Cinema is dead probably. Look, I don’t know.
I think YouTube or somewhere just played this one after we had watched another movie, and we let it. Deathmoon (1978) is a made-for-TV werewolf movie set in Hawaii. There’s not a whole lot to it, but the one novel aspect here is that it’s an anti-colonial curse.
I really like Martin Short. Most of the time. Clifford (1994) is not one of those times. Short plays an old priest who tells the story of how he was an annoying little kid, and while it is amusing to see an obviously grown man pretending to be a child in a sea of adult actors who are going along with it, it’s way more unsettling and creepy than anything else. Clifford (the character) also veers between behaving like a small boy to behaving like a psychotically manipulative adult man. But maybe Clifford had to walk so MADtv’s Stuart could run.
The big pluses here are Charles Grodin (pulling a real Richard Dreyfuss in What About Bob? and managing to steal the show from a comedy icon by playing the straight man so well). The other big plus here is Dinosaur World. The whole movie Clifford wants to go to Dinosaur World, and, when they finally do, we get amazing matte paintings, elaborate whimsical sets, and impressive prehistoric animatronic monsters.
Up and down, stem to stern, Anaconda (1997) is dumb. It’s a dumb movie. It’s one of those creature-features where the titular animal just wants to get you so bad. It will do anything to get you. It boasts some truly awful performances (Jennifer Lopez) and some truly bewildering performances (Jon Voight). It was hard for movies like this living in the shadow of Tremors and Jurassic Park.
We knew it would be bad (and probably much worse than we remembered it being from when we were kids), but it does have a few things going for it:
- An actual animatronic giant snake (most of the time). This and Tobe Hooper’s Crocodile are terrible, but some of the last bastions of B-movie creature-features that have fun puppets on set. It adds weight and danger to what you’re looking at. If you’re a B-movie that only has weak CGI effects, don’t even waste my time.
- Some actual jungle locations and a cool boat. That’s nice. I like the boat.
- Ice Cube. Say what you want, but he brings something grounding to this nonsense that really helps the whole thing go down smoother.
And that’s what I’ll say. It’s dumb, but goes down smooth. One of the last classic watchable prestige B-pictures maybe. Well, that or Deep Blue Sea. But it is bad. I can’t in good conscience tell anyone to watch this.
I really wanted to like Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989). Robinson’s directorial debut (that also stars Richard E. Grant), Whitnail & I, is a boozy classic of British comedy. His next film was arguably more ambitious and zany, but it’s also rather grating.
Spoilers ahead.
A cynical ad executive grows a conscience…sort of. For a bit. Or at least he has a break with reality where feels he cannot, in good conscience, continue to peddle products that are probably bad. He goes from being mean and irritating to being mean and irritating. Then he grows, quite literally, a boil on his neck that sprouts a face and begins talking to him. This makes him mean and irritating. Eventually the boil – which is his more unscrupulous side – grows larger and more powerful, ultimately overtaking him and the ad exec ends up just a mean and irritating man. And that’s how you get a “head” in advertising.
The central theme is good, the Cronenbergian body horror is gross and inspired, and Richard E. Grant is throwing himself into this, but it’s all a bit just one note for me. And while I generally like a downer ending, this just felt unsatisfying. Like all that screaming and running around just for this? It’s worth checking out, and I’m sure a lot of folks out there will like it more than I did.
I recalled liking Super Troopers. And I realized it’s the only Broken Lizard movie I’d ever seen. Sick on the couch and needing something brainless, I put on Club Dread (2004). It’s an early 2000s comedy that parodies the slasher genre. It’s got hot ladies and guys being dumb, as well as Bill Paxton as a washed-up Jimmy Buffet knockoff.
It’s not particularly cinematic. It’s not a good slasher flick. And it’s not that funny. However, it did grow on me. By the third act it actually starts to become pretty funny and gory. Why it didn’t lean into the humor and the horror before then is a bit of a mystery, perhaps the scariest mystery of all. It definitely needed more funny accents. Jay Chandrasekhar and Steve Lemme get to have some fun with their wacky characters. Share the love, ya know?
A Private Function (1984) is a respectable British comedy about meat rationing in a small town during the postwar period. There’s an uptight inspector who is a stickler for the rules and an unlicensed pig being kept on a farm illegally for the political class. It’s all very dry and English, but it’s a veritable who’s who of legendary British actors. We got Dame Maggie Smith, Michael Palin, Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Bill Paterson, Jim Carter, Liz Smith, and Pete Postlethwaite all up in here.
Ken Russell tells the classic yarn of a cold and distant man who gets so obsessed with unraveling cosmic mysteries and touching God by doing shamanic drugs in a sensory deprivation tank to de-evolve himself into an early hominid, when the real meaning for living was the woman who loves you and has been there all along. We just gotta ignore the people he killed.
Altered States (1980) is a bit of a mess, and the mechanics of what is literally happening in the universe of the movie are…silly. They’re very silly. It fastforwards through time like it’s nothing, so we never really get to sit with the characters for very long, and when we do they’re not very compelling. The movie is nuts. It has great visuals and wild psychedelic trip sequences. It’s got William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban. The real star? Charles Haid as a foul-mouthed Southern scientist who absolutely has no time for any of your shit.
As you are well aware, Christopher Nolan’s sweeping biopic about the man who made the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer (2023) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Score, Best Editing and Best Cinematography. It was pretty decent.
You ever watch a movie and think to yourself, “Gosh. I just don’t know if I’m Czech enough for this”?Vojtěch Jasný’s Cassandra Cat (1963) (aka When the Cat Comes, The Cat Who Wore Sunglasses, One Day a Cat, The Cat) is weird, even by Czech New Wave standards.
A small town (with a few characters that have different views on society and what is best for human flourishing) gets visited by a traveling circus. The circus features a cat. The cat wears sunglasses. If the sunglasses are removed, anyone it looks at will change colors to reveal their true inner self.
I’ll come clean and say a lot of the metaphors were lost on me, which I atribute to having not grown up in Soviet-controlled postwar Czechoslovakia. However, narrative enigmas aside, I enjoyed the fairytale feel and the look of it. I loved the magic show sequence, fourth-wall breaking, the textured imagery, unpredictable chaos, the colors, and the performance Oliva/the Magician (Jan Werich). I really just don’t know what to make of it.
Brian Trenchard-Smith is my favorite Trailers from Hell guy. He’s always so eloquent and proper, regal even. He’s always wearing Hawaiian shirts. And I don’t even really like any of his movies. That is, until we saw Dead End Drive-In (1986), an Australian post-apocalyptic grunge fest (is there another kind?). It’s general chaos and lawlessness out there, but if you can make it to a movie, you might just get away from it all…until you realize you can never leave. It’s essentially a prison that the government feeds drugs and junk food to in order to reign in and contain some of that violent youthful rebelliousness. It’s grimy and punk and it actually has some things to say. It’s also got a really nice car stunt at the end.
Adam Rifkin’s The Dark Backward (1991) is one weird, gross, messed up kind of movie that will forever be remembered, for me at least, as the most accurate depiction of entry level standup comedy and the movie that has Bill Paxton fondle and lick the corpse of a woman he finds in the garbage at the dump.
More Ken Russell! Twiggy stars in The Boy Friend (1971), a comedy about all the drama onstage and behind the scenes of a lavish stage production, and Russell’s tribute to Busby Berkeley musicals. It’s a sweeter, more tame film than Tommy or Liszomania, but apparently he did this right after The Devils (my personal favorite) to prove he wasn’t just some insane deviant. It’s very breezy and stylish. Each musical setpiece does something new and exciting. Welcome style over substance.
Writer/director/producer/astrologer/star Craig Denney set out to make a name for himself in The Astrologer (1976), an incomprehensible pile of dogshit that is absolutely worth your time. We laughed a lot, just don’t ask us to recount the plot. Don’t even ask Craig Denney. You can’t. He died right after the movie came out. Or, perhaps more plausibly, as many claim, he faked his own death for reasons that will forever remain a mystery.
If you love it when a movie looks like it smells bad, you’ll love The Astrologer, not to be confused with The Astrologer (1975) which we accidentally watched a few lists back thinking it was this one. See? I told you I’d get to it.
John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970) can be a bit too meandering, improvised, and long at times, but at the end of the day, it’s a fairly unflinching portrait of a particular type of man, one that has perhaps evolved over time but exists nevertheless.
John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk are MEN. They don’t cry! They get drunk and throw up! They’re rude to people! They beat their wives! They have repressed emotions! They are deeply insecure and afraid! They have intimacy issues! They can barely admit to themselves that they love each other! MEN!
E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a criminally underseen gothic horror about the making of the infamous 1922 Nosferatu. It posits an alternative cinema history wherein legendary German director, F.W. Murnau (played here by John Malkovich), so intent on realism for his vampire movie, secretly hires a real vampire (played by Willem Dafoe absolutely chewing up every scene and clearly having a blast being weird and creepy). If you’re a Nosferatu fan (either the original 1922 Murnau version or the 1979 Werner Herzog version, or are just excited for the upcoming Robert Eggers one – that will also feature Dafoe, but as a vampire hunter), then you gotta check out this underrated oddity. I love it when a film recognizes the only way to sell its zany premise is let the weirdness have a layer of grim humor.
The movie itself is good, if a little cartoony (and Udo Kier and Eddie Izzard are fun additions to the cast), but the real reason to watch it is for Willem Dafoe’s unabashedly kooky performance as the bloodsucking immortal posing as obscure actor Max Schreck. I daresay Dafoe is even more captivating and fun to watch than the real Schreck and even Klaus Kinski. He really is one of the best actors working today, and I respect the hell out of him for taking weird roles like this.
Harrison Ford’s innate charisma extends to a cop drama that morphs into a steamy Amish romance in Peter Weir’s Witness (1985). I had forgotten that it’s not really an action movie. Kid me remembered the intense ending, but adult me was digging all the sexual tension between Ford’s wounded cop and Kell McGillis’s thirsty Amish widower. Like a lot of folks, this was my introduction to Amish culture, and, while it’s pretty surface level (I mean we really only have this, Kingpin, and For Richer or Poorer), it highlights their pacifism and plain living. It’s a pretty solid drama with an absolutely terrible soundtrack.
Rewatched this banger, and The Fifth Element (1997) is still so breezily fun and good that it only rubs it in further that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets isn’t. Luc Besson’s filmography is filled with arresting visual flair that is also unmistakably French. Like how you don’t get that feeling watching a Terry Gilliam film. Like how when you’re watching Alien Resurrection and someone says, “hey, you know the director is the Amélie guy”, and you’re like, “oh, well, now THAT explains a lot of what I’m seeing.”
Anyway, the thing I’ve always loved about The Fifth Element was that, horny sci-fi hijinks aside, it’s just so odd. And silly. It’s having fun being silly at you. And it dishes out it’s silliness and its cavalcade of silly characters in carefully planned installments. The costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier really help define the movie’s unique tone. And you gotta love a montage of an interstellar cruiseship readying for takeoff intercut with Chris Tucker banging a stewardess set to space reggae. The French, man.
Not that it’s saying much, but this is Milla Jovovich’s best movie, and Bruce Willis was always at his best when allowed to showcase his sense of humor. The whole cast is great. Don’t make me name them all. It’s a who’s who of supporting greats.
William Peter Blatty is most famous for writing the novel and screenplay of The Exorcist. He only directed two movies. The Exorcist III, which I loved, and The Ninth Configuration (1980), a truly beguilingly dark yet comic film about trauma and faith.
A laconic marine psychaitrist (Stacy Keach) goes to a mysterious castle asylum in the foggy northwestern woods. It is a dysfunctional place populated by brilliant men who have all gone mad from the war. One patient (Scott Wilson), however, isn’t a soldier at all. He’s an astronaut that had a psychotic break moments before takeoff and had to be dragged from the rocket ship. From there we embark on a spiritual journey in and out of madness and reality, and confront the duplicitous duality of man: the good and evil that lurks within us all.
The setting is great. The cast is great (love me some Ed Flanders). It has a great bar fight. It’s a weird sort of movie that really doesn’t get made anymore. At least, not like this. It’s a hypnotic mystery that unravels very slowly, and it is steeped in some serious post Vietnam anti-war sentiment. This all adds to the flavor. Now, Blatty’s worldview might be a bit too inaccessibly Catholic for me at times, but he uses his religious framework to intelligently get at deeper truths about the human condition…or at least truths we all hope are true. I do think The Exorcist III is a lot more polished and relateable, but this is a worthwhile curio.
And you know something? I even like Stacy Keach without a mustache.
I liked Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 2 (2024) a good deal better than the first one, although there were things in the first one I did really like. Villeneuve’s team can create some striking images and manufacture the feeling of immense scale, but there’s just something about Timothée Chalamet that really takes me out of things. Even more than Christopher Walken did for a lot of people in this. But hey, I’m mostly watching these things for Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, and Charlotte Rampling. Zendaya doing some good stuff in here too. If you can get into the slow pace and get sucked into the scope of the world building, there’s a lot to appreciate.
The Full Monty (1997) is a just a prime example of an efficient comedy executed well. Aided by a smart, funny script and a terrific cast (Robert Carlyle, Mark Addy, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber), it hits every mark it sets out to hit. Six desperate and unemployed Sheffield steel workers come together to put on a striptease show in order to make enough money to solve their problems. Simple set up and pay off with just the right stakes, jabs at masculine insecurities, and hiccups along the way to make for a very enjoyable 90 minutes.
R.I.P. Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom, Michael Clayton, Batman Begins, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Full Monty)
Powell and Pressburger are glorious movie gods and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) proves it. So does The Red Shoes. And Black Narcissus. And The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. And if I cheat and sneak in The Thief of Bagdad, that too.
A British airman (David Niven) gets shot down during WWII and his afterlife escort (Marius Goring) can’t find his soul in the thick English fog to ferry him to the next world. This causes problems upstairs. To make matters even more complicated, the airman has fallen in love! Now he’ll have to fight for his right to live in the high courts of the otherworld. Or maybe it’s all in his head.
As much as I may not buy the oh-so-crucial romance between David Niven and Kim Hunter (I dislike it, in fact), and as much as I find it weird that the survival of their relationship depends on a successful lobotomy (don’t enjoy that), I absolutely love the audacious look of this thing, the weird bureaucratic mechanics of the afterlife, Roger Livesey and Raymond Massey are great, and I LOVE the trial in the final act.
There’s something magical and refreshing about the progressive optimism embodied by certain films of this era that we’ve really lost as we’ve all become more cynical and jaded. I miss stories that believed in something real and hopeful and had the temerity to back it up. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington comes to mind, among others. It’s the difference in flavor between patriotism and jingoistic nationalism, I think. These films are patriotic. And they actually taste good for it.
To me, what makes A Matter of Life and Death work is not that the court case is about proving the love between a death-dodging Englishman and a woman from Boston; it’s that the trial puts modern (for the 40s) American culture on trial. It dares to challenge America’s angrier revolutionary past, and demands that it face how the very things it claimed to believe in all came true, and in ways that are better than it could have imagined (and in ways it cannot recognize or even really approve of). Sure, it sidesteps a slew of historical evils, but it does at least rub England’s face in its own stodgy history of imperialism and murder. Watching it now, I lament, because it seems that, for a time, we were maybe getting on the right path, albeit in fits and starts and with plenty of maturing still to do. But there was hope, and reason to hope, dammit.
Watch this one. It’s a unique film that’s been copied enough by now. Fits nicely alongside films like The Devil and Daniel Webster, Heaven Can Wait, Defending Your Life, Wings of Desire, and maybe even Beetlejuice.
What an absolute treat The Holdovers (2023) is. Directed by Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Nebraska) and starring Paul Giamatti (in one of his best roles since Payne’s Sideways), Dominic Sessa, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Dolemite is My Name), the story concerns three lonely creatures stuck at a private high school over the Christmas break. This is a great example of an excellent script, stellar cast (and their chemistry), and rich locations and setting really elevating a simple premise and making it something special. The 70s aesthetic also gives it a lot of extra juice. It just looks so good. It pulls you into its cozy, misanthropic world and just lets a sweet dusting of snow settle on you while it makes you some hot tea with lemon. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it yet.
OK, Craig Denney was a curiosity for making The Astrologer. Shuny Bee is a legend for making Fight of Fury (2020). Once again, Bee is the writer/director/producer/editor/stunt coordinator/star. That’s exactly what you want for this kind of thing. I shan’t say too much, other than I absolutely loved it and cannot wait for the sequel.
Ishirō Honda’s original Godzilla (1954) remains a classic, and one of the best movies about the atomic bomb (sorry, Oppenheimer). The hand puppet closeups are little goofy, but the destruction is still visceral and shocking. And there’s just something extra haunting about Godzilla in black-and-white.
This movie frightened me as a kid (although the version I saw then had a disconnected Perry Mason spliced into it) because unlike Frankenstein or King Kong, which I loved, there was no identifying or humanizing with the monster. Godzilla was just a bastard. It was just a mindless force of destruction oblivious to the wanton carnage it wrought. Some of the scenes are still effectively frightening 70 years later.
It’s easy to take for granted Godzilla’s status in monster movie history. For the remainder of the Shōwa era of Godzilla, the movies get increasingly campy, silly, and geared toward children. There are a few bright spots (Mothra, I love you), but none of them try to be horror like the initial outing. The Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa eras all kind of have their own vibe. But that first movie remains something unique and startling. Perhaps because it was less than a decade after the bombs were dropped. Perhaps because it was the first time cinema had seen a monster that large and unstoppable. 33 Japanese films later, the lizard stomps on.
This Won't Be For Everyone 