Monday Morning Quarterback Part III

By BOP Staff

September 21, 2011

There went your fantasy football season (yes you, Kim Hollis).

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Bruce Hall: A brief but not necessarily complete collection...

Apollo 18 - If you hate someone, and you're not sure how to tell them, recommend this film to them. They'll get the point.

Conan the Barbarian - If you hate yourself, see this movie. You'll get the point.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Better than I expected. As long as most of the cast was CGI anyway, they should have considered having Andy Serkis play James Franco, too.

Captain America - Marvel is just pushing these off an assembly line now. I also feel cheated by my education. According to this movie, America was a sepia toned paradise field with racial harmony and equal opportunity for both sexes. I have no idea what Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King were so upset about.

Horrible Bosses - The fact that Jason Bateman is not more famous is proof that the terrorists have already won.

X-Men First Class - Better than X-3, but somehow anticlimactic.

I could go back further but my opinion on Pirates of the Caribbean is unprintable, and if you want to know what I thought about Thor, Google the word "Meh".

Edwin Davies: I spent the last two weeks visiting my parents in Florida, which apart from being all full of lovely family times and all that, provided me with ample opportunity to take advantage of their Netflix account. I watched a lot, and also caught a few films in the theater, but here are the high (and low) lights.




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Hud (1963) and The Verdict (1982) - Two very different sides of the much missed Paul Newman. In the former he's a beautifully played antihero who engages in a game of wits with his elderly ranch owning father, and in the other he is an old, drunk lawyer who decides to defend a client in a medical malpractice case even though no one - including the family of his client - want the case to go to trial. Both are excellent in very different ways; Hud is a great examination of different ideas of masculinity and the appeal and hollowness of callow youth, whilst The Verdict is an exquisitely constructed court drama that is hugely satisfying and entertaining.

Shadows and Fog (1991) - I'm a huge Woody Allen fan but I almost without fail hate his weird stylistic experiments. I hated this one less than Celebrity (his worst film), Everyone Says I Love You and Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), but it still wasn't good, so much as interesting. If you want to see a murder mystery/tribute to German Expressionism and Franz Kafka starring Woody Allen, go nuts, but it's only really interesting for the first half an hour or so, at which point it has used up all of its tricks and you're left wondering why you're still watching it.

Mary and Max (2009) - An Australian stop-motion animation film about a young girl who becomes pen pals with a 44 year old New Yorker with Asperger's Syndrome? I know, you're probably thinking that you've seen it all before, but give it a chance! Shot through with a very deadpan and dark sense of humor, Mary and Max is not a film that everyone will get on board with - I would describe it as equal parts whimsical and harrowing - but if you're willing to take a chance on it, you'll find one of the funniest, saddest and most distinct visions of recent years. Genuinely beautiful and relentlessly odd.


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