What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[Prospero]

"The Village At The End of The World' a cinema released documentary about the Inuit community of Niaqomat in Greenland. The title refers not only to its location where it can be reached only by ship or heiicopter, but also to the fact that, with the closure of a fish processing plant, the community faces total collapse. It's a revelatory look at a community thatit is almost impossible to imagine being part off - wth one small shop, no teenage girls (so the teenage boy featured has no chance of dating) and where everyone seems to be related. They only got electricity in 1998. The happiest man in the film seems to be a guy whose job is collecting and disposing of barrels of shit everyday from the village houses.

[Odelay]

The Counsellor (Ridley Scott, 2013)
Ridley Scott makes some interesting films, and some terrible films. I was intrigued by The Counsellor because it had such terrible reviews. They were right. The script by Cormac McCarthy is bloated, obscure pretentious crap (or embarrassing, as in the first scene). I don't know how many more films can be made about a drug deal that goes wrong, they can't be much worse than this. But at least Natalie Dormer is in it, all to briefly, wearing one of those spray-on dresses that brings the best out of her derriere, inviting others to enter.

Damn, this movie was bad. The two reasons I made it through it were: 1) I have a much lower standard for movies viewed while on an airplane; and 2) Stavros' point about seeing just how bad the movie could get.

Here's how bad... at the beginning of the movie they describe a device used by drug lords to decapitate their enemies, and also an in depth conversation about snuff films. By the end of the movie I'm rooting for several of the supposedly sympathetic characters die by decapitation and snuff film. Ridley did not disappoint me.

My last two Ridley Scott films were this one and the almost as horrible, Oblivion. Just retire already, old man!

[Stavros]

I have to agree with you; I am not a fan of Cormac McCarthy on any level, and if Scott can't do better than this, yes, maybe its time to give up.

[robertlouis]

Thinking I might go to see Blue Ruin when it opens in the UK later this week. Anybody seen it in the US?

[Prospero]

Calvary, an Irish film made with a mix of Irish and UK funding, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, who made the excellently dark and funny The Guard. Both films star Brendan Gleeson, and in Calvary, he plays a good priest - in every sense - in a rural parish in present day Ireland, with its ruined economy and broken lives, so don't go expecting some Quiet Man whimsy. This is raw, dark and occasionally violent. The set up is that a parishioner tells him in confession that within a week he is going to kill him (the priest). So yes, it's a thriller, but it is also so much more.

Gleeson is the centre of the film, and I don't think I've ever seen him give a better performance. It's a hard watch at times, but also both gripping and absorbing.

I can't recommend it too highly.

I saw this last night. It is bleak and uncompromising and very powerful indeed. I think RL hits the nail on the head with his brief review. Anyone with Catholicism in their past - or present- is likely to find this film even more affecting.

[trish]

Damn, this movie was bad. The two reasons I made it through it were: 1) I have a much lower standard for movies viewed while on an airplane; and 2) Stavros' point about seeing just how bad the movie could get.

Here's how bad... at the beginning of the movie they describe a device used by drug lords to decapitate their enemies, and also an in depth conversation about snuff films. By the end of the movie I'm rooting for several of the supposedly sympathetic characters die by decapitation and snuff film. Ridley did not disappoint me.

My last two Ridley Scott films were this one and the almost as horrible, Oblivion. Just retire already, old man!

Sorry to hear that.

I have to say I enjoyed The Counselor. I don’t think there are any main characters that are supposed to be sympathetic, perhaps the Counselor himself (played by Fassbender), but only because he the least crooked of bunch (in it for some quick money to presumably pay for an exorbitant ring). What I loved about the movie were the exchanges and the soliloquies. A lot of people panned the dialog for being unrealistic, and that’s very true. The screenplay (which I read before seeing the movie...”cause as you know...I’m a McCarthy fan) reads like a play, rather than a film.

Listen carefully in the beginning to the dialog between the jewler and the Counselor. The jeweler explains that because of its eternal nature, a diamond is a cautionary stone. “At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”

Later in the movie, seeks the influence of Jefe, a very wealthy and powerful Latin American businessman. The character Jefe at this point is given a rather long soliloquy on the metaphysics of choice and consequence in which he advises the Counselor, “...the world in which you seek to undo your mistakes is not the world in which they were made.”

Still later in the film, the Counselor has a brief interchange with the tender of a seedy bar who explains that here people are killed on a daily basis,
“To make a joke. To show that death does not care. That death has no meaning.”
The Counselor asks, “Do you believe that?”
And the bartender says, “No. Of course not. All my family is dead. I am the one who has no meaning.”

The film is full of gems. Watching cramped in an agonizing airline seat probably wasn’t conducive to your viewing experience.

[dderek123]

I enjoyed The Counselor as well. The plot wasn't anything special but films like that can be carried by good dialogue and solid performances by an ensemble cast. Splash in a few scenes that are novel or 'edgy' along with some decent foreshadowing and I'll be entertained for the entire movie.

I wouldn't watch the movie again though. The plot is wayy too thin. Guy gets into the drug dealing business and it goes badly for him. THE END

[Stavros]

Listen carefully in the beginning to the dialog between the jewler and the Counselor. The jeweler explains that because of its eternal nature, a diamond is a cautionary stone. “At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.”

Later in the movie, seeks the influence of Jefe, a very wealthy and powerful Latin American businessman. The character Jefe at this point is given a rather long soliloquy on the metaphysics of choice and consequence in which he advises the Counselor, “...the world in which you seek to undo your mistakes is not the world in which they were made.”

Trish, it is a film -cinema exists to say things with something you can see, and your quotes, I have to say, merely underline what pretentious garbage Mac writes. The characters have no depth and no meaning in a film whose basic premise, a drug deal gone wrong, attempts and fails to say something 'profound' about 'the human condition'. There are other ways of doing it, this wasn't one of them.

[trish]

Goes to show, to each his own. I won't argue for the value of the movie in any absolute terms. I just happen to like Cormac's stark, metaphysical dialogues and existential characters. But I understand (I think) how some would be repelled by sketchiness of the characters in The Counselor and the violence of the piece, which is as predictable as a Greek tragedy.

[Stavros]

Mac's brittle style in his books seems to me to have the texture of a biscuit in a desert -some things don't translate well to the screen which is why it is often a short story or under-stated piece of writing that makes for the best adapted films. Things you would accept in prose can often sound overblown and ridiculous in a film.