Last Movie Watched Thread

Here is a slopheap of movies I watched over the past couple of weeks.

Blind Woman's Curse (1970) - I wished I liked this more than I did. It had a lot of thematic stuff that I’m into and a pretty stellar cast but for whatever reason it never really clicked for me. I think the big problem is that it’s trying to be two different movies at the same time but never really succeeds in making it work so for like half the movie you’ve got various gangs beefing over turf (which seems to consist primarily of a carnival and a noodle restaurant) and then the other half is a weird supernatural thriller with ill omens, murderous hunchbacks and a side show akin to the one in that fucked up Midori cartoon I saw that one time. Either one of these would be a fine-ass movie but they just do not work together at all but the thing that bums me out more than any of that is the fact that Meiko Kaji is theoretically the star of this but spends way too much of the movie just sort of hanging out while everyone else does interesting shit. She has a decent fight at the end but again is kind of secondary for a lot of it. At the end of the day all this really made me want to do was rewatch Lady Snowblood.

Skyscraper (2018) - While the dumb action part of this movie was fine dumb-ass action I am amazed by the fact the the Rock had more romantic chemistry with an exploding skyscraper in this movie than he did with Neve Campbell, a woman who you could pair with pretty much any other man or woman in Hollywood as a cinematic love interest and have it be believable.

Ivy + Bean: The Ghost That Had To Go (2022) - I watched this with my kid who has read all the Ivy + Bean books. She dug it. I thought it was fine children's fare. The kids they got to act in it are pretty good but unless you're a small child or watching it with a small child or maybe a young adult that read these books as a kid there's not really anything here worth bothering with.

Ivy + Bean: Doomed To Dance (2022) - In the third (and currently final) Ivy and Bean movie Ivy and Bean start taking ballet because they are of the mind the ballet involves "kicking peoples' heads off" but quickly find out that it does not and also that they are terrible at what ballet actually is. Of all the Ivy + Bean movies I think this one was probably the funniest. The other two movies both had their humorous moments but this one had multiple scenes that caused me to crack up which is a pretty impressive feat for a movie that is aimed at small children.

Ring of Fire (1991) - Finally a movie that dared to ask the question, “What if Romeo and Juliet was about a Chinese guy that knew kung fu falling in love with a girl from a rival American gang in California!” Overall I thought this was okay. Both Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Maria Ford are likable enough as the star-crossed lovers and the fights are perfectly serviceable early 90s direct to video American martial arts flick fare but I have a pretty big problem with this movie namely the fact that pretty much all the action happens in the last 20 minutes or so. Like there’s some kickboxing tournament to start and then it’s basically just a romantic melodrama until the last 20 minutes when guys start talking about doing a street fight “the old Thai way” with fists covered in broken glass and racism gets solved via roundhouse kicks. I’m honestly kind of confused who this was supposed to be geared too. Like people who are stoked about a movie featuring the World Kickboxing Federation’s Welterweight Champion (or whatever title the main villain dude was listed as having in the end credits) are going to be bored that most of the movie’s runtime is just a straightforward romance movie and people who want a love story are going to be put off by the fact that everything gets resolved with underground pitfighting.

Hellmaster (1992) - There are some cool visuals in this and decently creepy vibes at times but the editing is kind of a mess and they do a piss poor job of explaining who most of the characters are or why we should give a fuck about them but if you want a movie where a college jock randomly walks around with a bullwhip for some reason and John Saxon is a leather trench coat wearin' cult leader with weird little freak minions this is a movie that has both of those things.

The Big Bird Cage (1972) - It’s kind of weird how this movie, with its lighter tone and attempts at humor, ended up feeling nastier than its more serious and straightforward sister film, The Big Doll House. I don’t know if it was just the tonal whiplash between the stuff that was clearly supposed to be funny and the acts of abject cruelty or the fact that 90% of the “humor” boiled down to “Gay men exist lol…” (or some combination of the two) but this was kind of rough at times. It also didn’t help that Pam Grier was barely in it. I mean the other actresses were fine but none of them are Pam Grier so there was a dip in the level of awesomeness whenever she wasn’t on screen.

The Brain Eaters (1958) - I love a pop culture thing about brain fuckler worms. Baldur's Gate III! That one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation! And now this 1950s b-movie, The Brain Eaters! It's all good shit! Here you also have Leonard Nimoy (or Nemoy as he's credited) as a brain fuckled subterranean wizard, scientists smoking pipes, fist fights that are entirely double axe handle based and a mess of characters that are constantly referred to by their full-ass names. While this wasn't great cinema by any stretch of the imagination it was a fairly entertaining 50s b-movie which is more than I hoped for going into it.

Space Truckers 1996
How had I never seen this before? A gloriously weird mashup of Star Wars and Mad Max by way of Smokey and the Bandit. I watched the first ten minutes and they had me at "Dennis Hopper is a space semi driver hauling genetically engineered square pigs". Steven Dorff is his unwilling partner, and Debi Mazar is the space truckstop waitress they both like.
Charles Dance, Norm from Cheers, Wez with a ponytail, and a host of 90's character actors chew up the scenery.
While it's far from masterpiece, it's pretty entertaining. The special effects are mostly really good, and when they aren't, they are gleefully cheesy. The killer robot super soldiers are especially well done.
it's great that that the characters mostly talk and act like actual people with believable (under the situation) motivations, but my favorite thing about it is that Dennis Hopper gets to be he good guy. That didn't happen nearly often enough.
 

I watched this over the weekend to kick off my annual Summer of Noirs. It didn't 100% work for me--I think it's the Hitchcock elements that you identified, whose filmography I struggle with and often find simplistic and uninvolving. Still, plenty to admire here. Nice to see Toronto's own Christopher Plummer get a meaty role during a low period in his career (same year as Starcrash).

Songs of Earth—Director Margareth Olin, feeling her parents’ mortality approaching, went back to her home fjord to record to record her parents, record some family/community history from them, and take lots of gorgeous nature photography of the fjords, over the course odf six seasons (winter-spring-summer-fall-winter-spring). There is a lot of beautiful footage, but the thing is if there’s one big shape after another big shape on flat screen nonstop you lose sense of scale. There’s no real sense of sequence or rhythm apart form seasons, so you don’t actual feel any size or majesty, it’s one image, another image, another imgage… It’s hard not to like her dad but ultimately his history and the history of the fjord aren’t too compellingly presented, either. Again, there’s no structure or sequence, it’s just stuff that’s said, so it’s just kind of another thing that doesn’t have much effect.

It's almost a joke how unrelated the poster is to the actual movie. There is no definition of "on the take" that fits Veronica Lake in this movie and, although she's sexy, she does not dominate the plot the way she rules the poster.

But I sympathize, because selling this movie must have been hard. Its plot is chaotic, constantly rising to false climaxes and then rebooting itself like a 1940s Groundhog Day. Its tone is broad comedy, but there's also a violent death and police brutality and an astonishing moment of real emotional power in a Black church. Preston Sturges was always stuffing a little too much into his movies, trying to add one subplot too many, or wringing out all your emotions on the way to the happy ending. In that way, Sullivan's Travels isn't just weird - it's kind of disorienting, postmodern. The Coen Brothers paid very famous tribute to this movie, which is appropriate, because this is kind of a pure Coen Brothers movie. The only way it could get more Coeny is if someone with a funny regional accent showed up to give bowling advice.

Now that that general comment is out of the way...godDAMN does this movie work. It is not just mind-boggling, it's mind-bogglingly great. Sturges tries everything and everything works. The meta beginning is an incredible novelty, the comedy is still laugh-out-loud funny now, there's a pretty great chase scene, McCrea and Lake are practically smoldering with lust, and so many of the satirical targets are still worthy of targeting today. Wealthy liberal do-gooder patronizing, check. The casting couch, check. Incompetent police, check. Reality TV, somehow check even though it didn't exist. There's a line about Pittsburgh that's hard to forget once you've heard it, an all-time great visual joke (I laughed so hard at the reveal of the bus following Sullivan), some good ol' sound-effects-replacing-curse-words. Amazing blend of high and low comedy. Lake is on fire the whole time, and uhhh real hot when disguised as a boy. Joel McCrea, in my opinion the least charismatic leading man in Hollywood history*, transcends himself here, but I still watched him thinking about how late 80s Harrison Ford would have absolutely killed it.

Three demerits, maybe. The famous "poverty montage" I could do without because montage. The very ending, with the flashback, is too on-the-nose sentimental, and creates a real ambiguity - this is a movie so opposed to sending a message that it...sends a message. And there's an early bit where an uncredited Black extra gets repeatedly humiliated and slammed into various cabinets. It works really well as pure slapstick, but the subtext is queasy for sure. Until you reach the near-ending, where the tables are turned and a Black church is about to welcome the white prisoners from the nearby prison camp into their congregation for movie night. The preacher - an authoritative, amazingly deep-voiced, scene-stealing, uncredited (ugh) Jess Lee Brooks - reminds his flock to treat the all-white prisoners with dignity because no matter how low they've fallen, they're still people too. That Black people were capable of the racial compassion that white people couldn't ever manage is an amazing message for a 1941-made movie to be sending. And then Sturges, who is not a visual director at all, comes up with the most amazing visual of his career. The camera is placed low down to the ground in the center of the aisle so that we watch the legs of the prisoners shuffling in...then we see the guards and their long, scary rifles...and then, as the rifles move to the side, we see Brooks, looking freaking powerful, leading his congregation in the final bars of "Go Down, Moses." Chills.

But all in all, the amazing thing about this movie is that you can only love two or three of the things Sturges is trying to do, and still be blown away.

*nominations please!


It was wild to look up the Ebert review and see just how low Plummer was at the time - Ebert praises him and says it's surprising because Plummer is usually boring! Imagine!

Anaria is a beautiful, heartbreaking movie. I have actually watched it twice over the last few years and I found the ending to be truly haunting. 

BERGMAN...IN...SPACE!

Yeah, I liked Aniara a lot. Sobering look at just how tied psychologically and spiritually we are to our planet and how quickly things would go to shit for a society adrift in the vacuum.

I remember Theodore Bikel from Frank Zappa's 200 Motels.

Victor Mature
I've seen him play lead in Kiss of Death and I Wake Up Screaming and will get around to Violent Saturday soon. I know noir characters often aren't supposed to be sympathetic but there are plenty of actors who can be compelling bastards. In those movies, Mature just comes off as a smarmy piece of shit or a whiny loser. 

Inside-Out 2 - Saw this with the family last night. Oh man, it's it spot-on with a lot of the emotions we're dealing with for BGirl right now. MrsB couldn't stop laughing early on. It was really sweet though, and funny. Maya Hawke was great as anxiety, and SO accurate to how that feels. 

Black sisters getting revenge on fools, the double feature.


Sugar Hill (1974)

Part of the AIP wave of horror Blaxploitation after Blacula and Black Frankenstein. Quite well made if not very authentically Black in feel, with a surprisingly wack theme song by The Originals. Still, Diana "Sugar" Hill gets some good-ass kills in retaliation for her man being stomped to death by the local crime syndicate, via a voodoo zombie army. The performance of Don Pedro Colley (who also co-wrote) as Baron Samedi is alone worth the price of admission. This is the one director credit of Paul Maslansky, who has a fairly remarkable stamp on film history, giving us everything from the Police Academy franchise (originated the concept and produced the bulk of them) to producing things like Death Line, Race with the Devil, and Return to Oz.


Coffy (1973)

A blind spot for me and oh so good. The goddess that is Pam Grier gives an astonishingly nuanced performance balancing badassery and gutting vulnerability. Also excellent is Booker Bradshaw as the embodiment of the Black community's uncomfortable relationship with upward mobility.

chalkdevil 😈 I think Hit Man was in part Powell’s baby, so it might be in part a case of him having enough clout to get things done too. I enjoyed it a lot, it doesn’t hold up to too much scrutiny at all and that’s fine, and I agree that as good as Powell’s acting was his looks worked against him. You need a quirky guy who you recognize is actually quite attractive if he presents himself a bit differently, a 70s casting move rather than Powell’s 90s teen comedy hero look.

I can see where Miller was coming from with Max—he’s disconnected, only concerned with his own survival, not really interested in any kind of larger moral duty to the world, and Fury Road’s about him getting past all of that. I completely agree it wasn’t necessary and was distracting, though, and made the world of Mad Max, which seemed to get bigger even if we were largely recvisiting places we’d already been, smaller.

I’ve read it countless times since I was very young;I like the Winona Ryder version, but I’m not super attached to it, and I had issues this version. I agree that Pugh as a 12-year-old was idiotic, but otherwise she was fine, and most of the casting was good as well (although Odenkirk as a Civi War era dude was pretty jarring ymmv)(well Laura Dern as Marmee was jarring as well but because in my head she’s not old enough to have four girls of any age). And  I was impressed with  Chalamet - he was honestly a great Laurie.

However, between deciding Amy was in love with Laurie all her life, and making Bhaer a pretty boy basically Jo’s age, I must assume that Greta Gerwig read a different book than I did. I’ve never had any problem with Jo not ending up with Laurie; they would have been a complete disaster as a married couple and would have ended up utterly miserable. No matter how good Laurie’s intentions, he’d end up expecting her to be a Laurence/society wife, and that is absolutely not a role Jo could fill, or would want to fill. 

Bhaer was exactly what Jo needed; someone laid back, older enough to have realized societal expectations aren’t that important, who has no societal position to uphold, and very little concern about her checking all the boxes on the Standard Wife list (and in the book he’s also very onboard the Transcendentalism/New England piety train)(well it’s more obvious in Little Men tbh). 

My iPad is about to die so tune in next time when I go on a tear about People Who Are Mad Eowyn Gave Up War.

They digitally altered the young actor's face to look like Taylor-Joy.