The last few movies I watched in an order representative of what I generally thought of them.
I shall not be stopped.
24. Being the perfect wife in a man’s world is a dystopian nightmare. Many talented people gathered together around a premise that was ripe for horror and satire and completely biffed it with this truly awful attempt at comedy called The Stepford Wives (2004). It pained me so much because there was so much potential!
23. The Alligator People (1959) is exactly as classy as it sounds. Cheesy science-less B-movie nonsense with flat-lighting, bad accents, and a depressingly bloated Lon Chaney, Jr. Points for having actual alligators on set and for the fun fake swamp scenery.
22. Sometimes you want something trashy and painfully early 2000s, and Queen of the Damned (2002) has you covered. Stuart Townsend stars as Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat, and boy oh boy could you have not asked for a more early 2000s pretty boy vampire guy tragically devoid of charisma. Like Stepford Wives, this thing had potential. A cursed vampire wakes up after 100 years and becomes a rock-star, and if the movie were actually about that, it could have been great. The rest is boring characters skulking around and glamoring everyone until the first vampire (played by the late Aaliyah) gets woken up and causes some mischief. It’s a very Korn and Linkin Park kind of a soundtrack.
21. Listen, David Lean is a filmmaking legend and I love me a light ghost comedy, but Blithe Spirit (1945) is not a particularly memorable one. Rex Harrison stars as an exceedingly English writer who hosts a séance as a lark and accidentally conjures his previous dead wife (Kay Hammond). This obviously leads to some complications with his current wife (Constance Cummings). It’s a wacky premise that’s just a little too stuffy and dry to do anything interesting with it. I want a whole movie about the quirky, old medium played by Margaret Rutherford.
20. A soldier assumes the identity of a dead waiter in order to kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (played by Erich von Stroheim). A few tiers beneath Morocco, and several football fields behind Casablanca, Five Graves to Cairo (1943) is a WWII spy thriller that I may remember for its haunting beginning (a tank, most of its passengers dead, careening aimlessly through the sand dunes) and for being one of those dramas having been made during the war.
19. Friday Foster (1975) is no Coffy. Based on a comic strip about a freelance photojournalist who chases the scoop, this murder investigation flick is pretty forgettable apart from its cast (Pam Grier, Yaphet Kotto, Thalmus Rasulala, Carl Weathers). It desperately needed more Eatha Kitt. She’s a joy to watch.
18. Please, do not ask me to recount the plot of Demonia (1990). The imdb summary says: “A Canadian archaeological team in Sicily accidentally unleashes vengeful ghosts of five demonic nuns who were murdered 500 years earlier, and the ghosts now set out to kill the group and townspeople alike.” And yeah, that sounds about right.
17. I Like Bats (1986) is an oddball Polish vampire comedy that bears the unique distinction of being the only depiction I’ve encountered wherein vampirism is a metaphor for being unwed. It’s a weird one, and I wished the themes were a bit more consistent or it explained more. Hard to recommend, but interesting for what it is. Also, what is with the whistling score?
16. Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, and Pam Grier star in Original Gangstas (1996). The new gangs are not like the old gangs. They’re all bravado and displays of cruelty. They have no honor or respect and exhibit no restraint. The only ones that can stop them and make the streets safe again are the old timers who may have started the whole cycle of violence way back when.
15. Italian genre movies between the 1960s and the 1990s were something else, weren’t they? Boldly stylish and absolutely inscrutable. Footprints (1975) [aka Footprints on the Moon, aka Primal Impulse, aka Le Orme] concerns a Portuguese translator (Florinda Bolkan) living in Italy following a freak-out causing her to wake up seemingly missing several days. She follows a series of clues to a mysterious but familiar hotel on the island of Garma. Also the film keeps cutting back to black-and-white footage of Klaus Kinski performing an experiment where he leaves an astronaut on the moon to watch him die. It’s a standard weirdo Italian fuzzy dream logic thriller that’s pretty slow-going, but boasts some nice cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, a wild finale, and a pleasant but brief appearance by Lila Kedrova.
14. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. stars as a sort of Zorro of the high seas in The Black Pirate (1926). It’s got the biggest pirate ships you’ve ever seen and some classic silent swashbuckling action. It also is a very early example of two-tone Technicolor.
13. Rhys Darby is so breathlessly funny and likeable that he elevates the Canadian time travel comedy, Relax, I’m from the Future (2022), to heights that might have bee unattainable otherwise. It’s a clever little sci-fi adventure about an incompetent time traveler that taps into a lot of current day anxieties. Weirdly, the stuff that doesn’t work for me here is what was taken from the original 2013 short (a depressed cartoonist gets his attempted suicide interrupted by a fan from the future). Which is a shame, because the rest of it is pretty cool. Gabrielle Graham also gives a great performance as Darby’s present-day confidante.
12. I dig Sparks. Most folks who have chanced upon them, also do. Edgar Wright made a documentary about them. It’s called The Sparks Brothers (2021). They are a weird group. It dives into the band’s evolution from 1966 until now. And if you don’t leave without a massive crush on Ron Mael, I don’t know what to do with you.
11. Julie Andrews really is sensational. I grew up watching Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but was never exposed to Victor/Victoria (1982). I was also a big Pink Panther fan, but this might be my favorite Blake Edwards movie I’ve seen. Andrews plays Victoria, a destitute soprano in 1934 Paris. She gets taken under the wing of an aging gay performer (played wonderfully by the Music Man himself, Robert Preston) who is also down on his luck. He proposes that, in order to get work as a novelty act, she pretend to be a gay man whose schtick is impersonating a woman singer. The gender bending scheme comes to fruition and soon hits a snag when a Chicago gangster (James Garner) is suspicious of the act’s realism based solely on his attraction to her. It’s a pretty funny musical, quite progressive for the time, and I love the chemistry and friendship between Andrews and Preston. It’s a movie to just make you feel good.
10. For a more authentic French musical, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is a romance in three parts starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. Two young lovers, a poor mechanic and an umbrella shopkeeper, fall in love but when the girl is drafted to fight in the Algerian War, the girl has to decide how she will go on. Sumptuous colors paint the streets and interiors with such vibrance, that that alone should make it worth the viewing. It’s very French.
9. What an illustrious career arc Nicolas Cage has had. From Leaving Las Vegas to Con Air and Adaptation to Mandy, he’s carved out a uniquely unhinged niche for himself. Wild at Heart, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, National Treasure, Face/Off, The Rock. Come on. The guy’s unstoppable. Vampire’s Kiss (1988) is the one all the memes are from. In it, he plays a New York yuppie literary agent who, after binging cocaine and alcohol and chasing money and women for so long, starts to believe he is becoming a vampire. The thing I think people making fun of this movie don’t get is that it is a comedy. It’s a black comedy about a man going insane and abusing the people around him, but it is a comedy. And it rules.
8. Following a peculiar assassination inside the Seattle Space Needle, an American journalist (Warren Beatty) gets caught up in a twisted web of political intrigue and conspiracy in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974). One thing I really liked about this movie is the big, imposing spaces and the ever-present sense that our protagonist is being watched…also that the nefarious machinations pulling the strings in the periphery are always occluded in total ambiguity.
7. Olivier Assayas gets meta in Irma Vep (1996). Framed as a story about the troubled production of a remake of a silent French pulp serial by Louis Feuillade, it’s a movie about making movies, but it really delves into the precarious state of contemporary French cinema in the 90s. Plus Maggie Cheung is fun playing herself.
6. Michelangelo Antonioni utilizes stark industrial factories, empty interiors devoid of warmth, and desolate landscapes ensconced in smoke and fog to depict the state of extreme mental isolation of a woman (played by Monica Vitti) in Red Desert (1964). It’s a coldly beautiful and haunting film that requires an appreciation for its use of space and architecture as the driving force behind much of the emotion.
5. What if The Avengers were just a ragtag troupe of Italian sideshow performers caught up in the chaos of World War II, and instead of fighting some apocalyptic space laser they were just trying to stop a train? Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out (2021) might be a skosh too long, but it is an energetic adventure that I’d highly recommend to anyone who wants an offbeat quasi-superhero movie with a bit more heart and balls. Is it a more important film than Antonioni’s Red Desert? No. Am I more likely to watch it again? Yes.
4. I finally finished George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy. Night of the Living Dead (1968) is an original masterpiece. Dawn of the Dead (1978) is basically the greatest zombie movie ever made. Day of the Dead (1985) brings the nihilistic undead horror trilogy to a fittingly gruesome close. Mad science is pitted against the evil military and a few survivors are caught in the middle. Also there’s like a million zombies outside the compound. Scathing social commentary and gore galore!
3. I first encountered Kaneto Shindo’s minimalist Japanese folk horror, Onibaba (1964), years ago for a college radio show I was hosting. It has never left me. And this re-watch kind of reminded me why. It’s a sweaty, visceral psychology play, pared down to essentially three characters: a widow, her mother-in-law, and a dirty man returned from the war. Amidst feudal wars, these characters eke out a meager existence in the tall grass, motivated only by food an survival. The widow starts a romantic fling with the man. Worried she will be left alone and not be able to survive, the nasty mother-in-law tries to manipulate and terrify her daughter-in-law into staying put. Gorgeously shot, superbly acted, and just a well told story.
2. Re-watching the Alien franchise might have to stop with Aliens (1986), because honestly after the amazing peaks of the first two, it’s all downhill from here. Both films are absolute masterpieces of sci-fi horror and action. The character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is developed even more and becomes the ultimate badass. The rest of the series tries to get by on the atmosphere, chills, and Gieger xenomorph designs, but the first two films utilize all those things to perfection in service of a compelling survival drama in a true nightmare scenario.
1. Fans of absolutely breathtaking animation and sweet Japanese folktales look no further. Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata’s final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013), is a lush, impressionistic, vibrant, tragic, inspiring, affirming story about growing up. The minimalist animation is executed with such sensitivity and deceptive complexity and the score is sparse but elegantly employed. This fairy tale chronicles life of a moon girl who emerges out of a bamboo shoot and is raised by a poor woodcutter and his wife. Like all good and very old stories, it uses the fantastical to reveal truths about humanity. In life, there are always too many goodbyes and different paths we might have taken.
This Won't Be For Everyone 