Oooh, that's out? Time to check the queue.

Meanwhile, we followed a Netflix recommendation for a movie called Cashback.

We turned it off. It was unwatchable. Which is too bad because the premise was interesting and there was a good scene or two. But they made the decision to go with a running voice-over monologue through the whole bloody movie which they clearly thought contained brilliant prosaic writing, but was actually hackneyed over dramatic drivel.

It was especially glaringly bad having just seen WALL-E where an entire love story was told with fewer words than this amateur attempt at a movie had in any 2 minute stretch.

This was so horribly bad! You don't even get to meet the original love interest, it's all slow-mo flashback (running through fields, I kid you not) and he blathers on and on about how much he loves her. I didn't believe anything he said, as there was no reason to.

I was practically screaming, don't tell, SHOW! But even when they showed things happening, they also told at the same time, and the redundancy was just as bad. We gave it as long as we could stand it.

It thought it was Garden State, but it was sooooo not. And Garden State wasn't perfect, either.

Man alive - I hated Cashback when it was just 15 minutes long (nominated for best short film live action in 2006, bleah!)

We watched La Vie en Rose last night. Man, she had a rough life!

I've been reading The Secret History of Star Wars recently. (A free PDF download. Informative book, but very poorly written. 524 pages that could be easily cut in half with better editing.)

Anyway, the book talks about how Hidden Fortress influenced Lucas in the story and style of Star Wars. So I gave it a watch. Pretty good movie. I liked it. According to The Secret History of Star Wars, the plot and storyline of the first draft scripts of the Star Wars were taken directly from Hidden Fortress. The theatrical release of Star Wars doesn't have the same plot, but it has some similar elements that remain. What's interesting though is, from what I saw, there are even elements from Hidden Fortress that seemed to show up in Phantom Menace. The swipe cuts in all the Star Wars movies also seemed to be taken directly from Hidden Fortress.

3PO and R2 are HEAVILY ripped off from influenced by Hidden Fortress, as I recall from my viewing.

Grave of Fireflies.

Wow. That's a powerful movie. I realized that while I've seen countless Japanese movies and tv shows that have had blatant, beyond thinly veiled allegories relating to WWII, I've never seen anything that so directly addressed it. So seeing the war from that perspective for the first time added even more emotion to an already gut-wrenching story.

It is not an easy watch, but it's a stunningly beautiful film.

I didn't care for it. Yes, very disturbing and haunting for an animated film. But I really found it rather relentlessly depressing for no particularly good cause of cinema.

Yeah, who would want to immortalize one of the most tragic events in history for? No need to remember all that.
:rolleyes:

I watched The Women for the umpteenth time last night, still wonderful, still funny and still makes me laugh and smile. Mary Boland and Roz Russell do steal the picture. That is all.