BobO'Link

But that's when the grandkids show up for a week or three. Mine have been living with us for ~10 weeks while my wife and daughter paint/clean/remodel her house following the birth of #3. Yes, daughter and all three kids (10 weeks, 4 1/2, and 7 1/2 - no husband). Being summer, mom lets them stay up *way* past "normal" bed time. I've been lucky to get anything watched besides kid-friendly fare this month. By the time they go to bed I'm usually too worn out to make it more than an hour or so before I succumb to the lure of the couch. Thank God for great-grandparents, who live in town, taking them for 2 day stretches every week! You can pretty much tell when they've been gone based on what I managed to watch. Even then, most has been late at night or very early in the morning when I wake up on the couch and attempt to watch some more before going to bed. While I came nowhere close to what I wanted to accomplish I'm pleased with what I've managed to watch.

Ash Ketchum

Well, I wound up getting in three Bernard Herrmann films yesterday on his centennial. On this last day of the challenge, I'm instead going to see a 3-D movie at the Film Forum tonight--Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER, which is not eligible for this challenge. If I have any energy when I get home, I'm going to try and squeeze in Disney's MULAN so I can finish all my Mulan films. If not, I can use it for the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Challenge because of that friggin' Eddie Murphy-voiced dragon.

shadokitty

Well, wasn't able to get the whole Man with No Name Trilogy in today as I had a guest over today and he had his fill of westerns after the first two movies. So I guess I'm quitting early.

davidh777

Who needs guests with an opinion

Travis McClain

Looking Back

Firstly, I was pleased to actually participate this year. I found June a nice month for exploring Westerns, but I confess I had little enthusiasm for most other eligible content. I really only had one goal: to finally watch Saving Private Ryan, which once again I failed to do. Strangely, I did make time to watch Amistad, which has a comparable run time, is also directed by Steven Spielberg, and is worth no checks on ICheckMovies.com. Go figure.

I had a somewhat ambiguous secondary goal, which was to get to some of the films starring Ronald Reagan in recognition of this being the centennial of his birth. To that end, I opened the challenge with Law and Order and This Is the Army. I much preferred the former; the later was a glorified talent show that didn't really engage my interest. I also finally got around to Victory at Sea, which I've owned on DVD for several years now. I didn't think I'd finish it, but I managed to make it through the last disc in its entirety on the last day.

Here are my awards:

Favorite Movie Watched (first time viewing): Amistad
Best/Most Brutal Catfight: Destry Rides Again
Most Overt Sexual Subtext: The Outlaw
Most Awkward Sex Scene: Bonnie and Clyde
Most Impressive Fight/Action Scene: Victory at Sea; lots of footage
Most Outrageous/Squeamish Killing: Heavenly Creatures
Best Performance: Djimon Hounsou in Amistad
Most WTF Moment: Billy the Kid pins down and rapes Rio (who has already tried to kill him to avenge her brother, whom he killed in events before the movie starts) in The Outlaw; later she falls for him in some kind of Stockholm Syndrome effect
Favorite Commentary Track: Silverado Along the Silverado Trail: A Western Historians' Commentary

Also, speaking as a participant and not making a formal declaration as host, I would once again nominate Ash Ketchum as the discussion thread MVP. I know when I stream a fifty year old Western I've never heard of and share my thoughts, he'll know something about it and help place it in its proper historical context for me. I particularly enjoyed debating the storytelling merits of Winchester '73.

ororama

A good illustration of the proper use of ICheckMovies.com. It can suggest interesting movies that are relatively obscure, but a lot of its lists are collections of the same old "important" movies.

I still haven't seen Amistad or Saving Private Ryan yet myself. Maybe next year.

shadokitty

Looking back, I didn't get as many movies in as I would have liked due to the demands of life, but it was still an entertaining and somewhat informative challenge.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

My biggest problem was that I watched stuff but failed to maintain my list, which I guess I'll be doing for the next couple of days.

pagefrance

Finished last night with the fourth part of Les Miserables (French miniseries, 2000). There have been many adaptations of this classic novel and I have only seen two others, and they don't even come close to being as good as this miniseries which because of it's length (6 hours) can really bring you the whole story. I watched it over the course of 3 days and every minute was riveting. Gérard Depardiu is superb and John Malkovitch gives an understated but very powerful performance. Kudos also for Asia Argento who is hypnotic every time she appears on screen. Highly recommended if can find the full 6 hour version since I'm told there's also an edited 3 hour version.
This challenge really was more enjoyable than I expected since I saw many great films that I normally would not have seen.

davidh777

Ended my challenge by finishing a couple I had started: LA Confidential and Two Mules for Sister Sara.

Love LA Confidential, and I remember Kevin Spacey being a god at the time. My wife mentioned a few years ago that she'd like to see this one again, so that's one off my own personal checklist.

As mentioned earlier, Sister Sara was not a planned choice, but I had a stack of Universal Westerns I had gotten all the same time. I was really looking for The Naked Spur but couldn't find it, and instead of going Stewart or Wayne, decided to go Clint. Kind of an oddball movie, really, but glad I saw it.

I think Inglorious Basterds is the only challenge entry I started and didn't finish. Not sure whether I should go ahead and finish it or just return it to Netflix and move on.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Didn't take long to do my list.

I went heavy on Westerns, followed by WWII. Everything else was pretty much a mix of different periods in history.

Ash Ketchum

Thank you for that. But it's easy to weigh in on the subject of westerns when one has been watching them since the age of two...starting 56 years ago! The western is my favorite genre and I would have watched more for this challenge if I hadn't watched a bunch last year (independent of any challenge) and for the B-Movie Challenge in April of this year. (I also watched most of "Stories of the Century," a series about famous western outlaws, for the TV on DVD Challenge back in January and then finished the series independent of the challenge in February.) Plus, I got into war films right off the bat and each one led into another, related one, so I watched a series of films about Pearl Harbor, Midway, D-Day, and the war in the Pacific.

So I didn't even check off most of the western items on the checklist. No John Ford, no John Wayne western, no Eastwood western, no Italian western. Although, granted, I put those aside in favor of more films I hadn't seen. Part of me just wanted to go through two Mill Creek box sets I have: 50 Combat Classics and 50 Western Classics. (I did see five from one and one from the other.)

I would have liked to have seen a more diverse range of historical eras, although I did get in FIRE OVER ENGLAND (Elizabethan era), MUTINY (War of 1812), DRUMS IN THE DEEP SOUTH (the Civil War), MULAN (5th century China), MARCO POLO (13th century China), JANE EYRE (Victorian England) and THE TARTARS. But I wanted to do the American Revolution and various stories of the Ancient World (Egypt, Rome, Greece, etc.), plus some samurai epics.

Of the 21 films seen for the first time, the real discovery was HELL TO ETERNITY (1960) about the experiences of Japanese-Americans during the war and the true-life combat experience of a soldier who'd been raised by Japanese-Americans and could speak Japanese to the enemy. I believe it was the first Hollywood film to show the internment camps for Japanese-Americans during the war.

THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957) covered a lot of ground, from Ancient Egypt to WWII, and it was fun picking out all the footage culled from other, more expensive films (e.g. LAND OF THE PHARAOHS, HELEN OF TROY, CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER, KING RICHARD AND THE CRUSADERS, etc.). Plus spotting all the gimmick casting (Dennis Hopper as Napoleon! and the three Marx Bros. as various people). Plus the Devil's (Vincent Price) scathing attack on humanity's fatal flaws and foibles. Not a good film exactly, but worth seeing. Ideally, I would have watched this film and then one film for each of the eras covered in it.

BobO'Link

I pulled out all the stops and managed to break 50. Not as good as I expected, but still respectable. I didn't quite finish the "World at War" set but I really wanted to get in a few westerns so I stopped with one disk left. It's the hardest disk to watch - "The Final Solution" - and the grand kids were still up when I could have stayed awake for it. They are still too young to watch that one. So I moved on to westerns and finished with those. I must admit that it took me almost 5 hours to watch the last 2 films (2:44 total actual length) as I kept falling asleep on them.

I'm ready for some sci-fi!!!

Trevor

Ended up watching a lot more than I thought I would. No time to chat lately, but just wanted to mention that a great first time viewing for me this month was A Serious Man. Amazing film, perhaps one of my favorite of all time.

davidh777

I would have loved to have watched more but I'm happy with my challenge. Like others, I decided to focus on Westerns, and my two favorites of the months were probably The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Seven Men from Now. A couple other big ones to check off my to-watch list were The Cowboys and The Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as Oliver! with my kids and LA Confidential with the wife. Also watched True Grit (2010) and some more Mad Men with her, and finally watched my Saving Private Ryan BD (sorry, MinLShaw). So yeah, a good month. I was hoping to slide in Inglorious Basterds and Where Eagles Dare but much better than last year, when the only thing on my final list was episodes of Mad Men.

mrcellophane

I had a blast participating in this challenge. This was my first, and I found it extremely nice to have an objective with my film viewing. So often, I just randomly choose something off the shelf or (worse) spending too long trying to figure out exactly the film that I want to watch. This way I was able to watch the Alexander Korda set I got during the last B&N Criterion Sale as well as a set of westerns that I got from Big Lots. I just wish that I could have watched more, but life seemed to keep throwing me curve balls.

I think my favorite film was American Graffiti with its complex and nuanced characters. However, John Adams blew me away. The worse film would have to be either X-Men: First Class or Canyon Passage. Both felt very unfinished. Canyon Passage had too many characters and situations for me to connect to anyone. As for X-Men: First Class, I probably shouldn't have counted it since the 1960s seemed to boil down to newspaper headlines and a couple funky lamps.

Ash Ketchum

I love CANYON PASSAGE. Here's an excerpt from a review I posted elsewhere on the web last year after seeing the beautiful DVD transfer:

Just to elaborate a little more--I was very pleased with the way it avoided formula and just immersed itself in the details of life in a settler community and the virtues and foibles of people in that community and how it has to police itself. It had a more literary quality than the average western of that time did.

Doc Moonlight

I specifically bought a copy of Peter Lorre's DER VERLORENE for this challenge and planned to build a subset of post-war films around it, but I never got around to it. The films I was considering were kind of "dark" and I wasn't in the mood, so I stuck with more positive fare.

The most surprising performance for me was Stella Stevens in THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE. Although I had seen the film before, I didn't realize how good she was in the role and how unique it was for her career. Another surprise was Vincent Price in THE SONG OF BERNADETTE. I'm a big fan of Price, but never got around to watching this film, assuming it was just another supporting performance in his 20th Century Fox period. I was truly moved and surprised at his final scene as the non-believer who is forced to confront his own mortality. Great stuff!

The biggest disappointment to me was BEACH RED. I had heard great things about it and knew it had a cult following, but I found it dated and not nearly as good as Wilde's earlier film, THE NAKED PREY.

After watching KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK CROSS, I found out that the film has been restored for its 50th anniversary and am eagerly awaiting it's release on BluRay. This is a great film, but the current DVD doesn't do it justice.

I managed to pay tribute to a few performers who passed during the challenge: Peter Falk, Clarence Clemmons and James Arness. I also paid tribute the THE BOOK OF MORMON's Tony triumph by watching CANNIBAL: THE MUSICAL.

Ash Ketchum

I never heard of KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK CROSS. Please tell us more about it.

Doc Moonlight

KNIGHTS OF THE BLACK CROSS, aka KRZYZACY, BLACK CROSS, KNIGHTS OF THE TEUTONIC ORDER is a 1960 Polish film recreating the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. It features some incredible battle scenes and a very complex plot. No CGI work, it was all done live, presumably, with the Polish army at its disposal.

Here's a link to the IMDB entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054004/.

The film was shot in scope, but the current DVD is cropped to 1:185 and has an authoring error. A new DVD was prepared for the 650th anniversary of the battle, but is out of print. There is talk that it will be released again soon and will also be available on BluRay. Here's a link comparing the old DVD (right) and the restored version (left): http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/8410/pdvd000q.jpg

mrcellophane

Canyon Passage is definitely beautifully shot, and I did enjoy watching the film. Dana Andrews is a fantastic as is Brian Donlevy. Also, Jacques Tourneur creates some breathtaking visuals. My problem with the film is simply that I wanted more; it needed to be at least 20 - 30 minutes longer to really develop the many characters and situations. It felt like an "epic lite" and left me feeling unsatisfied.

davidh777

I found my copy of Django! It was like six feet away from the TV.

I did end up extending my challenge but not with Django. I only watched the start of Inglourious Basterds during June, but I still had the Netflix disc, and the opening sequence was so riveting that I decided to watch the rest even though I wasn't getting "credit." Really good film, and after I was done I went back and rewatched some parts. One of those movies I just never caught up to when it was new.

Ash Ketchum

I'm guessing that it was filled out a lot more in the novel and that a lot was pared down to make a 92-minute screenplay. ("Epic" wasn't in Universal Pictures' vocabulary in 1946.)

ororama

I fell far short of last year's total, but I knew that would happen before I started. There is always an urge to try to better your previous high, but last year I think that almost everything that I watched qualified for the challenge, and this year I knew that I would be watching a lot of movies that didn't qualify. I watched more "historical" movies than I expected to, and my guess is that overall I watched more movies this June than last.

The John Ford and Douglas Fairbanks films, Michael Collins, The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Surrogate Woman were all movies that I've wanted to see for a long time, and I was not disappointed by any of the movies that I watched.