Ordinary People, My Dinner with Andre, Two-Lane Blacktop, Assault on Precinct 13, & Kinsey

Ordinary People had a strong performance from everyone in it, but it seemed way too calculatingly made to be an Oscar winner to have deserved the Oscar. Raging Bull? Empire Strikes Back? Kagemusha? The Last Metro? All vastly superior movies. Really, this is just Oscar Bait. I'm pretty sure that had someone besides Robert Redford directed it, it would not have won the Best Picture Oscar. People love them some Redford. Probably also has a lot to do with the fact that Redford hadn't won an Oscar for any of his performances. Overall, a good film, but was not as good as the Academy said it was. Which is basically just a normal reaction to a good movie. They can't actually reward the best film. They have to reward people for careers in less than stellar movies. I think I just object to the completely irrational aspects of it, because, as I said, the movie itself was very good, but the Academy screwed up royally that year.

My Dinner with Andre is one of the worst DVDs I've watched. No subtitles, it doesn't go to the menu, the audio and video were muddled, and, worst of all, it doesn't show the time elapsed. Who puts out a crappy DVD like that? That's a shame, for it actually distracts from what it a very interesting conversation. And I want my My Dinner with Andre Action Figures!

Two-Lane Blacktop kept making me think of Easy Rider and Vanishing Point. I'm pretty sure that Vanishing Point couldn't have made much of an impact on this film, since it only came out six months earlier. Still, the James Taylor and Dennis Weaver pairing was an interesting choice. It definitely was a movie of its time.

Assault on Precinct 13 was bad. Really, why was it remade? And, especially, why bother trying to give characters reasons to exist and the like? And why change it to cops instead of gangs? This movie suffers from an insanely high budget for the movie. It should have been made with much less than a twentieth of the budget and no names. Oh, wait, that was the original one. Or it could have been moved out west. Oh, wait, that was Rio Bravo. Why the hell are movies like this remade? Why is there so much money to waste on craptacular movies? About the only good thing I can say for it, is that it doesn't pull any punches.

Kinsey is a movie that is made for people who have never grown up to have them giggle through most of it. I, unfortunately, giggled. It's too frequently, however, not able to be interesting from any standpoint. Two hours of hectoring about sex being normal is not needed today, at least for normal people, and the people who need it aren't going to watch this movie. They're going to boycott it and saw that everyone who sees it is going to hell or something. The sin of this movie is that it's boring, not that it deals with sex. Had it been more consistently interesting, I would have been very happy, but there are seriously frustrating problems with the film being alternately boring and somewhat worthwhile. Also, I really didn't know that was Timothy Hutton (even after having just seen Ordinary People), I thought it was Fred Armisen. He really looks like him, and every time I saw him, I kept thinking of Armisen. I'm just keeding!