Entries in the "Movies" Category

December 30, 2009
Note: This is #51 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. I was kind of familiar with the television series of the same name that spun off from this movie, so MASH wasn't completely new ground. Like the TV show, the movie features an ensemble...

December 24, 2009
Note: This is #50 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Easy Rider stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as Wyatt and Bill, who while flush with cash from a drug deal strike out for New Orleans in search of freedom on the open road....

December 16, 2009
Note: This is #49 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. The Wild Bunch is interesting because we essentially follow a group of villains with one hero (or, arguably, just another kind of villain) just hanging around on the periphery. The bunch in question is...

December 9, 2009
Note: This is #48 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is kind of weird, as if it can't figure out what kind of movie it wants to be. Cassidy (Paul Newman) and Kid (Robert Redford) are the leaders...

December 2, 2009
Note: This is #47 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Good God, that was depressing. More so because for some reason I had gotten this movie mixed up in my head with Rhinestone Cowboy, a 1984 movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton. They...

November 18, 2009
Note: This is #46 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Here's a pretty accurate plot summary of Bonnie and Clyde: Bonnie and Clyde fall in love, try to escape the Great Depression, commit violence, get famous, die in a hail of gunfire, leave beautiful...

November 12, 2009
Note: This is #45 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Man, I'm really of multiple minds on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? On the one hand, it can basically be summarized as "Two crazy, spiteful people are horribly mean to each other for 131...

November 7, 2009
Note: This is #44 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, THAT was certainly wholesome. Where to start? Well, Julie Andrews plays Maria, a young woman with a terrible haircut and aspirations to become a nun. But Maria is really bad at being a...

October 28, 2009
Note: This is #43 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. To Kill a Mockingbird is based directly on Harper Lee's novel of the same name, so if you've read that book (you have, haven't you?) you should know the plot minus a few minor...

October 21, 2009
Note: This is #42 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well. That was also epic. Actually, for film with such a large feel and a 227 minute running time, Lawrence of Arabia is fairly easy to summarize. It follows the life of British Army...

October 14, 2009
Note: This is #41 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. A while back I decided to better myself by not using epithets like "super gay" to describe things. I mention this only because it makes describing my first impression of West Side Story kind...

October 7, 2009
Note: This is #40in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Man, watching Ben-Hur and Spartacus in rapid succession is kind of grueling. The two movies require 410 minutes between them to see, and they both deal with ancient Rome and some beefy, lantern-jawed dude who...

September 30, 2009
Note: This is #39 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. The Apartment is one of the few movies where I'm not quite sure why it's on this list. I feel like I'm missing something. It features Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter, a sad sack...

September 23, 2009
Note: This is #38 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. For those of you who don't yet know, the plot of Psycho starts with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary who steals $40,000 from her employer so that she can elope with her boyfriend....

September 16, 2009
Note: This is #37 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, that was epic. To boil it down, Ben-Hur tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur (Charton Heston), a contemporary of Jesus Christ who enjoyed the luxuries of the Roman Empire until he chooses to...

September 10, 2009
Note: This is #36 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. The third the four Alfred Hitchcock movies on the list, I think I like North by Northwest the best (at the time of this writing I've already watched Psycho as well as Vertigo and...

September 2, 2009
Note: This is #35 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. More Alfred Hitchcock. This time, in Vertigo, detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stuart) develops a fear of heights after a close call involving a fleeing criminal, a tricky jump, and a lot of gravity. After...

August 26, 2009
Note: This is #34 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Of all the wartime movies I've seen so far in this experiment, I think The Bridge On the River Kwai comes in pretty high on the list, if not at the top. It's got...

August 19, 2009
Note: This is #33 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, hello John Wayne. Nice to see you here in your cowboy hat. I've heard a lot about you. Care to swagger around and punch somebody out after delivering some pithy one-liner? No? Well,...

August 12, 2009
Note: This is #32 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Rear Window (the first of several Alfred Hitchcock flicks in this experiment) is another one of those movies that has permeated popular culture to such a degree that I felt I was already familiar...

August 5, 2009
Note: This is #31 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. More Marlin Brando doing his Marlin Brando thing. And you know what? It ain't bad. On the Waterfront tells the story of Terry Malloy (Brando), a minor cog in the mafia machine that controls...

July 29, 2009
Note: This is #30 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Unlike last week's High Noon, the movie Shane seems to fit more of the prototypical Western (non-spaghetti) movie. You've got your eponymous lone hero, mysterious Shane (Alan Ladd), who is trying to atone for...

July 22, 2009
Note: This is #29 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. At first I thought High Noon was going to be a quintessential cowboy movie, what with Gary Cooper in the tall, lanky lead as a sheriff in a small town set upon by criminals....

July 16, 2009
Note: This is #28 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not particularly looking forward to the musicals that this little experiment is going to throw at me, but I really enjoyed Singin' in the Rain. It was...

July 8, 2009
Note: This is #27 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Halfway through! Oooh, the first color movie in this little escapade! Humphry Bogart and Katherine Hepburn play what I consider to be a fairly unlikely couple in this 1951 drama/adventure film. When the prim...

July 1, 2009
Note: This is #26 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Here, wait. I need to get this out of the way first: Everybody take a deep breath and shout "STELA! HEEEY! STEEEEELLAAAAAAA!" Okay, good. Glad that's done. Let's move on. For about the first half...

June 25, 2009
Note: This is #25 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. I think it's kind of telling that just a couple of weeks later I can barely remember a dang thing about Eve OR this movie that's all about her. There's something about an aging...

June 17, 2009
Note: This is #24 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Oh, man. Talk about bringing the crazy. Sunset Boulevard really surprised me by being an absurdly black comedy with a performance by Gloria Swanson that by all rights should be so completely over the...

June 10, 2009
Note: This is #23 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, here we have the first real western (or close enough to it) in this little experiment. Surprising, since that's the kind of genre (along with musicals) that comes to mind when I think...

June 4, 2009
Note: This is #22 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Here's a question every generation has to answer, hopefully not too many times: What happens when veterans come home from a war? Released right around the time this was happening after World War II,...

May 27, 2009
Note: This is #21 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Yeah, here's another one I have to admit to never having seen, despite having absorbed a lot of it through popular culture. I wasn't a minute into the film before I was yelling "Hey,...

May 20, 2009
Note: This is #20 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. As far as examples of film noir go, I liked Double Indemnity a lot more than I did Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon, mainly because it's so different and intriguing in the way that...

May 13, 2009
Note: This is #19 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, my first real musical in this little experiment. Yankee Doodle Dandy is both a musical and a biographical picture. It tells the story of George M. Cohan (James Cagney), who was a man...

May 6, 2009
Note: This is #18 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Yes, it's true. I'd never seen Casablanca, even though I'd picked up the gist of the story and all the famous lines through some kind of pop culture osmosis. Turns out I liked the...

April 29, 2009
Note: This is #17 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. This was kind of an odd one. Sullivan's Travels is a curious mixture of drama and comedy with the perplexing message of "Don't try to make movies that honestly explore the human condition; just...

April 22, 2009
Note: This is #16 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. The Maltese Falcon strikes me as another one of those classic movies that gets credit for stepping out and doing something for the first time, or at least being remembered most for it. It's...

April 15, 2009
Note: This is #15 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. More romantic comedy, more Katharine Hepburn, more James Stewart, and more Cary Grant. The Philadelphia Story has one of the more complicated plots of its ilk that I've seen, telling the story of self-important...

April 8, 2009
Note: This is #14 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Having grown up in Oklahoma, I'm familiar with the story of The Grapes of Wrath. It's the law. I'd also read the book by John Steinbeck upon which this movie is based, and was...

April 1, 2009
Note: This is #13 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Well, here's a movie that has aged ...oddly. When the governor of an unnamed state has to appoint a successor for one of his state's deceased U.S. senators, he refuses to listen to his...

March 25, 2009
Note: This is #12 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. It's not like I'm particularly familiar with actors like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, but I can tell you that when I hear them I don't automatically think "screwball comedy." And yet here we...

March 18, 2009
Note: This is #11 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. I admit, I wasn't looking forward to this movie going in. I figured that if musical and dance movies were all but dead (or at best degraded to cheerleader and break dancing epics), there...

March 12, 2009
Note: This is #10 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. This sorta silent comedy film by Charlie Chaplin features one of the last appearances of his Little Tramp character. I enjoyed it, though in a lot of ways it's less funny and MUCH more...

March 4, 2009
Note: This is #9 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Okay, so I'm going to back peddle a bit on my previous dissing of The Marx Brothers. Unlike Duck Soup, I kind of enjoyed A Night at the Opera. The plot? It's mainly a...

February 25, 2009
Note: This is #8 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. After watching It Happened One Night I have come to two realizations. First, fedora hats TOTALLY need to come back in style. Second, I want Clark Gable to have my children. I think I...

February 18, 2009
Note: This is #7 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. After watching Duck Soup, I think you can add The Marx Brothers to the list of Supposedly Classic Things I Don't Get. It's slapstick, absurd, manic, and strange, but I didn't find it all...

February 11, 2009
Note: This is #6 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. When I popped in the original 1933 King Kong movie, I thought that this 52-in-52 project had finally brought me to some familiar ground: a genre movie. A big, special effects laden monster movie...

February 4, 2009
Note: This is #5 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. After seeing The Gold Rush I was somewhat enamoured with Charlie Chaplin's brand of silent comedy films. So when this 1931 movie, City Lights came up on my list, I dove right in. I...

January 28, 2009
Note: This is #4 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. I didn't even get past the subtitle of "A Song of Two Humans" to suspect that this 1927 silent film was going to be more art house wankery that was ahead of its time....

January 21, 2009
Note: This is #3 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Another silent comedy, but this week it's from Buster Keaton, who was Charlie Chaplin's contemporary and I can only assume box office rival. I imagine that "Chaplin vs. Keaton" debates are all the rage...

January 14, 2009
Note: This is #2 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Netflix sent me the 1942 re-release of the original 1925 movie, which included voice overs, music, and slightly different editing. Having never seen a Charlie Chaplin movie before, I was only familiar with his...

January 7, 2009
Note: This is #1 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Wow, what a movie to start this thing off on. Released in 1916, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages is film pioneer D.W. Griffith's sprawling silent movie epic about how much intolerance really totally...

January 1, 2009
In 2008 I did the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge in which I attempted to read a book a week and write a review about it. Instead of repeating that exercise again, I've decided to do something a little different by taking in 52 movies during the 52 weeks...