sycasey 2.0

In general I'm against the idea of a movie being "overrated" (who am I to tell people what they should enjoy?), but sure there have been plenty of movies that took home Best Picture that I don't think are great. I'll add The Artist. It's cute and all, and I liked Jean Dujardin in the lead role, but it felt to me like a tribute to silent movies made by people who haven't actually watched a lot of silent movies.

And Donald Sutherland has an honorary Oscar.

I love Boyhood. Richard Linklater is the modern master of plotless character pieces that are still subtly compelling. It's worth noting, though, that though the movie did get a bunch of nominations, it didn't actually win any Oscars.

Yeah, same. It doesn't seem like something super ripe for HDTGM treatment, other than the super-dated virtual reality stuff. But it's also been more than 20 years since I saw it, so we'll see.

I mean, I can acknowledge that the story and characters of North by Northwest don't have a ton of depth, but . . . every time I watch it I find it zips right along, even knowing what's going to happen. That's hard to quantify, but I think you've just got to put it down to Hitchcock's skill as a director. He has four movies on the list and every one deserves to be there for one reason or another. He created several of the foundational texts of cinema. My only real gripe with the movie is that the cut near the very end, from Cary Grant holding Eva Marie Saint's hand on top of Mount Rushmore to them in the train car at the end always feels kind of awkward to me, like it's too much of a cheat that they never showed us how the two of them got out of that pickle (when every one of Grant's other escapes is super clever and entertaining). The visual joke of the train entering the tunnel (time for sex!) that actually ends the film helps make up for it though. Sure, let's put the Coens on the list. But not at Hitch's expense. Forrest Gump or The Sixth Sense can go instead.

Having never read or viewed any previous version if It, I can't speak to what is a more faithful adaptation and what is not. I can only say that to me the first of these movies was clearly a better story, better executed, with moments of horror much scarier than those in the sequel (the opening scene alone outstrips anything in Two for existential dread IMO). I also find that sometimes if I have read the source material before seeing a movie I find it hard to let go of my original vision of how something "should" look, which often is not entirely fair to the movie. I don't know if that's going on here, but it's something to consider. Or maybe it's just different taste.

See, I thought this was doing a great job of capturing how boys at that age really interact with each other. Yes, they can be pretty annoying. I thought that was the point.

I think that's not the kind of restraint I'm talking about.

On this: I guess it is slightly different because it's a middle/high school crush rather than a first-grade crush. It's plausible someone might hold onto the former into adulthood, not so much the latter. Carrying it around in your wallet is still kinda weird though.

Compared to this one, I definitely would. I only saw the first movie once, but I don't remember any big CGI spectacle stuff until the very end (which I think is fine as it represents a raising of the stakes). In this movie the early tone is set with the Chinese restaurant scene and not for the better. And yeah, much more chemistry with the kids in the first movie that is not replicated with the adults. The plot structure doesn't help.

I thought this was a big comedown from the first film. Never read the book, so I don't know what was different, but the first one felt like it had a real sense of story momentum to me, and also a sense of restraint. This one is just throwing big fakey CGI monsters at the characters and is way more disjointed as a narrative.

Perhaps an omission: When Paul read the taglines for the movie, they commented on how "For Better" and "For Worse" as separate taglines was dumb. But I suspected these were for two separate posters, each featuring a different actress. And indeed it was:

In the episode they talk about why the movie was named Unforgettable, but then talk about how most of the other good titles were taken. But Unforgettable is ALSO taken! This does look like prime HDTGM material.

It needed a moment like when J-Lo stabs the guy in the eye in The Boy Next Door.

IMO A Hard Day's Night is a legitimately great and important film . . . but it's also totally British and probably doesn't belong on the AFI list.

On the question of this being an apologia for Kazan's actions during the blacklist era: certainly the ending seems that way, but when considering the movie as a whole, you also have to take into account how it begins, where Terry gets a friend killed as a result of ratting him out. Given that, I can see more nuance in the movie: it all depends on who you are ratting out to, and in Kazan's time, it might have been hard to tell who were the good guys and who weren't. For me this helps with any discomfort I might feel about the film's relationship to HUAC; it is thoughtful about the issue, not just a polemic.

Here's hoping they cover Ringo Starr in Caveman!

Amy's reach candidates for an On the Waterfront reference. I couldn't come up with a direct one either.

Maybe, but a more generous reading would be to say that the movie is saying that humans in general are tribal like that, and that very few are able to see outside of that to a more altruistic view (as the Omar Sharif character does). It comes from the perspective of the British, of course (being a British movie about a British soldier), but I do think the filmmakers seem pretty aware and critical of the "white savior" problem inherent in the story (especially for a movie from 1962!).

I think it really was just "people voting," not that the institute made any ruling to declare it ineligible, but I believe the oft-stated reason for The Third Man being left off the second list was that it wasn't really American. I'd argue that by the same standard, Lawrence of Arabia isn't either, probably even less so (The Third Man has an American lead character and antagonist, at least). You could get into whole discussions about this "country of origin" stuff too. Like Lord of the Rings, what is that? The source material is certainly very British, along with a lot of the supporting cast. The production itself was New Zealand-based, as were the director, screenwriters, and most of the production staff. The studio financing was all American, as was much of the principal cast (Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Liv Tyler). You'd have a decent claim for all three countries.

Oh yeah, here:

I voted no solely because I agree with the argument that this is really a British movie, and if The Third Man could be knocked off then this one could too (if anything, that film is more "culturally" American since two of its lead actors are American). As a film unto itself it's clearly worthy of standing among the Top 100.