20th Hall of Fame

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2022 Mofo Fantasy Football Champ
I'll be done by tomorrow, I got Phantom Thread all lined up and ready to go! Look forward to it as I haven't seen it since theater



Elmer Gantry is one of those films that I wish I hadn't seen before watching again. This is one of those films that's 2 1/2 hours long with scene after scene of indulgences things that work great the first time but don't really work when you know where everything is headed. Burt Lancaster gives a tour-de-force performance as the titular character but I found myself more drawn to and more intrigued by Jean Simmons Sharon Falconer.



Brooks does a great job shooting a period piece but doing so economically. The film manages to look good even though 90% is just people in rooms talking and performing. The finale is someone unrealistic (pretty sure those people would have died of smoke inhalation). But at the end of the day this was a great nomination and good film





The film that was never supposed to work, Ghostbusters was in my opinion the film that should have won BP in 1984. It's a film that demonstrates you can make a film that fills almost every genre and does each one incredibly well. It's a solid horror film when it needs to be, but it's also got some science fiction, adventure, romance and ultimately comedy.



What I liked about the new trailer for the next Ghostbusters film is that it seems to get that the concept is so versatile that you can take it in an adventure type area and it will work out well. Now the film does have some technical flaws...the stop motion could have been better and some scenes the practical effects don't seem to have the weight they should have. Then again compared to the soulless excesses of CGI it looks better than most of the sci-fi films I've seen this year.


But most consider Ghostbusters a comedy and the reason for that is simple the screenplay has just the perfect amount of jokes and distinctive characters that sells the film as a classic.



i also watched ghostbusters today and liked it. i hadn't seen it since i was probably 9 or 10, when i recorded it on tv because i loved bill murray and i knew it was a movie i should watch eventually. i liked it at the time, but i only remember laughing at bill murray's opening scene and probably rick moranis and that's it, although i'm sure i liked other stuff. it never became a childhood favorite like fletch, vacation, caddyshack, airplane, etc., so i didn't have much nostalgia for it going in and was prepared to reaffirm the notion that i've developed in the last few years that it's fine, but a little overrated and doesn't really hold up.

and it is overrated, but it actually holds up surprisingly well. it's held back by having weirdly very few actual jokes in it. 95% of the humor that works comes from bill murray, who is so good at seeming like he doesn't want to be there that i'm pretty sure it's real, or rick moranis, who is truly perfect in every scene. the other 5% is from the stay puft marshmallow man reveal, but the ever-churning pop culture machine has robbed that gag of its impact. but even without being all that funny, the whole movie just sorta works. reitman deftly manages the tone, packaging all these disparate genres into a coherent blockbuster. it's a film that's remarkable for its hyper-competent execution, even if the material is pretty average.

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Most Biblical movies were long If I Recall.
seen A Clockwork Orange. In all honesty, the movie was weird and silly
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2022 Mofo Fantasy Football Champ
Phantom Thread



I'm not usually a big fan of PTA films, but this one brings it all and certainly shows that the man has talent. He is helped of course by a tremendous performance by Daniel Day-Lewis. I would say this is my absolute favorite performance of his that I have seen. It's just as equally amazing that Vicky Krieps could go toe to toe with him and deliver a performance that was as equally as astounding. And Lesley Manville did some impressive work here as well.

The best thing about the film was it's setup. It is perfectly paced, makes you always keep your full interest. The score is one for the ages and the cinematography is beautiful. It got better on a second watch and would be a part of my updated top 100 for sure.






Noah Baumbach has issues, it's strange to watch The Squid and the Whale after Marriage Story which is a more mature work though this one leads more to a comedic side. Squid and the Whale is story of a poor cat who's life is ruined by several pretentious dillholes. Baumbach's attempts at attacking the narcissism of these characters is amusing. Jeff Daniels is particularly good as a former writer who lords over his family. I particularly enjoyed the relationship he has with his son and his date first convincing them to see Blue Velvet in place of short circuit and then having a ridiculously inappropriate conversation at dinner.





A salesman/con man comes to a town and suckers the townspeople into purchasing needless uniforms and instruments in the 1962 film The Music Man. The movie is adapted from a Broadway play and you really feel the theatrical roots. The film is shot with an epic scoop in technicolor brilliance you can imagine seeing this in the theater and really enjoying it.


For me though the film is the lacking, perhaps it's the genre and time period but I enjoyed the humor more than the film. The film doesn't really have a strong narrative and you don't really grow to like or sympathize with the characters. And the film has issues with continuity the villagers we meet in the first scene are very different each time you see them. I also don't know what time period the story is supposed to take place in.


You've also got a very outdated message of a woman needing a man to be happy

You keep missing this one..here's my tenth review



The thing isolated becomes incomprehensible
Just to let you know i'm still on this. Just need to watch Music Man and I'm done! will try to post my write-ups during the weekend



just rewatched cool hand luke. the first and only time i'd seen it was with my dad around five years ago and i thought it was great, it really left a lasting impression on me in a way that few movies have. turns out it still holds up and i liked it about the same. it's a powerful film about power, fascism, resilience, suffering, idolatry, martyrdom, but most importantly, it's an intensely homoerotic movie about guys being dudes. it takes every opportunity to show us sweaty male bodies glistening in the sun and literally ends on a montage of paul newman's smile. i'd definitely like to read some sort of psychoanalytic paper on why straight dudes are so drawn to this movie – dudes who think they want to be paul newman when they actually just like looking at his beautiful blue eyes. it's a pretty fascinating portrait of an explicitly masculine community, in which the miracles peformed by the christ-like figure involve getting punched in the face a bunch of times and eating 50 eggs for some reason, which is the same shlt my college baseball team would think was badass. these pointless brutal activities take on a spiritual significance because they have nothing else. they turn to luke as a spiritual figure of sorts, but he is merely a human and will of course let them down, until he is killed and his legend is allowed to live on and continuing bringing hope.
one thing i remember from my first viewing is that it felt a lot longer than it was, which i think is because it features not one, not two, but three failed escape attempts by luke. this could make it feel like it's going in circles, but the accumulation of suffering and frustration is crucial to the film, so the perceived extra length is a necessary effect.

this is probably my favorite paul newman performance and george kennedy absolutely rules here too. cool movie

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2022 Mofo Fantasy Football Champ
Tough call for what will win, but I have an inkling on the winner. Though yeah, Rear Window would have.

As for the 21st I've already made up my mind on my nomination there.



just watched blood diamond. this is one of my mom's favorite movies and i remember catching like five minutes of it maybe seven years ago when i came home to her watching it. i had the impression that this was a serious and sensitive issue-driven film with some thriller elements, but it's actually just an extremely run-of-the-mill hollywood thriller that uses human suffering and exploitation as its exciting backdrop. it's really some of the worst white savior bullsh;t, i don't really believe the film cared about any of its african characters very much. djimon hounsou gives a good performance, but even he has zero characterization beyond wanting his family back. we don't even get the perfunctory "getting to know each other" conversation scene between him and leo, but we get plenty of character detail in the scenes between leo and jennifer connelly as the obligatory white female lead, because god forbid a movie about the exploitation of africans have to depict an african person as recognizably human, it's better to concoct another white character for our racist hero to talk to. hounsou's only other personality trait is that he is apparently too irrational and emotional to not get himself killed in his native land without constantly being saved by a white foreigner. every single villain is portrayed as nothing more than a cartoonish savage, while the victims of their brutality are an afterthought.

there are moments where it seems it wants to make a political statement and give a broader indictment of global capitalism, but it always pulls back right before it goes anywhere and it's pretty frustrating. there's so much more it could say, but it feels more interested in playing with your sympathy and guilt than connecting it to any broader critique.

with all that said, i still didn't hate this movie and thought some of it was alright. the performances are all great. some of the action scenes were iffy, but some were quite good. it successfully hits a handful of its dramatic beats, although there is some rough dialogue at times. i do appreciate the way it shines a light on an important issue, i just wish it went about it less sh;ttily. i also appreciate just how much it feels like a 00s film, harkening back to a time when you didn't need to make your thriller interesting or subversive in order to get it taken seriously, as long as it was about a Serious and Important Topic.

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Tough call for what will win, but I have an inkling on the winner. Though yeah, Rear Window would have.

As for the 21st I've already made up my mind on my nomination there.
I have no idea what's going to win, no really I don't. That's because I don't tally the results until the very end of the HoF. But it looked like Rear Window was doing pretty well....I've been ready for the 21st for a while now, but keep flip flopping between several noms



I also have no idea what to choose for 21st. Citizen, how long after this one ends do people usually start the next one? Or does it depend on what else is going on?



I also have no idea what to choose for 21st. Citizen, how long after this one ends do people usually start the next one? Or does it depend on what else is going on?
Usually they start right after one ends. But I started the 10th HoF while the 9th was still going, but only because the host of the 9th told me it was OK. I've also waited many weeks to start the 15th and the 20th, because a lot of HoFs were going on and I wanted to let people catch their breath. But this time not much is going on, so I'd say you could start as soon as you want to.

Looking forward to the 21st



I also have no idea what to choose for 21st. Citizen, how long after this one ends do people usually start the next one? Or does it depend on what else is going on?
Usually they start right after one ends. But I started the 10th HoF while the 9th was still going, but only because the host of the 9th told me it was OK. I've also waited many weeks to start the 15th and this one because a lot of HoFs were going on and I wanted to let people catch their breath. But this time not much is going on, I'd say you could start as soon as you want to.

Looking forward to the 21st
Me too, hopefully me hosting doesn’t scare people away like the Western



Me too, hopefully me hosting doesn’t scare people away like the Western
I like you as a host. Why? You're active and enthusiastic and you keep the HoF up to date. You didn't scare anyone away from the Western HoF The first one we did didn't have many members either. I gather not everyone loves westerns like I do!

BTW, I've noticed enthusiasm and conversation has been waning in the last year or so. It use to be that HoFs were much more dynamic and people actually talked to each other, but lately it seems we all just post our movie reviews and that's it. I miss the conversation of the good old days I though I could help with the 'movie of the week' idea and maybe I didn't try hard enough to make that work.