What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Harp]

^ Ultimate chick flick notwowaysaboutsiteither.
I know a girl who saw Titanic six times.
Kate Winslett is hot and she definitely does something to me but enough is enough.

 

[Fading Fast]

^ Ultimate chick flick notwowaysaboutsiteither.
I know a girl who saw Titanic six times.
Kate Winslett is hot and she definitely does something to me but enough is enough.

That's what they say: huge chick flick with DiCaprio the magnet. Okay.

Re your Winslet affection: did you see all of her in 2008's "The Reader?"

 

[Harp]

That's what they say: huge chick flick with DiCaprio the magnet. Okay.

Re your Winslet affection: did you see all of her in 2008's "The Reader?"

nope not yet

 

[Touchofevil]

My G#n is Quick (1957). It’s a very bland or maybe blah movie. It hasn’t gotten better with each viewing. Robert Bray as Mike Hammer just doesn’t do it. He is too forced in his tough guy snappy patter. The villains feel as if they were borrowed from the cheesy Batman tv series of the sixties. Of course with the weak script and directing, no one had a chance. And yet here I am once again watching it.

 

[Harp]

^ Liam Neeson's Marlowe (2022) isn't bad for gumshoe genre set 1939 Los Angeles;
although its scripting is a tad slow with a hard boiled over the top Tinseltown sub plot,
which I suppose is only to be expected given locus hocus pocus. Still, its doable after a hard day
and a cold brew or two.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Blade Runner -Final Cut, 2007s DVD on CRT.

This time original tone.

 

[Touchofevil]

^ Liam Neeson's Marlowe (2022) isn't bad for gumshoe genre set 1939 Los Angeles;
although its scripting is a tad slow with a hard boiled over the top Tinseltown sub plot,
which I suppose is only to be expected given locus hocus pocus. Still, its doable after a hard day
and a cold brew or two.

I keep planning and forgetting to watch Marlowe, but that can be said about a lot movies and shows. Without Lady ToE around anymore, I have a hard time committing time to watch. Maybe, during this next heatwave, I can sit and watch a few.

 

[Touchofevil]

In the background, Escape from New York.

 

[Fading Fast]

Should Ladies Behave from 1933 with Lionel Barrymore, Alice Brady, Katherine Alexander, Mary Carlisle and Conway Tearle


Based on a play, Should Ladies Behave is a heavily contrived attempt to be witty and "daring." The movie does use its precode elbow room to show that s*xual behavior wasn't really buttoned up in the 1930s, but the entire effort is uneven and, often, forced.

Lionel Barrymore and Alice Brady married when she was a young woman and he a middle-aged man. Twenty-plus-years later, he's a cantankerous old man and she's a flighty woman thinking she's locked into a bad marriage.

They both, though, love their daughter, played by Mary Carlisle, who has grown bored with her perfectly acceptable young boyfriend. She also wants to get some "experience" before settling into marriage.

At the theater one evening with her family, Carlisle, by chance, meets Brady's sister, played by Katherine Alexander. She, we learned, has been married twice and is now "friends with" a successful middle-aged artist played by Conway Tearle.

Alexander, looking to spend some time with Tearle, wrangles an invitation for herself and Tearle to spend the weekend at Brady's Connecticut house. The last piece of the puzzle is Brady believing she had an affair with Tearle before her marriage and that he now wants her again.

So out at the house, Alexander is trying to sleep with Tearle, while Brady believes he's there to steal her away from her often nasty husband. Daughter Carlisle then throws herself into the mix when she sees in Tearle a mature man she thinks she should marry.

This was considered sophisticated storytelling by playwrights of that era. No one admits what they are thinking, so the movie becomes one "funny" misunderstanding, contretemps or thwarted s*xual rendezvous after another, yet, on the surface, all appears respectable.

Playing to script, the movie climaxes – no spoilers coming – as all the misunderstandings spill out, some honest expressions of feelings are finally made, and things, as they always do in these types of stories, work out pretty well for everyone.

Barrymore plays the angry husband so angrily that you just want him to go away. Brady plays her flighty wife so annoyingly hairbrained that you want her to disappear too. These two deserve each other, if for no other reason than that nobody else would have either one.

Carlisle is fine as the generic pretty blonde looking for some premarital nooky until she falls for the middle-aged man. It is Alexander, though, as the one person who is honest with herself, and pretty much everyone else, who saves the movie.

Her performance is spirited as the attractive middle-aged woman who's been knocked around enough to know that turning love into a lasting relationship takes work, compromise, and realism. She delivers the funny barbs and sharp asides that keep the movie going.

Should Ladies Behave is overly and obviously constructed with a few irritating performances, but it does show that s*xual norms, while more secretive than today's show-and-tell-all standard, were more freewheeling than many believe today.

It's also refreshing to see a movie with both smart men and women and silly men and women as opposed to today where the "gender" obsessions usually tilt the field to make the women the smarter ones. Balance is one realism that 1930s pictures have over our modern movies.

 

[DR_ Reeves]

^ My understanding is that an alternative feminist version of The Odyssey served literary foundation for this picture instead of the Homeric magnum opus; therefore setting stage for a less faithful film.
Something Mouse House corporate suite asinine antics seen woke Snow White, so there it most certainly is folks.

Emily Wilson apparently despises Nolan’s adaptation, lol

 

[Doctor Strange]

Of course she does - the problems with the film are NOT about which translation Nolan allegedly based the film on, it's his insistence on adapting the story with modern concerns that are entirely alien to The Odyssey.

Nolan ignores nearly all the main thematic points of the original story and portrays Odysseus as an a-hole who doesn't seem to care when his men die, who doesn't come off as the smartest and most tactically brilliant Greek king, and who's apparently more wracked with guilt about inventing the Horse and causing the fall of Troy than motivated on getting home to his wife, son, and kingdom.

And as I said above, the treatment of Odysseus is far from the only significant failing if you know the story.

 

[Harp]

Emily Wilson apparently despises Nolan’s adaptation, lol

Still haven't seen the flick, but the prof apparently has some arguments against Nolan.
And I surmise she is enjoying all the campus buzz besides.

 

[DR_ Reeves]

Of course she does - the problems with the film are NOT about which translation Nolan allegedly based the film on, it's his insistence on adapting the story with modern concerns that are entirely alien to The Odyssey.

Nolan ignores nearly all the main thematic points of the original story and portrays Odysseus as an a-hole who doesn't seem to care when his men die, who doesn't come off as the smartest and most tactically brilliant Greek king, and who's apparently more wracked with guilt about inventing the Horse and causing the fall of Troy than motivated on getting home to his wife, son, and kingdom.

And as I said above, the treatment of Odysseus is far from the only significant failing if you know the story.

I think the best take away I’ve seen is that Nolan just gave us Oppenheimer a second time out with a Faux Bronze Age veneer.

I thought it was passable at best as a movie, but downright abysmal as an Odyssey adaptation. It did not help at all that the writing was in places, pardon my french, ****** awful. When Odysseus said “Our age of bronze is collapsing” I had to look away from the film in pure disgust.

Fortunately the best adaptation of the Odyssey, O Brother Where Art Thou, remains my favourite picture of all time, so I just watched that afterwards as a palette cleanser

 

[Harp]

When Odysseus said “Our age of bronze is collapsing” I had to look away from the film in pure disgust.

''...barely a sentient being...''

 

[Doctor Strange]

I agree! The insertion of recently coined historical terms into this mythological story - mention of the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse - which I guess Nolan thought would make it seem more "realistic" to some, was an especially embarrassing misstep. That awful line pulled me right out too.

And yeah, O Brother Where Art Thou is loads more enjoyable than this!

 

[Trenchfriend]

The Godfather I.

Didn't watch it for a while, so it will be a happening. The german synchro is still top-notch!

 

[DR_ Reeves]

''...barely a sentient being...''

“.. Well if it is Pete I am ashamed of him”

 

[Harp]

^ Jane Monheit, a Jazz singer favorite of mine was a siren river *****. Loved that flick.

 

[Touchofevil]

Last night on TCM, “Sweet Smell of Success “ followed by “Touch of Evil.” Beautiful cinematography and entertaining, I never tire of watching each film. A nice way to spend an evening.

 

[Fading Fast]

Persuasion (1995) with Amanda Root, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Redgrave, Sophie Thompson, and a lot more impressive 1990s British acting talent


Kudos to Jane Austen: it's been two-plus centuries since her passing, yet she's still a vibrant cottage industry of everything Austen. Her books are widely read and Hollywood regularly adapts movies and TV series from them and from everything Austen-adjacent imaginable.

In the 1990s, there were several notable adaptations of her novels. The BBC made a particularly good version of Persuasion for TV with Amanda Root proving to be a nearly perfect Anne Elliot, the quiet, beaten down, but not beaten protagonist.

Having let her family dissuade her from marrying a man because he was poor, but who later became a successful naval captain, Anne has spent the ensuing eight years becoming the perceived family spinster, despite her intelligence, comeliness, and decency all still being quite vibrant.

Her family, a group of superficial idiots and selfish louts, meanwhile, has been going downhill. Her father is an insecure, arrogant spendthrift who has so badly mismanaged the family's affairs that they have to lease out the ancestral estate and live as tenants in a smaller home.

Anne, who seems resigned to being the family's doormat – her older arrogant sister, Elizabeth, treats her like a servant – experiences great pangs of regret when her former fiancé, now a wealthy sea captain, Captain Wentworth, returns to her circle of friends and relations.

"Oh great, I'm eight years older, a bit tattered in appearance [this not-vain woman checks herself out in a mirror after seeing him again for the first time and appears disheartened], and still shackled to this embarrassing family, while he's become more handsome and successful."

As in any Austen story, there are several subplots and substantial supporting characters, but the main storyline – Anne pining away with regret internally – is surprisingly strong enough to hold the picture together. Austen is all about making the internal important and visible.

Here she has an amazing actress – really, an amazing cast – to bring her words to light. Root looks more like Anne than the Anne in your head from reading the book. She is unassumingly pretty and refined, with eyes that all but speak her emotions even when her face stays placid.

Watch for almost any scene where Captain Wentworth is talked about to see Root suffer silently but in a way that is quite visible. It's more painful when he's actually in the scene. It's what is meant by acting with your eyes and body English, not your words.

Ciarán Hinds is very good as Wentworth, but like in a Hallmark movie, the men in Austen exist to engender the emotions and actions of the women. They are almost like 18th-century trophy wives: there to look pretty and be quiet when not needed.

The talent here runs deep with Sophie Thompson playing Mary, Anne's younger sister. In real life, Sophie Thompson is the sister of Emma Thompson – an actress herself who is no stranger to playing an Austen character. Credit is owed to another acting family as well, the Redgraves.

In this one, it's Colin Redgrave playing Sir Walter Elliot, Anne's father, an arrogant, selfish, pompous braggart. Somehow failure never drains even a bit of his deep reservoir of unearned confidence. It's both an argument against hereditary titles and a testament to his acting talents.

Credit also goes to director Robert Michell for not making the 18th century look prettier than it was. Clothes get soiled, teeth (some, not all) aren't perfect, women wear little makeup, and the lighting in many rooms is soft, dull yellow, and insufficient – just like light was then.

Michell, additionally, knows how to move along a story that has very little action, as scenes zip by and what action there is – a fall from steps, a race to beat the rain, a circus coming to town – is amplified to lift the energy. The movie is never boring, but on paper it could be.

Still, Persuasion is Root's movie, just like it is Anne's book, and both are more than up to the challenge. Root went on to have a successful career, but maybe not quite the outsized success one would have predicted back in 1995 for the then thirty-two-year-old actress.

Modern authors twist history into knots by having period characters sound like modern social justice warriors transported back in time, but to see genuine heroines – truly strong women of Austen's time – look for one of her six contemporaneous novels about them.

Perhaps that explains her enduring appeal. From Hollywood's first Austen adaptation, 1940's Pride and Prejudice, where actress Greer Garson put her stamp on the indomitable Elizabeth Bennet, to the modern ones, Austen's version of girl power never goes out of style.