What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[MisterCairo]

Let me lead by saying I have a hard time watching Streep....IMHO a terrible actress but I watched her performance in the trailer for Iron Lady and now will rent it. I thought she was light years better than Anderson's horrific caricature of Maggie.....

One of the funniest and most biting Dennis Miller gags when he was the SNL news guy at one point in the 80s was his Hollywood report to the effect "From Hollywood, it is now admitted that Meryl Streep is actually rather plain looking."

He was fed up with the near universal fawning over her career. She has had her moments of course.

 

[MisterCairo]

^^^

Ref Rope, my wife and I really enjoy this one from Hitch, and we have the blu-ray in our AH collection.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The thing that bugged me about Rope was that it would have been easier to buy the thrill-killer angle if, like the actual Leopold and Loeb, the killers had been teenagers. But teenagers wouldn't have had a snazzy apartment for the movie to take place in, so I guess I can see why that choice was made. But the whole "intellectual superman" thing is hard to buy from a couple of guys who look like they've been around long enough to know they aren't.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Meanwhile, I sat down last night to watch the UCLA restoration of "Glorifying the American Girl," an early and extremely ill-fated musical from 1929.

This picture, dedicated to stage legend Florenz Ziegfeld, was dogged by problems from the moment it was first proposed -- it was first discussed as a silent, was finally shot in Astoria as one of Paramount's first talkies, but its quality was so lacking that it was first given a bunch of guest star scenes featuring Eddie Cantor, Helen Morgan, and Rudy Vallee, and then finally dumped into release in early 1930 without a New York premiere. That was always the sign of a dog, and "Glorifying" met that definition. Except to one critic, who preferred to call it a "stone cold turkey." Years later, the film fell into the public domain, floated around television in horrendous, dupey 16mm prints with the Technicolor scenes cut out, and ended up, in practically incomprehensible form, on You Tube. Pretty sad, especially, when so many better films were lost completely.

But UCLA got hold of the original Paramount 35mm vault print, with Technicolor footage intact, and finally got around to putting out on disc -- and seen in that form, it isn't quite as intolerable as it was when I first saw it on AMC back in the 90s. It's still not a good movie, but it's not as bad a bad movie when you see it as it was meant to be seen.

The story is a backstage potboiler about a singing song-sheet clerk who wants to be be a Ziegfeld star, despite her dopey piano playing boyfriend who wants her to marry him. Her Gorgon of a mother -- who makes Uncle Bim Gump's social-climbing mother-in-law look like Mother Theresa -- pushes her into a relationship with a cheap vaudeville hoofer, their act improbably catches the eye of a Ziegfeld talent scout, and she ends up starring in a Broadway spectacular, underneath a gigantic feather headdress -- weeping as her boyfriend sits in the audience with his new wife. The guest star scenes with Cantor, Morgan, and Vallee have nothing to do with the plot -- they're integrated into the stage revue our heroine stars in -- and Cantor, with his famous Moe-the-Tailor sketch is about as unadulterated as you'll ever see him on film. When he started doing pictures for Goldwyn, Sam made him cut out most of the ethnic gags, but here he's in full Delancey-Street-dank-you mode, and if you can handle that, he's pretty good. Morgan does one of her torch numbers sitting on a piano, and makes you wonder why she isn't the star of the show. And Vallee -- well, there's nothing wrong with his performance, but he really must have pissed off the cameraman because he's photographed from an angle that makes him look like a buck-toothed gargoyle.

Mary Eaton, the star of the film, is twenty-nine years old here, and on the downside of her career. She had been an actual Follies star in the late 1910s, and went on to headline in several other book musicals of the 20s. And the problem with her here is the same problem you get with all the other stage performers who jumped into pictures in 1928-1929: they don't know how to modulate their performances for the screen. Her singing and dancing are fine, as they go, but her delivery of dialogue IS JUST TOO BIG FOR THE MEDIUM, with every line sold to the back row of the balcony. She'd never make another feature after this, and the only other one she made was with the Marx Brothers, which I guess must count for something.

The real value in this film, though, is the Technicolor revue scenes -- which document what actual Ziegfeld stage shows looked like in their prime. And they are not, as you might expect them to be, lavish dance numbers. They are, in fact, "tableaux vivant," an old stage genre that's pretty much extinct now, but which was huge in the 1910s and 1920s as an acceptable way to bring nudity to the legitimate stage -- as long as the performers stood stock still, they could be as naked as the director wanted them to be. Because, you see, it was "art." The main tableau in this case is some kind of insane scene where fishermen have caught a bare-chested mermaid in their net, while soldiers, sailors, a group of nuns, and the Pope stand around looking on. For the "church angle," you see. One of the naked gentlemen standing around as the two-color camera pans across the scene is Johnny Weissmuller, but the photography has so much Technicolor grain to it that you can't really pick him out by face or anything else. Modern Dance legend Ted Shawn is cited in the credits as the dance director for the film, and since there's very little "modern dance" in evidence anywhere else, one must presume that the presence of such beefcake in the background is his major contribution to the picture.

(I wish there was a good still of this tableau on line, but alas, there is not. You'll just have to take my word for it.)

"Glorifying" isn't really as awful a film as its reputation suggests. But it isn't as gloriously-awful as some of its contemporaries. "Golden Dawn" and "Madam Satan" just laugh it right off the screen.

 

[belfastboy]

One of the funniest and most biting Dennis Miller gags when he was the SNL news guy at one point in the 80s was his Hollywood report to the effect "From Hollywood, it is now admitted that Meryl Streep is actually rather plain looking."

He was fed up with the near universal fawning over her career. She has had her moments of course.

A few but I have mostly found her acting to be a series of ticks and affectation is place of real acting. Everything she does seems to do is "on top of" rather than her embodying the performance.

 

[MisterCairo]

The thing that bugged me about Rope was that it would have been easier to buy the thrill-killer angle if, like the actual Leopold and Loeb, the killers had been teenagers. But teenagers wouldn't have had a snazzy apartment for the movie to take place in, so I guess I can see why that choice was made. But the whole "intellectual superman" thing is hard to buy from a couple of guys who look like they've been around long enough to know they aren't.

The very terrifying aspect of the alleged superman mentality is that it is not "grown out of". It just is, and thus any age can be guilty of it.

 

[Harp]

It just is, and thus any age can be guilty of it.

Rope reminds Hitchcock's film Strangers on A Train, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel.
The psychological Tennessee windage/Kentucky elevation angle aim with mature men.

 

[Touchofevil]

Wonder Woman 1984
“Free” in our cable package so we figured we would give it a shot. It was a waste of my life. The acting was weak, the characters were boring/weak, the story was very weak, the CGI was weak, all adding up to a weak and very poorly made movie. One of the worst movies I have seen in a long time.

 

[Zombie_61]

New year, same old garbage on television. So we're watching Rocky again because it's the least offensive of the current offerings.

 

[Seb Lucas]

Let me lead by saying I have a hard time watching Streep....IMHO a terrible actress but I watched her performance in the trailer for Iron Lady and now will rent it. I thought she was light years better than Anderson's horrific caricature of Maggie.....

Agree on Streep. Generally found her performances to be mannered and very self-aware. I'm sure I thought she was good in a few films but I don't remember which ones. Haven't seen these two as I have no interest in movies about politics as a general principle.

 

[MisterCairo]

Wonder Woman 1984
“Free” in our cable package so we figured we would give it a shot. It was a waste of my life. The acting was weak, the characters were boring/weak, the story was very weak, the CGI was weak, all adding up to a weak and very poorly made movie. One of the worst movies I have seen in a long time.

I tried to tell you all I watched this film so you did not have to!!!

 

[Fading Fast]

I tried to tell you all I watched this film so you did not have to!!!

I was all set to watch it this weekend, until I read the comments in this thread. I thought WWI was a good not great movie in a genre I'm indifferent to - it was pretty enjoyable for the first 2/3 and then, IMO, fell apart in the last 1/3. And since it's already included in our HBO subscription, I keep thinking, why not, but then all these comments make me believe there are better uses for two-and-a-half hours of free time. Hmm, what to do, what to do?

 

[Touchofevil]

I tried to tell you all I watched this film so you did not have to!!!

Unfortunately I did not see your post in time to warn me.

 

[Bushman]

The Good Liar, starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Next to the "Stanton-Walsh-Rule", there's a "Prochnow-Rule" for me.

 

[Zombie_61]

Currently watching The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) on TCM. It's a largely fictionalized account of American war correspondent Ernie Pyle's travels with an equally fictionalized group of U.S. infantrymen in Europe during World War II. Burgess Meredith stars as Pyle, accompanied by Robert Mitchum as "Lt. Walker". Perhaps a little better than most "follow these guys through World War II" movies, for me this one survives because of the performances--not particularly special, but entertaining.

Sadly, Pyle was killed in action two months before the movie premiered and never got to see even a rough print.

 

[MisterCairo]

I was all set to watch it this weekend, until I read the comments in this thread. I thought WWI was a good not great movie in a genre I'm indifferent to - it was pretty enjoyable for the first 2/3 and then, IMO, fell apart in the last 1/3. And since it's already included in our HBO subscription, I keep thinking, why not, but then all these comments make me believe there are better uses for two-and-a-half hours of free time. Hmm, what to do, what to do?

I am not, seriously not, over exaggerating how bad this was. Say what anyone wants about the first one, it is Citizen Kane to this one's Freddy Got Fingered.

Mr. C

 

[Harp]

Currently watching The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) on TCM. It's a largely fictionalized account of American war correspondent Ernie Pyle's travels with an equally fictionalized group of U.S. infantrymen in Europe during World War II.

John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro, a 1945 War Department documentary is factual, combat footage;
includes Graves Registration bag-and-tag dead in rigor mortis and other grunt crapshoot glory.
Not for the squeamish.

 

[Touchofevil]

I am not, seriously not, over exaggerating how bad this was. Say what anyone wants about the first one, it is Citizen Kane to this one's Freddy Got Fingered.

Mr. C

I will second that. It was Aquamanish in its badness. Should not be watched unless watched at gunpoint.

 

[AmateisGal]

Wonder Woman 1984
“Free” in our cable package so we figured we would give it a shot. It was a waste of my life. The acting was weak, the characters were boring/weak, the story was very weak, the CGI was weak, all adding up to a weak and very poorly made movie. One of the worst movies I have seen in a long time.

this makes me sooooo sad! I loved the first film and I had high expectations for the second one. Darn it.