Challenge within a challenge: Watchlist update

With award season in full swing, it means it is also a time when I add lots of films to my IMDB watchlist. Adding to my original total, it now totals 119 films to watch. However I have been watching some of the films on the list….at last!

Since announcing the challenge I have seen 9 of the films, and unfortunately the large majority of them fell flat. I'm so glad I didn't pay good money to see them on the cinema, or pay full price for them on DVD.

I really wanted to like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty but there was just something missing to make it great. I thought it was a great idea, but it didn't deliver. I did record the original the other day, so I’ll give that a watch to see if it’s any different.

The Rewrite with Hugh Grant was one of his weaker films, it just felt like he’d given up on finding good roles. None of the characters in The Romantics had any depth to care about them.
Personal Effects was in essence a TV movie I think with an A-List cast and I thought like Michelle Phiffer and Ashton Kutcher did the best they could with the script they had, which was only just off the mark of well rounded character.

August: Osage County had an all star cast, but it dragged for the first hour and although it stepped up a gear in the second hour, by that point I didn't care for the characters or what happened to them.
There were a few films that were better than I thought. Last Vegas was pretty funny in places and New Year’s Eve wasn't as bad as I heard it would be. And Soul Surfer was a good solid film that had a good pace and didn't flag at all.

But the best film of the bunch so far is a documentary called A Place at the Table. It investigates America and the millions who experience hunger on a daily basis. For a country so big and rich, you wouldn't think there would be such a problem, but there is.

This is one of the main problems, the cost of fruit and veg over the years has increased, while the cost of processed foods has decreased.

$3.00 is how much is spent on a child's school dinner everyday, although after admin, transportation of food and other things, it's more like $1.00.

Here are some other facts which you probably didn't know about the situation. 1 out of every 2 kids in America will be on food assistance (food stamps) at some point. In 1980 there were 200 food banks and or equivalent. Now there are 40,000. And there are 50 million American’s who don’t have enough to eat everyday.

It was a real eye opener and I highly recommend seeing it if you can.