Last Movie Watched Thread

Midnight Cowboy is the “Hey, I’m walkin’ here” movie.  Taxi Driver is the "Are you talkin' to me?" movie.   They would make a great double feature.

I guess last night was 70's night. We watched Rocky (1976)

It largely held up. I was worried the courtship between Adrian and Rocky would get uncomfortable because of how uninterested she seemed at first. But his big move was a tentative kiss on the cheek and she kind of took over from there.

The training montage and fight were both a lot more sparse and shorter than I recalled. I guess my memories of all the ones that followed have merged together. My wife had forgotten that Rocky lost.

We watched a few featurettes about the film as well. It had a budget of $960,000 and grossed  $225 million. The director talked about how they only used natural light for most of the outdoor scenes shot on location in Philadelphia. When they shot the car scenes a cameraman was strapped to the hood and the actor was actually driving the car.

The director also points out the production manager Lloyd Kaufman in some of the photos and a small cameo. You all should know Kaufman as the head of Troma Entertainment, home of the Toxic Avenger.

Yup, and her ex-husband is the composer David Shire, who did scores for Saturday Night Fever, Taking of Pelham 123, The Conversation, Zodiac, bunches else.

Is it about that bad Interpol song?

Beverly Hills Ninja (1997). Chris Farley's final non-posthumous film and goddamn is it not a swan song to go out on. His tenure at SNL famously devolved into "fat guy falls down," so why not try that for a whole movie? seems to be the premise behind the film (although according to a few seconds of internet research I did before writing this review it was conceived and written as a vehicle for Dana Carvey). I didn't go in expecting to love it, but I thought it would have at least a few redeeming qualities, but it really didn't--in ninety minutes there are maybe three "just okay" jokes but nothing laugh out loud funny or even particularly interesting. It's exactly what you expect--a lot of Chris Farley accidentally hurting himself, accidentally hurting people he isn't trying to hurt, and accidentally destroying property. Nothing about anything that happens in the film isn't incredibly predictable, from the way Farley out of nowhere is highly competent at the crucial save the girl/stop the bad guy moment to the film's soundtrack ("Kung Fu Fighting" and "Turning Japanese" are both heard, because not even the music choices could be imaginative). Chris Farley apparently lobbied hard to get his old friend Chris Rock a supporting role as his naive protege, in a role that doesn't really add anything to the plot (not that this was a film whose plot was at all its central focus) or offer anything particularly funny either (when he was introduced I was expecting him to fill the role as the "street smarts" guy befitting a Chris Rock supporting character, which I guess could have resulted in some good and funny dialogue scenes between the two, but the movie couldn't even do that right and Rock's character was barely given any personality at all). It was really just Chris Farley who was an obese ninja for some reason despite having been trained and raised by top-skilled ninjas from birth (don't question it, I guess).

According to his agent, Farley's reaction to seeing the finished film was to break down in tears at the terrible product he'd produced, and he vowed that he would pick much better projects from then out. Of course we only know his failure to improve his personal life prevented him from being able to salvage his professional one, so we're left with this, a terrible action comedy. It might have worked as a PG-rated film aimed at a younger audience if some of the brief profanities had been cut (a running joke is Farley's unintentional culture shock of not realizing "asshole" is not a term of endearment) and the pointless strip club scene cut or toned down. Instead we got dumb slapstick coasting on a reliance that audiences would love seeing Chris Farley playing Chris Farley and Chris Rock not playing Chris Rock.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)

Some filmmakers resurrected a French Bond-ripoff franchise as parody. I loved it--I've adored this sort of guileless stupidity (think Top Secret or Hot Shots) since I was a kid and this is the best example of that kind of parody I've likely seen in 20+ years.

I haven't seen the sequel, Lost in Rio, but I've heard it's nowhere near as good. Apparently, though, there's a third film out later this year.

If anything I have more affection for the The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. 

Is that the one with the gorilla?

Ghostbusters 2 is better than Ghostbusters 1 there I fuckin' said it.

Alien Cubed (1992) - Alien Cubed...this time it’s a prison! Charleses Dutton and Dance are all up in this mug. A bunch of bald sooty British guys call each other “wanker” and bellow “fuck” a lot. Also what was going on with sci-fi horror movies in the early 90s that so many of them ended with people leaping into vats of molten metal heroically?

Tampopo is one of my all-time favorite movies but the scene that bothers me the most is the one involving that poor turtle.

That turtle scene is pretty horrifying, and really unnecessary for the rest of the movie.  When we watched Tampopo as part of an Asian movie night festival it traumatized one of my friends (who raises turtles, snakes and the like) so much that it pretty much ruined the rest of the night for everyone.

One of the big strikes against Alien Cubed when it was originally released - and which led to a log of negative comment which I remember being a teenage fan at the time - was that it had functionally the same ending as Terminator 2. There was a lot of jabber which amounted to "yeah, maybe the studio did help fuck up your movie but that ending is still stolen". With the benefit of hindsight Ripley's death is a lot easier to appreciate but at the time if was definitely seen as being a derivative ending in a movie less good than the one it was nicking from. Which, to be fayyyaaahhh, it is.

Home Alone (1990)

Top flick. Kids liked it.

Vibes (1988)

Trading on recent successes of Ghostbusters and Indiana Romancing the Lost Temple, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel pull a Laverne and Shirley in Andean Ecuador. This tight-but-loose, 100-minute Action-Comedy has: Cyndi Lauper's first screen role (which she totally smashes out of the park); Hard-muggin' Jeff Goldblum (who replaced a disdainful Dan Aykroyd) and squint-winking Peter Falk; incredible Andean scenery; a pack llama; incredibly-maned Julian Sands; and some zingers that make you remember short is sweet.

Panned by Ebert and NYT at its release, this flick is adequately refreshing in the current era. Recommended.