The Last Movie You Watched

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The Great Silence (1968). A surprisingly good spaghetti western, about a mute (due to his throat having been cut) gunslinger hired to protect a widow and a group of petty criminals from bounty hunters. Stacks right up with Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy.


Boru

[Nanny]

It Came from Outer Space (1953) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_from_Outer_Space

With the story by Ray Bradbury, if you think of campy sci-fi tropes you can piece this one together in your mind. Overhead opening pan cresting a rocky hill to reveal a small Arizona town. Theremin wooing and weeing away as we meet the scene and our players. A "Buck Rogers-esque" special effect of a blazing meteor that crashes. A curious star gazer rushes to the scene. He sees the alien, then we see him from the alien's perspective. The alien retreats into a circular spacecraft. A massive rock slide covers up the ship. Nobody believes our hero and laugh him off as a crackpot. Then shit gets real. Finally the sheriff realizes the aliens have held townspeople hostage. He forms a posse and goes after the aliens. The crackpot tries to intervene but can he buy the time the aliens need to blast off before the posse gets them?

The camera work is excellent, from the overheads to the shots from the alien's perspective it set the standard for many of the tropes we see in lighthearted sci fi )think Mars Attacks! and the Men in Black series). The music is pure gold - over the top like in the Twilight Zone or Star Trek. The "one eyed man in the land of the blind" theme is one familiar to readers of sci fi stories like those of Philip K. Dick.

A fun and important pulpy sci fi for any film buff.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Bandolero! (1968). A mediocre western starring Raquel Welch, her boobs, and some guys.

Boru

[Gwaithmir]

Oddly, no Polar Bears appeared in this film. 

[Nanny]

Confess, Fletch (2022) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confess%2C_Fletch

John Hamm is not Fletch. His timing and delivery fail to hit the mark. Decent script but Hamm blows it.

[Fake Messiah]

I watched 30 minutes of the Fall Guy because critics praised this movie, but I find it unwatchable. The main problem is that it's just unfocused on what the plot is as well as the dreaded word "genre": is it a comedy or action or maybe even a thriller.

The movie's inciting incident is supposed to be the main character's back injury that could have been fatal to him, but then they brush it off so it looks like he rather had a bad weekend, especially since it happened before the main credits. So they just use it to make slight references to it and you keep waiting for the movie to "begin".

The movie also uses the dreaded narration that literally tells us that the main character has a crush on a female lead - wow, some real film school dropouts here who never heard of the "show don't tell" principle.

So the movie comes down to a bunch of "cool" scenes.

In other words, the movie was deservedly a bomb.

[A. Secular Human]

Watched Animal House for probably the fifteenth time.

It's hilarious if you really, really high. My laughter keeps me from falling asleep.