This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip series for French Toast Sunday.
In Boston’s grimy crime-ridden underbelly, Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) is high on the wanted list of Massachusetts State Police, who plant a mole, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) inside Costello’s operation. Unbeknownst to the police, Costello has performed a parallel manoeuvre, with his man Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) infiltrating the police system.
Continue reading
August is always an introspective month for me. It’s my birthday month (this coming Friday, in fact), which brings with it a reminder of my mortality and the finite time I have left spinning on this giant rock – I’ve always been a glass half empty guy, if you hadn’t worked that out. Not that I ever allow myself to forget this ever quickening slide into my own doom, seeing as the main driving force of my existence – or at least my blog – is the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I suffer a kind of fractional life crisis pretty much every birthday. This year I’ll be turning 28 which, according to Wikipedia’s chart on International Life Expectancy, leaves me 51 years left, so I’m at my 35% Life Crisis. And that’s being generous. I have a body type and general lifestyle that one might describe as synonymous with being rolled back into the sea should I fall asleep on a beach, and my propensity for cycling on busy roads with car drivers who seem to be doing their utmost to claim some kind of bounty on my head probably means I’ve got far fewer turns on my mortal coil. So what does this mean?
Well, this birthday marks what should have been a significant milestone in my blogging quest. I started my mission of working through four film-filled lists four and a half years ago, based on the notion of a half-remembered dream or epiphany I’d had some years prior, in which I was certain I’d die at the age of 28. I don’t really believe this, but when I was gifted the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, I set 28 as an achievable goal. 55 months later the grand total of films I should have watched and reviewed sits at 1,494, and I’m at a paltry 532 which, what do you know, is 35% again. Suffice to say, even if it were possible in the time frame, I highly doubt I’ll be watching and reviewing the remaining 958 films in the next 3 days, mainly because there’s roughly a solid 8 weeks worth of films to watch, let alone discuss. So I’ve failed the initial mission. Rats. I’ve also worked out that so far this year I’ve reviewed 51 films from the 1001 List, as well as a smattering of others from the various other lists. If I keep going at a similar pace, and not counting the new additions added to the 1001 List every year, I should finish in about nine and a half years. Let’s say 10, and we’ll be including those films added in from now as well. Ten more years. Fifteen in total. A failure rate of 200%. And that’s not allowing for any major changes my life may take between now and then. I dearly hope these changes don’t include children, but you never know what life throws at you. Had you told me a few years ago that by now I’d have a puppy and two rabbits but no pet velociraptor or even a procompsognathus and you’d find yourself talking to a disappointed and confused fellow. Now, I can sometimes be found actually smiling at the idea of owning a menagerie, so times change. What evidently needs to change is my rate of reviewing.
Someone posted a link to this post on Facebook recently. The gist I took from it is basically stop wasting time. Sort your life out a little bit better and you can accomplish something you’ve wanted to do. I’ve never been musically inclined. Judging by my CD and iTunes collection, many would tell you I’m not a fan of music whatsoever, so my achievable goal must lie in a different direction, and that rather glaringly points towards my lists. Whilst I disagree with some of the scheduling referenced in that post (whilst 8 hours of work a day may seem fine for some, my work day is 9 hours, plus a daily total of 90 minutes commuting on the aforementioned bipedal torture device), it’s become clear to me that a better structure to my day – nay, life – will result in a more efficient completion of this list. I’d hope to be done with it before I turn 40, yet some days that looks like a reality. So, this week I’ve made an effort to knuckle down and get stuff done. Granted it’s been a busy week, what with a wedding, family barbecue and an impromptu evening of badminton (I figured the cetaceous nature of my frame could be improved upon as well), but looking at everything I accomplished blog-wise this week I’m quite impressed. I mean, I watched a total of three films, only one of which was relevant to anything, and wrote two whole reviews. Oh. Shit. Here’s what I watched this week:
Continue reading
A Shaolin monk named Lee (Bruce Lee) is invited to a martial arts tournament being held by Mr. Han (Shih Kien), a former Shaolin monk who abused his training for personal gain. Lee intends to bring him to justice, having been recruited by British Intelligence, but is joined in the tournament by other competitors Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly). It soon becomes clear that the tournament may be a cover for something more sinister.
Continue reading
Sometimes I hate that writing is a creative endeavour. I’ve always been much happier with numbers than I have with letters, and the solution to a maths problem is always achievable somehow, whereas compiling thoughts into cohesive paragraphs can often, for me at least, seem impossible. I get near a deadline, I get frustrated, I get moody and I wander round the house scowling and breaking things. So, this time, I’ve opted to cease staring at the 8 lines I’ve written in the past 90 minutes for my overdue Road Trip post on The Departed, and I’m writing this instead. Yes, it means I’m now behind on my Road Trip target, however it also means I won’t have to clean up any smashed glassware later this evening, so there’s pros and cons to everything. Fortunately, I’m on track with everything else and only need to review one other movie to still be on track next week, and it’s a film I’ve already watched this past week. This is a very good thing, because in the fast-approaching month of August I’ll be needing to watch up to 15 films for podcasting purposes, only four of which will be towards any of my goals, so I better get cracking on these. It’s a good thing they’re mostly all films I want to watch then. Here’s what I saw this past week:
Continue reading
This review was originally written for French Toast Sunday as part of my USA Road Trip series. It was also nominated for me to watch by Ryan McNeil of The Matinee, and is my submission for August for his Blind Spot series.
Brooklyn, 1989. On a particularly sweltering summer’s day, racial tensions simmer amongst the everyday lives of the inhabitants of a single street. Central to everything is Mookie (Spike Lee), a young, black, pizza deliveryman, working for the Italian-American Sal’s Pizzeria, run by Sal (Danny Aiello). As the day progresses and the temperature increases, everything threatens to boil over, and does so in a life-changing way for all involved.
Continue reading
Expectations, don’t you just hate them? When you hear a lot of good things about something for a long time, from pretty much everyone, it’s hard not to anticipate good things, if not even great ones. Such is something I’ve dealt with this week, on both sides of the coin. Two films this week have been something of a couple of disappointments in comparison with how great I’d heard they were, whereas elsewhere a film I’d never even heard of turned out to be pretty damn wonderful. Here’s what I watched this week: Continue reading
Hossain Farazmand is a journalist who has heard wind of a potentially great story. A man has been pretending to be Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and has convinced a family that if they help him out they will be in his next film. Farazmand plans to make this story a life-changing event in his career, and heads to cover the man’s arrest and trial.
Continue reading
During an upper class social event, a scavenger hunt breaks out, with one of the required items being a forgotten man, meaning a man forgotten by society, such as the homeless men living down by the river, in a dump area slowly being filled in for renovation. Two sisters, Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) head to the dump and find Godfrey (William Powell). Cornelia offends him, but Irene’s desperation to finally defeat her sister at something warms Godfrey to her cause, so he helps her out. However, when he is humiliated at the event and questioned as to the validity of his “forgotten” status, Irene takes pity on him and employs Godfrey as the family butler, before promptly falling in love with him.
Continue reading
I’ve spent most of this past week watching movies about time travelling robots because, as you can probably guess, the most recent episode of the Lambcast (posting later this week) is devoted to the Terminator franchise, celebrating (commiserating?) the release of Terminator Genisys (more on that later). As such, my regular scheduling has taken something of a temporary back seat, and I’ve gone and lost one of my green ticks, dagnammit. I am way ahead on some of the others though, so if you add everything up I’m ahead. Maybe spending a week watching robot feet crushing endless piles of human skulls wasn’t a massive loss after all. Speaking of which, why is it always pile of skulls in these films? I get that it looks more ominous, but it implies that either pre- or post-massacre the terminators divide up and sort out the various human body parts into different areas. Are there pyramids of pelvic bones somewhere? Piles of shoulder blades? Towers of femurs stacked up like an H. R. Giger Jenga set? Anyway, here’s what I watched this week:
Continue reading
Jerry is a nice guy. The nicest guy, in fact. He lives a happy life working in the shipping department of a bathroom fixtures company and longing to get to know Fiona from Accounting a little better, but spending the evenings living above a bowling alley with his dog Bosco and his cat Mr. Whiskers. Who talk to him. And tell him to kill people.
Continue reading
Life Vs Film 