An anniversary of sorts

I'm a couple of days late and probably more than a few dollars short, but I just realized that it is the one year anniversary of the blog. Did anyone bake a cake? Maybe I'll go crazy and have a glass of sparkling water and a cookie. One whole year, and I just passed 3,000 viewers. It surprises me because I thought only my friends would read it, and it's hard to sustain something like this, at least I thought it would be, and some movies are harder to review and write about than others. Other reviews pretty much write themselves. It's funny how often my friends ask my opinion on movies, any movies, and then related to the blog, what's my favorite so far, what's the biggest surprise, etc. So, in honor of the blog being one year old, I thought I would give some of my highlights and my disappointments.

Biggest surprises:  A year into the process and I still think Departures is one of my favorite movies. It's a Japanese foreign film and I found it graceful and and tender and very respectful of its subject matter. Crash also took me totally by surprise, and it is not graceful and tender, but still extremely powerful, but hard to watch at times. I was glad I did. I had routinely beat up on Gary Cooper as being wooden and uninspiring and just awful in movies that I really didn't like anyway. That changed with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It was playful, funny and I enjoyed his performance immensely. Nowhere in Africa was another foreign film that blew me away. Set in Africa during World War II, it was poignant and triumphant and an homage to a different kind of pioneer spirit. There have been a lot of other movies that I liked a lot and recommend, but these four stuck out in my mind (I probably could list more, but I'll stop for now).

Biggest disappointments: The Hours seemed brutally long and I seriously thought about stopping the movie and admitting defeat. It would be nice to say my persistence paid off, but the only pleasure I take in finishing the move is that I didn't jump into oncoming traffic. Read Mrs. Dalloway instead. The Private Lives of Henry VIII was disappointing because I had seen the movie years and years ago and thought it was great, so either I was somehow brainwashed because it was in black and white and ipso facto a 'classic' or I was just young and naive. Take your pick, but a second viewing was torture, and I think I fell asleep at some point, although I woke up long enough to watch the ending. Charles Laughton is much more tolerable in Mutiny on the Bounty. Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, I'm just going to say I didn't get it and leave it at that.

Favorite Genre: I honestly have to say that forced to pick a favorite genre or type of movie is not that hard: documentaries hands down. In fact, I have done a few posts just on documentaries. A good documentary, even on a topic or point of view with which I disagree, is still thought-provoking, entertaining and sometimes will induce a brief and quiet crying spell, like Undefeated or Invisible War. Invisible War did not actually win the Oscar in 2013, but to me, it should have because the consequences of that film are still being felt today in the US Senate and House of Representatives. The documentary on the DeBolt family was equally inspiring and made me laugh.

One of the hardest parts of writing a review for me, is to decide if I want to give a full blown synopsis of the movie or focus on my 'feelings' of it, or my reaction to the movie receiving the award that it did. If it's a well-known movie, like the Wizard of Oz, I may be more inclined to talk about the awards or the wave of nostalgia that I experience when watching it. I try to give you an idea of the story line up to a certain point without giving away the ending or critical plot points that add (or detract) to the film. It's not perfect and it's definitely not an exact science. You can probably tell when I struggle with writing. I also realize that I have different tastes in movies, which is why I mainly watch them by myself, most of my friends are not interested (of course, I have broken out of my stuffy, elitist mode periodically, most recently for The Heat and 2 Guns, and I'm not even ashamed of it). I'm still determined to complete this task I have set for myself, and I have 707 movies to go. Watching such a broad spectrum of films, silent films, early color films, actors in different roles, etc., fits into my holistic view of things; it's important for me to understand the whole picture, who influenced whom, who is copying whom, where do the lines blur. Here's to a successful and fun first year. More to come.