herbiehancock

No 166 - Goldfinger Director - Guy Hamilton I have been following the excellent Blogalongabond since its inception, and now as they reach their third month, they have finally come to a Bond film which makes my list... therefore I can jump onto The Incredible Suit's coat-tails and try to explain why Goldfinger is such an important film for the Bond canon; why it's the film in which Bond finally seems to find his voice... The first two films in the Bond canon create a world of action and adventure - but they are still very much spy films, not necessarily obvious 'Bond films' compared to the structure which becomes so key to future episodes. And many of the elements which are now famous and integral to Bond tradition stem from this film. This is the film where Bond becomes a lot wittier, dropping one liners and innuendo all over the place (though it would be 35 years before the undisputed peak of Bond's smutty rubbish puns). It is the film where we finally meet Q b...

No 22 - Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Director - George Lucas I had a serious ponder as to what order to watch the Star Wars films. Should it be 1,3,4,5,6 or 4,5,6,1,3 (2 didn't make it into the list.....) - in the end I chose to pick with the order they were released, and I'm glad I did. I promise not to moan too much about the re-issue, and the constant fuckery that George Lucas does with these films ( The Incredible Suit did it much better here ), but what I will complain about is that if I wanted to watch the original film I had to trawl through the special features to find it. Also, the film was exactly as it was in the 70's, which meant that it had had no digital remastering. So I ended up watching a copy with worse sound and picture than my old VHS copies. But it was worth it not to get all the bullshit added stuff. Don't get me wrong - I can see the appeal of making the lightsabers slicker, or making the explosions better, or making the battles more epic.....

No 18 - Casablanca Director - Michael Curtiz Another massive classic film that - for reasons unknown - I had never watched until now. I think I thought it would always be very schmaltzy and had therefore avoided it. I love to be proven wrong. Which is good, because it happens a lot. We find ourselves in Casablanca, the cultural melting pot and pretty corrupt town occupied by those wishing to leave Europe and those rotten Nazis. At the centre of it all - the place to be - is Rick's bar where everyone comes to have a jolly wonderful time and drink away their troubles. And there are a lot of troubles. It is a kind of 'limbo' town in that everyone there is just waiting to leave... and it creates a wonderfully strange atmosphere. Into this limbo town come two people Laszlo - a concentration camp escapee - and Ilsa, his wife. Only.... Ilsa and Rick have a shared past. Thus we have our story, a love triangle in a seedy lawless town. But, this is a film where the characters draw ...