I see a lot of movies every year. A
ton. But this year I’ve decided I don’t see enough movies, so one of my
New Year Resolutions was to simply see more. And to write about them.
See, that’s the other half of the equation: I see a ton of movies, but
I write about comparatively few of them. There are a lot of reasons,
but they mainly boil down to the fact that I feel the need to do long
form reviews, and sometimes – like in the midst of Sundance – I just
don’t have the time.
And
so was born this new blog! I aim to make an entry for every single
movie I see in 2010. Some entries may be very short, some may be
lengthy. Entries may take a couple of days to be posted. Let’s see how
long this lasts.
One
last thing: one of my main objectives this year is to rewatch more
movies. I know this sounds like a strange goal, but there are films I
haven’t seen since high school, which means it’s been almost a lifetime
since I saw them. Recently I rewatched Black Christmas for
the first time since the 1980s, and I might as well have been seeing
the movie for the first time. I’m interested in getting a look at some
movies I loved or hated twenty or even ten years ago and seeing how I
feel about them now.
Let’s begin…
#11 Caged Heat
1974
d. Jonathan Demme
This film has forced me to face the amorphous rules of this project of mine. I have two rules in place: I will write about EVERY movie I see complete, and if I start watching a movie under my own power I will finish it. I don’t have to watch one every day or anything, but every one I watch needs to be documented.
But what about when I barely watch the movie? That’s what happened tonight with Caged Heat, a really terrible and boring women in prison movie that was the directorial debut of Jonathan Demme. I had put the DVD on expecting to dig it – I famously like exploitation – but the film lost me really quickly. Maybe ten minutes in. I was out of the film before Barbara Steele even showed up as a warden in a wheelchair, an occurance that barely roused my interest.
Caged Heat has the prerequisite nudity and a final shootout and some other violence sprinkled throughout, but it’s also filled with boring but weird dream sequences, lots of yapping and plenty of crummy cinematography. A guard does get his ear shot off, though, and we see the ear flop in the dust, so there’s that.
Other than that I would never have guessed this director had a future of any sort. That’s why I’m a film critic!