Mini Reviews
I've got a few more to post my thoughts on!
The Bad Sleep Well (The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - IMDB)
I'm a big fan of Akira Kurosawa, and this certainly didn't disappoint. It's a lengthy, complex white collar crime epic with Toshiro Mifune and Takeshi Shimura. Mifune's performance is particularly impressive here: gone are the manically hot-headed, physical and often slapstick driven roles he played in films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Instead, we get something more akin to Superman's Clark Kent. This performance is a thoughtfully complacent facade with some deep secrets and designs on revenge. I guess Mifune isn't an actor who I typically associate with a large range (although I love him), so this was a pleasant surprise. Shimura also gives us a pretty solid performance, and, as usual, the film is beautifully shot. At two and a half hours, it has very few moments of boredom, so I think it deserves an 8/10, and sits as one of my favorites of Kurosawa's works.
Sharknado 2: The Second One (Sharknado 2: The Second One (TV Movie 2014) - IMDb)
From time to time, I really love a stupid so-bad-it's-good b-flick, but **** this movie. Seriously. I've always felt that there's a distinct difference between a film by someone like Ed Wood and a film by The Asylum (the studio cashing in). When I watch an Ed Wood movie, I expect to be able to laugh at the incompetence of the filmmaker. Ed Wood actually thought he has good at what he was doing, and made films because he loved movies. He just sucked, and there's something charming and entertaining about that. Not so with the people at The Asylum. They don't in any way suck at what they're doing. They know that making a bad movie in a certain way can put some hella change in their pockets, and that seems to be their only motivation. That's the thing about sharknado: the idea that it's a good-bad movie is just a facade. It's good in all the ways that won't alienate viewers, and bad in all the ones that will make them laugh. It's stupid as hell, but never slow, because the type of people who they're aiming this piece of **** at are not going to accept slow. It's totally fake, and I'm not of the mind that you can intentionally recreate the feeling that an intentionally bad classic like Zaat provides us with. I couldn't help but feeling like the wool had been pulled over my eyes at the end of this one, and I wont be returning to it. **** this movie.
3/10