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.