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


Mr. Breathmask

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3 hours ago, Sweeping Strings said:

Fail Safe

 

I started watching this once and didn't get to finish it. Looked pretty terrific. I can only imagine watching something like this when it was in cinemas. Sure I had more than my share of nuclear fear in the 80's.

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Best in Show Blu-ray

 

Best In Show

 

I had somehow never seen this before - I've actually never seen any of the Christopher Guest movies other than A Mighty Wind.  I liked this one a lot, the cast really excelled frequently and a lot of the improv really worked.  It was also very well paced, a nice quick 90 minutes with every scene being funny and no excess.  It's also very 90s which I enjoyed.  Nice work by everyone, but I'd say Fred Willard, Larry Miller, Ed Begley Jr, and Parker Posey probably made me laugh the most.  Really enjoyed this and want to watch the other Guest improv films now!

 

It's on HBO Max

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22 hours ago, Jay said:

I've actually never seen any of the Christopher Guest movies other than A Mighty Wind.  

 

Are you including Spinal Tap?

 

I never got around to Mascots but love Waiting for Guffman. For Your Consideration is just okay for the most part but I remember it having a particularly funny ending and worth it just because it's sooo much Catherine O'Hara. 

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Batman & Robin on 4K Blu-ray I got on offer. There's no point defending the film but I still have more fun watching this than any of the Snyder films. It is such a nonsensical thing I cannot hate it. On a genuinely positive note, the film actually doesn't look bad in 2022. Some of the prodction design - Batcave, Robin, Mr Freeze - is genuinely cool to look at. And I always enjoyed Uma Thurman's campy performance. Goldenthal's score is great. One of my holy grails. Great cinema it isn't bit neither is it boring. 

 

Also watched No Time to Die and Silence of the Lambs on UHD discs. Enjoyed both. 

 

Karol

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Pin on Best Christmas Movies

 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

 

Another movie I had never seen before!  I wanted to see it when it came out, and then somehow just never got around to it.  Boy, I can see why it was so highly rated!  It's very unique, quirky, original, funny, interesting, etc.  What happened to Shane Black?  He doesn't make movies remotely like this any more.  Val Kilmer was so good in this film, Robert Downey Jr was funny, and Michelle Monaghan was the real surprise; I've only seen her in things like True Detective, Mission Impossible, Source Code, etc where she's just in kind of thankless dour type roles.  Here she was so fun and charming and sexy and interesting, her character was great!

 

The plot twists and turns the whole time and probably doesn't make too much sense if you think about it too hard, but what matters is the characters and their interactions and everything unfolds.  It was a lot of fun!

 

It's on Kanopy

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The Fugitive (1993)

 

The Fugitive (1993 film) - Wikipedia

 

I was looking for something to watch on HBOMax and then I found this movie which I instantly recognized as one of JNH's earlier Oscar nominations (he lost that year to JW's Schindler's List). I thought: "Hey, this looks like a generic 90s thriller, how come the score was nominated? I need to watch it to know why".

 

Then I watched it and found out that the score is highly effective in the movie. The Oscar nom was well deserved. And the movie is pretty good too, with great editing and cinematography, impressive action scenes and fine performances by Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. 

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15 hours ago, Jay said:

Pin on Best Christmas Movies

 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

 

Another movie I had never seen before!  I wanted to see it when it came out, and then somehow just never got around to it.  Boy, I can see why it was so highly rated!  It's very unique, quirky, original, funny, interesting, etc.  What happened to Shane Black?  He doesn't make movies remotely like this any more.  Val Kilmer was so good in this film, Robert Downey Jr was funny, and Michelle Monaghan was the real surprise; I've only seen her in things like True Detective, Mission Impossible, Source Code, etc where she's just in kind of thankless dour type roles.  Here she was so fun and charming and sexy and interesting, her character was great!

 

The plot twists and turns the whole time and probably doesn't make too much sense if you think about it too hard, but what matters is the characters and their interactions and everything unfolds.  It was a lot of fun!

 

It's on Kanopy

I still need to see it. I really liked The Nice Guys. This seems like the same type of movie, but even better, going by the reviews.

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Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country - since Christmas Day I've been meaning to watch this as I have a memory of a mid-90s Christmas when it was on the TV and I remember watching it in amongst the wrapping paper and opened presents in the evening when everyone else had either gone to bed or otherwise retired (weird as I don't imagine it was on that late!). Still an enjoyable way to close out (more or less) the original cast's tenure and who on good form throughout even if they do show their age a bit. Always amuses me that nobody ever complains about Patrick Stewart's age, he's only 10 years younger than William Shatner!

 

The one thing that strikes me today is how small it feels; the Enterprise seems even more submarine like (even though even the TOS/movie Enterprise is still pretty huge) and poky, Rura Penthe seems to have the smallest caves known to man or Klingon - surely a couple of matte paintings of some much larger caves to give it some more scale can't have been beyond the budget? - and even the Klingon court where Kirk and McCoy are put on trial is clearly filmed cleverly to make it look bigger than it is (ingenious but once you notice you do kinda become aware of the limitations). Funny that some people have grumbled about Boba Fett feeling "cheap" but it feels considerably more expansive than something like this; it's kinda depressing how little money Paramount used to spend on Star Trek movies (yeah, I know, they need to make money, but still...). Plus the stuff with the gas following torpedo on the Enterprise makes no sense when it's the Excelsior that was doing the gaseous anomaly survey (which definitely sounds like the kind of mission Starfleet would commit one it's biggest starships to... no, wait). A shame that René Auberjonois' role as Colonel West was cut out, annoyingly the Blu-Ray version is the theatrical version where he doesn't appear. I am clearly anchored to the TV version where he appears so I'm always surprised when I don't see him.

 

Cliff Eidelman's score probably still remains one of his best efforts and it's a shame he never did a James Horner career wise. Weirdly, I actually missed Jerry's theme a bit more than usual which is odd as Eidelman's upbeat main themes are pretty great and his Stravinsky (the opening is straight out of the Firebird) meets Holst darker material is great.

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2 minutes ago, Sweeping Strings said:

Interesting you say that about the budgets/scale. One presumes the zero-gravity assassination/early-CGI floating-in-mid-air blood must've cost a bob or two. 

Yes, fair point. Plus the Praxis explosion effect which was novel at the time I believe. Weird how Star Trek films generally had fairly tight budgets but often managed to include one or two novel visual effects (the Genesis Planet rendering in TWOK, for example).  Funny how phasers never made anyone else bleed like that anywhere else nor was Klingon blood ever pink again!

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11 hours ago, Jay said:

The Fugitive is an awesome movie, and the score is great

 

It's even more remarkable with the passage of time. It's just so solid. The only "movie star" in the movie is Ford and it's one of his best roles.

 

4 hours ago, Tom Guernsey said:

it's kinda depressing how little money Paramount used to spend on Star Trek movies

 

Especially this one. The only reason this movie got made at all was because it was the 25th anniversary and they didn't want to end with V.

 

The script just feels unfinished. There are so many lines that feel like they had an idea "Someone will say something like..." and they never came back and made it something a human being would say. Like "Two racist bozos show up and say racist things." "Like what?" "Oh, I don't know. Just... Racist things, right?"

 

The torpedo plot feels like "And then the Enterprise crew comes up with a brilliant plan to destroy the enemy ship." "Is that hard?" "Super easy. Barely an inconvenience."

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5 hours ago, Tom Guernsey said:

Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country

 

(You got the Roman numeral wrong)

 

Still one of the best bigger scale Trek things, in the same general league as Khan and perhaps First Contact. Nicholas Meyer has a talent for making Trek feel earnest, relevant, and almost intimate at the same time - I still say that Khan, with all its derivative elements (and specifically because how skilfully they were integrated) has a brilliant script. Eidelman's score remains a favourite - it's true that it's not as continuously entertaining in its full form as some of the other entries, but condensed to its core, I rank it every bit as highly as Horner's Khan. And I'm a big fan of how Eidelman handles the Courage theme.

 

I'm hoping that with the upcoming new releases of the earlier films, we might finally get a remastered Blu-ray with both versions before long. (And decently mastered versions of the rest - of all the pre-JJ Treks, I still only own Khan on Blu, though that twice).

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Star Trek VI: TUC (VI not IV ;-)

34 minutes ago, Tallguy said:

Especially this one. The only reason this movie got made at all was because it was the 25th anniversary and they didn't want to end with V.

 

The script just feels unfinished. There are so many lines that feel like they had an idea "Someone will say something like..." and they never came back and made it something a human being would say. Like "Two racist bozos show up and say racist things." "Like what?" "Oh, I don't know. Just... Racist things, right?"

 

The torpedo plot feels like "And then the Enterprise crew comes up with a brilliant plan to destroy the enemy ship." "Is that hard?" "Super easy. Barely an inconvenience."

Even though I like it, it would have been a shame to end on STV: TFF given its poor public reception (although shame they didn't think the same when it came to TNG as it really deserved a better send-off than Nemesis). I hadn't really thought of the script for TUC being unfinished, but maybe I like the various really great lines in it, "Only Nixon could go to China" and the fun Shakespeare quotes, which really work with great actors like Christopher Plummer delivering them. But I do agree that the plotting could have done with some tightening up - I don't hugely object to the way they work out how to destroy the Bird of Prey. It's no more deus ex machina than working out how to recrystallise the dilithium crystals in The Voyage Home, especially since it's emphasised that it's not possible in the 23rd century, but miraculously they work it out in 1986... I mean, it doesn't matter to me, but it's hardly a novel issue to TUC.

 

25 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

(You got the Roman numeral wrong)

 

Still one of the best bigger scale Trek things, in the same general league as Khan and perhaps First Contact. Nicholas Meyer has a talent for making Trek feel earnest, relevant, and almost intimate at the same time - I still say that Khan, with all its derivative elements (and specifically because how skilfully they were integrated) has a brilliant script. Eidelman's score remains a favourite - it's true that it's not as continuously entertaining in its full form as some of the other entries, but condensed to its core, I rank it every bit as highly as Horner's Khan. And I'm a big fan of how Eidelman handles the Courage theme.

 

I'm hoping that with the upcoming new releases of the earlier films, we might finally get a remastered Blu-ray with both versions before long. (And decently mastered versions of the rest - of all the pre-JJ Treks, I still only own Khan on Blu, though that twice).

Can't disagree with most of that and especially on how Eidelman uses the Courage theme. I love when he punctuate's Spock's "If I were human, my response would be... go to hell... if I were human" line, which is both cute but also quite touching. I seem to recall someone pointing out that Eidelman's upbeat main theme is based on intervals of a fourth, the same as the Courage fanfare. Although I always enjoyed the secondary main theme (if you want to call it) that plays when the main cast's signatures appear in the end credits.

 

The older movies could all use a decent remaster though, hopefully the UHD version of TMP will appear on Blu-Ray and kick off remastering of the others.

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Apparently, the P.O.V. shot of the Bird Of Prey circling the Enterprise (where Chang says "...prick us, do we not bleed..?"), was the middle section of a much longer shot.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Tom Guernsey said:

...the Praxis explosion effect...

This was always the money shot, and it grabs one's attention in the same way as the opening shot in STAR WARS does.

It's an extremely dynamic, and kinetic (if much imitated), shot.

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17 minutes ago, Tom Guernsey said:

The older movies could all use a decent remaster though, hopefully the UHD version of TMP will appear on Blu-Ray and kick off remastering of the others.

 

I got the 4K set of the first four movies for Christmas. They look great even though I haven't had the time to sit and watch any of them end to end. No idea what the plan is going forward or how they're going to break them up. 5 and 6 in a set? Mixing the last two TOS films with TNG?

 

Khan has both the theatrical and the "director's cut". I would assume that any new release of Undiscovered would have both as well.

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The 4K remaster of the TMP director's cut isn't out yet.  It premieres on Paramount+ sometime later this year.
 

We have a thread about the project, which includes links to some pictures and videos hosted on startrek.com that show their restoration progress

 

https://www.jwfan.com/forums/index.php?/topic/33965-star-trek-the-motion-picture-director’s-cut-4k-restoration-supervised-by-mike-matessino

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7 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

I still need to see it. I really liked The Nice Guys. This seems like the same type of movie, but even better, going by the reviews.

 

Yes, for sure, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys share a similar vibe.  I would say The Nice Guys is more polished, a little more mainstream, a little more set up to be a hit.

 

KKBB is a little more indie, a little more loose and off the cuff, and also a bit outdated from looking at it from a modern perspective.  I wish I had seen it at the time and this watch was a revisit!

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1 hour ago, Jay said:

 

Yes, for sure, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys share a similar vibe.  I would say The Nice Guys is more polished, a little more mainstream, a little more set up to be a hit.

 

KKBB is a little more indie, a little more loose and off the cuff, and also a bit outdated from looking at it from a modern perspective.  I wish I had seen it at the time and this watch was a revisit!

I'm still disappointed that The Nice Guys didn't get at least one sequel. I can't remember laughing as much in the cinema as when seeing the movie. The door scene had everyone in the cinema in stitches.

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Shane Black's gone in a weird direction since The Nice Guys.  Predators was just so terrible, and he spent a ton of time developing Doc Savage and Remo Williams films that never got made

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12 minutes ago, Jay said:

Shane Black's gone in a weird direction since The Nice Guys.  Predators was just so terrible, and he spent a ton of time developing Doc Savage and Remo Williams films that never got made

According to IMDb, Doc Savage is still in development with the rock but there's no production date or anything like that.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606752/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_1

 

Too bad that Nice Guys didn't have a bigger box office.

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3 hours ago, Tallguy said:

Khan has both the theatrical and the "director's cut". I would assume that any new release of Undiscovered would have both as well.


That's what (and why) I'm hoping for.

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15 hours ago, Sweeping Strings said:

Interesting you say that about the budgets/scale. One presumes the zero-gravity assassination/early-CGI floating-in-mid-air blood must've cost a bob or two. 

I forgot who scored TUC.

Was it Endelman, Eidelman, or Edelman?

 

😎

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19 hours ago, Tom Guernsey said:

Yes, fair point. Plus the Praxis explosion effect which was novel at the time I believe. Weird how Star Trek films generally had fairly tight budgets but often managed to include one or two novel visual effects (the Genesis Planet rendering in TWOK, for example).  Funny how phasers never made anyone else bleed like that anywhere else nor was Klingon blood ever pink again!


Yep, back then wasn't Trek's/most of sci-fi's go-to alien blood colour green (or black)? 

Hence McCoy's brilliant 'That green-blooded son of a bitch ... it's his revenge for all those arguments he lost!' in The Search For Spock.    

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28 minutes ago, Sweeping Strings said:


Yep, back then wasn't Trek's/most of sci-fi's go-to alien blood colour green (or black)? 

Hence McCoy's brilliant 'That green-blooded son of a bitch ... it's his revenge for all those arguments he lost!' in The Search For Spock.    

I wonder who thought "yeah... Klingons... they seem like a pink blooded species...". I guess it does show up quite dramatically inside the darkness of the ship so it's pretty effective.

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LOL

 

Circa 2008-10 I considered that movie a near-masterpiece of dark comedy with enough pathos to really stick with you and I'm ok not revisiting that opinion.  Some things are best left in the memory!

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20 minutes ago, bollemanneke said:

I also mostly liked the humour, but did think they were sometimes taking things too far, especially when Gleeson just wouldn’t die: I was feeling compassion for his character while laughing at the absurdity of it all and I didn’t really like that because I just wanted to mourn his death.

 

But this absurd blend of dark humour and serious tragedy in a very surreal world is what makes it so special, and very rewatchable in my book. It's a film about a contract killer who accidentally killed a boy and suffers from serious depression as a result, and yet it's also hilarious, and has likeable characters. It's also extremely quotable, and yes, Gleeson is absolutely brilliant in it.

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I didn't like In Bruges and I know I'm not inanimate object. Maybe I looked at it from a wrong perspective. I mean, if everyone at JWfan liked it, why didn't I?!

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In Bruges was, if I recall correctly, quite deceptively marketed ... the trailer made it look ONLY like a knockabout comedy about 2 hitmen who go on holiday out of necessity because one of them fucked up a job. 

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