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Post by spiderwort on May 9, 2023 2:10:54 GMT
Appropriated from kijii on the old board, this is a thread about movies you've just seen, for the first time or re-watches. List the title only, or add comments as well (I really like that idea). And, of course, feel free to add posters and images, too.
As kijii said: "This would make a good record of what you viewed and when. It also would also give us an opportunity to see what others, here, are seeing in a more immediate format."
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Post by politicidal1 on May 10, 2023 15:21:44 GMT
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Post by Nalkarj on May 10, 2023 17:48:43 GMT
Transferring my post from the “classics last week” thread to this one—thanks, spiderwort! On Sunday I saw Evelyn Prentice, 1934, dir. William K. Howard. This is a fun enough little crime/courtroom drama, though I’m only really commenting on it because it has William Powell and Myrna Loy and came out the same year as The Thin Man. While TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said it’s not Thin Man-like, and it certainly skews more toward drama than comedy or mystery, Powell and Loy have the same easygoing charm—and the same oodles of chemistry. Most of it is very entertaining, though the pace slackens as the movie approaches its ending—and that ending does come off as something of a copout. Interestingly, the mystery plot is almost identical to that in a Powell picture one year earlier, Private Detective 62. I think Private Detective 62 is ultimately the better movie, but Evelyn Prentice is worth seeing for Powell’s and Loy’s performances. ____________________________________________________________ And then I finished The Strawberry Blonde, 1941, dir. Raoul Walsh, which I’d started watching last week. This mostly interested me because my late grandfather, who was a major influence in my love of “old movies” and whom I miss dearly, liked to say, “That’s the kind of hairpin I am,” which is James Cagney’s catchphrase here. He was a big Cagney fan, and he liked to sing “And the Band Played On,” and I have no doubt he’d seen this movie—I wish I could have talked to him about it. Otherwise, this is fine. It moves fine, Cagney’s as good as always, it’s not all that funny but it’s cheery and entertaining. And that’s all this hairpin has to say about it.
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Post by timshelboy on May 10, 2023 19:56:58 GMT
Lengthy, lavish ripping yarn about gentleman thief,
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Post by Nalkarj on May 10, 2023 21:40:37 GMT
Oh yeah, I rewatched Mark of the Vampire (1935, dir. Tod Browning) the other day. I still like it, though on this viewing the flaws stood out stronger to me. That frankly laughable ending, of course, but also that awkward wipe from a daytime church steeple to a nighttime gypsy camp, and some bad dialogue (“Sir Karol was murdered. There’s no cause for alarm”), and how the first five minutes or so are completely irrelevant. Wow, that sounds negative. But it does have fog banks’ worth of atmosphere, and it does have an entertainingly bizarre Lionel Barrymore performance, and it is just so darn interesting as director Tod Browning’s bitter parody of his own Dracula. The word parody got me into trouble on a site called the Monster Kids’ Classic Board, but yeah, I stand by it. {Spoiler}The very concept of doing a Dracula imitation—which everyone on that board agreed is what Browning is doing, with Elizabeth Allan looking and sounding like Helen Chandler, Michael Visaroff back as the innkeeper with almost identical dialogue (“bat thorn” instead of “wolfsbane,” hardy har har), the gag with the spider web, and of course Bela Lugosi—and then revealing it’s all phony strikes me as parodic. It’s almost like Browning, that old carnival huckster, laughing at his own movie—and its audience.
And on this watch I keep noticing all these little things early on that aren’t clues, exactly, but kinda let the viewer know Browning isn’t playing this seriously—the hand sticking out from the grave that we find out is a garden weeder, the moving armor caused by a kitten, etc. Also, the movie has this odd dreamlike sense to it that I also get from Dracula. To a lesser degree, I should note— Dracula strikes me as dreamlike, even surrealistic, all the way through, while in Mark I mostly get that sense as the film approaches its disappointing ending. {Spoiler}The scene where Allan talks with the actor playing her dead father always sticks in my mind as a bit spooky, even though we know it’s all a con, and quite a bit sad. And, oh yeah, {Spoiler}the con makes no sense. No sense at all. Neither does Jean Hersholt’s murder plot, for that matter. And Lugosi, though he looks great as the vampire, gets more to do in the trailer than in the actual movie. But all of that is just part of Mark of the Vampire’s extreme oddness, even 90 years later. Not a great movie, sure, but what an interesting one.
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Post by politicidal1 on May 10, 2023 22:28:21 GMT
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Post by Chalice_Of_Evil on May 11, 2023 4:26:39 GMT
West Side Story (1961).
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Post by Teleadm on May 11, 2023 4:29:19 GMT
Alive and Kicking 1958 British comedy directed by Cyril Frankel. Dame Sybil Thorndike, Kathleen Harrison, and Estelle Winwood are three old ladies who escape from a retirement home in England and wind up on a small island off Ireland. There they meet Stanley Holloway, just returned from America. When he goes over a cliff into the sea, they take over his new-bought property and pass themselves off as his nieces. They have no money, so they wind up organizing a sweater industry. Not a great movie but a very joyful one mainly thanks to it's elderly cast who seems to have the time of their lives. These are not pitiful ladies, they have energy and a can-do spirit instead. A young Richard Harris made his movie debut here, playing an island local.
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Post by politicidal1 on May 12, 2023 0:50:58 GMT
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Post by Teleadm on May 12, 2023 5:58:24 GMT
Moonrise 1948 directed by Frank Borzage. "HER ARMS...HER LOVE...HIS ONLY ESCAPE FROM A HERITAGE OF HATE!". This is a very difficult movie to explain, a very moody and complex noir with many layers. In a small Virginia town, Danny Hawkins' father is hanged for murder when Danny (Dane Clark) is just an infant. The result is that, for his entire life, other kids have tormented him for being the son of a man who was executed. One night at a dance, out in the woods, Danny and his tormenter since childhood are having a fight. Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges) is the tormenter, and when the fight turns against him, he picks up a rock. Danny gets the rock away from him and does to Sykes what Sykes was going to do to him - bashes his skull in repeatedly, with a lifetime of anger over this guy's bullying swirling in his head. The rest of the town is about as likeable as Sykes was - judgmental, snobby, a hive mentality. But those characters are largely kept at a distance as part of the crowd. The ones you get to know are likeable and sympathetic people - a retired brakeman living in the woods (Rex Ingram), Sykes' girl whom Danny unfortunately loves (Gail Russell), and the sheriff (Allyn Joslyn), playing against stereotype for a lawman of a southern town of the era. That long explanation is just the set-up, scraping the surface since there is much more to this story, and yet it's not the story that's important its how it was done with it's many moods and settings. It's dark and moody with many twists and turns that keep the story moving forward with many interesting camera angles and movements. I'm not sure if I got this movie right myself. It was a very good copy I watched.
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Post by persistenceofvision on May 12, 2023 22:44:54 GMT
LICORICE PIZZA One of those films like Inherent Vice or Punch Drunk Love that Paul Thomas Anderson knocks out rapidly between Oscar-baiting masterpieces: I think I enjoyed this more than some of his masterpieces.
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Post by LeBeauSerge on May 13, 2023 14:36:30 GMT
Wings Of Desire (1987) Probably the best German film I've seen, like nothing I've seen before.
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Post by timshelboy on May 13, 2023 16:43:33 GMT
All star asylum drama with the staff as bonkers as the patients - florid Minnelli melodrama.
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Post by theravenking on May 13, 2023 16:56:05 GMT
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Post by Deleted on May 13, 2023 20:20:51 GMT
Mrs Harris Goes To Paris (2022)
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