“I have two goals for this project this weekend. One is to get my total of AFI movies watched to at least ten. The second is to have enough cash left over in this pay period to place a half.com order for a few of the ones that are expensive at Best Buy and not available to rent on Amazon. Here’s hoping.
The order Im picking to watch movies is pretty random. Since I’ve seen about 1/4 of them before, Im trying to keep those repeats spread out to every 4th movie. Also trying to balance the online vs offline movies. Right now the strategy for picking online movies is to first go for the ones that would be most expensive to otherwise get at Best Buy. Sullivan’s Travels would have actually been the most expensive purchase, according to bestbuy.com So its priority was upped and I watched it just now. Wow that paragraph was boring. Sorry, peeps.
Mixed feelings about this one. There were points when I thought it was one of the greatest comedies Ive ever seen, and points when I found it kinda dull. Mostly the good outweighs the bad. The dialogue (which you’ll learn is prolly the most important thing in a movie for me) was smart and snappy, especially in some of the opening scenes, which I absolutely loved. But the slapstick that was sprinkled into that was a bit too much for my taste. I think thats because I tend to find visual humor very predictable, whereas quick dialogue is more likely to surprise me. That’s also why I like offensive humor, but thats not applicable to this film.
My big complaint, however, is that while watching the film, it felt kinda disjointed. The main plot line wrapped up earlier than I expected, and then the story took a weird twist kinda late on. By then I was kinda ready to file this movie away, not start on some new train of thought. It all got wrapped up very nicely, but it wasnt until those final moments that it all made sense. Until then that last half hour was just awkward.
Another thing Im on the fence about is that there were a lot of sequences without any dialogue. Some of them were beautiful, others boring. Ultimately, I do think it was a nice touch, I guess I just didnt have the attention span.
What I am completely sold on in this movie, was Veronica Lake’s performance. I just loved her. She has that 1940’s glam but she was also one tough cookie. This may actually be the first time that I see a character from such a far back time period who I wish I was. Sadly a quick IMDB check shows that I wont be encountering Ms Lake in any other AFI films, but she did make a zombie movie in the 70’s. May hafta scope that one out later.
Im just not enough in the writing flow right now to come up with any more comments on this one. I very much enjoyed the first hour, but the rest of the 90 minutes just lost me.”