I watched L.A. Story, the Steve Martin movie from 1991. I remember it as a favorite of mine from my youth, but it had been too expensive to digitally rent until recently.
I like Martin’s earlier career as a stand-up and SNL performer more than most of his movies, which can be all over the map. From the very broad (The Jerk) to the quite peculiar (Pennies From Heaven) to saccharine (take your pick of his later family movies—hey, gotta fund that art-collecting jones somehow) to the quite excellent ensemble comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
L.A. Story is in the middle of that—quirky, dated (perhaps self-consciously so, even in its time), with several surreal bits (Martin and his girlfriend in a car engaging in casual chit-chat while they are in a freeway gun battle, Patrick Stewart as a fascistic maitre’d, etc). Featuring Sarah Jessica Parker in an early movie role, making the best of what might have been a one-note side character. A fun soundtrack juxtaposing tasteful New Age music with hot jazz a la Django Reinhardt.
Not a deathless cult classic, but worth a watch if you like Steve Martin or quirkiness (but I repeat myself).
I just watched The Perfect Neighbor on Netflix. It’s a documentary made almost entirely from pieced together police body cams as well as a some surveillance cameras, phones etc, but mostly body cams. It follows the police as they deal with complaint after complaint after complaint regarding one person, either her complaining about neighborhood kids or their parents complaining about her.
I watched Guy Ritchie’s Fountain Of Youth last night. It’s not very good. John Krasinski is just annoying. Domnhall Gleeson, who is Irish, puts on an entirely different Irish accent to his natural one. Natalie Portman is dragged along on the adventure with no clear motivation to do so. The villains likewise are all over the place on who they are and why they are villains.
Watched Black KKKlansman for the second time. A Spike Lee joint. The based on a true story about a black police officer who infiltrates the KKK.
I feel like this movie is almost great, but doesn’t quite get there. I was not alone in this feeling. The four of us were trying to figure out the issue.
Possible factors:
Tonally all over the place. Parts of it feel like satire, other parts are really heavy and intense. For example, they hired a comedian to play David Duke, which leans to satire, but there are also incredibly graphic accounts of real violence.
The racists feel more like caricatures of racists than actual racists, which would work in a satire, but again, wild swings in tone make it hard to pin down.
One could argue that this movie believes policing can be changed from within. It’s left unresolved but it’s a surprising take from a movie that seems deeply sympathetic to the Black Power movement.
I was the only one with this take, but I think it’s too long.
The coda contains brutal footage of Charlottesville, again, tonal whiplash.
That being said, it is a good movie. It is worth watching. Adam Driver elevates anything he’s in and this was no exception.
If anyone knows more about the context of this film and what the director was thinking, I’d be interested in it.
ETA: Oh, another thing about the movie. The constant machine gun battery of racial and homophobic slurs is pretty hard to stomach, to the point of being kind of distracting from the actual content.
Shame, this has a lot of talent behind it and the effort is there, but this movie is so sweet, the worms in its stool would have type 2 diabetes. This works against it.
Two people meet in magical, unusual circumstances. They end up falling in love, but have both been hurt before.
I was drawn to this movie because it is Joe Hisaishi’s first live-action American movie. He is the composer and honestly, it mostly is forgettable.
A big attempt at a sweet and imaginative movie, but it’s mostly boring and too sappy.
Driver was one of the problems I had with the movie - because his performance was so much better than Washington’s, and his character was more compelling that that of the movie’s main protagonist. Face it: I’d rather watch a movie about a guy risking his life to go undercover with the Klan, than about a guy making prank calls.
I really liked it. I was worried about it being piecemealed/disjointed and either difficult to follow or, at the very least, have large gaps in the narrative, especially without a narrator, but that wasn’t the case at all.
One thing that surprised me is that, with all the people involved, no one ever got a doorbell/surveillance camera. Or, if they did, the footage never ended up in the movie. There’s a lot of he said/she said stuff and, as a viewer, it puts you in a similar position as the cops, trying to figure out what really happened. But, WRT to the people in the actual situation, if either side could have shown the police a video that proves their version of events, I think this entire thing would have ended before anyone was shot.
Another thing, considering the director and the victim knew each other (victim is best friend of director’s sister-in-law), it’s not at all one sided. Given their prior relationship, you wouldn’t fault her for doing this from the POV of a sympathetic victim, but it didn’t feel that way at all. I’m glad I didn’t know that fact going in or I think I would’ve assumed that bias was there.
And why didn’t either side ever get a restraining order?
Unrelated, spoiler-adjacent, and, if this were a current event it would belong in the police interactions thread:
When the cop suggested the lady write an apology letter to the kids, what kept going threw my head was “lady, you need a lawyer, stop talking” and “you asshole cop, you’re trying to trick her into ‘voluntarily’ writing a confession”. Please understand, I’m not defending her, I just didn’t like what those cops were doing.
I thought one of the scenes right before the incident was from a door camera on Ajike’s porch. You see her walk off to Susan’s house and then the son yelling for help.
I just watched this tonight and damn that was tough. Really excellent film. Susan is a total sociopath.
I believe you’re right. I didn’t really count that one because, IIRC, there was a truck parked in front of it and you couldn’t really see anything. Now that I think about it…can we hear her knocking or yelling before the shot?
Also, I don’t think the location of the iPad was ever resolved, was it? Maybe the kid had it back by the time the police were there but I was really hoping to see someone pull up Find My iPad to show it was in Susan’s house.
I re-watched The Warriors yesterday for probably the 50th time. No exaggeration. It’s my favorite movie since I’m 14 when I saw it at the theater. I wanted to go see The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh at the other theater but my friends talked me into seeing The Warriors instead. Good friends. I went back and saw it at the movies twice more. When it came on HBO I marked the little booklet we used to get and I’d wake up at 3:00am to watch it on school night. I had the soundtrack album, the director’s cut DVD, the video game, I’ve seen all the deleted scenes, I could literally - and I do - recite every line in the move right along with the actors.
The Perfect Neighbor was gripping. Amazing that something as outstanding as the Florida Public Records Law can be on the same books as a travesty like the Stand Your Ground law. The police come off a lot better in this than most docs of this sort and I suspect it is because their every move is documented and publicly available.
Funnily enough, the current season of Only Murders in the Building has a character named Miller who works at the Arconia and is played by David Patrick Kelly, AKA Luther (“Warriors … come out to PLAAAYYY”) from that film.
Black Phone 2
I was press-ganged into taking my granddaughter and three friend to this the past Sunday. It’s rated “R” but it’s wimpy. Perhaps because of gore though there’s not much of that. No sex, one kiss, Gwen has a couple of f-bombs in an appropriate situation (non-gratuitous swearing). A few jump scares but not much to my old jaded mind. It’s pointed at teenagers - not a geezer like me.
IMDB blurb -As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, his sister begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.
You probably needed to see the original Black Phone. There’s a bunch of flashbacks both to that and to tell the background to this movie. A bunch of shakey cam that got excessive to me.
Grabber (the bad guy - Ethan Hawke) was killed in the original. The mechanism to drag him back is through Gwen (the young sister) dreaming. She becomes a separate body and Grabber threatens her in this displaced form. Others cannot see Grabber but he/it can throw things and people around in the present. The other kids struggle to wake Gwen’s body to stop the goings-on.
Refreshing that the film’s music was relevant to the mood, not some mashed together pop songs. Also no product placement crap. Acting was fine though one character appeared during the movie from nowhere (I could have been napping).
If your teens want to see it, fine. Not that scary and not for my elder cohort.
Had a long plane flight, watched a couple of films:
The Amateur - a low-key action flick. Given that the best action moment (featuring a swimming pool) is in the trailer, don’t expect much edge-of-your-seat action here. There are some thoughtful moments here and there but on the whole there’s not enough action for an action film, not enough intrigue for a spy thriller, and not enough plot twists for, well, anything. I’ll give it credit for not being completely predictable, but it rates at “not great but fine”.
Ballerina - I’m not really a big John Wick fan but there really is a point where you start to wonder about the demographics in this world, where virtually everyone is an assassin and the birth rate must be negative given the endless stream of corpses throughout. It’s a killfest - a well-done one if you like that sort of thing but yeah. Gore-tastic.
Burn After Reading - why have I not watched this before? This is the Coen Brothers in maximum farce mode. It’s just weird, sad, hilarious madness.
Three since I last posted. All are re-watches of movies I haven’t seen in many years, and all are recommended with a moderate degree of enthusiasm.
They Live. John Carpenter’s classic science fiction movie about a drifter who breezes into town and discovers that aliens have taken over Earth via subliminal messaging. With, of course, the epic back-alley fistfight and Roddy Piper delivering, in a different scene, the infamous line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
Total Recall. Arnold in an action-packed movie based on a Philp K. Dick story about, I guess, the relationship between memory and reality (the nature of reality and our perception of it being a relentlessly recurring theme in Dick’s body of work). Good stuff. With, of course, the prostitute with three boobies.
Back to the Future. This choice was prompted by the recent buzz over the movie’s fortieth anniversary. I would guess it’s my most enthusiastic recommendation of the three. All the elements blend together elegantly, with great performances from the cast all the way around. As a whole, very entertaining.
On your recommendation, I watched it and really liked it, too. I was also impressed with how coherent it was with it being almost entirely police camera footage. Just an overall bad situation. Damn. Kids make noise. It’s pretty well known. Move into a neighborhood with kids and outside of school hours, you’re gonna hear noise.
I love this movie! It’s one of those that if I happen on it when channel surfing I have to stop and watch. My older sister watched it first and watched it with me when I was at her house. She was waiting for me to react to “that scene.” So, of course, I had to make my younger sister watch it while I waited for her reaction to “that scene.” Tuckman Marsh! J. K. Simmons was letter-perfect.
