No Death at a Funeral today because I'll be watching it with Shishou and Drift some time this week (:D), and no Ronin because my DVR somehow recorded the wrong movie. =/
EDIT: Also, UNMEI KAIHEN posts on ep8 of Spice and Wolf II and ep8 of Bakemonogatari.
White Heat (1949): I need to watch more old gangster movies, especially ones with James Cagney, because holy crap he is great in this. He plays a ruthless, psychotic gangster with a mother-complex, which might be kind of ridiculous if Cagney weren't so insane and scary. I really love how Cagney's character, Cody Jarrett, is built to be this inhumane monster, not just psychologically but also physically. Jarrett is almost never the biggest guy in the room, but he almost always gets the most imposing shots, and even when he's hit with a crippling migraine, it's as if he could go off any minute. The ending is fantastic, too. If I saw that in a theater, I'd remember it the rest of my life. Maybe the only boring part is the insane attention to detail regarding police methods used to catch Jarrett -- it's interesting to see how they do their work, but too much focus is put on it at times.
All About Eve (1950): I love it whenever I hear nothing but great things about a movie, and it still manages to wow me. This is without a doubt the best movie I have seen so far this year. I knew the basics of the storyline going in, so I wasn't fooled by Eve's manipulations in the beginning (even if you don't know, the very beginning is enough to make you suspicious about her), but the way the movie builds and wraps around the destruction Eve wreaks in her climb to the top of the acting world makes irrelevant any predictability about what she is truly after. It takes a lot for me to really hate a fictional character (the good kind of hate, anyway), and I despised Eve (which is partly due to Anne Baxter's great performance, and partly due to her being written so well). It's not just that she causes destruction on her own -- it's also that she causes everyone around her to nearly self-destruct as well.
Bette Davis is also awesome as Margo Channing, the superstar actress whom Eve emulates and eventually tries to displace. Channing is grouchy, paranoid about her age and prone to drinking and lashing out at others, but she is awesome nonetheless because she is much more human than Eve can ever be. She is like that awesome aunt who has lived everywhere and done a ton of crazy things and always has interesting stories to tell. One theme with Margo I really like is how the blurring of the lines between acting and reality with her is completely different than it is with Eve -- for Margo, taking that "Margo Channing" character offstage, and letting it consume her, just about wrecks her (there's a great scene where she has a fight with her younger boyfriend onstage like it would unfold in one of her plays), while with Eve, it's all she has, because she's got nothing beneath the fake self she projects to others.
And, uh, definitely can't talk about this movie without mentioning George Sanders as Addison DeWitt, the venomous theater critic. (Some of you may recognize Sanders as the voice of Shere Khan from The Jungle Book.) He's great at lurking in the background throughout the movie, calculating, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He has several of the movie's most brutal, savage lines. No wonder at all why he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this. And the ending ... well, it's the perfect way to close the movie.
Anyone who loves movies needs to see All About Eve now.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976): Haha, well I finally watched the version of this movie I wanted to see! I like it overall, but damn is it ever a weird movie (and totally different from the other version!). This is a lot less straightforward than the TV version -- Newton's objective is much more vague (you can pretty much gather that he wants to bring water to his world), and this movie's story is more about how Newton is gradually disintegrated -- both physically and spiritually -- by Earth culture. He's overwhelmed by mass media, addicted to drink and sex (this is a fairly sexually graphic movie) and physically tormented by various people. It's pretty depressing, actually, and not always in a literary way ... more like in a "this is really depressing" way. The pace really drags in places, too.
On the queue for this week: Death at a Funeral (2007), Shane (1953) and The Big Heat (1953)
Total Movies: 115 (Gaslight, The Last King of Scotland, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Darjeeling Limited, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Diary of the Dead, Bullets Over Broadway, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, The Professional: Golgo 13, Lars and the Real Girl, Lolita, Quills, Hamlet, Iris, Manhattan Murder Mystery, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The Savages, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Stranger, Love and Death, Harold and Maude, Spartacus, Scarlet Street, Sabrina, Zelig, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Stardust Memories, Barry Lyndon, Be Kind Rewind, Radio Days, Deconstructing Harry, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Creating Rem Lazar, Undefeatable, Ninja Terminator, Ninja Dragon, Rumble Fish, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, In Bruges, The Bank Dick, Marathon Man, Clannad, Air, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, MirrorMask, Slither, It's a Gift, Splendor in the Grass, Waitress, North by Northwest, Monkey Business, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, The Brave One, 3:10 to Yuma, Bringing Out the Dead, Gurren Lagann: Gurren-hen, There Will Be Blood, Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Spellbound, Frenzy, Anatomy of a Murder, Clue, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Changeling, Shadows and Fog, Into the Wild, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1987), Synecdoche, New York, Carlito's Way, Shoot 'Em Up, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Up, Yor: Hunter from the Future, Tropic Thunder, True Romance, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, A Woman Under the Influence, Casablanca, Frost/Nixon, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Le Samouraï, Inland Empire, The Reader, Doubt, Arachnophobia, Manhunter, Wild At Heart, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Omega Man, Hitman, Leaving Las Vegas, Cape Fear, Say Anything ..., Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, Chasing Amy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Point Break, 500 Days of Summer, Man Bites Dog, Burn After Reading, Glory, Training Day, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, White Heat, All About Eve, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976))
