Media Man

The Usual Suspects  is a 1995 crime mystery written by Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Brian Singer. The film won two Academy Awards in 1996: Best Screenplay for McQuarrie and Best Supporting Actor for Kevin Spacey. The movie is regarded to be one of the greatest films of all time, partially because of its infamous twist ending. Story "Verbal" (Kevin Spacey), the lone survivor of a bloody gunfight, is brought in by a police detective to recount the chain events that lead to the death of more than a dozen people. Six weeks before the event, five criminals were brought in for a lineup, which they learned was set up by the mysterious criminal Keyser Soze. Despite the film being told in a non-linear format, it's actually very easy to follow. The format even adds to the experience of the film in some ways, with different parts of the mystery being revealed in both the past and present. The twist is one of the best I've ever seen. Even though I knew what the twis...

24 hours as of this writing I have just seen Saving Private Ryan  and I'm still trying to decide if it's a good movie. This is partially because it's one of those movies that makes you feel guilty if you were to ever find fault with it and because I'm still kind of reeling at what I just saw. In their attempts at making a faithful dedication to the hardships and bravery of WWII vets and soldiers in general, Steven Spielberg and company have made one of the most disturbing movies of all time. It's a kind of WWII battlefield simulator, complete with copious amounts of blood and gore, effective shaky-cam for added intensity and characters having mental breakdowns as they slowly bleed to death surrounded by a never-ending barrage of gunfire. You know how they keep telling us that war is hellish and ugly? Well, you wanna know how to make that lesson really sick? Just show the Normandy landing scene from Saving Private Ryan and not only will they fully understand and ap...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  is a 1966 Spaghetti Western directed/written by Sergio Leone and cowritten by Luciano Vincenzoni, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli and Mickey Knox. The film has garnered a reputation as being one of the best, if not the best, film in the Western genre since its release. Story A cowboy (Clint Eastwood), a bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef) and a drunk (Eli Wallach) all hear about a $200,000 treasure hidden in a graveyard and the entire film is a race to see who will reach the money first. You'd think a premise like that would lead to a short movie, but the writers got everything they could out of it. Instead of going right into the plot, we have an entire act dedicated to setting up the characters, their personalities, their motivations and their world. This makes it so that we can focus on the adventure through the second and third acts without too much character exposition. The character who's developed the most is Wallach as Tuco, a treacher...