What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[loren]

Pride And Prejudice Zombies

[Stavros]

You're brutal like Tarantino but, unlike Tarantino, you get to the heart of things quickly! I agree with your assessment though I still watch his movies if only to see and hear actors I like speaking Tarantino's lingua franca. Yes, it's tired and has been since Pulp Fiction but I do get some joy from seeing Samuel Jackson holler essentially the same caveman script time and again. And I definitely enjoy seeing DiCaprio let loose his inner racist or Jamie Fox kick white ass or Kurt Russell as an aged and more voluble Snake Plisken. With Tarantino it's all about the visceral effect derived from watching certain actors expand on innate characters that they don't get to do in other movies. Once they play their Tarantino role it's difficult to imagine them otherwise. And of course, details are somewhat inconsequential - maybe spurs on Joe Gage's boots were used to keep him steady in the stagecoach!

For me, watching the latest Tarantino movie isn't much different than listening to the latest Rolling Stones album: you pretty much know what to expect and will get what you expect with maybe a fatter pig and different colour of lipstick.

The success of Reservoir Dogs is due mostly to the script and the editing, and at 99 minutes it is a neatly drawn essay on how gangs fall apart, compared to the 187 minutes of The Hateful Eight and the 165 minutes of Django Unchained. On gang cohesion and collapse, Tarantino as usual pinching ideas and motifs from Triad and Yakuza films, where greed or pride is usually the cause of breakdown. If RD is different from the Asian films of Johnnie To and Takashi Miike, it is that in RD the gang is ad hoc, formed of people that mostly don't know each other, but where the strongest figure in the gang, Nice Guy Eddie is revealed as the weakest in the longer term as he recruited the undercover cop, Mr Orange who is the agent of the gang's destruction.
In Pulp Fiction, an alternative explores a more personal version in which the gang survives by losing one of its own -Vincent Vega- and by reconciling with an errant member -the one who kills Vega-, although Butch Coolidge is not formally part of the gang. In PF, the leader of the gang, Marsellus remains in place, but with his sexuality compromised more explicitly than in any other Tarantino film. The quasi-homosexual bond between Marsellus and Butch is at the symbolic level announced with Christopher Walken's speech about the 'watch in the ass' -focusing huge importance on the ass as the centre of gravity for Butch just as it is Marsellus' 'black ass' that gets violated in the sex scene, but where the two become reconciled in their liberation.

While Tarantino's wholesale pinching of or cross-references to his own and other people's films is common knowledge, less discussed is the gay subtext to so many of his films -how in Kill Bill the women who kill replace guns with substitute dicks, albeit ones made of steel (but not Valerian steel). As Tarantino says it in RD 'dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick'. It does seem to interest him. Joe Gage in The Hateful Eight may be a reference to the Joe Gage who directed Gay Porn films in the 1980s, but as this is a long topic to get into, I offer you this link instead-
http://www.out.com/armond-white/2015...-hateful-eight

[runningdownthatdream]

The success of Reservoir Dogs is due mostly to the script and the editing, and at 99 minutes it is a neatly drawn essay on how gangs fall apart, compared to the 187 minutes of The Hateful Eight and the 165 minutes of Django Unchained. On gang cohesion and collapse, Tarantino as usual pinching ideas and motifs from Triad and Yakuza films, where greed or pride is usually the cause of breakdown. If RD is different from the Asian films of Johnnie To and Takashi Miike, it is that in RD the gang is ad hoc, formed of people that mostly don't know each other, but where the strongest figure in the gang, Nice Guy Eddie is revealed as the weakest in the longer term as he recruited the undercover cop, Mr Orange who is the agent of the gang's destruction.
In Pulp Fiction, an alternative explores a more personal version in which the gang survives by losing one of its own -Vincent Vega- and by reconciling with an errant member -the one who kills Vega-, although Butch Coolidge is not formally part of the gang. In PF, the leader of the gang, Marsellus remains in place, but with his sexuality compromised more explicitly than in any other Tarantino film. The quasi-homosexual bond between Marsellus and Butch is at the symbolic level announced with Christopher Walken's speech about the 'watch in the ass' -focusing huge importance on the ass as the centre of gravity for Butch just as it is Marsellus' 'black ass' that gets violated in the sex scene, but where the two become reconciled in their liberation.

While Tarantino's wholesale pinching of or cross-references to his own and other people's films is common knowledge, less discussed is the gay subtext to so many of his films -how in Kill Bill the women who kill replace guns with substitute dicks, albeit ones made of steel (but not Valerian steel). As Tarantino says it in RD 'dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick'. It does seem to interest him. Joe Gage in The Hateful Eight may be a reference to the Joe Gage who directed Gay Porn films in the 1980s, but as this is a long topic to get into, I offer you this link instead-
http://www.out.com/armond-white/2015...-hateful-eight

That was an enjoyable read - thanks!

I mostly watch film for the entertainment value and a lot of the literary nuances escape me. This may have come from my learning to read at age 5 and using books as a means of escape instead of tools for learning. It took awhile for me to absorb the 'moral of the story' when I read. And when I did, I was mostly interested in the historical significance of what was contained in the book - I read the bible not for spiritual guidance but its historicity. The whole religious thing was lost on me! In many ways I watch film in the same way - to escape. Depending on the presentation (combination of the story and cinematography) I may look deeper. I like David Lean and Sergio Leone and Roman Polanski. To me, most American cinema either tries to shock and awe or twist its tongue into foreign shapes trying to look intellectually muscular and profound. But I guess that's the problem of all johnny-come-latelies trying to establish their own identity.

I asked in another thread but you didn't respond: did you watch Tangerine and what did you think about it?

[sukumvit boy]

One of the other brilliant minds at Bletchley Park, but not movie material-

"But it was Harry Hinsley who, at the end of April 1941, identified the Enigma system’s fatal flaw. The same codebooks used on German U-Boats were also aboard their unprotected trawlers. These trawlers, transmitting weather reports to the Germans, also received naval Enigma messages. Hinsley helped initiate a programme of seizing Enigma machines and keys from German weather ships, significantly aiding Bletchley Park’s breaking of German Naval Enigma."
http://thebloxwichtelegraph.com/2012...harry-hinsley/

Sorry , I'm a little late to this party but just got around to seeing "The Imitation Game" and find the fast and loose play with historical , biographical and scientific fact distressing Also , although I must admit I enjoyed the movie and am sort of a Cumberbatch fan from the BBC "Sherlock" series , they portrayed completely wrong .
I found a few interesting links to that effect :

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/...an_turing.html

http://www.turingfilm.com/short-biog...-andrew-hodges#

[Stavros]

Sorry , I'm a little late to this party but just got around to seeing "The Imitation Game" and find the fast and loose play with historical , biographical and scientific fact distressing Also , although I must admit I enjoyed the movie and am sort of a Cumberbatch fan from the BBC "Sherlock" series , they portrayed completely wrong .
I found a few interesting links to that effect :

You can be as late as you like. On the Enigma codes Poland now wants more recognition for its contribution-
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...-a6880906.html

[sukumvit boy]

Right , the Polish contribution to breaking an earlier 'Enigma' was significant , and the Poles are now upset ,like many others , about the way " the Imitation Game " handled the history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptan..._of_the_Enigma

Unfortunately , those of us who expected 'the real story' got a flaky pastry instead .
We'll have to wait for someone like a Ken Burns to treat this fascinating and complicated story and personality with the respect for the history of science and biography that it deserves.

[BatMasterson]

Kuroneko
Murnau's 'Faust'

[Stavros]

Right , the Polish contribution to breaking an earlier 'Enigma' was significant , and the Poles are now upset ,like many others , about the way " the Imitation Game " handled the history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptan..._of_the_Enigma

Unfortunately , those of us who expected 'the real story' got a flaky pastry instead .
We'll have to wait for someone like a Ken Burns to treat this fascinating and complicated story and personality with the respect for the history of science and biography that it deserves.

Too many people involved in a complex sequence of events out of which to make a feature film, the curse of all fact-based history films. The focus on Alan Turing was in any case part of a separate campaign to rehabilitate his reputation. Hinsley, whom I mentioned in an earlier post, was given the job by Prime Minister James Callaghan, of supervising the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World, the result being five volumes in the link below. Hinsley's view -and had he lived I would imagine Turing also would have said it - was that Bletchley Park was a community all of whom played their role and elevating one above the other trivialises the endeavour, and that is without adding in external help from Poles, the French, the Americans...

I can't imagine a feature film on the origins of the CIA or the National Security Agency would get it all right and be a great film...?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Britis.../dp/0116309334

[Jeremy.Nogueira]

Nolan's Interstellar for the 2nd time. A brilliant masterpiece!

[Stavros]

This week I watched two films by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan -Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012) and Winter Sleep (2014).
Both films are beautifully shot and set mostly in the rural interior of Turkey in the present day. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia concerns the attempt by the police to find the body of a man who has been murdered. Set mostly at night a small convoy directed by the key suspect drives to various locations because he cannot recall precisely where he buried the body. This becomes a metaphor for a country that was founded on violence having also lost its way, while the closing moments in the mortuary where the post-mortem technician complains about having to use out-dated tools adds to the feeling that for all its economic success, remote rural areas remain as poor and neglected as they were when the Republic was founded.

In Winter Sleep, a retired actor and the manager of a hotel built into the rocks at Cappadoccia (the actor playing the role was in the BBC soap opera Eastenders for a few years) where he lives with a young wife and his sister, is revealed to be part of a family indeed, a 'community' of people who live close to each other but are remote from each others feelings to the point where their concerns -mostly about money, property and facilities for local schools- are either ignored or spurned.
Both films are long and very very slow, and stylistically related to Bergman and Tarkovsky. I found them understated and at times quite dull, which may be deliberate. I would only recommend them to people who enjoy these 'meaningful' films unless you have trouble sleeping at night, in which case either one will send you to sleep after at least an hour and a half.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1827487/

Winter Sleep
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2758880/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1