After a good start to my week in dork, things calmed down a bit. Well, actually they didn’t. I was extremely busy with all kinds of stuff, but little in the way of dorkiness. Without further ado, the movies.
Malibu Express: Wow. The 80s. Sometimes I forget just how much changed in the 90s, when they stopped putting nudity in movies. Or, cut back substantially. There must be a topless woman every two minutes in this cheese filled goof-fest. Pseudo-Tom Selleck Darby Hinton smarms his way through scene after scene of pretty and not so pretty women being compelled to find him sexually attractive for some reason. Oh, and there’s a murder mystery or something. And spies, I guess. Yeah, it’s dumb. Very dumb. But you don’t watch movies like this because you want smart.
The Teacher: Holy smokes. The 70s. This film has some of the most twisted morality I’ve seen in a while. A neighborhood full of bored housewives all lusting after a young man (seemingly, even his mother). A kid falls to his death and it’s no big thing. A murderer on the loose and…well, you know. Boys will be boys. And women will be statutory rapists. Angel Tompkins is extremely cute, but this movie feels icky on so, so many levels. When the kid’s mom pretty much feeds her son to The Teacher (Tomkins), saying he needs to learn to be a man, it just feels…Ugh. But, go-to TV hoodlum Anthony James is great as the psycho stalker. And oh, man, that ending.
Cadfael: A Morbid Taste for Bones: Cadfael heads to savage Wales in this episode of the always cool UK mystery. He faces some interesting moral questions and pulls some kind of dubious stuff, but keeps to his own moral compass, as usual. Plenty of twists and turns. Good stuff.
Caged Fury: Oh, no. Someone is kidnapping out bimbos and brainwashing them into human bombs. This ugly, shoddy movie is basically an excuse to get some moderately attractive girls to take their tops off, which wouldn’t be so bad if they’d done so more often, and spent less time on the awful script and acting. These made in the Philippines movies are just never as good when Pam Grier isn’t there. The really shocking thing about the film is that it wasn’t made in 1972, but 1984. Everything about it looks MUCH older than it really is.
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: A great cast of ‘that guy’ actors fills out this by the numbers, narration heavy mob movie about the early power plays of Al Capone. It feels a lot like those 50s FBI films Fox put out a decade or so before, but without a central investigator to hang a plot on. It’s worth checking out, for sure. But nothing amazing. That said, the film features some really good mat paintings and looks very good for what was no doubt a low budget.
I also watched a few more episodes of Star Trek. Season 3 is all over the place. Some good. Some awful. I love the cast, and I love the feel of the show. But I wish they were a little more consistent, and consistently good.
I read one of the short Star Wars Adventures graphic novels for kids, Luke Skywalker and the Treasure of the Dragonsnakes. I like that these are all set in and around the original films, expanding in little ways the beloved movies of my youth. And like all the best Star Wars stuff, they’re done by folks who love the movies, not by Lucas, who seems to have nothing but contempt for his films and their fans.
I sat down and read the first (of hopefully many) volumes of Rocketeer Adventures, which I also wrote a review of here. So much fun.
And I had my first game night since my road back to gaming began. Read about it here. I can’t wait for the next one. I’ll have to figure out my schedule and see when that’ll be. I also posted another Prodigal Son, about what players should do to prepare, here.
Found myself listening to a lot of old timey pop music this week. Some radio hits of the late 20s, among others.
-Matt
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