Take a Proustian journey through my life vis-à-vis the words I have published to the Internet over the last four decades.
Guy Ritchie‘s second film Snatch is so close to his previous movie that it could be renamed Lock, Stock, Two Smoking Barrels, and Brad Pitt. This is not to say that Snatch is a bad film; its breakneck pacing and slick camera movement make it very enjoyable. Also interesting is the glimpse into the social hierarchy in gangster London where everyone “fuckin’ hates pikeys.”
Very rarely do movies rattle you to your core with nearly every scene or come together as well as Pink Floyd: The Wall. Told in a circular style, the film only makes complete sense after having watched it in its entirety. Combining music, animation, and live-action sequences, Pink Floyd: The Wall takes a concept album and fleshes it out to a wonderful feature-length film.
John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy—a character study of Joe Buck, a Texan who immigrates to New York City with dreams of being a hustler—is an X-rated update of the old fable about the country mouse and the city mouse.
I cannot say what is biggest in The Bridge on the River Kwai: Colonel Nicholson’s pride in the bridge, director David Lean‘s budget for the film, or the nationalistic stereotyping within the film.
After the promised autonomy of the Hollywood film system had lured director Alfred Hitchcock away from Great Britain, he remade The Man Who Knew Too Much, a film he had made in his motherland in 1934. I have not seen the original British version, so I cannot compare the two films, but the later version stands among the paragons of Hitchcock’s style. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, contains several elements characteristic of Hitchcock’s work: long takes, well-wrought sets, and a serpentine plot replete with foreigners and false leads.