Do The Right Thing, Yo!

Do the Right Thing directed by Spike Lee was a great comedy with a tragic ending. Spike Lee wrote a directed this film which was about racism. I really liked this movie. I found it to be very funny and made me think a lot. I liked how Spike Lee used colors to make things stand out. An example is the big bright red wall the three guys are sitting in front of all day. This movie takes place on the hottest day of the year and the red wall represents the heat. Spike Lee plays a guy named Mookie and Mookie is sort of the mediator between everyone. He works for a white man named Sal at Sal's pizza joint. Sal's pizza joint is in the heart of a black neighborhood and has had his pizza joint there for years. The whole conflict of the movie is that Sal doesn't have any pictures of "brothers" aka black people up on his walls. This causes two guys to fuss. The fuss becomes out of control and one person ends up dying, Radio Raheem. He was killed by a white police officer and that causes a lot of controversy. With the racial slurs and the actions between blacks and whites, Do the Right Thing makes you think about the reality of racism in our world today.

Battle of What?

I read the critic that really praised the movie. I couldn't disagree with them more. I did not find this movie to be “THE BEST MOVIE I SAW ALL YEAR – THEN, IN 1968, AND NOW!” I really did not enjoy this movie. First it was in black and white, then there were SUBTITLES. Come on Mr. Klobuchar! Haha, just kidding. But seriously. Fine, I admit it was sort of interesting but depressing and boring all at once. I did not like how in the end Ali (awesome name) was hiding in the wall with three other people and they all were blown up. That made me really sad because there was a little boy in the wall with Ali and had the choice to get out or stay and he stayed and died. Bad ending. Overall, I didn't enjoy this movie and hope to never watch it again.

M E M E N T O

Holy cow Memento directed by Christopher Nolan was a confusing movie. If we didn't have to fill out the movie guide I would have been completely lost. I had to watch this movie at home because I was absent the days we watched Momento in class. I think watching it at home also helped a lot to help me understand what was going on. I thought the acting was great in this movie. Christopher Nolan directed and wrote this film and I thought it was a brilliant film. The way he told the story backwards but forward at the same time made it a very unique film. One thing I didn't like about this style of story telling was that you knew who the bad guy was the whole entire movie. From the start to the end. Even though this film gives away the ending in the beginning it was still entertaining to see how a guy with a short term memory was able to make notes and tattoo himself to help him remember who's who and what means what. Guy Pearce is a babe and I really liked watching him in this film. Memento and one other movie are the only movies I have seen with Guy Pearce. I thought this was a great movie to watch to end our film noir unit.

XOXO Me Deadly

The second film noir movie we watched was Kiss Me Deadly directed by Robert Aldrich. This film is a classic that involves a stolen "nuclear" thing. With a great cast such as Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Cloris Leachman, and Alber Dekker, they make the movie a great film noir. Mike Hammer (Meeker) gets tangled up in a mess when a women jumps into his car and are both kidnapped. This sort of get out of control from there. Involving his girlfriend/assistant Velda (Cooper) they are pulled into this mess and are kind of responsible for the stolen "nuclear" thing. In the end a women (above) opens the box with the "nuclear" thing in it and screams and lights on fire, and the whole beach house explodes while Mike Hammer and Velda run into the ocean. Our class had a discussion on what we thought was in the box and I thought they could have been spirits locked up. The class laughed but I was serious. When she opened the box, the thing inside the box was screaming and it sounded like more than one thing was in that box. Obviously have missing the clues that there was a stolen "nuclear" thing on the loose, my theory of spirits in the box was not relevant.

"I'm crazy about you Baby!"

We watched the film noir movie Double Indemnity which was, I thought, a great movie to start a genre with. I had never heard of film noir before and it definitely striked my interest. Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder was an amazing film about an insurance man named Walter (Fred MacMurray) who goes to this man's house to try and sell him life insurance. He meets the man's wife and falls for her in a matter of hours. Her name was Phyllis played by Barbara Stanwyck. She was most definitely the femme fatal in this movie. Her character brought on such an amusement because for a woman she was well spoken and very scandalous. Also, Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) was a huge character in the film. Walter worked for him and they had a close bond. This film contains a murder and a heartbreak. Once again, I thought that Double Indemnity was a great movie to kick off the film noirs.

KISS ME DEADLY

"I Got You Babe!"

This was the song that woke up Phil Connors at 6:00 a.m. a million times in this movie. Groundhog Day was a romantic comedy about a weather man (Phil Connors) who is arrogant, selfish, and just plain mean. He goes to the town of Puxsatawney, Pennsilvania every year to do a report on the national holiday, groundhog day. He makes rude comments about the situation and is rude to everyone he encounters with that day. So he relives that same day, February 2nd, at least a hundred times during the movie. He finally figures out that this curse does have an end to it. After living the same day a hundred times, he firgures out how/when he could save people during that day. His last day reliving that day Phil was completely selfless. During this whole time he fell more and more in love with his co-worker Rita. He learns what she likes and does everything to make her happy and hopefully fall in love with him. Well, this being a romantic comedy and all, they do fall in love at the end. YAY. Anyways, I thought Groudhog Day was really funny and by far my favorite movie we've watched all year. Bill Murray is a fantastic comedian and really made this movie very enjoyable.