I figured most people wouldn't be up for the crazy "30 movies, 30 days" contest, but I still want to hear what everyone's watching. I'm gonna start posting what I've seen in the comments here - just a line or two and maybe a rating - and invite anyone else to do the same with any movie they watch over the next month. You don't have to do the contest, just sound off on what movies cross your path.
Also: I'm cheating and starting a day or two before September. I need the head start if I'm even gonna come close to 30 movies :)
I watched The Losers. Well, most of it. I turned it off because it was horrible. Thus endeth the review.
ReplyDeleteI got lucky with my first outing, The Wages of Fear. It's a tough as hell 50s French film about a few desperate scoundrels who take a one-time, high paying job to drive trucks filled with volatile nitroclycerine across the shittiest roads of South America. It's spectacularly tense, and being a foreign flick, a lot edgier than American films of the era. It's got nudity, the f-bomb, and an awesomely grisly leg injury.
ReplyDelete5/5 for me. The pacing's slow, but I've rarely seen a more suspenseful movie. Gotta look into the director's other big movie, Les Diaboliques, soon.
Hey - you know what I wanna watch again? That Spanish movie that I've been trying to remember the name of for a year! ... This is getting annoying, it's like it doesn't exist!
ReplyDeleteDave, I mentioned this to you before, and it's NOT Timecrimes :p (the first suggestion anyone makes).
Cindy, you should describe what you remember of the movie again - if it's a horror flick, I bet that between Jamie and Jason Murphy, it'll be identified.
ReplyDeleteProbably as Timecrimes :P
Next up is Lilo & Stitch. Very fun Disney outing with Disney's first thick heroines and some surprisingly offbeat humor (I didn't expect to hear a joke about insects laying eggs in someone's ear). Loses a few points for predictability and my hatred of any cartoon people whose voice even remotely resembles Slimer or Howie Mandel.
ReplyDelete3/5
I watched Ichi, a 2009 homage to the old Zatoichi films that focuses on the daughter of Zatoichi, also a blind swords(wo)man, cast out of her group of blind musicians and wandering sround, looking for her father. She hates life and herself because she is blind and alone, until she meets a samurai who is too afraid to draw his sword and he teaches her to love again. The main actress, Haruka Ayase, does a great job, but the story is all angst and sadness, lacking in the flair and verve that made the original movies so great. The whole point was that he didn't let his blindness stop him! Anyway, the emo got pretty tiresome after a while, and I give it 2/5.
ReplyDeleteI think the lesson you learned, Dan, is that dudes are just better at being blind swordsmen than chicks.
ReplyDeleteMy third movie was Payback, which I watched as follow-up to reading the same (basic) story in Darwyn Cooke's comic adaptation of The Hunter. It wasn't so great, even though it was the director's cut, toughening up the original cut, which had more in common with 90s hipster crime movies. It still wasn't tough enough, and Mel Gibson, who you'd think would be perfect for playing an amoral bastard, tries to make the character too sympathetic.
2/5
Was Payback hunting Jews and gold-digging Russians?
ReplyDeleteLatest was Broadcast News. I remembered this being a big movie in the late 80s, but I only ever saw clips and I was too young to appreciate it. Over twenty years later and it's a movie that's held up fantastically. A great tale of the pressures of modern journalism, but even more than that, just a really great story of three decent but flawed people interracting with all the awkwardness of reality. Some great lines, too. "Except for socially, you're my role model."
ReplyDelete4/5