What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[Stavros]

I have watched that Baldwin monologue many times. Don’t know who won the Best Supporting Acting Oscar that year, bc Baldwin deserved to win hands down.

Must be the 60th Academy Awards in 1988, when Sean Connery won the Best Supporting Actor for The Untouchables, in the year that saw Michael Douglas get Best Actor for Wall St, Cher the Actress award for Moonstruck, and The Last Emperor the film. Mamet has only had two Oscar nominations, for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).

[Stavros]

Salo, 120 Days of Sodom. Pier Palo Pasolini. Based on the unfinished De Sade novel he sketched out in prison. Four aristocratic libertines sexually abuse innocent virginal boys and girls before murdering them.

Set in the last days of Mussolini’s Italy when the Germans rescued him and put him in charge of a doomed Northern Italy rump state.

Last 10 minutes was perhaps the most disturbing scene I have ever seen in a movie. Horrific bc it is believable such sexual atrocities could have happened at the end of World War II when the Fascists knew their time was short.

Pasolini was horribly murdered, run over several times with his own car, trying to ransom stolen footage of the movie

I had to join a film club to see this when it was first shown in the UK as the censors would not give it a certificate for public viewing. These days it is available on DVD, an uncut version released in 2000. They used an awful lot of chocolate in that film...

[morim]

"Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull"

[Stavros]

Mulan (Nikki Caro, 2020)

Predictable and Bland, if beautifully shot, and inadvertenty perhaps a glossy advert for the Communist Party of China, founded 100 years ago on a steamy night in Shanghai in July, the day after a man was murdered in the Oriental Hotel next to the building where the first meeting was held. Spooked, the delegates shfted the next meeting to a boat on South Lake..I was disappointed because Caro diected the wonderful film Whale Rider (2002), a far superior film to Mulan. But hey, its Disney.

[Stavros]

Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019)

A former nurse involved in a traumatic incident has become a care worker for Amanda, a flamboyant dancer and choreographer now bedridden and dying from cancer. It may be that Maud is seeking some form of redemption by caring for others, but from the outset it is clear she is no ordinary care worker. She converses with Almighty God. Indeed, at one point, shortly after 'Nancy' (the name given in the credits to a cockroach) slips under the dresser on which Maud stores her religious paraphernia, Almighty God speaks to her -in Welsh, so its just as well the actor playing the role is herself Welsh. There are dramatic moments, moments when identities and behaviour are challenged, and a climax that some reviewers have hated, but utimately this to me is a film about a lonely person who cares for others but has noone to care for her. It is an impressive first feature from Rose Glass but I can see why some people might find it uninteresting. It has echoes, in some parts of John Huston's Wise Blood (1979) and a levitation reminiscent of Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). There are also some clever re-workings of William Blake's ecstatic images, from a book given to Maud by Amanda.

[Stavros]

Assassin's Creed (Justin Kurzel, 2016)

The Australian director Kurzel created a fascinating visual landscape for his version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, but the two of them in this video-game-movie must have wondered why they were there and what they were doing. I was confused for most of the film, which aired on Channel 4 last night, as I had never thought of the Knight's Templar as a body dedicated to world domination, though they were a militant branch of the Catholic Church before being disbanded in 1314, and there is a successor organization claiming the occasional title of 'Knight's Templar' but formally the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem which has NGO and Special Consultative status with the UN. To complicate it further, there was also a group in history known as the 'Assasins', though Bernard Lewis in his study suggests they were at one time called 'Hashashin' as they got doped up on weed between murder gigs in Persia and Syria between the 11th and 13th centuries. If you are also confused by this, do watch the film, if only to see the climax filmed in the headquarters of the Freemasons in London where the Apple that Eve plucked from the tree is reveaed to be both inedible, and magical, which is not what God had in mind -or was it?

Confusion all round, with startling visuals, and computing power that is probably -one hopes- impossible.

[Stavros]

Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)
Shaft (Tim Story, 2019)

The 1971 film is a model of bad acting, a bad script, and shoddy camera work, it bears a visual resemblance to the New York also seen in its contemporary The French Connection, but the comparison ends there. The re-make with Samuel J Jackson and Richard Roundtree has a better script and is obviousy better filmed, but retaiins the predictable and by now done-to-death story of turf wars among drug dealers and organized crime. The third generation Shaft is a weak actor whose outsize role in the film renders it an also-ran in terms of durability. I think someone has been shafted with this film -the audience.

[Stavros]

The Mule (Clint Eastwood, 2018 )

IMDB estimates the budget for this film at $50m, most of which must have gone on the salaries for the cast, as I doubt Eastwood spent much on the script. Ordinary Americans, 'badass' Mexicans, drugs, lovely ladies in underwear who don't mind a threesome with an 80-something when someone else is paying - so there may be hope for those of us closer to 80 than 20. It may be a true story, but this is a 'chamber work' that is filming by numbers, with the Polka band the highlight. In the end, it's more ass than mule.

[Stavros]

Dark Encounter (Carl Strathie, 2019)

The mystery of the abduction of an 8-year old girl is solved by Close Encouners of the Third Kind, with obliging aliens who have seen and admired Interstellar. The script is as poor as the acting, but when it's late and there is nothing else to do, it fills a gap where sleep does not. And it was broadcast on terrestrial tv.

[Stavros]

Self/Less (Tarsem Singh, 2015)

Senseless might be a better title for this rubbish.