Films 14 to 16
14. The Big Sleep (1946)
Bogart! Bacall! Decent little noir pic and surprisingly faithful to the book, convoluted plotting and all, until the more traditional ending. I've never seen this before but I still hear Bogart's voice when I read the Chandler novels; he's perfect as Marlowe.
15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Continues the trend of making the Potter movies darker and more interesting. Less tightly plotted than the last few films, but by no means as bogged down in teen romance as some reviews would indicate. Then again I've never read the book so I had no expectations. Oddly the title seems only tangentially related to the main plot.
16. District 9
A fairly simplistic blockbuster masquerading as an arthouse SF movie. The plot is straight out of an episode of The Outer Limits, but the documentary style and the astonishingly seamless CGI set it apart from the norm. It's very violent, but almost literally on the level of an Unreal Tournament frag-fest so it didn't bother me. (However, is it slightly weird that a movie set in South Africa featuring an alien analogy for apartheid has no strong black characters except a superstitious nigerian gangster?)
Bogart! Bacall! Decent little noir pic and surprisingly faithful to the book, convoluted plotting and all, until the more traditional ending. I've never seen this before but I still hear Bogart's voice when I read the Chandler novels; he's perfect as Marlowe.
15. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Continues the trend of making the Potter movies darker and more interesting. Less tightly plotted than the last few films, but by no means as bogged down in teen romance as some reviews would indicate. Then again I've never read the book so I had no expectations. Oddly the title seems only tangentially related to the main plot.
16. District 9
A fairly simplistic blockbuster masquerading as an arthouse SF movie. The plot is straight out of an episode of The Outer Limits, but the documentary style and the astonishingly seamless CGI set it apart from the norm. It's very violent, but almost literally on the level of an Unreal Tournament frag-fest so it didn't bother me. (However, is it slightly weird that a movie set in South Africa featuring an alien analogy for apartheid has no strong black characters except a superstitious nigerian gangster?)