Films you've seen lately

[LMcD]

Thank you so much for taking time to offer this considered and insightful point of view, which gave me pause for several thoughts....

You're welcome! I really could do with a few more hours in every day, as this would enable me to go on longer walks, take more photographs, explore more musical and cinematic highways and byways, expand my charitable activities and reconfigure the rockery - where does the time go? I'm quite convinced that Fridays come round much more quickly than they used to!
We did manage to squeeze in a movie last night - ' Stranger Than Fiction', featuring Dustin Hoffmann and Emma Thompson on top form (when aren't they?) and hope to schedule 'Hotel Rwanda' before too long.

[jayne lee wilson]

You're welcome! I really could do with a few more hours in every day, as this would enable me to go on longer walks, take more photographs, explore more musical and cinematic highways and byways, expand my charitable activities and reconfigure the rockery - where does the time go? I'm quite convinced that Fridays come round much more quickly than they used to!
We did manage to squeeze in a movie last night - ' Stranger Than Fiction', featuring Dustin Hoffmann and Emma Thompson on top form (when aren't they?) and hope to schedule 'Hotel Rwanda' before too long.

Your activity levels put me to shame; you seem to be very lucky with your health.

All I do in my (very) wild garden now is - sit in it, watch Birds, talk to Cats and read. Close my eyes, take deep breaths.... and just simply...listen....
But my wildflower meadow is now glorious; all either wind- or wing-borne.... the Wild Rose coming into flower towers above as a centrepiece.. ...the passerines feast on the hips later....

Just to add - those three new favourite films seem very vital to me because they offer new insights into contemporary manners and mores, whether of sex-and-gender role and stereotype or how one adapts to an insecure late middle age....
Modern agonies and predicaments. What happens when you lose something very precious (your job and home; betrayed by your beloved partner, but still at least half in love; enforced separation; a rock musician with sudden profound hearing loss...resonant with many musiclovers, surely...)....

[LMcD]

Your activity levels put me to shame; you seem to be very lucky with your health.

All I do in my (very) wild garden now is - sit in it, watch Birds, talk to Cats and read. Close my eyes, take deep breaths.... and just simply...listen....
But my wildflower meadow is now glorious; all either wind- or wing-borne.... the Wild Rose coming into flower towers above as a centrepiece.. ...the passerines feast on the hips later....

Just to add - those three new favourite films seem very vital to me because they offer new insights into contemporary manners and mores, whether of sex-and-gender role and stereotype or how one adapts to an insecure late middle age....
Modern agonies and predicaments. What happens when you lose something very precious (your job and home; betrayed by your beloved partner (but still at least half in love; enforced separation; a rock musician with sudden profound hearing loss...resonant with many musiclovers, surely...)....

Hi Jayne! I just thought that younger Forum members (and still-active older ones) might like to be reassured that a busy retirement can more than compensate for the various travails that may crop up from time to time - such as slowing down and seizing up at the same time.
The world may quite possibly be on its way to Hell in the proverbial hand-cart - or is it a basket? - but I decided some time ago that there's very little I can do about that, so I concentrate on important matters. I've only just worked out how to stop the pigeons gobbling up nearly all the food I put out on the bird table and depriving me of the pleasure of watching our smaller avian visitors, and have developed a technique for tying my shoelaces without help from my long-suffering lady wife.
Ironically, I find that I now have less time for fresh musical and cinematic exploration - talking of which, I shall now make time for another of the pieces by Louise Farrenc recommended by another Forum member before making my weekly visit to Radio 2 (yes - TonyB! )
Something else for which I should be grateful, I guess, is that Saturday mornings are now Radio 3-free in our house, which gives me more time to pursue other interests.

[jayne lee wilson]

Might try The Broken Hearts Gallery tonight......
"After a break-up, a young woman decides to start a gallery where people can leave trinkets from past relationships."

Trailer here (warning: sexually explicit language)...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2140571/

BTW Nick - good piece on Zack Snyder here...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...ey-want-to-see

Anything with "The Dead" in the title tends to creep me out so I creep away, though I did see the original Romero classic a few times; probably easier to take in black and white!

Back to bed (with Cat) now after an hour of CPE Bach.... more on which later....

[Joseph K]

Has really no-one else here seen the stunning Promising Young Woman yet? Sky Cinema, for which director Emerald Fennel won best original screenplay, and nominated for best direction etc too.....
Stunning pop soundtrack....(Paris Hilton to Britney Spears to Juice Newton and more)....
do-not-miss-this-miss!

Along with Sound of Metal (Amazon Prime) the most riveting, compellingly original films I've seen in years (I watch, or try to watch, too many movies, but usually end up discontented, leave halfway through, etc...).

See #1045 above for more.....But as I said there, the problem is the films spread across all these subscriptions....
(Nomadland (Disney+) is totally different of course, almost a docudrama - very beautiful, gentle laid-back classic road & landscape movie, rural, mountainside and industrial, also a study of friendship within deprivation, and the creation of community within tough social conditons in USA....
Deserved the Best Film award for sure, but I did find a second viewing a little hard going....)

I generally can't be bothered watching films these days ... I say 'these days' but in fact it's been 'these days' for more than several years; in fact, probably over ten years since I really last enjoyed watching films - getting stoned with uni friends and watching Easy Rider or Human Traffic, those were the days...

Actually I have watched films and found it a not unenjoyable experience since then it's just generally it was with someone who somewhat selfishly insisted it was always a recently made film. I guess I don't have the right set and setting for watching films now (i.e. people with sufficient enthusiasm to persuade me to watch something with them, and I don't get high any more) but that suits me since I prefer music or reading anyway.

[cloughie]

I generally can't be bothered watching films these days ... I say 'these days' but in fact it's been 'these days' for more than several years; in fact, probably over ten years since I really last enjoyed watching films - getting stoned with uni friends and watching Easy Rider or Human Traffic, those were the days...

Actually I have watched films and found it a not unenjoyable experience since then it's just generally it was with someone who somewhat selfishly insisted it was always a recently made film. I guess I don't have the right set and setting for watching films now (i.e. people with sufficient enthusiasm to persuade me to watch something with them, and I don't get high any more) but that suits me since I prefer music or reading anyway.

I don’t do films either J K - so time consuming when there are so many other more interesting things to do! Fitting everthing in is difficult, particularly now things are slowly moving back to some kind of normal - three sings this week! Once or twice during lockdown when the weather was cold and miserable and the Covid rate locally seemed to be getting ever higher (around 170/100000) I lingered on the edge of boredom, but it did not last. My last visit to the cinema was in 1983, which perhaps highlights my disinterest in films - the downside is that I fare badly in GK crosswords or categories in Pointless, but I can live with that!

[gurnemanz]

A few years ago when our daughter was visiting us she added her Amazon and Netflix passwords to our TV. We don't actually watch those channels that often. I've used Amazon more for football and tennis than movies. She is a film editor and sometimes suggests films she thinks films we'd like. A couple of more recent ones we enjoyed and probably would not have watched without her recommendation are:

Rocks

Uncut Gems

We remain big film fans even if we watch fewer than previously.

Re being pensioner: the great thing is that we seem to have more than enough time to do the things which take our fancy.

[Barbirollians]

A few years ago when our daughter was visiting us she added her Amazon and Netflix passwords to our TV. We don't actually watch those channels that often. I've used Amazon more for football and tennis than movies. She is a film editor and sometimes suggests films she thinks films we'd like. A couple of more recent ones we enjoyed and probably would not have watched without her recommendation are:

Rocks

Uncut Gems

We remain big film fans even if we watch fewer than previously.

Re being pensioner: the great thing is that we seem to have more than enough time to do the things which take our fancy.

Bringing up Baby on iPlayer - known of it for many years but never seen it - it is indeed the classic of its reputation.

[jayne lee wilson]

A few years ago when our daughter was visiting us she added her Amazon and Netflix passwords to our TV. We don't actually watch those channels that often. I've used Amazon more for football and tennis than movies. She is a film editor and sometimes suggests films she thinks films we'd like. A couple of more recent ones we enjoyed and probably would not have watched without her recommendation are:

Rocks

Uncut Gems

We remain big film fans even if we watch fewer than previously.

Re being pensioner: the great thing is that we seem to have more than enough time to do the things which take our fancy.

I'll check those out - thanks!
If you have Amazon, please, please, watch and and tell me what you think of the Oscar-winning Sound of Metal (vide #1045). With the great Riz Ahmed in the lead role, this is a gentle, deep, very original and very moving film. You may have a good cry when two long-separated people meet once again....

Promising Young Woman, as devastating a film as I've ever seen, many films in one, a thriller, comedy, romance, offbeat rape-revenge-flick which dives off in other directions, satire of gender-stereotype and expectation... It could not have been done in any other artistic medium.

*****

For the record, I only ever watch movies late at night. After my one-and-only meal, with the frequently replenished wine... a lifelong insomniac very prone to depression, the films (and the wine - as Michel Barnier said in an EU/GB policy meeting, everything is better with wine) always help get me through the toughest time of the 24 hours...

The best of them, as with TV Drama Series, are like visual novels - but far easier to get through for this slow, impatient reader... they've nourished my soul, my visual wonder, offered me insight into other lives; kept my childlike, or childish, sense of fantasy, of the beyond, alive. They feed my human need for - narrative, for stories.
And like all great gesamtkunstwerken (the best films always have great soundtracks), often give me the chance of a good cry.

No better therapy than Catharsis.

(At the end of the wonderful Elton John biopic Rocketman, I was singing dancing and crying all around the room to I'm Still Standing... glass in hand, of course....impossible to overstate the huge importance of modern film & tv to anyone LGBTQI - finally some celebratory narratives after years of (often suicidal) gloom and hetro-imposed "guilt and shame"...)

[gurnemanz]

I certainly intend to check out Promising Young Woman

[Richard Barrett]

I certainly intend to check out Promising Young Woman

One of the more memorable films of the past year, along with Sound of Metal and Nomadland.

[Richard Barrett]

Bringing up Baby on iPlayer - known of it for many years but never seen it - it is indeed the classic of its reputation.

A masterpiece!

Do you know Born Yesterday? Highly recommended in a not unrelated vein.

[LMcD]

Hotel Rwanda - a film which is all the more powerful because those made it clearly decided not to let themselves get too angry. Rated 12, it manages to convey the horrors of the atrocities committed in Rwanda without feeling the need to dwell on them. Beautifully acted, and without a single unnecessary frame or line of dialogue. Decency achieves a victory of sorts.

[Bert]

A masterpiece!

Not sure that's quite the right description for a film that uses a "domesticated" leopard.

But it is a very funny film, otherwise.

Happily, they don't make films using animals like that these days.


"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"

[Bryn]

Not sure that's quite the right description for a film that uses a "domesticated" leopard.

But it is a very funny film, otherwise.

Happily, they don't make films using animals like that these days.


"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"

Ah, yes, a box-office disaster on its initial release, which brought Hepburn's career to a halt for some years.

On the subject of domesticated wild animals*, it's long overdue that an uncut director's intended version of Russell's and Jarman's The Devils was made available.

* Oliver Reed.