Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Movie Log 2006 #68-76
I haven't updated in a month? Jeezy Creezy! I'd better unload before the film festival starts...

Angels with Dirty Faces - Cagney shooting a gun in the movies is always funny to me. In I guess what is supposed to be a recoil action, he instead shakes the gun at his victim as he shoots. It's like his hand motion is what propels the bullets. He does the same in White Heat. Oh, the Dead End Kids (later the East Side Kids, later the Bowery Boys) also appear, and are pretty good.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - I would have liked this a lot more if not for the interminable Burt Bachrach score. I can't believe he won an Oscar for it.

Borat - I've already talked about this.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media - Say what you will about Michael Moore but at least political documentaries have picked up the pace in his wake. This one was nearly three hours, and leaden in its pacing. High points included crazy John Silber calling Chomsky a "phony" in a debate, a sequence set in Media, PA, the site of Rosenberg's infamous Gerbil car accident, and seeing a former co-worker's name in the credits.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades - I'd heard decent things about this series of samurai films. This one got off to a bad start, as three rapes in the first 20 minutes drove Kirsti away. That unpleasantness ended soon enough, but on the whole this installment was not as action-packed as I expected. The one set in winter looked pretty cool, though...

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories from the Kindertransport - A Holocaust documentary? That won an Oscar? Surely you jest! This was better than most, though, and didn't make one want to open a vein after viewing.

Syriana - Hey! Oil is bad! BAD! That's pretty much all this film had to say, but Stephen Gaghan, confusing "complicated" with "complex," tried to mask its shallow message in a deliberately abstruse storyline. Yawn.

Concrete Cowboys and Lady in Cement - Steve's Movie Dictator selections (theme was "Don't Take Your Work Home With You," as he works in the concrete industry). The former was a made-for-TV movie starring Jerry Reed and Tom Selleck, as well as a young Morgan Fairchild. She was never attractive, by the way. The latter was a Frank Sinatra/Raquel Welch movie.

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