Blue Streak is an underappreciated 90’s masterpiece. Just old-school comedy: get some S-tier improv guys together and let them goof their way through the scene. It has that kind of Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie vibe. Seems like there hasn’t been a comedy like this since Anchorman.
I was 19 when this came out and the VHS (lol) was in the rotation along with Office Space, Half Baked, The Matrix, Baseketball, and The Usual Suspects
Rear Window
I knew essentially nothing of this movie going in. I noticed in the opening credits that the screenplay was by some dude; I figured Hitchcock wrote it. So I looked on Wikipedia and found that he has almost no writing credits. So I guess the fact that he was strictly a director was news I learned far too late.
Anyway, it was quite the engrossing film. Great use of basically a single setting.
.I had some minor quibbles (like the part where the nurse was talking about how Grace Kelly was a nice young woman and Stewart was a nice young man; dude was nearly 50 and over 20 years her senior) and the part at the end where Stewart fires flashbangs the villain slowly lumbers towards him with no attempt to go faster or cover his eyes was awful.
That’s more complaining than I wanted to do about what was a great film. It holds up well after 70 years. It’s not a 10/10 the way the other 1950s movie I watched this year (12 Angry Men) was, but I’d certainly welcome another Hitchcock movie viewing experience.
Glad to read your thoughts. Many will tell you that Vertigo is the GOAT, and while I’m not quite there I do highly recommend it. It’s more ambiguous than Rear Window, so I do think this worked better as an entry point. Vertigo is sitting on YT for free also right now. Think my personal Hitchcock rankings go something like:
And for context, I regard Rope as at least a four-star film and feel that there isn’t THAT much daylight between #1 and #7. I think the Hitchcock catalog is truly loaded.
lol yeah that’s standard for Hitchcock in this period (and probably most of Hollywood movies)
I recently rewatched “to catch a thief” (way down on the Hitchcock tier list, do not recommend unless you’re already a fan), and a major plot point is how a 25 yo woman (Grace Kelly again) and a 17 yo girl are fighting for 50 yo+ Cary Grant (“she’s too old for you !” says the youngest). Very creepy !
(Not helped by the fact that Cary Grant at this point has a weird very red tan (in Technicolor !), which does not make his appeal super credible. Although I guess 15 years earlier he really was as charming as anyone’s every been on screen, and he hadn’t fully lost it at that point.).
Anyway have fun on your Hitchcock journey, I’m envious of you discovering those for the first time !
(I have Vertigo as goat, Psycho, Notorious, Shadow of a doubt as elite, and almost all of the other ~20 I’ve seen as good or at least worth watching for one or two scenes).
I am so damn jealous of you watching this for the first time. It’s a true classic that has been given homage in many TV shows, movies, and a few excellent remakes.
The best remake of Rear Window imo stars Christopher Reeve (Superman) after his accident confined him to a wheelchair. He was PERFECT for the part, and it should also be said he was an incredible actor. His roles in stuff like Somewhere In Time are way up there.
That’s a good list.
There was a time Shyamalan was heralded as the next Hitchcock, and for good reason with such direct homages as the opening sequence for Signs.
Safe to say he fell at least a little short but was often quite good in those Unbreakable days. The point of no return was Lady in the Water, with The Happening as confirmation he was going to be more of a genre taste than elevated auteur.
My favorite Christopher Reeve scene.
This was certainly my point of no return with Shyamalan. Haven’t touched one of his works since. Still goes down as one of the most tedious and dull theater experiences of my life.
Oh hell yeah. I’m just glad he kept acting.
My favorite Christopher Reeve scene.
As soon as the credits started, I quoted my favorite review of the movie by saying loudly, “Has M Night Shyamalan lost his goddamn mind?”
[quote=“LKJ, post:2012, topic:10443”]
When I was reading the list I was surprised to see Rope so low, but this above is pretty much right. My top 7 is essentially the same
The best remake of Rear Window is clearly
Good call. I tried to find one better, but not even Rocko’s Modern Life did an homage better than Simpsons.
I’d include the very good Kimi in the genre of Rear Window remakes.
Right, I mean what you quoted was definitely just me seeing “7. Rope” as an eyesore and feeling like I needed to proactively apologize for it. I’m hard-wired to rank everything, but it’s kind of a silly exercise with Hitchcock because could come back and post a random.org Hitchcock ranking and I’d almost certainly nod and go, “Yeah, I could see that.”
I understand the sentiment posted by some about being jealous of a first-time Hitchcock watcher, but it should be said that Hitchcock rewards rewatching better than just about any director, and it’s far from clear that the first watch of any of his films is going to be the most enjoyable watch (assuming you watch them more than once). I kind of had a “WTF is this shit” reaction to The Birds until a rewatch set me straight.
I thought Disturbia worked well. I haven’t ever rewatched it and probably won’t, because it wasn’t truly bringing any new ideas to the table and a person might as well just the superior original, but I had a good time in my one go at it.
I haven’t seen that one! I could blame it on Shia, but that’s during the era when I saw him in Eagle Eye. I think that one may play extremely well today given advancements in technology that mirror what the movie was suggesting might happen soon enough.
Eagle Eye follows two strangers who must go on the run together, after receiving a mysterious phone call from an unknown woman who uses information and communications technology to track them.
Since I had time to spend I went to watch Napoleon yesterday and the new Hunger games movie today. Wasnt impressed with either. I found the latter one even rather boring.
Someone described Napoleon as an adaptation of his Wikipedia page.
It was The Boys in the Boat.
First of all, obligatory and 100% correct: fuck the University of Washington. A document that portrays one of their sports teams as a plucky likable underdog is every bit as fictional as Starship Troopers.
But that aside, this is a paint-by-numbers sports movie with solid execution, but once you know the underlying story the movie is a capable but meh retelling of it. The primary focus is on one of the titular boys in the boat, and his character is really never fleshed out in a way that successfully made me care about him. I do think this was a commendable audio book, narrated by the inimitable Edward Hermann. Shame that he couldn’t live for 200 years and just devote that whole overrun to narrating things, because that guy’s speaking voice was a rare gift.
3/5, with the caveat that a person might like it a bit more than me if they like garden-variety sports movies (I tend to be pretty negative on sports movies; Hoosiers was already made, and we don’t need 250 more of them). Among 2023’s sports movie offerings, it was a better execution than Next Goal Wins.
