49th Parallel. Michael Powell. 1941.

Oops. I bought a box set of Powell/Pressburger movies, and now I guess I have to watch them…

I thought it was a 2K set, but this is DVD.

Wow, this is a proper anti-German propaganda piece. I like it!

Oh! It’s Laurence Olivier playing that trapper with the bad French accent! I couldn’t quite place him but now that I know I don’t understand why I didn’t see that immediately. Weird.

It’s pretty unusual in that we follow the Germans (who are, with one exception) horrible people, escaping through the Canadian countryside, so whenever one of them is killed, the audience would presumably cheer.

The meeting with the Utopian Christian settlement is also… odd.

I like bits of this movie (like the great shots of the wheat fields), and it’s not dull or anything, but it’s not a good movie.

The way it ends with a flagrant violation of international law concerning refugees as the “RAH RAH YEAH *punches air*” moment is fascinating, but then again, we’re talking about literal Nazis here, so whatevs.

The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp. Michael Powell. 1943.

So the question being posited here is, I guess: How do you make a lighthearted farce while simultaneously making a propaganda piece about the army? The solution is pretty ingenious: Make the framing story be about a contemporary army exercise, and have the main section of the movie be about the generals’ antics in previous wars.

I want to like this. It plays into all myths about Britishness: Everybody acts as if they are Jungian archetypes. It tries so hard to be amiable and silly, poking fun at everything it depicts. But it doesn’t work for me. Everything moves so slowly. The repartee is ponderous instead of zipping.

I understand what it’s made to do, and it’s quite likely that this is just the thing to keep the British spirits up in 1943, which also explains the length of the thing: A proper night out.

Hmmm… Oh! The gummint didn’t like the movie, because there are some sympathetic German characters in it. And:

The film provoked an extremist pamphlet, The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, by “right-wing sociologists E. W. and M. M. Robson”, members of the obscure Sidneyan Society, which proclaimed it “A highly elaborate, flashy, flabby and costly film, the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film studio.”

Wow. Well, that makes me like it more. Hm… and the last half, which is barely funny at all, is really good. And when we get back to the framing story, that’s suddenly brilliant.

Unbreakable. M. Night Shyamalan. 2000.

Well, this is odd:

I don’t think a single line there is correct? That’s kinda special. (Well, OK, the “per year” thing might be true, and if you divide that by the number of days, you probably get to the “every day” number.)

But why?

Well, OK, this is Shyamalan, so it’s probably all part of the inevitable twist.

I Willis still the dead guy from the previous movie? OOPS SPOILERS Or is his son dead this time?

Again with the Shyamalan, this is a movie I’ve managed to avoid watching, but it’s a movie that’s so part of popular culture that I know that Willis is playing a super-hero before starting to watch it. So as with The Sixth Sense, I’m sitting here wondering whether people are supposed to not understand that he’s a super-hero already? What with the title “Unbreakable” and the surviving the train crash etc, and that’s going to be the twist at the end or something else?

It’s not an idea way to watch a movie.

It does pick up when Samuel L. Jackson shows up.

I wonder who they got to make the super-hero artwork. It sucks.

Oh, there’s the twist.