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Once Upon a Time in the West

 So, when you think of westerns what comes to mind?  A dusty old west setting?  Good guys and bad guys?  A damsel in distress?  Cowboy clothes and six-shooters?

Well, they're all here in Sergio Leone's spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West.  The shots in this film are truly amazing and nearly every frame of this film is a work of art.  Several tracks of music in this film will stick in your head and they accentuate each moment and character like exclamations of a legend.  The pace of the film is slow, but each shot is like a highly detailed painting so the pace is appropriate to allow the viewer to absorb each wisp of dust, each dirty pore, and beautiful landscape of the desert west.

A classic that has aged remarkably well with the only sign of it being from the 60s is the sound quality.  The story may be slightly typical of westerns, yet it has plenty of intrigue to be refreshing and original.

10/10 -- Deservedly belongs among the rank of the classics.

Rubber

Ok, so judge a book by its cover.  Looks like the star of the film is a rubber tire.  A rubber tire that has psychokinetic powers and rolls around the desert landscape making things blow up with its "mind".  The film aims to be one of those "break the rules" movies and pokes fun at the whole essence of movies and the audience participating in the experience.  There are some nicely framed sequences of the tire rolling around without any human intervention.  The film establishes an intriguing thesis, but the details soon start to bore you.  Maybe it's a statement?  Maybe it's entertainment?  Maybe this isn't for everyone.

3/10 - The movie rolls along too slowly and comes off as annoyingly proud that it is absurd.  Maybe a few decades from now we'll look back on this with fondness for its irony.

Iceman

No this isn't a superhero movie, Iceman is based on the true story of a mob hitman who managed to keep his violent secret away from his family.  Michael Shannon stars in this biopic but comes off rather robotic in this one.  The directors fail to humanize or demonize the Iceman, who had killed about a hundred people for the mob.  His indifference towards killing came off as... indifferent.  I've seen others describe this as a made-for-TV movie and it certainly had that feel to it.  This is no Goodfellas as it fails to provoke any real emotion out of the moviegoer and the plot is only mildly interesting.

5/10 -- a mediocre film.  Michael Shannon is much better than this.

M

The manhunt is on!  There is a serial killer murdering children and the search is on for the monster behind the killings.  Fritz Lang's M is noted as establishing the blueprint for many thrillers to follow.  You can see a lot of modern filmmaking techniques in this film, but coming from Lang it should come as no surprise (especially if you've seen Metropolis).  The film brings up a debate that is still relevant for today and there is a scene in the film that sounds a lot like the comment section of any political topic on a website.

The chance to see depression era Germany alone is worth the watch.  You get a chance to see aspects of everyday life as this occurs to everyday people.  There are many themes to this film ranging from criminal rights to engineering fear in the populace.  You wonder what the significance of the M is and when it is revealed, it is symbolic of the disappointment of our expectations.

10/10 - Every shot in this film is a masterpiece and the themes are still relevant for today.

The Act of Killing

"We were allowed to do it.  And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished."

The Act of Killing is a surreal movie.  The filmmakers approached Anwar Congo to tell his story and recreate the events of 1960s Indonesia in which paramilitary groups captured and killed communists.  Anwar decides to film a movie to reenact the atrocities committed by his death squads.  They go into great detail describing how they did, often in prideful reflection like a veteran telling war stories.  This is in stark contrast to the normalcy of their lives now.

What's chilling is their interactions with families who have been affected by the killings.  The civility and frankness that they give to each other now as they talk about the ways in which their family members were murdered just boggles my mind.  As the reenact some scenes, the people playing the victims seem to be "acting" a little too realistically as you see the pain and torment on their faces.

For some of the former death squad killers, the guilt has been pushed deep down inside them and they are even proud of what they did.  For others, you can see the conflict in their eyes as they ponder the morality of their past actions.  The film is haunting because they are digging up old ghosts from the past.

10/10 - one of the most original, moving documentaries I had ever seen.

Lone Survivor

A war film that sets aside politics? The action is intense and realistic, the gore and pain are also realistic. Props to the filmmakers for depicting war as brutal and dirty. It's as simple and effective as that--much like the SEALs they represent.

 8/10 for realistic depiction of war and the soldiers who fight in it.