Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2015

The Man Who Never Was Review

What I liked: I think this is an excellent example of old movies. It isn’t too long (Gone with the Wind/Lawrence of Arabia). It isn’t boring (Thing from the Black Lagoon). It isn’t sappy (Little Women/Citizen Kane). It isn’t just weird (Dr Strangelove). It has a good story to tell and does so quite well. It is the story of the misinformation campaign prior to the allied invasion of the continent. The pace is much slower than if it were made today, there is plenty of British tea drinking, but I think this actually works quite well to capture the amount of time that went into planning. It was also impressive to see the level of detail that the orchestrators included about the fictional man. I was also impressed by the execution of the token love story. Normally, I find romantic side stories boring, unbelievable, and completely superfluous. This one was actually believable and played an important role in the plot without upstaging the real action. I liked the morse code action, though

His Girl Friday Review

What I liked: This is apparently a classic movie. I had never heard of it before but Netflix kept telling me that I should watch it because it was classic. Ok fine Netflix you win. So as classics go this is pretty good. It comes in well ahead of Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago. When it comes to black and white movies I am more of a Hitchcock girl liking things like 39 steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Charade. As you can infer from the title and poster it is an early romantic comedy which works out fine until they guy finally gets the girl. The premise is the couple is divorced and the girl is about to get remarried, they guy still loves her so keeps trying to sabotage her leaving. I thought the antics were ridiculous and funny. The backstory of the couple’s relationship is also absurd and entertaining. The girl was feisty and saw through the guy’s plans. I also liked the portrayal of the reporters and their different versions of the same newspape

K19 Widowmaker Review

What I liked: K-19 was made by National Geographic so falls in the very very small genre of awesome dramatized almost documentary thing. Going it to the movie I did not know the story of the submarine and so foolishly assumed that the widowmaker would be attacking other boats. Actually this boat was the embodiment of Murphy’s Law: Launched too soon, this early model nuclear sub encountered every disaster possible. Unbelievably, according to the internet nearly all of the incidents actually happened. Also surprising, it is entirely believable in contrast to the series of disasters encountered by U-574. While I was not particularly invested in any of the characters their plight was compellingly pitiful. And despite my feelings about the characters, I felt like their interactions with each other were convincing and engaging. I really liked the epilogue, the acting was better and I was impressed with the old person makeup. I thought that the acting was the best and As a submarine mo