Movie Death Match 2007 tuh 2008

My father, Joel Dodson, told me stories as a child about the great unfinished Movie Tournament of 2007. The night he passed, he made me promise him that, should it ever start up again, I was to "finish the race" for him, as he put it, quoting Philippians 3, clutching that silly old tattered rag-tag dog-eared Gideon's Bible in his hand, the one that saw him through so many rip-em-up, strangle-hold, alcohol-sodden nights with Mom. So here's my attempt to carry on the tradition.

Yours truly,

Justin Dodson


Last Waltz over Smoke

I haven't seen either movie, but I was told I had to choose the first one in earlier rounds.

Dazed and Confused over Hudsucker Proxy

Hudsucker Proxy is pretty solidly a product of its time. It never really makes it past, for me, the early 90s bourgeois sentimentality for all things old, and it has more in common with Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy than not. Dazed and Confused is the inverse of this, and it has all the timelessness that Saturday afternoon movies have conferred on it over the last few years. Or, to put it less pretentiously, it activey encourages us to hate Ben Affleck, as Lee pointed out in his original, now-classic posting. My only complaint is that it also actively encourages us to root for a kid as the everyman whose gender is frustratingly unclear throughout the entire movie.