Overlooked Movie Marathon 3: Week 3



Two weeks ago, I embarked on my annual journey of catching up on a bunch of movies that I had yet to see.  Before this week began, I had seen five movies that I hadn’t yet watched that are viewed by my Twitter peers as classics.  I continued that journey this week by adding three more movies to my month long marathon of filling in blindspots.  But before I get into the movies I watched this past week, I must once again give an overview of what this marathon encompasses.  There may be people who have yet to read the other two posts.

There are a lot of movies that people deem as classic, must-watch films that I have missed over the twenty-four years of my life.  Two years ago, I decided that I would dedicate my month of September to seeking out some of these movies that I had missed.  I would use the month to fill in the blind spots that I have when it comes to film.  Or, at least, I would attempt to fill in some of them.

The first year was a collection of movies chosen by me.  I went through each decade of film, starting at 1900, and chose one movie that I had not seen from that decade.  The second year, I asked people on Twitter what some of the best movies ever were and chose from the movies that they said.  This year, I decided to do things differently again, but have come up with another list of great movies to watch during the month.

Late in 2013, Marcelo J. Pico founded the Tweet Film Society (now the Talk Film Society), a coalition of Twitter users that liked film.  He wanted to share people’s opinions and bring everyone together as a Twitter sub-culture.  As 2014 began, he decided to poll everyone and see what the top 100 films of all time were, as voted by the people in the Talk Film Society.  He released that list in July.  When I saw that list, I noticed that there were about eighteen films on it that I had yet to see.  This includes movies such as The Prestige, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Chinatown.  I decided that the movies I hadn’t watched yet that made the TFS Top 100 would be the basis for what I caught up on in September 2014.

And thus my journey began once again.  I began checking movies off of my unseen list by using the TFS Top 100.  I’ve had some highs and some lows through the movies I’ve been watching.  Some that I agree are some of the greatest ever, and some that I disagree with.  That’s my opinion though.  And if you’re reading this, you want to know my opinion.  So here are the three movies I caught up with this week.

Annie Hall
There are parts of this movie that I loved.  The character of Annie Hall.  Oh man, I fell for her hard.  I adore that character and want to do anything for her.  I liked the fourth wall breaking stuff.  The scene in the line for the movie theater.  That was some great stuff.  But a lot of the movie fell flat for me and I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it was the overly Jewish nature of the comedy coming from Woody Allen.  Since I’m not Jewish, it didn’t connect with me as much as it would other people.  That’s the only thing I can think of.  It sounds mean but isn’t meant to be.

Before Sunrise
A movie that is purely dialogue is not something that I imagined myself enjoying too much.  If you know me, I like action scenes in my movies.  I don’t mean action movie action.  Just things happening.  Movement and stuff.  I like things to happen.  But… When the dialogue is as good as it is in Before Sunrise, I can forgive the fact that they do a lot while not really doing anything.  They spend the entire movie talking to each other and I was enthralled the whole time.  It was fantastic work by the writers, director, and actors to make the movie as good as it was.  This one is definitely a highlight of the month.

Persona
I’m still not entirely clear about how I feel when it comes to this movie.  It’s hard to put into words my thoughts when it comes to it.  I had a big paragraph but it didn’t make sense so I scrapped it and wrote this in its place instead.  I’m not sure I loved the movie.  I’m not sure I didn’t.  It was an experience like almost no other, though.

So, there’s one week left in September and I have nine more movies in the TFS Top 100 that I have yet to see.  I won’t be watching all nine of them this week, but I’m sure I could get a good three, four, or maybe even five of them watched.  It’s just a matter of which ones I will choose and which ones I will not.

Next week, you will find out what the final batch of movies in my third annual Overlooked Movie Marathon will be.  I’ll find out what they are sometime during this week.  I’ll see you next week when we’ll both discover what the movies are.  See you then.

Comments

  1. Brittani BurnhamSeptember 24, 2014 at 8:50 AM

    Nice reviews! I liked Persona, but you're right. It's kind of hard to put it into words. I'm not even 100% sure if I understood the film.

    ReplyDelete

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