Slacker (1990). Have heard about it for a long time. I love independent films, and am a huge fan of Clerks, so I had high expectations.
What a bore. Couldn’t wait for it to end.
Well, in “good” news, there is a Clerks 3 on the way!
Which… I probably won’t be seeing.
I absolutely loved Clerks. Didn’t like Clerks II. I watched a couple more of his films (Mallrats and Chasing Amy) and sorta gave up on him. He’s a one-hit-wonder for me.
We were trying to figure out a new Christmas movie to add to our usual fare and gave Nora Ephron’s Mixed Nuts a try. A really awful movie, although we only made it through about 20 minutes. A cast that should have worked: Steve Martin, Madeline Khan, Robert Klein, Rob Reiner, etc. But it seemed like the actors had little direction and the plot was as thin as a coat of paint. As is typical for Ephron, most all of the humor was wrung out of it prior to starting. And it also had Adam Sandler, who has the astonishing ability to ruin almost every movie he appears in.
Kevin Smith has really become a disappointment. He seems like a pretty nice guy and I’m glad he recovered from his heart attack and lost weight, but his movies I have long given up on.
I’ll see Clerks 3. I only saw Clerks 2 once time and it was kind of cute. Lost a lot of its bite from Clerks, though.
It is cliche now, but the discussion about contractors being killed on the Death Star II was the kind of discussion I had not encountered pre-internet. It kind of opened my mind a bit to thinking about movies, not just taking them in.
I really liked Slacker but I think it needed to be seen at the time. It’s one of those films that spawned other films that spawned other films and so forth, to the point where everything that was fresh and interesting about it then is now a tired, threadbare cliche.
Yea, even though 1990 doesn’t seem like “a long time ago” (at least to me), it really seemed dated.
Just finished another Hanks movie; this time it was Greyhound, about a WWII escort destroyer fending off U-boats. Hanks once again doing his usual solid job, but I’m not sure what the purpose of film was supposed to be, as there are a plethora of WWII submarine movies out there.
I was very impressed seeing Slacker when it came out in 1990. What affected me was not just the innovative ideas and methods. It also made me nostalgic for the years that I lived in Austin (1974 to 1977), so that already by 1990 it was a long time ago. I’ve only seen it once since then, so I’ll pass on commenting how much I would be impressed by it now. Let me note though that it’s now among the 825 American films in the National Film Registry. I like a lot of Linklater’s movies.
Don’t Look Up, on Netflix. Not getting good reviews, but I thought it was pretty good.
My local newspaper critic has it on his 10 best of the year list.
I can’t remember if I mentioned the movie Pig before because the search engine doesn’t seem to allow you to search in just one thread. Anyway, it’s Nicholas Cage in the first really decent role I’ve seen him in in more years than I can remember. It’s about a fictional famous former Portland chef who became disillusioned with the biz and moved to the boonies and trained a pig to hunt for truffles, which he sells to truffle marketers.
It was okay… but there’s a lot of things I would have done differently.
It was very US centric, which would be okay, but they were a little late in detailing that there were other projects out there, and by the time we learn of the efforts in Russia, it blows up. I could have done without the religious stuff too. There were some interesting implications, but the one guy, out of the blue, literally looking up, (at something that’s been visible for a while,) would not have sparked a reaction like that. I’m sure there would be doubters to the very end. Flat Earthers especially. Not that the movie said whether or not there were any, (I don’t think). The editing wasn’t my favorite.
Try Dogma. It’s anti religion but done really well, with Chris Rock as Jesus’s black disciple, and angry angels. I loved it and to me it is Smith at his best.
And then try Red State. You will not be disappointed.
Just finished Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I parked my brain at the door and had a blast. Getting a real hankering for more Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
I saw Don’t Look Up today. Pretty good, but somewhat scarily accurate in how people responded to the imminent threat. Which of course was the whole point of the metaphor.
I watched The Beast Must Die (1974) yesterday.
Really fun mystery movie. Right from the very start it was quite gripping because this was the narration that came before the opening scene. It’s an exciting horror take on the country house whodunnit theme.
This film is a detective story – in which you are the detective.
The question is not “Who is the murderer?”.
But “Who is the werewolf?”
After all the clues have been shown you will get a chance to give your answer.
The last line alludes to a 30 second pause towards the end where the action and frantic drama is halted and the set of characters, all suspects, are shown one by one. Pretty interesting way to slow the tempo right down but at the same time build up the tension to the big reveal.
Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (2015). Documentary directed by Alex Gibney. A slow crawl (four hours) through Sinatra’s life. It’s in the modern style of biographical documentaries, with a surprising amount of footage you probably haven’t seen, many revealing off-camera testimonies from those who knew him well and excellent editing of sound and images to make for a smooth and coherent whole. Biomentaries have taken a huge step forward in this regard, although it’s made them seem too similar in some aspects, IMO. The vast majority of the testimonies are off-camera and some are voiced by actors (Vincent D’Onofrio and others), which I found a bit unsettling, because it’s not clear whether they’re reading actual quotes made by the people they portray or if it’s scripted material. I may have missed something, but it looked to me like another example of blurring the line between fiction and fact.
Those complaints aside, I enjoyed it very much. Although I don’t care for Sinatra’s singing or most of the lyrics he sang, there’s no denying his talent and importance, and I thought it did a very good job of telling the story of the life of a man whose life was a story to be told. Definitely worth watching; just don’t forget it’s four hours long.
The Last of Sheila is a fun mystery from that same era(1973) that is often overlooked today. It doesn’t pause at the end, but is just a really fun and nowadays obscure mystery movie with a great hook.
A guy, known for his love of board games, invites a bunch of people onto his yacht to play games. He ends up giving all of them secrets on slips of paper…and they have to figure out whose secrets are whose.
Don’t read through the Wikipedia page. It’s old enough the entire thing is massively spoiled in the article.
Our annual viewing of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a nice interpretation of the Dylan Thomas piece.