Checked off another box this afternoon.

For the first time, I watched what is undoubtedly a masterpiece from the classic director Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai.

This movie has inspired multitude of films over the years from The Magnificent Seven to the Avengers.  You could literally see the development of what would eventually become tropes in action movies worldwide begin in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

A village of farmers in 16th century Japan are being threatened by a group of bandits, who are preparing to pillage the village.  To protect themselves, the village decided to hire a group of samurais to protect them.  The samurai warriors were assembled and fought the bandits.

Toshirô Mifune played the rapscallion rogue Kikuchiyo.  Takashi Shimura played Kambei Shimada, the older and respected leader of the samurai.  Isao Kimura played the young and untested son of a wealthy family, Katsushirō Okamoto, who talks Shimada into taking him on as an apprentice.  

All of the samurais received a certain spotlight in the movie, and not just one from the action.  Each character had important pieces to their story that really brought each man to life.  You did care for each one, so when they were in jeopardy, you felt it.

There were other characters among the farmers that received character bits as well.  Keiko Tsushima played Shino, a daughter of one of the farmers who wants her to be a son.  She has a relationship with Katsushiro that leads into struggles for both characters.

This is a spiraling epic of a movie, lasting over 3 and a half hours (including an intermission breaking the film into parts).

The battle scenes in this are absolutely beautifully shot and masterfully planned out.  Each moment is important to, not only, the story, but to each character’s development as well.

There is no doubt this is one of the great movies of all time.

“Who are these guys?”

That was asked several times during the classic Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the titular characters.

Iconic outlaws Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and The Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) were leaders of the infamous Hole-in-the-Wall Gang in the Old West.  After a series of train robberies, a seemingly unstoppable posse, hired by the railroad president, comes after Butch and Sundance, chasing the outlaws across the land.  This leads them to flee to Bolivia with Sundance’s girlfriend Etta Place (Katharine Ross).

I really enjoyed this movie.  I am not sure I had seen it before, though I have seen some of the scenes involved here, in particular the iconic cliff jumping scene.  The relationship and banter between Paul Newman and Robert Redford was utterly fantastic and easily the best part of the movie.  They were so quick-witted and engaging that you fall immediately in love with them despite the fact that they were criminals.

The script was written by William Goldman, who would write the book and movie The Princess Bride, and you can see the similarities between the sharp dialogue and the connections between characters.  I laughed out loud several times as Butch and Sundance snipped at each other showing perfect comedic timing in a film that did not make me think would be funny.  Goldman earned an Academy Award for his writing on this project.

The music here is amazing as well.  The happy and bouncy “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” works so well in a beautiful scene with Butch taking Etta around on a new-fangled bicycle.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman showed amazing chemistry with each other and totally make this movie work.  Everything depends on these two actors delivering the characters and their dialogue and they are just great.  I had a lot of fun with this movie, as it becomes one of my favorite Westerns around.

Reach the stars, fly a fantasy
Dream a dream, and what you see will be-eh, yeah, yeah, yeah-eh
Rhymes that keep their secrets, will unfold behind the clouds
And there upon the rainbow is the answer to a Neverending story-eeh

The Neverending Story is a classic tale of fantasy and adventure, a beautiful family film that provides thrills, humor, deep themes and magic.

A young boy Bastian (Barret Oliver), who has recently lost his mother, is getting bullied by a group of kids.  One day on the way to school, Bastian ducks inside an old bookstore to avoid the bullies chasing him.  Inside, he meets an old man who shows him a book that is meant to be more than what it was.  Bastian sneaked away with the book and found a deserted building to read it.

In the story, he discovers a land called Fantasia that is slowly being taken over by the Nothing and the leaders of Fantasia has recruited a mighty warrior by the name of Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), who turns out to be a kid, and they send Atreyu on an adventure to save the Princess, who was dying from the Nothing.

This adventure becomes majorly meta for Bastian as he learns the importance of imagination and daydreams, something he has been told to stop doing.

The movie is truly wonderful.  Yes, visually, it looks like a 1980’s movie, but actually the practical effects involved here are part of the film’s charm.  The creatures and the sets are masterfully imagined and designed.  There is a realness to most of the movie that is sometimes missing in the big green screen epics of CGI today.

Barret Oliver does a really solid job as Bastian.  Some of his reactions as he reads through the book are well done.  Some may be over the top as well, but he is solid enough to keep the narrative going.

Noah Hathaway is a good looking young boy for the role of Atreyu.  He does get a little whiny at times with his voice. but I am guessing that he is directed to do so.  However, there is no denying… this kid had some magical hair.  One scene he turned from the camera and his hair flowed like the mane of a lion.  It was epic.

Then the film pulled out the tissues for us early on as Atreyu was trying to get his way through the Swamp of Sadness with his horse Artax.  You have to have a heart of stone to not be affected by this scene.  It came out of nowhere but it does a great job of setting up the difficulties that Atreyu would be facing while being a metaphor for depression and how dangerous it can be for individuals.

The Neverending Story was a beautiful story with all kinds of emotional beats in it.  The young actors do a decent job and deliver when they need to.  The tale is remarkably meta, although the ending when Bastian uses Falkor the Luck Dragon to get revenge on the bullies who had dumped him in the dumpster may not have been the most evolved message to give.

I was scrolling through Netflix to try and find a movie for tonight and I found something new on the streaming service from 2014 that featured Dan Stevens.  It was a movie called The Guest.  However, that had not sold me on watching the film as of that point.  Then I saw that the list of actors included Brendan Meyer, and I was in.

Brendan Meyer is an actor who also participates in the Movie Trivia Schmoedown as Brendan “The Kid” Meyer.  I liked the Kid a great deal and getting a chance to see him work in a movie was a great opportunity.

David (Dan Stevens) arrives at the house of the Petersons.  He tells Laura (Shelia Kelley) that he was a friend of her deceased son during their time in the military and that the last thing he had promised to her son was to look out for his family.

Laura’s other son Luke (Brendan Meyer) and her 20-year old daughter Anna (Maika Monroe) started to bond with David as he showed that he was capable and helpful.

However, David has a dark secret that threatens to put the entire family in jeopardy.

Dan Stevens does a very solid job as the machine-like soldier who never seemed to be out of control.  You could understand why, just by the way he carried himself, this family took him in so quickly.  He was clearly a skilled manipulator, finding specific way to endure himself to each member of the family.  Plus, he seemed to be going out of his way to make their lives better.

Little did they know there was a darkness inside him and that he could snap and turn on them all at any moment.  The film does a great job of playing that tone of uncertainty, always suspecting but never being totally sure what was going on.  In fact, there were chances that the story might flip on us and that what we were being led to think was not that way at all.

When the tables turned, it went violent very quickly, putting our protagonists in desperate situations.  There some moments of brutality that was tough to watch.

Now, David’s motivations did feel muddy.  I was not sure I understood in the end why he wound up in this place and what his true motivations were.  I understand why things happened the way they did, but I am not sure what brought him here in the first place.

The film moves briskly and gives you some good thrills and some exciting moments.  The performances are decent and there was an appearance by Abaddon from LOST (Lance Reddick) too as Major Carver.

This is a fine watch on a Saturday night if you’ve got nothing else to do.

Maybe the news networks should take a closer look at this film.

Network was the story of an aging anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) whose ratings had slipped and was going to be fired until he flipped out live on television.  The ratings for his diatribe soared and he became a network standby.

This is still completely relevant in today’s world, especially in the world of 24-hour news networks as we have now.  The ratings are the most important factor.  The networks spend more time with the darkness than in the light.  They try to get viewers to believe/do certain things, mainly to keep tuning in.

Network is full of amazing performances including Oscar winner Finch (who became the first winner to receive an Oscar posthumously).  Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight also won Academy Awards for their performances.  William Holden and Ned Beatty were nominated for Oscars.

Directed by the iconic Sidney Lumet, Network won for writing as well.  Everything was brought together in the perfect package at the right time.  The United States had just gone through Watergate and the desire of the public was ripe to respond to such work.

The movie was a satire on the media and the influence of ratings.  It provided some ridiculous situations to show how responses could be just a bad.

News networks such as FOX News, MSNBC etc can easily be seen and recognized in the fictional UBS network in Network.  It makes one wonder why we have not come fartehr.

Here is the next classic 1980’s hit movie that was missing on my list.  I had never seen The Lost Boys before, although I knew that it featured Kiefer Sutherland and involved vampires.  I had added it to my list to watch this summer and I was looking forward to it.

Then, I watched it.  I have to say, I was pretty disappointed with what I saw.

I never expected to dislike this movie, so I am shocked at the result.  The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher (which should have given me a hint) and produced by Richard Donner had a cast of several of the 80’s teen idols.  Not only Kiefer but also Corey Feldman (who I enjoyed in The Goonies and Stand By Me), Corey Haim, Bill (of Bill & Ted) himself Alex Winter, Jami Gertz and Jason Patric.  It had roles as well for Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann and Bernard Hughes.

So the cast was solid.  What was the problem?

The film was a mixture of horror and comedy.  Those kind of films work well, if done properly.  Our main heroes are young kids fighting against the monstrous odds, which I historically enjoy (Monster Squad).

Even our main protagonist, Sam (Corey Haim), went into a comic book shop and knew his material.  Another point that should have made it special for me.

So what happened?

I just did not feel as if the two tones worked together in this movie.  The two Coreys felt out of place in the movie and, perhaps, miscast.  I found nothing original here.  It was a bare bones story.  The ending came out of nowhere, and yet was painfully apparent.  Our heroes felt very incompetent, yet they handled themselves really well.  And Michael (Jason Patric) was just endlessly irritating.  Haim was just screaming all the time and there were so many tropes of the genre.

I was very disappointed with this movie.  If there were ever one that was set up for me to love, this was the one.  I did not find it funny.  The scary parts were underwhelming and it felt as if actors were cast in the wrong roles.

Blah Blah.

I started the day with the teaser trailer for Bill & Ted Face the Music.  I followed that with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  That meant that we had to finish off the day with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

The sequel to Excellent Adventure took the franchise in a different path despite keeping much of what made the original film so fun.

The evil De Nomolos (Joss Ackland), a futuristic tyrant, created a robot pair of Bill & Ted to go back into the past and try to kill the real Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) and prevent the future from worshiping their music.

Of course, the evil robot Bill & Ted were able to outwit the witless real Bill and Ted and killed them, sending them into the afterlife.

And that is the start of the movie.

I liked this movie quite a bit too.  I may have liked this a little bit more than the first one.  It would be close.  This one has the same kind of silly story with ridiculous situations as the first one did.  There may have actually been more things tossed into the second film, most of which worked.

I think the first movie may have been a little funnier, but the biggest thing the sequel has that the original movie did not have was The Grim Reaper (William Sadler).  The personification of Death was a total epic character, stealing every scene that he appeared in.  William Sadler was clearly having a great time with the role and he really elevated the rest of the movie to a level above the first.

I also loved the song God Gave Rock N Roll to You, performed by Kiss.  This song had a major place in the story/plot.

Reeves and Winter continue to be great as the constantly lost Bill & Ted.  Honestly, I think they were a little less idiotic in this movie, perhaps showing some character growth…(nah).

I think most people seem to think this sequel is not up to the original, but honestly I believe I enjoyed it more.  Watching these two movies today has increased my enthusiasm to see the third film later this year (I hope).

This morning, the teaser trailer for Bill & Ted Face the Music (the third in the series) debuted online and it inspired me to go ahead and watch the first of the series.  I have actually never seen Bill & Ted, never thinking that it was the type of film I would enjoy, but since I will most likely be seeing Bill & Ted 3, this felt like the right thing to do.

Surprisingly, I found this to be quite funny, clever and engaging.  Sure, there were stupid parts, but most of the stupidity was actually quite charming.

Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) were on the verge of flunking their history class which would result in Ted being sent to military school and the pair split up.  However, a man from the future named Rufus (George Carlin) arrived with a time machine and a plan to help Bill and Ted pass their history report by collecting some of the great figures in recorded history.

Yes, the story is silly and makes little sense, but you have got to expect that.  There was nothing that made me just hate watching it and the use of these historical figures is funny.  Yes, the idea of Napoleon (Terry Camilleri) at a water park and Genghis Khan (Al Leong) at a sporting goods shop in the mall are ridiculous and doesn’t work if you think too much about it.  So don’t think too much about it.  If you just let yourself embrace the idiocy, there is a lot of fun to be had here.

Both Bill and Ted are charming and lovable for the goofballs that they are.  If you accept them as characters, you cannot help but enjoy their adventure.

If you are looking for a specifically detailed and well-thought out plot with well reasoned scenes and an in-depth and well thought out use of time travel…well, this one won’t be for you.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is light-hearted, goofy, and a ton of fun.  Is it dumb?  Absolutely.  Is it good dumb?  Yes, it is.  I did not expect to like this as much as I did.

Last week was the Top 10 Show’s list of Female Directed Movies.  This movie was number one on their compiled list.

When I saw it in the theaters, I found it boring.  While I did not hate the film, I did fall asleep several times, only being awaken by the on-screen explosions.

However, the nearly universal praise of the movie, including multiple Oscar nominations and one win, made me wonder if I needed to revisit the film.  There have been several films that, over time, I found more interesting the second time around than I did on original viewing.

This morning I did that rewatch and I found Zero Dark Thirty considerably more compelling this time than I did in the movie theater.

Zero Dark Thirty is the true story of the hunt for and eventual killing of al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.  We meet Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative who has arrived in Pakistan and becomes involved with a group using torture to discover details of al-Qaeda plots.  The head agent Dan (Jason Clarke) led the “enhanced interrogation” as Maya was showing signs of being uncomfortable with the techniques.

Eventually, with a change in political administrations on the horizon, Dan began to be beaten down by what he had to do and returned to Washington for a change.  Maya continued her search for information.

In 2011, after breakthroughs, Maya tracked her target to a compound in Pakistan but she could not confirm to a certainty that bin Laden was here.  Despite the doubt in the government, Maya was confident that she was right and he was there.

There is not a ton of action in this movie.  It does drag along at times, especially if you had been expecting this to be an action movie.  It is much more of a character study, if not a psychological thriller than an action movie.  The action here is very realistic and anxious.  The action in Zero Dark Thirty builds the tone of the movie more than it does satisfy the action itch.

The scenes at the beginning of the movie involving torture are the most controversial scenes by far.  They make you feel uncomfortable and show the brutality that went along with the use of them.  However, it did not glorify torture.  In fact, it showed the effects of torture not only on the victims, but also those who were engaging in it.  The first twenty to thirty minutes of this movie weer extremely difficult to watch.

The performances were very strong to fantastic.  Jessica Chastain, very deservingly, received award recognition for her role as Maya.  Jason Clarke was great, taking what many would have written as a one sided character and showed both sides to a complex man.  Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez and James Gandolfini all had roles of significance and provided real moments despite the lack of screen time.

I am glad that I took the time to revisit this movie.  When I approached this with the proper mindset, I found it much more engaging than I did the first time around.  Kathryn Bigelow does a tremendous job as the director of the film.

Of the three films in the Back to the Future trilogy, Back to the Future Part II has always been considered the worst of them.  While I can understand that opinion, I disagree with the justification.

In Back to the Future Part II, Marty (Michael J. Fox) and Doc (Christopher Lloyd)  head into future, as we saw at the end of the original, to do something about Marty’s kids.  However, once in the future, old man Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) gets his hands on the DeLorean and, with the Gray’s Sports Almanac, visits his young self so 1955 Biff can make millions betting on sports.

This led to a dark, dystopian 1985, where Doc and Marty return to, shocked by what they find.  They realize that they have to head back to the past once again to retrieve the Sports Almanac  and fix the future.

I actually like Back to the Future Part II quite a bit.  I liked it more than I did the Part III in the old West.

I think that this would be an even better movie if they had changed up one thing.  I really liked the 2015 hover board chase, which echoed the chase with the skateboard in the original movie.  I loved the dark 2015 world with rich Biff.  I enjoyed the trip back to 1955 with the way they mixed the new scenes in with the original film’s third act.  The end twist is epic and funny.

The one place that is not great is the trip to Marty’s 2015 house, seeing his family and meeting his kids.  This whole section with injured hand Marty getting fired and Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) seeing her future self is simply terrible.  This entire segment really taints the trip to the future, setting up a waste of a storyline just so the film can add the whole “Don’t call me a chicken” bit that had not appeared in the first movie at all.  The removal of this section would improve the film dramatically and would not change the story of this movie at all.  And we would not have to see Michael J. Fox dressed up like his daughter.

Otherwise, I thought the trip to 1955 was very clever and well written.  There were twists and turns making you unclear how Marty was going to get out of the situation.

I have heard people complain that this film’s third act was too familiar, but I really thought that was the purpose.  Several of the jokes and the scenes depended on reacting and adjusting to what was happening from the original movie.

This was also one of my favorite uses of time travel and the explanation of it.

Back to the Future Part II is much better than what it gets credit for, despite having definitive flaws in the first main act of the movie.  Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd are their normal awesome selves and the writing is extremely clever.

Recently, the Top 10 Show Re-List had a list of Coming-of-Age movies as its topic.  I compiled my list, but one of the films that appeared on the list of the shows turned out to be The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I had never seen this movie and Matt Knost specifically raved about it. He said that he did not expect to like it as much as he did and that it was a film that people should watch.

This was a film that I had never seen and had not had any interest in seeing.  I saw it on the streaming platforms around the web but just had not interest.  When Matt gave it such a glowing rave, I added it to my summer to watch list.  It was on Netflix and it was going to be easy to see.  Now I just had to find the mindset to watch it.

It wasn’t about time.  I have the time.  It just felt like a film that I had to get into the right head space to watch it.  I was still afraid that I would be bored and that I would not like the film.  I had always liked Emma Watson from the Harry Potter franchise and Logan Lerman had been a young actor I liked.  Even still, I was not sure if I wanted to watch it.

I am so glad that I did watch this today because I just found it to be so brilliantly done and totally compelling.  The film was filled with amazing young characters, brought to life by some talented young actors and it tugged on the heart strings.

It also was able to catch me off-guard in ways of story, which I did not expect.  I do not usually get shocked by movie scripts so when it happened here, it made me all the more impressed by what they had done.

Logan Lerman was amazing as Charlie, the freshman boy who is befriended by a group of seniors.  Charlie had his own troubles but I had not expected them to be more than what I expected.  Charlie did not fit in at high school and finding this group of people who also was outside the norm of the school was a blessing for him.

Each of them had major issues.  Ezra Miller’s Patrick is quirky and bold, but his own secret has emotional stakes for him and another.  Emma Watson’s Sam was a sweet girl with a bad reputation for making bad choices.  These two helped Charlie find his way through high school even though they did not have a real clue about the depth of the pain he was in.

The film had fantastic music and did a memorable job of interweaving the music into the plot.  Set in 1994, there are some great moments from the Come on Eileen dance scene to the David Bowie Heroes driving scene.  The music made every scene better.

This movie truly does show the gamut of emotions that young people go through during these uncertain times of their lives.  One only hopes that they can find people who are as important to themselves as these friends turned out to be.

It would have certainly made my own Coming-of-Age top 10 list had I seen it before.  It was a wonderful movie.

Ah, what could have been.

A film shrouded in tragedy, The Crow is one of the greatest revenge films ever made and one of the earliest films that was based on a comic book to be quality and well-done.

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), a rock musician, and his fiance Sarah (Rochelle Davis) were murdered on the eve of their wedding by a band of dirtbag criminals. Eric thrown out of the sixth floor window and Sarah, raped and beaten, dies later at the hospital.

A year later, a black crow arrives on Eric’s grave, tapping on the tombstone.  This causes Eric to pull himself out of the grave.  Discovering that he had returned from the dead, Eric, with his face covered in white makeup, started his path of revenge.

Of course, The Crow was marred by the tragic death of its lead star Brandon Lee, son of the legendary Bruce Lee.  With eight days of shooting remaining, Brandon was accidentally injured by a malfunctioning round of blank ammunition.  He died later during surgery.  Producers rearranged certain scenes and used tricks to finish the scenes they still needed to make sure that the film was released.

The Crow was a great film.  Lee was spectacular here.  This could have easily been a massive breakthrough for the young actor.  His charisma, his presence, his aura stood out on each image.  The character was compelling and easy to root for.

Ernie Hudson played police officer Albrecht and worked very well as the supportive cop, the man who is the audience’s eyes, his wonder for what was happening was the same as what we felt.  Hudson brought a true gravitas to the role and his very appearance gave a credibility to the film.

The story is very simple, but the key to the film is the imagery in each scene.  There are beautiful shots in the film, a visual cornucopia of violence and style.  The images tell the story and help set the tone of this film better than most of the words.  It is like a comic come to life.  There were several moments where I was watching the film where I thought, “That looked like a splash page from a comic.” It was bathed in darkness as well, with color used sparingly.  It created something wonderfully dark.

Yes, the film is very violent, but I do not think that it is gratuitous.  It has cinematic element to it and it works so well.

The only issue I had while watching The Crow was that I kept thinking about professional wrestler Sting.  Sting took a “Crow-like” gimmick after the film came out and he looked quite a bit like Brandon Lee.  It was distracting for me, but that was not the film’s issue.  It was mine.

The Crow was a great film.

I have been a fan of Taika Waititi and his work over the last few years.  What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, and Jojo Rabbit are three of the great films that I found remarkably entertaining and touching.  However, there was always one film missing from the movies I have watched.  Today, I filled that gap by watching Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

In New Zealand, troublesome foster kid Ricky (Julian Dennison), who had been pulled out of several foster home, is dropped off with Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hec (Sam Neill), an older couple who live just outside of the bush.  Ricky was withdrawn and protective of himself and did not want to get too close.  However, Bella won the boy over with her kindness.  Sadly, she dies suddenly.

When it sounded like the child service agent Paula (Rachel House), who was over the top, was coming back to take Ricky away, he ran away into the bush.  Hec went to find him but hurt his ankle.  The two of them stayed in the bush as Hec’s ankle imporved.

The social services arrive and start a nationwide search for the pair of them.

This movie is great.  It is funny, beautifully emotional, and poignant as can be.  You can see how Waititi will create a film like Jojo Rabbit.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople has so much ridiculousness going on around it, but the whole thing is anchored by the relationship between Ricky and Hec, and it is not a relationship that is typical.  It is shaky as both individuals have lived lives that prevented them from truly connection with others.  They were brought together by Bella, and, when she was gone, left them floundering.  The social services, led by Paula, the police, the hunters who kept being involved, were so unrealistic, but you buy it immediately because of the strength at the core of the pairing of Ricky and Hec.

You can see the beginning of Taika Waititi’s own little band of actors that he will be dipping into as his movies continue.  Rachel House appears in Thor: Ragnarok.  Taika himself is here, as he is in his other films.  Rhys Darby was Anton in What We Do In The Shadows.  Mike Minogue had a cameo in that film too.  It is starting to feel like Wes Anderson, who has a group of regular actors to appear in his roles in his films.

Julian Dennison would go from here to be Firefist in Deadpool 2.  He was a great find here as he and Sam Neill have amazing chemistry and make for the heart of this movie.

I am very happy that I took the time to watch this film.  It only makes me even more of a fan of Taika Waititi’s work.  Knowing he is working on the next Thor movie and a future Star Wars film really provides me with a lot of hope and excitement.

One of the online movie pundits I like made a comparison of The Social Network to Citizen Kane, format-wise.  I made that decision that I wanted to watch them together to see how I felt about that idea.

I had seen The Social Network before, but I had never seen Citizen Kane.  Touching on the idea of the comparison, I do see some connection between the way the story is told with the non-linear storytelling format (though honestly, the flashbacks feel more like the main story than flashbacks), the main protagonist having negative qualities, and Rooney Mara (who played Erica Albright in Social Network) is comparative to Rosebud in Citizen Kane.  There are other connections, but it would take me diving deeper into both movies to really do that analysis justice.

The Social Network is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the founding of Facebook.  We meet Mark as he is breaking up with the aforementioned Erica (Rooney Mara).  Actually, it was Erica who did the breaking up and it sent Mark on this path toward Facebook.  He went back to his room and started blogging negative things about her, showing his true troll side.  This led to an idea to compare other female students at Harvard.

The comparison website had a huge response and that drew the attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), rowers and legacy students at Harvard.  The brothers approached Zuckerberg with an idea about a social network and they wanted him to write code.  Zuckerberg agreed, taking the idea to another level.

With the monetary investment of his best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), Marc went to town.

Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network just pops with the writing of Aaron Sorkin.  The combination of these talented individuals really provided an amazing product that gave these great actors some fantastic material.  Performances here were just astounding as well.  Jesse Eisenberg, Armie Hammer, Andrew Garfield were all great and it is most likely the best performance in the career of Justin Timberlake.

The film does a great job of showing the character of Mark Zuckerberg and how he was desperate for a connection, yet unable to connect.  The irony of having a person who has so much trouble with the relationships in his life being the driving force behind a platform that is meant to connect to other people is unbelievable.

I did not think originally that this would be a great movie.  I felt that this would be dull, but it is anything but.  I liked it the first time I saw it and this time was even more as I appreciated the technical aspects of the film this time more.  The Social Network is an exceptional film.

Universally recognized as one of the greatest movies ever made, Citizen Kane is, as movie pundit Scott Mantz might say, the Citizen Kane of movies.

Citizen Kane is one of those experience movies that anybody who considers themselves a cinephile must experience.  Starring the director Orson Welles, Citizen Kane is a movie that has an amazing relevance to today’s world, almost 80 years later.

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) was a newspaper magnet and one of the country’s richest men.  Upon his death, he became even bigger news, and journalists searched for a hook for their audiences, in their attempt to discover something new about the millionaire.  A group of reporters focused in on a riddle… the last word spoken by Kane was “Rosebud” and no one knew why.  This mystery sent the reporters on a journey into the past of Charles Foster Kane searching for a clue to the true meaning of that allusion.

I had never watched Citizen Kane before, but I knew the answer to the riddle of :What was Rosebud.”  It is one of the most iconic movie images ever put to screen.  I knew about that allusion for decades.  Heck, the first place I ever heard of it was from the Dr. Demento Show and the song “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” by Julie Brown.  It was a pop culture symbol that everyone knew.  That speaks to the successful nature of the film.

This movie was filmed in ways that would inspire directors and creators for years.  In fact, many of the styles used to film here may not seem special when viewed today, but were, in actuality, influential to the film industry when Orson Welles did it.  Techniques such as “deep focus” which is a technique that allows the filmmaker to keep objects in the foreground and in the distant background in focus at the same time.  Images in the film are utter masterpieces of composition and imagination. They literally teach classes on the imagery found in Citizen Kane.

The story telling of the film was ahead of its time as well.  The film starts off with the death of the main protagonist in Charles Foster Kane, setting up the film’s main mystery with the “Rosebud” utterance.  Then the film is told in flashbacks to the different stages of Kane’s life, and it was not even chronological at this point.  Yet the story is so well constructed that you are never confused about where in the story you are and what place in Kane’s life you are watching.  The use of the news reel right after Kane’s death provides us with exposition in a manner that is both effective and entertaining.

I also found a disturbing comparison between Charles Foster Kane and another of our major public figures in today’s world.  Another multi-millionaire narcissist with delusions of grandeur.

I avoided Citizen Kane for the longest time because I thought I might be bored by it.  Au contraire… I found it completely compelling and fascinating.  The tale of the life of this man and his hopes and his desires, along with a longing for what was and what could have been.  Devastating.  This is an amazing debut from Orson Welles and it had to be difficult for him to manage expectations after the first film you make is one of the most revered films in movie history.

A true masterpiece.