Every Monday we can talk about what we watched over the weekend. I’d enjoy hearing what new movies, games, or televisions shows were seen over the weekend. This is what I’ve been watching this weekend.
What Have You Been Watching?
July 23rd 2012 Edition
Finally we had a weekend with very little actually planned out. The only thing we truly had to do was see The Dark Knight Rises at IMAX on Friday night. The movie experience itself was fantastic, but I would be lying if there wasn’t a sense of anxiety over the events that occurred in the early Friday morning. Movie goers have had their sanctuary violated by one mad man. It is a truly terrible event and our thoughts and prayers go out to those in Colorado.
Saturday night we started to watch some of the Criterion films I picked up during the B&N sale. Saturday was my first viewing of Rushmore. Wes Anderson‘s second feature had a lot to admire. Then on Sunday, we watched the first movie of the Samurai Trilogy. Without further delay let’s get into more detail.
Movies:
The Dark Knight Rises: Check out our full review.
Rushmore: There’s always been little argument over which Wes Anderson movies were the best. It was always between The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore. The problem was that I had seen Royal Tenenbaums and it didn’t do anything for me. Worse of all it put me off of the director until he released Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’ve since enjoyed Moonrise Kingdom and Bottle Rocket, so I was interested to see where this would place in his filmography for me. I think Rushmore’s quirky charm won me over in the end. Jason Schwartzman is fantastic in his début, creating the character of Max Fisher and instantly making him iconic. Max has a lot of the qualities of a teenager struggling in high school, but it’s amplified by 100. While Wes Anderson continues to follow the same charisma he created in this film, this is where a lot of his signature was born.
Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto: One of my last purchases from the B&N sale was a blind buy of the Samurai Trilogy, based solely on my enjoyment of Toshiro Mifune in other samurai movies. This was a worthy purchase. Having lost his way after returning from war, Takezo lives by the code of the samurai, but his skills are unrefined. He longs to return to the village he grew up in, but there’s only enemies awaiting his return. For a movie a made in 1952 the production values are amazing. The entire movie is beautiful and while the action isn’t as exciting as current samurai extravaganza 13 Assassins, it’s completely entertaining. I’m looking forward to the other two movies in the trilogy.