Happy New Year, everyone! Hope 2008 treated you all well, and that 2009 will be a hell of a year! My 2008 was pretty sweet -- graduated from college, of course, had an amazing time working at the student newspaper, made a ton of great friends and watched a crapload of great anime and movies. Basically the only negative is that I am still a jobless bum. However, I shall rectify that, ASAP!
And since I kept track of every movie I watched last year, I figured I should do my final count on the first day of the new year. Note on Nashville -- I meant to watch it yesterday, but I got addicted to 24 and absolutely needed to finish the fifth season yesterday (this is what I spent most of New Year's Eve doing >>). Well, that just means Nashville will be the first movie I watch this year! Yay!
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985): Solid movie about the escape movies bring people and the line between fantasy and reality. Woody Allen's fingerprints are obviously all over this; the characters speak with the wit and freeflowing air that make his writing so awesome. I especially liked Mia Farrow's character in this movie -- as a big movie lover, I really identified with how charmed she is by the movies and with her desire to bury herself in their world. The ending is kind of a downer, but it makes sense in the context of the movie (although thinking about the things that are left unsaid is kind of sad lol).
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): Great western about what people are willing to sacrifice for the good of everyone. Jimmy Stewart is excellent as a lawyer who wishes to fight using the law rather than force, and Lee Marvin is likewise great as a vicious gunslinger who is the opposite of everything Stewart's character stands for. John Wayne is a mixed bag for me -- there are times where he is fantastic (especially near the end, when it really counts), and there are times where his acting comes off like he just inserted the John Wayne persona into a serious western. Again, though, he steps up to the plate when he needs to.
The Searchers (1956): Another great John Wayne western, except this time his performance is more consistent. Many people say this is his most complex role; I have not seen enough of Wayne's movies to agree with that, but the role is certainly more complex than the type of person one would normally except him to play. In The Searchers, Wayne is a Confederate veteran who virulently hates Native Americans and who possibly did some shady things before returning to his brother's home. One day that home is ransacked by Indians, and most of the family is killed, except for two daughters, who are taken by the tribe. Wayne and another member of the family, a part-Comanche named Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), embark on a five-year search for the tribe. The Searchers was one of the first westerns to openly explore racism as a theme; Wayne's character is a heroic figure, but at the same time he is deeply flawed due to his racism, and he does some terrible things because of it (which some people question, and others do not). The movie is by no means perfect (there's a marriage storyline that is just awkward, and there's some comedy that fails more often than not), but it is damn good.
Just for fun, on the next page I made a list of the top 25 movies I saw for the first time this year. Every movie on that list is highly recommended by me, so check 'em all out!
Final Movie Count: 146 (Live Free or Die Hard, Time Bandits, The Hustler, Black Dragon (Miracles), Hollywoodland, Blood Diamond, Animal Crackers, Marie Antoinette, Inside Man, The Fountain, Tombstone, Jurassic Park (Rifftrax), No Country for Old Men, Juno, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Rifftrax), There Will Be Blood, Rize, Born Into Brothels, Eastern Promises, Gone Baby Gone, Hard Candy, The Matrix Reloaded (Rifftrax), Hot Fuzz, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs, Phone Booth, The Dark Knight, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Predator, Ratatouille, Renaissance, Pretty in Pink, Scanners, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Stop Making Sense, The Killing, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rifftrax), Voices of a Distant Star, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Amadeus, Touch of Evil, Paths of Glory, Gangs of New York, Five Easy Pieces, Perfect Blue, Novocaine, A Fish Called Wanda, A Hard Day's Night, Arsenic and Old Lace, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, The Wild Bunch, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bringing Up Baby, Pleasantville, Citizen Kane, They Live, The Terminator, The Adolescence of Utena, The Castle of Cagliostro, The Professional, High Plains Drifter, In the Heat of the Night, Michael Clayton, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Munich, Traffic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bug, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Maltese Falcon, Rashomon, Big Trouble in Little China, Sleeper, Badlands, Johnny Guitar, Mildred Pierce, Shadow of a Doubt, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Hard Boiled, Targets, Away from Her, Hud, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, He Was a Quiet Man, Gilda, Borat, Ikiru, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Boxer, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, The 39 Steps, The Philadelphia Story, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Adam's Rib, Throne of Blood, Ran, Peeping Tom, Clueless, Shadow Magic, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children of Men, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Volver, Atonement, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Iron Man, Dial M for Murder, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Emperor and the Assassin, WALL-E, Casino Royale, I'm Not There, Zodiac, 2 Days in Paris, His Girl Friday, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Blow-Up, La Vie en Rose, It Happened One Night, Mean Streets, Venus Beauty Institute, Dirty Pretty Things, A Very Long Engagement, Westworld, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, Little Children, Sense and Sensibility, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, The Ladykillers, The Player, The King of Kong, Hollywood Ending, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Persepolis, Futurama: Bender's Game, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers)
