I can't believe it's taken people almost 20 years to see Jurassic Park!!!
I've been watching all kinds of knobby pretentious stuff recently.
Battleship Potemkin for starters. 1920's silent Russian film that most directors claim is "highly influential". It's really weird to watch, there's a constant feeling of deja vu as you see all these scenes that have been ripped straight from it for other films. Anyway, these films are generally pretty hard to watch (particularly if they haven't been done up like Metropolis), but it was well worth sticking with.
It's essentially the simple tale of a Russian battleship crew who revolt after being badly treated. The local town they are anchored in support them as it's the time of revolution in Russia. It all ends badly in the town though with the famous staircase massacre scene, then the battleship has to face the Russian navy who have come to destroy them.
From the staircase massacre onwards, the film is really good. It's horrific, touching and incredibly tense. Okay, it's aged really badly, but all the techniques required to engage you in a film are there and it grabs you. If you're into film history, then it's an absolute must. If you can stomach having to read and watch a film instead of having it spoon fed to you, it's also well worth watching. - 9/10
Letters from Iwo Jima is similar in the lack of colour, having to read sense. Also the starkness and brutality. Really interesting film, presented in an almost documentary manner about the Japanese stand on Iwo Jima, the last island between America and Japan in the Pacific theatre in the second world war.
Brilliantly and simply presented. It was fantastic to see "gritty realism" without all the gung-ho bollocks of Saving Private Ryan
. If you've not seen it and want some idea of how hard the war was on the Japanese, it's a must - 10/10
Rope from Alfred Hitchcock is a 1949 "classic" about two students who decide to kill a "less intelligent" fellow student in an effort to produce the perfect intellectual murder. They arrange for a dinner party straight after the murder and the corpse in the room all the time. It's a constant "will they get away with it or wont they" situation. I have actually seen this before, but I was very young at the time (and going through a 'must watch everything Hitchcock has done' phase) and I didn't realise how good the film was. I was expecting Psycho or The Birds and got a simple single room play. Watching it again you can see the tension and while it's not my favourite Hitchcock, it's great to watch. James Stewart in particular is epic in a "kind of like Nic Cage, if Nic Cage could speak or act" way
If you like single room dramas with a splice of tension, give it a go 8/10.
I think that's it for arty-farty rubbish, so how about
Mars needs Moms? Pretty typical non-Pixar CGI affair? Actually, it's more like an 80's kid's Sci-Fi film like Flight of the Navigator (only without being anywhere near as classic, but that kind of idea) and isn't completely dreadful, in fact, it's almost good. Joan Cussack is blatantly far too irritating, but she has the common decency to spend the majority of the film unconscious, a state she should consider making permanent for her acting career.
Anyway, it's a kids film which is mildly captivating and almost a little bit different from the norm. 7/10
