Valley Girl, Ugetsu, Walk Don't Run, Out of Africa, & Last.fm

Valley Girl has one of the best soundtracks of any 80s films. Yes, I'm, like, totally serious. The Plimsouls, Josie Cotton, and, of course, Modern English, with one of the best songs of the 80s. I Melt with You was outstanding, but the third homage to The Graduate in the film (after Plastics and the entire scene between Skip and Suzi's mom) with that song playing was great. I know the song was great, but I thought it wasn't entirely necessary to play the song so often in the movie. But the music just was very good overall. And Nicolas Cage (in his first appearance as Nicolas Cage) was not too goofy, and there was much gratuitous toplessness, as is the point of a good 80s teen movie. Very few people in the movie really went on to do anything much afterwards besides him, but that's a shame.

Ugetsu, based on reading some reviews when it was released on DVD, was supposed to be a ghost story. After watching it, it still is, but it's much more about the problems with being very greedy, and the ghost story parts just happens to further emphasize that main moral. It feels very much like an early Kurosawa film, and subsequently, it was very good, even though it was more moral than I would have liked. I know that even a movie like Seven Samurai has a very pro-farmer message, but they just didn't feel as if they were morals.

Walk Don't Run is Cary Grant's last film, and it's also a remake of The More the Merrier, about a housing shortage in WWII DC. This time it's 1964 Tokyo during the Olympics. Jim Hutton is a starched shirt, making this film not nearly as good as The More the Merrier, especially as Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea were very good, as was Coburn, and only Grant really stood out in this one. Mainly because he's Cary Grant, and he's always the best thing in the whatever film he's in. This one does have George Takei as a policeman though, so that was a sort of strange thing to see. Then again, it does make sense, considering he's Asian, he was a somewhat famous actor in America, and the movie was set in Japan. Yay for Hollywood having a very small list of non-white actors to choose from in roles. It's clearly gotten better, and, in this case, Takei is at least Japanese, so it's better than others. Back to the movie, it's nothing particularly special.

Out of Africa is long and beautiful. I have a very strange strange mind and I won't say what I was thinking. Of course, Meryl Streep is very good. And the movie is beautifully shot. Robert Redford was British in the movie? Really? Did you know that Kevin Costner was English in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as well? My, what outstanding accents these men had. If you haven't seen this, block out three hours of time and she it, it's worth watching.

I also added a little bit to know just how awesome my musical tastes are. Look on the bottom right under the Blogger button and the counter. And you'll see the last ten-ish tracks played by me on iTunes and my iPod, and by clicking on it you get to see a lot of info about how much music I listen to and what I do listen to. As it only goes back to March 2005 and doesn't even include a lot of the songs I played on my iPod, it's not entirely accurate, but it'll give you an idea of just how much my musical taste rocks. Note that I don't listen to songs over and over again. So that explains why songs I absolutely love don't get played hundreds of times.