marriage to his own adopted daughter already makes him dubious to say the least. But I do think you separate the artist from the human. otherwise how could anyone bear to listen to Wagner or Strauss or read Celine when we know of their anti-Semitic ideas? Caravaggio killed a man yet he is a great artist. The fact that Phil Spector is now in prison for murder does not diminish his accomplishment as a great record produce and John Lennon, by all accounts, was quite a bully. I still love the music of The Beatles.

[qwerty94]

Remember Me.

I started watching Water For Elephants, but I fell asleep in the middle.

I'm on a Robert Pattinson binge right now.

[Stavros]

Stavros, I like your ironic remark regarding the absence of gay and black people from Woody Allen movies. But regarding the allegations against him this is in keeping with the moral panic that has erupted in the UK - with a growing list of celebrities accused of molesting minors, some very young indeed. Many of the cases are still proceeding.

I am not sure i do always believe the accusations of abuse. It's an easy thing to claim and hard to prove or disprove. The mud usually sticks. Teachers are particularly vulnerable to such accusations (Powerfully treated in a Danish film that came out a couple of year ago called "The Hunt.")

Yes - I do enjoy Allen's films - those from his early years especially. He went through a couple of decades of making very poor films indeed. The one i watched the other evening and his most recent were better - though not up to his best.

However I can separate this from the allegations made against him. I have no idea about their veracity. if proven then he would have to be seen as a pretty disgusting character. His marriage to his own adopted daughter already makes him dubious to say the least. But I do think you separate the artist from the human. otherwise how could anyone bear to listen to Wagner or Strauss or read Celine when we know of their anti-Semitic ideas? Caravaggio killed a man yet he is a great artist. The fact that Phil Spector is now in prison for murder does not diminish his accomplishment as a great record produce and John Lennon, by all accounts, was quite a bully. I still love the music of The Beatles.

I agree with most of this, and though I won't challenge you on The Beatles on aesthetic grounds you are wrong about Richard Strauss. His daughter-in-law Alice (whom I believe is still alive) was a Jew and by allowing her and his son to live at his home in Garmisch made him vulnerable to Nazi laws on harbouring Jews. It is true that he became director of the ReichMusikkammer in 1933, a position he used to introduce a law on copyright which gave composers the right to claim royalties from the sale or rental of their scores where before they could only earn money through performances; and a measure which benefited him too! But Strauss regarded Goebbels and Hitler with characteristic detachment, considering both men to be vulgar and unintelligent. Moreover, in 1935 when he was rehearsing the premiere of Die Schweigsame Frau in Dresden, he refused to remove the name of the Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig from the playbill, Zweig having transformed Ben Jonson's play The Silent Woman into a scintillating libretto with music to match (I don't think it has ever been performed in the UK). In an exchange of letters intercepted by the Gestapo Strauss ridiculed Goebbels and was subsequently sacked from his post, as if he cared. He did 'escape' from the last days of the war to Switzerland and it is said he appeared before a de-Nazification court in the American sector when he returned to Garmisch, not because he was a Nazi but because he had occupied a position of authority in the Reich, albeit for barely 2 years. I tried to find the transcripts of the Court proceedings about ten years ago when I was researching an article on the censorship of music in Israel (Strauss's music was 'banned' -ie not officially but the understanding among musicians being they would refuse to play it) along with Wagner's until the conductor Igor Markevich persuaded the Israelis to change their minds in the 1960s, but was unable to, making me wonder if it ever happened. I do believe there are transcripts somewhere of de-Nazification sessions; I am also not sure if the transcripts exist of the sessions with Carl Orff, Herbert von Karajan and the singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, all of whom actually joined the Nazi Party (Schwarzkopf's lame excuse was that musicians and singers viewed it as a sort of trade union and joined it to guarantee they would have paid work...). Not really about movies, but a fascinating subject. The controversial film that Ken Russell made about Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils was shown once on the BBC before being banned. That Russell loathed Strauss's music may account for his bizarre misinterpretation of a life with the usual lurid scenes of schlock-horreur mixed with kitsch and phoney history -it marked the end of Russell's relationship with the BBC. You can read about it here and see some of it too if you can bear it-
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/k...he_seven_veils

[RallyCola]

i caught Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit over the weekend. It was terrible.

They attempted to re-tell the entire story that was told in flashbacks and exposition in the sum of all fears and red october.

next, the action is damn unbelievable and incredibly heavy handed. the flat chested ugly cunt keira knightley stinks up the screen again and finally, kevin costner just makes things worse.

i don't want to give too many details away but realistically, i've enjoyed watching paint dry more than this movie and its deliberate disregard for proper story telling. it gleams over so many details in an attempt to make us believe that plugging a laptop into an AC outlet will allow a douchebag to take over a secure network and clone an algorithm to stop a terrorist bank transaction. anyone with any knowledge of a post 9-11 finance system would see right though this bullshit. moreover, the influx of russian money into the dollar as an investment would not, in the course of the movie, have inflated the dollar as it did, and such an influx of foreign investment in our currency would have triggered other automatic fail safes by the EU and China to hedge against reduced returns. Finally, once the FBI agent that was in the midwest failed to report in, it is possible that another agent would have been dispatched to ascertain the whereabouts of such a high value target. finally, we are supposed to believe that a terrorist cell that planned the final plot forgot such a detail as letting paint dry? such a cell would have secured a van far in advance of the actual due date.

ya know what, movies are supposed to make you escape and enjoy things that are not mundane. computers are mundane. they are not sexy. they are not inescapable and not without the layman's ability to understand. i am so tired of "hackers" or "information terrorists" being used as villains in movies. i get it...someone has a really cool program/virus/algorithm that can destroy something should it launch...its a bad crutch to fall back on because it is abused too many times on film.

don't waste your money on this crap. just watch one of the far more enjoyable movies about jack ryan that were made before information terrorists were in vogue.