Last Seen Movie - The Latest Movie You Have Seen; ratings

[Uri]

David makes money by moving black families into flats near elderly women who are afraid of them, so he can then buy their flats on the cheap.

Good for him. This is exactly where the slyness of the film lies – these little old ladies are the real villains, and David is the subversive, hence positive, element, unless, off course, one is committed to the petite bourgeois mind-set of Jenny's background.

[Big Magilla]

I probably should have said "although the film is not anti-Semitic" instead of "if not outright anti-Semitic", which puts a different connotation on it.

Of course the film is not overtly anti-Semitic. Such well established actors as Emma Thompson and Alfred Molina with their impeccable liberal credentials would never appear in such a film, but...

David makes money by moving black families into flats near elderly women who are afraid of them, so he can then buy their flats on the cheap. He and is friends steal expensive objects from homes that up for sale. He has a wife he'll never leave. It plays into all the worst fears of the bigots.

The voiceover at the end makes it clear that Jenny benefited from the affair, but she allows the headmistress and everyone else around her to maintain their smug superiority by keeping it to herself.

Since the film is set in 1961, today's audiences can feel superior to the characters representing their parents', grandparents' or great-grandparents generations and be thankful the world has become more enlightened in the last fifty years. Or has it?

[Uri]

If not outright anti-Semitic, it comes dangerously close with Peter Sarsgaard's character all the things her bettors warned her against.

Anti-Semitism is a constant team in An Education. Most of the characters in it, from the headmistress through Jenny's parents to Jenny herself, are driven by it in the different ways they react toward Sarsgaard's David, whose attractiveness derives from being an exotic, dangerously persuasive Other, which is all about him being Jewish. But the film is not in any way anti-Semitic. The lack of distinction is a sorry product of simplistic PC oriented method of evaluating ideas and the way they are manifested.

Jenny's pseudo rebel, with which she toys being safely guarded by her deeply inherited conservatism and a confidence deeply rooted in her belonging to the main social section, is mirrored by David's conflicting emotions as someone who forever will be shutout of it. From Moshe Mendelssohn to the Coen brothers, from Baruch Spinoza to Sabin, the fascinations and bewilderment Jews felt for the Christian culture they were operating in but never fully immersed in combined with the supremacy/inferiority complex attached to it, made for major driving force – in philosophy, the arts, science, business – you name it (ok, not sports), but also it might be manifested in more personal ways, such as David's pathetically endearing, self suggestive attempt to act as if his relationship with Jenny is the real deal. Maybe it's the racially built in Shylock in me, but I felt that in En Education there was a sense of compassion and understanding for David's motives and actions.



Edited By Uri on 1266054666

[Precious Doll]

A Prophet (2009) Jacques Audiard 8/10

Valentine's Day (2010) Garry Marshall 5/10

Outrage (2009) Kirby Dick 7/10

Spawn of the North (1938) Henry Hathaway 5/10

[Big Magilla]

I agree. Mulligan compares more to Watson than Hepburn.

If a 50s comparison is to be made then Leslie Caron in Gigi would be a more fitting one than Audrey in Roman Holiday.

I liked the film's production style tremendously and also agree that Rosamund Pike is the standout in support. However, I didn't care for the film overall. If not outright anti-Semitic, it comes dangerously close with Peter Sarsgaard's character all the things her bettors warned her against.

[Hustler]

An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009) 7/10

I liked the 1960s atmosphere which brought back memories of the films made in Britain at the time. Also liked Carey Mulligan though don't understand why she has been compared to Audrey Hepburn. Rosamund Pike is also outstanding and I'm glad some of the London critics have recognised her performance with nominations.

Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009) 6/10

Films like this always make me think that we have our own troubles here in Pakistan while the ones in the U.S.A., in many ways, are of a more serious nature......dealing with the family unit (or lack of). What amazes me is that a Government so interested in the lives of other nations has failed to address and help out with basic issues of their own people. Yes, I know they are ''trying''.

Extremely disturbing film about child abuse and incest, with Gabourey Sidibe a standout as the damaged teenager. Mo'Nique is also very good as the abusive mother while it was a surprise to see how effective Mariah Carey is as the welfare counselor.

An Education 8/10
Carey Mulligan could be compared with a fresh and young Emily Watson. She´s absolutely delightful

Precious 5/10

I was very disappointed about that movie which I´ve been expecting with anxiety. I´ve found it so conventional and manipulative.
The perfomances are great: Mónique, Sidibe, Carey, Patton and even Kravitz.

[Big Magilla]

Son of the Gods (1930) Frank Lloyd 7/10

Early Talkie take on racial bigotry has a cop-out ending, but is otherwise a well made tale of love and redemption despite everything.

Richard Bartelmess is the son of a wealthy Chinese banker with Caucasian features. Constance Bennett is the woman who loves him until she learns of his heritage. Their jaw-dropping confrontation is one of the most wince inducing scenes of all time.

Frank Albertson has a nice bit as Barthelmess' college buddy and prolific child actor Dickie Moore appears as Barthelmess as a boy in the climactic flashback scene.

Forever Amber (1947) Otto Preminger 6/10

The Gone With the Wind of the Restoration.

Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde are no Leigh and Gable, but handle their roles competently enough. The standouts, though, are George Sanders as Charles II and Richard Haydn as Darnell's mean, elderly husband.

The costumes and sets are gorgeous and David Raskin's Oscar nominated score is excellent, but it's mostly idle chatter until we get to the best scenes depicting the Black Plague and the burning of London, which appear near the end. Preminger stages them extremely well but another major sequence, a duel between Wilde and Glenn Langan is under-lit and not nearly as exciting as it could have been.

[ITALIANO]

Yes, Law of Desire and other early Almodovars were at least as gay as Bad Education, but that was another Almodovar, younger, angrier; I was talking about the director's most recent work, the one which got the Oscars, etc. I saw Bad Education long ago, should see it again, but I was impressed by its power, its honesty, its torment, its complex but never annoying narrative structure. One of his best movies, and in Almodovar's case this means alot.

[Sabin]

I haven't seen Laws of Desire, which I hear is pretty gay. Bad Education is certainly a very gay movie, but for ages now I've been waiting for a movie to come along that both indicts and cherishes how our past works its way into our movies. I don't quite find the ending entirely satisfying because it is building for explosion. To be honest, the notion that Enrique could still be directing movies today with the same passion is ridiculous. Cop-out. Something else needs to happen. But the remainder of the film is almost note perfect.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009) David Yates 2/10

The worst of the series so far. And how did this get a Best Cinematography nomination? It's so dark and dreary looking.

I'm going to say Absolutely Not to literally every statement in this passage. Were it not for The White Ribbon, I would have no problem choosing this for Best Cinematography of the lot.

[ITALIANO]

/Bad Education/ (Pedro Almodovar) - 9/10

I think there's a little something missing in the final act. Here's what I wrote for a soon-to-be-published piece:

"A director takes a story and adds a spin. When Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) first walks across his office to greet “Ignacio” (Bernal), one of his first utterances is how he should lose the beard. He’s already found his subject, twisting him into what he needs him to be; and what a subject he’s found! Alberto Iglesías’ score swells and Enrique watches Ignacio leave his office, and says with a smirk that he was his first love, but that he’s changed. It’s a knowing moment evoking noir, but, no mere pastiche, Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education speaks to how sick puppies who have lost it at the movies bend over backwards to integrate moments past into life – if not works – present. He gets such a thrill to even be present in something so nourishing – and noir. It’s a film of persisting ellipses of expectation as a memory, a dream, and a movie often at the same time."

[

Yes. And it's also probably the best of Almodovar's recent movies, though of course not the most popular, maybe because it's his most openly gay, masculine movie. It's fascinating, and very personal.

[OscarGuy]

But it's so dark and dreary looking! Isn't that was great cinematography is?? No...oh, ok.

But, I'm glad someone else finally agreed with me that HBP was the worst of the series to date.

[Precious Doll]

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009) David Yates 2/10

The worst of the series so far. And how did this get a Best Cinematography nomination? It's so dark and dreary looking.

In the Electric Mist (2009) Bertrand Tavernier 4/10

I saw the director's cut 117 minute version of this (apparently the US release is a shorter 102 minutes). I hate it when director's films are taken away from them an re edited and though the longer version is rather plodding and padded I find it hard to believe that cutting it would actually improve it. A good cast (Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Peter Sarsgaard, Mary Steenburgen, Ned Beatty) wasted in the swamps of the deep south in this overcooked pot boiler.

Personal Effects (2009) David Hollander 4/10

Daybreakers (2010) Michael & Peter Spierig 4/10

[Sabin]

/Bad Education/ (Pedro Almodovar) - 9/10

I think there's a little something missing in the final act. Here's what I wrote for a soon-to-be-published piece:

"A director takes a story and adds a spin. When Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) first walks across his office to greet “Ignacio” (Bernal), one of his first utterances is how he should lose the beard. He’s already found his subject, twisting him into what he needs him to be; and what a subject he’s found! Alberto Iglesías’ score swells and Enrique watches Ignacio leave his office, and says with a smirk that he was his first love, but that he’s changed. It’s a knowing moment evoking noir, but, no mere pastiche, Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education speaks to how sick puppies who have lost it at the movies bend over backwards to integrate moments past into life – if not works – present. He gets such a thrill to even be present in something so nourishing – and noir. It’s a film of persisting ellipses of expectation as a memory, a dream, and a movie often at the same time."

Josh, I'm just curious -- what impelled you to watch A Beautiful Mind again? I assume you're reviewing the decade, but hell there must be an Ozu, Rossellini, Minnelli, Bresson, de Toth, etc. picture you haven't seen with which you could have filled up those two hours.

Natch.

My roommates were watching it and I was pretty curious. I'm a little specious of my film viewership more than five years past. I was more interested in what I was watching rather than how it was being put on. A Beautiful Mind was released in Phoenix on the 21st of December. This immediately followed my departure from the University of Arizona with a GPA barely hovering 2.0 following two and a half largely wasted years, and with a lot on my mind I found myself angry at this film for presenting a neutered portrait of a wholly unlikable man. It's the only Best Picture winner I have not revisited and as it was playing in my den (and one of my two full-time jobs being largely mindless logging), I figured Why not?

Thankfully, I live near the New Beverly which routinely plays classic cinema which I would prefer viewing there to at home. And with seven people taking up residence in my house, finding the right modicum of silence to watch a Bresson takes some talent.

The last movie I watched in Tucson, Arizona during my failed stay at the University of Arizona was The Royal Tenenbaums. The first movie I watched in Phoenix, Arizona was The Royal Tenenbaums a couple of weeks later with my sister. Then I began studying film.

[Big Magilla]

The Last Flight (1931) William Dieterle 7/10

John Monk Saunders, was a former flight instructor, whose second wife (1928-1939) was Fay Wray. He wrote the story for Wings and won an Oscar for The Dawn Patrol. He adapted his novel Single Lady into the screenplay for this film, which greatly resembles Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1926.

Like his previous films about WWI aviators, the specter of death hangs over his characters for much of the film. Saunders himself committed suicide in 1940 at the age of 44.

Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent are the four WWI flyers who are now drifting through Europe as part of the lost generation. Helen Chandler, whose life was even more tragic than Saunders, is the girl who follows them from Paris to Lisbon. Tragedy ensues in ways you don't see coming.

All five leads are excellent including Nugent who later became a director.

Chandler, who is best remembered for 1931's Dracula, was institutionalized in 1940, disfigured in a fire in 1950 and died of a peptic ulcer in 1965. Her body cremated by the State of California when no one claimed her remains.

This was Dieterle's first Hollywood film.

[Damien]

Josh, I'm just curious -- what impelled you to watch A Beautiful Mind again? I assume you're reviewing the decade, but hell there must be an Ozu, Rossellini, Minnelli, Bresson, de Toth, etc. picture you haven't seen with which you could have filled up those two hours.