IMDB rating: 8.3
My rating: 9.4
The Prestige is about two competing magicians around the turn of the 20th Century. I was really transported back to this era by the costumes and the elaborate mechanical props used in the magic tricks.
After seeing The Prestige, Christopher Nolan is cemented as my favorite writer/director. I don't know which movie I liked more, this one or Memento, also written and directed by Nolan. Other notable movies by Nolan include Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
My only complaint about this movie is that it's hard to tell when in the timeline things are happening. It gets very confusing at the beginning, but it starts to come together at the end. Even after the movie, I was still a little confused on the order of things.
I loved this movie and highly recommend it to everyone.
The Prestige - #82
A Clockwork Orange - #51
My rating: 8
A Clockwork Orange was one of the stranger movies I've seen. There is a surprising amount of sex and violence in this movie, but it does serve to get the point across.
My main complaint is that the characters were hard to understand. It took a while to get accustomed to their accents and manners of speech. Also, it seemed a little too long and slow at parts.
What I really liked about this film were the messages it told. Even though the book was written almost 50 years ago and the movie 10 years later, everything is still relevant today.
I recommend people watch A Clockwork Orange at least once.
The Lives of Others - #53
IMDB rating: 8.5
My rating: 9.5
The Lives of Others has the best character development of any film I've seen.
Lives of Others, like Downfall, was entirely in German with English subtitles, but it doesn't subtract from the quality at all. The movie was so well made it would still make sense without subtitles. Come to think of it, I really can't remember anyone's name from the movie, but I remember their faces and who they are and that's what's important.
The main character has only one facial expression the entire movie, but he somehow brings through every imaginable emotion. It was truly a great performance.
The Lives of Others is a must see and I recommend it to everyone.
Der Untergang (The Downfall) - #77
IMDB rating: 8.3
My rating: 8.5
The Downfall was probably the best historical film I've ever seen. The entire movie was in German with English subtitles. It chronicles the last days of Hitler's Germany as told by Hitler's last secretary.
The actor who played Hitler did a fantastic job. He really brought out the insanity and hatred within him. All of the other actors played their parts well and no one seemed out of place.
This film was brutally honest and completely unforgiving toward the Nazis. I had to turn away at some scenes, but the impact was still there. I wouldn't recommend this to non-history buffs due to the 3 hour length and the many names to keep track of.
Reservoir Dogs - #70
IMDB rating: 8.3
My rating: 7
If you're a fan of Quentin Tarantino, then you'll probably enjoy this movie much more than I did.
I thought Reservoir Dogs was good, but I don't think it deserves to be among the best 100 movies of all time. The characters didn't have a lot of depth and none of the acting performances really stood out.
The movie certainly kept my attention the whole way through, despite a few slow parts, but overall it was just an okay experience. It was entertaining to watch, but the feeling didn't extend beyond the credits.
Leon: The Professional - #35
IMDB rating: 8.6
My rating: 8.5
I knew absolutely nothing about this movie when I decided to watch it. I'm glad I did because it was a welcome change from intense dramas like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption that IMDB's top 250 list seems to be filled with.
I'm not really sure what genre this movie falls into, it has elements of Action, Comedy, and Drama, but doesn't seem to fit any that well.
Natalie Portman was only 13 when they made this movie, but she stole the show. It was probably the best child acting performance I've ever seen. She played her part of a troubled child perfectly. I don't know how someone that young was able to bring such a complex character to life.
Jean Reno also had a great performance. The only roles I remember him in are Captain Bezu Fache in The Da Vinci Code, and the sidekick in the Pink Panther. After seeing Leon, I can't help but wonder how such a great lead actor ended up in such bad supporting roles. It's a shame that this is how most people will remember him.
Citizen Journalism
Traditional media (newspapers, radio, and television) may stick around for a while, but it's going to be passed soon by the internet and Citizen Journalism.
Traditional media powerhouses, like the New York Times and NBC, are trying to capitalize on the popularity of internet news, but they can't compete with user submitted, social news sites like Digg and Reddit.
Reddit and Digg have news stories submitted every second by thousands of users every day. If the stories are popular enough, they get displayed on the front page where hundreds of thousands of people read them. These 2 sites are citizen journalism at its best. Some other sites include Wiki News and Orato, both of which have multiple new stories every day.
When devises like the Amazon Kindle become mainstream, I think newspapers as we know them will die out. How can they compete with sites that generate an entire newspaper worth of stories in under an hour?
Memento - #27
IMDB rating: 8.6
My rating: 9.8
Memento was one of the best movies I've ever seen. I watched it late at night and I couldn't fall asleep afterward because I kept thinking about the twists and turns in the plot. I laid in bed for hours retracing the story and thinking about all the implications.
Christopher Nolan directed this masterpiece before moving on to his other blockbusters, Batman Begins (IMDB #105), The Prestige (IMDB #83), and The Dark Knight (IMDB #6). If these movies don't confirm Nolan as one of the best writers and directors alive today, I don't know what will.
Nolan is coming out with a new movie, Inception, to be released sometime in 2010 before moving on to the final installment of the Batman trilogy. I'll definitely be watching both of these as soon as they hit theaters.
The Godfather - #2
IMDB rating: 9.1
My rating: 9
I thought Marlon Brando played his role as the Godfather perfectly. It was one of the best performances I've ever seen. Al Pacino was also great. The complexity of the characters is what made this movie so good. There were no clear cut good or bad guys.
My main criticism of this movie is that there are too many names to keep track of. I ended up missing a lot of references because I didn't know who the characters were talking about, but I'm sure after watching it a few more times it'll make more sense. This isn't really a con, since it's the type of movie I wouldn't mind watching again and again.
IMDB Top 100 Challenge
A few of my friends and I started a competition this weekend to see how many movies we could watch from IMDB's top 250 list by the end of the school year. We decided to just focus on numbers 1 through 100 to make it easier.
I started the competition with 19 movies knocked off and plan to finish with close to 50.
I'll post a short review here whenever I finish a movie from the list.
The Power of Blogs
A blog is a place where I can write about the stuff that I care about and share these writings with the world. Blogs even the playing field for writers. I have the same number of potential readers that The New York Times or the Huffington Post has. Anyone that has access to those sites has access to mine.
If I were trying to circulate my writings in a magazine, I would spend hundreds of dollars and my circulation would be limited to a 5 mile radius. With a blog on the other hand, I can distribute my writings for free and have a global reach.
My web design blog, http://jeremydorn.blogspot.com, gets most of its readers from outside of the US. My largest readership is actually in India, followed by the US and then the UK. I've had visitors from Norway, Slovakia, and Nigeria. Now that I think of it, most of the information I read on online was probably written in another country. The internet and blogs in particular have created a global community that has no boundaries. Hopefully, these ideas of freedom and connectedness will filter through to the real world.
Seven Pounds Review
Last weekend I watched Will Smith's latest movie, Seven Pounds. I was kind of reluctant to see it after the horrible reviews it got by critics, but I'm glad I did. It was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, right up there with Slumdog Millionaire and the Dark Knight.
Smith's acting abilities range from comedies (Hitch, Wild Wild West, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) to action movies (Independence Day, I am Legend, I, Robot) to dramas (Seven Pounds, and Pursuit of Happyness). Seven Pounds firmly cements Will Smith as one of the best actors of our generation.
Seven Pounds and Will Smith's other drama, Pursuit of Happyness were both directed by Gabriele Muccino. Considering the great success this duo has had, I wouldn't be surprised if they made another movie together. Personally, I can't wait till they do.
The Changing Web
My first experience with the internet was 10 years ago in 1999. I would run a long phone cord to my computer and connect through NetZero. Using the internet tied up our home phone, so I had limited time to enjoy it.
My start page was Yahoo, and this is where I spent most of my time online. I would play Yahoo Games, read Yahoo News, use Yahoo Mail, etc.. I used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to remind me of what it was like. I actually prefer the 1999 Yahoo to the bloated, ad filled Yahoo of today.
When I wasn't using the various Yahoo services, I was playing multiplayer games and chatting with my online friends. Some of my favorites included Acrophobia, a game where random letters are shown and you have to come up with a sentence that fits that acronym, and You Don't Know Jack, an online game show. I made many online "friends" while playing these games. We would chat during games and occasionally exchange emails. The site that hosted all these games, Bezerk, got taken down in 2001.
That's about the same time I first started with web design. I had gotten a few magic trick books and I created a Yahoo Geocities page explaining how to do various card tricks. I got close to 1,000 visits to my site over the few years.
I discovered Google around 2003 and haven't gone back to Yahoo since. Here's what it looked like then.
I discovered Wikipedia in 2003, signed up for a Gmail account in 2004, and started using Digg in 2005. Since then, I've discovered Youtube, Flickr, Worth1000, Pandora, Hulu, Facebook, and Blogger.
Back in 1999, images were sparse and video was non-existent, background music and animated gifs were considered good web design, most of the content on the web was written by professionals, and interactivity wasn't really interactive.
Now, sites like Vimeo, DailyMotion, Youtube, and the recently deceased Stage6 stream High Definition video on demand. Web 2.0 design styles overtook ugly, bland ones. Sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, and Blogger made amateurs the primary source of content. Today, almost all sites are interactive and some like Facebook take this to extremes.
In the future, video may be replaced by 3d animation, web 2.0 styles will look quaint, and interactivity will be taken to levels not even imagined today. I for one, can't wait.
Visual Blogs
When blogs use images, it enhances the experience for the reader. Pictures can show and explain things that text can't do justice. For example, a blog I often read, Engadget (http://engadget.com) has an image with almost every blog post. If a post just said "The new iphone looks nice and has a large screen," it wouldn't work as well as a simple picture. Images are especially important for blogs that deal with new products or services.
Another blog, Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/), looks at bad web design in action. They post comments about user submitted websites that use poor web design practices. Most of the posts don't use images, which is unusual for this type of site. I think I would be much more likely to read it if I could see an image right away without having to actually visit the sites they are talking about.