Library Project: February 9 - 22

...And now we're at the end, as I watched the final films in my DVD library. This is what I watched over the last two weeks:

I finished off the film noir anthology:

February 10: Kansas City Confidential (1952) - A hard edged noir about a man wrongfully accused of having been involved in a bank robbery who tracks down the men who let him take the fall and take them out one by one. Of course, what he doesn't know is that the mysterious mastermind is an ex-cop who isn't going to go down easily.

February 12: Port of New York (1949) - A film perhaps most notable for being the debut of Yul Brynner (and he has hair!), this one is shot in documentary style and tells the story of a Customs Agent and a Narcotics Agent out to stop a drug shipment from coming into New York.

February 15: The Scar (1948) - This one has a strong cast which includes Paul Henreid and Joan Bennett, but it has a rather perfunctory story. Henreid stars as a con who's on the run and discovers that there's a psychiatrist who looks just like him save for a scar on his cheek. Giving himself a similar scar (but accidentally putting it on the wrong side of his face), he tries to impersonate the psychiatrist - only to discover that the psychiatrist himself has some pretty shady people after him.

February 16: The Stranger (1946) - A film starring and directed by Orson Welles, about a Nazi hiding out in the US. Edward G. Robinson co-stars as the agent trying to track him down, and Loretta Young plays the woman he marries in an attempt to create a cover for himself. It's a tight thriller and Welles gets a fantastic death scene.

I also watched a trio of Bollywood films given to me by my friends over at Culturazzi:

February 19: Iqbal (2005) - The title character is a deaf mute who dreams of becoming a professional cricket player, but has to contend with a disapproving father, a mentor with a drinking problem, and various other familiar hurdles of the sports genre.

February 20: Swades (2004) - A film grounded in realism, following a scientist who has been working for NASA and returns to the village of his birth, discovering the disparity between the developed and developing worlds. A really great movie which I've since learned was voted one of the Top 10 Bollywood films of the last decade.

Febraury 22: Dev D (2009) - A visually arresting film about a self-destructive young man who gets involved in the underworld of drugs and prostitution. The film is sort of like Bollywood meets Tarantino meets Danny Boyle.

And that's it!