What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[pedromonkey]

Originally Posted by vincenzo

Three Days Of The Condor and The Parallax View.

Watched back to back. Two of the best thrillers of the 70's.

i love Three Days of the Condor, such a great conspiracy thriller and a cracking performance from Redford. Because of this film i baught Brubaker, another great performance from him and an early role for Morgan Freeman.

[vincenzo]

Condor is definitely one of Redford's best films. Full of twists and turns and blessed with a brilliant Dave Grusin score too.

Check out Parallax View if you can. Possibly Warren Beatty's finest film.

[pedromonkey]

i though Parallax was unavailable on DVD i may be wrong though.

[TALL DUDE]

Watched case 39 at the cinema the other night. One of the most laughable excuses for a horror film i've seen in a while.

[Angel]

Wages of Fear (remake) - the 121m version not the cut down European version.

Have to say I preferred the 98m version - at 121m it was way too long. Nice Tangerine Dream score though.

[nekromantik]

Originally Posted by TALL DUDE

Watched case 39 at the cinema the other night. One of the most laughable excuses for a horror film i've seen in a while.

Yeah it is pretty bad

I saw a str8 to dvd thriller last night called Nine Dead.
Its got Mellisa Joan Hart from Sabrina The Teenage Witch
so thought her acting will be kinda bad but I was surprised. She wasnt as bad as I thought she would be.

Anyway the movie is about 9 random strangers are kidnapped and are locked in a room by a masked man who tells them they have 10 mins to figure out why they are all there and connected, if they dont then one person dies every 10 mins.

So not a new stroy but I thought it was pretty good movie for a direct to dvd release. Kept me entertained and them finding out slowly was pretty entertaining. It all went sour at the end though, the ending was quite bad and left alot to be desired. It felt like they rushed the ending as they ran out of story. Shame though as rest of the movie was pretty good.

[|cy]

Just finished watching Gran Torino. Decent film, though I was expecting a little more. Clint Eastwood did a great job, and considering that he's now 79, I'd say he managed ok!

[42ndStreetFreak]

Sydow is wonderful in "Condor".
Nearly always shown at a stupid time on TV, normally the afternoon (just like the '15' rated "Eye of the Needle"), and so that entire opening assassination sequence gets cut to buggery.



"Nosferatu" (Herzog)

Although not as good a film overall as the silent classic, Herzog's film does perhaps feature an even more creepy and dangerous Dracula than even our Max. Our Klaus!

Kinski's make-up is basically the same but wisely loses those rather bushy eyebrows, and when mixed with the really intense performance he gives (just check out the scene where he pours Harker a drink of wine but never, not even for a second, takes his feral, hungry, eyes off him) creates a Dracula who is perhaps the only really, truly, dangerous Dracula on screen.

Although such a creature fails to work as Stoker's 'Count' persona part of Dracula, who has to interact with the everyday world to plot his plans, because he looks just far too inhuman (Harker would have run a mile as soon as he saw this creature!).
But as a scary Vampyric creature?
Well quite frankly this version (in both original and re-make, but especially here) of Dracula is the scariest most unnerving Vampire seen in anything...Be it a Dracula film or any other Vampire movie.

Herzog does pad things out a bit too much and does tend to briefly pop his head up his own arse on the odd occasion...But the extended running time means he can do all the classic "Nosferatu" moments as well as adding in a few (pretty faithful, at least in spirit) Stoker moments into the mix.

The haunting music, great make-up, and highly effective Cinematography and framing (just check out the superb scene where Lucy is sitting in front of her mirror and watches the door open behind her to reveal only a creeping shadow that moves towards her until the physical Dracula finally appears on the far right of the frame as she turns away from the mirror to face him!) mean we have a really classy slice of arthouse horror.

And I forgot just how truly gorgeous and radiant Isabelle Adjani is. A voluminous Gothic beauty.

You have to love the fact as well that we have a version of Van Helsing here who refuses to believe in such silly things as vampires!
The plague aspect of the story is played up far more here than in the original, and this means Herzog can create some classic Gothic vistas of death as dozens of coffins are carried through the town square at the exact same time by an army of pall bearers.
Silly as hell really (and it seems to avoid the plague simply become an undertaker, given the mass of them seen here!) but an effective visual for sure.
And this aspect of Dracula as a plague, or later to our modern eyes as a cancer, is something picked up on brilliantly by both the original and this re-make..and yet never seems to be picked up by any other adaptation.
Instead you get rubbish like we see in the Crapola version were this cancer becomes a romantic anti-hero! Dear me.....

The 'never saw the real plot point of him anyway' Renfield is sadly essayed here as an annoying little dwarfy person who hams it up to distraction...and just goes to show what a truly outstanding, and I mean truly, truly outstanding, job Dwight Faye did in the Lugosi film.

The ironic, black comedy ending sort of sits badly with the rest of the very serious film, but the final image is a good one and overall this was much better than I remembered it and Kinski's Dracula is a great Vampire for sure.
Check it out if you have not done so...But watch the German language version.

[pedromonkey]

you reference Eye Of The Needle, i actually got this a couple of weeks ago after viewing it on TCM on a sunday afternoon. Donald Sutherland is utterly chilling in this. Fantastic WW2 spy thriller.

Three Days of the Condor was on the othernight on TCM at around 1.30am, who's gonna watch it then. silly time to put such a great film on.

[James Morton]

The name of the rose
murder-set-pieces
bruiser
ilsa she wolf of the ss
sexy killer
accio mutante
xtro