The Films That I Saw: May 2012

The summer film season definitely kicked things off with a bang thanks in part to a brilliant and entertaining film in The Avengers. Then came the Cannes Film Festival which turned out to be a bit underwhelming despite the line-up of films that were playing. There’s a lot of them that I am eager to see including the Palme d’Or-winning film Amour from Michael Haneke. I’ll just maintain lower expectations for these films.

The summer is now coming but there’s not a lot of films that I’m really excited to see other than The Dark Knight Rises, Brave, and Prometheus along with art house fare like Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild. To counter all of that, I’m going to be watching a lot of films at home for the summer since I don’t consider myself to be a very sociable person. I much prefer being at home as I’m also half-way finished with completing an outline for my next screenplay project.

Throughout the month of May, I did see a good number of films though not as much as April due to the Cannes Marathon I had been doing. In the month of May, I saw a total of 38 films. 22 first-times and 16 re-watches.

Here’s the list of the 10 Best First-Timers I saw for May:

1. Silent Light

 

2. Andrei Rublev

3. Paths of Glory

4. Thirst

5. Dead Man

6. Missing

7.The Knack... and How to Get It

8. The Avengers

9. Precious

10. 3 Women

The Monthly Mini-Reviews

The Change-Up

This is the only new film I saw that was on TV and what a piece of shit it is. It tries so hard to be crassly funny that both Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds end up looking very silly. The script doesn’t do either actor any favors where even as they go against type, the material falls flat. There’s an air of sentimentality that is around that is really un-earned and just really makes the whole film very uneven. Then there’s the nudity and not only a lot of it is very fake but the fact that it was digitized nudity just makes it downright insulting. You expect someone to whack off to these women including Olivia Wilde and then realize, “those aren’t her tits?” From a guy standpoint, it’s a slap in the face. And then there’s the location itself which is set in Atlanta.

I may not be a social-active person but having lived in Smyrna for all of my life and coming to Atlanta so many times. The way its depicted is absolutely false. It’s not that pretty. Piedmont Park is often quite dirty. The photography just makes it too much of a postcard look including a climatic scene at the Phipps Plaza mall. It is just fucking awful. One of the worst films I had ever seen so far in my years as a cine-phile.

The Re-Watches

1. The Tree of Life

2. La Dolce Vita

3. Moulin Rouge!

4. Do the Right Thing

5. The Wind That Shakes the Barley

6. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

7. Jane Eyre

8. Dick Tracy

9. Reagan

10. Thirteen

Well, that is all for the month of May. June will be the start of the long-awaited James Bond Marathon which I will release the details tomorrow about the marathon in its entirety. Alongside the monthly Favorite Film essay series that will be on Morvern Callar, I will be watching the films of Nicolas Winding Refn for my upcoming Auteurs piece on him for June. Along with new releases of films like Prometheus, Brave, and Moonrise Kingdom, I will take some time to watch a few films by Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa. The latter of which I will hopefully unleash my old reviews of his work in re-edited form along with some old reviews of films by Stanley Kubrick. Other things I’ll check out will Kevin Reynolds’ Hatfield & McCoy mini-series as well as various films old and recent. Until then, sayonara.

© thevoid99 2012