Welcome to week 2 of this lame experiment. This was a weird week. Because i watched 8 films last weekend and only 3 during the week. Sneaked in a few repeat views there.

Here is the list of films I saw since last Friday.

  • The Hustler
  • Carrie
  • Dressed To Kill
  • Frozen
  • An Evening With Kevin Smith 2 : Evening Harder
  • Accepted
  • Wake Up Ron Burgundy :  The Lost Movie
  • Magnolia
  • Four Lions
  • I Am Comic
  • The General

Out of those there are only a few that struck a chord with me, in different ways.

I watched Carrie and Dressed to Kill back to back. And that was a nice little experiment. Thematically, I found them to be very similar. It uses different ways to explore frustration and repression of sexuality. A girl blossoming into a woman and a man struggling with his own sexuality. Then De Palma adds the supernatural and religious element to Carrie and the serial killer angle on Dressed To Kill. Michael Caine was and is awesome.
It was also interesting to see the opening shots of both movies. In the shower, with the women enjoying washing themselves. Hawt.

After that I really really loved Magnolia. I know, who knew? But since it was a big topic on the boards this week, I’ll just link to Patric Ripoll’s thread about it.

Wake Up Ron Burgundy was certainly a weird beast. It’s simply amazing to me that there was so much and wildly different footage spared from that movie. I honestly don’t understand the process of making movies very well. But is this something normal? Does every movie have so many story lines and alternate takes and scenes shot and then discarded? I used to think a script was a pretty solid foundation and almost everything was used.

Four Lions is a movie that while I was watching it I didn’t love it. I really appreciated what it was doing and the issues it was tackling and specially how it tackles it. But over the week I honestly couldn’t get it out of my head and it really grew on me. Sure, the movie is hurt due to the lack of recognizable stars and the first act is not great. It’s a movie that gets better while it unfolds. And that’s certainly true. By the end I was really into it and laughing my ass off. And it’s certainly a movie i’ll come back to and probably i’ll appreciate the first half more than before.

Overall, no movie really blew me away (Magnolia came close though) so this week i wasn’t that inspired. Sorry. This sucked.