Category: movies

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Chandu the Blu-ray Review

I got this on Blu-ray because it struck me as a great way to give another chance to a film that put me to sleep when I was 13. As a teenage classic movie weirdo dorkface, all Bela Lugosi movies I’d seen at the time were winners, except for Chandu the Magician from 1932. This movie STUNK. It was choppy and uninvolving–and actor Edmund Lowe’s impersonation of a piece of wood as the titular hero didn’t help.

What did I know back then, though? I didn’t know how to drive a car. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know that my clothes and hair looked stupid.

But decades have passed and things have changed. (I can drive now.) Maybe my opinion on Chandu has similarly changed.

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THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL and Why Everything New is Old

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL (1941; directors: William Witney and John English)

Believe it or not, but there was a time when superheroes were considered strictly B-movie fare. No big star would’ve been caught dead in a cape and mask. No major screenwriters or directors would have considered it. The most popular characters from the comics page only made it to the screen in weekly fifteen-minute serial chapters spread across 3-4 months.

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“Heroin, Peppermint-Flavored Heroin”

CHARADE (1963; director Stanley Donen)

A romantic comedy that happens to also have brutal, violent murders in it. Sounds like perfect holiday season comfort food viewing to me.

With these amazing players and director Stanley Donen, there needs to be a major fuck-up somewhere for this to turn out bad—and there is no major fuck-up. I’m not sure if every puzzle piece in the plot fits together, but I can say that I don’t care. There’s too much sparkling dialogue here for one dwell on silly things like that.

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The Internet’s Very First Review of THE LAST JEDI

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (2017; director Rian Johnson)

Here’s the kind of Star Wars fan I am: A few short months ago, I was talking with a co-worker about our mutual enjoyment of the series, up to and including the latest movies, and then this person asks me “So, what do you think is really going on with Snoke?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

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WONDER WHEEL

WONDER WHEEL (2017; director: Woody Allen)

Woody Allen’s sense of tragedy is relentless, traditional, bears a powerful whiff of the theater stage and is as unfashionable as could be expected from an 82-year-old writer/director who’s been criticized for his hermetic approach for decades—and it’s only gotten more extreme as he’s aged.

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A Laurel & Hardy Party #1: “Unaccustomed as We Are”

(1929; director: Lewis R. Foster)

My Christmas gift to myself in 2016 was the Laurel & Hardy Essential Collection 10-DVD box set.

Christmas 2017, I’m finally watching it because that’s how I roll: Slowly, forgetfully and focused on things that no one cares about it.  I intend to write about EVERYTHING on this monster, even if one of the special features turns out to be a ninety-minute interview with Stan Laurel’s dentist. I will be here to report.

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The Basics on BASIC INSTINCT

BASIC INSTINCT (1992; director: Paul Verhoeven)

This early 90s meisterwerk is so dedicated to being trashy, sleazy, steamy and light on the logic that it’s real easy to love if you have a taste for the tasteless. It’s slick in that Paul Verhoeven way, which means that there’s a faint smirk underneath the perfect Hollywood lighting and the troubled cop/femme fatale cliches. Everything is over the top. Verhoeven lays on the close-ups and the opulent San Francisco views. The Joe Eszterhas script is hard-boiled to the max, all snap and innuendo, with scarcely two lines of dialogue in a row that sound like anything that an actual human would say. Meanwhile, Jerry Goldsmith’s booming orchestral score lays countless exclamation points all over this cinematic purple prose.

You’ll know in the first twenty minutes if you enjoy this movie or if you think that the original film negative ought to be fed to rats. I’ll lay it out for you.

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Rebelling Against THE OUTLAW

THE OUTLAW (1943; director: Howard Hughes)

As a sordid “sex western”, this hasn’t aged well. Also, there’s not one soul on Earth who praises it for good acting, tight pacing or making a nickel’s worth of sense.

Even Jane Russell’s legendary bra for this film, custom designed by hornball Howard Hughes to cantilever Russell’s already-abundant breasts to look like nothing short of two Boeing B-17 bombers in her dress, wasn’t actually used on camera (according to Russell).

See this in the 21st century and watch one of the cinematic scandals of the 1940s reveal itself as clumsy and quaint, impotent and befogged.

With its shocks worn down to nothing and its gasps turned into yawns, what’s left today is still one strange piece of pulp, nonetheless.
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I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, But I Do Believe in A GHOST STORY

A GHOST STORY (2017; director: David Lowery)

In 2017, we could use a reminder that movies don’t have to be loud enough that your ears ring for three days afterward. Movies don’t all need to shove you onto a rollercoaster that loops through a dozen explosions before it careens into a brick wall. No one needs to overact their way to an Oscar. An entire CGI city doesn’t need to blow up. Musical crescendos don’t need to pound you into cerebral dislocation. We don’t need a cut every three seconds. Movies don’t need to be filled with noise like an amateur radio show that’s terrified of one second of dead air.

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