analytics

Queue Total



NETFLIX QUEUE-
284 MOVIES (released titles only)

Note: Real spoilers are in black text on a black background. Highlight the black areas to read the spoilers.


Queue Numbers

#50- Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

#100- Black Swan

#200- Mysteries of Lisbon

Last- Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Sunday, August 22, 2010

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)


Director: Robert Wise
Writer: Edmund H. North (screenplay), Harry Bates (story)
Starring: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal

Synopsis
Alien ship comes to Earth amidst a huge fanfare.  One dude gets out and is immediately shot by some stupid kid in a tank.  Labeled a fugitive for escaping the hospital, he goes on the lam and rents a room at a boarding house where he meets a bunch of people, including a kid and his single mother.  His goal is to tell everybody to cut the shit with the nukes or the interplanetary community will blow up the planet.

The Woman
this was ok for a moldy oldie. nothing much has changed in humanity since it was made. people are still assholes, and i think we would still shoot first ask questions later. we're prejudice against aliens man, ever since independence day.... those jerks.

solid three starrer on netflix. it wasn't amazing, but it was well done, and the story was good. MESSAGE!

MOster
I appreciated this.  It's telling how even though we understand that nuclear holocaust is bad the smaller parts of the message (e.g. persecution without understanding) are just as relevant today.  There were a couple of twists in the story, even though the climax is aided by a fairly lazy deus ex machina.  I'm also not sure I buy that NO high level people would be there when the saucer landed nor that there wouldn't have been some explicit orders handed down to the troops, but it's not worth going on about.

Acting was pretty good, I guess.  The dude who played the alien was really good as a cool customer, and while the kid was pretty shitty the grownups were fine.  The douchy boyfriend dude did a good job of slowly becoming douchier as time went on.

Leila credits at least some of the technical stuff to remastering, but I couldn't find any information to support that.  Much like Sunrise, I thought that there were some really cool tricks for the period.  While here they're more evident when it comes to the alien tech stuff such as the flying saucer over Washington, I don't think that really makes a difference.  It was nice to see what must have been some real innovation... even if some kids on a computer cleaned up the edges a bit.

I don't need to give this movie more than a 3 but I do recommend it.  It will be interesting to see how it compares to the new one when we watch it in another month or so.

No comments:

Post a Comment