What was the last movie you saw?

[Starless*Eyes]

Last movie I saw in the theater was Salt which I really enjoyed. Especially a certain scene involving Angelina Jolie and Liev Schreiber. Plus it really motivates me to continue learning Russian.

Last movie I watched at home was The River Wild. It was predictable as most 90's action movies are but Kevin Bacon- DAMN

[Jestak]

John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 has all the classic virtues of the best B-films of days gone by: made on a tiny budget, it has a tight story, a solid but unknown cast, and good direction. A Los Angeles police precinct house, about to be abandoned, comes under siege from a small army of gang toughs. After the first round of gunfire, only six people remain in the station--newly promoted Lieutenant Bishop (the commander for the evening), two secretaries, a pair of convicts who are there only because their prison transport van picked the wrong place to stop, and a nearly-catatonic man who wandered in after his daughter was brutally murdered. Their enemies are almost wraith-like--I can't recall a single line of dialogue that any of them have in the movie.

Carpenter was nearly a one-man show creating this one; in addition to writing and directing, he composed the score and edited the movie (under the name John T. Chance, a nod to Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, one of Carpenter's sources of inspiration for this one). The standout in the no-name cast is Darwin Joston as Napoleon Wilson, one of the convicts, who reminds me a lot of a young Ben Johnson at his best. Also good are Austin Stoker as Lieutenant Bishop and Laurie Zimmer as the braver of the secretaries; fans of 1970s Disney films will also recognize Kim Richards of Escape to Witch Mountain fame.

[The Real Carlisle Cullen]

Most recently I saw Inception. It was mind bending and entertaining for someone like me who feels like I have seen it all. Esme and I both enjoyed it.

[nezziecarlycullen]

Dispicable me - my summer program that i go to took us to see it. not exactly something im just all that interested in. but is was a bit of a good laugh.

before that i saw eclipse - you can probably guess my reaction to that (AMAZING)

Movies i want to see:
the last airbender
vampires suck - that should be very funny

inception sounds i bit good now too.

[Jestak]

Tonight I watched The Nest/Nid de guepes, a very intense French action thriller--it has an intensity level that I'd compare to films like Aliens. The plot is something of a reworking of Assault on Precinct 13: an international squad of police are escorting an Albanian gangster to his upcoming trial when the gangster's cohorts ambush them and try to free him. They are forced to take refuge in an industrial warehouse. Caught there with them are the two night watchmen, and a small band of thieves who chose the wrong night to try to hijack the place. The only cast member I recognized was Nadia Fares from The Crimson Rivers--she's in command of the soldiers--but the cast is solid and the action scenes, as I indicated, are terrific.

One thing to note about this one--for any of you who are Netflix members like me, or are thinking about it, this film is an excellent example of why you can't rely on the movie descriptions at Netflix. The one for this one is laughably inaccurate.

[Jestak]

Kelly's Heroes reunited director Brian Hutton and star Clint Eastwood (who had worked together on Where Eagles Dare), in what seems to have been an attempt at a wartime caper film. Kelly (Eastwood), a World War II officer busted to private, comes across information about a bank filled with $16 million worth of gold (a whole lot of money in 1944). The catch is, it's 30 miles behind German lines, but Kelly and the ragtag band of troops he gathers aren't going to let a little thing like that stop them from getting rich. This one is a sprawling, sloppy mess, and the tone lurches from gritty realism to action comedy and back several times. But Eastwood is a solid lead, the combat scenes are often quite good, and Donald Sutherland's gloriously anachronistic hippie tank commander has to be seen at least once.

[Mrs.TeddyBear]

Eclipse...yeah, it's been a while since I've been to a movie

[Jestak]

Tonight I watched an early Stanley Kubrick film called The Killing. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is a veteran hood who, like many in his line of work, has plans for one "big score"--in this case, a racetrack robbery. In this late film noir, almost every major character is a wannabe who tries to be something he or she isn't capable of. Johnny wants to be a master criminal; the motley band of helpers he recruits for his heist--crooked accountant Marvin (Jay C. Flippen), bent cop Randy (Ted de Corsia), racetrack cashier George (Elisha Cook, Jr.) and bartender Mike (Joe Sawyer)--all want to be tough guys; George's wife Sherry (Marie Windsor) wants to be a femme fatale. The only main characters to escape the hubris of the others are Johnny's loyal-to-a-fault girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray, one of film noir's perennial "nice girls") and Maurice (Kola Kwariani), the chess-playing wrestler who Johnny hires to start a brawl at the track as a diversion. Hayden is very good in the lead role, while Cook, Windsor and Kwariani stand out among the supporting players. Kubrick's superb execution (especially of the prelude to the robbery, which he presents from several perspectives in sequence) , his economical storytelling (the film clocks at a tight 84 minutes), and the fatalistic mood (enhanced by Gerald Fried's score, all help overcome a very tight budget (which shows at times).

[Jestak]

Tonight I watched V for Vendetta. In a future, totalitarian England ruled by Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt), a terrorist calling himself V (Hugo Weaving) tries to undermine the government. Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) is the young woman who is unwillingly drawn into V's orbit one night when she chances to be out after curfew. Taken as an action picture, this one is quite good; taken as something more, as the social commentary it seems to aim for, it is less effective, far too heavy-handed. On the plus side, in my book Natalie Portman is made of awesome, and virtually any non-Star Wars Prequel she is in is worth seeing for her alone--this one is no exception. Weaving is good, but the other excellent performance is from Stephen Rea as a police inspector who, unlike many of his fellows, proves to have a bit of a conscience.

[Jestak]

Akira Kurosawa ranged far and wide for source material, even as far as Shakespeare. Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru/The Bad Sleep Well is an adaptation/reworking of Hamlet. The kings, princes and courtiers of Shakespeare's Denmark have become executives and accountants with a Japanese corporation. The Hamlet figure, Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), is out to avenge the murder of his father at the hands of several top executives. This one was quite good, although I somewhat prefer Kurosawa's "Macbeth," Throne of Blood, which is told more tightly; the pace in this film is a bit slow in the first hour.