Return of the RECENT VIEWING

[Matt Wilson]

Nicholson was in a lot of classics though, wasn't he? I'd add Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Shining to that list. I like Reds, Terms of Endearment, Prizzi's Honor, A Few Good Men, As Good as it Gets, and The Departed an awful lot as well.

[Matt Wilson]

We should do a poll of Nicholson, Pacino, and DeNiro in terms of who has more great movies on their resume.

[naughty boy]

Nicholson was in a lot of classics though, wasn't he? I'd add Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Shining to that list. I like Reds, Terms of Endearment, Prizzi's Honor, A Few Good Men, As Good as it Gets, and The Departed an awful lot as well.

He was also great in Carnal Knowledge (which is often forgotten) and of course The King Of Marvin Gardens.

[Matt Wilson]

Oh, I love Carnal Knowledge. Not so keen on KOMG.

[...]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the few examples of a great film of a great book. I think the film might edge it, even though it does very closely follow the source material, just because of the power of Nicholson's performance, although the entire cast is superb. The problem with having seen the film first, is that no matter how well the book describes the McMurphy character, it's not possible to visualise him as anything but Jack. The character of The Chief makes more sense within the confines of the novel though, as he's the main narrator, and because he's a schizophrenic his mental state is pretty much used as a measure of the positive impact of the freedom of McMurphy against the oppression and tyranny of Nurse Ratchid.

Agreed. While it does follow large parts of the source material quite closely, screenwriters Lawrence Hoben and Bo Goldman wisely jettisoned the whole Chief Brombden sub-plot from the book as it would have slowed the whole pace of the movie to a crawl.

Luckily, I'd read the book before seeing the movie so was never really encumbered with picturing JN as RPM (clever punning by KK there!).

As someone else said, it would be interesting to see who out of AL, RDN and JN did the most 'great' movies. That said, JN was really on the top of his game in almost every film he did back then.

[Matt Wilson]

Rockshow

Filmed in '76, released in '80. It's exactly like his triple-live Wings Over America LP. Same set list, same sequencing, etc. No backstage footage. Still, it's our Paulie in all his mid seventies glory.


To Live and Die in LA
Probably Friedkin's best '80s movie - which isn't to say it's great or anything, but certainly serviceable. Dafoe should've stuck to villains as he is a natural, and William Petersen still had an edge at this early stage in his career (he was good in Manhunter as well - still playing a cop if memory serves?) There's a truly laughable Wang Chung soundtrack (yes, you read that right) which makes this movie more of a timepiece than it needs to be.

[Darkness_Fish]

Meh. The early scenes led me to believe this was going to be very worthy and dull, yet the sinister brain-washing plot quickly stepped up the looniness by multiple factors. And then I lost interest, and stuff was happening, but it didn't really occur to me to check what.

[PresMuffley]

Carol

I’m a bit puzzled by the rave reviews this received. I thought it was good, it looked great (loved all that 50s period detail) and Blanchett was very good but it left me pretty much unmoved I have to say. I thought the young lass was a bit of a drip frankly.

I watched this today and while I agree about Blanchett and that the costuming / set design / art direction were appealing to the eye, what struck me most was how the story itself felt so intellectually dated & tame in comparison with Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour. Sure, we get to see two beautiful women making love to one another on screen, but if that's the most progress Hollywood has made in the 80+ years since Hellman's play (and 50+ since the last film adaptation), we are truly stuck in a sad state of affairs.

[PresMuffley]

Upper-crust Jeanne is unhappy with her marriage and dull provincial life. After her car breaks down she catches a ride home with the "complicated", poetic archeologist Bernard. Being the gentleman that he is, Jeanne's hubby invites Bernard to stay the night at their lovely estate. That night, when Jeanne has trouble sleeping, she takes a walk outside in her flowing white nightgown and pearls, unexpectedly meeting Bernard pondering the complicated things poetic archeologists ponder under the moonlight. After several minutes of courtship, they drift downstream together on a rowboat, as has happened to us all at some point in life. Jeanne's outlook on life has taken a drastic change. She has found Bernard. She has found love.

All rather silly and predictable, but I do like Jeanne Moreau and many Louis Malle films, plus this is shot gorgeously.

[pcqgod]

A college grad gets a job as a customer service assistant at The Circle, a big internet company with its own Facebook-like social network site. She soon discovers that it is run like a cult based upon sharing of information, where employees are actually shamed for not living their entire lives online, and are taught that not recording and posting all of your RL experiences deprives little disabled kids who are unable to do the same. Meanwhile, management of The Circle keep promoting new technology that will essentially ensure that all human rights abuses around the world will be revealed and all escaped criminals will be found, with the attendant realities that (a) everyone will constantly be under surveillance and (b)someone, somewhere has access to every little detail of your life, which would seem more scary and prescient if we didn't already know that Facebook, Ebay, Amazon and various retailers, the U.S. government, the Russian government and any number of foreign governments weren't already doing this.

[Darkness_Fish]

A college grad gets a job as a customer service assistant at The Circle, a big internet company with its own Facebook-like social network site. She soon discovers that it is run like a cult based upon sharing of information, where employees are actually shamed for not living their entire lives online, and are taught that not recording and posting all of your RL experiences deprives little disabled kids who are unable to do the same. Meanwhile, management of The Circle keep promoting new technology that will essentially ensure that all human rights abuses around the world will be revealed and all escaped criminals will be found, with the attendant realities that (a) everyone will constantly be under surveillance and (b)someone, somewhere has access to every little detail of your life, which would seem more scary and prescient if we didn't already know that Facebook, Ebay, Amazon and various retailers, the U.S. government, the Russian government and any number of foreign governments weren't already doing this.

I really, really liked the novel, so I'm quite intrigued to how the film turns out, it doesn't read like an obviously cinematic book. The main character is my biggest problem, her motivation and lack of question didn't ring true. The ex boyfriend who symbolises freedom and self reliance has the coolest name, too. Mercer. Something like that.

[pcqgod]

I really, really liked the novel, so I'm quite intrigued to how the film turns out, it doesn't read like an obviously cinematic book. The main character is my biggest problem, her motivation and lack of question didn't ring true. The ex boyfriend who symbolises freedom and self reliance has the coolest name, too. Mercer. Something like that.

I've never read the novel, so I can't tell how true it is to the source material. I suspect the non-cinematic nature of the novel is why the movie adaptation doesn't entirely satisfy.

[Snarfyguy]

This is scary, and not in a fun way. It's a wake up call about the dangers of cyber warfare as a threat to the global community's critical infrastructure systems. As if I didn't have enough to worry about already!

The great documentarian Alex Gibney is again using subject matter (computer stuff) you might not think would easily lend itself to visual treatment, but he pulls it off pretty well (although cascades of digits falling through cyberspace get to be a bit of a holding pattern).

It's riveting stuff, although your mileage may vary -- Mrs SG slept through the whole thing on the couch.

[sloopjohnc]

Surfer girl goes off the beaten track to an idyllic bay in Mexico. Staying for one surf too many, she's attacked by a shark and left wounded and alone in the shallows, unable to swim back past the persistent piscine peril. Blake Lively does a decent job of looking brave and pained for 80 minutes, and there is a decent bit of tension. Frankly, though, rubber sharks were more convincing in film than all this CGI piss, and the silly ending ruins most of what went before. Could've been more than half-decent, but fell like so many others at the CGI hurdle.

Watched this with my son. I wanted her to get eaten after awhile.

[sloopjohnc]

Saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2 last weekend. After, I asked my son which one he liked best and he said the first one. I told him there was too much going on and was relentless in its pace - more than Mad Max even. He agreed.

[algroth]

I saw it yesterday. I thought it was alright. I liked the fact that they are willing to throw so much at the screen and generallly enjoyed the visual aesthetic of it, but it's with the overwhelming frequency of jokes and nods where I felt it let me down the most: it's fine to have some levity here and there, a bit of comic relief to break the tension and play with some cliché or other; problem is, Guardians is not a comedy, and the jokes may arise the occasional smirk but for the most part they are simply not funny. They don't just cut the mood of a scene, they fucking cleave it with a butcher-knife. And it's all too often, all too forced too. There are whole five-minute sequences that are designed specifically to throw jabs at one another, and it just makes me groan. The stuff with the "Taserface" dude was the fucking worst. And do we really need FIVE post-credit scenes? As with the first one the jukebox soundtrack doesn't always work either. These matters aside, fun enough romp.

[PresMuffley]

I had seen 10 or 15 minutes of this several years ago and it piqued my interest though I quickly forgot about it. Finally got a chance to see it all last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's far from a perfect film, but this kind of dark comedy really appeals to me. I'd like to think Hesher went on to have a lucrative career as a life coach. We all need a bit of him in our lives.

[...]

Meh. The early scenes led me to believe this was going to be very worthy and dull, yet the sinister brain-washing plot quickly stepped up the looniness by multiple factors. And then I lost interest, and stuff was happening, but it didn't really occur to me to check what.

Did you ever see the original, DF?

Whilst very much of its time (cue those crazy McCarthy references!), it's a million times better than the remake and still well worth watching

[Darkness_Fish]

Meh. The early scenes led me to believe this was going to be very worthy and dull, yet the sinister brain-washing plot quickly stepped up the looniness by multiple factors. And then I lost interest, and stuff was happening, but it didn't really occur to me to check what.

Did you ever see the original, DF?

Whilst very much of its time (cue those crazy McCarthy references!), it's a million times better than the remake and still well worth watching

No, it was really only the presence of Denzel that led me to watching this, with fairly low expectations. Y'know, struggling to agree on what to watch, so you say, "that's a Denzel film I've never seen, it won't be terrible, it won't be particularly good. Let's watch that." I'll keep an eye out for it though, I really need to make more of an effort to delve back into 60s and 70s cinema more often, it's obviously more satisfying than recent years.

[pcqgod]

Their Finest (2017)

In 1940, a young British woman takes a job with the Ministry of Propaganda, film division, and finds herself working as a scriptwriter on a film about the evacuation of Dunkirk, all the while having to deal with the demands and whims of her male co-workers, military brass who want to send the right message to the British and American audience, and the movie's cast, including an over-the-hill primadonna actor and a talentless American foisted on the production for propaganda purposes. There is plenty of comedy and romance, but because of some very tragic moments, I'd hesitate to call this a romantic comedy. Charming performances from Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy, in particular.