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113. Once Upon a Time In America (#70)

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, The 250 is a fortnightly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This time, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.

Drawn back to New York City from a decades-long exile, retired gangster David “Noodles” Aaronson discovers that the past is not buried nearly as well as he might like. Navigating a complex web of secrets and betrayals, “Noodles” is forced to confront sins past; both his own and those dearest to him.

At time of recording, it was ranked the 70th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Non-Review Review: The American

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Darren

The American is a slow-moving introspective film. Director Anton Corbijn seems to be trying to evoke Sergio Leone, with the story of an American hired gun lying low in a small Italian village. Slow-moving and subtle, The American feels quite meditative for most of its runtime, although it does occasionally seem almost comatose. Still, George Clooney makes for a convincing leading man, adding a great deal of depth to an archetype we’ve seen countless times before. While it’s a little too slow for its own good, it’s never less than beautiful and often fascinating.

Beautifully shot...

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Meme of the Moment: Double Feature Blog-A-Thon… or why I should never be allowed to run a cinema…

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Darren

Hey, I was invited to take part in the latest movie blogger meme by the wonderful Marc over at Go, See, Talk. The idea is to pretend you run a movie theatre and schedule a week of double-bills for that cinema. There are no other rules, save for the fact that you run a triple-feature on Sunday. So I peered into an alternate universe where I was allowed any sort of responsibility, and came back with a handy brochure for Cine-Moi, the exclusive high-end movie theatre experience that my alternate self has somehow bamboozled his way into running (not into the ground… so far). Let’s see what a typical movie schedule might look like.

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Secret Shame: Classic Films We Haven’t Seen…

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Darren

One of the things about having a blog is the fact it takes a significant amount of self-confidence to publish. I mean, even if you’re just doing it for own sake, it still takes a great deal of faith to put something out there for others to see and read. To be honest, I’m not sure I properly consider myself a “critic” and certainly not an “expert”, at least not in a sense that requires big inverted commas. I don’t like to think that I make statements of cinema, and I hope (perhaps with a hint of arrogance) that I might contribute in some way to some discussion about cinema somewhere. Still, I’m always a little bit embarrassed at all the great films I haven’t seen. I feel like it diminishes me in some way, not even as a blogger or any nonsense like that, but as a film fan.

Getting in deep with my classic movies...

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Memory Lane: The Joys of Channel Surfing…

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Darren

Hello dear reader. I’m very sorry. It’s going to be a relatively slow week at the blog here, I’m afraid. That blasted real world keeps getting in the way, as it must from time – I’m preoccupied with various boring concerns, and my attention to cinema perhaps isn’t as finely honed as I might have liked. Even over the weekend, although I took the occasion to treat the better half to her first viewing of The Queen (which I suspect I liked far more than she did), I found myself without a clear idea of what I was going to watch. I hadn’t made a note of anything, or decided to revisit a particular classic, or seek out an important film, or even overheard somebody in work talking about a cult or classic film. Indeed, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to watch. So I decided to just turn the television on and see what it was that home entertainment could offer me this time.

My childhood was a bit like this...

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Three is the Magic Number: Why Do We Like Trilogies?

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Darren

Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing all three films in the Matrix trilogy. I sat down yesterday, watched all three back-to-back and wrote reviews of them. As I did, I found myself thinking about how nice the concept of a “trilogy” is. It’s even a nice word – it sounds much better to say “the [insert film name here] trilogy” than it does to say “the [insert film name here] tetralogy” (or, to quote the Alien films, “quadrilogy”) or even the more generic “[insert film name here] series.” So what is it about sets of three movies that we like so much?

Looking for a stellar trilogy...

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Non-Review Review: Rango

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Darren

I quite enjoyed Gore Verbinski’s Rango, even though I was never quite sure what to make of it. While it isn’t quite as strong as the typical Pixar fare, the film compares rather well with some of Dreamworks’ better output over the last number of years.

A prickly customer...

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