Category: Movies

I bought this film as part of my February buying spree, which means it was part of my March binge. Which is a couple of movies a week, so I am not sure that that counts as a binge in 2023.

I just read the book–in this case, “just” means almost two years ago. So I will steal the book’s plot summary as the film is pretty true to the book:

So. The story of the book is that the protagonist, a 35-year-old record store owner named Rob Fleming gets dumped by his long-time live-in girlfriend for the guy who formerly lived upstairs from them (and the two move in together elsewhere), which triggers Rob’s reflection on his relationships and his life which seems to have stalled. Prone to making a list, Rob lists his top five heartbreaks of all time and gets in touch with those women and moons over Laura, whom he met while he was DJing at a defunct club. She has gone onto become an attorney at a big law firm in London, which creates a gulf between them in Rob’s mind, and he’s starting to get a little bitter.

That’s the size of it, except the location is changed to Chicago.

In the film, Rob (John Cusack) breaks the fourth wall a bunch to talk directly to the audience, which actually works to capture some of the first person narration of the book. The film also wraps up and closes pretty quickly after the funeral, when Rob and his most recent girlfriend reconcile–the end part of the book where Rob dotes a little on the reporter for the local alt paper goes on a bit much, and his future with Laura, the girlfriend with whom he reconciles, is left more in doubt. In the film, as I said, this is minimized, and it looks like Rob has actually grown up and changed, whereas the book left that in doubt.

The film resonated with me, perhaps more than it did when I first watched it. Rob’s kind of at a loose end, getting older and not really accomplishing much these days aside from sticking in his rut and then bolting from relationships. It’s been a while since I have had a project that I spent time on–I’ve started to think that the things I start or try are pretty much doomed to failure as I tend to get to a certain point with them, encounter some difficulty, and then set them aside and the tide of life washes over them, and suddenly six months or six years have passed.

I’m fortunate, though, that I’m still married and I don’t have to deal with that particular angst of dating and finding someone. I just need to remember I have her more.

So a better film than a book, strangely. Perhaps a bit anachronistic to the younger people, although who knows? It certainly did not seem anachronistic to me because I lived it contemporaneously.It also has nice casting, including Jack Black as one of Rob’s employees and Tim Robbins as the pony-tailed martial artist and Zen master neighbor that Laura shacks up with.

And one of the parts of the film is Rob reaching out to women who broke his heart–although he relearns that he was often the dumper and not the dumped. The film casts many lovely actresses as Rob’s former girlfriends.

Continue reading “Movie Report: High Fidelity (2000)” →

I bought this movie during a spree in February, and I wasted no time in watching it. It’s a bonus pack with the film on DVD and on Blu-Ray, which worked nicely for me, for although I have both, only the DVD is hooked into the sound system and the Blu-Ray only plays through our nearly 20-year-old television (which we will keep for as long as we can because it is not a smart device). So I played the DVD version of it.

Basically, it’s kind of like The Avengers in that you have a number of action stars, Stallone, Statham, Li, Lungren, Terry Crews (who I have seen mostly in commercials, honestly), and some other guys (cameo by Schwarzeneggar, Mickey Rourke in a supporting role) are mercenaries. In the initial action sequence, one is a little too violent and gets expelled from the group. They pick up another assignment, to take out a dictator on a Caribbean or South American island who is just a front for a rogue CIA operative’s drug operation. Some action sequences, some betrayal by the discarded merc, and finis.

Statham and Stallone have the meatiest parts. I think Jet Li was a little underused, but he’s a martial artist in a world of firearms, so I suppose that’s to be expected. Overall, about as good as you would expect, which is not bad if you’re into actioners with blockbuster budgets.

The one thing I would have stuck a sticky note on were this a book, though, was Tool’s speech, where Mickey Rourke as a tattoo artist who supports but does not go on missions, describes how he lost his soul:

Gentle reader, that is the plot of Albert Camus’ The Fall, in a nutshell. And either Stallone or the other writer on the film David Callaham knew it. Given that Wikipedia sez that Callaham’s screenplay was only a starting point for the film, one must infer that Stallone has read The Fall.

A quick Internet search indicates that nobody else has recognized this as the source of the side story meant to burnish the development of the main character (who goes back to the island to save the girl before the splash), one must also infer that the Venn Diagram of people who watch movies like The Expendables and people who like Camus books is a picture of me.

Thanks for stopping by, and know that although I am not a genius like Dolph Lundgren (well, I once scored Trailer Park Genius on an IQ test), I am well-read. And a fan of actioners, big budget or not.

This is a Luke Wilson film, as opposed to an Owen Wilson film. So you’ll have an everyman protagonist thrust into a bit of a situation, and he’ll play it pretty straight throughout.

In this case, Wilson plays Matt, a project manager who has not been lucky in love until he meets and is encouraged to ask out a mousy librarian type by his womanizing friend. She rebuffs him, but when someone snatches her purse, he chases after the fellow and gets into more trouble than he bargained for. Then, the tables are turned on his attackers. The woman, art historian Jenny Johnson, is the secret identity of superhero G-Girl, and she’s touched that he tried to defend her. So she goes out with him, they start dating, and she reveals her secret. Then she meets his co-worker Hannah, with whom Matt is really comfortable, and Jenny becomes jealous. When Matt breaks up with her, she lashes out in a series of humorous situations that only a superhero can provide. So Matt teams up with G-Girl’s nemesis, Professor Bedlam, to strip her of her powers, but all’s well that ends well with a comedic ending.

The arc of the story is a little more balanced than the title would have you believe–she is only his ex-girlfriend for the final bit of the film, so the movie relies on other situations for the humor, which is just as well. The quick bits of her revenge would make for a long night if they comprised the whole thing.

At any rate, the movie runs about an hour and a half, which means that it’s fortunately not padded out. So an amusing thing to watch, and not something I’ll avoid rewatching in the future.

I know, I know, gentle reader: As I post these notices mostly so I have future reference as to films I’ve watched and what I thought about them when I did watch them.

You, on the other hand, are here for the pictures of the actresses in the movies. However, I am too lazy to work that up today, so you’ll just have to go to Kim du Toit’s blog as he just posted pictures of Uma Thurman last month.

Last month already? How long has this DVD sat on my desk awaiting a couple paragraphs of brain dump?

I remember seeing ads or trailers for this film, but I am not sure if it was contemporaneous advertisements for it in 1987 or if the trailer preceded one of my favorite comedies from that era, which meant I saw it over and over again. So I bought this DVD earlier this month, and because I have liked Cheech in some of his later work (Nash Bridges and Lost, so it’s not recent later work), and because I was in the mood for a comedy one night, I popped it in.

The film follows the story of Rudy, a Los Angeles resident, who is supposed to go pick up his “cousin” from Mexico at a factory. Due to plot contrivances (which are not unnecessarily unrealistic plot contrivances), he mistakenly leaves his wallet at home when he goes, and while he’s there, he’s swept up in an INS raid and gets deported. With no ID and no money, he has to figure out a way to get back home. Which relies not only on the grifts of an ex-pat American running a club (a pre-Home Alone Daniel Stern, but the affection of a Mexican woman (played by an American of Southwest Asian Indian-Venezuelian descent). Eventually, he is able to cross the border when he storms it with a vast crowd of Mexicans. My DVD must have skipped a scene or two, as he pops up in a parade, and he and other main characters in the movie try to blend in to escape the authorities.

Ya know, times have changed. Although sympathetic with the main character, a couple of pieces of the movie don’t ring quite so innocent in 2023. One is the storming of the border by the numerous Mexicans. Another is that one of the grifts that Rudy participates in is helping some non-Mexican immigrants from Asia to act Mexican-American so when they illegally cross the border, they can fit in. Ay, carumba! the blogger said, stealing from a culture–not so much the Latinx culture but the 1990s catchphrase of Bart Simpson.

The biggest difference is not so much the political questions of today–those sticking bits from the preceding paragraph–but the loss in the shared humanity that made these stories approachable and consumable in the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, when I rewatched Friday last October, I also hearkened back to a time when the art made me sympathize with the plight of the characters even though I was not of that particular race.

I mean, I liked The Triplets’ “Light a Candle” which is all about illegal immigration:

But, now, it’s a political hot button (and a far greater problem), and I’m having trouble seeing it as a human interest story or a bit of shared humanity.

Because the professionals, the grievance industry, the politicians, and the people making “art” today would prefer to divide us.

Man, the future of back then sucks. I hope the future of today is better, but I’m not betting on it.

At any rate, the film was amusing. And notable for being a whole film based on a novelty parody of “Born in the U.S.A.” Which is better than most films based on video games and board games.

As I just read a translation of The Art of War, of course I jumped right on watching this film even though I didn’t pick it up on my latest DVD buying binge. Actually, it ended up atop the cabinets by the media center because last week, as my boys were out of town, I organized the media center by throwing all of the video game controllers, cords, and games into their cabinet and also tried to match discs with their cases for the most part before giving up when I was almost done. In condensing the unwatched films from the top of the cabinet to the interior, it moved them around a bit so some from the cabinet are now atop the cabinet and more visible when I’m in the mood for a film. Kind of like I did to my library 7 years ago(?!)–which means I should give that a go again this year and rediscover half my books.

At any rate, on to my thoughts on this film. Hominy crickets, but this film, released in 2000, might be the very 1990s movie ever.

I mean, Snipes plays a black bag covert ops guy for the United Nations whose first exploit is to jam up a North Korean general in Hong Kong who is dealing in sophisticated military equipment and underage prostitutes. When the Canadian Secretary-General of the UN, played by Donald Sutherland, learns that someone is trying to saboutage a US-China free trade agreement, he reluctantly brings Snipes’s character in to investigate and to protect the Chinese ambassador (James Hong). When the ambassador is assassinated, Snipes is framed for it and has to hunt down the real conspirators aided only by a translator who claims he’s innocent (played by Marie Matiko).

I mean, it’s got the UN as the ultimate power broker here, using its covert operations branch to manipulate China and the US into a better tomorrow. I mean, of course the bad guys are ultimately westerners who want to hold China down (and, presumably, to loot China’s cultural treasures as in every martial arts movie I’ve seen recently). But this is strictly Hollywood’s play: The actors are mostly American, and most are not Chinese, even the Asian characters. We’ve got Koreans playing Japanese, Americans of Japanese descent playing Chinese characters, and so on. I mean, even James Hong is an American of Chinese descent from Minneapolis. Weird.

And listen to the big speech by the ultimate bad guy:

Eleanor Hooks, the bad guy: The Art of War teaches win by destroying your enemy from within. Ironic, isn’t it, that a 2000-year-old strategy would be turned against the very people who created it? Better us doing it to them than them doing it to us.

Julia, the translator caught up in the middle of this: What are you talking about?

Hooks: I’m talking about 20 years of China fucking America from within, and nobody noticing. Well, now, they’re going to notice.

Julia: You. You’re behind all this.

Hooks: With just enough help from David Chan to keep everyone guessing. David Chan most of all.

Julia: I don’t understand.

Hooks: Of course, you don’t, my dear. Because you, like most people, never stop to look at the big picture. I’ve been looking at the big picture every day for 20 years, and I’ve tried to look forward, and you know what I see? I see China maintaining a stranglehold on freedom, influencing our political process with illegal campaign contributions, stealing our most secret military technology and selling it to our enemies, weakening us from the inside. Like a virus. This trade deal is an invitation to finish the job. I intend to cancel that invitation. I intend to return America to Americans.

Geez Louise, considering that the bad guy was looking at the situation in 2000, think of how it is now, a quarter century later. I’m more sympathetic to the bad guys than the good guys from the U.N.

But the ultimate bad guy is not a MAGA Republican:

Julia: Who do you think you’re representing?

Hooks: The people who have steered this nation for decades behind the scenes, the people who protect democracy from itself.

Julia: For a woman obsessed with Chinese conspiracies, you sound frighteningly like the government you’re trying to stop.

The ultimate bad guy wants to save the day for the deep state.

Twenty years later, things are the same. But different.

Enough of that, though. Marie Matiko plays Julia, the translator in over her head. Continue reading “On The Art of War (2000)” →

I bought this DVD last weekend, and it was the first of the new films I watched.

I got the paperback book when I was in middle school or early high school, and it was years before I actually saw the movie. And probably decades passed since I watched it again (this time). Or maybe this was the third time I’d seen it. Over the years.

My oldest has become a Chevy Chase fan (we watched National Lampoon’s Vacation and Fletch Forever last year), so it was an easy sell for him. Even though he said, “Who is that other guy?” Dan Ackroyd, from Saturday Night Live (forty-some years ago), Ghostbusters (almost forty years ago), Dragnet! (almost forty years ago)…. (The next day, my beautiful wife would point out that he was also Elwood Blues.)

As you might recall, gentle reader, if you’re an old man, that this film centers on two nincompoops, one a Lothario smooth-talker from the State Department (Chase) and the other a tech whiz civilian employee of the Department of Defense (Ackroyd), who are chosen to become operatives–well, they’re chosen to be expendable decoys for the real operatives whose mission is at risk because of a leak that has gotten other operatives killed. So we get training montages with Bernie Casey as the military commander. Then, they’re air-dropped in Pakistan to a remote area, where they avoid being killed by Pashtuns by pretending to be doctors, where they meet Donna Dixon and a bunch of real doctors; when an operation fails to save the kin of the clan chieftain (before they begin to operate), they have to escape, and they do–to the chagrin of their controllers. But they bumble their way across the Soviet border to continue being a decoy, until they begin helping the lone survivor of the actual agent team to–launch a nuclear missile, it turns out, in a live-fire test of an anti-missile system.

So they have to save the day.

It’s chock full of 80s tropes, paced like a late 20th century comedy with some sexual humor but it’s not terribly crass, and it has a good heart although it pokes fun at the idea of missile defense (making sure we understand that Reagan was president). It has Chevy Chase playing a Chevy Chase character and Dan Ackroyd playing a Dan Ackroyd character, so it might not stand out that much from their respective ouevres. But it was Vanessa Angel’s first film, so it is notable in that regard. Continue reading “Movie Report: Spies Like Us (1985)” →

I picked up this film on one of my more-recent (within three years, “recently” could mean) trips to the antique malls or something. As you know, gentle reader, I am picking up DVDs and VHS cassettes at a bit of an accelerated pace as I’ve come to recognize that they’ll soon be obsolete and absent in the wild, or more likely, expensive. As this film was atop the stereo and other cabinet by the entertainment center, I know that I picked it up recently (the ones in the stereo cabinet repurposed to my to-watch shelves in the early part of the century are old acquisitions). And at Nogglestead, we have a bit of a LIFO (last in, first out) policy on books and other media. Well, I do. Because when I acquire it, I am eager to watch it, but that eagerness fades as time passes (which is why we have entire sets of television series in the stereo cabinet). Just so you understand why I am watching this “new” film which I bought sometime in the past couple of years even though it’s only fourteen years old now.

At any rate, this 2009 film comes from what historians might consider the last gasp of cinematic comedy (except they won’t, as historians after the next dark age will not have DVD players or thousand-year-old streaming accounts). I mean, the film comes from the same vein of R-rated comedies as Horrible Bosses (2011), Ted (2012), or Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015, but the original was 2010). Crass films relying on a lot of drug/alcohol humor, but able to make fun of different stereotypes and whatnot in a way I’m not sure they can any more.

The whole premise of this film relies on a drink-and-drug-filled evening. The morning after a bachelor party, three friends awaken to find the groom-to-be is missing, and they have a baby in the closet and a lion in the bathroom. The film follows them as they work backwards to try to find the groom so they can get him to the wedding on time. In doing so, they find that one of them has married an escort/stripper and that they’ve stolen Mike Tyson’s pet lion–and Tyson and his bodyguard insist they return it somehow.

So it’s a bit like a drunken comic Memento in that they’re working their way through the night in reverse. It’s an interesting structure and pretty novel, so I enjoyed the film more than I did the others mentioned above–and all of them spawned quick sequels, which is better, I suppose, than waiting a decade or more to try to resuscitate old characters like Ron Burgundy or Derek Zoolander.

The film also stars Heather Graham, whom you know I rather like, gentle reader, as we were born in the same hospital a year apart. We looked at her when I watched License to Drive in 2021. So let’s look at Rachael Harris. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Hangover (2009)” →

Wow, this film is twenty years old, which makes it an old movie by now. Which means it’s about time for me to watch it. I mean, it’s not like a black and white film, which it might well have been if it had been a movie twenty years old when I was born. But its humor is that of another time, when you could make fun of stereotypes and whatnot.

At any rate, Sandra Bullock plays a tomboy FBI agent whose compassion during a raid leads to an FBI agent getting shot and puts her in the doghouse with her boss played by Ernie Hudson. When the team gets a tip that a serial bomber might target the Miss United States pageant, they decide to send someone undercover–and Agent Gracie Hart is the only one of the team who might look good in a swimsuit. So she goes undercover, getting a crash course in behaving like a lady from a pageant tutor played by Michael Caine, and she learns that the pretty women whom she’d mocked for performing in pageants have heart and intelligence and they’re all similar.

You know, the kind of lesson we used to get from movies and whatnot.

At any rate, a product of a different time, and a pleasant viewing experience. My beautiful wife, who had already seen the film, watched it with me, and that’s kind of rare these days as our taste in movies has diverged a bit as, strangely, she prefers more modern blockbuster sorts of films.

Also, it starred Sandra Bullock.

Continue reading “On Miss Congeniality (2000)” →

A couple of weeks ago, one of the blogs I read mentioned this film (not the Ace of Spade HQ movie thread which mentioned Clint Eastwood only this weekend). Sorry, but I read so many blogs that if I don’t post on something right away and instead, if it sticks a little nugget in my brain triggering a thought days later, it’s lost in the torrents of time. So sorry for no hat tip, other blogger. But when I saw you mention it, when it came time for a film at Nogglestead, I tried to tempt a young man to watch a film with me, offering Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Fast and Furious, but when the boy demurred, I settled on this film which I bought sometime in antiquity. I know that not because it’s a videocassette–I buy them all the time inexpensively–but because it was in the movie cabinet and not atop it.

So I watched it.

The story details how two convicts, Kevin Costner and the other guy, break out of a Texas prison and go on the run. They end up with a hostage, a boy whose home the other guy invades instead of stealing a car, and Costner prevents the fellow from raping the mother before they get away. The boy and the fugitive bond a bit as the boy’s family is strict and the fugitive was abandoned at a young age, and he grew up in bordellos but did not grow up to be Brahms. Clint Eastwood leads a Texas state team of law enforcement in pursuit in a new mobile command trailer that has all the latest gear–and steaks and tots in the freezer. So we see the fugitive and the boy bond, but although we get some sympathy for the fugitive, he eventually goes a bit off the rails and is stopped when the boy defends another father from the fugitive. Which leads to a long climax/denouement and ending. And a closing that matches the opening shot which frames the whole thing for some reason.

So I guess the deeper story is the fugitive bonding with the boy, making some of the same mistakes he would have expected his father to make (trysting with a waitress at a roadhouse, for example, telling the boy to wait in the car) to his trying to rectify his father’s sins (making a father tell his son that he loves him presumably before the fugitive before the he is setting up to kill the father). But it doesn’t work for me, maybe because I’m a father busy making different mistakes than my own father (he was the type to tryst with waitresses), and I don’t have to project or empathize with the fugitive as much as many men without fathers might.

At any rate, not a bad film, but probably not something I’ll rewatch unless I’m on a complete Clint Eastwood retrospective. Which might happen in the next thirty years.

I ordered this a year or so back when I thought maybe the boys would enjoy Jackie Chan films. A year later, I have discovered that they really didn’t, or maybe they just aren’t interested in watching films with their father these days. So I watched this film, which I thought I’d seen before during the middle 1990s, when a member of my gaming group introduced us to Jackie Chan with some of his old films. But as I watched this film, it was very unfamiliar. I learned that the film I had seen when this film was fresh was Drunken Master from 1978, and this is The Legend of the Drunken Master, a sequel sixteen years later capitalizing on Jackie Chan’s new international fame.

This film starts with Wong (Jackie Chan, not named not Jackie in this film) is on the train with his father and brother, bringing ginseng back for a neighbor, when a fight breaks out, and Jackie battles with someone who he thinks is trying to steal the ginseng. When he successfully returns with an ornate box in which they were carrying the root, it turns out that another man was carrying the imperial seal in a similar box. Hijinks ensue when Wong uses a root from his father’s prized bonsai tree in the stead of the ginseng when it’s presented to the neighbor and when his stepmother takes out a loan on her jewels to try to buy real ginseng before the neighbor ingests the bonsai root. At the bottom, though, the plot is about the Westerners trying to steal the Imperial Seal (which was also the MacGuffin in Shanghai Knights–and as far as the plot of the film being the Westerners stealing China’s heritage, that’s awful prevalent).

So it’s fairly standard Jackie Chan fare, especially the post-popularity Jackie Chan fare, which all has a similar feel and vibe to it. Which is okay until you start thinking about why so many of these films have Westerners as the bad guys. The West is almost 100 years past the inscrutible Oriental as the stereotypical villain (well, all right, sixty years after Dr. No), and we’re the benighted culture according to, well, popular culture.

The film also has another common trope from Chinese films: The young wife. Wong’s father’s new wife is played by Anita Mui, who would have been Wong’s stepmother even though the actress was almost ten years younger than Jackie Chan.

Continue reading “On Legend of the Drunken Master (1994)” →

I tried to lure my boys into watching a film with their old man (is that a slur or just slang? In the 21st century, it depends upon not so much the word nor the intent but how someone feels about it) by watching an Adam Sandler film, but they didn’t bite, which is just as well. This is not a comedy despite what the box nor blurbs say. This is one of the films where Adam Sandler is trying to turn into a dramatic actor as Tom Hanks did, but Hollywood and audience are still not letting him do it.

He’s not even the main character in the film: That’s Flor, played not by Salma Hayek. I am probably to be condemned for confusing Selma Hayek with Spanish actress Paz Vega, but I confuse a lot of people for others for reasons unknown and for reasons inscrutible to others (apparently, Heather Newman does not sound like Mary Chapin Carpenter and so on). Flor is a Mexican woman left by her man with her daughter. She comes to the United States (although not said explicitly, illegally is implied). She finds work as a maid/nanny for a wealthy family, including a famous chef (played by Sandler), a shrewish striving wife (Tea Leoni–has she ever played a character that did not annoy me? The Family Man, maybe?), a dumpy daughter, and an alcoholic mother in law (Cloris Leachman). The wife takes an interest in Flor’s daughter, buys her things, takes her to a salon day, gets her into the daughter’s private school–to Flor’s dismay and discomfort, her daughter starts behaving like the rich Americans. Flor does nice things for the family and gets closer to them, including moving into their vacation home during their vacation with her daughter, and she learns English. When the wife cheats on the husband, who has been busy preparing for a meal serving an influential critic and getting all his stars as well as having a subchef threaten to leave the restaurant–well, throughout, the husband and Flor grow close, but when the wife cheats, the husband cooks for Flor in the restaurant, they share a moment, but Flor leaves, and the husband seemingly goes to reconcile with his wife as Flor and the daughter leave them for good.

The film has a frame story of the girl, in voiceover, telling the story as part of her essay trying to get into Princeton and explaining how much she admires her mother. I’m not sure whether it adds to the film, and I’m not sure how much I really enjoyed the film or if I took any lessons from the film, but I suppose as I’m becoming a pre-Netflix Sandler completeist, I can cross it off the little checklist.

Below, in my defense, I have some pictures of Paz Vega so you can determine if she looks like Salma Hayek.
Continue reading “On Spanglish (2004)” →

This is a two-pack of Tom Hanks comedies from the middle 1980s. Remember when Tom Hanks made comedies? Try explaining that to young men born in the 21st century. Ever since his back-to-back Academy Awards in 1993 and 1994, he’s pretty much been a serious actor. No cross dressing for laughs, as in television’s Bosom Buddies–I am pretty sure that show could not be made today at all, and I bet if I dug, he has probably retcontrited for forty-year-old humor. But I digress.

The Burbs tells the story of a man taking the week off from a high pressure job and just hanging out in his cul-de-sac when he begins to suspect his new neighbors are evil. With the help of a couple of neighbors, he investigates after a fashion and suspect the neighbors have killed another neighbor. They hijinkily try to prove that the neighbors have murdered him but not his little dog, but just as Tom Hanks’ character is about to accept that their intrusions and suspicions are causing more problems than they’re detecting, their suspicions are proven correct.

The movie has an all-80s-star cast, including Carrie Fisher as Mrs. Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Rick Ducommun (whose special I’d seen on Showtime and who would later appear in Groundhog Day as Gus), Henry Gibson (whose looks somewhat like Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate infame would have helped if only this film had not come out 8 years before that cult killed themselves), and Corey Feldman as the local teen who stands aloof and likes the show. It’s funny: The film came out in 1989, by which time we were living down the gravel road, so it is not one that I would have watched over and over on Showtime, although I think of it as such. However, we did have a movie poster for it, or rather a video store poster of it–a local video store would give us old posters, and we hung them on our walls, my brother and I. So perhaps I remember the poster of it and only later watched it over and over, perhaps at my father’s house when I was in college. And perhaps “over and over” is once or twice.

The film ultimately is a fairly stock indictment of living in the suburbs as viewed through people from either coast, but it’s not preachy or messagy, and it pokes a little fun at people, caricatures, who are solely defined by living in the suburbs.

I watched this film with my older son, who thought it was okay.

The Money Pit is actually an earlier film, but might be slight less remembered than The Burbs. In it, Hanks plays a record company/band management guy dating a woman in the symphony (Shelley Long) who is the ex-wife of a maestro (Alexander Godunov) whose apartment they’ve been living in. When the maestro returns suddenly from abroad, they have to vacate in a hurry. The pressure of finding housing leads them to a mansion outside New York City that is an amazing deal because the husband has just been extradited, and the old woman living there has to unload it in a hurry. When they move in, they find out that it needs a little more work than they’d been led to believe. Which leads them to having to deal with household disasters, contractors and their workers, and asking maestro for help. It tests the bonds of their relationship but ends well, of course–it’s a comedy.

The film is not as star-studded as The Burbs, but it does have Yakov Smirnoff in a small role, and the boys recognized Alexander Godunov from Die Hard.

You know, I am not sure that I’d seen this film all the way through before this time. I remember bits, probably from commercials on television when I was 12. What, fourteen? How do I remember things that recent?

At any rate, it’s amusing. Like The Burbs, it’s poking a bit of fun at the fixer upper house, the deal too good to be true, and dealing with contractors (whatever the question, whatever the job, it will be done in two weeks). However, in the intervening years, I suppose we’ve (I’ve) gotten a little sensitive to “What is this movie attacking?”

I started this film with both boys, but they both gave up before the midway point. Whether that’s a question of pacing, a question of adult concerns (home maintenance and improvement), or a question of whether they had pressing business on their important Internet games, I leave to you gentle reader.

However, the Internet has not made a debate about Carrie Fisher versus Shelley Long as your preferred dream partner, but I am here for you.

Continue reading “On The Burbs (1989) / The Money Pit (1986)” →

Before watching the Christmas movies (Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Invasion USA, and Lethal Weapon), I invited my boys to watch this film with me. I’d found it in the videocassette player, and asked them if they’d watched it already–but they had not. So I watched it, alone, as they’re too sophisticated for 80s B actioners now that they’re in their teens in the 21st century.

I actually watched the Highlander movies, including Highlander II: The Quickening, Highlander III: The Final Dimension (alternatively titled Highlander III: The Sorcerer with Mario van Peebles) and Highlander: Endgame which tied the movie to the television series, a couple years ago (a couple years being maybe two, five, or eight–as I was not writing movie reports at the time on this blog, I have no way to know). But I picked up fresher videocassette copies last July, so having new copies (well, new old copies) on the to-watch shelf means I have to watch them again.

Okay, you probably know the premise if you’re of a certain age: A Scotsman joins his clan in battle, but nobody fights him–a strange figure has said that he wants the Highlander for himself. But circumstances, and the need to make a full movie of it, means the dark figure does not best the Scotsman, who is seemingly killed. When he miraculously returns to life, he is run out of town as being the devil. Sean Connery appears to tell him he is an immortal of a special sort, and to explain the rules of The Game: He can only die if his head is lopped off, and the immortal who cuts off the head of another get his power or some such. When they come to a final reckoning in a strange land, one will emerge with the power to rule humanity.

So, yeah, you know, it doesn’t go a lot into the cosmology, which is probably for the best–the second film (The Quickening) kind of tries to retcon some weird, almost Scientological backstory on it, but other cuts of the film eliminate that in favor of just letting it ride. But that’s to come in the future.

The film was a disappointment at the box office, and it’s pretty clear why: It has more of a direct-to-video feel and look to it, but it’s since become a cult classic and clearly has spawned several other movies, television series, and books (including Highlander: Element of Fire, which I read eighteen years ago–equidistant in time between this movie and now).

But someone has been listening, whether it’s my boy’s phone or whatnot, but Facebook knows I’ve watched the film.

I’ve also gotten posts explaining that Christopher Lambert is very nearsighted and did not wear his glasses for filming, so the stunts and sword-fighting he did were that much more dangerous. So, yeah, someone knew I watched this film before you did, gentle reader. Perhaps they knew it before I did (which might have been asking if they’d already watched it since it was in the videocassette player). You think I’m mad? I WILL SHOW YOU MADNESS.

At any rate, although it has become a cult film, Highlander has not spawned any Brenda versus Heather Internet arguments.

Continue reading “On Highlander (1986)” →

Quick, what is the first comic book movie starring Chris Evans and Brie Larson? If you pick one of the Marvel movies, you’re mistaken–they both appear in this film based on a comic book series. I’d hoped that that would have come up on a trivia night the night after we watched this film, but it did not–2004 films fall into the dead zone of trivia these days. I might have a post for a later time about trivia nights in the 2020s, but that’s for another time.

In this film, Scott Pilgrim, a nebbish in Toronto, lives in a garage apartment with a gay roommate who is actually paying for everything. Scott is the bassist in a band called Sex Bob-omb. He’s 22, but he’s dating a girl in high school. And then he sees Ramona, the, well, not manic pixie girlfriend archetype but something simliar–the girl with the colored hair with a mysterious past and a jaded attitude. I mean, this was an archetype even when I was going to college a decade before the comic book appeared. To date her, he must defeat her seven evil exes he discovers. They include a Vegan bassist in the band fronted by Scott’s successful pop star ex, a professional-skateboarder-turned-actor, twin Japanese DJs, and a half-Ninja woman amongst others.

The film has a great look-and-feel that combines elements of film, video games, and comic books to great effect. The first time I watched it, it took me a couple of sittings to get through the movie, but I bought the soundtrack and have listened to it since. This time, I watched it with my oldest son, and we both enjoyed it.

And what’s not to enjoy with a cast like this?
Continue reading “On Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)” →

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Ours was a bit subdued as my beautiful wife and I came down with raging colds at the beginning of the week, so our guest list and our menu was curtailed, but we had turkey, cranberries, and stuffing (and will for days to come, as we bought a large turkey in anticipation of sharing it asynchronously if not in person. But no.

Instead of watching the three football games, I managed to spend the afternoon and evening on the couch with a trio of films.
Continue reading “Thanksgiving Triple Feature” →

Alright, kids, I’m a bit late to this party. This film came out when I was twenty-five years old. I’d just met with a beautiful girl who would become my beautiful wife, but I also briefly reunited with a lovely young lady who would not. I was busy, you know. What’s that, gentle reader? The film came out the same year as The Man Who Knew Too Little, a Bill Murray film I saw in the cinemas with that woman I would claim (or would claim me). So this film came out in my cinema-heavy years, but I did not see it in the cinema or anywhere else for twenty-five years. Like Friday, a still from this film has become a meme–the one where Nicholas Cage steps off the bus and revels in what he thinks is his freedom (it’s early in the film). So that is probably why I picked it up relatively recently and why I watched it.

The plot: An Army Ranger leaves the service, but comes home and meets his pregnant wife at a bar (what, not the airport?). A he is a former hothead, when some bar denizens stalk the wife, he, Nicholas Cage, kills one of them in a fight and is sentenced to Federal prison (wut?) He is paroled after many years, but he’s put on a plane with really bad guys headed to a new Supermax prison. One of them is John Malkovich, which is always a bad sign. The bad guys take over the plane as part of a plot to free a member of a drug cartel (a la Die Hard 2), and although he has a chance to go free, Cage stays on board to try to help his diabetic cell mate find a hypodermic needle to deliver a needed dose of insulin before he goes into shock. Action set pieces and a plane crash and pursuit trash the Las Vegas strip. A bit over the top, but it was designed to be a blockbuster.

At the end of the day, I will probably confuse this film less with The Rock than I might have previously. The Rock was Nicholas Cage’s action blockbuster from the year before.

Facebook ads tell me that this is one of the most 90s films ever made. I think it’s not quite so tied to its decade, but its cast features a list of people whom you’d recognize:

• Nicholas Cage
• John Cusack
• John Malkovich
• Dave Chapelle
• Danny Trejo
• Steve Buscemi
• Colm Meany
• Ving Rhames
• M.C. Gainey
• Rachel Ticotin

So an all-star cast.

And did we mention Rachel Ticotin?
Continue reading “On Con Air (1997)” →

DailyWire+ Secures Exclusive Film, TV Rights To Classic Novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’

C’mon, man, it has only been eleven years since the last Atlas Shrugged. Less, actually, as it was a two-parter, and the second film came out in 2014.

Which is to say, almost prehistory to the 2022 Internet.

(Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

I am pretty sure I picked up this film when I bought Friday, but I will be darned if I remember where I picked them up. At the antique mall? I have a couple of new movies atop my to-watch cabinets that are mixing with the “new” movies I bought last year and left up there. Face it: My to-watch movies are in worse shape than my to-read shelves, because even though I’m not reading as many books this year in years past, I’m certainly not watching any more movies. Maybe three in October, which is trending up. Some cinephile I am.

So, about this flick: It came out in 1994, which is last century, before America healed its racial divide by continuing to listen to racebaiters and electing one president (before sitting down to write this, I was presented with a Facebook adversomething with Dusty Baker lamenting that the World Series teams did not have an American-born black player, so look how far we’ve come, baby). In 1994, I would have thought that the characters were like me and my brother, but now in the 21st century, I think first that these guys are black, and maybe I am guilty of something for liking the film and wishing we could go back to the bad old days of the 1980s on racial relations.

Ah, but I cannot, but I defy them and liked the movie anyway.

In it, two brothers played by David Alan Grier and Daymon Wayans grow up with their grandmother. Grier becomes well-adjusted, grows to be a cameraman for a tabloid program, and Daymon Wayans becomes an inventor and tinkerer whose machines made from common devices are more humorous than groundbreaking. Their grandmother volunteers for a candidate for mayor running on an anti-corruption ticket, and when the candidate refuses to get in bed with a mobster, the mobster’s goons kill a bunch of volunteers, including the grandmother. Which leads the tinkerer, influenced by the Batman! television show of the 1960s, to become a crime fighter. Which draws the attention and admiration of a news anchor played by Robin Givens, whom the cool brother flirted with briefly.

So a bit of a love triangle ensues, and they go after the bad guys, and some set pieces, and resolution, and….

All right, it’s not Oscar material, but it’s akin to the stuff we gorged on in the 1980s, whether it was direct-to-video or direct-to-cable or disappointing box office (full disclosure: I saw Wild Thing on Showtime many, many times, and I enjoyed it).

And, I mean, even, uh, a couple years from its original release date, I still relate to the awkward nerd character who gets the girl. Before this film came out, I wrote a couple chapters on a teen who has gadgets and becomes a super hero (White Knight, not likely to be released in my every-couple-of-years self-publishing attempt at relevance). So it harmonically resonates with me, and even if “Rotten Tomatoes” hates it, I do not.

Also, the film had Robin Givens, whom I remembered from the nerd-friendly Head of the Class.
Continue reading “On Blankman (1994)” →

I must have seen this film right after it came out, maybe twenty-five years ago. On one of my trips to Milwaukee in my post-collegiate life, my friend Brian rented it from a video store when I was staying with him, and we watched it along with…. Well, I forget what. The first time I watched it, I was, what, 23 years old, working a retail job probably, and probably having bounced around a couple of times. A couple years out of the house down the gravel road, a couple years out of the trailer park, and a decade out of the projects there in Milwaukee, watching it with a friend in his small apartment just out of downtown Milwaukee, I related better to the main characters played by Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. Of course, I would have been the Ice Cube character and my friend would have been a smoke-free version of Chris Tucker, although I guess he was more of the straight man to my antics at the time.

At any rate, the film depicts life in South Central LA without a whole lot of gangsta, although there is some of that. Ice Cube plays Craig, who is fired from a job on his day off, and his friend Smokey, a pot dealer who has consumed the pot he was supposed to sell. They spend the day with Craig chasing a local girl, being broken up with by his current too-good girlfriend, and interacting with local characters and their family members. When the drug dealer, Big Worm, makes an ultimatum that they repay his $200 by tonight, they have to try to come up with that money, which leads to a burglary and other things more akin to hikinks than true crime.

I guess I had a hankering to see this film again because Severian often uses a photo of Big Worm on his posts and because “Bye, Felisha” kind of rattles around the Internet, or at least blogs I read, as a general dismissal.

But those intervening years have changed me. I’m no longer that young man, nor close to him, so I identify more with the parents in the film, especially the father–who has a job and supports his family and tries to give advice to his son who does not appreciate it.

So an interesting cultural artifact, and not a bad story. No boobies, but lots of doobies, so I’m not sure whether it would be appropriate for my teenagers, but this is the 21st century, and Missouri will be voting in November whether to basically legalize marijuana. So perhaps this movie was prescient as to where our society was going.

At any rate, it would not be a movie report if I did not feature one of the actresses, so let’s look at Nia Long, who played Debbie.
Continue reading “On Friday (1995)” →