I’m pretty easy when it comes to animated fare. I ask for some funny, some good characters and something unique. Rarely, we get films like LION KING or, really, most of the Pixar stuff. The other companies are hit or miss in recent years, but I had some hopes for MONSTERS VS ALIENS because the characters and unique premise marks seemed to be hit.
My new year started with a fairly big gap in movie watching. I do worry that this may continue as Quinn continues to be on the move more and more, the days of two hour naps and being satisfied to lay in my arms as I finish the last ten minutes of a film may have come to an end. But I can’t complain, because soon enough we’ll be watching TOY STORY or LAND BEFORE TIME or BAMBI and that sort of stuff together. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to see what I can see!
I did this last year as well, and here I am again (on the same exact day of the year, no less) making my movie review for 2010. Enter ye who dare…
At the end of each year I take time to assess the rankings project. There are a couple of minor changes in store for 2011, which will hopefully improve the articles greatly…
I wasn’t going to rank this at all, since it comes in at just shy of 40 minutes. But a few things occurred to me while watching this landmark French film. 1) I wanted to talk about it. 2) It won the Oscar for best original screenplay. Being the only short film to win an Academy Award category (other than the ones dedicated to shorts) has to count for something. 3) These are my rankings, my rules, and I can do whatever the hell I want. So, without further adieu, LE BALLON ROGUE…
Continue reading ‘johnlink ranks LE BALLON ROGUE (THE RED BALLOON) (1956)’
I very much want to see the Coen Brothers remake of this classic film, but I also wanted to see the original John Wayne flick before checking out the new one. I’m not a particularly huge John Wayne fan. I haven’t seen too much of his, but absolutely hated THE SEARCHERS (though I liked STAGECOACH very much). But his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn is one of his most iconic roles in a career full of them, so this is a movie I’ve long wanted to see.
I’m a bit of a sucker for creepy alien movies. It is a genre which fails more than it delivers, and I went into this hoping it would fall into the latter category. I knew very little about it, save for the fact that it dealt with aliens abducting people in Nome, Alaska.
Between this film, RED HEAT, and RED DAWN, I am on quite the kick of twenty-plus-year-old films made in the winding down of the Cold War. THE RUSSIA HOUSE stars Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, and has a script written by a favorite of mine, Tom Stoppard. So… Connery in an espionage flick spouting out Stoppard banter? I’m in!
As a huge football fan, I obviously am aware of the legend of Vince Lombardi, widely considered the best head coach of all time. As a Patriots fan, I constantly hear Lombardi’s numbers as a basis of comparison for Bill Belichick. But I’ve never had a full grasp of the scope or story of Lombardi’s greatness. HBO Films produced a documentary on the subject, and I saw it as an opportunity to fill that knowledge gap.
I wanted to watch this again before seeing the just-released sequel. But, really, there is no way this can still be any good, right? With the advances in CGI and green-screen sophistication, this sort of cartoony, crude piece of arcade popcorn can’t possibly hold up. Right?
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