last movie you watched

[pmp]

Last week, I rewatched the first season of Hunters on Amazon Prime, ready for season 2, which has just dropped (three years after the first). I've done a review for my blog, which I have posted below. There are some spoilers of sorts for season 1 because this discusses season 2, but I don't think there's anything here that would spoil your enjoyment.

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Three years ago, Hunters was unleashed on Amazon Prime with great fanfare, and no doubt high hopes for the streaming service. Starring Al Pacino and Logan Lerman, this tale of a group of Nazi-hunters in 1977 got very mixed reviews. While intriguing, the first season was something of a mess. The tone switched from serious to irreverent to downright stupid, and it should have been clear from the outset that certain sequences were crass and were going to cause offence to many people. In short, the Holocaust is not a laughing matter or to be treated in a frivolous manner. But you knew that already, it’s just a shame the makers of the programme didn’t. There were calls from some for it not to be renewed for that very reason, but the programme makers said they wanted to make up to five seasons. Eighteen months after the first season dropped, Amazon announced that a second had been commissioned, and, a few months ago, they announced it would also be the last.

At some point in the last eighteen months, the first season was re-edited without announcement. Some of the more controversial sequences were cut out completely, as were some that relied on music that appeared to have rights issues. In other places, the original music was exchanged for something else. The quiet re-edit has drawn criticism from some fans on social media who are shouting “censorship”, but it’s fair to say that it makes the series better for the most part. It gives it a more even tone, and everything seems a little tighter in its pacing, and it removes some of the more self-indulgent fantasy elements. It was clear to anyone watching the re-edit that the second series was going to be a little more respectful in nature.

The second season dropped in January 2023, some three years after the first. All of the regulars return, some with bigger roles than others, and that includes Al Pacino. Pacino’s involvement was one of the big selling points for Amazon first time around, and one has to commend how his return is negotiated here. There are also some new additions to the hunting team, including Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The second season is much more assured than the first, and it’s also far more focussed, concentrating almost completely on the hunt for Hitler, who is alive and well and living in South America. As the season starts, the hunters have disbanded, but the news about Hitler being alive quickly brings them back together, despite reservations from some of them. It moves at quite a pace, having just eight episodes instead of ten to tell its story, and one of those is given up entirely to a story within a story involving a completely different group of characters, and which doesn’t move the plot on at all (although it’s beautifully done). Yes, even in this somewhat superior season, Hunters seems intent on throwing a curveball. It’s still got as many four-letter words as a Tarantino film, and much of it filled with violence, although it is less gleeful about it this time around.

As with the first season, though, the series succeeds because of standout performances. Pacino is fine, but not outstanding. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s much heralded appearance is as annoying as hell, with a dodgy British accent, and it’s a tribute to the writers and the rest of the actors that the performance doesn’t derail the whole thing. But this is very much Logan Lerman’s show now. His acting in the first season might have been somewhat low-key, but here he is much more assured and his performance has great flair, perhaps because he’s playing a grown man this time around instead of a wide-eyed teenager. He’s also credited with a producing role in season two. Carol Kane is also particularly good here (just as she was in the first season). There are times when she doesn’t have much to work with, but she has five minutes in the final episode that are spellbinding, remarkably moving, and remarkably real. I would be very surprised if a supporting actress Golden Globe or Emmy nomination doesn’t come her way.

There is a sense here that the season is both too long and too short. The fairytale penultimate episode could be cut without detriment to the series, although it’s superbly done as a separate entity. Likewise, you could take out every single scene that Pacino is in, and it would make no difference to the main narrative arc whatsoever. That would probably leave a six episode final series instead of one that is eight episodes. At the same time, the finale seems too short, even at 66 minutes. Making that final episode feature-length would have helped it, I think.

This final season isn’t perfect, but it is a considerable improvement, and the final episode acts as a fitting – actually, an exceptional – finale, with some very moving moments. That hour or so is a great piece of television that raises some important questions that are pertinent to events happening in the world today (and arguments on Twitter that I was involved in just before watching it, as it happens), although it’s not particularly subtle about it. But the series was never about subtlety.

It will be interesting to see how Hunters will be viewed in years to come, if it’s remembered at all. There is still that feeling that it didn’t quite manage to achieve what it set out to do, and part of that is due to its own self-indulgences in the first set of episodes which probably resulted in a second and final season rather than a third, fourth, and so on – although I also admit that Covid delays might have had a part to play in that, too. What’s clear, though, is that the re-edit of the first season, and the clear focus of the second, makes it a worthwhile, if sometimes frustrating, watch - but not for the easily offended.

[MikeFromHolland]

watched last evening Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967) , a timeless classic starring Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy.

What an entertaining movie i thought that was!!! The dialogues are superb, awesome performances and direction too. The characters are magnificently portrayed. This must be me 30-40th time i watched over the years. Never tire of watching.

spoiler alert...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%27s_Coming_to_Dinner

Enjoyed it too. You’ve seen part two with Poitier too?

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[MikeFromHolland]

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Watched another classic from Bollywood’s golden years: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (something is happening), from 1998. Again with the king of Bollywood Shah Rukh Kahn and the amazingly acting Kajol.

Now I can’t get the title song out of my head…





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[Walter Hale 4]

watched last evening Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967) , a timeless classic starring Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy.

What an entertaining movie i thought that was!!! The dialogues are superb, awesome performances and direction too. The characters are magnificently portrayed. This must be me 30-40th time i watched over the years. Never tire of watching.

spoiler alert...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%27s_Coming_to_Dinner

Enjoyed it too. You’ve seen part two with Poitier too?

.

No, i did not know that there was a part 2.

[MikeFromHolland]

watched last evening Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967) , a timeless classic starring Katherine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy.

What an entertaining movie i thought that was!!! The dialogues are superb, awesome performances and direction too. The characters are magnificently portrayed. This must be me 30-40th time i watched over the years. Never tire of watching.

spoiler alert...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_Who%27s_Coming_to_Dinner

Enjoyed it too. You’ve seen part two with Poitier too?

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No, i did not know that there was a part 2.

There isn’t. I mixed it up with To Sir With Love. That one has a sequel. My fault.

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[Mister Mike]

Hey, what can I say, I'm still a kid at heart . Really enjoyed it.

[MikeFromHolland]

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Watched Hindi thriller ‘Mom’ (2017) from Ravi Udyawar, with Sridevi, the wonderful acting actress who died shortly after (February 2018) and much too early by accidental drowning in a bathtub. A thriller in itself.

It’s a nice movie, but too western in my opinion. It’s just not distinctive enough.




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[pmp]

Finally watched a film tonight. It's been a while. Rupert Everett stars as Oscar Wilde in The Happy Prince (2018), which depicts the final years of Wilde's life, following his move to France when he was released from prison. This was something of a labour of love for Everett, and it's clear that it's heartfelt. The problem, perhaps, is that there's not all that much story to tell from these final years, just a series of encounters and reunions that ultimately lead him in a downward spiral to death. While the film gets the main gist of the story correct, it's difficult to know just how much of other elements are true, and how much are made up. One thing in the film's favour is that it doesn't give a one-sided "Bosie was evil" type of account of Lord Alfred Douglas. Instead, it shows that the two men simply weren't good for each other, and contributed to the other's misery. Douglas has been the pantomime villain of the story over the years, but Colin Morgan at least makes him seem three-dimensional rather than a rather stock bad-guy figure. Everett is excellent, too, and yet the film still isn't as compelling as other Wilde biopics, most notably the stunning Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch, back in 1960. It's also worth adding that there is some horrible green screen and CGI work in The Happy Prince, which betrays the film limited budget. Still, it's a good film if not a great one, and it's certainly worth a watch.

[MikeFromHolland]

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Watched another Hindi movie. From 2016 this time. Actress Alia Bhatt is becoming my favorite actress by now. She can really play anything. And she’s so naturel in this one. Just like Shah Rukh Khan as her therapist. Another person who can really play anything. “Dear Zindagi” was the second movie of director Gauri Shinde, who also wrote it. In 2012 she made her first one and last year her third. So she takes her time for making her films. It shows. This one breaths quality in every aspect. Another Bollywood film I enjoyed very much.




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[Tang Lungs side kick]

Witches 4/6 , Angelica Huston is the leader of witches.....the witches hate kids and can turn them into mice. Atkinson as hotel owner

Gremlins 5/6

[pmp]

Over the last three nights, I've been watching the first three films in the Child's Play series. I never bothered with them in the past, for some reason, but after catching and enjoying the Chucky TV series, I thought I should start catching up on how it all started. From what I can gather, the series of films is effectively split in two. The first three films (Child's Play, Child's Play 2, and Child's Play 3) were made as serious horror movies, whereas the franchise turned to comedy horror for the later films (after a seven year gap) and for much of the Chucky TV series (which has just been renewed).

Rather surprisingly, the original trilogy of films hold up rather well. Unlike some of the other horror movies of the time aimed at the same audience, these films are not particularly gory - in fact, it's rather interesting to see the range of age certificates on the blu ray discs, from 18 in the UK and Ireland, down to "not for the under 12s" in France. The whole idea of a mass murderer transferring his soul into a kid's toy by way of voodoo is downright bonkers, but it's not played for laughs in these early movies. All three films feature around the same character: Andy Barclay. He's about 6 in the first film, about 8 in the second, and 16 in the third (where he's played by a different actor). It's interesting to see the series following the way of the Elm Street series - where the villain gets more and more jokes and one-liners with each passing film. The third one, set in a military academy, looks like it might go the way of the 2nd Elm Street film and end up being somewhat homoerotic, but it doesn't go there, and instead borrows liberally from such films as Taps and Omen 2. All three films are thoroughly enjoyable, it has to be said, much more so than I anticipated, and it's interesting to see that they attracted stars such as Brad Dourif, Jenny Agutter, and Chris Sarendon - and later entries would feature Jennifer Tilly, Nicholas Rowe, Katherine Heigl, John Ritter, John Waters. And the last two, plus the TV series, also see the return of Alex Vincent, who played the young boy in the first two movies.

[pmp]

Tonight I returned to Lugosi's Dracula from 1931. My plan was to watch it with the Philip Glass score. Dracula has no background music at all (except the opening credits), and so Glass wrote a score for it. I'd never watched the film with it before, but quickly turned the music off. It runs constantly through the film, and just doesn't fit, not least because it has a completely different sound to it than the rest of the film - modern recording techniques over a soundtrack from 1931. But I did watch the rest of the film. I've given it a hard time in the past, but have to say I enjoyed it more than I have done during previous viewings. Perhaps my advancing years is more forgiving of the slowness of it, and how wooden much of it seems, but I did have more appreciation of some of the decisions that Tod Browning took in his direction. Sadly, Lugosi's performance seems to get worse as the years go on, and one really has to wonder how he ended up making a career on the back of Dracula, even if much of it was on poverty row. He was capable of better, though, as the likes of White Zombie and The Return of the Vampire show.

The weirdest thing about watching it now, though, is the quality of the picture. I first saw it during Christmas of 1997 or 1998, when BBC2 showed a whole lot of Universal horrors. And it crackled and buzzed, and the audio could barely be heard, and the print had all kinds of problems visually. Now on blu ray (and 4K), it's almost pristine. Part of me wonders if much of the atmosphere came from that battered old print, in standard definition, through an aerial sat on top of the TV, late at night in the middle of winter! Or was it just that the 24 year old me was transfixed by seeing these classic movies for the first time? Either way, the Universal Horrors documentary shown during the same Christmas holidays certainly had an impact on my field of study (silent movies) when I started by degree in 2005. I had seen Hitchcock's The Ring at the cinema, my first silent film, earlier in the same year (1997) - by accident, as I went into the wrong screen at the cinema. And the documentary on Universal Horror introduced me to the romantic notion of the "lost film," in its discussion of London after Midnight. That was another spark lit!

[MikeFromHolland]

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Indicator just announced their first 4K UHD releases. Really looking forward to these two beauties…


https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/4k-uhd

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[pmp]

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Indicator just announced their first 4K UHD releases. Really looking forward to these two beauties…


https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/4k-uhd
















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To add to this, Eureka made an announcement yesterday of a set of 30s and 40s horror movies: Murders in the Zoo, Night Monster, House of Horrors, and Horror Island. I have them all on Scream Factory releases, but it's a nice set. Horror Island is the least exciting, but even that is a decent time-filler.

[MikeFromHolland]

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Indicator just announced their first 4K UHD releases. Really looking forward to these two beauties…


https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/4k-uhd
















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To add to this, Eureka made an announcement yesterday of a set of 30s and 40s horror movies: Murders in the Zoo, Night Monster, House of Horrors, and Horror Island. I have them all on Scream Factory releases, but it's a nice set. Horror Island is the least exciting, but even that is a decent time-filler.

O man, so many wonderful releases and so little time…

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[pmp]

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Indicator just announced their first 4K UHD releases. Really looking forward to these two beauties…


https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/4k-uhd
















.

To add to this, Eureka made an announcement yesterday of a set of 30s and 40s horror movies: Murders in the Zoo, Night Monster, House of Horrors, and Horror Island. I have them all on Scream Factory releases, but it's a nice set. Horror Island is the least exciting, but even that is a decent time-filler.

O man, so many wonderful releases and so little time…

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That's not all. Warner Archive have announce Camille (1936), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Flamingo Road (1949), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Neptune's Daughter (1949).

[Mister Mike]

Being a big baseball fan, I really enjoyed this.



Had enjoyed the first one and this sequel was very good too, although it does lose a few point for its abrupt ending (guess they wanted to leave the door open for a third installment).

[ForeverElvis]

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Indicator just announced their first 4K UHD releases. Really looking forward to these two beauties…


https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/4k-uhd
















.

To add to this, Eureka made an announcement yesterday of a set of 30s and 40s horror movies: Murders in the Zoo, Night Monster, House of Horrors, and Horror Island. I have them all on Scream Factory releases, but it's a nice set. Horror Island is the least exciting, but even that is a decent time-filler.

O man, so many wonderful releases and so little time…

.

That's not all. Warner Archive have announce Camille (1936), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Flamingo Road (1949), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Neptune's Daughter (1949).

Confessions of a Nazi Spy for me. A taut, exciting WWII film. Made to combat isolationism at the outbreak of WWII in the USA.

Bought it when Warner Archive first started and it was MOD. Put it in to watch a year or two later and the disc was blank.

Now i can not only replace but upgrade it!

[ForeverElvis]

Shotgun Wedding on Prime with Jennifer Lopez.

Oh how low has she sunk her film career. What a cheap, unfunny, dead on arrival film. Some funny people in the movie that probably had a blast making it but what wound up on screen was trash.

A slightly funny joke or two is not a movie make. The leads have no chemistry. Jennifer Coolidge firing a gun is the funniest bit. Clichés abound, all is telegraphed.

When you can only afford to hire Lenny Kravitz in a pivotal role you are in trouble.

I could almost watch Stay Away Joe twice in one day before this, I said almost.

And critics say ad nausea that Elvis made nothing but utter garbage. If they want to know what garbage is they should watch this.

I won’t subject you to the trailer. I don’t want to be responsible for what you might do to yourself after.

[pmp]

This set arrived this morning . Despite the title, most of the 9 films here are actually just straightforward B-movie thrillers, but that's just fine with me. Looking forward to delving in. The films included are:

Address Unknown
The Guilt of Janet Ames
Escape in the Fog
Assignment Paris
711 Ocean Drive
Johnny Allegro
The Black Book
The Miami Story
The Killer That Stalked New York.

Region A locked blu rays. There are two more volumes, and so if the quality on this set is fine, then I'll invest in those next month with birthday money. Volume 1 cost me £30.

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[pmp]

I watched The Killer That Stalked New York tonight from the above Noir set. The set has turned out to be Region B compatable, by the way. Killer That Stalked is above average, and part crime thriller. It's also similar to Panic in the Streets - and released in the same year. Evelyn Keyes stars. The picture quality and transfer is very nice.

[pmp]

Tonight I saw Assignment Paris from the Noir set. It's not a noir, but a spy movie really, but that's beside the point. It's rather dour and complicated, but it's always good to see George Sanders, although he doesn't look too engaged here. Dana Andrews is the lead. The transfer is very good.

[pmp]

Tonight I saw The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, a Hammer production from 1960. It got quite mediocre reviews when it came out, and it's not hard to see why, as this is less a horror film (as would have been expected) and more a romantic drama. It feels rather drawn out at 90 minutes, and there are relatively few thrills - not least because Mr Hyde is more handsome than Dr Jekyll (and it is the latter that sees the actor covered in makeup, and not the former). It's OK as a film, but not something I'll be watching again. The print is good in the Mill Creek 20-film Hammer collection blu ray.

[ForeverElvis]

Last night I watched the extended 178min Avatar 2009 on BluRay on a 4k TV.

Hadn’t seen it since 2009, it looked fantastic! It’s almost as if other films with lots of cgi still haven’t caught up to this.

What a spectacular film, visually stunning in every way possible. The story is a little cliche and it’s metaphor for our world is blunt. It was a game changer for cinema visual and sound effects, just like Star Wars 30 years before.

It is a film not to be missed by any movie lover!

Today I went to the cinema to see Avatar - The Way of Water 2022, 192 mins in UltraAVX 3D HFR.

EPIC Cinema, as with the first film a spectacular film, visually stunning in every way. An incredible movie going experience that must be seen on the big screen.

Again, the story is straightforward, the message clear. You really care for this family and what happens to them.

The first film took place almost completely in the forest and Cameron explored it in such detail that keeping the film there would have made this a tired repeat. Instead 2/3’s of this film are set on and in the ocean.

The cgi is incredible, I can’t begin to understand how it was done. But what an achievement, Oscar Worthy visual and sound effects.

Run to see this, you’ll regret it if you don’t!

[Walter Hale 4]

I watched the second sequel to Arthur Hailey's novel AIRPORT, a film titled AIRPORT '77 on sunday evening.

Good solid cast typical of the seventies disasters epics that starred Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, Joseph Cotten, Olivia de Havilland, Christopher Lees , Brenda Vaccaro and George Kennedy who features on all four of the AIRPORT series.

Im probably in the minority but AIRPORT 77 is my favorite out of the four films.

Anyone here seen and liked, or even disliked AIRPORT 77 ?

good article online on wiki for you..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_%2777