Recent Viewings, Part 2

[RCMerchant]

^ I used to sell blotter acid at the biker bar out near Fish Lake- way out in the boonies- I did a bit. I've only done it about 9 times. I never had scary hallucination's, though. Only had a bad trip once, walking in a snowstorm down a dirt road at night. It was out near Fish Lake, in fact! I was lost. Some guy I knew from the area just left the bar to go home and found me . I was trippin' hard!
Your right about how it might affect different folks different, I reckon.

Ah, the 80's.

[Rev. Powell]

Like RC, I didn't see things that weren't there. When you have visual hallucinations on LSD they are either abstract shapes (kind of like paisley, which is why that pattern was popular with hippies) or just distortions of what's already there (inanimate objects "breathing" is common). I think people with great imaginations could turn some of that stuff into visual stories about what they're seeing.

I think a real acid trip on film would be boring, since it's mostly about what's going on inside your brain, but the movie that captured the LSD experience best was one of the first ones: EASY RIDER.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDAdzb9IeGU

[RCMerchant]

^ I agree! EASY RIDER! 

[lester1/2jr]

Shortwave (2016) - A lot of the mostly negative reviews call this "pretentious" but it's more just amateurish and visually kind of annoying looking. I'd definitely file it under "sci fi demo reel" and I hope the guy ultimately is able to get work in better pictures.

A couple's child is kidnapped and the wife loses it. At the same time, the husband is trying to communicate with aliens using scientifically souped up shortwave radios. The drama with the wife is like an indie movie and the alien thing is like a sci fi movie, so this is the audience they're going for. The wife stumbles around and is constantly covered in blood either imagined or flashback or who even knows. She's cute, though.

It fails in kind of unusual ways. It's basically just an indie version of a Syfy movie. They seem to sell the most interesting aspects of the story short and just kind of go on. Also, visually it looks like a 90 minute ad for some sort of medication like they are going to start reading a doctor's warning halfway through it. What was up with that?

3/5 watchable but not too memorable and ultimately unsatisfying. Stick with Another Earth or, hell, Midsommer

[FatFreddysCat]

"Airplane II: The Sequel" (1982)
Ted Striker (Robert Hays) and Elaine (Julie Hagerty) are together again in a sci-fi flavored follow up to the 1980 comedy mega-hit, and this time they're trapped on board a malfunctioning space shuttle that's locked on a collision course with the sun.
("The SUN? What is it?" "It's a giant fiery ball in the center of our solar system, but that's not important right now.")
...more of the same wacky sight gags, puns, and corny jokes delivered by an amazing cast that includes Sonny Bono, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and William Shatner, who single-handedly makes up for the lack of Leslie Nielsen with his scene-stealing turn as crazed lunar base commander Buck Murdock.
This sequel wasn't very well received back in the day, but I've always found it just as much goofy fun as the O.G. "Airplane!"

[Rev. Powell]

A rare re-watch for me: LIFE OF BRIAN (1979). Jesus' neighbor Brian, an ineffective schlub, is mistaken for the messiah. A blaspheriffic Python satire with multiple classic sketches ("what have the Romans ever done for us?", "do you laugh when I say the name Biggus..."). 4.5/5.

[M.10rda]

BURN AFTER READING (2008):
This was one of a small handful of Coen Bros joints I hadn't seen somehow. For 25-30 years the Coens were notorious for (intentionally) having their next film in the works before their previous one had been released - a safeguard against critical backlash and financial failure. I guess that's one explanation for why they'd follow their greatest critical success (and one of their best films) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN with a glib, slapdash romp like BURN AFTER READING, and then pivot quickly again to make another undisputable masterpiece, A SERIOUS MAN. Another explanation might be their pure Puckish contrarianism...

BURN has the lighting-fast repartee and shocking plot twists of many of the Bros' best films as well as their typically large cast of movie stars and character actors alike. Like THE BIG LEBOWSKI, BURN exists essentially as a shaggy dog joke as much on the audience as for the audience's benefit. BURN runs about 25 minutes shorter than LEBOWSKI, which is probably fortunate, as it lacks that film's ostentatious set pieces and virtuoso performances. (It does, however, have David Huddleston for a couple of scenes.) Although all Coen films seem to challenge audience expectations to one degree or another, some of them really put viewers through a work-out for (in most of those cases) a considerable payoff. LEBOWSKI was a marathon obstacle course that led to no satisfying resolution yet provided many rich ancillary benefits along the way. BURN just sort of moseys about for 90 minutes, asking very little of its audience but also delivering only modest landmarks of interest during the trip and again arriving at a non-ending. Therefore it seems to me to belong to the series of minor works that followed LEBOWSKI and preceded the monumental NO COUNTRY. Tarantino might call them "hang out" films, a term he's used to describe Linklater's grand DAZED AND CONFUSED but also the excremental second half of DEATH PROOF. One could accuse O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?*, THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, THE LADYKILLERS, and also BURN AFTER READING of just crashing at your pad for a while, eating your food, and then leaving while you're at work without doing their laundry or throwing out their trash.

I'm being harder on BURN than it deserves. Maybe I blinked and missed the scene or passing explanation of how the green CD-rom case w/ loony Malkovich's memoir makes it into Menolo's hands at Hardbodies.    Anyway, the Coens are the exemplars of "worst work is better than many others' best work". BURN still gives us Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey DeMunn, Olek Krupa (from MILLER'S CROSSING!), Richard Jenkins in a thankless role, and Brad Pitt doing comedy, which has always been one of his long suits. Pitt is also at the center of one of film's strongest scenes, which for what it's worth is some kind of odd inversion of the famous climax of a David Lynch film.

And, finally, there's the wonderful J.K. Simmons in two scenes that stand alongside the Coens' most clever scripting. As Deep State specters (real and imagined) menace our national imagination with increasing aggression, I find Simmons' 2008 rendition of a spymaster - aghast, fretful, and eager to know as little as possible about the crimes committed under his watch - to be highly comforting indeed. 

Also, George Clooney bludgeons a large dildo. Hey, it's something!
3.5/5

* By "one" I obviously just mean "I" myself. I know most people love O BROTHER. I laughed once and the music did nothing for me.

[Trevor]

A rare re-watch for me: LIFE OF BRIAN (1979). Jesus' neighbor Brian, an ineffective schlub, is mistaken for the messiah. A blaspheriffic Python satire with multiple classic sketches ("what have the Romans ever done for us?", "do you laugh when I say the name Biggus..."). 4.5/5.

Another classic comedy banned by the apartheid censor board ☹️☹️

[RCMerchant]

ANGST
 (1983) An Austrian geek who killed his mother as a teen is released 10 years later and has a problem controlling his urges to kill  and go on a rampage. He tries to strangle a woman driving a cab, but f**ks it up.
Running threw the woods, he stumbles upon a secluded house. In it live an old woman, her daughter, and her physically and mentally handicapped brother. Of course he kills them all in horrible ways, in particular the overkill butchering of the girl. Deciding that he wants to save the corpses to scare the p**s out of his next prey, he steals a car and loads them into the trunk to take a ride into town. Bad idea.
 Dam. Why haven't I seen this before now?
 Not much dialouge at all, except for the spoken thoughts of the killer scumbag, and not much really has to be said.
It seems to take place in almost real time. Unlike the slasher and "holiday" themed horror movies that were all the rage back then, this is much like HENRY: PORTAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1986).
Excellant film. Give it a try.

[Trevor]

I watched Billy Jack again. I will always be grateful for that movie bringing me here in the first place 😊😊🙏🐢

[Rev. Powell]

ANGST
 (1983)
 Dam. Why haven't I seen this before now?

I don't think it was available in the US until about a decade ago. Cult Epics found it, restored it and released it. It's intense.

[M.10rda]

I intend to watch a heck of a lot of movies this month so I'd better learn to write shorter reviews...

DA 5 BLOODS (2020):
I listened to Spike Lee get interviewed on NPR in 2020 when this was released and gained a great deal of admiration for him as a groundbreaking figure in Cinema and tireless independent journeyman. I just wish he was better at directing! Could someone direct me to the truly Great Spike Lee Joint? His best films (that I've seen) are imperfect, his worst films are tough to endure, and then he's got a bunch that vacillate between moments of brilliance and long passages of sheer amateurism. DA 5 BLOODS falls in that last category.

There's a moment near the very beginning of this film where the main characters enter a Vietnamese disco and for about 30 seconds, Lee generates as much frisson as I've ever seen and felt in any Scorsese or Tarantino flick. Some of the rest of that (long) opening scene are also pretty good. But then D5B goes to sleep for nearly 90 minutes, barring an extremely flatly directed Nam combat flashback sequence. Instead of frisson, we get looooooong scenes of expository dialogue where characters communicate information that we might have easily intuited or didn't need to know anything about or didn't care about. At around the midpoint the cast searches the jungle floor with metal detectors for what seems like over ten minutes, mostly in long uncut single takes. They're searching for gold, not mines (which they should know are out there) and for a long time all we get is "I found another bar!" ad nauseam. Old 60s badfilms like RED ZONE CUBA are far more nailbiting! At the point in the film where characters start stepping on mines, we're so past the point of suspense that explosions make almost no dramatic impact. There are two really GOOD shootouts in the last 40 minutes, which indicates that Lee can direct tight action if he wants. So why is the first battle scene so damn inert?

A big focus of the NPR interview, and too big of a focus of this film, is the central figure of "Paul", played by Delroy Lindo, who I guess Lee and his screenwriters intend as a tragic Richard III-type anti-hero. He's introduced to us as a guy who has committed indefensible acts in the past, and proudly boasts of one of those crimes against humanity on the hat he's always wearing. Over the course of the film, we learn even more of Paul's bad deeds, and he persists in making terrible, corrupt choices as the plot progresses, too. All of that tracks with who Paul (and Paul's hat) tell/s us he is - an irredeemable monster who deserves the grisly fate he finally receives. Yet Lee compulsively points his camera directly at Lindo and lets him rant directly at us for long minutes (like Sam Jackson in CHIRAQ, another crazy clown-car of bad ideas) as if somehow they can eke out some empathy for Paul. It's good to see Lindo again, but the gamble doesn't pay off. Lee used to be known for his hand with actors - Jackson, Denzel, John Turturro - but though Jackson was dynamite in CHIRAQ in spite of the rest of the film, I'm starting to wonder if Lee even really cares for actors beyond their usefulness as vessels for rhetoric. The great if problematic actor Jonathan Majors plays Paul's son. He stole the show in 2023's ANT-MAN: QUANTUMANIA, giving a completely hypnotic performance in a deeply stupid superhero film; yet he disappears altogether in D5B, in spite of having even more screentime and potentially better material to work with. Now what kind of director gets a non-performance out of Jonathan Majors?!

Why does Lee insist on burying 10 or 15 good or great minutes of cinema with another 140 minutes of filler? Why can't he make a movie that's just all good parts? I ask this even after listening to that interview where he was highly eloquent in stating his mission - to document black American history in exhaustive detail for (I gather) younger viewers or future generations. I suppose that sheds some light on why he's been opening and closing ALL his recent films with long montages of newsreel footage, supertitles of historical factoids, etc etc. Most of this material seems (to me) relevant to the black experience in this country, though not always directly relevant to the plot of any given film in which it appears... or otherwise the larger allusions that Lee is making through the use of these sequences might be much more elegantly evoked through a few discreet lines of dialogue or a single image or two sprinkled through the film. That's what I think a really GOOD filmmaker would do - but perhaps I'm not the intended audience for Lee's films and therefore what I think doesn't matter. Fred Williamson has his own tobacco plantation but only distributes his brand of cigars directly to personal (BIPOC) friends - because, as he revealed to Steve Puchalski in an old Shock Cinema interview, "I don't want honkeys smoking my cigars!" Eh!

2.5/5
Maybe my next one will be shorter.

[RCMerchant]

^ I don't think I ever seen a Spike Lee movie. I think me and Tiana were watching one on TV, and I feel asleep.

[M.10rda]

Yeah, that's an appropriate involuntary physiological response to Spike Lee movies! They ain't "gripping"... the best ones (DO THE RIGHT THING, BLACK KKKLANSMAN) keep a viewer awake, at least! 
MALCOLM X was pretty good but it's about 190 minutes but than again that's only about 25-30 minutes longer than many of his other ones.......

[RCMerchant]

^ Wait! I seen Malcom X ! I liked it.
But I'm not in the mood to watch a docu-drama too often.
Unless it's a docu-drama about Vlad the Impaler or something!