Desert Warrior – (preferably said while mumbling with a hand over your mouth) is an amazing masterpiece of cheap 80’s cinema. With enough characters and plot devises to keep things interesting, but not to many to make you think, and a budget to low to afford anything good keeps the laughs coming. The fights frequent and hilarious, actors dive out of the way when they should fall over dead everything explodes and nobody runs out of bullets. Who would stand for ammo getting in the way of mindless violence, honestly. I really enjoy B-movies but sometimes they can really drag when some writer thinks he actually has a story worth telling but this never happens in Desert Warrior, I highly recommend to lovers of bad cinema, that is if you can find a copy, this is a really rare DVD that seems to only be available at Scarecrow Video in Seattle. 4.5/5 stars

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Taxi Driver – Taxi Driver is the story of narcoleptic Vietnam vet, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). The film starts off nice and slow with Travis getting a night job as a taxi driver. He struggles with his separation and alienation, but cannot connect with the self righteous, or the scum that surround him. Infuriated by the filth that share New York City with him becomes compelled to do something about it as he pushes the bounds of his sanity peaking at the brutal climax of Taxi Driver. Highly recommended 5/5 stars

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Dr. Strangelove – (I have seen this before and own it on DVD but I have yet to review it) Dr. Strangelove is the war comedy to end all war comedies. I really dislike comedies that are just stories build around setups for jokes, in fact I really hate jokes in comedy (at least in large quantities, there is after all the classic line, “You can’t fight in here gentlemen, this is the war room!”) Instead Strangelove takes the high road with a very dry sense of humor built around the ignorance and prejudice of the characters and the absurdity of the situation which there narrow skewed perspective land them in. Not only is the satire great, but Dr. Strangelove does something very few comedies are able to do, it’s suspenseful, it draws you in, and hangs you by a thread, your enjoying it, it’s funny but you can’t suppress the exhilaration that rises as the film reaches it’s climax, PERFECTION! 6/5 stars

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Strings - Every so often you run across a movie that is a tribute to it’s medium, and could not have been done effectively any other way. Strings is one of those films, to bad it wasn’t much better. If you didn’t figure it out from the title this is a film about marionettes but rather then working around the limitations that the puppets have they created a world based on the limitations of the puppets. Imagen a world where all life comes from strings that ascend into heaven, people are unable go anywhere there strings can’t and can be killed by severing there head string, it’s really something that must be seen to fully understand. Sadly the films story was not as well thought out as the world it takes place it. While the script was defiantly written for an adult audience it often seemed that it was directed for children. This is most obvious and the end of the film which is a real tragedy, one instance that really stood out to me was when the Prince was in danger of being killed a boy called out “Watch out!” in much the same way a child would cry “Watch out!” in any direct to DVD kids animated feature. Things like this would pop up throughout the film thwarting what had tried so hard to be a mature animated feature that pushed the bounds of marionette puppetry to new heights. But even though this film was not nearly as good as it could have been I enjoyed it to the end. 3.5/5 stars

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El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) - It is unusual for me to rent horror films but when Netflix recomended The Devil’s Backbone and I saw it had been directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) I could not resist adding it. During a Spanish civil war a young boy who’s father died is dropped off at a boys school who’s staff is helping the resistance. Unfortunately my Spanish history is a bit sketchy so I was a bit unsure of the whole context the film is set in. However the war is primarily a background to the events that take place. It’s a hard film to review because talking about it without giving away spoilers is very hard. As the film opened it began showing typical horror elements but as the plot progressed it turned into a triller. At the heart of The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story about revenge and greed, the fact that children are mixed up in it makes the film have a very dark tone. I felt that it veered away from your standard horror clichés and was both exiting and enjoyable but not nearly as great as Pan’s Labyrinth. 4/5 stars

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Poirot: Peril at End House - I am perhaps the most unqualified person to review this film. It is an Agatha Christy murder mystery featuring her popular French detective Hercule Poirot. It features acceptable acting and camera work along with a mustache that sometimes looks fake. I rarely watch mysteries as I tend to prefer that darker Noir crime stories, but my parents were watching it and I figured why not. It wasn’t bad if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer my crimanals to be caught becouse of there own human flaws, not becouse of brillent detective work. 2.8/5 stars

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Animated Soviet Propaganda (disk 4) - This is the last disk in Animated Soviet Propaganda, and I was really disappointed in both this disk, and disk three. The shorts I enjoyed the most in this series were not just outright propaganda but short films created to entertain as well as brainwash, sadly the only real short film on this disk was ‘The Hot Stone’ which was easily outdone by some of the shorts disk one and two. Disk 4 2/5 stars Series 3.4/5 stars

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Au Revoir Les Enfants: This is a French coming of age story of Julien Quintin and his classmates in a Catholic boarding school during the German occupation of France in WWII. Julien befriends a new student who is Jewish (but posing as Protestant). The cruelty of the war makes them grow up fast, in this un-romanticized picture of boyhood to manhood. Great acting for all the children and well shot 3.5/5 stars.

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I Married a Monster From Outer Space: I added this to my queue because it’s called ‘I Married a Monster From Outer Space’ and it had been a while since I got my cheesy 50’s B-Movie fix, but as I watched it I realized that it was a well shot, well acted low budget sci-fi noir. It is notable that this is a rare film for it’s era to have no male hero, Marge, the unfortunate bride of the outer space monster does everything in her power to alert the town and rally the them against the terrors from space that hides in there midst. If you like film noir and 50’s cinema you should check this out 4/5 stars.

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Visions of Light: I found this interesting but it’s for cinematography nerds only, after watching this I added ‘The Conformist’, ‘Naked City’, ‘Blue Velvet’, and ‘On the Waterfront’ to my queue and bumped up ‘Taxi Driver’ closer to the top. 3.5/5 stars.

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Bande à part (Band Of Outsiders): I’ve only just begun to watch French New Wave films and watching ‘Band of Outsiders’ helped me understand what the ‘New Wave’ entails. This is the story of three people involved in a heist, rather then being about a heist involving three people. The crime was secondary to the relationships and characters rather then it being in the forefront. While it had similarities to film noir, it was not nearly as dark in the story or the photography. Overall enjoyable, but I would have a hard time as describing it as ground breaking. 3.5/5 stars.

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Re Cara: Big Fish: Last week Cara found my big fish review to be disappointingly short, and overall useless, so heres a bit more incite to what I felt about the film. One of the great aspects of this film what how the reality was so dependent on the fantasy. Without that fantastic element the relationship and the conflict between William Bloom and his father would not have been believable in the reality based segments of the film. This dependency is very unusably to movies and really played to Burton’s strength as a director. Oddly enough that tie in to fantasy makes this one of Burton’s most realistic movies that I’ve seen (apart from Ed Wood, which was a bio-pic) 4.5/5 stars