Lekce Faust (1994)

A Czech, French, British, German, American fantasy directed by Jan Švankmajer
A man receives a map from men passing them out on a street corner. He follows it and becomes an actor in the role of Faust at a theater production. As the story progresses, stop motion fantasy elements are added and he turns into a marionette, but goes back to being an actor between scenes, while still in a deal with the devil.
Jan Švankmajer also made Alice (1988) and Little Otik (2000). This belongs in the same category as those: weird and wonderful. I liked Little Otik the most, but this was pretty cool too. The stop motion all looked good and there were some great scenes. The heads rolling through areas looked good and the small marionettes in the signature scene were great. My favorite was when the jester was trying to catch a bird. He repeatedly summoned and banished a devil with some humor involved. The audio was in Czech, but the version I watched had on time English subtitles. I rate this good just for being so strange. You should probably watch it.
Sorry, no image. Blogger is broken again.

About Adam (2000)

An Irish British American romance directed by Gerard Stembridge.
3 women from the same family are all interested in the same man.
I could tell within 5 or 10 minutes that this movie was not for me. I waited until 35 minutes in to turn it off. As I have said before, love and war are my least favorite subject matter for films. The video was really bright, which is not bad, but this usually (and in this case) goes along with very feminine films. I'm just too male to appreciate any value which my be there. I rate it shit in accordance with my turn off policy.

About a Boy (2002)

A British French German American romantic comedy directed by Chris and Paul Weitz, starring Hugh Grant, Toni Collette and Rachel Weisz.
An independently wealthy man decides that single mothers are good to date and gets himself in trouble by lying about having a son. Through a friend of a friend, he meets the 12 year old son of a suicidal single mother and they become friends.
I think I like Chris Weitz as a director. I recently watched A Better Life (2011) and saw the similarities between these 2 films. His films don't jump out and grab the viewer like those of Alejandro Jodorowsky or Quentin Tarantino, but these realistic dramas about families are made well and hold my attention. They seem to have a tendency to get a little sappy at the end, but I can see past a little maple syrup when the rest is this good. Something about this one that I really liked was the heavy double narration. The man and the boy both had voice-overs spaced through the duration. I'm rating this good. If you like this or A Better Life, you should watch the other and possibly other films by Chris Weitz.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

A British American fantasy directed by Desmond Davis, starring Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith and Ursula Andress, with visual effects by Ray Harryhausen.
Perseus has adventures trying to appease the gods, kill monsters and win the beautiful princess. He does have a magic sword, shield talking mechanical owl and flying horse, though.
Classic fantasy flick. I thought the plot was a little convoluted and not presented clearly enough. Possibly, there were too many side-quests, maybe there were too many characters. Casting did a great job. If you're interested, look up the actors listed. I just finished watching Hook (1991) with Maggie Smith as old Wendy. I prefer Harryhausen stop motion miniatures over CG monsters any day. I know they look quaint to most people, but they are not a clearly computer-generated item in a live action setting. There was a real item photographed, so it looks more like it belongs there to me. I rate this adequate because it's worth having and watching, but not one of my favorites.
As a side note, I made my friend a vase with figures from this movie on it: http://pccsm.blogspot.com/2018/12/calyx-krater.html

Yellow Submarine A.K.A. The Beatles: Yellow Submarine (1968)

A British American animated musical directed by George Dunning.
A man from a musical world is sent to get help saving his home from Blue Meanies. He recruits the British pop/rock group and they travel to the music world.
This is definitely odd enough for me. I can't say that I like the music very much, but the animation makes up for it. The plot is actually interesting, but the characters seemed shallow. It possibly depended upon a knowledge of The Beatles to know what the characters were like. Unfortunately, The Beatles did not play The Beatles in this. There were plenty of fantasy elements in the journey from London to music land under the sea. In fact, the characters pass through many seas, such as the sea of holes and the sea of green. The hippie-esque moral message of the film is very clear and needs no explanation. I used this image because it goes against the moral message of the film. The real Beatles are showing Satanic hand signals in this photo. I like it and rate it good. For 1968, this was amazing animation.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A British American crime film written by Anthony Burgess, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Malcolm McDowell and Patrick Magee.
A young criminal goes around causing chaos with his friends until being caught and imprisoned. From prison, he goes to a research hospital and is subjected to a new technique to "make him good". He is then released and tormented by his previous victims.
I feel like I've written about this before. Malcolm McDowell is one of the 2 best parts of this film. The other is the music of Wendy Carlos. I would strongly advise viewing my post about Caligula (1979) and that film after reading and watching this one because he plays the same role in both films. Reading the book is a little difficult. The heavy use of Nadsat language requires having the Nadsat glossary open as well as the narrative. It is nearly impossible to figure out word meanings by context. This is one of those famous classic films that everyone spouts about for good reason. You can read everyone else's spouting if that's what you want. I would rather watch it than read praise of it. I rate it best. Watch it!

The Shining (1980)

A British American horror written by Stephen King, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson and Scatman Crothers.
A writer gets a job as winter caretaker for a large, rural hotel. He brings his family, but goes insane and tries to kill them.
I can't believe I haven't written about this yet. Stylistically, it is very much of the time when it was made. It used lots of 1970s wide framing, but also had closer shots. I read the book as well and was disappointed that the moving animal-sculpted topiary was excluded. Also excluded were scenes of the family going into town. The references in Ready Player One (2018) were right on the mark for good scenes, with exaggerations of large figures over the hedge maze. I think the blood hallway was very effective. One more reference to redrum or Jack Nicholson's dialogue as he uses an axe on a door will push me over the edge. I've also reviewed Room 237 (2012 documentary) here. You should probably read that as well and maybe watch it before The Shining. Searching for an image to go with this makes me question again: why can't anyone post movie images in the original aspect ratio? I rate this good for cinematography (how could Kubrick fail? oh yeah, 2001 Space Odyssey) and casting.

84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

A British American drama directed by David Jones, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.
A jewish woman in New York is pen pals with a British man at a book shop in London.
Boring. If you've seen them, think of this as a first try at Forrest Gump (1994) and Mary and Max (2009). The penpals live at a great distance and events of the time are mentioned. It was mostly about monologues (not dialogue) as the characters spoke their letters. The woman in New York City was written VERY Jewish and I found myself mocking her speech. Anne Bancroft is a great actress though. It looked and sounded fine. Just so dull. I rate it o.k.

633 Squadron (1964)

A British war film directed by Walter Grauman, starring Cliff Robertson.
A group of pilots must bomb an enemy rocket fuel factory.
I'm glad this was about pilots and planes because I didn't give a flying fuck about it. The plot was predictable and characters stereotypical. It was the first widescreen Panavision film, so it looked great. One thing that I noticed was a man with a very fake hook hand and some terrible compositing. When the pilots were flying, the view through the cockpit cover windows was composited poorly, but when the enemy guns were shown firing at them, it was composited extremely unconvincingly (image). I rate this polished turd poor. I could see and hear what was going on and it had a plot that I could follow. However, what was going on made me wish it were not. You probably should not watch it.

9 Songs (2004)

A British erotic musical romance directed by Michael Winterbottom.
A climatologist in Antarctica remembers a relationship with a woman and the concerts they saw. In actual fact, the have sex and watch alternative rock bands.
Vapid, boring, repetitive. The movie is just like the music. She sucks him off and then the alt rock band just plain sucks. This happens about 9 times. A few rare snippets of Antarctica are thrown in and the cinematography is amazing. I liked the close-up of this (image) ice being cut more than the rest of the film put together. In fact, I would rather have watched a few seconds of cutting ice than the whole hour and 6 minutes. I have to admit that the sex scenes were expertly filmed and the audio quality of the concerts was good, even though the content was not. I rate this bad for technical perfection on some of the worst content I've seen in a while. Don't watch it.

8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997)

A British American crime comedy directed by Tom Schulman, starring Joe Pesci, George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon.
A mobster loses his bag of decapitated heads at an airport baggage claim. They are picked up by a young man on vacation with his girlfriend's parents. Insert standard stupid American comedy plot here.
Dumb and stale. The plot seemed like every other American comedy with a missing item I've ever seen. Like it was copied and pasted from a previous film. Joe Pesci plays a great mobster (obviously) and David Spade makes great comic relief in a Stephen Chow deadpan delivery, but with Jim Carrey absurdity. The humor(?) was not very funny, except 1 scene: Joe Pesci is sleeping in a hotel room with the heads on a table and dreams that they sing to him. Video looked exactly like every other film from 1993 to 2001 or so. Audio had dialogue I could hear and Mr. Sandman on the soundtrack. I rate this poor because it was not good, but I've seen much worse. You probably should not watch it.

Blueberry A.K.A. Renegade, Blueberry: L'expérience secrète (2004)

A French Mexican British acid western directed by Jan Kounen, based on a comic by Jean Giraud A.K.A. Moebius, starring Vincent Cassel, Juliette Lewis and Michael Madsen.
Treasure hunters have founs a map to the Native American sacred mountain. The sheriff recognizes one of them as an old enemy and tries to stop him. Luckily, the sheriff is friends with the local shaman, who helps him.
This was like a western, but more. The cowboys were rougher and tougher and there was Indian magic. The plot held my attention very well because there was always something going on. The characters were pretty good, but I would have cast a more extroverted hero. Michael Madsen played a good villain, but should have had more dialogue. Video was high quality and very creative. There was a wide range of shot lengths and camera placements. There were also some CG dream sequences which were very convincing. It was alright that it didn't look photorealistic because it was only used for dream material and worked well like that. Audio was good. I could hear the dialogue, there was appropriate music and I found subtitles which included English as well as all of the foreign language parts. I rate this best, mostly for plot and video. Watch it!

8½ Women (1999)

A British Netherlands Luxembourg German drama directed by Peter Greenaway, starring Toni Collette and Amanda Plummer.
An old woman dies, leaving her husband and son together after the funeral. Being astronomically wealthy, hey decide to build a harem for themselves and collect women who sign contracts to be their concubines.
Excellent! I would put this in a folder with La Grande Bouffe (1973) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), labeling it "too much of a good thing". The plot took a little while to develop clearly, but it definitely got interesting. I liked the middle section most, which is weird because I usually like film beginnings most. The characters weren't that great, but this was more about plot anyway. Amanda Plummer played Lydia in The Fisher King (1991), Yolanda/Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction (1994) and Claude's mother in Ken Park (2002) (one of my more popular posts). Toni Collette played Princess Yum Yum's Nanny Witch in The Thief and the Cobbler (1995), Mandy Slade in Velvet Goldmine (1998) and Lynn Sear in The Sixth Sense (1999). Video all looked good. I liked how each section started with script text. There were also manufactured earthquakes which looked convincing. An odd note, this movie about sex has no graphic sex scenes. Audio was terrible. Everything except the helicopter landing was really quiet. The father spoke mostly in whispers. I'm rating this awesome because it's a keeper. If you like the weird, but coherent stuff like I do, this would be a great choice. Watch it.

49th Parallel (1941)

A British war film directed by Michael Powell, starring Lawrence Olivier, Raymond Massey and Anton Walbrook.
A German submarine sinks near Canada. Six of the Germans are stuck in Canada and trying to get back to Europe. They meet trappers, pilgrims, settlers and an author studying native Americans among others.
Really really boring. The plot did not even suggest that I might care what happens. The characters did not offer the option of caring what happened to them. In fact, they were down to 3 guys before I realized the others were not there anymore. Black and white 4:3 video doesn't float my boat, but there were a few scenes with good camera placement. This military command center shot from above looks great (image). The audio was very much of the time. Everyone announced their lines and there was not much non-diegetic music. I rate this bad for being so boring. I would seriously advise against watching this.

360 (2011)

A French Austrian Brazilian British crime drama directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Jude Law, Moritz Bleibtreu, Jamel Debbouze, Rachel Weisz, Ben Foster, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Anthony Hopkins.
People are involved in sexual situations. One woman is a hooker, a man orders her, but misses the connection, a sex offender gets out of jail and is tempted by a beautiful woman at the airport...
Boring and desultory. The plot or plots did not hold my attention at all, maybe because of the audio, which I will get to. There were far too many characters. Some of them seemed to be connected in some way. The video was all great. There was a variety of shot duration and camera placement. It really looked great, natural and not forced. The audio was horrible. Most of the dialogue was whispered. When that happens, I take it as a sign that the filmmakers thought dialogue was unimportant and don't care if the viewer hears what people are saying. If the dialogue was important, we should be able to hear it, right? Given that I only heard a few words and phrases over the course of almost 2 hours, I rate this bad. It looked great, but sounded terrible. Don't watch it.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

A French British American romantic comedy directed by Michael Lehmann, starring Josh Hartnett and Griffin Dunne.
A man who has broken up with his girlfriend is addicted to sex. He takes a vow of celibacy for lent, but meets a woman and begins a relationship with her.
Not quite as bad as it would seem at first glance. The plot was a little bit predictable and the characters were a little bit shallow, but I've seen many films with much worse. The humor was all about sex, but it didn't get into the really crude and immature style which most American romantic comedies go for. Video was mostly good, if a little too bright and cheerful looking. There were some special effects, but nothing amazing or worth writing about. Audio was a problem because I got a bad file. It was all skippy and warbling. Besides that, there was the prerequisite inaudible whispering. There was a quote I saw while looking for an image: "sexy, fresh and wildly hip". I thought it was stale and bland above all else. I would almost suspect that this set out to be a mediocre film because it did such a good job of being so. If it wants that middle o.k. rating, here it is. Don't go out of your way to watch it.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

A British American science fiction directed by Stanley Kubrick.
A black monolith is found on the moon, with a beam pointing to Jupiter. A team of astronauts are sent in a spaceship powered by an "infallible" computer.
A visual masterpiece, an audio nightmare. The sparse plot failed to hold my attention and the shallow characters did not even make me care to find out what happens next. I have watched this a few times, but it was not on my blog, so I watched it again just to review. All of the video looks amazing. I really like the shots with rotating sets and camera to simulate space travel. Even the sets in those scenes are amazing. However, Kubrick forgot that a movie has audio as well as video. It sounded like Wendy Carlos puked on her keyboard to record the soundtrack. There is only Kubrick to blame for this, as he used pre-existing classical music recordings. The worst was the scene in which David Bowman was unplugging HAL 9000. The shrieking white noise would work as a Ludivico Technique to make me hate science fiction films. I would really like to like this movie because it looks so good. It just sounds so bad that I have to rate it shit. I will never be watching it ever again.

Ninteen Eighty-Four A.K.A. 1984 (1984)

A British science fiction drama based on the book by George Orwell, directed by Michael Radford, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton.
A dystopian future society forbids thought. A man who works in a "fact checking" job for a newspaper realizes what truth is and that he is being lied to. He meets a woman who feels the same and they have a romance, but are caught by thought police.
This is a weird one. I really like the plot and the ideas behind it, but this was extremely unpleasant to watch. I would classify this alongside THX 1138 (1971) and Metropolis (1927) as films about runaway governments. I really like the genre and wish that more people would get into this set of ideas because this science fiction is getting closer to present day fact every day. The characters in this film were cast correctly and acted their roles well. The video was very stylized, with drab city scenes, bright outdoor scenes and institutional torture chambers. It was the torture chambers which irked me most. It seemed too convincing and there was a scene with possible abuse of real rats. I don't object to Cannibal Holocaust (1980) having a real turtle mutilated, but there was a time when rats were my only friends and a pet turtle will never like a person. Editing was very slow compared to the newer films I've watched recently. Audio was generally alright, but there was some whispered dialogue which was too quiet. I have to give it a pink rating because I like the subject matter and the book, but not the film. If you don't know the story, you need to watch it.

Up series (1964 - 2012)

A British documentary directed by Paul Almond and Michael Apted.
Beginning at the age of 7, 14 British people are interviewed every 7 years.
This was definitely interesting. There is a 2019 film, but I was not able to find a copy. Given that I watched over 13 hours of material in a few days, I did get a little tired of repetition. If I had watched them on TV when they came out, I would have enjoyed it more and that is why the repetition was there. TV viewers are not expected to remember what all 14 people were doing for the past few chapters. I think the idea was a good one, if a little intrusive into the lives of these chosen people. I find that I share the most similarities with Neil. He was the one who was homeless before becoming a politician. I'm not saying that I am either of those things, but like him, I am viewed as an eccentric. There were some great quotes from the whole series and none of the people were boring. It was not quite as deeply informational as I would like from a documentary, but it was not completely entertainment either. There was no techno and mostly talk, so that was good. I rate it adequate and wish I had watched a few less of the episodes.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

A British American drama directed by Steve McQueen, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt and Alfre Woodard.
A free black man who is a professional violinist is abducted into slavery, leaving behind his wife and 2 children. He is mistreated and has to hide his ability to read and write.
How appropriate for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The simple plot developed into many episodic side-stories about all of the things which happened to this man. The main characters were him, a female slave and a few slave owners. It's pretty clear to define protagonist and antagonist in this setup. The video all looked really good. I liked that exposure was done so well because I've seen it done badly so frequently. Audio was fine, but there was some whisper acting. I got a version with good English subtitles though. Moral and ethical implications of films seems to be something that needs to be addressed when reviewing stuff like this and 125 Years Memory (2015). The scene with Chiwetel kind of being saved from being hung was disturbingly powerful. It should be obvious that slavery is/was bad and wrong. The question to ask is whether today's monetary and psychological slavery is any better than physical slavery was back then. Their thoughts were their own and they could see and hear clear evidence of being someone's property. We are faced with a barrage of things which try to manipulate our thoughts and cannot see or hear the master's whip and chains. I rate this adequate because I liked watching it once and it was made well, but I wouldn't watch it again. You may want to check it out.