Author: Brian J. Noggle

So after a couple of meh movies (The Day After Tomorrow and The Son of the Mask), I decided to go old school here with this black-and-white film on videocassette which I bought sometime, but I am not sure when–it must have been fairly recently as it was atop the cabinet, but I don’t see it in any gleanings from the recent past.

At any rate, the story: A couple of down-on-their-luck musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) in Chicago, 1929, see a mob hit, so they go on the run by posing as women so they can join an all-woman band heading by train to Florida on a several-month-long engagement. One of them (well, the both of them) are hot for the lead singer, played by Marilyn Monroe. Monroe’s character hopes to find a millionaire instead of a no-good saxophone player. Curtis’s character, the saxophone player, also portrays a millionaire to woo her. Lemmon’s character (whilst portraying a woman), however, draws the attention of an actual millionaire whose trappings Curtis’s character uses in his deception. Then, the mobsters show up at the same hotel for a country-wide mobster meeting, and hijinks and more gunplay ensue.

Definitely a more grown-up film than The Son of the Mask. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than what you get out of modern comedies even though some of its themes match what we might have seen on the big screen up until recently, where everything got so serious. Or television–I couldn’t help but remember Bosom Buddies (the trailer played before the film, and it said starring Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom…. Buddies). What’s weird is that Wikipedia says it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor–but only won for Best Costume Design. I guess it won that because many of Monroe’s gowns made it look as though she were effectively topless. Or just dressed like a celebrity in 2025.

I liked it. And I’m starting to think I should pick up any black-and-white film I find on home media whenever I can just so that they don’t end up in the landfill somewhere. I’ll probably like most of them better than the 21st century fare I come across.

Clearly, I have decided that it’s the right time to clear out some of the lesser films in the cabinet. And, brother, the cabinet is full of lesser films. I bought this sequel to 1994’s The Mask at some point in the past (before I was fastidious and fatuous in enumerating most of my media purchases here on the blog). I saw The Mask in the theaters one night when I was staying with Dr. Comic Book on one of my excursions to Milwaukee right after I graduated. I remember that he and some of his city friends, who were some miscreants, got a hold of a video cassette of a non-Milwaukee town councilman shooting himself at a news conference, and we watched it several times because they thought it was a hoot. Me, not so much, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Eh, but we were talking about The Son of the Mask, a sequel that came out eleven years later when Hollywood was new to mining old movies and properties. Although two of the last three films I have seen were dated 1993 (Grumpier Old Men) and 1997 (Alien: Resurrection), so maybe this has been a constant Hollywood thing which Millenials Discover and post on the Internet about. After all, my pool company is named after a swimming champion who played Tarzan (Buster Crabbe), and that’s not the swimming champion who played Tarzan that my boys and I watched (Johnny Weissmuller), not to mention the Tarzan I watched on television (Ron Ely) or the film that we saw on HBO (Christopher Lambert). But I really am going at length to talk about anything but this film.

Well, enough of that. In this film, the mask from the first film has washed to Fringe City, where a dog finds it. The dog belongs to a cartoonist who’s working as a costumed character at an animation studio (played by Jaime Kennedy, whom I think was supposed to become a thing at that time). Cartoonist’s wife wants to have a baby, but cartoonist is unsure. But when he needs a costume for a Hallowe’en party, he puts on the mask and revives a party from its doldrums, and he comes home and sires a baby. But! Because he was wearing the mask, the baby has the powers of Loki. Which somes in handy, because Odin has charged Loki with finding the mask because it’s causing havoc amongst the mortals. Then the wife has to go off for a week and leave the cartoonist, now tasked with coming up with a pitch for the networks based on the antics of his character–him while wearing the mask at the party. The dog, jealous of the baby’s attention, puts on the mask, and we get the dog and the baby competing for the father’s attention, sort of–the baby, fed on a visual diet of cartoons (so the cartoonist can work), tries to make the father crazy so he can go to the psychopathic hospital. Also, Loki is closing in to find the mask.

So it’s a silly little live-action cartoon of a film that lacks the Jim Carrey of the original, and, to be honest, a lot of the stakes of the original. I mean, they did go in a different direction (they actually invoke the difference between Alien and Aliens, which is the second time I’ve come across this explanation for a change in direction in a franchise recently–although, perhaps, the first was when looking into Alien: Resurrection). It would probably have done a little better as an independent story of some sort, but I guess they had enough in the Mask mythos (the comic books and the film) that they rolled with it. Not as good as the original, and more of a cartoon/kids movie.

It did feature Traylor Howard as the wife/mother, though. Continue reading “Movie Report: Son of the Mask (2005)” →

What an absolutely ludicrous movie.

A couple years ago, I took my brother to a medical appointment in St. Louis and spent the next night with him in eastern Illinois before heading home. They watch a lot of television and movies out there, and my new sister-in-law put this film on, claiming it was one of her favorites. I made it maybe 60% of the way through before turning in for the night. So I spotted it in Nixa last August, and I picked it up. And decided Friday night was exactly the night I needed to watch it.

Oh, boy. Okay, so the story: Dramatic scene in Antarctica where a team of scientists is retrieving ice cores for paleoclimatic research but an ice shelf happens to break off just then. So Dennis Quaid, who does not call anyone “char” in this film to my disappointment, has to leap a growing chasm to get the cores. Twice he leaps it, dramatically. Whew! Cut to a climate conference where he presents a theory that a dramatic climate reversal can happen if the oceans get too much fresh water, killing the North Atlantic current. But! The Vice President, who happens to have traveled to this climate conference because that’s what Dick Cheney stand-ins do, go to these sorts of things to poo-poo the sentiments. BUT! The ice shelf that broke off at the dramatic beginning of the movie just so happens to trigger that scenario, and instead of a new ice age starting in a couple of hundred years, it happens in the next week.

So the first part of the movie is a special effects bonanza of strange disastrous weather events, from giant hailstorms in Tokyo to super tornadoes that destroy downtown Los Angeles to the creation of super storms which are not only dropping many feet of snow on the northern hemisphere, but also have giant “eyes” like hurricanes where the temperature drops to 150 degrees below zero (centigrade, presumably, but who knows–it was made for American audiences) and anything caught in that eye is flash-frozen instantly. These special effects scenes are broken by groups of people watching news reports about these events, and then some scienting going on, where models need to be run on mainframes, and wake Dennis Quaid when you get the results, which will indicate sudden bad cold which is only possible with Hollywood special effects.

Then, the next bit is a trek bit, where Quaid’s scientist has to go from Washington, D.C., to New York rescue his son, played by Jake Gyllenhal, who is holed up in a room with a fireplace in the New York Public Library where they build a fire by burning the effin books instead of, I dunno, all the wood furnishings, furniture, desks, and chairs in the building first which would, you know, burn longer and better than effin paper, but, c’mon, it’s Hollywood, baby. Does he get there on time? Dunh dunh dunh! Yeah, then end, but not before the scientist convinces the president to evacuate the northern states, which leads to scenes of the Mexicans closing the border to American refugees and Americans storming across the border anyway (how things are reversed!), although anyone with a gorram brain knows that nobody, much less hundreds of thousands of Americans, are driving from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota to Texas overnight, and if they are, there’s an awful lot of room in the southern states for them. But, eh, it’s freaking Hollywood, baby.

Apparently, this film made half a billion at the box office. Which leads me to a spurious assertion that there was a time, a couple of decades, perhaps, when a special effects bonanza experience could carry a film–where people would go to see things in the theatre to be thrilled, so the tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles or the White House (and Los Angeles) getting blown up by aliens (as in Independence Day, another film by the same director) was worth a couple million in box office receipts. But that time might have peaked with Avatar–and when special effects bonanzas, especially the CGI kind, became so commonplace that they stopped being worth seeing a film for alone. But don’t expect me to put together a Substack-length piece defending this thesis.

So: Yeah, this movie was dumb in so many ways. It’s like someone put Independence Day, Zardoz, a bunch of disaster movies, The Forge of God, and a source book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber into a blender and this script came out. Which is not to say that is not what, in fact, happened.

So: Yeah. Oh, what rubbish, but high budget spectacle rubbish.

But, Brian J.! Of the two The Day After Tomorrows you’ve suffered through, which is worse? The film or the book with Adolf Hitler’s frozen head which got a two million dollar advance and hit the New York Times best seller list in 1994?

Yes.

Back in 2023, I watched the first one (also on videocassette). So when I saw the sequel in a thrift store in Berryville, Arkansas, last year, I picked it up. Like Alien: Resurrection, this title was in my video cabinet. So maybe it’s almost time to reshuffle and condense the holdings into the cabinet as much as possible to make it so I want to watch the recent acquisitions before a decade elapses.

At any rate, the film picks up not long after Grumpy Old Men. Lemon’s character is still involved with the Ann-Margaret character. The Mattheau character is leading a lonely existence. Their kids are planning their wedding. And an Italian woman, played by Sophia Loren, plans to open an Italian restaurant in the old bait shop. So the bulk of the movie is really the two men trying hijinks to keep the restaurant from opening; Mattheau’s character and Loren’s character starting off as rivals but becoming lovers; and tensions arising as the old men “help” with the wedding planning. When tensions boil over and the bride declares the wedding to be off, Mattheau and Lemon revert to their rivalry of one-upmanship in pranks.

So an amusing film if you’re of a certain age, which is probably “old man.” And the film does feature Sophia Loren, who was, what, 63 when this film came out? Still very stunning. Of course, I’m closer to that age than I was back then.

I grabbed this film from within the cabinet because I didn’t want to watch the dozens of titles which I’ve recently purchased. And, I thought, “It’s the one with Winona Ryder, the third one.” Ah, if you’re a real fan, you are already telling me that this is the fourth installment in the franchise, and Alien³ is the third one of the series, the one in the orbital prison. Ah, yes, well, gentle reader, I eventually got that sense, too, when they were talking about this film taking place 200 years after previous events, and, oh, yeah, Ripley is a clone. So I’ve got the other one shuffled into the cabinet somewhere, and I guess I know how it ends.

So: Uh, spoiler alert for the previous movie, but Ripley dies, sacrificing herself after being impregnated with an alien queen. On a military research ship operating on the fringes of the solar system, the military is working to clone the alien by cloning Ripley from a blood sample. A group of pirates/mercenaries brings aboard some people in cryostasis to use as the hosts for breeding xenomorphs. Among them is a new crew member, Call, played by Ryder, who breaks in to where the scientists are holding Ripley in hopes of killing her before the scientists can extract the embryo queen, but she’s too late. And when the scientists actually grow some xenomorphs, donchaknow those gosh-darned killing machines escape at the same time as the pirates are trying to escape the space marines who think they’re up to something. So basically, it turns into a chase across the military ship while the xenomorphs. Fortunately, the new Ripley has xenomorph DNA mixed in with hers from the cloning, so she’s strong and resilient, but unfortunately is a little sympathetic to the aliens.

So it’s been a couple of years since I watched the first film (2021), and it’s certainly been a while since I bought the first, third, and fourth films (2013), so clearly I am not the biggest fan of the series. But I’ve seen a lot of things that slag on the movies after the second. Although the first was almost cosmic horror in tone as well as a slasher movie in space, Aliens was an action film, and this, too, is an action film and not so much a horror film, although it does have some budget for gore. So it’s an okay action film, with plot-dependent bad decisions and reveals/side quests/sacrifices that are necessary because the screenwriters are under pressure to deliver something cinematic.

So, okay. Given how long it’s been–almost thirty years(!), I am comfortable seeing them out of order. And I’m pretty sure I have not seen Aliens, the second film, available secondhand at book sales or garage sales. Apparently, people still hold onto it of all the films in the franchise.

I bought this movie last weekend and watched it right away. Actually, of that haul, I first picked out Revenge of the Nerds, but I then discovered that the disc was cracked and would play. Ah, gentle reader, I have not been in the habit of checking the condition of the dollar discs I buy–I have honestly only relatively recently gotten to the point where I consistently check to make sure that the folder contains the matching disc, but I might have to start checking the condition of the discs as well. Or not, if I don’t remember.

So this is a 1980s comedy whose plot we’ve seen before. When the daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped, he contacts the Crumb and Crumb detective agency to investigate. That fellow, played by Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, if you need a reminder), is not a Crumb, and he puts the bumbling current generation of that well-reputed family of detectives on the case. Crumb bumbles his way through various plots at cross-purposes, including the wealthy man’s oversexed second wife, played by Annie Potts, who hopes to kill him before he can change his will, and the head of the agency itself being behind the kidnapping, hoping to get the ransom money to be able to afford the lifestyle that the oversexed second wife wants.

So it’s a series of often slapstick set pieces populated by Canadian comedians, and, you know what? It’s not a bad bit of film. It has its moments of amusement and isn’t a bad way to pass some time. You remember when these kinds of mid-tier movies, not blockbusters but not complete slop. They probably made more economic sense when you had a whole tail of other revenue possibilities for them besides the theater–video store rental sales, home video sales, licensing to cable or television…. Now you’ve got, what, cinema and streaming? So we lose out on films like this. The pity.

So I’m not the biggest John Candy fan, but I’ll think about picking up Uncle Buck if I can find it for a buck.