Overlooked Movie Marathon 3: Week 2

Once a year I devote a month to watching the great movies that I have missed over my many years of watching movies.  That would be the month of September.  I use September as a means to catch up on many of the movies I have overlooked while watching the movies that I typically watch.  If you know me, you know that is a big deal.  I spend a lot of time watching things like Battledogs and Baby Geniuses, while movies such as Drive and The Prestige go unwatched.  September is all about rectifying that.  Yes, I still watch some of the stuff I usually watch (out of necessity this year), but I also shift my focus to watching some of the greats that I haven’t seen yet.

This year, I began the month by flying out of the gate and watching a lot of movies in the first week or so.  Then I slowed down a little bit.  My schedule at work made it so.  The good thing is that I still managed to sneak in two of the movies from the Talk Film Society Top 100 that I hadn’t yet seen.  That means that I caught up on two of the movies I was going to spend September trying to catch up on.  I’ve already listed them in this post so I’m not going to go over them again until I get to my actual feelings about each of the movies.  Next week, I will hopefully be back up to three of them.  Who knows?  I could end up seeing more than that.

For those of you who didn’t see the first post for this year’s Overlooked Movie Marathon, I have been using the Talk Film Society Top 100 as a basis for the movies that I watch this month.  This top 100 list was a list created through the contribution of many Twitter users to the Talk Film Society account.  People sent in lists of the 25 best movies, in their opinion.  Marcelo J. Pico took all of these lists and calculated which movies were voted on the most times.  He then compiled the movies into a list ranking them based on how many votes they got.  The 100 movies with the most votes were the top 100 movies.

When I saw the list, I noticed that there were about eighteen or so movies that I had missed seeing.  Thus, I decided that I would use the list to catch up with the great movies I had overlooked.  It became the foundation of my September marathon schedule.  And I have been slowly but surely working my way through some of the movies this month.  The first week included Pan’s Labyrinth, Chinatown, and The Big Lebowski.  This week included two more movies that I hadn’t yet seen.  Let’s get to them, shall we?

The Prestige

This one was not completely unseen by me.  A few years ago, I had seen about half of the movie late into the morning of the new year with a few friends.  That was only half of the movie.  You can’t count half of a movie as a watch.  Now I have finally seen the rest of the movie and I can say this.  The twists and turns of the movie are interesting, but the movie as a whole left me cold.  I did not love this movie like so many people seem to.  It was good and I would watch it again.  But I won’t be going out of my way to watch it again.  Bale and Jackman are great, but it didn’t connect with me.  That’s a shame, really.  I thought I would love it.

Drive

Stylistically, this is a great film.  The driving scenes are reminiscent of Bullitt in the look, sound, and overall feel.  The physical violence is visually stunning.  The whole movie is visually stunning, really.  It is easy to get into the movie and easy to feel as though you are a part of everything going on.  That is thanks to Refn’s direction, and the writing of the characters.  So little is known about the driver that it is easy to fantasize that you are in the driver’s shoes throughout the movie.  Not that I want to fantasize about what goes on in the movie.  But you get what I’m saying right?  I hope so because I’m not going to elaborate on that point.  The movie was a feast for both the eyes and the brain.

That’s all that I watched for the Overlooked Movie Marathon 2014 this week.  It was a pretty lackluster week in terms of the number of movies I was able to see.  If you were expecting more of me, I’m sorry.  I couldn’t live up to your expectations.  I’m a failure.  Don’t disown me, daddy.  Nah.  I was a little busier this week than I expected and it took up some of the time that I would have devoted to these movies.  This week will probably be a little better.

You can look forward to another installment of this movie marathon next week as I continue my journey to catch up on some of the great movies that I have missed through my life of watching movies.  What will the movies be?  I don’t know yet, though I know where my selection of movies will come from.  I have thirteen or so movies left to choose from.  I want to see some of them more than others and will likely focus on those ones first.  Such as Annie Hall.  You are pretty much assured that I will watch that movie this week.

So that’s it for this post.  I’ll see you next week with another recap of the seemingly great movies that I catch up on in order to fill in my movie blindspots.  In case I don’t see you before then, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

Here are the Twitter accounts of Marcelo J. Pico and the Talk Film Society.

The first week of the third annual Overlooked Movie Marathon can be found here.