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Recent Viewings, Part 2

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

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FatFreddysCat

"The Aristocrats" (2005)
Dozens of stand-up comics discuss a particularly infamous filthy showbiz joke that comedians have been telling each other backstage for decades, each adding more disturbing details and putting their own particular spins on the joke, while trying to explain its mysterious staying power. Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame co-produced this documentary about a gag that was, until recently, a showbiz secret amongst stand-ups until Gilbert Gottfried broke it into the mainstream during his appearance at Hugh Hefner's celebrity roast. Some of the participants include George Carlin, Lisa Lampinelli, Paul Reiser, Bob Saget, Jackie "The Joke Man" Martling, the writing staff of "The Onion," Don Rickles, Pat Cooper, and many more. Hilariously filthy and fun!
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"

M.10rda

That was a fun movie the one time I caught it in the theaters. I thought Sarah Silverman stole the show via going in a different direction altogether w/ the format.

ACROSS 110TH STREET (1972):
For some reason I always thought this was a, errr, serious  :lookingup: crime melodrama, maybe because of top-billed Anthony Quinn, who was, like, a legit prestigious actor... right? As it turns out, it is generally considered part of the early 70s Blaxploitation wave, and in plenty of regards it fits that mold. It starts with a lot of bangs, ends like a forest on fire, and in between it's ludicrous and cheesy at times, and classy and thoughtful at others, so really it's all over the map... of Harlem!

Two African American patrolmen knock on the door of a mob pick-up of the black-run ghetto numbers racket. Hmmm, funny thing though, that one patrolman's got a submachine gun and an itchy trigger finger...  dozens of 9mm rounds later, the two uniformed dudes are jumping in wheelman Antonio Fargas' junker with a bag full of cash and taking wild shots at real police officers. Who will get them first? The Harlem racketeers? The Italian mafioso from uptown? Or mismatched detectives Quinn and Yaphet Kotto? Or will the shady trio escape NYC with the loot? (Probably not.)

This is practically three movies, stapled together with clunky industrial sutures. One is a snappy middlebrow suspense/action flick mostly centered on junior Capo Anthony Franciosa struggling with the scummy yet engaging Harlem boss "Doc Johnson" and his thugs as they both get closer to the thieves. The second is a weirdly understated and moving character melodrama, where you realize the initially unlikeable, vicious trigger men have their reasons for their wild act of violence, and those reasons are pretty compelling. The third film is the weakest - the Old Racist White Cop hackling at the progressive (or just by the book) attitudes of his new Enlightened Black Partner/Superior. That's the hoariest old chestnut today but even in '72 it was five years on from IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. Both Quinn's character and Kotto's (who is obviously supposed to be Mr. Tibbs in New York) are written broadly, and then both (fine) actors are allowed to holler and mug to their heart's content instead of being directed to fill in the hacky dialogue w/ any kind of nuance. It's pretty tiresome.

Also, there are a few weird plotholes that might be the result of cuts, reshoots, or just sloppy post-production. The weirdest involves Fargas (immortal essayer of both "Huggy Bear" and "Fly Guy") who at the end of one scene is in the clutches of Franciosa (who presumably intends to do away with him) and then immediately in the next scene is in the back of an ambulance with a shouty Quinn and Kotto yet without any explanation of how he got there. Then, on the other hand, there's a beautifully shot and mixed scene of an interrogation in an auto garage. And then on the third hand there's the last ten minutes, which is just very lightly controlled chaos (bullet-riddled bodies falling out windows, actors tussling unsafely on rooftops, fiery explosions and burning stuntmen) about which absolutely no exploitation fan could ever complain (including this one).

Basically then it's a pretty good time at the Grindhouse!
3/5
But I do regret that the version of the famous theme song is an alternate recording from the masterful one that plays at the end of JACKIE BROWN.

RCMerchant

^I have that on VHS tape! Unfortuantly I haven't had a vhs player in years.
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

RCMerchant

#4413
SECRET LOVE LIFE OF THE INVISIBLE MAN (1973) aka DR.ORLOFF'S INVISIBLE MONSTER

Why do I do this to myself?
Dr. Orloff aka Howerd Vernon controls an Invisible Man, whose love life amounts to raping a servant girl; which is basically watching a naked chick writhe on the floor-ya know- cuz he's an invisible man. Oops- I mean gorilla. Or a man in a ratty gorilla suit. Who the f**k knows what or why. It's a Jess Franco film, who did the great the AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (1962) and the DIABOLICAL DR. Z (1966) and didn't make a decipherable movie again.
Yikes.
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

LOL, I was slowly working my way through the (4?) ORLOFFs and that one will be next. I'm sure you're correct that it's terrible, but honestly you had me at "ratty gorilla suit"!  :bouncegiggle:

M.10rda

WICKED PART 1 (2024):
We intended to go see this @ a real theater but have been working too much to like the idea of spending two and three-quarters hours stuck in a movie we didn't enjoy, so streamed it instead. Now I regret our decision - this looked gorgeous at home and would've looked even better on a big screen.

I like musicals when they're done well, and the musical sequences in this are handled very very well, but even if you don't like musicals I think you could make it through WICKED w/ minimal irritation. It's equal parts WIZARD OF OZ fanfic, HARRY POTTER pastiche, and Marvel superhero movie, though all executed with a criticality more akin to that seen in GAME OF THRONES, but w/ a PG-ish rating. (There is, pleasingly, a lot of polymorphous queerness, though it's all implicit and presumably hasn't spooked those prissy Chinese censors.) The songs (and the staging of those songs) more or less propel the story w/ only a little bit of "let's stop the show for ____ seconds to watch people dance" shenanigans. There are two back-to-back numbers that function in that way, but the first one is an eye-popper involving what I think is an enormous gimbal in a library, so that was cool. The next scene takes place at a Oztralian dance party, but when the well-oiled cinematic action stops dead for a few moments, it's not for mindless choreography but instead for the film's least easily digestible set-piece, a dance-floor confrontation between the film's leads that momentarily makes the audience - and all the other characters in the scene - veeeeeeery confused and uncomfortable, before resolving, sort of, into a sublime kind of detente. It's the highlight of the film.

I'm averse to hype and so I never saw "Wicked" produced onstage. I did begin to read the book many years ago, then stopped pretty quickly. Mme.10rda is a big fan of the book and was extremely pleased w/ how the musical was supplemented w/ more characterization and backstory from the original source material. Most theatre folks I know seem to dislike the movie, complaining that there's too much added to the stage version's first act. I dunno - yeah, the movie's 165 minutes (which is the length of the entire stage version) but it never felt slow to me and every single moment felt necessary and earned. In fact, I suspect that when I finally see "Wicked" onstage, I'll find it hurried and underdeveloped, and I'll miss all the bits that were added to this film. What's more, I got to the very end of this "PART 1" and felt confident that I'd seen an entire, very satisfying dramatic narrative... so my primary criticism, perhaps, is that right now I see little point in the inevitable second act/"Part 2"!

4.5/5
I think this is the only 2025 Best Picture nominee I've seen. FWIW I enjoyed it more than OPPENHEIMER!

lester1/2jr

#4416
Second Woman (1950) - Solid plot, but there are much more colorful and memorable noir sort of films out there. It has some of that "40's starting to become the 60's" energy where people have modernist paintings in their lake house drawing rooms and so forth, like they still wear suits everywhere but have heard about marijuana and orgies.


3.25/ 5

M.10rda

#4417
Quote from: RCMerchant on January 29, 2025, 05:00:13 AMSECRET LOVE LIFE OF THE INVISIBLE MAN (1973) aka DR.ORLOFF'S INVISIBLE MONSTER
Why do I do this to myself?
Dr. Orloff aka Howerd Vernon controls an Invisible Man, whose love life amounts to raping a servant girl; which is basically watching a naked chick writhe on the floor-ya know- cuz he's an invisible man. Oops- I mean gorilla. Or a man in a ratty gorilla suit. Who the f**k knows what or why. It's a Jess Franco film, who did the great the AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (1962) and the DIABOLICAL DR. Z (1966) and hasn't made a decipherable movie since.
Yikes.
Quote from: M.10rda on January 29, 2025, 08:27:31 AMLOL, I was slowly working my way through the (4?) ORLOFFs and that one will be next. I'm sure you're correct that it's terrible, but honestly you had me at "ratty gorilla suit"!  :bouncegiggle:

Of course, instead of just watching DR. ORLOFF'S INVISIBLE MONSTER, my OCD had me waste time returning to the original AWFUL DR. ORLOF, just in case I hadn't watched it correctly the first time. (RCM did call it "great" but I remember it just being decent.) Mental illness is a terrible thing! O the life I could lead if only I could stand to be medicated!

Well, in the past 15-ish years I've watched AWFUL DR. O, THE SECRET OF DR. ORLOFF aka DR. ORLOFF'S MONSTER aka THE MISTRESSES OF DR. JEKYLL, THE SADISTIC DR. BARON VON KLAUS, THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z, and also THE HORRIBLE DR. HITCHCOCK, which might not be Franco? I dunno. Anyway, I remember DR. JEKYLL and DR. Z very clearly and the rest have sort of just faded into a vague gray blur. I don't think my brain is completely to blame. THE AWFUL DR. O is shot on the same locations as DR. JEKYLL and has more or less the same plot as, uhhh, all of them!

I know a lot of critics - RCM included - favor Franco's early B+W "serious" films, and it's true that he put more effort into things like character and dialogue and continuity editing (though there are lapses), but as those early "serious" ones go, this first ORLOF is less interesting and memorable than those later two I mentioned. It does have that bug-eyed weirdo Morpho and it does have Howard Vernon, who... isn't a great actor, honestly, though he became more affable as he grew into his dotty elder years in the 1970s. It also has bare breasts in short passages - one a surgery scene where Vernon starts to slit a poor girl w/ a scalpel up the sternum (pretty graphic for '62!) and a later close-up shot where Morpho mashes a dancer's tits for a long 5+ seconds. These two instances (which do enliven the flick) suggest a sort of origin story for the rest of Franco's career. You can almost hear a phantom director's commentary of Franco circa 1962 saying Wow, those tits are really great! I must admit, those tits might be the highlight of this entire film...! You know what would be nice? If Cinema could just be ALL tits, and none of the boring parts that I'm obligated to include around the tits... hmmm, think of it... films that are ALL TITS... and slow zooms into BUSH!

Alas I don't think it's a great film and I think he made better ones even in the 70s! SPOILER for one funny (bad) part at the end: The cop points his pistol at Morpho, who is standing at the edge of a tower balcony w/ the cop's girlfriend in his arms, then lowers the pistol and says "I can't take the shot, it's too risky!" or something. Then he raises the pistol again and shoots Morpho anyway! A dumb-looking stuffed Morpho falls off the tower. The girlfriend survives. Ehh, it was a judgment call!

M.10rda

#4418
SATURDAY NIGHT (2024):
The guy who plays Lorne Michaels takes about an hour to begin to seem remotely plausible as Lorne Michaels - hey, we've been spoiled after decades of celebrities doing his voice - but all the other famous folks are at least good enough. "Garrett Morris" is outstanding (I think he's played by Garrett's real son or grandson), Tom Dewey is a compelling Mike O'Donahughe, and Rachel Sennett (from BOTTOMS) is very compelling as Rosie Shuster, Lorne's wife, a figure I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of, though she seems to have been instrumental in this origin story. Nicholas Braun ("Succession") is passable (and uncredited) as Andy Kaufman, but pretty darn funny (and credited) in a second role as Jim Henson. Willem Dafoe (of course) is the evil network executive. The film is stolen however by the always magnificent JK Simmons, who is a more perfect Milton Berle than Berle ever was.

As docudrama, SATURDAY NIGHT is a little suspicious: some parts seem conflated or obviously injected from later SNL history, and others are almost certainly manufactured. But as myth-spinning, it's effective. It's also occasionally a funny comedy in its own right. But most of all, SATURDAY NIGHT succeeds as a tense and entirely realistic thriller. I've done a bunch of 24 and 48 hour original productions of 10-20 minute shows - you write 'em overnight, rehearse 'em all day, and hope they hold together when the lights come up @ 7 PM. I also produce, design, and help develop and direct a 100% original 2+ hour show every summer. Teenagers write it and rehearse it for six and a half hours a day, Monday through Friday for two weeks. We get a few extra hours that second Friday, then 100 audience members show up @ 7 PM and expect to see a whole lotta' world premiere magic. Every year there's $#!t on fire, every year someone's threatening to have a breakdown or threatening to punch someone else, and some years there's even some Dafoe-esque @$$#0le trying to shut the whole thing down. I'm always reasonably convinced 90 minutes before the show that it won't happen. In other words, it's entirely like this film.

4/5
But it always happens and most years people tell us it's better than SNL.  :bouncegiggle:

FatFreddysCat

"Jolt" (2021)
Kate "Underworld" Beckinsale is Lindy, a woman with an anger-management issue so severe that she requires regular electric shocks to keep her from lashing out at everyone. She finally finds an outlet for her rage when her new boyfriend is killed by mobsters. Kate kicks a TON of bad-guy ass in this cartoonishly ultra-violent Amazon Prime original. Fast paced, bone crunching fun!
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"

FatFreddysCat

"Foul Play" (1978)
A mousy San Francisco librarian (Goldie Hawn) picks up a stranded motorist, who leaves her with something that some very bad people want to get back. Soon she's being chased all over the city by a variety of villains, and Chevy Chase is a goofy cop assigned to protect her.
A breezy comedic mystery/thriller with a great cast and some cool San Fran locations. Goldie was at her absolute peak of cuteness when she made this.
I hadn't seen this movie since I was a kid in the very early 80s when my family first got HBO, so it was fun to watch it again after so many years.
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"

Dr. Whom

Conclave (2024)

I grew up in 1970s and 1980s Belgium, which was still a very Catholic country at the time. I learned to write under the watchful eye of the portrait of Paul VI in the classroom. All this to say that, although I have lapsed beyond redemption, the whole Catholic atmosphere and ritual still resonates with me, while someone outside the tradition may feel less affinity with it.

So, the present pope has died unexpectedly, the cardinals are called to Rome and sequestered in the Vatican. The manoeuvring to elect a new pope can begin. Ralph Fiennes is the dean of the college of cardinals and has to ensure everything runs smoothly.

This is very much a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery, in which an isolated group of people have to find out what really happened, and who can be trusted. There is no actual murder, of course, but plenty of revelations, deceit and manipulation. True to the nature of the format, the plot seems to advance towards a certain outcome, and then a series of twists and reversals change everything. The ending is very contrived, and I can see that some people may find it is done purely for effect. I myself liked it. Also, you get lots of atmosphere and it is visually stunning. Very solid performances all around.




"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.

Rev. Powell

Quote from: Dr. Whom on February 04, 2025, 03:45:43 PMThe ending is very contrived, and I can see that some people may find it is done purely for effect. I myself liked it. Also, you get lots of atmosphere and it is visually stunning. Very solid performances all around.


Trying not to give spoilers, I thought it was fairly obvious that the person who would be elected Pope eventually was, and the suspense was in how he would get there. I suppose you are referring to the final twist, which was sort of meaningless, ultimately, but still thought-provoking. A very good movie overall.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

FatFreddysCat

"Maximum Overdrive" (1986)
Stephen King wrote and directed this cheese-tastic action/horror flick based on his own short story "Trucks," in which  a group of puny humans are trapped in a small town truck stop when machines suddenly become sentient and homicidal. It's awful, but in an awesome sort of way. The soundtrack by AC/DC and the performances by Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, and Yeardley (Lisa Simpson!) Smith elevate "Maximum Overdrive" to "so bad, it's good" territory.
"If you're a false, don't entry, because you'll be burned and died!"

lester1/2jr

#4424
I only saw Maximum Overdrive recently. I didn't really see it as so bad it's good? I enjoyed quite a bit, if not on the level of like The Shining.

speaking of so bad...

Dragon Wasps (2012) - The lead actress is a very cute Phish/ 3 day music festival looking Polish blonde, which is the main reason to watch this. Besides of that, it's a typical Syfy kind of thing with a science lesson worked into every 10th scene "It has the exoskeleton of a hexopod ...".

Jaguar, the jungle antagonist cannibal, is too weirdly emasculated to be a racist caricature. He seems like he's waiting for the cameras to stop rolling so he can go shopping. I've never heard of people who wantonly fire at each other, then are basically good friends later somehow. Also no clue why the highly trained mercenary guys went along with any of this, much less for free.

3.75 /5

I'd probably watch it again just for the absurdity. filmed in Belize