Recent Viewings, Part 2

[FatFreddysCat]

"Beverly Hills Cop III" (1994)
Axel Foley is causing chaos in the 90210 again, when he tracks a gang of counterfeiters from Detroit all the way to a SoCal amusement park called "Wonder World."
This lukewarm third installment is noticeably cheaper looking than the first two BHC movies, and everybody seems to be simply going through the motions. Watchable, but not necessary.

[Rev. Powell]

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE (2025): An undocumented Uyghur refugee in New York falls for a young soldier with a troubled past. Slow-moving, socially relevant, realistic romantic drama that excites mainstream film critics. 2.5/5.

[Trevor]

not sure what's wrong with these candles

😳😀😃😄😂😅🐢

[lester1/2jr]

Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour (1931) - This is a very early (obviously) Sherlock Holmes movie and the guy who plays him is good. There's even a fairly hot girl and, as usual, I mean hot for 1931 not in general. It's very talky in that "let's take a radio show and make it a movie" sort of way and it got to be a little much, but I still mostly enjoyed it. The classic Holmes villain "Mr. Moriarity" is featured. He acts as a kind of reverse Sherlock Holmes, using his advanced intelligence to do crimes rather than solve them. His appearances are really the high point.

I liked how kind of decadently buffoonish and average Watson is. He has no intuition whatsoever and talks to Holmes like he's insane. "The killer climbed a tree?? haha are you mad??"

3.75 /5 It was good and had some very cool stuff, I just had trouble keeping up with all the talking at 4 in the morning. In 1931, I would have been psyched to see it though.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Identity Thief" (2013)
A Denver financier (Jason Bateman)'s life is turned upside down when his identity is stolen by a con artist in Florida  (Melissa McCarthy). Frustrated by the slow response by law enforcement, he decides to track her down and bring her to justice himself, which of course leads to all sorts of chaos.
McCarthy is a hoot playing yet another Sassy Fat Broad and it's fun to watch Bateman get put thru the wringer.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Spider-Man: Homecoming" (2017)
Following his introduction in "Captain America: Civil War," Tom Holland's first solo Spidey film finds the web slinger balancing his troubled high school life with his crime fighting. Former "Batman" Michael Keaton is the villainous Vulture, who's been stealing alien tech from Tony Stark to create high powered weapons for the black market. The youthful Holland fits the Spidey role perfectly and the movie keeps him leaping from one impressive action set piece to another. Lots of fun.

[lester1/2jr]

The Wind (1928) - Lillian Gish moves from Virginia to West Texas and starts having a bad time immediately. It's too windy, her adopted brother's wife hates her, and all the guys are schlubs. The genre is western/ romance but it's more like western/ depressing. The wind machine is constantly going. They even have to interrupt a festive barn dance to retreat to the basement to wait out a passing cyclone.

Not the greatest print, but Gish still looks good and it's an interesting sort of scenario. I just wish it had been a little more fun to watch. It mostly survives on it's melodrama and Gish's long hair.

3/5

[M.10rda]

Wow, that hair is lovely!

[lester1/2jr]

She looks like she's about to bust out a spider walk there.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Stripped For Parts: American Journalism on the Brink" (2023)
The newspaper industry is in a shambles in the 21st century, but this PBS documentary suggests that the rise of the Internet and the decline of ad revenues may not be what finally kills your local daily -- the final blow may be the shady hedge fund investment groups who buy up troubled news chains and hollow them out before selling off their assets. As a former member of the news industry (whose former employer was part of one of the takeover attempts mentioned in this film), I found this doc quite fascinating, but I suppose its appeal would be limited to news-biz junkies and those still working in its trenches.

[M.10rda]

"Stripped For Parts: American Journalism on the Brink" (2023)
 As a former member of the news industry (whose former employer was part of one of the takeover attempts mentioned in this film), I found this doc quite fascinating,

That's really interesting to learn - your background in journalism helps to explain your crisp and informative reviews! What kind of news media did you work for and what did you cover? (If only they had a punk rock beat, you'd have been ideal for that byline!)

[Senor Citizen]

Deep Blue Sea

Stupid 90s action movie and still so entertaining and good (Renny Harlin-proof).
Arrows 4k is top notch release. If you have Dolby Atmos-home theater, get this release.

[FatFreddysCat]

That's really interesting to learn - your background in journalism helps to explain your crisp and informative reviews! What kind of news media did you work for and what did you cover? (If only they had a punk rock beat, you'd have been ideal for that byline!)

I was never a reporter (though that had been the plan when I was in college), instead I got into the news biz in the early 90s doing behind-the-scenes production stuff (page/section layouts, typesetting, pre-press prep, ad trafficking, etc.).

I initially worked for a group of small NJ weeklies, which were then bought by the Bergen Record in the late 90s. The Record became part of the Gannett/USA Today network in the 2000s until they too were bought out by Gatehouse Publications (narrowly beating out a takeover bid by the MNG/Alden Capital hedge fund, the subject of the above documentary).

Then came the pandemic, during which the Powers That Be decided that it would be cheaper to have some dude in Mumbai, India do my job via remote (yes, seriously) and offered me a buy-out, which I accepted and ran for the hills!

All in all I managed to survive 28 years in the print media biz, which is pretty impressive (or so I'm told). I have no regrets. It was fun while it lasted, and hey, I can say that I got to watch the collapse of a great American industry in real time, from the inside!

[M.10rda]

Good for you, FFC! Enjoy that buyout! 

[M.10rda]

Wolfman. 
 Larry Talbot's father is played by Claude Rains, and it's not that Claude does a bad job, but it's hard to imagine these two as father and son.  In real life there is about a 16 year age difference between the two men, so it's not like it would be impossible, but it's a a hard nut to swallow. 

There's a brief but powerful and memorable role by Bela Lugosi as a gypsy.   

Chaney does a wonderful job as a likeable romantic lead, but his real strength comes through in the scenes where he has to be sad, pathetic, and afraid.  He knocks that out of the park.  If I have any complaints about this, is that we don't get ENOUGH Wolfman. 

If I have a second complaint, the thing they do with his feet where they try to make it look more wolflike... it just doesn't work.  It just makes him look like he's walking on tiptoes. 

THE WOLF MAN (1941):
Chainsaw got me curious to revisit this (vaguely remembered) one for the first time in 40-45 years...  Alas the result was similar to what happened when I rewatched FRANK and BRIDE OF and DRAC and PHANTOM 15 or so years back - none of 'em work as well in adulthood as they seemed to work when I was a small child.    THE WOLF MAN is literally a man and a wolf struggling for control within a man's body but metatextually it's more about a great film and a terrible film struggling for control of what ultimately is a pretty average film.

I agree w/ Chainsaw that top-billed Rains and Chaney are distractingly miscast as father and son. It isn't just the ages, though, it's that Lon might be nearly a foot taller than Claude (characters even remark on his unusual size, lol) and also of course one is rather British and one is very American. That just contributes to the bizarre Hollywood-brained vaguely-European setting, where some people have British accents and some people have mid-Atlantic accents and also there are Romani wandering through and also the local Constable is a ludicrous Noo-Yawk accented Ralph Bellamy.

I didn't mind the Wolf Man's furry slippers like Chainsaw did but we gotta' talk about two major F-ups that should purchase WOLF MAN a place in the "Bad Movie" section of this site. First, the original werewolf is definitely 100% a wolf when it attacks Chaney early on, Chaney kills it, and then it still has all its clothes on when Constable Bellamy finds its human body.      Harder to ignore, though, is Chaney's first transformation scene, which he plays in a white wife-beater. Cut to the woods and he's inexplicably wearing his standard-issue W.M. dark longsleeved button-up. Oh yeah, Wolf Man stopped to put on something warmer before heading out for an impromptu rampage.     One could point out these problems w/ most werewolf movies, but most werewolf movies aren't classics produced by one of the biggest studios in film history. C'mon.

I also think all the business w/ the pentagram is silly and contrived. I won't attack Chaney's performance but I will take issue w/ Chainsaw calling Larry Talbot a "likeable romantic lead" - he's immediately established as a peeping tom and a sex pest who refuses to take "no" for an answer!  Now that actually could've been good foundation for his transformation into a literal wolf but of course the screenplay tries to convince us that Talbot is "pure of heart".

Although there is some crap writing, there is also some genius dialogue here, and most of it gets delivered by Rains. He gets two one-liners here (one about God and one about cops) that feel almost as iconic as his zingers from CASABLANCA, and he also gets to deliver an Oscar-reel monologue about the duality of man that would do wonders for the film if it was really about psychology and not actually about lycanthropy. Rains is spectacular as always and was worth every penny they paid him, but the film rides away on Maria Ouspenskaya's carriage. It is remarkable how understated (yet intense) her performance is, especially in a genre rife w/  overacting. Bravo, Maria.

And of course there is Bela, who is onscreen approximately 10% as much (or less) as he is in the 1942 Universal horror flick NIGHT MONSTER, in which he does nothing whatsoever. But although he has only a minute or two of screentime in WOLF MAN, it's the most important couple of minutes in Universal Wolf Man lore! Cheers then to a great cameo.

3/5
Okay, now that I've rewatched O.G. WOLF MAN '41 in adulthood, I hate to say it but I think it's true - Naschy is a better Wolfman than Chaney!