Sunday 20 March 2011

TV

Family Guy
2x11 A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Bucks
2x12 Fifteen Minutes of Shame
2x13 Road to Rhode Island [2nd watch]
2x14 Let's Go to the Hop
2x15 Dammit Janet!

this week on 100 Films

5 new reviews were posted to 100 Films in a Year this week, including three from 1953 (for no particular reason). And they were...

The Big Heat (1953)
The cast are excellent. Glenn Ford is a suitably square-jawed lead; Alexander Scourby a detestable gentleman-villain; Lee Marvin a truly brutal thug. The best part goes to Gloria Grahame however, in a role that moves from a ditzy minor broad to so much more. In the performance stakes, it’s certainly her film.

Genevieve (1953)
The titular Genevieve is a classic car — bearing in mind this was made in the early ’50s, we’re talking properly classic — that takes part in a two-day drive from London to Brighton and back again. It’s not a race, though competing friends turn it into one. That’s about the gist of it.

Let Me In (2010)
The nighttime scenes are bathed in the orange glow of street-lighting, a nice choice of colour scheme as it’s evocative of the real world, especially as it’s not unnaturally overdone: the colour is abundant where there is such lighting, but more natural tones are used in forests, etc.

Let the Right One In (2008)
We’re used to vampire films being Dark, visually, due to the necessity of a nighttime setting, but here the snow-covered locale makes most of the night scenes bright and white. Alfredson emphasises this with wide compositions that fill the frame with the white stuff.

Roman Holiday (1953)
Hepburn seems to be effortlessly likeable, and it’s easy to sympathise with the idea that seeing the sights and having fun in an iconic city is a lot more better than meeting a bunch of stuffy old men.

Having posted reviews of both Let the Right One In and its remake, I also did a bit of a comparison, which you can read here.

More next Sunday.