I pity da fool who don't like the 3rd movie.

How was Rocky supposed to fight right after his trainer was knocked into the arms of Jewish Jesus?

You're worried about that? What about how do these guys survive 100 blows to the head per round?

Defense was not a priority in 1970s boxing.

I have never seen Rocky.

If it comes on TCM, I will recommend it for you.

I actually bought the DVD at Walmart one day for $5 but have yet to open it.

Movie night GNO at Diello's!

Omg

Oh well, um, spoiler warning for that review up there, big fella.

Rocky is worth a viewing. Star Wars, not so much.

bush

Annie Hall - Your enjoyment of this movie completely depends on how well you can tolerate Woody Allen. I like Woody Allen just fine, so I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. I can certainly understand why you wouldn't like the guy, aside from the whole marrying his wife's adopted daughter thing. His movies are oozing with ultra-intellectualism and it's so over the top you begin wonder whether people like this actually exist somewhere in the world. These are people who can discuss existentialism at length. They know the difference between Schumann and Schubert. The tone is set in the opening monologue when Allen mentions Freud and Groucho Marx in the same breath. You're gonna get a little bit of both here: deep psychological analysis mixed in with a bunch of one-liners. If you can't handle it, you're out in the first minute. I stayed with it and laughed my ass off. There's not a real story, per se. The movie is all about relationships, but the nice thing is all the Freud and philosophical crap serves its purpose to analyze why we bother to go through with it all. Allen addresses the audience several times to get us involved in his exploration of relationships. It gets silly at times, but it's a fun ride. His early movies were all rather silly, but here he went in a different direction and added a lot more depth to his comedy. Good stuff.

Did it deserve to win?: The fight was between this and Star Wars. Allen himself wondered how you can even begin to compare the two since they're two completely different movies. I think they made the right choice. Star Wars was a huge part of our childhoods, but looking back, it really isn't that great. It's got bad acting and dialog to go along with all the cool asplosions and laser knives. Annie Hall deserves it in a weak year.

(out of 5)

Up next: The Deer Hunter

I'm well behind on your list, but I'll throw out a few generic comments....

Cuckoos Nest - Top 5, maybe Top 3. Fishing sequence, Basketball sequence. World Series sequence. Chief's reveal... all classic cinema. Nicholson at his demented best. Almost perfection...

Rocky - Still a classic. Shallow and forced in places, but I still smile when I see the first round knock down and the reaction from the crowd of Philly low lifes at the bar. Spot on review.

Annie Hall - Has not aged well. The whining New York Jew is not particularly novel anymore. Woody's personal exploits / failings don't help. It was ok for its time, but you couldn't pay me to watch it again.

The Deer Hunter - This movie is an unnecessary epic. Not unnecessary as in "shouldn't have been made", but more like it didn't need to be so friggin' epic. It tells a good story about brotherhood and war stuff, but takes way too long to do it. It opens as a bunch of blue collar steel worker dudes are gearing up for the wedding of one and a final hunting trip before 3 head off to Nam. Camaraderie and Russian wedding polkas take up the first hour. Then you get the hunt, which is more arguing and grabassery than hunting. (I've never been hunting so maybe that's normal.) A lot of this could've been chopped down. We get it, these guys are close. They group sang an R&B song in a bar. That's all we needed, bro. The length of this first act works in one way: it lulls us into a state of calm before all hell breaks loose when they get to Nam. The POW Russian Roulette scene is what everyone remembers, of course. It's brilliant and as tenses as you recall. Then it's over and there's the return home, which again goes on for way too long. Up to this point, it's been about DeNiro and Walken's characters, but Walken is practically forgotten about while everyone mopes around back home. It's only when they're reunited back in Saigon does the movie regain its power. Chop an hour off this thing, and you've got a nice, tight drama. As is, it's a good movie with some great moments, but that still means it's only a good movie.

Did it deserve to win?: No. A lot of it has to do with what came afterward. Coming Home did the struggles after the war thing better. Apocalypse Now and Platoon upped the ante on the horrors of war. Top Gun had a better bar sing-a-long. I think Coming Home is the better movie, despite Jane Fonda's presence.

(out of 5)

Up next: Kramer vs. Kramer

The first hour is a fucking beating.

Never watched it. Grease should have won that year.

The gayness of the above statement cannot be measured with instruments currently available to mankind....

Kramer vs Kramer - There are only a handful of the remaining movies left to watch that I haven't seen all the way through (4 to be exact), which means the chances of these movies providing me with a "profound moment" is rather slim. I'm defining a "profound moment" as any instance which makes me look differently at any given thing. Kramer vs Kramer provided me with one. I knew the story due to a Mad Magazine parody back in day, but I'd never seen a single minute of the actual movie. As the story goes, it's standard stuff about a workaholic dad who has to adjust his life around his son when his wife splits to go find herself. Everyone grows in the process. If it sounds like a bad movie starring The Rock or Ice Cube, it's not. There's no silliness, and the focus is on how hard such an event is on everyone involved. It's all completely sold by a fantastic performance by Dustin Hoffman. It was through him that I had my profound moment, as I saw a lot of my relationship with my own son. Every time he was short-tempered or had to be hard-ass, I felt something. I was reminded of too many times when I acted the same way. I felt sadness and regret, and I realized sometimes I'm a real dick. Yes, everyone around here already knows that about me, but I'm just now learning it. This movie made me not want to be such a dick. It made me want to be a better dad. It made me want to change. Of course, there's also still a part of me that says, "Eh, fuck all that," but at least now I know there's room for improvement.

Did it deserve to win?: Yep. It doesn't have cool man moments in it like Apocalypse Now or Alien did, but so what. Sensitive men need movies too. Being There also came out this year, and so did All That Jazz, which I like a lot and makes me even gayer than you ever thought. It was a very good year, but KvK is a good winner.

(out of 5)

Up next: Ordinary People

I remember that one. I also used to obsess over the purple rain parody because of all partial nudity. Being 12 years old really sucked back then. Fuck kids today and their easy access to internet porn.

Kids today miss out on the rite of finding Forest Porn. It wasn't easy to find, but it was out there, and what a glorious day it was whenever some neighborhood kid would stumble upon some.

Ahhhh yes, forest porn. We had a row of trees in Irving (Esters and Northgate) where we would find the occasional Penthouse. Also if it didn't smell too bad, we'd go dumpster diving for a tossed mag. Thinking about it now I remember one Playboy we found that had pics of pubes shaved and dyed. I remember a heart shaped snatch and a red/white/blue dyed snatch. Must've been 1976.

forest porn. I found my first forest porn in the forest near Williamson Park around White Rock Lake with a bunch of friends. What a magical time. I think at that time I didn't even know what girls had going on under their clothes, except for boobs of course.

I happened upon my first forest porn experience in the woods close to Seagoville. We would ride our bikes exploring for stuff and we found a tree house int the middle of no where.

I miss the days of instantaneous boners.

Took a trip to the city dump once as a kid. That's a great place to find abandoned material.

Oddly enough, I never heard of forest porn until Junior Miller mentioned it a few years ago.

However, as a sixth grader I did learn of something called "house under construction porn."

i discovered 'house under contruction head' when i moved to texas. I love this state.

You love Texas because you got blown by a construction worker here?

gigglesnort

In lieu of payment did he just buy the guy lunch?

simply

Sounds like a bad Sopranos subplot.

This forum may be long in the tooth, but it still delivers. Do you hear that, Walt? Chiwanna? Dr. Hoopenstein?

It still delivers.

Ordinary People - Who knew Mary Tyler Moore could be such a cunt? I certainly didn't, but she plays one of the greatest cunts of all time as a mother who completely shuts herself off emotionally from her surviving son after the first dies in a boating accident. The son tampered with her social status cutting open a couple veins and spending some time in the loony bin. He's home now and clearly has issues, but this goddamned bitch wants nothing to do with him. The father is concerned, recognizes a problem, and does what he can to keep his family together. Usually we get the absent/alcoholic/asshole father and the mother is the rock that keeps everything grounded. Here it's flipped, and it makes for a nice twist on a typical family drama. Howard Hawks said that a good film should have three good scenes and no bad ones. That's essentially what we have here. It's good scenes are absolute killer, but the rest is good and interesting but not especially noteworthy. The sequence from where Tim Hutton learns of his friend's suicide until his breakdown with his shrink is great stuff, and probably alone won this movie BP. There are other great scenes--the golf course argument, the pictures with the grandparents, Donald Sutherland's confession at the end--and it's still pretty devastating emotionally, but nothing else is extraordinary, so what we have is a very good family drama which may have great back in its day, but it seems a bit tame years later. Still a good movie--no bad parts--but it falls short of greatness.

Twist: This is the second BP winner in a row that featured a french toast scene. It was an exciting time for movies.

Did it deserve to win?: With Raging Bull out the same year, I gotta say no. There's also The Shining, which wasn't received well at the time, but most now view as a masterpiece.

(out of 5)

Up next: Chariots of Fire

I remember MTM was getting licked from all directions in Hollywood for this. "Not the Laura Petry you've come to know and love" type shit.

Chariots of Fire - So you've got two British twits who can run in the Olympics in the 1920s. One's a Christian who gives up missionary work so he can run for the glory of God. The other's a Jew who runs to spite the discriminating few. It's all very British, which means it's not as exciting as it could be. It's like a Merchant-Ivory version of Hoob's Observations of Fringe Sports. This is a good movie, but it all seems rather minor. The big tension hinges on whether the Christian dude will run on the Sabbath. Turns out he doesn't when another fellow British poof volunteers to not run his race since he already won a medal another competition. That's about as entitled as you can fuckin' get, I'm thinking. It's just an Olympic medal. It's not like it's anything special or out of the ordinary. Also, in the ironic running on the beach shot that bookends the film, they make it a point to focus in on five of the runners. At the end, I realized I didn't know who one of the guys was. I recognized the two main characters and the one who gave up his shot at another medal. Then there was one I recognized who kept appearing but didn't have a real purpose within the story. Then there was Mystery Runner #5. I have no clue who he was, and I even had the subtitles on. Maybe someone can fill me in. It's tough to tell, though. Aside from the Jew, these guys all look pretty similar. The upper class over there should've done like we did in America and fucked our slaves.

There are now only 2 movies remaining which I have never seen.

Did it deserve to win?: No. Good movie, but no. Looks like no one knows how it won either. Reds was the epic. On Golden Pond had the pedigree. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the popular favorite. Even Atlantic City scored noms in the top 5 categories. Somehow everything split letting the dark horse in. The others deserved it more, Reds probably the most.

(out of 5)

Up next: Gandhi

Just 24 more years.

I didn't like Reds. Chariots of Fire does have Bilbo Baggins in it.

I saw Reds a long time ago and I really liked it then. But then I'm a communist sympathizer.