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Message: [QUOTE="ATenderLad, post: 71940, member: 3864"] .....sorry in advance. I think there came a point when I noticed I had seen or knew enough about every damn movie on Netflix that nothing seemed interesting. Flash-forward a bit and I've done everything I can to watch something new every day, for years now. Where do the movies come from? Well that's a good ques- To keep from just listing random movies from now till Doomsday, I'll do....genre, maybe? [HEADING=2]Comedy - [I]Used Cars[/I] (1980)[/HEADING] [ATTACH type="full" align="right" width="297px" alt="1739250016888.png"]24278[/ATTACH]Here's a (not-so-old) comedy that never got appreciated, bombing at the box office when it released alongside Airplane!, and with few theaters and little marketing to boot. Kurt Russel is really shedding his old Disney child star reputation here, as a fast-talking piece of shit with dreams of being a corrupt politician. The movie is damned funny, and the massive set piece ending - with hundreds of cars speeding across Arizona - is an insane bit of stunts and mayhem for a comedy. It's a bit like Blues Brothers in that sense, and that's great company to be in. Speaking of stunts, one of the most deceptively dangerous things put on film happens here, with actor Gerrit Graham walking backwards across the street as a speeding car misses turning him into slush by mere inches. He doesn't react, and neither him nor the director had any idea the stunt man would be coming that fast. The director commentary by Robert Zemeckis is full of the man saying "I would never do this again, oh my god", for that and...other reasons. See, according to them, most of the crew was shacked up in a hotel doing the only thing to do in Phoenix, AZ: Lines of cocaine and sex with everything that moves. The stunt drivers in particular were blitzed out of their minds, gleefully performing the more dangerous parts of the movie. Bottom line, it's wild, it's raunchy, and if it had been starring Bill Murray they probably would have made money! (Kurt Russell's words, not mine!) [HEADING=2]Mystery - [I]Sleuth [/I](1972)[/HEADING] [ATTACH type="full" align="right" width="256px" alt="1739252219767.png"]24304[/ATTACH]Jumping back about a decade, we have a movie with just two actors; Laurence Olivier - at the tail end of the most celebrated British film career of his day - alongside Micheal Caine, a then-rising star in the prime of his career. Olivier plays an old wealthy landowner, whose invited his wife's younger lover to speak with him. The two couldn't be further apart in terms of economic standing, or "class" in the British sense, and Caine expects a fight as he arrives. To his surprise, he finds a vibrant conversation....and an offer. Any more than that is really doing the film an injustice, but suffice to say I recommend this movie with all my heart. [I]Sleuth [/I]is an incredibly tense ride with several twists, you won't know where the movie going. The fact that it's starring two incredible actors with absurd chemistry/friction with each other just lifts the whole thing up even higher. Please, watch this one if you're in the mood for a bit of surprise. [HEADING=2]Action - [I]The Train[/I] (1964)[/HEADING] [ATTACH type="full" align="right" width="338px" alt="1739253370644.png"]24318[/ATTACH]War movies in the wake of WWII were a dime a dozen, but here's one to stand out from the crowd a bit. Directed by John Frankenheimer - who you may know from the modern spy-action masterpiece [I]Ronin[/I] (1998) - sets up the plot quickly: The Allied forces will soon liberate France, and the Nazi commander overseeing the Louvre attempts to spirit away the valuable art before they arrive. A small resistance cell working out of the train yard receives a desperate plea from the museum curator: Save the cultural heritage of France at any cost. The cost of course, is human life. Not to spoil anything, but this movie takes a surprisingly hard line on the value of art. Our hero, played by broad-shouldered Burt Lancaster, simply never agrees that paintings are worth dying for. The movie largely agrees with him, but it sure makes the process of trying fun as hell. Lancaster and his comrades do everything under the noses of the Nazi's, constantly pushing their luck and risking their cover. They even have to worry about American fighter pilots, who just see the Nazi payloads they're hauling on their trains and can't intuit that the drivers are on their side. This was probably the last big-budget black and white action movie, but it looks fantastic. There's very little fat on the movie either, pacing-wise, like the French under occupation there's rarely a safe moment to relax. It's also based on a true story? The Nazi's did in fact try to secure the art near the end of the war, and the Allies found and secured the train car holding the loot. (Details are embellished and changed, naturally.) If you're looking for a tense action movie with real stakes, or if you've just watched [I]Inglorious Basterds [/I]too many times and need to change it up, try this one out. [HEADING=2]Musical - [I]Kiss Me Kate[/I] (1954)[/HEADING] [ATTACH type="full" align="right" width="319px" alt="1739254823918.png"]24331[/ATTACH]I've kinda settled on rolling it back a decade for each of these, so the obvious choice here is [I]Singin' in the Rain[/I], but I'm willing to bet everyone's heard of that one. Here's a slightly more uncommon pick, starring the booming deep tones of Mr. Howard Keil. Kiss Me Kate is a novel premise about the lead actor of a new production of Taming of the Shrew, and his mostly terrible attempts at getting his ex-wife to be his leading lady. It's meta, like [I]Singin' in the Rain[/I] but for the stage as opposed to movies, with most of the flick taking place in-between scenes of the play they're putting on. The play of course gives an excuse for big MGM musical numbers, and between Howard Keil's singing and Ann Miller's dancing this one's a showstopper. (Tommy Rail, who co-starred with Keil in the other movie I thought of naming, [I]Seven Brides for Seven Brothers[/I], shares several scenes with Miller here and is a phenomenal dancer as well, athletic and energetic like Gene Kelly.) This one's fun! It's saucier than a lot of musicals of it's day, doing everything in it's power to talk about sex without getting busted. There's a pair of gangsters who show up to collect on an IOU, and they are the most charming pair of leg-breakers ever put to film; these are the best kind of goons. They even get one of the best music numbers at the end, a song about helping losers pick up girls with prose! Also, a bit of trivia, Bob Fosse of [I]Cabaret [/I]fame acts in this, one of Ann Miller's suitors in the play within a movie. He was given the chance to choreograph some of a sequence at the end, I think for the first time in a movie, and it's easy to see why he went on to be a success. Visually, the movie might seem a touch odd in places, with things facing the camera and audience sometimes, seemingly throwing items at the screen. This was a 3D movie! See, that effect has come and gone in phases throughout film history, and this was one of the last big 3D movies of the 50's, after which I think it died out for a couple decades. (There's a topic I need to research, *note to self*) It's crazy, and unless you get a particular re-release and watch it on a 3D TV, you (and me, dammit!) are shit out of luck seeing it the way it was originally intended. That's a long-term goal for me, one day I'm going to make that happen. If you're looking for a musical that's all about having a fun time, with zero interpretive ballet sequences, or if you just want to see a beautiful woman sing the phrase "I need a Dick!", look this one up. [HR][/HR] I'm getting a touch short on characters for this post, and I still haven't done Westerns, Drama, Romance, or Horror...I'll be back, eventually! [/QUOTE]

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