So schlock cinema 101 spring quarter just started… not that any of the movies in this ‘class’ are under/overrated but they are usually worth sharing with this kind of crowd.
The Guilt Of Janet Ames with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas as well as a bit part by a young Denver Pyle sans beard. A war widow is out to get back at the men who survived when her husband threw himself on a grenade. She gets hit by a car and is wheelchair ridden so is taken one hypnotic mind trip after another to meet the survivors. Trippy dream sequences for 1947 but a pretty sappy melodramatic ending.
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Most Overrated:
Avatar
Prometheus
The Avengers
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To continue my disappointing experience of this (last?) year’s Oscar nominated films, I didn’t think much of Whiplash or Foxcatcher.
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Not your tempo?
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Last nights schlock was interesting, Creation Of The Humanoids. An interesting non action bit of B cinema considering the premise is robot revolution. Very static camera work and very close to stage play in presentation but reasonably good thoughts about what it means to be human. It reuses a robot suit from Earth vs. The Flying saucers and what looked to be like some props from This Island Earth as well.
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I dunno, man. Everybody I know seems to think everything Miyazaki ever touched is perfect and beautiful. I get a lot of hate for just suggesting that any Ghibli movie has flaws. So, at least within the groups where I circulate, it’s all overrated. I don’t think that they’re all bad, particularly; I just don’t think that Mononoke is a better movie than, say, 2001.
(I think that might be an issue with my cohort, though. People in their 20s were typically getting their first taste of anime with Miyazaki dubs, and it’s an important part of their childhood. But, I don’t think that people who first saw these things as adults necessarily have a warped view of them. I was about 16 when I finally saw some of these things, after years of hype, and so I was kind of outside the target audience.)
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First Miyazaki I saw was Spirited Away, and I was well into my 20s by then.
Have gradually worked my way through them, but other than that one and Mononoke I find them charming but don’t really want to revisit them.
2001? I love the technical quality of the filmmaking, it’s fabulous. I just get nothing out of the ending, which probably marks me as a philistine.
Oh, watched Rosewater yesterday. Not quite what I expected. Not a happy subject, so even with Jon Stewart directing I wasn’t expecting it to be funny, but it needed something to provide a bit of a hook. It just…dragged.
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I also consider 2001 to be overrated. I just think it’s overall a much better film than Mononoke.
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Most critics agree that Gay 3 was the apogee of the franchise.
Meanwhile, in Ulaanbaatarawood
Jurassic World Is A Huge Mega-Hit, And That’s Terrible News For Movies
takeaway:
And it has to be said: Tomorrowland and Jupiter Ascending, like Oblivion and several other non-franchise movies before them, were also pretty meh. But it’s still sad that the massive audiences who come out for Jurassic weren’t there for something that at least tried to start something new. (And when you get a non-franchise picture that’s actually excellent, like Edge of Tomorrow, it’s a goddamn tragedy that it doesn’t get any support.) I don’t know why any studio head would greenlight another movie like Edge of Tomorrow any time soon, and more’s the pity.
Edge of Tomorrow
Edge of Tomorrow
Edge of Tomorrow
Edge of Tomorrow
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Well, they should have called it All You Need is Kill, like the book.
And the book’s better than the film, anyway.
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I’d never heard of this until it was mentioned here. Watched it yesterday, I liked it!
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I just realized that I had forgotten MouseHunt as an underrated film. It’s seriously one of the best modern slapstick comedies I’ve ever seen. It’s very well done, and you can tell that there’s a lot of attention to detail for a kid’s movie: Everything from the odd and eerie anachronistic setting to the way it treats sibling relationships. Nathan Lane is phenomenal in this movie as a crass know-it-all. And the CGI is limited to what’s necessary to drive the plot, it’s not noticeable, but impressive for a movie of its time (1997) and therefore bears mentioning.
If you have a moment free and Netflix, it’s worth a watch, even if you don’t have kids. It may even be too dark for some kids.
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One of my favorite movies ever Electric Dreams has just been put up on YouTube in quite a nice quality. I’ve always had the soundtrack, which is amazing - amazing!!! - Giorgio Morodor produced, Jeff Lynne, Culture Club at their best - but I had not seen the movie since I saw it back in the 80’s as a teen.
I rewatched it and thought it even better than I remembered it, and then I watched it with my kiddo, a teen herself, and she was also so in love with it. There’s just such an amazing vision of computers in this that completely ignores any reality of how computers work - a very physical conception of them which of course came out of the fact that really the computers didn’t do much at the time but we imagined a future where they could talk to us and sort through databases of movies and use graphics on the screens.
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That is a really cute movie. I forgot about that one.
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Apocalypse Now, it’s an ok film, but Birth of a Nation is a lot funnier.
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Here is one I caught before it was on DVD and before things were uploaded willy nilly to YouTube
Nightmare Alley a great noir about the rise and fall of a stage psychic and a look at how it is done.
The ending is a bit telegraphed if you are paying attention but still a story that keeps your attention to the end and totally worth watching
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Just recently caught this for the first time. Great movie. I’ve heard good things about the original novel as well.
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My daughter and I have been chuckling over the scene where the computer becomes sentient. It involves champagne spilled on the keyboard + a word processor (q:“where’d you get all the words?” a:“word processor”) + upload of “the big office computer”…through the phone coupler modem of course.
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