Every couple of weeks, the OFCS polls its members with a question related to movies. It can be serious or amusing, but each member is given the opportunity to submit a short response to the question, which we will then post on Thursday mornings. Here is this week’s query.
Essay Question #14: What movies are you vowing to cross off your “Movie Resolutions” list in 2015 (either classic or contemporary)?
Kristen Lopez @ Awards Circuit
Responses
Samuel Castro @ Ochoymedio.ino
Intentaré, seguro infructuosamente, ver los “deberes” de crítico que no son placenteros para mí, es decir, la obra completa de Bergman, de Fassbinder y de Tarkovsky.
Andrew Wyatt @ St. Louis Magazine
Most of the films I’m making it a point to catch this year are those contemporary releases that never appeared theatrically in St. Louis last year. MAP TO THE STARS and NIGHT MOVES are probably at the top of that list. Among older films, I’m sitting on a few never-seen Criterion Blu-rays that are taunting me. At the top of that pile is probably PICKPOCKET, which I’ve caught in snippets, but never savored in its entirety in one sitting.
Robert Cashill @ Popdose
There was a meme floating around at Oscar time, regarding “your Oscar birth year movie,” or something like that. Mine is The Sound of Music, and you can do the math on when that came out. I saw the recent TV version, and I’ve seen parts of the Oscar-winning one, and with a new Blu-ray out I figure I should finally Andrews up and see the whole thing. I’m not getting any younger…
Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee
“The Assassin”
Hou Hsiao- Hsien
Shu Qi
Cinema poetry.
Kristen Lopez @ Awards Circuit
Since I’m planning to see The Force Awakens, I promised everyone I’d watch the original Star Wars trilogy. I have one down, two more to go by December.
I’d also love to finally finish The Godfather trilogy and Citizen Kane.
Sarah D Bunting @ Tomato Nation
Encouraged by how much I loved the Kansas and Eagles documentaries from the last year, I’ll be knocking off a bunch of music docus: BEWARE OF MR. BAKER; THE OTHER ONE: …BOB WEIR; DIG!; and WHO IS HARRY NILSSON? We seem to be in a golden age of these pics, and as I’ve also gotten sucked into VH1 Classic’s constant re-airing of BEHIND THE MUSICs lately, I’m interested to see if there’s any influence between and among these movies and older music docs like GIMME SHELTER, eg.
Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
It’s funny: a friend and I actually had this exact conversation the other day. She’s currently going through the list of Best Picture winners and I remembered how much fun I had crossing films off that list when I undertook the task a few years ago. We tried to think of another good way to revisit landmark classics and explore why some films were chosen to stand as the best of the best at a specific moment in time, and we agreed that a fun complement to the Best Picture project would be to make a bucket list of all the Palme d’or winners from the Cannes Film Festival. Not only is a project like this a treat for a film buff because one can look at the evolution of a canon (and how problematic it can be), but it’s also a treasure hunt of sorts to track down all these films. The highlight of the Best Picture might have been getting an old VHS of Cavalcade in the mail that came wrapped in a pizza box, which was a far better novelty than Cavalcade itself.
While looking over the list, I’m surprise how few of the top Cannes winners I’ve seen. Pulp Fiction, La dolce vita, and Black Orpheus are immediate favourites among the one’s I’ve already checked off, but I’m embarrassed to admit that films most in need of a check include Paris, Texas; Kagemusha, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. There’s really no excuse for a film buff not to have seen these films yet, but I might attribute my own obsession with the Oscars and emphasis on Canadian films for creating a neglect of world cinema and American indies. Hopefully by the time I finish with the Cannes list, there will be a Canadian film with a Palme to its name and the best of both worlds will collide!
Candice Frederick @ Reel Talk Online
The entire Toy Story series
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
There are a few silent films that I’ve yet to tackle: The Crowd, The Wind, and while I have seen Greed I’d like to watch it again to give it a deeper appreciation.
