mrm1138

Kiki's Delivery Service was probably the second Miyazaki film I ever saw not too long after catching Princess Mononoke during its initial US theatrical release. Mononoke is still my favorite movie of his. My favorite thing he's ever done, however, is his manga Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The film adaptation was done well before Miyazaki had finished the comic, so the movie's story comes to an abrupt end. I'd really love to see Ghibli adapt it as a long-form story, the way it's meant to be told. It ran me through the entire gamut of emotions in a way few stories have. Anyway, I found Kiki to be incredibly charming, and I actually thought its gentleness was refreshing, a feature rather than a bug.

Rio Bravo comes to mind. It was conceived by Howard Hawks and John Wayne as a reaction to High Noon. Both of them were frustrated by the fact that Gary Cooper's character kept asking everyone in town for help instead of (presumably) manning up and taking care of it himself. Of course, Wayne's character in Rio Bravo is hardly alone, as he has two deputies (played by Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin) helping him from scene one.

Yep, I absolutely agree about this. Admittedly, I'm a white dude who was raised in the suburbs, so I guess my opinion doesn't count for as much as Devin's. Also, I'm abstaining from voting this week because I haven't seen Boyz N the Hood in over a decade. I do remember thinking it was quite good when I saw it.

And somehow this movie lost Best Picture to Crash. Hell, any of the other nominees that year were preferable to Crash.

If The Adventures of Robin Hood gets in with anything less than a unanimous (or near-unanimous) vote—or, worse yet, doesn't get in at all—I will be very disappointed with The Canon's audience. This is absolutely one of my all-time favorite films, and even though I saw it when I was still a kid, I was in high school, just the right age to be stupidly cynical and dismissive of something this old-fashioned and fun. (Admittedly, this is when I was getting into a phase of trying to catch up on historically important movies—especially anything people suggested had been an influence on Star Wars—because I was still young and hopeful enough to believe I would one day become a film director.) I just can't say enough what a thoroughly wonderful viewing experience it is. There is nothing about The Adventures of Robin Hood that doesn't work. Aside from that, the story of a nobleman who shuns other nobles—and, to an extent, his own nobility—in the interest of doing what is right for the common people is something that's always spoken to my bleeding liberal heart. I can only imagine how this resonated with a country just beginning to emerge from its long, hard climb out of the Great Depression.