What were the last movies you watched?

[BevoTheWarrior]

The Girlfriend Experience - I watched this one because Steven Soderbergh directed it and it was described as "experimental". It stars Sasha Grey in (I believe) her first non-porn role as a top-tier call girl. It was not a good movie. At all. Sasha's acting was mediocre at best and the plot was sort of all over the place at times. Thankfully it was only about 70 minutes.

Deep Blue Sea - Better than The Girlfriend Experience but still not that great. One of those "Aaahh! Sharks are scary!" movies. But it did have some fun moments. I actually laughed quite a bit during the movie.

Trick 'r Treat - I loved this one. Four short stories are seamlessly blended together over the course of Halloween night as things inevitably go wrong. It's got a bit of camp to it but that definitely adds to the appeal. I can't believe it took me so long to get around to seeing this.

[Insane3]

Faust (Murnau)
Very impressive in terms of setting and special effects for the time. A great example of german expressionism, although it didn't age very well on the narrative side, but that's with most silent films.

[AshtrayHeart]

Interview with a Vampire

Not a bad film. But, jesus, Guns N Roses did a terrible job covering Sympathy for the Devil.

And 90% of Cruise's lines can be summed up in 3 words: "You ****ed up."

Quarantine 2: Terminal - 4.75/10

Pretty bad sequel. The first one is much better. The only interesting thing to note about this movie is that it takes place at the same time as the first one.

lmao they made a sequel to it?

Same thing for the sequel to the original film, by the way (known as [REC]. I believe it's a Spaniard film). I only watched [REC] fully. I thumbed through Quarantine, and it's so identical that it's pathetic. Didn't know us 'Murrikans hated subtitles that much.

[moderndaycatastrophist]

Celtic Pride and Home Alone. See the connection?

[Insane3]

La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir)
Amazing movie about humanity, with constructed characters and authentic dialogues. The aesthetic is very simple and focused on stage direction and layered composition (both in sound and image) with wide angles.

Paranormal Activity
Very scary, but in an easy stupid way. The characters are hopelessly stupid and passive about what's happening and that's a classic in bad horror movies. At least, this movie does very well at being stupidly scary and the tension builds up relentlessly until the very unclimactic ending where you are just [spoilers] glad that the guy dies and the girl finally becomes a little more capable at expressing her emotions

[Mega-Tallica]

Blitz - 4/10

Boring movie with a plot that has been way overdone already. Jason Statham is in it, so that helped the movie out some.

[McTenzington]

Cul-De-Sac

Probably the most Polanskian of the Polanski movies I've seen. Odd, scary, funny and directed in such an idiosyncratic manner---it's pretty crazy that it doesn't all fall apart.

[BachiG]

The Killer Inside Me - 7/10 Pretty decent movie about a small town Texas deputy that turns out to be a sociopathic killer that has to continue killing in order to cover his tracks. The film caught an inordinate amount of flack due to a couple of rather graphic and gruesome scenes of brutality directed towards women and admittedly in the first instance, where he beats Jessica Alba's face to a bloody pulp, it is awfully difficult to watch, but overall the film is very engaging as you wonder how/when/if he's ever going to get caught.

[HairyMan]

License To Kill - 6.5/10.

I'm a pretty big James Bond fan. I never really watched them when growing up, but when I got to college my roommates and I would stay up late playing Goldeneye on the N64. I had heard of the franchise and knew of the actors and some stories, but didn't have a deep interest, or knowledge, of the series. A friend down the hall from me in the dorm had a collection of all the movies on VHS tape. So one weekend, I sat through a marathon watching all of them in chronological order. (Tomorrow Never Dies had just come out on tape at that time. DVD wasn't widespread yet).

Having not been "poisoned" by growing up watching any specific actor as James Bond, I had a chance to objectively view each of them. For me, Sean Connery is the best. He is followed by Pierce Brosnan, then Roger Moore, then Tim Dalton, then George Lazenby. I'm not including Daniel Craig in this ranking as at the time I was being introduced to the series, he had not yet been James Bond.

I guess I liked Sean Connery the best since he seemed to fit in quite well with regards to the timeframe of the movies he was in, and he had a nice mixture of charm and humor. The last two movies he did (You Only Live Twice, then after a one-movie break, Diamonds Are Forever) he started to show some signs of aging and just didn't really come across in the same way as he did before.

Pierce Brosnan took my second slot since he seemed able to mix the charisma, charm, and "manliness" of Sean Connery with the whimsical nature and humor of Roger Moore. Sadly, Pierce started out with the best film of his run in Goldeneye, and the story writing for his subsequent films got worse and worse. (Tomorrow Never Dies was fairly good, The World Is Not Enough had so much potential to be fantastic, but just seemed to fall short with the stretching of reality and nuclear physics by having Denise Richards play a nuclear scientist, having Renard holding a massive lump of plutonium metal and saying "It's safe", and having the ultimate battle take place in the middle of an operating nuclear reactor core. Die Another Day was just a complete travesty to the franchise and was painful to watch).

Roger Moore came in 3rd for me since the bulk of his movies really set the tone for what a Bond movie should contain (sexual innuendo, crazy gadgets, far-fetched situations to escape from, humor, and megalomaniacal antagonists). The problem with him is that sometimes the humor was taken too far, and he stayed on as James Bond a few movies too long. A View To A Kill was just painful to watch as Roger Moore was in his 60's at that time, I believe, and he just looked like an old man wearing Depends in all his fights. Tanya Roberts was PAINFUL as the Bond Girl in this movie, but in 1985 (when the movie came out) she was the prototypical "dumb blonde babe" so it made sense to use her.

Tim Dalton ranks 4th for me because while he played a great, true to the literature form of James Bond, the movies he played in were just too sharply contrasting what Roger Moore had done, and also seemed to suffer from the late 1980's transitional philosophy with regards to the Cold War and the Drug Epidemic of the era. The Living Daylights was an overall good movie, but by that time the Cold War had greatly lessened in severity and the transition the world was in just didn't seem to correlate well with the movie. Some great actors starred in that movie (John Rhys Davies, Art Malik), but overall it was a bit too sharp of a transition from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton as Dalton was just a bit "too" serious of a Bond. I'll go over License To Kill in my formal review.

Finally, George Lazenby ranked last not really due to his portrayal of James Bond, but due to the fact that he just always seems like a temporary stand-in for Sean Connery in an otherwise fantastic movie. Trying to come to grips with a new Bond actor generally takes a couple of movies. Lazenby was only there for one movie and so it was hard to really come to grips with him being James Bond. I think he could have become a great Bond actor if he had more movies to work with, but it just wasn't in the cards.

So back to License To Kill. This film was Tim Dalton's second, and last, film as James Bond. The story focuses on Bond's revenge mission against drug dealer Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) for the murder of his friend's wife, and torture of his friend, Felix Leiter. (Played by David Hedison, who also played Felix Leiter in Roger Moore's first film, Live And Let Die). This movie also stars Benicio Del Toro and Jay Mohr as "associates" of Sanchez.

I give the movie a 6.5 out of 10 since for me, Tim Dalton just didn't really "do it" for me as James Bond, and the departure from the norm in this movie (most movies generally deal with some type of Cold War type plot, while this one focused on the cocaine problems that were prevalent at the time) made it seem more like a standard 1980's action movie and not a James Bond movie. In addition, the way the script was written, it seemed as if those involved in the movie knew that it would be their last Bond film. For many, at the time, it seemed as if it would be the final James Bond film since the Cold War was coming to an end, and after License To Kill a great deal of time passed before the next Bond flick, Goldeneye, would come out. (1989-1995). When the next film came out, there was a new James Bond, a new M, and a new Moneypenny.

This film was also one of the more violent, and gruesome, entries into the series. Scenes of characters being eaten alive by sharks, whipped with a cat-o-9 tails, and ground up alive in a grinder are displayed. This was shockingly different from previous Bond movies where scenes like that were alluded to, but never graphically displayed.

I also had issues with the fact that throughout this movie, the way Dalton performed as James Bond just didn't seem like the Bond that Connery and Moore had gotten me used to. In repeated viewings, the movie has indeed grown on me thanks to the great acting from Del Toro and Davi, but it's still not one of my highest ranking Bond films. Just too different, and too "dated" for me.

[Insane3]

Hanna
Very decent action feature with a nice and shiny style. The plot is repetitive and thus the action gets boring by the end, but there are some very involving sequences, sometimes in an action way, sometimes in a comical way, sometimes in a (spoiler: ) dyke romance way.