News You Can Bruise for 2012 August 25

Since Sumana bought us a membership to the Museum of the Moving Image we've been going to see a lot of old movies, movies we hadn't seen before, movies that although critically acclaimed are generally not ones I'd have made a special trip and paid money to see.

I haven't been posting detailed reviews of my experiences, but at this point I think I've seen enough films at the museum to try and map out my views on classic film in general, with a special focus on where my opinion differs from the critical consensus.

• A New Leaf: A hilarious comedy. I'd never heard of it before, now highly recommended.
• Marnie: Eh. Pretty decent Hitchcock.
• Marathon Man: A great, exciting thriller.
• 2001: It's 2001, what do you want? I love this movie and I wrote about watching it earlier.
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: A propaganda movie that had too much humanity to succeed as propaganda.
• Bridge on the River Kwai: Another superb, even more complicated war movie.
• To Catch a Thief: Super frivolous but fun to watch.
• Vertigo: BLEH. Not the greatest movie ever made, British Film Institute. Not even as good as Marnie. What's going on here? Is everyone hypnotized by the dolly zoom?
• The Searchers: A beautifully-shot movie that I didn't care about.
• Taxi Driver: Another beautifully-shot movie that I didn't care about. I really liked the ending, though.
• Brazil: Amazing, even though over the course of my life I'd essentially absorbed the entire movie through osmosis before finally seeing it today. Not perfect, but really really good.

I'm really interested in figuring out why I hated Vertigo and thought The Searchers and Taxi Driver were boring, given how celebrated those movies are, and given that I like other films that are superficially similar. I don't have any hypotheses to go on, but maybe you and I can compare notes?

Also, Roger Ebert didn't get Brazil but loves, absolutely loves Dark City. How does that even hapen? I like Dark City too, but before seeing Dark City I was required to take a special test to prove I understood Brazil.