Watching Movies Mar 22

Hard-hitting doc about prison abuse and the feeble cover-up by the state government that's just another reminder of how terrible our penal system is, with no fix in sight.

A fun dystopian romance that presents a compelling world without over-explaining itself, although it runs a little long for a short. 

If you want to see one guy kill a bunch of Nazis then this is the perfect film. Cartoonish and ludicrous with an unbelievably invincible hero, but its simplicity and non-verbal lead gives it the right tone to make it work. Characters in these sorts of films seem to have more depth if they don't speak - giving them a mythical stature. 

Set mostly in Orlando (hey, the French Connection isn't set in France either) this is an amateurishly bad movie made by a taekwondo instructor with little charisma. Luckily he's surrounded himself with all the 80s action movie tropes imaginable - pop rock bands, ninjas, bikers, weight lifters, beach-goers, and bad fashion - making this somewhat entertaining with its ineptness. I wanted to dump my wardrobe and replace it with all the costumes from this film. 

Seems like Newman/Woodward were trying to corner the market on Southern dynasty movies in the 1950s. This might be the best of them thanks to the Tennessee Williams script (with all homosexual overtones removed). The dialogue isn't as sharp as The Long Hot Summer but the story is much tighter and the family dynamics much stronger. Often these films are a bunch of unlikable characters, but these are all good people who just can't stand to be around each other. Most of all, Burl Ives is much better as the patriarch than Orson Welles, even though both actors were playing characters twenty years older.

A romantic comedy with the horribly strained premise of timid professor James Stewart being unable to tell his parents that he's married nightclub singer Ginger Rogers. If you can live with that gimmick, then everyone brings amusing charm to the film, and Beulah Bondi almost steals the show.

John Ford's silent epic about building the transcontinental railroad is an illustrated ode to American expansionism that at least recognizes the multi-cultural aspect of settling the west and seems to go out of its way to praise Abraham Lincoln. It's wrapped up in a melodrama about a John Wayne-like hero confronting greed and corruption that never matches the scale of the film. Throw in some corny humor and a cast of colorful characters you have John Ford's first major western, but it's simply far too long at 2h30m. I was particularly amused that a few scenes after stating the film was trying to be as accurate as possible, the hero rides out of Springfield, Illinois directly into the mountains.