Another Two Fistfuls of Favorites! (Matt’s Picks)

    It’s that time of year again.  Brad and I put down in stone (blog) the next ten movies in our lists of all time favorite films.  (See my 1-10 here, and 11-20 here).  The further into the list I get, the more weird I feel about it.  Not bad.  Just weird.  Of course, picking favorite movies is like picking favorite children.  Still, some kids are better than others.  And dang it.  Where’s Citizen Kane?  2001?  Hard Ticket To Hawaii?  I love those movies.  Well, maybe in the next installment.

30.  Cat People:  “Look at that boat…Look at that boat.”  I’m not a kinky guy.  But this movie drips in kink and I love it.  John Heard plays a successful me (you know, if I ran the zoo, and all that), wrapped up with a very special kind of femme fatale.  Nastassja Kinski is that fatale, a sweet natured girl with giant eyes and deep naivete.  They’re a perfect match, except for one thing.  Beautiful, deliberately paced, and with plenty of time spent on character, this weird mystery takes more than one unexpected turn.  Not for the easily upset, it features some rather unusual ideas, none too few of them depicted on screen.

29.  In a Lonely Place:  I’ve been a Bogart fan since I was around 10, when we got a VCR at my house and saw Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and Key Largo on a VHS my dad had.  Bogie was so cool, so tough, and so beautifully ugly.  Over the next 25 years, I watched those three films many times, and slowly watched others in his filmography.  But it was In a Lonely Place that struck me like a bolt of lightening.  Like when I read Henry Rollins’s poem I Know You, I felt my heart and soul were being ripped out and shown to me in their raw form.  Here was a film where my favorite actor was playing me, or at least the version of me I’m most ashamed of, most scared of.  I think it’s his best performance, and though the ending is a bit sensationalist, the movie feels like a brutally honest piece of self assessment by a writer about being a writer.

28.  Zardoz: "I have seen the future and it does not work."  It doesn’t get a heck of a lot more British-weird than this 70s masterpiece of the bizarre.  Sean Connery plays an ubermensch uplifted from the shattered remnants of humanity who sneaks into a pampered paradise of bored immortals.  Everyone plays it straight, no matter how crazy it gets.  And it gets CRAZY.  Zardoz is not for everyone…Scratch that.  Zardoz is not for most.  But for those lucky few, this movie is like no other and it’s wonderful.

27.  The Creature from the Black Lagoon:  I saw this film at such an early point in my life that I only have the vaguest sense of when it was.  I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6, and it would likely have been on the Creature Double Feature, seen at a friend’s house (they had cable, and got Channel 56 out of Boston).  I’m sure it wasn’t the first monster movie I saw, but it was the one that stuck with me, that made me a lover of the genre.  And it was my introduction to the Beauty and the Beast plot archetype, which has remained a favorite of mine ever since.

26.  Escape from New York:  Kurt Russell is a one eyed monster getting all up in the Big Apple’s prison hole.  Great cast, great score, lots of awesome action, and Snake Plissken, one of the most ridiculously tough tough guys of cinema.  I don’t think anyone but Russell could have pulled it off.

25.  An American Werewolf in London:  Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, I’d heard a lot of negative stuff about this movie before I rented it, but just minutes in and I loved the Hammer Horror vibe, the humor, and the surprising twists.  I laughed and jumped and marveled at the horror.  The effects are some of the best put to film, the cast is extremely charming, and the story wonderfully tragic.

24.  The Iron Giant:  The design and animation are excellent, but the story is the thing.  A lonely boy living in Cold War era Maine finds and befriends a giant robot from outer space.  It’s a good movie all around, but the ending.  Man, it gets me.  Superman indeed.  Niagara Falls.

23.  The Virgin Spring:  A beautifully filmed medieval story that straddles Ingmar Bergman’s symbolic and visceral sides comfortably.  It’s gut-punch brutal and lyrically mystical in turns.  A family’s love, the destruction of innocence, and the calculated vengeance of a grieving man.  This was the movie that made me a Bergman fan, and it’s a darned fine film.  Human ugliness displayed in a beautiful package.

22.  Coffy:  The rough, tough, and sexy Pam Grier shotguns her way through the criminal underworld as a one-woman war on corruption.  Reveling in the weird fashion and décor of the 70s, while slinging slang and splashing house-paint blood, it may not be the best Blaxploitation (Trouble Man, maybe?) or the best Pam Grier film (Jackie Brown), but it’s my favorite, and my go-to.  It’s the film that brought me to the genre, and the one I find myself popping in the DVD player most often.

21.  Alien:  A fantastic cast of characters, stunning production design, wonderfully slow then nightmarishly fast pacing, and one of the most beautiful creatures ever designed.  It’s a haunted house on a space ship.  It’s a creature feature.  It’s a pretty darned good slice-of-life science fiction film.  Everything about this film is top notch.  But I think it really comes down to the script and performances.  (See my detailed review here).

-Matthew J. Constantine

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/11/13-8/18/13)

    A slow start finished big this week, with the ever amazing William Shatner.

Zardoz:  Certainly, Zardoz is not to everyone’s taste.  Possibly because it’s completely bonkers, features some surreally strange acting, wildly improbably turns of event, and Sean Connery running around in red swim-trunks bringing the gift of death to spaced-out psychic flower children while a bit of the ol’ Ludwig Van plays.  Zardoz is a 70s dystopian nightmare unlike any other.  The closest thing I could compare it to are a lot of those ultra-trippy sci-fi shows coming out in the UK at the time, of which Doctor Who was probably the most mainstream and easy to follow.

The Showoff: A borish oaf treats everyone like crap and can’t tell the truth.  Things go from bad to worse, and then they really get pathetic as he blusters his way through life, destroying everyone around him.  The film isn’t all that great, and the main character is bloody awful.  But Louise Brooks is pretty swell as one of the dames.

The Plastic Age:  It’s jocks versus nerds in this pre-sound college comedy that shows little has changed in a hundred years.  Everyone’s got dames and sports on the mind, and they’re all freaking out.  It’s all kinds of goofy, but an interesting look at a long standing subgenre of comedy.  Many of the archetypes are already in place before the first words were spoken.  And of course, it ends with The Big Game.

A Band Called Death:  The trailer for this documentary took hold of my brain.  But, to a degree, it also told the story of the film, so seeing the whole thing is a touch disappointing.  However, the film sizzles with the band’s musical energy.  It is an interesting family story, and of course, a revelation of an unknown band that played Punk before there was Punk.

Escape from New York:  In the crime ridden future of the 1990s, New York City has become the pit of hell everyone thought it was in the late 70s.  Into this comes an anti-hero for the ages, a bitter, gruff, one-eyed bastard who doesn’t much like The Man.  Great action, great score, cool setting, and a great cast of character actors playing colorful roles.  This is one of the coolest films to come out of the 80s.

    We started off ShatAttack with a couple episodes of Thriller (The Grim Reaper & The Hungry Glass.  Both are quite good, with Shatner getting to play both perp and victim.  Up next was an episode of The Fugitive (Strange in the Mirror), featuring more manic madness from the Shat (keep an eye out for Astronaut Dodge from Planet of the Apes!).  And then Alfred Hitchcock Presents (The Glass Eye & Mother May I Go Out to Swim?).  Then on to The Outer Limits with Cold Hands, Warm Heart.

    Day two of ShatAttack started with Escape from Planet Earth and William Shatner’s World Famous Cappuccino Muffins.  Mmm.  And we followed that up, obviously, by The Bastard, part of The Kent Chronicles.  And then it was on to ShatAttack favorite The Devil’s Rain.

Escape from Planet Earth:  No shock that this movie wasn’t very good.  It has a few funny gags, but is mostly about as obvious as it gets.  The jokes are pretty obvious and the ‘social commentary’ is ham fisted.  And I’m not sure, but I think the moral of the story was that being single is bad, being stupid is good, and being a housewife is all a woman should strive for.

The Bastard:  Part one of The Kent Chronicles, this details the life of a French murder-machine as he kills everyone who crosses him, often with their own weapons.  After being raped by a milk-maid, our hero goes on to get set upon by various roughians and thugs, who through either luck, or some grand and hidden methodology, he thwarts, mostly to their death.  Then he heads to America, where I don’t know, I guess he gets into freedom and stuff.  It’s a very forgettable made for TV film that’s entirely too long and very repetitive.  Also, many of the actors, especially Andrew Stevens, seem totally wrong for their parts.  Stevens’s accent comes and goes more than the tide.

The Devil’s Rain:  Over the years since I first saw this film, it has become something of a favorite of mine, at least when the William Shatner mood strikes.  It’s not good.  The ending doesn’t make much sense.  But it’s beautifully shot and has some good performances.  And I like all the weird family history it hints at but never does a very good job of explaining.  And then there’s the pudding poring finale capped with a nonsense ending to give it that final punch.

    Of course, then you’ve just got to throw in a Police Woman episode (Smack).  And then…we put in the amazing, the wondrous, the incomparable Impulse.  After that, we played Star Trek Scene It?  And then it was time for the main event.  Kingdom of the Spiders, the most amazingly…well, a movie.  Following that with Star Trek IV just seemed like the thing to do.  And the follow-up to that was the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action.

Impulse:  “People like you ought to be ground up and made into dog food.”  I have come to the realization that Impulse is one of the greatest bad movies ever made.  From start to finish, it feels like a rollercoaster of awkward exchanges, poor choices, technical failings, and lack of continuity.  The ‘day for night’ shooting is among the worst outside of an Ed Wood movie.  The slow car murder, the Shatnerrific reactions, that awful little girl…Glorious.  No joke.  This is an absolute MUST see for any fan of cheese.

Kingdom of the Spiders:  Sadly not as genius as it should be, this does feature some great sleazy acting from Shatner and a fun, if poorly executed ending.  But the movie is slow, and the creatures ultimately not very scary (seriously, just get on a bike and you’re home free).  If you’re creeped out by spiders, this should be freaky.  If you’re not, it’s not quite campy enough, but it’s watchable with friends.

Star Trek IV:  One of the only Star Trek films to capture anything of the original series, this is also one of the most fun films of the whole franchise.  The first thing you’ll notices is that there’s no villain.  There’s nobody that needs to be punched or exploded at the end.  Like The Motion Picture, the film is more about identifying and figuring out a problem than it is about action.  If only the makers of the new films, or potential makers of a new TV series, would look at this movie and learn something.  No, that something isn’t ‘we should do time travel.

’

     After a raffle, those few who remained sat down to Big Bad Mama, the Roger Corman classic.  And we finished the evening off with a couple more original series episodes.

Big Bad Mama: This sleazy gangster film feels like a cheap attempt at capturing a taste of the Bonnie & Clyde pie.  It’s low budget and wonky, and it has dubious moral quality.  But it’s also got all kinds of 70s nudity (even Angie Dickinson).  Fun, but not especially good or memorable.

    Any week that involves a ShatAttack is a good week.  And this ended up being a really good week.

-Matt

Dork Art: More Great Showdowns

Scott C continues to rule my soul with his smiley renditions of cinema's greatest showdowns.  Soylent Green!  So damn funny.  I love you sir.

--Brad

Zardoz: The 8 Bit Adventure

All this talk of Lee Marvin and Point Blank has rekindled my love for the mad works of John Boorman.  Hell in the Pacific, Deliverance, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, The Tailor of Panama--these are some great mad movies, but the most bugnuts flick you've hopefully seen (and if you haven't get over to Netflix quick!) is Zardoz.

Well, Badass Digest just posted this wonderfully bizarre 8 Bit Video Game adaptation that just has to be seen.  Absolutely wonderful.  

I only wish that we could play the rest of the game.  Come On People, start the write-in campaign!  Let's make the Zardoz game a reality!

--Brad