"Hit Me" Season 4 - Last Three Movies !
Saturday, August 17, 2013 at 3:08PM As we move into prestige Oscar buzz season and restore old internet favorites like the Smackdown and _____ time gets tighter. Hit Me With Your Best Shot must ride off into the sunset until its revival in the spring. So here are your last three movies. Let's go out with a bang.
08/21
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Amazon Instant | Netflix Rental
Vincent Minnelli's noir was up for a ton of Oscars and Minnelli's films always look great. Which will be your favorite shot and will it incorporate Gloria Grahame's Oscar winning turn in Supporting Actress (which we'll be discussing on Sunday 08/25 in the Supporting Actress Smackdown)?
08/28
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Netflix Instant Watch | Amazon Instant
We'll be looking back at a few key Robert Redford classics in the build up to All is Lost, his comeback Oscar bid in October. Let's start right here since we've never done a Western in this series. This buddy movie with Redford and Paul Newman won Best Cinematography at the Oscars.
09/04
Spring Breakers (2013)
We never do anything brand new in this series so let's investigate this divisive hypno-oddity before everyone (and the blog) goes 'Back to School' for the fall. We're talking a cue from Nick's suggestion on the podcast that this cinematography is worth fussing & FYCing over.
On a Housekeeping Note: You wouldn't believe how hard it is to choose films for this series as so many movies that are suggested or that I think would be good choices are increasingly difficult to find with the ever fragmented dvd/bluray/streaming wars going on among studios/stores/sites/netflix. Even things as recent as the 80s are often hard to get a hold of. For instance, I wanted to do Married to the Mob (1988) for its 25th anniversary and given that Michelle Pfeiffer is returning to the mob comedy genre but it's not available for rental on iTunes, Netflix OR Amazon if you can believe it! And the movie is from an Oscar winning director, stars familiar actors who are still working and is only 25 years old. I own it but the whole point of the series is for many people to be able to talk about the same movie (sigh)
In the comments, please let me know how / what service you use to rent movies since Netflix no longer has the huge library they used to have but their vault is still better than anyone else's. These are dark dark days for non new-releases.
Reader Comments (17)
Thank you for the Married to the Mob shout-out. I looked for that movie on Netflix a few weeks ago and was horrified to find nary a one Michelle Pfeiffer film available on-demand. What the hell? Have some respect!
I still watch them the old way. I rent them.
And just a few miles north of Yale in New Haven it the greatest video store on earth.
"Best Video," is located on Whitney Avenue just 3 miles north of Yale. They have a staff of film experts and their selection is incredible. You have to see it to believe it. If it has ever been released on VHS or DVD they have it. I have spent hours there discovering films I never would have seen.
I've got Netflix (Instant, no DVD's) and Amazon Prime. And, my new apartment is just a few blocks from a Blockbuster (yes, they still exist apparently) so....who knows what treasures I will find within!!
If I ever gain the vocabulary or insight to do these I would. Loved The Color Purple, it Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes and Tyrannosaur (because of Colman and her babies speech) can have me sobing anytime.
I am so serious about finally doing one of these I am going to do it today dammit. Today!
Can't wait for Spring Breakers. What a bounty to choose from!!!
Butch Cassidy is not fine, but it is not what we were expecting when we suggested a western. Don't be afraid of the classics of the genre!
The Warner Instant Archive is ever-expanding, great quality, and costs about as much as an Amazon rental!
Can't wait for Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. Such a great movie!
Like Patryk, I channel my inner Luddite by renting an actual piece of circular plastic and give my money to something with a pulse rather than a voltage. Hence my lack of participation unless I can rent it readily (and, of course, quickly) or I already own it. So I am probably not the HMWYBS target audience.
I get the "Butch" choice for this, though...if you are going to pick a Western, go for one that the typical movie-loving audience for this site have all seen and that has a whole bunch of gorgeous camerawork.
Anxious for The Bad and the Beautiful, especially since TCM ran it last week as an Essential on their Lana Turner day during the wonderous Summer Under the Stars series.
I'll have to look into Spring Breakers, it doesn't really look like my thing but for the Best Shot series I might give it a try.
I prefer older films and while you're right about Netflix not having the library they did they're still the best I've found for discs, I don't have streaming. They do have The Heiress available which I still hold out hope to be a Best Shot one day!
Carl -- but that's my point. the new systems should allow easier access than "what's available at my local store" and they did for awhile but it seems lately they're getting as "you'll choose from this limited selection we have" as the brick and mortar rental places always were.
Cal -- i'm not afraid of any classics but i also didn't want a 3 hour movie which a lot of them are. it's hard enough to get people to watch a movie every week, let along a long one in a genre they might not like. Plus, some of the titles were not as easily available for rental.
but there's always next season.
So excited you are choosing Spring Breakers...I know a lot of people hated it, but I found it so visually interesting, provocative, funny, depressing, stimulating..all at once. Looking forward to see everyone's pics.
Also, Nat, when will you be seeing "In a World..."? It's a female-driven, smart comedy and it felt so wonderful to watch a film that was so clearly from a perceptive woman's eyes -- cheers to Lake Bell for that. Hope to see a review of yours soon!
Netflix has become very frustrating. I've been trying to rent The Bad and the Beautiful for months, but it's been on "short wait" at the top of my queue. (And I won't mention the number of discs in my queue that are on "very long wait." I think they've just stopped ordering physical discs, which I understand is part of their business plan, but they're not paying streaming fees to replace all of them in the same measure.) I wish I had known TBATB was on TCM last week.
Suzanne -- you can watch TBATB on Amazon Instant. it costs a couple of dollars i think but at least it's rentable.
Damn. I've already seen SPRING BREAKERS and I kept thinking about which shots I would choose if it was chosen for HMWYBS but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Don't think I can re-rent the film so I may just need to rely on my really, really awful memory for that post.
But I cannot wait for BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. My roommate is a big Western fan, but for some reason hasn't seen this film so we're both looking forward to checking it out for the first time.
I have NETFLIX (dvds and instant).
Not sure where else to post this, but my "Bad and the Beautiful" best shot is up at my journal, under the title "Grit Beneath Glamour." Looking forward to seeing what everyone else has picked!
allison -- me too. the post will be up late this time on Thursday afternoon. i threw my back out and am operating very very slowly.