Admittedly this ended up being more about my reminiscences of watching Star Wars than a review of Star Wars itself. Sorry about that. I just had to get that out of my system, I guess, before I could talk about the objective merits of this film. At some point, I'll have to come back and take another crack at reviewing this movie. Sooner or later, I'm bound to watch it again, and when I do, I'll try to just jump straight into the review next time.
As I mentioned in the video, this is a rewatch. But this is the first time I'm reviewing it on this blog, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
As I mentioned in the video, this is a rewatch. But this is the first time I'm reviewing it on this blog, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
As I mentioned in the video, this is a rewatch. But this is the first time I'm reviewing it on this blog, so according to my new rules, I'm doing this as a video only review.
At one point, I put this movie on my list of my favorite movies of all time. Upon rewatching this movie, I'm now pretty sure that it doesn't deserve a place on my all time favorite list, but I'm not going to redo that list now. (Maybe once I finally get around to rewatching and reviewing all the movies on my all time favorite list, it'll be time to do a re-evaluation of that list.)
I explained about this project in a previous post HERE
I got cut off right at the very end, but I was pretty much finished. I was just going on a little digression about "The Godfather Saga", and was possibly going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of watching the Godfather saga all in chronological order. But you can get the same information from Wikipedia.
I've kept putting it off, however, just because of what a major project it would be. I knew myself well enough to know I would never be able to be succinct when talking about a movie I had a lot of history with. Which meant I'd be writing for hours and hours about each movie. And I waste too much of my time on this blog as it is. (Whisky Prajer, who knows the value of succinct writing, was able to pull his own project off with a lot of short well-written essays. But I doubt I'd be able to duplicate it.)
But then, the other day, the wife and I were watching The Godfather. (She had never seen it before, but she had been curious to see it because she had been noticing a lot of references to it in pop culture. I was eager to introduce her to the movie. We had to stop it a few times because the baby was crying, but we did managed to get through the whole thing.)
"Are you going to do a video review of this one?" she asked me.
"No, I only do a review a when I see a movie for the first time," I explained.
"Why's that?" she asked.
"I don't know--it's just my system," I answered. I started to explain how it took me much longer to review a movie I have a lot of history with... and then it occurred to me that actually, these video reviews I've been doing lately are much less painful than the written reviews. I just turn on the video camera, ramble for 30 minutes, and then the review is done and ready to upload. (This is, of course, the laziest way to do Youtube. The top-tier Youtubers put a lot of time and effort into scripting and editing. But I've been discovering more and more that there are a lot of other people like me on the bottom tier--people who just turn on the camera, say whatever comes into their heads, and then upload the video. I've made my peace with being on the bottom-tier.)
So... I've decided I'm going to tackle this project as a video only review.
I'll be posting them on this blog as I do them, but just to be clear: no one is under any obligation to watch these. I fully anticipate that these are going to get long-winded and rambling--in fact, that's why I'm doing them as video only reviews instead of attempting to write them. I'm doing these more to get it off of my own chest than I am because I think other people need to watch it. So if you don't want to watch the video, we're still friends.
I'm taking the list that I posted in February 2017. It was originally supposed to be a top 10 list, but then it got expanded into two top 10 lists when I didn't trust myself to differentiate between critically acclaimed movies and guilty pleasures.
In the same post, I also posted my old list from 2002, which had some overlap, but also had 5 movies on it which weren't on either of my new lists.
So, what the heck, I'm just going to take all the movies from all 3 lists--all 25 movies total.
In no particular order:
The Star Wars Trilogy
Peter Pan (1953 Disney version)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
Platoon
The Planet of the Apes (The original 1968 version, of course)
Aliens
You Only Live Twice
Gremlins
Citizen Kane
The Godfather
Casablanca
The Great Dictator
Gandhi
Malcolm X
The Third Man
Psycho
The Big Sleep (This is the only movie on this whole list that I've also reviewed on this blog--see that review here).
Doctor Strangelove
Duck Soup
Easy Rider
Hard Day's Night
Help!
West Side Story
I'm planning on re-watching each of these before I record a review, so this could take some time. I'm also not going to do this on any particular schedule. It might take 10 years before I re-watch all of these movies and review them again. But I will do it eventually.
The first one, obviously, will be The Godfather, because I just got done re-watch one. I'll post that video tomorrow. I'm not sure when the next video after that will be.
I'll be keeping the videos collected on this playlist HERE
I've actually forgotten why I made this list--other than the fact that I love making up these time-wasting self-indulgent lists, and it doesn't take much to get me to do it. I think I came up with the idea for this one day on a long walk, and then spent the next couple days jotting down notes and coming up with this list just for fun.
The reason I didn't publish this list two years ago was because I fell into the trap of trying to explain why I liked all of these movies.
I started to write a little bit about each movie. And then that little bit turned into a little bit more. And pretty soon I was writing long essays about each movie on this list, and the project became too overwhelming.
So I've cut that all out. I'm not going to write any explanations for any of these movies.
For now. Although I may return at some point in the future and do retrospective reviews for these movies.
It's been in the back of my mind to do a series of posts detailing my favorite movies ever since Whisky Prajer did it back in 2006. (One of the disadvantages of my current movie review project is that I only review new movies. But since I'm old now, the new movies I see don't make much of an impression on me. All the movies that really matter to me are movies I saw before I was 25.)
So, anyways, for now I'm not going to say anything about these films or try to justify why they're on this list. I'm going to save all that for the future, if I ever get around to it.
Also, I ended up creating 2 lists instead of one. Simply because I found it impossible to rank critically acclaimed movies on the same list as my favorite guilty pleasures. So I decided to just split it up into two lists. The first list is all my favorite respected critically acclaimed movies. And then once that's out of the way, I just listed all my guilty pleasures.
The numbers within the particularly lists are meaningless. (I haven't sorted out my definitive rankings yet, so at the moment these movies are in no particular order.)
Critically Aclaimed Movie List
1. Citizen Kane
2. The Godfather
3. Casablanca
4. The Great Dictator
5. Gandhi
6. Malcolm X
7. The Third Man
8. Psycho
9. The Big Sleep (This is the only movie on this whole list that I've also reviewed in the last 10 years--see that review here).
10. Doctor Strangelove
The Guilty Pleasures List
1. The Star Wars Trilogy (Yes, I'm cheating by counting the whole trilogy as one movie. But I've always viewed these 3 movies as one entity.)
2. Peter Pan (1953 Disney version)
3. Indiana Jones Trilogy (Cheating again, but for the same reason as above)
4. Monty Python's Life of Brian
5. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (Actually, really allof the old universal monster movies. But if I had to choose just one, it would be Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. )
6. Platoon
7. The Planet of the Apes (The original 1968 version, of course)
8. Aliens
9. You Only Live Twice (Actually really all of the Sean Connery Bond movies, but if I had to pick just one movie it would be You Only Live Twice.)
10. Gremlins
Bonus List:
Way back in 2002, I traded favorite top ten movie lists with my old college roommates on a Yahoogroups email. (Remember Yahoogroups? In the days before Facebook?) Anyway, just for fun, I decided to dig around in my old email archives and pull that old email out to see how that list compares with my list now.
1. The Great Dictator
2. Duck Soup
3. Malcolm X
4. Easy Rider
5. Gandhi
6. Hard Day's Night
7. Help!
8. West Side Story
9. The Mummy Returns
10. Frankenstein meets the Wolfman
As you can see, a lot of the movies are the same. Duck Soup got dropped from the list, but only because I haven't seen it for years now, and it's faded in my memory. If I re-watch it one of these days, it might well get back onto my top 10 list. The Mummy Returns was never a serious entry. It was an inside joke, targeted at one of my old college roommates who really hated that movie. Easy Rider I've outgrown. It's a great movie to have on your top ten list when you're 23, but not so much when you're 38. Probably ditto for Hard Day's Night and Help!
As for West Side Story, I'm not sure why that no longer makes the cut. I think I probably just got sick of it over the years.
"The Big Sleep", based on the detective novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler, is one of those old classic movies that everyone knows about but very few people seem to have actually sat down and watched. But take it from me, this movie is definitely worth the rental.
In addition to being based on Chandler's classic hard boiled novel, the movie stars film giants Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. And the screen play was written by none other than William Faulkner himself (during his Hollywood writing phase).
Not having read the original novel, I'm not sure how much of the screenplay is Faulkner and how much is original Chandler, but the dialogue is crackling with wit. Brilliant one liners are flying around so fast it's difficult to keep track of them all. And Bogart does a great job delivering them as the wise cracking detective.
My only complaint about this movie is it seemed to go one a bit too long for my attention span. But maybe that's my failing instead of the movie's. Like a lot of detective stories, just when you think you have everything all wrapped up, a twist gets thrown in and it turns out the story is only half over.
Still, 60 years later this film can hold its own with any of today's Hollywood blockbusters. If you haven't seen this film yet, check it out. It's one of those classic films that doesn't feel at all like a stuffy classic film when you're watching it.
Link of the Day
According to his site, Tom Tomorrow just put up a couple of his old web cartoons on youtube. I remember watching some of these the summer before I left for Japan. Unlike Tom Tomorrow's biting satire in his weekly cartoons, these are kind of self-indulgent humor in the sense that they will only be funny or convincing to people already on board. I don't think these cartoons will win any converts, but for the Tom Tomorrow fan it's worth checking out.
