OK, I have finally broken past 100 movies watched for the year. Celebrate my lack of a life! Woo!
Anyway, I watched an assload of movies, so I will try not to make this super friggin' long.
The Boxer (1997): Very solid movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a boxer (duh) and former Irish Republican Army Volunteer who went to prison for 14 years and comes back to town to open a gym and rekindle love. The boxing scenes are excellent -- very brutal and hard-hitting; some of the best I've seen since Raging Bull -- but all of the hullabaloo concerning Danny Flynn's (Day-Lewis) loyalties to the Irish cause versus his work for peace is the more compelling part of the movie.
Some Like it Hot (1959): I love comedies, and yet I went all my life without seeing this. How is this possible? Hell if I know. This is sooooooooooo friggin' hysterical and is the best example possible for the "crossdressing = hilarity" argument. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are amazing, totally getting into their roles as women while also being as lascivious as possible (the way Lemmon switches between indignity at being hit on by random guys to being a total perv and leering at women is a thing of beauty). And if you have never understood Marilyn Monroe's appeal, well, this movie will turn you around in a heartbeat. My lord. Sexiest movie star ever? Maybe so. See this immediately, laugh long and hard (lol) and sit in awe of director Billy Wilder's genius.
The Apartment (1960): Speaking of Mr. Wilder, here is more evidence of his awesomeness. The story in this is actually more serious and dramatic than I thought it would be; it's still funny as hell, but it's also quite sad. There is so much loneliness in this movie -- C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) can barely use his apartment because he is busy renting it out to executives who want to cheat on their wives, and Baxter sacrifices his personal life so that he can get ahead. Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine, looking quite cute with short hair, if I do say so myself >>), meanwhile, is part of an affair that will never go anywhere, and she knows it, but she cannot do anything about it. If this sounds way too emo and heavy-handed, trust me when I say it is not. There are even some sly winks at genre convention with this sort of story that made me laugh pretty hard (a certain running joke has to do with misunderstandings about attempted suicide).
The 39 Steps (1935): Pretty damn good spy flick from Alfred Hitchcock. It is a bit dated in some respects (the European spy in the beginning of the movie is so ridiculous and unbelievable lol), but some the action is good, although it obviously pales in comparison to what you'd see today. But, yes, spies + innocent man on the run + Hitchcock usually = good times, and this is no exception.
The Philadelphia Story (1940): More comedies coming out and surprising me. The basic plot involves the wedding of a socialite (Katharine Hepburn) to a lower class guy (John Howard), and the efforts of the socialite's ex-husband (Cary Grant) to disrupt the wedding, with the help of a writer (James Stewart) and a photographer (Ruth Hussey). Hilarity ensues, of course, but the story and characters go much deeper than that, with some interesting twists and turns in the plot and hidden agendas and prejudices on the parts of the characters. This movie has probably the deepest characters of any light comedy I have ever seen, haha. Love the acting, too -- Grant shows why he is the smoothest bastard ever, Stewart won the Oscar for Best Actor for his work here and Hepburn and Hussey are both great at being sarcastic in different ways.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971): Very anti-typical western here from Robert Altman. The first hour or so I was not really getting into it, but the second hour, where McCabe (Warren Beatty) is trying to defend his property and then getting into to trouble and then desperately trying to sell it, is interesting, mostly due to McCabe being different than the typical western hero. For one, he is a big doofus. No. 2, he is scared shitless to be in a gunfight. Third, his plan of attack is based more on luck than skill. Other than that sort of thing, I also enjoyed the setting -- the movie takes place in the colds of Washington and was filmed in Vancouver (hello, SomeGuy!). It is an interesting departure from the dry deserts of most westerns and provides a huge impact for the movie's ending.
Adam's Rib (1949): I didn't like this as much as I thought I would. I think it's because the characters played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy aren't very likable to me at all. Don't really know what it is, exactly -- maybe their stubbornness, maybe the way they defend their points of view, or whatever, but I could not bring myself to support the characters as intended. Maybe it's just me, though. The movie is well made and quite funny at times. It's just the characters turned me off so much, haha.
Throne of Blood (1957): Hooooooooooooly crap, I love Akira Kurosawa more than ever after seeing this. Throne of Blood is Kurosawa's reworking of Macbeth, with Toshiro Mifune as a man whose paranoia and hidden lust for power brings about his fall, and Isuzu Yamada as the wife who spurs him on in his quest for power. One thing that really strikes me about this movie is how well it uses silence to heighten the mood. There are some scenes that are just draped in silence, and the only communication comes from the movement of the actors, but it perfectly conveys what they are trying to say. From what I am reading, that is part of the influence of Noh drama on the movie, although I cannot comment much on that, not knowing much about Noh, myself. And once again, Mifune surprises me with how different he can make characters with outwardly similar appearances -- in this case, his character here is somewhat similar to the character he plays in The Hidden Fortress, although that character had an unbending sense of honor, where in Throne of Blood, Mifune's honor bends and breaks in his hunt for power.
Ran (1985): This is Kurosawa's other major reworking of a Shakespeare tale -- Ran is partially based on King Lear. It is pretty interesting to read about the similarities between movie and play, and where Kurosawa's approach differs from Shakespeare. Ran is much more about the cruelty of the world and the nature of people destroying the old king's plans than it is about the king's descent into guilt and senility. The focus is partially on the king, but it is also on the wars that result from the decisions he makes at the beginning of the movie (which, ironically enough, were intended to bring about peace). This is the first Kurosawa movie I have seen in color. It is kind of weird at first, but Kurosawa sure as hell knows what he is doing with color, and it definitely adds a bit to the ferocity of the war scenes. Absolutely nobody could film a war scene like Akira Kurosawa. Nobody.
On the queue for this week: 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Peeping Tom (1960), Children of Men (2006), Volver (2006)
Movie Count: 102 (Live Free and Die Hard, Time Bandits, The Hustler, Black Dragon (Miracles), Hollywoodland, Blood Diamond, Animal Crackers, Marie Antoinette, Inside Man, The Fountain, Tombstone, Jurassic Park (Rifftrax), No Country for Old Men, Juno, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Rifftrax), There Will Be Blood, Rize, Born Into Brothels, Eastern Promises, Gone Baby Gone, Hard Candy, The Matrix Reloaded (Rifftrax), Hot Fuzz, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs, Phone Booth, The Dark Knight, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Predator, Ratatouille, Renaissance, Pretty in Pink, Scanners, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Stop Making Sense, The Killing, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rifftrax), Voices of a Distant Star, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Amadeus, Touch of Evil, Paths of Glory, Gangs of New York, Five Easy Pieces, Perfect Blue, Novocaine, A Fish Called Wanda, A Hard Day's Night, Arsenic and Old Lace, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, The Wild Bunch, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bringing Up Baby, Pleasantville, Citizen Kane, They Live, The Terminator, The Adolescence of Utena, The Castle of Cagliostro, The Professional, High Plains Drifter, In the Heat of the Night, Michael Clayton, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Munich, Traffic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bug, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Maltese Falcon, Rashomon, Big Trouble in Little China, Sleeper, Badlands, Johnny Guitar, Mildred Pierce, Shadow of a Doubt, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Hard Boiled, Targets, Away from Her, Hud, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, He Was a Quiet Man, Gilda, Borat, Ikiru, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Boxer, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, The 39 Steps, The Philadelphia Story, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Adam's Rib, Throne of Blood, Ran)
