I Must Make Amends

The following is the list of movies on my hard-drive that I have not paid for. Over the course of the next few years I will be trying to purchase a legal copy of all of these films and then delete them from my computer. I hope that this will make up for everything and I will also have a pretty sweet start to a DVD collection. I haven’t seen some of these movies yet and some of them are not movies that are very good but I stole them so I must make up for it and buy them.

*Film labeled with Rifftrax denotes that I will also buy the Rifftrax for it and listen for some laughs.

12 Angry Men

28 Days Later

2001 A Space Odyssey

2019 AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK

300 (Rifftrax)

The 40 Year Old Virgin

A Beautiful Mind

A Clockwork Oragne

Adaptatioin

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

A History of Violence

American Gangster

American Psycho

Animal House

Batman

Batman Begins

Battlefield Earth (For Rifftrax)

Beyond The Valley of The Dolls

Black Hawk Down

Blazing saddles

Blowup

The Bourne Identity

The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Ultimatum

Bullitt

Cape Fear

Cashback

Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke

Children Of Men

City of God

Crash (not the one from 2004 the good one)

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Daft Punk’s Electroma

Daredevil (For Rifftrax)

The Darjeeling Limited

Death Proof

Death-Race 2000

The Departed

Dirty Harry

Dogma

Eyes Wide Shut

Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Flash Gordon

The Fly (1986)

The Forbidden Zone

Gangs of New York

Garden State

The Godfather

Good Will Hunting

The Graduate

The Great Dictator

Harry Potter 1-5

High Anxiety

History of the World – Part 1

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Hot Fuzz

In Bruges

Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade

Invasion USA

Jackass 2

Juno

Jurassic Park

Lawrence of Arabia

Let the Right One In

Little Miss Sunshine

Magnolia

Mallrats

Man on Wire

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

No Country For Old Men

Now You Know

O Brother, Where Art Thou

Old School

Once

The Passenger

The Phantom of the Paradise

Planet Terror

The Prestige

The Princess Bride

The Producers (old)

Rear Window

Rushmore

Saving Private Ryan

Shaun of The Dead

Shawshank Redemption

Silent Movie

Slacker

SLC Punk

Snatch

Spaceballs

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

Sunshine

Superbad

Taxi Driver

Teeth

There Will Be Blood

Three Amigos

Trainspotting

Transformers (Rifftrax)

Tropic Thunder

The Twelve Chairs

Twelve Monkeys

V For Vendetta

Videodrome

Wild Strawberries

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

The Wrestler

Young Frankenstein

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Zabriskie Point

Zapped

Zodiac (I guess)

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Pierrot Le Fou

I mentioned that I would review movies that were old well I thought that I would review one of my favorite movies of all time. The film is by the visionary director Jean-Luc Godard. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Godard was starter of the French New Wave movement along with filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. French New Wave cinema is defined by its iconoclastic themes and innovative use of editing and photography. The New Wave movement borrows heavily from the Italian Neorealist movement. New Wave directors really wanted to break away from classical cinema.

In 1965 Godard released the vibrant and colorful Pierrot Le Fou. Le Fou tells the story of a Parisian man, Ferdinand, who is sick of his upper-class life and runs away with this baby-sitter/former lover, Marianne Renoir. Ferdinand and Marianne go on the lamb and committing crimes and living in their love for one another.

There are so many things in this movie that I love. The thing that struck me at first was the use of bright primary colors and white. It gives the film a very bright and sharp look. The visual style is very appealing. Godard uses a lot of images from French pop culture of the time and other such cinematic images. He also show a lot of what the characters are writing. As all of this is going on the characters are expressing their love for one another in voice overs. The innovative film making is reason enough to watch this film. There are even three musical numbers that I enjoyed as well. This is by no means a musical however.

It is hard for me to express the reasons why I love this film without giving away the ending but I will say that I empathize with Ferdinand in the end of the film. I know what he went through or at least something similar and well. I feel for the guy.

Trust me this film is well worth your time. It is my second favorite film of all time. If that isn’t reason enough to watch it then I guess I haven’t built up enough of a reputation. Either way there aren’t very many good films out right now so why not head over to your netflix account and throw that down in your cue.

Grade: A+

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Acting

I can’t really act, but I sure can tell when I am watching good acting verses bad. I feel that the best actors are stage actors. (I am referring to dramas not Broadway stage actors.) I feel that acting is suffering at the moment. I don’t really see any knockout performances anymore. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and George Clooney in Michael Clayton are the exceptions. It may just be that I am watching older films that are the best films of their respective years, but I feel that acting is not as good as it used to be.

I recently saw Network for the first time and I was in awe of how well acting that film was. There wasn’t anyone that I felt dragged in acting talent. Another film that must be mentioned is Twelve Angry Men. The acting in that film was some of the best acting I have ever seen. I again can not find any faults in the armor of the acting in these films. Even the two actors I mentioned before don’t have the same acting style that used to be present in these older films. It is as if actors aren’t trying to reach the style of acting in 12 Angry Men or any other such Henry Fonda picture. The actors just seemed more confidant and passionate back then.

Actors are using method acting more often which will give you a different result in acting style. No one will discount the greatness of Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight. He dominated the screen when we was on it, and left most viewers waiting until he returned when he wasn’t. Yet his performance to me isn’t as good as Fonda’s in TAM. Fonda made me believe he was real, that he was human with real emotions and doubts like the rest of us. He portrayed the sort of man that I would like to be. A man that doesn’t stand down in his convictions. It may be due to the script that I find the character so intriguing but had Fonda not played the character it would not have had the same effect. Acting back then was harder and rawer. It was just damn fine acting.

Now the acting is one thing but does the acting overshadow some of the other aspects of the film and therefore corrupt the film as a whole? It must be looked at in a film by film basis. As I mentioned before Daniel Day-Lewis performed like an acting virtuoso in There Will Be Blood, but is that what made the picture good? I don’t think so. There were so many other great cinematic elements to that film that made it what was.

On the other hand while thinking about the film Doubt, I believe that the best and biggest factor drawing me towards that film is the acting. Meryl Streep put forth one of the best performances in a long time, as does Philip Seymour Hoffman. While the themes and cinematic put forth in the film were good, nothing could out shine the acting. That fact could actually blur what the filmmaker was trying to get across with this film. People could be so distracted by the wonderful acting that they don’t pay attention to what the characters are actually saying, just how they are saying it. This is not to say that the film was over acted or even that the film was bad. It was riding that thin line between overacting and knock out drop dead awesome acting.

Acting is a tricky thing and it gets even harder when you start to think that you could act too well. I don’t think acting is a dead art and that we will stuck with a crop of pretty boy bad actors. There are still masters of the art around. I just wish we could go back to the glory days of actors like Henry Fonda and Sydney Pollack. Yet, it is always good for an art form to evolve to keep it from getting stale and over done. Art is a mysterious and interesting thing. I am looking forward to what a new generation of actors will bring us in the coming future.

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