A Year of Movies

Week 14: April 2, 2010 to April 8, 2010
Total number of movies watched: 11

144. The Passion of the Christ -- It's Easter weekend, so I thought it was fitting to watch this incredibly moving film again. I thought it was visually stunning with an impressive performance by Jim Caviezel.

145. U. S. Marshals -- A great sequel to The Fugitive--and a good movie on its own merits. I wish they'd made another sequel of this movie--I wonder why they didn't. Every year I watch this movie on the anniversary of my friend's death. He was murdered seven years ago--I can hardly believe its been seven years--and its the last movie we watched together. He liked the movie, so in honor of him, I watch it again every year. RIP Joe. We all miss you.

146. Law Abiding Citizen -- It seems like most critics hated this movie--I guess it's a good thing I'm not a 'critic'. I didn't 'love' this movie, but I found it to be darkly entertaining. They say revenge is a dish best served cold--I'd say this movie served it up cold and nasty.

147. Surrogates -- An intriguing story idea with an always (well, almost always) fun to watch Bruce Willis as the cop/surrogate cop investigating a series of homicides. With modern technology advancing so quickly, how long before we all plug in and start living our lives through surrogates? In a way, aren't we already doing something akin to this when we go online? A though-provoking idea....I liked this movie.

148. Raising Arizona -- Just a bizarre movie. The Coen Brothers sure do write their share of oddball characters, don't they? This is another of those movies I had seen over the years piecemeal so it was nice to finally watch this from start to finish. Holly Hunter is so much fun to watch in this. Nicolas Cage and John Goodman are good in this too.

149. Dead Poets Society -- Carpe Diem. Seize the day and make your life extraordinary. This is one of my favorite movies and it has one of the best messages contained within a movie. I don't know why this movie didn't end up bigger than it did--what a truly inspiring movie with truly inspiring performances by Robin Williams and Robert Sean Leonard. Looking it up on imdb.com it looks like it won an Oscar in 1990 for writing, but not for acting/director or picture. Now I'm curious--I'll have to see which picture(s) did win that year.

150. 3:10 to Yuma -- I watched the Christian Bale / Russell Crowe remake of this earlier this year--but a friend of mine suggested I watch the original with Glenn Ford as Ben Wade, so I did. This version was an even tighter plotted movie than the remake and the ending was different (for those who haven't watched both I won't ruin either ending), but overall, I liked both films quite a bit. Growing up, I really didn't watch a lot of westerns, but I'm really enjoying that genre lately and I'm looking to include even more westerns into my list of movies to-be-watched this year (and in the future).

151. The Sixth Sense -- M. Night Shyamalan's great thriller and one of my favorite movies of all time (with a great performance by Bruce Willis -- again). A couple of weeks back I watched a bunch of Baz Luhrmann's films back-to-back and I enjoyed the experience, so I thought I'd do it again with another director (and I'll probably do it again throughout the rest of this year--probably with Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron...just to name a few). Just an impressive movie from start to finish.

152. Unbreakable -- I know some people didn't like this movie as much as The Sixth Sense, but I've always been fascinated by the idea of....the spectrum of people. What I mean is, at one end of the spectrum, like in the movie, there probably is someone who is 'unbreakable' in the sense that they are incredibly strong, or healthy, or good, or some other quality of the human condition--while at the same time, there is an opposite person at the other end of the spectrum. I know a lot of these qualities are subjective--and yet, there are world record holders who are the world's fastest runner, highest jumper, quickest reader etc. Anyway, since I'm also a super-hero fan--I just thought this was an interesting, thought-provoking story, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

153. The Village -- I was impressed with the story of this movie, and like a lot of Night's movies, it makes me think 'what if'. What if a group of people decided to go off into a nature preserve and start a new society without any outside influence....could they make it work/seem real to the next generation and beyond? How would the next generation know about the real world without experiencing it for themselves? I know this movie wasn't as well liked by the critics either--but I really enjoyed this movie and Bryce Dallas Howard's performance.

154. Mission: Impossible -- I wasn't able to get the last Night movie I wanted (Signs) until a few days later, so I decided to watch the Mission Impossible trilogy back-to-back-to-back for the first time ever. I'll talk about the other two movies in the next blog post since they ended up being seen by me in Week 15 -- but of the three movies, I think I liked this one the least. It had some really good action in it, an intricate plot, but I suppose what I disliked about it was (and since this movie has been out for many years now, I don't think I'll spoil this ending) the film-makers took the original TV 'hero' (as far as I can tell--I didn't watch many of the original TV episodes) of Mission Impossible, and turned him into the villain and tried to explain it as Jim Phelps woke up one day and realized he wasn't appreciated for his work, he wasn't compensated well enough, and he disliked his boss. If another villain had been used, I think I would have liked the movie better.

Favorites for the week? Dead Poets Society, The Sixth Sense, U.S. Marshals and The Passion of the Christ are up near the top this week, but overall, another good week of movies. Next weeks movies have some favorites too. Yeah, I know, I really should try to watch some movies I hate from time to time!