Archive for January, 2006
January 23, 2006 at 1:08 am · Filed under Movies
Dressed to Kill is a deeply stupid movie. Brian De Palma knows his way around a camera; it’s just a shame that that camera has to be filled with film. The wordless sequence of seduction at the museum (the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stuck in the middle of Manhattan) is terrific. It’s a whole story, told completely by images and Pino Donaggio’s score. It’s great, and it’s sandwiched by crap.
The parts that are stolen from Psycho are great, in Psycho. The opening shower scene is pretty much the definition of gratuitous, and why bother with an obvious body double?
The dialog is pretty much nonstop awful. Cringeworthy awful. I have already blocked most of it out, or I would provide examples.
The big twist is only a surprise if you haven’t seen the aforementioned Psycho.
It’s another early ’80s movie with Keith ‘Christine’ Gordon, who seems to be here to get a version of Mr. De Palma into the story. Otherwise, mostly pointless.
I’m glad Brian was tryin’ on this one. He’s reaching for greatness. It’s just that he missed, by a lot.
January 22, 2006 at 8:33 pm · Filed under Movies
This wasn’t bad, but it could have been a lot better. There’s a lot of muddled, messy relationships. Parentage is disputed, or kept secret. Nobody really loves anyone else, or maybe they do. It’s a Don Roos picture, so everyone is high-strung, with the exception of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays a femme fatale on a long con with wealthy Tom Arnold and his gayish son, who works at the restaurant of Steve Coogan, whose partner may or may not have been the sperm donor for a couple of no-sugar moms. Steve also, back in the day, fathered a child (that he doesn’t know about) with his step-sister, who grows up to be Lisa Kudrow, abortion counselor, who gets blackmailed into helping a film student make a fake documentary about a massage-therapist-as-sex-worker, so that he, the film student, will tell Kudrow the name of the baby she gave away.
I was actually with all of this complicated business for about two-thirds of the film, but it got excessive in the third act. I was also put off by the snarky titles that came up from time to time to tell us about the characters histories, as well as their fates. I don’t know; the same idea worked terrifically as voiceover in Amélie and Y Tu Mamá También. Maybe I just grow weary.
As Jessica points out, the problem with movies like this is the world is too small. Everybody’s a little too intricately related (related and related-related) with everybody else. Call it Magnolia syndrome.
Also, I admit that I don’t know how to end this review, happily or otherwise. Let’s leave it there.
January 22, 2006 at 4:07 am · Filed under Movies
You find some interesting stuff on the Comcast OnDemand at four in the morning, such as this. It’s an extremely earnest message short about a girl who doesn’t quite fit in with her peers at school. Susan Jane thinks the other kids laugh and make fun of her behind her back, but they don’t! They think she’s stuck up because she never talks to them, but she’s just shy!
This seems to have been meant to be shown in schools. There are even discussion questions at the end:
- Do you know a boy or girl like Susan Jane?
- Does your group ignore boys and girls like her?
- What can a boy or girl like Susan Jane do to make friends?
- How can the group help boys and girls like her?
This dealie is not particular good; these may be the worst child actors ever, or they are tied with Corey Feldman. It is mildly interesting because it was directed by Herk Harvey, who went on to make Carnival of Souls, the Salt Lake City horror movie from the ’60s.
The Outsider actually plays like the prologue to 13 Going On 30, a film which is much better than it should be, and which Jessica watched, rapt, while sitting on the coffee table.
I am happy to count The Outsider toward my life movie quota, which I may get around to explaining here for those who don’t already know.
It seems that you can see this film for yourself at the wonderful archive.org.
January 22, 2006 at 1:52 am · Filed under Music
Spider the Tylercore:
Too young to live, too young to die. You will die forever, never in your life. You will die forever and I will cut your skull.
Presumably, his cookie monster voice is inspired by the real thing.
January 20, 2006 at 2:18 am · Filed under Movies
It’s a ‘57 Plymouth Fury that has a(n evil) mind of its own. Again, I’m the last one to get on the (evil) bus to see this. I am (evil) sorry.
I didn’t find it particularly scary, but I mostly enjoyed it. I did find the language between the teen leads to be rather salty for the mid-1980s. I thought that was more of a ’70s thing, but the trend survived to here, at least. It is interesting to note that the main boys, Keith Gordon and John Stockwell, have had reasonable success as directors in recent years. Stockwell does surf movies like Into the Blue and Blue Crush and Blue Watery Blue Blue. Gordon has gone a bit artsier, including the latest incarnation of The Singing Detective, Waking the Dead, and the terrific Vonnegut adaptation Mother Night. The female lead, Alexandra Paul, went on to become the least-endowed woman on Baywatch.
So, the car is really really mean, and it has the ability to repair itself when it gets wrecked. The pre-digital effects that make this work are pretty cool. Apparently, they used high-power vaccums to implode the cars from the inside, and then they just reversed the footage, so the car appears to heal. The effect is kind of like how a Joan Rivers plastic surgery must be.
The movie starts and ends with George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.” Man I hate that song. I guess it sort of works here.
January 20, 2006 at 1:44 am · Filed under Movies
To celebrate the opening day at the Sundance Film Fest: Another one of those movies that everyone else saw before I did. You can’t really pretend to know anything about late-20th-century film if you haven’t seen this. Okay, up until now, I was pretending. I was a sham. I’m not anymore. Shout it from the rooftops: I know something about late-20th-century film!
So why is SLV (directed by Steven Soderbergh) important? Well, it was the first “independent” film really worthy of the sobriquet that made a big splash outside of the festival circuit, and sort of swooshed Sundance-the-event and Miramax-the-company into prominence on its coattails. Made for about $1 million, it grossed about $25 million at the American box office, where it was seen by everyone who aspired to know anything about late-20th-century film, present company excluded.
I knew the premise: a half-nice, half-creepy guy (James Spader, big surprise) gets off on making videotapes of women talking about their sex lives, and it ruins Andie McDowall’s marriage to Peter Gallagher. Well, Peter Gallagher ruins his own marriage by affairing with Laura San Giacomo, who happens to be Andie’s sister.
It’s a pretty nice little film; lots of intensity from the four actors, without feeling play-y. This is what Closer should have been, was trying to be, and utterly failed at.
I was really fascinated by the success of Spader’s character’s sad-sack approach to intimacy with women, rather than trying to bed them, he just asked them to tell him and his camera their most deeply-held secrets. And they did. I wonder if this would have changed my approach to romance in the ’90s if I had seen this movie way back then. It probably would have, and it’s kind of scary to contemplate.
I have always maintained that Andie MacDowall is a terrible actress who happens to show up in some darn fine movies (c.f., Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, The Player, Four Weddings and a Funeral). She’s actually fairly genuine in this; I would venture to say that the role is close to her own persona, but that’s idle speculation meant to prop up my decades-old supposition. I gotta admit, she’s good here. Of course, on the down side, SLV lead directly to Green Card…
You will note that I have capitalized this film’s title, contradicting the “official” film title. You will need to sue me, mr. soderbergh.
January 18, 2006 at 12:18 am · Filed under Movies
I had only the vaguest notion of where this phrase originated until I caught this film on the TCM tonight. God is not really anybody’s actual co-pilot here; the WWII fighters that Col. Robert Lee Scott flies are strictly single-seaters. But Scott (played by a non-descript Dennis Morgan who eerily anticipates Bob Crane’s irascible Klink-knocker in look and demeanor) finds religion in the skies, as he blasts the Japanese out of them.
Nothing too drastic plotwise or dialogwise here. The aerial combat footage (of which there is quite a bit), however, is stunning and entirely engaging. Watch out also for Alan Hale as the garrulous priest, eerily anticipating in look and demeanor his son, The Skipper.
January 17, 2006 at 11:15 pm · Filed under Fun
Here’s an image-stabilized GIF of that famous “bigfoot” footage from the days of yore. It becomes much easier to see it’s a guy in a Chewbacca suit.
January 17, 2006 at 11:02 pm · Filed under Fun
This is only funny if you’ve ever played Zork or something similar. I realize this eliminates everyone under 30 and over 40, and most of the rest of you.
defective yeti: Xyzzy
January 17, 2006 at 10:01 pm · Filed under Asides
Here is a list of Google’s Highest Paying Search Terms via cyberwyre.
I confess that I do not know what mesothelioma is. Maybe I should talk to a lawyer about mesothelioma?
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