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

[C_Larence]

It is a fun bit of action schlock (or was however many years ago I last watched it). Not sure if that's me being dense or the film not actually making sense, but I never got the bit about him

Spoiler alert

swapping guns to frame his partner. And then it turns out the baddies were on to him anyway, so what was the point?

[close]

Spoiler alert

It seems like they edited the wrong scene in when they explain the gun swapping situation because I'm pretty sure the part they show happens chronologically after the crime Preston is trying to frame Brandt for, so he wouldn't have had his gun there based on the flashback they show. The whole movie is full of plot holes but it does make me miss mid budget non franchise "blockbusters"

[close]

[Inspector Norse]

Two Shots Fired Suburban Buenos Aires teen finds a gun in the shed and shoots himself (twice), seemingly on a whim. He survives, and life goes on.
A peculiar little film that seems mainly to be an exercise in anti-narrative, with the climactic event happening right at the start and the rest of the film switching between characters in small vignettes and subplots that fizzle out or never really get going. The teenager recruits a new member to his woodwind group, his brother meets a girl who may or may not be splitting up with her boyfriend, their mother has her trip to the seaside gatecrashed by a group of irritating and unpredictable acquaintances, the dog runs away.
It's amusing at times and nicely filmed in that typical "I'm an art film" way with rigid camerawork and careful, detailed framing. The cast underplay very well: no emotions but some lovely blank expressions, particularly Susana Pampín as the mother who spends the whole film with a look of bemused disdain on her face.
I'm not sure it really adds up to much or has a lot to say, but I enjoyed it.

[Egyptian Feast]

Highway Racer (1977) Maurizio Merli shaves his moustache and takes a break from kicking fuck out of crime to be miscast as a cocky yet incompetent police driver obsessed with speed and a danger to everybody. When he attempts to tackle a master bank robber who is dead good at driving fast, he fails repeatedly and spectacularly, but an experienced older officer takes him under his wing and teaches him how to do that cool stunt where you drive on two wheels without killing your irritating comedy relief sidekick.

I love Merli's usual angry moustachioed authoritarian beating the shit out of a succession of increasingly nasty punks schtick and was initially disappointed he was playing another character in this. This guy is much less of a fascist and bothered more by health and safety than crime, which does make him sound like a more likeable protagonist but honestly he was a bit of a dick. I was rooting for the classy villain, a poor man's Omar Sharif, all the way. Usually in Italian crime flicks, even the likeable baddies will eventually do something unforgivable (often rapey), but this guy is all class. I wanted him to get away with it and he could've too, if he wasn't so damned honourable.

Excellent car chases and stunts throughout, climaxing in an awesome double car quarry leap, rightfully repeated from multiple angles. Despite all this, the real highlight for me was the first time Merli flips his car and you can see a stunt dummy's head detach and spin through the air in slow-motion. The crash is non-fatal, so perhaps they should've retooled that for the bit where his annoying partner bites it and they could've given him the gruesome demise he deserved. There's another great bit where he finally pulls off the driving on two wheels stunt and when the car comes to a halt you can briefly see Rose West behind the wheel.

[Famous Mortimer]

Virgin Hunters 2 and 3

The first one, which I saw under its original title "Test Tube Teens From The Year 3000", while a trashy sex comedy, had some effort put into it and was solidly entertaining (if you skipped through all the sex stuff). Part 2 has about 20 minutes of plot mixed in with interminable softcore rubbish, and part 3 has, maybe, a minute of plot?

I'm not proud of myself, but I had a wisdom tooth out and didn't feel in the mood for anything too challenging. With skipping through the soft-focus nonsense, both movies took me about half an hour. I promise to watch something slightly smarter next.

[sevendaughters]

Still haven't seen Top Gun and never will. You can't make me.

L'argent 8/10

The final film of Bresson which he made when 83 not a bad one to bow out on.

A counterfeit note is passed around by a load of tossers until it unfortunately lands in the hands of an innocent civilian and then his life goes all wrong. Its not peak Bresson, but its enjoyable enough and the ending is a genuine wtf moment in a good way. Only 80 mins long also .

I think this one is a feckin riot, the first 10 minutes absolutely bounces along, and it's boiling with so much piss and resentment, it's a shame that Bresson didn't live to 163 because he seemed to get angrier and more interested in the material as he got older and wore more leisurewear.

Wings Of Desire last night. Almost* unbearable, interminable, pretentious nonsense.

Resisted the temptation to see it in the cinema on its reissue as it was kind of a gateway to Art Cinema to me, but I think there's two other things going for it other than Peter Falk: i. it is very humane and tender and I think there's just not enough of that and ii. it is one of the few films that actually embodies that very spirit of Art Cinema that popcorn heads take the piss out of in all of its precocious preciousness.

If you want terrible, check the sequel.

I watched two more Rohmer films - Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle and The Aviator's Wife - which are both solid 7s and two more Wilders - Ace in the Hole and Some Like It Hot - which are both so good that it is almost unreasonable and unfair because Hollywood will never be this good again.

[the science eel]

two more Wilders - Ace in the Hole and Some Like It Hot - which are both so good that it is almost unreasonable and unfair because Hollywood will never be this good again.

I watched SLIH again a couple of weeks ago and it really knocked me out, more than ever. There isn't a wasted second, and they're all totally in tune with the spirit and the humour of the thing. It just left me feeling happy that such art exists, huge talents collaborating to make something so cheerful and sharp. And yeah, we'll never see anything remotely as good again. But it's not going anywhere.

[Crenners]

That's how I (and the enlightened people of the future) feel about Top Gun.

I must watch SLIH.

[Famous Mortimer]

Ritual In Transfigured Time - 1946, Maya Deren

Only partly because I didn't want my last four films on Letterboxd to still have Virgin Hunters 2 and 3 on it.

It's an extraordinary work of dance and light, which I get the feeling I understood relatively little of on first viewing. But it's beautiful, and it's on Youtube for nowt.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Burning an Illusion - fantastic early 80's film set in London about the life/drama of a young black woman, played by Cassie McFarlane who was great. Apparently the second film in Britain to have a black director as well, a few familiar faces from Babylon in there.

[zomgmouse]

Ritual In Transfigured Time - 1946, Maya Deren

Only partly because I didn't want my last four films on Letterboxd to still have Virgin Hunters 2 and 3 on it.

It's an extraordinary work of dance and light, which I get the feeling I understood relatively little of on first viewing. But it's beautiful, and it's on Youtube for nowt.

yes this is incredible! i really need to see more of deren's work

[Famous Mortimer]

Meshes Of The Afternoon

Another Maya Deren film - her most famous one, named the 40th greatest American movie ever made by the BBC in 2015. Probably a bit low on the list, if we're being honest.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Meshes Of The Afternoon

Another Maya Deren film - her most famous one, named the 40th greatest American movie ever made by the BBC in 2015. Probably a bit low on the list, if we're being honest.

Yea it's dead ace that, you can hear the sound of lynch scribbling furiously throughout, not a bad thing

[Mobius]

I watched The Lighthouse. Loved it, funny and weird and looked ace.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I watched The Lighthouse. Loved it, funny and weird and looked ace.

The black and white one with Willem Dafoe? It's an execllent film, that.

[Mobius]

The black and white one with Willem Dafoe? It's an execllent film, that.

Yeah loved it, definitely felt a bit different to the usual movie. Loved Dafoe's big epic monologues and the fighting and farting and all the sounds of the ocean and the foghorn.

[Inspector Norse]

Yellow Sea Na Hong-jin's follow-up to the entertainingly nutty The Chaser is a more expansive thriller following a "joseonjok" - a poor Chinese of Korean background - as he goes to Korea on a local crime boss's order to kill some guy and try to find his missing wife while he's there.
The first hour of this is a taut and deep suspense noir, really getting into the desperation and moral confusion of our protagonist, before the deed is done (not in the expected way) and the action kicks off. It's a jarring shift, the dark tension suddenly making way for a ridiculous Keystone Kops sequence, and then the plot also goes completely off the rails as another local gangster gets involved and the second half of the film just dissolves into a lot of people attacking each other (with knives, axes and, at one point, a roast chicken) without it ever being entirely clear why, where or who half of them are.
It's a shame because there are some really exciting and skilfully-handled action sequences, and it's a very bloody, full-on film for those who like that kind of thing; it just gets lost trying to amp up the violence and drama, missing the themes and the tension that made it start so promisingly, so that by the end it's hard to care about any twists or turns any more. A shame.

[PlanktonSideburns]

You've made it sound like a five star film in that review

[Inspector Norse]

Oh if you just want to see madcap shakycam fight and chase sequences it's a blast, just the way it completely abandoned coherent plotting or any attempt at two-dimensional characterisation meant it got tired before the end.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Ah fair enough, might give it a go

[Bad Ambassador]

Watched Being There on Saturday for the first time in a while. Peter Sellers, in his last film released before he died, plays Chance, a simple-minded idiot who has never left the townhouse where he has lived his entire life, tending the garden and watching television. When the old man who owns the house dies, the lawyers find no official record of Chance's existence and turf him out into the street, where after a day of aimless wandering he is hit by a car belonging to one of the world's richest men. Taken back to his huge estate to recover, Chance's non-sequiters about seasons of growth are taken to be deep economic wisdom, and he quickly forms a bond with the dying tycoon, bringing him into powerful circles and catching the attention of his much younger wife.

Sellers is a revelation as Chance, a person characterised as a total blank, a mirror in which people see what they want. Different characters describe him in wildly varying ways, but the only person who suspects is the tycoon's doctor, who even after he asks Chance point blank about who he is declines to tell his employer the truth as he knows how much good Chance's presence has done. There are themes about the power of the media, race (Chance's lifelong caretaker, the old man's maid, now living in a scuzzy rest home, sees Chance interviewed on television and ruminates that as a white man he was able to walk right into success without any effort), mental illness and politics. It's also often very funny, despite being presented in a very understated, restrained style. Shirley Maclaine as the wife, Melvyn Douglas as the tycoon and Richard Dysart as the doctor are all excellent, and Hal Ashby's direction is sublime.

The best-known element of the film is its ending. The tycoon dies, and at his funeral the pallbearers agree that they will nominate the mysterious "Chauncey Gardiner" as the next president. Meanwhile, Chance wanders off, and after straightening a sapling weighed down by a branch, heads back towards the main house - right over the surface of a lake. The scene was a late addition to the script and its meaning left to the viewer. I've always interpreted it as Chance being such an absence of a person, rather than a physical entity, that even the laws of physic don't properly apply to him, but others have come up with more complex readings.

A remarkable film, funny, warm and compassionate while also angry at the state of society that someone like Chance can rise without trace while saying and doing nothing of any substance at all.

[Blumf]

The Way of the Gun (2000)

One of them late 90s/early 00s wannabe-cool crime films. You know they type, usually involves Mexico or general Hispanic stuff, for some reason. I blame Quentin Tarantino.

I think the trick with this one is to go in understanding everyone is supposed to be a cunt. Once you're comfortable with that, it's not too bad. There's some good chase/action sequences, and the overall story (a kinda cross of Raising Arizona and Charley Varrick) makes it decently engaging. There's a good contrast of old-school vs new-school criminal cunts doing their thing. James Caan and Benicio del Toro work well together. Cann, especially, is good here.

There's a bit too much pretension here and there, that nonsensical speech at the end, for example. If it had just relaxed a bit, it might have been better.

7/10

[ImmaculateClump]

Being There

Oh yeah, it's good film that, nice and relaxing and fun. Been a lot of years since I saw that one.
Yeah, I think that's what I thought about the ending as well.
How he just floated through life blissfully ignorant and people were projecting all sorts of their own thoughts and meaning to what he was doing.
Then they turn that on it's head. Like he just wanted to walk over there so he did it and no one was there to tell him he'd sink.
Probably not a very hot take, but yeah, like you say, it's a wonderful reminder that life doesn't need to be complicated. You don't have to be the hero of your own narrative. Just nurturing plants or other people and being kind and bringing happiness to people is enough to keep you content.

[druss]

Event Horizon

A little frustrating as the good bits were absolutely spectacular and I also do wonder what the original 2 hour cut would have looked like. Some truly horrific imagery though, up there with Hellraiser. Pissed myself for a good few minutes at "We're leaving", delivered as if someone had made an uncouth joke at a party, rather than having just witnessed a murderous cannibal orgy.

Panned by critics at the time, reminds me of a similar thing happening with The Thing, although The Thing having bad reviews is less understandable as it is pretty much flawless.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Event Horizon

A little frustrating as the good bits were absolutely spectacular and I also do wonder what the original 2 hour cut would have looked like. Some truly horrific imagery though, up there with Hellraiser. Pissed myself for a good few minutes at "We're leaving", delivered as if someone had made an uncouth joke at a party, rather than having just witnessed a murderous cannibal orgy.

Panned by critics at the time, reminds me of a similar thing happening with The Thing, although The Thing having bad reviews is less understandable as it is pretty much flawless.

15 year old me thought this was the absolute best thing I'd ever seen for a while, watching it's influences diminishes it a bit but a lovely bit of business none the less

[ImmaculateClump]

I came to it after having heard everyone talk about how underrated it was, so it was a bit of a letdown. It's all over the shop, but I agree, there's some good stuff in there.

[PlanktonSideburns]

I think at the time I'd probably only seen this, Scooby Doo and Bad Boys

Obviously the day I taped The Thing off the telly I realised what a chunp I had been. used to watch that on an endless loop waiting for the school bus

[ImmaculateClump]

Yeah, the thing is amazing. Peak practical special effects.
No going back now :(

[Bad Ambassador]

I think Event Horizon suffered because it's Hellraiser in space, and came out only about a year after the actual Hellraiser in Space, Hellraiser: Bloodline.

[SteveDave]

It was my wife's birthday last Wednesday, so we took the day off and watched 3 Nicolas Cage films

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent
Really enjoyed this. We were second guessing that the Mandalorian was in on it the whole time and everyone on the island was an actor but then we were wrong.

Knowing
This was a 4/5 until the very final scene when it plummeted to a 2/5.

Dog Eat Dog
Absolute dog shit. Willem Dafoe co-stars in a film that's like an American Guy Ritchie horrorshow. Paul Schrader wrote and directed it but used film students for the crew which results in some nice shots but that doesn't help the story being something a 14 year old would come up with to be edgy.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I've always thought of Event Horizon as a sort of unofficial and very loose adaptation of Doom. Obviously, there's a lot that's different about it (no guns, no demons, no Mars) but the core hell in space stuff is all there and works better than a 1:1 translation probably could (e.g. the utterly shite actual Doom movie). It's kind of a good illustration of what works in both media.