Matt’s Week in Dork! (6/8/14-6/14/14)

    In spite of some difficulties, I’m loving life right now.  This week, I even managed to get in some good Dork living around the other stuff.

All You Need is Kill (aka Edge of Tomorrow):  With a good amount of humor and plenty of balls to the wall action, this science fiction adventure film was a pleasant Summer Blockbuster.  Unusually, the fast cutting and hand-held camera work was good.  Tom Cruise, for all his wackiness off camera, is still a charming dude.  And Emily Blunt is awesome.  Truth be told, I wish she’d been the star of the film.  She’s a close second in an Obi Wan Kenobi sort of way.  The Groundhog Day storytelling works well and the overall vibe of the film is great.  I think the ending could have been better.  But it’s not bad.  Well worth checking out.  Give me more of these, and less Transformers/Avatar type movies.  Give me movies where the effects help tell the story, not where they take the place of the story

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Girly:  Super boring.  Super British.  It’s another movie about upper-class twits going crazy and being evil.  There was a cinematic epidemic of this sort of thing in the 60s and 70s, and this is a lackluster entry.  If Steed & Peele had shown up half way through, things might have gotten interesting.  They did not.

    On Monday night, I went with Ben and Nick to a place I’d never been to before, and frankly, probably never otherwise would have gone to.  Hooters.  So, here’s the thing.  Every time anyone brings up Hooters, someone says ‘they’ve got great wings.’  I love wings.  And it’s certainly not that I’m put off by beautiful women in skimpy outfits.  But somehow (well, I think the "how" is obvious), Hooters has always had a certain something about it, in the cultural zeitgeist, that I found off-putting without ever actually going.  So, we went and yes, the wings are great.  I got all-you-can-eat, and made it worth the money, eating three plates.  The best were the lemon & pepper.  I want to go back and try all the other flavors I didn’t get to (there are like 10).  That said, the place has a very, very weird vibe.  It feels like an uncomfortable mix of family restaurant, sports bar, and strip club.  No, the women aren’t stripping, but their outfits are so out of keeping with the rest of the place that you can’t help but notice.  Whatever the case, I had a good time and ate some good food.  And yeah, I’ll probably go back, because I want more wings.  In stead of Hooters, though, they might want to call it Wedgies.

The Best Years of Our Lives:  I found this film pleasantly honest.  The lives of three WWII vets get complicated when the return home and try to pick up their old lives.  One is haunted, one is wistful, an done is physically damaged.  Each one faces his own set of demons, each one must find his own way, while forming a bond of friendship.  It’s a good movie about men, and about soldiers.  For a film made in 1946, I found it’s frank look at the damages of war to be refreshing and surprising.  This would be an excellent capper to a WWII movie marathon.  It is rather long for its type.  It isn’t an epic, but it’s nearly three hours long.  However, it’s not boring, and well worth the time. 

    What’s a little apocalyptic downpour?  Wednesday night, we went to the Alamo, and were treated to a massive thunderstorm with out Spaghetti Western.  About 20 minutes from the end, the power went out for a bit, giving folks a break to get up and walk around.  But all was well, and the show went on.

For a Few Dollars More:  Dare I say it?  Is this the best of the Man With No Name trilogy?  I kind of think it is.  Everything works here.  It’s beautiful.  It’s funny.  It’s violent.  The music is flippin’ amazing.  Lee Van Cleef is so danged good.  And that finale?  Awesome.  Straight-up awesome.  I saw these films when I was a boy of maybe 12 or 13, and I didn’t really get them.  Though I knew I was seeing something different from the ‘black hat-white hat,’ John Wayne strutting Westerns I’d disliked on Saturday afternoon TV, I didn’t get what I was seeing.  A quarter century later, and I get it.  Darned fine stuff.

The Cranes are Flying:  Russia.  World War II.  Yup, this film is super depressing.  However, it’s also beautifully shot and filled with uplifting moments and relatable characters.  With a strong anti-war message, and a weirdly non-political (at least, non-Communist VS Capitalist) spirit, I’m not surprised that this went on to international success when it came out.  The camera work alone is more than worth the price of admission.  Forget Alfonso Cuaron’s gimmicky long-shots.  The camera here is an intimate partner of the actor in a way I’ve rarely seen.

The Horror of Party Beach:  Ultra-campy, and a ton of fun, this movie about a bunch of kids (played by very adult actors) having fun in the sun while being menaced by terrible looking fish-creatures (who are really Zombies!) this is a must see.  The MST3K boys took their turn at it, but honestly, it’s just as much fun without ‘em.  If you’re in the mood to watch a stupid movie with friends, this is a great choice.  Check it out.  And stay groovy!

The Curse of the Living Corpse:  Roy Scheider and Candace Hilligoss in a movie together?  OK.  Sign me up!  Unfortunately, that’s the best part of the movie, right there.  No, not them in the film, but that they were cast in the film.  The film is stupid.  But worse, it’s boring.  Other than some laughably bad acting, there’s nothing to see here.  Move along.  Move along.

    Saturday morning, I finished Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy.  Pretty darned good.  Can’t wait ‘til the third volume comes out in September.  Saturday afternoon, even though I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the book club, I finished off volume 1 of Preacher (thank goodness, I didn’t have to suffer through volume 2).  I know.  People love it.  But I am not one of those folks.  This was my second try reading it, and while the first time (about 10 years ago) I found it boring and didn’t finish the trade, this time around I outright hated it.  The further in I read, the more I hated almost everything about it.  I won’t be writing an extended review, so I’ll just say here that I thought the dialog seemed to have been written by a 13 year old boy trying his little heart out to be shocking.  The characters are all cardboard.  And the plot twists range from obvious to stupid.  I’ve heard the series gets better as it goes.  But I don’t care.  I got the same gut-level hate feeling I got from Saga, and like Saga, have to stare at the people telling me it’s great with a slack-jawed, dumbfounded look.  There’s obviously something I’m missing, and nobody has been able to explain to me what it is.

Colour From the Dark:  Another adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space.  It’s not too bad.  Fairly well produced (though the footage looks made for TV, the editing and composition are more ‘theatrical’), with some good creepy bits, it does fall a bit too heavy onto the Good VS Evil fallacy that is so wrong with Lovecraft.  The actors are a mixed bag.  And considering that it is supposed to take place in WWII era Italy, the fact that there are so many different accents is a bit weird.  Not nearly as good as Die Farbe, it’s still worth a watch, and better than many adaptations of the author’s work.

Riddick:  I know, I know.  I enjoy these Riddick movies.  I liked Pitch Black a lot.  I thought Chronicles of Riddick, for all its many faults, was a lot of fun.  I enjoyed Dark Fury, the animated short bridge film between the first two.  And I like this one.  This third feature is more in keeping with the original, and not just because the latter part of the film is something of a carbon copy of the first, but because it feels like it’s set more in an Alien type universe, as opposed to a Star Wars type universe (as Chronicles of Riddick did).  I really like the first half hour, where he’s kind of Robinson Crusoe on a desert world.  Once the Mercs show up, it’s not as good, but still watchable.  I’ve said this of several films in the last couple of years, but this is the sort of thing that should be a dime a dozen these days.  Mid-level, entertaining science fiction films.  Yes, I’d love for there to be great science fiction films.  But in between the great ones, I want to see a dozen or so of these more pulpy efforts.  This movie also reminds me that there’s no valid reason for not doing a live action Warhammer 40,000 film.

Oblivion:  My second viewing of this film, and darn it, I just really like it.  Absolutely, many of the ideas, if not all, are lifted from other science fiction films and books.  But so what?  My problem isn’t with lifting ideas, it’s with using them poorly, and this film isn’t guilty of that.  The movie is a feast for the eyes and the ears, with stunning visuals, gorgeous location shooting, and an excellent semi-electronica score.  Like Moon before it, Oblivion raids sci-fi of the 60s and 70s, and comes out with some very watchable stuff.

Chef:  This is definitely what the internet has termed ‘food porn.’  But it’s also a Capra-like comedy about a guy who falls on hard times, then learns valuable lessons about life and fatherhood (with WAY more swearing than Capra).  On occasion, it does stretch credibility (like, everyone talks about needing money, but they all seem to have enough to do whatever they want at any given time, including quitting good jobs with no prospects…and I’m not just talking about El Jefe).  And the very end?  OK, that seemed silly.  However, the movie has a great deal of heart, and the cast sells the familiarity of close friends.  In fact, the scenes between Favreau, Leguizamo, and Cannavale feel more true to what men are like without women around than most movies manage.  Like The Big Night, this movie makes you want to do a serious restaurant crawl.  I wanted to reach into the screen and eat some of everything.  I never had any interest in going to Miami, New Orleans, or Texas before, but suddenly the idea of a food tour is sounding amazing.

    I’m still listening to a bunch of Black Mountain.  I tapped into that 70s rock/metal vibe and can’t seem to shake it.  I may have to load up some Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Blu Oyster Cult this week to keep the train rolling.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (11/3/13-11/9/13)

    As the year draws to a close, I’m trying to see some of the various movies I missed for whatever reason.  But, as each one kind of sucks, I’ve also been descending more and more into my obsession with old films.

The Big Combo:  Rough, tough, and mean.  The Big Combo has the requisite cracking Noir dialog, ugly brutality, and dripping (though obscured) sexuality.  It even features gay hitmen (though it never comes out and says as much, it’s quite clear) played by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman.  Cornell Wilde is the sucker.  Richard Conte is the smarmy villain.  Great stuff.

    On Sunday night, as I was recovering from HestFest, Brad and I went out to the Alamo Drafthouse to see Gilda.

Gilda:  My second viewing of Gilda, no doubt effected by seeing it on the big screen, made me enjoy it much more than my first time ‘round.  The dialog is awesome, with Glenn Ford so amazingly hateful and cruel.  Rita Hayworth is obviously gorgeous, but she’s also delightfully nasty.  And their constant war of words, looks, and implications is a joy to watch.  Unfortunately, the last third of the film, though it features some cool scenes, goes way off the reservation, dropping the overall quality of the film.  It feels like studio interference.  Still, a good movie.

Doctor Who: Survival:  And I’m done.  Gah.  The final story of the classic Doctor Who series is one of the better of the Sylvester McCoy era (even though it features The Master).  But that still only puts it up there as a mid-level arc.  I completely understand why the show was cancelled, and why its popularity had slumped.  From the last season of Colin Baker to the end, there are few rays of light.  This one features horse mounted cat people and some listless British youth.  It’s also quite short, being only three episodes long.  So, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.  For the last couple years, I’ve been on a quest to rewatch Doctor Who from beginning to end, in as close to order as I could do (what with the gaps and with stories being released after I’d passed that point), and it’s been fun.  But I’ll admit, the last four years of the show are, for the most part, really awful.  And I’m more and more convinced that many of the worst aspects of the new series were birthed during this time.

The Virgin Spring:  Stark, beautiful, haunting, disturbing, and maybe a bit challenging.  The Virgin Spring deals with Paganism, Christianity, savagery, and the sublime.  It features one of the most horrendous and squirm-inducing rapes ever put to film.  The cast is excellent.  The cinematography is gorgeous.  A fine film, but not an easy one.

The Purge:  When I talk about ‘what’s wrong with modern horror’ I’m talking about this film.  Or, this film is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.  Here’s a pretty solid idea for a movie (if 30 years too late to feel relevant); society was on the verge of collapse, due to rampant crime, so a radical change was made, creating a once a year suspension of the law.  For one twelve hour period each year, people can do whatever they want, kill whoever they want.  Reveling in this violence isn’t just accepted, it’s considered a person’s patriotic duty.  OK.  Cool.  This could be the basis of something really good (and was, in a classic Trek episode).  Unfortunately, the script feels like it didn’t get much beyond the rough draft phase.  The characters aren’t even nuanced enough to be one dimensional.  And every time anything is about to happen, you’ll find yourself saying, ‘ah, here’s is the scene where they do this thing.’  Everyone is exceptionally stupid, doing the dumbest thing at the worst time in order to move the plot along.  And that right there is the key problem with most horror films made since the end of the 80s.  Lazy writing has created an industry standard that allows for characters to do whatever the writer needs to get the action going.  X person is perfectly safe, with no danger of ever being hurt whatsoever, as long as they just don’t turn that knob…so, what’s the first thing they do?  Yup.  Turn the knob.  EVERY TIME.  I’m so sick of this bad writing.  So sick of it.  And if that wasn’t enough, the whole film is shot…say it with me…hand held.  Yes, that’s right.  Everyone’s favorite; the shaky cam.  Are you tired of being able to tell what’s going on?  Are you sick of having some frame of reference?  Well, worry no longer, this movie jitters and shakes, while someone having a seizure waves a flashlight, so you’ll have no friggin clue what’s happening.  Yay!

Here comes the suck.

The Magician:  I need to watch this movie again, as I was half passed out during much of it, but the film is certainly odd.  I’m still fairly new to Bergman, having only seen three of his films to date.  And this one feels more like The Seventh Seal than like The Virgin Spring, a bit more surreal and ‘theatric.’  There were some things I liked, and it warrants a second look.  So in a year or so, I think I’ll try watching it again, and see if I like it more then.

World War Z:  I would absolutely hate to think that the collection of morons and twits they assembled in this film might be in some way responsible for saving civilization.  Every stupid-ass choice, dumb decision, and foolish move seems to be the first done.  Bloody idiots.  Getting past the obvious moronic choice of the producers to abandon the book (which probably could have made a compelling basis for a film), and the appalling CGI zombie ant-swarm effects, and the crappy PG-13 pseudo-violence, I can not get past how idiotic everyone is, and how kinda boring the whole thing ends up being.

Renoir:  “He always makes me look like a girl.”  The Great War is raging, and old painter Renoir is hold up in his beautiful rural home, painting and torturing himself over his two sons who are off at war.  It is strange to see the idyllic setting and the sad, out of touch old man, knowing the horrors that were raging.  Family conflicts and old wounds are observed by a new model who arrives at the direction of Renoir’s recently dead wife.  The movie is quiet and quite beautiful, the gorgeous countryside and the stately old home make me wish I’d stuck with painting.

Summer Interlude:  “Nothing means anything in the long run.”  A successful, but aging dancer (they get ‘old’ while still quite young) is haunted by the wonderful and sad memories of a Summer spent on an idyllic island.  Her fickle, petulant younger self had a sweet, but also brutal love affair with a serious young man.  The scenery is amazing, the wistful look back at vacationing drips with nostalgia, the mistakes we make when we’re young, and the regrets we have when we get older.  It’s tragic, sad, and beautiful.

I Married a Witch:  “Did you ever have one of those days when just…nothing seems to go right?”  An odd, madcap comedy.  I can’t say it’s great, but it’s sure weird.  A goofy old warlock and his daughter who were stuck in a tree for a couple centuries get unleashed on the modern world, and hijinks ensue.  Not sure that it deserves a place as a great classic, but it’s a fun, light entertainment.

    Other than doing some more general reading of this and that, that was my week.  Not especially exciting, but not completely unpleasant.  The biggest thing was when I finished the run of classic Doctor Who.  Though the end of the series was pretty bad, thinking back over the whole run reminded me of a lot of the great stuff.

-Matt

Dork Art: Escape From New York

I'm about halfway through my Martin Scorsese-a-thon and I'm already thinking that John Carpenter is gonna be my next director obsession.  Having devoured They Live twice already this year, and thumping my car stereo with the Assault on Precinct 13 soundtrack, my brain is simply ready for his pop cowboy aesthetic.  Anyway, it's late at night and I just stumbled upon this kickass dork art from Big Ode Ideias.  Bravo sir, you gotta em all in there.

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (2/17/12-2/23/13)

    I scraped out my penny jar and went out to see a matinee with Ben, Brad, and Paul on Sunday morning.  Five dollars.  Not too bad.  We saw the new Die Hard film (review to follow).  But what I really took away from it was how bloody awful the trailers were.  Scary Movie 6?  Holy crap, it looks terrible.  Like Donovan’s Reef, where you see where you know everyone must have thought they were being funny, but can’t for the life of you figure out why.  And then…the trailer for The Heat.  Good sweet crap.  It’s like looking in to the abyss, and knowing in your very soul that it looks back at you.  Every moment of the trailer was like having my scrotum wound up on a spinning wheel.  Only really unpleasant.  Anyway, I really don’t know how I got so many movies and such in this week.  Because I also did a lot of reading and some writing.  Not to mention some solid music listening time.  Whatever the case, it was a good week.

A Good Day to Die Hard:  Look, I’m gonna say something that will almost certainly earn me some hate, and I know frustrates the crap out of my co-Dork Brad.  I really like the first Die Hard film.  It’s a fun, silly 80s action movie with lots of cool stunts and stuff blowing up (though not even one of my favorites of that time/genre).  But I absolutely HATE Die Hard 2 in every way.  And I think the rest of the sequels are stupid, though mildly entertaining.  This new one is no different.  The script is crap.  The acting (most likely because of the script) is crap.  And yeah, it feels PG-13, because except for one bit of CG blood, the violence is very restrained.  But a lot of stuff blows up, and frankly, that’s all I expect from this series.  They’re not good.  Honestly, they’re not even memorable.  And I never find myself thinking, “I need to watch a Die Hard film.”  I think the only one of the sequels I’ve ever seen a second time was 2, and that was because Brad wanted me to give it another try (still didn’t like it).  Beyond the first one, they’re all pretty meh.  And so it is with this latest entry.  I had fun watching it, but in a week, I won’t remember it. (edit: this latter prediction was brilliantly prescient -Matt of 5 days later).

Destroy All Planets:  Gammera doesn’t think too much of aliens in their striped ball-rings.  Wacky fun ensues when two boy-scouts play havoc with a submarine.  Like some late Godzilla films, this one relies WAY too much on stock footage, showing large chunks of previous films’ Gammera battles in order to pad its run-time.  Clearly, a solid script would have been a bit more helpful.  Once the kids get on the alien ship, it gets a bit better.  Actually, everything that’s not monotonous stock footage is pretty good.  The aliens are freaky.  And it’s kind of horribly violent.  But it also finds a giant turtle riding a giant squid-alien like a jet ski, so all’s fair, I guess.

Attack of the Monsters:  “You’re dumb.”  Trouble makers are out looking for a space ship when they get more than they bargained for.  By this point, these Gammera films were pretty much goofy kids films.  None of the seriousness of the first couple is left.  And having the little kids as leads is rough.  The crappy marching music that plays continuously is aggravating.  I like that this one goes to another world, which makes for plenty of weird things to see.  This is another one of those movie from this era where people don’t seem to know the difference between various cosmic bodies.  In this case, stars and planets seem to mean the same thing.  I remember seeing a lot of movies that talk about going to other galaxies, when really they were talking about other star systems.  Seems basic, but I guess looking in books was too hard.  Whatever the case, untrustworthy space babes are always a concern when traveling between worlds.  Keep watch!

Mmm.  Brains!

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (aka An American Love Story):  Entirely too made-for-TV.  Though the story of Jefferson and Hemings could make for a fascinating movie, this ain’t it.  Sam Neill is dashing (in a sophisticated intellectual sort of way) as Thomas Jefferson, and Carmen Ejogo is ridiculously fetching as Sally Hemings.  This had to have been a complex and fascinating love affair, as Jefferson was a complicated dude, and from what I’ve read, Hemings was quite a woman.  However, here we have Jefferson seeing a beautiful woman and wanting her.  I have to imagine if it was just a beautiful woman he wanted, he could have had his pick.  And while Ejogo is amazingly beautiful and seems to be a talented enough actress, there isn’t enough in the script to make her seem like someone interesting enough to woo Jefferson.  It comes off as, well as what it is, a Hallmark made for TV movie.  It feels a bit like a visit to a theme park, like all the surface is there, but the content missing.  The old age make-up is generally not good, mostly looking like people have lumps of clay splashed on their faces.  In the end, it’s a different look at Jefferson than one might be used to, though again, not a very deep one.  I feel like there was so much more that could have been done here.  Instead, what we get is one of those high school text book renditions of history.  A few dates, a few names, a couple of anecdotes for color, and done.  No heart or passion.  No dirt under the nails.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers:  “I don’t have any friends, Doctor Kibner.”  The original is a classic.  But this is one of those rare-breed, serious, and worthy remakes.  Starting on some distant planet, we see weird alien life launch into space, like plant or fungal spoor.  It eventually descends on our unsuspecting world in a rain storm, and the horror begins.  Right from the start, there is an unsettling, off balance feel to the movie.  Weird angles, suspicious faces, and creepy lighting.  Paranoia is whipped up with gusto.  This is a story archetype that is one of the fundamentals of science fiction.  Who can you trust?  Is the person you know and love really who you think they are?  Or are they something else, something sinister and alien?  On of the more obvious and frequent uses of the concept was in the anti-Communist films so popular in the 50s, but it goes far beyond that, becoming a timeless look at our fears of the Other.  We can never really know who someone is outside of ourselves.  And can we really know even that?  And this is 70s PG, so there is some strong language, some pretty nasty violence, and a bit of nudity.  It really isn’t a kid-friendly film.

Just Before Dawn:  The 70s weren’t quite over for the makers of this film.  Was there some kind of subconscious fear of rural life, or the ‘country’ that had infected city folk?  So many movies about the horrors of leaving the city were being made.  Right off, this has a dash or two of Texas Chainsaw.  But the way it’s shot actually reminds me of early Sam Raimi (remember when he was good?) and early Peter Jackson.  In fact, the very opening, looking down through the hole in the roof of an ancient chapel felt right out of Peter Jackson’s low budget horror days.  Greg Henry leads a group of young people into the mountains for some camping.  George Kennedy is the local ranger who warns ‘em not to go.  Them woods got the giggling fat guys in ‘em, and nobody wants that.  Not to mention all the twins.  And as The Slammin’ Salmon tells us, twins are disgusting, man (not my actually feelings, all you twins out there).  It doesn’t really cover any new territory.  This was all well explored country by 1981.  But, it still has a certain charm.  And while I can’t say I especially liked any of the characters, unlike most modern horror movies, I didn’t dislike them.  Plus, Deborah Benson is cute, especially when she lets her hair down.

Prince Valliant:  “Don’t bring in religion to confound me!”  The venerable comic gets a 50s Technicolor treatment, staring a young Robert Wagner.  Throw in Janet Leigh (good golly, but she’s lovely in this, and Debora Paget is nothing to sneeze at, either) and James Mason, and you’ve got something.  It’s Christian Viking VS. Pagan Viking in a duel for the hearts and souls of Scandia.  The locations are beautiful, enhanced occasionally with some pretty good mat paintings.  One thing that old adventure films have taught me is that I need to do more wandering/adventuring.  Because that seems to be the surest way to stumble upon beautiful women bathing, who will quickly fall in love with you.  It’s weird seeing King Arthur portrayed as an old man.  I just don’t think of Arthur as old.  He should have died in the prime of his life.  Whatever the case, this is very much in the style and spirit of those other vibrant and somewhat cartoony medieval adventure films, like the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.  It reminds me a bit of that sequence in Time Bandits when they meet John Cleese, and he’s in that ridiculous costume.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance:  “He’s mocked my dirks.” This is one of those films that explores the oft repeated cinematic mistake of screwing with your hired killer.  If movies have taught me anything, it’s that you should always treat your exceptionally competent and deadly help with respect.  If you have a great hitman (or woman) in your employ, and he or she chooses to retire, you give them a care package, a nice bonus, and send them a Christmas card every year for what you hope is a long life.  If your executioner does a fine job of taking some princeling’s head off, but it becomes politically embarrassing at a later date, you don’t take it out on him, you simply accept that these things happen, be honest, and move on (maybe take the executioner out to dinner at a nice place…nothing too fancy…just to show that everything is A-OK).  But don’t kill his wife, or threaten his kid, or sick assassins on him.  Don’t go to some mountain village and kill his master or have his brother shot in the street.  These things may seem like good ideas in the heat of the moment.  But they are not.  Anyway, the movie is pretty cool.  Very stylized, with extreme sound design and buckets of blood.  The violence is pretty extreme.  The duel in the sun drenched field is a nasty highlight.  There are some crazy dismemberments in this movie.  If Akira Kurosawa’s work was inspired by John Ford, I think these movies were inspired by Sergio Leone.

The Island:  “It is no fun in an airplane with a 400lb sow gone ape-shit.”  This movie is crazy.  Crazy.  Michael Caine is a stressed out reporter on a quest to find out what’s up with a bunch of missing boats.  He hires the greatest pilot ever to take him and his boy to the Caribbean.  In the meantime, some sort of nutty killer is roving the waters with a burning crown.  Oh, yeah.  Then things get weird.  I would actually avoid reading up on this movie before you see it.  Not knowing where it’s gonna end up is probably a lot more fun.  Overall, it doesn’t live up to the madness of its first 15 or 20 minutes.  But it’s oddly enjoyable anyway.  The violence in the opening is pretty extreme.  The rest of the movie tones it down several notches.  And the music?  That’s crazy and seemingly inappropriate.

El Condor:  Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef are a dirty pair, out for loads of gold in this odd Western.  Van Cleef is ultra-goofy and spastic, which is odd to see.  And Brown isn’t playing suave, as he normally would.  Lots of killing and shooting.  Some very odd bits.  A bunch of good twists and turns and back stabbings.  Frankly, this was a far better movie than it seemed to be, and much more than I was expecting.  It was nice seeing Van Cleef in such a different role.  And though he gets more serious and more ‘smooth’ as the film goes on, Brown is a bit goofy in the beginning, too.  The women are lovely, and there’s a surprising amount of nudity for a movie of its time.  The violence is pretty nuts, too.

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord- Terror of the Veroids:  The first story to feature Mel (gah!) finds the Doctor and his companion on a space ship loaded with mystery.  Mel is this perky nightmare of frizzy 80s vacuousness.  I think I had tuned out of the show at this point when it was on PBS in the 80s, because my first memory of her was with Sylvester McCoy.  Dang, she’s aggravating.  Still, when the pod people start a rampage, things got rolling.  The overall story is not too bad.  It’s very Agatha Christi.  The whole season, with its trial frame story is kind of blah.

"I look like a what!?"

Branded:  This satire about advertising, politics, image, and business takes on a bedtime story feel, with a calm, mellow narrator.  Setting it in Russia helps capture all that crazy Cold War history, and the Orwellian boogieman of the State as God.  The speech about how Lenin created marketing with his propaganda to sell Soviet Communism, and how everyone else learned from that is pretty spot on.  There are elements of Brazil, and as one comes to expect in films like this, Kafka, and for some reason, I kept thinking about The Hudsucker Proxy, and by the end, Videodrome.  Like a good bedtime story, it features a weird, transformative quest of a hero who must find himself in order to battle great evil.  Will or can anyone understand the transformed man and the message he brings?  While this movie is kind of a smorgasbord of previously used ideas, it manages to take those ideas in some interesting ways.  Certainly non-standard ways.  Does the ending ring a bit false?  Yeah.  But again, it’s like a fairy tale, and fairy tales often wrap up in less than believable ways.  I can’t say that the film is any kind of genius, but for what it is, it’s pretty good.  In a way, it feels like all the things Cosmopolis wasn’t.

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession:  A documentary about the ground breaking L.A. channel that helped bring movies of all kinds to viewers, presaging HBO, Showtime, and the rest.  Wrapped in that is the tragic story of one of the channel’s driving forces, Jerry Harvey, a mad genius.  The wide breadth of what the channel showed made it like a televised version of The AFI theater, or Criterion collection.  From trash to art, from foreign to simply unusual, it showed movies many would never otherwise see or even be able to see.  Sometimes giving movies that bombed a second shot at life, showing what would eventually be known as ‘directors’ cuts.’  Seeing this makes the movie lover in me so  hungry for a taste of all these great movies, and reminds me of the pleasure I receive in sharing my love of film with others.  Obviously, there’s though, as you know from the start that it ends in death, both for the Z Channel and for its tempestuous champion.  Jerry’s life is a depressing spiral that ended where all too many spirals end.  His passion for film and for sharing it was impressive.  But the man suffered from severe mental illness.  Interviews with actors and directors who had their work shown, as well as co-workers and personal friends of Harvey give a human side to the story, both on the part of those involved and those who were effected.  It was an emotional film, and you can see it raw in faces of his friends, who still can not fully reconcile the good times with his violent and ugly exit.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx:  “Gyaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”  Our strange heroes are back, eating dumplings and taking names.  This series of films features an especially bleak vision of feudal Japan, where danger lurks in every glance, life is cheap (if it costs anything at all), and everyone is unhappy like it’s their job.  Samurai films in general owed a lot to Westerns, but this series feels like it’s got more than a dash of Film Noir, not in visual style, but ugly human action.  Like the first film, this one features extremely disturbing use of sound design, and for that matter, its own visual language.  The film certainly reiterates that classic advice, I think it was from Aristotle, ‘watch out for crazy bitches.’  The cackling lady and her deadly maidens are not a group to run afoul of (or work for), ninja or no.  If I ever have a kid, I’m getting that stroller.  You can see pieces of this film in many other later movies.  What’s really weird though, is that this movie (trippy as it is) is much less trippy than the first one.  And as I sit her watching what I’m watching (the Three Storms just killed the Wolverines!), that mere fact speaks volumes.

    Started watching season two of Game of Thrones.  So far, so good.  Maybe a bit much on the sex.  I mean, it’s not the later books of Niven’s Ringworld we’re watching, right?  Still, I’m digging it.  And I like a lot of the new cast.  Hope they fare better than some of last season’s.

    I finally got back into Fraggle Rock.  Seriously, one of the best television shows for kids ever.  It’s the perfect blend of thoughtful, ethical, creative, funny, and stamped with that intangible Jim Henson genius.  And it’s not condescending.  I think that’s why I can watch it as an adult and still feel that wistful sense of childhood wonder.  If the stars shifted, water changed course, and the pressures of evolution ever let up, allowing me to have children, this is the kind of thing I’d want them to see.

    On Sunday afternoon I finished God is Not Great.  A solid read, if not my favorite Hitchens book.  Still, gets the blood pumping.

-Matt

A Fistful of Happy Birthday, Roger Corman!

Yesterday marked the 86th Birthday of the man commonly refereed to as "The King of the B's" but as anyone who's seen the recent documentary Corman's World knows, that's a title that never settled well with the man himself.  Personally, what I love about all...well, most of--uh, several of the movies directed or produced by Roger Corman is his go-for-it willpower driven cinema.  The movies don't have the talent or the money but they've got a concept and they drive it home to the best of their abilities.  A lot of dogs are born, but there are some serious gems to be celebrated.  

But for this week's Fistful, instead of championing my all time favorite Corman flicks (you can see those over at cineAWESOME! where I gushed during one of last year's Top 7 Tuesdays), I thought I would list the films I'm still dying to see.  For the last couple of years I've been obsessing over Corman and these are the handful of flicks I have yet to track down.  And I just know there's gold to be found here.

5.  Piranha II: The Spawning:  After contributing some second unit work for Corman's Galaxy of Terror, James Cameron was given the reins to this flying fish sequel to the Joe Dante semi-classic.  I love the first film, and as much as I loathe recent efforts like Avatar & Titanic, you can't help but geek out over The Terminator and Aliens.  But somehow I've managed to avoid the Piranha sequel.  Need to fix that.  Plus, this is the film that first partnered Cameron with Lance Henriksen, who plays the Jaws-like police chief on the hunt.  Netflix apparently has a cheap dvd, but I'd kinda like to see a transfer of some quality.  A pipe dream probably.  

4.  Sorceress:  Not to be confused with The Warrior & The Sorceress or Sorcerer.  The first time I saw the trailer for this film was on the Alamo Drafthouse edition of 42nd Street Forever and it blew my mind.  A couple of Playmate Twin Warriors battle it out with a satyr, a not quite Chimera-not quite Griffin Lion Monster, and boobs, boob, boobs!  It looks bonkers and I must have it.  Seriously, get this thing on DVD Shout Factory!

3.  It Conquered The World:  I've actually seen this a long time ago, but it was wonderfully interrupted by the MST3K geniuses.  But now that I've developed a proper taste for Corman I want to experience this rubber creature feature pure.  Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef lure It from the planet Venus and Alien Hell follows.  Include Corman regulars Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller and you've got some serious cheezy potential.  This has been on crappy DVD before but I want a cheap Film Chest blu ray like last year's The Terror.

2.  Machine Gun Kelly:  Not currently available on blu ray or dvd, I did just discover seconds ago that the whole film is up on YouTube and I am going to watch it the very second I finish with this post.  As a  child of the 1980s, Charles Bronson's Death Wish franchise was incredibly important with instilling an unhealthy amount of fear about the big city.  I remember when we first moved to the outskirts of Washington DC, I was deathly afraid of venturing into the Capitol because that's where the gangs were--that's where Jeff Goldblum's rapist stalked the streets!  Hmmmm...Death Wish was probably not the best movies for a ten year old to watch, I guess.  But it did introduce me to the badass that is Charles Bronson and I devoured several of his films as a result of that fear; I needed him to get my back.  Mr. Majestyk (which also introduced me to Elmore Leonard).  Once Upon A Time In The West.  Hard Times.  10 To Midnight.  Murphy's Law.  But I've never seen this biopic.  Can't wait to correct that.  Should be a good companion piece to other Corman gangster flicks like The St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Capone.

1.  Apache Woman:  As far as I'm concerned this is the Holy Grail of Corman films.  I've been trying to track down a copy for years and it doesn't appear to be available in any format, bootleg or legit.  The film stars Lloyd Bridges and Joan Taylor, but the real desire to see this flick comes from the fact that it's Dick Miller's first.  As you should all know by now, both Matt & I are great admirers of Miller and we grew up fascinated by his short terms in The Howling, The Terminator, Gremlins, and Explorers.  Not to mention his starring role as beatnik wannabe Walter Paisley in my all time favorite Roger Corman effort, Bucket of Blood (which Matt still hasn't seen and you should all get on his case about that).  For Apache Woman he plays not one, but two roles: the Indian Tall Tree & the cowboy Ed.  And, SPOILER ALERT, apparently one Miller kills the other in the climactic shootout.  That's just something all cinephiles should see.  So please, if anyone out there in Internetland knows of a copy, send it my way.

--Brad