Last Film You Watched? VI

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
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Mother

So this is my 4th Bong Joon-ho movie. Not sure what to think about this movie as a whole? The craft most definitely has a special feeling to it though. Honestly, haven't watched a movie as tense as this for quite a while. It's also most probably my favorite climax to ending out of the four movies i've watched from him.

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Revisited PEEPING TOM (1960) and THE THIRD MAN (1949) on the big screen recently.

Masterpieces!

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Jubilee (1978)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
Quai des Orfevres (1947)
Ammonite (2020)
Mandabi (1968)
Schizopolis (1996)

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Dracula (1931)
Julius Caesar (1953)
The War of the Roses (1989)
The Producers (1967)

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A Ghost story
I didn't have tons of fun watching it. But ever since, whenever I listen to the song of the film, I get a feeling of pure, absolute and terrible loneliness.
It was different from what I thought. I thought the film
was carried by Mara, but around the middle of the movie she disappears, and then the film is carried by the ghost, the souvenir of the presence of Casey Affleck. Lowery and Affleck did an incredible job to make the very long passages without Mara work. Affleck doesn't look like he has much to do, but strangely, I think few actors could have make this work.
And though Mara wonderfully carries her scenes, what remains is the feeling of the ghost, the feeling of the passage of time, of decay, of loneliness, of vacuity, emptiness.

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Deadly Illusions - OMG, this was so hilariously bad. It's like a straight to video softcore erotic thriller from the 90's but without the nudity and with an emphasis on "plot". The way the characters act is just so dumb...

Highly recommended :D

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Body of Lies

Watchable.   Like, there's nothing particularly  good bad to take note of.

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Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
It is top tier Chaplin. It's Chaplin at his most angry. The story of an unemployed who earns his living by seducing then killing older lonely women and then disappearing with their money, based on the true story of a French criminal.
Alike Ealing comedies from the same period (Ladykillers, Kind hearts and Coronets) or Hitchcock's The trouble with Harry, it understands perfectly the connexion between suspense and comedy. By showing the audience things that the characters ignore, or showing converstations where one character knows something that the other one doesn't, you can create both suspense and comedy: both rely on the same storytelling approach that Chaplin fully embraces, with his usual perfect direction and sense of rythm. Each scene is incredibly suspenseful, and while some end in murder, other end in comedy. The set-up is the same, only the issue differ.

But on the contrary of the Ealing comedies, where the film shocks by its total lack of morality, creating a world where moral compass is only the bottom of the joke, Chaplin while having an immoral lead still makes a moral film. Verdoux knows right and wrong, a notion the heroes of Kind hearts of coronets seem to fully ignore. Destroyed by a broken capitalist society, Verdoux has renounced rightfulness, but he tries to somehow reach for some mercy.

Chaplin ends by comparing his criminal with other criminals and inserts images of Hitler or Mussolini, he also shows bankers comitting suicide at the peak of the financial crisis. He compares the few women Verdoux killed to the millions that died because of how gorrible society is. Never has Chaplin been so upfront with his disgust for the society of his time. Probably way too much for his own good, at a time where he was already accused of being a communist.
And while some could consider that Chaplin refuses to condemn Verdoux and his murder by comparing him to Hitler, Mussolini... he more accurately wonders how society can still be legitimate to condemn people and how society can regain its moral sense.

Tavernier will have a same approach at the end of Le juge et l'assassin, where he ends by comparing the numbers of people his pedophile lead character killed and the number of kids who died working the mines every year during the last decade of the nineteenth century, while the character start singing a socialist anthem. Both films finally expressing wothout constraints their anger towards a society only strong against the weakest.

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Demoph wrote:
March 22nd, 2021, 4:39 pm
A Ghost story
I didn't have tons of fun watching it. But ever since, whenever I listen to the song of the film, I get a feeling of pure, absolute and terrible loneliness.
It was different from what I thought. I thought the film
was carried by Mara, but around the middle of the movie she disappears, and then the film is carried by the ghost, the souvenir of the presence of Casey Affleck. Lowery and Affleck did an incredible job to make the very long passages without Mara work. Affleck doesn't look like he has much to do, but strangely, I think few actors could have make this work.
And though Mara wonderfully carries her scenes, what remains is the feeling of the ghost, the feeling of the passage of time, of decay, of loneliness, of vacuity, emptiness.
I love A Ghost story very much. It's one of my faves

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Scarface

Aside from Al Pacino's enjoyable to watch acting, i wasn't expected to be actually kinda invested in the characters. Like, i wasn't expecting the story and characters' arcs to be this sad. I knew nothing about the movie, before watching, except for Pacino's acting and the popular scene. I'm glad the movie was more than i expected.

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