I’m watching The Lobster.
Da Fuq? Maybe I’m really having a fever dream. Maybe I caught the Covid and don’t realize it. I dunno.
[The Lobster - Wikipedia](The Lobster - Wikipedia}
Uncle Peckerhead quite a fun little indie horror about a starting Punk band who ends up with a roady who is possessed by a demon, and eats people.
From within A suicide curse devastates a small christian town, revealing dark secrets of the past. Nice and atmospheric, good to see Jared Harris again. I enjoyed this one.
The beach house Another horror about the things from the sea coming for us. One of the more beautiful apocalypses.
Missionary A divorcee has an affair with a mormon missionary, who doesn’t take it well when she returns to her husband, turns out he’s crazy and violent. Enjoyable thriller by the numbers.
On the rocks Sophia Coppola directing Bill Murray again, as he helps his daughter try and work out if her husband is having an affair, him being an expert Lothario himself, knowing all the tricks. Far more fun that I thought it would be, I never cared much for Lost in translation, it just depressed me.
Monsters of Man Functional killer robot movie. Would make a Terminator 0.5 prequel I suppose, just the usual action thing of “PICK UP THE GUN” which nobody ever seems to do in these. If I was in such a thing, I’d have every gun I passed strapped to me.
Peninsula The followup to the wonderful Train to Busan, was at best, alright.
“We need an action vehicle for Wesley Snipes. Doesn’t matter what as long as he gets to mention being black as some point.” That’s how.
Watched the live-action Mulan. It was fine. Lots of fun wuxia action sequences, lots of heavyhanded female empowerment (and while I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it was laid on pretty thick), lots of people getting killed yet somehow not actually bleeding (because Disney). I prefer the cartoon, but then that’s true of all the live-action Disney remakes I’ve seen thus far.
A couple of old movies that I really enjoyed:
The Bad News Bears (1976) - kicking it old school. I was around 11 when the movie came out, so it was right in my wheel house. Favorite line: “A stretcher for his balls?”
The Lords of Flatbush (1974) - Stallone, Winkler, other people. A lot of overacting but a lot of great performances too.
I recently listened to Paul Stanley’s (of KISS) autobiography. As such my current obsession is New York City in the 70’s. I’ve got a nice list of movies that show the city in its gritty prime, but I’m not sure I’ll get to them all.
Got bored yesterday so we put on Love Stinks from 1999. It’s quite a mess. I think they were aiming for Black Comedy, but it’s so full of Rom-Com tropes that it’s hard to tell just what it’s supposed to be.
French Stewart (Third Rock From the Sun) is the male lead. My take is that the producers tried really hard to get Tom Hanks but couldn’t. So the sole direction for Stewart was “Act like Tom Hanks.” Speaking of acting (and directing), there are times when it’s painfully obvious that we’re watching actors just standing there reciting lines. Nobody’s even trying to sell this with any believability whatsoever. The film is narrated by the lead character’s best friend - even the scenes he wasn’t there for and couldn’t possibly know what happened - in one of the most ridiculous framing devices I’ve ever seen. The ending features a twist that you see coming from 5/8ths of a mile away, and then it’s over very abruptly.
And yet the whole thing is… watchable. It’s very much an artifact of the ‘90s, making it archaeologically interesting, and it’s not completely devoid of humor. I even laughed out loud a time or two. Not the worst-ever waste of an hour and a half.
I re-watched School of Rock with Jack Black, and I found it to be enjoyable all over again. I had forgotten how they had integrated both the Opening and Closing credits into the movie at a time when it was not as common as it is today. The only thing that felt a bit strange was seeing Sarah Silverman play a completely serious character.
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Have you listened to Patti Smith’s Just Kids? It is a terrific, National Book Award winning book but, if anything, the audiobook read by Patti is even more enjoyable.
Drivin’ with Patti Smith’s Just Kids on Audiobook CD features a short clip of a reading that is good fun.
In a review of the book Edmund White said:
Like that art opening, this book brings together all the elements that made New York so exciting in the 1970s – the danger and poverty, the artistic seriousness and optimism, the sense that one was still connected to a whole history of great artists in the past. This was a small community that was carefully observed by the media; it also flourished at the moment when New York was becoming the cultural capital of the western world.
Thanks for the recommendation. I read Please Kill Me by Legs McNeill years ago - about the punk scene in the city in the 70’s. I may need to crack that one open again.
We watched Tenet over the weekend. I was underwhelmed. While I was wrong about exactly who it was who saved the Protagonist in the Opera House, I was close. I was right when I guessed who the Protagonist was fighting in the Freeport, and about who the woman Kat saw dive off the boat were, though.
I dunno, maybe it would have been better on a really big screen.
A Perfect Getaway (2009)
Pretty decent film. It’s about a couple on their honeymoon trip hiking along the Hawaiian islands who get tangled up with another couple on the trail when word gets around that another newly wed couple had been murdered on their honeymoon trip earlier nearby with the suspects being a fourth unidentified couple. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful and the acting performances from the four characters who dominate the film is well delivered.
My wife won the coin toss and we watched her favorite Christmas film, The Family Stone. (Diane Keaton, Sarah Jessica Parker, Luke Wilson…) It’s the really really familiar plot: adult children come home for Christmas, hilarity ensues. It’s occasionally funny and charming. The plot includes a dramatic/tragic thread that in hindsight is really not at all necessary.
We watched Hearts Beat Loud, which was a nice little father (Nick Offerman) - daughter movie. He runs a record store that’s about to go out of business, she’s about to go off to college. Both are musically talented, and write a song that shows a lot of promise on Spotify. It may be worth watching just for the songs they write - she has an amazing voice.
Watched Incident in a Ghost Land
Tried a twist early on but bungled it. Standard psychos terrify family film.
It did introduce me to Mylene Farmer for which I am grateful. She was 57 when she made this and she is unbelievably beautiful.
Mean Streets (1973) - first in a series of NYC in the 70’s films I’m trying to take in. I’d never seen this before, though I count myself a Scorsese fan. I liked it. It was interesting seeing Harvey Keitel as the main protagonist/most stable character with Di Nero playing the off the rails Johnny-Boy. Good looking young guys back then. I thought the ending sucked - I was kind of left hanging. We don’t really find out what happens the guys after they get shot. Did Johnny-Boy die? Did Charlie get arrested? What happened to Teresa? After the cops got her out of the wrecked car she just sort of disappeared. How badly was she even hurt?
Eh, I was pretty tired watching it last night. I may have missed a few plot points here or there, but it’s still a great, gritty NYC in the 70’s flick.
Hitchcock again. The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. I’ve only seen about half of it. It was my bedtime, and also, I was so blindingly pissed at Stewart’s character I could barely follow the plot. I’d like to think that once the sedative wore off, I’d kick him in the balls forever, but I have to get past that.
Soul is now on offer on Disney+. It’s perfectly fine. Points for the various interesting characters (including a whimsical turn from Graham Norton) and obviously it’s good to have more black protagonists and elements of black culture in family movies, but plotwise it’s a bit generic Pixar and the overall message of the film is a massive cliche. Worth watching but not one of Pixar’s top efforts (albeit not one of its worst either). Quality soundtrack though.
The surprise of the week: Dolemite is My Name, an Eddie Murphy film from last year, seen on Netflix.
What I thought it was going to be, based on the trailer: a Bowfinger-style goofy comedy about a guy persevering in making a terrible film in the face of a complete lack of talent and experience.
What it actually was: a really funny, surprisingly uplifting, and - startlingly - true story of Rudy Ray Moore and his rise first to underground comedy fame and then blaxploitation stardom (including the making of a… movie of questionable quality… despite a lack of experience and a certain talent deficit). The film clearly has a love for its subject and the supporting characters; also, I spent a little time looking up some of Moore’s oeuvre after seeing the film and discovering that all the things in the film I thought were grossly exaggerated for laughs were disturbingly accurate.
Be warned that the film is extremely sweary and there’s some abrupt nudity as well. On the other hand, you really need to see Wesley Snipes playing waaaaay against type. I didn’t think it was possible to be a “blaxploitation luvvie” but Snipes pulls it off brilliantly. So good.
Now that the live action Mulan is included with Disney+ for no extra fee, I watched it last night and quite enjoyed it as well as being moved by it at points. Being somewhat of a fan of similar films it was great seeing familiar faces from other films though Jet Li was barely recognizable. The scenery was great and the story thought formulaic had some interesting side points that I was not expecting.
I have never watched the animated version of Mulan, other than some bits and pieces, so I don’t know how it compares to that one. It probably is best that way and if I do watch the animated version from start to finish, I will likely simply consider them to be two separate films.
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We were pulling films from my DVD collection. Recently rewatched Fantasia and Fantasia 2000.
Last night, since nothing else we wanted to see was on, I pulled out one that I’ve had for years, but have never seen, despite its being a classic – It Happened One Night, the Frank Capra film starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. I’d seen the hitchhiker scene before and heard about the links to Bugs Bunny, but I’d never seen the actiual film before, It swept the Oscars, is judged by some to be one of the Best Films Ever Made, and is seen as the proto-screwball comedy. I’m not sure it’s any of those. It’s enjoyable, and it’s been copied pretty often, but Greayest? Colbert herself said, after completing filming, that it was the worst film she’d ever made. Gable is supposed to have said, walking in the first day “Let’s get this over with.” Columbia, I was surpriseed to learn, was considered a “Poverty Row” stdio, like Monogram would later be. Capra had to compromise with the stars he got because the bigger studios wouldn’t release the Big Name ones he really wanted. The film is credited with liftiung Columbia from its lowly status, but to the actors at the time, they must have felt they were being punished by being “traded” to Columbia for the film.
Today, while cleaning, I put on the Peter Jackson extended cut version of King Kong. I know this film has caught a lot of flak for being too long or too complicated, but I love it as it is, even (or especially) at full length. And I say this as someone who grew up on the 1933 classic, imbibed it continually. When the 1976 version came out, I wrote a scathing review of it for our paper (which it fully deserved). Most films I stand a bit off to the side of the intended audience, and I can see what buttons the director was trying to push, knowing that they weren’t directed at me. But I am dead center target audience for this film.
I woke up in the middle of the night after Christmas and couldn’t get back to sleep. TCM was just starting Two For The Road, so I figured I’d watch it until I fell asleep. I watched the whole movie. For me, it holds up just fine, even though it is one of the most Sixties movies to come out of the 1960s. It helps that Audrey Hepburn is at peak Hepburn. One of the most beautiful actresses ever.