Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Last Night's Movie Geeks

We had a great turnout last night for Movie Geeks Club. Most of our regulars were in the house, and we had several new faces. Thanks for coming out, folks.

We screened Roman Polanski's The Pianist last night, and by the time it was over, everyone in the house was thoroughly depressed and feeling guilty about the burgers they'd consumed while watching the Szpilman family split an overpriced caramel 6 ways. This is really an incredible film. It really does a good job of placing the viewer into the life of Szpilman during his struggle for survival during World War II. A very moving film.

The voting was finished last night for the May Movie Geeks selection, and the winner is: The Seventh Seal. Regarded as a masterpiece of cinema, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal follows the journey of a Medieval knight (Max von Sydow) across a bleak and plague-ridden landscape. Along the way, he encounters many facets of Medieval life during the plague, particularly how people of the time faced impending death and the lengths they would go to in order to keep death from coming for them. The film is probably best known for its scene in which Block, the knight, has to play a game of chess against Death, with his fate to be decided by the outcome of the game. This scene has been parodied on numerous occasions, most notably in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, in which Bill and Ted defeat Death at Battleship, Clue, electric football and Twister.

Micah and I are still kicking around some ideas for the nominations for the June movie. We were thinking about feature-length documentaries. We'd come up with a list of five and you could vote on the one you'd like to see. We've not yet screened a documentary, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace. Another thought is that we've seen a couple of long, slowly paced films, and maybe we'd like to do something a little more fast-paced and intense for the warm weather month of June. Thoughts, Movie Geeks?

4 comments:

BlogFreeSpringfield said...

I enjoy documentaries. Two I might recommend are Stevie and Air Guitar Nation.

I agree, however, that it might be good to lighten things up for the summer. Too many depictions of death tend to bring me down.

John said...

Me too. We've done slow, meandering insanity in the South American jungles followed by the Warsaw ghetto in World War II to be followed by an existential pondering of plague-ridden Medieval Europe. Maybe a change is in order. We can hit the documentaries in a few months.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for another great night at the movies. See you next month.

BlogFreeSpringfield said...

Inspired by Nick Roger's article in today's A & E section, I'd like to recommend that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang be nominated for a future screening.