Day 110: Life Is Beautiful (1997)

Movie #70 – Life Is Beautiful (1997) - 116 min, cert PG.

Guido Orefice is an Italian Jew. In 1939, just before the start of Second World War, he meets a pretty young woman named Dora, and uses his zany sense of humour to win her heart. Five or six years later, just before the end of the war, they are married with a son. They are rounded up and sent to a Nazi death camp where Guido tries to hide the horrific truth of what is happening to them from his son. He uses the same sense of humour to pretend it is all some kind of game.

This was very much a film of two halves. The first half of the film deals with the way Guido woos Dora, and then the remainder takes place in the camp. I found the first half rather dull. About forty minutes into it I very nearly turned it off. If I hadn’t been watching it for my 250 Challenge then I probably would have done. And that would have been a shame because I would have missed the second, much better, half. I would rather have seen much less of the romance at the start – half an hour would have been ample. Then that extra running time could have been used in the camp scenes, which I wanted to see more of.

I would have liked to see more of Dora in the camp. She seemed to pop up occasionally, just to give a reaction to Guido’s latest antic, and then disappear again. This is a woman who effectively volunteered for the camp. She’s not Jewish, so she didn’t need to be there. She went to be near her family, only to be separated from them upon arrival and never see them. I wanted to see more of what she was going through.

Score – 7/10. The first half was dull. The second was good, but could have been better. So 70 films in, my top ten looks much as it did ten films ago, except LA Confidential has come in at No 8, dropping Memento off the bottom.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       Forrest Gump (1994)

4.       Amelie (2001)

5.       Fight Club (1999)

6.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

7.       Toy Story 3 (2010)

8.      The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

9.       L.A. Confidential (1997)

10.   WALL-E (2008)

Next up is Back to the Future. A time-travel paradox movie done really well. The franchise lost its way a bit in the sequels, but the original is still a great film.

Day 109: Chinatown (1974)

Movie #69 – Chinatown (1974) - 130 min, cert 15.

J.J. Giddes (Jack Nicholson) is a private investigator in LA. He is hired by a woman to investigate her husband whom she believes is having an affair. Giddes finds evidence of the affair only to discover that his client was an imposter and the press have now got hold of his photographs. He soon becomes embroiled in a complex plot that he gradually pieces together as the film progresses.

This is Nicholson’s fourth appearance in the list, and his fourth fantastic performance. A good job too, because he’s in every scene.

I started watching this yesterday, but was too tired and kept nodding off, and this is not the sort of film that forgives such inattention, so I gave up after 40 minutes. When I picked it up tonight, I started again from the top and I’m glad I did. The plot is complex, and if you still want to know what’s going on at the end, then you need to have been concentrating for the last two hours.

I was a little disappointed by the ending. I believe Roman Polanski made this movie not long after his wife was murdered, so he wasn’t in a very happy place when he made this, and it shows in the rather bleak ending.

Score – 7/10. A decent detective yarn, with a solid performance from Nicholson. The plot was perhaps a little too intricate, and the ending too downbeat for my taste.

Next up is Life Is Beautiful, yet another Holocaust movie, but a slightly more light-hearted approach if such a thing is possible.

Day 107: Modern Times (1936)

Movie #68 – Modern Times (1936) - 87 min, cert U.

Charlie Chaplin is a factory worker, but the tedium of the work drives him to a mental breakdown and he loses his job. He meets a pretty young homeless girl. He gets arrested and thrown in jail. He gets various jobs which he can’t hang on to, etc., etc.

‘You'll never laugh as long and as loud again as long as you live! The laughs come so fast and so furious you'll wish it would end before you collapse!’ – That was the tagline when it first came out. The only part of this I agree with is ‘you’ll wish it would end’. I like a comedy that’s witty and clever. There is no wit in this. Never has the word witless been more appropriate for a film. No intelligence is required to watch this movie. It is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the audience. It is the 1930s comedic equivalent of Rik and Ade hitting each other with frying pans in Bottom.

At least I could look back on City Lights and think of one redeeming scene. I’ve tried to do that with this movie and can’t think of a single one. This was the last ‘silent’ movie Chaplin ever made, and he really shouldn’t have bothered.

Score – 1/10 and I’m being generous. Truly awful.

Next up is Chinatown. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen this movie or not. I’ve a feeling that I have, but I can’t remember anything about it. I’ll have to see if it looks familiar.

Day 104: L. A. Confidential (1997)

Movie #67 – L.A. Confidential (1997) - 138 min, cert 18.

At the start of the movie we are introduced to three LA cops. There’s Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) who acts as an advisor to a hit TV cop show, and takes bungs from a tabloid magazine editor to make high profile drug busts so they can get the scoop. Then there’s Bud White (Russell Crowe) a cop who’s handy with his fists, and not averse to bending a few rules to get his man. Lastly, there’s Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) a straight ambitious cop with high ideals who wants to do everything by the book and hates police corruption. A series of killings around the city gets all three men involved for different reasons. The trail of corruption leads right to the top, and the three men have to work together to see justice done.

I’ve simplified the plot into about two pretty generic lines there. If I tried to be more specific, I’d have to write a couple of pages, because the plot is very involved. I remember having to watch this film two or three times before I really began to understand who had done what to who and why. But it’s undoubtedly worth it. The characters are interesting and extremely well portrayed by the principal cast members. Overall it’s an excellent thriller. It does demand your complete attention to keep track of the twist and turns of the plot, but it’s well worth it.

Score – 10/10. I loved it when I first saw it, and love it just as much now.

Next up is Modern Times. More Charlie bloody Chaplin. Great.

Day 103: The Third Man (1949)

Movie #66 – The Third Man (1949) - 104 min, cert PG.

Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna to stay with his friend Harry Lime. On his arrival he learns that his friend has recently been killed in a road accident. His suspicions are aroused when he discovers that the driver of the car was Harry’s own driver, and that the two passers-by who carried the body to the side of the road happened to be Harry’s friend and doctor. When another witness says he saw a third man that no one else has mentioned, Holly starts to investigate, and he doesn’t like what he finds.

This is another one of those movies that are seen as classics by the film buffs, but are somewhat lost on me. I found it hard to concentrate on what was going on, because I didn’t really care about any of the characters. I also found it a little disjointed and difficult to follow. Martins spends the first half of the film looking for the third man, then after Harry Lime turns up alive and well, he forgets about this and starts looking for him instead. We are never told who the third man is. I imagine we are supposed to assume it was Lime himself, but it isn’t made clear. I also thought the chase in the sewers went on for far too long at the end. I get to the end and thought – what the hell was all that about?

Score – 2/10. I didn’t understand it, and I don’t care enough about it to watch it again.

Next up is L.A. Confidential, a really good ‘one good cop in a corrupt police force’ movie. It’s a long time since I last saw it, but I know I like it and I own the DVD.

Day 101: Black Swan (2010)

Movie #65 – Black Swan (2010) - 108 min, cert 15.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina with a New York ballet company. The director is casting for his new show – a modern reworking of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – and the lead part of Swan Queen is up for grabs because the main dancer within the company is retiring. Nina is desperate to land the role, just like everyone else, and she is technically the best dancer. However, the role requires the dancer to change personalities part way through from White Swan to Black Swan, and this latter part requires much more freedom and sexuality. Nina’s precision and grace are perfect for the White Swan, but not for the Black Swan. A new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), is much better suited for this part, but Nina gets given the role anyway. The continuous pressure from the director, her overbearing mother, and the other dancers becomes too much, and she begins to suffer a mental breakdown, becoming paranoid that Lily is trying to steal the lead part from her.

This is a very dark film. I discovered after watching it that the director, Darren Aronofsky, was also responsible for Requiem for a Dream which I watched last week, and I can see the similarities. Both films deal with lives that are spiralling out of control. With Requiem it was generally clear when we were looking at the world through the skewed mind of the character, and when we were not. In this film, however, we are always looking at things from Nina’s point of view, and that can make it very hard to tell just what is real and what is paranoid delusion. But then that is probably Aronofsky’s intention. He wants it to seem very real to the audience, just as it seems real to Nina. Only at the very end do you really start to piece together what was real and what was not.

Overall, I liked it. It was dark and edgy and difficult to watch at times, much like Requiem for a Dream, but that helps make it memorable. I like films that are not instantly forgettable.

Score – 8/10

Next up is The Third Man. Technically, at some point during the evening, this climbed above Black Swan, so I am actually stepping back a place to watch it. Anyway, I don’t really know much about it. I believe it’s some sort of black & white crime thriller. Film noir, perhaps?

Day 100: Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Movie #64 – Reservoir Dogs (1992) - 99 min, cert 18.

Six criminals have been recruited for a diamond heist by a crime boss and his son. They don’t know each other, and to prevent them being able to identify each other they have all been assigned colour aliases – White, Blue, Pink, Orange, Brown & Blonde. The heist has just happened but has gone terribly wrong. Those gang members who have managed to get away rendezvous at an abandoned warehouse and try to work out what went wrong. What actually went wrong was that one of them, Mr Orange (Tim Roth), is an undercover cop. He was shot in the stomach trying to get away, has been brought back by Mr White (Harvey Keitel) and now lies in a pool of blood in the corner, waiting for the boss to arrive so the police can come in and arrest them all.

This was Quentin Tarantino’s first feature either as a writer or a director, and as debut’s go, it’s pretty extraordinary. The set up is unusual. It’s about a jewel heist, only it isn’t about the heist itself. It’s about the aftermath, when they’re all pointing fingers at each other looking for someone to blame for the fiasco that has just taken place. The cast is quite impressive for a debut movie as well – Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi & Lawrence Tierney. Apparently it was Keitel’s involvement as producer that helped bring the big names in.

It is everything you would expect of a Tarantino film – a soundtrack full of obscure seventies pop, fast-paced, expletive-heavy dialogue, a blasé attitude to extreme violence. If you like Pulp Fiction, you’ll probably like this, but perhaps not quite a much.

Score – 8/10. I like Tarantino’s style, and this is typical of it.

Next up is Black Swan, unless it drops any further before I get a chance to watch it.

Day 99: Das Boot (1981)

Movie #63 – Das Boot: The director’s cut (1981) - 209 min, cert 12.

The movie follows a German U-boat and its crew on a tour of duty in the North Atlantic during World War II.

The version I watched was also dubbed into English rather than subtitled. It was also the director’s cut, which is 60 minutes longer than the version that was originally released in the cinema. This takes it up to an epic 3 hours 29 minutes which I had to watch in two sittings. It still kept my attention though. I watched the first hour in one sitting, but didn’t expect to finish it on the next one, so it’s a testament to the movie that I didn’t want to stop it again until the finish.

It’s an indication of a well-made film that you really find yourself rooting for the crew of this particular u-boat, even though they were the enemy at the time, and shooting torpedoes at British ships. But the director cleverly keeps politics absent from the goings on within the boat, so you become more interested in the individual characters on board than you do with the nation that they represent.

Although it is clearly a very claustrophobic setting to have so many men squashed into such a confined space for so long, this isn’t the overwhelming impression. The submariners all seem quite comfortable with this, with the possible exception of the journalist who is on his first u-boat tour to write an account for propaganda purposes. No, when they’re not in combat it’s their frustration at being sidelined, and when they are it’s the unbearable tension of having a stand around in total silence, waiting for the inevitable depth charges that will try and shake the boat apart.

The terribly ironic ending leaves you unsure whether to cheer or cry.

Score: 8/10. Very well made, but this version was too long, and I’m not sure whether the original version would have been too incomplete.

Next up is currently Black Swan, although because it’s a brand new film, still doing the rounds at the cinemas, it’s tending to move around the list quite a lot. It looks OK from the trailers I’ve seen on TV, but again it’s not a film I would generally have chosen to go and see.

(later) Oh no, hang on, Black Swan has just dropped another place, like I said, it’s still moving around quite a lot. So it’s Reservoir Dogs next instead. This is a really good film that I used to have on VHS, but have never got round to replacing on DVD.

Day 96: Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Movie #62 – Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 102 min, cert 18.

Four people from Coney Island have their own addictions. There’s Harry and his business partner Tyrone who inject heroin, Harry’s girlfriend Marion who snorts coke, and Harry’s aging mother Sara whose vices are TV and sugar. Thinking she’s going to be on TV, Sara wants to lose weight so she gets some diet pills from a doctor. These turn out to be a combination of uppers and downers and soon she is as much a drug addict as the others. The mood of the film gradually changes as the characters’ highs become shorter, and the periods between the highs become longer and more desperate and each character spirals towards their own doom.

Wow. When I first saw Trainspotting, I thought it was a pretty hard-hitting drugs movie which showed the consequences of drug-taking in a pretty harsh light. Well, Requiem for a Dream makes Trainspotting look like more fun than a trip to Disneyland by comparison. It starts off fairly slowly, introducing the four main players, and telling us the hopes and aspirations for the future. Then the drugs start to take hold, and all of that goes out the window. Trainspotting at least had a feelgood ending, where the lead character eventually gets clean and moves on with his life. You get none of that here. These guys are on a fast train to hell, and nobody’s getting off halfway.

I didn’t really notice the soundtrack during the first half of the movie, but as the film goes on, the score becomes more and more pervasive. Like the drugs, it takes over the scenes until it becomes constant and unremitting, but unlike the drugs, in a good way.

Score – I was originally only going to give this a 6 or 7, but the more I look back on it, the more I realize that it was actually better than I was giving it credit for, so 8/10.

Next up is Das Boot. I’ve not seen this before, but the version I have gotten hold of appears to be the Director’s Cut which adds an entire hour to the running time. I hope this doesn’t spoil it.

Day 95: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Movie #61 – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - 108 min, cert 15.

Joel (Jim Carrey) has had a fight with his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet). He goes to see her but finds she doesn’t appear to remember him. He discovers she has had him removed from her memory using a new scientific technique. He applies to have the same thing done to remove her from his own memory, but part way through the procedure he tries to change his mind. We then follow him as he runs through his own brain, leaping disorientatingly from one memory to another, desperately trying to hang on to any one of them.

I like weird and imaginative films. I liked Being John Malkovich which was made by the same director as this one. But Eternal Sunshine makes that movie look positively mundane. I’ve tried to summarise the movie, but in reality it’s way more complex than I’ve described. But it had me hooked from start to finish, and I loved the ending which fits the rest of the film perfectly.

It’s refreshing to see Carrey in a role that doesn’t require all that rubber-faced buffoonery that made him a household name. Kate Winslet was also good, but I’m not sure I really believed there could be any chemistry between them. They just seemed too incompatible.

Score – 9/10. A thoroughly enjoyable romp, but I would have liked to believe in the Carrey/Winslet pairing a bit more.

Next up is Requiem for a Dream which looks a little disturbing from the trailer.

Day 94: Aliens (1986)

Movie #60 – Aliens (1986) - 137 min, cert 18.

Having put herself back into suspended animation at the end of the first film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is awoken by a deep space salvage team who have happened across her craft some 57 years later. The planet where she encountered the aliens has been colonized in the intervening time, so no one believes her story. Some time later, contact with these settlers is lost and Ripley is persuaded to accompany a team of marines who are going to investigate. They still don’t really believe her story, so they are taken by surprise when they get there and find that the aliens are real and have taken over the colony. The only survivor they find is a little girl hiding in the air ducts. The marine force is decimated by their first encounter with the aliens, and the few that survive have to find a way to escape back to their ship so they can blow the aliens up from orbit.

Ridley Scott directed the original as a horror movie set in space, with lots of quiet, creepy scenes where you’re just waiting for the alien to jump out. This is a James Cameron film, and the difference is noticeable. There are still some horror elements around, but it is essentially an action movie, with lots of big battle sequences. Michael Biehn is great as Hicks, the ever-cool corporal who finds himself in command when all the other officers are out of action. I’ve always thought him a very underrated actor, but he’s an apparent favourite of Cameron, having also been in The Terminator and The Abyss. There isn’t a huge amount of dialogue, but what there is is often punchy and memorable.

Score – 8/10. Not exactly a heavyweight, but certainly entertaining. So 60 films in, my top ten looks exactly as it did ten films ago:

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       Forrest Gump (1994)

4.       Amelie (2001)

5.       Fight Club (1999)

6.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

7.       Toy Story 3 (2010)

8.      The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

9.       WALL-E (2008)

10.   Memento (2000)

Next up is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I knew absolutely nothing about this movie, so I watched the trailer and, actually, it looks quite good.

Day 93: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Movie #59 – To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) - 129 min, cert PG.

A white attorney defends an innocent black man on a trumped-up rape charge in 1930s Alabama.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Harper Lee, the story is told through the eyes of Scout, the 6-year-old daughter of the attorney Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck). The character of Scout is supposedly based on Lee herself, and the novel is semi-autobiographical. This is a story about institutionalised racism, made at the time when the Civil Rights movement was at its height, but set in a time and place when such a movement could not even have been dreamt of.

Atticus Finch is called upon to defend a local black man who has been accused of beating & raping a local white girl. It becomes clear during the trial that the defendant Paul Robinson is entirely innocent, and that the girl in question tried to force herself on him, and was then savagely beaten by her bigoted father as a result. Despite the unequivocal evidence to the contrary, the all-white jury find him guilty, and later we hear that Robinson was ‘shot while trying to escape’.

Maybe I’ve been conditioned by too many gung-ho movie heroes who shoot first and ask questions later, but I kept wishing that Peck’s character would stand up for himself a little more. He seemed to accept everything that went on around him all too readily. He doesn’t react when the guilty verdict is returned, he doesn’t appear to question the dubious circumstances around Robinson’s death. He doesn’t even rise to the bait when, after he has delivered the tragic news to his client’s family, the man who beat his own daughter into framing the innocent Robinson just to save their reputation turns up and spits in his face.

In fact, Finch is pretty ineffectual throughout the whole film. He fails to secure justice in the courtroom, also when faced by an angry lynch mob it is his daughter who shames the men into leaving, and even when his children are attacked towards the end of the film, it is left to the local recluse, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in his first screen role) to come to their aid.

Overall, I felt the film’s message was  depressingly negative. Maybe it needed to be seen at the time to fully appreciate it, or maybe I’m just an ignorant philistine.

Score – 6/10, quite watchable, but not much more than that.

Next up is Aliens, the sequel to the already seen Alien where Ripley returns to the alien’s nest with a new team. What was I saying about gung-ho heroes? – Michael Biehn’s Hicks is a perfect example.

Day 92: The Departed (2006)

Movie #58 – The Departed (2006) - 151 min, cert 18.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, an undercover cop who has infiltrated the inner circle of Boston crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). However Costello has his own man inside the police force, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and as each man becomes aware of the existence of the other it becomes a desperate race for each to expose the other before they themselves are compromised.

The movie starts off slowly, following the central characters as the lives play out to place them in these opposing positions. But once the action begins, the tension builds all the way through the movie, and despite the lateness of the hour, I couldn’t bring myself to stop it before I reached the end, and staying alert was not a problem.

This movie has to rank as one of Scorsese’s finest. Right up alongside Goodfellas & Taxi Driver. I thought when I watched it, what an original twist on the ‘undercover cop struggles to avoid exposure’ storyline it was. However, I now discover that it’s a remake of another film, Infernal Affairs, which also appears in the list (currently at #229). I’ve not seen that film, so I can’t comment, but I’ll make the comparison when I get down that far in the sequence.

The cast is amazing. A real Who’s Who of who’s great in Hollywood at the moment. As well as DiCaprio, Damon & Nicholson who have already been mentioned, there are Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone & Alec Baldwin. Nicholson plays the bad guy as only he can, oozing menace from every pore, ably assisted by Ray Winstone. Damon is also good, but DiCaprio’s is the real stand out performance.

Score – Not quite top marks, I don’t think, so only 9/10, but certainly one of the better 9s.

Next up is To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck. I vaguely remember having to read the book, although I don’t think I ever finished it. I believe it’s some kind of courtroom drama about a white lawyer defending a black girl against some racist charge or other.

Day 91: M (1931)

Movie #57 – M (1931) - 117 min, cert PG.

A German city is being prowled by a serial killer. He preys on children by luring them to a quiet spot with sweets and balloons, then killing them. We discover his identity early in the film – he is Franz Becker (Peter Lorre). The population is in uproar because their children are not safe. The police are throwing all their men into hunting for the killer. In the process, there seem to be police on every corner, while the vice dens and illegal drinking clubs get raided on a seemingly nightly basis. The criminal organisations are finding it impossible to operate under such a crackdown, so they too are putting all their resources into finding the killer. With the odds stacked so overwhelmingly against him, it is only a matter of time before Becker is caught, but who will catch him first – the police or the criminals? If the police get him, he will go to prison, or more likely, an asylum, but if the underworld takes him first, he will surely be lynched by the angry mob.

I actually quite liked this film. A fact which is surprising for a film of this age. Most of it is concerned with Becker trying to evade capture by the criminal mob that has identified him. He hides in a factory overnight, and the gang break in and literally tear the place apart looking for him. Peter Lorre is superb in this role of the serial killer, unable to control his homicidal urges. His speech in front of the kangaroo court at the end of the movie is unforgettable.

Score – 8/10. Still holds up surprisingly well for a film for its age.

Next up is The Departed. The first modern Hollywood movie for quite a while, and it’s one I haven’t seen before. I’m looking forward to it.

Day 90: The Lives of Others (2006)

Movie #56 – The Lives of Others (2006) - 137 min, cert 15.

Gerd Wiesler is a captain in the Stasi, the East German secret police force, five years before the Berlin Wall came down. He takes on the task of monitoring a budding young playwright who appears to the authorities to be too good to be true. He toes the party line and seems happy to do so. Wiesler bugs his apartment and sits in a little attic room day after day listening in. He finds nothing – Dreyman, the playwright, really is as clean as he looks. Wiesler’s superior in the Stasi is having an affair with Dreyman’s girlfriend and tells Wiesler to find some dirt on him so he can be got out of the way. Wiesler objects to this and doesn’t come up with anything. Then when Dreyman writes a defamatory piece about the East German system and smuggles it out to be published in the West, Wiesler covers it up. Although Wiesler’s commander cannot prove his involvement, he knows what happened well enough and condemns Wiesler to a menial job for the rest of his career.

It’s a bit of a slow burner this one, and quite hard to follow at times. What makes it so hard is Wiesler’s utterly inscrutable expression throughout the movie. He has no family or friends that he can trust enough to talk to, so he doesn’t. Throughout the movie he hardly speaks, and makes few, if any, facial expressions. He knows that to betray the slightest suspicion can lead to being shipped off to a labour camp in the middle of the night. This means that the audience has to make up their own minds what he is thinking, purely by judging him through his actions.

Score – 8/10. It took a while to get into, but surprisingly good overall.

Next up is Fritz Lang’s M. It’s a very early talkie, and it’s in German with English subtitles.

Day 88: City Lights (1931)

Movie #55 – City Lights (1931) - 87 min, cert U.

Chaplin is a tramp, sleeping rough wherever he can find some shelter. He sees a pretty blind girl selling flowers and falls in love with her. He stops a man from killing himself in the river, and the man, who turns out to be rich, invites him back to his house. They go out on the town and get drunk. Returning home the man gives the tramp his car and some money. The tramp uses his newly acquired riches to impress the flower-seller who believes he is some kind of rich benefactor. He finds out that she is on the verge of being evicted due to rent arrears, and goes out to try and raise the money she needs. His rich friend has sobered up and no longer wants to know him, so he tries his hand at prize-fighting. When this doesn’t work, he goes back to his rich friend and manages to foil a robbery. This gains him enough money to pay the girl’s rent and have enough left over to pay for an operation that restores her sight.

Things have changed a lot in the last eighty years, and this film is now very, very dated. Antics that audiences no doubt found hilarious back then, had me bored to tears. The scene where Chaplin saves the man from drowning himself in the river was just so predictable that it reminded me of the Chuckle Brothers on a bad day. There was one scene that made me laugh, which was the boxing match. I thought it was for the most part very clever and well choreographed. But overall, this was a dire film. There are more Chaplin films to come in the Top 250, and on the strength of this one, supposedly the best of them, then I’m not looking forward to them at all.

Score – 1/10. Am I being too harsh? Possibly, but that’s how it made me feel.

Next up is The Lives of Others, a German film that I’ve never heard of before.

Day 86: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Movie #54 – A Clockwork Orange (1971) - 136 min, cert 18.

Set in a bleak future where lawless gangs of young men roam the streets indulging their every violent fantasy. Alex DeLarge is the leader of one such gang who get high on milk laced with drugs, then go out and commit various atrocities, including one particularly violent assault on an author and his wife. She is brutally raped, while he is beaten so badly that he is left paralysed from the waist down. Not long after this, Alex’s gang turn on him, leaving him behind after a crime for the police to capture. He volunteers for a new reconditioning program which involves forcing him to watch a series of horrific images, leaving him unable to perform any anti-social acts. Upon his release he is found by all the people he wronged before and they exact their revenge on him, while he is unable to do anything in response.

This is the third Kubrick film in the last six, and the fourth overall, making him only the second director so far, after Hitchcock, to get four films in the list. In fact, casting an eye down the rest of the list as it stands at the moment, that’s a pattern that continues throughout the list. Hitchcock has the most entries with 9, then Kubrick is next with 8, then a slight gap to Wilder, Miyazaki & Tarantino with 6 each.

So far his films haven’t hit with me. I thought Dr Strangelove was OK, didn’t like his adaptation of The Shining, and just didn’t get Paths of Glory at all. This one falls into the OK camp as well. It clearly sets out to shock at every opportunity with its graphic violence and full-frontal nudity. It plays like soft-core porn in several places, so it’s easy to see why it has spent so much of the last forty years banned in so many countries. Is it art? Is it making some sort of bold statement about the culture of today? I don’t claim to know about such things. All I know is that it was quite bizarre, and not always in a good way.

Score – 6/10. It’s an experience, but not really a film that you can sit down and enjoy.

Next up is City Lights, a silent Charlie Chaplin movie. I’ve never seen a Chaplin movie all the way through, but I haven’t been impressed by the clips that I’ve seen.

Day 86: Double Indemnity (1944)

Movie #53 – Double Indemnity (1944) - 107 min, cert PG.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a hotshot insurance agent. He visits a client to get him to renew his car insurance, but ends up speaking to his young wife, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) instead. She asks about getting her husband some more life insurance without his knowledge, but Neff immediately smells a rat and backs off. Her feminine wiles are too strong for him, however, and he soon returns. They hatch a plan between them to kill her husband and collect the insurance money. Everything appears to go well, until a colleague of Neff’s, an insurance investigator named Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), gets suspicious and starts to look a little deeper.

This is a proper film noir, with snappy dialogue supplied by Raymond Chandler. It was an enjoyable film, with plenty of suspense and intrigue. Although the quick-fire hard-boiled dialogue, particularly between the two main characters was a little over the top at times. It was so extreme that it almost seemed to be spoofing the film noir genre in places. It left me wondering what the actual motives of the characters was supposed to be. They didn’t seem to need the money, and they didn’t seem to be particularly in love. It’s as if they just did it for the hell of it.

But those are just my thoughts looking back on it. While I was watching it, I didn’t really care about all that too much. I like that sort of quick-witted snappy dialogue, and so it kept me entertained.

Score – 7/10. Perfectly enjoyable, but nothing to write home about.

Next up is Kubrick again, this time with A Clockwork Orange.

Day 85: The Pianist (2002)

Movie #52 – The Pianist (2002) - 150 min, cert 15.

Hot on the heels of Lawrence of Arabia, we have another biopic. This one is based on the life of Polish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, or more specifically, his account of how he survived the Holocaust. We pick up his story in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II. He is playing the piano for a Polish radio station, and enjoying all the trappings that go along with being a successful artiste. He and his family are clearly financially comfortable and well-respected within the community. Then the war comes and their lives change very quickly. They are evicted from their beautiful house and forced to live in extremely cramped conditions in the ghetto with the rest of the Jews. He is separated from the rest of his family when they are all ordered on to one of the trains destined for the death camps, but he is pulled out of the line by a friendly Jewish policeman and told to stay and work in the labour gangs. He escapes the ghetto and hides in a nearby apartment with the help of the Polish underground. He is discovered and has to flee. He survives by the kindness of sympathisers and blind luck, hiding out in bombed out buildings and foraging for food wherever he can find it, until the Russians arrive to liberate the city.

This is an excellent movie about the Holocaust. Perhaps not quite as good as the definitive Schindler’s List, but very good nonetheless. It approaches the subject from a slightly different standpoint. Most films that tackle the topic start in the Ghetto, then move on to the deathcamps. The central character here never goes to the deathcamps. All his family do, and he never sees them again, but he stays in Warsaw. At first in the work gangs, then running and hiding and eking out an existence in the rubble as best he can.

The only thing that let the movie down for me was the copy that I had, which was a shame. Although the film is mostly in English, there are a few scenes, and some of them key ones, in German, and my copy had no subtitles. So for the scenes in German I had to try and guess what was being said which was not always easy. There is one scene in particular, where Szpilman is discovered hiding in a bombed out house by a German officer. They have a conversation in which (presumably) Szpilman tells him he was a professional pianist and the German challenges him to play something on a handy piano. One day I would like to watch that scene again with the proper subtitles.

There isn’t much actual piano playing in the movie. Not altogether surprising, of course, there isn’t much time to play while running and hiding from the Germans. The pieces that are there though are exquisite and well worth waiting for. The piece he plays for the German officer, Chopin’s Ballade No 1 in G Minor, is mesmerizing. And this is the first of the films so far that I’ve sat and watched through all of the end credits just to listen to the music.

Score – 9/10. Brilliantly acted by Adrien Brody who thoroughly deserved his Oscar.

Next up is Double Indemnity, about which I know nothing.

Day 84: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Movie #51 – Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - 216 min, cert PG.

This first biopic in the Top 250, with the possible exception of Schindler's List, we follow the life of T.E. Lawrence, or at least that part of it that he spent in the Middle East and North Africa. At the start of the story, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is a lieutenant in the British Army, stationed in Cairo. He is insolent and slovenly but the army put up with him because of his specialist knowledge of the local tribes. It is this knowledge that gets him selected for a mission to go and assess the prospects of the Arab Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) in a revolt against the Turks. He suggests a daring strategy to the Prince, which involves crossing a harsh desert to attack a Turkish stronghold from the lightly defended landward side rather than from the sea and offers to lead the attack himself. The prince accepts and the attack is successful. Lawrence goes on to pursue a guerrilla style war on the Turkish railway network – staying hidden in the vast Arabian deserts, and then striking without warning. He leads another attack, this time on Damascus, and is again successful, but instead of conceding it to the British, he tries to organise the Arab tribes into ruling it themselves. This proves impossible, however, as the various tribes are incapable of working together enough to run a city the size of Damascus. His dreams of Arabian home rule dashed, he returns to England.

I actually enjoyed this more than I expected to. At over three and a half hours, I thought I would find it too long and a too dull, more like a history lesson than a movie. But O’Toole’s personality makes the movie very watchable, and I found it very easy to lose myself in the story, so the time passed quite quickly. That said, I do think it’s about half an hour too long.

David Lean is undeniably very good at this sort of thing. Vast battle scenes with thousands of extras is something of a trade make for him, and this film needs his skill at it on many occasions.

Score – 7/10. Quite good, but a bit too long, and starting to look just a little dated.

Next up is The Pianist, another Holocaust movie. It will be hard pushed to match up to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, but it comes recommended to me so we shall see.

Day 80: Paths of Glory (1957)

Movie #50 – Paths of Glory (1957) - 88 min, cert PG.

Set in the trenches of the First World War, the French and German armies face each other across no-man’s land. The French top brass decide that it is essential to the war effort that a particular hill is captured immediately. The task is assigned to Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) who is well aware that the task is impossible. He does his best to lead the doomed attack, but when it becomes clear that their mission is hopeless, his men retreat back to their own trenches. Indeed one company of men never even make it out of their own trench. Watching this from a position of safety, the French General Mireau (George Macready) is outraged and orders his own artillery to fire on the men in an attempt to drive them forward. The battery commander is appalled and refuses. After the battle, Mireau tells Dax he must pick three men, one from each company involved, who will be court-martialled for cowardice and then executed by firing squad. Dax, a lawyer before the war, is horrified and defends the men in the courtroom.

This is my second Kubrick film on the trot, and indeed there’s another coming up in just four films time (A Clockwork Orange). It’s also my second disappointment on the trot. A bit like Spirited Away a couple of films ago, I just don’t get this one. I found the film a little dull, if I’m honest. I suspect a lot it went over my head somewhat. I think a lot of Kubrick’s ideas are quite subtle and easy to miss. Is he making a point about the futility of war? Maybe, I don’t know.

Score – 4/10. It had its moments, but it was a bit too deep for me. There have been a couple of films good enough to make my top ten since I last included it – Amelie and WALL-E. It now

 looks like this:

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       Forrest Gump (1994)

4.       Amelie (2001)

5.       Fight Club (1999)

6.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

7.       Toy Story 3 (2010)

8.      The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

9.       WALL-E (2008)

10.   Memento (2000)

Next up is the David Lean epic biopic Lawrence of Arabia, which is another one of those films which I’ve never seen but feel I probably should have done.

Day 79: The Shining (1980)

Movie #49 – The Shining (1980) - 142 min, cert 15.

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is a struggling playwright. He has been employed as caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, way up in the mountains of Colorado, and it will be his job to stay in the hotel during the long winter when it is cut-off by the weather and look after the place. Jack, his wife Wendy, and his son Danny arrive as the hotel is closing up and get shown around the place. We find out that Danny has a low-level psychic ability, a talent he shares with the cook, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers). Everything begins normally enough. Jack is taking advantage of the peace and quiet to work on a new play, Danny rides his trike around the maze of corridors, and everyone is happy. But the hotel is haunted by the ghosts of people who have died there over the years, including a previous caretaker who ran amok one winter killing his wife and daughters, and then himself. Needless to say, it isn’t long before Wendy and Danny are looking for a way out.

As I believe I mentioned when reviewing the very first film on the list, Shawshank Redemption, I’m a huge Stephen King fan, having read all of his books. My first encounter with Stephen King was in an airport bookshop when I was quite young. Me and my sister were looking for some good holiday reading matter, and she said she’d heard he was good. We bought Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot and The Shining between us, and I read all three on that holiday. I was hooked and have been ever since.

While this is undoubtedly a good film, I struggle to view it as a film in its own right. Instead, I cannot help but see it as an adaptation, and feel compelled to judge it as such. Unfortunately, therein lies the problem. Kubrick rather butchered the book in the course of making the movie. I understand why he did it. A lot of the motifs of the book are primarily involved with what the characters are thinking about, and that would be very hard to convey on the screen, others would have been very difficult to film from a technical point of view, like the hedge animals that come to life. So Kubrick stripped them all out, and this presumably left something of a void, which he filled it with something entirely new and much more visual – the idea of the maze. It’s not just the obvious hedge maze, but also the maze of corridors that Danny rides down, even the maze-like patterns in the carpets and wallpaper.

I think it’s this addition of something new that jars the most. It takes a lot longer to read a novel than it does to watch a movie, so inevitably there is going to be too much substance in the book to make it into the film and some of it will need to be culled. While this is often a shame, it has to be expected, it just isn’t practical to include everything. But when a director starts adding entirely new elements, he crosses a line that fans of the original source find hard to accept.

Of course, Nicholson is fantastic in the role of Danny, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Shelley Duvall does well as the timid wife, although she’s a little too timid for my liking. In the book she was quite a bit stronger mentally. Danny Lloyd is superb as Danny Torrance, considering he was only 7 at the time, it’s an exceptional piece of acting.

Score – 5/10. I just can’t help scowling, tutting and shaking my head whenever the hedge maze gets mentioned.

Next up is Paths of Glory, an early black & white World War I film with Kirk Douglas. I’ve never even heard of it before, let alone seen it.

Day 78: Spirited Away (2001)

Movie #48 – Spirited Away (2001) - 125 min, cert PG.

Chihiro is a young girl who has gone exploring on foot with her parents after taking a wrong turn in the car. They come across what appears to be an abandoned fair, but the food stalls have hot food laid out even though the stall owners are absent. Chihiro’s parents sit down for a free meal while she explores a little further. By the time she returns to her parents, they have magically transformed into pigs, gorging themselves on all the food. Looking for some answers, Chihiro goes to the bathhouse which is said to be run by a powerful witch, and embarks on a series of adventures in the search for a way to free her parents from the spell.

I’ve spoken to several people who love this film, and read numerous reviews that rave about it, but I’m afraid I just don’t get it. I find the style of artwork too simplistic, and the plot too fanciful and ridiculous. The whole pantheon of dragons, witches, river-spirits, and so on, is all very Japanese. No doubt it’s me being very short-sighted, but I just don’t think it translates very well to a Western audience.

Score – 2/10. Not for me at all. Sorry.

Next up is The Shining, Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. I saw it a long time ago and had my reservations about it.