2011 in Review: Catching Up on Older Movies

I said over a week ago that I would discuss some of the movies that I had seen for the first time throughout 2011 that I hadn’t seen before that.  These aren’t movies that come out in 2011.  These are going to be me discussing movies from before 2011 that I had finally caught up with.  This is going to be an interesting mixture of films because they range through a lot of time and genres.  Where to start, where to start?

Around February, I sat down with a couple of my housemates and we turned on a movie that I had never seen before.  It starred Bruce Willis as John McClain and was titled Die Hard.  I had just never gotten around to it.  It’s a very good action film.  I don’t have too much to say about it that hasn’t been said a million times.  The characters are interesting, the acting is pretty damn good, and it has one of my favorite police phone calls that I’ve ever heard in a movie.  I don’t know what else I could have wanted from Die Hard.  I also saw Die Harder for the first time, but Die Hard is the bigger first time watch, I think.

There is a former Twitter follower who had been bugging everyone she followed for an extended period of time to watch Sweet Smell of Success.  So I did.  It’s an intriguing story of the lengths a man will go to in order to get ahead in business.  Tony Curtis put in a solid performance, and Burt Lancaster cast a shadow under which even the best other actor in the movie would fall.  It was well worth a watch, although it’s not one of my favourite movies ever.  Along this Tony Curtis line, I also saw Some Like It Hot.  Great movie, but once again, not one of my favourites.

I think there were two Stanley Kubrick films that I saw for the first time this year.  The one I most want to write about is 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Brilliantly made film.  Kubrick showed that he was a visual master throughout this film, doing things that few, if any, other directors were capable of at the time.  From the great shots of outer space to the use of gravity to the final third of the movie in which vibrant colours explode onto the screen, Kubrick made a visual masterpiece unlike any other that I have seen.  Just thinking about it makes me want to mentally orgasm all over my computer.

There is too much good in this.  I need to share something bad I watched.  Why not choose the obvious?  If you’ve followed my movie marathons, then you might know about this one.  During my horror-like movie marathon, I watched a movie called Cruel World.  This movie could have had potential, but it lived up to none of it.  There was an interesting story that could have been told.  Yet the acting was so terrible that it negated any of the possible good that could come out of it.  The direction and the specific scenarios didn’t help too much either.  All in all, the movie tasted as bad to me as the cow full of human probably tasted to the characters in the movie.  By that I mean I never want to watch it again.

The final one I’m going to make a paragraph out of is Garden State.  It was a very good independent romantic movie that I quite liked.  Zach Braff did fairly well with all of the stuff he did for the movie from the direction to acting to, I think, writing.  All of the other actors were good as well, helping to craft a movie which captured my heart.  I don’t know what else I can say about it other than how much I enjoyed watching Zach Braff and Natalie Portman grow as a couple.  It was wonderful.

There were a lot more movies that I watched during the 365 days that were 2011, but I can’t write about every one of them.  I don’t remember exactly what I watched in 2011.  I don’t have the time to write about every single one of them.  This will have to do.  I can say that I liked more movies than I disliked.  That’s about all I can say for sure.  Here’s looking forward to another year of movie watching and hopefully another year of good movies.