Once Upon A Time In The West -- 1968 -- PG-13

What to say about this one. I've been sitting here thinking about this film and (amusingly) thinking about what I think about it. Sounds goofy, but it's the truth. If ever there was a definition of a smooth movie, this one meets that definition head on. It was definitely smooth, but I'm not sure of how memorable it came out.

It starts with a bang. Three guys wait for a train, and the guy they meet shoots them. Next scene, a family prepares for their mother to come home, and a group of guys kills them all. This is the foundation laid. It is out job while watching this film to figure out why all this happened. The story begins from that point with a woman coming to town to find her family was blown away and there is also that stranger from the earlier train platform. How do they relate? What is his interest in her? What's with the harmonica? Everything that happens works to fill in the blanks, but not until we are finally told what the deal is with this and that, which doesn't happen till 2 hours into this 3 hour movie. It's a long wait for an anticlimactic revelation.

Maybe that was my problem. It was anticlimactic. Every scene worked to a peak and was played out very well. The characters were fairly well drawn for the genre and even interesting. Everything seemed to work really well, the plot really doesn't have any holes in it, and I understood the characters and their motivations, but maybe it just wasn't that dramatic to me. I really can't put my finger on it. It wasn't even boring.

I was drawn into the intrigue of these super secretive guys wondering who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. Little by little, their lives were unfolded to us showing us just a bit more, but leaving enough in the shadows to make us want even more. That worked really well.

So in the end, it's a movie without major problems except that it lays really flat for the 3 hour duration. It's not boring. It's not bad. It just didn't do anything. Someday, I will watch it again to figure out what it is I missed when I watched it this time because for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Yours, Mine and Ours -- 1968

This is probably one of the last films without a rating that fell under the old production code before the MPAA took over and started rating everything. But it is a sweet little movie that exemplifies all the good parts about going to an older movie like honest subtext and feeling good about life despite whatever circumstances come up.

The long and the short of this film involves a naval officer who decides he wants to spend more time in port to get more time with his ten (yes, ten) children. His wife had passed away fairly recently leading him to get off the sea and into the house. Of course, the kids have difficulty relating to him since he hasn't been home too much in their lives and he sends off the younger two to live with his sister while he sorts out the elder 8. Enter the woman who moves to San Francisco to leave behind memories of her husband who passed away within the past year. She has eight children of her own and is going to work as a nurse on the naval base.

The rest is both standard in plot, but over the top in comedy. As could be expected, the pair hooks up giving them a family of a whopping 18 kids. The sheer numbers make it difficult to relate much of what goes on since the kids, while an attempt is made to give them individuality, are there to support the parents and their relationship. The first half of the movie focuses almost solely on the two aprents and their courting and marriage. The second half goes into the making the two families into one; no small feat for one as large as this.

I've touched on the characters, but to look a ttheir construction, the parents are both fairly well developed. Their conversations are honest and they make perfect sense in wanting to keep the size of their broods secret from each other until ready. The children are given as much as they can get. Rather than full personalities, which would be impossible, the ones that get some focus get individual traits of some kind to play into the larger plot. They're amusing, but really the idea behind them is more important than trying to figure out who each one of them is.

Overall it's a very funny film with some great chemistry between the leads and a highly amusing and original idea underlying them. In today's world, the thought of this "Brady Bunch" extreme would be near unbelievable because of people's seeming indecision in not only marriage, but having children as well. But for this film in that time, it worked out very well.