Weekly Movies #6
Wizards - 28 May
If I'm being honest, Ralph Bakshi doesn't make very good movies, but they are extremely inserting to watch. There are so many strange and original things going on that it's an extremely engaging watch even if the quality isn't at all high.
Circle - 30 May
This one is boring. We spend the first hour being shown around someone's new job, where we're told by everybody about how fantastic and good all this new technology is, even though it's clearly going in the direction of showing that it isn't good. Then we get lots of Ted Talk like speeches about society, ending on a montage of how much better the world would be if we used technology right. It was a silly pseudo political movie that didn't really say much at all.
Stop Making Sense - 31 May
A talking Heads concert film. It's great, there isn't a lot to talk about here because it's just a concert, but it's got great music and it's a great watch.
Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salary man - 1 June
This is a short Japanese series. It was completely insane, it was about some salesman who ate sweets between his sales visits. Everything was completely over the top, every time he bit into anything we'd see a whole montage pf him rising up to heaven to experience the sweet. There were millions of side plots where he was trying to stop his coworkers from finding out that he eats sweets. It was so wacky and a complete blast.
The Dollars Trilogy - 3 June
This is one of the nest series of film of all time. I wrote about it in my best films list a while back, and they're all still fantastic.
A Fistful of Dollars, even though it was basically stolen directly from Kurosawa's Yojimbo is filled with so much unique style and originality that it's hard to be mad at the guy. It provided the basis for all of his other films all the style, the music, the characters. It's filled with so many great moments and beautiful subversion of the western genre. In any western before this, when the protagonist is asked "Why are you helping us?" the response is usually something along the lines of, "just doin' my job" but the response in this film sums up Sergio Leone's whole attitude towards westerns beautifully, his response being, "five hundred dollars?"
For a Few Dollars More, this one has more focus on the characters and backstory, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, is still the same mysterious wanderer, but Lee Van Cleef's character gets some backstory. He has some reasons other than just money for chasing this particular bounty, this reason is of course revenge. This gives that last shootout so much more meaning than others, as well as the use of the in scene music of a clock, it's one of the best shootouts ever, it's so tense and the music is so chilling. It still has all of that classic western stuff going on. Like the cigar lighting scene and the first standoff between Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, where they argue about who would've won afterwards.
Then there's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the longest and highest budget of the three. Everything about this one is fantastic. The great character introductions, featuring the classic, "Save a man from bounty hunters, turn the man you saved in for bounty money, release the man you turned in, then leave that man stranded in the desert, then receive the title card 'The Good'." It's fantastic, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly really comes down to three bad men, fighting over gold, none of them are really good (or ugly). This lack of a real protagonist makes for such an engaging watch, seeing all of these horrible men fight among each other will always be entertaining. There is so much spectacle in this one, including scenes featuring entire units of the actual Spanish army and huge bridges blowing up. As well as that last shootout at Sad Hill, the number one shootout location.
A Fistful of Dollars, even though it was basically stolen directly from Kurosawa's Yojimbo is filled with so much unique style and originality that it's hard to be mad at the guy. It provided the basis for all of his other films all the style, the music, the characters. It's filled with so many great moments and beautiful subversion of the western genre. In any western before this, when the protagonist is asked "Why are you helping us?" the response is usually something along the lines of, "just doin' my job" but the response in this film sums up Sergio Leone's whole attitude towards westerns beautifully, his response being, "five hundred dollars?"
For a Few Dollars More, this one has more focus on the characters and backstory, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, is still the same mysterious wanderer, but Lee Van Cleef's character gets some backstory. He has some reasons other than just money for chasing this particular bounty, this reason is of course revenge. This gives that last shootout so much more meaning than others, as well as the use of the in scene music of a clock, it's one of the best shootouts ever, it's so tense and the music is so chilling. It still has all of that classic western stuff going on. Like the cigar lighting scene and the first standoff between Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, where they argue about who would've won afterwards.
Then there's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the longest and highest budget of the three. Everything about this one is fantastic. The great character introductions, featuring the classic, "Save a man from bounty hunters, turn the man you saved in for bounty money, release the man you turned in, then leave that man stranded in the desert, then receive the title card 'The Good'." It's fantastic, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly really comes down to three bad men, fighting over gold, none of them are really good (or ugly). This lack of a real protagonist makes for such an engaging watch, seeing all of these horrible men fight among each other will always be entertaining. There is so much spectacle in this one, including scenes featuring entire units of the actual Spanish army and huge bridges blowing up. As well as that last shootout at Sad Hill, the number one shootout location.
Good reviews!
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