Year # 3: 1935

So what's next on the agenda? A real beauty of a year known as 1935. This was the year of "Mutiny On The Bounty", which coincidentally was also one of the first movies we watched in the last challenge, one of the first very old movies we saw. It wasn't a great movie but it certainly was good enough that we were no longer dreading the old movies. It did much better than expected, lets put it that way. Plus it introduced us to one of our new favorite actors, the "Best Picture" guru himself, Clark Gable, and you have to give it props for doing that.

By the way if you are interested in historical movie artifacts, the model ship used for cut-away shots of the Bounty in the 1935 film is actually housed in Jenkinson's Aquarium. Really. Anyway...

Kim's pick: Les Miserables
Adam's pick: PASS

For this year I chose one of the original film versions of "Les Miserables." I've seen the musical on broadway, but never the play and never one of the movies. It's such a famous piece of literature though, I figured why not.

Adam chose to "pass" on 1935, and he did not choose to veto Les Mis, so that's all that is on the horizon. Hopefully we'll get it watched in less than a week this time. As always, stay tuned!

1953: DONE!

Well, we FINALLY got around to our 1953 movies, we managed another double feature! In case you've forgotten, our choices for this year were "War of the Worlds" and "Stalag 17" so let's see how they did...

First we watched WOTW. It was pretty much an ok movie. Generally cheesy in terms of special effects, but what can you expect from 1953, right? I'm sure it was way ahead of its time. It was a short movie (under an hour and a half!) which we enjoyed, no hundreds of useless sub-plots that movies nowadays have which make them run well over 2 hours, just the story, told simply. Aliens invade earth, scientist tries to save the Earth, aliens end up dying of something no one really had control over. It was very interesting to watch because you could see a lot of movies that had pulled scenes from it for inspiration, like "Signs" and most notably "Independence Day." I enjoyed this movie because it gave me a chance to reference both Joe Dirt (it aint a rock its a meteor dumb-dumb) and Mars Attacks (maybe to them doves mean war...) which are both excellent films worth quoting. So overall we think this was an alright movie, not going to watch it again, but glad we've seen it and don't HAVE to see it again. The best picture of this year was "From Here To Eternity" and we felt this fell a little short of that. VERY different movies, but the Best Picture winner was a smidge better. Moving on to...

Stalag 17. A comedy/mystery/suspense movie about American POW's being held in Germany. Good movie, well-done, humor and suspense mixed well together. Some humor was cheesy, but most was understated and well-placed. We felt this movie had a "Best Picture" feel to it especially for the time, and it held up very well to the winner from that year. In fact we both enjoyed this movie more than the winner from this year. They were actually quite similar (both war movies with some humor and some action mixed together) but we enjoyed this one more overall. I personally knew what to expect because I had seen it, though many years ago, but it did not disappoint my expectations. We highly recommend it to the movie buffs out there :)

Year # 2: 1953

In 1953 the Best Picture was "From Here to Eternity." Adam gave it a 4 out of 5, I gave it a 3.5 giving it a total score of 7.5 out of 10. To be perfectly honest, I don't remember that much from it. It was one of the first movies we watched during the first challenge, which was like... 2 years ago. According to our reviews it was pretty good, and one thing I do remember is that Frank Sinatra was in it, and he was pretty good in it. I seem to remember the famous scene from that movie (the beach scene where they are rolling around in the waves kissing) being WAY overrated. Anyway, this should be an interesting year in terms of comparing movies. So, with that in mind...

Adam's pick: War of the Worlds (the original, no Tom Cruise)
Kim's pick: Stalag 17

I picked Stalag 17 because it's a movie that I watched in my German class in high school and I haven't seen it since but I remember LOVING it. (yes, we are allowed to pick movies we've seen before) It's about POW's during WWII trying to break out of their camp. It's a drama-ish movie but has lots of good comedy, so I'm pretty stoked. Right now I'm feeling like it's already a better movie than From Here to Eternity, but we must be fair and we'll wait and see.

Adam picked War of the Worlds because it is a classic movie that he thinks everyone should have to see, and it was successful as a re-make (which he actually never saw, but I did, and I hate Tom Cruise, but I will try not to hold that against this version.) I must say I'm curious about this one, because I'm not a sci-fi person, but here's the one redeeming quality: it's only 85 minutes. Sweeeeeet.

The last 2 movies are in the mail and these 2 are already on the netflix queue so we should get them early next week. So as always, stay tuned.

1976 DOUBLE FEATURE done!

=Whew!= So we finally got marathon man in the mail, and decided tonight was the night to watch both that and taxi driver, in one shot. Let's start with...

TAXI "you lookin at me?" DRIVER
Good movie. Dark and creepy, makes me never want to get in a cab EVER. Or run for political office for that matter. Robert DeNiro is a lovable psychopath who drives a taxi and is in love with Sybil Shepherd (and you can't blame him, she looks hot in this movie) but it's not in the stars for them, especially after he takes her to an, um.. "adult" movie theater on their 2nd date. She's apparently not into that. Women, right? So then he gets all pissed off and goes a little nuts, almost hits 12 year-old prostitute Jodi Foster with his cab, buys a lot of guns, tries to assassinate the senator who Sybil was campaigning for (unsuccessfully) and then decides to become Jodi Foster's sweet old Uncle Crazy and gives her money to go back home and live a normal life. Lots of twisted stuff going on. Our overall assessment of this one is: It's well done and DeNiro is excellent, but it doesn't live up to the best picture of the year, Rocky. So lets move on to...

MARATHON "is it safe?" MAN
Another very good movie. More of a mystery/action type flick than the full-on creepfest that taxi driver was. Hoffman is a history student going for his PhD, writing his dissertation on his father who was innocent of some charges that we never really figured out; had something to do with the McCarthy hearings. Hoffman's brother played by Roy Scheider is a double agent for the US and the leftover Nazis, particularly the head leftover Nazi played by sir Lawrence Olivier. Scheider is killed because Olivier thinks he's going to rob him when he gets a bunch of diamonds, and then he thinks that Scheider shared information with Hoffman, so he tries to kill him too. Here's the beauty: he uses dental torture. FANTASTIC. I had a dentist appointment today and my teeth hadn't even completely healed yet while we were watching this, and it was pretty traumatizing. Anyway pretty much everyone dies at the end, just like in Taxi Driver. Actually the two movies had a lot of weird little similarities, but I can't remember most of them now. So the overall consensus is: Another good movie, felt more modern than Taxi Driver and a little more engaging in general. Adam was happy to watch any movie with Lawrence Olivier that wasn't Hamlet (best picture, 1948)

Between the two we both enjoyed Marathon Man more than Taxi Driver, which actually surprised me. We had gotten a more positive response to the taxi driver pick than marathon man. Neither of them, however would have gotten our vote over Rocky for best picture.

Stay tuned sometime in the near future for our post on our next year and the movies we chose (they've already been drawn, but it's after midnight, and I'd rather go to bed and make you wait)

GOODNIGHT!!!

Still no "Marathon Man"

Apparently some punk kid in our neighborhood tried to open up our mailboxes with a wire contraption of some sort and now the mailpersons can't get in there. They have had to call the head honchos in to put a while new lock on the mailboxes for the houses in our little area of the development. Crazy. They didn't even tell anyone this, Adam had to call them and it took a few days to get the explanation out of them, and they said they weren't sorting the mail at all, but they told us they would sort ours out, because we wanted our mail, thankyouverymuch.

Aside from all that nonsense, Adam went to the post office to pick up our mail today and still no Marathon Man. So we had to tell Netflix and they're going to send it again.

So, here's the plan: tomorrow (weds) we are going to go watch the last home blueclaws game, because I didn't get to go to any this year, and I rather enjoy minor league baseball. Thursday I have a dentist appointment at 4 but after that we will FINALLY start watching our movies. As long as we have both movies we are thinking we still may watch both movies in one sitting, but that will ultimately be decided the day of.

So check back Thursday!!!