@ Craig: In that respect, I think you’re right, but I hate waiting in lines so I got plenty tired of watching the queue. Like I said, I’m not claiming the film is flawed and I fully get the intent, but you could have just as easily shortened or eliminated some scenes and still arrived at the same effect. The funny thing is that in all the reviews, critics repeatedly talk about three specific dialogue scenes that make up about 40 minutes of the film. Almost no one seems to be praising the long, drawn-out surveillance sequences that make up the other 80 minutes.

We can agree it’s a good movie that almost put me to sleep.

Kurosawa would’ve been 100 later this month.

This is an after the fact Hard Candy SPOILER so don’t read this if you haven’t seen it, but I think one thing that bugged me about the movie (I can’t remember if she was really supposed to be 14 or if she was just acting…I remember I was surprised to find out Page was 20 or so at the time) is that the fact she just tricked him into thinking she was going to cut off his johnson. It seemed like a cop out. Call me sick, but I really wanted her to do it.

Ikiru was definitely the highlight of the weekend. :-)

Yes Sam, the spotlight is the attention grabber, though hopefully there will be many gems in the ones that haven’t gotten any press yet.

I should add I orginally indicated sex & drugs & rock & roll was available as part of the VOD program, but it looks like I was as wrong as wrong can be.

Joel, yes you could chop out a big chunk of Police Adjective in terms of plot, but I think it would damage it thematically. I think it was meant to be a sloh at times, sort of the eastern european police procedural version of waiting in a bread line, the idea being that things have changed, yet they really haven’t.

Alison, Hard Candy was the first film I ever saw Ellen Page in. The marketing sold me on that movie. The poster alone sold me on it: http://www.movieposteraddict.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/mpahardcandy.jpg.

The movie didn’t quite live up to its reputation, but it was still good. I don’t remember what my specific issues with it were.

The films are by John Carney, and Mssrs. Witterbottom, Jordan, Jeunet and Akin.

Those five alone make this quite a festival to attend!

In the past few days I have watched YI YI, THE IDIOTS, GOODBYE DRAGON INN, LILYA 4-EVER, TROPICAL MALADY, MILLENNIUM MAMBO, and EUREKA, and loved them all to varying degrees. I especially loved TROPICAL MALADY and YI YI, and included them both in my top 15 of the decade list.

I saw THE GHOST WRITER at a screening a few weeks ago, and really thought it worked MUCH better than SHUTTER ISLAND.

I’ll get back to new stuff this week, but I enjoyed catching up on some really good things I missed.

I watched Fatih Akin’s Im Juli again and really enjoyed it (again – I’d seen it in the theater almost a decade ago). It’s much more light-hearted than The Edge of Heaven, which I assume more people have seen, and features fantastic chemistry between its two leads.

Saw The Yes Men Fix the World and chuckled pretty consistently throughout at the embarrassment of Exxon, Dow, and others. Corporate suckers.

And I saw the highly regarded yet decade-old Dark Days, a documentary about people living underground in Manhattan, shot with zero budget by a guy who was just interested in what was going on down there. He ended up living there for two years. This movie came out a couple of years before I really got into documentaries but I would have raved it about it had I seen it back in 2000.

I’m still planning on Green Zone despite the tepidness I’m picking up here about it. Maybe with a little bit lower expectations it will hit the sweet spot for me.

And Iron Man…I was underwhelmed in 2008 and I’m underwhelmed in 2010. That one just missed the mark for me, despite all of the rightly positive things Craig points out about it.

As for Humpday, yes, I didn’t like that one much. Good acting, film not so much.

As much as many of us like to discuss and debate so-called Oscar films, it’s a shame that films this great are relegated to merely the best foreign film category.

Although he did his share of B films during the 1950s, his face pops up in such unexpected places as Night of the Hunter and Stalag 17.

I’ll most remember him as Jim Phelps, the rock that held Mission: Impossible together.

Not that long ago he did a series of semihumorous bits for an airline, which included references to his role in Airplane. I like the last one the most:

http://www.internetiquette.com/

I didn’t hate GZ either, though its pointlessness really bothered me after the fact and tainted this review.

Paul, I’d sort of been avoiding Humpday because I feared what you’ve just said. I think Joel also reported back with tepid results when he saw it. It’s too bad because as you say it’s a set up they really could’ve done something interesting with.

Christian. No.

Jennybee as far as Jules Dassin and “City” movies go, I prefer Night and the City to the one you watched. And yeah, I think Clash By Night sometimes gets lumped in with film noir because of the title and because it’s Fritz Lang more than anything else.

Joel, I thought the slowness of P,A actually kind of worked in its favor…I mean, it’s not exciting, though I found myself kind of hypnotized by it. It’s sort of un-self consciously anti-plot in that the main character spends the first half of the film actively trying to keep anything from really happening.

No, it’s not a barn-burner, but for me it kind of lingered. But you’ll note I never actually reviewed it.

But don’t get me started on board game movies and the like.

Watched three classic films for the first time: Naked City, Clash by Night, and The Searchers. All were very well done. I was particularly smitten with some of the shots in Naked City (and all those period NYC location shoots, gaaahhh) and the composition and subtle details of The Searchers. Naked City left me a little cold emotionally. The Searchers was pretty all-around great.

Clash by Night suffered from being a lot less noirish than I was expecting. More of a melodrama, and one that had some odd choices in it. Marilyn Monroe was bright and lovely in it.

I’m fully on board for Iron Man 2. All I want is an entertaining couple of hours with some clever lines, exciting action, and comic book characters that don’t make Paris Hilton look like a three-dimensional supergenius by comparison.

RIP Mr Graves. Beyond the hilariously latent homosexuality in Airplane!, you inspired many a badass with Mission: Impossible. He also had one of the coolest names ever. RIP.