Sam's Pretty Cool Movie Blog

98. “Singin’ in the Rain” – 1952

July 17th, 2023

We’ve finally done it folks, we’ve finally gotten to a movie that’s not only in color but also in English! We’re still in 1952, but I’ll take what I can get as Singin’ in the Rain was admittedly a very fun watch.

Singin’ in the Rain opens up on the red carpet of a Hollywood premier in the 20s. This is where we meet the majority of our main ensemble: the leading man with the voice to go along – Don Lockwood; his rambunctious and overly eager sidekick – Cosmo Brown; and the (not so) lovely – Lina Lamont. We find out fairly quickly that ol’ Donnie Lockwood is a bit of a shyster. We listen to him regale his loving fans with the tale of his learn-ed background only to be shown the real story of him and Cosmo slumming it up and doing everything they can to make it to stardom. When Donnie says he studied at Julliard, he really means he was dancing for pennies on a bar room floor; when he says he toured the world performing at only the most prestigious stages, he really means that he was strapping himself to various motorized vehicles and risking his life as a stuntman. This brazen lifestyle certainly worked out for Donnie and Cosmo. Well, it did for Don, Cosmo seems to be riding coattails a little. We also soon find out that Don’s costar and presumed love interest, Lina, sucks super hard. She’s ditzy to the max, narcissistic, and – worst of all – has the most annoying voice I’ve ever heard in a movie.

After learning that our trio is more than meets the eye, we get a brief preview of their silent movie before Don and Cosmo split off to head to the after-party. However, before they can make it to their car, Don is mobbed by adoring fans and displays some genuinely impressive acrobatics to escape his actorial duty of signing autographs. He serendipitously lands in a passing car where we meet our real love interest, Kathy Selden. At first, Kathy is understandably terrified of the strange man who has suddenly dropped from the sky into her car. However, after Kathy learns that Don is a famous actor and not a potential molester (though these two things are certainly not mutually exclusive), she loosens up a bit. Well, until Don starts blatantly hitting on her (see?). This is where we get our first peek into who Kathy Selden is. Instead of the typical swooning over a movie star, Kathy says she’s actually not a huge fan and has maybe seen a movie or two of Don’s. This is particularly impressive as – keep in mind – Singin’ in the Rain is set in the 20s and what else is there to do besides see movies in the 20s? Kathy then reveals that she herself is an actor, a stage actor, and looks down on the silent movie stars as all their acting is, is performative and a bit ridiculous (I agree Kathy, I think you would have enjoyed my reviews of M and Ikiru). Faced with a woman who is supposedly immune to Don’s charms, he of course immediately falls in love with her. Kathy is none too impressed and splits off from Don – it seems she has a party of her own to attend.

We then head to Don’s premier after-party where Lisa continues to flirt with Don to no avail. It seems as though she can’t quite comprehend someone not being madly in love with her, and if you only saw her on the big screen, I would share that confusion. More importantly, however, the producer hosting the after-party has a neat surprise for his guests – a talkie. What’s a talkie? Well, if you couldn’t guess, it’s what we think of as movies today. That’s right, movies with sound have finally been figured out, although the party guests don’t seem too excited about it – seems like a fad to me. Another surprise appearance occurs and we see what Kathy really means when she says she’s a stage actor as she bursts through a giant cake stripper-style. Don can’t get enough of this turn of events and begins to pester her to the point that Kathy throws a cake at his face, only she misses and plants it right on Lina’s instead. She then splits from the party and Don is left standing with his dick in his hand in the driveway, watching her escape into the sunset.

The next scene happens a few weeks later on the set of Don’s new silent movie. We see him and Cosmo discussing his recent obsession with Kathy and Don asks Cosmo if he’s a good actor or just some guy who reacts weirdly in front of a camera. Cosmo tries to reassure Don and we see our first real song and dance act of the movie. Now, I knew Singin’ in the Rain was about a musical, but it was only now that I realized it also was a musical. This was my first musical movie and while it caught me off guard a bit, I thought it was pretty neat. Learning this also assuaged some of my gripes about the acting being too “stage-y” because it pretty much is a play that happens to be on the big screen rather than the stage (this is actually an interesting aspect of the movie that I’ll discuss later in more depth). Back to the actual performance though, and I gotta say – these old-school actors were not messing around. Cosmos sings and dances for about 4 minutes straight and he’s pulling acrobatics out of his ass. I mean really great physical bits, impressive stuff. But then – uh oh – breaking news, remember those talkies we saw earlier? Turns out the people love them. So much so that production is being halted on Don’s silent movie and is being converted to a talkie! The only problem? Lina.

We’ll talk more about how much Lina sucks in a bit, but first, we head back to the studio as the screen fills up with what looks like the peak of an acid trip. For about 6 minutes, a song and dance number featuring disembodied legs, acid-bright colors, and various other trippy visuals play. I actually had no idea what the fuck was going on until the camera pulls back and I realize the producer is in the middle of shooting some sort of clothing advertisement. I refuse to believe that this is actually what ads were like in the 20s, but if they were, the only explanation is that Schedule 1 narcotics were available over the counter and this adult swim-esque ad was the only way to effectively communicate with housewives who were essentially pickling themselves with drug store heroin. Anyway, turns out Kathy is in the ad and the producer likes what he sees. He begins to offer her a job on Don’s new movie when she reveals that she was the one who pied Lina’s face during the afterparty a few weeks back. Suddenly, Don comes in and says, “Hey no problem! We’ll just keep you and Lina separated and she’ll be none the wiser!” Solid plan Donnie, let’s make a movie!

The next few scenes are some more song and dance numbers and we see Don really turn up the heat with his courtship of Kathy. I mean really suave stuff. He’s serenading her and showing her the true “magic of movie making.” Even I was starting to fall for this crooning casanova, and it looks like Kathy was on the same page. Jump cut to Don and Cosmo fucking with their vocal coach for some quality humor before it’s time to shoot the talkie.

One problem though, remember how Lina’s voice sounds like personified nails on a chalkboard? Turns out she also has an undiagnosed mental deficiency as she can’t put together that you need to talk into microphones for them to pick up sound. All this combined and the early screening that the movie studio puts together is a disaster and viewers are leaving the theater vowing to never watch another Don Lockwood film again. Everything seems to be going wrong as Don, Cosmo, and Kathy are mopping around Don’s much too-large house when suddenly he’s got an idea. Hey, why not make this movie a musical? Good one Don! Now let’s sing and dance! But wait, Lina’s voice is terrible, how is she going to sing in this musical? Well, let’s just have Kathy dub over all her lines! Don is on an absolute roll.

Don then takes Kathy home and gives her a couple smooches and some real grade-A flirt. She closes the door and Don walks home in the pouring rain… can you guess what he does next? Yup, he starting singin’ in it. As a side note, I remember hearing a fact about this scene that I’m not sure is totally accurate. Apparently, the rain in this scene is actually milk. Or maybe it was that black and white movies had to use milk to depict rain? Not totally sure, but I remember the fact being both movie and milk related. Anyways, when you think about the non-zero chance that the rain is in fact milk, the scene becomes a lot grosser, don’t you think?

The gang is now in the final stretch of production and all they need is the final scene. For some reason, Don’s idea is to do a future scene where he goes to New York and tries to make it as an actor. This was really bizarre as I was like 100% sure the movie was a Victorian-era love story. I mean both Don and Lina are in powdered wigs so I have no idea what the sequitur is to him singing in a nightclub about how he absolutely needs to dance. It’s also like 20 minutes long which is insane if you ask me.

Anyway, the movie is wrapped and it’s ready to premier when Lina comes in absolutely pissed. Turns out she’s discovered that her voice is being dubbed over by Kathy and starts making all sorts of threats. Don and Cosmo basically tell her to fuck off but apparently Lina has a pretty legit lawyer and tells the head of the studio that if she doesn’t get sole credit for both her performance and Kathy’s voice, he’s gonna have to hand her the studio. Bad news bears for the gang. The movie premier happens and the audience loves it. Don is about to go on stage to make his speech, but Lina informs our trio that Kathy won’t be getting any credit and, in fact, is going to have to dub her movies for the next 5 years according to the contract she signed. Not only that, Lina is going to go out on stage and give a big speech, and Kathy is going to live-action dub that over too! The gang is distraught but ol’ Donnie has a plan. He agrees to Lina’s braindead plan and Kathy can’t believe what she’s hearing. She feels betrayed, and even though for some reason she’s going to go along with it, she tells Don that after this, she never wants to see him again. This is actually a pretty unintentionally hilarious moment because Don seems like he could not care less even though like 30 minutes ago he was literally singing and skipping in the rain for her, and 20 minutes before that he was proclaiming his love for her straight to her face (also through song).

Lina starts her acceptance speech and the audience is understandably confused that she sounds nothing like her movie counterpart until she (Kathy) starts singing. Queue Don’s plan and the curtain rises revealing Kathy singing before Cosmo steps in and makes it look like Lina’s singing a baritone. The audience starts to laugh at Lina while Kathy tries to make a break for it, sobbing as she runs. Don steps up to the mic and instructs the audience to stop that girl! He then reveals his true plan was to embarrass Lina and give Kathy all the credit, oh, he also still totally loves her. We then cut to a movie poster that features Don and Kathy, no Lina, as the happy couple kisses and leaves us with a nice and tidy ending.

I know at this point I’m 3 for 3 when I say that I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this movie as much as I did, but it’s true. At face value, a G rated musical from the 50’s sounds like its up my opposite alley, but I really had a great time watching it. In fact, of the movies I’ve watched so far on this list, Singin’ in the Rain is the only one I can see myself happily rewatching. Now, onto the ratings.

I am a little conflicted in how to judge this one as I’d almost call Singin’ in the Rain a filmed musical rather than a movie. Again, my lack of experience with old movies is hurting me, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m going to be judging all movies on this list with the same scrutiny – and Singin’ in the Rain is no different. Therefore, the ratings on this one are going to be lower than one might expect given how much I enjoyed it. Does that make 100% perfect sense? Probably not, but too bad, that’s how I’m doing it.

I’m going to go over the story first, which was pretty insane if you think about this as a movie rather than a play. Every scene feels incredibly disjointed from the last and the transitions between are lacking if they even exist. The story is also really inconsistent. The prime example of this is Don’s idea to finish the Downton Abby-esque movie with a flash forward to a New York night club. I know the audience is only seeing two scenes from the movie within the movie, but this anarchonous jump was so jarring that I rewound three times and even turned on subtitles to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Even if you were to take that scene out of Singin’ in the Rain, the movie still has pretty poor flow and at times felt like I was watching a clip-show that vaguely followed some over arching story rather than a continuous film. Aside from that, the story really isn’t anything special. A silent movie superstar has a tough time adjusting to movies with sound, ehh…

I mentioned this earlier in the review but the acting is the piece I am most excited to talk about. In my other reviews of old movies I’ve had a consistent issue with the acting not being realistic and instead feeling like I was watching a play. However, with Singin’ in the Rain, it pretty much is a play. Even with that, I thought the performances were significantly better than both M and Ikiru (feels a bit weird to compare these three movies but just wait until im comparing Toy Story 3 to Das Boot). There were definitely some campy, over the top theatrics, but it felt appropriate and didn’t take me out of it at all. I’m not sure how much influence the movie being in English and focusing on American culture had to do with it, but when I put Singin’ in the Rain next to the previous two movies, Singin in the Rain comes out on top. This does bring up a couple of things I think are interesting though and will be paying attention to as I continue down this list. Do I think that acting gets better as movies become more modern? Do I think that American movies have better acting because I can understand the language without subtitles and I share the same culture? The answer to the first question I think will be a yes, however the second question is more interesting to me. I’ve discussed this before but I worry that I miss important aspects of foreign films due to the fact that I am ignorant of cultural and linguistic values. This then leads to a larger question of, can you truly understand and review a movie in a language that is not your own with a culture you don’t fully understand? This is getting a little tangential to the main point of this post, but it is something I want to keep thinking about.

Now, onto the filmmaking. I really loved the filmmaking of Singin’ in the Rain. They did some really creative and cool shots that seemed far ahead of its time. While the context of a few of these scenes were wack, they looked fantastic. My favorite scene visually has to be the incredibly bizarre clothing ad I talked about earlier. When I said that is was adult swim-esque, I meant it. Even if the rest of the movie sucked ass, I would probably rewatch it just to see this scene (and a few others) again. The colors were another thing I thought they did a great job on. Generally, the colors were pretty muted with lots of browns, greys, and beiges; but when color did come into play (and it did frequently, dont get me wrong) they nailed it. The reds were so red, the blues so blue, and don’t get me started on the greens and yellows… Bright colors would pop incredibly well, and every splash of color felt very intentional. The crazy clothing ad, the scene were Don serenades Kathy, and the interesting jump to future New York were all visual highlights.

While the score certainly doesn’t reflect how much I enjoyed Singin’ in the Rain, I do emphatically recommend everyone watches it at least once. It’s a ton of fun, pretty light hearted, and would probably provide some great (or terrifying) company to an acid trip.

Story: 4/10, Acting: 7/10, Filmmaking: 8/10, Total: 6.3/10
99. “Ikiru” – 1952

July 2nd, 2023

Ikiru opens with the narrator of the film describing Kanji Watanabe to the audience – an elderly, devoid of life, ground down, all-around-bummer of a public works bureaucrat. Sitting at his desk and stamping his seal on document after document, the dreary office life is briefly interrupted by a group of local women asking for someone to help them clean up a sewage-filled lot overrun with mosquitoes and dirty water that is making their kids ill. Well, ladies, that sounds like a parks division problem, or actually that’s a sanitation issue, or maybe it has to do with the school district chief? As these women are bounced from office to office, the audience is granted a peek at the soul-crushing bureaucracy of local government. Shortly after, Watanabe goes to the doctor to find out that he has stomach cancer and roughly six months to live. A few hours later, Watanabe is sitting at home in the dark when his son and daughter-in-law come home while discussing how badly they want to move out and just how much money they’ll inherit once poor old Watanabe dies. Yeah, it’s a pretty rough opening.

Feeling down from the combination of his pointless job, ungrateful son, and newly inherited death sentence, Watanabe goes to a small pub to drown his sorrows – something he’s never even thought about doing in his 60-odd years of life. It is there we meet the novelist. The novelist and Watanabe get to talking and, moved by just how badly Watanabe’s life sucks, the novelist agrees to help him cut loose and spend some of his hard-earned money. Booze, women, and miscellaneous debauchery are had and the next day Watanabe is exhausted. This is also the moment we see Watanabe begin his quest for meaning. Although currently undirected, Watanabe’s long-extinguished joie de vivre has reawoken. However, it isn’t until his meeting with Odagiri, a young and bubbly girl from his office, that Watanabe has an outlet for his newfound drive. Well, it isn’t until Odagiri admits to him that she finds him a little creepy and is confused why he’s spending so much time with her, that his drive is found.

After a brief period of playing sugar daddy and worrying just about everyone in his life, Watanabe comes back to work and he’s only got one goal – cover that dirty old sewage with a brand spanking new park. Oh yeah, he also dies – kinda. The audience is brought forward six months in time to Watanabe’s wake where we discover he accomplished his goal and the park is complete. From this point on, the story is told through the eyes of his wake attendees and their memories of Watanabe’s last six months on Earth. His family, coworkers, and high-ranking members of the local government are all in attendance.

Here again, bureaucracy rears its ugly head. Instead of sharing stories about Watanabe or congratulating him on his efforts toward the completion of the park, the deputy mayor instead is credited. It isn’t until the government bigwigs leave the wake that someone bravely speaks up and calls bullshit on the whole machine. Whether it was the sake or the sheer admiration of Watanabe’s herculean efforts to actually do something in local government, I can’t say, but here the story picks up again and we see the final few months of Watanabe’s life play out.

In parallel to the beginning of the film, Watanabe is bounced from department to department being brushed off and disregarded. However, this time he has nothing to lose. Watanabe won’t take no for an answer. Ironically rejuvenated by his lethal stomach cancer he manages to trudge through the endless paperwork and political shmoozing needed to build his park. We then find out that Watanabe died in the very same park he was so adamant about building. The wake attendees, now more comfortable due to the departure of Mayor and co. (and the sake they’ve been pounding all night), begin to voice both their admiration for Watanabe and their shame that they can’t do the same thing he did. Together, they vow to change their ways and live life in a manner that would make their dear departed friend proud.

Wow, what a great ending! A little played out but hey, this movie is from the 50s, that’s to be expected. Wait, what? There’s still 5 more minutes? What happens? Yup, you might have guessed it, the next morning at work a group of women comes into Watanabe’s old department asking for someone to help fix an empty lot with sewage pouring out of it. The drunken pledge is seemingly forgotten and the group of women are told that, actually, that’s a sanitation problem – go ask them to do something about it.

I really enjoyed Ikiru. It discusses two of my greatest fears, the dreaded 9-5 and bloated, slow-moving government bureaucracy. The story is great, although a little drawn out, and you really connect with Watanabe. It’s easy to understand how he got himself into the position he’s in, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has imagined all the crazy things I would do if I were to find out I only had six months to live. Watanabe’s goal of building a park is a little more noble than what immediately popped into my mind, but that makes his character all the more redeemable. Faced with the realization that he’s pretty much done nothing in his life, he summons the courage to not give up in the face of the administrative monster he’s spent the last 30 years helping prop up. All-in-all the story felt really modern, which is kind of depressing that in 70 years humanity still hasn’t found a better method to the madness than molasses-like paperwork to accomplish anything. I mean it literally takes a dude sacrificing the last six months of his life to build a single park.

As for the filmmaking itself, there’s not a whole lot for me to say honestly. Camera work didn’t add or subtract to Ikiru in my opinion. Now maybe that’s due to me not recognizing greatness, or maybe it’s due to the story not really needing any fancy camera work, or some combination of both. I’ve not seen other Japanese films from the 50s so it’s hard to understand if Ikiru was ahead of its time in reference to filmmaking. To me, it seems as though it would have looked pretty similar visually if this story came out today rather than 70 years ago – which I guess says something.

The acting was another aspect of Ikiru that I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on (man I might be a terrible movie reviewer). I did notice that the ladies had a stronger performance than the fellas, as some of the reactions from Watanabe were kind of strange. Something I’ve come to realize about old cinema is that the actors act like they are on the stage rather than the big screen. Now this might be something that has changed over time and evolved throughout the years, but Ikiru, M, and 12 Angry Men all share this quality in my eyes. Maybe it’s a camera-quality thing? You know, cameras and screens back then couldn’t do the subtle human reactions any justice so actors had to rely on big, over-exaggerated movements and facial reactions to get the point across. That’s just a theory I came up with as I’m writing this, but it seems not half bad. Overall, the acting wasn’t fantastic, but it was pretty decent compared to the small amount of pre-70s movies I’ve seen, so Ikiru gets a bump from me in the acting category.

Overall, Ikiru is a classic. It tells a story that can be understood nearly 100 years later on an even deeper level than the crowds of the 50s maybe could. The filmmaking and acting aren’t anything revolutionary in my opinion, but the story is really where Ikiru shines, and it shines pretty bright. Therefore:

Story 9.5/10, Filmmaking 5/10, Acting 7/10, Total 7.2/10

*Side Note: I changed up the format in which I write the review a little here. On this one I tried going deeper into the synopsis and giving little reviews/analysis throughout and then breaking out story, filmmaking, and acting. Not sure if I’ll keep doing it this way or maybe try a different way in the future. My M review was more stream-of-consciousness, which I like, but a little structure is nice. I’ll most likely try to find a nice meeting point of having essentially a rubric while also keeping it very conversational and flowy.
100. “M” – 1931

June 26th, 2023

Synopsis: M is the story of a German city that is overrun with the presence of an unknown serial child murderer. Families are terrified, police are overworked, and crime syndicates are tired of their illegitimate operations being highlighted in the coppers’ search to unearth this sicko. Due to this, the crime lords decide to take matters into their own hands and find the murderer themselves. They are eventually successful and hold their own sort of trial in which the judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense are made up of other criminals. This trial is cut short right after a pretty intense monologue from Mr. Child Murderer when the police show up and take him into custody. Interestingly, the final scene of the film occurs right after this and only shows the actual trial being set up and the mother of one of the deceased children giving the call to action of “protect our children” to the audience.

We’re starting off the list with M, a German crime thriller from the 1930s. I mentioned this in the opening blog post, but I was not expecting great things from this. It’s almost 100 years old, in German, in black and white, about a child murderer – none of these things get my fire stoked if you know what I mean. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I was not only able to sit through it, but kinda enjoy it the whole time as well. Before this movie, the oldest piece of cinema I had seen was 12 Angry Men (don’t get me wrong this is a banger, but still, these movies are so fuckin old) and even 12 Angry Men is like 30 years newer than M. So, I was all the more surprised when I was pretty captivated throughout the whole viewing experience.

The first thing I noticed when watching M was how much of the story is shown rather than told. I kept finding myself being surprised when information that was important to the story wasn’t explicitly told to the audience – something I’ve always disliked about many modern movies. M doesn’t assume the audience is stupid. Things are left up to interpretation and can be puzzled together through careful watching. Another point on the filmmaking that I noticed was how much they employed the use of still shots, that is, how often there was a shot of like a kitchen table and nothing else going on. In fact, at the the beginning of the film, there was a series of around 5 shots that were just empty rooms around some person’s apartment building. This is something that almost never happens in modern film aside from artsy fartsy movies and I’m not really sure how I feel about it. There’s also this weird scene in the homicide inspector’s office where the camera is positioned underneath the inspector’s desk and you get a solid view of this guy’s cock and balls through his pants for what felt like 10 minutes but was probably closer to 1. The amount of visual storytelling is pretty cool though and in my opinion, affects the score in a good way.

Another thing I noticed is that people kind of sucked at acting 100 years ago. That isn’t to say that there was a whole lot of bad acting, but I’d be pretty surprised if any of the actors in M would get any roles in today’s age aside from student films and high-quality pornos. Now that may read pretty harsh, but some of the reactions and moments of “acting” are almost laughably ridiculous. There’s a particular scene that comes to mind where the murderer is being shown pictures of his victims and after every picture, he has an even more ludicrous pose and facial expression than the last. If you asked a 2nd grader to put on their best shocked and sacred face, you’d get a pretty close approximation of the shit this guy was pulling. What’s interesting to me, however, is that the bad acting never really pulled me out of the story. I’m not sure if this is because my expectations were tempered, or maybe because everyone is kind of a shitty actor so individual performances aren’t vastly different, and there’s a weird sense of cohesive mid-ness that ties everything together. So while the acting isn’t doing my rating of M any favors, I’m not taking it too heavily into consideration.

Now onto the story itself. I thought it was pretty neat. M plays with the ideas of mob justice, sense of community, and compulsion as a mental disorder. The organization of the story is interesting as well as there’s only one scene where they delve into the murderer’s psyche, which happens right at the end during his “mock” trial. The angry mob is demanding that the murderer be put to death and is met with the argument that criminal compulsion should be met with treatment, not execution. It’s interesting that we currently have some pretty similar debates going on in the modern world and brings me to my next observation of the differences in time and culture.

This aspect of my viewing experience was most fascinating to me. Throughout watching I kept thinking to myself, “Man, I don’t know anything about 1930’s Germany – aside from nazis and stuff.” This gap in knowledge left me wondering if I was missing things that a viewer from the ’30s would have picked up on. For example, there’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where in the midst of murder hysteria a mother is concerned that her daughter hasn’t come home yet. The mother asks the mailman (book delivery guy?) if he’s seen her daughter and shouts down the stairwell of their apartment building calling her name. Is this a typical reaction of a German mother in the 30s? I have no idea; I was wondering this whole time whether this was a typical reaction, an underreaction, or even an overreaction. That was just an example, but there are many moments in the film that made me wonder what I was missing due to the significant culture and time gap.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised with M. It’s probably never gonna be the subject of a rewatch but I’m glad I sat down and finished it. I’ll give it the following ratings:

Story 8/10, filmmaking 5/10, acting 4/10, Total 6.7/10.

*Side note: I’m not sure if I will be keeping this rating system or changing it in the future, I also am not going to be “adjusting for inflation.” That is to say, I’m not giving or taking away points based on when the movie was released. If the movie was awesome in the 20s but I think it sucks today, then it’s going to get a bad rating (looking at you Citizen Kane).
Introduction

June 26th, 2023

Hi everyone, my name is Sam and this is my Pretty Cool Movie Review Blog. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Aren’t blogs stupid and nobody reads them anymore?”. Yes, that is super accurate. Blogs are dumb and this one will be no different. In fact, I’m really not expecting anyone to read this, its more of a way for me to keep track of the movies I’m about to watch and for me to learn more about film culture. Posting blog entries is kinda like homework for myself to try and keep me on task with this project.

The project I am referring to is of course my journey to watch the 100 greatest movies of all time (according to popularity polls by IMDB). Every Sunday I will watch a movie from this list, starting from 100. I will then digest this movie and write a little review about it and give it a score. By the end of this, hopefully, I’ll have my own list of 100 greatest movies! Or maybe I give up and don’t, who knows?

Why am I doing this? Well, I actually really like cinema, I just haven’t seen all that many movies. In fact, I’ve probably seen a below-average amount. This is because whenever I am in the mood to watch a movie, I tend to gravitate toward things I’ve already seen. So in an effort to break out of my comfort zone and stop my super lame and boring movie-watching method, I’m forcing myself to watch movies I might not like. I’m even starting with a black-and-white German film from the 30s, which sounds pretty terrible, to be honest.

Now, in the case that anyone happens to stumble upon this and reads any of my reviews; be warned, I don’t really know that much about movies so my takes are probably terrible and baseless. However this is a personal journey, so the opinions of any readers are also terrible and baseless.

Ok, enough with the intro, here is Sam’s Pretty Cool Movie Review Blog.

98. “Singin’ in the Rain” – 1952

99. “Ikiru” – 1952

100. “M” – 1931

Introduction