Main Menu

Recent Viewings, Part 2

Started by Rev. Powell, February 15, 2020, 10:36:26 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

RCMerchant

^ I seen that. You liked it more than I did.
Supernatural?...perhaps. Baloney?...Perhaps not!" Bela Lugosi-the BLACK CAT (1934)
Interviewer-"Does Dracula ever end for you?
Lugosi-"No. Dracula-never ends."
Slobber, Drool, Drip!
https://www.tumblr.com/ronmerchant

M.10rda

 :bouncegiggle: I admit, there is no realistic critical defense for ROAR!

Rev. Powell

ANORA (2024): A stripper meets the 21-year old playboy son of a Russian oligarch and quickly gets married; things get complicated when the scion's parent's hear of the affair and send some goons to sort it out. An exotic slice-of-life story that turns into a chaotic comedy once the Russians arrive, this is an highly entertaining affair from Sean Baker, eliciting laughs while retaining respect and empathy for sex workers. 4/5.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

lester1/2jr

#4398
Shock Em Dead (1991) - This is the best movie I've ever seen. Traci Lords is the manager of a sort of half new wave, half hard rock band that's looking for a guitar player. They find the perfect one (played by ridiculous showboating double guitar neck guy Michael Angelo something) ... too bad he's some kind of voodoo vampire guy who needs to kill people and take their energy to survive. Hate it when that happens.

I don't know why it's called Shock Em Dead but it hits all the right notes, no pun intended, of comedy, ridiculous murders, and LA cheese. If I had one criticism it might be that the second half is a little more conventional and less balls out than the first, but it's still great. Hoes who look like extras from Rick James' "Superfreak" video add color and sophistication to the proceedings.

4.75 /5

Considering her then recent circumstances, it feels a little creepy to talk about Lords' appearance but she does look great.

M.10rda

THE LOVED ONE (1965):
One of the absolute worst, painfully bad films I watched in 2024 was titled OH DAD, POOR DAD, MOMMA'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I'M FEELIN' SO SAD, which starred the aggressively unfunny and unlikable Robert Morse as a spineless, nutless loser and Jonathan Winters as his dead father. Nothing about that film made any sense, including its throwaway jokes about Nazi fugitives and MONDO CANE. Backtracking now to THE LOVED ONE, a well-received earlier irreverent comedy from a respected directed (Tony Richardson) w/ the same two stars, does nothing to justify OH DAD... but at least illuminates its origin.

Morse plays a vacuous young Brit who visits his uncle, a scenic designer working in Hollywood (John Gielgud!), and somehow gets embroiled in a labyrinthine funeral industrial complex run by two brothers (both played by Winters in performances that are almost restrained by his standards). Morse also meets a brittle young "gothic cosmetician" played by Anjanette Comer, an actress whose name is unshakeable though I'd never seen her in anything else. She gives a weirdly committed performance in a large, complex, though puzzling role that places her in a love triangle with Morse and complete psychopath "Mr. Joyboy" (Rod Steiger!!!). Adapted from a novel by Evelyn Waugh (?!) via screenwriters Christoper Isherwood and Terry Southern (hence the Winters roles?), THE LOVED ONE promises "something to offend everyone" and was obviously conceived to cash in on Southern's DR. STRANGELOVE. It's dark and weird but it didn't offend me, nor did it make me laugh more than a couple times. However it looks nice and Morse, though he loves pulling goony faces, is reasonably tolerable.

The compelling reason to check this one out is the bonkers supporting cast, one of those 1960s stunts that never cease to amuse. Besides Gielgud (who after all was in CALIGULA, too), there's Roddy McDowell as a smug movie exec, the singular Robert Morley as (what else?) a pompous buffoon, Milton Berle as the husband of a gun-waving wife, Lionel Stander as a drunk advice columnist, and James Coburn in a nothing role as a customs officer. But wait, there's more - how about 25-year old Paul Williams (inevitable star of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE) as a young boy genius who helps Winters blast bodies into outer space? Better yet, how about Liberace - yes, the Liberace - as a perfect funeral director... perfect in that he's a funeral director that simply acts like Liberace?

And, at long last, I have to give a lot of light to Steiger... an endlessly odd actor who plays the one character that actually seems like he belongs in DR. STRANGELOVE. Steiger's "Lafayette Joyboy" maxes out the bizarr-o-meter in his every scene, looking like early 1980s Brando and delivering one monologue about lobsters that is more terrifying than any of Brando's dialogue from APOCALYPSE NOW. Somehow simultaneously I feel like Steiger's virtuoso wacko performance also inspired both Steve Martin and Bill Murray in the LITTLE SHOP remake (and perhaps elsewhere), plus he even dances like Martin Short's Ed Grimley at one point.  If THE LOVED ONE's sole claim to fame is this one seminal freakshow, it would be worth a watch.

3.5/5
And also, Liberace.  :buggedout:

M.10rda

Quote from: lester1/2jr on January 25, 2025, 06:55:50 PMShock Em Dead (1991) -
Considering her then recent circumstances, it feels a little creepy to talk about Lords' appearance but she does look great.

Wow, will have to check this out. I admit I was able to access her "early work" when I was a teenager. (That doesn't make it legal, but perhaps makes it less creepy/more age-appropriate.) She was, uhhh, always a gifted performer, and I wish she'd work more outside of the adult biz...

lester1/2jr

#4401
Traci Lords has what today is called "resting b***hface" a kind of perpetual sneer. She was never marketed as a "barely legal" type porn actress. She looked, especially with her mature figure, like she was like 25. It's no wonder she was able to fool people, at least for a while.

edit: or maybe just "ethnic looking"?

Dr. Whom

Badland Hunters/Hwang-ya (2024)

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where water has become scarce, survivors also have to face marauding gangs. Yet there is one apartment building that is still standing and where a new civilisation is being built. A girl is invited in, but it turns out to be a trap.

This is mad scientist movie, Fury Road style. Nothing we haven't seen before, but well executed and entertainingly done. The villain's arc is better than most, and you have Ma Dong-Seok/Don Lee bulldozing his way through dozens of goons.
Nothing exceptional, but very watchable.
"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor."

Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.

FatFreddysCat

"Rock N Roll High School" (1979)
Teenage rocker Riff Randall (P.J. Soles) leads her fellow students at Vince Lombardi High in an uprising against the school's new fascist, music-hating principal (Mary Woronov) with a little help from the Ramones -- and some high explosives. 
I just finished reading "I Want You Around," a book about the making of this movie, which is one of my all time favorite films, so naturally I had to re-visit it for the millionth time. I am pretty sure that I've seen "Rock N Roll High School" more times in my life than any other movie.
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"

M.10rda

#4404
That Korean film sounds great and I am always up for another viewing of R'N'RHS, but instead I watched...

ROPE (1948):
You probably know the plot even if you've never seen it (as I did). A Leopold & Loeb-esque pair get a little too cocky by murdering a victim immediately before their classy dinner party, even (intentionally) leaving the body literally under the noses of their guests. Unfortunately one of their guests is Jimmy Stewart, so you know he'll figure things out!

Formally speaking, ROPE works very nicely, though its 8 long tracking shots are less ostentatious today and pretty much just allow the viewer to forget about them and focus on the suspense, mostly generated from the arrangement of moving and non-moving bodies in the contained space. Pulling it off was a notorious headache for Hitch and company, though, and it took Truffaut to convince Hitch and critics that ROPE was actually ahead of its time and worth the trouble. For all its technical challenges, I couldn't help but wish Hitch had also taken a little more care w/ the screenplay (which is credited to Hume Cronyn (!) and Arthur Laurents, both of whom also should've known better). It works just fine for the most part, except for one problem - the ending - which is, you know, pretty important.

Okay, so the studio wanted Cary Grant, not Jimmy, who had yet to bounce back from the colossal bomb that was IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  :lookingup: Jimmy has some fun dialogue making light of how much the patrician class luuuuvs Cary Grant... anyway, Stewart was the right man for the role in any case as his character is kind of a misanthropic weirdo who essentially (though unwittingly) has inspired the murderers to murder, so it marks a nice segue from his pre-IAWF career as a wholesome Midwestern guy next door through the (very) dark IAWL and then into Stewart's next two famously weird roles for Hitch. And Jimmy is a perfectly misanthropic weird guy... except the entire conflict is premised on Will Jimmy get wise to the murderers? (SPOILERS here, I guess, if you care) And naturally we know the answer to that question is "Yes". So there are then four possible ways that the situation can resolve itself: 1.) The murderers can kill Jimmy. (Never!) 2.) Jimmy can kill the murderers. (Unlikely but not impossible.) 3.) Jimmy can be impressed and agree to help the murderers cover up their crime. (A dark weird twist but very much within the Hitchcockian wheelhouse.) Or 4.) Jimmy can have a dark moment of the soul where he realizes that his edgelord rhetoric has had unforeseen consequences and can repent and see that the murderers are brought to justice. Okay, now more *************SPOILERS************
...It's #4, pretty obviously, and that would be okay as long as Jimmy literally spends a moment, or two lines of dialogue, expressing his horror at the crime, then gets the gears of justice moving. Unfortunately, Hitch, Cronyn, and Laurents decided he needed a good solid minute or more of soliloquizing so not even the dumbest member of the audience could conclude that James Stewart was actually even a little bit okay with murder.  :lookingup:  :bluesad: Yeah, it's about a minute, but it's the last minute of an 83-minute film, and it's the wrong last minute. Endings count! ...Double or triple or quadruple, maybe.

3/5
Farley Granger plays the Sub in the L/L relationship and he's okay. The Dom, however, is terrific - played by a guy named John Dall who mostly did theatre and very little film, though he was Olivier's little buddy Marcus Publius the war hero in SPARTACUS, which I started watching around the holidays and will get back to when I have 3 more hours...

Rev. Powell

NICKEL BOYS (2024): At the dawn of the civil rights movement, two black boys are sent to "the Nickel," a notorious segregated reform school in Florida. The film's highly experimental impulses--switching first person perspectives, nonlinear interludes, mild surrealism--enliven what might otherwise be an overly-familiar story, although they can also make the ambitious tale disorienting and difficult to follow. 3.5/5.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

RCMerchant

Supernatural?...perhaps. Baloney?...Perhaps not!" Bela Lugosi-the BLACK CAT (1934)
Interviewer-"Does Dracula ever end for you?
Lugosi-"No. Dracula-never ends."
Slobber, Drool, Drip!
https://www.tumblr.com/ronmerchant

M.10rda

#4407
I might... not return to ROPE. Life is short... then again, I rewatched LES DIABOLIQUES (1953) for the first time since college, and... shouldn't have! I like WAGES OF FEAR just fine and think Henri Clouzot is interesting, but LES DIABOLIQUES... doesn't work! It's slow, predictable, and Simone Signoret is not hot and not interesting to watch. Vera Clouzot is both attractive and interesting, so Henri obv knew what was up in terms of wifey material, but I dunno why he had to cast Signoret other than maybe she was sleeping with another producer or something? Anyway, won't bother reviewing this one, but I moved on from it to a first time viewing of Clouzot's earlier, long-buried

LE CORBEAU/THE RAVEN (1943):
...Which is often called a horror movie but isn't and has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe. An anonymous "poison pen" author terrorizes a small French town with an onslaught of vicious muckraking letters which prompt much scandal and eventually suicide and finally murder. That's a fun premise that remains timely (the Circleville Letters, "Gossip Girl", "Bridgerton") but though it's much better written than LES DIABOLIQUES and mostly beautifully acted, it finally ends up demonstrating the familiar plotholes and pratfalls of countless thrillers that would follow it.

Okay, Pierre Fresnay from GRAND ILLUSION is a shadowy surgeon who gets the brunt of a lot of the letters, and the primary suspects include his chilly blonde mistress, her RBF-suffering spinster sister, and two other cute teenage sisters w/ crushes on Fresnay, one of whom Fresnay finally obliges w/ a roll in the hay or two! (LE CORBEAU is rather spicey, with a lot of seduction and extra-marital bed-hopping plus extensive discussion of abortion, which maybe was why it was taken out of circulation for many decades.) At times even Fresnay himself comes under suspicion for authoring the letters, but in the final 15 minutes you will get whiplash from the amount of times Fresnay's eyes bug out as he declares a variation on "...So it was actually [insert female suspect's name here], I should've known!" ...before quickly being fed yet another delicious red herring. LE CORBEAU carries on way too long to support these over-elaborate machinations... IMDB and Wiki say 93 minutes but my Criterion disk here clocked in at over 2 hours, maybe as a result of restoration. It gets quite tiresome in spite of the classy direction and acting, and by the time you receive the final of countless "twists", it barely registers as a shrug as it was telegraphed 10+ minutes earlier. All those sound like pretty typical mystery movie shortcomings, yet the real clincher is a perennial howler that has plagued endless genre films since, and LE CORBEAU might be the first noteworthy appearance I can think of.......

SPOILERS if you're ever going to watch this... third-billed Pierre Larquey steals the film repeatedly as a quirky old psychiatrist who is an expert in handwriting and poison pen outbreaks, and is the (apparently) tolerant husband of Fresnay's mistress and the ex-boyfriend of the mistress' grumpous of a sister and provides Fresnay with all necessary evidence to suspect the mistress at the film's climax....... and even has been present near "the scene of the crime" on one or more occasion... and yet because he is such a lovable daffy old coot, no other character even once accuses Larquey until it is unequivocal in the final moments that he's the culprit. Ahhhh it's the hoary old "ostentatious supporting performance that appears entirely tangential to the central mystery" , the gamey leg of many a mystery/thriller, and I almost fell for it this time, too....... but I did catch on well before Fresnay catches on! .......Which is inexcuseable in a canonical title by a reputed master of suspense such as Clouzot.

Still he invented a lot of genre tropes, including many of the bad ones, so props to him.
3/5
Plus his wife was fiiiiiiine.

RCMerchant

^ It's certainly not one of my favorite Hitchcock films... PSYCHO, the BIRDS, and NORTH BY NORTHWEST are much better, but it's interesting. As for LES FDIABOLIQUE- I enjoyed it, but I feel it's overrated. Now, the WAGES OF FEAR- there's a movie!
Supernatural?...perhaps. Baloney?...Perhaps not!" Bela Lugosi-the BLACK CAT (1934)
Interviewer-"Does Dracula ever end for you?
Lugosi-"No. Dracula-never ends."
Slobber, Drool, Drip!
https://www.tumblr.com/ronmerchant

FatFreddysCat

"Hickey & Boggs" (1972)
Robert Culp and Bill Cosby are two down-on-their-luck P.I.'s who are hired to find a missing woman. Their investigation gets them mixed up in several murders and the search for a stash of bank-robbery loot.
The two stars try hard but "Hickey & Boggs" is an overlong, muddled crime drama with too much talking and not enough action. It *is* kind of odd to see Cos playing a bad-ass tough-guy, and the '70s L.A. locations are a cool time capsule, but overall this really wasn't worth the time. Skip it.
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"