What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[Stavros]

Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria, 2019)

This is the sort of eye-candy that could lead to diabetes, so its just as well the story is tedious, though based on real events, and presented in a pre-packaged format so that each chapter is fairly predictable. It is not as bad as Showgirls (1995), which some valiant, but mis-guided journalists have recently attempted to rescue from the dustbin of film history.

The men don't emerge from this with any credit, for what's worth, and one does wonder how much surgeon-general Lopez pays to maintain that perfectly shaped, but iron-hard set of buttocks. Note that for the most part, this is a nipple-free zone, so Constance Wu, who was in the Crazy Rich Asians film, is as it were, 'tastefully undressed', so don't get your hopes up.

What I want to see is the uncensored, transgendered version, but without the music of Chopin, which, must as it can often please, is out of place in this story and any other like it.

[sukumvit boy]

Since "hustling" unfortunately often becomes a necessary part of transgender life for some I'm surprised there aren't more films about it.

[Stavros]

Uncle Vanya (Gregory Mosher, 1992)

This aired on TV in the Performance series of filmed plays in the 1990s. It is a fine performance of Chekhov's play, with David Warner at his irritating best as the depressed Vanya, and David Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon as his niece, who has the last lines in the play that confirm the genius of Chekhov, the greatest European playwright after Shakespeare -I just can't decide if he is better than Ibsen- and also a writer of superb stories, making him for me one of Russia's finest, and along with Turgenev, Bulgakov and Pasternak a preferable read than either Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. Ian Holm is brilliant as the Doctor, but at the age of 60 was too old, as Asrov is assumed to be 37 years old.

Chekhov is one of the few writers who offers deeply thought stories in which money is at the core of the woes of the central chacters, but often with another -usually not a relative- benefiting from them, or having the means to survive when the principal family is in trouble, one thinks of Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, and Trigorin in The Seagull.

A more recent tv version with Toby Jones was so marred by four-letter words that are utterly remote from Chekhov I turned it off.

[Stavros]

Sicilian Ghost Story (Fabio Grassadonia and Antonia Piazza, 2017)

This aired on Channel 4 a few nights ago.
A love-sick 12 year old pines for, and goes in search of the classmate who has disappeared, becoming a rebel in her small family, and taking many risks. He appears for real, and as a ghost in this sensitive film derived in part from the true story, which I shall not spoil for those who don't know it. It is not really a ghost story as such, as the use of the 'Ghost' is suggestive of those things in Siciy that people neither want to see or hear, though they are all around them.

[Stavros]

Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)

I hated this film when it came out, and decided I did not like David Mamet either, though I did like House of Games (1987). Seeing this again has not completely flipped my view, but it is a 'tour de force' with a superb cast, and I can appreciate Mamet's craft, and also see how he influenced Tarantino, for one. The film differs from the play as he included a new scene featuring the speech the Alec Baldwin character (Blake) makes near the beginning. Rather like the films of Takashi Miike in which crime families fall apart through greed, the film is about a cohort of men, none of whom are likeable, turn on each other in an attempt to score more contracts, rather than co-operate with each other to achieve the same ends. The language is, to put it mildly, 'robust', but serves as weapons rather than the dealers choosing swords or guns. Al Pacino is particularly fine, and while this is a grim story about ruthless competition in which there are, in the end, no winners, it is a gripping film of the play to watch, and there are some alternatives on YouTube though they fail to match this version.

[sukumvit boy]

"The Spy" new Netflix miniseries with Sacha Baron Cohen

[Stavros]

Ransom (Ron Howard, 1996)

I don't usually like Mel Gibson films, but this is a well-made thriller in the safe hands of Ron Howard which, though it has the standard format -the crime group that fails as it falls apart from within- is good throughout and has that peculiar twist with the ransom money. I know Delroy Lindo is highly regarded, but this London-born actor I find wooden in most of the things I have seen him in, but it doesn't mess up the film. Gary Sinise is particularly nasty in this film, he even looks it too, though I understand he has done a lot for veterans.
https://time.com/5542632/gary-sinise...eful-american/

[Cerberus]

News of the World with Tom Hanks.

Bit slow but heartwarming enough.

[BlüeKarma]

[Stavros]

The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (Won-Tae Lee, 2019)

This aired on tv a few nights ago.
A serial killer makes the mistake of attacking a crime boss who survives to team up with a rule-brreaking cop to hunt down the 'devil'. Mildly comic, sort of interesting to pass the time.