Category: Movies

This 2004 film comes from a time where Tim Allen was at the height of his celebrity, returning to the genre where he saw his greatest success in films (the Christmas comedy, as The Santa Clause and its sequels were far better received than, say, Joe Somebody). It’s based on a book by John Grisham who was at about the beginning of the ebb of his bestselling dominance I presume–I can’t think of another book of his after Skipping Christmas, but that might be because not long after I stopped looking at the bestseller list to see how Robert B. Parker’s latest work was doing.

At any rate, Allen plays an accountant. His daughter leaves after Thanksgiving to travel to Peru in the Peace Corps, which will leave Allen’s Luther Krank and his wife Nora, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, alone for the holidays. Fearing being alone for the holidays, Luther accounts for the money that they spent on the previous Christmas and convinces Nora that they should not spend any money on Christmas and should take a cruise with the money instead.

So the first part of the story deals with how their co-workers and neighbors deal with them when they’re not decorating and whatnot. Dan Ackroyd plays the local neighborhood leader who tries to pressure them into decorating like all of the neighbors do. The Kranks cancel their annual Christmas Eve party, which upsets their friends who have been coming to the party for years. Co-workers start calling Luther “Scrooge.” Collectors for the police charity, played by Cheech and Jake Busey, don’t like being rebuffed in their collection efforts. But the Kranks soldier on, until their daughter Blair calls on Christmas Eve as they are packing for their trip: She has arrived in Miami with her Peruvian fiance, and she wants to show him how they celebrate Christmas.

So the second part of the film covers the Kranks who try to decorate and get something of a party together for Blair’s homecoming. When Ackroyd’s Frohmeyer sees them, he calls the neighbors to help out. Not to help out Luther, but to do it for Blair. So they try to decorate, find Blair’s favorite foodstuffs, and whatnot. And we get an ambiguous appearance of an umbrella salesman who seems to know everyone but whom nobody knows. Could it be… SANTA?

The film has its heart in the right place, but it falls a little short. I don’t know–somehow the film makes what must have been some long-term relationships with friends and family seem a little shallow. Maybe the film somehow misses a sense of Christmas in it–the film has the decorations and trappings of it, but not much of a sense of Christmas in spite of the change-of-heart gifting that sees Luther give the cruise tickets and package to a neighbors where the wife is suffering from cancer (the book was published in the Before Times, where tickets did not have names on them or something). Maybe that change was very subtle, because although Nora calls Luther selfish right before it, throughout the film, the character does not come across that way. Perhaps it’s shaded differently in the book. Perhaps I’m too fresh from viewing the hijinks in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that some scenes–icing his lawn so carolers cannot stand out there and sing to him–might have been more mean-spirited in the book. Or maybe Tim Allen has played too many nice guy characters in the past so that we put the best possible spin on his behavior. I expect the book differs.

It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy the book sometime to hide in my stacks as an annual Christmas novel. But I won’t be pulling this out of the Nogglestead video library around Christmas too often.

This film is also entitled National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Reunion which clarifies which holiday is involved, as I discovered when I watched it after Thanksgiving and totally ruined it.

Well, not really. This made-for-cable movie features Judge Reinhold as a California anaesthesiologist whose family is consumed by materialism and modern society who wants to have an old fashioned Thanksgiving, but he lacks family outside his immediate family–and has for a while, apparently, as eating out is the family’s general practice. But he receives a letter from a distant, forgotten cousin (played by pre-Walter White Bryan Cranston) inviting them to the old family homestead for Thanksgiving. So we have a fish out of water comedy as the spoiled and upper class family from southern California meet the hippie cousins in Idaho, where the Snider name has a bad reputation ever since the country cousin made an error in a state championship football game decades earlier.

So hijinks ensue, and the town Sniders discover that the country Sniders have invited them because they need some money as country Snider pere has had some bad luck with his businesses around his inventions and his washing machine repair services. So the town Sniders have to determine what to do, but their car disappears and then their daughter disappears–she’s discovered the joys of country boys and their hillbilly deluxe trucks. But all’s well that ends well when the country Sniders and town Sniders team up to save the day and reconcile the Snider family with the townsfolk.

So an amusing bit of clearly television fare. Not destined to be a holiday classic, but then who knows? Although the fragmentation of culture might mean that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is the last Christmas classic ever.

A couple of pieces of the film resounded with me: first, Bryan Cranston does battle with a washing machine at one point, and I know the feeling. November and December weekends here at Nogglestead has seen me inside both my washer and my dryer multiple times trying to keep the commodity-level things operating for another year or so. Or maybe just a couple of weeks. Second, the story line about the football championship took place whilst the local high school football team made it to the state championship ever. No game-losing errors, but they did lose to a Catholic school from the St. Louis area which, as a private school, can recruit football players. So no curses on my boys’ friends.

On the scale of “National Lampoon” branded movies, it’s not amongst the best, but still not a bad hour and a half.

Also, note this trivium: The DVD sold for $.99 at Vintage Stock at some point, but I bought it for a dollar at the antique mall. Which means it appreciated in value, but the person who had the booth at the mall probably paid fifty cents or less for it.

Alright, alright, alright, my film watching has not shifted to Christmas movies exclusively, gentle reader. So I picked up this film one quiet evening at Nogglestead.

You might recall the plot: In the near future, a crime syndicate from a farther future sends people back in time to be killed because the victims could easily be tracked in that future (but apparently time machines cannot). So the hitmen in the movie’s present wait at a certain time for someone in a hood to appear, and they kill that person and dispose of the body, keeping the silver that is secured to the victims’ bodies. When they find gold on the body, that indicates they’ve killed their future selves and “closed the loop.” I am not sure why that would be a thing, but it’s part of the movie’s lore, so….

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, one such killer in the future / past who starts having doubts about his job as his drug and alcohol intake increase. When a co-worker, Seth, lets his future self escape one such loop-closing, Joe tries to shelter him but eventually turns him over as the future Seth/old Seth tries to get to a particular location while suffering debilitating injuries inflicted on current Seth. How Seth would be able to conduct his hits or live to be old Seth who is uninjured at the outset but gets injured as young Seth is tortured…. Well, don’t overthink it, just go with the look and feel of the movie.

So when it’s time for old Joe to go (in the future) he (played by Bruce Willis) resists, leading to the death of his wife. He fights as the future bad men are throwing him into the past, so he’s loose and gets the drop on the younger version of himself. And we get some flashbacks from his point of view, and they’re a little different and are changing. But he learns that a kingpin in the future called Rainmaker is killing all the loopers, and Old Joe tries to kill the Rainmaker as a boy by doing the Herod thing (so is Looper actually a Christmas movie?) He goes child hunting while young Joe goes to a farm with a young boy to await old Joe’s arrival, and….

Well, like I said, just go along for the ride and don’t try to overthink it. Or think about it after all. The whole thing kind of comes off as a script based on the idea for a video game. I mean, shoot, loot the bodies, level up (although I guess they’re not leveling up, really). According to Wikipedia, the “thought-proviking” film appeared on a number of best film lists for 2012. Which is probably more a sad commentary on the quality of film and critic thought in the 21st century than any real philosophical or scientific (why does it sound right that one of those ends in al and the other ic? Now that’s thought-provoking) measure.

Given Bruce Willis’s later diagnosis, I can’t help but wonder if he was already in decline here as his performance is a bit wooden. I would rather re-watch Hudson Hawk, Blind Date, or The Color of Night than this film.

I am not sure that I have seen this film all the way through, but I probably have at some point and might even uncover another copy of it in the library (which happens slightly more for films than for books, fortunately, although the Nogglestead to-read stacks would be less daunting at times if I could like Thanos snap my fingers and half of them disappear–although I’d rather not give my beautiful wife the idea that that is an option). But as it is coming up on Christmas time, I thought I’d watch some Christmas movies, starting with this one.

I watched National Lampoon’s Vacation last year but skipped National Lampoon’s European Vacation because I haven’t seen the DVD or videocassette recently in the wild. It’s all right, though–of all the Vacation movies, I’ve probably seen European Vacation most as it was on Showtime in that brief interval where I was supposed to stay in the trailer, not have friends over, and not go outside while my sainted mother was working. Which meant a lot of Showtime.

At any rate, Clark Griswold invites both his and his wife’s parents along with some family members to stay for Christmas–even though they argue amongst themselves. He’s planning–and put a deposit on–a swimming pool in anticipation of a healthy Christmas bonus. Set pieces include getting the family Christmas tree, struggling with Christmas lights, Cousin Eddie’s arrival, and then the holiday dinner. Side plots include annoying the 80s-archetypical Yuppie neighbors.

You know, I suspect this only became a “Christmas classic” because of the time period it released–the end of Generation X’s youth where large families and family gatherings were more common, and when we became adults and left many of these things behind. Or perhaps I’m projecting a bit, although I am too old-souled to apply classic to a film from the 1980s, especially in the tradition of a Christmas classic.

I did want to note that, unlike more modern films (::cough, cough:: The Heartbreak Kid), this film does not deconstruct marriage or the family for the humor. It takes family and marriage seriously, presents them as a good thing, and the gags take place in that context. The Griswolds find themselves in some crazy situations, sometimes as a result of the father’s actions, but marriage and the family are not presented as an impediment to Griswold’s life (although he does think about the Lady in Red, this time it’s less serious than in Vacation).

The film was amusing, and it’s entirely possible I will watch it again this season with my boys or family. But in the recent search for a specific film I’ve seen before, I pulled out a number of actual Christmas classics to watch, so maybe not. I guess Christmas is only two weeks away, which is probably 10 movies tops.

The film featured Nicolette Scorsese in the aforementioned “Woman in Red” role that Christie Brinkley played in the first film–the woman whom Clark thinks about.

Continue reading “Movie Report: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)” →

I think of this movie as coming after Ben Stiller’s peak period, but to be honest, something happened in 2006 that killed our cinema-going days for a while (before the insipidity of modern movies completely killed it). My oldest was born in 2006, so I missed a lot of movies between then and forever except for those I’m catching up on via home media (whose reach is already waning as streaming takes over). Looking at his IMDB listing, Stiller has remained active, although mostly on sequels to things that came out before 2006. So I guess we don’t have to pen a “Where Are They Now?” entry about him just yet.

At any rate, in this film, Stiller plays Eddie, a sporting goods shop owner in San Francisco who feels pressure to get married because his long-time fiance is getting married and because his best friend (played by Rob Corddry, who also was in How To Be A Latin Lover and the Hot Tub Time Machine movies–so I’ve seen him often enough to learn his name), because his friend (he repeated because that other parenthetical grew long) who extols the virtues of marriage whilst being a henpecked husband, and because he, Eddie, is forty. So when he attempts to help a woman getting mugged on the streets of San Francisco, he meets an attractive woman who seems perfect. After a montage of them snogging in various locations over a couple of months, they marry and go to Cabo for their honeymoon.

During the trip, though, she starts to annoy him, and starts slipping things about her past (cocaine addiction and apparently a lot of varied sexual adventures, along with the fact that the “mugging” was an ex-boyfriend trying to reclaim his wallet which she stole from him). They don’t agree much on what to do, and on the first day, a beach day, she gets sunburned terribly and refuses to leave the room. So Eddie goes out to dinner and meets a woman in Cabo with her family, and then meets her family, and has a montage of pleasant trips with her whilst his new wife is laid up. So much so that she falls for him, too, but when she discovers he has a living wife (not a murdered wife, which is part of a story he told to kids at the wedding in scene 1 who also happen to be in Cabo at the same time), it’s over. Eddie has a montage of him trying to cross the border without papers as his wife burned all his belongings before returning to the U.S. When he arrives in Oxford, Mississippi, he finds that Miranda (played by Michelle Monaghan) has married an ex-boyfriend and is happy. Eddie reflects on his life and decamps from San Francisco, having lost his sporting goods store in the divorce, moving to Cabo and opening a business on the beach. Some time later, Miranda returns to Cabo separated from her husband and looking to rekindle her romance with Eddie, but the very last scene is Eddie telling his new Mexican wife the same lies he told his first wife when he was going to sneak off with Miranda.

So, basically, the whole thing is a deconstruction of marriage. I mean, he rushed into his marriage after a couple of months, only to discover some things about his new wife that he didn’t learn in those months when they were together all the time, apparently snogging but not shagging. And, in the end, he has not learned anything and is in the same place, with the same shortcomings.

This is a remake of an earlier film starring Charles Grodin. I haven’t seen it, but the Wikipedia entry makes it sound like Eddie was a less sympathetic figure. A cad, but in the end he marries the girl (and ends up at the kids’ table, which is where Eddie begins in this film). So there is some recognition of the value of marriage and that Eddie is outside the bounds of the mainstream or the “good.” But Ben Stiller plays, well, Ben Stiller, so the character comes of as sympathetic, it could happen to anybody, even as he plies deception and continues the deception to the end of the film and beyond. So I didn’t like the film and ultimately found it morally repugnant.

I bought this film late last month and popped it in as I’m more in the mood for films than reading these days, perhaps spurred by the realization that even though I know I will not finish reading all my books, I have a shot at watching all my unread videocassettes and DVDs if I put my back into it. So I have been a bit.

In this ultimately forgettable comedy from the 1980s, Chevy Chase is a sportswriter who quits his job in the city and moves with his wife (no children) to a…. Well, a hobby farm sized parcel way out in the country. Hijinks ensue as they deal with movers who get lost and are days late (with only a truckload of furniture, but I guess they are moving from an apartment to a home), the eccentric locals, the wildlife, and so on. Chevy Chase wants to write a book, and he starts on it. When he shares the beginning of it with his wife on their anniversary, their romantic mood is ruined when she says it’s not good. So their marriage founders, especially when she writes a children’s book that she sells and starts working on others. They plan to sell the house, hiring the townsfolk to act Norman Rockwellish for a couple who is interested in the property, but they decide to reconcile and stay. And finis!

You know, the 80s brimmed with “New Yorkers Move To The Suburbs/Rural Areas” comedies. Well, okay, maybe I’m only also thinking of The Money Pit just because I watched it earlier this year. But these fish-out-of-water tales really miss the proper zeitgeist of rural areas (and adding meth to them a la Winter’s Bone and whatnot does not correct this flaw).

I didn’t care for the film, as it was kind of shallow and hollow at the same time. The characters are underdeveloped, even for a comedy–in the best of movies, you get the sense that the characters have some sort of life off screen, but the characters here are just ciphers for cinematic manipulation. And it wasn’t that funny.

Although it did speak to me a bit: 1) When I first met my beautiful wife, I brought a manuscript of The Courtship of Barbara Holt and watched her while she read it at a coffee shop called The Grind in the fashionable Central West End. And 2) Something about the marriage rankled me–both participants showed some selfish tendencies, and the husband’s poisonous envy of the wife’s success was off-putting. I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would be too easy for me to become that person.

So I have seen it, and although I asked my boys, including the Chevy Chase fan, if they wanted to watch it, I ended up telling him (the fan) that he made a good decision as the film was insipid.

You know Chevy Chase made a fair number of films in the 1980s, but he’s mostly remembered for the National Lampoon’s Vacation films. And fittingly so. They were family-oriented films, which made the adults adults and not childish. Well, not completely childish. Which is often lacking from modern comedies.

This film also came out when I was in college (although I guess Don Juan DeMarco was shortly after). I would not have been the target audience back then. No matter how grumpy I was, and I was a curmudgeon before I graduated, this film is about grumpy old men. So although I might have caught glimpses of it on television from time to time in the intervening years, this marks my first viewing of the film now that I’ve grown into closer to being an old man.

In the film, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau play John and Max, neighbors who live alone next door to each other and who spend their days ice fishing and insulting each other. John’s hiding from the IRS which is about to foreclose on his house. When an attractive English professor played by Ann-Margaret moves in across the street, they both watch her and hope to court her, with John eventually emerging victorious at winning her heart, enraging Max. But John breaks it off when Max learns of John’s debt to the IRS and how he can offer her nothing. During the exchange the two have, we learn that their feud stems from when they were young friends, but John stole Max’s love and married her–a marriage that proved to be unhappy, while Max married another woman and was happy. But they eventually reconcile, partially because their children, played by Daryl Hannah and Kevin Pollak, are attracted to one another.

The film has a great supporting cast, including Burgess Meredith as John’s 94-year-old father and Ossie Davis as the local bait shop owner.

It includes several scenes on a lake while ice fishing, which I would have found helpful for our Trunk or Treat “Trunk” this year where my youngest son and I dressed like we were ice fishing. Because, you see, in years past, the night of Trunk or Treat has been cold, and we’ve been outside for almost three hours in nothing but costumes. So, this year, planning ahead, I lit upon costumes where we could wear coats, hats, and gloves–ice fishing! Unfortunately, the night was so cold that the church ended up moving the event indoors, so we were indoors bundled up for several hours. But I’ve never been ice fishing, so although I had us bundled up, a nice metal bait bucket to use for the candy we were to pass out, ensafened fishing rods, and a flopping fish cat toy, we did not have a ladle to use to dip into the open water and pour it onto the edges of the hole to keep the ice open. I don’t think the Trunk or Treat attendees suffered from the lack of verisimilitude. But we were amongst the most frightening trunks for the little children, who were nonplussed by the monsters and other Halloween things but demurred at the sight of two men with northern accents, one spot-on and the other mixed with Southern and Indian accents, and more likely the squirming fish which looked real until its USB-charged battery gave out.

At any rate, you know, I enjoyed the film more than I enjoy more recent fare. And I’m hoping to find the sequel somewhere. Because when it comes down to the debate our forefathers had and never resolved, between Ann-Margaret and Sophia Loren, I am definitely on Team Sophia.

Last-in, first-out (LIFO) appears to be my film watching philosophy, gentle reader, but that’s partly because the results of my most recent trips to book sales or antique malls end up jumbled atop the cabinets beside my entertainment equipment, so of course I watch them first. This is not holding true for the Marvel movies I have been accumulating for some time now–perhaps I’m going to put them together and watch them in order sometime. But it took me only a couple of days from purchase to watch this film.

I watched Not Another Teen Movie relatively recently, but perhaps before I started doing movie reports, and it was silly but not odious. So I expected something similar from this film, even though apparently it was not from the same people–this is from the people who wrote Scary Movie. Perhaps that was an early 2000s trend, to just give a generic Movie name for a parody. I’ll have to think on whether other unrelated examples exist. With or without National Lampoon Presents above the title.

At any rate, Alyson Hannigan in a fat suit starts out deciding she will not give up and will find a man. So she consults Hitch who gives gets guys a la Pimp My Ride to give her a makeover, and like Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she becomes pretty. Well, she becomes Alyson Hannigan, which is several steps above pretty. She meets the man of her dreams, who has quirky parents (played by Fred Willard, who made every movie he was in better, and Jennifer Coolidge). When they are engaged and planning their wedding, she discovers he wants Andy to be his best man–and Andy is an attractive woman who wants him back. Hijinks ensue.

Amusing in spots, although I am pretty sure I would have written something similar in high school. There are spot hits/gags based on Michael Jackson trying to prey upon a child, a brief spot from the frame of Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I would not have gotten two months ago, a not-necessary-to-the-plot Napoleon Dynamite gag, and just a bunch of other things machine-gunned in. It’s similar to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films, but the characters in the film do not play it as though they were in a serious film.

And since Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker have been out of the game for a while now, if anyone is going to make a Samurai Cat movie, it’s these guys. Wait a minute. This movie is almost 20 years old now. Perhaps they, too, are out, and we will never get the Samurai Cat movie we deserve. Because we have been very, very bad.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Bendigo Shafter, but based on that reading and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, when I saw this two-videocassette set at the Friends of the Library book sale in April, I picked it up. And given the long Thanksgiving weekend coming up, I figured I could make it through the whole miniseries. To be honest, I was not sure whether it was a major two-night or four-night event when it aired when I was seven years old. The videocassettes themselves said the running time was 198 minutes, but I was not sure whether that was each or total. When I got to the end of the first part, the end titles played, but they used the same stock western footage as the beginning titles, so I thought two episodes per videocassette. But, no, it turns out this was a two night movie event. Maybe it was a couple years before miniseries stretched to four or five nights.

The story is based on two L’Amour novels, The Daybreakers and Sackett featuring basically two stories that tangentally intersect–one can almost see the stitching lines. Sam Elliot plays Tell Sackett who is working in a mining camp when he shoots a card sharp cheating at a camp poker game. He has to leave before the Bigelow brothers come to avenge their brother. He ends up discovering a gold mine and a woman who has been hiding from the Indians who slaughtered her family. Meanwhile, his brothers Orrin (Tom Selleck) and Tyrell (Jeff Osterhage) run from a Tennessee feud, join a cattle drive, gather their own cattle, and then make their way to Santa Fe where Orrin gets elected sheriff just as an Anglo cattle baron (John Vernon) is preparing to square off against the Mexican natives.

The stories continue independently except for a couple crossovers ending in a climactic shootout where the brothers dispatch the Bigelow brothers and their hired hands. The brothers reuinte only after a frantic cable to Santa Fe summons Orrin and Tyrell who ride out and arrive just in time and not tired at all.

I am sure that the books cover most of the threads in greater detail. Orrin’s romance with the cattle baron’s daughter probably encompasses more pages than the couple minutes of screen time we get. One of their friends from the cattle drive and business partner develops a grudge against Orrin that leads to a shootout, but it happens in a couple of short scenes. Tyrell also has a fellow cowpuncher from the cattle drive that for some reason decides he’s an enemy, and they have a near-shootout where Orrin spares but humilates the man; one wonders if he would return later. But if you’re going to make a miniseries out of two whole books, you’re going to chop a lot.

Still, it’s Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, and Jeff Osterhage as brothers in a western. It worked so well that they later did another L’Amour book together, The Shadow Riders (which I had previously seen). If you’re a fan of the western genre, you could do worse. However, I’m not sure if I’m quite the western fan. After all, the genre often relies on minutes and minutes of stockish footage of men riding horses in Western expanses, rivers, deserts, and so on. I guess my favored genre might be noir as I’ll take black and white shots of dark streets, alleys, and rooms over horses and farms.

Well, after watching Don Juan DeMarco, I thought watching this film (bought in my massive haul in September) would fit in thematically. Well, sorta, but not really.

This is an independent comedy, which means it has a large number of name actors working in what turned out to be an overlooked film. Maximo, a Mexican whose father was a hard worker but who died comically in the intro flashback, decides he wants to be a trophy husband as a career. So he charms and seduces an older widow who visits a resort where he’s working. The bulk of the film takes place twenty-five years later where Maximo, played by Eugenio Derbez (not a recognized name actor here in the U.S.), checks every morning to see if his elderly wife has died. He leads a pampered, spoiled life, but he finds that he has been cuckholded and supplanted by a McLaren dealer (played by Michael Cera). He’s thrown out without a penny. He turns to his fellow trophy husband Rick (played by Rob Lowe), but Rick does not have room to help as he has to satisfy his wife Millicent (Linda Lavin) who likes a lot of role-play sex. So Maximo goes to his estranged sister Sara (Salma Hayek) and moves in with her. When he finds that his niece nephew attends an expensive school on a scholarship, he vows to help the boy win his crush whose grandmother (played by Raquel Welch) is loaded and single. It all goes awry, of course, comically.

So I laughed a couple of times–the Weird Al cameo was unexpected and very welcome.

Did I say Salma Hayek? I did, and not Salma Hayek Paz Vega.
Continue reading “Movie Report: How To Be A Latin Lover (2017)” →

I was vaguely aware of this film when it came out. I was just about a year out of college, and either my friend Mike mentioned it, or perhaps the premise reminded me of Mike. But I did not see it in the cinema, nor had I seen it any time before now.

Johnny Depp, fairly fresh from 21 Jump Street, plays Don Juan DeMarco, a man who dresses in black and wears a mask like Zorro. He is a great seducer, but he has decided to end his life. So after one last conquest, he scales a billboard and plans to end it all in a duel with his greatest adversary. However, the responding police send up a psychiatrist played by Marlon Brando who plays along with Don Juan to get him into the bucket of a bucket truck and from thence to a mental hospital on a ten-day hold for evaluation.

Dr. Mickler, Brando’s psychiatrist, goes against the wishes of his colleagues and does not drug DeMarco but instead listens to his fanciful story of his life. The child of an American and a Mexican property owner who falls in love with his tutor but the affair leads to his father’s death in a duel and DeMarco’s running away and his mother’s entering a convent. He then has a variety of adventures told in flashback, including being in the harem of a shiek and then meeting a beautiful woman on a beach after a shipwreck who would go on, after their parting, a centerfold.

The authorities locate his grandmother, who tells a different story. The father died in an automobile accident, which might have been a suicide based on his wife’s affairs, and the mother did enter a convent. The fanciful stories that DeMarco tells have enough touchpoints with the grandmother’s story to introduce some ambiguity as to whether his stories, although fantastic, have some truth to them, or if he is really deluded.

Meanwhile, Mickler is learning from the stories to alter his outlook on life to be more romantic and legendary even in the everyday. This helps him to rekindle his marriage with his wife, played by Faye Dunaway.

So I liked the film more than I expected. Thematically, it questions our every day epistemology and outlook. How do the stories we make of our everyday life make our lives better? How did I save the planet today by defeating the invading mildew in my bathrooms? I guess the movie did not cover the last case explicitly, but it’s implied.

I’m surprised that this film is not more fondly remembered today. Perhaps its fanciful nature limits its Seriousness, so it is not thought of as meaningful as, say, Girl, Interrupted. Which I am not inclined to watch twenty-five years after its release because it was so serious and probably more a product of its time.

Well, gentle reader, I suppose since I just watched a couple episodes of You Bet Your Life on DVD, it was inevitable that I would watch this videocassette shortly thereafter. It’s been almost exactly two years since I watched Horse Feathers and Duck Soup which I liked so much that I bought this film the next spring. And it’s likely I will buy all three of them again when I find them for fifty cents or a quarter just to make sure I have them. And backup copies thereof.

But enough about the reification of my related watching and purchase activity. This is a movie report, ainna?

Groucho Marx plays Groucho Marx Otis Driftwood, a grifter working as a… manager? for a rich woman (played by Margaret Dumont) who wants him to introduce her to the heights of New York society. They open in Italy, where Driftwood introduces her to the leader of a New York Opera company director who is in Italy to bring Italy’s greatest tenor to New York. The tenor, Lassparri, insists that the New York Opera company also sign his female co-star whom he’s trying to woo. She agrees, parting with her lover, Ricardo Baroni, who is also a tenor. When Driftwood discovers how much opera singers make, he signs Baroni to a dubious contract to serve as his manager as well. Instead of waiting for his lover, though, Baroni and two Marx brothers stow away on the ship to New York and hijinks ensue, including what was apparently an iconic stateroom scene and a near-destruction of the opera house.

It’s an amusing film, probably moreso for me because I was an old soul even before I got old, and I lived in the Before times and even then had a bit of a predilection for old movies and whatnot. But perhaps the Marx brothers’ slapstick is more universal than that, especially as the film relies on a thin base plot and archetypes.

I’ve mentioned before that Marx’s impact carried on into the 21st century, in so far as you can still (or could still as of six years ago) find Marx glasses in the party store to put into elementary school birthday party gift bags. When I was watching You Bet Your Life, the following Facebook memory came up:

I told him I loved his work and asked for his autograph. Which he spelled like the plural of mark because he had not yet gone to a public school or university.

Six years? But my youngest is still that boy. He’s all of the boys he was and the young man he is now. Simultaneously. I am not sure how that works.

This weekend, gentle reader, I spent a moment to take the DVDs that in September at the Friends of the Library Book Sale (fifty or more) out of the box in which I brought them home. I fit some of them into the to-watch cabinet, a repurposed old stereo cabinet, and others into the ones atop the video game cabinet (including fitting some into the box atop the cabinet that I brought home my purchases from the April Friends of the Library Book Sale). I have been watching television DVDs of late, so I had a little space to condense the cubic feet of media. But something occurred to me. I have kind of made peace with the fact that I have more books than I will ever read (and, to be honest, some are just reference works and not readers, like books on trees of North America or weeds of the Midwest). But with these films piling up, for decades in some cases, I might be getting to having more movies than I will ever watch. Unless I make a concerted effort. Which I have here recently. I bought this film in September amidst the aforementioned fifty-some films because my oldest picked it up. And then I watched it without him.

Being a 2019 film, this is one of the more recent films that I have seen–Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick might be the only others I’ve seen as recent. And if you’re looking for a 2001-like film where at the end of the day it’s not an artificial intelligence that the hero must destroy but his own father, his hero, and perhaps his past (although I guess thematically, I am taking it one step too far there).

Brad Pitt, whom I saw recently in Mr. and Mrs. Smith from fourteen years earlier, shows some lines on him. He plays Roy McBride, an astronaut/space worker. When mysterious pulses devastate the electronics on Earth and in space, including sending him falling from–a space elevator?–he is tasked with going to Mars to send messages to a space station in orbit around Neptune which looks to be the origin. The Lima project, which was supposed to look for extra-terrestrial intelligence, went that far out to escape interference from the sun, and Roy’s father headed it up, but the project has not been heard from in 30 years.

A couple of side quests ensue on the moon and on Mars, from which Roy is supposed to send pre-written radio messages to the Lima project, but he breaks protocol and sends a personal message instead which causes Space Com to keep him from joining the mission heading to Neptune. He learns from Reina the station director the truth about the project: how McBride the father went mad in his obsession to find other intelligences out there–and that he killed her parents when they tried to leave the Lima Project. So Roy tries to stow away on the mission to Neptune–not a rescue mission, but a search and destroy mission with a nuclear weapon designed to destroy the Lima Project. The other astronauts discover him as he comes aboard, and Space Com orders them to dispatch him, so he kills them instead. He travels to Neptune (currently the furthest known planet from the sun even when you count Pluto) and finds his father, and the unfortunate truths.

As I said, it tracks kind of closely with 2001 in spots but without alien intelligence to guide or to provide the deus ex maquina. Roy returns with a lot of knowledge of Space Com’s wrong doings and cover-ups, which it seems to me would end the film on a bit of a sour note, but instead the film wraps up with McBride returning the data collected by the Lima Project over the decades, which includes exoplanets to explore and colonize, and he reconciles with his estranged wife, whom we see in numerous flashbacks as Roy has pushed her away in his drive to be autonomous.

A slower paced movie, but not a waste of time. Its depictions of life in space and space travel are very detailed and nicely filmed.

In addition to recognizing Ruth Negga (who played Reina in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), I thought I recognized Liv Tyler as the wife even though her face is obscured, out-of-focus, or blurred in the flashbacks.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Ad Astra (2019)” →

Wait a minute. Somehow, I got it in my head that this was a Mel Brooks movie, and it is. Sort of. This version of The Producers is the film version of the Broadway show, starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane. The Broadway show, of course, was the Broadway show version of a Mel Brooks film from the late 1960s (The Producers starring Gene Wilder). Sweet Christmas, the only way this could peg the things Brian J. reads/watches meter would be if it were the novelization of a video game based on a novelization of a film of a Broadway show based on a film. Based on a Shakespearean play in the original Klingon or something.

So: Nathan Lane plays a Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, who was something sometime in the past, but whose latest shows have flopped. Broderick plays a timid accountant, Leo Bloom, who comes to do his books and mentions that a flop could make more money for the producers than a hit if dealt with the right way. So Max presses Leo to join him, and Leo eventually does, and they look for the worst possible play to produce. They settle on Springtime for Hitler, written by a former Nazi (played in the film by Will Ferrell). A Swedish actress (played in the movie by Uma Thurman) wants to audition, and she captures Max and Leo’s, erm, lower heart, and she gets to act as their receptionist until the show comes off. They hunt up the worst director they can think of, a flamboyantly gay man, who wants to make the show gay (along with his Village People staff). The Nazi comes to the audition and impresses everyone to take the part of Hitler, but on opening night, he actually breaks a leg and cannot go on. So the flamboyant director, who knows the role, takes the part. Although the audience gets restive and offended during the opening number, when the director hits the stage and vamps it up, they think it’s satire. And the show is a smash, which puts Max and Leo in a bind.

As a movie based on a Broadway show, there’s more singing and dancing than I generally prefer in films, but I could tolerate it since it was a Mel Brooks musical. It ends with the putting-on-a-show-in-prison trope which has become fairly common–was the original The Producers the source of this? The Blues Brothers came along later.

At any rate, an enjoyable bit. But I am still not generally a fan of musicals or Broadway shows. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (he said, making allusion to a 30-year-old television program, old man). Of course, one wonders how a younger viewer not raised on Mel Brooks would do with this job given that a lot of the humor is based on homosexuality and even some cross-dressing.

When I mentioned that I was watching this film to my beautiful wife, she associated the title with the 1988 Dennis Quaid film of the same name (which is now almost as old as the original was in 1988). But, no, I was watching the original, which is (does math) 74 years old now. But it doesn’t seem dated to old people who remember life before computers and cell phones. Of course, the Quaid film also comes from the before time, but shots probably included office environments with PCs, so it would look slightly less alien to kids.

Also, I have seen this film listed as 1949 and 1950 in various sources, so I am not sure whether the film was released in 1949 or 1950. I guess I could watch it again and convert the Roman numerals, gentle reader, for proper accuracy in this movie report, but I am far too lazy for that.

In it, Edmond O’Brien plays Bigelow, a California accountant who decides to have a holiday away from his town and his receptionist/flame Paula in San Francisco. He joins a group of convention attendees on a night out and is unknowingly given poison by a figure in a suspicious looking get-up. When he falls ill, the doctors tell him he has only a short time to live. So he investigates and learns that someone from San Francisco named Philipos has been trying to reach him–and said fellow has committed suicide. It looks to be tied into a bill of sale that Bigelow notarized for Philips, almost forgotten because it was a while back and a routine transaction for someone passing through Bigelow’s home town, and that leads Bigelow to encounter some organized crime types who might have stolen the sold good–iridium–and whose theft put Philips into a legal jam.

There’s a twist ending, but the twist is not that Bigelow survives. The film has a frame story which seems to have been popular at the time (Double Indemnity had a similar one) where the main character tells someone the story in flashback–in this case, Bigelow is telling it to homicide detectives.

So if you’re a fan of original noir films, this one will please you. If you’re a damn kid, you’ll probably be bored through it.

I mentioned the main actor, Edmond O’Brien. You know, he won an Academy Award (for his supporting role in The Barefoot Contessa) and was nominated for another (for Seven Days in May), and he appeared in films I’ve seen like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and a bunch of other notable films. But he’s not a common name now. He was that guy for a long time, but the world has moved onto its insipid streaming series instead.

Still, it has made me curious to watch the Quaid version. Which I think I will have to find on videocassette. Online sources indicate there are three other iterations of this film, although it counts the Jason Statham film Crank among them, so the connection to this film as the source looks to be more inspired by than remake.

Old movies had Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr or Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The (early) 21st century had this film bring together two attractive and popular stars–Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie–for what they might have hoped would be similar chemistry. I guess it kind of worked–this film broke up Brad Pitt’s first marriage and led to his relationship and eventual marriage to Jolie (which also ended in ongoing acrimony).

Pitt plays John Smith, an assassin for a government agency of some sort, who has a cover of a construction engineer who has to travel to various projects. Jolie plays an assassin for a different agency whom he marries after meeting her in Bogotá after one of them–or both, or neither–has done a job (the flashback is ambiguous). Five or six years into their marriage, they’ve settled into a routine that has led them to counseling (the counseling bit is a frame story that begins and ends the movie). They’re both tasked by their agencies to take out a prisoner during some sort of exchange, and each approaches the job in their own way. Mrs. Smith has a tech trap set up, and Mr. Smith comes at it from a more hands-on approach. But they interfere with each other’s attempt and vow to eliminate their rival–only to eventually discover it’s the spouse. So they come together to grab the prisoner from a super-secure facility and discover that he’s bait in trying to get the Smiths to kill each other which leads to a shoot-em-up climax and finis!

I guess Pitt and Jolie might have some chemistry here, but it’s not developed as in an old movie. This is an actioner, so it’s a series of set pieces with practical effects and it looks to be some wire work. So it doesn’t look quite as video-gamey as today’s fare but is does employ on some video-gamey camera work. One wonders if what it would look like if made today–probably Mr. Smith would be a punchline and not an equal to his wife, although when they have a long hand-to-hand combat sequence that destroys their house, Mrs. Smith equals her husband already for drama’s sake which is, erm, stylized? Idealized? A physical confrontation like that would only take place in a movie. In real life, it would be a lot shorter and likely less favorably for Mrs. Smith.

At any rate, not a bad film. A product of its time. Which is a bit now, but mostly then.

This film comes from the early middle 1980s, and it’s definitely a product of its time.

Eddie Murphy was beginning his ascent to being a box office superstar–he’d done 48 Hours the year before, and Beverly Hills Cop was a year in the future. Wait, then it was Coming to America in 1987, but The Golden Child in between, and maybe that was it–Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman and Vampire in Brooklyn were kinda flops, so aside from a couple of sequels which did okay, it was onto the silly family movies and remakes in the middle 1990s. Maybe Eddie Murphy’s heydey coincided with my youth and watching Raw and The Golden Child over and over on Showtime whilst in the trailer.

Still, one detects a certain theme in Murphy’s works: The fish out of water. The con out of jail. The Detroit cop in California. The PI in Tibet.

And, in this film, a con man swept up into a life of luxury. Dan Ackroyd, who is also in this film (I say that a bit facetiously–both he and Murphy star in the film and have equal billing), plays a commodities trader named Louis Winthrope who aspires to be respected by the old money men, played by Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy. They, on the other hand, don’t think much of him. And when one of them reads an article about Nature vs. Nurture, he thinks that any man in the commodity trader’s environment would thrive, and that if Winthrop were out of his environment, he would not thrive. So they make a wager on it and they turn Winthrope out and replace him with Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy), a con man arrested after bumping into Winthrop outside the club. When Winthrop and Valentine learn of the scheme, they set about to reverse their fortunes and to bankrupt the Duke boys. That is, the old money brothers, not the Dukes of Hazzard.

Maybe I just haven’t watched enough period pieces set in the 18th or 19th century or much of recent times, but something about the club and the snooty people there and the social circles and the locations smack of the 1980s. One could almost imagine Judge Smalls from Caddyshack in the film. But unlike perhaps some recent things, it does not depict commodities trading or making fortunes as evil in and of themselves. Thematically, that will change, and by 1983, probably already is.

An amusing film which stands the test of time if you’re of a certain age. Undoubtedly, younger people might find it an anachronism. But maybe not–I caught my oldest re-watching The Secret of My Success. Maybe kids these days can appreciate aspirational comedies.

Oh, and the film also had Jamie Lee Curtis as a financially savvy prostitute. But, to be honest, I’ve never found Jamie Lee Curtis all that. Maybe it’s the short haircuts. But Kristin Holby, on the other hand, plays Winthrope’s fiance who abandons him in his time of need. She, I like, although she’s made up in this film to be a caricature of a shallow society girl.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Trading Places (1983)” →

“Didn’t you just watch this movie?” my beautiful wife asked as she passed through the den the evening which I watched this film. No, gentle reader; we know I watched Indiscreet a couple weeks ago. I am internally aghast that my wife might think that all Technicolor Cary Grant movies from the late 1950s look the same.

C’mon, man, you know the plot, ainna? Grant plays a suave playboy engaged to an New York heiress meets a woman engaged to a wealthy man on a ship crossing the Atlantic. They strike up a friendship, which everyone else on board thinks is an affair. They visit his grandmother in her home in a beautiful Mediterranean setting, and the engaged woman (played by Deborah Kerr) starts to fall for him–and he for her. As they reach New York, they make a pact to meet at the top of the Empire State Building in six months if they’ve broken away. On the day of their reunion, she is struck by a car and cannot make it, and he feels jilted. But he eventually meets her again and discovers her secret. Sorry if I spoiled it for you, but the film has been a part of our culture from its debut up until the end of the time when we had a culture. Sleepless in Seattle relies on it heavily, for crying out loud.

I have seen this film before some time ago, and although I enjoy it, I did not get into it so much as apparently, at least fictional, Baby Boomer women might have. I still want to be Cary Grant when I grow up (and, as he said, “So do I.”).

I don’t think I have many other Cary Grant films hidden amongst the stacks, so I will have to hunt for them in the wild. But Cary Grant movies for the home video market seem to be more videocassette than DVD, and the VHS tapes are getting thin out there all ready.

Gentle reader, I will ask you to indulge me here a bit. I saw Ghost Rider recently, but I cannot tell you how recently that would have been since I’ve only been doing movie reports since 2020 here (recently). I mean, I am pretty sure I watched it at Nogglestead, but it could have been on a DVD I rented in my most recent movie store membership days (within the last decade) or on a DVR version I recorded before the last time I cut the cord (also within the last decade, but more last decader than when I had the video store card). Or, gentle reader, it could have been somewhere in the middle where I bought the movie on physical medium, watched it, and put it on the “watched” shelves which are not as deep, extensive, or inscrutible as the Nogglestead bookshelves, but are quite deep never the less.

At any rate, suffice to say, I have watched Ghost Rider recently. But not in the cinema, so my time between viewings is less than 300.

Most notable about watching the two on successive nights is the great chasm between 2007 and 2012. No, not the political chasm. Not the personal chasm (Old Trees >mother dead > Nogglestead). The whole aesthetic approach to comic movies. Maybe the studios’ understanding, or not, of them.

At any rate, in Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze works with his father in the circus as a stunt rider. Johnny hopes to leave the circus to be with Roxy, who doesn’t think much of circus folk. When Johnny learns his father is dying of cancer, he signs a deal with the devil to heal his father–and the devil does, but the father dies immediately in a stunt gone bad. Because, you know, the devil. But he says he will call on Johnny when he needs him.

Years later, Johnny is still a stunt rider although a la Evil Knievel, packing stadia with people who want to see his outlandish stunts. Johnny can’t die, so no matter how badly the jumps go, he is all right. But then the devil needs him to help find and prevent another demon loose on the planet from getting his hands on an unfulfilled contract. Sorry for the late notice, but the film starts with Sam Elliot narrating the legend of the Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter, who was supposed to execute on a contract for 1000 souls but who did not. Blaze gets the powers of the Ghost Rider (on a motorcycle, not a horse).

The film is mostly a series of set pieces where Ghost Rider has to take out the minions of the demon and finally kill the main boss. The subplot revolves around Blaze reuiniting with Roxy–he left her after signing the contract, but she returns as a reporter who scores an interview with him before a big jump.

This film comes from the Before period, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as did The Punisher). Mark that.

Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance (2012) comes five years later and does not extend the story of the first so much as reboots it, albeit with the Nicholas Cage again as the Ghost Rider. The film tells his origin story again, albeit differently, which is much more jarring when you have just seen the original film just the night before. Maybe it worked better after five years, and perhaps people watching this film did not see the first one. At any rate, Idris Elba portrays a holy man of some motorcycle-riding order who comes to an armed monestary of some sort just an armed force attacks it, looking for a boy who is part of some prophecy. The boy’s mother escapes with him, and Idris Elba finds Johnny Blaze hiding out in Europre, trying not to be the Ghost Rider or let the Ghost Rider out. He reluctantly agrees to find the mother and to protect the boy, who is the spawn of the devil and into which the devil eventually wants to put himself in exchange for Elba lifting the curse on Johnny. So that’s what happens with a twist at the climax.

As I mentioned, the two films have a completely different feel to them. The first has a touch of CGI to it–well, okay, a bunch–but it at the core has a certain heart to it that the second does not. The second feels like a series of CGI spectacles stitched together loosely with a plot. Both have Nicholas Cage doing the gonzo Nic Cage thing, but the second is gritter, pared down to the bone and a touch pessimistic or brutal. The second ignores some of the constraints put on the Ghost Rider in the first film–only coming out at night, for example–which might only matter if you watch the two films in close succession, which perhaps only I and Nic Cage do in 2023.

So I liked the first more than the second.

Violante Placido played Nadya, the mother, in the second film.
Continue reading “Movie Report: The Ghost Rider Collection: Ghost Rider (2007), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012)” →