Film 10 - Casablanca

Here's looking at you kid...

What a film that was, I watched it a couple of days ago and I now know why it so often gets in lists of the best film ever. No film I've ever watched ever had more quotable lines than this one - and even ones attributed "play it again Sam" which were never actually said.

I don't often watch black and white films, and for the first few minutes it was a culture shock, but after a while I grew to see how it worked exactly with the old-fashioned charm of the characters. Characters like Rick were just the right mix of devilishly charming and with just enough virtue so you think he'd do the right thing in the end, and it was obvious why Ilsa was wanted by two men.

The ending, although predictable from my cultural point of view, was perfectly done and the final line remains the best end to a film I've ever seen.

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

Film 9 - Bowling For Columbine

Michael Moore is my sort of guy, a liberal in a land where the term liberal is mostly used as an insult, and according to one Morning Star article - a closet Marxist. The latter seems less plausible, but what is true is that he is one of the world's most famous documentary film-makers and very possibly one of the best.

I had seen part of Bowling for Columbine before, but never all the way to the end - thus it is eligible for this blog. We watched the whole film over a couple of lessons in Media Studies (blah, blah, blah easy subject etc - yep I've heard it all before).

America is infamous for having one of the highest gun crime and gun murder rates in the world and the high rate of gun ownership has been blamed for this, but by the end of the film Moore comes up with a new, more thought-provoking idea: The Media.

Looking at some of the examples of TV news from the US he showed, gives some idea of the climate of fear created that separates the US from equally gun loving Canada. Put simply, fear drives violence and the violence drives more fear and continues in a vicious cycle fuelled by the news media, looking for their ratings.