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

[Slartibartfast]

The Kid Detective (2020), dir. Evan Morgan. This movie deals with an Encyclopedia Brown-type character who is now thirty-two years old and barely treading water. I watched it on the recommendation of Red Letter Media about five hours after their recommendation video dropped. I think that it's probably best to go into this movie completely cold, so I won't say much about it right now. It reminded me a bit of "Beneath the Silver Lake", which I've reviewed elsewhere in this thread. Overall, I enjoyed this movie, even though I wasn't enthralled throughout it. As Jay and Mike at Red Letter Media point out, Evan Morgan (the director) has great command of tone.

Watched on the morning of 12 Feb 2021 at the house in Keperra.

[Slartibartfast]

News of the World (2020), dir. Paul Greengrass. Tom Hanks stars as a widowed, surrendered ex-Confederate Captain and former preacher in 1870s Texas who now makes his living traveling from town to town and reading the news to people in a kind of traveling show. Trouble arises, and so does the plot of the movie, when Hanks finds a little blonde-haired girl, the lone survivor of an episode of racially-motivated mischief. From there to the end of the movie it's basically Lone Wolf and Cub or The Mandalorian. The movie is one hour and fifty-eight minutes long, doesn't feel long, is exciting and interesting, and ends without any serious horror. I might call it a feel-good and shorter version of The Emigrants.

[Scotia]

Spacey is......here?

[Space Tycoon]

Apparently.

Unfortunately. (Fortunately? I am confused).

[Slartibartfast]

The Passenger (1975), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Jack Nicholson stars in this extremely Antonioni movie about a reporter doing a story about a coup in Chad. Nicholson assumes the identity of a dead guy. This kind of feels a bit like North By Northwest, but since it's Antonioni, it's much, much slower. It's got Maria Schneider in it, who you might remember as the poor girl raped by Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci in "Last Tango In Paris". I watched this toward the end of April 2021 when one of my friends was dying of cancer, and it was atmospheric enough to distract me from grief. I can neither recommend it nor not recommend it, but I can say that it is very, very Antonioni.

Mr. Destiny (1900), dir. James Orr (he wrote "Three Men and a Baby", or, more accurately, adapted it from that French movie). This movie is a rip-off of "It's a Wonderful Life", and I liked it a lot when I was a kid. When I watched it in late April or early May of 2021, though, I was shocked at what an inconsiderate asshole the main character of the movie was and I was surprised at the interchangeable nature of the people in the situations, which struck me as a child's notion of destiny (which might explain why I as a child enjoyed the movie). None of the characters seem like real people. Hart Bochner is the primary antagonist in this movie, and he's a pleasure to watch even if his character is as thinly written as every other character in the movie. (Hart Bochner played Ellis, the guy in Die Hard who snorts a lot of coke and gets shot in the head by Hans Gruber when he tries to cut a deal.) Anyway, this movie was morally unserious and its characters were thin and unconvincing. It was a bummer to revisit this movie, because in my memories it was enjoyable but in this adult watching it was a slog. Maybe I'll like it again if I get a brain disease.

[Slartibartfast]

Shogun Assassin (1980). dir. Robert Houston. I watched this movie on 16 July 2021 at the house in Keperra. From start to finish, I was bored by this movie. It's a mashup of "Lone Wolf and Cub", and it's a formless mess. It amounts to one damn thing after another, with no character development and no particularly interesting fight scenes. The costumes look great and the movie is well-filmed, but there are no characters in the movie and nothing to connect with. There is no dramatic action in the narrative. The movie begins with the murder of a matriarch and her widowed husband declaring that he intends to seek vengeance. At the end of the movie, the child (who has provided voiceover narration throughout the film) says something like "I wish things were different, but they're not.". I won't watch this movie again.

[Slartibartfast]

Crimson Tide (1995). dir. Tony Scott. The fucking nuclear fucking submarine that couldn't fucking make up its fucking mind. This movie was childish bullshit. The characters dick-measure and posture and are bad company. In every way this compares unfavorably to The Hunt for Red October. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

[Slartibartfast]

Welcome to L.A. (1976). dir. Alan Rudolph. This is a slice-of-life Altman-alike that bears a family resemblance to Nashville and Short Cuts and Magnolia. I found it interesting and worth watching, but I don't think that it's a good movie. The cast is absolutely loaded, and rather than name the characters and the actors who play them, I'll confine myself to the simplest recounting of the story I am able to construct. A young male songwriter of breathtaking 1970s-style pre-AIDS sexual promiscuity returns to Los Angeles to write songs for a musician. The musician is recording an album, and we (the viewers and listeners) get to hear some of that album's recording sessions. Despite several in-movie remarks by the characters that the songs are beautiful, any viewer with ears and the least bit of musical discernment will not be fooled. These songs are pretentious and interminable.

The plot, which isn't much of a plot at all, is Updike-style middle-class handwringing about marriage and sexual fidelity and people having inconvenient infatuations with one another, which is another way of saying "standard whitebread sexual bullshit". This plot, such as it is, comes to something that structurally is intended to be a climax but which has failed to build dramatically to a climax. It doesn't help the dramatic content of the movie or the movie's structure that the characters aren't particularly sympathetic or interesting.

And yet, though I was bored by much of the movie, I found it interesting and worth watching. Why? Well, in this movie there are a lot of shots of cars from 1975 and lot of shots of Los Angeles in 1975, and there are many interiors that I find credible, where credible means "this must be pretty close to what it looked like to be indoors in the mid-70s in Los Angeles". And though the characters weren't particularly interesting, I mostly enjoyed spending time with them and watching them. The acting was good and mostly credible, even if the characters being portrayed weren't particularly interesting.

There are four and arguably five female leads in this movie, and they are of different ages, and they are all beautiful. Several of them appear naked in this movie, and now, even two weeks after seeing the movie, I can't decide whether their nudity was dramatically necessary to the movie or extraneous. What I am pretty sure of is that the nudity in this movie feels very 1970s, which is to say that it has a devil-may-care quality that I do not recognize in modern (2020s) movies. Whether the nudity in this movie was artistically necessary or calculated-for-word-of-mouth and dramatically extraneous, it makes me think that the people who were in Welcome to L.A. were in touch with their bodies in a way that people who make movies now aren't.

In a way, this movie gets to have what I might call "moral lessons" that are of different flavors. For example, one thread of this movie causes you to think that a marriage is going to fall apart. But ultimately the people in that endangered marriage reconcile and the institution of marriage is thereby asserted to be durable. And at the same time (and by that, I mean "at the same time in the movie"), an artist affirms his own independence and his freedom from the constraints of marriage and the constraints of romantic attachment. The movie presents these things without much comment, which is a kind of restraint at odds with the over-the-top oversharing self-indulgence of the soundtrack that putatively (according to the narrative itself) holds the narrative together.

This was an interesting movie, but not entirely for the reasons its creators intended. In this, it resembles "Inserts". (It's much more tolerable than "Inserts", though.) I recommend this movie to anyone interested in the 1970s and interested in stolen shots of that era.

I liked the way that this movie was shot. I didn't say that before, but it's true.

[Slartibartfast]

Grand Canyon. 1991. dir. Lawrence Kasdan.
This movie's narrative centers on the life of Mack (Kevin Kline) in 1991 Los Angeles, and two other men who know him.

Summary
-------
Mack's car breaks down during the drive home from a basketball game in Los Angeles. Mack had recklessly chosen to drive through South Central L.A., and while waiting on a tow truck in a dangerous part of the city is accosted by four armed black men who intend to steal his car. Just when it seems that Mack is in mortal danger, the tow truck driver Simon (Danny Glover) arrives and convinces the armed black men not to rob or kill Mack.

Mack's son goes to summer camp as a counselor, which causes Mack's wife (Mary McDonnell) to feel alone. While out for a jog, Mack's wife finds an abandoned baby. She takes the baby home and gives it a bath.

Mack's best friend Davis (Steve Martin), a producer of trashy, violent movies, is shot in the right thigh during a robbery. While recovering in the hospital, Davis has a kind of spiritual awakening. Later he tells Mack's wife that he will no longer make trashy, violent movies.

Mack is sexually tempted by seemingly every woman he sees. At some point in the recent past while on a business trip, he had sex with his secretary (Mary-Louise Parker). Though she is in love with him, he has not had sex with her a second time. Mack's secretary feels rejected by him, and finds working closely with him a kind of torture.

Mack finds Simon and tells him about a time when he was almost hit by a bus. A stranger pulled him back onto the curb just before the bus passed, and Mack has always wished that he had spoken to the stranger. Mack regards Simon's arrival in the tow truck a second occasion on which a stranger saved his life. He tells Simon that he is determined to (at the least) speak to the person who saved him. Mack and Simon go to breakfast, and at the end of their meal Mack offers to find Simon's sister a safer place to live. During breakfast, Simon told Mack that Simon's sister's house was recently shot up in a drive-by shooting (the shooting happened presumably because Simon's nephew is in a gang, but this is too far from the main thrust of the movie to discuss here in detail).

Mack sets up Simon with one of his secretary's friends. Simon and the friend develop a nourishing relationship.

Mack and his wife adopt the abandoned baby.

Davis declares that he was briefly insane after being shot, and says that he will continue to direct trashy, violent movies.

While Simon and Mack play basketball, Simon tells Mack that he wants to do something to thank Mack for the positive changes that Mack has caused in Simon's life. Mack says that no thanks are necessary, but Simon insists and asks Mack to hear him out.

The movie ends as Simon drives most of the cast to the Grand Canyon (something that Mack and Simon had spoken of before). The credits roll over an aerial shot of the Grand Canyon.

Comment
-------
This movie is an L.A. ensemble movie like "Short Cuts" and "Magnolia" and "Welcome to L.A. and "Crash".

The scene at the beginning of the movie when Mack is accosted by the four black men seems to me in 2021 almost racist. The men seem unsympathetic and inhuman in a way that is so without insight into their characters that it feels to me that they might as well have bones in their noses while they prepare to cook Mack in a boiling pot. I don't think that the Kasdans intended to portray these men as cartoonish villains, but nothing about the writing suggests to me that they have any sense of who these men are or why they are there. The four armed black men are seen entirely from the perspective of their (white) potential victims, and even Simon (Danny Glover) seems to me to interact with them only on behalf of the interests of Mack, the white guy who represents the interests and fears of well-intentioned middle-class white people.

This movie is easy to read. By that, I mean that it is easy to understand the motivations of most of the characters and that their motivations are not cryptic. The characters are exactly what the narrative suggests that they are. So: the story is, in a sense, basic. But the filmmaking and the acting sustained my interest, and the ease of reading the movie heightened my appreciation of the excellent filmmaking and acting. This was a confidently-made, capable presentation of these characters' stories and feelings.

The Grand Canyon is mentioned in the dialogue of this movie, and is used consciously by the characters as a metaphor for the socioeconomic distance that society puts between them. Every time this happened, I was astonished that the script would pull the subtext up into the text. It seems like something that a student film, and not a film by an accomplished filmmaker, would do. But despite the obviousness of this directorial choice, I enjoyed the movie and I even enjoyed the characters' discussions of this subtext and this metaphor. The head-on confrontation with the subtext reminded me of Mary McDonnell's speech to Mack on the subject of the abandoned baby: we viewers are led to think that she has been driven mad by her empty nest, but she assures Mack (in the dialogue, and in a clear and rhetorically convincing tone of voice) that she has not taken leave of her senses and that she knows that she cannot keep the baby without going through proper legal channels. This dramatic choice prevents her from being unsympathetic, and makes her seem self-aware and humane instead of (as I think we are led by the movie to think) to seem, as Mack might see her, irrationally attached to a baby out of a desire to take comfort and refuge in her role as a nurturing and purpose-filled mother.

[Slartibartfast]

The Accountant. 2016. dir. Gavin O'Connor

watched 22-23 Nov 2021, Keperra.

Interesting enough action movie about an autistic accountant who also works as a kind of hitman. Sort of a John Wick for people who are less stupid, but marginally less stupid.

[Slartibartfast]

A Man Called Horse (1970).

Watched 28 Apr 2022, Keperra.

I watched this because I remembered that my father liked it.

This seemed like a less humane version of Dances With Wolves. The idea that the old are left to die by the Sioux seems villainous to me. I didn't enjoy watching this movie, and didn't find anyone to sympathize with in it.

[Space Tycoon]

I watched a movie called "The Northman" a few weeks ago! In an actual honest-to-Odin Movie Theee-Ay-Terr!!!

Vikings doin' Viking shit, while lookin' way hot. Arguably hotter than the times would have permitted. Not a lot of fitness centres or hair care products in 895 AD Iceland.

Raw, brutal, horrifying, and uncompromising look at Scandinavian society a thousand years ago. I believe we need more movies like this. Unconventional, unglamourous (except for the hotness), and unpredictable. Pure filmmaking, acting, and storytelling.

Viking Gladiator?!

[Mal Shot First]

I watched a movie caled The Northman a few weeks ago!

And you watched it in the North... man!

I'll let myself out

[Space Tycoon]

I watched a movie caled The Northman a few weeks ago!

And you watched it in the North... man!

I'll let myself out

Get thee to a punnery!

[Space Tycoon]

I have to say, this year I was impressed by both Kenobi and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Neither series was perfect, but they did a good job of returning to what made the original source material strong to begin with; while adding some new elements that were mostly complimentary.

I actually teared up during Kenobi and Vader's final conversation. Mind you, I was possibly on some vegan/soy/tofu low testosterone thing. Possibly.

Anyway, tears. Manly Tears Of Manliness.

[Slartibartfast]

Foul Play (1978). Written and directed by Colin Higgins.

I saw the first two minutes of this on television back in the late 80s or early 90s one Christmas Eve. It must have been on Showtime. With access to a good American library, I could track down the very day that I saw those first two minutes.

The movie always stuck in in my head, and I finally saw it in September of 2022 at the house in Bardon. It took me three sessions to get through it.

The movie starts like a Hitchcock film. Goldie Hawn, terrifically braless throughout, picks up a hitchhiker who hides a microfilm with her. Shortly after that he is killed. So begins an ultimately unsatisfying plot that I'm not going to bother summarizing. Instead, I'll write this paragraph:

The villains in the movie intend to assassinate the Pope in order to begin a new era of 1770s-and-1840s-style uprisings against entrenched power. This means that they are morally correct, so to the extent that the main characters of this film oppose the villains, they are morally wrong.

The end of the movie is similar to the end of The Godfather, Part III. The stunts performed during the final chase sequence are remarkable, but I found the whole thing dull. I also found the humor lame. There's a lot of risqué jokes in the movie that I think the writer/director intended in earnest, but they don't land and they embarrassed me.

I can't recommend this film except as a filmic record of Goldie Hawn's attractiveness in the late 1970s.

[Slartibartfast]

The Caine Mutiny (1954).

Watched at the house in Ferny Grove, 31 Jan 2024.

I had been meaning to watch this for years. Bogart as Captain Queeg provides the most accurate portrait of an incompetent paranoid boss I've seen. Watching him reminded me of my corporate days working at Red Hat. The focus character is a young man with whom it is difficult to sympathize on account of his foolishness. Fred MacMurray initially comes across as a likeable guy, but he later behaves like a coward and betrays his fellows. There is also a romance plot that serves only to give an arc to the young focus character, but it's not much of an arc and it's not worth the time spent on it. It's an interesting movie.

[Jubbers]

We watched Godzilla Minus One towards the beginning of December; Jan 25th we watched Godzilla Minus One Minus Color. I preferred the Minus Color version.

[Slartibartfast]

Dune: Part Two (2024)
The absence of CHOAM from the narrative makes political nonsense of the story. Jessica would never vomit unless she meant to do so, because no Bene Gesserit would vomit unless they meant to. Walken is wasted and miscast. Zendaya is a bad actress and has no sexual chemistry with Timothee Chalamet. The notion that there is a religious split in the Fremen is absurd and contrary to the nature of the terraforming project that they are engaged in. It also makes little sense for the northerners to be freethinking and for the Southerners to be fundamentalists--are we supposed to believe that Mapes (a believer who lived in Arakeen, which is in the North) is a fundamentalist? I dislike this invention as it relates to Dune.

I thought the movie was engaging even though it was ramified and sloppy.

I hated the ending. Is Chani really so childish that she doesn't understand the necessity of political marriage? Are we as viewers supposed to accept this childish Chani?

[Space Tycoon]

The Caine Mutiny (1954).

I've been meaning to watch this one as well. Read the book a number of years ago. I've been reading a number of war-themed novels lately connected to films. This will be next, if I can locate it somewhere on the World Wide Web.