I wanted to break out of the monster rut that I had gotten myself into with the Sunday Great Easter Binge-a-Thon.  So I was looking for what I wanted to watch and I pulled up the AFI list of Top 100 movies.  There are several of these films that I have not seen that I consider holes in my film knowledge.  As I was going through them, I came across North By Northwest and, being a Hitchcock fan, I thought that was a perfect film.  I had never seen it and it was available on YouTube.

Cary Grant played Roger Thornhill, a New York advertising executive who found himself unwittingly stuck in the middle of an international espionage plot.  Finding himself as a fugitive, Thornhill jumped a train to Chicago where he met beautiful blonde Eve Kendell (Eva Marie Saint).  Eve helps him avoid capture by police and Thornhill tries to figure out exactly what happened to him.

This film is a lot of fun.  Cary Grant really goes all in on the story and the weird things that happen to his character.  You can see the character of Roger Thornhill change as the film progresses and he is placed in one dangerous and confusion situation after another. You can see Thornhill get better and better at the trickery as the film progresses.

Eva Marie Saint is great as Eve Kendell as well.  She was way more than just a pretty face in this story.

Hitchcock creates suspense throughout the entire story as the viewers try to figure out what is going on.  Hitchcock drops pieces of the truth as the film moves along.  He mixes humor in with the suspense and mystery making this very entertaining.

The suspense is at its highest peak on the top of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.  For 1959, the effects were decent and did not take me out of the excitement of the situation.

A Hitchcock classic.  Check that box off – Have Seen.

It was unintentional, but the Great Easter Binge-a-Thon has kind of turned into monster central here, as the next film I have watched today is the 1986 remake of The Fly starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.  This has joined today’s monster fest with Jaws, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the zombies from Zombieland.

The remake of The Fly was one of those films that received a lot of positive remarks from members of the staff at Collider, and I had not seen it since it came out (and I am not sure I eve saw the entire film) so I thought this would be a good one to include.

I love Jeff Goldblum, and there are plenty of Goldblum-isms here.  The film wisely does not lose its sense of humor and the script keeps returning to that humor as a way to mask the fear of what was happening.  At least that is until there is no room left for humor.  And then it is horrifying.

Again, much like the Creature, the practical effects may not look as realistic as some of today’s CGI films,but I think it is much more terrifying.  Some of the things that happen to Brundle here – well, I would hate to have happen to me.

Goldblum plays scientist Seth Brundle who is trying to impress journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) by showing her his new technology that was going to “change the world” in his words.  It is a teleportation device that he has created.  After some experimenting, Brundle believes that he has perfected it enough to teleport a living object.  So he, like so many other mad-scientists, tries it on himself.  However, a house fly found its way into one of the chambers and gets fused together with Brundle.

At first, the changes were positives.  Brundle had more stamina and strength, but soon he realized that there was going to be changes that altered what he was.

David Cronenberg directed the reboot and brought a level of fright to the slowly transforming man.  The man into a monster trope is certainly well represented among horror films, but this one is done with a flair and a humor that most do not attempt.

This version of the Fly brought us the well-known quote “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

And now during the Great Easter Binge-a-Thon, it is time to “Nut up or shut up.”

That is right… it’s Zombieland!

I remember seeing this movie at the Voy Theater and going in without any expectations.  I came out of it completely loving it.  One could argue that Zombieland was at the head of the renaissance of zombie related pop culture.  Zombieland certainly took the genre in a different way.

Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is a survivor of the zombie curse and he has a list of rules that he follows.  These rules pop up on the movie screen whenever they come into play. The rules include “Double tap”, “Don’t be a hero,” “Always Wear your seat belt,” and “Beware of bathrooms.”

Columbus, who was a loner, hooked up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a bad ass zombie killer, and sisters Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin) and the foursome tried to survive the land while learning to trust one another.

Zombieland also featured one of the greatest movie cameos of all time with Bill Murray.

I found Zombieland to be remarkably funny and still enjoyable to this day.  The four actors have great chemistry together and they have great comedic timing as well.  Some of the “zombie kills of the week” examples are a hoot (especially with the piano).

Zombieland was a whole lot of fun.

The winner of the past year’s Academy Award for Best Picture was Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which, for obvious reasons, owes a lot of dues to the 1954 classic, Creature from the Black Lagoon, as del Toro saw the film as a child

One of the Universal monsters, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, sometimes referred to as Gill-man, premiered in 1954 near the end of the 3D craze.  Over the years, the Creature became popular and successful as the other Universal monsters.

In the film, Dr. Thompson (Whit Bissell) discovered an artifact in the Amazon of a fossilized hand, a hand of something that had never been seen before).  He went to recruit help where he found David (Richard Carlson) and Kay (Julia Adams).  David was a former student and he was intrigued by what the doctor had found.  He brought his benefactor Mark (Richard Denning) with him and they formed a group to see what htey could find.

However, once they got back to the excavation site, the men the doctor had left were killed.  To make it worse, they spent several days finding nothing.  Then, David came up with an idea that the fossils had wound up in the nearby Black Lagoon, so the group took off on their boat to explore the idea.

The conflict between the human characters made it easier for the Creature to pick them off, but, like King Kong before him, the beauty killed the beast.  The Creature seemed to have some kind of attraction for Kay (and who could blame him).

I enjoyed the film in the black and white that it was originally shot in, and the Creature itself looked decent for the special effects of the time.  The practical effects were very well done and the fight scenes underwater must have been difficult to shoot.  Either way, everything looked tremendous.

I had a great time watching this film and I can see how Guillermo would be inspired by this.

Jaws Class of 2016

The Great Easter Binge-a-Thon continues this Easter morning with one of my favorite movies of all time.  Another Steven Spielberg classic…. Jaws.  The movie that made people everywhere afraid to go into the water.

Jaws was credited as the first of the big “summer blockbusters” as it led to what we have today.  It creates a tone unlike many of these types of films.  Spielberg famously got very lucky during filming as the shark robot, named Bruce, would not work properly and forced Spielberg into shooting Jaws differently.  The had to hide the shark with camera tricks and shots.  The ensuing scenes created that fear of the unknown and a sense of mystery that served the tone brilliantly.

Jaws boasts three of the great movie characters of all time.  Roy Schneider played Chief Martin Brody, the Chief of Police of Amity-an island in the New England area who had a fear of the water.  Richard Dreyfuss played Matt Hooper, a young marine biologist brought in as a shark expert.  And Robert Shaw played Quint, the grizzled shark hunterhired to kill the shark who owns the Orca, a boat that needed to be bigger.    These three characters are the lifeblood of this film and the interactions between the three of them made Jaws more than just a horror film.

in fact, perhaps the best scene of the entire film is the USS Indianapolis scene where Quint revealed that he was aboard that ship during World War II when in was sunk by a Japanese submarine and 1200 men floated in the water for days.  After rescue, only 300 men survived.  That scene should have earned Robert Shaw an Academy Award.

As a child, nothing scared me more than the scene where Quint was slowly being consumed by the shark.  And there are plenty of suspenseful moments like this scattered through Jaws.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the score from EYG Hall of Famer John Williams.  There may not be a more iconic theme than the Jaws theme.  Every time we heard those well known beats that picked up intensity, you couldn’t help but be uneasy.

Jaws is one of the best movies of all time and can be watched at any time and still create the same emotions in a viewer as it did the first time you saw it.  It holds up today and is a must see for any cinephile.

I had not seen this film in a long time so I wanted to make sure it was included in the Great Easter Binge-a-Thon.

This past Friday, I saw the most recent Steven Spielberg film, Ready Player One, in the theaters and I found it missing something that made it feel off.  I could not put my finger on it, but it just lacked something.  Minority Report is 100% wonderful and is a compelling and considerably better futuristic movie directed by Spielberg than Ready Player One.

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the Chief of a bureau of the police called Pre-Crime.  This bureau used three orphaned people called the precogs to see murders before they take place and arrest the perpetrators prior to the crime.  The process seemed to be working well.  So well that the program was going to be expanding nationwide.

However, things get strange when Anderton himself is shown to be committing a murder in one of the precogs’ vision, leading to him trying to avoid capture while investigating what is going on.

This movie is based on a short story from EYG Hall of Famer Phillip K. Dick and Spielberg takes the imaginative story and creates a brilliant world.  But there is more here than just the futuristic technological advances.  There is a mystery behind the story that sends the characters on a journey as interesting as any technology or precog.

Max von Sydow gives an excellent performance that keeps you guessing up until the very last moment.  Colin Farrell is one of the detectives trying to track down Anderton.

Minority Report is one of the top science fiction movies of the past 20 years and features a top notch performance from Tom Cruise.  Cruise believed in the pre-crime technology for years until it became something that he was forced to look at closer.

This was another film talked about by the Top 10 Show and I am so glad that I added it to the binge-watch.  It was a great reminder of what a fantastic director Spielberg can be.

A powerhouse performance highlights the next film in the Easter Binge-a-Thon as Mickey Rourke resurrects his career with his role as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.

This is a tough watch, one that really rips at the emotional heart of the viewer.  Randy Robinson is a broken-down, aging professional wrestler who is no longer the headliner of the major promotions.  Going form small arena to small arena on the weekends, riding on his reputation, Randy struggles trying to balance his real life with the life in the ring.

Honestly, this film is only somewhat about professional wrestling, although the parts about wrestling is the most realistic parts of any wrestling film.  The movie focuses on Randy “The Ram” as a character study.  Randy tries to make money with a job at the supermarket, tries to make up with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and tries to start a relationship with a strip club dancer (the effervescent Marisa Tomei).

The way Aronofsky filmed The Wrestler showed how sad and alone Randy was and how he used the ring as an escape.  Even when he was faced with the dangers of his heart trouble, he found the ring to be an easier place to exist than the real world.

Some of the scenes with Randy and his daughter were just heart- breaking and so very real.  It played like some of the scenes from the documentary Behind the Mat.  There was not that many scenes with his daughter, but they were sincerely impactful to the story and to the character.

Then, after seeing the hardcore wrestling scene, it was one of the hardest scenes to watch as a wrestling fan.  Just watching the backstage doctors trying to remove the pieces of glass and staples from these men was difficult to watch.

And the final match with the Ayatollah (Ernest Miller) was really tough to watch as well as Randy faced his reality that inside the ring was more to him than outside.  The way the end of the film is left up to interpretation is a brilliant (although frustrating) way to end the film.

Mickey Rourke was absolutely robbed of an Academy Award as he should have won for this rile.  It is one of the most personal, most raw, most devastating and real performances you will ever see.  Whether you love professional wrestling or not, The Wrestler is a masterpiece in cinema.

Next film in the Easter Binge-a-Thon is the Rob Reiner classic, A Few Good Men.  It features a strong movie with perhaps one of the best third act scenes in the history of movies.

The whole “You can’t handle the truth” scene is one of the most iconic scenes shot and show off the amazing performances and antagonistic chemistry between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.

This is one of the first times where you really see Tom Cruise as the charismatic, charming lead character he will become.  He nails all of the smart-ass lines that he was given and he also had to handle complex emotional scenes.  He showed that he belonged on the screen at the same time as a heavyweight like Nicholson.

Demi Moore does a solid job here, but Cruise is clearly the star of this movie.  One thing I did like was that the film did not try to force a romantic entanglement into the story between Moore and Cruise.  Both Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon bring strong performances to the film and Kevin Pollack provides a nice counter-balance to Cruise’s Kaffee.

James Marshall from Twin Peaks does a great job as the more naive and childlike Marine Downey.  Another great performance came from improv stud Christopher Guest, who appears as the doctor from Guantanamo.

Most of the courtroom drama is well done and is really carried by the likability of Tom Cruise.  If you have never seen the film before, you have the real feeling that there is no way that Cruise could win this case and that is a great success for Rob Reiner.

A Few Good Men is a top of the line thriller with great performances.  I loved this one.

It is time to begin the first Awesome Easter Movie Binge-a-Thon!.  Now, I plan on doing a bunch of movies (older ones) that I will include in the Doc’s Classic Movies Reviewed section of the web site.

We started off on Netflix with a movie that I had actually never seen, Oceans Eleven.

I did not love it.  Honestly, I thought much of the beginning of the film was fairly dull.  We moved around to all of the different characters but a lot of them receive little to zero development.  The heist itself picked up considerably, saving the movie for me.

Now, there was a lot of suspension of disbelief here as this group of thieves seemed to have everything perfectly planned out and there were no hiccups in the plan.  Every time it looked like there might be some unforeseen aspect that might cause them some problems, it turned out to be part of the plan.  That kind of foresight is hard to believe and does make the situation a little more boring than it should be .

There is no denying that there is a great cast of charismatic actors involved in this movie.  George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Casey Affleck, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, and Julia Roberts.  Add to that list the villain, Terry Benedict played by Andy Garcia, who is a solid character, you can tell what a lineup was here.

Everything just went so smoothly, I wish there would have been a couple of bumps in the road just to keep the doubt alive.

On the whole, Ocean Eleven was okay, and got better as it moved along, but it just did not hit for me.

Thank you, Matt Knost.

During the discussion this past week on the Top 10 Show, Matt Knost placed a movie on his list of “Technological Dystopian Future Movies” was a film that I had no idea about.  I had never heard of this movie before, so I checked on Netflix and, sure enough, there it was.  And it had Sam Rockwell starring as well, and I like him as an actor.  So I planned on watching this one, and I am really glad I did.

Sam Rockwell plats Sam Bell, a man alone on a station on the moon, monitoring the outposts that are mining gases from the moon that could allow the earth to reverse the energy crisis.  Sam had a three year contract but it was coming to an end and he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughter when he returned home.

Of course, there is more than meets the eye here.  Sam has a robot at the station named Gerty (Kevin Spacey) who does all kinds of stuff for Sam.  They have an interesting and strange relationship.  There are several little things hinted at as the film progresses that show you that something weird is going on.

Sam Rockwell is tremendous in this role.  It is one of his best performances that I have seen.  He goes through a plethora of emotions as the situation is revealed to him.  Rockwell was certainly overlooked for Academy Award consideration for this performance.

This is a great science fiction film.  It may be a little slow at times, but I honestly enjoyed that part of the movie.  I think sci-fi has fallen into a trend of being too action oriented, where this embraces the old style of sci-fi.  It is more psychological and thought provoking.  I find these movies every bit as thrilling as the action/adventure films.

I do not want to spoil the main part of the film, which actually does make it hard to discuss Moon, since that spoiler would be a major talking point.  I will say that the relationship between Sam and his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) is fascinating and heart breaking.

The film looks great as well.  The director, Duncan Jones, certainly has a winner in this film.  If you have not seen Moon, it is on Netflix and it is a great film.  It is a compact film just under 100 minutes and it is worth the time to watch.

Once again, thanks Matt Knost.  Great choice.