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 :)