What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Biff42]

Backrooms. What the hell did I watch and why was I so intrigued?

 

[Harp]

View attachment 796067
The Boys from Brazil (1978) with Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Steve Guttenberg, Denholm Elliott, and Rosemary Harris

The World War II generation has all but died off. Even many of its children, children who felt the war passionately, are leaving us, making WWII no longer a cultural touchstone – a shared lived experience. Yet still, it stands as the defining historical event of the 20th century.

The Boys From Brazil seemed to follow Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author
in as much as shooting a certain nefarious themed flick appeared necessary at the time.
I caught snips but not the whole enchilada which I wrote off as a somewhat Simon Wiesenthal
homage but not quite up to the mark. Mengle died of drowning, escaping justice by providential
allowance, much to the rightful dismay of Israeli detectives who exhumed his grave.

As a child in postwar Chicago, I recall remarking concentration camp numerical arm tattooing,
hearing indecipherable German spoken in the flat downstairs, and plentiful Iron Crosses brought back
by fathers from Europe only to become playground talisman trade stock. Memories gone like the horse drawn
milkwagons.

 

[Turnip]

Carlito´s Way yesterday evening, been quite nice.

 

[Fading Fast]

Berkeley Square (1933) with Leslie Howard and Betty Lawford


Combining the sci-fi of time travel with the eternal bonds of Romantic Era love is a heavy lift, but Berkeley Square – based on a play that itself was drawn from an unfinished Henry James novel – plows right into it. It boldly says: accept me on my own terms.

Later time travel movies devote a lot more thought to the science of time travel to create (waves hands) a "plausible" explanation, but does it matter? You either accept the movie's time-travel conceit (let's be honest, it's not been proven) or watch something else.

Here, Leslie Howard plays a modern-day (1933) American in England where he's examining his inheritance. The inheritance includes a home on Berkeley Square dating back to the 18th century, which was once owned by the in-laws (the Pettigrews) of his namesake ancestor.

Modern-day Howard also has a fiancée, played by Betty Lawford, who realizes that the house is having an odd effect on him. Howard has become obsessed with his ancestor's diary that details his travails and relations from that earlier era.

There's a scant attempt to explain how Howard, via a trance state at an exact time, goes back in time, but basically – abracadabra – he goes back in time and switches places with his ancestor, whom we later learn came forward in time.

Howard is now in the 18th century trying to act like he is his ancestor who just arrived from America (like his actual ancestor had) to become engaged to one of the Pettigrew daughters. Yet, of course, he ends up attracted to the one, played by Heather Angel, he's not slated for.

Most of Act II is Howard doing an awful job of trying to fit into an era and culture whose customs are foreign to him. Other than Angel, who sees he's different and is attracted to that, the Pettigrew family becomes quietly and then not so quietly hostile toward him and he to them.

Visually, when Howard is with the Pettigrew family, the movie feels like a play as most of it takes place in one room with characters coming in and out and talking a lot. Director Frank Lloyd missed an opportunity to use the full canvas of a movie to "open the play up."

With Angel and him now in love, Howard reveals who he truly is, but only to her. By looking "deep" into his eyes – abracadabra again – she can see the future: trains, mechanized war, etc. – and is a bit horrified by it all (and, remember, she gets to stop in 1933). What are they to do?

Howard can't stay in the 18th century – he's also disgusted by the hygiene – and she doesn't want to come forward (even if she could), so despite their abiding love, they accept that they will be separated now but will reunite in the afterlife – which is full-force Romantic Era faith.

After that, it's a quick "trip home" to the 1930s and a sorting of his affairs, which includes checking on Angel's nearby grave. Meanwhile poor Lawford has been hanging out waiting to see what modern-day Howard will do, but Howard's heart is back in the 18th century.

None of this is great if you bring your modern expectation of a time travel movie as the genre has built a rich and complex history of films – ranging from very good to very bad – well past the clunkiness of this early effort.

Yet if you're willing to take Berkeley Square on its own terms and for its time, it's an okay inchoate attempt at a story that has been retold by Hollywood in some version ever since. The first Back to the Future movie has several reworked elements of it.

If you do embrace it, you can enjoy Howard's performance. Yet even he, at this early point in the talkie era, is a bit stagey in this, as noted, very stagey movie. Conversely, it has at least been pretty nicely restored.

You also might enjoy the snarky way the late-18th-century British disparage the recently victorious "colony" of America: the subjects of the Empire, at least here, are not shown to be gracious losers.

As a quirky combination of sci-fi and Romantic Era love, Berkeley Square today offers two things: Leslie Howard, who is always an interesting actor, and the chance to see an early time travel effort by Tinseltown. Adorable Heather Angel is an added side benefit.

 

[Edward]

So after waiting nearly three years for it to come to streaming (call me tight fisted if you will, but it rather rankles me when a service to which I pay to subscribe already keep trying to cajole me into paying *more* to watch something), I finally saw The Bikeriders (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21454134. A little late for my normal preferences in period-set pictures, this one, the action taking place between c.1965 and 1973. The plot surrounds fictional MC The Vandals in Chicago, loosely based on Danny Lyon's photojournalist work The Bikeriders (1968), which recorded the real life Outlaws MC across several years. Lyon was part of the same New Journalism school as Hunter S Thompson, working as a embedded, first-person participant in the communities which he recorded. Thompson had already published his own book about the Hells Angels; his advice to Lyon was 'wear a helmet and don't join the Club.' Lyon didn't take the advice, becoming an active Outlaw member around 1967, though later retiring.

The film, narrated by English actress Jodie Cromer, playing with a flawless regional US accent, in a series of flashbacks via a framing device involving a young photo journalist, wisely fictionalises the story. It plays out rather well as an overview of the narrative of a Club started at the back end of the fifties / turn of the sixties by a bunch of roughhousers who don't fit in with the normies, and over time with new drugs, a new generation of traumatised young men returning from Vietnam, and a hefty dose of what would now be recognised as toxic masculinity, evolved into something rather else. There are a number of fine acting perfomances in it. Jodie Comer as the female lead (and really the only female character who is much fleshed out, given the nature of the picture), is impressive. Austin Butler is probably the closest we'll ever see to an alternative world where The Wild One was made a decade or so later, much darker, and featured Elvis getting material he could really get his teeth into (it's a shame he didn't get more roles like Danny Fisher in King Creole). Tom Hardy does what Tom Hardy does best: imbue a bit of a violent thug with an element of charm and sympathy. Hardy's Johnny is a somewhat violent man who nonetheless believes in a sense of fair play and a certain code of honour, which will ultimately prove his undoing. The Vandals all look fantastic: the aesthetic for a club of their period is spot on, nicely replicating the original looks recorded in Lyon's 1968 book. In particular, the differences between the earlier generations and the younger, the beer drinkers and the pot smokers, East and West coast looks.

Based on everything I've read about that world, it's a vastly more realistic representation than the likes of Sons of Anarchy; anyone looking for something replicating an earlier-period version of the same would be better served keeping their fingers crossed for the once planned 'First Nine' prequel. It is very much a character piece: if you want something more directly focused on the motorcycles themselves, look elsewhere (but then that's usually true of most any film about those who ride motorcycles, really...). All in all, I found it worth the wait.

 

[Fading Fast]

So after waiting nearly three years for it to come to streaming (call me tight fisted if you will, but it rather rankles me when a service to which I pay to subscribe already keep trying to cajole me into paying *more* to watch something), ...

Burns me up too. Just like Amazon now charges me ~$4/month to not have commercials. I'm a capitalist and even I've come to hate some companies.

 

[Edward]

Burns me up too. Just like Amazon now charges me ~$4/month to not have commercials. I'm a capitalist and even I've come to hate some companies.

I refused to pay the upcharge for no ads. So far they've yet to become particularly invasive. I was less annoyed with the way Netflix handled it, offering a cheaper deal with ads rather than pushing ads in and then charging more to get rid of them ,but hey ho. Bezos gonna Bezos.

 

[Fading Fast]

I refused to pay the upcharge for no ads. So far they've yet to become particularly invasive. I was less annoyed with the way Netflix handled it, offering a cheaper deal with ads rather than pushing ads in and then charging more to get rid of them ,but hey ho. Bezos gonna Bezos.

I believe Bezos is out, but your point is still a good one. It's all how it's done.

I don't mind price increases (I don't love or like them, but I get it) if they are honestly done, "we are raising prices, here is your new cost if you stay with the service." It's all the cheats they do to get there to make it sound less like a price increase. "You can continue to pay your old price you'll just have – cough, cough – some ads now. Oh, by the way, if you'd prefer, for $4 more a month you don't have to have the ads." It feels like the streaming version of shrinkflation.

 

[Touchofevil]

I believe Bezos is out, but your point is still a good one. It's all how it's done.

I don't mind price increases (I don't love or like them, but I get it) if they are honestly done, "we are raising prices, here is your new cost if you stay with the service." It's all the cheats they do to get there to make it sound less like a price increase. "You can continue to pay your old price you'll just have – cough, cough – some ads now. Oh, by the way, if you'd prefer, for $4 more a month you don't have to have the ads." It feels like the streaming version of shrinkflation.

Such as when xfinity says that to “serve you better” we have increased your costs so that you can continue to keep watching the channels you have been watching.

 

[Touchofevil]

Bad Day at Black Rock on TCM this morning. Great cast and movie. For me, it is a stop and watch movie when I come across it. The yard work will be postponed by an hour Or so.

 

[Harp]

^ A spot on film featuring a gripping murder and its repercussions unearthed by Tracy's one arm man truth seeker portrayal.

Ernest Borgnine approached Tracy for advice concerning the role offered him for Marty. Tracy told him to take it. And the rest of the story is the rest of the story.

 

[Touchofevil]

^ A spot on film featuring a gripping murder and its repercussions unearthed by Tracy's one arm man truth seeker portrayal.

Ernest Borgnine approached Tracy for advice concerning the role offered him for Marty. Tracy told him to take it. And the rest of the story is the rest of the story.

Marty was one of those films that I figured (for no good reason) I would not enjoy and happily I was not correct. It was the film that really made me appreciate Borgnine. Another film which surprised me was The Apartment. A great film with a great story, cinematography, and acting.

 

[Fading Fast]

Marty was one of those films that I figured (for no good reason) I would not enjoy and happily I was not correct. It was the film that really made me appreciate Borgnine. Another film which surprised me was The Apartment. A great film with a great story, cinematography, and acting.

Have you seen him in "The Catered Affair" (1956). It's another very good one from that era.

 

[Fading Fast]

Mona Lisa (1986) with Bob Hoskins, Cathy Tyson, and Michael Caine


Do you smile to tempt a love, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?

— "Mona Lisa," the song


Mona Lisa, the movie, is director and cowriter Neil Jordan's exhaustingly engaging trip through London's seedy human meat market in the mid-1980s where prostitution, appreciation, and mobsters formed an unholy trinity driven by crime, violence, abuse, and, of course, money.

It's England's version of America's 1970s dystopian movies. Cities were broken back then as shown in films like Panic in Needle Park, Death Wish, and, here, Mona Lisa. The latter is told through the eyes of a low-level gangster, played by Bob Hoskins, who has just come out after seven years in stir.

The bosses up the chain give him a job driving around a high-end prostitute, played by Cathy Tyson, tall, thin, black, and pretty. Hoskins – short, balding, and cheruby looking – is a bit of an odd choice, especially since he has to pick her up in the lobby of elegant hotels where she fits in but he doesn't.

Hoskins also has an-ex wife who hates him and a teenage daughter who doesn't know him since he's been locked up for about half her life. Finally, he has a good friend, played by Robbie Coltrane, who repairs cars, but is also an artist of sorts. Coltrane lets Hoskins live in his isolated repair shop.

With that setup, off we and Hoskins go as he drives Tyson from job to job. They start off disliking each other as he sees her as "just a wh*re," and she sees him as an uncouth excon. In an odd social commentary, each feels superior to the other on a part of the social scale that no one else cares about.

They spend night after night together in the car between her "jobs," where she often orders him to drive through the city's red-light district, King's Cross. Eventually, we learn she's looking for a young prostitute whom she used to work with and whom she is now afraid is being abused by a pimp.

Eventually, of course, a bond forms between these two misfit people. A grudging respect also forms as he is impressed with her polished toughness and she respects his unrefined integrity. The scenes when he tries to understand her world – luxury hotels and prostitution – are the early movie's heart and soul.

It's a powerful juxtaposition where she – elegantly attired and refined in carriage and diction – fits in fine, unless the hotel management learns why she is there, but he – uncouth and loud – stands out in the wrong way. He can't really understand her nor she him, but the respect grows.

Watch for the scene when she takes him to buy some appropriate clothes as a short, stocky, middle-aged white guy shopping with a tall, young, and pretty black girl – who is paying – is more movie gold. As their friendship grows, she asks him to help her find her former friend, played by Kate Hardie.

These scenes show us the real connection between these two as, up the mobster chain, they both work for the same boss, played by Michael Caine. Caine, a gangster, tries to project polish, but is ruthlessly coldhearted about the women who "work" for him.

Hoskins, now falling in love with Tyson, takes us on a trip through the seedy peep shows and strip clubs of Soho – all also run by mobsters like Caine – as he looks for Tyson's friend Hardie. For Americans, think of searching for one specific prostitute in the overrun-with-prostitution Times Square of the 1970s.

The movie has a mystery feel as all along we aren't quite sure how the disparate pieces fit together, which, when explained, will surprise you in a long, revealing, and sometimes violent Act III that you'll want to see fresh. As almost always, not everyone is who they appear to be.

Atmosphere-wise the movie has an overarching sense of dread owing to the nasty world of illegal prostitution where the girls are brutally abused by their pimps, but many scenes are lighter in tone with touches of comedy and even hints of romance. It's a good balance for an overall tough movie.

Hoskins is the star as it's all told from his perspective and the little man's acting is impressive. It's his narrative arc as an excon trying to make a place for himself in a world that has all but no use for him that frames the story, but Tyson carries near equal billing as the tough, smart, yet polished prostitute.

Caine, too, past his early 1970s career peak, reminds us why he had that peak and why he was in so many crime caper movies: he's really good playing a ruthless gangster. Toss in impressive performances from Hardie, Coltrane and a few others and the cast impresses.

Stepping back only slightly and you can feel the transition from the relentlessly gritty crime movies of the 1970s to the Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie criminals-have-lives-too movies of the 1990s, as you get wrapped up in the hopes, dreams, and fears of types of people you will never meet in your life.

Mona Lisa seems to have fallen off the radar, but it deserves to be given a little more attention from movie fans for its complex morality, its intense look at the 1980s nexus of mob and appreciationography, and its outstanding cast. Plus, it's a valuable time capsule of mid 1980s London.

 

[ShadowXY]

View attachment 796913
Berkeley Square (1933) with Leslie Howard and Betty Lawford


Combining the sci-fi of time travel with the eternal bonds of Romantic Era love is a heavy lift, but Berkeley Square – based on a play that itself was drawn from an unfinished Henry James novel – plows right into it. It boldly says: accept me on my own terms.

Later time travel movies devote a lot more thought to the science of time travel to create (waves hands) a "plausible" explanation, but does it matter? You either accept the movie's time-travel conceit (let's be honest, it's not been proven) or watch something else.

Here, Leslie Howard plays a modern-day (1933) American in England where he's examining his inheritance. The inheritance includes a home on Berkeley Square dating back to the 18th century, which was once owned by the in-laws (the Pettigrews) of his namesake ancestor.

Modern-day Howard also has a fiancée, played by Betty Lawford, who realizes that the house is having an odd effect on him. Howard has become obsessed with his ancestor's diary that details his travails and relations from that earlier era.

There's a scant attempt to explain how Howard, via a trance state at an exact time, goes back in time, but basically – abracadabra – he goes back in time and switches places with his ancestor, whom we later learn came forward in time.

Howard is now in the 18th century trying to act like he is his ancestor who just arrived from America (like his actual ancestor had) to become engaged to one of the Pettigrew daughters. Yet, of course, he ends up attracted to the one, played by Heather Angel, he's not slated for.

Most of Act II is Howard doing an awful job of trying to fit into an era and culture whose customs are foreign to him. Other than Angel, who sees he's different and is attracted to that, the Pettigrew family becomes quietly and then not so quietly hostile toward him and he to them.

Visually, when Howard is with the Pettigrew family, the movie feels like a play as most of it takes place in one room with characters coming in and out and talking a lot. Director Frank Lloyd missed an opportunity to use the full canvas of a movie to "open the play up."

With Angel and him now in love, Howard reveals who he truly is, but only to her. By looking "deep" into his eyes – abracadabra again – she can see the future: trains, mechanized war, etc. – and is a bit horrified by it all (and, remember, she gets to stop in 1933). What are they to do?

Howard can't stay in the 18th century – he's also disgusted by the hygiene – and she doesn't want to come forward (even if she could), so despite their abiding love, they accept that they will be separated now but will reunite in the afterlife – which is full-force Romantic Era faith.

After that, it's a quick "trip home" to the 1930s and a sorting of his affairs, which includes checking on Angel's nearby grave. Meanwhile poor Lawford has been hanging out waiting to see what modern-day Howard will do, but Howard's heart is back in the 18th century.

None of this is great if you bring your modern expectation of a time travel movie as the genre has built a rich and complex history of films – ranging from very good to very bad – well past the clunkiness of this early effort.

Yet if you're willing to take Berkeley Square on its own terms and for its time, it's an okay inchoate attempt at a story that has been retold by Hollywood in some version ever since. The first Back to the Future movie has several reworked elements of it.

If you do embrace it, you can enjoy Howard's performance. Yet even he, at this early point in the talkie era, is a bit stagey in this, as noted, very stagey movie. Conversely, it has at least been pretty nicely restored.

You also might enjoy the snarky way the late-18th-century British disparage the recently victorious "colony" of America: the subjects of the Empire, at least here, are not shown to be gracious losers.

As a quirky combination of sci-fi and Romantic Era love, Berkeley Square today offers two things: Leslie Howard, who is always an interesting actor, and the chance to see an early time travel effort by Tinseltown. Adorable Heather Angel is an added side benefit.

This sounds great & I've never seen it... Off to the U Tube to watch it...Look at those hats!

Post Update: Very enjoyable movie. Just 10 years later Howard's passenger plane with ~17 on board were attacked by German Fighter planes over the Bay of Biscay in 1943 & the plane plummeted in flames into the depths of the ocean.

Just watched Mothman Prophecies & need a time cleanse.

 

[Harp]

Whims carry great weight.---Blaise Pascal, Pensees

The hidden costs of a well lived life and truths borne to the grave are seldom progressive
film studio box office banter; which renders The Last R.f..man (2024) exceptional film.
Pierce Brosnan delivers a decidedly low key but taut portrayal of ninety-two year old
Arthur Crawford, a recently widowed Northern Ireland nursing home resident and Second World War veteran who embarks on a journey into his past. Based on actual events, Crawford initially asks medical attendant travel to France for the seventy fifth anniversary Normandy Invasion commemoration. Denied, he flees the nursing facility and becomes a media celebrity enroute
to France, revealing parts of his life along the way. Crawford is the ''last man standing'' sole surviving Normandy veteran of his Ulster regiment, all of which have passed in the interim.
An all too brief cameo features the late American actor, John Amos, but otherwise it's all Brosnan's show with assorted unknowns providing background character support. A serious glimpse into
the human condition and the hidden costs borne without complaint secretly through life.

 

[Fading Fast]

Pigs and Battleships (1961), a Japanese film


Noted Japanese director Shōhei Imamura looks very closely at the street-level crime, seediness, and filth of a Japanese red-light district, unsurprisingly located right next to a US naval base. Sailors want booze and s*x and the Japanese want American dollars and goods.

These two wants come together, like they do the world over, with little top-down arranging as they naturally seek each other out. Worse for the Japanese, organized crime – a shabby branch of it here – also seeks out the money and power that bubbles up from all this "commerce."

It's unclear for at least half of Pigs and Battleships, but the Japanese also run a pig farm that provides meat to the US Navy. Illegally, the Japanese bribe the Americans for the naval base's food scraps that the Japanese use to fatten up the pigs to then sell to the Americans.

It's the circle of life woven into the circle of greed and corruption. Why this logical arrangement has to be conducted underground is never explained, but keeping it "off the grid" also means no taxes, regulations, health inspections, etc. So illegal also means more profit for those involved.

While this "business" transaction is a big part of the movie's "framing," the real movie takes place among the mainly young men and women who live and work around the base either in poor paying legal businesses or in better paying illegal ones: pigs, gambling, prostitution, etc.

There's exaggeration at play, but taking it as presented, the local Japanese are desperate for American dollars and will wh*re themselves and, literally, their daughters to get some. Japan was poor, but, as shown, many chose this life versus a harder-working honest one.

This conflict is examined in detail in the main couple of Kinta and Haruko. Kinta is a low-level Yakuza (Japanese mob) member, who is so stupid and emotional that you never understand why pretty and level-headed Haruko wants him so badly, but she does.

She spends her days working in a greasy hole-in-the-wall restaurant while trying to keep her idiot boyfriend from getting into more jams. Again, she is young, attractive, and smart – but the heart wants what the heart wants and hers wants Kinta. If she's your daughter, you shoot her.

The scenes here that capture the calmest human thoughts and emotions not distorted by the pressures of this awful town are the quiet ones when Haruko tries to reach Kinta. Sadly, the only thing to say to Haruka is "good luck with that," as Kinta is hopelessly stupid.

The mob uses Kinta to care for the pigs and to potentially become a fall guy, but he thinks they respect him and he'll be moving up. He's mistaken. Meanwhile, Haruko, whose mother tries to pressure her into becoming a mistress for an American sailor, just wants out of this town.

Wanting and getting are two different things because she wants Kinta to come with her, get a basic factory job, and start a normal family. It's a lovely dream, but no sentient being thinks that Kinta could ever hold a factory job or be a normal husband.

There are a series of related and tangential characters, families, and mob members in this frenetic town that beats to the comings and goings of the sailors (ships in, economy is up, and vice versa). Also, the Keystone Cop mob is terribly organized and has hits on its own somewhat regularly.

The commercial streets, with their blazing neon, look gaudy yet cheaply prosperous. The houses, conversely, are so filthy you wonder how disease isn't rampant. Watching crude Kinta eat is enough to make you sick. One wonders if he's washed his hands once ever in his life.

After two-thirds of the movie being the above setup, Act III smashes everything together – the rival mob factions, the prostitutes, the American sailors, and the normal people like Haruka – in an edgy screwball climax that resolves nothing as in a few days, it's back to business as usual.

You'll have to see it to understand, but Imamura ends on a somewhat hopeful note, or at least a defiant one. You can identify a lot of themes – corruption, imperialism, bullying, disloyalty, s*x, and individual responsibility – here if you want, or just say Imamura was showing not telling.

All these years later – after Japan had its rise to the commanding heights of economic success in the 1980s to its ensuing "lost decades" – the real value of the picture is that it captured this time and place, however exaggerated, on film. What it said at the moment is less important.


N.B. #1 Pigs and Battleships has a warped Preston Sturges feel with Japanese characteristics, but it's basically a brutal movie looking at how lives can fail for a variety of reasons. If there's any message, it's that often it is on you, the individual, to take control of your own life and get out.

N.B. #2, There's a low-level general disdain of Americans running through the movie and you can understand young Japanese, born after the war, not "getting it," but America didn't build and occupy military bases in Japan because Switzerland bombed Pearl Harbor.