Rate The Last Movie You Saw

[drinkanddestroy]

The Purple Gang (1959) 7.5/10

A Prohibition Era gangster movie, this one taking place in Detroit. Robert Blake plays the queer leader of the gang. Barry Sullivan is the police lieutenant assigned to the gang.


The Caine Mutiny (1954) 8/10

Bogie is great and Fred MacMurray is hilarious, all the performances are amazing. My only problem with this movie is an abundance of very obvious process shots in the scenes at sea.

[noodles_leone]

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) 6/10. Standard Wes Anderson whimsy, this time about a pre-adolescent couple who run away from the world the grown ups have made so that they, the children, can act more like . . . grown ups. (The adults of course are the real children). It's Summer With Monika without the sex and with jokes--exceedingly precious ones--instead. A pleasant enough way to wile away two hours, though, in the end, none of it amounts to much. The patented Anderson visuals are laid on thickly.

Just saw it! 8/10. May be Anderson's best. It's cool to see him talk about something else than rich people depressions. The part with the children really really works and you even get some adventure feel (which is so rare that even 5 secondes of it gives a movie a rating above average). Rating a Wes Anderson film after the first viewing only is always a guessinggame, since the real value of the movie always reveals itself after repeted viewings. We'll see in a couple years if this one is better than life aquatic.

[PowerRR]

Rushmore
Probably my favorite Wes Anderson

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Very good. Slow start but great movie.

Bottle Rocket
Probably my least favorite Wes Anderson. Still good.

The Thin Red Line
10/10, Malick's best

The Tree of Life
Incredible

[cigar joe]

Brighton Rock (1947) A great British Film Noir with a young Richard Attenborough set in the Coney Island-ish atmosphere of Brighton, 9/10 review to follow soon.

[Groggy]

Brighton Rock (1947) A great British Film Noir with a young Richard Attenborough set in the Coney Island-ish atmosphere of Brighton, 9/10 review to follow soon.

Glad to hear it.

[Groggy]

Rewatches of:

The Crucible - 8/10

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing - 6/10 - Pampered Sarah Miles runs away from sleazy husband George Hamilton and winds up a not-unwilling hostage of outlaw Burt Reynolds. Starts out great, then gradually drifts off into oblivion. Like most '70s Westerns it's episodic and character-driven, which wouldn't be bad if it led somewhere worthwhile. At least there are some neat set pieces (Reynolds' slugfest with Jack Warden) and pretty scenery along the way. Reynolds is great but what the heck is Miles doing in a Western? The assorted making-of controversies are more interesting than the actual movie.

[cigar joe]

The File On Thelma Jordan (1950) Director: Robert Siodmak, with Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, and Paul Kelly, sort of a Noir light in the same vein as "No Man Of Her Own", "Sudden Fear", "Mildred Pierce", entertaining enough to be interesting but not very hard core noir in style. 7/10

[Amaze]

Prometheus(2012)
My first 3d experience. It was a little weird at first but the picture smoothed out a bit when I got used to it. It didn't add a whole lot to the movie other than being a nice little effect.
The movie itself was somewhat disappointing. The plot is like a swizz cheese, both story and dialogue suffers. If you're gonna see it don't go in expecting another classic like Alien and Blade Runner. It's just your average blockbuster.
I'll give it a "mildy enjoyable".

[dave jenkins]

If you're gonna see it don't go in expecting another classic like Alien and Blade Runner. It's just your average blockbuster.
I'll give it a "mildy enjoyable".

I'll give it a pass, then. Thanks.

[Groggy]

Prometheus(2012)
My first 3d experience. It was a little weird at first but the picture smoothed out a bit when I got used to it. It didn't add a whole lot to the movie other than being a nice little effect.
The movie itself was somewhat disappointing. The plot is like a swizz cheese, both story and dialogue suffers. If you're gonna see it don't go in expecting another classic like Alien and Blade Runner. It's just your average blockbuster.
I'll give it a "mildy enjoyable".

A Ridley Scott film, "average"? Shock of all shocks.

[drinkanddestroy]

TCM has been playing some real shitty 50's Crime Dramas lately:

Inside the Mafia (1959) 5.5/10

A ridiculous movie which refers very loosely to two real-life Mafia events: the murder of Albert Anastasia while under the towels in a barber chair in a Manhattan hotel; and the infamous Mafia meeting at Appalachin (re-named "Apple Lake" for this movie). At the end, the narrator predicts that the breakup of the Appalchin meeting and arrests of the underworld leaders in attendance may mean the end of organized crime in America. Yeah, that seems pretty accurate  

The Night Holds Terror (1955) 6/10

I hate when directors think they can just switch narration anytime they please without having to justify whose point of view the story is being told from. The story -- about a family held hostage by 3 bad guys -- begins with a third person narration (stuff like "this is a true story that happened to..." then switches to the main character (like "I was never more terrified in my life...") and then switches back to the third party narrator toward the end as it suddenly changes to a police procedural and the narrator describes the police effort to nab the bad guys.
That sort of shit simply shows contempt for the audience. The narration has to be justified as much as anything else does.


The Hitch-Hiker (1953) 4/10

A criminal on the run holds two fishermen hostage as he tries to avoid police through California and Mexico. The whole movie is basically spent going around and around with the bad guy holding a gun to the back of the good guys. The sort of shit you've seen a million times and which could make for a decent 20 minutes worth of screenplay, not an entire 71 minute movie  

[emmo26]

In Cold Blood (1967) 9/10

What an amazing movie. My only minor complaint is that Scott Wilson is not very good as one of the leads; Robert Blake is good as the other lead (made all the scarier knowing about what he did later in life... yeah, I know he was acquitted). That murder scene was spellbinding...

I saw this the other day, Scott Wilson reminded me very much of a cross between Dennis Hopper and Michael Madsen

Other things I noted was the "Nature born killer" line, the camera shot from the boot (very QT)

and the middle finger salute....was this the first film to do this???

[Amaze]

I'll give it a pass, then. Thanks.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh. I think it's worth seeing once. It's not as bad as what T3 was to the Terminator trilogy.

[drinkanddestroy]

An Unfinished Life (2005) 7.5/10

If a movie is done well and has good performances (Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Lopez, and the little girl who plays her daughter), it can be entertaining even if the story doesn't feel very original 

[noodles_leone]

Prometheus

Hard one to rate.

8/10 : Great "adventure" first part, cool characters, great effects, nice use of 3D (no overuse: the movie is actually quite flat, except for CGI, which, as we now know, look much better in 3D. What looks especially cool in 3D are holograms.), all in all gorgeous cinematography, true adventure feel, nice vision of our future (the inventions you see in the movie are believable, the ergonomics of the spaceship are believable...), a few übercool scenes.

2/10 : far less exciting second half, "cool characters" are not used (while bad ones are), lots of ridiculous dialogues (few in the first half, then more and more), lots of incoherence, a few weirdly/badly done scenes, most creatures look terrible (very videogamish, while other CGI look gorgeous), more and more faith/parenthood nonsense (if you're gonna do Blade Runner, you'll need to have real depth in the movie and some utterly crazy dialogues like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_soliloquy, or your movie will suffer a lot).

5/10 : the "Alien" part. The movie gains nothing (and loses nothing, to me) by claiming to be part of the Alien universe. On the other hand, the Alien quadrilogy gains/looses nothing either.

I guess it has to be seen at least once, for the underlined part at least. I'll probably buy the BD, because I have to learn a lot from it. All in all, i'd say it's got the begining of the first Alien, the action part of an "average" alien movie (think Aliens or Alien 3), and the whole thing is brought down by stupid dialogues and botched themes, probably added by a script doctor after version 1 or 2 of the script.