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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)


Mr. Breathmask

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19 hours ago, Richard said:

The more I watch TND, the more I warm to it. It has its faults (it's too fast, has very little character, and criminally under uses Baker and Jay - "throwing the playing cards" should have stayed in), but it looks good, and Pryce is...delicious. The score is a fantastic calling-card, for Arnold.


Yep, an Oddjob-style 'deadly gimmick' wasted ... the cards could've had super-sharpened corners, and Jay could've 'nicked' Bond with a few of them.    

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On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

With all due respect to Deakins and Young, this might just be the best shot Bond film.  It also may be the best movie with James Bond in it, even if it is not the best "James Bond" movie.  What it may lack in mystique and charm, it makes up for with a sophistication and depth that is rather uncommon in the series.  The pacing here is deliberate, yet still engaging, thanks in part to the very sharp editing.  The action sequences are top notch, especially the assault on Piz Gloria, which still looks and feels very fresh, modern.  And the earlier sequence where leading up to Bond seeing Tracy at the skating rink is masterful filmmaking on all levels.  Lazenby's performance is mixed.  He is flat when he goes for his Sean Connery impression, but is more than serviceable when performing the action scenes, and actually surprisingly good during the romantic ones with Riggs, who is magnificent.  Tracy is by far the best Bond girl.  

Capital score, too.

4/4

 

The Living Daylights (1987)

Bond by the numbers.  Competent, mostly engaging.  The camp has been toned down here, for sure, but some of it lingers.  The villains seem to think that they are still in a Moore Bond.  I really like Dalton's approach to the character, with its darkness, its mystery.  And no other Bond can believably appreciate what exquisite cello playing is, eh?  For me, it is the right way to go.  But, he does not feel completely at ease with himself in the role, and can't really pull off the one-liners.  He also does not play to the audience, like Connery, Moore, and even Craig do. But, of course, he never had the advantage that the similarly dark and deep Craig did, namely a hard reboot.   

3/4

 

License To Kill (1989)

A pretty solid Bond film.  Dark, disturbing.  This one does something thing that the best Bonds do.  It smoothly integrates the Bond mythos with the prevailing mood of the times.  Most Connery movies do this.  Most Moore films go to far with the zeitgeist.  Here, the "greed is good" heady spirit of the 80s, in both hunters and hunted, has a clash with the larger than life that is Bond, and not just any Bond, but Dalton's Bond, on the edge, human, professional, yet flawed, not one to cross.  Bond screws up a couple of times here, has his judgement clouded by his personal feelings, with consequences for himself and others.  And Sanchez is a refreshingly realistic Bond villain, with a strong arc to boot.  He looses his masculine self-confidence, his organization, his code of loyalty, becoming unhinged as a grinning Bond facilitates it all.  This is a proto-Craig Bond, really.  

And Q is in the field here!  Come on, you can't top that level of awesome, now can you?

There are a couple of issues, though.  The romantic subplot feels a tad out of place, obligatory.  GoldenEye is so much better at this. Both of the female supporting leads are a little bit annoying, to me, but that may be the point, especially with Lupe.  It is a revelation to see how Dalton alternates between a chivalrous Bond offering her help, to a brutal one putting a knife to her throat, then back again to expressing concern about her wounds.  And Bouvier's transition to short hair is actually a wonderful piece of serendipitous character development.

Also, like TLD, the denouement is very weak, cheesy even, and completely out of touch with the rest of the movie, save for the equally out of place boat love scene. 

Overall, I must say this is one of my top 5 Bonds.

3.5/4

 

 

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There is a weekly special on TV here, showing the early Bond movies. Haven't seen them in forever. Watching Thunderball right now.

Film making used to be so simple, so effective, so unafraid to be obvious and provocative, so ... fun.

The fuck happened?

You can't watch a film these days without getting fucked in the brain with a moral or political message.

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6 minutes ago, gkgyver said:

There is a weekly special on TV here, showing the early Bond movies. Haven't seen them in forever. Watching Thunderball right now.

Film making used to be so simple, so effective, so unafraid to be obvious and provocative, so ... fun.

The fuck happened?

You can't watch a film these days without getting fucked in the brain with a moral or political message.

 

Absolutely agree. I love the first 6 bond films. All classics. And 6 classic scores.

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1 hour ago, gkgyver said:

You can't watch a film these days without getting fucked in the brain with a moral or political message.

Your talking about movies that desperately want to hit the zeitgeist which later suffer from the lack of timelessness. These movies occur in every decade, following annoying trends that change from time to time. The trends of the 80s, for example, were much worse, but they're painted with nostalgia.

 

I've seen a lot of films lately, ranked from the most to the least convincing one:

 

Tideland 5/5 (Wow, one of the most outstanding movies of this millenium.)

Phantom Thread 5/5

Hell or High Water 4/5

Dunkirk 4/5

Ex Drummer 4/5

The VVitch: A New-England Folktale 4/5

Gravity 4/5

Apocalypto 3/5

The Thing 2/5 (Just a classic, because of the effects.)

 

As you can easily see, I have had a really enjoyable time. The first 6 films were extremely interesting and original.

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1 hour ago, dougie said:

Operation Petticoat

 

Yeah nah. Pleasant flick but I'm really not much into Blake Edwards' films it seems.

 

Breakfast at Tiffany, Days of Wine and Roses, Experiment in Terror, A Shot in The Dark, Victor and Victoria, The Wild Rovers (!), 10, Skin Deep, and maybe S.O.B. and one of the later Pink Panther movies are for me. He did have some great scenes once in a while but also is a typical case (imho) of a director who didn't wait for a script polish, which in sharp contrast to a perfectionist like Wilder resulted in a lot of so-so movies that always hovered between 40-70% of what could have been.

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Dark Victory

 

I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative! Bette Davis plays the longest death scene in cinematic history, and despite her overwhelming screen dominance, sidekick Geraldine Fitzgerald somehow manages to attract attention for her straight-faced performance. Ronald Reagan reminds me of an X-Files serial killer from Season 2. Bogey is disappointingly wasted.

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1 hour ago, dougie said:

Dark Victory

 

I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative! Bette Davis plays the longest death scene in cinematic history, and despite her overwhelming screen dominance, sidekick Geraldine Fitzgerald somehow manages to attract attention for her straight-faced performance. Ronald Reagan reminds me of an X-Files serial killer from Season 2. Bogey is disappointingly wasted.

What an utterly stupid review. It is one of the great melodrama's in film history. Bogey is fine as a 3 or 4th billed actor. Betty Davis deserved the Oscar over scarlett.

its probably beyond your knowledge that at this point in film history Bogey is not a top star.

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9 minutes ago, JoeinAR said:

What an utterly stupid review. It is one of the great melodramas in film history. Bogey is fine as a third or fourth billed actor. Bette Davis deserved the Oscar over Vivien Leigh.

 

It's probably beyond (the forest) your knowledge that at this point in film history Bogey was not a top star.

 

What are you talking about? I enjoyed the film.

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Ant-man and the wasp.

 

Not bad, but there's too much science in it, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas are bad in the dramatic moments, Hannah John-Kamen is boring (oh, look, a British villain in an American movie...), but it's great that Michelle Pfeiffer was brought back. I hope to see more of her than Lilly next time, but that's probably hoping for the impossible. Michael Peña is still great and the final scenes are just what I needed to be interested in future films in this franchise, but the spell is definitely wearing off now.

The score has some good moments, but the emotional parts are lacking emotion.

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Yeah, I caught it again a couple of days ago. Its nice to see Marvel return to their action-comedy roots, and in a more scaled-back fashion, to boot. There are two caveats to that sentence, though: while the film is enjoyably small-scale, it has way too many villains and too many moving parts in its climax, to its detriment; but to its credit, its comedic sensibilities are matched by heartfelt moments between the characters (most notably, Hope and her parents) that really, really work.

 

Nice interlude of a film.

***1/2 out of *****

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5 hours ago, The Illustrious Jerry said:

One bummer is that the voice actors are all British, and none of them really sport Dutch or French accents, as would be correct. 

 

The 19th century Dutch spoke English with a Dutch accent as their primary language?

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6 hours ago, Stefancos said:

Too long and convoluted! Mistakes structure for content. 

* out of ****

Not good enough.

See me.

 

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Jurassic Shark said:

I like this film, and there can never be too much science!

She blinded me with science!

 

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

The 19th century Dutch spoke English with a Dutch accent as their primary language?

That's the TARDIS translating, isn't it?

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3 hours ago, dougie said:

 

What are you talking about? I enjoyed the film.

You sounded rather critical. 

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15 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

The 19th century Dutch spoke English with a Dutch accent as their primary language?

The voice actors are all British, not Dutch, so they were speaking English, as was my implication, and maintained their British accents as opposed to possibly taking on more appropriate ones.

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6 hours ago, The Illustrious Jerry said:

The voice actors are all British, not Dutch, so they were speaking English, as was my implication, and maintained their British accents as opposed to possibly taking on more appropriate ones.

 

Nothing would be more inappropriate than Dutch people speaking their native language (which apparently is represented by English in this film) with a strong foreign accent.

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The Poseidon Adventure.  Love the last line. How of you down there. 6. Is that all? Anyone from the bow. NO.

BRUTAL AND Finale 

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Edge of tomorrow.

 

Well... I'm not quite sure what to say. The premise is quite original, though I found it a little unrealistic at first. I also found Emily Blunt (and Noah Taylor) to be quite unconvincing, but that changed dramatically during the second half. The longer it lasted, the more I began to enjoy this movie, but I feel a little cheated by its ending because it seems so pointless to undo the first ending: all it does is destroy Cage's credibility, as if he hasn't learned a thing over the course of his entire ordeal.

It's also rather amusing that I've watched two films this weekend that are both scored by Christophe Beck. I definitely prefer this score to Ant-Man and the Wasp. Nothing special, but it does what it needs to do.

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Trading Places

 

It was funny enough and Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy’s performances are pretty good. The scene where Aykroyd’s character is in blackface is slightly jarring but I guess it was a different era.

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Batman Begins in full screen on a Sony Trinitron Wega.

 

I did my best to improve this boring orange pap. Zimmer tries his best to bring it all together but unfortunately almost everything in this movie stinks. Here are just a few of my issues:

 

- It's more boring than Algebra and feels like it's 4 hours long.

 

- Bruce Wayne being in a foreign prison, being told to carry a flower up a mountain and then being trained as a swordsman even though Batman doesn't use a sword.

 

- Lots of boring talky scenes and only a couple really good performances that aren't boring, such as the crimelord and of course Jonathan Crane.

 

- Nolan just can't do humor. There are several attempts that fall so flat, it's like a T-Rex just stomped all over the punchlines.

 

- The last half hour is so boring and terrible, I just wanted it to end and only stayed awake because I was pounding Diet Cokes, the official soft drink of a far superior Batman.

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So I guess Nolan came up with all the other cryptic rhetorical nonsense and flat out bad lines.

 

"Why do we fall? So we can pick ourselves up."

 

"What am I looking for?"

"Only you can know that."

 

"Let me pass. I'm a Gotham City district attorney."

 

"I won't kill you. But I don't have to save you."

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It hasn't aged well, I think. In my view is clearly the worst of the trilogy. Gotham feels quite small. The scene that really irks me is Thomas Wayne exposition while riding the train. And Nolan did the death of Bruce's parents much more impressively

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Casino Royale is great!

 

 

Catwoman

 

Maybe they should have called it Catwoman Begins? Fuck me. This is a massive pile of shit, obviously. All that can be positively said about it is that the lady who played Ms. Swan on Mad TV (Yes, she's in this) was in her prime here. Only old black guys seem to like this movie and I can't even bring myself to enjoy it ironically. We need Max Shreck to shoot this cat broad at point blank range over and over again. She's fired!

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44 minutes ago, dougie said:

Batman Begins and Casino Royale were the beginning of the post-9/11 realistic/relatable/dark/disturbing craze.

Didn't Bourne do it first?

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