Category: Movies

This movie is a two-fer, at least for where Brian J.’s Rule 5 movie report posts go: It has both Marisa Tomei (from My Cousin Vinny) and Heather Graham (from License to Drive). However, although it probably is the best part of these movie reviews, I am not posting more pictures of these ladies at this time.

The film also features Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson. In it, Adam Sandler plays an executive assistant working for a pet supply company who is mild mannered and less of a man boy than his normal roles. On a flight to St. Louis, he sits next to an obnoxious man and touches a flight attendant to get her attention–which she calls assault, so Sandler’s meek character is tased and arrested. In lieu of jail time, the judge sentences Sandler to anger management therapy–run by the obnoxious man (Nicholson). So he joins anger management group therapy with the usual collection of Sandler character actors (John Turturro, Allen Covert) and, after another incident, gets personal high-contact therapy–Nicholson’s character moves in with him. It leads to some amusing set pieces–Dave (Sandler) picks up Heather Graham in a bar and goes home with her, only to reject her sexual advances because he has a girlfriend; a confrontation with a childhood bully who is now a Buddhist monk leads to a brawl at a monestary; a trial separation between Dave and his girlfriend (Tomei) leads to Tomei’s character dating Nicholson’s character; and finally, the climax at a Yankees game stocked with cameos as self including Rudy Giuliani, Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens, and so on.

So it was amusing, which is honestly the rating I give most comedies. It’s not raunchy (PG-13), but there’s some sexual humor in it. It was a bit different to see Sandler playing a more sedate role and having Nicholson chew the scenery. You know, I am going to run up to the Netflix barrier some day, where Sandler’s films are only available, maybe, online. But I’ve got plenty of his oeuvre to catch up on before then.

Also, in searching the Internet for anger management several times, I might have set myself up for a Red Flag something or other. Which is the risk I run to bring high quality content like this to you.

I saw this film early in the trailer park years–it seems to me that I saw it over and over, which probably meant it was on Showtime but rotated out pretty quickly. Of course, we got our first VCR right after we moved into the trailer, so I suppose we could have gotten it as a rental in the days when every grocery store and some gas stations rented videocassettes. Which, conceptually, is about as dated as this film.

Basically, the film starts en media res–a car is getting chased by a helicopter, and the man driving the car lets a boy out before driving over a cliff; the boy is picked up by an elderly couple and taken into town. My youngest, who was watching the film with me while trying to simultaneously play a video game, got confused immediately because the thought he’d already missed a plot point or two–but that got him watching the film. At any rate, the boy apparently has partial amnesia, so he’s placed with foster parents (Lenny and Mary Beth Hurt). They discover that he’s good at a lot of things, but he’s a little lacking in social skills. He befriends a neighbor boy who teaches him a little about being a kid, and when it’s going good, his “real parents” show up to claim him.

They’re scientists who essentially “built” him. He’s not a robot, really–he’s got the body of a human and will grow and whatnot, but a computer for a brain. They learn that he has become almost human (not that Almost Human) with emotions and preferences. The military shuts the program down and orders the scientists to terminate Daryl. Instead, they break him out of the military facility.

You know, I misremembered the doctor who breaks him out as being played by Dabney Coleman, likely because I saw a lot of Dabney Coleman in those days; however, the kindly doctor is played by Josef Sommer who has played similar characters his whole life (I remembered him from 2000’s The Family Man).

At any rate, kind of a neat film, not high art, but if you’re a kid about Daryl’s age, it might speak to you a bit. I liked it when I was that age, and my youngest son liked it well enough. And the lad did not offer any comment on the “ugly” people in it since the film does not include romantic plot points or women in bikinis, but it did include Colleen Camp.

Continue reading “Movie Report: DARYL (1985)” →

Well, this should have been a blockbuster, ainna? A young Mel Gibson in his heyday, a young Robert Downey, Junior, version 1.0 fresh from the Brat Pack days. A buddy film set, part comedy and part adventure, with corrupt government officials as the bad guys, flying action scenes and stunts, and….

Well, it’s a bit underwhelming.

The plot is that a helicopter traffic reporter (Downey) loses his job and gets his license to fly revoked stateside, but a secret government agency recruits him to join an outfit in Laos that flies and drops supplies to various locations in southeast Asia, from guns to friendlies and aid to outlying villages. He meets the crazy pilots who are already in country, who do the flights by day and party really heartily at night. One (Gibson) takes the new pilot under his wing, and the new guy learns that the old hand is amassing arms to sell to finance his retirement. After Downey and another pilot crash, the local warlord, an ally of the leaders of their outfit, rescue some “flour” and leave the fliers stranded. So Downey plans his revenge on the local opium processing plant, which involves setting up a couple of grenades–but it only throttles production for a little bit and kicks up a hornets’ nest of revenge. Subplots involve a senator (Lane Smith, last seen in My Cousin Vinny) on a fact-finding mission looking for evidence of drug smuggling and an American aid worker working with refugees whose underdeveloped storyline only exists to provide a redemption story for Gibson’s character (the refugee camp is located in poppy fields that rival factions converge on to harvest).

It’s hard to say why it doesn’t really work. The pacing? Are the characters just outside the relatable range? Is the pacing a little slow? Is the main problem or conflict under-defined so we don’t really know what’s at stack until the middle or end of the movie? I mean, Gibson and Downey should be at the height of their charisma, but it’s kind of wasted. A script that is not sure how buddy it is or how serious it is with a message? Probably all of these things.

So it will go into the library and not represent something I watch over and over again, but I guess it’s good for completeness’ sake in the ouevres of Gibson and Downey.

You know, gentle reader, I am so old now that I think of things from long ago as recent–so I think of this as a recent Clint Eastwood movie, perhaps because it’s from the 21st century, and Eastwood’s filmography goes way back. But he has been making and acting in films up to the present day (I posted a Toby Keith song with clips from the really recent movie The Mule here, although it’s only really recent now–if you’re reading it seven years from now, maybe not recent any more).

At any rate, I will explain the plot for those of you who are later to the 21st century movies than I am. Eastwood plays a recently widowed Korean War veteran whose Detroit neighborhood has changed around him. It’s become a bit dangerous, and Hmong immigrants have moved in, including next door. The first scenes deal with his wife’s funeral and its aftermath, including Walt (Eastwood) watching his children and grandchildren’s behavior at the funeral and the cold cuts at his home after. The priest of the parish church wants to look after Walt as the priest promised the late wife that he would, but Walt rebuffs him.

A local gang tries to initiate the teenaged son of the next door neighbors by having him steal Walt’s pristine Gran Torino, but Walt prevents it. To atone, the Hmong neighbors offer the boy as a worker to help work off his offense; Walt doesn’t think much of it and tries to rebuff this gesture, but then takes the boy on, tasking him with helping to clean up and repair houses in the neighborhood, which makes Walt a little more popular with the new neighbors and introduces him to them. Walt takes on mentoring the young man and protecting him from the gang with escalating violence which leads to the ultimate violent conclusion.

Spoiler alerts, kinda.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Gran Torino (2008)” →

I watched this film with my boys since I’ve got a son who’s going to be soon eligible for a learner’s permit (what? at eight? he’s not eight any more? what sorcery is this?). This movie came out when I was 16 and was, hence, by age eligible to learn to drive. However, my high school drivers’ education classes were held in the summer, which I spent with my father in Wisconsin, so I did not really get much shot at learning to drive in my high school years aside from a couple hours with a private driver’s school and Pixie’s then-husband driving with me once.

But, somehow, I got to watch this film over and over again on Showtime…. while we lived in the trailer? That hardly seems possible, since I would have moved to the house down the gravel road (which did not have cable for a while). But I did then.

Enough to write a quiz program on my Commodore 128 based on the film and use it for my own written portion of the test, which you had to pass in Missouri to get your learner’s permit.

At any rate, the plot: A slacker (played by Corey Haim) fails the computer-based part of his license test, but passes the driving part in a hard urban environment while his sister passes. As he (Corey Haim, Les Anderson, whatever; he’s playing the Corey Haim part) has backed into a date with one of the hottest young ladies at school (played by Heather Graham in an early role), he pretends that he has actually license–but his parents find out, so he cannot use the family car. He sneaks out in his grandfather’s special Cadillac; Mercedes (not the car, Heather Graham’s character) discovers that her now-former boyfriend, an Italian out of high school, is also seeing someone else, so she becomes intoxicated. Les (Corey H.) ends up picking up his friends (played by Corey Feldman as the Corey Feldman character and some other guy as the guy who is not Corey Feldman). They go to the best drive in which is way out of town and….

Well, hijinks ensue. Cars get demolished. And it works out in the end. It’s a comedy, after all.

As to the important question. Corey Haim versus Corey Feldman.

My boys said “Corey Feldman.” The cooler Corey, and the only one still with us. Still, based on this film, which I saw over and over, and not The Lost Boys which was not on Showtime, I identify more with Corey Haim. Also, I might have failed a driver’s license test or two in my time.

As to ugly women, my youngest did not deem Heather Graham ugly. Which is good, gentle reader; as you might know, I was born in the same hospital as Heather Graham, albeit two years later (a fact I have not brought up in conversation in a professional networking event since Wednesday–yes, June 16, 2021–look at my self-discipline!). So I would feel some sort of affection to the starlet of later films such as Bowfinger (which my boys have seen) and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (which they’re almost ready for–as a boy, I would have watched it, but as a father, I cannot condone it unequivocally). But let’s review. Continue reading “Movie Report: License to Drive (1988)” →

This film is a Jason Statham film, so you know what you get: Jason Statham being tough and whatnot. The plot, which is told at the outset in flashbacks that jumble the main characters’ recent-ish lives leading up to now, but omitting some important details until the story is under way. A mixed martial arts fighter accidentally wins a fight he was supposed to throw when he knocks his opponent immediately–which not only puts the fight promoter in the bind, but upsets the local Russian mob who bet a bundle on his loss. The Russian mob kills Jason Statham’s wife and leaves him alive, but telling him that they will kill anyone he gets close to, starting with his landlady if he’s not out of his home in 24 hours. So we get a montage of his experience on the streets until he’s thrown out of a store after being pickpocketed, but the police detective who rousts him recognizes him as a former police officer who ruined the corruption a collection of crooked cops were running, so they beat him and encourage him to consider suicide. Meanwhile, also in flashback, a young Chinese girl is very good at math. She embarrasses her school teacher, gets picked for a special school in Beijing, but in reality, it’s a job for a Chinese mob working with numbers and memorizing things because the mob boss does not like computers. She is brought to the United States and works in Chinatown (New York) in memorizing and analyzing details. The MacGuffin of the plot is that the Chinese triad want her to memorize a long number, and she will be required to memorize another long number and then get further instructions, but before this happens, the Russian mob tries to capture her, but in evading her, she meets Jason Statham as he’s about to jump in front of a subway, and then Statham happens.

So Statham takes on the Russian mob and the Chinese mob and the corrupt cops to protect the girl and to find out what they’re after. During such a time, we learn Statham is not only a mixed martial arts fighter and former cop, but a highly trained operative tasked to the New York police force after 9/11 to help eliminate criminals while normal cops pursued terror suspects. Or something. And the ultimate boss level fighter is another operative with a similar mission that is hoping to sell out to the Chinese mob with an elaborate and, frankly, unbelievable MacGuffin.

So, basically, this movie is a retelling of Mercury Rising; in that film, the balding hero (played by Bruce Willis) protects an autistic freshly orphaned young man who ran afoul of a government agency. Although this story has a bit of For a Few Dollars More/Last Man Standing (the Bruce Willis, not Tim Allen, version) in it. It’s more frantic as befits the times, and it keeps one’s attention–I probably wandered off less during its run than other non-comedies.

Also, gentle reader, there’s a subtle visual cue when I have recently watched a Jason Statham film: I think, hey, maybe the stubble look would work for me. However, my facial hair color is so subtle that it does not stand out on my face.

I’ve got three day’s of stubble here, and it’s invisible; I have to grow a fold-over length beard for it to show. So every year or so, often coinciding with a Statham film, I grow a little facial hair for a couple of days until I think it looks ridiculous. Which is scheduled for Friday this week.

Also, who can forget my Facebook submission for the 10 Year Challenge on Facebook in 2019?

The ten year challenge.

Man, have I changed.

I know, I know: Why have I given up on Bruce Willis as my role model? Because Statham’s closer to my age. Bruce Willis can draw Social Security these days, and I would prefer to pretend I’m a long way from that.

I have recently devised a methodology to determine one’s age based on the person one thinks of when one thinks of Spider-Man on screen.

Take this simple test for yourself.

Whom do you think of when you picture Spider-Man on screen?

Image:
Actor:	Nicholas Hammond	Tobey Maguire	Andrew Garfield	Tom Holland
Your age:	Okay, Boomer. Or old Generation X	Generation X	You have revealed yourself to be a Russian deep cover agent through your lack of understanding of American pop culture	Millenial

I mean, really, the government would use this test to ferret out dangerous moles if it were competent.

And, c’mon man, we all know there’s only one Mary Jane Watson.

Continue reading “The Spider-Man Age Check” →

All right, all right, all right, now I remember where I got the sense that 21st century comedies were all crass crap: not long after I joined a local video store, I rented a couple of recent comedies, including Ted (which, in reviewing my comments on it, I was already knocking 21st century comedies) and Hot Tub Time Machine which I did not dislike as much as Ted.

In the first Hot Tub Time Machine film from 2010, John Cusack and some of his early middle-aged buddies go back in time to 1986 and hope to take a chance to make some changes for the better–however, Chevy Chase appears and tells them to try not to change anything, as it can have great repercussions in the future–their present. So what happens then is sex and drugs, mostly, and the fellows return to 2010, where some changes have occurred–one of them stayed in the past and became a billionaire based on his knowledge of the future.

This sequel takes place in 2015; One of the now-Cusackless group is shot, and they rush him to the hot tub time machine to find his killer. Instead of going to the past, they end up ten years in the future (which is 2025, or three and a half years from now). Where drugs and sex occur as they try to discover who the killer that travels back in time might be. Shockingly, it turns out that sex and drugs lead to the motive. I don’t want to spoil a movie you’ll never see for you, but I don’t want to spend much more time on the mediocre plot.

It doesn’t hold up, the picture of the future that they have from 2015, although perhaps the wide availability of hallucinogens might be presaged by the marijuana shops on every block these days. But all of the humor within the film is pretty base and obvious, and the whole thing lacks the depth that John Cusack brought just by being.

It was widely panned, and deservedly so. And, as I said when I watched Ted, I am back to actioners. And probably old comedies, although I might take a flier on National Lampoon films from the 21st century since the nearly direct-to-video films watched recently pleasantly surprised me.

After watching the National Lampoon double feature (Adam and Eve and Dirty Movie) last week, I thought about watching this movie with my boys. It’s rated PG-13 instead of R, and I didn’t think it had any boobs in it (it doesn’t), so I queued it up.

It’s a send-up of buddy cop action movies, particularly the Lethal Weapon series although it has bits making mock of other contemporaneous films films as well. Emilio Estevez plays the rogue, gun-happy cop; Samuel L. Jackson, playing against type, is the straight-arrow partner Lugar who is getting too old for this stuff. Estevez’s Colt is mourning the disappearance of his K9 partner Claire when he gets assigned to a case where Lugar’s partner is murdered while trying to get microfilm to Lugar. The microfilm contains the recipe for turning cocaine into Wilderness Girls cookies for transit and distribution.

So that’s the story. The film includes appearances by Jon Lovitz as the stool pigeon; William Shatner as General Mortars, the bad guy; Tim Curry as his henchman; and Denis Leary, Phil Hartman, Corey Feldman, Frank McRae, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Lance Kinsey in small roles. Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox from CHiPs make cameos, as does Paul Gleason as an FBI agent. Charlie Sheen makes an appearance as a valet, and Jon Lovitz’s character has a meta gag where he says something like “Isn’t it funny that your brother is in Hot Shots! and you’re doing this?”

So a lot of the humor comes from then-contemporaneous (the then- is extraneous with contemporaneous, ainna?) understanding of movies and commercials, but some of the humor is not–enough that my oldest son liked it more than, say, Airplane! or the aforementioned Hot Shots!.

And, as for the judgment of the youngest: Well, when Colt and Kathy Ireland’s Destiny Demeanor (Allyce Beasley plays the same character, the head of the Wilderness Girls organization, before she lets her hair down) do the sharing of scars before lovemaking scene (riffing off a similar scene from Lethal Weapon 3), he declared he didn’t like ugly people because he is still scandalized by kissing in a movie.

What? Kathy Ireland ugly? Let’s review, shall we?

Continue reading “Film Watching: National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I (1993)” →

So while sitting in the vet’s parking lot yesterday, I had a chance to browse through the Springfield-Greene County Library’s current quarterly newsletter which generally includes a schedule of activities at the various branches. This quarter is pretty thin because semi-governmental and medical and psuedo-medical facilities are the last to give up on the late unpleasantness. Which explains why I was sitting in the parking lot of the vet’s office, killing time.

I guffawed (I am old enough, gentle reader, to be described as gruff instead of just an ass, and I can now guffaw) when I saw the virtual shared film discussions for this quarter.

July’s film is Hell Comes to Frogtown.

Pseudo Rowdy Roddy Piperaste will argue that They Live! is Piper’s masterpiece mainly because that’s the only film they’ve seen him in, but those of us raised on USA Network’s Up All Night in the 1980s know that Hell Comes to Frogtown is truly his pièce de résistance.

In it, Piper plays Sam Hell, who is a wanderer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland whom, the military medical corps discovers is virile–the apocalypse has left much of humanity incapable of bearing children, so the race is on to repopulate and have another go at the war. He gets drafted to impregnate some fertile females, but they’re kidnapped by a mutant warlord in Frogtown, so Sam Hell and two Army women have to go to rescue them.

I watched it once or twice on Up All Night and then I recorded it–so I watched it over and over during my college years. I eventually got it on videocassette, so I got to see that woman who played the psycho in the three part Hunter television series’s boobs–that scene with Rowdy Roddy Piper was cut from the USA Network version.

“Are you going?” my beautiful wife, also in the car in the veterinarian’s parking lot, asked.

Oh, but no.

I mean, what is there to talk about? That it’s a sterling example of the post-apocalyptic genre that we got fed a steady diet of in the 1980s (but not recently, though, even though a major national rival is currently threatening nuclear war with the United States if we don’t let it do whatever it wants). That the videocassette market and the new cable markets made for quite a collection of B, C, and D movies. Kind of like the streaming providers now are churning out, except they’re doing “series” instead which is more of a commitment of time.

Hey, I’ve just gotten used to having time to watch movies in my normal week, so I’m not about to start extending that to entire six- to thirty-hour blocks of time to watch series. Also, I’m skeptical of modern movies and television, and I have many, many fine films to go through in my newly rapidly growing again physical media library.

But Hell Comes To Frogtown? Perhaps I’ll revisit it sometime soon. And the virtual cineaste’s discussion is a month away. If I have nothing else going on that afternoon, maybe I will join the Zoom call.

Gentle reader, my wife and children are finding excuses to go to Silver Dollar City once or twice a week to get the most out of season passes, and as I am not an amusement park kind of guy–once a year is enough for me to walk around and maybe get onto the shoot-at-stuff ride (the Flooded Mine at Silver Dollar City), that means I get a chance to watch a couple of movies each week. Which is good, as I have a cabinet full of videocassettes, DVDs, and a Blu-Rays that I’ve been meaning to get to, and I’ve also started grabbing them with more frequency at garage sales and whatnot as I see their availability in such places coming to an end in a decade or so. Wow, that was quite a sentence.

Regardless, I bought and watched two National Lampoon-branded movies from the early part of the century this past week. I picked them up at a thrift store for a couple bucks each (the same trip where I bought My Cousin Vinny).

National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie (2011)

When I got back from the thrift store, I made sure to show my purchases to my beautiful wife just in case my youngest (he of the I thought I’d find you in the Adult section infamy) saw some of the titles and told his mother I bought a Dirty Movie.

So. The movie is not a movie about a porn film a la Zack and Miri Make A Porno. Instead, it’s a meta film about making a film comprising nothing but dirty jokes being acted out. The frame story is a polyester producer who wants to make this film working with the studio, the director, writers, and actors to make the film interspersed with dirty and offensive jokes acted out. You have a bunch of clips with doctor, give me the good news/bad news jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes (a favorite of my father’s) where a schoolboy responds to a normal question with an off-color remark or pun, and that sort of thing. The comedy is full of ethnic humor and jokes at the expense of homosexuals, too, including some in the acted-out-joke portions and in the meta portion, where the writers insinuate that the director is gay. AND an extended bit where the producer wants to insert the baddest word but the head of the studio won’t allow it–and every time the writers, producer, and head of the studio say the baddest word, they bleep it out even though they’re using all manner of other ethnic slurs throughout the movie and in this bit in comparison (“So a bleeped baddest word can call a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out, but a lesser ethnic slang, but not bleeped out cannot call a bleeped baddest word a bleeped baddest word?”) So it’s poking fun at the then-orthodoxy which has only gotten worse.

So it was amusing for people of a certain age who were not raised snowflakes, but it’s also not for young people, so if I ever make a locked cabinet for films to keep them out of the hands of my boys, this one will go in it. Although they’re teens now, so I only would need a locked cabinet for a little while yet, so I will probably not and just rely on their predilections for just staring at their other electronic devices and finding setting up the entertainment center to watch a movie on physical media too much of a chore to bother with.

National Lampoon’s Adam and Eve (2005)

With the title Adam and Eve, one might expect some sort of Biblical story, and that’s not what this is at all. It has a standard setting for a National Lampoon film, a college, with main characters in a sorority and a fraternity (it says), and there’s a lot of drinking, sex, and drug use.

But at its core, this movie has a very, erm, conservative message. Adam introduces himself to the girl Eve, and they start dating, but she’s a virgin, and she’s not sure when she might want to go all the way. So most of the story deals with his frustration and her uncertainty, with pressure on Eve not only from Adam but also her sorority sisters. The gags are typical college movie fare, but the story isn’t about the gags. It’s about the tension and resolution in Adam and Eve’s relationship. Can they stay together without sex? They both declare their love for one another to each other and to others. An obvious plot twist and a satisfying conclusion.

So I was rather pleased with the film. But another one not for the boys.

In the film, Eve is played by Emmanuelle Chriqui, whom I recognized from You Don’t Mess with the Zohan but who also apparently has had a good career in television as well.

Continue reading “National Lampoon Movie Double Feature” →

So we, like many people in the nation, are getting saturation-bombed on the radio by the One Dime Down woman. I first heard this series of commercials a couple years ago when I was traveling back and forth to the Kansas City area which was already infested with these commercials. They feature a woman with an exaggerated New York accent in high dudgeon that car dealers want a down payment, and that the selected car dealer only requires “one doime down.”

Here’s an example of the genre:

Well, the blissful silence ended when one of the local Springfield dealerships bought the advertising package and began running the ads in heavy rotation on the local radio stations during the day. As it stands, at :20 and :50 minutes after the hour, as you’re trying to find music but failing because the radio stations all take their ad breaks at the same time, you’re more likely to find a commercial in this vein running on one or more stations, consecutively if not concurrently.

The ads made me think of the film My Cousin Vinny because the titular Vinny and his girlfriend Lisa, played by Marisa Tomei, both have exaggerated New York accents in it. And Tomei is not too far off the squeal of the auto pitchwoman.

I saw this film in the theater when I was in college and once or twice since then, but I was saddened to see that I did not have it in the library. Since my shaming by not having The Blues Brothers among my collected VHS and DVDs, I have been looking to expand the library where I can, and I came across the DVD of this movie at a thrift store recently.

So I watched it with my boys.

If you’re not familiar with the story: Two New York boys on their way to UCLA stop at a quick sack to stock up on food for their trip. One of them, the Karate Kid (Ralph Macchio, not actually playing the Karate Kid in this film), accidentally shoplifts some tuna. After they leave, a couple of other guys in a similar car come in and rob and murder the clerk, and the kids from New York are picked up for murder by Sheriff Jack Dalton (Bruce McGill, not actually playing Jack Dalton in this film), and when the Karate Kid admits to the shoplifting, they think he’s admitting to the murder. So they get locked up and call Vinny, the lawyer in the Karate Kid’s family who just passed the bar and has never tried a case. So it’s a fish-out-of-water comedy as the New York lawyer learns on-the-fly (it’s a flying-fish-out-of-water story, apparently, in my mixed metaphor) court procedure aided by his girlfriend.

Amusing and funny in spots even today. My boys liked it, my older one getting more of the humor than the younger. And then we posed the question: c’mon, man, is Marisa Tomei ugly?

Continue reading “Weekend Movie Watching: My Cousin Vinny“ →

So we had some time on Sunday evening, my youngest and I, to watch a film. As my youngest is very patient and will watch old movies with me, I picked Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii. You know, my sainted mother was a big Elvis fan–she was a woman of a certain age, after all, and so many of the Baby Boomer women were Elvis fans–but I had not actually seen an Elvis picture before. So I got it in my head to watch this film, and I set it upon my entertainment centers for just such an occasion.

So: It’s Elvis being Elvis, in Hawaii. It was one of the first films after he returned from his army service (c’mon, man, you know he was drafted and served in Europe for a couple years in the fifties, ainna? How old are you, son?). So he plays a GI returning to Hawaii, where he wants to take up again his life of surfing and goofing off with his friends who are mostly natives. His parents are transplants, his father an executive at the pineapple canning plant and his mother (played by a 36-year-old Angela Lansbury–at 36, she was cast as a matron, a look that she would carry for, what, sixty years now? Hollywood certainly had a bright line for when actresses were old in those days). They (his parents, not the people in Hollywood) want Elvis to come work at the plant, but he wants to find his own way. He gets a job with the tourist agency where his native girlfriend works (Joan Blackman with a makeup tan/native coloring). His first assignment is to show an attractive teacher and her teenaged companions around. Which he does, with some hijinks including a surly and worldly teen who is unimpressed with Hawaii but wants to nail Elvis and who causes trouble–including inciting a bar fight that lands Elvis in jail and fired from his tour guide job.

Ah, you know the plot does not get much beyond its treatment, stock characters, and a handful of scenes with dialog between the musical numbers. But, c’mon, man, if you’re watching an Elvis movie, you’re watching it for the musical numbers (or you’re interested in them as a cultural artifact). Apparently, this was Elvis’s biggest film, and its soundtrack includes “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You. One who was not there must wonder if this film was taking advantage of the tiki bar fad or if it triggered it–given this film is from 1960, probably riding on the interest as I think it preceded this film (this article asserts such a place existed before the first recognized tiki bar in the 1930s).

At any rate, it’s a bit of light fun, a summer movie before they had to feature explosions or super heroes. But my son had a couple things to say.

First, he said he’d seen the movie before. Well, part of it. Apparently his teacher likes Elvis movies. And she showed them the first thirty minutes of this film during their lunch period. Last week. Friday. So it was very fresh in his mind, and quite the coincidence that he watched the whole film three days later.

The other thing he said was that the women in the movie were ugly.

Son, I tried to explain to him, perhaps you’re just not used to the fashions of the early 1960s. I mean, it was before my time, but I grew up watching movies from the era, so I’m at least acclimated a bit to it (although since my parents, aunts, and uncles dressed and wore their hair like that, I still kind of thought it was old when I saw it as a kid). But, gentle reader, I would leave it to you to determine if the women of Blue Hawaii were ugly or if my son has a lot to learn.

Continue reading “Weekend Movie Viewing: Blue Hawaii“ →

Friar, in his quest to entice us to watch foreign films that do not star Jackie Chan, wrote up a more meaningful and insightful review of Naam Shabana starring Taapse Pannu than any movie report you find on this humble blog.

But he forgot to include photos. But don’t worry, gentle reader. I got you.

Continue reading “Did Someone Say “Taapsee Pannu”?” →

With a name like this, you might expect a direct-to-video or cable schlockfest designed to cash in on one or more contemporary fads. Oh, but no. This is a big budget Chinese release from 2017 that stars Jackie Chan and is Chan’s highest grossing film in China according to Wikipedia.

The plot revolves around a lost treasure that some ancient treasure traveling from India to China that was lost. The movie starts with a very video-game looking historical battle sequence leading up to this event with two of the stars (including Chan) green screened onto some elephants and flying arrows. In the present day, a Chinese archeology professor played by Chan is approached by an Indian archeology professor who might have a clue to where this lost treasure is. Using Chinese technology, they follow the lead to a frozen lake where they’re ambushed by some Indian heavies who also want the treasure. One of the archeologist’s team, the son of a friend who has made clear he’s a treasure hunter, escapes with a piece of treasure; although the bad guys bury the good guys alive in an ice cave, the good guys escape, and although they recover the treasure “for the world” (it belongs in a museum!), they soon have to travel to Dubai to participate in an auction to recover the bit of treasure and participate in a car chase, including a bit where Chan is driving a car with an unrestrained lion in it as depicted on the cover. Then they have to go to India because this bit of treasure is a key to an ancient treasure.

The film was supposed to be a joint Indian-Chinese production, but the Indian component dropped out. And with any bit of Chinese culture or history starting in the middle of the twentieth century, one must view it with a gimlet eye and recognize that it’s Chinese propaganda (see also Hero). This one fosters a message of India and China as friends, which perhaps might have worked if their armies weren’t continuing to skirmish in disputed border regions. I might be unexperienced in international affairs, but friends typically have worked out their border disputes by now (c’mon, man, England and France aren’t friends–France has no friends). Regardless of how it might have worked on international audiences, it does portray the Chinese protagonists as altruistic and friendly and cooperative with outsiders. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

Yeah, the key having to be mounted on a scepter and have light shine on it is directly copied from Raiders of the Lost Ark–and the movie does mention Indiana Jones by name (“I love Indiana Jones!” says Chan at one point, and when the ladies are confronted by snakes in the marketplace, one says “I hate snakes!”).

The movie started playing with subtitles on, and as I read them, eventually I heard English, but I was too lazy to turn them off. Which is just as well–it turns out that when the Chinese characters are speaking together, they’re talking Mandarin, so the subtitles are required, but when the Indian characters talk to each other or with the Chinese characters, they all speak English. Which makes me wonder what was not translated or translated differently from the Mandarin for the English subtitles.

The film also conflates Buddhism and Hinduism a bit, as they talk about yoga, which is a Hindu tradition and the travel of Buddhism from India to China–and the ending has a large Buddha statue at a temple. Perhaps they’re not as separate as we think of them.

Jackie Chan is getting older, so the stunts and craziness from his older movies (and, presumably, the injuries) are muted. And its intentions are suspect. But it’s a fun little caper movie and not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Also, it features Disha Patani as the fake Indian archeologist/actual Indian princess, and she has Dish right in her name.
Continue reading “Weekend Movie Watching: Kung Fu Yoga“ →

As you know, gentle reader, I have spent some time this spring reading movie and television tie-in paperbacks (and a hardback). Which has led me to watch a couple of movies last week.

I watched Alien because I read the book, and I watched Young Guns because Heroes and Outlaws of the Old West featured a lot of participants in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, which Young Guns dramatizes.

So, what did I think?

I had not seen Alien before. As I noted in the book report, I had read that some scenes in the book were missing. Which was true. The ship seemed bigger in the film than in the book, which made for creepy empty rooms for filming, but I have to wonder about how much metal and stuff would really go into the Nostromo, a tug pulling a large industrial complex. Or does the movie take place on the whole refinery? Perhaps I am asking too many questions. But these slasher movies in space are not my bag, so although I will keep my eye out for Aliens since I somehow missed picking it up when I bought the other three of the first four entries in this series, it might well take me years to get to them.

I had seen Young Guns before, but much closer to its release than today (thirty-three years later, old man). It’s rated R, but it’s an eighties R for violence and swearing, but the violence is not especially gory. Although it’s probably not indicative of how one would fare against gunshot wounds, as some people get shot a bunch and die cinematically whilst others, like Billy the Kid, get shot three times and ride away without any distress. I do like the way that Emilio Estevez (Emilio! Emilio!) played Billy the Kid as a manipulative psychopath, just enough so that you think maybe he’s not psycho, but, yeah, he’s probably psycho. The film is not historically accurate, but it’s probably better than any Western made in the 21st century.