2016 Movie Challenge – Page 14

Challenge Week 19: Before Midnight

On May 15, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

In a way, this is kind of a gimme recommendation – Before Sunrise, the first movie in this trilogy, is my #156 and in the 96th percentile of my Flickchart, and while I don’t like Before Sunset as much as many people, it’s still solidly in my Top 1000 at 80%. It’s probably a given that I would like Before Midnight, and really, I’m surprised I hadn’t gotten around to it already. Good news for Ryan, though, as he gets to rack up a definite win with me.

The third part of the Richard Linklater-Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy Before trilogy resolves the ambiguity of the end of Before Sunset – Jesse and Celine DO get back together after nine years of being apart, and now they’ve been together for nine years, have twin daughters, and are living in Paris but currently finishing up a summer in Greece. That helpfully gives the movie a beautiful location to add to the Paris of the Part 2 and Vienna of Part 1. But like the others, Before Midnight is really a series of extended conversations between Jesse and Celine, and sometimes a few other people.

Challenge Week 19: Being There

By Jandy

On May 15, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

I’ve only seen a couple of Hal Ashby films – Harold and Maude and now this one – and though both are highly acclaimed, they both left me feeling pretty uncomfortable. I’m sure that’s the point, but it’s not an uncomfortable I appreciate.

In this one, simple-minded Chance (Peter Sellers) has been gardener to a rich man all his life. He’s never left the house, never really talked with anyone, never learned to read, never even gets his own meals – he just tends the garden and watches TV. When the old guy dies, lawyers come and tell him he’s got to leave, just like that, and after roaming the streets of Washington D.C., he finally ends up being hit by Shirley MacLaine’s car and she takes him home to get checked out by her ailing husband’s live-in medical team (mainly thinking to hush up the accident). His simple way of thinking is refreshing to the upper-crust Washington political elite, and he ends up an accidental and unconscious celebrity, with everyone taking his simplicity as wisdom.

Challenge Week 18: Fail-Safe

By Jandy

On May 9, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

If Ken’s other film Mortal Kombat had me a bit apprehensive going into it, I was pretty excited about this one – a political thriller based on the same book as Dr. Strangelove (and released the same year), but with a totally straight rather than satirical take on it. It’s been years since I’ve seen Strangelove, and that’s probably good, as it gave this one a chance to stand on its own with little comparison.

At the height of the Cold War, a bomber squadron in Alaska mistakenly gets the message to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow, and thanks to all the fail-safe systems built into their protocols, there’s basically nothing the government, even the president, can do to stop them. It’s a nightmare of automated military orders gone wrong, of paranoia-driven conspiracy theories run amok, and the dangers of an overly efficient war machine.

Challenge Week 18: Mortal Kombat

By Jandy

On May 9, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

When I first announced this challenge back in December, Ken Gagne was one of the first ones to lock in his choices – but he chose a week in May rather than January. So I’ve had quite a while to consider his choices, and I’mma be honest, when Mortal Kombat the movie was one of them, I had a moment of wondering if this whole idea had been a terrible mistake! Letting other people pick movies for me? Who knows what could happen? Well, what’s happened has been wonderful, and even the movies I haven’t been looking forward to have given me a lot of pleasure.

This is a video-game based movie made probably before video-game based movies got the bad rap they have now, adapting the long-running fighting game series to the screen. I’ve never played Mortal Kombat (I’m a gamer, but fighting games aren’t my thing), so I had to look up on Wikipedia whether the story here has any relationship to the game, and apparently it does – so strange to me that a fighting game would have this amount of lore, but there you go.

Challenge Week 17: Stand by Me

By Jandy

On May 8, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

This falls into the huge mass of films that everyone who grew up in the ’80s loves but I missed because I was busy watching Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies growing up. When I catch up with these films, I rarely love them the way people who saw them as kids do, and of course, to some degree that’s to be expected – seeing a certain type of film when you’re a certain age is very powerful, and often the films you see as a kid, regardless of what those films are, stick with you in a very special way. That said, I’m very happy when I do find a film that transcends what I’ll call the nostalgia barrier (in the sense that I don’t have nostalgia for these films). Though I may still not love it the way someone who grew up with it does, Stand by Me is definitely a film that broke through for me.

On the surface, this is the story of four 12-year-old boys in 1959 who make a 20-mile trek to see a dead body one of them overhears his brother talk about. Such a thing is very out of the ordinary and adventurous for these boys in small-town America at the end of the 1950s, and of course, it is an adventure – they outrun trains, swim in leech-infested waters, and roast hot dogs over a campfire. But all the boys come from troubled homes in one way other another – one’s father is in a mental institution, another has lost his older brother and is ignored by his parents, and another is from a family with a bad reputation that holds him back no matter what he does. None of these things are TOO extreme, and could happen to anybody, but to an adolescent, it’s their whole world, right? And that’s what this film gets so well.

Category: 2016 Movie Challenge Page 14 of 21

Challenge Week 19: Before Midnight

Challenge Week 19: Being There

Challenge Week 18: Fail-Safe

Challenge Week 18: Mortal Kombat

Challenge Week 17: Stand by Me