Saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt a couple of weeks ago. This is a very highly rated film;it’s on the IMDB top 250 and has been there as long for at least several years. While I didn’t dislike the film, I don’t understand this high a rating. It has a lot of good points but it wasn’t really suspenseful for me,(which is what I expect from a Hitchcock film, and the characters didn’t capture my sympathies all that much.
There are a lot of good things in the film. The acting is good. I thought Macdonald Carey was especially good. Some of his lines were very corny if you think about them but he delivered them in a way to avoid seeming so.
I think I should see this again because I can’t really come up with anything wrong about it. I just didn’t come away feeling like I’d seen a great film.
Tag Archives: movies
Shadow of a Doubt
The Dark Knight
Finally saw The Dark Knight last night. My one word review: WOW. All the rave reviews I read and heard were right. I’m a big fan of this film’s predecessor, Batman Begins,but right now I agree with those who say this sequel topped it.
The performances were top notch, including, but not limited to, Heath Ledger’s final role as the Joker. Ledger was excellent, totally insane and brutal and very disturbing, really quite a marvel to see. Watching him as the Joker evoked the thrill and awe of reading Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight when it was first published (note: this movie does not portray that storyline, though some of the influences might come from it). I was also impressed with Aaron Eckart’s performance as Harvey Dent and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes. Gyllenhaal was very natural, like she wasn’t acting at all, which is hard to convey in a larger than life story like this one.
This is a long film, but it doesn’t feel long. It’s dark and deep and exciting. It’s a disturbing ride but an entertaining one. I’m looking forward to more sequels.
a feel for my taste in movies
I’m going to post occasional and probably brief movie reviews here. To start off, I thought it might be a good thing to give readers a feel for my taste in films.
I like a lot of movies and at least something in almost any genre there is. The genres I tend to like more are (in no particular order): comedy, film noir, drama, romance, science fiction, musicals, and classics (which I don’t really think of as a genre myself but a lot of movie sites seem to split them out). The genres I like least are slasher films and horror. I’m not into bloody gorey films much and I’m also easily terrified by supernatural horror, so I avoid all that. The other genres (war, western, historical, silents, animated and anime, etc.) fall in the middle. I like a lot of foreign films that I’ve seen, but I don’t really think of that as a genre. Oh, and I’m not adverse to watching children’s movies at all.
I have a couple of mini-collections of films on dvd and vhs: comics based movies and baseball themed movies. The former is because I also have a large comics collections (though I stopped adding to it a few years ago). The latter just came about. Maybe there are just a lot of great baseball movies.
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