A new year and a new movie list! This list will start small, but it will grow to enormous lengths! (That's what she said.) I have a couple of goals for this year, too:
1) 200+ movies. I was annoyed that I got so close to 200 near the end but fell short. It won't happen this year. 200 or bust! If I don't make it, you all have permission to mock me.
2) Get to 100 anime movies watched. Right now I am at 77 (including a movie in today's post). There are definitely at least 23 good ones I have not seen before. Feel free to make suggestions btw.
Also, I'll be keeping up the "best movies I've watched for the first time this year" list from the start instead of waiting until I build up to 25 movies, so get ready to see some REAL QUALITY on there.
Blazing Saddles (1974): If you don't love Blazing Saddles, then you have no heart. It's so ridiculously offensive but hilarious at the same time. And it only could have been made in that era; it would have been absolutely destroyed today, or at least toned down a bit because people would have bitched and moaned about it to hell and back. This is why we can't have nice things. Also, is it just me, or was Madeline Kahn a totally slammin' hottie? (As our dear friend Turk from Scrubs would say.)
The Descent (2005): Pretty good horror flick. The all-female cast works well, and there's a great sense of claustrophobia throughout. It gets a bit goofy later after the twist, though. (I somehow didn't know about it before watching the movie, so I want to keep it vague in the chance that someone here who hasn't seen the movie also won't be spoiled.) The movie comes around before the ending, however, which is suitably horrific.
Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie: Awakening of the Trailblazer (2010): Good god, what a mess! This blog post I wrote says it all, but man, it's disappointing to see something with potential just piss it all away. I could see what Seiji Mizushima and company were trying to do; they just botch everything throughout, except for the animation (although, honestly, it looks more like a souped up version of the TV series than a movie). The main antagonists are stupid, the politics are stupid, and the ending is possibly the single most retarded thing I will see all year. Just ... terrible.
Village of the Damned (1960): Not a bad horror movie for the time, actually. The premise -- a mysterious force impregnates all the women in a village, who then give birth to rapidly developing psychic children -- is actually pretty creative for the era, too. There's some goofiness, of course, but in all, I was actually impressed with how solid and unnerving it is at times. Only problem is that the beginning is a bit slow.
Children of the Damned (1963): This is more of a Cold War-era sci-fi flick than a horror movie. Those usually turn out one of two ways: 1) Interesting or 2) Unintentionally hilarious (as MST3K proved time and again). This is somewhere in the middle. There are some interesting bits and shockingly violent images for the time (though tame by today's standards), but it's all surrounded by a heaping helping of '60s sci-fi goofiness.
On the queue for this week: Trigun: Badlands Rumble (2010), Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha the Movie 1st (2010), Dawn of the Dead (1978), maybe Shutter Island (2010), either Black Swan (2010) or True Grit (2010)
Total Movies: 5 (Blazing Saddles, The Descent, Gundam 00 the Movie: Awakening of the Trailblazer, Village of the Damned, Children of the Damned)
