Cinephemera

After last week’s explosion of movies, this week was a lot lighter. I imagine next week will be as well since Netflix just added a ton of Discovery Channel shows to Watch Instantly. Any free time I might have had will now be occupied by an endless stream of Mythbusters, Extreme Engineering, Survivorman, Future Weapons and Deadliest Catch. God, I love Netflix.

Atonement
Rating: Worthy

When new movies come out, I strive to know as little about them as possible so that I can watch them with a blank slate. Sometimes this works and oftentimes not. With Atonement, all I knew was that it won an oscar or two, it looked like a sweeping romance movie and there was supposedly a twist. All of this is true but I wasn’t expecting such a devastating story to go along with it. For being over two hours long, it moved swiftly so that I never got bored and for a romance movie, that’s quite a feat. The last 1o minutes felt rather rushed and almost detached from the rest of the movie.

This movie definitely fits the descriptor of “sweeping” and is well worth a watch. Guys, watch this one with your woman, you can show her your sensitive side and still enjoy the movie. Win-win.

Sukiyaki Western Django
Rating: Worthy

Sometimes the Worthy/Unworthy rating system can give me a lot of grief. There are just some movies that I know aren’t that good but still got some enjoyment out of. Such is the case with Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django. This is a bizarre western set in Japan and the story borrows heavily from Akira Kurasawa’s Yojimbo and Sergio Corbucci’s Django and other spaghetti westerns. It’s a fun, but ultimately shallow movie. I never cared about the characters involved and there wasn’t much going on storywise.

In an odd move, Miike has all his actors speak English which some do well but others… well I ended up wishing it had subtitles. The movie is fun and stylish to look at and most of the actors seemed to be having fun playing their over the top characters. This isn’t a particularily deep movie but I think that was Miike’s intent. Have fun paying homage to the Spaghetti westerns of old.

What did you think of this week’s movies?