I watched the MST3K version of It Lives by Night (originally known as The Bat People), truly awful 1974 movie that appears to have been mainly filmed in the dark. I don’t think I’ve seen this one before, and it well deserves the drubbing it got, which was hilarious.
The only high point is that the makeup was by Stan Winston, who later went on to advanced animatronics and puppeteering in films like The Terminator, Aliens,Jurassic Park (he did the T. Rex) and Pumpkinhead. At the time, he was doing mainly makeup. He’s the one who gave Khigh Dhiegh his long beard so he could play Judge Dee in Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders this same year. Unfortunately, aside from the pretty nifty hand makeup in the transformation scene, the man-Bat makeup is pretty awful.
Last night I tried to give up my status as the last person on Earth who hasn’t seen The Matrix. I’ve always wanted to see it; it sounded pretty cool and I’ve seen those clips where people dodge bullets in slow motion.
I’m sorry to say I just found it irritating. Even though I kind of knew what the story was about, the movie didn’t want to give me any unnecessary clues. In one exchange, somebody says to Keanu, “They’re after you.” He says, “Who’s after me?” And she says something like, “There’s no time for that. Just listen.”
And another thing. I get that Keanu’s supposed to save the human race from the AI who is using them all as batteries. I just don’t really see why. If nobody knows they aren’t living a normal life, then what’s the harm? I call it rather sporting of the AI.
I was on Team Cypher right away. Once he bit the dust, I decided to just go to bed.
For the hat trick, you need to watch Allegro Non Troppo (although perhaps without any younger family members around). If you haven’t seen it, it’s an excellent Italian-made Fantasia parody - witty, on point, occasionally risqué, occasionally traumatizing (I mean, the “Valse Triste” segment is an absolute tearjerker), and often ridiculous. A little dated but still pretty good. I might have to go rewatch my DVD copy one more time.
In other news, I finally got around to watching the entirety of the True Grit remake. Bridges and Damon are much better than I expected in cowboy roles but Hailie Steinfeld is an absolute treasure. I’m not a huge cowboy movie fan but this is a good’un.
I’ve seen it plenty of times. It’s pretty clearly intended as direct parody. It not only almost-mentions Disney and Fantasia by name, but some of its segments are obviously meant to parody those in Fantasia (like the Bolero segmen, with its story of extraterrestrial evolution starting from a drop of Coke in a bottle left by astronauts on some other planet directly parodies the Story of Evolution told to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring)
My problem with Allegro non Troppo is that several of its segments are definite downers, like the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Sibelius’ Valse Triste with its cat’s memories of a demolished home.
Disney itself did some Fantasia-like movies during and just after WWII, including Make Mine Music,Fun and Fancy Free, and Melody Time, which used both classic and modern music. I’ve just watched two of these, too. Make Mine Music is interesting in that the first segment, The Martins and the Coys was excised from the videos (although you can find it on Youtube) and the Blue Bayou portion was originally supposed to be to the music of Clair de Lune, but they changed t it to a more modern arrangement (you can find it set to Clair de Lune on Youtube, too)
Another movie that was supposed to be a “Modern Fantasia”, mixing animation with modern rock music, was supposed to be Metamorphoses (AKA Winds of Change), where all the stories are from Graeco-Roman mythology.(It’s nominally based on Ovid’s poem of that namr) It used Japanese animators and some Disney alumni, and was originally supposed to have music by The Rolling Stones and other major groups. This was in 1978. Something came apart, though, and the result was severely disappointing. The musicians pulled out. The animation is listless rather than dramatic. Rather than having the stories told wordlessly, they got Peter Ustinov to contribute some lackluster narration. It’s a real mess. I only watched it because I wanted to see how they handled the story of Perseus and Medusa. It really doesn’t help that the lead characters have Kewpie-doll cuteness, and look more as if they belong in that simpering “Love is…” one-panel cartoon than in heroic tales.
Murder mystery with High School kids that sounds and plays like really smart Film Noir. Rapid fire dialog is a little hard to follow, but well worth trying.
I watched Midnight Sky last night. It’s a Netflix film directed by and stars George Clooney, along with a solid supporting cast (Kyle Chandler, Felicity Jones, Daniel Oyelowo). It’s 50 years into the future, Clooney plays an astrophysicist (?) stationed in the Arctic Circle, and we meet him “10 days after The Event”. Clooney is diagnosed with something terminal, the world is going through some as-yet-unspoken catastrophe, and he begins to try to talk with the one remaining space mission on their return trip from a recently-discovered moon of Jupiter that might be able to sustain life.
It’s slowly paced. It’s well acted. The writing is mostly good in places. But there are a lot of holes to be found for your average science fiction fan, and it relies on a lot of common movie tropes to sustain it. It did not need to be 1 hr 58 min, that’s for damn sure.
John Hawkes, Jeff Fahey, Robert Forster, Natalie Zea…what could go wrong.
Every aspiring filmmaker should see this movie…as an example of how you fuck up so badly that people will turn it off after being bored out of the minds in the first 15 minutes.
The writer and the director were the same person. This should only happen if you can write or direct. This guy could not.
Ventured to an actual movie theater (my third time during the pandemic, actually, and this was the most crowded yet - five people, including my husband and me) to see Promising Young Woman. We both loved it. I haven’t liked a move so much in years.
King of Staten Island (2020) - semi-autobiographical flic starring Pete Davidson and directed by Judd Apatow.
I liked it very much. It is not your typical Apatow film. Yes, you’ll recognize the type of humor, but this one’s a little darker. The main characters and his friends are not some stripe of suburban caricature as with most of his movies, but slackers in Staten Island. I found it very relatable - every character in it is severely flawed. The story meanders a bit, and the movie overall could be a little shorter, but it’s very heartfelt at places, hilarious at others and downright disturbing as well. Pete Davidson delivers an occasional amazing performance, mixed in with your basic Pete Davidson mugging, but I could see him really growing as an actor. One of my favorite comedians, Bill Burr, also stars as the guy who dates Davidson’s mother and ends up becoming a bit of a mentor to him. The end seemed a little mailed in, but I think that’s because, like I said, it’s just too long and they painted themselves into a corner and let it just fade away.
Gist: Nice, but forgettable movie about a Korean family and their experiences in America.
I was disappointed that this movie was not better. I had heard rave reviews and I believe Bong Joon-ho had even suggested Steven Yuen might be the first Asian American to win the Oscar for acting. I…disagree entirely.
The movie has a few good points. It’s sweet, realistic, and I do like the characters.
However, it suffers from a fatal flaw. It’s kind of boring. I found it to be a bit of a slog to get through and once it was over, I immediately said, “Meh.”
A well made movie, but not a script that really does much for me.
I felt nostalgic last night for an older Apatow film so I watched Knocked Up. I was thinking of 40 Year Old Virgin when I dialed it up, so imagine my confusion for about the first 20 minutes before I caught up.
Rebecca (2020) (Netflix) With Llily James and Armie Hammer in the roles originally played by Joan Fontaine an Laurence Olivier. Pretty looking, good performances, and a nice period piece gothic romance was a welcome change of pace from our usual viewing. (After watching I went to wikipedia to look up differences with the original, which I haven’t seen in 50 years. Hitchcock had to make a minor tweak from the novel to comport with the Hayes Code; the remake restored the novel’s handling,)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Amazon Prime) It’s been a very long time since I read the novel; watching this made me want to go back and read it again. It’s played as a narrative by the title character – an obvious stand-in for Dickens himself – reading his story to an audience, and I think the director played up the eccentricities of the characters, turning it into a broad farce. But I liked it a lot. Also famous for its color-blind casting (eg, Dev Patel in the title role)
If you like movies based on Dickens’ novels, try the 2002 version of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Charlie Hunnam. It’s only two hours long, so the novel is compressed, but I liked it quite a lot. I checked, and it’s not on Netflix or Amazon Prime (except as a paid rental).
耳をすませば (Whisper of the Heart) 1995. One of the few early Ghibli films not directed by the usual directors Miyazaki or Takahata, it is a sweet story about Junior High School students in Tokyo. It famously uses the song Take Me Home, Country Roads which is interesting to listen to in Japanese, where the meaning is not quite the same. The animation is amazing and the story grounded in every day experiences in a way that some of the other Ghibli films are not.
猫の恩返し( The Cat Returns) 2002. A spinoff of Whisper of the Heart using one character from the previous movie. Once again set in Tokyo, but this time with much more fantastic elements added. There is still a grounding in the everyday of the main character, but the main thrust of the story is into the fantastic.
Of the two, I think I prefer the former, but both of course have great animation and attention to small details of mundane elements in every day life.
Supposedly one of the greatest of French films – especially of those made during the Occupation - I had never heard of it. It’s extremely well-made, beautifully lit, elegantly designed, fluidly directed, well-written and acted. I found the characters and story – thwarted ambitions and passions among a generally awful French family and their servants – less compelling, but at least they didn’t get in the way of grade-A filmmaking.
Over and above everything else was the totally awesome opening shot featuring a ginormous miniature of 1887 Paris complete with under-construction Eiffel Tower.
I received two DVDs over the weekend. One was for the Giorgiou Moroder restoration of Metropolis. I already had a DVD of it that I’d dubbed myself, but this was a professional-grade dubbing from a good master. It also included a Moroder-made feature on film restoration (and the restoration of Metropolis in particular).
I also received my copy of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which I’d never seen before. It’s the Cohen/BBC version, with music by Carl Davis. Unbelievable that a film made in 1916 could look this impressive, or be restorable to such a good state.
