Category: movies

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #11: HOG WILD

(1930; director: James Parrott)

Looking back, I’ve spent my whole life stumbling and fumbling. I’m still alive and have all of my limbs so I guess that I haven’t done too badly, but my sharpest memories of the past are of the mistakes. The pratfalls. The goof-ups. Slipping on a banana peel and crashing into the fine china (in the figurative sense).

I’m not complaining though, because I think most of us are like that. As I write this, we just went through November elections in the USA and we’ve been watching some of the most powerful people on Earth stumble and fumble for months. No one is above it.

Stumbling and fumbling is life. Just be careful and don’t kill anyone or yourself. Don’t screw around near open flames. Say no to addictive drugs. Don’t run with scissors. Practice safe stumbling and fumbling.

Make peace with your capacity to stumble and fumble and watch your sense of humor about yourself emerge. Watch your ability to roll with life’s many punches emerge.

You might also acquire an appreciation for the genius of Laurel and Hardy, cinema’s greatest stumblers and fumblers.

We’re coming up on a hundred years since these early shorts had Depression-era audiences rolling in the aisles, but as I sit in my living room in my underwear here in the 21st century going through the 10-disc Essential Collection DVD set, I find myself relating fiercely to this madness.

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FREEWAY 2: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Director: Matthew Bright

This bizarre hidden gem has all of the odds stacked against it.

It’s an uncalled-for sequel to an offbeat cult film.

It’s got a different cast from the original, with its most established name at the time being David Alan Grier (who’s very funny as a lascivious lawyer).

It was released straight to video.

Like most straight-to-video movies in 1999, you likely didn’t know that this existed until you saw it on a shelf. Holding the VHS or DVD box in your hand, this looked like a cynical waste of time. Probably a bad imitation. Something watered-down. Very possibly a money-laundering front. Or at least the product of a bad deal made by somebody.

Writer/director Matthew Bright, returning from the original film, seems to know this and as if to make up for it he coughs up one of the craziest, sleaziest midnight movie freakouts of the final years of the 20th century. Freeway 2 does NOT want to be obscure. It’s a scream in the night. It’s a film full of left turns, uncomfortable laughs, and characters who most normal people would find repulsive. If Freeway 2 is heading straight toward a dead end, Bright works to crash it at top speed.

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THE SPARKS BROTHERS (2021)

The Sparks Brothers

2021, Director: Edgar Wright

When I first heard Sparks, they felt like one of those brilliant secrets of the used vinyl bins that you run into from time to time. For a few years, that was the only place I ever encountered them (never saw them in the CD racks at all). In the 90s, most old records were treated like the unwanted mess left over from yesterday’s party. Prices were low even on a lot of classic stuff and on a good day, I could get my hands on some real jewels for shockingly little money.

You bought records based on cool cover art a lot of the time and I’m pretty sure that’s why I went for Kimono My House one day. 

I paid my $3.99 for it, took it home (well, to my dorm), slipped on the headphones, laid the needle down on the record and then when “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” started to pound, explode, and do melodic somersaults in my ears, it was one of those “holy shit” moments. It’s not just a great song; it’s a song that can feel like it’s changing you, like it’s sending you in a strange new direction somehow. 

That song turned up loud and coming at you from left field is still my personal pick for the best way to discover Sparks. 

The second best way? In 2021, Edgar Wright’s documentary feels good to me. It’s a lively, energizing film that I’d happily recommend to someone who’s new to the curious of path of Ron and Russell Mael. 

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PAIN DON’T HURT: Surviving the Texas Winter Apocalypse of 2021 with ROAD HOUSE

Most of the stereotypes about Texans are just not true.

I only wear my cowboy boots on special occasions such as weddings and barn dance night.

I don’t care that much about football (I only have three Dallas Cowboys tattoos; the fourth one on my neck doesn’t count because my cousin accidentally misspelled it as Dallas Cobwoys).

I’m also opposed to guns, except for in extreme cases, such as when a stranger shows up in town or somebody says that they don’t like Waylon Jennings.

There is ONE stereotype though that I will admit is 100% on the money.

Texas people don’t know shit about winter. Example: me.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #65: SOME DRINKING IMPLIED

Guided by Voices
Some Drinking Implied
2001, MVD Music Video

If you’re under 40 and outside of the US, you probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but back in the 1980s and up to the early 90s, there was an amazing TV show called Night Flight. It came on after midnight on Saturdays and it was three hours of weird short films, music videos and random artifacts from pop culture’s junk pile.

In one night, you might see a Public Image Ltd. interview, an episode of Dynaman, some bizarre Church of the Subgenius short, a World War II-era Daffy Duck cartoon and what felt like about five hundred other things. Whether you were staggering in from an evening out in your cool 80s clothes or a kid like me up late and learning the ways of the night owl way too young, Night Flight was the perfect hallucinatory trip-out. Turn your brain on or off. Either is fine.

It was formative. It twisted me up pretty good. Looking back, I can see what it helped turn me into, which is a culture freak who will watch anything no matter how old or strange or low-budget or tossed aside. (See this site’s film section for the damage wrought.)

It made me the kind of goofball who enjoys the wrecked spectacle of Some Drinking Implied.

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Missing Girls, Texas Rangers, Barflies, Teenagers, and Peter’s Friends: Recent Film Reviews

One thing that I learned about myself during the Great Pandemic of 2020 is that when I’m stressed out, I don’t watch very many movies. When I did put on something, it was usually an old favorite that I’d reviewed before. In fact, three of these films are ones that I’d seen before, but just hadn’t written about. SO, these are the only film reviews that I wrote in 2020. I’m hoping to get back in the swing of things this year.

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)
Night World (1932)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Peter’s Friends (1992)

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THE WORLD’S END at the AGFA Secret Screening #79 at the Richardson, Texas Alamo Drafthouse, 10/7/2020

Edgar Wright’s pub crawl comedy oddball was the first movie ever screened for the public at the opening of the Alamo Drafthouse location in Richardson back in 2013. As of October 7, 2020, it’s also the last movie that they’re going to show for awhile because all North Texas Alamo locations are closed up again. The announcement came that same day.

Hey, it’s 2020 and we can’t have nice things. Hollywood aren’t taking chances with their hyped releases in theaters during a pandemic and the crowds aren’t ready–or haven’t yet been convinced–to come back. Many Alamos in the US remain open, as of this writing, but in North Texas, they’ve decided to step back into indefinite hibernation. It’s just temporary, they say, but who knows?

So, host and local Alamo creative director James Wallace treated Secret Screening #79, the show’s seventh anniversary to the day, like it was the last.

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A Laurel and Hardy Party #10: BELOW ZERO and TIEMBLA Y TITUBEA

(1930; director: James Parrott)

Depression-era comedies such as this one feel freshly relevant in today’s Age of the Pandemic, when many of us are teetering on the edge of ruin. Who knows? Maybe this winter, I’ll be on the street with an instrument that I have no idea how to play, busking for pennies, and having snowballs thrown at me.

The opening title card explicitly sets this mean and funny little short in the winter of 1929. Money is scarce, but snow is plenty. It falls in harsh blankets on the city where Laurel and Hardy have set up shop as street musicians. They play one song over and over again (“In the Good Old Summertime”, hilariously). One suspects that it’s the only song that they know. Or at least Stan Laurel knows it, sorta kinda. He plays a hint of the main melody repeatedly on a portable organ while Oliver Hardy plucks random strings on a stand-up bass like it’s the first time he’s ever touched one, or any other musical instrument, in his life.

Everyone hates them, of course–and those instruments don’t have long to live.

That’s the first half.

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Nostalgia Shit Fuck #1: BATMAN (1989)

Look, we’re all dealing with 2020’s global pandemic and the economic collapse and the chaos in the streets and the grim future and the disintegration of everything that was once normal in our own ways.

Some turn to social media to share with the world their cute quarantine projects. Their home-baked bread. Their living room workout routines. Their macaroni art. Or some shit like that. I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to those people.

Still others become more politically active. Or maybe they turn to religion or escape into video games or Netflix or alcohol abuse. I personally know one suicide.

Me, I’ve been hiding out as best I can in a nostalgic bubble. When the curtains are drawn and the pants come off, I live in the 1980s. Movies bring the best high, particularly when I haven’t seen them in some decades. I also dig into vintage TV here and there, too. Some music. Some comics. Junk that I grew up with .

I ordered Cobra on Blu-ray this week. That’s how nutty I’ve gotten.

And in my travels down Nostalgia River, I reached a point when I needed to rewatch the 1989 Batman movie. THIS stupid old thing was somehow going to help save me–and, in a way, it did.

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