James Barbour

James Barbour

Favorite films

  • It's a Wonderful Life
  • Hitch
  • High and Low
  • Signs

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  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    ★★★★★

  • A Fistful of Dollars

    ★★★½

  • The Usual Suspects

    ★★★★½

  • Yojimbo

    ★★★★★

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  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    ★★★★★

    “‘Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving th peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.’
    ‘No, I would not agree,’ Alysha said softly.”

    -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  • A Fistful of Dollars

    A Fistful of Dollars

    ★★★½

    I was pretty disappointed by this in all honesty. Leone and Morricone are doing Leone and Morricone things, but the story was not nearly as tight and well-crafted as I had hoped, considering the source material. Somehow Eastwood’s character is built up by the plot to be more heroic, while having an even more ambiguous goal than Sanjuro. Also the choice to make the Rojos the villains and the Baxters the victims really just doesn’t fit with the whole man-in-the-middle…

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  • Barbie

    Barbie

    ★★★★½

    “The real world is not how I thought it would be.”
    “It never is. And isn’t that marvelous?”

    A ridiculously misunderstood movie. This film is way more than the feminist empowerment movie that liberals praised it for being and conservatives condemned it for being. Nearly everyone who saw this (or intentionally didn’t) decided exactly what they were going to get from it beforehand. Very few people actually asked, “I wonder what this movie is actually trying to say?”

    Well, it’s…

  • Yojimbo

    Yojimbo

    ★★★★★

    “Hansuke, go hang yourself.”

    My grandma really liked this, especially the humor.

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