2007 | Week 36

Posted on September 9, 2007 by badblokebob

While I’ve managed to keep things to single-week entries for a fair while now, I suspect it’ll be back to double-weekers for at least next week. I’m off to New York for eight days, y’see (also explaining why this entry is ever so slightly earlier than usual), and my film watching is likely to be minimal. Though there’s a cinema right near the apartment, so you never know. Maybe I’ll finally see The Bourne Ultimatum…

This week is an unusually short one. Normally I’d just carry it over into the next entry, but one very important thing stops me…

I’ve reached 100!

Hurrah! And, as predicted, I’m there well before the end of the year! In fact, there’s only just shy of a third of it left, meaning that my average viewing has me hitting 145 by year’s end. Quite a bit more than 100, clearly. Of course, the spacious summer weeks are now giving way to term time work, so quite how well that whole average thing will work out is another matter entirely.

But, for now — 100! Whoo! And I specially picked a pretty momentous film to view in celebration of the achievement. In film terms, you’d struggle to find any more significant than… well, read on, and you’ll see…

#99 Starter for Ten

#100 Citizen Kane

2007 | Week 35

Posted on September 4, 2007 by badblokebob

As you may remember from last week, this is technically Week 34 Days 5-7 and Week 35; and I bet no one would’ve remembered if I hadn’t said. For a 10-day week I haven’t watched a great deal of films, though (as explained last week) there have been reasons. Nonetheless, the four I have watched leave me only two short of the long awaited number 100!

But that’s for next week. So, here are those four films, each from a different decade, across almost 60 years no less.

#95 Before Sunrise

#96 Before Sunset

#97 A Study in Scarlet

#98 Great Expectations

2007 | Week 34

Posted on August 23, 2007 by badblokebob

This was going to be the first double-week entry in a fair while, the main reason being that I’m going away for the best part of a week very shortly, probably without internet to post an entry. But then I watched a fair few films at the start of this week and decided to just do an earlier entry instead! So this may be called Week 34, but it’s actually Week 34 Days 1-4, and the next entry will just silently include Week 34 Days 5-7 (if I even watch anything then). I’m sure no one will mind but me.

If I do get the net working during my away-time, you may be lucky enough to see the first stand-alone editorial here. I’ve been musing on the IMDb Top 250 and may put some of those thoughts down. [2015 edit: I don’t think I ever did.]

Anyway, several over-long reviews this week — I appear to be losing my self control on that front. They’ll have multiple paragraphs before long, you mark my words!

Something I’ve also just noticed is that across five reviews I’ve used four different scores. Considering I’ve so far this year only seen one film deserving of the lowest score, that’s quite a spread. Just a shame the scores nicely rise only to fall right back at the end…

#91 Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth

#92 The Cat’s Meow

#93 Letters from Iwo Jima

#93a Gone with the Wind

#94 The Black Dahlia

2007 | Week 33

Posted on August 20, 2007 by badblokebob

The biggest news this week: I’ve passed 90. 90! Only ten films to go ’til I hit the final aim — I think I can manage that in 19 weeks, to be honest. Anything after that… it’s all a bonus, and something to aim to beat next year.

Anyway, on to the business of the films themselves. The first one up this week is an odd’un, but I’ve gone ahead and justified that in the review itself. Elsewhere it’s the usual mixed bag of filmic delight and despair. How I’ve fit it in whilst also watching nearly all of Neon Genesis Evangelion I do not know.

#83 The Sign of Four

#84 Alfie

#85 Thunderbirds

#86 An Inconvenient Truth

#87 Point Break

#88 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

#89 Mrs Brown

#90 Wilde

2007 | Week 32

Posted on August 13, 2007 by badblokebob

Another single-week entry! Well now, isn’t my film watching going smashingly.

Some might say I’ve been generous with the five-star ratings of late — four in the last two weeks, compared to a total of six in the 29 weeks before it. Maybe I have. There aren’t any to be seen this week, though that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen any good films. In fact, some only fall slightly short.

Another thing you’ll notice this week are reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy. This is the first time I’ve seen them in a ridiculously long time; certainly more than five years, possibly as many as ten. It’s all part of a little Star Wars weekend I’ve had — watch out for a 100 Films special (yes, I have specials now!) about it in the next few days.

It would be pretty hard to beat the massive eight new films I saw last week… and I haven’t. But five new ones, plus all six Star Wars films (three reviewed here), is far from bad going. And, obviously, adds up to more in total.

I say five news ones — that’s not strictly true. You see, we begin with a slight oddity this week: I actually saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a couple of weeks ago… and then completely forgot to review it! So, technically, it belongs in an earlier entry, with a lower review number… but that’s far too much hassle, so I’ve just put it here instead. I’m sure no one will mind.

#78 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

#79 C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

#80 Pan’s Labyrinth

#81 Stranger Than Fiction

#81a Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (DVD Edition)

#82 Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny

#82a Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (DVD Edition)

#82b Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (DVD Edition)

2007 | Week 31

Posted on August 6, 2007 by badblokebob

My quest to see 100 films I’ve never seen by the end of 2007 passes the three-quarters point this week, and we’re not even two-thirds of the way through the year!

This is the first single-week entry since week 14. As well as a concerted effort (such as three films on the Friday), it’s helped by a lessening in the amount of TV I’ve been watching — last entry’s list of 19 on-going programmes has shrunk to 13 by the end of this week. Some might say I watch too much TV…

Nonetheless, I’ve moved from about two films per week average over the last 16 weeks, to a total of eight films this week! Well well well.

As well as a Week Of More it’s a bit of a Week Of Quality. Three of this week’s films are ones I’ve been dying to see for ages, and the rest follow not too far behind (OK, maybe I wouldn’t’ve put the likes of Kinky Boots or Confetti on a list of films I was dying to see, but I did want to). There’s also a fair few awards and nominations, and no small amount of critical acclaim, across them.

One could also argue that it’s a Week Of Variety. To be honest, I suspect there’s always a fair bit of variety in my film choices, but this week it’s especially pronounced — straightforward British comedies stand by low-budget intellectual sci-fi; complex teenage faux-film noir sits next to epic trilogy-starting Russian fantasy/horror; American gangster thriller lies beside classic British romance… And, while most were made in the new millennium, there’s a spread of over 60 years between the oldest and the most recent. All within the space of seven days, too!

Perhaps because of all these reasons I’ve found choosing the final rating for every film here quite tricky; all of them have some malleability, either up or down.

#70 Primer

#71 Kinky Boots

#72 Brick

#73 Night Watch

#74 The Departed

#75 Confetti

#76 Brief Encounter

#77 Educating Rita

2007 | Weeks 29-30

Posted on July 30, 2007 by badblokebob

Another two week stretch on my quest to see 100 new films by the end of the year. I’m just not seeing enough films per week to warrant entries that often, it would seem.

This time round I blame TV — so many new things have started, as well as continuing shows, that I spend most of my time keeping up! During these two weeks I’ve been watching Boomtown, British Film Forever, Cape Wrath, Dexter, Dirt, Dragons’ Den: Where Are They Now?, Eight Out of Ten Cats, Firefly, Heroes, House, Hyperdrive, Jekyll, Mock the Week, Shark, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Time of Your Life, Vanished, The Wire and Would I Lie To You, as well as a variety of one-off things. Quite a bit, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Nonetheless, I’ve managed to get a few things watched (half of them right at the end of the second week!) — and they’ve all turned out to be of good quality too, as you will surely see when you read my reviews…

#66 Mystic River

#67 Right at Your Door

#68 Heat

#69 Mean Creek

2007 | Weeks 27-28

Posted on July 16, 2007 by badblokebob

My quest to see 100 films that I’ve never seen before by the end of 2007 rolls on into its second half. I’ve done really pathetically in the last couple of months — my average number of films per week has dropped from 2.7 for weeks 1 to 18 to just 1.5 for weeks 19 to 26! I ain’t gonna get to the end that way… Actually, I’d hit exactly 100 by the end of the year if I carried on that way. But still, reaching ‘only’ 100 when I was more on track to hit 150 does seem like a slight disappointment.

Anyway, things do continue, and I think I’ve seen a pretty respectable number of films for these two weeks. Will the giddy heights of six films each in weeks 8, 12, 13 and 14 ever be reproduced? (And, by-the-by, that’s six films on average across 12 and 13 — the exact number from 13 was higher, but I can’t remember what it was. Though I’m sure no one else cares for such boring information…)

So, that said:

A couple of Oscar-winners crop up this time round, as we move through the first few weeks of July (the 2nd to the 15th, to be precise).

#61 Capote

#62 Ocean’s Twelve

#63 Monster

#64 Ringers: Lord of the Fans

#65 The Woodsman

2007 | Weeks 24-26

Posted on July 4, 2007 by badblokebob

In case you’ve forgotten, and can’t work it out from the title, I’m trying to see at least 100 films that I’ve never seen before by the end of 2007. That’s an average of eight per month, donchaknow; or two per week. I’m well on target.

And, I’m halfway through! For anyone who can’t remember how many weeks there are in a year… well, there’s 52; and half of 52 is 26; and the week of June 25th is week 26 of 2007, meaning that July 1st is just about halfway through the year (though, to be precise, there’s actually 52 weeks and one day in a year… well, actually, 52 weeks, one day and a quarter day… anyway…)

I passed the numerical halfway point (i.e. 50 films) way back in week 19 — clearly I’ve not been doing as well in the past 7 weeks! At all. Oh dear oh dear…

Exams may be long over and holidays may be on, but combine the odd bits of good TV filling days and evenings with a commitment to completing Script Frenzy, and you wind up seeing less films than you might expect. A lot less, as it turns out — just three in three whole weeks. Still, I’m currently well on track to pass 100 by the end of the year anyway. Shiny.

And as has become standard practice, I’ll handily remind you that this entry is covering films seen between 11th June and 1st July.

#58 Sense and Sensibility

#59 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

#60 Kramer vs. Kramer

2007 | Weeks 21-23

Posted on June 11, 2007 by badblokebob

This time I do see Spider-Man 3! But not Zodiac, mainly because I can’t be bothered and I’m quite happy to catch it on DVD. Plus, Pirates 3 is long out now, and if you think I’m going to be foolish enough to brave the cinema to see a film of that popularity in its opening week when that week is also half term then you’ve got another thing coming! This period is also affected by exams and the beginning of Script Frenzy.

Talking of exams, I had my film exam on May 30th, which should in theory have meant a glut of films from the course or related to the course just before that. Well, there’s Chinatown… and there would’ve been Only You but the sound wouldn’t play… on my Mac anyway… and how about Die Hard and Once Upon a Time in the West (seen them before)… or connected films such as The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, Predator, Dirty Dancing, The Fifth Element, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Star Wars or Once Upon a Time in America? Well, I can tell you for nothing that I’ve seen some of them before. As for the others… you’ll just have to see… or not…

Actually, this entry has wound up covering a longer period than I initially thought (though not as long as it nearly did). Mainly cos it turned out I didn’t (and haven’t) watched many films since those pesky exams finished. I’m not sure why, to be honest.

I’m slowly making my way past the halfway mark in numbers, and slowly heading towards it in time. This period covers the three weeks from May 21st to June 10th.

#53 West Side Story

#54 Spider-Man 3

#55 Chinatown

#56 Road to Morocco

#57 It’s All Gone Pete Tong

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