Cinema Cycle - Victory At Sea, Vols: 1, 2 & 3

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 08/14/2015

TITLE: Victory At Sea (Vols: 1, 2, & 3)

FORMAT: LaserDisc

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 1 hour 21 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 18.1 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2398.5 miles

SYNOPSIS: (from Wikipedia)

1.	October 26, 1952	"Design for War"	Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1941	World War II begins and the Germans succeed in invading Poland and France. But German forces are restrained by the British thanks to the vital convoys, Canadian and American naval forces' initial involvement and the Lend-Lease program. Still, the German submarine war increases its crescendo thanks to new French bases.
2.	November 2, 1952	"The Pacific Boils Over"	Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941	Using Japanese footage, viewers see the planning, execution and, ultimately, the celebration of the country's attack on Pearl Harbor. There also is an explanation provided for the attack and some peaceful moments depicted among the U.S. sailors before the fateful events unfold. Though damaged, the U.S. Navy survives to fight again. (This episode was re-broadcast on 7 December 1952—the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.)
3.	November 9, 1952	"Sealing the Breach"	Anti-submarine warfare, 1941–1943	With war now declared by the U.S., naval forces throughout the states have joined to bring convoys of supplies across the Atlantic Ocean to the Allies in England. German U-Boats come through and manage to destroy some of ships along the way. Still, the Americans are resilient.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: History as told by the victors.  Impressive archival footage, wonderful narration and writing, exceptional score.

PROS AND CONS: This is the art of the documentary before Ken Burns and PBS came along.  This is 12 hour+ long film about naval seapower and the United States use of it during WWII.  More a recruiting poster for the American Navy and the American way of life.  Which translates to “We are good and resolute and the rest of the world is weak and evil”.

While the footage is mostly Naval Signal Corp footage along with footage obtained from other governments after the way, what stands out is the narration and the musical score.

The work was commissioned by NBC television who had their own orchestra the time.  Richard Rogers wrote the extensive suite of music that is interlaced throughout all 20+ episodes.  The narration by Leonard Graves is compelling and grandiose.  It is also very arrogant and condescending toward the defeated foe, as though God himself had laid waste to the enemy using the United State as his sword.  

The rule of history has always been that the victors get to write the history books.  

To read an overview of this project, check out this status posting.  

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle - Ocean's Eleven

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 08/12/2015

TITLE: Ocean’s Eleven

FORMAT: DVD

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 2 hours 7 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 30.8 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2379.7 miles

SYNOPSIS: A group of ex-army buddies plan to heist millions from Las Vegas casinos on New Years Eve.  

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Good intentions and honor among thieves.  Even the best laid plans can go astray.  Vegas in its heyday, before all the commercialism.

PROS AND CONS: This film is somewhat overshadowed by the remake starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.  After seeing both I can say that they are two entirely different films.  

This film is more about the development of character and the way that the key players interact with one another and their motivations.  The latter is more about glitz and style and action.  

The actual heist in this film takes up only a small segment of the two hour film.  In the end, Danny Ocean gets neither the money or the girl, showing that a life of crime never pays off in the end.  In the Clooney version, the entire crew walks off with the money and Danny gets the girl.  Such is the difference in societal morals and values in the 50 year span between the films.

That said, the best part of this film is Vegas in its heyday, when neon was king and Vegas was still a wide open town.  Also endearing is Sammy Davis Jr. who, during a time of Jim Crow laws and segregation in the south, was still able to hold his own with his Caucasian partners in this film.  

To read an overview of this project, check out this status posting.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle Status

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: Ongoing since April 2014

TITLE: Almost 2,000 of them

FORMAT:  (see above logos)

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: (selected media length)

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: (in miles)

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: (from the earth to the moon, how many times?)

I am not quite sure how this whole thing started.  It began when I came across a copy of “Regard for the Planet”.  A laserdisc of the photos of Marc Garanger.  It contains 50,000 photos that he took on his worldly travels.  This was before computers or the internet and since photography has always been my hobby I bought the disk and a player to go with it.  That was probably around 1995.  

As the years passed I started to collect LaserDiscs here and there before they finally went out of production (curse you DVD!).  Then along came the internet and eBay, and all of a sudden all the laserdiscs that I ever wanted were cheap, cheap, cheap.  

Fast forward to 2014 and I found myself with 1800 laserdiscs and retirement quickly approaching.  One day I had the epiphany to combine several interests into one and see if I couldn’t make it work.  

I decided to find a way to systematically go through my collection and watch each film while exercising.  As I work out I will keep track of the results and write a review of each performance.  The only drawback I could find was choosing which films to watch first and which to skip.  This was solved by putting all of the media onto a spreadsheet and letting the computer calculate which films I would watch next at random.  I call this the random media generator (RMG).  

As I started the project, it began to evolve to include other media that I had collected (VHS, DVD, etc) so that the collection now numbers over 2,000 titles.  

So here I am a year and half into the project and I have gone through about 4% of the collection and I have traveled about 2,500 miles.  I cycle every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Tuesdays and Thursdays are for hiking.  What I have found along the way isn’t what I expected.  

The media collection that I have amassed is pretty varied.  While I have purchased some large lots of media (boxes of discs sight unseen), most of the individual disks that I have picked up are dramatic, documentary, foreign (non-Hollywood) pre-1960s and musicals.  I am not a huge fan of fantasy, violence and horror although I have quite a few of those as well.

What I find myself watching as I cycle through this 20th century media output is a cross section of the human experience that we as a society we have chosen to preserve for our own entertainment and for future generations.  It says a lot about us a society and about our cultures and how they differ and how they are similar.  

I don’t expect to be able to get through the entire collection before my time on the planet is up, but I am curious to see just how far I can go.  About 50 films into the project, I added a small video short and post these to YouTube.  They can be viewed as a channel on my YouTube account.  

The more I watch, the more interesting the overall experience has become, not to mention challenging.  Oh, and I have lost about 30lbs as well.  Go figure. (WIN!)

So if you want to start from the beginning (I know you are curious), here is a link to the first entry. The overall project is also connected to other data collection tools on the internet whose links are at the bottom of the blog.

If you want to see where all the magic happens three times a week. Check out the tour of the Man Cave.

Finally, if you want to take a look at the RMG and all its contents, the link to the Google Spreadsheet that contains the data is here. 

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle - Rubinstein Plays Beethoven / Brahms

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 08/10/2015

TITLE: Arthur Rubinstein Plays Beethoven / Brahms

FORMAT: LaserDisc

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 1 hour 24 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 20.7 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2348.9 miles

SYNOPSIS: Classical Musical Performance

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Art and the people that make it and perform it.  

PROS AND CONS: There isn’t a lot you can say about viewing this type of media.  Criticizing the composer or the performers would be allowable if this were an amateur performance, but it isn’t  

This really isn’t a concert film.  The works were performed in a closed venue with no audience.  The performance was for the cameras only, and there were a lot of cameras.  The effect is to give the viewer the feeling of floating through the orchestra and peering over the shoulders of the performers.  So to say that this is an intimate work would be an understatement.

With all that is going on in my life these days, this work was a welcome break, allowing me to get lost in the music and collect my thoughts about the meaning of a lot of things.  

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle - Live Free Or Die Hard

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 08/05/2015

TITLE: Live Free Or Die Hard

FORMAT: Blu-Ray

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 2 hours 10 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 30.1 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2328.2 miles

SYNOPSIS: A veteran NYC Police detective and a slacker hacker try to prevent a rogue ex-government hacker from destroying the United States' infrastructure.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Basically, one guy faces insurmountable odds to overcome a platoon of really bad guys and save the day.  Another one of the Bruce Willis bad-ass movies.

PROS AND CONS: A good film.  Like most of this genre, this falls into the latter day action adventure movie film that is so popular with young men.  You get a two hour thrill ride for the price of admission.  It falls into the ‘every problem that we face can be solved with gunfire or by blowing something up’, film.  

While he is engaging to watch and good at his craft, Mr. Willis is starting to look a bit long in the tooth in this incarnation.  The random movie generator (RMG) has given me several films of this type of late and the similarities are interesting.  They have taken the concept of a one man army and taken it well into the fantasy realm.

Since the ‘bad guys’ in the movie all use fully automatic assault weapons, I believe that the shot count has to number somewhere around 4,000 to 8,000 rounds of ammunition that were fired off during this two hour cinematic event.

Although, I will say, that the motive of the evil doers in this film, the compromising of the U.S. infrastructure (communication, power, transport) is something that we should all be worried about but not to the level that we see in this film.  The fact that we all come to ‘expect’ this infrastructure to work and how we panic when it fails is telling about our culture and our value system.

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle - Out Of Africa

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 08/02/2015

TITLE: Out of Africa

FORMAT: LaserDisc

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 2 hours 42 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 35.1 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2298.1 miles

SYNOPSIS: A Danish woman marries and moves to Africa to farm coffee with her husband.  She questions her life and her relationships as the beauty of Africa fades around them.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Pretty much everything that makes up the human experience.  Love, honor, betrayal, friendship, beauty, loss, redemption, and the things that drive men and women apart and also those things that bring them together.

PROS AND CONS: I can’t recall how many times I have seen this film.  Probably at least three times prior to this viewing.  With each successive showing it just gets better and better.  The first viewing sucked me in with the the lavish production, sweeping score and fascinating glimpse into a world long gone.  

What struck me most this viewing was the complex relationship between Finch-Hatten (Redford) and Blixen (Streep) and the dialog that they shared which explored the core desires that men and women have and how they differ.  In the end they both understood one another so well, that it makes the final scenes of the film all that more touching.  

The film is a european version of a western, but in this case, instead of homesteading in Oklahoma and fighting off savage indians, the Europeans wandered off to far away imperial colonies where they worked with the natives instead of slaughtering them.  What makes the film so exceptional, is that it shows the fantasy of two people, deeply in love set against a world that is essentially an Eden that is all theirs, which slowly fades away.  Only it isn’t a fantasy.  This stuff actually happened.

For those that have never scratched the surface of this film, it is a true story that is the precursor to many other famous works.  Karen Blixen went on to be a published author and the character of Felicity in the film is actually supposed to represent Beryl Markham, who was the first person to fly solo across the atlantic from east to west.  Markham documented this famous adventure and her time in Africa in the book “West with the Night”.

All in all, a fascinating cast of people, set in a golden time that is also gone with the wind.  

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.

Cinema Cycle - The Bourne Identity

CINEMA CYCLE

(Cardio Workout And Reviewing Movies At The Same Time)

DATE VIEWED: 07/31/2015

TITLE: The Bourne Identity

FORMAT: HD-DVD

TIME RIDDEN / FILM LENGTH: 1 hour 59 minutes

DISTANCE RIDDEN WHILE VIEWING: 29.1 miles

TOTAL CINEMA MILES LOGGED: 2263 miles

SYNOPSIS: A black operative agent (assassin) of the United States government develops amnesia and has to find out who he is.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: Living a lie and finding out the truth.  What is fiction and what is fantasy.  

PROS AND CONS:  This begins the trilogy of the Bourne Conspiracy (Ultimatum and Supremacy being the other two).  This film is slick.  It sweeps you up and carries you along and you have to hold on tight.  Tight script, good camera work, and superior stunts make it a good film to watch.  

From a personal standpoint, the film falls into the genre of fantasy more than anything else.  You are removed from real life and actually believe that the government can engineer a human that can literally disarm 5 marines.  These type of agents could exist, but I doubt anyone could be that perfect, hence….fantasy.

I have yet to see the two follow up films, but there are enough hints in this one to give a clue about where the trilogy is heading.

To read an overview of this project, check out the initial post for this series.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. 

This film was viewed while exercising on my recumbent cycle.  A summary of my time spent working out on my journey through movie-land can be found on Strava.com.