The Last Movie You Watched?

The Saloon
3981

[url]http://img683.imageshack.us/i/fury2m.jpg/[/url] [size=12pt]THE FURY[/size] (1978, Brian De Palma)

Typical, but less compelling De Palma sleaze, about a young man with special powers who’s abducted by a special government organization, for reasons that are left more than just a little bit obscure (can’t be anything good, knowing De Palma)

The young man’s father traces a girl with the same powers (they’re mind readers, can absorb memories of unknown people, have telekenetic and psychokenetic powers etc.). Her deepest wish is to get in touch with the boy (well, at her age …)

Oh boy. Script isn’t only nonsensical but also extremely trashy, more offering a hodge podge of set pieces (some better than others) than telling a coherent story. Saved by decent acting (Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Amy Irving, Charles Durning) and a few examples of De Palma’s visual bravoura.
Doesn’t make much sense, but somehow fun to watch

3 out of 5

3982

I Am The Law

Enjoyed this one alot. Liked the way the movie kinda blurs the lines between good and bad. Gemma was good in it, as always.

3983

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in a snow fort. As expected, I found that this was the best possible thing one could do in a snow fort. Video evidence:

[url]Once Upon a Time in a Snow Fort (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly homage) - YouTube

More recently, the last tv show I watched was the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Deanna Troi gets seduced and manipulated by a Jimmy Stewart-looking-guy trying to secure the rights to a worm hole. As you are probably expecting, the Ferengi were also involved.

3984

Great

But the You Tube video is called after the wrong movie

Edit:

Now I see: you mean to say it happened in a snow house
That’s correct, but still confusing …

3985

You are right, the title “Once Upon a Time in a Snow Fort” is a little confusing, but it sounded better and seemed more true to the action in the video (and its location) than any play on the “Good, Bad, Ugly” title would have been. Also, I just love “Once Upon a Time in the West” too much – as my favorite spaghetti western, I just couldn’t leave it out.

3986

It’s very well done, you really surprised me with this ‘double shootout’

You should put it up here :

3987

Thanks, I put it up.

I’m glad you liked the “double shootout”, and that it was a surprise – this was the effect we were hoping for. The idea was to sync our four shots to Clint Eastwood’s four shots in the scene. It took 5 takes to get it right.

3988

Yes, very good. A real surprise ending.

Good score too. Who wrote it?

3989

I think it was some little-known Italian trumpet player.

3990

It sounded somehow familiar …

3991

@ ModernDjango | Couldn’t find the video on facebook first, but have traced it now
For some reason it didn’t appear on top of the page, but somewhere behind much older posts
I wonder why, like this new things will hardly be noticed

3992

I watched Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine recently and I think I finally understand how non-Québécois feel when they watch a Québécois movie. I honestly couldn’t understand half of what the characters where saying, ok, maybe half, but I did need the subtitles because otherwise I would have missed on quite a lot. Otherwise, great movie.

3993

Don’t worry the French spoken in the streets/suburban places is much different from the one I’ve learned and spoke, I also need the subs for this one (Not a Rohmer flm) but its a great and powerful film among the best in the 90’s.

3994

Need the subs too for this one, the French spoken in les quartiers is nearly unintelligible. There’s a lot of influence from Ararabic. Words like ‘nique’ (I guess you know what that means) are literally taken from Arabic. More in general you’d probably have trouble to understand anybody younger than, let’s say, 25, especially when they talk to each other. Of all European languages I know, French has changed most in recent times (spoken French that is). It’s not just that people speak fast. When I see a movie of the sixties or seventies (and no argot is used) I have no trouble understanding the actors. A man like Louis De Funès speaks incredibly fast, but he articulates rather well and his lines cause no trouble. But there have been several more recent films that had dialogues that were very hard to decypher.

3995

I had the same trouble a few days ago while watching Total Western , I couldn’t understood half of it without subs, and for someone who now only rarely speaks (or writes) the language like me but used to do it a lot, and learn it in school and speaking with relatives (both in Canada and in France) watching this more recent films is becoming quite difficult without subs. On the other hand older films are quite OK I can watch Wages of fear or Police Python 357 without any problems.

3996

It’s a fact that languages change considerably over the years. I watched a Dutch movie from 1934 the other day, and although I had no difficulty understanding the dialogue, it sounded weird. The intonations were remarkably different and some letters were pronounced differently, notably the consonants.

On another level I get a lot of complaints from people who tell me they can’t understand people from the other side of the border. Dutch and Flemish aren’t exactly the same (a lot of different words and expressions), but until recently people could understand each other rather well, provided no strong dialects were spoken (and some people only speak dialect!). But today, people start having problems with the so-called standard language from the other side. I notice that I start changing my language a little when I cross the Dutch border, and Dutch also starts to sound a little ‘foreign’ to my ears (that have become more used to Flemish over the years).

3997

Yes languages do change over the years, we now have a lot of expressions that were brought up from Portuguese Africa after the decolonization and with the people that arrived from those countries (mainly Angola and Mozambique), and also from Brasil by soap opera influence.
But for me the worst changes are the ones on the written, we now have a new orthographic agreement with Brasil (and with Portuguese speaking countries), and a lot of words will change the way they are written, and in Brasil they have a more American influence on writing so in some cases things will very different, we normally used more letter’s in a word.

Ex:
Quatar will be Qatar
Actualização will be Atualização (actualization)

and so one

But I will always write the same way I’ve learned

3998

That’s very interesting, I never really paid much attention to how much spoken language has changed when watching older movies (or in real-life, but I probably haven’t lived long enough for that), but once you start to hear about something, you start to notice that something. I hope that in the future we’ll still be able to understand people who speak the same language, but live in different parts of the world, or maybe we’ll all talk some kind of Cityspeak like in Blade Runner! :wink:

3999

City Heat - Would have been better with a different director and a better script, imo. The comedy is just annoying and the final line is shocking.

Its nice to see what it would have been like if Eastwood was in a film noir though.

4000

[size=12pt]The Changeling[/size] (1980) Dir. Peter Medak
With George C. Scott and Trish Van Devere

This may seem like a contradiction but this is a very pleasant terror film to watch, well is not quite a terror film at least a typical one more a paranormal thriller, with a Gothic feeling in it.
The film is divided in two parts the first one more ethereal and phantasmagorical, being the second part with the inevitable unfolding of the mystery, one with a more terrain feeling.
I specially like the used of music, the main character is a music teacher and composer so that was necessary but brilliant any way, even more because not only the classical music pieces and soundtrack use in general was great, also the use of strange sounds very effective, not that the movie is much different from others of the kind, it does have the usual stuff the piece of symbolic furniture, the music box, but it very well done classy stuff, by the way the cinematography is also excellent.
The story is about George C Scott character that after loosing is wife and daughter in a freak car accident, and in order to forget his grief moves to Seattle and rents an old gothic style mansion and yes as you can imagine the house is haunted. So the tale is pretty normal, but the difference to other films is in the details, the talking with the dead boy scene, is one of the best I’ve seen in the screen even with the Exorcist included, the use of the tape recorder, the wheel chair chase scene very creepy, the sound and music use is like I said excellent, all very effective to create the right environment.
On another point the director didn’t use carnal or gore elements to create terror, (the dead boy bones for instance were of no significance in terms of adding a terror feeling to the story), always used only the most atmospheric/ethereal ones, the entity was also an ambiguous one (note what happened to the police captain), and so one, the film loses some focus when it comes to the more detective work part, but I guess it was necessary to the story.
And then we have George C Scott, what a great actor, he looks tired and somehow oblivious from the film, but that was necessary, he’s representing someone who lost the entire close family so brilliant stuff, pity that his wife wasn’t such a good actress (can’t even be compared), but she goes well and looked terrified enough, she was also looking much different from her Last run days, Scott was really a good fellow giving work to the missus.
I also liked the the way the director avoid European terror references, so this it’s a very North American film.
As conclusion it’s a very well done film with a cool cold gothic taste brilliantly filmed, with only a few minor less interesting part not enough to spoil the viewing, and with George C Scott every film has very good chances of being good, it will give a nice nocturne viewing (even for the family, if the kids are older that is, there’s no blood coursing nude etc, but the terror is effective) at least for me it did.

4 stars

P:S. It also has Historical Societies, something I found very cool and unfortunately non existing in the Latin countries