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What DVD / Video did you watch last night? (pt3)

Scare Me. A 2020 comedy horror by Josh Ruben. Set entirely in a holiday cabin, it involves two neighbours, both writers but with contrasting fortunes and writing talent, who get under the same roof one evening when the power goes out and decide to past the time by telling each other horror stories.

Some might not like it. I fucking loved it. Clever script and dialogue, good performances, and whereas this is mainly a wordy play, things do happen. Out on Shudder.
 
Finding Vivian Maier. A young auction hunter buys a box of negatives for $380 and discovers one of the greatest street photographers ever. It's a really great story and her photography is absolutely outstanding.
 
www.rottentomatoes.com

The Square (2013) | Rotten Tomatoes

Egyptian revolutionaries battle their leaders and regime to build a new society.
www.rottentomatoes.com www.rottentomatoes.com

The Square - documentary shot right in the thick of it from 2010 to 2013, capturing the fall of Mubarak, the fall of Tantawi, and then the fall of Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood...told from the intimate view point of a cast of a handful of revolutionaries who are there throughout, which includes the people making the film - this isnt an outside-looking-in account
Really impressive footage and story telling , I've never seen anything quite like it in all honesty.

Currently on Netflix, may be elsewhere. According to IMDB Trivia " The film is both the first Kickstarter (crowd-sourced) film to be nominated for an Oscar, but it is also the first film released by Netflix to receive a nomination. "
 
The Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin delivers the dialogue and a great cast excel in this courtroom drama that played out 50 years ago and shows little has changed. Brilliant.
 
ska invita said:
saw it got a bit slated on the netflix thread for innacuracies
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Yeah, it's more of an entertaining drama than a proper history lesson. But am sure anyone with any interest in politics then and now would be reasonably familiar with the case or would be checking out how things went down after seeing the movie...
 
The Uninvited, which in 1944 was the first proper Hollywood haunted house film. The films which dealt with haunted houses before, like The Ghost Breakers or The Cat and the Canary, were comedies and it was usually revealed that the haunting had a rational, Scooby-Doo style explanation. The Uninvited is about a brother and sister (Ray Milland & Ruth Hussey) who purchase an abandoned mansion on the Cornish coast, for a suspiciously low price and then things go bump in the night. They also befriend a young woman, who has a connection to the house and who may hold the key to its past.

Many elements which were to become tropes of the haunted house film are present. A room which is always cold, a seance that gets out of control and a character who eventually becomes possessed by the apparition. The Uninvited has its lighter moments and isn't necessarily that scary today, but it takes its ghost seriously and there are a few plot twists along the way as to the nature of the haunting. When the ghostly presence materialises in the climax, it's a surprisingly beautiful special effect (which got removed by the British censors at the time), anticipating the amorphous, glowing spectre who descends the staircase in Poltergeist.

A1811E72-92ED-4667-8121-A95A30348582.jpeg
 
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Rebecca (2020)

Oh well, it was not to be. All the gothic is gone, turned into a simple melodrama (well, okay, not that simple). Armie & Lily aren't right and if they are going to stick strictly to ther book (in the way that the Hitchcock doesn't) you really need show and explain a bit more because it makes Max look like a complete bastard. Or was that the point? [ambivalent knowing look]. KST and Jason Williamson are the best things in it. I thought Sam Riley was going to literally twiddle his moustache at one point.
 
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belboid said:
Rebecca (2020)

Oh well, it was not to be. All the gothic is gone, turned into a simple melodrama (well, okay, not that simple). Armie & Lily aren't right and if they are going to stick strictly to ther book (in the way that the Hitchcock doesn't) you really need show and explain a bit more because it makes Max look like a complete bastard. Or was that the point? [ambivalent knowing look]. KST and Jason Williamson are the best things in it. I thought Sam Riley was going to literally twiddle his moustache at one point.
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This was on at my local cinema and I was a bit 'nah', especially as it's on Netflix soon (today?) Is it worth bothering with? I love the Hitchcock version but thought this might be vaguely worth watching as it's Ben Wheatley, if I did hate his adaptation of High Rise..
 
Islands in the Stream.

Watched this on one of the nostalgia channels last weekend. Based on a Hemingway novel which he completed in the early '50s but never published, it was surprisingly good. Sculptor Tom Hudson (George C. Scott as a passable Hemingway) is chilling on a Caribbean island, but it's 1940 and the war is coming. Final scenes, involving trying to smuggle Jewish refugees into Cuba deliver the goods.

Better than I expected.
 
Sue said:
This was on at my local cinema and I was a bit 'nah', especially as it's on Netflix soon (today?) Is it worth bothering with? I love the Hitchcock version but thought this might be vaguely worth watching as it's Ben Wheatley, if I did hate his adaptation of High Rise..
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It is still Rebecca, so its a grand story and its lusciously shot, but it's no Hitchcock. If you had never read the book or seen the film you'd probably find it quite entertaining.
 
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The Wolf of Snow Hollow, a horror comedy about cops in a small town in Utah, who come to suspect that a werewolf may be behind a series of brutal murders. I liked this a lot, it isn't your run of the mill horror comedy and its filmmaker has a distinctive voice, which keeps the film unpredictable. It's the second film written and directed by Jim Cummings who also plays the lead role. He plays a cop whose life is a mess, who is in over his head and who is edging towards a breakdown as it becomes apparent that the murderer may not be entirely human. It's played for an curious mixture of funny and serious, especially when it comes to its protagonist's unravelling mental state and the tonal shifts are what makes this interesting. This also features Robert Forster in his last role. Well worth checking out and I'm going to track down Cumming's first film Thunder Road.



800px-Wolf_of_snow_hollow_xlg.jpg
 
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I saw the new Borat - nowhere near as funny as the first one and a bit redundant - it's just too easy for him to expose these nutbar Republicans - he didn't even need to be Borat to do so. Stil, some very funny moments.
 
Seen first two films in MUBI's Aki Kaurismaki season. I've seen Le Havre before and it remains an absolute delight in every way wonderful to look at, charming and just full of humanism. Lights in the Dusk is a lot bleaker, the protagonist subjected to one pain after another, though there might just be a little tiny bit of hope at the end.

Then had a French crime double bill
The Color of Lies - On on Chanbrol's later works, going over his favourite ground, relationships breaking apart and murder, but no worse for all that. The relationship and contrasting personalities of the two central characters is top notch.
Then watched an adaptation of his spiritual partner Ruth Rendell in Claude Miller's Betty Fisher and Other Stories which trends similar ground, how people find themselves in the strangest situations. Not quite in the league of Chabrol's own Rendell adaptations but still good, and I have a soft spot for Sandrine Kiberlain as an actor.

The New Girlfriend - Another Rendell adaptation, though in this case only very loosely, this is very much Francois Ozon's sensibilities rather than Rendell's (he does not have the sympathy with her work that Chabrol and Miller do). It's ok but the balance between the comedy, thriller and more sexual elements did not work.
 
Aterrados (Terrified). A 2017 Argentinian supernatural horror. Pretty good, actually. Keeps the jump-scares to a minimum, and that actually works pretty well as the story is strong enough to sustain the film.
 
krtek a houby said:
Season (or "volume") 3 of Dear White People. Not quite as good as season 2 but still very watchable, great dialogue and characters.
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I dropped it after a few there. I'm not sure that S3 is better or worse than the first two, but it's very different in tone and it put me off. That being said, I do think it kind of jumped the shark with the conspiracies.
 
Orang Utan said:
I saw the new Borat - nowhere near as funny as the first one and a bit redundant - it's just too easy for him to expose these nutbar Republicans - he didn't even need to be Borat to do so. Stil, some very funny moments.
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Yeah, it was dreadful. Most of the people we're supposed to believe are real in it are obviously actors and the editing in it at the real points was not very clever. I like SBC as a person, but Borat has passed it's sell by years ago.
 
skyscraper101 said:
Yeah, it was dreadful. Most of the people we're supposed to believe are real in it are obviously actors and the editing in it at the real points was not very clever. I like SBC as a person, but Borat has passed it's sell by years ago.
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Who are we supposed to believe are real?
 
belboid said:
Rebecca (2020)

Oh well, it was not to be. All the gothic is gone, turned into a simple melodrama (well, okay, not that simple). Armie & Lily aren't right and if they are going to stick strictly to ther book (in the way that the Hitchcock doesn't) you really need show and explain a bit more because it makes Max look like a complete bastard. Or was that the point? [ambivalent knowing look]. KST and Jason Williamson are the best things in it. I thought Sam Riley was going to literally twiddle his moustache at one point.
Click to expand...

Well I watched it last night and although the last act is a simple melodrama I thought the rest of the film had an interesting atmosphere and a sense of alienation that even dabbled in folk horror at a couple of points there was one fleeting scene that even reminded me of the May Day celebrations in the Wicker Man and in a way that didn't feel forced. The sudden use of Pentangle tune in the soundtrack was jarring but on reflection it brought out what was already there. So I thought it worked as a satire on the landed gentry even if Wheatley's intentions were ultimately at odds with the source material (I guess, I haven't read it).
 
Watched Parasite now that it's free on Amazon Prime a couple of nights ago. I liked it but not as much as I was expecting to. I thought the dialogue was really well written and the story would have been jarring if it hadn't been told so well, but it was seamlessly alarming. I still just didn't love it, I would have preferred a film that's more slimmed down but then it might not have been so seamless.

It's amazingly similar thematically to a certain other film that came out at about the same time.
 
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