“Trying something new I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Now that I’ve got some semblance of free time, instead of doing a themed mini project, I wanna work thru the movie wall of doom. There’s two rules. The shelving unit I have holds about 20 movies in each little cubby. Rule one is to go in order and pick a movie out of the next cubby. Rule two is that it has to be something I haven’t blogged before. But I can otherwise pick anything I want.
To be honest, I cheated on rule one a little bit. But that’s only because the first cubby had all movies I’d blogged before (Aladdin, LOTR, and all my older Edward Norton ones) and just one that qualified that I wasn’t feeling. So I chose the first one in the next spot. Sshh. Don’t tell.
Oh, you’re gonna get extra nostalgia in these old school posts. You’ve been warned.
Wow this takes me back to high school. Once a month we got a half day, and a group of us girls had taken to spending that free half at the movies. We showed up at the empty theater in our uniforms. Everyone in the group got carded for the R rated film except me. I don’t remember anything else about watching the movie then, I just remember the lead in. I know I did receive the DVD for Christmas later that year and I watched it with my dad in our anual Christmas day movie marathon.
Also, so much was different back then for me movie wise. The now iconic voice of Kiefer Sutherland was just creepy pre-24. Colin Farrell was quite the bad boy play boy, and the role gave him a chance to relish that. (If you don’t pay attention to what an a-hole he is, his rapid paced dialog is kinda hot) And this was my first introduction to Forest Whitaker, a couple years before his Academy Award. Until that point, I always thought back to him as the downtrodden Phone Booth cop. Funny that now I’d completely forgotten about him in this. That’s how much of a household name he’s become in his more respectable career path.
While the premise is kinda silly, I am impressed with how well it was pulled off. I mean, it’s a guy stuck in one location for 90 min. Speaking of 24, this was in real time, just before 24 made real time a thing. The suspense was unlike anything else at the time. Now it’s all kinda cheesy, but still it was fun while it lasted”