Someone should make this
L’ART ET LA MANIERE DE PLIER UN TEE - ALL TRIBES HOT STUFFS
And give it to us as a wedding present, along with a CD of the accompanying music.
Beetle Juice
This has been buggin me for quite some time. Do you know about the cochineal and the carmine? No one ever believes me.
Hitch (2005)
We watched this the other day, but I haven’t got around to posting about it, so why not now?
I had misgivings going in, given the recent Will Smith track record, and I’m not talking about Willennium.
(I’m really trying to make this bulleted list start below the picture. So far I have not been successful. Maybe if I add a bit more text here? Okay, that works on my machine. Your mileage may vary. Offer not valid in Tennessee.)
Here’s the last seven movies he’s done prior to Hitch:
- Shark Tale
- I, Robot
- Bad Boys II
- Men in Black II
- Ali
- The Legend of Bagger Vance
- Wild Wild West
Will (I feel like I can call him Will) was pretty good as Mohammed Ali, but it wasn’t a great movie. When We Were Kings (which Will had nothing to with) had 100 times the heart and emotional depth. Okay, so Ali was mediocre, but not awful. Can anyone dissuade me from the notion that all of the rest of those movies are jaw-droppingly bad?
So yeah, misgivings. But I gotta say, I wasn’t as un-entertained as I thought I would be. Will is a nice mix of stud and doofus, and completely likable. His movie is sort of a dude’s version of Emma-meets-Clueless, if you can imagine such a creature. There’s also a soupçon of Cyrano de Bergerac in this story of the matchmaker for hire who isn’t as smooth at making his own matches.
Make no mistake, this film is total fluff, and it has its problems. In what world does accountant Kevin James end up with heiress socialite Amber Valletta? The world of implausible romantic comedies, that’s where. The speed dating thing at the end seems like it belongs with another movie, say How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a lesser variation on the same theme.
Links:
- Hitch: Amazon | IMDb
- Shark Tale: Amazon | IMDb
- I, Robot: Amazon | IMDb
- Bad Boys II: Amazon | IMDb
- Men in Black II: Amazon | IMDb
- Ali: Amazon | IMDb
- The Legend of Bagger Vance: Amazon | IMDb
- Wild Wild West: Amazon | IMDb
- Emma: Amazon | IMDb
- Clueless: Amazon | IMDb
- How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: Amazon | IMDb
Today I read a short story
Here’s Isaac Asimov talking about The Last Question, first published in 1956:
This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won’t tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything — and I’m satisfied that it should.
Dressed to Kill (1980)
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.
Happy Endings (2005)
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.
The Outsider (1951)
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.
Death Metal Five-Year-Old
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.
Christine (1983)
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.
