What are you lookin' at?! Right now...

[Mal Shot First]

Knives Out - I liked it. This was a cute movie that, on my first viewing of it, was not quite as good as Clue, but was still very enjoyable.

I really liked Knives Out. It doesn't seem quite right to compare it to Clue since the latter is a much more straightforward comedy/parody of the murder mystery genre. Knives Out certainly has comedic elements and plays with established genre conventions, but in the end it's still a mystery first and a comedy second. I guess it's a bit like Shaun of the Dead that way, in that it starts sort of as a sendup of a particular genre and then ends up as a shining example of it.

[Slartibartfast]

This morning, I watched "La Planete Sauvage" (Fantastic Planet) (1970), about which Gene Siskel was wrong. Siskel said "an animated piece of science-fiction pretending to be a Meaningful Statement ... According to publicists for the film, the visuals and story begin to make sense if your mind is chemically altered. I doubt it." The film has a straightforward plot and is engaging and weird. I'd prefer to say little about it because I enjoyed discovering it cold.

[Slartibartfast]

I watched "Pulp" (1972, directed by Mike Hodges). "Pulp" begins like "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (a recluse on an island hires a writer to write a history) but ends like True Detective Season 1 (a group of men from the ownership class are revealed to be rapists who murder in order to cover up their rapes). Despite this subject matter, which sounds quite grim, the tone of this movie is insouciant and smart-assed. This mostly does not work. Mickey Rooney turns out to be the man who hires the writer (who, by the way, is played by 39-year-old Michael Caine wearing a light-colored suit that somehow never gets dirty). There's a scene in which Mickey Rooney, age 51 or 52, is standing in white jockey shorts and nothing else; this scene is notable but not for any erotic quality. There's also a shockingly sexy young woman in the movie, an actress named Nadia Cassini.

Anyway, Michael Caine writes Mickey Rooney's biography just before Mickey Rooney is killed at a dinner party. It turns out that old hunting buddies of Mickey Rooney raped a girl to death on a beach and at least one of them, who is now a prominent capitalist/fascist politician, is worried that that information will be in the book.

The narrative in the movie is not anywhere near this straightforward. The movie meanders and wastes time and is almost completely narratively inert. I kept watching for Michael Caine's brand of smart-assedness, which is different than the more familiar smart-assedness of Peter Venkman, and I kept watching for the interesting interiors and set designs and costumes. Mostly, though, this movie is full of misfired jokes.

There is a scene in which Michael Caine discovers that Al Litteri is carrying women's clothing with him, and he says "The guy was a fag. A transvestite", which is the kind of thing that men used to be able to say but that they probably can't say anymore. So that's noteworthy, or at least I thought it was when I was watching the movie.

I don't have the patience to type up all of the actors who make the claim in this sentence true, but three or four of the supporting actors from Godfather I and II are in this movie.

This is a movie for completists. Basically, don't bother.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I'm doing some shuffled rewatching of Nightmare on Elm Street entries, The Prisoner, and Friday the Thirteenth: The Series.

I like the second Nightmare on Elm Street quite a bit. It is consciously and proudly gay, which I appreciate. The female co-lead, who starts grabbing more and more screen time past the halfway point, is a dead ringer for a young Meryl Streep. (The shift to her was apparently due to the studio worrying about the marketability of a scream king.) The third movie is more coherent, feels more competently assembled, is more inventively shot, and boasts a more impressive and able cast--mostly thanks to Craven's return--but it's also duller.

The Prisoner is The Prisoner. I love the hell out of it, though I don't know anyone else under the age of, say, fifty who isn't put off by it. It's best to put a little space in between each episode. Otherwise, they run together. It's preachy and smug to the point of laughability, but its earnestness ultimately wins me over by the end of each episode. There's a comfort to me in its formula. It may be the kind of thing that best appeals to neurodivergents.

Friday the Thirteenth: The Series is the perfect eighties horror comfort food. It's very Canadian. It has been three decades since the last time I saw an episode, but the theme music never left my head. It has nothing to do, plot-wise, with the movie series. The only real tie, beyond some actor cameos, is that it was produced by Frank Mancuso, Jr. (The IP use was shameless. Like the rest of the show.) It's a monster-of-the-week affair about cousins-by-marriage who inherit an antique store from a relative who had a deal with a demon to spread evil via antiques. (I think the "by-marriage" part is revealed later on. It becomes necessary to sidestep the creep factor as the two become increasingly flirty.)

The cousins attempt to retrieve the antiques one-by-one. That's the major connective tissue. How do they stay in business despite no longer selling anything in the store? It's never discussed. They flounder around, pretending to be cops and monks and medical examiners (et cetera), often with forged credentials, somehow never getting arrested for it. It's kind of like a proto-X-Files (beyond its Canadianness, it also features a prim skeptic as female co-lead and playful believer as male co-lead), but crossed with The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. (It's not just the whole monster-a-week evil retrieval that reminds me of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Both shows also feature an elderly mentor.)

[Mal Shot First]

The Prisoner is The Prisoner. I love the hell out of it, though I don't know anyone else under the age of, say, fifty who isn't put off by it.

My college roommate and his girlfriend loved the shit out of The Prisoner. I was never sure whether they watched it ironically, though. Maybe they started out that way and then genuinely liked it... hard to say.

(I think the "by-marriage" part is revealed later on. It becomes necessary to sidestep the creep factor as the two become increasingly flirty.)

I wonder whether the writer originally didn't see anything wrong with the cousins' flirtatious relationship and then someone pointed out to him, "Hey, that's kinda creepy, dude," and to avoid public shame he put a lazy band-aid on the situation by saying, "Oh, it's totally cool - they're not blood relatives. 'Cause, you know, that shit would be gross. Yeah... "

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I wonder whether the writer originally didn't see anything wrong with the cousins' flirtatious relationship and then someone pointed out to him, "Hey, that's kinda creepy, dude," and to avoid public shame he put a lazy band-aid on the situation by saying, "Oh, it's totally cool - they're not blood relatives. 'Cause, you know, that shit would be gross. Yeah... "

I had the same thought. I mean, I'm from Alabama. What's more natural to an Alabaman than the idea of kissin' cousins?

Really not sure why the kids of my generation (well, middle-agers, now) aren't keen on The Prisoner, unless it's just for the reasons I listed. I think it's pretty strong stuff. I guess it sounds kinda hokey when you're talking it up to people, but it's not hokey in execution. I grant that I haven't talked about it with all that many people from my generation.

[Slartibartfast]

Harper (1966) - I watched this movie after hearing Bill Burr mention it in a conversation with Bert Kreischer (I think that's where I heard it mentioned). This is the story of a private detective (Lew Harper, played by Paul Newman) hired to find missing rich man. This is a clear homage to Bogart movies and Philip Marlowe. As in "Pulp", the main character calls another character a faggot in a way that no one would do anymore in 2020.

This was an interesting and adult movie and a portrait of a kind of lifestyle that no longer exists. Recommended to fans of the noir genre. Lauren Bacall is in this film.

[Slartibartfast]

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) - Tommy Lee Jones directs and stars. Julio Cedillo, Barry Pepper, January Jones, Melissa Leo, Dwight Yoakum. This movie, which is almost exactly two hours long, is about the killing of an illegal worker in the Texas borderland by a border patrol agent and the subsequent return of the worker's body to his home in Mexico by the man who employed him and was his friend. Maybe many viewers will be put off by the untranslated, unsubtitled Spanish in this movie. Anyway, the movie is exactly what it says in the title. A man is killed, and then his friend takes him home to be buried. The movie feels like a movie from the late 60s or the 70s, and the two central performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Pepper are strong. More than one scene of probably forensically-accurate decay of the human body is included in this film. Melissa Leo probably has the standout role in this movie, and Dwight Yoakum is also very good as a sheriff with a bad disposition who nonetheless is human and has a conscience.

I highly recommend this movie.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I recently revisited two of my preschool babysitters: The Last Starfighter and The Night of the Comet. I texted running commentary to a friend or two on Facebook Chat. I may cannibalize from that and add some of what I said here.

[Slartibartfast]

The Silent Partner (1978) - Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Celine Lomez. This movie, which is set largely in a mall in Toronto in 1977 and therefore looks the way that I like things to look, is about a bank robbery and its aftermath. Here's the basic story: Elliott Gould plays a bank teller who has reason to believe that his bank will be imminently robbed immediately after a large deposit has been made. Armed with this knowledge, he hides the large deposit immediately after it is made, proceeds to be robbed, gives the robber a small amount of money, and then triggers the alarm.

This is the setup for the cat-and-mouse game played by the bank teller and the robber for the rest of the movie.

I watched this movie on the 21st or 22nd of May, 2020, and I thought that it was excellent. I heard about it on a Chapo Trap House podcast which I ultimately abandoned for being too annoying.

This was the first film to be produced by Carolco, which also produced "Terminator 2: Judgment Day".

[Slartibartfast]

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019/2020), dir. Armando Iannucci - I watched this movie, or rather a little over half of it, and I had to abandon it. It was extremely irritating. Every scene was too manic, everything in the movie was grim and cruel or irritating and ingratiating. I absolutely do not recommend this movie.

[Slartibartfast]

Anthropoid (2016), dir. Sean Ellis.

This movie is about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and contains a torture scene of unusual cruelty. The scene is so cruel that it is difficult to believe that even Nazi torturers would behave this way. After Reinhard Heydrich is killed, the Nazi force occupying Prague locates the family that sheltered the assassins. The matriarch of the family, who runs the safehouse, manages to take a cyanide pill before the Nazis torture her. Her son is not so lucky and is captured by the Nazis. The son is studying to be a violinist so the Nazis tie him to a chair and smash his hand with a blacksmiths's sledge hammer, then show him the decapitated head of his mother in a bucket. The son gives up the location of the assassins, and the rest of the movie is a dramatization of the shootout in the church where the assassins were hiding.

Everyone dies.

This movie is grim and not much fun. It isn't fascinating the way that "Army of Shadows" is.

I recommend this movie only to people interested in representations of World War II resistance on film.

[Slartibartfast]

My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes (2018).

This 14-minute documentary is about a son and his distant father, and the father's controlling mother, and her recklessly abusive father.

It was touching and human. Narrated by David Wain of The State.

Watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLhctg8j5kI

[Slartibartfast]

Tenet (2020), dir. Christopher Nolan. Sharp-looking probably incoherent time-reversal science fiction story that throws more at you than you can understand on a first viewing. Like all Christopher Nolan movies, this one looks like an Omega watch commercial. Kenneth Brannagh shows up as a Russian oligarch who speaks with the same summer-stock-theater Russian accent that Naomi Watts used in "St. Vincent" (2014). Some of the dialogue in the movie, especially near the end, is so on-the-nose and so melodramatic that I couldn't help rolling my eyes. There's also an escalation of the stakes in the narrative so high that if the heroes don't succeed, the world ends. Maybe on a second viewing, this dizzying escalation of stakes will seem thematically appropriate, but on my first viewing, it very did not.

I watched this on August 31, 2020 and I enjoyed it.

[Slartibartfast]

Brubaker (1980), dir. Stuart Rosenberg. 2h10m. Robert Redford plays Henry Brubaker, a reform-minded prison warden who goes undercover as an inmate in a prison in Arkansas in 1969 and attempts to reform it. As I recount it, it's unlikely to sound distinct from any of the other prison movies: there's torture and cruelty. There's general unfairness and corruption, and occasional moments of humanity. There's some prison rape pretty early in the movie. But I liked it and I had a good time watching it, and it felt like a real film instead of big television. It held my attention and improved a Friday night when I was starting to learn how to pick locks for sport.

Watched 04 Sep 2020.

[Slartibartfast]

Emperor of the North Pole/Emperor of the North (1973), dir. Robert Aldrich. Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Keith Carradine. In 1933, railroad hobos played by Lee Marvin and Keith Carradine are tormented by and defy a murderous, cruel train conductor played by Ernest Borgnine. This movie culminates in an entertaining, brutal fight between the characters played by Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine and the whole movie is handsomely filmed, but it feels like it should add up to much more than it ultimately does. It's not hugely entertaining, and Ketih Carradine is--to my surprise and dismay--not convincing or good, and devoid of charisma to such a degree that it's hard to believe that he's the same man who played Will Bill Hickock in "Deadwood".

This movie has many lovely shots of trains and some nice tableaux of hobo life. There's attention to detail, and the movie shows the industrial and consumer waste that the hobos live in, while the trains, representing lucrative commercial business, run through the midst of the waste. But the movie is too long, and the characters are mostly unlikeable, and Ernest Borgnine's character (who is named Shack) is one-dimensionally cruel and evil, and the whole thing is not quite a failure but definitely a slog.

Watched 05 Sep 2020.

[Slartibartfast]

Slaughterhouse-Five (1973), dir. George Roy Hill. This is an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel about a man named Billy Pilgrim who comes unstuck in time and experiences his life out of order.

This movie is faithful to the plot of the book, but it doesn't at all have the feel of the book. The book is shell-shocked but goofy and kind of jolly, and it engages in humor even in upsetting situations. For instance when people die, the book invokes the refrain "So it goes" as a kind of epitaph or acknowledgement of life's impermanence and death's inevitability. The movie has a car chase scene in which Billy's wife, while rushing to the hospital to see Billy after he has survived an airplane crash, wrecks part of a town. George Roy Hill chooses to film this in a madcap, zany style, but at the end of the sequence, Billy's wife dies. This struck me as a failure to understand the tone of the movie.

The actor playing Billy is in his early 20s, and the middle-age makeup that he wears to play contemporary-to-the-release-of-the-movie Billy is unconvincing. His body isn't thick in the middle the way that middle-aged men's bodies are, and his face is wrongly thin.

I regard this movie as an interesting failure. It's dour and its central character is passive and unsympathetic and his family is unpleasant and seems to have been chosen by the author to represent dull middle-class American life and not chosen by Billy to be the foundation upon which he would build a nourishing engagement with the world.

The movie shows style and is interestingly put together--which you'd expect from George Roy Hill--but it is a slog, and it doesn't capture the feeling of the book.

Watched over two sessions between 06 Sep 2020 and 17 Sep 2020.

[Slartibartfast]

Charley Varrick (1973), dir. Don Siegel. Walter Matthau plays a hard man who Don Siegel wanted Clint Eastwood to play. This is a caper-aftermath story, and is superb. I highly recommend it.

Watched sometime in the second week of October 2020 in 1080p.

[Slartibartfast]

Hostiles (2017), dir. Scott Cooper. Christian Bale, Rosamond Pike. A movie about the transport of Native American prisoners to freedom from Arizonia to Montana in 1892. I enjoyed this movie very much and recommend it to everyone, with the caveat that it is violent. It isn't gory like Bone Tomahawk, but it is mercilessly violent. Despite the presence of this credible violence, the characters' humanity shines through. The dramatic tension at the heart of the story might be characterized as the tension of humanity struggling to assert itself in the face of hostility and violence and misfortune.

Watched 01 Dec 2020.

[Slartibartfast]

Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. This recut of "The Godfather: Part III" removed Michael's collapse and death at Don Tommasino's estate, and adds a maudlin and self-important intertitle card at the end of the movie. I never saw "The Godfather: Part III" in a theater, so I was glad to be able to see it in early December 2020 in Brisbane. This cut of the movie, I thought, made less sense than the original cut and revealed the inconsistency of the story.

[Slartibartfast]

Havana (1990), dir. Sydney Pollack. Robert Redford and Lena Olin and Raul Julia as Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund and Victor Lazslo in 1958 revolutionary Cuba. This movie was handsomely produced, but I was bored by it. It was self-important and tiresome, and the monologue just before the credits rolled sounded like something a high school student would write. This movie is two hours and twenty-four minutes long, and you feel every bit of that run time. I do not recommend this, and it made me wonder if "Jeremiah Johnson" wasn't also too long, which is quite an achievement.

Watched on the morning of 12 Dec 2021.

[Mal Shot First]

Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. This recut of "The Godfather: Part III" removed Michael's collapse and death at Don Tommasino's estate,...

That ending was always my favorite part of the movie. After decades of grasping for more and more power, Michael is left with no one left but himself and dies a miserable old man's death. Basically, that ending was one of the things that redeemed an otherwise mediocre film for me because it's the logical consequence of Michael's hunger for power.

[Slartibartfast]

That ending was always my favorite part of the movie. After decades of grasping for more and more power, Michael is left with no one left but himself and dies a miserable old man's death. Basically, that ending was one of the things that redeemed an otherwise mediocre film for me because it's the logical consequence of Michael's hunger for power.

I agree. I thought that Michael's collapse, timed to the climax of the Intermezzo of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" was a strong enough choice, cinematically, to justify both the choice of the piece (which had been used before in Scorsese's "Raging Bull", and would certainly be identified by many of the filmgoers as "that Raging Bull piece of music", and which therefore is fighting an uphill battle for acceptance in another film) and the long, nonsensical plot about Corleone's attempt to wash his money through International Immobilare and the Catholic Church (which plot makes no damn sense because both organizations are completely corrupt and the idea that they'd shy away from doing business with someone like Michael Corleone is naive and reveals the slapdash anything-as-long-as-it's-done-by-Christmas nature of the script by Puzo and Coppola). Removing this scene was a fatal blow to the movie, and the final shot of the film (a shot you'll be familiar with) is of Michael, blinded by diabetes, putting on his sunglasses and looking into the camera. This shot, without the collapse, undercuts the power of what happened on the stairs at the opera house in Palermo and, in my opinion, makes nonsense of the last five minutes of the movie. The intertitle card says something embarrassing, too, that is something like "When a Sicilian says "centanni", he means "may you be happy for one hundred years"... and he means it."

The Godfather Part III is a half-baked plot that makes little sense intellectually and what is good in it is good on only an emotional level. Coppola's choice to recut his movie forces us to take the movie in a more intellectual, analytical way, and diminishes the emotional, irrational parts of the movie that were its good parts. A real shame.

[Slartibartfast]

Salvador (1986), dir. Oliver Stone. A fictionalized account of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1980 and 1981. James Woods plays a balls-out rake with children in several places, a drug addict, and a functional alcoholic journalist whose abrasiveness and irresponsibility have alienated everyone in his professional life. He goes to El Salvador on spec to cover the civil war, and there undergoes a picaresque series of events that fail to build dramatically to a coherent climax. This movie began energetically and was compelling in a fuck-it-all-let's-get-wasted Fear-and-Loathing-in-Las-Vegas way. But the movie loses its momentum as it draws toward its close, and though I think it was aiming for the shock of an expose and horror at the atrocities that it comments upon, the probably unintentional comic tone worked against the frisson of anti-colonial anti-CIA horror that I think was the moral of the film. The movie ends with a refugee woman being sent from the United States back to Central America, presumably to be murdered by CIA-trained death squads, so that part of the movie, from the perspective of 2021, seems not to have aged at all. This dramatic moment is undercut, however, by a text crawl before the credits that informs us that she survived and now lives in a refugee camp in Guatemala.

There's a presciently-drawn portrait of a blonde-haired right-wing televised female propagandist, who is a proto-Fox-News talking head.

I was bored for more than half of this movie's two-hour running time, and I felt every bit of its last three quarters.

Watched late on the night of 16 Jan 2021 in Keperra.

[Space Tycoon]

I, too was slightly disappointed with Salvador, once I viewed it.