Blogger's Note: Be sure to check out parts One and Two, if you missed them. You know you want to.
In our last installment we recapped Tree of Life, The Old Man and the Sea, Gone with the Wind, The Dust Bowl, and Red Tails. What wonders will this edition bestow!
Midnight In Paris (2011 - Woody Allen) - Other than this one, I think I've only seen two other Woody Allen movies from start to finish, the mildly amusing Small Time Crooks, which I don't remember that much about except that I found it mildly amusing. The other is Bananas, which I remember was actually pretty funny (that's about three steps ahead of mildly amusing). I enjoyed Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson stars as a hacky screenwriter looking for inspiration to write a novel while in Paris with his neurotic fiance and her kooky rich parents. On a late night walk he stumbles into an alternate universe where he is in 1920's Paris, rubbing elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Salvador Dali, and a few other notable artists and authors of the era. It's a lighthearted fantastic sort of movie, with good performances from Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and especially Michael Sheen as an uber-pretentious self-proclaimed expert on all things Paris. The famous figures of the past are perfectly funny caricatures, particularly the manly man Ernest Hemmingway. Dos Equis guy has nothing on him. The dialog is clever and it probably helps that Woody is not actually saying the lines he's written.
Three Kings (1999 - David O. Russell) - A pretty underrated movie and one of Clooney's first meaty movie roles--ie not a cheesy action flick, rom-com, or franchise crushing comicbook movie. Clooney plays an Army major during the closing days Desert Storm with doubts about the war. He catches wind of a map a trio of non-coms find in an Iraqi soldier's hindparts that supposedly leads to a cache of Kuwaiti gold stolen by the Iraqis. Seeking to get something out of his days in the desert, Clooney and his booty map (double-meaning!) finding cohorts, ably played by Mark Walberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, take off to find the gold and end up in a series of sticky ceasefire situations involving the Iraqi Republican Guard, anti-Saddam partisans, and an exploding cow. Among other things. Director David O. Russell, who is getting love recently for his Oscar nominated Silver Linings Playbook, co-wrote the script which is both funny and thought provoking, which really all war movies should be. Very solid flick. I hadn't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how much I liked it.
How to Train Your Dragon (2010 - Dave Dubois and Chris Sanders) - I watched about half of Steven Spielberg's War Horse today, which is a similar type of story as How to Train Your Dragon, and I found the latter to be exceedingly more entertaining. Granted they aren't exactly the same kind of movie, slapstick gags and one-liners may have been a little out of place in the WWI horse tale, but they're both "boy and his dog/horse/dragon" stories, where the lead character forms a bond with a creature and some sort of serration or crisis gets between them and the boy vows to never forget/desert the creature. I won't be too hard on War Horse since I haven't seen it all the way through, but just as I wouldn't expect it to play for laughs, I would expecte it to go for the heart strings. From what I've seen thus far Dragon tops Horse even in that respect, on top of being funny and exciting. Rango was my favorite animated film I saw last year, but Dragon wasn't too far behind and had the added advantage of being something I could watch with my four year old daughter.
Rango (2011 - Gore Verbinski) - And speaking of the animated noir with a chamaleon in the lead role, here is my full-blow review of Rango from a few months back. I really liked it.
From Here to Eternity (1953 - Fred Zinnermann) - Probably one of the most famous images from classic movies, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach as the tides washes over them, comes from this movie. Starring Lancaster, Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Montgomery Clift, and Ernest Borgnine, the melodrama based on the racy novel of the same name, tracks the lives of the characters in and around an Army base at Pearl Harbor in the days before December 7th, 1941. Honor, duty, infidelity, intimidation, love, scandal, friendship; it's all there. Good performances all around, particularly Ernest Borgnine as scuzzy Sgt. Fatso Judson. Legend has it Sinatra secured his role with a little help from his Mafia friends, providing the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather. No word on how many horses lost their heads to make it happen.
Stay tuned for Part 4.
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