These are the posts for the month of June in the year 2007 of the common era.
This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!
If the rest of American history would have had such great musical numbers, I might have gotten better grades. Okay, this adaptation of the hit Broadway play wasn’t exactly letter-perfect history but it is remarkably faithful to the facts for, you know, a musical. It’s also extremely entertaining if you allow for its stage bound origins.
You can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater because then all you have is a wet, critically injured baby.
Reuniting virtually all of the personnel from Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration is a middling Hollywood comedy that trods familiar ground and never quite gets its comedic feet under it. Once again, as in A Mighty Wind, co-writer and director Christopher Guest’s affection for his characters undermines the potential for humor. The subject of Oscar hype in Hollywood might be ripe for scathing satire, but all this movie can manage is a softball thrown underhand.
This is your fucked-up country, it’s your responsibility!
Babel, the third and probably final collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, is a well-acted, beautifully shot film that somehow manages to hold you at arm’s length for more than two hours. It is frustrating because you do want to know these characters better but the movie never lets you get close enough.
We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.
Full Metal Jacket is an outstanding film about Marine recruits in training followed by two less successful films about the Vietnam War. It begins so strong with the natural conflict between the slow-witted and unhinged Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) and the profane force of nature known as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey, a former Marine drill instructor himself) that the two following segments border on anti-climax.
Dead, or alive, we all come home together. So help me, God.
In a lot of ways, this is the movie that The Green Berets should have been.
If you’re here, I thought you’d be interested in checking Kaboom Review, another movie review site run by Mike Blitz. He focuses primarily on action movies and does a great job, so if that’s your cup of tea, head on over and check it out.
Death? What you all know about death?
Oliver Stone’s Platoon remains the pinnacle of his directorial career and with good reason. Presenting the grunt’s eye view of the Vietnam War, this is definitely a movie that could only have been made by someone who had been there. Even if you disagree with Stone’s politics and find fault with his later work, it’s hard to dispute the sincerity and brutal honesty he brings to this film.
For our homeland. Until the very last man. Our duty is to stop the enemy right here. Do not expect to return home alive.
Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of our Fathers is a tighter, more intimate film, focusing on a more sharply drawn collection of characters and following their story in a more coherent way than the first film could manage.
That airplane of yours looked exactly like a ruptured duck.
Despite being produced explicitly as a propaganda film during World War II, this adaptation of Ted W. Lawson’s account of his own experiences as a pilot during the famous Doolittle raid on Tokyo is a remarkably authentic account of the daring air attack on April 18, 1942. Still, some elements of this are sufficiently dated that this is one classic film that could stand a modern remake.
Why I Hate These AFI Lists…
Thursday, June 21st, 2007Last night, CBS ran a three-hour special running down the American Film Institute’s new “100 Years . . . 100 Movies” list of the top 100 movies, at least according to their 1,500 voters. The title is now somewhat inaccurate, since the list now covers 110 years, but I think that’s the least of its problems.
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Posted by Paul McElligott in Commentary | 2 Comments »