Random Thoughts

Hey, that didn’t take long at all.

What I’ve learned from watching 100 movies and making 100+ cocktails is: 1) There are a lot of bad cocktail recipes out there.  2) New movies suck. 3) The WordPress spell checker doesn’t think that “movie” is a word.

But I swore to never use the word “film”.  Just to annoy people.

Oops.

My selection turned out to be a bit Now That’s What I Call Quite Early 90s Film Club, which is kinda natural, since that’s where I left off.  I tried getting a bit more current by buying a few handfuls of movies that had won Sundance awards during recent years, but most of them turned out to be lower-ish budget Hollywood-like schmaltz like Beasts of the Southern Wild.  They look kinda indie and interesting, but are excruciatingly boring to watch.

I mean, I do have patience with “boring” stuff as long as it’s good.  (For instance India Song or  Blue.) But when my bullshit detector goes off, I get cranky.

And I have little in the current crop of European art movies, like Antichrist or Irreversible.  And I loathe Haneke.  Basically crappy and dehumanising movies that have delusions of relevancy.  While probably functioning like the R&D division for commercial movies.

Anyway.

I’ve tried scoring the movies based on whether they’re good or not, and not whether I like them.  I do have great taste, though, so these are correlated, of course.  I sometimes like bad movies a lot, and (somewhat less often) I hate some good movies.

Here’s the complete list.  1 star means “awful”, 2 “bad”, 3 “not good, but watcheable”, 4 “not bad, but misseable”, 5 “good”, 6 “fantastic”.

I started CM&C partially because I had too many unseen DVDs on the shelves. After finishing it, I have more unseen movies than I started with.

And I have way more booze in the cupboard than anybody should have.

I peeked at imdb scores for the films I was watching, and it seems like virtually all movies get a rating between 6.5 and 7.5.  The only exceptions are truly awful ones, that get 5.7-6.3, and totally horrible fan service ones that get a rating of 8.0-8.5.  Any newer movie with a rating over 7.5 is almost certainly execrable.

Hm…  perhaps I should do a correlation matrix between my ratings and imdb ratings…  but that seems like work.

And now I never have to watch another movie again in my life! Whoho! I have my life back!

The Red Shoes. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. 1948. ★★★★☆☆

Bailey’s Banana Split: 😃

Foreign Correspondent. Alfred Hitchcock. 1940. ★★★★☆☆

I think I’ve seen most of Hitchcock’s post WWII movies, but very few of the earlier ones. I had forgotten I had bought a couple of box sets of the early ones, but I found them today. Just in time for the penultimate CM&C.

But it was a bit disappointing. It has lots of nice technical stuff going on, but the tension collapses all the time. Hitchcock reused some of the plot elements to great effect in the 50s.

Frozen Banana Daquiri: 😃

Small Town Gay Bar. Malcolm Ingram. 2006. ★★★★☆☆

I really liked this. A heartwarming documentary.

Bridal: 😃