I really fell behind this month but I am more than on track to hit 365 by year's end. I spent most of this month re-watching films for my Oscar Watch blogs so I only included the films that I have never seen or haven't seen in so long that I lost all memory of them.
256.
I didn't hate this movie but it was very forgettable. It has all the same problems that all the DCU movies have, it's an hour too long and all the action takes place at night. Remember the airport battle scene in Captain America: Civil War and how cool that was? It was because you could see everything. The 3rd act of this movie is so dark that I can't tell what's going on. There were parts I enjoyed though. I liked all the fish out of water comedy and thought Gal Gadot was a charming and charismatic lead and it was way better than Batman v. Superman but this is entirely skippable. 👎
257.
This movie shouldn't work. You're taking a character that was based on a comedian's persona and casting another actor. It would be like if Steve Martin starred in The Jack Benny Show: The Movie. Sgt. Bilko was less of a television character and more of a Phil Silvers character that they built a show around. This movie however has a weird and absurd attitude to it, almost like it knows it is in a no-win situation so they just have some fun. The jokes aren't half bad and it's a quick watch so I would recommend checking it out if you were ever curious about it. It was always on my radar but I never watched it because I thought it would make me sad but I laughed a lot and had a good time. A good Sunday morning movie to turn your brain off to. 👍
258.
It's hard to watch this movie and not think, "Half of this movie is a guy in blackface. This is uncomfortable.". It's a musical biopic of Al Jolson who became famous for minstrel shows and if you're looking for a "warts and all" biopic then this is not the movie for you. We see him as a young kid with singing ability, then he grows up, he's successful, everything he does is loved by millions and nothing really goes wrong for the guy. There's almost no conflict in this movie and for some reason they made a sequel. 👎
259.
This is one of the Oscar winning Best Pictures that I've never seen. I avoided it because I thought I wouldn't like it and I was right for a while. This movie starts very slow, almost deliberately so. A British family has an ideal life, there's a flower competition coming up in the town and a kindly old train master has grown a rose he wants to compete with and he names it the "Mrs. Miniver" after the matriarch of the family. There's an old lady who has won the flower competition for years and is trying to get the flower not to enter, she's also upset that her granddaughter is dating Mrs. Miniver's son and you're watching this movie wondering what the hell is happening. Then World War II breaks out and they are still trying to have this ideal life while sleeping in a bomb shelter at night and daily air raids. The juxtaposition of pre-war life and war life is really fascinating especially since this movie came out in 1942 just months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was actually rushed to theaters to drum up American support for the war effort. It's a really good film, the long set-up was worth a dramatic 2nd and 3rd act. 👍
260.
I had myself a Greer Garson double feature. She won the Oscar for Mrs. Miniver but also starred in this film the same year. Ronald Colman plays a WWI veteran with amnesia. He wanders out of the sanitarium one night and meets Garson, a burlesque dancer. The two fall in love, get married, have a kid and then Colman remembers his old life and forgets his current one. He goes back to his old family while Greer Garson is left basically widowed. She takes a job as his secretary and tries to get him to remember her all the while he's romancing another woman. So we're left with a love triangle where the guy does not remember that he's involved with one of the women. Both Colman and Garson are really good here and this was a very enjoyable find. 👍
261.
I had no knowledge of this movie before randomly going into the theater because I had some time to kill. I saw the poster and thought I like Jenny Slate and I liked Obvious Child, let's check this out. It's about 2 sisters who discover that their father is having an affair and it's a very cute albeit forgettable film. I doubt I will have many memories of it come year's end but I enjoyed watching it. Jenny Slate is incredibly charismatic. It's hard to believe that the girl I watched swear on live TV during her first episode of SNL has grown into one of my favorite actresses. Newcomer Abby Quinn plays her little sister and is a terrific find that I hope goes on to bigger things. There are also nice supporting performances from Edie Falco, John Turturro and Jay Duplass. It was fun to spend 90 minutes with these characters. The gimmick of setting the movie in the 90s doesn't add to much except that nobody has cell phones and they can throw in some references to mix tapes. 👍
262.
Half way through this movie I was thinking maybe it was intentionally bad. I guess that's the optimist within me. "A movie can't be bad. They were probably going for awful". That's undoubtedly not the case though, this is just a terrible film. I know everybody loves Harry Potter and you love Hermione Granger, but that does not make Emma Watson a good actress. I thought she was pretty decent in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower but this, along with Beauty And The Beast this year, are two of the most wooden performances I have ever seen on film. This girl has no screen presence. Speaking of a child actor who hasn't fully blossomed yet, Ellar Coltrane from Boyhood also appears in this film and is terrible. Then let's not forget Tom Hanks, Patton Oswalt, John Boyega and the late great Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly, everyone is pretty awful here, even usually good actors. As for the story, well, that's lame too. Emma Watson gets a job at a Google or Facebook-like company that is so obviously secretly evil that by the time they are revealed as evil, there is absolutely no suspense. Emma Watson volunteers to be a web based EdTV but then discovers that being watched 24 hours a day isn't that great, like when everybody sees her accidentally catch her parents having sex, that's embarrassing. She uses the Big Brother technology to show everyone that Tom Hanks is cheating on his wife and he goes, "Awww nuts". What a dull plot-less piece of crap. 👎
263.
This was a fun movie. Tom Cruise accidentally uncovers a mummy and gets cursed. It turns into a zombie flick where Cruise can see the undead everywhere. He's also visited by the ghost of his best friend who he accidentally killed and there's intense action scenes. It's like They Live mixed with The Walking Dead mixed with An American Werewolf In London with a little touch of Evil Dead. If you like all those things then there is no reason to hate The Mummy. They do show their hand a little early with Russell Crowe playing Dr. Jekyll in a Nick Fury-like cameo that sets up a cinematic universe, but that's a lame 20 minute scene in an otherwise enjoyable film. If they hadn't done that scene I feel that reviewers might have found this movie a little more palatable. I'll throw The Mummy a bone and give it a thumbs up, maybe move that Rotten Tomatoes score up to 17%. 👍
264.
If you have any interest in seeing T2 Trainspotting then you probably have a deep love for the original movie. If you are like me and have not thought about Trainspotting for 20 years then this movie isn't going to do much for you. If you love Danny Boyle's visual style, which I do, then it's an enjoyable watch but just like when I saw the 5th Pirates Of The Caribbean movie this year I was left thinking, "That's right, I don't really care about these characters nor have I given them a 2nd thought since the last time I saw the previous film". 👎
265.
I have a memory of looking through a TV Guide in the early 90s and seeing an ad for the world television premiere of this movie. I remember thinking that this was probably a great movie. Look at that cast, Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick. Come to find that the great Sidney Lumet directed this. This has gotta be great right? Wow was this a waste of time. It came on cable and was billed as a comedy/drama/crime film and it's really none of those. It's not funny, I don't care about any of the characters and the caper that they go on is not the main plot of the movie and is in no way fun to watch. The actors are all quite good even though you can't for one second believe they are related. Connery is speaking in his Scottish brogue while Hoffman is Jewish and Broderick is neither of those things. Seeing Broderick read from the torah near the beginning of the film is one of the most unintentional funny things I have ever seen. 👎
266.
This movie is very theatrical, obviously it's based on a play, but I mean that all the action takes place in one room with a lot of master shots and long takes. It looks more like a filmed play than a movie. But that doesn't really matter because the real star here is the story, the script and the performances. A poor black family is awaiting a $10,000 check from the insurance company and everyone has different ideas on what to do with the money. They eventually buy a new house but the white people in the neighborhood want to give them even more money to buy the house back so they won't live there. It's an incredible story filled with incredible performances. 👍
267.
Stanley Kramer is an interesting director. He seemed to be more interested in telling stories with messages than technical film making. His movies always seem to have lots of master shots and very long takes but the performances are always terrific. He definitely had an eye for mood and was able to pull wonderful performances from his actors. This movie is about nuclear war. It's after World War III and the entire northern hemisphere has become completely uninhabitable so we're following Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire and Ava Gardner in Australia. There's a lot of doom and gloom here, people trying to score suicide pills, people sitting and waiting to die because they have nothing else, that sort of thing. It's a grim warning of what we could do to ourselves and a really engaging film. 👍
268.
When I talked about A Raisin In The Sun I mentioned that it wasn't a very cinematic film, but it didn't bother me because the story and performances were so good. Here, I was falling asleep at how boring the staging was. If you told me that this was a live taping I would believe you. The sets look like sets, the singing seems dubbed and more than half the movie is singing. It's an opera so it's all songs but because people are just mostly standing and singing, the songs either have to be really great or the performances have to be really great, neither applies. Sammy Davis, Jr. is a high point as Sporting Life but everything else is pretty dull. Sidney Poitier walks around the whole time on his knees, with obvious knee pads over his pants, he looks less like a cripple and more like Dorf on Opera. Kudos to the studio who made a movie with an entirely black cast in 1959 but they really could have taken a second to make this seem like an actual movie. 👎
269.
Bryan Cranston plays a guy who falls asleep in the attic above his garage one night and the next morning, instead of going back in the house to his wife and children decides to live in the garage and spy on his family. It doesn't take long before he transforms into full on hobo, almost psychotically spying on his family and friends like Tom And Huck at their funeral. Almost the entire movie is told through Cranston's perception and voice over and how sees interactions through the window in his hermit hole. It's a quiet and fascinating film, the best part about it is the small scale. He doesn't see anything huge happen but in the little instances he witnesses he expounds poetically about their deeper meanings. Cranston is more than capable of handling this one-man show. 👍
270.
So I'm working on my Oscar Watch blogs and one of the reason I am enjoying them so much is because of films like this. I always assumed this was a drama where Rosalind Russell takes care of her infirmed of dying sister. Not the case at all, this is a hilarious screwball comedy starring Russell as a reporter who gets fired after she writes a bogus story about her aspiring actress sister and the two head off to New York City to make a name for each other. Russell is the brains and her sister is the beauty. Her sister is naive in that "just off the bus" kinda way where she doesn't know that every guy just wants to sleep with her. They live in a horrible apartment, above an area where they are building a subway and with a window with no shade that leads directly to the street. It's akin to The Out-Of-Towners where most of the jokes are aimed at small town folk adjusting to the big city but the pace, performances and humor turn this into a classic comedy for me. One that should be remembered more today than it is. 👍
271.
Much like Sgt. Bilko, sometimes you just look at a poster for a movie and automatically hate it. I'm always very pleased when I turn out to be wrong. I really enjoyed the Kelsey Grammer naval comedy. This has a very care-free 1980s feel to it. Grammer plays a sub commander given one last chance to prove his merit by running some war games for a navy exercise. He is given a rust bucket for a submarine and a crew of the motliest ragtag seamen you've ever seen. There's the loose cannon, the degenerate gambler, the spazz, the old drunk, the fat guy and the w-w-w-woman? It turns into Police Academy underwater and I'm just a sucker for these type of slobs vs. snobs comedy. When you get a bunch of underdogs together and they use the things that alienate them to overcome obstacles it gets me every time. 👍
272.
This movie fell apart real fast. I will give credit where credit is due, there were some gags in this movie that made me laugh really loud, the scene shown above being one of them. It starts off as a Police Academy clone where you get introduced to all the crazy characters, there's the goofball, the sexy girl, the old lady, the hypochondriac, the nut-ball, the puppeteer, but then there's just no plot. They all go to traffic school where a very angry cop wants to fail them all because...he's a bad guy? John Murray stars as the Guttenbergian lead and is charming enough to hold together the film but his character lacks any motivations other than to crack wise at every turn. 👎
273.
This is a biographical story of a down on his luck boxer who gets his shot at the heavyweight championship. He doesn't care so much about winning as he does going the distance with the champ. If the plot sounds familiar, then you've seen Rocky. This is a biopic of the guy that Rocky Balboa was loosely based on. You may be asking, what's the point, we already have Rocky? If you're thinking that then this movie isn't for you. Rocky is definitely better and what this movie does well is that it doesn't end the story with the climactic fight, so it's kind of like Rocky I and II with a little bit of Rocky III mixed together plus a touch of Boogie Nights. If you like an underdog sports movie, then Chuck is another good entry in the genre and Liev Schreiber gives a charismatic lead performance. 👍
274.
I was starting to enjoy this biopic about the couple that discovered radium and then I realized I was enjoying it ironically. This movie runs through all the biopic tropes and all the romantic comedy tropes. Pierre Curie gives a big monologue about how women can never be scientists and how they should never step foot in a lab and then sees Greer Garson and goes, "Ooooh, she pretty." It's a really dull movie that just gets laughably bad as it goes along. 👎
275.
George Burns plays an ex-Vaudevillian who finds a naked Brooke Shields in his trunk. She's on the run from a drug dealer and he lets her hide out in his house. Then she goes around with him on old man errands. It's hard to explain just how joyless this movie is. Burns doesn't seem to care at all about his performance, tossing off one-liners like he's throwing them in the waste basket. Brooke Shields is almost trying to deliver her lines in the most monotone way she can. 👎
276.
Ronald Colman won an Oscar for one of the hammiest performances I've ever seen. It works because he is playing a hammy actor but still I found his over the top character distracting from the narrative. Colman is one of the greatest Broadway actors around but he has a slight problem, he gets too into character. He brings his work home with him and it effects his life. He just mounted a production of Othello where he plays the jealous moor and he is costarring with his ex-wife. Around the 300th performance the character enters his brain and he almost chokes his leading lady and then goes to Shelley Winters to choke her. It's an interesting movie that just probably hasn't aged well. 👎
277.
There are moments of absurd brilliance in this otherwise lifeless comedy but nowhere near enough to ever recommend watching. Lisa Kudrow plays a white lady who helps out her dad when his record label gets in trouble for releasing a CD by an offensive rapper, played by Damon Wayans in a bizarre performance where I'm not sure if he's trying to act tough or cover up his homosexuality. This movie makes no sense and hurt my brain, you can hear more of my thoughts on the Saturday Night Jive podcast, available on iTunes. 👎
278.
I like my Bette Davis movies either really good, All About Eve, or really campy, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, this movie lands somewhere in the middle. It's not that great but there is a fantastic moment where Bette Davis drives around town drunk talking to her Oscar mounted on her dashboard. The rest of the movie is fairly dull. 👎
279.
This was a late in the year Miramax release when it opened so I skipped it thinking that it was going to be an awards grab and nothing more. I choked up like nobody's business while watching this film. Judi Dench plays a writer dealing with Alzheimer's disease and we get flashbacks to her courtship with her now husband. Jim Broadbent is the secret weapon to this film working. He plays her husband, we see him in flashbacks played by the equally terrific Hugh Bonneville. He is a meek man, he was a virgin when he met Iris, and he gravitated towards her free spirit. Now in their twilight years he is forced to take care of her. It's a wonderfully sweet performance that deserved Broadbent's Oscar win. 👍
280.
You know what The Diary Of Anne Frank was missing? Bears. 👎
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