Category: Movies

I picked this film out from the library for a rewatch on a tiny, 22″ television/monitor combo that does, in fact, have speakers but is so old that it does not have an HDMI port. But it does have a PlayStation 2 attached to it, the PlayStation 2 that functioned as our first DVD player 25 years ago. So I spent the evening watching this film on a small screen from nine feet away. Like we used to do.

So: Terrorists hijack Air Force One and crash it into buildings in New York (not the World Trade Center), but the president gets into an escape capsule (see also Air Force One with Harrison Ford which also features this escape capsule which officials say is fiction which might mean it’s real but they don’t want anyone to know). However, due to an increased rate of crime stemming from a war with Russia and China, Manhattan has been walled off and turned into a maximum security prison with a wall around it across the rivers where the inmates are one their oen. The government tries to chopper in a rescue team, but some of the residents, who work for The Duke (Isaac Hayes), tell them if they try to rescue the president that they will kill him. So the army backs off, but they make a desperate bid by sending in a former special forces soldier who was scheduled for interment at the prison for trying to rob a federal depository. So they inject him with explosives that detonate in 23 hours and promise to fix him if he comes out with the president in that time.

So in he goes, flying a glider to the top of the World Trade Center, tracking the president’s watch but meeting up with an old acquaintance (and his girl played by Adrienne Barbeau), and they manage to get the job done.

I mean, it’s production was stylized probably to make things fit the smallish budget, but it’s held up pretty well. It was filmed in St. Louis, and I’m sure St. Louis looks even more like that than it did 35 years ago. And strangely enough, the plot and the tropes are strangely relevant even now. Peoples’ party terrorists. Vainglorious politicians. Et cetera. So it’s less dated than one might expect, although perhaps I’m just old enough that I can watch this film on a 22″ screen (bigger than the televisions in 1981 anyway) and enjoy it.

And the film had Adrienne Barbeau, who is famous for two things. Continue reading “Movie Report: Escape from New York (1981)” →

Ace quotes a video(?) about a director:

The Variety interviewer asked Snyder whether there were any other films he was “just dying to make.”

The director admitted that he still wants to make a Rick and Morty movie.

“It would be fun,” Snyder said. He then added, “For the longest time, I’ve been trying to make The Fountainhead into a movie or into TV show because it’s too long. I’ve written it.

When Variety pointed out that adapting the famous Ayn Rand novel was unlikely to “help with the right-wing allegations,” Snyder quickly agreed.

“I was going to say! That’s not going to help,” Snyder said. “But it’s an undeniably great book. What people don’t realize is that The Fountainhead in the 1950s was like Harry Potter now in terms of popularity. It was off the charts. Even just the why of that is worth it. And The Fountainhead is an insane melodrama. That’ll probably be my magnum opus. I’ll probably die on that one.”

Oh, c’mon, man. That was made into a film. In 1949.

I don’t know how I came up with a copy of that in college, before the World Wide Web, but I did, and I watched it several times. However, I have not watched the movie or read the book in a long time, and I used to read the book every couple of years and, in college, I watched the every couple of weeks. As much a function of how few videos I had as much as anything else.

But you cannot improve upon Gary Cooper. Although I expect “improve” is not what they would go for.

When I did the movie report on There Will Be Blood, I mentioned that it was the penultimate film I bought at Vintage Stock in February, and that This Is The End was the remaining film from that gift card purchase. I also predicted that I’d watch this film next, and like an amazing thing happening in a current NFL game, it’s amazing how it turned out to be the way to bet.

So: I knew what the plot was. I called it in February “the relatively recent ensemble comedy about the end of the world. I remember thinking it looked interesting when it came out.” Relatively recently being over a decade ago. It is about the end of the world and features a bunch of actors in the Roganverse playing caricatures of themselves after the rapture. Jay somebody visits Seth Rogan in LA, and although he (Jay) just wants to hang out with Rogan, Rogan wants to go to James Franco’s housewarming party, and they do. But Rogan kinda leaves out Jay as he spends time with his new 2013-era a-listers (or b-listers, or just people in the Roganverse and close to it). The Rapture happens while Jay and Seth are out getting smokes, and they see people getting taken up to Heaven in blue beams of light. They race back to Franco’s home only to find nobody in the party has been raptured from the party, but when earthquakes open sinkholes to hell outside, many of the partygoers are sucked into it. Franco, Rogen, Jay, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson and Danny McBride barricade themselves in Franco’s house and have to deal with demons outside and each other inside as their supplies dwindle.

It’s amusing, and it’s heartening to see different actors making light of their reputations and whatnot. In addition to the main players, we get appearances by other stars like Kevin Hart, Rihanna, Michael Cera, Mindy Kaling, Paul Rudd, Emma Watson, et cetera, as partygoers who meet sometimes gruesome ends (but mostly fall into pits). Being a Rogan R-rated comedy, though, it’s also crass at times. But better than There Will Be Blood.

And I can completely say that this is the best 2013 post-Rapture Craig Robinson film. I saw the other, Rapture-Palooza, back in my video store days (which were well into the streaming era, remember, so 2013 films were available for fifty cents for five nights). Although that other film had Anna Kendrick in it, and this one only had Emma Watson and Rihanna in it, briefly. So they’re perhaps closer than they should be since the other one was completely of direct-to-video budget.

Well, Rob did warn me when I watched Last of the Mohicans last year (already? I was going to say just) that this film was, in his words, ponderous and pointless and that he regretted watching it. Well, now I share that regret with him. I bought this last February with a gift card at Vintage Stock, and it looks like I’ve watched most of the films I bought that day, including:

• Commando
• Against All Odds
• The Bruce Lee boxed set, which included The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, and Game of Death II
• Deadpool
• The Man with Two Brains

That leaves This Is The End as the only remaining film from that purchase that I have yet to see, so I guess I know what I will watch next.

At any rate, Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his Sean Connery imitation in this film where he portrays a prospector/miner turned oil man who is led to a rich oil property in California. He has adopted the baby boy of a worker killed in a drilling accident, and he uses the boy as a prop when negotiating with families who own land he wants to buy or lease or investors. A series of setbacks and accidents occur, and he butts heads with a charismatic clergyman member of the Sunday family who for some unfathomable reason is the twin brother of the young man who told him where to find the oil in California. The young boy is deafened in an accident, sets fire to the house and gets sent to a school for the deaf in San Francisco, a man shows up claiming to be the oil man’s half brother and becomes his assistant until he reveals that he is not.

Things happen in the movie, but it rather lacks a narrative, really. It’s more of a Movie that you look at. Shots that linger for several beats too long. A hella lotta half-lit chiaroscuro closeups. Time jumps. The very last bit of the movie takes place many years after the main story just so that the main character can alienate the son and then kill the charismatic clergyman. None of the main characters are really good people or worth rooting for. Ponderous and pointless indeed, and suddenly I’m not that interested in acquiring and watching The Gangs of New York.

Not something I’m going to watch again, but now I have it on DVD for my estate sale, presuming that anyone still has a working DVD player when I shuffle off the mortal lacuna coil.

This is a Bob Hope film (which I picked up in Berryville, Arkansas, in 2024, but it’s also a Fernandel film, which it does not indicate on the cover–the cover says it stars Bob Hope, Anita Ekberg, and Preston Sturges. So I was a little confused when the main titles repeated Bob Hope Fernandel and then Fernandel Bob Hope. The gag, which played out whilst the tracking on the videocassette automatically adjusted with its crackle, buzz, and blur, was that the two comedians’ names were arguing over top billing in the film.

In it, Bob Hope plays a comedian/movie star on his way to Paris to buy a play from a famous playwright to use for a new movie. On the ship, he meets a beautiful State Department employee (played by Martha Hyer) and a famous French comedian (Fernandel). A beautiful woman (Ekberg) bumps into him and pockets his room key. She searches his luggage but cannot find what she is looking for. Hope’s character, Bob Hunter, macks on the embassy employee and hijinks ensue. When Hunter gets to Paris, he hangs with his new friend and makes headway on the macking, but “authorities” want him out of the country, and when he does not go, he narrowly avoids accidents that could kill him. He meets with the playwright, who explains (in not so many words), that the play is the MacGuffin, and Hunter can pick it up the next day at such and such place. So it’s a race to get the MacGuffin before the bad guys find it, and Hunter eventually does although sidetracked by being picked up for the murder of the playwright and then committed to an asylum because of his “delusions.”

So it’s a pleasant, lightweight movie. If you like Bob Hope–you’re old, man–you’ll like the film. It reminded me a lot of Charade, but this film came out five years earlier, so it’s not influenced by or taking on the Cary Grant film.

I said it’s also a Fernandel film because some of the film is in French, and although some spots have subtitles, many do not. So I’ll bet that the French got to see additional jokes fitting with Fernandel’s line than the Americans did.

But: The real controversy is Anita Ekberg or Martha Hyer?

Continue reading “Movie Report: Paris Holiday (1958)” →

Well, since I’m apparently in the mood to watch Woody Harrelson play Woody Harrelson (see also Zombieland), why not pop this film, which I bought last April–not long before Zombieland, which explains why they were both on the top of the cabinets. Looking at what I bought at the same estate sale and yard sales, it looks like I’ve made pretty good progress on the films–maybe soon, they will only be stuffing one cabinet and atop only a single other! Although the Lutherans for Life sale is this year, and I might find Cool Hand Luke or any number of other films that I might want to watch someday. Which, sometimes, comes. After all, nothing particular triggered my desire to watch Zombieland and The Cowboy Way. But I had them, and the time was right.

So: In this film, Woody Harrelson plays Woody Harrelson as a rodeo cowboy who is estranged from his best friend (Keifer Sutherland) and rodeo partner for missing the national championships, which they might have won and which would have provided Keifer Sutherland with a chance to put a down payment on a ranch. A common friend tries to get them to reconcile, but they do not, and the friend goes to New York where human smugglers have brought his daughter from Cuba–and now a young man in the rackets wants more money. This young man is not only going behind the crime leader’s back but also might want to keep the daughter for himself. When the friend does not contact Keifer Sutherland for five days, Keifer gathers Woody, reluctantly, and they head to New York City to find what happened to their friend and to find the daughter.

So the two real cowboys head to the big city and use their country ways to save the day. Ernie Hudson makes a welcome appearance as a mounted police officer.

I guess the critics didn’t like it, but I thought it was okay. Definitely a piece from its time when these lower-level b-style movies could get made and released. If it had been on Showtime a decade earlier, I probably would have watched it over and over again. Will I watch this over and over again? Well, maybe, someday. Or if I’m flipping through channels when on vacation someday, if I come across it, I’ll linger.

When I bought this at the Lutherans for Life garage sale last year, I mentioned that I really don’t like zombie movies. This film really didn’t make me change my mind.

The front says it’s Superbad meets Shaun of the Dead. Having seen both, I assure you it is not. In it, Jesse Eisenberg plays Michael Cera–no, wait, maybe he’s playing Jesse Eisenberg, and Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg are actually the same person. At any rate, he’s a neurotic loser who has survived a couple months into a zombie apocalypse. He meets up with Woody Harrelson playing Woody Harrelson, or at least a zombie survivor who acts like Woody Harrelson. They’re headed to that rumored place where the zombie apocalypse didn’t occur–but they’ve heard different things. So they head east, and they meet up with Emma Stone in dark hair and raccoon eyes (I thought, at a quick glance at the cover, that it was Aubrey Plaza) and her sister who are con artists who trick them into giving up their guns and vehicle so they can make a trip out west to an amusement park where, it’s rumored, there are no zombies. In California, they decide to bunk at Bill Murray’s mansion, and they find Bill Murray made up to look like a zombie–because, he says, the zombies don’t bother the other zombies. Oh, and zombies, zombies, climax at the amusement park where the survivally instinctive turn on all the lights and rides and attract the attention of all the zombies in the city.

Eh. It’s amusing once or twice, but not that funny, although Bill Murray makes everything better. It’s more cartoonishly gory, but only in spots–maybe in this second quarter of the 21st century, I am getting inured to gore. Apparently, they made a sequel to it 10 years later, because I guess that’s what you do with zombie movies. The plot and a lot of it don’t make sense if you think about it, but you’re probably not supposed to.

So, I’ve seen it, and I’ve told you about it. Look at me participating in the popular culture these days, neh?

I don’t know why I was thinking of Gary Coleman, specifically his movies, recently. Perhaps it was one of those things that came to mind in the middle of the night, when I tried to enumerate them in the darkness in the hours between sleep.

I mean, we know him from Diff’rent Strokes mostly. I remember those days, when I was a kid and thinking I was just like Arnold Jackson except I was white, the older brother, and I didn’t get adopted into a high rise apartment in New York. But otherwise I was the same kid.

The crossover events with other television shows, where Arnold Jackson showed up. Heck, I probably saw him most recently in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century when I watched the DVD series…. Gott in Himmel, I was watching it in 2004 and I recounted my progress in a series of blog posts 22 years ago. Heck’s pecs, he has run for governor of California in the interim. And died.

But, no, I was thinking about the movies and how I saw them on television in the day. On the Right Track (1981), a movie theater film. The Kid With The Broken Halo (1982) which was the basis for a brief cartoon when I was watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. The Kid with the 200 IQ (1983). The Fantastic World of D.C. Collins (1984). The dramatic turn as the firebug in Playing with Fire (1985). I can still see scenes from these films or their promos in my mind; shining shoes and crawling in a bus station locker in On the Right Track and flickering firelight on his face for Playing with Fire. I know I’ve seen these films; I’m less sure of The Kid from Left Field (1979), Scout’s Honor (1980), and Jimmy the Kid (1982), but…. Maybe? I mean, he was relatively everywhere in those years.

Maybe the films weren’t on heavy rotation on television in those days–I seem to recall them being on television as the movie of the week in prime time and a major event, such as things were when we had only three networks, PBS, two UHF stations, no cable to speak of. But I don’t remember seeing them available on home video, which was fairly new at the time. I guess some things are available–Ebay indicates you can find some of them on VHS and Betamax (man, I wish I’d kept the one I’d come across in my Ebay peddling days), but, day-um are they expensive. I will keep my eyes open specifically for them when I’m out and about.

And should I find one and pop it into a player, I do not doubt that 40+ years will fall off of me like autumn leaves for a little under two hours.

After recently watching Fantasy Mission Force, I rediscovered this film. And in (fruitlessly) trying to find out when I bought it by searching the blog for its purchase at a book sale or antique mall, I discovered I have a lot of Jackie Chan films floating around.

This one is…. Well, it’s not young Jackie Chan. In it, he plays a part of a burglary trio where Landlord plots the heists and drives the getaway car and he (Jackie Chan’s Thong) and another guy (Octopus) are the inside guys. Thong and Octopus waste their share of the loot, but Landlord stashes his in his home. But after he’s burglarized himself and his millions are gone, he takes a job he normally would not: Kidnapping a baby for a triad boss who thinks that the baby is his grandson. It ties back to a hospital heist at the beginning when the baby was being born while the crew were stealing drugs, and they lost it when saving the baby from an initial kidnapping attempt. When they kidnap the child, they have to take care of it whilst Landlord sets things up, and it makes them realize they’re missing something–Thong is estranged from his father because of his profession, and Octopus has left a wife in the hinterlands for his girl-chasing life in the city, and when she shows up in a chicken costume to announce she’s pregnant, he sends her away–but he comes to realize he’s missing that deep meaning of being a father. So–the middle part is them learning to handle a baby and whatnot, a bit of humor. The last part of the film is the delivery of the child to the crime lord who thought it was his grandson and the aftermath of learning the baby was not–which involved a bunch of kung fu fighting, some gun play, and a resolution where all parties were reconciled after a while.

So: Okay, maybe it has a bit of the Chinese sensibility, but the film does not make westerners out as the bad guys, so perhaps it was targeted for internal audiences more than international distribution. Or maybe my assertion that Chinese films of the 21st century favor Westerners as bad guys, especially when dealing with a larger scale plots always cast Americans or the West as antagonists and play up national unity against the outsiders, is incorrect.

The film fits in with what you expect from a Jackie Chan film, especially the Hong Kong work of the 1980s (Supercop, Police Story, Armor of God, etc.). All right, all right, purists: Police Story 3: Supercop which led to Supercop 2 which was not Police Story 4: Supercop 2. My point is these were set in the present day, not the past, like some of his earlier work.

Which reminds me: My collection of Jackie Chan films floating around don’t necessarily include the peak Jackie Chan. I’ve got Rumble in the Bronx. I’ve got the Armour of God films. I think I’m lacking in the Police Story line. I have a boxed set that I watched before reporting on movies (also Rumble in the Bronx). So I’d have to order them, as Stever did when he made the D&D group watch some videocassettes in 1994 which introduced me to Jackie Chan. Well, maybe, someday. When I’ve cleared some of the films, and Jackie Chan, films which are stacked still atop my to-watch cabinet.

But enough about that. You wanted to learn more about Charlene Choi, ainna?
Continue reading “Movie Report: Robin B Hood (2006)” →

I got this DVD a year ago, and in that post, I again acknowledged that I’m a bad sucker for films badge National Lampoon’s. They really are a mixed bag; some, like Adam and Eve or Dirty Movie have heart and/or are transgressively funny in a way most R-rated comedies are not. Some, though, are just “meh” like Holiday Reunion. As this film stars Paris Hilton, well, I expect I knew what I was in for.

Paris Hilton plays the head of an exclusive sorority at a south Florida university. They’re finalists in competition for FHM‘s hottest sorority. Another group of girls, a collection of misfit stereoarchetypes are left homeless when their dorm is closed due to a incredible (literally: unbelievable) plumbing mishap, so they decide to pledge to sororities. The group includes an older woman whose husband cheated on her, so she got a boob job and wants to go to college to bang as many bros as she can; an Indian woman; a girl from the country; a tough girl; a fat girl; etc. They visit a number of sororities with attempted-humor schticks, and they finish with Paris Hilton’s sorority, and just as they’re about to get laughed out, one of the girls who knew one of the outcasts in 9th grade reminds Paris Hilton that FHM wants to see some diversity in the group. So they take them on, and they have to go through hazing, parties, college scenes, etc.; the sorority wins the competition, kicks the outcasts out (and they plan their revenge), and her “sisters” see that Paris Hilton made it all about her, hoping to launch a modeling career. When the outcasts replace her demo reel with a series of photos from her awkward youth, she has a change of heart and all is well.

And, you know, this comes right at the peak of the Paris Hilton thing. It Girl, sex tape, The Simple Life, her musical career…. And, in this film, one gets the sense that she does not take herself seriously. Probably not in the reality show, either–she might have been playing a character named Paris Hilton. Not something you got out of the tabloid coverage at the time. So my initial (and long-held) impressions might have been incorrect. My “That’s hot” impression, though, remains spot on because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it to disprove my assertion in my own mind.

To be honest, it took me two tries to get through the film. One night, months ago, I got to the setup plumbing mishap and stopped the DVD right there, thinking that I had something, anything better to do than watch it. Second time’s the charm, I guess, as I powered through.

The film did have Noureen DeWulf in it, though.
Continue reading “Movie Report: National Lampoon’s Pledge This! (2006)” →

I got this film three years ago, and since I have been watching films with and/or about Bruce Lee, I popped this film in and…. what did I just watch?

This is a direct-to-video or direct-to-cable kind of movie, something that might have appeared on USA Network’s Up All Night program where they played outlandish films like Hell Comes to Frogtown or Surf Nazis Must Die. Heck, maybe they did play it at some point.

So, the plot: In World War 11 II, four allied generals are captured by the Japanese. A, erm, Chinese military man puts together a band of misfits to attempt a rescue, including a varmint, a con man, a guy who is dressed like Elvis, a couple of gay-coded, kilt-wearing members of the British Indian forces (I presume), a woman whom I thought was actually the hero, and a couple other interchangeable pieces, none of whom is Jackie (or Jacky) Chan. The first part of this film is the assembly of this group, after nixing James Bond, Snake Plissken, Rocky (I guess Rambo: First Blood Part 11 II was not yet the phenomenon)–no fooling, they’re offered as possible rescuers but are rejected–the first part, then is the, what, Allied authorities capturing these brigands to carry out the raid. Jackie Chan and a partner appear as grifters as well, but they’re not part of the main group–they just want to recoup the money they lost in a grift-within-a-grift, so they’re following the group. After assembly, the group travels toward the place where they think the generals are being held, and they visit–and destroy–a village of cannibalistic martial arts women and then a haunted house, where each individual is tempted in his or her own way by undead creatures, and then they get to the final destination to find a bunch of dead Japanese, and then they’re attacked by Japanese Nazis in 70s muscle cars festooned with Nazi swastikas, and then they’re all slaughtered except for Jackie Chan and his partner, who learn that it was all a double-cross from the beginning.

The film was dubbed from the original Chinese, and I do so wonder what might have changed in the translation. Perhaps not much, as outlandish as it was in English.

I invited my boys to watch the film because, hey, Jacky Chan, but I’m glad they demurred (as they always do, now). Because they were not steeped in the direct-to-cable schlock in the 1980s and they would not have been acutely amused to watch something like it. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but one never knows.

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)” →