Last Movie You Watched...

[Clovitide]

I just watched Shutter Island. I watched it as a kid and now again as an adult. Enjoyed it. I see why people like it. My coworker gave me a list of movies to "expand my horizon". I gave him a list of books in exchange but I've watch two and half movies and he hasn't read or listened to a single book. All his movies are depressing, too.

 

[Cobalt Jade]

Since I'm still out of commission with a torn plantar fascitis, I watched The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) on Netflix. It's a biopic. Dev Patel plays a low-caste (?) Indian man, Srinavasa Ramanujan, who's a mathematics prodigy in 1910s India -- he keeps tidy books of all the formulas he's written. He wrangles his way into an accounting job and comes to the attention of the British owner (of course) of the company, and in time he's sent overseas to Trinity College to study with the top mathematicians of the day. I liked it, but seeing the Indian mathematician continuously put down and disregarded by the British Whites was painful to me, and the ending of the story is bittersweet.

Then I watched the Netflix documentary Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam. In'Sync and Backstreet Boys guru and manager Lou Pearlman created the bands, and spawned a new musical genre, to facilitate a Ponzi scheme that spanned 30 years. Holy Cow, I had no idea any of that was going on. Pearlman died in prison -- he got 25 years -- and only 5 people went to his funeral.

 

[MythMonger]

Trap by M. Night. (MAX US)

Not good. My wife made the comment it seemed like a vehicle to get his daughter, Saleka, on screen.

There were multiple points where things didn't make sense.

 

[Tiger1b]

“Brothers”

 

[darrtwish]

Watched A Cinderella Story and Clueless this weekend because I was craving comfort movies. I've seen them so many times I entertain myself by basically writing fanfiction in my head to fill in gaps or scenes for alternate perspectives while I watch.

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

The Marvels. Gosh, it was fun!

 

[Diana Hignutt]

We watched Deadpool and Wolverine last night. I haven't laughed like that in a long time,

 

[Diana Hignutt]

I Saw the TV Glow - Weird, art house trans allegory. Deep, powerful, off-putting. I am still not sure how I feel about this film. It's probably a dark masterpiece. My only fear the allegory may send the wrong message.

 

[Maryn]

Trap by M. Night. (MAX US)

Not good. My wife made the comment it seemed like a vehicle to get his daughter, Saleka, on screen.

There were multiple points where things didn't make sense.

If only I'd read this thread earlier! We watched it, too, and I fully agree with your assessment. There were so many things that were completely implausible--nay, impossible--and clearly the filmmaker has not attended a live concert, since it was portrayed so very poorly.

We made a theme weekend out of it, with Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You, in which a 24-year-old member of a boy band becomes involved with the 40-year-old mother of a fan. Not only were the concert scenes far more realistic, but it was surprisingly better than expected.

 

[Diana Hignutt]

We watched Watchmen Chapter 1, the animated adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons masterpiece. It's solid. And it looks like we're getting the squid in Chapter 2. It's currently on MAX in the US.

 

[Diana Hignutt]

I Saw the TV Glow - Weird, art house trans allegory. Deep, powerful, off-putting. I am still not sure how I feel about this film. It's probably a dark masterpiece. My only fear the allegory may send the wrong message.

This film has really haunted me. I can't stop thinking about it. It really is a masterful exploration of trans egg cracking. It's on MAX in the US.

 

[Cobalt Jade]

Knives Out (2019). I was expecting a physical comedy more like Peter Sellers' A Shot in the Dark, but I enjoyed it anyway. Jamie Lee Curtis is a National Treasure!

 

[oneblindmouse]

His Three Daughters (2023). Excellent! I really enjoyed it.

 

[Sage]

Meet Me Next Christmas (Netflix). I enjoy a lot of Netflix's holiday movies. Mom's all about Hallmark movies (which, hey, she could watch on Netflix now). I enjoyed the romance build, and I do like Pentatonix--which one must admit, this is half a Pentatonix commercial. Still, the group was silly and made fun of themselves a bit, and it was fun when they'd just break out into harmony for no reason.

 

[worrdz]

The Bone Collector. Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie and Queen Latifah (both very young), and all the late-90s tech you can imagine.

I saw it (on satellite) shortly after it first came out. Watched it last weekend during a multi-channel "free preview."

It's tough to get past the old tech, mostly because it's recent-ish and yet so far behind what's available today.

The core cast was what made that film, unsurprisingly.

And I still can't watch the "scary parts" of movies that have them. (The only way I got through the last third of Silence of the Lambs was with the sound off.)

BTW, that's a fascinating exercise, not just to screen out the emotional nudging of film scores, but also to see how shallowly many of these projects land without audio. Watch a familiar movie with the sound muted, and gauge the differences in your reactions to it.

 

[Cobalt Jade]

Yeah, it seems like there's not much of a visual difference between 1999 and 2024 aside from improved cell phones and social media. Everything else is practically the same, except (in the US that is) people don't dress up as much.

I watched a charming but very strange, annoying, and, IMO, unrealistic movie called My Old Ass. It's about a teen girl preparing to go away to college. Her family runs a cranberry-bog farm in Canada. That was the best part of it, all the pretty scenery which includes forests, lakes, bogs, and rivers on which the families speed about on their boats. The girl is gleefully gay and Rainbow Pride, or so she thinks! She makes out with the POC girl who runs the harborside general store and has two like-minded friends who she goes camping with and gets high on -shrooms, one of them is also POC. On this vision quest the girl is visited by herself from 20 years in the future (39 years old.) The girl refers to her older self as "My Old Ass" even though she's actually well preserved and could still rock a bikini. (?) The older self is still as annoying as the present-day girl is but has a slight motherly attitude and gives vague advice. The strongest advice is to stay away from a man named Chad and spend more time with her family and appreciate the time she has with them.

So I'd call it a soft time travel fantasy.

Girl does the latter but also meets the former young man, who is a summer worker at the farm, and falls in love with the quirky yet charming dude. Which upends who she thought she was as a lesbian. Later the older self reveals why she warned her, it wasn't any heinous thing Chad did, but The fact he dies young and devastates her. Life lessons follow from there.

Overall the movie was touching, but looking at the script, I wonder if the writer had an anti-LGBT agenda, or a pro-LGBT one. If it's pro, it stretched my disbelief the the girl's family, which were presented as conservative and community small and isolated, were OK with her baby lesbian coming out behavior. Plus, where did her like-minded friends and lover come from? It seemed to be wishful thinking that such a traditionally conservative milieu would be so laissez-faire and accepting. Maybe the movie was more in the Hallmark Movie mode. I don't know. (The amount of cursing though calls against this.)

But OTOH, it couldn't have been anti-gay, because the girl and her friends were presented as so quirky and adorable.

I couldn't help thinking the writers/producers lobbed in the LGBT element to add some spice and novelty and current news and ladled it on too thickly and naively. But, YMMV.

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

Watched Groundhog Day the other night, for the first time since I saw it in theaters.

I enjoyed watching the beats of the story. It's very well crafted for what it is.

It is rather interesting, and perhaps unusual, how little fashions appear to have changed in the last thirty years. The old people have a lot more curly perms and assertive sweaters than we would see today, to be sure, but all of the main characters could walk around today in the same clothes and hardly raise an eyebrow. I can't think of any other modern historical period where this was the case. At least the reliance on landline phones and the no-internet isolation solidly grounds this film in the 90s.

Anyway, it's a good story of a man making himself a better person by learning to care about the people around him.

 

[nighttimer]

We watched Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (get it?) about the soft rock by The Doobie Brothers in their Michael McDonald era, Kenny Loggins (who has had waaaay too much Botox), Christopher Cross, and Toto among others. It was kinda fun to return to that age of rock that sure wasn't heavy, but it was kind of fun as long as you're not a music snob.

The one act that prominently figures into the yacht rock era is the one that declined to participate: Steely Dan. This leads to an amusing moment when Donald Fagen fields a call from the director and let's just say he wasn't subtle in saying "no thanks."

 

[Maryn]

Ooh, a Christmas movie to be avoided: The Merry Gentlemen, on Netflix. I watched it alone after a medical thingy, knowing it would be predictable and sappy, but I did not realize it would also suck.

The basic premise, saving the family bar, failed to work because Evil Landlord was the one responsible for most of the things wrong with the place, including failed plumbing that was supposed to be funny. Has none of the writers or producers ever rented?

 

[capricornair]

The Fall Guy. Super silly and over-the-top, but it was self-aware, so my partner and I were along for the ride. (And that ride had a lot of stunts, explosions, and flips).

 

[Fantasiawrites]

The Straight Story (1999) A very sweet, yet bittersweet film about family and connections.

 

[Alessandra Kelley]

Ooh, a Christmas movie to be avoided: The Merry Gentlemen, on Netflix. I watched it alone after a medical thingy, knowing it would be predictable and sappy, but I did not realize it would also suck.

The basic premise, saving the family bar, failed to work because Evil Landlord was the one responsible for most of the things wrong with the place, including failed plumbing that was supposed to be funny. Has none of the writers or producers ever rented?

The CBC critic was also unimpressed.

 

[Cobalt Jade]

The Agatha Christie movie A Haunting in Venice. It takes place over Halloween night in post-WWII Venice and stars Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poiret, who did an excellent job portraying the hero as world-weary and somewhat bitter, yet too young to really retire like he wants to. The murder plot was complicated, to say the least, and I never would have guessed it. Tina Fey plays Hercule's friend/rival, a lauded mystery novel writer who acts as his sidekick as he solves the case. She seemed right for it in the beginning, but once I see her and know it's her, I can only see her SNL impression of Sarah Palin, and the two get conflated in my mind. She's uncomfortable for me to watch, in other words. The whole story is set in a spooky old Renaissance villa that is isolated because of an Autumn storm.

If you're a Christie fan and want chills with your mystery, watch this!

 

[benbenberi]

I've been resisting the temptation to watch A Haunting in Venice because it was billed as an adaptation of Christie's Halloween Party but with everything changed (and made fashionably Dark) -- I happen to have read the novel recently, it's a good one, and it could have made an excellent film as Christie wrote it, not strip-mined for plot material. But one of these days I may break down and watch it anyway. Christmas may be a good day for a spooky story.

 

[Diana Hignutt]

I've been resisting the temptation to watch A Haunting in Venice because it was billed as an adaptation of Christie's Halloween Party but with everything changed (and made fashionably Dark) -- I happen to have read the novel recently, it's a good one, and it could have made an excellent film as Christie wrote it, not strip-mined for plot material. But one of these days I may break down and watch it anyway. Christmas may be a good day for a spooky story.

I was actually reading Halloween Party when I watched A Haunting in Venice, and yeah. They kept some of the names, and someone was drowned in the apple bobbing bucket, it happens on Halloween, and that's about it. That said, it's the second best of these Branagh Christie adaptations and there's a lot to like about the movie if you forget about the book (the Murder on the Orient Express adaptation is excellent, and the Death on the Nile with its bizarre origin story for Poirot's mustache, film sucks, imo).