I would like to open with an apology; it has been quite a while since I have posted, and common courtesy demands I apologize to my loyal follower. Sorry Mom.
I have been a movie buff for a long, long time. I love movies. At one point, my wife Nita was given a courtesy card to an un-named chain from her sister. We have seen many movies together. Some really good, some really bad, and many in the middle. We only ever walked out of 1; “The Story of us”.
When we lived in Toronto, we attempted to discover a movie reviewer we could rely on. We found the best we could get was about 50%, so we saw quite a few movies in the 2nd and 3rd criteria listed above.
Getting to the end of the available reviewers, I came across this dude in the Star who was brutal; we agreed with him less than 20% of time. I was inspired and threw inverse logic into the calculation, and he became my Bizzaro reviewer; if he hated it, we usually liked it, and if he loved something, we would save our money. It worked quite well.
A few years ago, when I purchased my first iPod, I was trolling iTunes and discovered podcasts. It was wonderful; here were audio, and sometimes video, snippets of people’s shows or ramblings, and they wouldn’t cost a cent. I also discovered that sometimes the snippets were entire programs, like the audio from “60 Minutes”.
One of my first discoveries was “Filmspotting”. This is a wonderful reposting of a Chicago public radio broadcast. These guys are great. I have been listening to them since late 2007. The podcast is simply a couple of guys intelligently and astutely discussing movies. I don’t always agree with them, and they don’t always agree with each other, but it is always very entertaining.
Adam and Matty are somewhat director-centric in their views, but they do not fill their time with technical-ese. They are also responsible for 2 of my favorite new sayings. “Getting dusty” is a term they use when a movie plays to your emotions. Their second is something that many people I know think about me; “I hear what you’re saying, but you’re completely wrong”.
I’m hitting about .700 with these guys, so I think I’ll stick with them. And yes I used the baseball analogy for Matty “Ballgame” Robinson, who refers to “Major League” as his favorite movie. Nita is not so enamored with some of my recent rental choices, with good reason.
These guys have however turned me onto a web site called “Flickchart”, which is fun, free, and addictive for all you movie lovers. Once you have signed up, you are presented with 2 movies, and you simply select which one you liked better, and the site tracks all your answers. I have been wasting time on the site for a few months now, and my statistics show that I have ranked over 3300 times on 600 movies. My top 5 movies are an eclectic mix; “X-Men”, “Ray”, “Slumdog Millionaire”, “Little Miss Sunshine”, & “Snatch”.
This is usually fun and you sometimes end up having to make odd and challenging choices. Just look above; choose between “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Godfather”??? Really? What about choosing between “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Goodfellas”.
When it comes to movies, however, my favorite stories are centered on movie critics and reviewers. All too often, we are presented with the views of someone who has grown into an aficionado, or perhaps a critic who has discovered he gets more feedback when he mercilessly tears a movie to pieces. Either one of these 2 scenarios are also self fulfilling scenarios. The more movies you see, the more you know, or the more you ravage movies, the more you want to.
In 1939, 2 movies were almost universally panned; the critics at the time hated them for various reasons. In my lifetime, one of the worst reviews I read was in 1977 was peppered with words like schlock , gimmicky, and too loud.
The reviewer at the time, and probably also those in 1939, forgot one of the basic rules about movies. Movies are made to entertain us. Not every movie needs to be a statement or teach us about our world. Sometimes movies just need to make us laugh or get a little dusty. This is good; even more so when that was the film makers intention.
In closing, I do love my movies, and probably always will. I will not regale you with my favorites, because I am neither an authority nor an expert. But when next you see me, I would be more than happy to share my views on what I have seen recently; I always have and always will.
For those of you paying attention, the 1939 movies were “Gone with the wind” & “The Wizard of Oz”, and the 1977 bomb was “Star Wars”. Fortunately, Hollywood producers don’t always listen to the critics.
Cheers folks!
www.filmspotting.net (Also see iTunes for their podcasts)
www.flickchart.com
www.imdb.com (The Internet Movie DataBase)
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