2014 MOVIE OMNIBUS THREAD

[Brian Fowler]

Watched Now You See Me. Thoroughly enjoyable completely disposable popcorn cinema. Really fun, doubt I'll remember it in a month.

[J.T.]

It's been years but I saw a couple of the Lone Wolf and Cub films with friends that had them downloaded. Great stuff, but the frequent rape scenes left a bad taste in my mouth. 

 

Yeah, I always dug the LW&C movies, but I think that the Zatoichi franchise is my favorite chambara jidaogeki not named Seven Samurai or Yojimbo.

 

Portrayed the prevailing distasteful social conditions and attitudes of the time along with dudes getting fucked up via iaijutsu without nearly the amount of tough to watch scenes.

 

There was also awesome shit like this.

 

[jaedmc]

24hr CRITERION FLASH SALE!!!!

CODE: MADFOX

There goes my tax return.

[Zero]

Watched Now You See Me. Thoroughly enjoyable completely disposable popcorn cinema. Really fun, doubt I'll remember it in a month.

I'm surprised by this. I thought it was a little too ridiculous for me. I was really looking forward to it after seeing the trailer, and the movie was completely different then what I was expecting though. 

[Brian Fowler]

"Ocean's 11 with magicians" is what I expected, and by god that's what I got.

[Tabe]

Watched Now You See Me. Thoroughly enjoyable completely disposable popcorn cinema. Really fun, doubt I'll remember it in a month.

I agree.  I thought it was a lot of fun.

[Bustronaut]

It was the best magician based movie of 2013!

 

I'm not sure what I expected out of it, but I got a new "watch whenever flipping past on TV" movie out of it.

 

I love that they play fair with the twist during the entire movie.

[caley]

It was the best magician based movie of 2013!

But how could it be better than 'Burt Wonderstone'!?

[Bustronaut]

Burt Wonderstone wasn't very good, even though they got a lot about being a magician correct.

[New Blood]

I forgot to post this last month but this was a project that I love to do every year and it's my list of favorite first time watches.

 

Check out the series of blogs from www.rupertpupkinspeaks.blogspot.com for a lot of different lists.

My Top 30 First Time Watches of 2013:

1. All That Jazz [1979]
2. The Devils
3. The Driver
4. Princess Mononoke
5. The Thin Red Line
6. Barry Lyndon
7. Los Olvidados
8. The Beguiled
9. La Strada
10. My Neighbor Totoro
11. Duck Soup
12. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
13. Cockfighter
14. Tourist Trap
15. The Curse of Frankenstein
16. Hard Ticket to Hawaii
17. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
18. All The Colors of the Dark
19. The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh
20. Hard Times
21. The Baader Meinhof Complex
22. Dead Man
23. Tenebre
24. Hellbound: Hellraiser 2
25. Marwencol
26. Across 110^th Street
27. I Saw the Devil
28. Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
29. Miami Connection
30. The Man Who Wasn’t There

[Curt McGirt]

The Devils can't possibly be below All That Jazz. That means I really need to see All That Jazz I guess.

[jaedmc]

All That Jazz is pretty damn good, though it sometimes pops off the rails, which is really part of its charm. Roy Scheider murders that role too, and it's really worth watching for his performance alone.

 

Hellraiser 2 being ahead of I Saw The Devil is the real crime. Oh wait...this is a list of the BEST of your ENTIRE 2013?! I thought it was like a random month or something.

 

Now I want to know what didn't make the cut.

[Curt McGirt]

Yeah, I would have Baader/Meinhof irrationally high, and Tenebre very rationally high. And I Saw the Devil fourth from last? RELEASE THE FILES~

[Antacular]

Saw RoboCop, and it was somewhere between a million and a billion times better than what I was expecting. A legitimate solid action film. I'm honestly shocked it didn't do better numbers, because it deserves to be a hit.

[New Blood]

All That Jazz is pretty damn good, though it sometimes pops off the rails, which is really part of its charm. Roy Scheider murders that role too, and it's really worth watching for his performance alone.

Hellraiser 2 being ahead of I Saw The Devil is the real crime. Oh wait...this is a list of the BEST of your ENTIRE 2013?! I thought it was like a random month or something.

Now I want to know what didn't make the cut.

I overall had a list of 56 films I enjoyed the most from 2013. I do admit that I Saw the Devil is rather low. I adored the set pieces for Hellraiser 2.

All That Jazz and The Devils are both kinda tied for me. I love them equally. I like ATJ for how it basically blends 8 1/2 with 70s American cynicism. That and Schieder is amazing!

I had some big ones that missed the cut like Koyaanisqatsi, Detour, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, This is Spinal Tap, Die Hard (I never realized that I hadn't seen the entire film until I started watching it and remembered that I had only seen clips), It's a Wonderful Life. I loved all of those and wanted to fit them in but somehow couldn't on this draft. I also left out trashterpieces like Pieces and Never Too Young to Die.

[Swift]

I've just discovered The Gentlemen's Guide to Midnite Cinema podcasts, and have been going through some older episodes. They also do a top 30 first time watches of the year thing. I see the Rupert Pupkin link, and I'm curious if you're part of that community?

[caley]

I love making lists, so here's my list of the 30 Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2013 (Excluding 2012 and 2013 flicks that I watched for polls).

 

 

1 Smokey and the Bandit: I'm not really sure why I put this off for so long, but man is it a lot of fun.

2 Prince of the City: Awesome police procedural about dirty cops starring Treat Williams in a performance you never really see coming.

3 Cloud Atlas: Endlessly inventive, visually enthralling and just a lot of fun.  I mean, even if you don't like it, you had to admire its audacity.

4 All the President’s Men: Another film that I needlessly put off watching, even though I love stuff like this, journalists digging up clues.

5 Burden of Dreams: I've been meaning to see this for years, the documentary about the making of 'Fitzcarraldo', but this was the first year I was able to track it down.  Engrossing.  

6 Young Mr. Lincoln: This film was the reason I saw no reason to bother seeing 'Lincoln' (Not entirely true, I got about 30 mins into it and never bothered to go back), casting Henry Fonda as a Southern-wisdom spoutin', joke makin' Lincoln.  So entertaining.

7 Rope: Hitchcock's ridiculously fun story about two guys who commit what they feel is the perfect murder and Jimmy Stewart as the guy who suspects something's up.

8 Destry Rides Again: Stewart again, this time as a peace-loving sheriff trying to take down a gang of baddies.  I was enjoying this, and then the insanity of the ending comes along and bumps it up from "That was good" to "That was great!"

9 The Longest Yard: Turned this up for $2 at a book sale.  Man, Burt Reynolds is awesome.

10 The Man From Nowhere: Terrific Korean action flick that plays with the action formula by having the hero's actions all taking place either off camera or on grainy security cams so that when the last showdown comes, it just kicks your ass.

11 Rust and Bone: French film about a Sea World-esque trainer who suffers a debilitating accident and meets a down-on-his-luck father engaging in underground fights.  A little too "What else could go wrong?!" kinda films but the acting is top-notch.

12 The Raid: I took my sweet time seeing this Indonesian action flick, but it totally blew me away.  Why can't they make action flicks like this in America?!

13 Die Hard 2: I've seen every Die Hard but this one for some reason (Well, actually, at a party when I was 12, a friend's mother rented it and handed us the remote and told us to fast-forward every time he was going to swear...which is an impossible task for someone who's never seen the movie and kept getting mad every time we missed one.  We gave up watching it after like 20 minutes) and I loved it.  So big and explosive and entertaining.

14 Hit and Run: This was really good.  An entertaining action-comedy with Dax Sheppard and Kristen Bell and a great cast: Bradley Cooper, Beau Bridges, Tom Arnold, Sean Hayes, Kristen Chynoweth.  Lots of fun.

15 Westworld: Lots of fun, what more can you say?

16 On Dangerous Ground: Not the Steven Seagal one but the one with Robert Ryan as a bad-ass cop.  I liked the first half a lot when it was just Ryan being a hard-nosed take-no-prisoners cop, not as much the second half when he finds his humanity.  Ryan is awesome here, though, my favourite performance of his.

17 Disco Godfather: Insane action comedy from the 70s about a club owner who decides to put a stop to the sale of angel dust after it puts his nephew in a sanitarium.

18 M: Classic 30s police procedural about the hunt for a child murderer.  Pretty dark stuff.

19 Bad Day at Black Rock: Spencer Tracy as a badass war veteran who has to deal with local bullies when he travels to a small town and begins to inquire on the whereabouts of a local Japanese rancher.

20 Jour de Fete: Precursor to the Mr. Hulot series about a smalltown letter carrier who gets drunk and tries to imitate what he believes are cutting-edge American letter delivery techniques.  Not as madcap or zany as the Hulot series, a lot of this just seems to be observing everyday life in a small town.

21 Quiz Show: Highly entertaning look at the quiz show scandals of the 1950s.  Like I stated above, I love movies like this were a journalist tries to uncover a massive conspiracy.  I should probably watch 'JFK' one of these days...

22 While the City Sleeps: A serial killer is on the loose, so a dying media mogul pits his three outlets (the wire, TV, and newspaper) against each other in a race to discover the killer, the winner takes over his empire.   Ida Lupino steals this one every time she's onscreen.

23 The Blob: Crazy monster movie with a young Steve McQueen.  Takes the unusual 1950s tact of making the mischief-causing teens as the ones who know what's going on and the adults as the ones who won't listen to reason.  Fun.

 

24 The Bells of St. Mary’s: Bing Crosby Christmas movie with him as a new priest in charge of a school who must decide whether or not to sell the dilapidated school to a rich businessman.  I wasn't crazy about the ending because I thought it was just perfect until he revealed something which I felt removed some of the pathos.

25 Dolemite: Crazy 70s blaxploitation action comedy.  I watched it on Youtube, so it wasn't an ideal viewing, but until I track it down on DVD, it'll do.

26 Scarface: The one from the 30s is a pretty dark little gangster flick.  I might finally watch the Al Pacino one this year, I think.

27 The Runaways: Fairly standard musical biopic, highlighted by performances by Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon, and a couple times when music video director Floria Sigismondi is allowed to go crazy and indulge her nightmarish visuals.

28 Marked For Death: I'd never gotten around to this Seagal film for the longest time because I had a hard time finding it.  It's pretty great with Seagal taking on evil Jamaicans with a touch of voodoo thrown in for good measure.  And a really good soundtrack!

29 Sudden Death: I'm a pretty big hockey fan, and a pretty big Jean-Claude Van Damme fan, so I don't know why I took so long to watch this.  There's a scene in here, where JCVD fights a mascot that pretty much the silliest thing I've ever seen (And supposedly a holdover from an earlier script that satirized action flicks) and stands out like a sore thumb in what is, otherwise, a pretty by-the-numbers action flick.

30 The Fog: There are three or four scenes in here that do not fit and kinda ruin the tone of this John Carpenter horror flick about a killer fog that, when you look it up, were added post-production to make it "scarier".  Still, it's pretty atmospheric and entertaining with a solid cast.

 

And The Worst 5 Films I Watched For the First Time in 2013: 

 

5 The Three Stooges: This isn't terrible, but the sequences where they try to give the Stooges some pathos are so heavy-handed and completely wrong that it kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth by the end.  I don't care about Moe's childhood trauma.

4 Lebanon: Heard good thing about this claustrophobic Israeli war film that takes place almost entirely inside a tank during the Lebanese wars.  And it is intense and claustrophobic, but there's lots of stuff that just doesn't feel "right" like a scene where a crying woman has her dress ripped off after it catches fire that comes across, honestly, as completely cheesy, like something out of a Michael Bay film.  I dunno, it has near universal acclaim, but I didn't really get anything out of it.

3 Five Minutes to Live: Johnny Cash as a psychotic criminal who gets involved in a heist where he holds a bank manager's wife at gunpoint while his partner goes in and requests a large sum of money from said manager or she will die.  Cash is no actor, as is clearly demonstrated here.

2 The Adventures of Ford Fairlane: I went on a bit of a Renny Harlin kick after 'Die Hard 2' and decided to watch this one.  But, it's bad.  Really bad.  Andrew Dice Clay is a completely uninteresting lead and there's enough stuff misogyny here that would be alarming if it wasn't a film starring the Diceman.  Gilbert Gottfried is probably the best part in this, though Ed O'Neill as a rival cop is okay, too.

1 Village of the Damned: I'm a big John Carpenter fan but this is just bad.  It's cheesy, the performances are bad, the effects are terrible, and the plot makes little to no sense.  Just awful in every sense of the word, honestly.

[piranesi]

23 The Blob: Crazy monster movie with a young Steve McQueen.  Takes the unusual 1950s tact of making the mischief-causing teens as the ones who know what's going on and the adults as the ones who won't listen to reason.  Fun.

 

I just saw this for the first time since I was a kid.  It's one of those movies where all the "kids" are like 30 (Steve McQueen was 28).  But McQueen is hypnotic.  There are some scenes where he's almost not there, almost like an SNL host reading cue cards and then some others where he's so clearly a natural, so beyond anyone else on set when he settles in and just charms the shit out of you.

 

For the latter watch the first few minutes of this, and for the former go about 8:00 in:

 

http://youtu.be/KBsHTJV5aq4

 

 

 

20 Jour de Fete: Precursor to the Mr. Hulot series about a smalltown letter carrier who gets drunk and tries to imitate what he believes are cutting-edge American letter delivery techniques.  Not as madcap or zany as the Hulot series, a lot of this just seems to be observing everyday life in a small town.

 

I like this better than the Holut movies.  It's so great because I know there's a thing about him and sound, like he was originally a silent film guy and his movies are an odd mix of things that use sound (like the bee chasing him around) and don't actually make sense with it (like a scene that only works if you imagine a train makes no sound, like it would in a silent film).

[Reed]

Watched Now You See Me. Thoroughly enjoyable completely disposable popcorn cinema. Really fun, doubt I'll remember it in a month.

 Now You See Me is basically The Prestige for stupid people.

[Leonidas]

And The Worst 5 Films I Watched For the First Time in 2013: 

 

 

 

1 Village of the Damned: I'm a big John Carpenter fan but this is just bad.  It's cheesy, the performances are bad, the effects are terrible, and the plot makes little to no sense.  Just awful in every sense of the word, honestly.

 

 

 

No no no no no no no. Village of the damned falls into so bad it's good category and is a firm favourite. The scene where the kids force the women to put her hand in boiling water still sticks with me. Not to mention the random Mark Hammill performance.

[jaedmc]

18 M: Classic 30s police procedural about the hunt for a child murderer.  Pretty dark stuff.

19 Bad Day at Black Rock: Spencer Tracy as a badass war veteran who has to deal with local bullies when he travels to a small town and begins to inquire on the whereabouts of a local Japanese rancher.

 

23 The Blob: Crazy monster movie with a young Steve McQueen.  Takes the unusual 1950s tact of making the mischief-causing teens as the ones who know what's going on and the adults as the ones who won't listen to reason.  Fun.

 

Bad Day At Black Rock is pretty damn solid, and I think most people around these parts would love it.

M is one of my favorite movies of all time. 

The Blob: I wrote a lot about it here: http://jaekrenfrow.blogspot.com/2013/10/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about.html It's one of most fun movie experiences you can have.

 

Just so I can play along, here's my TOP 10 OF JANUARY 2014

 

1. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)

2. Paris, Texas (Wenders, 1984)

3.I Will Buy You (Kobayashi, 1956)

4. The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012)

5. Magicians (Song, 2005)

6. Wolf of Wallstreet (Scorsese, 2013)

7. Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)

8. Blood Simple (Coen, 1984)

9. Les Enfants Terribles (Melville, 1950)

10. The Long Hot Summer (Ritt, 1958)

[Control]

24hr CRITERION FLASH SALE!!!!

CODE: MADFOX

There goes my tax return.

While I'm sure the code just refers to THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, I'm hoping its a clue that they're releasing Tomu Uchida's THE MAD FOX.

[jaedmc]

It's actually referring to Mr. Fox and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad MadMadMadMad World.

[Tabe]

 

Watched Now You See Me. Thoroughly enjoyable completely disposable popcorn cinema. Really fun, doubt I'll remember it in a month.

 Now You See Me is basically The Prestige for stupid people.

 

Except The Prestige wasn't very good but Now You See Me was.

[jaedmc]

You must be confused with that one movie with Ed Norton.