A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
In a way, I feel like I just watched The Man with the Iron Fists again, so maybe that should count as a real Quentin Tarantino film after all. Heightening the illusion was the fact that I brought along the same friend to provide a male perspective. This time, however, we might almost have been watching different movies.
There’s a famous story about Raiders of the Lost Ark that you might have heard, where the script called for a big fight scene between Indy and a very large man with a very large sword. When the time came to film that scene, however, Harrison Ford was just getting over the flu and totally didn’t want to go through all that effort, so instead of fighting, he just pulled out his gun and shot the guy — inadvertently creating one of the most memorable scenes ever.
This movie does exactly the opposite and creates a scene that, mercifully, I’m already starting to forget.
Just in time for the end of the world! Okay, not really. I’m reasonably confident that the world will be here to see the sun rise on December 22nd, so this is not the time to give away all your stuff and rampage through the streets. But it did get me thinking about how often the world has ended on the silver screen, for our, er, entertainment. So to speak. Anyway, if your neighbors are rampaging through the streets, lock yourself in and try kicking back with this list of the top five flicks that make you feel glad you’re alive.
As everyone was leaving the theatre, I heard a man asking his companions — in what seemed a very annoyed tone — if he would have to come back again to watch the second part (The Desolation of Smaug, due in 2013). “Well, of course,” was the reply, though either his companions didn’t know or didn’t have the heart to tell him that there’s now also a third part, namely There and Back Again, due in 2014. I’m a little nervous about the whole back and forth between two movies and three, since already the pacing occasionally seemed a bit off in this one.