Website Reviews: Personal Movie Logs

Doug's Movie Reviews is, as you may have guessed, a personal movie log. I enjoy these sort of blogs, which review movies with the same vicissitudes that people watch them; to wit, the November 10 double feature of Hell's Angel's (1930) and John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994).

Re: Hell's Angel's:

Story-wise, it's basically 2001's Pearl Harbor...except it doesn't suck. Two brothers get involved with the same woman, join the air force, and take on a dangerous bomber mission in World War I. Like Pearl Harbor, this romance serves basically to kill time until The Big Fight Scene, but since there is no Ben Affleck, it's about ten times less annoying, and about two hours shorter.

---

I've linked to Elliott's House of Pain before on this blog, but if you're the type who thinks the Oscars are always wrong, well, Elliott agrees. Astoundingly, having watched every Oscar-nominated film from 1956, Elliot not only writes poetic tributes to the overlooked Ugetsu and The Night of the Hunter, he then rifles off a great list of other shoulda-beens:

There are a few other films that I would have given awards to, but aren’t quite up to the standard set by “Ugetsu” and “Hunter”. There’s the slight, but affecting and entertaining French criminal gambling story “Bob Le Flambeur”, as well as the tense and entrancing suspense thriller “Bad Day at Black Rock”, the apocalyptic end-of-the-world intensity and madness of “Kiss Me Deadly”, the finely-tuned comedy of “The Ladykillers” (which WILL be nominated in 1957, so I won’t mention it much more here), Jimmy Stewart’s harrowing western experience in “The Man From Laramie”, and, not one of my favorites but obviously an important picture, “Rebel Without a Cause”, which was nominated for acting and writing, but nothing else.

---

For B-movie hounds, there's Exclamation Mark's Movie Reviews, featuring at the time of writing The Amazing Colossal Man (1957):

Glen Langan (Women of the Prehistoric Planet) gives the best performance of the movie as Lt. Col. Glenn Manning. Unfortunately, his performance is mediocre at best. We still care about the guy, but sometimes the theatrics get in the way. He sort of looks like a gigantic Telly Savalas.

---

stickyfloor seems to have the monopoly on new release popcorn movies and J-Horror. This colorful blog hasn't been updated in a while, but I hope this link will encourage the author to return.

---

Cinema Blend is not a personal movie log, but a website that manages to review just about every movie that is in theaters and on DVD, plus reviews of the buzz surrounding unreleased movies. This Dallas, Texas-based syndicate gets their reviews into newspapers and is always looking for reviewers to join the crew. In my opinion, their layout and format is eminently more readable than the sloppy movie poop shoots Ain't It Cool News and Movie City News.

---

Got your own favorite personal movie log? Email a link to makingthemovie AT gmail DOT com with the subject "Personal Movie Log".

TO WIT:
Nick's Flick Picks
Jason Jackowski's "You Know, For Film"

UPDATE 11/14/07:
Flixter's list of 25 movie bloggers