Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

Rev. Powell, I never knew about the Brando/Kubrick western. Did it never happen or did Kubrick leave the project? I like THE APPALOOSA (starring Marlon) but it's tricky to imagine it beginning life as a Kubrick film. (Never seen MISSOURI BREAKS.)

Google's A.I. summary: "There's no completed Stanley Kubrick western, but he was set to direct Marlon Brando's 'One-Eyed Jacks', fired due to clashes with Brando, who then directed it himself."

Ah that makes sense. I need to see that 1, too. Thanks!

[FatFreddysCat]

Fast Freddy's Cat - which is better Detroit Rock City or Record City?

Haha! "Detroit" and its not even close!

[indianasmith]

SKY SHARKS (2020) - Nazi zombies emerge from a secret lab hidden under arctic ice for 75 years, riding flying sharks and attacking aircraft worldwide.  An incomprehensible mess, like a SyFy original with a few nude scenes thrown in, couldn't hold my interest enough for me to stay awake. 2/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"Linda Lovelace's Loose Lips: The Last Interview" (2013)
Punk journalist Legs McNeil recorded the final interview with "Deep Throat" star turned anti-porn feminist Linda Lovelace prior to her death in 2002. Linda's often bizarre life story is interspersed with comments from former co-stars and associates, as well as vintage video clips and photos. An intriguing portrait about a complex, sometimes divisive figure in movie history.

[M.10rda]

Perhaps my experience with ARABESQUE is similar to that of people who sincerely enjoyed Soderbergh's OCEANS TWELVE, a film with a similar imploding plot twist. I hated OCEANS TWELVE for it but I can't find it in my heart to dislike ARABESQUE.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (2007):
An accidental/impromptu rewatch, following my (vintage, 20+ year old) hot take on OCEAN'S TWELVE. My initial hot take on THIRTEEN was that it was the best of the three SoderReboots - like many of my hottest takes, not a popular one. The thing about such takes is that they often bear revisiting for a more balanced/objective evaluation. If my argument was that THIRTEEN is superior to TWELVE because TWELVE's plot makes absolutely no sense, then yes - THIRTEEN is better than TWELVE. I could decorate my Mom's Christmas tree and still pay sufficient attention to THIRTEEN to make sense of it. That said, it ain't great.

George Clooney and his original ten guys are joined by Andy Garcia (returning bad guy from ELEVEN) and... I think that's it, no idea who the thirteenth team member would be, maybe Eddie Izzard, who appears briefly on occasion and looks suspicious though his cameos have no clear impact on the action. Al Pacino amusingly plays a lightly veiled version of Donald Trump from an era when all we knew about Trump was that he seemed like a dyspeptic and not particularly classy guy who owned real estate and had very silly hair.  But there's no bad reason to attack and defeat a Trumplike villain. Ellen Barkin (Pacino's love interest from SEA OF LOVE) plays his right-hand woman, looks incredible, and gives a fun performance, though it's inescapably problematic that she is the only significant female character and her primary job is to look sexy and be gullible. Most of the Ocean crew are (always) fun to watch, but it's Coolest Man In Hollywood Brad Pitt that walks away with every scene he's in (as he did in the previous two movies). Unfortunately again, though, Soderbergh decided to give Matt Damon the most screen time in this one, and Matt Damon is simply no Brad Pitt.

3/5
This was pleasant but something of a drag in five(!)-minute increments interrupted perpetually by equally long blocks of commercials. I would never watch a film I actually wanted to pay attention to in this fashion. How did we do it in the 80s?!

OCEAN'S ELEVEN started immediately after THIRTEEN ended (rather counterintuitively). My grudge against this one upon release was that it relied entirely too much on (contrived, artificial or non-existent) chemistry between George Clooney (who I had yet to warm to) and Julia Roberts (who I have progressively disliked in this century). The first forty-five minutes, being Roberts-free and focusing on Clooney and Pitt recruiting their entertaining ensemble, is a good time, however. Then Roberts showed up and I finally changed the channel.

[lester1/2jr]

A Daughter's Plan to Kill (2019) - This is a dumb movie that doesn't take it's various elements, put them together, and become something truly remarkable. Does NOT. With that out of the way, I did sort of enjoy it for it's extreme predictability and preposterousness.

A witchy looking girl with an appealing Claudia Schiffer style gap toothed situation is welcomed into her Dad's new family with loving arms, only to quickly drive them apart/ try to destroy them all the time. Deadly Dilf did this better, but there's lots of funny/ absurd "Why would they be doing this?" sort of stuff and the director clearly knows it.

In one scene, they're having a breath holding contest in the pool when the new sister starts to hold the other sister's leg causing her to lose. She comes to the surface and says to the other swimmers "did you see that?" and they are like "you were underwater, how could we see?". Meanwhile, they are in like 3 feet of water. You think to yourself "If I were in this family, I would dedicate my life to exposing her plot." Really though, if you were in this family you'd be too stupid to do anything except sit there and take it.


charitable 4/5

On the one hand, every single thing the daughter says and does is evil. On the other, she did remind me of a college room mate I had, so there's kind of a truth to all of it.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys" (2004)
The great-grandson of the original Puppet Master (Corey Feldman!) uses his little friends to battle a crazed toy maker (Vanessa Angel) who plans to unleash hordes of lethal playthings on Christmas morning. Ultra cheap made for Sci-Fi Channel production, has some charming stop motion FX but the rest is blah.

[M.10rda]

JAY KELLY (2025):
The fact that we watched this brand new, (apparently) quite expensive, star-studded, Oscar-baiting, holiday season "crowd"-pleaser on Netflix must only be seen as spelling the inevitable and possibly more-impending-than-I'd-thought doom of movie theaters. Maybe it's playing in some theater somewhere, however it isn't playing in any theaters in the WNY (Buffalo) region, and it doesn't appear as if any other films with stars the caliber of Clooney or Sandler are playing in those theaters. At the very least Netflix is clearly trying to kill movie theaters, and this seems like a "critical hit" in role-playing terms if not cinema terms. (Maybe cinema terms too, reviews seem mostly effusive.) So that sucks - though we watched it too, so I'm part of the problem.

I guess I've seen at least half of Noah Baumbach's films and while I admire parts of all of those I've seen, I've also disliked each one overall. JAY KELLY is clearly the best Baumbach-directed film I've seen. (He did co-write THE LIFE AQUATIC, a film I love but a film with long melodramatic dialogue scenes like a Baumbach movie and little of the swift economy heard in Wes Anderson films not co-written by Baumbach, most obviously the snappy and still profound RUSHMORE.) JAY KELLY doesn't indulge in gratuitous or cheap sadism towards its characters, like say THE SQUID AND THE WHALE; it doesn't engage in profligate perambulation around its central conflict and fritter away its viewers' time, like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING; and it never catastrophically leaves the rails, as WHITE NOISE certainly did. JAY KELLY is a handsome, confident film (like its title character and the star that plays him) which generally hews towards conservative choices... somewhat unlike Clooney, who has participated in the pedestrian projects of others and then used the capital on his own often-unprofitable but more interesting (and often leftist) projects. There is some artistry to JAY KELLY though its mostly of the tasteful and understated variety that wouldn't confound home viewers in the fly-over states. (I guess I imagine fans of the OCEANS franchise rather than fans of the sort of dense surrealism that WHITE NOISE was aspiring towards.)

So all of that is to acknowledge that I like JAY KELLY but it's hard for me to get really excited about JAY KELLY. The hoary tale of JAY KELLY recalls JERRY MAGUIRE and THE PLAYER, with stakes higher than the frivolous MAGUIRE (I mean, who really cares if Tom Cruise finds love?) and lower yet more compelling than Altman's glib, hollow PLAYER. KELLY kind of also completes a trilogy of films that, with UP IN THE AIR and THE DESCENDANTS, celebrate the deep existential questing of one George Clooney, Exceptionally Attractive Man. It's inherently challenging for me to commit to such a premise, hence my apathy for JERRY MAGUIRE; I hated UP IN THE AIR and it took me most of DESCENDANTS' long running time to warm up to it. I never really cared about Clooney's Jay Kelly, either, but at least I was willing to give the film my patient benefit of doubt. There is ultimately authentic human drama in this film - somewhat movingly between Kelly and his long-time manager (played by Sandler) and between Kelly and his estranged adult daughter (played by Riley Keough). Also I commend the film for not giving Jay Kelly a pass at the end because he's simply such an iconic movie stud. The final moments and final shot are respectful of the audience's intelligence and of the humanity of the characters around Kelly who have had to suffer his oblivious behavior - that's more than some similar films would bother to do.

There are about three things in this well-made film that don't work for me at all. The biggest are the scenes with Sandler and the great Laura Dern, which sound like they were scribbled hastily on train napkins on-location in Europe when it was discovered that Dern was available for a few days of shooting. The quality of dialogue (credited to Baumbach and, oddly, another great actress Emily Mortimer) plummets particularly in the scene where Dern exits the film. My wife was also quite upset by Baumbach's apparent ignorance about how peanut allergies work (the allergy is introduced as relevant in these Dern-centric scenes and then no one behaves accordingly). Finally, Baumbach tries for some looser, more stylized flourishes towards the end - at a film festival rave and in the woods at night - and those fall really flat.

I did appreciate the casting! Among others, we get #thegreat Stacy Keach cast brilliantly as Kelly's dad and #thegreat Jim Broadbent used beautifully as Kelly's mentor. Broadbent's under-celebrated fellow Brit Lenny Henry shows up as well in a short yet powerful flashback, and I liked the young, rather offbeat actress who plays Kelly's younger daughter. Co-screenwriter Mortimer appears briefly in the periphery of some scenes and then is never seen again after (apparently) being picked up by French President Emmanuel Macron, who I thought was married.

3.5/5
Baumbach's own current wife and former (?) co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig also appears occasionally as Sandler's wife. I dunno, I'm just speaking as a highly committed monogamous-minded kind of guy, but if I was Greta Gerwig (who co-starred in Baumbach's GREENBERG with GREENBERG co-screenwriter/former Mrs. Baumbach Jennifer Jason Leigh) I would be nervous about my husband writing screenplays with other women. I mean I suppose Greta Gerwig could rationalize that Emily Mortimer is no Greta Gerwig, but then if we're being perfectly frank Greta Gerwig is no Jennifer Jason Leigh.

[M.10rda]

Also, let's talk about that opening tracking shot! It's fine. Madame and I briefly watched the "Making of" featurette after the movie and it focuses on that tracking shot. I was quickly confused by the doc and thought I'd misheard some information. Nope - it took five weeks for Baumbach to set up and execute that shot. Now I - as a failed filmmaker who has never been lucky enough to enjoy many millions of dollars nor the participation of movie stars like Sandler, who appears quite impatient with Baumbach during the doc - thought to myself, How long would it take me to set up and shoot this opening? After a few seconds of reflection, I decided it would take me maybe a day or a day and a half. But maybe that's unfair or ignorant of me. So I did a little Googling:

* The tracking shot in TOUCH OF EVIL took five hours to set up and shoot. Five hours.

* Just to pull another random famous tracking shot from a famous film - the tracking shot through the nightclub in GOODFELLAS was set up and shot first thing in the morning. Scorsese got it in the can by lunch. Three hours!

* It's been at least twenty years since I watched RUSSIAN ARK but as soon as that ended I watched its making-of doc. IIRC they may have rehearsed that 90-minute tracking shot for something like five weeks - as you would with a play - but then that poor Russian camera op, God bless his soul, strapped on that huge DV rig and shot the whole thing twice - back to back. So... 90-minute tracking shot... executed in under three and a half hours.

Baumbach = five weeks for five minutes.

Now JAY KELLY is the best Baumbach film I've seen, yeah, and it's a good movie. But it ain't, like - Kubrick... or TOUCH OF EVIL or RUSSIAN ARK. Thus based on the above, I still maintain:

Noah Baumbach is triflin', yo.         (Adam Sandler appears to agree.)

[M.10rda]

Final post on this...  The joke is partially on this smart guy right here, who can't even get a movie's title right when he spends half an hour writing about the movie and mentions that title 25 times. On the other hand, I guess that speaks to the deep impact the character and film had on me, if the character's name/film's title is mentioned hundreds of times and it still didn't stick with me!

[chainsaw midget]

Silent Night Deadly Night.  (The original.  Haven't seen the new one yet.)

Probably the bleakest Christmas horror movie out there.

As a little child, Billy goes to visit his (apparently) catatonic grandfather.  However as soon as the rest of the family leaves the room, his grandfather comes to life and warns Billy about how Santa Clause punishes naughty people and that if you se Santa, you better run for your life. 

Just a little while later, Billy's family happens to get murdered by a man dressed as Santa and his mother raped and murdered. 

He grows up in an orphanage showing some massive signs of trauma and is repeatedly punished by the Mother Superior and made to take part in Christmas activities when it's obvious to everyone that he really doesn't want to and really needs some deep psychiatric help. 

Much later, a grown Billy get a job working at a toy store, where he's made by the boss to fill in as their store Santa.  This leads him to go on a bloody rampage punishing people that have been "naughty." 

This is a horribly mean spirited movie where you can't help but feel bad for the guy that's chopping people up with an axe.  It seems like everybody around him makes the absolute worst mistakes and uses the worst words and phrases possible in any given situation, yet it never stops feeling real.  It almost has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre gritty psuedo documentary style to the filming. 

Definitely a must see, if you've never watched it before.  It's certain to get you into that holiday mood!