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Back in the 1990s, I saw dozens of kids movies because I had kids that were just that age.  "That Darn Cat", "The Mighty Ducks", "Three Ninjas", "Casper", "Matilda", "The Indian in the Cupboard"..., the list seems endless. Many of them were fine films, especially for a kids audience, but I have never felt a need to revisit them after my own kids grew up. It may be true that nostalgia will only carry you so far. There were however films from my own childhood that I can still watch as an adult and treasure despite the fact that they were kids movies. "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", "Swiss Family Robinson", "Robinson Crusoe on Mars", Mysterious Island" hold up pretty well. I think that "The Kid Who Would be King" fits better into my list of childhood style films than those of my children. This is a retelling of the Arthur Legend and it puts the concept of Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake ...

Sometimes it is just nice to sit and watch a film that can entertain you without any explosions, car chases, political satire or smug irony. "Stan & Ollie" is the sort of picture that adults used to be able to see at a movie theater. Most films of this sort get shuttled off to a streaming service where older audiences can enjoy them without having to mix with the youthful riff raff. Fortunately, some film makers are still interested in providing a theatrical experience and some older audiences are still interested in venturing out of the house on a Friday night. This is basically a biopic about one of the great comedy duos of the Twentieth Century. I do worry a little about the next generation having no context for films however, when the young lady taking my popcorn order asked me what I was going to see and I told her, she asked "What's it about?"  Of course my students probably think the same think when I ask who or what is Post Malone? So the problem doe...

A hundred years from now, people will not have to guess what we were like, or how we lived or what thoughts we might have. Our technology and culture is resulting in the most documented, photographed/filmed generation in human history. For good or ill, our lives will be available in a format that ten decades from now will be understood and easily accessible. Go backwards a hundred years and the exact opposite is true. We have grainy pictures, incomplete sound and you have to go to an historical archive to even see that world, at least until now. Peter Jackson, of "Lord of the Rings" fame, has scoured through the 100 hours of film footage that the Imperial War Museum has, and put it together to make a fascinating look at the experience of soldiers on the Western Front of "The Great War". His collaborators have meticulously re-timed the footage to create a smooth flow of film that was usually hand-cranked at different speeds. Computers have been employed to correct li...

I'm afraid I feel compelled to start my comments here with a bad joke. My opinion on this film is not as clear as a pane of...oh, you know.  There was a lot that I liked about the concept, set up and visualizations here, but there are plot holes, trails not followed and an ending that is frustratingly opaque. "Glass" should be better than it is, but in many ways I don't think it can. M. Night Shyamalan has created a set up for his super hero epic, but stops short of committing to the characters he created to continue his mythologizing of comic books. I suspect a lot of people will be pissed off at this. I was a fan of "Unbreakable" when it arrived 19 years ago. The notion that a sequel might be coming was appealing but not essential to me. I pretty much got the point of that story and it felt complete. After pitting out with some films that are reviled by film fans, Shyamalan seemed to redeem himself with an effective thriller with "Split" two year...

I started my movie version of the blog in 2010. I was interested in films from my years growing up as a teenager during the 1970s.  The project was originally intended to run the length of that summer and then I would be done with it, but movies have a way of steering your life in directions that you can't always anticipate. I was over fifty years old when I started working on the project, and I was not particularly adept at using the social media that was available. As I became more familiar with what I was doing, I discovered of course that I was not the only person who had opinions about movies, and that included films from my preferred time line. I started searching for other bloggers who, like me, were not only interested in reviewing a movie but also cared about the context of the times and the personal history that they had with the movies they loved. I had searched a few movie blogs for sites similar to mine, but I struggled to locate the right mixture. Everybody had opinio...

I had originally dismissed this as a piece of television animation that was getting a theatrical release to boost interest in DVD sales and streaming. Well that turned out to be wrong. After hearing a number of my colleagues on "The Lamb" rave about it, and seeing a half dozen really positive reviews (which I scanned rather than reading), I became a lot more motivated. I can now see why there is a lot of enthusiasm, and while I am not inclined to say it was the best film of the year as some of the hyperbole had it, I can say it was excellent. The story does take a while to set up and you have to be patient with it. Not only do most of us know the origin story, but when the various dimensions start crossing paths, we get it partially recapped, although with slight variations each time. The main focus in this telling is on Miles Morales, a kid from Brooklyn who is starting at a charter school where he stays in a dorm during the school week. This story is immediately different b...

The YouTube Friendly version of the Top 10 55 New Films this year, here is a video inventory for you. 20 Posts Covering Older Films, Special Events and Assorted others. 5 Movies I Want Everyone to See I have been restoring posts that were originally published on Fogs Movie Reviews back in 2013. Fogs closed his site so the material I wrote has to be re-listed. I've been doing it piecemeal, so here are the links for the five entries I updated this year. Podcasting I was a very active member of the LAMB community this last year. [Large Association of Movie Blogs for you neophytes], and I started off the last year with the Movie Of The Month Podcast I championed, Ishtar. You can listen here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/lambcast/episodes/2018-01-11T14_54_50-08_00 After being on at least seven other of the LAMBCast episodes, Jay, the Shepard of the LAMB, decided that he might as well just automatically fill a weekly spot and give himself the chance to take an occasional episode of...

So I enjoyed a lot of films this year but I would not say I was knocked out by many. In some years I could pick out a dozen films that will be on my long term watch list. This year, there were maybe five or six. Certainly there were plenty I enjoyed but I would not classify them as classics. This is the traditional top ten list for 2018. As usual, I am not making a completely aesthetic judgement, my list is always most strongly influenced by my subjective reaction to a film. These are the movies that moved me, or stood out in my memory.