Recent Viewings, Part 2

[zombie no.one]

Have you seen the 2008 film of the same name? strong contender for spritual successor to THE ROOM imo (with a hint of PSYCHO COP thrown in)

[Rev. Powell]

I disliked THE LODGE in-tense-ly... just had no patience for its pace and its pastiche of better films. I always think of you as being a much tougher critic than I am, Reverend, but definitely not in all cases! 

A weird thing about this one... reading people's comments about it afterwards, I think I was out of the room pouring a glass of wine or something when they delivered/confirmed the "twist." I imagine if I had caught that scene I would have been less satisfied. There were a couple of times I was wondering things like, "well, why hasn't the boyfriend checked in yet?" which I thought only made sense if it was a real supernatural event or a completely subjective descent into madness thing. I think I would have liked it less if I had realized the plot was more literal than I was thinking.

[M.10rda]

In your defense, I recall that the film hedges its bets and tries to deliver several different "twists", some of them inherently contradictory. It made little sense to me ultimately and irritated me a ton.

[M.10rda]

GREASE 2 (1982):
Second-time viewing at the behest of Madame. We watched "with" our niece, who sat mostly silently editing TikTok videos on her iPad. 

I really abhor the original GREASE, an opinion I could've probably posted in the "Unpopular Opinions" thread. Young Travolta is charismatic and Stockard Channing is iconic - otherwise I have nothing good to say about it. I find most of the characters unlikeable and the film's message is despicable. The catastrophically rejected GREASE 2, on the other hand - is just fine in my book. 

Michelle Pfeiffer, born to be a star. Adrian Zmed isn't quite Travolta but he's an essentially good-hearted and inoffensive hothead. Pamela Segal (later Adlon) makes what must be her screen debut as the PLadies' "mascot" and is spunky and adorable as befits her durable career. Eve Arden gets a lot more screentime, while Sid Caesar, Eddie Van Deezen, and Didi Conn all spin through for sixty seconds to collect a paycheck. Maxwell Caulfield didn't initially impress me (decades back) but now I realize that his Brad Pitt/Val Kilmer-esque good looks were essentially all that was required of him and beyond that, his romance w/ Pfeiffer is more breezily likeable and less contrived than those in the original. (He later claimed that GREASE 2 ruined his career, but legions of ladies in their 40s + 50s will always remember him as the "Cool Rider", so what's his grievance really?)

Also a minority opinion (though one subscribed to also by Madame): most of the songs are extremely catchy and the choreography (especially in the bowling alley scene) is terrific. My favorite number just about scrapes surreal/camp genius: an intensely uncomfortable Troy Donahue singing about "Reproduction" to his drooling class of sex maniacs. The profondo basso closing line to the chorus is delivered by another Hollywood lifer, Christopher McDonald, who's played countless jerks and villains since GREASE 2 and never again looked like he was having one-tenth as much fun as he has here.

One of the T-Birds is a pushy sex-creep who looks like Jared Kushner. Other than that, though, I have no real complaints.
3/5

[lester1/2jr]

Lights Out (1950) - I watched 2 (21 minutes) episodes of this largely forgotten horror themed tv show and enjoyed both. The first featured Veronica Lake and was basically a retread of "I Married a Witch", the second was about a actor who hears his dead wife while he tries to act and features a seriously over the top performance by his female co star. More like Something Weird DVD extras than The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, but so short they didn't have time to be boring. I will definitely be watching a few more of these here and there.

4.25/ 5

[M.10rda]

OUT WEST (1918):
I watched a bunch of silent films last month and this one is the first that I actually enjoyed! All I knew about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle prior to watching this was the lore: that his career ended when he sexually assaulted a young actress (he didn't, it was consensual) and also stabbed her to death (he didn't) and/or crushed her beneath his obese frame during sex (no, she died of a kidney infection) and also she was underage (nope, she was 30). Also, Letterboxd reviews of this and other "Fatty" shorts would inform me that Buster Keaton (who co-stars here) was the true comic genius behind Arbuckle's films and the only funny part of them. I dunno, nothing against Keaton, uh, but I've seen THE GENERAL and some of his other films and I didn't laugh much. Keaton's in about two-thirds of OUT WEST and writer/star/director Arbuckle is in almost the whole thing, and both of them amused me throughout OUT WEST. So maybe my sense of humor is deficient, but in this courtroom, I can only find "Fatty" Guilty on the charge of Tickling My FunnyBone...! 

"Fatty" - hey, he called himself "Fatty", so I'll honor his preferred name - escapes a locomotive, stumbles into a saloon, and declares himself the bartender purely on the virtue of his sheer viciousness and craziness. Hey, it's the lawless old West where innkeeper Keaton shoots honest card-players in the back when they catch his pals cheating, then checks the dead men's hands and shrugs (via intertitle) "You would've lost anyway!" He keeps a bunch of dead bodies and some live ones in a pit beneath the floorboards. All the white cowboys start firing their pistols at the feet of the one black guy to make him dance, and dance he does. Of course this is wholly deplorable behavior, and "Fatty" lets us know that he knows this when the only woman in the whole wild West wanders in, saves the black guy, chastises everyone else, and they all instantly fall in love w/ her. I'm not saying OUT WEST is defensible or enlightened entertainment, I'm just saying it takes place on Planet Zany where no human rules of morality apply.

Chaplin might've had OUT WEST in mind when he made THE GOLD RUSH, a truly Great film but one that (perhaps for Chaplin's tragic dimensions) doesn't quite capture the pure cartoonishness of this one. OUT WEST is the closest any live action silent I've seen has come to "Looney Tunes". Fatty understands that the secret to Comedy is Excess. It ain't funny to hit a guy over the head with one beer bottle; it ain't funny to hit a guy over the head with two beer bottles; it's funny to hit a guy over the head with thirty-five beer bottles and then shoot him several times for good measure. At the climax Fatty faces off against an arch-enemy as seemingly unkillable as the Terminator, so he just pushes the guy's entire house off a cliff that looks to be a good 50+ feet high. The house lands and bashes into a million pieces at the bottom of the cliff and a body flies out and I'm not convinced it was a dummy. Maybe Fatty was a murderer... in any case, he's killin' me with chuckles!

4.5/5
I gotta' watch a lot more Fatty flicks.

[Rev. Powell]

TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL (2020): An in-depth look at the way the US government bungled the early response to the Covid pandemic, from the CDC screwing up the early detection tests to PPE shortages to mixed (sometime contradictory) messaging. Thorough and a bit nerdy; the comparison to South Korea's exemplary early pandemic response was enlightening.  3/5.