Trevor

That sounds like me.
Sure!

mrcellophane

Recently, I've been watching a lot of Murder, She Wrote while reorganizing books and DVD/BDs. I'm trying to thin out the herd enough so that everything fits on the shelves I currently own, though I may go ahead and invest in some plastic containers so I can store some things under my bed. I chose the antics of amateur detective Jessica Fletcher because I've seen them all before, and there is a nice, cozy feeling to the familiarity.

I've been all over the map with my viewing. Yesterday, I watched Too Late for Tears, a great film noir about a woman trying to hold onto some dirty money that literally fell into her possession. After that, I watched Disney's Winnie the Pooh (2011) which was disappointing. It's a fun romp with some good visual gags and lots of clever wordplay (sometimes literally playing with the type), but it lacked the heart of the original film or even The Search for Christopher Robin (my favorite Disney sequel). There's no real lesson learned or heartfelt moment. After that, I popped in Inception and have about an hour to go. Though I'm not a big Nolan fan, I'm enjoying it so far. The visuals are fantastic, and the story is quite clever. I would have finished it yesterday, but life got in the way.

malazar

I have an eligibility question. The other day I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel and a lot of it really was an adventure although nowhere I looked have I seen that listed as one of its genre. For anyone else that saw it or Trevor, would you count it for the challenge?

Giles

I'm putting 'Grand Budapest Hotel' onto my list - since one there's an actual crime in the movie, someone's thrown into jail, there's a break out, there's several murders/bodies ... and two funny action sequences - anyone got a problem with this? I agree Malazar: why imdb lists this as 'drama' is a head scratcher.

malazar

Yeah, it really has more action/adventure/crime elements than half the stuff that qualifies based on genre on imdb.

davidh777

I think Trevor is generally pretty liberal about what's allowed. In fact, I'm listing Muppets Most Wanted based on everything you listed for Grand Budapest Hotel--well, except for the murders/bodies.

Giles

AND the fact that imdb denotes three of the key words which automatically makes it eligible: "Adventure | Comedy | Crime"

davidh777

BobO'Link

I just watched King Dinosaur. Whew! What a turkey! I must have been feeling generous when I gave it a 4/10 rating! I gave it a 3/10 this time and still feel that I'm being somewhat generous!

It most definitely falls into the *some* "dino-action" category. A brisk 63 minutes of bad "Z" movie goodness that doesn't show the first "dinosaur" until ~35 minutes in (a "giant" cricket) along with the requisite scream from one of the women (who seem to be on the trip to scream, cook, and provide brief romantic interludes). The true "dino-action" doesn't arrive until ~45 minutes in where a pair of our astronaut/explorers get trapped in a cave by a giant lizard (King Dinosaur - identified as a T-Rex although it looks suspiciously like a iguana). We then have the requisite "giant lizard battles giant alligator" scene before help arrives. If you watch this one keep in mind the time it took to get to and from the spaceship while watching our rescuers go and retrieve the pair stuck on the island - they go *back* to the ship for a raft *before* heading for the island with the exploring pair stuck in the cave the entire time.

This was Bert I. Gordon's first film and is fairly typical of his productions. As far as the (very) low budget SF/Horror films of the 50s go it's fairly typical and full of that cheesy goodness we all love in those type films. A copy belongs in any self-respecting SF collection!

Ash Ketchum

On Sunday night, I took a break from Japanese TV shows to watch something in English and in black-and-white. I picked something that wouldn't be eligible for the B-movie Challenge: 'G' MEN (1935), starring James Cagney as a newly minted FBI agent who goes after a gang of robbers consisting of men he knew growing up on the streets of New York. It's a big contrivance to recreate the crime wave of the first half of the 1930s (Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, et al) by transplanting New York gangsters to the Midwest, but at least it doesn't use any real names. It recreates some major incidents including the Kansas City Massacre and the shootout at Little Bohemia but with completely new and fictional characters. It even whitewashes the Little Bohemia shootout by making the Feds victorious in that one. In real life it was a botched job. (See Michael Mann's PUBLIC ENEMIES or, better yet, read the book by Bryan Burrough.)

However, the big achievement of 'G' MEN is its crafting of Warner Bros.' first modern action film. The action scenes are spectacular and beautifully shot and staged and the film is incredibly fast-paced. It set the stage for such later WB crime films as BULLETS OR BALLOTS, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, THE ROARING 20S, HIGH SIERRA and WHITE HEAT. Just compare 'G' MEN to the studio's early talkie gangster films, LITTLE CAESAR and PUBLIC ENEMY, both 1931, and you'll see such a difference in terms of the film language employed to depict action and crime. Also, you can see how Cagney's gangster persona was reframed to put him on the side of the law in a way that audiences of the time would find plausible.

Interestingly, except for the 1949 prologue attached to the film for its re-release, there is no mention of the FBI in the film. It's strictly the Department of Justice. And the director of the agency is someone other than J. Edgar Hoover. I wonder why that was.

mrcellophane

I'm eight episodes into my first full viewing of Trigun. When it aired on Adult Swim, I watched a few episodes but never really got that interested. However, a friend recommended it to me years ago when I was getting into anime so I picked up a copy when it was super cheap. So far the series has built a dismal world inhabited with great characters. The series follows Vash the Stampede, a renegade with a huge bounty on his head, as he lackadaisically makes his way from town to town, hounded by two agents of an insurance agency sent to observe him after several major payouts.

Earlier this month, I watched Wild Arms: Twilight Venom, another western/fantasy themed anime. Trigun has already highlighted the problems I had with the other series which lacks that delicate balance of humor and gravity that marks a brilliant series.

shadokitty

Maybe I didn't give Trigun enough of a chance. I watched the first episode on Crackle or Hulu last year for the Animation challenge, and just couldn't get into it.

shadokitty

I plan on using the rest of this challenge as a distraction. Yesterday I found out my dad has stage 4 cancer, and I'll need something to get my mind off of things.

mrcellophane

Episode three was the one that did it for me. Then there are a few two parters that open up with world and deal with some pretty interesting situations. Also, I'm a bit of a sucker for media that plays around with the western genre.

I'm so sorry to hear that. I'll send good vibes your way.

pacaway

I'll definitely have to find a copy of that for next month!

pacaway

Thoughts are with you, buddy! That's tough news.

shadokitty

Thanks for the good wishes everyone.

Ash Ketchum

I wrote about KING DINOSAUR on this forum during one of the B-movie challenges, either last year or the year before. It's an astounding film, full of jaw-dropping moments, including the highly casual use of an atomic bomb, which they just happened to bring along with them, to solve a problem. I used to see this film on TV as a kid, when it seemed awfully impressive. Of course I was at an age when nothing was cooler than dinosaurs and we ate up every film that offered them, even flimsy attempts like this one to pass off iguanas as dinosaurs.

I once read an interview with Bert I. Gordon where he talked about how difficult it was to get the iguanas to do anything. (What, no budget for an "iguana wrangler"?) So he went to the library and read up on iguanas and learned that they only moved when subjected to intense heat, so that's how they were finally able to get the iguanas to move.

Trevor

I'm continuing my Breaking Bad marathon this month, so I'll have thoughts and prayers going your family's way daily shadokitty.

mrcellophane

If you are a film-noir nerd, one of the problems you face is keeping names and plots straight. Ex. "So it's either Jean Arthur or Mary Astor, and they end up getting a bag of money from either a blackmailer (George Raft? Robert Ryan?) or a bank heist or maybe they are part of the heist... Anyway, the film's called "Dial the House on Scarlet Street" or "The Lady Vanishes at Dusk When Its Too Late for a Detour" - something like that. And its awesome!"

Yesterday, I made pesto and a friend came over for dinner. My brand new copy of The Wolf of Wall Street was sitting on the table, and she decided that we had to watch it (she hadn't seen it before). I'm a huge fan of the film (hopefully for the right reasons, but there is an aspect of wish fulfillment for me), and my friend also enjoyed though. We talked at length about the rhetoric that Belfort uses, and I kept wondering just how much of his own bullshit he's bought, just how sincere he is at certain points. It's also fun to watch a crime film that doesn't have any car chase or gun fights, just avarice, paperwork, and imaginary money.

shadokitty

Thanks Trevor.

Was in the mood for some super hero cartoons today, so I watched some Challenge of the Super Friends. Always enjoyed the Super Friends.

Ash Ketchum

Again in the mood last night for something undemanding, in English and in b&w, I put in a film I hadn't seen before from a film noir set on the shelf. It was called BACKFIRE (1950, Warner Bros.) and it had all the right ingredients:

1) Two members of the cast of WHITE HEAT (Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien) with a screenplay co-written by the writers of WHITE HEAT (Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts);
2) WWII buddies at loose ends, with one searching through all corners of L.A. when the other goes missing (played by Gordon MacRae and Edmond O'Brien)
2) A foreign femme fatale (Viveca Lindfors)
3) A shady gambler based (very loosely) on Bugsy Siegel.
4) Lots and lots of flashbacks
5) Lots of location shooting in L.A.

So what went wrong? The mixture. They didn't stir the lumps out. The flashbacks, which relate to a very strict timeline, go back and forth along that timeline so indiscriminately that one gets confused very quickly. I kept waiting for a plot to develop out of all the flashbacks, but one never really does, so that the characters who should be the main characters--and the stars--played by MacRae and Mayo have a shockingly small amount of screen time. Also, a major character is introduced midway through in one of the flashbacks but in scene after scene, he's never shown, which signals us that he's clearly one of the characters we've already met operating under an assumed name. And there's only one character who could remotely qualify. And that of course is who he is. It makes no sense whatsoever.

No wonder I've never seen this film before. It's one of a long string of Hollywood films that never used to get shown on TV and that have no reputations but when I hear about them I'm intrigued and want to see them and then when I finally do I realize just why they're never shown and have no reputation. (HIGHWAY 301, another WB crime film from 1950, fits this bill.)

BobO'Link

Jaw-dropping pretty much nails it.

I loved how they set the timer on the bomb, run to the rubber raft, frantically paddle across to the main land, and hide behind a small dune only to peek over the top when the bomb goes off!

One man gets mauled by a gator and is proclaimed to be "almost dead" with bleeding wounds only to be apparently fully recovered the next day.

Taking a photo of the "dinosaur" then looking at the *photo* to identify the creature when it's still visible in the cave entrance is priceless!

10+ minutes of *stock footage* to open the film - and it's as good as most of what comes after (but the film makes use of *lots* of stock footage).

They fly to "Nova" in a V-2 rocket, but we are never shown the interior.

Yeah... so bad it's good. While I'm not much of a MST3K fan I'd like to see the episode in which they skewer this one.

Ash Ketchum

Last night, I watched sentai spectacle to end all sentai spectacles:
Gokaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Hero Great Battle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokaige...o_Great_Battle

Made in 2011, it has 35 years worth of sentai heroes in it, including cameo appearances by many actors from the older series, including Kenji Ohba (Space Sheriff Gavan himself), who was in Denjiman in 1980 and Kill Bill Vol. 1 in 2003!

Of course, I watched it on a DVD in Japanese with no subs, only to find it subbed on YouTube while preparing this post:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7hcrl5WrnPU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Not that the subs make much difference.

Great stuff!

shadokitty

I'll have to watch it before the month's out, sounds great.