My busy lifestyle continued this week, with me managing to miss out on a couple of screenings at The Russian Resurrection Film Festival but finally getting some time to relax and watching some movies from the comfort of our sofa. Ideally there will be some actual posts in the next week to break up the run of these weekly catch up posts.
Back at the start of the week we had some noir based trouble, we had to remove Shadow of a Doubt from the noir rundown because of a shoddy DVD provided by some cowboy eBay seller but we did fit in a double feature once more, complete with comfort food and beer to raise our spirits after a tough few weeks. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake starred in the first of this weeks films noir
This Gun For Hire followed by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in
Double Indemnity, reviews to come on Tuesday as usual.
We tried out the new Irish film that's been getting rave reviews,
The Guard, but were only mildly impressed. It had moments of great humour in an enjoyable performance from Brendan Gleeson but when it wasn't making me laugh, 80% of the time, I was quite bored, which I blame on the pacing of the script which was filled with many moments that felt completely irrelevant to the story and perhaps were supposed to be funny. Check out the Blondoner
review for more.
We took quite a few days of trying to watch
Star Wars again but falling asleep every half an hour, we can't help but love the film despite its melodrama and massive amounts of exposition. It's a movie that we've seen so many times that it feels so much more than mere entertainment when we watch it.
Jerome Bixby's
Man From Earth has been on my MUST SEE list for a while, it's considered a great piece of Science Fiction writing and after reading the
review from Chip at Tips From Chip I went out of my way to find it. I'm very glad I did, it's a simple film, almost a stage play, with a one room setting and a group of people discussing one characters life story. Some of the dialogue and acting is a little bit OTT but overall it's a thoroughly enjoyable film.
Classic pre Star Wars Science Fiction came directly after Man From Earth on a day of laziness and was a perfect lazy day movie. I'd never actually seen all of
Forbidden Planet but I can tell you now without any hesitation that this was an impressive and enjoyable film. The special effects were better than a lot of CGI films you get now, but for 1957 it was astounding. The influence on the science fiction of later TV shows is obvious as well, Star Trek would not have looked the way it did if it wasn't for this movie. The fact that Anne Francis didn't go on to be a superstar after making the most of her minuscule amount of dialogue and equally minuscule level of clothing is a travesty. If you haven't seen it and want to know more or just enjoy reading good movie reviews check out Kevyn's
excellent review over at The Most Beautiful Fraud.
The
blahblahblahgay turnoffs this week happily consists of a single movie,
Timeline.
Recommended by Ruth at FlixChatter repeatedly recently, including as part of the Groovers and Mobsters
time travel blogathon, the film had enough ideas on its side to get me interested, including being written by my favourite author of the popular novel, Michael Crichton, but I just could not get on board with any of it, I just kept picking holes until I got enraged and switched off. Blah at Paul Walker, blah at Ethan Embrey, blah at Gerard Butler with his own accent.
And that is the week that was. Feel free to share your weeks viewing or your opinions on my opinions in the blah below. Did anyone other than Ruth enjoy Timeline?
