I Just Watched...

Discussion of programming on TCM.
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TikiSoo
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by TikiSoo »

Thanks for the descriptions of those movies, umop. I am very much into Hindi movies and unfortunately the only one my library has is Pyaasa. From your description I'd be most interested in the last one for it's historical bent.

I still haven't found a good streaming site for new & old Indian movies, only HBO/Netflix seem to offer a few.
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Detective Jim McLeod
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Detective Jim McLeod »

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The Last Command (1928) TCM- 6/10

A Russian general (Emil Jannings) flees his country after the revolution and works as a Hollywood actor.

Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar and he does deliver an excellent performance. Since this is a silent he uses his face and especially his hypnotic eyes. William Powell is a former revolutionary who is now working as a director in Hollywood. There is a flashback to the Russian Revolution time and it drags a bit there, but the final scene as Jannings must act out a scene as a general is quite powerful.
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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by LawrenceA »

Yesterday:

Jigsaw (1968) - A remake of Mirage with Bradford Dillman as a man who accidentally takes a lot of LSD, blacks out, and then wakes up with a dead woman in his bathtub and no memory of what happened. He hires P.I. Harry Guardino to solve the case. With Pat Hingle, Hope Lange, Diana Hyland, Victor Jory, Paul Stewart, Susan Saint James, Kent McCord, and James Doohan. This was intended as a TV movie, but got a theatrical release instead. Michael J. Pollard, who has a brief role as a drug supplier, got prominent placement on the posters thanks to Bonne & Clyde. The copy on YouTube looks awful.

Joanna (1968) - Another swingin' 60's British feature. Genevieve Waite stars as the title gal, a goofy young woman who goofs around with other goofballs. I watched it for Donald Sutherland, who plays a terminally-ill rich guy who funds the goofy shenanigans. Also with Calvin Lockhart. Director Michael Sarne did Myra Breckenridge next.

Satanik (1968) - Italian weirdness, based on a comic book, about an ugly scientist (Magda Konopka) who invents a formula that turns her young and beautiful, but only for brief periods. It also makes her homicidal. I thought this was silly and dull, but there are some memorable costumes.

The Satanist (1968) - Very low budget adults-only flick about an author and his wife who become the targets of a beautiful Satan-worshiping neighbor. This is fairly typical of grindhouse skin flicks of the era, with bad B&W cinematography and all post-dub sound. The only highlight is the incredible Pat Harrington as the servant/lover of the satanist lady and she does one of her famous belly dances.

Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisedon (1969) - Hour-long TV movie from producer Dan Curtis, intended as a pilot, that never went to series. Kerwin Mathews stars as a paranormal investigator hired by Marj Dusay to look into the supposed haunting of the Blaisedon estate that she's just inherited. With Thayer David. This is very much in the vein of Dark Shadows, with the same sets and music. Louis Edmonds even shows up.
Watching until the end.
umop apisdn
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by umop apisdn »

TikiSoo wrote: March 21st, 2023, 7:09 am Thanks for the descriptions of those movies, umop. I am very much into Hindi movies and unfortunately the only one my library has is Pyaasa. From your description I'd be most interested in the last one for it's historical bent.

I still haven't found a good streaming site for new & old Indian movies, only HBO/Netflix seem to offer a few.
I have a newfound appreciation for Guru Dutt films and it's very sad that he and his wife died so young. He died of lethal combination of sleeping pills and alcohol or possible suicide at age 39, while Geeta Dutt died of complications from cirrhosis at age 41.

Being a Bengali, I was partial to Geeta Dutt's music and was always told Guru Dutt ruined her life and she died young as a result. I can now see that it was just two dysfunctional people living in an era and culture where mental health and addiction was hushed up. Two great artists were lost and that saddens me. Geeta Dutt would have been had a career similar to Lata Mangeshkar or Asha Bhosle. Hardly anyone was making serious and artistic Hindi movies like Guru Dutt in that era.

If you use Amazon for streaming they have channel add-ons for different services like Showtime, Paramount+, Britbox, etc. There is an option which has Indian movies and televisions shows called Eros Now. You can try it for free 7 days and then it's $4.99 a month.

It's got old and new movies most major Indian languages like Bengali, Hindi, Marathi etc. The trouble is finding things, but that is typical of Amazon's video offerings.

I thought my parents would like the channel and subscribed for a few months, but they still ended up watching movies on YouTube. I cancelled a Dish Network package of Indian channels because they stopped watching that and saved 100s of dollars. Last week my mother mentioned wanting me to get her an Indian movie streaming option. :headbang:
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Allhallowsday
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Allhallowsday »

95 years on, and it's still funny... THE CIRCUS (1928) TCM had it on last night or so.

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laffite
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by laffite »

Flight (2012) Difficult to say much without spoilers. Suffice it to simply say it is about an airliner crash under investigation. Denzel Washington is STELLAR. I have not sought him out but perhaps I should for now on. He is not merely an actor but an artist. I scrambled to see whether he had ever played Othello in a movie. Didn't see it, though curiously he played Macbeth in 2021 and in a movie directed by one of the Coen Brothers (without the other, a first.) He is old for the part but I read that's part of the drama, i.e., it is their last chance to get the Crown. Flight is with Don Cheadle, John Goodman, and Kelly Reilly. This is bucket list material. //
Sabine Azema in Sunday in the Country
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Feinberg
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Feinberg »

"Ireland, Scotland ... what's the difference?" - apologies to Mike Myers
Legion of the Damned (1969) a rather trashy Italian film shot in the English language starring Jack Palance as a commando Colonel who has to put together a band of misfits ala The Dirty Dozen to go on a mission just prior to D-day. The entire film was dubbed afterward and though Palance and Curd Jurgens gave their usual professional performances I don't think they showed up to do their own voices in post production. What makes this film a curiosity is that Palance is supposed to be playing an Irish Colonel but he sounds like an American putting on a Scottish accent. When he speaks out of the side of his mouth he reminds me a tad of Sean Connery.
Last edited by Feinberg on March 23rd, 2023, 1:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by LawrenceA »

Yesterday:

Shogun's Joy of Torture (1968) - Japanese anthology film focusing on "excesses of punishment" in the feudal era. In the first tale, a woman is degraded in order to pay for the medical treatment of her brother. In the second, bald lesbian nuns begin an escalating squabble when one of them sleeps with a man. And in the final tale, a deranged artist tortures people to "capture the true face of suffering" in order to tattoo it on a woman. High production values only make this more sleazy. This is the kind of movie that wallows in sadism while ostensibly saying "sadism is awful".

Space Thing (1968) - Softcore adults-only nonsense about the various couplings on a space ship. Very cheap and dumb, and obviously inspired by Star Trek. The women looked nice, anyway.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1968) - Umpteenth adaptation of the Stevenson tale, from producer Dan Curtis, with Jack Palance in the title dual role. Also with Denholm Elliott, and "introducing Billie Whitelaw". This has a decent reputation, but I didn't care for it. The make-up for Hyde wasn't too radically different from how Palance normally looks, so how anyone was supposed to be unaware they were the same guy is absurd. It also retains Curtis' Dark Shadows TV soap opera look.

A Thousand Pleasures (1968) - Another adults-only sleaze-fest from Michael & Roberta Findlay. A man murders his wife, and picks up two hitchhiking ladies while going to dispose of her body. He goes to the ladies' home, where he witnesses and is subjected to myriad sexual depravities. Yikes.

Mars (1968) - A brief (50 minute) Soviet documentary about what conditions may be like on Mars, and how man will have to cope with them in order to explore and colonize. As dated as this was, I still liked to look, and is my pick for best of the day.

Prisoners of the Sun (2013) - A motley crew of explorers and treasure hunters descend into the bowels of a just-unearthed pyramid in Egypt. It's tied into an ancient prophecy about aliens. With David Charvet, John Rhys Davies, and Carmen (granddaughter of Charlie) Chaplin. A decent plotline (for this sort of thing, anyway) is undone by abysmal filmmaking. From the director of Battlefield Earth.
Watching until the end.
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LiamCasey
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by LiamCasey »

laffite wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 12:43 am Flight (2012) Difficult to say much without spoilers. Suffice it to simply say it is about an airliner crash under investigation. Denzel Washington is STELLAR. I have not sought him out but perhaps I should for now on. He is not merely an actor but an artist. I scrambled to see whether he had ever played Othello in a movie. Didn't see it, though curiously he played Macbeth in 2021 and in a movie directed by one of the Coen Brothers (without the other, a first.) He is old for the part but I read that's part of the drama, i.e., it is their last chance to get the Crown. Flight is with Don Cheadle, John Goodman, and Kelly Reilly. This is bucket list material. //
If you're in a Shakespeare mood, he also appears in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as Don Pedro.
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laffite
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by laffite »

LiamCasey wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 5:51 pm
laffite wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 12:43 am Flight (2012) Difficult to say much without spoilers. Suffice it to simply say it is about an airliner crash under investigation. Denzel Washington is STELLAR. I have not sought him out but perhaps I should for now on. He is not merely an actor but an artist. I scrambled to see whether he had ever played Othello in a movie. Didn't see it, though curiously he played Macbeth in 2021 and in a movie directed by one of the Coen Brothers (without the other, a first.) He is old for the part but I read that's part of the drama, i.e., it is their last chance to get the Crown. Flight is with Don Cheadle, John Goodman, and Kelly Reilly. This is bucket list material. //
If you're in a Shakespeare mood, he also appears in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as Don Pedro.
I am always in the Shakespeare mood.

Thank You !
Sabine Azema in Sunday in the Country
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EP Millstone
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by EP Millstone »

LawrenceA wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 11:26 am . . . The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1968) . . .
Jack Palance's performance and makeup worked for me. Totally.

The scene in Dan Curtis' production that nastily etched itself on -- and permanently scarred -- my 12-year-old cerebrum is when Hyde sadistically disfigures a thug with his cane-sword. As his unfortunate victim sinks to his knees -- blood oozing through the trembling fingers covering his face -- the sneering Hyde taunts:

"I don't think you'll want to show your face in public again . . . not with your nose a-slit!"

For me, the 1968 Dan Curtis televersion excels because of its distinguished cast, Palance's memorable performance, and Curtis' characteristically nimble staging, artful production design, and masterful ability to create and sustain a mood of terror.

I'm extremely keen on watching (again) the 1973 TV musical of Robert Louis Stevenson's undying story, starring Kirk Douglas as a singing Jekyll and Hyde!
"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with." -- W.C. Fields
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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by LawrenceA »

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) - British TV movie written by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. Sometime in the future, a hedonistic society sits enraptured by televised "perversity". The producers behind the annual "Sex Olympics" (an uncensored live broadcast of various sexual feats) decide to try a new type of show, forcing a trio of residents to live in a primitive frozen wasteland while their every move is videoed and shown live around the world. Of course this should all sound familiar and prescient. With Tony Vogel, Suzanne Neve, Leonard Rossiter, and a 22-year-old Brian Cox. The best watch of the day, which isn't saying too much.

Curse of the Blood (1968) - Japanese supernatural horror, with a family beset by a curse after they murder a blind acupuncturist. This is very similar to many other Japanese revenge tales of the 40s-70s, and doesn't add much to the genre.

Castle of the Creeping Flesh (1968) - Bad silliness with a group of debauched high-society types going to a secluded castle owned by creepy doctor Howard Vernon. This only seems like a Jess Franco movie. I expected Count Floyd to show up at any moment.

Hammerhead (1968) - Vince Edwards as an American agent in Europe in yet another James Bond wannabe. He's out to thwart criminal mastermind Hammerhead (Peter Vaughn). With Judy Geeson, Michael Bates, Diana Dors, Beverly Adams, and big David Prowse. Lots of "mad" 60's acid-culture stuff tries to separate it from the usual Bond-rip-off schlock, to no avail.

The Erotic Circus (1969) - AKA Orgy at the Psycho House. A weird mama's boy and his domineering mother are visited by his hippie uncle and his two girlfriends. Sex and violence ensues. Very cheap, very bad.

The Gladiators (1969) - High-minded sci-fi from director Peter Watkins. In the future, wars are no longer fought with armies, but with small groups of "contestants" set against one another in televised matches. Another title to trot out when someone claims the Hunger Games books/movies were groundbreaking stuff.

Raptor (2001) - From producer Roger Corman comes what is one of the absolute worst films he's ever unleashed. An unofficial fourth entry in his dreadful Carnosaur series, this sees geneticist Corbin Bernsen continuing to engage in illegal experiments on T-rexes (ignore the title, folks!), while local sheriff Eric Roberts tries to stop him. A horrifying mish-mash of stock footage and poorly-written/directed/acted "fresh" stuff, this is mind-numbing in its ineptitude.
Watching until the end.
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Feinberg
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Feinberg »

EP Millstone wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 10:07 pm
LawrenceA wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 11:26 am . . . The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1968) . . .
Jack Palance's performance and makeup worked for me. Totally.

The scene in Dan Curtis' production that nastily etched itself on -- and permanently scarred -- my 12-year-old cerebrum is when Hyde sadistically disfigures a thug with his cane-sword. As his unfortunate victim sinks to his knees -- blood oozing through the trembling fingers covering his face -- the sneering Hyde taunts:

"I don't think you'll want to show your face in public again . . . not with your nose a-slit!"

For me, the 1968 Dan Curtis televersion excels because of its distinguished cast, Palance's memorable performance, and Curtis' characteristically nimble staging, artful production design, and masterful ability to create and sustain a mood of terror.

I'm extremely keen on watching (again) the 1973 TV musical of Robert Louis Stevenson's undying story, starring Kirk Douglas as a singing Jekyll and Hyde!
I was about the same age when I first saw the Palance Hyde film and it had a big impact on me as well. I was just starting to make my own Super 8mm horror movies. Much later I learned that this production was made just up the road from where I lived in a suburban Toronto television studio which impressed me all the more for what its director was able to accomplish.
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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by LawrenceA »

Haunted Castle (1969) - Japanese ghost revenge tale, with an otherworldly shapeshifting cat taking revenge against those who betrayed the cat's previous owner. Atmospheric, if not very original.

Inferno of Torture (1969) - More Japanese feudal-era atrocities, a follow up to the previous year's Shogun's Joy of Torture. While that one was an anthology, this one sticks to a single narrative, which benefits the unsavory proceedings, although the story covers similar territory from the prior film, with an obsessive tattoo artist driven to great lengths for his "masterpiece".

Latitude Zero (1969) - Fun, goofy Japanese sci-fi made in English and with many American stars. After two scientists and a reporter suffer an accident in a bathysphere, they are rescued by Captain Nemo-esque mystery man Joseph Cotten, who takes them to a high-tech utopian underwater city. They later face peril from mad scientist Cesar Romero. Also with Richard Jaeckel, Patricia Medina, and "introducing" Linda Haynes. This is from famed Toho director Inishiro Honda, and features the best production values of a Japanese feature of the time. It's very silly, with giant rats, man-bats, and a gryphon, but I had a good time with it.

Love Camp 7 (1969) - The execrable "Nazisploitation" genre got its start with the surprise grindhouse success of this cheap, adults-only flick about two WWII Allied female operatives going undercover to infiltrate a concentration camp stocked with beautiful women to service the "needs" of the Nazi officer class. Not quite as scummy as many of the later entries in this lamentable genre, but nothing worth seeing, either.

The Man Who Thought Life (1969) - Unusual B&W Danish sci-fi/fantasy about a strange man who demands that a brain surgeon operate on him in order to perfect the man's powers. It seems he can will things, including people, into existence, but his creations never last long. He is certain the brain surgeon can fix the problem, and chaos ensues when the doctor refuses. There's nothing flashy here, but what's done with the material is satisfying. My pick of the day.
Watching until the end.
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