The diehard members stayed up for the whole thing, all approximately 26 hours of it. Here's what we watched (in the correct order) and what I thought of it.
While the subtitled version of this movie is about three hours long, you barely notice it. The history, the story, and the people draw you in. This IS feudal Japan, you can tell just by looking at it. Those people ARE poor farmers who have had their noses ground into the dust many, many times before. And the samurai are there to help them.
I was surprised at how much this movie really "had". It was serious and dramatic, it was action-packed, it was funny, it had 3-dimensional characters and character development, it had history and it had beautiful scenery and unforgettable scenes. To summarize: Watch this movie.
Most of Charlie's movies are like that. He runs around in some not-now time, playing the epic hero in a grandiose multiple-hour movie and yells at you "Worship Me!!". (what, you think that's a joke? All those who watch this movie know that he is compared to and shown to be about as good as Jesus in the scene with the leper).
It had a good plot. Some of the characters could have been more three dimensional, but hey, who needs characters when a really big war is going on? This movie is also great for its little amusements, like its 50ies trademarks all over the place (all evil people wear black, the villain is killed in an unbelievably hokey way, etc.)
You should probably go see this movie at least once, for the story, for the scenery and for the unintentional laughs.
Roger and Me tells a story of people living in a system and playing by its rules all their lives; people who are then abandoned by the system. It records it as it happens, and it records the aftermath, the reactions to it by various people, and the effects it has.
Roger and Me shows you the world as you secretly think it works, even though you don't want to question it openly, since, so far, the system has worked for you. The 30,000 workers of Flint were thrown away like used paper towels once Roger Smith decided he could make more money on plants in Mexico, and nobody cared. Not GM, not the Union execs, none of the other well-to-dos of Flint, nobody.
Roger and Me captures this appalling flippance towards human suffering beautifully. From the old ladies driving their little carts and playing golf while telling us that out-of-work autoworkers just need to get a job to Ms. Michigan who can't really understand much of anything outside of herself, Roger and Me paints a picture of what could happen to you, if the system ever so decided.
Michael Moore has put together a brilliant piece of art here, very sad, sometimes funny, and always engrossing.
Election probably made my mind churn away in thought more than every other movie on the list. Given that, it had the most revolting set of characters I've ever seen on the silver screen. Well-acted, yes, I have nothing against the actors, but I wanted to personally give a VERY vigorous wedgie to every character in this movie. Well, every character save one: the jock was a great guy.
Each character has a personality quirk that you'll love to hate. The main character ignores everything he teaches. An ethics teacher who displays the ultimate in unethical behavior (despite his perchant of looking down on other people and their actions). Another has a constant lust for power and achievement and becomes extremely unstable when she doesn't get what she wants (Mom from American Beauty anyone?).
Speaking of lust, this was the movie that kicked off a strange motif seen throughout much of the movie marathon: adultery. Perhaps this movie simply brought it to the forefront of my mind as it depicted it in an interesting way. The best way I can describe how this is shown is that adultery seems to be viewed almost as an "Act of God". Something uncontrollable, something that just happens, something that leaves quite a wake. We are shown unhappy men in their middle ages suddenly swept off their feet by various not-wives. It destroys their marriages (which were established in the beginning of the movie as "close") but the men pretty feel blameless. They pick up with their lives and that is that. Not that the wives fared much better in the movie, but hey, I digress.
This movie also continued another motif in our movie marathon that started with Roger and Me: it was depressing. Roger and Me was depressing at times because it depicted real-life tragedy. Election was depressing because it was a piece of garbage.
Election is supposed to be funny, but I found it hard to get past what they were depicting. Every character was engaged in a self-absorbed, petty agenda of destruction against some other character while pursuing some throughly materialistic life goal. In other words, its a story about High School, high schoolers, and made for High Schoolers to watch. Perhaps they enjoyed it, but I think I've grown up a bit too much.
I have to wonder though, won't this be the ultimate form of entertainment someday? Escaping is what we do, and we do it through the medium of televisions and computers nowadays. But isn't being someone else the ultimate form of escaping? Or, at least, watching someone else doing their thing? Even now, live internet cameras and "real TV" do just that (although I think most/all of these shows are thinly-vieled attempts to look at naked people in the shower or naked people doing more involved activities, but I digress again). Oh, and this is movie 2 on our adultery list, but who would have thought we'd see a movie about a woman cheating on her husband with another woman while in a man's body?
The characters are quite neat too. This was back in the days of sci-fi when they tried to give their characters actual pasts, and have them tie into the action at hand.
Oh, and MST3K fans, don't forget that the star of the show is Dr. Clayton Forrester.
Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever actually seen a certain stereotype expressed "in real life". One of the sub-plots involved a married man who thought he was gay. That's a problem. Solution? Get him a beautiful woman, let them have at it, and boom, he's "cured". While I have heard of this before, I never thought I'd see someone express it, certainly not in a film! Quite a surprise. Hooray for stereotypes.
Blah blah blah, something about Charleton Heston being Mexican, that being signified by his thin black mustache apparently. Stuff certainly happened in this movie, but I must have missed it.
Oh, and this is film noir, so I guess it should count as depressing, but who's counting?
What a pleasant surprise! All you ever hear about MallRats is how bad it is, at least compared to the other movies under Kevin Smith's belt. This movie was actually quite funny, which is all I was looking for. And it had the familiar actors we've all grown to know and love (right?).
Cute action sequences (it'll be hard to forget Silent Bob dressed as Batman), funny comic book content, and some pretty gross jokes define the movie (not to mention some plot that ties it all together).
So let the naysayers say "Nay" and say that Mallrats is too "Hollywood" (and then let them see Dogma, for crying out loud). I liked this movie. Its not one you'd bring your parents to see, but then is any Kevin Smith movie that way?
I do wish I was a little bit more lucid while watching this movie. Even through my altered state of sleep deprivation, I could tell that this was an amazing movie.
The overall plot was straightforward, but I felt I missed a lot of subelty and nuance. The reason I think this is the actors. Heck, the scriptwriters could have been some crackerjacks from "Full House" or "Dumb and Dumber" but Bogart would have made every sentence they wrote mean something, something rich with emotion and feeling.
This film, like Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, you've seen before in endless imitations and parodies. But you realize when you watch this movie for the first time that this was the first time anyone did something like this, and they did it the best. All the hackneyed cliches you've ever heard pulled from this film don't amount to a hill of beans when you actually see it said.
Everyone should see this movie. It really has become part of our culture, and after seeing it now, I realize that is a good thing.
Oh, and Bogart's love interest is going out with him but is married to someone else. I call that a technical adultery
You really start to empathize with all of the patients in this movie, no matter how annoying they may seem at first. This makes it all the sadder when they are beaten down time and time again by the head nurse. Not with physical violence, but through psychological control. Would I say depressing? Yeah.
Still, I'm not sorry to have seen this movie. The acting was wonderful, the story was engrossing, and ALL of the characters drew you in. That's something that most movies can't even dream of doing.
I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on this movie, there was really nothing wrong with it. It had decent action, interesting suspence, and good characters. But, unlike the Seven Samurai, or Casablanca, you've seen this before, and other people have done it better.