Top 100 Club: Teproc

[smirnoff]

“You can't get so hung up on where you'd rather be that you forget to make the most of where you are.” - Aurora Lane, Passengers

There's a film you don't see quoted every day.

[Sandy]

There's a film you don't see quoted every day.

I thought you'd appreciate it! It's a movie that has a lot to ponder on and deserves more discussion.

[Teproc]

What makes Dawn of the Dead great is that it communicates this rather broad anti-consumerism message in such a striking and entertaining package. It's really an adventure film at heart, Rio Bravo in a mall as 1SO pointed out to me back when I first watched it. Definitely agree that seeing these people adjust for life in this unusual place is a really fun part of it.

[smirnoff]

Strangers on a Train

There's something about the very last scene which made me feel like the Seinfeld outro music was about to kick in.

I'm no Hitchcock connoisseur but I feel like this might be the best looking, most effective of his films that I've seen. The shadow play, the framing, the close ups... it kept the experience pretty stimulating and drew me in. At least for the first two thirds. I feel like there's a drop off after an hour or so, the visual creativity takes more of a back seat. That or my interest was waning at that point. I must admit I found it a bit of a tough premise to maintain for so long. There aren't any obvious missteps, but just for me I find this sort of story needs to accelerate faster. The sequence towards the end, at the tennis match, were ten minutes that I really felt tick by. That followed by the carousel sequence were probably my two least favourite, and coming back to back at the end of the film like that didn't give the film as strong a finish as I would have liked.

Movies in the thriller genre often live or die during the transition from villain being a potential thread to an active one, because that's when the film becomes more of an action movie. And action is tough to sell. Creating a scenario where all can be resolved in an ultimate reckoning is not easy. Characters wrestling guns away from each other, car chases, hide and seek stuff, it's where all the bad, eye rolling, action cliches can pop up. Here for example a cop takes an extremely reckless shot at Guy Haines as he's running onto a carousel full of women and children, and the bullet somehow finds a way past guy, past all the horses and people, and hits the carousel operator... which is what kicks off the whole sequence. Both the bullet finding such a target, and the detective actually taking such a shot are pretty tough to believe. But it's the kind of things you find thrillers doing to make climactic scenes work. Things are much stronger when all the lies and pressure are still bottled up.

All in all this was a good experience though. Maybe my favourite of the 8 to 10 Hitchcock films I've seen.