Has anyone here seen Woody Allen’s “Scenes from a Mall”? It may not have been the worst movie ever but it probably was the most boring. Each moment you’re thinking “SOMETHING has to happen now, if I just watch a bit longer the story will start”. But you’re wrong. You can watch the entire movie in complete shock as NOTHING happens. Some people think it’s impossible to make a movie about nothing but obviously they haven’t seen this.
Hey, Eve…since the flick ran on “American Movie Classics,” and that network is famous for never running a film without preceding it with extensive, occasionally idiotic commentary, I’m curious as to what it happened to be this time.
The last thing I watched on AMC was SUNSET BOULEVARD, a coupla weeks back…for some reason, they brought in Lauren Bacall to talk about it beforehand. (“So there I was, giving Bill Holden a blowjob, and Bogie walked in drunk and clocked him with an ashtray. Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim dropped the whip and handcuffs long enough to call the cops.”)
What did they do for KISS HER GOODBYE? Have Doodles Weaver scream “Holy cats! Hang onta your fedoras, everybody! Woo! Woo! Woo!” and rush off-camera?
Uke
On The Quick and the Dead:
I hate to be the one to say it, but if you are criticizing The Quick and the Dead for being absurd, you didn’t get it. The director made it very clear the spirit in which the audience was to take this film. Now I realize you could say that about any film, but Sam Rami isn’t just incompetent or aesthetically bankrupt. His absurdity is highly stylized, and it was fascinating and unprecedented to see Rami’s particular quirks brought to bear on a western.
Plus which, while the story of the gunfighter’s tournament may be historically absurd, it is the kind of story that would not have been out of place in one of the pulps of the very same period in which it was set – and taken seriously by contemporary people, many of whom believed a lot of those stories.
Personally, I thought the most remarkable thing about the film was its restraint. Rami knew what he was doing. The comparison to Ed Wood is nonsense. Ed Wood is fascinating because he didn’t know what he was doing. His films were masterpieces of incompetence. We watch them for the same reason we gawk at auto wrecks. Rami we watch because he intentionally makes the ridiculous sublime, and vice-versa.
On Billy Jack:
The chief problem with the Billy Jack films for me is how these laborious plots never go anywhere. Billy Jack’s a bad-ass kung fu indian, but he never does anything with it. He’s trying to make a difference, but he doesn’t try that hard and ultimately fails. In the sequel, Born to Lose, Billy Jack’s life is once again a funk of futility. I’ve seen film noir that didn’t do nearly as good a job of teasing the viewer with the idea that he could get himself out of the mess he’s in. These are the most frustrating films I’ve ever seen. They are hard to watch, not only because of the bad acting and bad dialogue, but just because of the twisting-in-the-wind doom that it portrays.
I’ll look out for Kiss Her Goodbye. It sounds like a treat.
Ike—
They didn’t DARE run any commentary before springing “Kiss Her Goodbye” on us. Maybe they could have had Elaine Stritch come out and rasp, “For God’s sake, don’t watch this piece of crap—I was a promising Broadway actress before I appeared in this, and now I’m just a less-campy Sylvia Miles!” till Bob Dorian drags her off, coughing and screaming, “TURN OFF YOUR SETS!!”
Eve, you’re a professional. If you tell me you’ve watched both Moment by Moment and Kiss Her Goodbye and the latter is worse I believe you. But by the same token, much the same way I wouldn’t enter a burning building or fly a combat mission over Kosova, I recognize my limits and have no intention of exposing myself to Kiss Her Goodbye. But I behalf of amateur filmgoers everywhere, I salute you and all the brave professionals who daily risk their brains and stomachs to watch these movies so the rest of us don’t have to.
Oh, come on, Nemo. PROVE to me you’re man enough to take it! Invite a friend over, tell them, “this is my favorite move!” and watch their expression as the horror that is “Kiss Her Goodbye” unfolds . . .
I really like old movies so I will watch for this one Eve. I have found, tho, that if I want to watch a high quality old movie, I watch TCM instead. Much better movies, and since it is a Turner channel, all the MGM movies that he owns are on it.
I prefer the oldies to the newbies. The scripts are better, the sets are better, the acting is SOOOO MUCH better and the black/whie is better than color.
A perfect example is “12 Angry Men”. There is no way actors could do that as well with the continuous, uncut scenes they used to do. They chop them up now where actors only have to learn one line at a time.
Watch an old Bogey movie sometime if you want to see class.
“My, my. Such a lot of guns around here and so few brains.”
~Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon”
OK, it’s time to bring this baby up to the top again—the horror that is “Kiss Her Again” will be available for taping, rewatching and nightmare fodder early this Friday morning.
Specifically, 4:00–6:00 A.M., EST, on AMC.
Watch it if you DARE . . .
There was a re-make of “12 Angry Men” done in 97 for TV that was actually very good. But they did film it in sequence like the original.
See http://us.imdb.com/Title?0118528
“You CAN’T be evil. 'Cos no matter how many ‘bad’ things you do on purpose,
you MUST be doing it because you think it’s the right thing to do.”
I captured “Kiss Her Goodbye” on tape but haven’t seen it yet. I’m looking forward to it, watching bad movies is a family tradition, I am constantly besieged with requests to go to the videostore and bring back something starring a fat guy from Saturday Night Live. (Fell asleep in front of the tube last night, woke up to “Putting on the Ritz” which followed KHG on AMC. This one was a pip, looked like one of the first talkies, full of Jean Harlow-ish females and a leading man who went blind from excessive drinking of bad gin!)