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


Mr. Breathmask

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Kingdom of Heaven (theatrical cut)

 

I was expecting a sprawling epic with too many characters and general confusion over 2 1/2 hours, but actually it was coherent, entertaining, and one of the best-staged battle sequences I've seen - possibly better than Minas Tirith. Bloom is excellent in the title role, and there were many sequences where my mind was saying 'woah' to a shot instead of 'what a nice sfx shot'.

 

HGW's score is surprisingly restrained and actually it didn't feel like there was a huge amount of music in the film. Surprisingly, the album, even at 55 mins does a much better job at including the highlights than most albums I've seen for longer scores.

 

The Goldsmith needledrop was a little distracting but the average filmgoer's not going to spot that. I didn't know about the Beltrami needledrop and it wasn't until I ran the scene via AudD that I realised it wasn't HGW. It's a really inspired bit of tracking, and the intended music is really nice as concept music - both represent very valid takes on the scene in question. I won't have any of this 'intended music is always better' nonsense.

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2 hours ago, crocodile said:

Watched The Ten Commandments over the past couple of evenings. Oh dear, this film really drags, doesn't it? I liked Charlton Heston's charismatic performance but everyone else is quite bad. Elmer's score didn't exactly stick out as much as I'd like but it has certainly a pretty main theme. Overall, I'd say this one didn't age well at all. Anachronisms aside, it just isn't very engaging filmmaking.

 

I dunno that it drags, but the style of blocking is certainly antiquated: the entire thing plays like a stageplay with a camera in the isles.

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11 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

Life of Brian is a film I've seen so many times, and from a rather early age (for the first several years only in German, obviously; and it's a rare case of an actually really good dub - within the possibilities, they did have to change a lot of jokes, obviously), that I'm still finding little bits and pieces that are probably obvious, but "new" to me. I remember only consciously acknowledging that the Pythons all play multiple characters years after first seeing it. This time, I was amused that the crowd that starts following Brian as the Messiah is actually the same that just a scene earlier was objecting to his calling the birds lazy.

 

I had a few friends over for watching it (most of whom had already seen it many times) and set them the additional task of spotting Kenneth Colley and George Harrison.

 

Also, the Bond series obviously has given us a good number of outstanding title songs, but as Bond songs go, Brian still has one of the best.


Somehow I never remember about George Harrison's appearance in it until I spot him ... weird, that. Ken Colley is easier to spot, I'd say. 

The fact that Chris Langham's in it can give one pause nowadays (he was convicted of possession of indecent images of children in 2007). Fortunately, he's not in it very much.   

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4 hours ago, crocodile said:

Watched The Ten Commandments over the past couple of evenings. Oh dear, this film really drags, doesn't it? I liked Charlton Heston's charismatic performance but everyone else is quite bad. Elmer's score didn't exactly stick out as much as I'd like but it has certainly a pretty main theme. Overall, I'd say this one didn't age well at all. Anachronisms aside, it just isn't very engaging filmmaking.

 

Having said that, the UHD presentation is quite nice.

 

Karol

I saw it years ago and think I found it pretty interminable to be honest. But then I have the same issues with most of those historical epics. They’re just a bit dull and slow moving. Even allowing for the significant change in how movies are made and acting, they’re usually still something of a hard slog. Usually the most interesting thing being the music but I’ll just enjoy that on its own!  

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3 hours ago, Richard Penna said:

Kingdom of Heaven (theatrical cut)

 

I was expecting a sprawling epic with too many characters and general confusion over 2 1/2 hours, but actually it was coherent, entertaining, and one of the best-staged battle sequences I've seen - possibly better than Minas Tirith. Bloom is excellent in the title role, and there were many sequences where my mind was saying 'woah' to a shot instead of 'what a nice sfx shot'.

 

HGW's score is surprisingly restrained and actually it didn't feel like there was a huge amount of music in the film. Surprisingly, the album, even at 55 mins does a much better job at including the highlights than most albums I've seen for longer scores.

 

The Goldsmith needledrop was a little distracting but the average filmgoer's not going to spot that. I didn't know about the Beltrami needledrop and it wasn't until I ran the scene via AudD that I realised it wasn't HGW. It's a really inspired bit of tracking, and the intended music is really nice as concept music - both represent very valid takes on the scene in question. I won't have any of this 'intended music is always better' nonsense.

Should have watched the director’s cut!

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2 hours ago, Koray Savas said:

Should have watched the director’s cut!

 

The Roadshow Edition!

 

The film really needs that intermission.

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The thing about all these Biblical epics, is that they may be stagey, but they have one thing that's missing from more modern interpretations, and that is respect for the subject matter. Case in point: that film about Noah, and the one about the Exodus.

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3 hours ago, Koray Savas said:

Should have watched the director’s cut!

 

If the DC had been on Disney+, I would have!

 

I may buy the DC blu-ray anyway as the Sibylla story line didn't have any real substance and it would be nice to see that fleshed out more.

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There are two versions of the director's cut: one that runs straight through, and a roadshow edit that has an overture, intermission and entr'acte. It may seem like an affectation, but the way the film is paced, it really needs that breather of the intermission.

 

Get that one.

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37 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

There are two versions of the director's cut: one that runs straight through, and a roadshow edit that has an overture, intermission and entr'acte.

For those of us who do not have "that one" (:)), where does the intermission happen?

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The Living Daylights - Dalton's dynamic, 'Fleming-friendly' (right down to the 'comma' of hair) Bond proves to be the shot in the arm that the series needed after the tired AVTAK. TLD balances a more down-to-earth, properly 'espionage-y' story with the familiar elements (globe-trotting, gadgetry, eye-popping stunts, lovely ladies etc) very well. Having John Barry's final score for the series doesn't hurt, either.

As for the humour ... well, Dalton's strengths in this department lie more with dry sarcasm ('Why didn't you learn the violin?' 'Correct ... you should have brought lilies') than the likes of the 'punny' 'He got the boot'. He's also very good at amused reactions.

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On 17/04/2022 at 11:56 AM, Richard Penna said:

Kingdom of Heaven (theatrical cut)

 

I was expecting a sprawling epic with too many characters and general confusion over 2 1/2 hours, but actually it was coherent, entertaining, and one of the best-staged battle sequences I've seen - possibly better than Minas Tirith. Bloom is excellent in the title role, and there were many sequences where my mind was saying 'woah' to a shot instead of 'what a nice sfx shot'.

 

HGW's score is surprisingly restrained and actually it didn't feel like there was a huge amount of music in the film. Surprisingly, the album, even at 55 mins does a much better job at including the highlights than most albums I've seen for longer scores.

 

The Goldsmith needledrop was a little distracting but the average filmgoer's not going to spot that. I didn't know about the Beltrami needledrop and it wasn't until I ran the scene via AudD that I realised it wasn't HGW. It's a really inspired bit of tracking, and the intended music is really nice as concept music - both represent very valid takes on the scene in question. I won't have any of this 'intended music is always better' nonsense.

I strongly recommend the director's cut. It's much better than the theatrical cut to the degree that I would dare to call the former the only acceptable version.

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I first saw the Theatrical Cut and to me it felt like Orlando Bloom's only purpose was to look good. That's why you need to watch the DC, it adds more substance to ... well, literally everything.

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The film's biggest flaw are the two baddies.

 

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These two characters should have been better 'fleshed out'. The DC did not help in that regard. Perhaps their story should have started sooner.

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By sheer coincidence i had a Richard Attenborough marathon the last few weeks, and boy, the guy was a hell of an actor (and only so-so director). 

 

The Man Upstairs: a psychotic man snaps and the people from the house he lives in and later the police try to get him out of his room and into treatment. One of those typical small-scale domestic british films from the 50's, directed by Don Chaffey who would later ascend to the impossible heights of Hammer cavemen battle dinosaur flicks, and Attenborough delivers an intense study of a man removed from this world. Slight but great stuff.

 

Guns At Batasi: a good 'ole Cinemascope romp by old pro John Guillermin about an uprising in the colonies, with Attenborough as fanatic officer barking orders. It's well done (Pinewood is doubling for Africa) and suspenseful, but glorifying soldiering in a perseverance story laced with racist undertones...basically it's an imperialist elegy: british racial superiority no longer provides any guarantee of authority or power, the movie wistfully concludes.

 

10 Rillington Place: The chilly psycho thriller/character study is based on the true criminal case surrounding the mousy ripper John Christie (Attenborough), and half-wit Timothy Evans (John Hurt), who was wrongly executed for one of his crimes. This is a movie so downbeat that after having seen Attenborough, expressionless eyes sunken into his bald head, worming around as treacherous lower-class henpecked killer in the drab and damp house he owns, you probably need a shower and three showings of something like 'Frozen' to shake off the experience.

 

Seance On A Wet Afternoon: Another chilly thriller, though this one belongs to ace actress Kim Stanley. She holds husband Attenborough under her spell to abduct a rich couple's daughter for ransom. Disguised as a nurse, Stanley convinces the child that she's in a hospital and helps the police supposedly by using her psychic skills to get in touch with the child. It gets more spooky and is overshadowed by the death of their own child. Helped by John Barry's exquisite chamber score (4 alto flutes!), this is far from typical clichés, atmospherically depressing - a thriller that combines suspense with the study of a mental illness in a largely artful way.

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11 hours ago, Richard Penna said:

The DC Blu ray is on its way :lurk:

Think about it this way. TC is the standard "hero's journey" film they tried to release whereas DC is the same story but with the world fleshed out. The main character's journey is not really the strongest thing about it anyway. And it cannot really be treated as a historically sound movie either. But DC reveals what Scott was trying to achieve in the first place - a sprawling "medieval fantasy".

 

Karol

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Kingdom Of The Spiders - quite cheesy but undeniably creepy late 70s 'creature feature' with William Shatner heading up the cast as the townsfolk of Camp Verde, Arizona are besieged by insecticide-mutated tarantulas.

What's impressive here is that this was an era when CGI and (unlike the later Arachnophobia) animatronics were non-existent, so the cast were frequently subjected to having real spiders crawl all over them ... 5000 of the scuttling hellspawn were used, according to the film's Wiki page. Brrrr.

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Last Friday was the 110th Anniversary of the sinking of Titanic. David and I were flipping channels and saw Titanic was coming on. He looked at me and I looked at him. "To the Hat" I said, and he nodded. No one has ever gotten me the way he does. May each of you find such a person.

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Basic instinct 2.

 

My first memory related to this movie is a pretty fun one. I had downloaded the subtitles because I had found out the translator was the same guy who had just done our illegal Goblet of Fire copy, which was so bad it was actually hilarious. I was 13 years old at the time and had no idea what Basic Instinct was about… or that my grandparents were looking at my screen while I was reading the text. Anyway… I properly watched it eight years later without having seen the first movie and I remember really liking it, but people here (and critics) told me it sucked and the original was way better.

Well, guess what. I re-watched it today… and I still love it! I honestly do not understand why people dislike it so much. Okay, replace David Morrissey with someone who can do more than just one voice, but other than that, it’s great. I love Catherine’s evil scheming and manipulating. Stone does sound different most of the time here. Is this all due to age or did she make that choice herself? Thewlis sounds exactly like my best culture of the UK lecturer – I NEED to know what that accent is. I would have liked an explanation as to why this one is set in England and what ended up happening to Michael Douglas, though. The shrinks might also have been a bit slow on the uptake, but Flora Montgomery was great, I did not mind the parallel Soho scene at all, surprisingly, and it’s always great to hear people smashing stuff.

The first score cue is a bit weird and percussive, but then, it turned out to be great too, with good, mournful piano cues and excellent Goldsmith theme reprises, which are even better on solo violins. What else can I say? I had a great time! Do I have poor taste?

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9 hours ago, bollemanneke said:

Basic instinct 2.

 

I honestly do not understand why people dislike it so much.

 

Because it's magnificently awful on a scale not even old Hammer cavemen flicks manage to be. Poor Sharon Stone has to deliver about two dozen of *bon mots* involving the word 'cum' that would make a drunk 14-year old run for the hills.

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Yesterday it was Good Friday here (orthodox Easter), so I watched The Passion of Christ again.

Masterpiece! (although I think it overused the slow motion)

I don't understand why it was buried by some critics.

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26 minutes ago, filmmusic said:

Yesterday it was Good Friday here (orthodox Easter), so I watched The Passion of Christ again.

Masterpiece! (although I think it overused the slow motion)

I don't understand why it was buried by some critics.

 

This is a movie that just cannot - or should not - be mentioned without mentioning first the heavy ballast of personal demons Mel Gibson brings to the party. He's one of the last true auteurs, working thru them diligently and in view of the whole world, movie by movie.

 

When i recently saw 'Hacksaw Ridge', it dawned on me how almost 20 years after 'PoC' he's still making films true to an ancient belief system where important renovations of catholic faith like the Second Vatican Council in the early 60's just didn't happen. In Mel's world, thick streams of blood, fury,  vengeance and holy martyrdom - and let's not forget a certain longing for death and a coming apocalypse - form into something i consider fascinating and toxic in equal measure. 

 

 

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First half of 'Hacksaw' is rather boring, second half gets the blood pumping, show values are great, the ideology behind it 'problematic', to say the least, but that makes you either entering an interesting discussion about what you've just seen or just fancying all the well-shot cinematic gore.

 

Once you realize how little Gibson cares about the reasons for his main character being a conscientious objector (at the start) and all the hell-fury he injects into having him experience extreme suffering, coming around seeing the light of mowing down enemy people, and getting a medal for it, you just know you're back in Mel Gibson looney land.

 

 

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With straight-up infantry based war films I mainly like watching for any ruthlessly convincing battle melees which showcase a director's talent for action staging, and I'm less interested in the philosophical meaning and narrative behind it. Which is why Saving Ryan is a good not great example of a brilliant but cinematically flawed war film. I do have plenty of time for sociopolitical content in the medium, but I'm more drawn to murky explorations like The Killing Fields or Paths of Glory than I am Spielberg's typical noble heroics.

 

I just imagine Mel to be good at making one go shiiiiit at the sight of a poor soldier's immediate predicament. 

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Yeah well, there's a difference between not being interested in subtext and not getting it. Which is why i was reacting to @filmmusic's post in the first place, since Gibson's war movies (and they always are, in one way or another) deserve at least an asterisk behind the 'masterpiece' moniker. 

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3 hours ago, publicist said:

 

Because it's magnificently awful on a scale not even old Hammer cavemen flicks manage to be. Poor Sharon Stone has to deliver about two dozen of *bon mots* involving the word 'cum' that would make a drunk 14-year old run for the hills.

But I keep reading that, magnificently awful. What does that even mean? It sounds to me like people are determined to hate it while secretly really liking it. How can something be magnificently awful? I'm ordering it on DVD at one point.

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@bollemanneke, you know that a film is in trouble, when the first thing that a character (in this case, the usually excellent David Thewlis), says is: "I want that cunt put in jail" :lol:

Stan Collymore had good grace to die in the first five minutes.

It really is a complete waste of a good cast - Stone; Thewlis; Rampling; Morrissey.

It might be filed under "so bad it's good". I prefer to file it under "so bad it's terrible".

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7 hours ago, bollemanneke said:

But I keep reading that, magnificently awful. What does that even mean? It sounds to me like people are determined to hate it while secretly really liking it. How can something be magnificently awful? I'm ordering it on DVD at one point.

 

Look, what can i say? Some things are just so awful from conception to execution, they become half-legendary just for their sheer turd-ness. If that is your idea of two hours well spent, more power to you.

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Cube - five strangers meet in a cube-shaped room, with no idea of how they got there or why they are there. Quickly establishing that they they are in some sort of maze made up of similar interconnecting rooms (some of which have fatal booby-traps), they realise they are going to have to work together in order to escape the maze alive. Intriguing little sci-fi horror-thriller.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark - horror based on a series of kids' books (although I'd say this is probably unsuitable for small children... some of it gave me a bit of a chill, so God knows what it would do to kiddiewinks). Quite entertaining.
 

The discussion about Basic Instinct 2 led me to its Wikipedia page out of idle curiosity ... I see that 'Sharon Stone's lopsided breasts' in the 'Worst Screen Couple' category was amongst its 'Razzie' nominations/winsROTFLMAO

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1 hour ago, Sweeping Strings said:

Cube - five strangers meet in a cube-shaped room, with no idea of how they got there or why they are there. Quickly establishing that they they are in some sort of maze made up of similar interconnecting rooms (some of which have fatal booby-traps), they realise they are going to have to work together in order to escape the maze alive. Intriguing little sci-fi horror-thriller.

 

Don't bother with the sequels!

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