Category: Movies

Ah, gentle reader. I seed my stacks with things which will only later become imperative. For example, at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library in autumn 2023, I bought this DVD (and thought it was a documentary). And this year, I read Be Water, My Friend by Bruce’s daughter Shannon, which inspired me to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought in February 2025 (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, and Game of Death II, the last two completed after he died–and the very last made without any footage that Lee shot for the film). So, when I was rifling through the unwatched videos and came across this disc, oh, yeah, I had to watch it and right now.

Although I thought it was a documentary, it is not. It is a fictionalized account of Bruce Lee’s life. And I watched for what seemed a very long time on Saturday night, and I started to wonder if it was a miniseries. Ah, The Legend of Bruce Lee was a Chinese television series. Which explains why every once and a while the music would swell (the theme song sung by Shannon Lee? I cannot find confirmation or refutation of the thesis, but I’m not going to spend an hour on it for a movie review that three people will read, and two of them are mes of the future) after a bit of a climax, but then we’d get another scene starting somewhere else. The Wikipedia for the television series indicates it had seven segments with numerous episodes per segment–50 in all? So I thought on Sunday night I would have another three hours to go since I was but through the fourth segment (the first four being, according to Wikipedia, “High School in Hong Kong”, “Late Adolescence in America”, “College Years and Opening a Kung Fu School”, and “Oakland”). I expected I would need to get through three segments (“Hollywood”, “Rise to Fame in Hong Kong”, and “International Fame and Death”). Oh, but no: This was but a three-hour feature film cut from the whole television series.

Which explains a lot of jumps in the film. Reading the summary, we get jumps from Hong Kong to Seattle–not much of the late Adolescence or Oakland portions (part 2 and part four) if any. It’s a rather simplified version of his story, or at least the highlights from Be Water, My Friend, although Wikipedia’s entry on Bruce Lee includes details that Shannon Lee’s book did not and which might or might not be true. And in the film I watched, not only are Seattle-Oakland-San Francisco blurred, but the last three sections go by very quickly, too–we go from him beating “Yellow Skin,” a lifetime rival who almost paralyzed Lee after a bout. I thought Be Water, My Friend put it on a weightlifting accident, but which is the real story and which is the legend? And right after the swelling music and advanced cinematography which indicated this was A Moment (and perhaps end of a section), we cut to an ambulance and Bruce Lee’s death, and finis! Wait, what?

As it’s a 21st century work, you still get bits of the China versus the West bits that mar 21st century Chinese martial arts films. Some of it probably are apropos, given that parts of the film took place in Hong Kong and Chinatowns in the middle of the 20th century, but the heavy thumb on the scale undercuts the other, more universal, themes in it, an outsider or a man going against the system and trying to improve himself and the world. One of the things that have made Bruce Lee endure as an icon for a small guy beating great odds.

But, eh, you’re probably better off spending time with the actual Bruce Lee films. Especially as Bruce Lee, the man, has been re-written into Bruce Lee, the legend. Which might or might not be true, and for better or for worse depending upon the needs of the moment. At least with the films, you know they’re fictional.

I got this film on a spree at Relics three years ago, and looking at the list of films I got, I’m pleased to say that I’ve watched maybe half of the 29 I bought. Which is pretty good for me, but the number of yet-to-watch films atop the cabinets has grown quite a lot despite those efforts.

So: The film’s protagonist, as it were, is Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, a half-Irish kid growing up in the middle fifties in sight of the local mob guy’s restaurant. He starts running errands for him, growing into a hijacker role along with full-Italian Tommy DeVito (not the quarterback) played by Joe Pesci and Jimmy played by Robert DeNiro. The first third tells about how they come up, the second kind of about a big heist they do and its aftermath, and then the final third is Hill going up for something and getting into the drug trade behind bars–and the final climax is a day where it all falls apart for him. Deep in the drug trade–against the wishes of Paulie, the neighborhood mob boss–he is hoping for a big score but the cops bust him, and he turns on and testifies against his former colleagues.

When I bought the film, Friar commented:

Goodfellas is like the anti-Godfather. No romanticized wiseguys, just crooks.

And I kind of agree with it. It looked like Hill might be the conscience of the group, maybe balking at how violent the groups became coming into the 1970s, at odds with his romanticization of them from his youth, but…. Nah. The film starts in media res, with the trio driving and hearing something in the back of the car–the dead body in the trunk wasn’t dead, and Jimmy and Tommy dispatch it further–and the first part is flashback leading up to that moment, and when the film catches up with it, I expected…. I dunno, something other than same old, same old with the latter dipping into the drug trade and then a rather abrupt jump into the passage of time to the final act where Hill has been too much into his own product and is strung out and under heavy suspicion. And then he testifies, and then he’s a schnook like the rest of us. So, ultimately, he is not the conscience of the film.

The film is based on an autobiography or memoir named Wiseguy by a former gangster. The film, of course, could not bear that title because the Ken Wahl television series claimed that title in the middle 1980s–perhaps also inspiried by the book, but more likely the free-flowing mob fascination of the era.

The film has punched above its weight, though, remaining timely at least through the two memes that one sees on the Internet even today. Tommy Gets Whacked and the over-the-top laughing image (although one still hears “Funny? Like a clown?” from the same scene from time-to-time). So people recognize images of it without, perhaps, understanding the context of the images, even now. Like so much of an Internetified education.

It took me two nights to watch the film for the oddest of reasons. Halfway through the movie, the screen went blue, and as my beautiful wife was home from her whatever that night, I didn’t look into it further, but apparently, for some reason, they put half of the movie on the back side of the DVD, so I had to flip it like a flippin’ laser disc. I dunno, maybe this is how media companies mark a serious mob movie–I have a set of The Godfather films which are on two VHS cassettes (because they’re recorded on the slow setting for better fidelity) which I watched almost five years ago and I think I have a two-VHS version of Casino around here somewhere, tentatively scheduled for viewing in 2031 because I go five years between mob movies apparently. But I’ve not seen that on DVDs before.

So: Well, one more down, which leaves only 8 of the 28 films I bought that day atop the cabinet (amidst dozens of others I have bought since then). Which I count as progress. But next month has two book sales, so….

I probably have a little Irish blood in me, much like every other scalawag race in Europe, so please enjoy some traditional Irish music this St. Patrick’s Day:

Technically this is not a movie; it’s a 30 minute short which would have played part of a whole package including a main feature (or two!) in the theaters during the Great Depression. I bought it last August, and it kinda filled that spot where I kinda wanted to watch a film in the evening and kinda wanted to read. I could watch this (and have material for a blog post) and read after. Which I did!

You know, when I was a kid in the 1970s, Laurel and Hardy shorts and movies were still on television. And some people did not lose anything in watching it because secondary televisions (and sometimes even then primary televisions–we were not middle class in the suburbs somewhere where color television was guaranteed). But when I was under 10 years old, I lacked the patience to watch these older films (which includes the other pairings like Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, or groups like the Marx Brothers). But now that I am an old man and have more patience but less actual time to just zone out in front of the television, I often pick these old movies. Perhaps to capture a little flavor of my youth or something.

At any rate, this film, as I mentioned, is 30 minutes long. Laurel and Hardy and their wives are about to take a trip to Atlantic City for the weekend, but just as they are leaving, one of the guys at the lodge calls and tells Hardy about the party they’re throwing that evening. So Hardy fakes an illness and gets Laurel to take care of him for the weekend so they can go to the party. The wives go away, and then Laurel and Hardy try to dress in their lodge gear (which looks like jockey outfits), but Hardy has trouble with his boot, and discovers it’s Laurel’s boot, and a full half of the run time is slapstick of trying to get the boot on and then the boot off. The wives miss the last train to Atlantic City and decide to return, and they discover the ruse.

That’s it. A bunch of slapstick, tripping, walking into walls, and a little slapping/pushing of Laurel. A little of Laurel doing the whimpering that must have inspired Beaker on The Muppet Show. The boot gag probably went on too long, but it was the 30s, man. Sensibilities must have been different.

These are the other two Bruce Lee films from the box set I bought (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Way of the Dragon were the first three). Bruce Lee only made three films–the previously noted titles–and although he started Game of Death in 1972, it was re-imagined after his death using footage they’d filmed and “doubles” for him. The second one was made using body doubles and clips from other films. So when I watched Fist of Fear, Touch of Death in 2024, I didn’t realize that there was a whole industry of remixing Bruce Lee material into new movies.

So, in Game of Death, Bruce Lee is Billy Lo, an international martial arts film star whom the syndicate wants a piece of. I say “is” instead of “plays” because the scenes he shot were apparently for a film with a different plot entirely, and it’s only in the remixing that they got meta with it. The confrontations with the syndicate become serious so after he is shot, Lo fakes his own death to get revenge and to protect his girlfriend played by Colleen Camp (whom we saw in DARYL and who contributed a song to the soundtrack, I think). Also, parenthetically (but I already used parentheses in the previous sentence, so I have to just say parenthetically in this sentence), although she has scenes with Billy Lo, she did not have any scenes with Bruce Lee because he was long dead. At any rate, the climactic scene finds Bruce Lee ascending the levels of a Chinese restaurant to get to the big boss, and one of the level bosses is played by Kareem Abdul Jabbar. So if you’re keeping score, Lee defeated Kareem, and it was Arnold Schwarzenneggar who defeated Wilt Chamberlain in Conan the Destroyer.

So part of the film was, again, meta as I was watching to see where Bruce Lee actually appeared. And it’s in several of the fight scenes, including the final assault on the Chinese restaurant. But otherwise it was (apparently) two other martial artists playing in disguise, filmed from behind, and a variety of other tricks to try to hide that it wasn’t Lee.

Game of Death II has Lee as Billy Lo again, but not the same Billy Lo. He’s friends with a martial arts master, Chin Ku, who is getting challenged to fight to the death a bunch recently as is Lo. Chin dies, and, at the funeral, a helicopter flies over with a Skill Crane cage and snatches the coffin, and Lo leaps onto it, but falls to his death when struck by a dart. Which is how they turn the film over to Lo’s younger brother, a ne’er do well who was not studying kung fu very dilligently. He goes to the compound of a rival martial arts master, who is a suspect but is cleared by getting killed in his sleep. Lo suspects the one-armed valet, whom he finds at a nearby temple and discovers the man has two arms after all–and the temple is the entrance to the Tower of Death, which is an futuristic underground bunker. Lo2 fights his way in, discovers Chin faked his own death because he’s a drug kingpin whom Interpol was closing in on, and they have a long fight where Lo triumphs.

Wow, this really was a cash-in. And low budget. We get scenes where Bruce Lee is talking to a mentor, and then they switch to a closeup of the mentor delivering lines pertaining to this plot, and it’s obviously a different guy. We get some of the filmed-from-behind, big sunglasses, and distant shot scenes to fill in gaps in the Billy Lo portion of the program. We get the changing shirt colors on Bruce Lee when two different films are spliced together. We get a lion attack where it’s obviously a guy in a lion costume. Jeez, Louise, I should have waited to watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist until after I watched this film so I could see exactly what they were spoofing.

At any rate, I feel some sense of accomplishment in finishing the boxed set, and I’m kind of glad it wasn’t an Urban Action Cinema Collection kind of thing where I had to get through 15 movies. I like martial arts films, but watching too many of them in a row gets a little tedious. But, as I said, I feel a sense of completion from making it through the set, and I could use that.

This is the third of the Bruce Lee movies in the boxed set I bought in 2025 (The Big Boss and Fist of Fury were the first two), and it’s the last one he finished before he died. “Last one” makes it sound like he made a lot of movies, but he really did not–they just made a lot of movies with him in them.

So: In this film, Bruce Lee plays a young Hong Kong man sent to Rome to help with some ex-pats who have started a Chinese restaurant but are running into trouble from “the syndicate” who are trying to muscle in. The young men who work for the restaurant are trying to learn karate to protect the restaurant, but Lee’s character shows them that kung fu is better. So we have some confrontation with various toughs of the syndicate culminating in the well-known–well, among people who watch martial arts films–fight between Lee and Chuck Norris at the Colliseum. Which Lee wins, but it helped Norris break into film, so really, we’re all the winners, ainna?

It was the last on he finished according to the Internet–he’d taken a break from The Game of Death to film it but died before resuming that film (we’ll talk about that by and by).

So, yeah, if you’re into martial arts films, you really probably ought to see it. I’ve seen assertions that Lee’s films defined or redefined the genre, and I won’t argue the counterpoint.

I do want to point out that all three films to this point have starred Nora Miao as the love interest such as they were.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Way of the Dragon (1972)” →

Well, after hearing “Fists of Fury” on the radio, I guess it’s fitting to watch the film which was the second in the five-pack I bought last February (The Big Boss was the first in the set).

This film, which came out the year after The Big Boss, also has a common martial arts theme to it: The rival martial arts school kills/destroys the protagonist’s school. In this case, Bruce Lee’s character, the best in the school, returns from afar to find that his master has died–the authorities say from pneumonia, but Lee’s Chen thinks it was murder. So it happens. The film is set during the Japanese occupation of China around World War II, so the rival school is also a rival power/oppressor. The rival school crashes the funeral to boast of their prowess, but the senior student at the Chinese school, now the master, holds Chen back and does not want conflict. Chen goes and busts up the rival school, though, leading to further escalations. And he discovers insiders poisoned the master at the behest of the Japanese, so he gets revenge on them and, eventually, all the Japanese and a visiting Russian master of martial arts and strongman.

So, yeah, a martial arts film. With Bruce Lee, so a step above, I guess. The most noteworthy thing about it, though, is that the antagonists are not “The West” or “The Americans” unlike more modern martial arts films partially subsidized by the Chinese government (or allowed, perhaps).

Two down, and three to go. I’m kind of spacing them out because they are likely to be very similar to one another and to other martial arts movies from the pre-wire era. Looking at his IMDB page, he really did only make…. four movies in his lifetime? Incredible. He punched above his weight, literally and figuratively.

So after completing the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, the first thing I watched was a Bruce Lee movie, one of the ones in the set I bought last February. You see, Be Water, My Friend truly was inspiring. Although I am not doing 100 punches or 500 punches every day, I did get into this film set. We can only speculate on how fast I get through the other four movies in the set; although I finished the winter reading challenge six days ago, and I was eager to watch some videos to change the tamber of the evenings, I have been compelled to finish Perelandra, the middle book of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, which was a bit of a slog. Maybe I’ll watch more films and television the next time my beautiful wife travels.

I think I’ve seen this film before, but I don’t think I have it on my shelves already, which would have meant I would have recorded it digitally in the era when I could do that. Or maybe martial arts films of the era have very similar plots. In this one, Lee moves across the water (a ferry is involved) and in with his cousins, promising his uncle that he will not fight any more–apparently, he’d been a bit of a fighter back home, and he’s moving for a fresh start (implied). They get him a job working with them at the ice factory, which is really an ice distribution center which cuts ice from large blocks in storage and ships it. When two of the cousins discover packets in the ice, they’re invited to The Manager’s Office. He offers them money, and when they decline, a group of men befall them and kill them after some kung-fu fighting. The cousins are worried and ask about them, but they trust The Manager even as other cousins disappear. But when the remaining cousins are killed in their home except for the pretty cousin who is kidnapped, then Bruce Lee’s character goes to the home of the Big Boss, the factory’s ultimate owner, and has to face him and his flunkies in combat.

So, yeah, pretty much what you would expect from a martial arts film plus Bruce Lee. The plot’s a little head-scratching–people from the family start disappearing, and they go to work and ask The Manager to intercede, and he reports that the Big Boss is talking with the authorities, and they all let that ride? Perhaps that’s a cultural thing from Hong Kong in the late 1960s or something. But I don’t think that’s how we would handle it in America, Jack.

At any rate, an amusing spectacle in the time before we had UFC fights to show up how those things would really go, and even UFC is a little gamified as to what various Internet videos show us fights to be (nasty, brutish, and short). But pretty to look at. They feature a lot of jumping over opponents, which I presume was mere camera work at this time and not wire work that would come later as usually you only see the jumper in the shot and not the jumpees.

But. I have four more to watch, and I’ll watch them sooner rather than later. The regular regimen of hundreds of punches a day? Should, but probably won’t.

I think of this as a later Adam Sandler film, which is odd, because he has continued to act in a pile of films since then, but before this you’ve got almost an annual film that became a classic, including Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, and lesser films that still were pretty big hits. Around the end of the first decade of this century, though, he mixes in some dramas and the comedies are a little more spaced out. And then he signs with Netflix, which really dropped him off of my radar (unless I’m over at my brother’s house, I guess). But, somehow, this film is 18 years old. Almost black-and-white, although it came out well into the 21st century.

So: In this film, Sandler plays Chuck, a womanizing firefighter. Kevin James plays Larry, his best friend, a widower with two kids. In a hazardous situation, Larry saves Chuck’s life, so Chuck owes him. Due to a paperwork error, Larry cannot assign his benefits and life insurance to a trust for his children which means they would get nothing if he died–so he enlists Chuck to enter into a domestic partnership/civil union with him so that Chuck can be the beneficiary. Although they thought they could keep it on the down-low, an investigation leads their firehouse to learn of it, which has two effects: The gay firemen are inspired to come out, but the others are no longer comfortable with Chuck and Larry. Jessica Biel plays a gay-friendly attorney (straight) who helps them on their case, but Chuck takes a shine to her. Hijinks ensue, and a dramatic courtroom scene ends the major drama and a gay wedding ends the film.

I suppose the film drew its share of ire for being about straight men pretending to be gay, but it’s definitely gay-positive in its tone and message. Of course, that might require more intellectual work to evaluate the message instead of reflexively condemning it.

Still, I wouldn’t call this one of my favorite Sandler works. Somewhere below Little Nicky and Don’t Mess with the Zohan but on par with Happy Gilmore 2 (ahut).

Well, since I just mentioned the film’s soundtrack, when I had a little free time, I looked for this videocassette which must be one of the most played ones I’ve ever owned. I bought it at Suncoast Video at Northridge Mall when I was in college, and as I had a small video library at the time and, somehow, a lot of free time even though I was involved in activities at the university and working full time, I watched it over and over again. Which probably means I got it my freshman or sophomore year when I was not quite as busy. Regardless, I’ve seen it enough times that even the previews before the feature (for The Book of Love and Metropolitan) were familiar.

At any rate, for those of you who haven’t seen it: A high school student, Mark Hunter (played by Christian Slater), has recently moved to Arizona from back east when his father has become the superintendant for the school district. His father bought him a short-wave radio to talk to his friends back east (this was in the days when long distance was expensive, young feller), but he instead runs a pirate radio station and broadcasts at 10pm every night. Although he is shy in person and has not made any friends, his broadcasts attract the attention of the local students, including Nora DeNiro (Samantha Mathis) who sends poems to his PO Box. Matters take a serious turn and the authorities start looking for him when he talks to a suicidal young man on the air. Suspecting it’s a prank, Happy Harry Hard-On (his on-air persona) teases the fellow but tries to calm him when he then suspects he’s serious–and the boy kills himself after hanging up. Meanwhile, the school principal is expelling students on thin pretexts to thin the herd while keeping the funding, and this comes to light as the FCC closes in on Mark.

The movie gives Slater a chance to go into on-air rants about the concerns of Generation X, and it spoke to me at the time. Come to think of it, the anti-consumerist and desire for authentic experience could probably apply today–I thought about offering to watch it with my young adult children to show them that some concerns might be universal for the age–but it’s an old movie by now and might as well be in black and white to them. Plus, Samantha Mathis appears topless briefly, and although that was a staple for late 20th century cinema, it is definitely not for 21st century movies, and they would be scandalized.

So although I’m not going to rewatch it every week or every couple of weeks as I did when the videocassette was new, I can definitely imagine watching it again.

I bought this videocassette in August; I think we might have already have it somewhere in the media library, but I picked it up because it was cheap, and because I can never really be sure aside from putting some actual effort into creating and maintaining a catalog, whether we actually have have a film on home media or only think have which will then catch me by surprise when I want to watch a movie. Well, we have have it now. Maybe twice.

So: In the early 1800s, a Spanish don acts as Zorro, the hero of the people of Mexico. The evil governor of California prepares to execute three random peasants as a trap for Zorro, but he dashes in, rescues them all, marks the governor with the Z, and rides off. However, the governor suspects the don and moves to arrest him, which results in the doña’s death. The don is imprisoned, and the governor takes his infant daughter back to España.

Twenty (some) years later, the governor returns; an American soldier pursues two Mexican thieves and kills one, and his brother vows revenge. The don escapes prison using the Count of Monte Cristo trick, and stops the (drunken) brother from seeking ill-timed revenge on the American soldier and trains him up to be the new Zorro. Oh, and the daughter and the new Zorro kind of fall for each other even though she thinks he’s a bandit. Which he is, but he’s doing it for the good of the people.

The film stars Antonio Bandeiras, Anthony Hopkins, and Catherine Zeta Jones, who might be almost as pretty as my beautiful wife. We talk a lot about how modern films strip-mine old intellectual properties, but this late 20th century film also mines old IP. Zorro started out as a pulp story and got film treatment several times, including portrayals by Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power in the early part of the century. I remember watching the Tyrone Power version on television with my sainted mother sometime in the 1970s. But why weren’t we complaining about it in 1998 when this film came out? Because it featured a compelling story, interesting characters, a competent-but-not-girlboss woman character, and basic filmmaking competence (well, maybe more than competence). Modern strip-mining of the old IPs tends to lack all of these things.

This is the kind of film I can imagine actually watching again, and not just hoarding for the next generation. Or the estate sale flippers.

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.

The film stars Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, so you know it’s a serious film, not an actioner or thriller like, say, Paycheck or Johnny Mnemonic (which I have seen since I read the book, but that was before I bored you a twee “movie report” on every last film I’ve seen recently).

At any rate, in the near future, prenatal genetic sampling/testing allows parents to select for ideal traits in their offspring, which leads to a bifurcated society where God babies/naturally conceived people are called “in-valids” and are left to the lesser jobs of society. One such person, played by Hawke, finds a black market fellow who will help him impersonate a “valid.” Jude Law plays the man whose identity Hawke takes, a champion swimmer and genius who is a parapalegic and hence is shunned for his infirmity. Law’s character provides blood and urine samples so that Hawke can work at Gattaca, a space exploration company, as a navigator whose work and plans earn him the right/privilege of launching on a mission to Titan. But in the week before Hawke can relax his ruse while he’s off world, the mission director at Gattaca is murdered. Despite the care he has taken for some years in removing loose skin and hair, he leaves a stray eyelash near the scene of the crime, and it is swept up, and the authorities know an in-valid was near the scene. So he has to continue playing the role under increased pressure and in getting through new challenges, including checkpoints and random sweeps of the Gattaca headquarters. Along the way, he finds that some people hope that he succeeds and help, and that his greatest opponent is his augmented brother who is heading up the investigation.

So: Eh, all right, I’ve seen it. A little more serious than it needed to be to be really entertaining–the pace was not enough to really be tense, and it lacked enough action to make it compelling. I should probably start a rating system for how many times I paused the film and went upstairs to fold some laundry in the middle of it or something–much less times where I paused a film and came to finish it another day. I must have paused this film three or four or five times.

Still, it must have punched above its weight and resonated with enough people at the fin de siècle that they refer to it today. Kind of like today’s…. erm…. well…. What will members of this generation allude to in twenty years? Probably nothing. Maybe hollaback meme templates.