Category: Movies

Powerline’s Week in Pictures informs us:

Not here at MfBJN, where we have enumerated the top five Christmas movies since 2003 as:

1. Die Hard
2. Lethal Weapon
3. Die Hard 2
4. Gremlins
5. Invasion USA

Even though we’ve not seen Night of the Comet yet, it is unlikely to break into this pantheon of 80s deliciousness.

After watching Shanghai Noon a couple of weeks ago, I had to go back and watch this movie again to see how many times Lucy Liu said, “Hubba hubba.” Ah, gentle reader, I was mistaken: She says, “Hubba hubba hubba” only once, so it was not her preferred phrase, and she was actually only echoing another character who said it more frequently.

So this is a Parker film based on a book by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake), but he did not want any films to use the name Parker when he was alive, so the main character in this film is Porter, and he’s a thief who steals from other thieves. The film starts after Porter and an associate, Val (he of the “hubba hubba hubba”), rob a Chinese triad of a payout that Val said was going to be $300,000, but it turns out that Val was lying, and Val wanted the entire $140,000 to buy himself back into a criminal syndicate–and he convinced Porter’s wife to shoot Porter, whom she thought was having an affair with a prostitute. So the film begins with a back-alley doctor removing the bullets from Porter and his vowing to get his share of the money back.

So Porter returns to the city, commits some petty crimes, and begins climbing the ladder to recover his money. Val has turned it over to “the syndicate,” so Porter has to deal with them as he ascends to the levels where someone can give him his cut of the cash. Meanwhile, a couple of corrupt policemen stand him up and threaten him with arrest or worse if he doesn’t turn the money over to them when he recovers it. And the syndicate, although it has told him that he’s crazy to try to recoup the $130,000 that they think Porter wants–and he corrects them that he only wants his share. The aforementioned Lucy Liu plays a sadomasochistic prostitute whose best customer, maybe, is Val and who is connected to the gang that Val and Porter ripped off–whom Val points at Porter so they can kill him for him.

At any rate, the whole Parker thing was he had a code that he only stole from bad people, or at least it worked out that way (from what I remember of the books). Aside from a couple of petty crimes at the film’s beginning, that holds true. And he has a soft spot for the prostitute whose picture with Porter spurred the whole movie (taken before he was married, we are told eventually), so that kind of humanizes him. He’s not the worst villain of the lot, for sure.

So I have enjoyed the movie at least thrice now (in the theaters, when I got the DVD, and just now, but I might have seen it another time or two in the last 25 years). And since we looked at Deborah Kara Unger (who played Porter’s wife briefly) when we talked about Highlander: The Final Dimension and we looked about Lucy Liu when we recently reviewed Shanghai Noon, I guess we should take a look at Maria Bello who plays the prostitute upon whom Porter is sweet.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Payback (1999)” →

Elon Musk calls Ben Stiller the R-word after actor says ‘Tropic Thunder’ couldn’t be made in 2024

So we’re up to at least two words you can only refer to by their first letters. Given the distribution of the consonants that start words and probably the fact that slurs with track statistically with consonants that begin words you can say or write (for now), someday we will run up against a dilemma: Do we go with the indefinite article (an N-word) or do we start adding numbers to them (the N1-Word or the N-Word1)? I cannot wait to see what the future brings.

The word is “retard.” Which I am pretty sure in its day was a polite way of describing an individual with mental disabilities. And it’s an actual line in Tropic Thunder, by the way.

Could it be made in 2024? Probably not in Hollywood. But some small indepenedent film maker probably. Without a distributor. So it would go directly into the miasma of streaming. Never to be seen. Much like most of the stuff coming out of actual Hollywood, actually.

And to be clear: Stiller is saying that America has killed edgier comedy, so I just presume Musk is just trolling. Keeping the engagement numbers up or something.

Not to get all recycler tour on you, but apparently on September 24, 2009, I said on Facebook, “Brian J. Noggle fears that, if they discover that he laughs at Larry the Cable Guy movies, Marquette will take away his philosophy degree.” Which is funny in itself: Looking at the list of his credits on IMDB, I’m trying to think what Larry the Cable Guy film I saw fifteen years ago. Witless Protection? Delta Farce? Or this very film? So I laughed that long time ago, but I have forgotten what I was laughing at. It must have been on the DVR in that period right after I moved, or I have lost it in the media library. Or I was referring to a stand-up special instead of a movie.

Alright, alright, alright, what do we have here? Larry plays a loose cannon health inspector who knows all the restaurant owners in his city or territory, but his boss, played by Biff from the Back to the Future movies, wants him out. So he, the boss, pairs Larry with a straight-arrow young woman played by Iris Bahr. Together, they investigate a series of incidents at better restaurants where diners are getting sick–and Larry himself falls prey to an intestinal disorder while on a date with a pretty waitress played by Megyn Price. Which seems to point to someone eliminating rivals from the city’s Top Chef competition.

I don’t know if I laughed out loud at anything here. I mean, it’s got the standard potty humor and running gags, like Larry using inappropriate idioms with a colleague in a wheelchair or referring to his partner, who wears her hair in a tight bun and wears pants suits, as a boy. The film is amusing in spots, especially if you’re a fan of the Blue Collar Comedy tours. Which I’ve seen but before I was wasting your time with twee comments on every thing I watch. It’s no comedy classic, though, so not to be remembered fondly or culturally. If I remember it all in fifteen years.

And, sadly, it hasn’t led to any Megyn Price versus Iris Bahr or Jane versus Butlin arguments on the Internet even though it was released at the height of the blogging world.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006)” →

I mentioned when I watched The Other Guys that I might have conflated the two films. And I had in my head that I wanted to watch this film. So I picked it up recently (undocumented on this blog, so probably the beginning of August when I was Christmas shopping). And a little ways into it, I thought I’ve seen this film before. As it’s not documented on this blog and not in the video library, I presume I rented it from video store six or seven years ago. And I’d forgotten it.

The film is nominally set in 1977, but it did not trigger any anemoia in me as the depth of the representation was pretty superficial. Ryan Gosling plays an alcoholic PI of dubious morals and utility who has been hired to track down a girl named Amelia. Russel Crowe plays a thug for hire whom Amelia hires to get the PI off of her back–which he gets via thuggery. But other thugs waylay Crowe’s Healy, so he thinks Amelia might be in real danger. So they team up, and some set pieces, and….

Well, you know, the whole thing is ultimately forgettable. The film is set in the late 1970s, but really doesn’t capture the time. It does allow them to put o on the end of porno and feature a plot that revolves around Detroit automakers working with corrupt government officials from the Department of Justice (?) to prevent catalytic converters from being mandated, and the daughter of a government official (Amelia!) makes a combination porno film that exposes the collusion and corruption. But people related to the film start dying, and….

Well, don’t think too much about it. Enjoy Gosling and Crowe having a good time.

And, if you’re like me, forget the whole thing and enjoy it again later.

Since Friar was hooked on Sarah Holcomb’s accent in Caddyshack, I decided to research her appearance in another of her four movies (this being her first in 1978, and Caddyshack her last in 1980, and Internet searches for “Where are they today?” lead to different flavors of LLM-generated “we don’t know; she starred in four films and disappeared with rumors that it was drugs and schizophrenia based on what one guy affiliated with Caddyshack said nearly thirty years later.” So, to answer the important question of whether she was from old Eire: No. She apparently was from Connecticut, and she did not have an accent in this movie.

At any rate, the film describes the happenings at a party fraternity at a fictional college. Two freshmen are looking to join a fraternity, so they visit the hoity-toity fraternity first and are not pledged, and then they go to the Delta house where they have an “in” as Dorfman’s brother was a member of the frat, so he is a legacy. But it’s the lowest frat, and Dean Wormer has them on probation and then “double secret probation” and looks for an excuse to toss them out. Hijinks ensue, including a toga party, a road trip, and culminates in an attack on the powers-that-be during a parade that is less funny now in an era of instability than it would have been in 1978 (but set in an even more stable 1962).

You still hear quotes from it and allusions to it (double secret probation, “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”) and see memes about it (Kevin Bacon’s character saying “All is well!”) So it must have hit a certain segment of, well, influencers in just the right way to make it stick culturally. Heaven knows the humor in it was mostly miss for me (as was The Blues Brothers). I guess I was too young to see them at a formative time in my life, or perhaps too old.

And we discussed the Maggie O’Hooligan versus Lacey Underall dilemma in Caddyshack; given that Karen Allen played Boon’s girl in the film and is the only developed female character, if we want an Internet argument, I guess we have to gin up an argument about Babs versus Mandy, the two sorority girls vying for the affection of the leader of the soc fraternity.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Animal House (1978)” →

well, as I bought this film on Friday, of course I watched it Friday night. I mean, it’s Zardoz. You might never have heard of the film, but if you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ve seen Sean Connery in his costume.

And if you have not, you’ve seen it now.

The film is dated 1974, and it was filmed in 1973, but this is a very British and very 1960s movie.

The plot involves a bifurcated or trifurcated story set in 2293, 320 years in the future. A flying stone head, the god Zardoz, distributes guns (but no ammunition seemingly aside from what might be in the guns) to Connery-clad Brutals. The orange-clad ones are Exterminators, tasked by Zardoz to hunt down other Brutals, the normal ones, and exterminate them to keep them from overpopulating or just because this is a 60s British movie. However, I guess the Exterminators are also making the other non-Exterminator Brutals raise grain for Zardoz. Which, it turns out, is a front for the Eternals, a group of people living in luxury, albeit a early to mid-20th century luxury. The Eternals are protected in a society run by a crystal-based AI called the tabernacle, written/built mostly by their parents who locked them into one or more protective societies called Vortexes, and they have evolved beyond sleep, instead doing hippie-dippy group meditation or something. They’ve got their problems, too–some of them have become Apathetic and don’t bother to move, and others who commit thought crimes are artificially aged, so a group of old people live in permanent old age in an old folks’ home. But Zed, Connery’s character, sneaks aboard Zardoz and lands in a Vortex. He is taken into custody, studied, and displayed as a curiosity even as one Eternal, played by Charlotte Rampling, wants to destroy him before he can destroy the Eternals.

As I mentioned, this is a very 60s British movie with more of an idea and cinematic execution of an idea than a gripping or even plausible plot. It starts with the floating head of the Eternal flying the, well, flying head of Zardoz explaining some of what he was doing followed by the head barfing guns and the Exterminators taking them and Sean Connery shooting the camera/audience before the titles. Some of the scenes and set pieces are very cinematic and perhaps influenced a bit by expressionism of some sort, and the sets have a spareness you might find in Blake’s 7 or The Prisoner. And the ending where Zed takes a woman, impregnates her, and family snapshots as they grow older with their single son and then die leaving little trace (even though Zed had received all knowledge of the Tabernacle through “touch teaching” which was a very groovy sex montage) kind of leaves one wondering, and not in a good way.

I mean, would man evolve that much and that way in only 300 years? The Brutals getting shot looked like they were dressed for the mid-20th century. And why were they shooting brutals who were producing their food? Was the whole thing a long plan designed to introduce Zed to destroy the Eternals, some of whom inherited the life and were bored with it? One could say It’s a timely metaphor for Western Civilization in the 21st century if one wanted to, and one could maybe write an academic paper on it that few people would read. Fewer people than would watch Zardoz in the 21st century, perhaps.

Yeah, so a cinematic idea more than a movie. And more an event to witness because that photo of Connery is floating around.

Photos of Charlotte Rampling? Continue reading “Movie Report: Zardoz (1974)” →

In lieu of picking up one of the many score of films I’ve accumulated and that rest inside my unwatched cabinet or atop the video game cabinet, I recently sat down and rewatched this DVD which I’d seen before. Perhaps it was because Facebook had been showing me posts about the film as it was released in July, so every page that promotes itself on Facebook dealing with movies had to remind its followers of it and Facebook taints my feed with nonsense. Or is it? Clearly, it influenced my viewing habits here, although I did not choose to follow any Facebook pages, and I rewatched a DVD I already owned. So commercially speaking, it was a worthless for Facebook. Unless it has some other sort of agenda….

At any rate, where was I? Oh, yes, Caddyshack. I was too young to see it in the theaters, and by the time we had cable, the film had rotated off of it. So I did not see it for the first time until the film was over a decade old or more. I’ve watched it within the last decade since I have the DVD of it, but I don’t appear to have shared my thoughts on it, so here I will.

It’s a common theme: The stuffy well-to-do versus the working class. In this case, Danny is the oldest of a large family, and he works at the country club as a caddy (obv). A new member, played by Rodney Dangersfield, represents the noveau riche, in this case a local condo developer who is crude and upsets the swells lead by Ted Knight. Danny needs a college scholarship that Knight’s Judge Smails controls, so he has to suck up to the judge whose niece, played by Cindy Morgan, has come to stay with him, and she’s a looker and very, erm, worldly and tempting. Chevy Chase plays a Zennish golfer, and Bill Murray plays Carl, the groundskeeper tasked with eliminating the gophers. I mean, the film is so iconic that I don’t have to explain it to you, gentle reader. After all, you’re old enough to be reading a blog, so you’re of a certain age. One who can quote the movie, and you’ve got that going for you, which is nice.

One thing that this film does not do, and some others have, is change whom you’re rooting for as you get older. The Smailsians are so over-the-top snobs that you don’t end up rooting for them against the kids like in some movies. It’s a story of the underdogs and Rodney Dangerfield against the bluebloods, and that’s the story of America. Well, competent underdogs against the bluebloods. Which is not necessarily the story of current America.

But enough of that. The real question would be: Maggie O’Hooligan or Lacey Underall? Continue reading “Movie Report: Caddyshack (1980)” →

I got this film last autumn, and I watched it late last week before current events evented and suddenly Stephen Green is writing columns about it. In the interim, a fellow I work with recommended the film as well, but that did not hasten my viewing of it. I have not been watching a lot of television or movies here lately; I don’t know why, but after watching a couple of series nightly for weeks at a time, I guess I didn’t want to commit to it. Also, I guess we’re having dinner a little later these days, which means it’s 8pm cometimes when I finish the evening chores, and I’d rather not commit to a film when I might want to go to bed at 9:30.

But, as I said, I did manage to watch this film last weekend.

It opens on a concert hall where an orchestra is finishing a radio performance featuring a beautiful pianist (although you can’t see her on the radio), and a call comes into the booth to deliver a recording of the performance to Comrade Stalin. But they did not record it. So the radio director, fearing for his life, makes the orchestra perform it again to record it. And it’s pressed onto a record, the pianist slips a note into it because she hates Stalin because he killed her family. When he puts the record on, he reads the note, smiles, and has a stroke, debilitating him.

And that’s where the fun(?) begins. While he’s incapacitated, various members of the party committee vie and jockey for power, including the head of the NKVD and Kruschev (played by Steve Buscemi) and some other members, including one whose wife was purportedly taken away as a traitor but was really held by Beria (the head of the NKVD) to be returned as part of his trying to consolidate power/gain control of the committee. And I guess that’s it: the humor is how they scheme and plot against each other as Stalin is incapacitated, then dies, and through the funeral.

I’ll be honest: The film really didn’t do much for me. Maybe I am more into parody over satire (maybe not) or perhaps I just like more wordplay or slapstick. But it’s not something that I’ll rewatch a bunch. But I guess it is timely as it has possibility to be a cultural touchstone in the current moment.

Like Friday, I watched this film when it was fresh on videocassette and I was visiting Milwaukee and staying with my friend the Elvis impersonator. And I’m not sure that I’ve seen it since, but my boys are big into basketball these days, so I watched it with my youngest so that he could pick up some pointers, more on smack talking than actual basketball fundamentals.

In it, Woody Harrelson, still relatively young, plays Billy Hoyle who comes to LA to make some money hustling basketball. He’s staying in a variety of cheap apartments and motels with his girlfriend, played by Rosie Perez, a step ahead of a couple of toughs who are following him around the country, apparently, seeking repayment of a relatively small loan that the girlfriend took out and could not repay, and they asked Hoyle to throw a college basketball game, but he did not. Hoyle runs into and teams up with a local hooper, played by Wesley Snipes, and they hustle some, but Snipes’ character hustles Hoyle out of his share of their winnings, so their respective women decide that they should enter a tournament with a $5000 prize.

Basically, it’s a series of basketball games and some trash talk. It’s a fine film, amusing and not without depth in the characters and story. It has a bit of a downbeat end as Rosie Perez’s character realizes her dream of appearing on Jeopardy! and does very well, but she leaves Hoyle who continues to gamble and does not seem ready to give up his hustling ways–even though the end makes clear to us that he has grown up enough to do so.

So of all the films I report on, this one fits into the tier of those that I might watch again, and probably not after thirty years have passed. After all, it has Rosie Perez.

Continue reading “Movie Report: White Men Can’t Jump (1992)” →

I ordered this film and Sergeant York in 2020, and I would have watched the film in 2020 except the copy that I bought back then was a European DVD. Although I did not soon find a used copy of To Hell and Back at a garage sale, I did find a copy at Vintage Stock when I had a gift card to burn. So when Independence Day came around and I wanted something unapologetically patriotic to watch, I finally popped this DVD in.

Like Sergeant York, the film starts with the pre-war bio. Murphy is a poor boy from a rural area who leaves school to support his family. When his mother dies, his siblings go to the church orphanage, and Murphy, although underage, eventually signs up with the army and is sent overseas. Although he is small and has had a rough passage, the men in his company take him under their wing, and they fight in North Africa, invade Sicily, invade the Italian mainland, and eventually invade France as part of the Third Division under Patton.

Murphy performs a number of acts of heroism, and a number of his friends die during their campaigns. In the final push to Germany, the film depicts Murphy alone lying ahead of a German advance to direct artillery fire until they’re almost on his position, and he then jumps onto a burning tank and fires on the advancing troops, hopping down after a couple of minutes before the tank explodes cinematically. I’d read that the film tones down what he did and squashes incidents–the particular climax here was taken from two separate incidents lasting an hour each, both of which resulted in medals for Murphy.

According to Wikipedia, Murphy got his start in the movies when James Cagney saw a magazine article about the most decorated soldier in American history and brought Murphy to Hollywood. Murphy played in a number of Westerns and whatnot, and when Hollywood optioned his autobiography, he was eventually convinced to play himself. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to go through it all again, albeit Hollywoodized.

Back when we watched Sergeant York, I asked who was cooler: Audie Murphy or Alvin York. I chose York then because he went back home to the farm after his wartime exploits, but in my research (reading Wikipedia) related to this post, it looks as though Murphy had a more exciting military career in addition to Hollywood. He died at age 41, though, not long before I was born. Hard to imagine such men lived almost during my lifetime.

Oh, and one other note: I invited my oldest to watch it, and he asked if it was about the guy who jumped on the tank. I said no because I hadn’t seen the film yet (Murphy does jump on a tank). But I thought my son was mistaking Murphy for Missouri’s own John Lewis Barkley, who also jumped into a disabled tank and won the Congressional Medal of Honor for it. But my son probably meant Murphy after all.

I guess this is the third in this line ([Genre] Movie) that I’ve seen; I saw Date Movie last December and Not Another Teen Movie in the last couple of years (but before movie reports on the blog were a thing). I picked this DVD up this spring and clearly could not wait to get into it. Or, actually, wanted something very, very light to watch one evening.

So: Like the others of its ilk, it piles together elements from other films to parody them. In this film, four orphans (whether or not their parents are still alive) win golden tickets to go to a candy maker’s palace. The candy maker proves to be very creepy, so one of them (and then another, and then all of them eventually) try to hide in a wardrobe which leads them to the land of Gnarnia. The first, a girl, meets a satyr who takes him to his crib (cue the MTV or whatever style intro to where he lives), but he turns her out as the ruler of the land (the White Bitch, played by Jennifer Coolidge) knows that she will be deposed by four humans, so humans are to be turned over to her at once. The second, played by Kal Penn, is found by the White Bitch, whom he calls Stifler’s Mom (from the American Pie movies, get it?), and she offers him sexual favors or the promise therein to betray his friends. But they team up along with Captain Jack Swallow, the Brotherhood of Mutants (from the X-Men movies), and a bunch of other misfits to aid Aslo, a randy lion-man, to free Gnarnia.

So it throws a lot of things in there, mostly to say, did you see what we did here? and so you can feel a little smart when you recognize what they’ve jammed in there, but that’s about the depth of the humor. It’s not particularly raunchy, although there is a little sexual innuendo (the film is PG-13, not R).

Still, I don’t know. I mean, when I was writing parody in high school, I had this series of short stories where a character encountered all sorts of characters from other source material, and I thought it was a hoot. But my sense of humor has changed, I suppose, to something more sophisticated than see what I crammed in here?. Well, maybe it’s not necessarily more sophisticated, but different all the same.

Which is not to say that I won’t buy others in this line when I can get them for a buck or fifty cents. But I’m unlikely to watch them repeatedly like Airplane!, Hot Shots!, or National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I. Are those movies that substantially different, or is it that I watched them for the first time at different stages of my life? I dunno.