Media Man

I was originally going to do this weekend's review on 2001: A Space Odyssey , but between school and catching a decent night's sleep I couldn't really find time for watching a 3-hour long meditation on the existence of humanity. Then, I thought I could do a review on The Dark Knight , but nothing I could say about that felt too revelatory; everybody and their grandmother knows why that film was good and they don't need to hear it analyzed by everybody and a lackluster film student. So I was sitting around wondering what I could possibly do for this week's post when I saw my Blu-ray of Fight Club , untouched since the day I first took it out of the Best Buy bargain bin. My mind thusly made up, I popped it in and was treated to one of the bleakest film experiences I've ever had. The premise is that our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) is nihilistically tired of life and looking for something more fulfilling than sitting on his couch all day and ordering more fur...

My immediate thought after watching  Battle Royale  is that it's a lot smarter than it needs to be from a financial standpoint. No matter how intelligent and sophisticated humanity likes to think it is it takes very little for us to be taken in by art with no value past fulfilling our most basic, primal desires. This can be evidenced by the popularity of such mediocrity as the  Spartacus TV show and, alternatively, Sex and the City . My point in explaining all of that is to point out that if  Battle Royale  was just about a bunch of Japanese high schoolers forced to brutally slaughter each other in a dense forest with guns, knives, crossbows and swords it would've been a smash hit regardless of how little it had going on thematically. This makes the fact that the writers and director decided to make what could've just been another Japanese action film a sophisticated satire all the more admirable. The premise might sound strangely familiar to those of you who ...

I would describe The Florida Project  as Lilo and Stitch  if they took the sister dynamic in that movie to its realistic extreme. Both films are about a relationship between an adventurous and emotional little girl and their older, unstable female guardian that ultimately ends in tragedy. However, whereas the tragedy in Lilo and Stitch  was diverged into a happy ending by typical Disney logic of "all endings must be happy endings", Florida Project almost feels like a slap in the face to that very concept and not just because it takes place right next to the Most Magical Place on Earth. The premise is a lot more like a setup since the film doesn't have a plot or even story to speak of until the last 20 mins. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) live in a dilapidated motel, managed by Bobby (Willem Dafoe), right next to the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. The film chronicles the steadily declining emotional and mental states of its characters unti...

I am of the mind that no matter how good  Planet of the Apes  is nothing would have come of it had the first film not been released in America during the 1960s, a time of massive social upheaval that sought to throw off traditional American standards held by the previous generation in favor of... well, nothing in particular. The film is fairly unsubtle about it's desire to appeal and pander to the beliefs and aesthetic tastes of a late 60s young adult American audience, who were more than likely looking for rebellious media that their parents definitely wouldn't approve of. Thus, when they heard about a film with an anti-fundamentalist message told through the imagery of monkeys, gun fights and women in animal-skin bikinis they turned it into a huge hit and ended up unintentionally launching a franchise. Just in case you've been in a five decade long coma and are unfamiliar with the franchise the setup is that an astronaut named Taylor (Charlton Heston) crash lands out of...

A Fistful of Dollars  is a 1964 Spaghetti Western written and directed by Sergio Leone and cowritten by Adriano Bolzoni/Mark Lowell/Víctor Andrés Catena/Fernando Di Leo/Duccio Tessari/Jaime Comas Gil. The film is the first installment in what has become known as The Dollars Trilogy, though it was intended to only be a stand alone film. Though it was received negatively by critics upon its initial release, the film has since become viewed as a definitive work of the Western genre. Story A mysterious Stranger (Clint Eastwood) wanders into a town in the midst of a war between two rival groups: a band of outlaws lead by two brothers and the family of the Sheriff. Thinking that he can make some profit off this battle, he starts playing both sides in the name of money and survival. The first thing I should note is that unlike The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  which had some swipes in the direction of anti-war messaging, this movie doesn't really have its eye on anything higher th...

Memories of Murder  is a 2003 South Korean mystery drama written/directed by Bong Joon-ho and co-written by Kwang-rim Kim/Shim Sung-bo. The story for the film was based on the unsolved Zodiac murders from the 1970s. Story A group of police officers try to solve a collection of sexually violent murders in the South Korean countryside. That's pretty much it as far as setup goes. According to Roger Ebert's review of the film the setup is used as an excuse to explore and critique different parts of South Korean society during the 1980s, but I never really picked up on that outside of a few instances like the constant abuse the police use in interrogating suspects and a demonstration against then president/dictator Chun Doo-hwan. The characters are well-realized, but oddly developed. When they're first introduced they all have very definable personalities and attitudes towards their job. Detective Park (Kang-ho Song) is lazy and cuts corners to solve the case. Detective S...

A few days ago I made a list of the films that came out this year ranked from worst to best ( https://connorveenstra.blogspot.com/2017/12/films-of-2017-ranked.html ). This week I'm going to discuss the movies I actually want to talk about. 2017 was the year where I doubled down on watching classic movies and movies that I just heard were great in general, which turned out to be a really good decision. However, I watched so many good movies this year that I couldn't bear narrowing the list down to just 10 entries. Thus, for this year I present to you my "Terrific Twenty (with Honorable Mentions)"! Honorable Mentions: Trainspotting: An important anti-drug film that will appeal to addicts and non-addicts alike. Grave of the Fireflies:  The first film to actually make me cry. Godfather Pt. 2:  Better than the first one, but still overly melodramatic and still not as convincing a decline story arc as Breaking Bad. Don't Breathe:  Tense, Hitchcockian horror/thr...