I thought 1991’s Pizza Man was the essential Bill Maher.
No love for DC Cab?
I remember that movie! Actually had a thoughtful comment on why delivering pizzas is a noble occupation.
And that’s exactly all that I remember about the movie, delivering pizza is noble.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989, Prime) I had hopes this would entertain my 10 year old history enthusiast and it succeeded. It holds up as well. I remember the Bill’s Mom/Missy gag was lame even in 1989 when I was 11 and looking back they leaned into it so hard and it still wasn’t funny.
I had harbored the notion for decades that Bill & Ted didn’t actually do the assignment and just brought a bunch of historical dudes to San Dimas High and got and A+, but as an adult now I can clearly see they did the assignment and certainly compared with their peers deserve top marks even if their persons of historical significance did much of the work.
Anyway, still has one of the BEST OPENING CREDIT TUNES
Big Pig: Breakaway. A great music video in its own right.
Thank you. I had no idea the song was a cover from R&B Chuck Jackson!
The Bill and Teds excellent adventure soundtrack is one of the few soundtracks I own, it is excellent, and has little known bands on it, Tora Tora, Shark Island, Vital Signs and Bricklin. Only Extreme were vaguely famous (and I think they might have become after the film).
Oh yes, the opening was fantastic. Especially when I saw it for the first time in a theater, on a big screen, when it came out.
Huh. Neither did I!
I watched Old Dads on Netflix in Bill Burr’s directorial debut. It’s basically an extension of his “angry white man trying to figure out the world” comedy and actual life, having kids for the first time in his late 40s.
It was ok. It seemed less about his character being a dad as it was more of a workplace / fish out of water comedy about a man with anger issues railing against overly PC Millennials until the typical Gen-X “old school” trope of never wanting the party to end where they go off on a alcohol, drugs, strippers, and brawling bender and realize it’s time to grow the fuck up and learn to live in a world where you can’t just go around calling people cunts and cocksuckers and talking about Kaitlin Jenner’s dick without people thinking you’re an asshole.
Made the mistake of watching Alien again. Hoo-boy, that one really didn’t age well. The weird dialog that seems ad-libbed, and literally everything on that spaceship beeps, boops, clunks, grates, or otherwise makes an odd and annoying noise. Even the computer keys beep every time they’re pushed, and the info on the monitors appears with a sound like a telex machine chattering away. I remember it as being very gripping all those years ago. Today, not so much.
Some quick reviews from me from the past week:
The Puppetman - skip it, boring
The BogeyMan - skip it, boring
Would You Rather - pretty good, though low budget kept them on one set the entire time. Not bad, though.
The Strangers - rather dull, to be honest. Grim. Not worth your time.
House of 1000 Corpses - Rob Zombie’s first movie. Kind of embarrassing and adolescent.
The Devil’s Rejects - Edgelord. “Look how intense and morbid I am!” Not thrilling.
Anyway, not a great week of movies for me. Would I Rather was the best of the bunch. Worth a stream on Hulu.
The noisy technology on Alien didn’t make any sense 40 years ago, either … so it’s not a question of aging well, it was just odd choices by Ridley Scott.
I think it just seems more annoying today than it did back then.
I watched the original 1931 Frankenstein yesterday. No doubt 5 stars adjusting for the period and being the granddaddy of the genre, but a lot of the fun was just spotting the bits brought forward in Young Frankenstein.
Adjusting for age, it holds up well, with surprisingly fast pacing in many segments, but the final scene left me cold.
I actually prefer Bride of Frankenstein for F-stein movies of that era.
Alien is an all-time classic and a masterpiece in my opinion. Even with the hokey looking tech (these days anyway).
That’s actually a fairly common opinion, as you can see here:
We’re Elsa Lanchester fans, so Bride we will watch this weekend (already recorded from TCM).
I concur. The Nostromo is an oil rig in space for the love of og. The beeps, boops, clicks and clacks are supposed to be jarring. The audience member is not supposed to feel comfortable, they are not on a cruise. The job of the crew on this ship is uncomfortable, unpleasant and it’s about to get hella scary.
Ridley Scott knows how to create atmosphere.