Year #5: 1968

Hello, 1968! It's nice to be back in more recent times after the last 2 selections. The Best Picture for this year was Oliver! This was one of the many musicals we watched throughout our first challenge. We thought this movie was very fun and enjoyable to watch. Kim had seen it before, so she knew what to expect, but she still found it entertaining. Most of the songs were good, especially the one where Fagin (our favorite character) plays the flute with an umbrella, which can be seen here. Anyway, on to our picks...

Kim: The Odd Couple.
Adam: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kim had originally selected Rosemary's Baby, but changed her mind at the last second to the Mattheau/Lemmon comedy The Odd Couple. This was ok with me - I have seen Rosemary's Baby and didn't care for it. She has seen the Odd Couple and really enjoys it, plus she was more in a comedy mood than horror mood especially considering Rosemary's Baby was about a possessed baby. I haven't seen Odd Couple, so I'm looking forward to it as well.

I selected 2001: A Space Odyssey because it's one of those interesting, strange, bizarre movies that's culturally significant and fun to watch from time to time. I last watched it in high school, whereas Kim has seen parts, but never sat through the whole movie.

We may be watching the Odd Couple tonight, and 2001 in the near future, so stay tuned for our results.

In the meantime, I am introducing a brand new interactive segment to the blog. We would like to know which of our 3 movies this year (if you've seen them) you liked the most. Is it Oliver!, The Odd Couple, or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Also, feel free to post any of your other favorite movies from 1968!

1936 done

Ok, so for 1936 we watched "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and we were disappointed. (To sum things up for you, Adam now refers to this movie as "Mr. Stupid-head goes to Loserville" starring Hairy Loser)

Directed by Frank Capra, needless to say we had high hopes going in. We have really enjoyed several of his other films (You Can't Take it With You, It Happened One Night and Its a Wonderful Life) and this one let us down a little bit. It was a nice movie, a simple story and had a good moral, but we just couldn't... get into it. We felt absolutely no attachment to Gary Cooper, who plays the main character, Mr. Deeds. Even the supporting roles we felt were weakly portrayed and while this movie had potential to be good, it just couldn't win us over.

The best picture from this year, The Great Zigfeld, deserved the win over this one. Ziggy was much more entertaining, and it probably helped that going into it we didn't have very high expectations (which worked to this movies disadvantage)

That's really all I have to say, and all I think needs to be said. We have drawn the next year and our movies have been selected, so that will be coming soon. In the meantime, stay classy.

Year #4: 1936...One freakin year later!

The next year we "randomly" selected just happened to be one year after our last pick. Tough luck on this one...2 really old movies in a row, but what can ya do? Well, you don't have to do anything, reader. It is us, Kim and I, who must do. And what we must do is each pick another old movie to watch. And then watch them, of course. Or do we? More on that later. First, I will briefly review the Best Picture of 1936...The Great Zigfield.

We both liked Flo Ziggy (as we call it - the movie was about legendary stage show producer Florenz Zigfield and his follies). It definitely had its entertaining moments (see: It's Delightful to Be Married number), but otherwise it wasn't anything special, though for some reason we reference this movie more often these days than most of the other Best Pictures. I gave it a 3.5/5, whereas Kim scored it a 4.3/5. Not bad, not bad - overall 7.8 is a respectable score. Also, for those keeping score, we failed to report in our previous post our scores for the last movie Mutiny on the Bounty, which I gave a 3.5 as well, but Kim only gave it a 3.45. Total score: 6.95.

Ok, on to our 1936 picks!

Adam: Romeo & Juliet (VETOED!)
Kim: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

So, the first veto made its appearance for this year (we each get 5, Kim now has 4 left). I wanted to watch the first full length "talkie" version of Romeo & Juliet.

Kim says: Let me butt in here- Ok, so the way I see it, Romeo and Juliet is Romeo and Juliet. I've seen many versions of it, read the play several times, and especially having been made in 1936, I'm sure it won't be any kind of special interpretation. I mean, they're probably just gonna put on silly costumes and go word-for-word from the play, which isn't one of my favorites by old Billy Shakespeare anyway, and I just wasn't in the mood. Of course, you could argue that I've wasted a veto on a movie that could have been easily suffered through considering I would know what I'm getting into, but I'm not interested in suffering through anything if I can help it. Back to Adam...

ok.....thanks honey for that "brief" explanation of why you didn't want to watch it (I got in a quick nap!) haha. So, basically, we're not watching Romeo & Juliet.

Kim picked Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (which I did not veto), and you may recognize the name, as it was "remade" a few years back by Adam Sandler, simply called Little Nicky. Yeah, that's a joke. It's basically about a schmo who inherits a lot of money and, well, 2 hours later and it's over. Kim picked it because it was directed by Frank Capra (who directed 2 of our favorite Best Pictures - It Happened One Night, You Can't Take it With You) and also because she confused it with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, another Capra film, starring Jimmy Stewart. Mr. Deeds stars Gary Cooper, for those who want to know.

We'll watch the movie and post back soon! (we already have it, so it hopefully won't be too long, less than a month at least!)

1935 LES NOT SO MISERABLES

So, hey everyone. This is Adam speaking. Yeah, I know. Don't get used to it. Haha. It's been a few weeks since we've posted, but we FINALLY watched Les Miserables. WOO HOO! As what often happened during our Best Picture Challenge, we hit a little rut. Sometimes it happens. We'll watch a bunch of movies all at once, and then go a month without watching one. If you're one of these crazy people who follows this blog, get used to it. But I digress. Wow, I can say anything I want on this thing, because it's MY blog. Well, our blog - but I'm writing it this time! Wanna hear a joke? What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino? Elephino! OK, back to movie business.

The Best Picture of 1935 was Mutiny on the Bounty, as we already told you. About this guy on a ship who decides things are unjust and starts a mutiny. Things get crazy, men go overboard, a little Gilligan's Island stuff going on there, you know the deal. Clark Gable, by the way, is the best actor in history. Just pointing it out there. Anyway, for this challenge I used one of my big fat passes (we each get 10) because there was nothing I wanted to watch from this year. Trust me, not a great year for movies. Kim found Les Mis, because she had seen the musical or something like that. Plus, come on, it's Les Mis!

We decided right away that we both liked Les Mis and found it very watchable. It kept our interest and was definitely very well made. I particularly liked Charles Laughton (who was also in Mutiny) mainly due to all the funny faces he made in the movie. Kim said she would even watch it again without a problem. That means it couldn't have been too bad. For those who don't know or haven't seen the film (or read the book, or seen the musical), it's about this guy who steals some bread and ends up in the Gallows (our favorite place from Ben-Hur), which is basically torture jail. He spends 10 years there, then is free but has to show up for parole and such every once in a while. He becomes poor and wretched, but some super nice priest guy lets him in and straightens him up into a giving person, as opposed to a taking person. Flash forward years later, and this same guy, under a different name, is now also a super nice guy, but now he's rich too. And then there's this police guy (played by Laughton) who suspects he's this former convict who missed a parole date years ago. Horse chase ensues, and, well, you can find out the rest on your own time. Good stuff though.

If faced with the choice of Les Miserables or Mutiny on the Bounty - it's definitely a close call. We watched Mutiny so long ago, that it's almost unfair to decide. But I think I would go with Les Mis. The jury is still out with Kim.

We already chose our next year and movies, but we'll post that in the next day or two just to keep you hanging!!!

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.