What Non-New Films Have You Seen? (2020 Edition)

[Armin Meiwes]

Yeah spot on on A Quiet Place, thought it was just completely stupid, couldn't even enjoy it for daft entertainment value because there were just SO many things wrong with the plot.

[Armin Meiwes]

Wenders Kings of the Road, vague memories of having seen some of it before essentially first time. Certainly familiar ground in some ways to Paris Texas although more in the way of quirkiness which I think finds a very nice level stopping it from becoming too po faced/self important dispite spending 3 hours touring declining west German towns in monochrome. Absolutely loved the two main themes, another example of ones that are used a hell of a lot but never IMHO wear out their welcome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-px60iPueEk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEs2Ntoi6Iw

Yeah brilliant that film, saw it last year, also saw Alice in Cities at the same time which is also well worth a watch, some similarities to KotR in the second half being a guy driving round small town WGermany but v good.

[phantom_power]

Breathless - Shit. I can sort of see what it was trying to do but it failed. Gere's character is such a cunt and the woman has no personality to speak of. I don't know, that might be the point but it wasn't fun to watch

[Artie Fufkin]

Jaws for about the 30th time.
Damn, that's a mighty fine film. Especially when it's just the 3 of them on The Orca. Dreyfuss is just brilliant.
I now want to watch Close Encounters.
Great familiar films that I don't have to concentrate too much on.

[Armin Meiwes]

Breathless - Shit. I can sort of see what it was trying to do but it failed. Gere's character is such a cunt and the woman has no personality to speak of. I don't know, that might be the point but it wasn't fun to watch

Didn't even like the original tbh, always felt like, of all the French new wave lot, Godard's stuff dated the worst.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Starship Troopers 3
Decided to watch this on TV last night.  What a stinker of a film!  I almost bailed after 3 minutes but decided to stick with it, I wish I hadn't.
If it was supposed to be a satire on the gung-ho attitude of the American military then it was a very heavy-handed one, and also not enough to carry a film for 2 hours.  I ended up feeling sorry for the bugs, the humans shouldn't have even been on their planet, they could have chosen a different planet to build their base (because if they have interstellar travel they must have visited many before finding one with life on it).

[Blumf]

Starship Troopers 3
Decided to watch this on TV last night.  What a stinker of a film!  I almost bailed after 3 minutes but decided to stick with it, I wish I hadn't.

Aw, I quiet like that one. It knows it's not as sharp as the original[nb]Same writer, but you really need that Verhoeven bite[/nb] but it still has fun with it. Much more entertaining than any of the other sequels, which are straight, non-satire affairs.

Sure, this one is blunt, but it still has some great moments in it, like the

Spoiler alert

wheelchair anti-war veteran being carried up for hanging whilst the media gloats

[close]

.

[Sin Agog]

Wild Goose Lake.  Cool downbeat crime film set in Wuhan.  Looks like a bit of a dingy place, even before all this went down.  Good movie, though.  Has a vibe.  It's about a wanted man trying to arrange with a prostitute to turn him in so his wife can get the reward money.  All feels like a low-key Seijun Suzuki flick.

Endless Summer.  Fancied throwing this on after working in the garden all day.  It really took some getting used to the chummy narration,  delivered in heavy Surfese.  It's like the Innocent Smoothie of narrations.  That said, the main thrust of the doc- two surfers following the sun across the globe so they can stretch out the summer as long as possible is compelling.  Even if it really does veer into some unfortunate glib racism at some points, especially when they hit Africa.

Been watching some old Martha Graham dance pieces.  I believe Tilda Swinton's character in the Suspiria remake was heavily based on Graham, who helped bring a sort of emotional, impressionistic dance style into the American mainstream.  She looked like some austere Night Before Christmas extra, and was a self-confessed egotist of the first degree, but she definitely had something.  Unfortunately most of the existing film footage of her, at least the stuff on the Criterion Eclipse DVD, is of her in later age, forcing her dancers into the shadows while her slowed-down 60-something self hogs the screen.  A Dancer's World was mesmerising, though.  Here she utters urbane truths in her dressing room while her dancers go to town.  Yuriko's sequences were especially spellbinding.

Been rewatching some of the Ghiblis on Netflix (and recently belatedly cottoned on that I've been pronouncing it the wrong way- it's Jibli).  I knew some of them were meditative and lovely, but I did write off a few of them, like Castle in the Sky and Porco, as glorified chase movies.  Idjut.  They're all brilliant, down to the last frame.  Been getting me old ma into them.

Think I may put on the 1934 Les Miserables next.  Not the Charles Laughton one which came out the year after.  This is a French adaptation (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025509/) and, typical of French films from the '30s, full of light and life and rich exterior cinematography.  No doubt it will be as wonderful as I remember.

[Shit Good Nose]

RE A Quiet Place - I thought it was okay, but (as I've said in other threads) its biggest problem is you need to watch it as if it's a traditional horror/haunted house film.  Do that and then all the facepalm tropes aren't so noticeable.  The problem being, of course, that it's not styled as a traditional horror/haunted house film, it's styled as an arthouse independent film.

Anyway...

Call Me By Your Name.  So...fucking...long.  Honestly that was the longest 2 hours ever.  Eric Rohmer has a lot to answer for.

[Inspector Norse]

Yeah, as a basic hiding-from-the-monster film it was fine: stylishly shot with some good setpieces.

The problem was the combination of lofty ideas and moronic detail.

[phantom_power]

Tag - surprisingly funny stupid comedy with John Hamm, Hawkeye, Andy from the Office and Hannibal Slumlord. Fucks the ending a bit by going all serious but dumb fun for the most part. Great end credits as well

[Small Man Big Horse]

Tag - surprisingly funny stupid comedy with John Hamm, Hawkeye, Andy from the Office and Hannibal Slumlord. Fucks the ending a bit by going all serious but dumb fun for the most part. Great end credits as well

I keep hearing good things about this but my hatred of Ed Helms is so strong I think I might struggle with it. Maybe one day, if he dies saving a lovely dog or something and I'm able to change my opinion of him I'll give it a go.

[greenman]

Been rewatching some of the Ghiblis on Netflix (and recently belatedly cottoned on that I've been pronouncing it the wrong way- it's Jibli).  I knew some of them were meditative and lovely, but I did write off a few of them, like Castle in the Sky and Porco, as glorified chase movies.  Idjut.  They're all brilliant, down to the last frame.  Been getting me old ma into them.

I'd say Porco is probably the most meditative Miyazaki film pre Mononoke, the nominal sea pirates plot taking up a relatively small amount of time relative to all the lost love/WW1/rise of facism regret and the scenery.

[phantom_power]

I keep hearing good things about this but my hatred of Ed Helms is so strong I think I might struggle with it. Maybe one day, if he dies saving a lovely dog or something and I'm able to change my opinion of him I'll give it a go.

He does spend a lot of the film getting beaten up and hurt, if that helps get you watching it

[Gulftastic]

Tag - surprisingly funny stupid comedy with John Hamm, Hawkeye, Andy from the Office and Hannibal Slumlord. Fucks the ending a bit by going all serious but dumb fun for the most part. Great end credits as well

Yes, I was pleasantly surprised by that one too.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Emo: The Musical (2016) -This is a superb modern musical, an Australian 2016 effort that's very funny, anw while it's often tongue in cheek it's also a sweet, knowing and smart affair. It's full of fantastic songs which made me smile from ear to ear, with this daft number being particularly great (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my1pxDdvHCg&fbclid=IwAR0QGNWdbiLqm-PHhCC7eXOFwdD1VqNeXDrxylpcKzhM414nblGy8OIGonY), and it's on Netflix right now so if you're in the mood for something all rather lovely I'd definitely recommend watching it. 8.1/10

Satanic (2016) - Modern Family's Sarah Hyland has friends who are the most annoying shits ever seen on screen, and after getting involved with a satanist eventually die. 95% of the film is the characters being arrogant and irritating, or mopey and irritating, and then their deaths take place off screen so we don't even get to enjoy watching them painfully die. One of the worst films I've ever seen and not even fun to mock, I think I hate everyone involved in the making of the film and hope they never work again. 1.0/10

[PlanktonSideburns]

Call Me By Your Name.  So...fucking...long.  Honestly that was the longest 2 hours ever.  Eric Rohmer has a lot to answer for.

what a fucking arse ache that film was

[Artie Fufkin]

Torn Curtain - 1966

Paul Newman & Julie Andrews star, but don't act, in this slightly better than average Hitchcock thriller.
Best thing about it being a horrid and drawn out fight scene, which brought to mind that scene from No Country For Old Men.
Some nice 'running about East Berlin' scenes.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Bang Bang Baby (2014) - A right old oddity and then some, this Jane Levy starring musical is  kind of like a very early Coen Brothers film where a woman imagines that she's dating a famous Hollywood crooner but then a mysterious pink mist descends on the town causing people to become mutated, the songs aren't anything amazing but they're fun enough and it's nicely shot and acted. The problem I have with it is

Spoiler alert

that her hallucinations are a response to date rape, so the lighthearted tone (at least until the end) is a strange choice

[close]

and I'm not sure what to make of it all. 7.1/10

[Egyptian Feast]

One good thing about this whole ordeal is that I've started watching movies again after a few years of not having enough time/attention span post-commute for anything longer than a 20 minute cartoon. The Wi-fi being a bit iffy in the evenings has sent me back to DVDs and torrents, which has been a magical journey with multiple "Fuck my hat, I forgot I had that!" moments. Alas, we're not dipping into the subfolder I named 'Eurosleaze' yet, but who knows what I'll be reduced to a few weeks more of quarantine. Mmm...Mariangela Giordano playing a nun. That'll be good. I hope she's OK.

Alice (1988) I've been meaning to watch this for ages, as it was very kindly donated by Lost Oliver at the last CaB meet, but I'm glad I saved it for COVID. Jan Svankmajer reimagines the Lewis Carroll classic and completely scours clean the stain in my memory of Johnny Depp dancing a jig in the last reimagining of Alice I saw. It completely creeped the fuck out of my partner, especially the white rabbit (who is admittedly quite the sight), but she was eventually drawn in too because how could you not be? An absolutely incredible visual treat. If you haven't seen it, I won't ruin it by describing it. Just watch it. You have the time now.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters (2007) I've been watching this series from the beginning recently (along with Adventure Time) because fuck it, I need extreme escapism atm. If you've ever seen the show, you know what to expect and whether or not you could sit through 80 minutes of it. In the dull stretches, I had fun imagining how an uninitiated older film critic would react to it. I hope Rex Reed had to watch it. Christopher Tookey probably didn't, but he should've, the cunt. I wish I could dig up Alexander Walker and make him watch it. If that was feasible, I'd do it, definitely. I don't know if I could sit through it myself a second time any time soon, but I enjoyed it. The opening parody of 50s drive-in concession ads is fantastic (and may even have impressed maggoty Walker), the target-audience-skewering abrupt ending got a big laugh (there were around 20 alternate endings in the folder, but they were shite with one exception), but the funniest section of the movie is oddly a removed subplot that ended up as the series 4 episode 'Deleted Scenes' which came out before the movie was released. Hit and miss but still better than The Simpsons Movie.

Public Enemy (1931), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939) I found a box set of James Cagney gangster films I bought in a sale back when Ealing Broadway had a HMV in a stack of DVDs behind a stack of other DVDs (which led me to discover a Luis Bunuel box set I'd forgotten about, but that's for next week). This is exactly the kind of escapism I was looking for. Cagney was a huge movie star for a reason. Watch him in a scene with a competent-but-dull co-star like Donald Cook (who also crops up in the next entry) and the difference is staggering. He had IT, if anyone ever had. Miles Davis would call him a motherfucker. I hadn't seen The Roaring Twenties before somehow, but it was my favourite so far, possibly because I found myself quite taken with Cagney's business associate Panama Smith (Gladys George). He's clearly been sleeping with her for years, but only has eyes for a much younger singer who's in love with his less interesting Army buddy (Bogie is the other and he's a proper cunt). Panama is a proper old-movie broad and I wouldn't have wasted my time with the young drip like he does here. It reminded me of An American In Paris where Nina Foch is so much more interesting and attractive than Leslie Caron I always want him to end up with her - OK, she doesn't do any dancing, which is a minus, but she's asking him to be her paid escort which is a fucking great job and possibly a film I want to see more, elaborately choreographed dance sequences or no. Cagney does end up with Panama Smith, if dying in her arms counts, but he didn't know what he had, even at the end. Great films all, looking forward to revisiting White Heat next.

Safe In Hell (1932) A prostitute (Dorothy Mackaill) fears she's murdered the man who raped her and ruined her life, but is rescued from the cops by a dull sailor (Donald Cook again) and taken to an island with no extradition laws. Stranded by her saviour, now-'husband', in a hotel full of leering old criminals and only a promise of fidelity to keep her going, she battles the advances of the sleazy old men and the truly appalling 'jailer and executioner' of the island. It gets much worse for her. This was pretty strong meat for 1932 and stands as a pretty savage indictment of men and their horrible greasy cocks, not only the sleazebags but the saviours. Our heroine is such an uncompromising broad I was rooting for her more than any character I've watched recently. She really doesn't take any shit, and if she doesn't want to fuck you, nothing you pull on her on her will work including the threat of execution. I'd never heard of Dorothy Mackaill before, but she was brilliant. Also, the black barmaid and porter at the hotel are the only truly decent characters in the film and are thankfully not patronised much. Nina Mae McKinney should've been a star, but was a few decades ahead of her time. She gets to sing a number while pouring the sleazebags drinks and her voice is as raunchy as she is gorgeous.

[Artie Fufkin]

Topaz - 1969

Dull as ditch water Hitchcock 'thriller' starring Blake Carrington from Dynasty and some Cubans. It's about the lead up to The Cuban Missile Crisis. Mweh. I dunno. Maybe me and Mrs Fufkin just weren't in the mood for it. It goes down as possibly my least favourite Hitchcock.

[phantom_power]

Sweet Smell of Success - Fun lurid melodrama with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. A bit hard to work out what the social mores of the time were to judge what was happening sometimes and pretty stagey, but fun nonetheless

[Egyptian Feast]

Thirteen Women (1932) Another pre-code movie, this one a precursor to giallo and slasher movies. An, err...amount of women formerly in a sorority at a fancy finishing school have become ensnared in a round robin gone horribly wrong. A mysterious swami is sending them horoscopes that warn of horrible fates. We meet twin acrobats, one who is fated to kill their sister during their act, which we see in the opening scene. So that's two women. We briefly meet Peg Entwhistle, sadly famed solely for jumping off the H in the Hollywood sign a few days after this, her only movie, was released. She apparently had a more substantial role in the original cut, but mostly ended up on the cutting room floor due to the studio objecting to a lesbian subplot involving her character. She kills her husband in a mysterious daze a few seconds after we meet her and so goodbye Peg. Three women.

We meet four other women from the same sorority, so that's seven. They're all receiving dire horoscopes from the swami, who it turns out is actually under the influence of baddie Myrna Loy, still in her vamp phase, playing a character later described as "half-Hindu, half-Japanese, I don't know". She was also in the sorority and the other girls treated her very badly, shunning her due to her race, just when as she later says, she was so close to becoming white. She has acquired exceptional powers of hypnotic persuasion since then, and after she stares the swami in front of an oncoming tube, she travels to California to murder the son of the lead character. She might be the eighth woman, I don't know. There's the boy's nanny as well, so maybe that's nine. Two other women were cut from the film along with most of Peg, so eleven. Eleven women, unless I missed a couple in the background somewhere.

I enjoyed this hour of utter nonsense, but it probably would've been a much better film with the now presumably lost 15 minutes the studio chopped out. Myrna Loy in brownface having a racist rant about racism was truly bizarre to behold. Thankfully she switched studios shortly after and got teamed up with William Powell.

[Dr Syntax Head]

I rewatched Kill List last night. Must have watched it drunk the first time because I don't remember it being quite so fucking heavy. It's basically an anxiety attack in film. Loved every second of it, especially the kitchen sink drama aspect to it. It just feels so real. The score is amazing too (apparently when they're getting chased through the tunnels the sound that sharks use to communicate was used, man I hope that's true). Time for a rewatch of Down Terrace I think

[Wentworth Smith]

Lifeforce (1985, Tobe Hooper). Watched this yesterday and whilst it is in no way a good film it is at least entertaining if only in a 'what the he'll were they thinking?!' way.

It's hugely over ambitious, crazily fast paced, and changes what kind of film it is constantly veering from Alien style space monster film, to zombie contagion, to hammer bedlam, to mad scientist, to apocalypse and sometimes back again.

The main villian is an attractive woman with big tits who spends the whole thing totally starkers (a highlight is when it is revealed her form was taken from one of the main protagonists inner mind, the dirty dog). Mainly duff performances with exceptions being Frank Finley as a scientist 'obsessed with death' and Patrick Stewart who does a nice line in stupidly sinister. The main characters are wooden but the script is at least partly to blame as it's daft as a brush with weird exposition all over the place (a favourite character was the helicopter pilot who only talks in plot updates, info dumps, and useful pointers to plot updates and info dumps).

Despite all this it does have many hugely entertaing bits and well done visuals with some nice model work of corpses springing to life, and a nice energy in some scenes when London, which has gone to pot offscreen, is a crazy zombie wasteland.

In short, totally bonkers and whilst not recommended as it has many flaws it is at least always interesting whether good or, mainly, bad. I came away thinking you could make a great netflix ten part series and genuinely not have to stretch the material in the film a great deal.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Lifeforce is great.

[Wentworth Smith]

I didn't get across how much I enjoyed it, it's never dull, but I couldn't recommend it to everyone. People who like ultra pulpy, lurid silliness and big tits: this films for you.

[Artie Fufkin]

I rewatched Kill List last night. Must have watched it drunk the first time because I don't remember it being quite so fucking heavy. It's basically an anxiety attack in film. Loved every second of it, especially the kitchen sink drama aspect to it. It just feels so real. The score is amazing too (apparently when they're getting chased through the tunnels the sound that sharks use to communicate was used, man I hope that's true). Time for a rewatch of Down Terrace I think

2 great films, there. Quite nasty, both of them. Must watch them again.

Saboteur - 1942

Better than average Hitchcock thriller.
Enjoyed this lots, actually.
A kind of road-movie, I guess?

[greenman]

I didn't get across how much I enjoyed it, it's never dull, but I couldn't recommend it to everyone. People who like ultra pulpy, lurid silliness and big tits: this films for you.

It does I'd say generally seem to be pretty aware that this is what its serving up, its not really a case of having to wait though long failed attempts at serious sci fi for the fun bits, something generally crops up every few mins and the whole thing just seems like exploiting an unusually large budget to pack in as much B-movieness as possible done to as high a standard as possible.

[Artie Fufkin]

Walk The Line - 1995

Joaquin Phoenix & Reece Witherspoon star as Johnny Cash & June Carter. Fuck my hat, June Carter wrote Ring Of Fire! I never knew that.
It was really good, actually. Joaquin & Reece both have great voices.