Overlooked Movie Marathon 3: Week 4

I’m a bit late getting this up.  About a week late, actually.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s my addiction to time wasting games on the internet.  It’s definitely not because I’m working.  I’ve had three days off since the month ended.  Perhaps it’s the other writing that I have been doing for other projects.  That could definitely be a factor in why I did not get this post written until now.  But I’m writing it now, so at least that’s something, right? Better a week late than never.

This is the final post of the third annual Overlooked Movie Marathon.  This final week didn’t go as well as I had hoped.  I meant to watch three or four movies over the course of the week that would be included in the marathon; however, I managed to only see two of the movies I meant to.  The two movies were two great movies, don’t get me wrong.  They were only two movies, though, and I’m disappointed in myself for not sneaking another one in there.  Oh well.  What’s done is done.  Que sera, sera.

Before I get into the two movies I watched, I’m quickly going to go over what this marathon was, why I did it, how I decided on which movies I would watch… All that fun stuff that I covered in the other three posts too.  I’m doing this because there may be some weirdos out there who decided to read the fourth post without a single glance at the other three.  Why would they do that?  Maybe they like one of the movies I watched in the last week of the month more than any of the other movies I watched.  Maybe they are those people who read the last page of a book first because they don’t care about order.  Who knows?  Well, they know.  That’s not the point though.  The point is that I’m going to give details about the marathon.

I have been running my Overlooked Movie Marathon for three years.  The basic idea behind the marathon is that there are a lot of great movies that I have yet to see.  I wanted to spend a month focusing all of my free movie time on knocking a few of them off of my blind spot list.  September 2012 was the first time I did that, and it was a success.  I saw a bunch of movies that I had neglected to watch prior to that time, and I felt better as an avid movie watcher for having seen them.  I could discuss the Godfather trilogy with people.  I understood what the ending of The Usual Suspects signified.  I saw the racism in The Birth of a Nation and was appalled by it.  It was an unforgettable month of movies and one that I wanted to try again.

In September 2013, I put together a list of movies that I would change from unseen to seen.  Much like the first time I had done this, I felt it was a success.  The big difference was in how I chose the movies for the list.  In 2012, I had taken one movie from every decade of movies, starting at 1900 up until the 2000s.  I changed it up in the second year.  In the follow-up to my first Overlooked Movie Marathon, I put the question out to Twitter about what some of the greatest movies ever were.  Through the titles that were thrown out there by my followers, I chose a bunch of movies that I thought I should see.  And with that, I had another month of great movies that I had never seen before.  I was definitely going to continue with my September theme the next year.

Then came September 2014 when I needed movies to watch for the month of catching up on great movies that I had not yet seen.  The month before, I had decided to use the TalkFilmSociety’s top 100 films as a basis for the new marathon.  I would take the movies I hadn’t seen that were in that list and watch as many of them as possible.  I ended up only watching ten of them in total.  That doesn’t matter, though.  They were a god ten movies in September.  It got me to watch ten more classics that I had yet to see.  I am grateful for that.

And now for the movies that I watched in the final week of September 2014.  There are only two movies to cover.  They are two big holes that I had in my film watching life and two that I patched up.  What were they?

Heat

This is only my third Michael Mann movie, I think.  I saw Last of the Mohicans in high school, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Manhunter.  As for everything else in his filmography, nope.  Heat was a pretty good outing from the Mann.  He managed to make the good guys and the bad guys equal both in skill and in morality.  He got two of the greatest actors to play the lead good guy and lead bad guy.  He managed to get a great cast to round out the rest of the characters.  And he made some gripping action in the final third of the film.  The more I describe it, the more I like it.  But while I was watching it, I never fell in love.

The Graduate

I never thought I would relate so much to a movie that doesn’t speak about my life in any way whatsoever.  Something in the great performances, the interesting story of lust and love, and the music really connected with me and made me fall in love with the movie almost instantly.  And when I got to the ending, I had flashbacks to Wayne’s World 2 because that movie used the ending of The Graduate for its climax.  It was a great movie to close out the month with.

And with that, September came to a close.  The third annual Overlooked Movie Marathon came to an end.  Ten movies in total meant the least amount of movies in any of the three marathons, but it was still a successful month in that I filled in some of the blind spots I had.  That’s what the month is about.  Seeing classics that I had yet to see

I’ll be doing this again next year.  I don’t know what the movies will be.  It will take a year to figure that out.  Until that time, I’ll be writing the other stuff I write.  I might throw a marathon or two in there as well.  Can anybody say Mustache Marathon?  November’s coming up, you know.