Matt Conroy's movie log

I have a place in my heart for 60s psychedelic movies. I'm not sure why. I like hippies, and psychotropic drugs, free love, and, of course, peace. Perhaps more important, I like the idea of these things.

This movie, starring a 30 year old Susan Strasberg as a 17 year old runaway, is not as good as some others of the genre, e.g. The Trip. But, my brain was a bit fried from a week of not enough sleep and tedious work, and staring at this for a while seemed to help.

Excellent! Very moving, great, great film.

An excellent film about escapees from a German concentration camp. Hume Cronyn is fantastic in this, and Spencer Tracy is his usual excellent.

An engrossing Japanese film about women who kill wandering soldiers in order to sell their armor and weapons for food. Well-directed and acted.

Ugh. A rather dull David Lean picture. Why'd I watch it? It is based on a novel by H. G. Wells, which, from the desciption of it, sounds like a much better story. Wells was very pro-feminism, and often wrote about how women freedoms are severly limited, economically and socially. That is only mildly addressed in the film (perhaps not at all, and I'm just "reading between the lines" from a Wellsian view).

There is one good three second shot of a landing gear wheel on a plane. The shot shows it not rotating, just above the ground, and then hitting the ground and spinning rapidly as the plane touches down. Cool.

Once again, a Tennessee Williams adaptation that was pretty much nothing like what I expected. I expected somethign taudry and lurid, lots of jealousy and, you know, "unbridled passion". This was not that at all. As usual, I don't really know where I got that impression; maybe some trailer or poster I saw long ago, or maybe it's just that Ava Gardner is in it.

What this film is is very good, nicely complex, with several interesting characters. The acting is great. It is surprisingly a bit heart-warming.

A solid, amusing Charlie Chaplin film. I was surprised to find Charlie acting like a bad-ass through most of the film: not really what he is known for (is it?).

There is a brief scene in which Charlie reads another soldier's letter over the soldier's shoulder, and their expressions show the same reactions to various parts of the letter. Nicely done.

Superbly well directed and acted. I'm very impressed. A very sad story, though.

One quibble: I watched it on my laptop with headphones, and some of the atmospheric sound seemed rather "tacked on", as though someone was trying to make it come to life through sound effects. In particular, there are carts rolling across cobblestones in at least two places that just didn't sound right. Maybe without headphones it sounds okay.

Excellent! The best movie I've seen in some time! The story line is not what you might think from the plot synopsis (a young man buys a sex doll and treats it like a real person; his family and the community respond). The film is moving, and sad, and joyful, and superbly well-acted and directed.

This was only so-so. I really like Karen Morley; I wish she had played a bigger role in this.

This was more entertaining than I expected it to be.

I love this movie.

And, stupid as this may seem, I have yet to read the book. Soon.

This is not the movie I expected it to be. For some reason, I thought this movie would be a languid, southern romance kind of thing. To put it lightly, it is not. Very restricted by mores of the time it was written and produced, the story would get a very different treatment now.

I've not seen Elizabeth Taylor in many films. She is not bad in this, and the rest of the cast do a decent job.

I always want to really like Fellini films. This one I did not find to be very good. I love the concept: a great director showing us the city he loves. But the result was actually somewhat boring.

One thing I realized while watching this is that Fellini films often sound terrible, and this one definitely does. Almost all the sound seems to have been recorded separately, with no attempt to capture the ambient sound of the scene, or the reverberation properly fitting the environment, and with little effort at syncing.

An odd film, played fairly well by the leads. The scenes between Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel are the best.

Really terrible score.

Excellent - I really enjoyed it. Moving at times, too. Bette Davis is great and beautiful in this.

A cult classic that I've often heard of, but not seen before now. Quit bad as expected, but campy and silly almost to the point of being worthwhile. The sped-up film of the cars racing is very cheesy.

Another well-made, sad film. Very nice cinematography throughout. Anne Bancroft is very good.

Excellent. A reminder of how difficult life is, generally.

I've liked Lon Chaney in quite a few films. This one was just okay.

Roman Polanski has made some good films, I think. This dreadful thing is not one of them.

Not a particularly good film. Mildly amusing here and there, but mostly dull, slow moving and uninspired.

Good, interesting direction and writing. I liked it.

A very short, minimal film. Well done.

Excellent! I loved this silent, soviet film. Would make a great double feature with Koyannisquatsi (or Keaton's The Cameraman, for a different effect).

Locally excellent, globally just okay. Very nicely directed, looks nice (beautiful, at times), sounds good, good characters and dialogue. But overall, just lacked something to make me really like it.

A very enjoyable film with excellent direction and tone. It is quite long, and I had intended to watch it in multiple sittings, but I started watching and ended up seeing the whole thing. I liked the characters; the acting is very good throughout. I like the "go for the gusto/grab things when you can" message.

A good, but not great movie. Jane Wyman is good in this, but some of the other acting is not well done. Lew Ayres in particular acts in a very unconvincing, over-the-top style.

I don't understand the title. The main character, played by Jane Wyman, is Belinda, and she has a child, who she names Johnny. Why these two names are stuck together and used for the title of the film is never made clear. Perhaps the play would shed some light on this?

Wow, this was terrible. While Garbo is a fine actress, this movie does not do her justice at all. The writing is uninspired, and Melvyn Douglas' acting is dreadful. I don't believe for a second that he is in love with Ninotchka.

While I understand the constraints of the time it was shot, this film would have been so much better had it been shot in Paris and Moscow, and really contrasted the two cities and their ways of life. As it is, it is all caricature and stereotype. The film could have shown the complexity of the appeals of each city, and could have shown the fine character transformations that one could believe would come about in people coming to Paris for the first time from the Soviet Union. Plus, the whole "romance" aspect needs a compete rewrite.

Another solid film from Michael Moore.

I was hoping for so much more from this Bunuel film. Certainly important, and it made quite a splash at the time, it now seems very tame, and, yes, dull. The toe-sucking scene is the most interesting.

An intense, sad, moving film by Bergman. It is excellent, but it is not pleasant.

Pretty good film. Jenni and I have a very good friend who is a pastry chef, and a superb pie maker, so I thought a lot of her during this film. While this is not in itself a sad film, it is hard to separate it from the story of Adrienne Shelly, who wrote, directed and acted in it.

An excellent film. Lots of amazing camera work and impressive large scale war scenes and what seem like quite dangerous stunts. Plus, Clara Bow is fantastic.

I wanted to really like this, but I found it mostly uninteresting. Nicole Stephane is rather engrossing, but I was always hoping for more.

Poor use of music throughout: it swells unnecessarily and often.

This movie is awesome! Very Fritz Lang-y (and some of films aren't so). Fantastic concept, acting and style.

TCM is always showing this film, and I had a hankering for a Bette Davis film, so I watched it. It's a very silly thing, without much seriousness at all, but it's fairly amusing. Jimmy Durante shows up near the end and says to Mary Wickes something along the lines of "Come up to my room in half and hour, and bring some rye bread!" (he says it all lascivious like, without any suggestion of lunching, so it's pretty amusing and absurd).

I remember liking the 1992 version for some reason, so I thought I'd watch this. It's not very good. It starts pretty well, but there is no substantial clearing up of the issues with the men in the film, so it's just rather...nothing.

A very good silent film. There is ambition, then tragedy (rather surprisingly brutal), and then love seems to triumph. Good acting. I'm always intrigued by shots of cities in old films: how different and how similar they look to their modern selves.

Our Tivo just recorded this without our asking for it, as it does. We started watching it, and found it engrossing enough that we watched the whole thing. It's not bad at all: some good writing and acting, smartly done. Michelle Williams is excellent, and very cute.

At least the second time I've seen this. Excellent.

Rather over the top, and unrealistic in a number of ways. Good acting, though.

A particular problem is the ending: it seems that with the removal of two students from the class, all difficulties are solved? Hmmm.

So, I watched this because Jenni and Pam were watching it where I normally eat dinner. Some funny bits of writing, and decent acting at times, but overall: just terrible. No pizazz, no good character development, no texture. I especially dislike the way the woman decides to have the baby, with no explanation for how she came to that decision; it seems like rather an anti-abortion sentiment and anti-feminist to not show her even considering the possibilities and coming to a decision. (Yes, of course, this is a comedy, and abortions aren't funny, but neither is childbirth.)

A very touching, thought-provoking, well-acted, well-directed film. Just great. I cried not a little.

Directed by John Cassavetes.

Excellent. This film has a fantastic look, and a great, very human story, told with terrific acting.

Directed by Rainer Fassbinder.

I like this film's premise quite a lot, and it is performed extremely well by Tom Hanks. The kid's mom's (Merceded Ruehl) anguish is a bit underplayed: that is, it is clearly horrible, but not much is made of it. I wonder what the film would have been like if the kid's home situation was more like that of the kid in Time Bandits or Otto's in Repo Man? The music is just awful: I wonder if, in fifty years or so, people will start re-releasing late 20th century films with updated soundtracks, the way, e.g., Alloy Orchestra does updates of silent movie soundtracks?

Directed by Penny Marshall.

I don't know. This film has very nice cinematography, and it's always nice to see cities one hasn't seen much of, but the plot here is negligible, as is the character development, dialogue, and acting: there is simply nothing here worth the viewing. Also, like A Taste of Cherry, there is nil humor in this film, and I don't think that bodes well for my liking this director's movies (I would say that to lack humor is to lack a sense of humanity, but that might sound pretentious).

Directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou.

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Directed by Max Ophuls.

The subtitles were atrocious. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing the film again with better subtitles.

Directed by Roberto Rossellini.

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

Directed by Sergio Leone.

A beautiful but sad film, with a lot of ambiguity. Some very sinister goings on, and uncertain futures for the two main characters. I'm still unclear about what was going on at the Albanian border.

I've wanted to see Stan Brakhage's films for a long time. When I was at the University of Colorado, there were opportunities to see his work, but I never did. This collection has a whole bunch of his films on two DVDs, so I feel like I got a good dose.

I am extremely pro-experiment, in basically everything. A lot of the films in this collection were too similar to each other, and too similar to themselves: that is, any two seconds of a film is often indistinguishable from any other two second chunk of the film. Each frame looks fantastic, a little abstract painted masterpiece, but when they are run together I find I can't discern much, and it quickly got tiring.

To me, easily the best film is Window Water Baby Moving, which is the best film of a birth I've ever seen.

The collection does contain "Dog Star Man", which is the one I really wanted to see, but I, sadly, didn't think much of it.

I love the Tarzan concept. I'd love to spend my life swinging in the trees, protecting the animals from nasty white hunters. But this movie is not good. And it's brutal: from the hippopotami being indiscriminately massacred, to the fellow falling to his death off the ledge where Jane falls but doesn't die thanks to a safety rope, to the killing of Tarzan's ape mother (I think...), this movie treats death way too lightly.

Maureen O'Sullivan and Johnny Weismuller are good in their parts.

Finally got around to seeing this. I love "It's a Wonderful Life", and this has much in common with it: numerous members of the cast, Frank Capra, and Auld Lang Syne is played (here near the beginning versus at the end of IWL).

Overall, a pretty good film, and worth seeing just for its cultural influence. There is some bad editing in places, where you can see different takes were spliced together. Some good acting. I especially like the scene with Thomas Mitchell's character at the press club.

There is surprising (from a film point of view) violence involving children which makes the ending especially dramatic. The ending is very abrupt, as often happens with older films. I really would have liked to have seen a little wrap-up.