Films you've seen lately

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... we saw The Favourite yesterday and loved every moment of it. Certainly the best film of the year so far...
Colman, Weisz, and Stone all at the top of their game, stonking performances. Every shot a beautiful photograph in its own right. Gorgeous costumes and settings. Funny, filthy, witty, moving.

I've just got back from seeing this and to all the above - in spades!

[Richard Barrett]

Yes indeed. It might have to share my film of the year award with Roma though.

[Belgrove]

An Impossible Love follows the life of Rachel, played by Virginie Efira from her impulsive and naive 20's to her wise and quietly radiant 70's. She falls for the charismatic, Nietzsche reading intellectual Phillipe, played by Niels Schneider, who is a wrong-'un, deserting her as soon as she becomes pregnant. Rachel brings up Chantal alone, but does not deny her the occasional interaction with Phillipe when he can be bothered to turn up, having married someone else and raised a family. Once Chantal becomes adolescent, Phillipe both charms and takes a greater interest in her intellectual development with catastrophic effect. This could be heavy stuff, but director Catherine Corsini has a light touch through which Rachel's goodness as a supportive mother and needs as a woman shines through. English speaking films tend to deal with such matters in an overtly hand-wringing fashion, but here the approach is very French, and that is meant as a compliment.

[jayne lee wilson]

Sometimes I wonder if I just don't like careful, elegantly structured, beautifully written films.....they wear my poor brain out after dinner.... sometimes only a great piece of sci-fi trash will do....

Revelling in Avengers Infinity War over Christmas (NOT trash...!), I saw this the other night....2036 Origin Unknown... yes it is a bit of a less than poetic, suggestive or convincing retake of 2001 - kind of follows what happens if an even cleverer more visually elegant HAL-type AI takes over.... and largely just a chamber piece for three characters, only one of them human...
Great Trailer though! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXM8ocZKWyo

with a spoiler alert, try this explication de texte....

https://www.signalhorizon.com/single-post/2018/06/14/2036-Origin-Unknown-Explained

....and I did enjoy Freak Show with the wonderful Alex Lawther as the classic gender-ambiguous high school outsider going to class as everything from Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction to the Corpse Bride.....finds a geeky friend,gets beaten into a coma by the jocks, but one of them falls in love with him and... he ends up running for Homecoming Queen...the religio-homophobia is crudely overdone, but....well, you know the sort of thing....still, it does have fabulous Laverne Cox and John McEnroe in it - not many can make such a boast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drg74wOy8z8

Will take on Red Sparrow tonight....

[Belgrove]

In Destroyer the divine Nicole Kidman appears as you've never seen her before, playing an undercover cop who has spent rather too much time for her own good in deep cover among a group of nasty villains, with the concomitant physical and mental toll being all too evident. A murder resurrects unfinished business, whose background we glean through skilfully interwoven flashbacks with the present, which cleverly interleaves a hidden third timeline into the mix (making the current True Detective 3's third timeline look pretty clunky in comparison). This narrative device leads to a twist that I did not spot coming, but makes the film satisfyingly complete. This is played out in a charmless and edgy LA, among its scuzzy backstreets, parking lots and under the freeways, painted in bleary garish colours, drenched in sun and neon. It's rather beautiful, in a kind of damaged way, as is Nicole. For all its 120 minutes, this film manages to pack in the preparation, dangers, costs and suspense of infiltration that The Little Drummer Girl failed to convey in six hours. Kidman should have got an awards nomination for her unflinching portrayal of a damaged and damaging woman (but then I'd be content to watch her for hours just doing the hoovering). Steve McQueen's Widows was justifiably feted as being one of the best thrillers in recent years, but Destroyer is as good, albeit in a less flashy and downbeat fashion.

[Conchis]

In Destroyer the divine Nicole Kidman appears as you've never seen her before, playing an undercover cop who has spent rather too much time for her own good in deep cover among a group of nasty villains, with the concomitant physical and mental toll being all too evident. A murder resurrects unfinished business, whose background we glean through skilfully interwoven flashbacks with the present, which cleverly interleaves a hidden third timeline into the mix (making the current True Detective 3's third timeline look pretty clunky in comparison). This narrative device leads to a twist that I did not spot coming, but makes the film satisfyingly complete. This is played out in a charmless and edgy LA, among its scuzzy backstreets, parking lots and under the freeways, painted in bleary garish colours, drenched in sun and neon. It's rather beautiful, in a kind of damaged way, as is Nicole. For all its 120 minutes, this film manages to pack in the preparation, dangers, costs and suspense of infiltration that The Little Drummer Girl failed to convey in six hours. Kidman should have got an awards nomination for her unflinching portrayal of a damaged and damaging woman (but then I'd be content to watch her for hours just doing the hoovering). Steve McQueen's Widows was justifiably feted as being one of the best thrillers in recent years, but Destroyer is as good, albeit in a less flashy and downbeat fashion.

I saw her in a theatre audience, once, sans make-up.

She looked utterly plain and ordinary.

[Richard Tarleton]

careful, elegantly structured, beautifully written films.....
[/URL]

A couple of recent-ish films (both elegantly structured, beautifully written) watched on Netflix in the last few nights:-

first, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, a true story about the last years of film star Gloria Grahame and her unlikely love affair with a much younger Liverpudlian actor. Her Hollywood years long behind her, Grahame (played immaculately by Annette Bening) is appearing in rep in the north of England and staying in B&B, has affair which morphs into something much deeper with young actor Peter Turner (played by an excellent Jamie Bell whom I last saw in, er, Billy Elliott, how time flies), here reunited with Julie Walters playing his mum; Kenneth Cranham is his father, Stephen Graham his Scouser brother, and cameos by Vanessa Redgrave and Frances Barber as Gloria's mother and sister. The film moves backwards and forwards over the last years of her life - definitely elegantly structured - and movingly written and played.

Then - My Old Lady, a curious tale of an American (Kevin Kline) who inherits an apartment in Paris from his father, only to find it has live-in tenants in the form of Maggie Smith and her daughter Kristin Scott-Thomas ( ) in a peculiarly French arrangement called viager. Drags a bit in places - Kevin Kline's drunk acting a bit tedious - but everything you'd expect from the two female leads. Can't say more without spoiler alerts.

[jayne lee wilson]

An all-time great left field, off-the-wall, cult classic, fabulous music and dancing, with possibly the greatest ever car-chase sequence? (Not even CGI! Any offers anyone?)...
Wonderfully deft, light-touch star cameos from Cab Calloway (Minnie the moocher - hi de hi de hi de hi!), Aretha Franklin, Twiggy...? One of the greatest ever Road Movies that never tries too hard?

The Blues Brothers
with dear, lovely, John Belushi....

Just watched it again, and again...
Right there in my Top Ten

[jayne lee wilson]

I saw her in a theatre audience, once, sans make-up.

She looked utterly plain and ordinary.

Most of us do you know...bone structure helps... (Vide Snapchat etc for a masterclass...https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...o-seek-surgery)
Just that as we get past 60, we (OK, some of us) don't mind so much. I hardly wear make-up at all now. Quelle Libération.
(But - taking my own selfie for a passport renewal (EU! Yeees!) last year was a bit...sobering.....that old? Really? Etc.)

Still cleanse and moisturise though!

[vinteuil]

... a peculiarly French arrangement called viager.

... the viager system has its risks. There is the notorious Jeanne Calment case. Mme Calment was (allegedly) born in 1875; in 1965 at the age of 90 she entered into a viager arrangement with her notaire M Raffray, then aged 47, he paying her a monthly viager rent of 2,500 francs. He paid this until his death thirty years later in 1995, aged 77, his wife continuing to pay until Mme Calment's own death in 1997 at the age of 122. In toto the Raffrays paid out some 920,000 francs.

There are now doubts as to whether Mme Calment was really born in 1875, or whether she was a 'replacement' for tax purposes of her mother who may have died in 1934.

Balzac (and Maupassant) wd have revelled in it...

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

.

[Richard Tarleton]

What a story. Also an observation in the film when Kline's character expresses incredulity to the real estate agent about there only being one loo in such an enormous apartment and the agent's explanation as to the French indifference to such matters....(an old apartment, obviously). Nice to see the impeccably francophone Ms S-T doing her thing.

[Dave2002]

Tulip Fever

Mary Queen of Scots

The Favourite

Stan and Ollie

All good (up to a point) in different ways. Tulip Fever could have done with significant pruning.

Stan and Ollie wasn't quite what I was expecting, but even the one of us who'd probably never knowingly seen a Laurel and Hardy film thought it was really good. I would probably put that film ahead of the others in this short list - though tomorrow I might change my mind. It should appeal to a wider audience - not everyone likes historical drama films.

[Bryn]

Not strictly in line with the thread's title but having decided the Criterion Collection double-Blu-ray of Terry Gilliam's Brazil was just too pricey for me to 'upgrade' from my UK bog standard DVD version of the film, I have been watching "The Birth Of Brazil" and "The Battle for Brazil", the main 'extras' on the Criterion Collection discs via YouTube (I did not feel the need of the running commentary during the film, or the cut US version). I don't think I will stay up to watch the film itself again tonight.

[Conchis]

Tulip Fever

Mary Queen of Scots

The Favourite

Stan and Ollie

All good (up to a point) in different ways. Tulip Fever could have done with significant pruning.

Stan and Ollie wasn't quite what I was expecting, but even the one of us who'd probably never knowingly seen a Laurel and Hardy film thought it was really good. I would probably put that film ahead of the others in this short list - though tomorrow I might change my mind. It should appeal to a wider audience - not everyone likes historical drama films.

A friend of mine, who is in training to become a lesbian, has seen The Favourite fifteen times already.

[jayne lee wilson]

A friend of mine, who is in training to become a lesbian, has seen The Favourite fifteen times already.

How does one train to become a lesbian?
Are you, Conchis, a trainer? (Inadvertently, it may be....)....