This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is a different one, and one that's more personal: Movies you have a different opinion of after rewatching it. Much more than, say, movies about teachers or any other concrete theme, this is one that's liable to get a wide range of responses. In my case, I had two easy selections of movies I was too young to get fully the first time around, but coming up with a third made me think:
Ikiru (1952). Akira Kurosawa's film about a civil servant who discovers that he's got terminal stomach cancer. The dying man wants to leave a legacy, but finds that taking on the bureaucracy he's been a part of his whole life isn't as easy as you'd think. The local PBS channel ran this one back when I was a teenager and they had a late-night classic movie block on Saturday nights. As a teenager, I was clearly too young for the material. Watching it as an adult, however, it's much more poignang
Fat City (1972). Stacy Keach plays a failed boxer living in the dying town of Stockton, CA, who meets young Jeff Bridges one day at the gym. Bridges plays a young guy who thinks he can make it in boxing. Together, the two new friends live out a bleak existence. The first time I saw it, I saw the opening scene, of Keach in his tighty-whities, and though, I don't want to stay up until 1:00 in the morning to see where this is going. I'm glad I ultimately rewatched it, because it's a really good movie. It's just not one for teenagers, who won't get it.
Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows! (1968). A sequel to The Trouble With Angels, this movie has a group of Catholic girls' school students taking a cross-country bus trip with their nun teachers to a religious retreat in the years just after Vatican II. Rosalind Russell reprises her role as Mother Superior with Binnie Barnes and Mary Wickes also returning; among those they interact with as they go across country are Van Johnson as the head of a Catholic boys' school and Robert Taylor as owner of a summer camp. When I saw this one as a kid, I thought it was absolutely terrible. As an adult, I realize it's a mediocre generation-gap movie, but not nearly as bad as I thought it was when I was a kid.
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2 comments:
I haven't seen any of your picks this week. I never realized Keach and Bridges did a boxing movie together. That's something I might have to look up.
I haven't seen any of these but I would like to see the first one for sure. Actually, the last one, I think I saw clips of it because I rolled my eyes at seeing Van Johnson as a priest.
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