What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[runningdownthatdream]

This week I watched two films by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan -Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012) and Winter Sleep (2014).
Both films are beautifully shot and set mostly in the rural interior of Turkey in the present day. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia concerns the attempt by the police to find the body of a man who has been murdered. Set mostly at night a small convoy directed by the key suspect drives to various locations because he cannot recall precisely where he buried the body. This becomes a metaphor for a country that was founded on violence having also lost its way, while the closing moments in the mortuary where the post-mortem technician complains about having to use out-dated tools adds to the feeling that for all its economic success, remote rural areas remain as poor and neglected as they were when the Republic was founded.

In Winter Sleep, a retired actor and the manager of a hotel built into the rocks at Cappadoccia (the actor playing the role was in the BBC soap opera Eastenders for a few years) where he lives with a young wife and his sister, is revealed to be part of a family indeed, a 'community' of people who live close to each other but are remote from each others feelings to the point where their concerns -mostly about money, property and facilities for local schools- are either ignored or spurned.
Both films are long and very very slow, and stylistically related to Bergman and Tarkovsky. I found them understated and at times quite dull, which may be deliberate. I would only recommend them to people who enjoy these 'meaningful' films unless you have trouble sleeping at night, in which case either one will send you to sleep after at least an hour and a half.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1827487/

Winter Sleep
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2758880/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1

Y'know you're little too cynical sometimes! While not disagreeing entirely with you about Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, I did rather enjoy it. The silences, the panoramas, the darkness all combined to make it somewhat like a fairytale. But one must be in the mood for alone time to really get into it........shut out the outside, turn off the lights, put on the headphones and just become an observer.

[Stavros]

Y'know you're little too cynical sometimes! While not disagreeing entirely with you about Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, I did rather enjoy it. The silences, the panoramas, the darkness all combined to make it somewhat like a fairytale. But one must be in the mood for alone time to really get into it........shut out the outside, turn off the lights, put on the headphones and just become an observer.

Far from being cynical, the problem is that I was not moved by the films, I do understand the landscape and the use of time, but there is a gap or an emptiness in the films which could not be filled -for me.

[Ambiguous shyster]

Snow White and the huntsmen

[trish]

"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" a troubling mix of humor and war depicting the addiction of an embedded journalist to the hazards of her job. It has it moments. I give it 2 1/2 stars (out of four).

[Absarokah]

[BlüeKarma]

Hush, about a deaf writer who lives in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, and then she gets a psycho slasher problem.

[fred41]

Hush, about a deaf writer who lives in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, and then she gets a psycho slasher problem.

Yeah, I was either going to watch that or "The Hallow"...I chose the latter. It had some potential but it was wasted and, at a playing time of 1hr. 32 min...it was about 32 min. too long.
Did you think Hush was worth it ?...I might still watch that next.

[Stavros]

The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn, 1976)
I came back to to this film after a gap of many years recalling it when I first saw it as a flop even though the promotional material for the film declares that Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson are 'a dynamo combo who set the screen ablaze...'. The film concerns the last days of horse rustlers in an age when modernisation and the rule of law is making their line of work hard and expensive. A local land baron hires a 'regulator' to stamp out rustling, and this pits Brando, as the eccentric regulator, against Nicholson with fatal results. Much comment on the film has claimed Brando spoiled the film, ranging from self-indulgent over-acting to changing the lines, but the real problem is Arthur Penn. In a series of films beginning with Bonnie & Clyde and continuing with Little Big Man, Night Moves, and this film, Penn tried too hard to make deeply meaningful films about people who lose control of their lives, but did not know how long a scene should be and repeatedly failed to dig deep enough to give his movies depth. Too many scenes in this film drag on for no purpose, the dialogue sounds at some points improvised, because it was, at other times stilted and theatrical. This mars a lot of Penn's work, and makes this film tepid when it ought to be hot, sluggish when it should be fast. The final confrontation between Brando and Nicholson is an abrupt moment which suggests there was a major cut in the final edition as there is no real confrontation at all. That Brando prior to it holds a conversation with two horses while waving around some carrots also implies that by this time Penn had lost patience with the 'World's Greatest Screen Actor' and just wanted to end it all as quickly as possible. One wonders what Clint Eastwood in his best western days would have made with this story. The quality of the print on the dvd was not good either and the music inappropriate.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074906/

[Stavros]

Talking of westerns, I see there is a new re-make of The Magnificent Seven, itself a re-make of Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai which with Rashomon and Throne of Blood ranks as his best films. The John Sturges western was good but not a patch on the Japanese original, but why do we need yet another version? Answer, we don't. What is next for a remake? Jaws? Citizen Kane? I just don't know how they get the money for it when there is such a lack of decent original films, just franchises and re-makes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/movi...seven-trailer/

[runningdownthatdream]

Talking of westerns, I see there is a new re-make of The Magnificent Seven, itself a re-make of Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai which with Rashomon and Throne of Blood ranks as his best films. The John Sturges western was good but not a patch on the Japanese original, but why do we need yet another version? Answer, we don't. What is next for a remake? Jaws? Citizen Kane? I just don't know how they get the money for it when there is such a lack of decent original films, just franchises and re-makes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/movi...seven-trailer/

.......remakes are needed for one simple reason: revenue. Why bother take a risk on the unknown when you can easily remake a popular original with tweaks to make it relevant to today's audience and likely assure yourself of a flood of money? I would expect every large budget film goes through a process of quantification, focus group studies, assessment for cultural significance, etc before it's greenlighted. Is it coincidence that movies with similar themes seem to appear in bunches? Look at the number of films about artificial intelligence released over the past few years as an example - it's relevant because a lot of influential tech people are involved in the space and making it a reality - e.g: Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google self-driving cars. The singularity is coming!

I bet there are people in the film industry dedicated to going through back catalogues and doing assessments on which films could be remade for significant profits. It's shameful but totally in-line with the millennial mindset which is to imitate the things they heard or saw in their youth and apply their pop-culture memes to totally destroy whatever artistic value it originally had.