Friday 15 January 2010

(500) Films of Empire - Day 122 - A third of the way there...

So by my calculations, day 122 marks the point where I am one third of the way through the challenge (in terms of days). Totalling up the films so far I have watch 178, which is 11 ahead of schedule. Not bad going but the plan is to try and get to 100 days remaining and have only 100 films to watch.
To treat myself on this momentous occasion, I thought I would choose a film that I knew I would really enjoy. Popular consensus was with High Fidelity but when I got back from the cinema at 10.30pm I changed my mind as I think that after watch High Fidelity, I may very well want to reorganise my DVD collection autobiographically and will need a whole day for that. So instead I went with...

244 - Dazed & Confused - 4 stars
"If I ever start referring to these as the best days of my life, remind me to kill myself"
Randall 'Pink' Floyd certainly has a point. If you look back on your life and think that school was the best time that is saying that you've done nothing with your life since you were 18.
Now Dazed & Confused is one of my comfort movies. I can just put it in the DVD player anytime and know I'm in for a cool, fun 90 minutes.
The only disappointment from the film is realising that my last day of school was not as fun or eventful as this one. In fact I can't even remember what I did, so it can't have been that exciting. I certainly know I wasn't allowed to paddle the upcoming first years!
Funny to think that back in 1994 this was a cast of relative unkowns that included Milla Jovovich, a blink-and-you'll-miss-her Renee Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, and Ben Affleck proving that he's best when playing a complete asshole.
The Seventies are lovingly recreated, mainly thanks to some fabulous wigs and a kick-ass soundtrack that include such tunes as Sweet Emotion, Slow Ride, Paranoid and the KISS classic 'I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night (And Part Of Every Day).
There is just time to mention one of the all-time greatest supporting characters in the history of cinema... Wooderson. This is a sleazy guy in his late-twenties hanging around high school kids, wearing pink velour trousers, yet somehow McConaughey manages to make him kinda likeable... and doesn't even remove his shirt in this film. He also gets the best line in the film, "That's what I love about these high school girls. I get older, they stay the same age"
A fun, nostaligic look back at our youth, when life was a lot simpler; before jobs, relationships, mortgages, etc, etc. It's like Wooderson says "The older you get, the more rules they are going to try and get you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin', man. L-I-V-I-N.

Days remaining - 243 Films remaining - 321

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