rate the last movie you saw

[BobaMike]

Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.
9/10

A very sweet, hilarious, suprisingly emotional movie about a small shell with one googly-eye and small sneakers (!). Based on the very funny youtube shorts, I went out of my way to see this as our local Alamo isn't playing it.

The animation (stop-motion), is so well integrated into the mostly live action film, that you forget that what you are watching is totally ridiculous. Jenny Slate does the voice, and carries the whole movie.

My 10 year old didn't like it, as it was a serious movie, with some very emotional/dramatic bits that he wasn't ready for, but my wife and I loved it. I was in tears from laughing at parts, and the ending was so touching/sad I cried. (I'm an easy cry at movies)

For those of you who are tired of Marvel movies and endless junk at the theater, I highly recommend this. I had a good a time as I did at Top Gun.

[Monterey Jack]

Agreed with BobaMike...Marcel The Shell is a delightful film, sweet and warm and charming. It'll probably be too genteel and slow-paced for young kids, but older ones and adults will find it a soothing tonic compared to the CGI fart-fests that comprise most animated family films these days.

[AndyDursin]

A BREED APART
5/10

Found this movie for $5 during the Hamilton Book sale this week -- and had never heard of it, which for me is pretty rare. Especially a movie with Rutger Hauer, Kathleen Turner and Powers Boothe (and Donald Pleasence also!).

This is a nutty, barely released 1984 Hemdale production that finds Hauer's troubled Vietnam vet living in the woods of North Carolina, taking care of local wildlife and scaring off poachers and other assorted lowlifes (including his "Blade Runner" cohort Brion James!). Kathleen Turner is there too, a single Mom who has a thing for him (Lord knows why, given his mental state), but things change for them all once Boothe's climber-for-hire is tasked by creepy egg collector Pleasence to net the unhatched offspring of a bald eagle -- all for some $200,000.

Philippe Mora's eclectic filmography is littered with the bizarre and occasionally awful, and "A Breed Apart" sports some of the more awkward on-screen sex scenes in cinema history plus a number of flat performances from the cast. Boothe noticeably looks a little out of shape, chugging down Budweisers and wearing an array of Patagonia shirts, while Turner's casting shows how desperate she became in the period between "Body Heat" and "Romancing the Stone." Hauer, meanwhile, does his usual offbeat shtick, cementing he was better off with character parts/heavies then leading men -- this character is apparently supposed to be somewhat appealing (hence Turner's infatuation with him), but his performance just comes off as weird instead (check out the brief montage bit where he's playing a Tuba for his pet snake and bear!).

It's all weirdly compelling -- not good and a little sluggish -- but still pleasingly offbeat if you're in the mood, capped by an ineffective score by Bee Gees' Maurice Gibb. Paul and I sat down to watch this last night and were ready to give up on it, but it still has...something...going for it that's hard to deny (and describe).

Shout's Blu-Ray has an interview with Mora and a 2K scan of the interpositive, which isn't in the best shape but is at least consistent with the movie's fragmented feel.

[Eric Paddon]

Ladybug, Ladybug (1963) 5 of 10

-A real incident of a California elementary's school civil defense warning going off by accident during the Cuban Missile Crisis led to this low-budget film being made in 1963 as we see children in a rural elementary school forced to walk home after an alert sounds, and principal William Daniels (his first film role as this is a cast of New York stage actors at the time making their film debuts, including Estelle Parsons in a small role and Kathryn Hays from the Star Trek episode "The Empath") has no idea if its real or a glitch. We then follow the children (being led by shell-shocked teacher Nancy Marchand) on their walk home and how all of them run into parents who don't believe them or who aren't at home. Meanwhile, back at the now empty school we learn it's really a false alarm caused by a short, but the children who have gone home have no way of finding this out since all of them conveniently never have access to a radio (which is still playing normal music). We follow one group of children into a family fallout shelter where one of them "takes charge" in an imperious fashion and then soon we have all kinds of musings by children on what's happening, why is there going to be a war etc. We get an artsy fartsy ending that causes the film to end on a jarring imprecise note (that almost presages the ending of "Seconds" stylistically) and while critics talk about the film being powerful and effective, I was totally underwhelmed. To me, the novelty was watching some of the performances by those who went on to better careers like Daniels and seeing how this subject was treated in the same era that gave us other apocalyptic films. The film would have been better off keeping the question of whether the alert was real or false ambiguous up to the end but because we KNOW it's false it throws the whole tone of the film off from that point on so that the abstract ending doesn't have the resonance that it was aiming for.

After having been forced to suffer and shut off a number of bad commentaries of late, I was surprised that a film about this subject yielded a good commentary by Richard Hartland Smith. He doesn't go off into annoying political tangents and keeps things straightforward and he also provides well-informed profiles of all the actors in the cast, adult and child. He also shows he's done his homework regarding the stage productions and classic TV episodes many of these performers were in at the time as well which is a kind of well-roundedness I don't hear often in film commentaries since they're done by people who usually know zero about television. So if the film was underwhelming, the commentary at least was good to listen to.

[Eric Paddon]

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) 4 of 10
=The period recreation of marathon dancing and how brutal it was, and the deserved Oscar winning performance of Gig Young is what I give the film points for. But basically......what is the reason for this film? Okay, marathon dancing was brutal and could be inhumane, but is it *really* something to hang a lot of social commentary and dreariness on that culminates with its downer ending (which because of the flash-forward cuts Pollack injected we were already supposed to be prepared for. I think the only suspense was just who was going to end up dead)? Yes, the Depression made people do a lot of things to try and find money etc. but my goodness, before we start going into the whole "evils of capitalism, exploitation of the masses" soapbox, maybe we should look at what desperate people in totalitarian societies were forced to do in this same time period and some perspective might come back to us.

-Fonda and Michael Sarrazin are far too much cyphers throughout the film for me to really care about them. It's amazing how at the end I still felt like I didn't know anything about them despite the fact we'd gotten a bunch of rapid fire expository spiel about their backgrounds earlier in the film, in contrast to how the supporting players seemed better drawn and delineated. Consequently, the downer ending and their fates just came across as dreary rather than emotionally upsetting.

[AndyDursin]

RED DAWN (1984)
5/10

This is one of those "nostalgia" movies for some people that I found silly and kind of lame even when I saw it as a 10-year-old -- and watching it again via Shout's 4K UHD, I have to agree with my pre-teen self.

Even by the parameters of silly '80s action movies, RED DAWN was a definite disappointment for director John Milius. At times, I often felt like I was watching a feature-length cutdown of a TV series, pared down to 2 hours -- the movie's structure is too wide open in the first hour, filled with too many (and weakly drawn) characters, "episodic" introductions of Russian/Cuban villains who are mostly undeveloped, cameos from adult actors (Harry Dean Stanton and Ben Johnson) who vanish as quickly as they appear, and montages. LOTS of montages. Even the action scenes are mostly just a part of montages wherein the "Wolverines" create skirmishes to take down invading troops. Meanwhile, there's scarcely time to develop the roster of early stars (Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, etc.) before the action starts (less than 5 minutes in!), leaving you at arm's length from becoming engaged with their plight. And there's also crying...lots of that too as Milius fails to get solid performances out of capable younger stars.

The last half-hour works much better than the rest -- probably because the cast has been pared down to just a handful and Milius finally delivers a really good action scene with the Wolverines on horseback trying to elude a Russian chopper. But the opportunity for actual drama involving these kids was completely missed by Milius and writer Kevin Reynolds, leaving this something of a "guilty pleasure" that's in all honesty a busted, missed opportunity, especially considering this was Milius' first film after the glory of CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

A couple of good scenes towards the end -- especially one involving Ron O'Neal's Cuban general, who finds himself more aligned with the teens trying to protect their home than his fellow "commies" -- hint at the movie RED DAWN could've been, but they can't compensate for the picture's failed first couple of acts.

[Monterey Jack]

Yeah, I saw Red Dawn for the first time roughly a decade ago, and found it laughably bad. A talented cast left to flounder, and some really terrible dialogue ("I ain't wipin' wit' no leaf...!"). Basil Poledouris' score is exciting, but otherwise a big disappointment coming from Milius.

[Paul MacLean]

Basil Poledouris' score is exciting, but otherwise a big disappointment coming from Milius.

I haven't seen the film in a long time, but Basil Poledouris' score is one of his best in my estimation. Stalwart, adrenal, very emotional (and interestingly, often atonal).

I've always suspected though, that Basil's association with this film (as well as the miniseries Amerika) resulted his being "grey listed" in Hollywood. There's no way to prove it, but Basil was part of that wave of talented young American composers who who came to prominence in the 1980s -- Horner, Kamen, Silvestri, etc. -- yet, while those guys were getting offered the top projects, it seems to me that Basil's phone wasn't ringing as much as theirs after scoring those "reactionary" productions.

[AndyDursin]

I agree it's a really good score. Do you think it was the combination of that and AMERIKA together? Because seemingly nobody involved with RED DAWN itself was prevented from having a long career, in terms of the cast to Kevin Reynolds or Milius. More the opposite.

What's ironic is RED DAWN doesn't even have a single scene where the kids really talk about rallying to save their country. There's next to nothing patriotic about the movie. They go from toasting marshmallows to shooting tanks without even "that scene" where someone like Swayze would've given a lecture about what it means to be an American. It's just such a poorly written movie, thin on any kind of development of its characters or the setting. Even the main scenario of the invasion is only explained in brief on-screen text and then later, and not in any kind of detail, when Powers Boothe shows up. You'd have expected there to have been "more" in that regard. At the same time some of the kids come and go -- I guess I missed the part when one or two of them died, they simply leave the movie!

I think Milius was generally an excellent writer (not here though) but as a director...I dunno. CONAN seemed like a movie where all the elements came together perfectly. I like BIG WEDNESDAY and WIND AND THE LION is "good" (I wouldn't call it great), but his work from RED DAWN onwards -- as a director -- is mostly miss after miss. Yet as a screenwriter he was apparently involved in all kinds of great films, especially uncredited.

I was just surprised how bad this movie is -- I remember not liking it when I was younger (I also remember my parents telling me how bad they thought it was!) but I didn't recall it being so poor on most every level outside the score.

[Paul MacLean]

I agree it's a really good score. Do you think it was the combination of that and AMERIKA together? Because seemingly nobody involved with RED DAWN itself was prevented from having a long career, in terms of the cast to Kevin Reynolds or Milius. More the opposite.

I remember Red Dawn being controversial -- or rather, labeled controversial by a media who couldn't stop castigating it as "dangerous", a "Reagan fantasy" -- and even a threat to world peace. In a way, it was The Passion of the Christ of 1984 (albeit less successful).

Maybe the cast members beat the rap because "They're kids who don't know any better". As far as Kevin Reynolds, according to Peter Bart, Reynold's script original was far-less militaristic, and Milius' re-write was much more "flag-waving".

I certainly don't think there was an "organized plot" to keep Basil Poledouris down. But between Red Dawn, Amerika and his association with John Milius, I could see people in Hollywood maybe not wanting to work with Basil -- guilt by association. He wasn't even considered for Patriot Games despite his impressive score for The Hunt For Red October, which I always found odd. And he obviously wasn't offered Oscar bait or Summer blockbusters in the 90s.

The irony is that Basil Poledouris was left of center. The windows on the front door of his home displayed stickers for Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

[AndyDursin]

It's a great score.

I still wonder what happened with this movie. I can't imagine it was written as it plays, there's just so little development. The ending is also bizarre. "Let's just end this with some narration and two characters who have never spoken together for the entire duration of the movie walking off into the sunset"

[mkaroly]

I too enjoyed Basil's score and play it every now and then. However, I have not seen the movie in decades and have never felt an inkling that I was missing out on something.

[AndyDursin]

BLACK PHONE
8/10

Superior effort from the Blumhouse crowd adapts a story by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son) and works primarily because of the efforts of director Scott Derrickson (“Doctor Strange"), who stages a solid comeback after the box-office bellyflop of “Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep.”

Hill’s story, adapted by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, offers Mason Thames playing a teenager abducted by a terrifying killer (Ethan Hawke); despite insurmountable odds facing his survival, Thames finds solace in a disconnected phone that improbably connects with Hawke’s previous victims.

“Black Phone” performed well at the box-office and ranks as one of the best horror entries from prolific producer Jason Blum, with fine performances and a worthwhile story that scores with an ending that absolutely scores a knockout. Really well executed across the board, with just a King-esque touch of the supernatural that adds a dash of horror/fantasy to an otherwise disturbing suspense-thriller plot. Much of this has been done before, but seldom so effectively, or satisfyingly.

[Monterey Jack]

Superior effort from the Blumhouse crowd adapts a story by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son) and works primarily because of the efforts of director Scott Derrickson (“Doctor Strange"), who stages a solid comeback after the box-office bellyflop of “Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep.”

Doctor Sleep was a Mike Flanagan joint.

Agreed about Black Phone though, one of the summer's more pleasant surprises (and proof that making a good scary movie for peanuts can pay off big time at the box office...$150 million worldwide gross on a budget of under $20 million).

[AndyDursin]

Oh yeah that's right. I was wondering why this movie was a nice and tidy 100 minutes and moved pretty well. Derrickson broke out with EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE which I recall being solid at the time.

Excellent movie and it did do well. Alas the box-office is dead as a doornail right now, theaters are going to be closing up again because there's nothing but super-hero crap this fall to keep the attendance going forward. Like TOP GUN was great and all but there's nothing like it on the horizon.