Cast: David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler
Director: Volker Schlondorff
This was one bizarre film and I don't know how I can blog about this. It's been a long time and I may be rusty. Let's see. This German film is about a boy named Oskar who was born with a mentally of an adult and on his third birthday he was given this red and white tin drum in which it became his life. With his mentally, the adult world involving his mother, her two love affairs (one of them is a cousin) and Germany between World War I and II, he decided to stop growing and purposely threw himself down the stairs. He would stay as a three year old forever and would not grow an inch more. He also learned an ability to produce this annoying shrieking sound that would shatter glass around him and he does this when he's upset and that happened quite a lot in this emotional film. He also bangs on his tin drum no matter where he's at, in a classroom, a circus, disrupting a Nazi rally, a funeral. Eventually Oskar became an adult but still in this tiny body, his life was going in directions and he found new loves, deaths and World War II had just started. There's so many bizarre scenes and scenes that makes you go "Umm." and I can tell you there was two scenes that made me cringe and they both has eels involved. It's a long movie and I started watching it late one night and couldn't stay up any longer but I would have seen this in one sitting in the middle of the day or something. You rarely see a kid give a great performance and whoever played Oskar was very impressive. I don't see very many German films and there's some German directors I follow but this was my first film with Volker Schlondorff and I'm curious about his other films.
Score: 7/10
Cast: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau
Directed by: Elia Kazan
Lonesome Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) was just a country boy in A Face in the Crowd. He was a drifter with a guitar found in some little jail in the middle of nowhere in the state of Arkansas by a local radio personality, Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). Lonesome Rhodes' charm and voice hit the heart of the listeners and he gained fame within the town, then the state and it reached out to Memphis where he was introduced to Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) and his television program. He can be his old country boy self in front of the camera but he also has a script to run by. One day he insulted a mattress company and the company forced to cancel the show but Lonesome Rhodes was becoming too powerful to do that with his followers behind him. A guy within the mattress company signed a contract with Lonesome Rhodes and the two went to New York City where he became a television spokeman for a dietary supplement and did advertisements for them. The ratings boosted for that company and the power grew for Rhodes and he was hungry for more but offscreen he was a rude and an abusive man and can use his listeners and followers to do anything. Marcia Jeffries realized what she had created out of just a drunkard back in a small town and a flick of the switch to hear what he has to say about his followers off-air to broadcast will take all of his power away in just minutes.
Everybody knows Andy Griffith as as good 'ol Sheriff Andy Taylor or Benjamin Matlock from Matlock but those are television shows. If I were to ask you to name a movie, you wouldn't come up with this. I wouldn't either but it would be my first answer because what a memorable role he had in A Face in the Crowd and that was his very first movie role too! He's still living today. Do me a favor and check out A Face in the Crowd once in your lifetime, you won't be disappointed.
8.5/10
Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford, Frederic Forest, Cindy Williams, Teri Garr
Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
The next movie that I felt like it should be good movie after seeing who's in it and who's behind it is The Conversation. I've only see a handful of films with Gene Hackman and I've yet to be disappointed with him and as for John Cazale, in his short career, is my last movie with him. Before Star Wars, Harrison Ford was in this and American Graffiti (also directed by George Lucas of Star Wars) which I'm hoping to see sometime soon. I'll always remember Teri Garr for her role as Inga from Young Frankenstein. In between The Godfather movies, Francis Ford Coppola had time to film The Conversation as he already had finished Part 1 of The Godfather in 1972 and wrapping up Part 2 in 1974.
The Conversation follows a man in his 40's named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who is a quiet man with great ears and his occupation is surveillance expert but he works privately and does his own invention. He was hired by the director (Robert Duvall) to follow two people and record the conversation (ah!) between the two and one of them is the wife of the Director. Caul was to piece together the recorded conversation and turn it over to the Director personally. Earlier in his life, his job cost the lives of two people and since he's a religious man, he feared that the one he's on now will add more so he went to the church to confess his sins. He was also disturbed by this and he doesn't know what the Director is going to do once he listen in on the tape so he went out and does some more surveillance.
The Conversation is a cerebral type of film, the one where you have to sit and watch closely. I tried to focus on it but.. the ending just went out of place for me. This will require another maybe two more playings but the suspense was definitely there. I liked the ending as well... that's paranoia for you.
Score: 8/10
Cast: Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner, Lasse Valdal
Directed by: Tommy Wirkola
It has been a while since I've seen a horror movie. I think the last time was almost 2 months ago and that was Trick 'r Treat which was a fun but not so scary film. As for my taste in horror, I'll watch anything from spiritual to creature features to bloodsplatter. The only genre in horror I don't care for is B-movies but that depends on the plot.
The plot in Dead Snow is like in any zombie flick out there, go to an isolated place and camp out for the night and everything in the movie happens in one night. Only in Dead Snow, the zombies were German Nazis and judging from the cover I thought we got a zombie Adolf Hitler but it wasn't him but a colonel with a bruise upper lip. Back during WWII, they had a Einsatzgruppen (German death squads) stationed out in friggin Norway and tortured the locals. Soon after Germany's defeat in the war, the locals retaliated and killing most of them while those that survived including the leader Herzog were chased into the Norweigian mountains and there were assumed froze to death.
Today, we see a group of medical students taking a trip out to an isolated cabin and everything happens in one night! It tried to be serious but Dead Snow had some comical moments and one scene paid homage to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead when one guy cut off his bitten arm to save himself from it spreading and becoming one of the undeads. I thought he was going to attach that red chainsaw to his arm too but he didn't. The Molotov cocktail scene had me laughing and there were some dumb moments but if you've seen enough horror movies, you're to the point where you say "I saw this coming. Shouldn't have done that!" One of the students in this trip is a fat guy and he's the movie nerd, right? He's seen enough zombie movies too and he said "Do not get bitten! Do not get bitten!" and you felt he's going to outlast his friends but no, he decided to stay close to the windows and au revoir. The old hiker was another stupid part because he crashed the party in the middle of the night and warned them of evil in the region and he left and set up a tent some way up in the wood and didn't take his own advice very well. How did he live this long anyway if he's this stupid? But then again, Dead Snow isn't the kind of film to be taken seriously.
Dead Snow was an enjoyable zom com but take in mind that the lanuage is in Norweigian but there's an optional English dub and English subtitle.
Score: 7/10
Cast: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela LansburyDirected by: John Frankenheimer
At first I didn't think I would be able to enjoy this film because politics were involved and I'm in my 20's and not really ready to be brainwashed by that yet. It's on a list of movies that I have to complete (imdb's top 250) and I thought well, this is going to be a one-time thing. I played it and after watching it it felt as if Alfred Hitchcock had his hand in it somewhere because it definitely felt like a Sir Alfred film and I guess it's because of Janet Leigh. I knew it wasn't directed by Hitchcock beforehand but a not-so-famous name of John Frankenheimer. I looked up who he is and what other films he had done and there's a few I've heard of. The same year he reeled The Manchurian Candidate, he also did The Birdman of Alcatraz (Burt Lancaster) and All Fall Down (also stars Angela Lansbury).
The Machurian Candidate is a pretty shocking film for 1960's and The Kennedy Assassination happened in 1963, that's pretty eerie. This film revolves around a Korean War veteran and sargeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and he had just returned home to be decorated personally by the President a medal of honor for rescuing his platoon and led them through enemy lines. Captain Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra) was also in Shaw's platoon and he had nightmares about what happened in Manchuria where Shaw and his platoon were. He recalled in his dream seeing his platoon brainwashed (or hypotnized) and Shaw killing two of his men. Marco went to New York to meet up with Shaw to question him and ask him if he has the same dream.
Shaw, however, is still hypotnized but it has to be triggered in order for him to do whatever his handlers want him to do. Shaw's mother is played by Angela Lansbury and I only know her as Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote but her role in The Machurian Candidate is another one I won't soon forget. Mrs. Iselin (Lansbury) is a wife of a senator but she's got the money and the brain. Janet Leigh has a small role but a vital one as Frank Sinatra's love interest. The Manchurian Candidate was a thrill to sit through and I would probably watch it again.
Score: 8/10
The sole reason why I bought The Hurt Locker on Blu-ray was for it's recent award in winning Best Picture at the 82nd Annual Oscar Award among other awards (Best Directing, Best Writing). It looked like a cool movie and not something I'd die sitting through. I'm not one to go after the best of the best as I have quite some obscure films in my collection and I also needed to grow my blu-ray collection. Okay, that's three reasons.
After watching the movie on my 52'' plasma in hi-def, I thought it was intense. The Hurt Locker wasn't that complicated of a movie to understand. To put it short, an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) squad disarm bombs, go into battle for a little bit and then disarm more bombs, that's it. Since I'm a guy and I like action and battle movies, I enjoyed The Hurt Locker despite it was filmed with a shaky camera. What's with the camera and shaking it anyway? I know it's supposed to give the realistic feel to it like Cloverfield for example but it kind of worked for The Hurt Locker because it's really what is happening over in the Middle East right now and what the army and the people had to live through.
Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow on her Best Director award and the first female to do so. I was curious to see what other films she's done and to my shock she cranked out Point Break (1991, Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002, Harrison Ford) which I've yet to see plus various other works that I have never heard of except for maybe Blue Steel (1989, Jamie Lee Curtis). It sucked that Jeremy Renner did not win Best Actor but then again his role in the movie wasn't hard to perform, become a reckless redneck and that's that. The rest of the characters in the movie were likeable to me. So.. I'd watch it again but I don't like it enough to need to memorize every line.
Score: 8.5/10
