tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21435657010992685192012-02-21T06:42:43.056-08:00..."Viddy this, and viddy it well, o my brothers" - A Clockwork Orange...Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.comBlogger856125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-14816952862148863702012-02-02T02:22:00.001-08:002012-02-17T11:55:43.537-08:002012-02-17T11:55:43.537-08:00

Jim Carter as the butler leads the servant staff (L), whileHugh Bonneville as the Earl heads the family (R) Brian Percival and Brian Kelly, directed four episodes each; several others directed two episodes. Season One: 2010 (10*) Golden Globe and Emmy Awards, best tv mini-series or movie During the reign of England’s King Edward, estates of the wealthy aristocrats grew to their ultimate in

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-20101288065752929102012-01-28T23:12:00.000-08:002012-02-06T19:13:53.638-08:002012-02-06T19:13:53.638-08:00

Jim O’Hanlon, 2009 (9.5*) Masterpiece Theater version for BBC There have been a veritable plethora of Jane Austen’s novels put to film, usually 3 to 5 per novel. In fact, this is the fourth version of Emma since 1972, beginning with another BBC miniseries, then a tv film with Kate Beckinsale, then the more famous film in 1996 with Gwyneth Paltrow (trying her best to affect a British accent, see

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-91587718728861489812012-01-18T23:54:00.000-08:002012-01-23T16:48:44.220-08:002012-01-23T16:48:44.220-08:00

Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009 (8.4*) Sundance Awards for directing and screenplay. Based on a true story of the troubles in Northern Ireland. A Protestant worker is ordered to leave a shipyard in Lurgan by Catholics. In retaliation, a teenage gang of four, members of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) orders a Catholic to leave, a man named Griffin. The youths decide to kill him, even though he’s

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-57602758361166936512012-01-12T23:11:00.000-08:002012-01-22T09:15:19.737-08:002012-01-22T09:15:19.737-08:00

Woody Allen, 2011 (9.0*) Woody is back! This is a light romantic fantasy in the same vein as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Alice, which mixes reality with a fantasy world that obviously comes from the mind of the protagonist. Owen Wilson is a young American, on a trip to Paris with his domineering fiance, Rachel MacAdams, whose right-wing parents are wealthy capitalists there for a business deal

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-56853207355274850672012-01-01T22:41:00.000-08:002012-01-04T16:55:03.041-08:002012-01-04T16:55:03.041-08:00

Frank Capra, 1937 (8.2*) Exotic, unspoiled locales around the world have always appealed to the more daring individuals of more populous regions, such as Europe; just look at the nationalities of all the famous explorers. In 1923, Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel was the first known westerner to enter the forbidden Tibetan city of Lhasa. She then published her accounts in her 1932 book Magic and

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-85237040157714178602011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:002011-12-31T09:05:03.041-08:002011-12-31T09:05:03.041-08:00

Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (10*) AFI Top 100 [Updated: 12.31.11] This groundbreaking SciFi epic was the first to feature totally realistic space effects, and changed forever the way SF films looked. The story, by Arthur C. Clarke, was written for this film because Kubrick wanted to film his incredible novel A Childhood's End, which could not be filmed at the time with existing technology. That

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-63515730007565942822011-12-28T23:07:00.000-08:002012-01-03T17:47:07.667-08:002012-01-03T17:47:07.667-08:00

Frank Oz, 2007 (8.3*) It’s not every day that you laugh all through a film about a funeral. Writer Dean Craig has managed to do just that in this black comedy. It’s also not in any other cinema funerals that you see hallucinagenic drugs ingested (accidentally), a naked man threatening to jump off a roof, and a blackmailing dwarf giving everyone a thrill with an unexpected appearance. These are

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-39812772404230048612011-12-26T17:24:00.000-08:002011-12-28T18:23:06.022-08:002011-12-28T18:23:06.022-08:00

Noomi Rapace, her biopic, and as LisbethSalander, the girl with the dragon tattoo The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Denmark - Sweden - Germany - Norway Niels Arden Oplev, 2009 (7.8*) I’m reviewing these together because after you’ve either read the novels or seen the trilogy, you realize it’s just one long story about the heroine, not three distinctly different stories. Actress Noomi Rapace made a

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-24905041124327388262011-12-22T23:47:00.000-08:002011-12-24T23:42:49.019-08:002011-12-24T23:42:49.019-08:00

Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, 1970 (8.5*) Roeg was also cinematographer This is #326 on our Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. Former cinematographer Nicolas Roeg shared directing credit on this one, beginning a career that included some visually stunning films. Performance woke me up when I first saw it. In the beginning, gangster Chas Devlin, played by James Fox, appears to be

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-5257462122139376882011-12-18T23:51:00.000-08:002011-12-22T17:05:08.653-08:002011-12-22T17:05:08.653-08:00

Elia Kazan, 1961 (8.6*) Ranked #1003 on our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. Not considered one of Kazan’s best, certainly not when compared to On the Waterfront (1951) or A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) bw, or even up against A Face in the Crowd (1957), or his first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), this film of a 50’s high school romance still stands up well

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-83917312444311885632011-12-17T22:41:00.000-08:002011-12-21T17:52:59.663-08:002011-12-21T17:52:59.663-08:00

Richard Linklater, 2004 (8.2*) This film was a small, pleasant surprise for me. This one follows Linklater’s Before Sunrise, made nine years earlier with the same actors. In that film, an American traveler, Ethan Hawke, meets a young Frenchwoman from Paris, Julie Delpy, and for at least one night, sparks fly. Yet somehow the film failed to involve me, it just didn’t seem to cut much beneath the

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-62630476593394907532011-12-15T23:42:00.000-08:002011-12-18T07:47:45.012-08:002011-12-18T07:47:45.012-08:00

Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969, France (9.0*) Based on truth, as both novelist Joseph Kessel and director Jean-Pierre Melville were both in this army themselves. An excellent (and low-key) war film without the histrionics of most, Army in the Shadows takes the French men and women of the Resistance as its theme, at a point near the end of the war when the Resistance movement and Nazi intelligence

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-20034449227477633962011-12-12T23:16:00.000-08:002011-12-14T20:26:27.480-08:002011-12-14T20:26:27.480-08:00

David Cronenberg, 1996 (8.0*) You now need the year of this film as a designator, so it's not confused with the mediocre film (that came later) that won best picture of 2005 in a very weak year (when they were afraid of Brokeback Mountain as well). Cronenberg’s Crash is the much more interesting one; this one pre-dated the terrible best picture one that resembled a tv show, and was based on SF

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-16963644847189705762011-12-10T23:42:00.000-08:002011-12-11T19:49:45.591-08:002011-12-11T19:49:45.591-08:00

Jonathan Demme, 1984 (9.2*) I guess it helps to be a fan of the rock band Talking Heads to really enjoy this concert documentary, but for any fan of concert filmmaking, this will also be a treat. There have been other good concert films, like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, documenting The Band’s last concert, but for me this one went a little more over the top. When I saw this in the theater,

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-53472925714264723952011-12-06T23:35:00.000-08:002011-12-10T17:49:08.443-08:002011-12-10T17:49:08.443-08:00

Leo McCarey, 1937, bw (8.8*) This is one of those 30’s screwball comedies that you can watch over and over. Cary Grant plays a man who may or may not have been philandering, as he’s getting a tan in a salon in the film’s beginning because he’s supposed to have been in Florida. When he gets home, wife Irene Dunne is gone, and the two start divorce proceedings. They also start trying to make each

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-81061954383768313312011-12-02T23:34:00.000-08:002011-12-04T20:28:43.543-08:002011-12-04T20:28:43.543-08:00

Michael Curtiz, 1938 (8.2*) This version of Robin Hood remains one of the most lively and colorful; it playfully captures the feel of the original legendary myth – after all, it’s a band of merry men cavorting in the woods in tights! These are the people who invented the phrase ‘derring-do’, that pretty well sums it up. It’s a film of fluff and derring-do, all with gusto and tongue-in-cheek,

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-11773663754625840712011-12-01T23:28:00.000-08:002011-12-03T18:34:50.369-08:002011-12-03T18:34:50.369-08:00

George Cukor, 1975, tv (8.6*) This wonderful UK comedy that takes place in I believe the Edwardian era is another reminder of just how far ahead their tv productions are compared to the U.S. – over there these are just as good as feature films with tenfold budgets and huge pr campaigns. Katharine Hepburn plays an aging actress who is being sued by a younger man for breach of promise. The lawyer

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-73672051712284280082011-11-27T18:32:00.000-08:002011-11-30T18:44:48.700-08:002011-11-30T18:44:48.700-08:00

Anders Thomas Jensen, 2005, Denmark (9.1*) This black comedy has one of the most insane casts since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). A paroled felon, Nazi skinhead Ulrich Thomsen, who’s perfectly cast here (he just looks like an angry criminal), shows up at a clergyman’s church that serves as a halfway house for some released felons that really should be behind bars. Here they supposedly

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-32664356367394172602011-11-26T18:35:00.000-08:002011-11-26T18:35:40.056-08:002011-11-26T18:35:40.056-08:00

This happened earlier today and I grabbed a screen shot from each blog, total = 1,000,812However, Google started keeping these stats about a year after I started these, so this is half our real total Thanks to all our visitors, we just crossed one million total page views on both film blogs combined, 860k here at 1000 Dvds to See, which is our site for individual reviews of what I'm building as

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-17410703805274904382011-11-24T23:36:00.000-08:002011-11-27T15:47:58.659-08:002011-11-27T15:47:58.659-08:00

Michael Curtiz, 1950, bw (8.7*) Well after To Have and Have Not (1944), which was loosely based on the Ernest Hemingway novel and which introduced Bacall to Bogart, this remake from famed director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) attempted to remain more faithful to the novel, and the author himself thought it was the finest cinema adaptation of any of his works. This was a much more serious and

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-24607700075566047852011-11-23T23:34:00.000-08:002011-11-26T21:12:40.498-08:002011-11-26T21:12:40.498-08:00

Carol Reed, 1951, bw (9.0*) One of the best adaptations of any Joseph Conrad novel, this is from his Almayer series, about a British merchant (Robert Morley) on a Malayan island paradise. In this tale, an unscrupulous white trader, Trevor Howard, falls in love with a beautiful native islander and basically sells his soul for money so he can entire her away. I and many others think that Howard

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-23540593542734578272011-11-22T23:23:00.000-08:002011-11-25T09:27:11.756-08:002011-11-25T09:27:11.756-08:00

Carol Reed, 1947, bw (8.8*) #634, Top Ranked 1000 Films, 2011 Update, all polls. Master British director Carol Reed made a perhaps even tighter, white-knuckle crime thriller with this gem. In one of his best roles, James Mason shines as a wounded IRA gunman, who is trying to escape a net of British police, and who is both helped and hindered by those along his route. We are made to feel his

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-85687099504726561482011-11-21T23:14:00.000-08:002011-11-24T13:08:57.195-08:002011-11-24T13:08:57.195-08:00

Luis Buñuel, France, 1972 (8.6*) Best Foreign Film (AA) #99, Top Ranked 1000 Films, 2011 Update, all polls. Probably the most affable and accessible of the Spanish master’s films, as many are a bit serious or obscure for the average filmgoer. On the surface, this is a comedy about a suburban dinner party. However, as you would expect from Buñuel, you don’t exactly plan then have a successful

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-12501598004146392182011-11-21T00:45:00.000-08:002012-02-06T19:20:15.648-08:002012-02-06T19:20:15.648-08:00

DVD's Reviewed So Far [Updated: 2.2.12] (831 total) Until I reach 1000, one would have to assume that all these will be in my top 1000 films, which I've never compiled before, it's always a work in progress anyway. One poll I found actually had 3 Jerry Lewis films in the last 30 or so in order to reach 1000 - I don't think I'll have to dig that deep! (though, The Nutty Professor is awfully

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2143565701099268519.post-52909717961081639502011-11-20T23:21:00.000-08:002011-11-24T17:28:26.089-08:002011-11-24T17:28:26.089-08:00

Peter Wang, 1986 (8.7*) The first American movie filmed in mainland China is a comedy of culture clashes. A Chinese-American computer worker in California , director Peter Wang, quits his job in a dispute, then takes his family to visit distant relatives in Beijing, China. Of course, the Americans are now thoroughly westernized Chinese-Americans, so the family they visit in China is pretty much

Jose Sinclairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03860067230183443583noreply@blogger.com0