Cristiano on Tech/Life

For the 4th week of our 52 movies challenge we actually went to the cinema. We have a shiny Odeon cinema pretty near to our new flat so it was a good excuse to give it a try. We went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008, currently #112 in the IMDB top 250). It was an interesting movie, and I really enjoyed watching it. It is up for quite a few Oscars and I think it might win a few because the cinematography is gorgeous.

The big problem with this movie is that the similarities to Forrest Gump (1994, #45 in the IMDB top 250) are ridiculous. I didn’t know that the writers behind the Curious Case were the same writers that wrote Forrest Gump, but you don’t need to know this to see the relation between the two. The little compilation below gives a good comparison (beware, it might have some spoilers).

In the end I think the movie was worth seeing, and the special effects are quite impressive, but if you have a big TV at home don’t bother going to the cinema and get the DVD instead.

We’re running a little bit behind in our 52 Movies Challenge, but nothing is lost: we will watch 52 from the IMDB Top 250 movies this year, no matter what! In week 2 and 3 we saw The Shawshank Redemption (1994, the almost permanent #1 of the top 250) and Psycho (1960, #23 in the top 250).

Week 2 – The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Andy Dufresne is a young and successful banker whose life changes drastically when he is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his wife and her lover. Set in the 1940’s, the film shows how Andy, with the help of his friend Red, the prison entrepreneur, turns out to be a most unconventional prisoner.

The film features Tim Robbins as Andy, and Morgan Freeman as Red. My expectations of this movie have been high from the start, mainly because it has been the #1 movie on IMDB for quite a while now (with some temporary interruptions of new movies like The Dark Knight) and I was ashamed that in all this time I hadn’t been able to catch it when it was shown on TV. 

So imagine how underwhelmed I was when I started to watch the film and slowly started to puzzle out what was going on and what the plot was heading too. It seemed I actually had seen the movie already, but had somehow repressed it. I still enjoyed the movie, but somehow my mind was spoiling it a bit for me. It seems I really need to work harder at doing my research before watching a long movie like this one.

Week 3 – Psycho

Phoenix officeworker Marion Crane is fed up with the way life has treated her. She has to meet her lover Sam in lunch breaks and they cannot get married because Sam has to give most of his money away in alimony. One Friday Marion is trusted to bank $40,000 by her employer. Seeing the opportunity to take the money and start a new life, Marion leaves town and heads towards Sam’s California store. Tired after the long drive and caught in a storm, she gets off the main highway and pulls into The Bates Motel. The motel is managed by a quiet young man called Norman who seems to be dominated by his mother. 

I normally don’t tend to watch movies made this far before I was born, mainly because most of the movies from this era are too slow and just bore me to death. Now to be honest, this Hitchcock classic would probably have not been on my list, but given that it’s number 23 in the top 250 I had to give it a serious try. The movie’s pace was actually not that bad and the fact that it’s shot in black and white actually works really, really well. This movie has been made in a time when color movies were already quite the standard so the reason for this one being black and white is just as much of an artistic decision as why some of my photos are. The cinematography is gorgeous and sometimes made me think “how did they record that?”.

It is a definite must see, and don’t turn it off after the first few minutes because it seriously only gets better from the start.