Recently Watched Films

Sometimes held up as his last great film, Limelight finds Chaplin in bittersweet mode, a semi-autobiographical feature that both celebrates his earlier triumphs and laments his decline. Buster Keaton also appears. The biggest missed chance of the film is not bringing The Tramp completely out of retirement even though Chaplin's old hero is recognised in the flashbacks through the billing of his character as the Tramp Comedian. 

Last one of my four film Hammer boxset from Indicator. This one was quite a solid psych horror. 

Mostly really funny, but Woody Allen's style of humour gets a little wearing after a while.

Shows its age, especially with the ending, but still quite funny. 

Asterix movies are somewhat hit and miss, but this one is a hit. Excellent 3D animation which keeps to the spirit of the original art style, if not matching it quite perfectly. A suitably absurd story, plenty of the usual cartoonish slapstick, and an excellent vocal cast, including Jack Whitehall, Nick Frost, Greg Davies and Harry Enfield.

On one hand this is a big step down from Casino Royale. On the other it's a lot better than I remember it being, possibly even underrated. 

Yeah, nah. Great idea from the pen of Ray Bradbury, but not terribly well executed.

Here's a YouTube link
 

(AKA Warlords of the 21st Century) I first saw this when I was a kid, and this was the biggest, coolest movie ever made in New Zealand, on a then massive budget of $1,000,000! This was made in New Zealand because there was a writers strike going on in the US at the time.

It's often accused of being a Mad Max 2 rip-off as there are a lot of similarities in plot and setting, but this was released only 2 weeks after Mad Max, so both were in production at the same time. 

Anyway, it still looks amazing, the truck is a fucking beast, there's some pretty cool stunts in it, and it has a pre-Cheers John Ratzenberger in it, along with a who's who of Kiwi actors - Bruno Lawrence of The Quiet Earth fame among them. There's also a young unknown boom operator called Lee Tamahori, later to direct Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day, and xXx 2.

Not the most flashy of sci-fi epics (it was made for TV, as well as not being that sort of sci-fi), but compelling. Later works like The Matrix owe something to this and of course the novel upon which it was based. 

I haven't finished with Moore yet nor started on Dalton, but Prime just added all the Bond movies and I want to get caught up on Craig so my Dad and I can watch No Time to Die one evening. I've seen this and the next two before (really didn't remember too much of this and even less of the next two), but Spectre and of course No Time to Die will be first time watches.

This one is bloody good.