Friday, May 19, 2006

Ed or Wood


In the last few days, I've seen a few IMDB top 100 movies.

In order of coolness:
  • Ed Wood (1994, actually #188 on the list, not in top 100). A must-see for all the fans of Ed Wood (of Plan 9 from Outer Space fame). A totally over the top commedy about one of our favourite movie directors. Sorta beating a dead horse feeling with regards to how the movie treats Ed Wood, but hey - he directed Plan 9, so who else deserves it more ?
  • Apocalypse Now (1970, #38). Based on Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, but taking place in Vietnam and much more psychodelic. All the brutality and absurdities of the Vietnam war, an interesting story and well developed characters. Definitely a must-see, unfortunately it's hard to tell much meaningful stuff about this kind of movies, they're just too weird.
  • Goodfellas (1990, #23). This one was kinda cool. It was based on facts, so they couldn't add too many over the top scenes of the kind that one sees in most of the mafia movies (especially in the Tarantino stuff), but it was still pretty extreme at times. This mixture of realism, and occasional overplaying made it one of the best mafia movies I've seen. The characters actually have some personality, not like everyone being "just another gangsta" like in many other movies. Oh, and the action is pretty cool. Definitely a nice movie to see.
  • Lawrence of Arabia (1962, #28). A long (over 200 minutes) movie about the war. The plot is ok and the main character is interesting, unfortunately the movie is excessively long for no good reason. Oh, and the secondary characters are rather boring. I say it's overrated.
  • Schindler's List (1993, #6). Did it really have to be 195 minutes long? Most of the time it was "just another Holocaust movie", y'know the one where there are evil Nazis doing all kinds of bad stuff to the innocent Jews, with little attempt of character development or social analysis of the war or such kind of the things. The idea is to completely dehumanize the Germans, because if they've shown otherwise "normal" guys taking part in the genocide, it could make some of the Americans uneasy about My Lai or Abu Ghraib or whoever the American Army have been murdering recently, and that would be bad for ticket sales. Oh, and they simply had to put the few completely unnecessary scenes to make it look like the Polish were ok with the killing. Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth are the only characters in the movie with any kind of character development, and they're both rather flat. I have no idea how did it get 8.8 on IMDB, I wouldn't rate it any higher than 7.0.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous17:30

    Apocalypse Now! is my TOP 1 movie. And for sure it's the best American movie I saw. Did you see the normal, or "redux" version? The redux version has a lot more footage, but for some it seems too long. I enjoy it a lot more tough ;-].

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  2. It was the 153 minute (normal) version.
    But that's probably ok, as I have very short attention span and I usually get distracted watching long movies.

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