I see I really have not been keeping up with this either. Now my son and I haven't watched as many movies as I expected, in part because he had a summer job that kept him fairly busy through July and the first week of August.
A couple of weeks back I wanted a switch from what we had been watching. I went looking for The Fifth Element, but just couldn't find it. I settled on The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai instead, which is sort of the epitome of weird 80s films. What an odd movie. I will say it made a lot more sense this time around. Hopefully I'll be able to dig out The Fifth Element fairly soon.
We have now watched all of Black Books Seasons 1 and 2. I am sure I never got to Season 2 previously. In general it doesn't hold up quite as well, though I did like "The Fixer" and "A Nice Change," particularly when Fran finds a cheap flight that has them transferring through New Zealand and then over to Stansted. Stansted was my airport of choice when I was living in Cambridge. Anyway, the characters are pretty horrible, cartoony characters (not all that different from Seinfeld really), and I am less in love with the show than I was when it first came out, but I'm still entertained by it. I think we'll tackle The It Crowd next, and then just possibly Slings and Arrows (which is a series based on the Stratford Festival of all things) and then maybe Max Headroom and then finally Red Dwarf (postponing it just because it is such a commitment now).
We saw To Have and Have Not last weekend and Key Largo this weekend. Both first time viewings for me. I thought Bacall's part was certainly better in To Have and Have Not. I was interested in what they kept (losing the fishing reel and the alcoholic deckhand) and what they changed (pretty much everything else) from the Hemingway novel, which I strongly disliked. I have a handful of other Bogart films I plan to watch soon, but most I'll probably catch up with on my own.
Because they are generally shorter (and we have been a bit pressed for time), we have moved to earlier movies. We watched 6 shorts by W.C. Fields and Horse Feathers and Monkey Business by the Marx Brothers. My current plan is to watch Chaplin's The Great Dictator (though it is 2 hours!) and quickly follow up with Duck Soup and probably Animal Crackers the following weekend. We'll probably get to A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera in September. If I want to catch up on any of the other "lesser" Marx Brothers films, I'll probably do that on my own.
Now my son's going to be away for a while, and I think in the meantime I'll watch Truffaut's Love on the Run (wrapping up the Antoine Doinel series*) and Closely Watched Trains and maybe Jules and Jim. And probably Ray's Apu Trilogy. That is likely ambitious enough, but if I do have time I'll get back into the Kurosawa box set where I paused (which I believe was at One Wonderful Sunday). Actually now that I think about it, I really should take this opportunity to watch Midnight Cowboy, which he's not ready for...
It's definitely a mental switch to watching more movies and reading less, but overall I'm glad to be catching up with a lot of movies that I really ought to have seen or rewatching some classics. Now if only Tiff Lightbox or the 2nd run theatres in Toronto (the few that are left) would start showing movies again...
* I really liked most of Bed and Board, particularly Doinel's interaction with his neighbours. And the weird American businessman (borrowed from Tati's Playtime) who hires him to run toy boats around a model of some real estate development. I wasn't at all convinced by any aspect of Doinel's affair with the Japanese woman, however, and of course that drove most of the 2nd half of the film. I've heard Love on the Run is a bit of a mixed bag, but it is concise (~90 minutes), which I do value these days, and I will be glad to have gotten through another classic film series.
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