Sunday, April 6, 2008

Slowly but surely...

Still working on viewing the movies on the list, just today I watched two VERY hard to find films, I'm still working on getting better about the blog (although I'm 99.99% sure that I'm the only person who reads this blog, but I don't mind). So here we go.

  1. I don't really remember the next two films L'Age D'Or and Earth. I do know that I got them both through netflix...but seriously nothing is coming to mind for these films, hmmmm...
  2. Little Caesar was on TCM. I kind of wish that this was the first film I watched with Edward G. Robinson. I happened to have watched Double Indemnity a while before viewing this film and it kind of ruined the bad-assness of Edward G. for me. In Double Indemnity he was the only person with any morals, and then to see him kick ass and take names in Little Caesar was a tad jarring. But still, a very good movie and furthered the thinking that Mr. Robinson is a phenomenal actor.
  3. All Quiet on The Western Front was on TCM many moons ago...war movies are always tough for me to go on and on about, well war movies and movies with grim or depressing subject matters. Cause on the one hand you want to say it's a stellar film and that you loved it, but on the other hand how can you really LOVE watching people suffer and struggle? On a cinematic level I found this film to be very moving and well done, personally it's hard for me to be thrilled over a film about destruction and suffering.
  4. Let me take this moment to say that I've discovered that I'm now a huge fan of French Films. I won't go ahead and say I love them all, cause I don't, but for the most part I find them to be entertaining and whimsical, there's just a certain, oh i don't know what, that these French films have. The next two movies on the list, A Nous la Liberte and Le Million are on the list of French films that I love and now want to own. I was intrigued by A Nous la Liberte after Robert Osbourne (from TCM) told the viewing public that this film influenced Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, I thought that anything that could inspired Charlie Chaplin would have to be good, and it definitely delivered. Le Million is one of those films with whimsy that I mentioned earlier. The story is so cute and fun (two down on their luck friends discover that their missing lottery ticket is a winner and hilarity ensues), just all and all very enjoyable. Two enthusiastic thumbs up for these two.
  5. Tabu is another film I don't entirely remember, I'm perusing the IMDB page now, and I vaguely remember the story, but I definitely don't remember what I thought about it as a film....sorry I guess sometimes I suck at this. :)
  6. The next two films were two that I was hesitant to watch. I guess you can call me a wuss or a baby, but I really don't enjoy scary movies all that much. They do too good of a job of scaring me. You'd think at the age of 25 I'd be able to face scary movies, yeah not so much. But I convinced myself that two scary movies from 1931 couldn't be that bad. I mean maybe their definition of scary was different than it is today, and it didn't hurt that I was able to watch one of them at home with my parents. :) Dracula was kind of exactly how I had imagined it after seeing the parody Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Francis Ford Coppola's remake of it. So I guess I had an unfair advantage, but the film was still great and impressive and definitely not as scary as I had feared it would be. Bela Lugosi was fabulous as Dracula, he had the perfect mixture of charm and creepiness, you knew he was up to no good, but you couldn't have cared less. I had the privilege of watching Frankenstein back home in NY with my parents, which was meaningful cause it turned out that when my father was younger he watched Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein whenever it was on TV with his dad. We actually watched Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein AND Young Frankenstein that weekend that I was home, you could say it was a FrankenFest and I would. The FrankenFest was HIGHLY enjoyable. The original Frankenstein had so much more of a story to it than I had originally thought there was and Boris Karloff was as impressive as all the hype made him out to be. I think Bride of Frankenstein was a more flushed out movie and where the franchise really found it's stride, but you gotta appreciate the original. And more on Young Frankenstein once we enter the 70's. :)
  7. City Lights is definitely one of my favorite films from this list, actually probably one of my favorite movies of all time (hey, maybe I should make a list of favorites...perhaps that'll be another entry), anywho yeah I loved City Lights, the boxing scene is one of the funniest things I've seen, and when Charlie's undershirt gets unraveled, oh so great. And the love story is just beyond cute. Definitely one of Chaplin's best.
Alright I think that's enough for now....the end for today.