Recently watched movies!

[jellydonut25]

[Dr Kain]

[king_ghidorah]

Love Actually-

If you don't love this movie you're dead inside. It's romantic without ever being stereotypcial or cliche. Well, the whole damn movie is a cliche, but in a wierd way it's also not. Usually romantic films fail in my book. They make it seem too easy, or selfish, neurotic or whatever else. Love Actually though...just gets everything right.

[MekaGojira3k]

Rankin/Bass The Hobbit TV movie -
It's so weird. XD, I dig some of the designs, but at the same time I hate that they left out so much. I get why it happened, but I'd love to have seen how they'd handle things like the Giants and Beorn. I forgot how quickly this moved.

[lhb412]

A Christmas Carol (1951)

My other favorite version of the story, critically enshrined as the best one... but I think I like the Finney musical a bit more. Anyway, it's the version that best captures the spookiness of the story (and the great b&w photography helps). It fleshes out parts of the story that are alluded to but not expounded upon in the book, and it's bursting at the seams with terrific character actors in practically every role.

[Dr Kain]

[lhb412]

[lhb412]

The Manchurian Candidate

Again, gotta love Barnes & Noble sales - got this Blu for $12! Great film, and I think the thing I love most about it (besides the fact that it takes what sounds like some right-wing delusion and then takes it in an insane, satirical other direction) is Raymond, as played by Lawrence Harvey; managing to make such an unlikable, unpleasant character so sympathetic. You understand why he's so damaged and you want him to get better.

[jellydonut25]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

^Screw being a slave to TV schedules! I just got these DVD sets on sale at Target:



Between them they've got every Christmas special I'd want to watch (sans Charlie Brown and the aforementioned Life and Adventures of Santa Claus). It's got Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Year Without a Santa Claus, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (Jim Backus lives!)... and it has some more obscure ones, too. Has anyone ever seen The Leprechauns' Christmas Gold?

Anyway, I've already seen A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV, and is it just me or is it kinda mind-blowing that this became popular and iconic? I mean, both this special and the entire Charles Schultz Peanuts phenomenon. If Schultz started today then he would be relegated so far into little-followed but much-loved cult favorite territory. There are such moments of totally un-sugar coated personal discomfort in Peanuts!

As a big MST3K fan I've also watched both the MST and Cinematic Titanic versions of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (jeez, I've seen this movie a lot) and the Rifftrax presentation of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (I can't allow this to become a holiday tradition as I'd prefer to keep my sanity). I'm saving my favorite, the MST version of that Mexican epic, Santa Claus, for nearer to the day. Love that film (and associated episode).

[eabaker]

^You make a very good point about Peanuts. Of course, part of the reason for the phenomenon's mainstream success was that the early comics (those from the 50s) were a bit less iconoclastic, forward thinking, and personally revelatory than what they became, and in some ways Peantus grew up with the baby boomer generation. Although Schultz was not of that generation, he seemed to understand and relate to their concerns a lot more than to those of his own generation.

I think that if Charles Schultz came along today, his work would probably have no place in the homogenized, santizied world of newspaper comics, but that it would be an internet phenomenon, constantly plastered on Facebook walls.

[lhb412]

^Jeez, Schultz - the guy who taught Sunday School at his church - had he done Peanuts today it would be shunned by most newspaper and see print mainly in alternative weeklies right under Dan Savage's column!

I admit, the thought makes me chuckle.

[DannyBeane]

Varan the Unbelievable. I have seen this movie once. When I first got the DVD I watched it. Its been a few years and I decided to pop it in again. My reaction is as follows. Its like a remake of Gojira if only you took everything that was fun and good out of the movie. The suit work was solid but everything else from the story, pacing, acting etc was terrible. I think this movie gets my mark as the worst Toho kaiju movie ever.

[MouthForWar]

[eabaker]

[DannyBeane]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[lhb412]

The Lives of Others

One of my favorite films (and certainly one of my favorite recent films, and certainly my favorite German film - even though I've only seen 4 or 5). In mid-'80s East Germany the government heavily monitors the populace for subversive activities, and one of their best surveillance operatives is Weisler, a man who's behavior is cold, mechanical, and precise - a perfect worker for the oppressive regime. That begins to change when he's ordered to spy on a playwright named Dreyman for the blatant reason that a high ranking official wants said playwright's girlfriend. Such a reason disillusions Weisler's belief in the communist state and his work, and he begins to become very invested in the life of the artist he's keeping tabs on, eventually living vicariously through the life of his charge and experiencing art and romance and other things hitherto unknown to him. When Dreyman actually becomes involved in subversive activities Weisler begins devoting his mechanical and precise behavior towards covering up his 'crimes.'

[jellydonut25]

[MouthForWar]