Soylent Green

In summation: It doesn’t hold up.

Soylent Green was made in 1973, and stars Charlton Heston and a bunch of other people that are way out of my generation, but that my mother will probably flay me for not mentioning here. I have been hearing references made to this movie my entire life, and as such decided I had better go ahead and watch it. This one was not available on Netflix when I watched it though; I happened to see it in a 3/$10 bargain movie bin, and I dropped 3 large (and 33 1/3 small) to buy it. I knew literally nothing about the movie going in except that it was often used in references to cannibalism. I didn’t know who was in it or what it was about, but I mistakenly thought that Soylent Green was a chemical similar to the Agent Orange that was put to use during the Vietnam War. Which didn’t turn out to be the case. Continue reading Soylent Green

Taxi Driver

In summation: Watch it.

Taxi Driver is one of those classic movies that I’ve always heard about, but never taken the time to watch. Whenever I would hear references to it, I would think to myself ‘gosh, I really should watch that’, but by the time I was near a television it would be forgotten. This changed, however, when I began watching Orange is the New Black. For reasons that I can’t properly explain, Natasha Lyonne‘s Nicky Nichols character always makes me think of a young Jodie Foster.

nicky1I say for reasons that I can’t properly explain because she really doesn’t look anything like her. Her hair is maybe kind of the same color, but aside from that, the resemblance is slight at best. I think it’s the whole streetwise sassy girl thing that Lyonne delivers in OitNB that makes me think of Jodie Foster. I’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis that Foster’s character in Taxi Driver had that same persona. Regardless of the reason, I happened to be thinking about Taxi Driver at the same time as it happened to be on the Starz Add-on for Amazon Prime. Everything fell into place last week, so I finally watched yet another movie that I’ve been hearing about for the better part of my life. Continue reading Taxi Driver