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What non-new films have you seen? (2022 edition)

Started by Famous Mortimer, January 01, 2022, 02:18:34 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: famethrowa on May 17, 2022, 01:34:41 PMYes, Andrew McCarthy should have seized the means of production!

He does play Monopoly with his boss' dead body, which I'm sure could symbolise something.

famethrowa

Behind The Candelabra (2013). I realise, despite being a lifelong piano toucher, that I don't know much about Liberace; obviously he was a lying piece of shit (suing anyone who dared to suggest he was even a little bit gay, and pocketing the cash) but also massively well-known in his day. It's fun to see all these big stars (Michael Douglas, Matt Damon etc) put in the effort and camp it up for a pretty solid period piece. The ending goes totally Python, closely resembling "Christmas In Heaven" in the Gilliam style, perhaps a nod to the ending of All That Jazz as well.

Also, what has Dan Aykroyd got to do to become a national treasure? He's worked consistently for over 5 decades, good and bad, not only acted in but created a couple of the most-loved movies ever, but I don't think he gets the kudos. Probably too weird and Canadian. I think he's tops!

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: famethrowa on May 17, 2022, 03:18:42 PMAlso, what has Dan Aykroyd got to do to become a national treasure? He's worked consistently for over 5 decades, good and bad, not only acted in but created a couple of the most-loved movies ever, but I don't think he gets the kudos. Probably too weird and Canadian. I think he's tops!
I think his time has come and gone. Plus, whenever anyone gets within a mile of him these days, all he does is shill his vodka, so I assume there are plenty of places that have decided he's not worth the effort.

itsfredtitmus

the turner, 2004, kira muratova

the style of acting in this is way too manic and all over the place to settle into, you really want to scream at the cast to bring them back to reality and stop acting out an episode of the goodies. must be one of those cultural disconnects because everyone in this seems to be out of sync with each other - no harmony!  usually love anything muratova too feel a bit disappointed i didnt like it

zomgmouse

Bit of a backlog of posting:

Life Is All You Get. Earlier film by Wolfgang Becker who is arguably most famous for Goodbye Lenin and surprisingly little else - this is very good. Also inexplicably featuring Ricky Tomlinson.

Freak Orlando. Ulrike Ottinger's relentlessly surreal, theatrical imagery can easily be offputting but this won me over - even if I still prefer Ticket of No Return.

The Fair. Incredible scathing indictment of post-war Germany, telling the story of a deserter soldier in a small town and the frenzy . The final sequence in particular makes this what it is.

Four Weddings and a Funeral. The supposed classic is a pretty weak in both rom and com, though Simon Callow steals the show.

The Edukators. Upbeat lo-fi crime-turned-chamber-drama with some young revolutionaries who break into people's homes and rearrange the furniture to make a statement. One of those goes wrong and they kidnap a witness. It's a good time.

Fantasia. Superfluous waffling narrator aside, this is a fairly hit-and-miss animation compendium. Liked some of the more abstract moments, dancing vegetables, and the demonic one, but a lot of the rest like the centaurs etc was kind of bland.

The Death of Maria Malibran. Werner Schroeter has been cited as a major influence by Fassbinder and you can definitely see some of the parallels of heightened emotional visuals - interesting to draw parallels too to Ottinger (see above).

Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave. Solid socialist film, made in a semi-documentary style, filmed in great-looking black-and-white.

The Lost One. The only film directed by Peter Lorre - also starring him, in incredible form, as a tortured ex-Nazi scientist with a murky past. Clearly very competent, a dark, wry and earnest thriller with much understandable comparison to M, though it's certainly far from it.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: zomgmouse on May 18, 2022, 02:51:42 AMThe Edukators. Upbeat lo-fi crime-turned-chamber-drama with some young revolutionaries who break into people's homes and rearrange the furniture to make a statement. One of those goes wrong and they kidnap a witness. It's a good time.

I quite liked this. I think it came out around the same time as Good Bye Lenin!

I keep meaning to start a thread on German cinema as most of what I've seen has been great but I know fuck all about it.

zomgmouse

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 18, 2022, 10:49:51 AMI quite liked this. I think it came out around the same time as Good Bye Lenin!

I keep meaning to start a thread on German cinema as most of what I've seen has been great but I know fuck all about it.

yes definitely similar time period and similarly baby-faced Brühl.

I've been on a bit of a German cinema kick and there's been some great revelations. A thread would certainly not go amiss!

rjd2

Thief - 8/10

The story is a little cliched, robber decides to do one last score while the police watch and his love life gets complicated. Its very watchable however, James Cann is immense in the lead and all the supporting cast do well in their own roles, it looks fantastic and one heck of a debut film for Michael Mann.

Eyes Without A Face 6/10

Oddball doctor has a daughter locked up who has lost her face. Along with his devoted wife, starved dogs he searches for lasses whose faces he can "borrow" to save his daughter. Its pretty creepy for an hour and the lead is very good, but its wrapped up way to easily and the ending is way to obvious.

Memorex MP3

A Couch in New York

Absolutely terrible, zero chemistry between the two leads with Binoche going into absolute overdrive with all her most annoying quirks (for someone else more charmed by her this might save the film), elements of screwball that don't hit at all which means some of the jumpier plot points fall flat too.


We're All Going to the World's Fair

Big chunks of this felt rather amateurish but it still hit really hard when it needed to. A lot of the stuff in this was maybe a bit too relatable for me to completely fairly assess it, reminded me a lot of some of my myspace friends when I was 15/16

Famous Mortimer


Famous Mortimer

#730
Bad Taste Movie no.1
A sketch film, if you were being extremely charitable about what "sketch" meant. Picture your local in the late 80s, and then the guy in there who's sleazy and unpleasant, always telling jokes that are just shitty and rude. This is the movie his stupidest relation would have made.

It starts off with a woman (seen only from the waist down) slowly drive up to a large house and walk up the stairs. She walks into a room and we then just see the lock on the door as...something is happening in the room. Cleverly, in a bit that relies entirely on sound, they used the camera's onboard mic, outside the room, so you can hear almost nothing.

The second bit is us being introduced to four topless dancers, one at a time. They come on, dance for a bit, cut to them at the bar saying "Hi...I'm Kate", cut back to the dancer, she's joined by another woman, repeat 4 times. This goes on for two or three minutes, oh, and there's a smoke machine so you can't really see much of what's going on. Then, a larger woman comes on and starts dancing...and that's it. Oh, there's this that pops up on screen when she's wiggled about for a few seconds:



"Sketch" three is a news report with a rowdy crowd's noise dubbed on top, and the joke appears to be there's an old topless woman being broadcast on the screen behind the newsreader. When he notices, this footage reduces him to fits of laughter.

To give you chance to relax between the bits, we then see a vacant-looking woman, from the shoulders up, gyrating a little. Followed by a couple of middle-aged topless ladies seeming very confused about the predicament they're in - attempting to emerge from an empty TV cabinet, while a different laugh track accompanies them. They're on a stage, I guess, but the audience who would laugh that hard at the performances we see would be very easy to please.

Bringing us to the 20-minute mark is the newsreader from earlier reading a series of limericks about a couple who use a vibrator. They leave in the bit where he completely blows a line and asks for another try, which interrupts what might politely be called the flow, and when he gets to the end he laughs, as if to tell us what we might have done if we'd been watching a different film.

You want six minutes of the slightly larger woman from earlier slowly stripping while wearing a Miss Piggy mask? You got it! They cleverly use a piece of incidental music that's far too short, so we get a few seconds of silence as they cue up an entirely different piece of music for the rest of it.

Newsreader again! We cut to him laughing, possibly at the previous thirty seconds of the vacant lady telling a joke that was old when the pilgrims made it to the new world. He then reads out this "joke":

"I met a woman who was willing
Now I'm using penicillin"

which he finds funnier than any human being has ever found anything.

Different old lady dancing with her boobs out, while we hear the newsreader still laughing, accompanied by crowd noises. She's joined by one of the women from the TV cabinet sketch?

Four minutes of the newsreader reading dirty seaside postcard gags while having an aneurysm from laughing so hard!

After more stripping, we get to a bit where a clapper loader traps a larger lady's boob; this, and her screams, are considered so funny we see it three times in succession, with very very slight variations on her scream each time.

At the 45 minute mark, there's a bit where a guy drives to a garage and unsuccessfully attempts to use the air pump to blow up his inflatable sex doll. It's impossible to tell if the comedy was supposed to come from his failure, or if there was something funny planned with the doll but the guy was genuinely unable to inflate it. The setup is then repeated but the guy wrestles a large unconscious woman wearing panties and a hideous mask (the front cover image, should you wish to see it) out of the car, dumps her in the same spot as the doll was, and eventually "inflates" her by sticking the hose up her arse. This is a forecourt with normal motorists filling up their cars all around, by the way. Again, the splendid comedic timing is interrupted by the woman's wig falling off and her collapsing to the ground to put it back on, as if that was her local garage and she didn't want anyone to see her.

(this is of course accompanied by random five-second bursts of different laugh tracks)

If you've ever wondered what a sketch would look like if the main performer had to awkwardly stop near the end and tidy up the mess they'd made because they didn't want to get their head kicked in by the manager of the garage they'd definitely not asked for filming permission, "Bad Taste Movie no.1" has got you covered.

Topless woman walking into a chippie! Then wandering round a busy street, full of families shopping, offering chips to passers-by! This bit just goes on and on!

Bringing us to the hour is an oddly edited few minutes of a fully dressed shop dummy lying in a gutter, while sad music plays and we get an occasional superimposed shot of a church, or some cloudy skies. It's almost as if they assumed no-one would still be watching by this point. Oh wait, there's a payoff! The skinny blonde topless dancing lady starts being superimposed on the scene, and the dummy is seen sporting an erection. If you were feeling impolite, you might say this is a weak ending to a scene which has gone on for a good six minutes, but we're in the home stretch!

Confused lady in a TV cabinet again! Welcome back! This time, after a few minutes, a scruffy looking bloke with a crude Emu puppet on his arm grabs her arse.

To calm us down again after that peak, we're treated to a few minutes of a medium-distance shot of topless dancing, with the lack of lighting and presence of smoke machines making sure you can't see anything and therefore get too excited. After a good while, one of the women emerges from the murk to dance at the front, which reveals this as a dialogue-free cover version of the "strippers introduce themselves" scene from earlier.

Skinny blonde lady leaves us with this zinger at the end: "they call me the one-armed bandit because I have a coin operated slot". The last five minutes is a shot of the film playing on a small TV, on top of a chunky editing bay VCR, as a strip-club-style voiceover introduces the women we've been watching.

This is what plays on the lift that takes you down to Hell.



Artie Fufkin

Edward Scissorhands - 1990

You know it. Typical Burton film.
Dianne Wiest steals the show, I thought. Closely followed by Alan Arkin
Spoiler alert
(absolutely love the bit where he's singing "I Saw 3 Ships Come Sailing In" on the roof of his house. That made me hoot with laughter).
[close]
Charming film. Johnny Depp is kooky. Vincent Price is great.
The only thing that annoyed me, apart from 'the bad jock', is that throughout the film Edward is continually having mishaps with his hands of scissors (cutting his face, other peoples faces, water beds, curtains etc.,) yet he is able to carve amazing topiary's and ice sculptures.
Twat.
3.5/5

PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on May 20, 2022, 04:52:37 AMBad Taste Movie no.1
A sketch film, if you were being extremely charitable about what "sketch" meant. Picture your local in the late 80s, and then the guy in there who's sleazy and unpleasant, always telling jokes that are just shitty and rude. This is the movie his stupidest relation would have made.

It starts off with a woman (seen only from the waist down) slowly drive up to a large house and walk up the stairs. She walks into a room and we then just see the lock on the door as...something is happening in the room. Cleverly, in a bit that relies entirely on sound, they used the camera's onboard mic, outside the room, so you can hear almost nothing.

The second bit is us being introduced to four topless dancers, one at a time. They come on, dance for a bit, cut to them at the bar saying "Hi...I'm Kate", cut back to the dancer, she's joined by another woman, repeat 4 times. This goes on for two or three minutes, oh, and there's a smoke machine so you can't really see much of what's going on. Then, a larger woman comes on and starts dancing...and that's it. Oh, there's this that pops up on screen when she's wiggled about for a few seconds:



"Sketch" three is a news report with a rowdy crowd's noise dubbed on top, and the joke appears to be there's an old topless woman being broadcast on the screen behind the newsreader. When he notices, this footage reduces him to fits of laughter.

To give you chance to relax between the bits, we then see a vacant-looking woman, from the shoulders up, gyrating a little. Followed by a couple of middle-aged topless ladies seeming very confused about the predicament they're in - attempting to emerge from an empty TV cabinet, while a different laugh track accompanies them. They're on a stage, I guess, but the audience who would laugh that hard at the performances we see would be very easy to please.

Bringing us to the 20-minute mark is the newsreader from earlier reading a series of limericks about a couple who use a vibrator. They leave in the bit where he completely blows a line and asks for another try, which interrupts what might politely be called the flow, and when he gets to the end he laughs, as if to tell us what we might have done if we'd been watching a different film.

You want six minutes of the slightly larger woman from earlier slowly stripping while wearing a Miss Piggy mask? You got it! They cleverly use a piece of incidental music that's far too short, so we get a few seconds of silence as they cue up an entirely different piece of music for the rest of it.

Newsreader again! We cut to him laughing, possibly at the previous thirty seconds of the vacant lady telling a joke that was old when the pilgrims made it to the new world. He then reads out this "joke":

"I met a woman who was willing
Now I'm using penicillin"

which he finds funnier than any human being has ever found anything.

Different old lady dancing with her boobs out, while we hear the newsreader still laughing, accompanied by crowd noises. She's joined by one of the women from the TV cabinet sketch?

Four minutes of the newsreader reading dirty seaside postcard gags while having an aneurysm from laughing so hard!

After more stripping, we get to a bit where a clapper loader traps a larger lady's boob; this, and her screams, are considered so funny we see it three times in succession, with very very slight variations on her scream each time.

At the 45 minute mark, there's a bit where a guy drives to a garage and unsuccessfully attempts to use the air pump to blow up his inflatable sex doll. It's impossible to tell if the comedy was supposed to come from his failure, or if there was something funny planned with the doll but the guy was genuinely unable to inflate it. The setup is then repeated but the guy wrestles a large unconscious woman wearing panties and a hideous mask (the front cover image, should you wish to see it) out of the car, dumps her in the same spot as the doll was, and eventually "inflates" her by sticking the hose up her arse. This is a forecourt with normal motorists filling up their cars all around, by the way. Again, the splendid comedic timing is interrupted by the woman's wig falling off and her collapsing to the ground to put it back on, as if that was her local garage and she didn't want anyone to see her.

(this is of course accompanied by random five-second bursts of different laugh tracks)

If you've ever wondered what a sketch would look like if the main performer had to awkwardly stop near the end and tidy up the mess they'd made because they didn't want to get their head kicked in by the manager of the garage they'd definitely not asked for filming permission, "Bad Taste Movie no.1" has got you covered.

Topless woman walking into a chippie! Then wandering round a busy street, full of families shopping, offering chips to passers-by! This bit just goes on and on!

Bringing us to the hour is an oddly edited few minutes of a fully dressed shop dummy lying in a gutter, while sad music plays and we get an occasional superimposed shot of a church, or some cloudy skies. It's almost as if they assumed no-one would still be watching by this point. Oh wait, there's a payoff! The skinny blonde topless dancing lady starts being superimposed on the scene, and the dummy is seen sporting an erection. If you were feeling impolite, you might say this is a weak ending to a scene which has gone on for a good six minutes, but we're in the home stretch!

Confused lady in a TV cabinet again! Welcome back! This time, after a few minutes, a scruffy looking bloke with a crude Emu puppet on his arm grabs her arse.

To calm us down again after that peak, we're treated to a few minutes of a medium-distance shot of topless dancing, with the lack of lighting and presence of smoke machines making sure you can't see anything and therefore get too excited. After a good while, one of the women emerges from the murk to dance at the front, which reveals this as a dialogue-free cover version of the "strippers introduce themselves" scene from earlier.

Skinny blonde lady leaves us with this zinger at the end: "they call me the one-armed bandit because I have a coin operated slot". The last five minutes is a shot of the film playing on a small TV, on top of a chunky editing bay VCR, as a strip-club-style voiceover introduces the women we've been watching.

This is what plays on the lift that takes you down to Hell.




Wow, a hero's work in describing that. You've made it sound white Lynchian and drawn like, which I'm sure it's not

Sebastian Cobb

10 to Midnight. This film is incredible, Bronson is a crotchety old cop, like a second rate Harry Callahan with a young partner who from the off is going to fall in love with the cop's adult daughter.

Some sex criminal is going around stabbing girls and while he's on their tale the killer crosses paths with this adult daughter and starts stalking her and making calls, Bronson roughed him up in an interview and had to let him go as he had tricked some people into giving him an alibi by being at the cinema by sneaking out and killing someone. So Bronson plants evidence but his partner finds out and so he admits it in court and gets sacked. So then the killer starts coming after his daughter but narrowly keeps missing her but getting closer culminating in him being in her house and killing all her housemates but her escaping and running into her dads arms who has a gun pointed at him. Throughout the film he's gone on rants about how he no longer believes in the law because it protects criminals human rights and the killer hints he's going to try and get out of prison by pretending to be schizophrenic just as the police cars are turning up so he blows his head off and the credits roll.

Like the whole message of the film is this guy's getting hard done-by while justice fails to be served and criminals get off, but they're only getting off because of tainted and botched cases because he's took it upon himself to act like a fucking maniac. It does have some incredible dialogue with 'subtext' to world-build about how old school tough he is.


Went to see five Nicolas Roeg films from 1970-80 at the cinema: Don't Look Now, Walkabout, Bad Timing, Performance (on 35mm) and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I'd only seen Don't Look Now (and The Witches) before. Looking forward to watching The Masque of the Red Death, Glastonbury Fayre and Who Saw Her Die?, a giallo set in Venice that came out a year before Don't Look Now. They have anniversary screenings of Cabaret and Cries and Whispers this month so have been showing three of the most famous red films from 1972-3.

Sebastian Cobb

Killing Them Softly - neo noir with a fairly decent ensemble cast of characters. It's a story mostly about two low lifes (Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNeary) who get told to stick up an underground card game on the assumption the guy running it (Ray Liotta) will be fingered for it because he pulled that trick himself in the past.

The on-going backdrop is Obama's inauguration and the financial crash. And the parallels between its events and the disruption this event causes in the mob, the syndicate is very organised, diplomatic and a bit squeamish around the violent ways.

It was good fun, but a bit too smug and over-stylised. It did worse than it deserved to if Rotten Tomatoes reception is anything to go by.

Famous Mortimer

Decoder (1984)

FM Einheit off of Einsturzende Neubauten is a guy who, after meeting the High Priest (Genesis P-Orridge) has the revelation that he can replace the muzak played in burger restaurants with the noise music he's been creating, and break people out of their slumber. This leads to him being wanted by the police for fomenting revolution (the music is pushed over the edge by the sound of a frog being squeezed, in case you want to skip that bit).

There's other stuff going on, like a guy who represents German bureaucracy being obsessed with a stripper, and a cameo from William Burroughs (the movie is based loosely on something he wrote). But it's mostly a neon-lit nightmare with an incredible soundtrack (partially by The The and Soft Cell, along with the FM Einheit noisescapes).

FM's bored sort of girlfriend is played by Christiane Felscherinow, who's best known for being an underage junkie prostitute who had a book written about her which was turned into a 1981 movie, one of those that regularly appears on "what to watch if you never want to be happy again" lists. Her autobiography was made into a series on Amazon last year, which seems to have gotten good reviews too.


zomgmouse

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on May 23, 2022, 01:55:03 AMDecoder (1984)

FM Einheit off of Einsturzende Neubauten is a guy who, after meeting the High Priest (Genesis P-Orridge) has the revelation that he can replace the muzak played in burger restaurants with the noise music he's been creating, and break people out of their slumber. This leads to him being wanted by the police for fomenting revolution (the music is pushed over the edge by the sound of a frog being squeezed, in case you want to skip that bit).

There's other stuff going on, like a guy who represents German bureaucracy being obsessed with a stripper, and a cameo from William Burroughs (the movie is based loosely on something he wrote). But it's mostly a neon-lit nightmare with an incredible soundtrack (partially by The The and Soft Cell, along with the FM Einheit noisescapes).

FM's bored sort of girlfriend is played by Christiane Felscherinow, who's best known for being an underage junkie prostitute who had a book written about her which was turned into a 1981 movie, one of those that regularly appears on "what to watch if you never want to be happy again" lists. Her autobiography was made into a series on Amazon last year, which seems to have gotten good reviews too.



this is a very cool and increasingly less unknown film

Famous Mortimer

I forgot to mention if I liked it or not, but as @zomgmouse says, it's definitely worth watching.

Sonny_Jim


Sebastian Cobb


Artie Fufkin

Duel - 1971

Spielberg's directorial debut(?)
Brilliant!
So tense. Hot. Thirsty. Oily.
Haven't seen this since back in the day.
I was small and it terrified me.

Now I'm big, and although it didn't terrify me, it gave me a sense of dread.
Dennis Weaver is great in it.

One thing I've just learnt, the plot was ripped off to cram into an Incredible Hulk episode, and I think I remember it.

A big old 4 out of 5.

Sebastian Cobb

I watched that a while back and it is incredible how well the tension is built given you don't really see the truck driver and it's all through the headlights of the truck appearing in the mirror and stuff.

the science eel

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 21, 2022, 08:04:19 PMKilling Them Softly - neo noir with a fairly decent ensemble cast of characters. It's a story mostly about two low lifes (Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNeary) who get told to stick up an underground card game on the assumption the guy running it (Ray Liotta) will be fingered for it because he pulled that trick himself in the past.

The on-going backdrop is Obama's inauguration and the financial crash. And the parallels between its events and the disruption this event causes in the mob, the syndicate is very organised, diplomatic and a bit squeamish around the violent ways.

It was good fun, but a bit too smug and over-stylised. It did worse than it deserved to if Rotten Tomatoes reception is anything to go by.

I've seen Ben Mendelsohn in three or four films now, and he's always absolutely fucking brilliant. I'm beginning to wonder if his presence in a movie is a sign that it's going to be good.

Sebastian Cobb

Yeah I think he's usually a good sign. So's Sam Rockwell imo.

phantom_power

Ben Mendelsohn is brilliant. If you haven't seen them you should try Mississippi Grind or The Land of Steady Habits for great performances by him

zomgmouse

Quote from: the science eel on May 23, 2022, 05:08:59 PMI've seen Ben Mendelsohn in three or four films now, and he's always absolutely fucking brilliant. I'm beginning to wonder if his presence in a movie is a sign that it's going to be good.

yes except occasionally Australian films such as Babyteeth which is not very good

however young Mendelsohn in Return Home and The Big Steal is very good and both these films are worth seeking out (the latter in particular)

Sonny_Jim

Quote from: Artie Fufkin on May 23, 2022, 04:52:06 PMSpielberg's directorial debut
First feature film, although he'd done a couple of TV episodes before that including an absolute ripper of a Columbo episode.  If you've never watched a Columbo episode it's a good place to start.

Murder by the book (1971) on IMDB

EOLAN

Fracture (2007)

The most infantilised court-room drama I have ever seen. Ryan Gosling and his colleagues prosecuting the case just seem to make any preparation to their case an absolute afterthought. You know when Anthony Hopkins is meant to be sinister because he puts on a Northern Ireland accent for some reason in their moments.

And the actual pacing, cinematography and the supposed surprise of the big reveal are all piss-poor.

Bad Ambassador

Spielberg's first credits were for television - episodes of medical dramas Marcus Welby MD and The Psychiatrist, legal drama Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, two segments for supernatural anthology and Twilight Zone successor Night Gallery, as mentioned, the first regular episode of Columbo and an episode of The Name of the Game. Supposedly a drama about the publishing business with feature-length episodes, LA 2017 was a science-fiction drama in which one character found himself projected decades into the future where the world is heavily polluted. It turns out to have been a dream, and was one of the last episodes of the series - they were clearly running out of ideas. Spielberg followed this with three TV movies - Duel, haunted house drama Something Evil and Savage, a pilot for an unproduced series from the creators of Columbo, starring Martin Landau as a reporter. After this, he wouldn't direct for television until Amazing Stories in 1985.