I Watched the Thing

I watch a thing then say things about the thing. By no means am I a student of film or even a remotely profound person. Truth be told, St. Looney-up-the-cream-bun-and-jam.

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I really liked Engineering the Dead. It didn't invent any wagon parts. Still, there was a lot to be said for standing out at that time. Worcester, MA was local and Ogre stacked the Metal & Hardcore fest to bring with sound alikes. Shitty local Metalcore Band and Bad, Just Plain Bad, Death Metal Act took many forms yet made up a fair chunk of each day. Dudes fucking burnt me out. My Metalcore aversion is still a thing 15+ years later. Death Metal and I made amends though. There are albums like Goremageddeon out there. This puppy is vile , filthy, groovy, and very good at changing things up a bit at just the right time. It's the sort of album that builds a rabid following. As a bonus, woohoo nice Carcass cover.

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"I tried to ignore it but kept expecting it to break out into porn." "Someone once told me they got $0.30 every time someone streamed their movie on Amazon. Are you sure you want to encourage Breen?" -honest reactions to Fateful Findings This one is a clusterfuck. Two kids find magic treasure in the woods one day. They fall in love. The girl moves. As an adult, the male is struck by a car (pretty hilariously) and pronounced brain dead when the Neurologist (or it may have been a random nurse. The narrative was incoherent) checks his pulse. He heals! He hacks stuff! And things! His wife gets hooked in his pain pills! It turns out the neurologist or nurse or passing hobo didn't even read his chart and was the little girl all along! They cheat on his wife as she ODs! Shirts keep falling off shoulders! Some guy randomly gets shot in a domestic dispute! A girl I swear I've seen in porn tries to seduce the lead by revealing her shoulders! Kidnappers and murderers are thwarted by magic! A bunch of government and business officials are exposed by the files and kill themselves! This fucking movie is terrible and makes no fucking sense! Some scenes appear to be out of order. Not that it matters.

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Samurai Cop is far more amazing than it sounds. The title and casting tell you a great deal about the basics of what you'll see. However, it's all given an extra edge because of the complete lack of production values. This deadly gang only operates in broad daylight not because they are bold but rather because lighting was too expensive. Not only were voices dubbed in poorly during post-production some were so warped random characters sound robotic. It's a labor of love that came out with four heads, six arms, seven legs, and still received a lot of love from Daddy.

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Take some of the worst criminals in the country. Put them in the same transport. Cast some brilliant actors. Add Bruckheimer. KA-BOOOM. Once again, the poster gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect. Add a few names visible in the hash tags, a southern drawl for Cage, a couple tough guy lines about a stuffed bunny, and you've got yourself a movie. The thing about this versus say The Rock is there's enough going on it ages better. Get tired of Cage? Focus on Malkovich. Tired of them? Watch Rhames. Buscemi. Meaney. About the only one who disappoints is Trejo and that's purely a writing thing.

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Can we talk about the end of the car chase for a moment? Why the hell did Michael Bay try to become a Zucker Brother? The stereotypical frail old woman? The wheelchair racing team? Man, I am honestly glad somebody eventually gave the guy a few hundred rendering stations and took away what approximated an imagination. Look, this is a Bay/Bruckheimmer joint. You know how it goes. Big scary menace. Bad guys. BOOM. Good guys. Tension. BOOM. Uh-oh. BOOM. Failed solution. BOOM OMG WILL IT WORK?!?!?!?! BOO—waaaait for it….OOOOOOOOOOOOM yaaaaaaaaaay. If you have testicles, they may flood with testosterone a few times. At least that’s the goal. Basically, it’s one of the most honest posters around. Do you like the cast? Do you like explosions? That’s the movie. There are also some supporting cast members but this is Bay. He could have made Olivier “guy with gun #3”. All I would caution you about is avoid watching this too close to any other Bay and/or Bruckheimmer films. Some ugly tactics like racial stereotyping become more apparent. Then there’s the whole thing with Bruckheimmer-Produced-Movie score déjà vu. It’s freaking weird hearing Pirates of the Carribean under Alcatraz.

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Ah. Good ol’ Death Becomes Her. The non-Fifth Element Bruce Willis movie that doesn’t make me feel dirty for watching a Bruce Willis movie until well after it ends. In my mind, there’s this image where he’s rolling naked on a pile of Die Hard money laughing, while throwing darts at Kevin Smith, and Mark Harmon is in a space lunging at Cybil Sheppard with a dildo as wooden as Bruce’s performance on Moonlighting held like a knife. It’s dark in there and Willis has a lot to do with that. In Death Becomes Her, he’s just a toupee and mustache. You could replace him with Wiseau and get the same results. As silly Black Metal fans day, GOLDIE HAWN UND ISABELLA ROSALLINI IST KRIEG! Glenn Close, eh. I’d rather Kathleen Turner in the role. Or a potato roll. Mmmm potatoes. So should you watch this movie? No. You should have already. When it was released. Don’t give me that “it was 1992 and I wasn’t born yet shit”. I know Mr. Only Reader I Have is younger than this movie, but that is why you millenials are going to invent time travel. Yes you will revolutionize humanity to see Death Becomes Her. Then probably destroy us all by trying to introduce ancestors who should be focusing on fire to avocados.

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A young bride named Rosoe is betrayed whilst pregnant when her husband attempts to skip town with his mistress. They instead wind up dismembered in the luggage compartment of a train, ratting out the poor mother to be by leaking blood. Fast forward 43 years, and the lovely woman has been cleared for release. Her first order of business his to take an assumed name and land a housekeeping position with her daughter's family. They are in trouble. The husband is a works obsessed distant vicar who all but pushes his wife, Gloria, into the arms of an American golf pro. By the way, if I come across like Patrick Swayze's character in Keeping Mum in any way to citizens of the United Kingdom, please know I am actually physically disabled and would not play golf. Their son is getting bullied at school. Their daughter rapidly swaps "badass" boyfriends. Rosie, in disguise as Grace, starts by killing the neighbor's dog so Gloria can sleep. She then takes bolt cutters to brake lines of bullies bikes, tells her grandson to say his favorite word, close his eyes, then watch as those who terrorize him suffer varying degrees of chaotic accidents on a hill. Some of that sexual energy swaps from boyfriends to cookery. The vicar learns to use humor in religion. Then, we get the awesomeness that is Rowan Atkinson reading bible verse as though they were lost verses of "Sexual Healing". A news report outs Grace as Rosie, but Gloria comes around to " mother" in time. The whole thing hinged on whoever got the part of Gloria. A scenery chewing psychopath would be all wrong. It needed to be someone who could play the part with love, affection, and in no way see anything wrong about what she was doing. Luckily, Maggie Smith was in the lead. Her Rosie sallied forth with the moral conviction of a Mary Poppins and mother's certainty of a . . . really certain motherly figure character in popular fiction. I'm tired. Watch the damned movie.

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This makes those NBC live spectaculars look like junior high drama club productions with only understudies. Ethel Merman can out emote entire casts with an eyebrow. Hell, I like Sinatra in this and he's iffy at best for me as a rule. Anything Went and I went with it TOOT TOOT.

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In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, James Dallas Egbert III disappeared. Articles and a book needed to get out before the actual facts were uncovered because OMG THIS HERE KID PLAYED HIMSELF A WEIRD GAME and that made for a fantastic story. Things turned out to be far less sexy but hey... movie! Mazes and Monsters tends to get watched because it's an early Tom Hanks movie. Some people love it then go online to rave about the thrilling psychodrama they just witnessed. Others get through to the end and go "wait... that was it? What. The. Hell." I'm . . . not a fan of it. At all. The thing is a TV movie. Sub-Lifetime level. Sensationalist, irresponsible, trash that shouldn't have been made. The Egberts deserved better.

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After American Graffiti, George Lucas felt all sentimental about 1930’s comedy films and radio. He then launched this film into the ether of development hell. It kicked around a good 20 years or so. I’m luckily not a fan of the man so I went in largely for casting and their strengths were only wasted a little bit. For an “homage to classic slapstick”, the thing just tried too hard. I suspect that’s more on the writing than anything else. I mean this is absolutely worth taking out of the library or grabbing for $2.00 somewhere but I wouldn’t kill in its name by any stretch.

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Good old Jørn Lande. When he releases something, Blabbermouth turns into a fairly amusing array of shit talk "articles". The guy can do one interview and fuel the site for a week. What makes that all possible is the fact dude delivers the goods. Well, vocally. Lyrically... he would write an album about a unicorn that was also a spaceship sans any sense of irony or humor. Here, he's in better form than some other albums. What can be problematic for the dude is Jørn soars and he needs musicians on par or better than himself. Ark has that. It's tasty, riffy, Progressive Metal. Jørn does some lyrically goofy shit in keeping with the cover art but there are worse things in the scene. He could be covering some selections from Celtic Frost's unreleased EP, for example.

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This movie keeps bursting into song. None of them are good. Most are “clever” word play relating to the words “bite” or “blood”. Oh and there’s a character named “Trey Sylvania”. I guess there’s a High School Musical person in here. Even so, it’s pretty rare for a musical to not grab me at all. I am all target demographics HEAR ME ROAR!

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Insane rich people take part in a scavenger hunt. One of their goals is a forgotten man. Little do they know the man at the city dump is a … well, you know. It was probably shocking when this came out, though. It’s well acted. The comedic timing is great. The script rocks AND rolls. Fuck yeah, Hoopla.

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This is a weird one. Ghibli movies kind of sort of don’t have so much of a specific time frame. There are certain contextual clues, but only enough to hold the story together. Here, fascism in Italy has taken over and our ritual Red Pig resists. Plus, the planes on display are very period-specific. Luckily, there’s still that sense of wonder and delight to be found in a good Ghibli film so who really cares? The bad guys are just people we really want to see look bad this time. So far as the American voice cast goes, I’m not sure I buy Batman beating the Dread Pirate Roberts but I guess it’s as Miyazaki wishes.

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A struggling actor decides to save a struggling church by gathering fellow struggling actors to put on a struggling production of Hamlet in a small town. It’s offbeat, full of weird characters, and just generally fun to watch. I like Branagh’s “weird stuff”. Thor left me cold and I guess Murder on the Orient Express had a cool mustache. I’m just not sure why it needed to be made in light of the productions that came before.

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I’ve always been a Roald Dahl fan from factories to elevators to Uncle Oswald to severed fingers and children licking wallpaper that tastes like dicks. One of the things I remain fairly neutral on are film adaptations of most of his work. The adaptations of his short stories he hosted we’re generally good. Films though, Willy Wonka… is a good movie but a crap adaptation, Charlie… sucks all around, James… got it right Matilda works alright and I takes shit for liking Witches because it’s “boring with very little actual tension and piss poor pacing”. Still, The BFG cost us an extra $0.00 on top of our subscription and I liked the story so why not? They did a decent job, all told. There’s nothing in the movie that makes me go “ooh ooh ooh better than the book” and.chances are I’ll return to the former of I want to pay that world a visit. The movie is competent and all but unless you’ve got kids who either can’t read or you don’t have time to read to, I fail to see the purpose of this production.

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There was this documentary a few years back called The Man Who Would be Polka King. It showed how a charismatic Polish immigrant with a polka band was able to use a Ponzi scheme in conjunction with some inexplicable connection to Pope John Paul II to pull off about $10million in fraud. The story was so fascinating somebody decided to make a movie out of it. One of my big issues with Jack Black is he can play one character. It’s “The Tenacious D guy”. They’re an over-the-top egomanical musician who believes in themselves above all other things and just freaking ROCKS. It goes great for the band, broke him big in High Fidelity, and royally blows in something like a romantic comedy where Black just looks like a clueless dink. As a guy who thrived because he was ego given shape? Dude works. Things get a bit Hollywood-ed. There’s a terrible crash without explicit mention of death. Two members.of the band actually died. His son very nearly did. Jan’s son only shows signs of recovery when an arrest for fraud is made and the ledger is balanced. In real life, it’s accepted someone did something at the Mrs. Pennsylvania pageant. In the movie, Lewan gets out of his seat to make clear it really was him. In the movie, only Jan’s mother in law calls the victims greedy people who should have known better. In the documentary, anyone who knew Lewan took that stance. Movie Lewan loses it all but he bounces back, wanting a career to pay back everybody. It’s a sad story of a delusional con-artist either way. I’m not sure they could have cast it any better.