Movie Notes by Zawmer

Mostly, this blog is for posts where I rewatch a movie and take notes about it and post the unaltered notes. I like movies, see. My notes on the Friday the 13th movies My notes on the Rocky movies My notes on the Star Wars movies My notes on the Mission: Impossible movies

[movienotesbyzawmer]

September 18: Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Time for another project of watching a movie series, taking notes, and posting the notes! I did not finish my last series. I probably will another day. But today I have obtained the six original Star Trek feature films on 4K and I'm starting it as a new notes project.

I saw every Star Trek movie upon its original theatrical release. I wouldn't say I'm a "trekkie", but I like a good sci-fi movie, right?

Worth noting is that I'm watching "The Director's Edition" of the first movie, which is an edit that I haven't seen before. I don't know if I'll notice the differences. I'll call them out if I do, though! Okay, pressing play.

This movie begins with… an overture? A shot of moving stars, and some pleasant orchestral music. Couple of minutes of that before even the Paramount logo. Seems like they were simply going for the same thing that the Superman movie had succeeded with a year earlier, making big, cinematic choices so as to transform it from a small-screen experience to a big-screen experience. Can appreciate.

Yes, first proper scene of Klingon ships approaching a something, it is cinematic, more so than you'd have seen on the show. And the music is cool. Wow, maybe I love this soundtrack? There is a creepy bass pluck sound.

They try to shoot the something with torpedoes. It's like firing a gun at a nebula, it makes no sense.

I'm happy to report that the look of the movie still looks very 1979. It's cleaned up, I guess, and it pops on my 4K OLED screen, but it looks like a good version of what they hoped it would look like at the time.

The nebula has fired back at the Klingon ships. Its torpedoes make them disappear in electricity balls. They just vanish.

That bass pluck sound is kind of like they took one very low piano string note and lowered the tension but still it makes a distinct note.

We're now on a scene with Spock on his home planet, with his parents, doing a judgement of some kind. That bass pluck instrument is getting used a lot. It's not just the theme for the nebula. It's overused.

0:12:50 - Now we're in San Francisco, headquarters of the future-peace union of planetary goodness or whatever. My not-a-trekkie-ness is starting to show, I guess. Anyway, it's Captain Kirk and he is being quite stubborn maybe? Saying he's going to take the Enterprise back.

Now these long, lingering, loving shots of the Enterprise it its space dock, a little indulgent but I get it. That ship with its iconic, recognizable shape is a big part of Star Trek. And it's a MOVIE so there's TONS of TIME.

Now finally Kirk is on the bridge, and between that and the lengthy sequence showing the Enterprise, I'm thinking must have been really exciting for people who had been fans since the original show aired.

Tension between Kirk and the guy who had just gotten promoted to Enterprise Captain, that's good for drama. Might have been more interesting with better actors in those roles. All due respect to William Shatner… not so much respect for the guy who plays Decker. Look it up. It is creepy.

0:27:40 - Transporter room malfunction, when I saw this as a kid I remember it being very scary, like almost traumatic. Not as effective to me today, but I've seen RRR now so maybe I just can't be fazed.

"My oath of celibacy is on record, Captain" announces Iliah. She is introduced with a strange gravity, like we're supposed to be blown away by a bald woman, but she also has romantic tension with Decker, but also she blurts out that weird celibacy comment, and plus also she is straight up pretty. I don't know what I'm supposed to come away with, and that's at least partly on purpose. Oh and they said "she's DELTAN". Don't know what that means.

0:40:45 - Okay, first the shot of them doing a big warp jump, the effect is kind of silly how, like, I don't know, fourth-of-july it looks. Like the backdrop of a performance of "Stars and Stripes Forever"….

…but while I've been typing this, it's going nuts with some other crazy visual stuff... as they did their warp jump, they got sucked into a different corny effect, very video-game-y, but it's making them be all smeared looking and sounding. It turns out this was the doing of a sinister asteroid, and they torpedoed it to resolve that issue. Video game-y.

So far this is the exact movie I remember.

Spock has boarded. Seems like the whole gang is back.

"Bones. We need him. I NEED HIM." William Shatner's dramatic flair is a little jarring.

They have arrived at The Cloud, and now there is the kind of story that drives a good episode of a Star Trek show. I really am curious about what the deal is with this cloud.

Spock has a vague telepathic understanding of what's going on, I guess? But also a sciencey understanding, and there's the thing about he thinks they, whoever is in The Cloud, don't understand why they aren't receiving a response, and Spock figures out it's because they're transmitting something but it's only a millisecond long, I think that's pretty cool.

Sometimes there are computer models on the big monitor in the bridge, and they look way way way more modern than they could have had in 1979 I think. I also think "so what".

1:08:10 - They've been penetrating The Cloud, and it's pretty suspenseful because what the hell is the deal with it. Did people complain that this part dragged? Because I don't think it's dragging. I think it's paced appropriately right now. They get to a solid part in the middle and it's a strange alien structure, what even is it. Again the pace is slow and again I'm not bored.

Then a thing I remember pretty well. After a long (but again I think appropriately long) sequence of them penetrating The Cloud and the middle part of it, an alien that is a vertical energy beam appears on the bridge and does stuff, like it's poking around. That ends with it making Iliah disappear, and Decker acting a little bit I-told-you-so about it. Unfair, Decker. This has literally never happened before.

By the way, I know a girl named Iliah whose parents actually named her after this movie's Iliah.

Now the Robot Iliah has been beamed aboard The Enterprise for the apparent purposes of being a leggy humanoid liason to what we learn is named "Veeger". I remember about the name "Veeger" which gets revealed at the end. Robot Iliah isn't the real Iliah, but there are memory imprints in her head and the gang is trying to exploit that!

Spock is sneaking around some room and he knocked a dude out who was just working at a console, wtf

Oh, that plot thickens, he did that so he could get in a space suit to get off the ship and do some kind of recon! It is one of many 2001-ish things in this movie. But it is maybe the most 2001-ish. He zips through the aperture thing that they didn't want him to get through, goes through some ovals, and starts narrating his trip past abstract things, and then, instead of the star baby from 2001, there's a star-Robot-Iliah. He touches it and it's damaging to him, but he still gets returned back to by the ship, like a respawn point. Get gud, Spock!

Veeger is now right by Earth, and I don't remember it looking like this. Did they totally redo that design? Maybe I just don't remember. It's sending onimous smartbomb things to hover threateningly because the "carbon units" aren't responding. They have to figure out how to be good at communicating to Veeger. I think it's an interesting conflict, I truly do!

A lot of the wide shots of the Enterprise inside the strange world of Veeger's interior actually probably look way, way cooler here than they did in 1979.

I think Leonard Nimoy is doing good acting in this movie.

1:55:45 - These big shots of the Enterprise near Veeger look really, really cool.

Sure enough, Veeger is just a little old 70s probe from Earth, it's "Voyager VI", but only VGER are still visible.

"Voyager VI disappeared into what used to be called a black hole," oh come on they definitely still call them that whenever this takes place.

Oh boy this ending, you guys, I remember the gist of it but I don't remember it seeming so dumb. So like, they figure out that Veeger wanted to join with the creator, and because Decker has always loved Iliah, he decides he is just the guy to fix the bad wiring in Veeger, thereby turning him into a cyborg husband of Robot-Iliah, blowing everything up in just such a way that it is non-catastrophic to Earth and the Enterprise and all the people except for Decker. Chatting about it on the bridge moments later, they're like "we seem to have done a fine job of creating an advanced life form, we're kind of badass that way". Then they hurry up to the credits so you won't spend time thinking about that unsatisfying ending.

But not before a title card that reads: THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS JUST BEGINNING

So. I do not like the ending of that movie. But most of the movie was quite tolerable. It's been a long time since I watched it, but I watched it a number of times as a young Zawmer and I can't put my finger on any specific editing changes that are different in this "Director's Edition".

[movienotesbyzawmer]

August 30: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible III)

I bet the powers that be at the Mission: Impossible movie factory didn't lose any sleep over the stupid colon in the title that screws everything up. I mean, just look at that up there with the colon after my date, then the colon in the middle of the OG title, and then it's like, well, you can do whatever you want with punctuation but we're adding a subtitle after it now and you just have to deal with it. On posters and stuff it's just "Mission: Impossible" and then underneath those words they put "Ghost Protocol" so they don't have to deal with it. What a mess. I tell you it is a damn mess is what it is.

Anyway, we have arrived at the M:I movie that, more than any of the others, just really hit the spot for me when I saw it upon its original release. I saw it at the end of a frustrating and tiring work day and it was exactly what the doctor ordered. At some point in the middle I realized that I was enjoying it thoroughly without having to tolerate the kinds of flaws that were apparently part and parcel of this kind of movie. Maybe there were flaws that I just wasn't registering. We'll soon see.

Continuing the tradition of making very hip choices for the directing duties, here we have the live-action directorial debut of Brad Bird, who started off directing episodes of The Simpsons before moving on to no less than The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Dude had two Oscars on his mantle by the time he showed up for this. Press play already!

Um Sweet Christ those opening shots look gook in 4K like HOO boy

Whoa, neat opening where Sawyer from Lost is chased off the top of a building in Budapest but his jacket deploys an air mattress right as he almost-hits, but then he's shot by Lea Seydoux in an alley, rat-a-tat-tat with the action here, like what is up

Simon Pegg is back, and he's being tricksy with the tech in a prison! He's opening cell doors and the prisoners are surprised and delighted with that twist! He plays them a jazz standard on the intercom and Ethan Hunt suavely emerges from one of the cells. Fun silly things ensue involving Ethan's rebellious and confident independent strategy and a small riot that seems kind of like a bar fight.

He has made a pal in the joint and he's breaking him out. Some kind of cool tech creates a really sweet vortex-y hole in the floor and they are swooped up by their helpers, it's fun.

We're introduced to Paula Patton who is a new team member, and then the credits roll, and they are spirited in a way that recalls the first movie, also showing real scenes from later in the movie.

Flashback to the thing that was happening with Sawyer shows how that botched operation, something about a file and a courier, got Sawyer killed because lots of bad guys were all over the place there. AR contact lens technology figures prominently, and that is a good idea (plus we totally might have those soon, right?).

0:18:16 - Once again we begin the movie without the leading lady from the previous one, but we're starting to get an explanation here. Or just a tease of one I guess.

And quickly we get a sneaky-style self-destructing message that sets up that Ethan has to disguise himself as a specific Russian and sneak into the actual Kremlin. This movie 100% gets what a Mission: Impossible movie is supposed to be.

This time, they aren't using fancy masks or voice shifter things, just costumes and a fake mustache. They comment about that in the dialogue but don't explain why.

0:24:52 - Dialogue mixed SO QUIET here I have no idea what SP just said. It seems like you're supposed to have heard it.

But that is quickly forgotten when they use the coolest spy gadget of them all - a screen that is placed in a corridor that makes the guy at the other end of the corridor think it’s the corridor, but it's a screen and SP & Ethan are hiding behind it and it is super super neato I love it

Then just when it's cool that that is going well, it's suddenly cool how NOT well it's going because someone is spying on their spycraft! The thing they were going to heist isn't there, and someone deliberately makes their comms thing be heard by the bad guys!

And THEN we see something we really didn't think we'd see and it is kind of mind blowing - Ethan escapes from the Kremlin with a very smooth quick-change of his disguise that we see him do in all one shot… but then the Kremlin totally explodes and it explodes all over Ethan as he's running away! It looks amazing!

Right after that there is some fun with subtitles - Ethan is in the hospital all damaged and concussed and stuff, and the news is talking about the obvious big story, and the subtitles are in Russian. At first I was like, "hey is my home theater tech busted?" but no, the subtitles become gradually more in English as Ethan starts to come out of it. Then we see with subtitles that Ethan is reading lips about the police people that want to be bad guys to Ethan.

After Ethan escapes, we shift to a wholesome-looking Russian family we haven't seen before. The scene is a nice little piece of drama about how the dad sees the Kremlin news and wants to get the family out of there, and very quickly that goes south and thugs have them all at gunpoint, it's nicely done

Ethan is being extracted by two new characters played by accomplished, Oscar-nominated actors Tom Wilkinson and Jeremy Renner… the conversation is dire and I don't want to type during it gahhh gah gah gah I am watching because holy shit this goes south too! TW informs Ethan that the DoD is going to frame him for blowing up the Kremlin and his only choice is to escape. He's telling him HOW to escape in a funny way, but they are attacked and it's visually very interesting and TW is headshot and they are in the water and it is such bad news for Ethan and his new colleague played by Mr. Renner, I probably typoed a lot during that because it was so hard to look away.

So Ethan is on the hook for the terrorist attack of the century and he's being chased by a little battalion of thugs who just shot that important spy boss, and he's in Russia. It is very not good for Ethan.

He's with JR and JR is playing a different character for him. He's a bookish analyst guy who feels very out of place in action-land.

We're learning about the main bad guy, Hendricks, who was the guy that screwed everything up in the Kremlin. He's a super-smart theoretical physicist or something who has big, well-thought-out ideas about destroying the world with nukes, and he took nuke codes from the Kremlin. So things are just really really hairy and it's effective storytelling is what I'm saying.

Also effective is that they met up with SP and PP on a neat secret train car thing that is well appointed with spy gear

And VERY VERY EFFECTIVE is what happens next, which is a series of establishing shots of Dubai which KILL ON MY TV. I am glad I have a 4K panel, kids. This begins what I recall as being an extended sequence of sweet-ass suspense. Ethan has to break into a server room by climbing the outside of the 130th floor of the Burj Khalifa using glove-gadget tech that will hopefully work. There is at least some actual Tom Cruise clinging to the side of that building. It's so cool looking. And to make matters worse, a dust storm approaches! Or should I say "to make matters even cooler looking". Yes I should. Please read that part.

Paula Patton's character seems underdeveloped so far, especially compared to her teammates Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner.

Jeez you guys, if you like suspenseful action scenes about barely surviving climbing a skyscraper this movie is for you.

1:05:34 - In the middle of a tense conversation we see that they were using the maskmaker but it wasn't working. They just don't want us to have mask fun in this movie. They hate mask fun. Why does Brad Bird hate mask fun.

Oh then this scene which is neat - bad guys are meeting with LS… but Ethan and JR are taking their place, and PP is taking LS's place for the real bad guys one floor down. The movie explains it better than me, but it is pretty exciting, the two meetings happening at the same time with opposite trickery.

Hah, SP does a sweet fake-hand trick to get the diamonds from the bad guys so he can get them to Ethan and JN, and JN is doing the thing where he uses the contact lens tech… gosh why are you even reading this, just watch the movie. I really like the tricksy espionage.

It all falls apart because LS spots the contact lens in JR's eye. The plot is moving along in a way that, I'm once again noticing, would normally require more half-assed-ness. It's just a solid spy plot. Which probably makes these notes more boring. Poor you.

LS dies by getting kicked out of the open window of the Burj Khalifa with a brewing sandstorm in the background! Neat looking!

And then a thing where Ethan is in a thick dust cloud and he's tracking the important paper thing with his tracker device, and it starts moving quickly at him and we realize just as it's too late that it's in a car that's gonna run him over! Then that mechanic gets used in a car chase in a dust storm, which we don't see very often outside a Mad Max movie, and that climaxes in a really cool looking collision, followed by the reveal that one of the nuclear code bad guys was Hendricks in a supermask. So we DO like mask fun after all! Except why do we care that it was Hendricks?

A scene where JR is confronted for maybe being a double-crosser has a beautifully choreographed gun-get-grabbity-grab thing that was probably super fun for the actors.

1:27:05 - JR tells a story that at first we think is that family we saw briefly almost scramming, but no, he's talking about Ethan, and what seems to be a story about Ethan's wife (Julia from the last movie) getting killed in Croatia, and Ethan killing six Serbians for revenge, and that's why he was in prison in the beginning? It's still a little mysterious and kind of complicated. It doesn't quite fit with what we think we know.

Dubai imagery is pretty. I have been to Dubai. I am standing by for your marriage proposals now.

I didn't really follow how we got to this point, but Ethan went for a walk and met with some underworld Dubai person and made a deal the ended up with a huge cache of spy gear and a private plane to India. I went to India like right after Dubai. I have my own car and a job kind of so you might need to calm your hormones at this point.

A probing exchange with PP establishes that indeed Ethan's story is that he killed the men who killed his wife. Doesn't really seem legit, though. There's more to the story, clearly.

One of the tech things they play with on the plane is the most magic-seeming one. It is a suit that looks like tight chain-mail, and it floats over a cart, like a magic carpet that you wear.

We're introduced to Brij Nath, whose name I had to look up so I could tell you how it is spelled. He has an access code that they need, which seems like they just kind of simplified the situation, and he's one of those only-kinda-bad bad guys that's really just a pawn, for our heroes as well as for these storytellers.

The wearable magic carpet gadget is fun and funny! SP has to remote control JR wearing the floaty-suit and JR is trying not to freak out too badly, and maybe on purpose it recalls the scene from the first movie where Tom Cruise hovers parallel to the floor.

Hendricks is now in a secret room in the place where they all are, and he has a bad-guy briefcase computer and orders some subordinates to do something with a virus, and I don't actually understand what's really happening but am I to believe that Ethan et al are thwarting literal nuclear terrorism here in Mumbai? Right here at this pleasant party at the palace of an only kinda-bad bad guy?

1:48:30 - Ha, the climax of the wearable magic carpet thing involves JR barely surviving by doing an acrobatic stunt that seems oddly intuitive and satisfying. You'll just have to watch the movie to know what I mean.

The spy-tech car they have is rad.

They fail to prevent the launch of a nuclear missile! We see it come out of the sub and start missiling toward its destination which we have learned is California! Hendricks mutters things about how that should get the ball rolling making world powers hate each other and nuke each other and may there be peace on Earth, he also, yes, says that.

A chase on foot has Ethan and Hendricks suddenly brawling on an exotically elegant robotic parking ramp. Platforms move around mechanically and transfer unmanned cars to different areas, and it is against that video gamey backdrop that Ethan and Hendricks struggle to get that sinister suitcase which is all bouncing around that environment. Unexpectedly, Ethan's hope of grabbing it is thwarted by Hendricks suicide-jumping down several stories! We see it! He definitely does that! Ethan drives a car off a thing to follow him, plummeting down hood-first, and the airbag saves him! He gets the briefcase and barely saves the day in time!

Again a denouement making it very clear that everything is really shockingly okay and tidied up. Even the thing with Ethan revenge-killing Serbians and the thing with his wife is cleaned way up, but with an elegance and sweetness that elevates this movie above the others. She's not dead after all, just fake-dead for her protection. And they're only where they are in Seattle so he can glimpse her lovingly across a marina.

So! I feel strongly that this is the best Mission: Impossible movie! It is an extraordinarily deftly-constructed spy thriller! It's got all the funnest types of things that are in the other movies, and other fun spy thrillers, but with so much less garbage! They did a great job and they should be proud.

[movienotesbyzawmer]

August 26: Mission: Impossible III

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible II)

Another one I haven't seen since it first came out (fifteen years ago!), but I remember liking it. Other than the exciting new personnel in the cast and in the director's chair, I really can't remember any details about this.

The director is, of course, J.J. Abrams. He comes in scalding hot from his television work, most notably Lost, and is making his feature directorial debut here before eventually directing what is currently the top-grossing movie of all time in the US. There was reason at the time to expect an improvement over the spotty second entry, but what does it say that I can't remember anything at all… okay let's start it.

You know how movies often love to tease the audience by opening with a really really exciting scene that's supposed to blow your mind and make you go OH my GOD like HOW did we GET to this VERY EXCITING SITUATION and then they jerk it all away and start from the beginning, this movie begins with that. That and very "modern" shaky shaky handheld camera stuff. I don't like that handheld stuff but whatever.

After the credits it's clearly back to before-problem. Ethan is having a chill dinner party with his girlfriend who is not Thandie Newton but who is definitely being tortured by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the opening tease.

That is subtly interrupted by a covert request to meet at a convenience store for some espionage and, perhaps less subtly, a lot of exposition. Very unnatural dialogue lets us know that Ethan is not in the field any more, he is a trainer, but one of his trainees is in trouble with PSH and will he help please. Also that was his fiancée not his mere girlfriend. That is a much more elite status. High stakes OMG.

Off to Berlin, and I'm reminded that the previous movie didn't do as much globetrotting; it was pretty much in Australia the whole time. I like location diversity.

The rescue of the played-by-Keri-Russell former protégé is not a stealthy one. They plant a bunch of blowy-uppy things around the rusty warehouse where they're torturing her and cause chaos to help them get to her and shoot their way out. There is no mask-craft so far.

After a cocky moment where Ethan demonstrates that being down to only one bullet was just fine with him, there's a cool shot where a closeup of Ethan has a nicely-framed surprise explosion behind him.

Much splody. So much splody. Maybe M:I3 is the one that should be remembered as The Splody One. There are rockets toppling wind turbines being negotiated by chasing helicopters. But the most suspenseful issue is that KR has a secret surprise blowy-uppy in her bloodstream. A race to maybe do something about it doesn't work and she dies. I remember predicting her death to my friends before the movie started, but it didn't make those friends like me any better.

Worth noting that J.J. Abrams is not wrong to apparently think we will think all the wind turbine imagery will look pretty neat.

Before dying, KR sent a postcard to Ethan, and not even in a normal way, in a "Hi is this Rollo Tamassy? I was given explicit instructions to let you know there is a delivery for you in dead Keri Russell's mailbox" kind of weird way. The postcard had a blank microdot hidden under the stamp. Feels slightly eye-rolly. Simon Pegg is now in the movie now, though, so that's cool.

Ethan had to have a serious talk with Julia about how serious his life is or something, and they get married like right there in a storage room! Then Ethan and the team go to the Vatican and do a heist there. It's an okay heist that involves seeming like bickering Italian van drivers and then changing into different costumes. No masks though. They still look like themselves. J.J. Abrams clearly told people, "why should I watch the other Mission Impossible movies when I literally made Alias".

They shoot magic sticky pebbles near cameras to make them not work, this is important to their method, but I'm not sure how this is supposed to end, aren't they kidnapping PSH or something?

0:47:57 - Welly welly well, what have we here, they have the mask machine! We actually see it 3D-print a PSH mask, now we talkin

Ooh, and we also get to see a whole thing about the voice disguise technology, Ethan has a PSH mask on and he forces the real PSH at gunpoint to say a script to teach the tech thing his voice, but it's not ready in time when he has to say stuff in disguise and there is suspense there, I like it!

They successfully completed the heist of stealing PSH from the Vatican, even though we didn't see exactly how they transported his sedated body out of there but okay

"Whoever it is I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna hurt her", we're seeing PSH be a villain on a level that one really doesn't see very much.

Ethan responds to that by doing an odd thing that I guess would be described as "dangling him from the bottom of a plane that is flying up in the air and therefore scary". He's trying to figure out what "rabbit's foot" is, which we heard about in the opening tease. We still don't know what it is. I've known for fifteen years apparently and even I don't know what it is so

The next exotic location on our tour appears to be the bridges connecting the Florida Keys, and things get splody again! Rocket bombs destroy the bridges they're on plus also some of the vehicles that are around. Right before that happened we saw the secret video message that KR had hidden in that microdot pre-her-unfortunate-death, and it was the news that the spy executive we've seen a couple of times, played by Lawrence Fishburne, is secretly a bad guy. So the rocket-equipped military force that is recklessly decimating bridges and automobiles is probably under Spy Executive's direction. Kind of rash doing all this destruction.

Oh, I remember that shot! Ethan is running away from a car that is the victim of a rocketplosion, and the force of that throws him in a way you don't see very much, it was probably hard to make it look that good. There are other cool shots in this sequence too.

Oh I like this I like this… the bad guys that are under the direction of Spy Executive have apprehended Ethan just after he found out that PSH kidnapped Julia. He has 48 hours to do a "rabbit's foot" something for PSH in order to save Julia, but he's all restrained and has a strange mask on, but what I like is that Billy Crudup, who is Spy Executive's lackey, did a trick that required Ethan to read his lips. BC knows what's up and is helping Ethan, it's exciting.

1:21:53 - Ethan has escaped and met up with his crew (hey, we have hardly even seen Simon Pegg, what is up with that), and they're doing a heist plan, and it involves drawing skyscrapers on glass and the camera angle matches the actual skyscrapers and it's pretty cool especially when he's doing geometry and actual mathematic calculations to plan some kind of corporeal transfer between two skyscrapers.

That scene is followed by a very impossible-looking shot of Ethan on top of a Shanghai skyscraper; it zooms in from way far away and then circles him and stays on him having a conversation with Ving Rhames, all one shot.

Then a very exciting sequence, the one that was planned for so academically before; Ethan does a super crazy run off the top of the building, and the bungee thing he's attached to does cool looking stuff to get him to swing to the actual building that is his destination, but it's on a sloping thing and he slides down it and there are bad guys he has to shoot. His job is challenging.

I keep forgetting to note this but I do keep observing with satisfaction that the score is all orchestral and traditional, none of the neo-slickrawk of the last two.

Things happened so fast that I didn't quite comprehend how all of his leaps and swings resulted in him obtaining the "rabbits foot", but I guess the thing that looks like a cartridge-container for a pneumatic tube conveyer that has a thing with a radioactivity symbol on it is that. What even is.

The meeting to do the exchange of Julia & "rabbit's foot" is set up and pretty quickly we're caught up to the tease from the beginning. We now are enjoyably frustrated that Ethan thinks he gave them the "rabbit's foot" but dude is asking for it and it's like wut dood I gave it? That ends with PSH seemingly shooting Julia and BC showing up and clearly being in cahoots with the bad guys after all. And it was a fake Julia in a masky-mask, the real one is still okay somewhere. Masked-and-now-dead woman is someone we saw as PSH's translator at the Vatican and the expository dialogue that helps us know this is so artificial-seeming that it reminds us that elaborating on who that really was is kind of pointless and laborious.

This long monologue by BC, mixed too quiet again, also tries to explain his point of view, but I can't quite get it. He says something about the "rabbit's foot", are we supposed to know what it is yet? He mumbled something about a "middle eastern buyer".

1:44:45 - Somehow Ethan was able to get Simon Pegg on the phone after biting his way away from BC (SHHH NO TIME TO EXPLAIN), and then he gets to the top of a suburban Shanghai house and a shot is really cool showing that and it moves and follows him in a cool way, and then the subsequent shots of him running through the streets are cool, he's on the phone with SP who is telling him exactly which little city streets to turn into.

Just as he has found Julia and is maybe going to rescue her, he gets a big headache and we remember that he has the same mini-splody in him that killed KR, and PSH shows up, pretty bad news. PSH delivers his threatening dialogue in a vividly psychopathic way.

PSH's end is dumb, especially on paper. He turns is back on Ethan, who is easily able to jump him and fight him. The fight spills out into the street and a lucky car accident seems to fatally maim PSH while leaving Ethan unharmed. Meh.

The final resolution involves trying the idea they had at the beginning that didn't work with KR, where some kind of on-purpose electrocution death preludes the micro-splody death and then you just have to be good at reviving the person. And it almost doesn't work… but then it does oh my god it does

There is a very very pleasant shot of Ethan and Julia strolling through a Chinese village with a canal bridge and it really is nice looking and I want to go there and stroll like they are strolling.

But then they're back at HQ or whatever and oh, I guess it turns out BC was the only secret bad guy and Spy Executive was good enough and they're all on good terms and Ethan and Julia go on a honeymoon the end. Oh, and the final exchange cheekily reveals that we will never know what "rabbit's foot" was. Creative? Cop-out? Who's to say? (insert why-not-both gif)

So what's to remember about that movie? Was it indeed better than MI:2? I guess a little; there are several little annoying things from both of the first two movies that are absent here, so that's refreshing… but also some of the plot contrivances don't improve on what we've seen so far. Some very very very ambitious visuals! That's the real thing I want to make sure not to forget about this. The previous one had John Woo's signature visual style, but none of it matches the accomplishments of the cool shots in this one. I might have preferred a little more playfulness with the espionage stuff, but if I recall correctly the series doesn't really return to that form.

(next: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

August 21: Mission: Impossible II

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible)

Not gonna lie, this is without question the Mission: Impossible movie that is remembered most unfavorably by me and, I'm pretty sure, everyone else. My recollection is that they tried SO SO SO SO HARD to make an action movie for Today's Kids; I'm typing this with the title screen of the 4K Blu-ray blasting its turn-of-the-millennium neo-metal version of the classic theme with Tom Cruise running in front of a wall of flame and it's just like come on. Is there even must fun spycraft in this? The first one promised lots of gravely furtive glancing, world-class makeup disguises, and dazzling gadgetry. Did this movie's director John Woo replace those with just way way way too much shooting and chasing and sexy vehicles? That's how I remember it but it's been a couple of decades.

I should probably address this series' exciting approach to director selection. The first one was directed by the legendary Brian De Palma, who brought us Carrie, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way. Whether or not this one worked out, the trend here seemed to be to choose a respected director with a certain cred that could be imported into the franchise. More on that as this series unfolds. I am now to press play.

Opening scene is about a scientist who injects himself with something while a voiceover teases us with I-already-forget-what.

Oh, he's pals with Ethan; they're on a plane together out of Sydney when some bad-guy shenanigans totally thwart the whole fly-to-the-destination-safely thing. But! It wasn't even Ethan! It was good-ol' makeup fake-outery! It was a heist to take the warn leather pouch that the scientist had.

This I remember - during the opening credits, the REAL Ethan Hunt is climbing somewhere impressive, all freestyle like. All the related supplemental marketing materials never fail to talk up Tom Cruise's penchant for doing his own stunts, but these don't look real.

He then receives a fancy techno-message in a very, very dramatic and action-movie-ish fashion, which is that someone flies a helicopter by his climbing mountain and fires a rocket near him containing message-glasses tech! The voice in the message glasses sounds like Anthony Hopkins. Is it Anthony Hopkins?

Anyway now he has to go to Spain to recruit Thandie Newton and here is where it's already starting to get way too the-style-of-John-Woo. There is a flamenco show and Ethan and TN spot each other across the room. There is SLO MOTION and SPANISH STOMPING and ACOUSTIC GUITAR, and THOSE TWO GAZING AT EACH OTHER. I tell you I do not care for it.

What happens next is TN proceeds to use fancy technology and lockpicking skills to steal a well-concealed necklace. Ethan tags along flirtatiously. She still tries to steal the necklace even though this Lothario, this smarmy but irresistible cad, is trying to distract her with his testosterone.

Ugh, I was very right to remember not liking stuff about this movie. Ethan fails to recruit her at the jewel heist, so he car-chases at her the next day! He calls her during the car chase to irritate/seduce her, and she's all "you'll have to catch me ha ha", and it ends in a nearly fatal crash and then they KISS. The director worked very hard to ensure the kissing was HAWT, and Ethan has now successfully recruited TN for both spy work and boinkage.

Anthony Hopkins! He is in the next scene! That really was him! How did I forget that he is in this movie. This scene where he meets with Ethan and fills him in on everything is effectively expository. But then after he knows what he's gotta do, he walks with INTENSITY and it is in SLOW MOTION next to a BURNING EFFIGY THING with ELECTRIC GUITAR MUSIC GOING ON.

0:33:40 - Oh now it's a little more what I like, with a montage about using spy tech to get Ambrose, the bad guy who was pretending to be Ethan on the plane in the beginning, to track TN. And to further assure us that there is techie-fun to be had, Ving Rhames returns to be that guy for Ethan's team. But there is also time in this sequence for shots of TN walking slowly and looking super pretty. You know, so she can seduce Ambrose. A flowing scarf figures prominently in this imagery. A John Woo Film.

I like that they tricked Ambrose into thinking he is so damn smart for tracking her down. I also like Ambrose's compound on Sydney Harbour, it is a bitchin property.

Scene just happened where Ambrose seriously menaces his friend and uses a cigar-clipper on his finger. Ambrose is a bad friend.

But then they're all at the horse race game, even Ambrose's injured friend, who we learn is named Stemp and who is spying on TN, and Ethan and VR are spying on them all. There are shots of TN doing sleight of hand to steal a tape from Ambrose's pocket and it's pretty good spy-shot stuff.

I guess I should mention that there's one more guy on Ethan's team of four, an Australian guy. I haven't caught his name, so he is Australian Guy now, and he is pretending to be an employee of the horse race game venue. He gets bullied by Stemp! We don't like Stemp!

The tape she stole, they watch it right away and it shows footage of what the virus (there's a virus problem at the center of this) does. It is effective, and a little shocking.

But then, this is surprisingly actually kind of well-conveyed - they made it VERY clear that the tape was originally in Ambrose's left jacket pocket, and they showed very clearly that TN returned it to the wrong jacket pocket, AND it's obvious a moment later that Ambrose knows it has been replaced in the wrong jacket pocket. Don't know why, but at least it's keeping us on top of this situation.

Also not-too-shabby is how they're doing the consequences of Ethan and TN fancying each other, except then she has to go and seduce Ambrose and that's uncomfortable and drama-making. In Ethan's defense, as well as Ambrose's, I am also in love with TN right now.

1:02:12 - Ethan disguised himself as Scientist, the dead one from the beginning, and I'm just saying I'm glad this movie is embracing the disguise-craft theme that was established in the first movie. Ooh, is the show like that too?

And then just as I've typed that, it turns out that Ambrose did an Ethan disguise (it was established by Anthony Hopkins that Ambrose was an IMF agent so he can do that stuff too) to trick TN into outing her intentions. They make it very clear that there is voice-fake tech with their disguises that involves a wire mesh thing stuck to the throat.

Next up is a heist scheme to break into a skyscraper where they're growing stuff about the virus, and it's a little bit of that style I liked so much in the last movie, with the added twist that Ambrose is somewhere else anticipating what Ethan's planning, and, I think, plotting a separate, way-better heist. They're still talking about it and the heist is happening and it is suspenseful! I totally like this more than I remember.

1:13:30 - Ethan is at the part of the heist where he's at fancy lab facilities with robot arms and AI voices and oddly no people. VR and Australian Guy are observing everything that's happening using technology and Australian Guy's helicopter, making it more suspenseful, but I also don't know exactly what's going on? We appear to be where Scientist originally injected himself, and Ethan is I think killing the virus while also somehow visualizing Scientist injecting himself.

But then that all goes away because a platoon of thugs in black burst in and are shooting at Ethan. It all quickly became an action movie with blazing guns and VR's tech van getting bombed.

In the fracas it's clear that one of the injector guns contains the last of the virus, and also gunplay might shatter it and make them all infected, so that's decent suspense. But also, the lighting in this bio-lab is like a nightclub, with inexplicably roving spotlights and neon accents that pop in 4K.

TN is in the mix, and she decides to inject the last of the virus into herself, and there's a dumb moment where it's like ETHAN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO SHOOT ME WITH YOUR GUN and Ethan, Man of Ethics, does not do that. Instead there is more gunplay and Ethan jumps out a hole he made in the wall.

1:28:45 - We've moved to new location, a new compound, and it's on a guard-patrolled island and Ethan sneaks up on a guard and does a totally unnecessary body-flip martial arts move to take him out. I think he needs to steal the antidote from this compound so that he can save TN, who is somewhere else. He is visually passionate about this mission.

Ethan got caught sneaking in to this new compound by Stemp, and he did a whole grenade blowup thing but he still got caught. It's a trick, right? Yup, he put an Ethan mask on Stemp and a Stemp mask on himself and got Ambrose to kill Stemp. He realizes he just killed Stemp because of the finger injury, good job with that.

I am reminded that this movie is from the director of Face/Off, so I needn't have feared that the mask/disguise conceit would be forsaken.

But did he get the antidote? He must have. Sometimes when I'm typing notes I miss stuff, but he's now motorcycling away while VR and Australian Guy are providing support from their chopper.

This is now the vehicle-chase opera that I remember ending the movie so terribly extendedly. Much gunplay. Vehicles pirouette with violent elegance. Ethan can do such exquisite dances with his motorcycle and firearm. This climaxes in the ridiculous feat of Ethan and Ambrose riding their cycles at each other and jumping at off them at each other to finish the job sans vehicle. It ends as a tussle on the beach, and Ambrose has a knife that almost gets in Ethan's eye. The visual on that is striking. But it's no good, Ethan is too Tom Cruise for him. He gets the knife from him and DISCARDS THE KNIFE, and punch-kick-fights him a lot instead. Ethics.

Turns out Ambrose has a gun after all oh no. But then it turns out Ethan is standing by a sand-obscured gun somehow also oh good. He does a thoroughly storyboarded sand-kick-body-twirl gun recovery that ends like you'd guess.

So although there are some dumb things about this movie, I think it's better than I remembered. And having just watched the first one, I think it actually did a good job of having a story where you don't have to ignore a lot of stupidness. It's not like it's an especially good plot, but it didn't try to make you forget its holes like the first one. I still like the first one better, though.

(next: Mission: Impossible III)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

August 19: Mission: Impossible

I sometimes like to watch a movie at home and type up my written observations. Usually it's a movie I've already seen, but not for a while. So with that said, welcome to my new notes about the Mission: Impossible movies!

I've seen all of them of course, and they are really up my alley. Globetrotting espionage is totally diverting for me. Try just saying "globetrotting espionage" to me sometime. Especially if I'm in a bad mood, I will appreciate that gesture. I like these MI movies enough that I bought a box set with all six (as of summer 2021) of them on 4K Blu-ray. 4K! That's a lot of K! I watched each of these upon its original theatrical release, but there are only two of them that I've seen more than that one time.

I think one thing I want to try understanding is what it is about these movies that makes them so much more tolerable to me than popular action movies of the sort that is suckier. I realize that sentence pretty much answers the very question that it raises, and yet come on you get me.

One more thing before I press play on this first one: I have never seen any of that TV show that it's based on. I am confident that doesn't matter. And yet I'm saying it. Okay let's watch spy movie.

Emilio Estevez! This first scene has him in a cameo that I'd forgotten about. It's a stacked cast. They're watching a spy cam in a room somewhere, but the changing angle of the spycam makes it look like they're watching an Eastern European soap opera. We don't know much about this whole situation, but it's some kind of elaborate setup that involves a chemically engineered fake death of a spy lady and also Tom Cruise was in makeup disguise. Then the credits! Very very edited credits! But brief. For excitement! It's in the style the opening of a TV show! Good job with that.

John Voight is on a plane, but spycraft secret messaging happens so that he can look at a strangely-formatted video file about a mission to stop a crime. The crime has to do with a list of names of people with their code names. We can barely hear that information.

Just like that, JV is briefing the all-star team in Prague that's going to pull of the heist they need to do to recover the "Noc List" as it's apparently called. Tom Cruise is immediately exactly like his character in Top Gun. Cocky, so devillishly cocky!

The movie is kind of proud of this spy tech where there's a camera in her glasses and EE can watch the video on his watch.

0:10:14 - We linger on a news feed where there is a politician being interviewed, and it's pretty obvious to me that that's TC in old age makeup. Sounds like TC doing a voice. But maybe it was less obvious before FOUR KAY.

Then after one more gadget, which is a stick of gum-like explosive putty, we're at the actual heist, and there's POV imagery and split-screen video sneakage. And then… oh, okay now I understand that TC is pretending to be the politician we'd been seeing on TV, via elaborate makeup. Is why all that.

Look how… there's something about how the camera probes and peers, it makes us feel like furtive little sneakers doesn't it! I like it!

There's a thing where one of the spy pals is spying with special spy glasses and she can see the back of a person's head that their spying on and I missed how they explained that but whatever

Elevators and glasses are figuring so significantly into this heist, but also so is very open flirtation between EE and Kristen Scott Thomas. That's probably partly because…

…something went wrong! And it wasn't an accident! But it's weird, the guy they were spying on looked like he was innocently calling an elevator but the elevator totally killed EE, and it involved the sudden but deliberate appearance of death spikes in the shaft that impaled EE! He is a dead, dead spy! And it's totally catastrophic because that spy guy somehow wasn't supposed to leave the building and they're now all freaking out about him just strolling along the fetching cobblestone streets of Prague.

But JV does a phony-looking I've-been-shot thing, and then a car blows up with one of the spies, and the guy they were spying on is getting stabbed through a fence, so much stuff, what even the hell! And KST is also a victim somehow! Stabbings! And where is the disk! They really got their asses kicked. And all of it pops on my 4K TV. This is important to you in your life.

So TC is going through some kind of standard post-screwup protocol that involves a restaurant meeting and the restaurant is also an aquarium. Okay but now through effective dialogue and striking closeups, this place is a hotbed of suspicion, and TC is the one everyone's suspicious of! The whole Prague operation, they agree, was a mole hunt. But I don't understand why then anyone got killed? Boss man seems to think that proves that TC, who I should probably hereafter refer to as Ethan, is the mole. But he gets away with the splody gadget and blow'd-up fishtank distractivism.

0:34:50 - Always fun to see what 90s Hollywood thought the internet was like. Ethan runs a program called INTERNET LINK and types MAX.COM because he heard boss man refer to someone named Max! Looking up usenet groups is also in this scene, though, which was an actual thing you'd do. But then he remembers that boss man talked about "job 314" and figures it has to do with Job 3:14 from the bible, so he sends an email to "Max@Job 3:14"! And it works! There is definitely a space in the "email address"! What a smart smart cyberspy.

So I don't understand, like, okay, Ethan heard Boss Man talk about Max and "job 314", and that information was important clues but he doesn't think Boss Man knew he was giving clues and Boss Man still thinks Ethan is the mole. Seems weak. Okay.

I also forgot Vanessa Redgrave is in this. Ethan's laughably simple email resulted in a meeting with her where he Tom Cruised at her and a fun escape happened. He winds up agreeing to do the crime she wants that's the real version of the mole hunt? Yes.

"Jim was my husband", says the young French spy who turned out not to be dead. That's a little weird. Why is she… just ugh. Weird couple. Okay Hollywood.

DISAVOWED - I remember being a little confused about this the first time I saw this. The word appears and they don't quite elaborate on its significance.

Okay, here's Ving Rhames and now they're talking through the plan of what they're going to do to break into Langley and steal the real Noc List. They're flash-forwarding to what it should look like if all goes well, super cool. The camera snoops around at all the things they're talking about with the computer room and it's really fun to look at!

Now we're at the actual Langley heist sequence which is really the centerpiece of the movie. Fun spy shot of French Girl squirting a liquid into the Langley Guy's coffee! Then another fun shot of her tapping a little tracker square onto his blazer! That Langley Guy actor was for sure born to play the role of CIA-Analyst-Lookin'-Man.

Ethan's gotta lower himself ever so gingerly into the computer room and Jean Reno has to hold the rope so carefully and they have to watch the temperature because we know that can set the alarm off and it's all very very very tense! Langley Guy comes in and Ethan has to quietly dangle above him! The shot is fun! The SHOT is FUN!

No music. Tension. Ethan is downloading the Noc list. JR is in the duct holding the rope and there is a rat and he is struggling! He slips and Ethan falls almost to the floor which would totally bork everything but he stays parallel and you see that image a lot in stuff about this movie but you don't usually see how intense it is in the movie.

1:15:00 - I remember being annoyed by this too-long scene where Tom Cruise arrogantly does sleight-of-hand gags a bunch of really irritating ways to show that JR doesn't have the disk he thinks he does.

Now Ethan is being suspicious because the bible in this new safe room they're in is from Drake Hotel, where Jim had said he stayed, plus then French Girl is a little affectionate. Why again did a whole bunch of the spies get murdered during that mole hunt?

Jim is alive, surprise!

The picture is lovely on this 4K Blu-ray, but there is some bad sound mixing, some dialogue is too quiet.

But Ethan is thinking through what happened in Prague, and he's talking like he's thinking of how Boss Man did all the killing but we're seeing other things. French Girl and JR doing killings. Is that real? It ends with him being like "Why did you do it Jim?" I don't get it that much. But it's engaging! I think it's going to be that he knows Jim is the bad guy and is pretending to go along with thinking it was Boss Man plus French Girl and JR?

We're at the setting for the movie's climax, on I guess the Chunnel train. This movie was timely, what with that being pretty new as well as shooting movie scenes in Actual Prague; in 1996 those were not things you'd seen in Hollywood movies yet.

Big shocker twist at the end, Ethan takes his Jon Voight mask off and now we know French Girl was a double-crosser. I honestly am still not sure if the Jon Voight mask is really just a really good mask or if they did a really good effect where it was Jon Voight at first.

There is a big action chase to finish the movie, which now that I think about it is how all these movies will end. The Chunnel train is being chased by a helicopter flown by JR, and I think we only know his intentions are villainous because he scowls like one who wants bad things to happen and is making them happen. He flies the helicopter INTO the tunnel! Everyone tries to get each other during all that transportation, and it's corny but fortunately not too drawn out.

So I definitely enjoyed this movie, but when you think about the plot points, some of them don't hold up. And some of the cinematic style, which was totally fun, probably existed to obfuscate that reality, like when Ethan was thinking through the mole hunt disaster and we were getting mixed messages. But if I were doing this project without having seen the five sequels and someone told me "yeah, they're basically all like that", my enthusiasm for continuing this project would be undampened.

(next: Mission: Impossible II)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 26: Rocky V

(previous notes: Rocky IV)

A fifth Rocky movie if you can believe it! I saw this in the theater when it came out in 1990. My movie appreciation had become exponentially more sophisticated since the previous movie, but I remember thinking that they were going for something less formulaic when they came out with this. They even brought back the Oscar-winning director of the original Rocky, John Avildson. And surely this character was way too old to still be able to win fights against professional boxers, right? I must say, I don't remember what the story of this movie is.

The intro does a brief throwback to the original name-scroll-plus-fanfare, but now we're showing a recap of the previous movie's final fight during the credits, which promise an appearance by no less than Burgess Meredith.

Do you think there was a conversation where Sylvester Stallone condescendingly told Avildson, "hey, trust me, start the movie with three and a half minutes that is just the end of the last picture, easy money baby, cha-ching ya know?"

The story begins immediately after the Battle of Cold War Symbolism, and we see that he is experiencing physical trauma as a result of Soviet Boxing Technology.

Then we see that they had the idea to introduce a Don King-type character, a really irritating boxing promoter blindsiding him in public to get on his case about a new challenger. Do you think the promoter character will have a nuanced arc.

After a chill father-son catch-up chat, there's an awkwardly-blocked expository scene about how Paulie made some stupid mistake and got tricked into signing away millions of Rocky dollars to a sinister accountant. And then he goes to the doctor who tells him he has irreversible punch damage and can't fight any more. Conflict is looking dire. Do you think Robot Character will arrive soon to cheer us all up.

After selling all of their possessions at an auction, Rocky goes to his old hangouts. He leaves the corner bar looking defeated. They don't show how he was defeated in the bar, but that bar clearly humiliated him.

Then he goes to the old gym, and here's where we have a flashback scene of Burgess Meredith giving him a pep talk. It's kinda nice. But it still feels like we're at the point in the story right before the tide turns and suddenly Rocky is inspired to become supernaturally good at boxing once again. But that's not gonna happen; we're just twenty minutes into the movie.

Rocky has to move back into his old neighborhood. It's dirty and run down, and people gawk.

0:32:00 - For the third time in this movie, Rocky tries to charm his family with a LOOK WHAT I PULLED OUT OF YOUR EAR gag. The characters are barely charmed by this gag. We, the audience, are way way way less charmed.

Fake Don King is buzzing around a lot. He is a dick and he is annoying to every single person alive. It's effective at driving the conflict because he is so persistent at needling Rocky into maybe fighting. But the acting is cringey. Kinda the point, though, right?

Just like that, the old gym where we saw the flashback, which was abandoned and run down, is open for business and full of people. How did that happen?

0:43:30 - Okay now it is me - Zawmer! - who is about to be an unappealing bad guy because I must now report how little tolerance I have for this scene with two child actors. Rocky's son, who got bullied at school earlier, is having his first maybe-we-fancy-each-other conversation with a girl. The dialogue has no chemistry with these kid actors.

I should mention that there is a character named Tommy Gunn. He is a spirited young boxer who has found Rocky and wants Rocky to help him. He is bemulleted and earnest and good-punch-y.

Rocky is going to manage Tommy, but his son wants some attention. Feels like an artificially manufactured conflict. Plus the dumb bullies at school beat him up again. It is hard being the newly-poor child of Rocky Balboa.

0:53:25 - I probably wouldn't have caught this if I hadn't watched the first movie kind of recently, but we cut to a fight, Tommy is fighting someone and it's in the same church that started the first movie. He wins that fight and it becomes a montage of Tommy becoming increasingly successful under Rocky's coaching, plus there is evidence that Rocky's son is trying to get his dad's attention by using some of the gym equipment.

It does seem like it would be fun to make boxing-improvement montages.

Oh, the kid learning boxing was so he could get back at the bullies. Mission accomplished but he clearly thinks his dad was supposed to be even nicer about that, even though he was kind of nice. But he was in the middle of something with Tommy, I mean, come on!

Ooh, and that was just a brief interruption in the boxing-improvement montage, it keeps going. This movie is pretty generous with fun montages.

The falling out scene between Rocky and Kid is not better than a similar scene in an after school special. And it's way worse than that one anti-drugs commercial we all remember, "I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU"

Oh, but then Kid runs away and starts hanging out with Ivan Drago! Drago starts teaching him how to beat up his dad, and says something about "If he die, he die". No. No he doesn't. That doesn't happen. I was just getting a little bored there. What's true here, what's actually true, is that Kid's increasingly rebellious personality has yielded a very, very stupid looking ear chain. It is an earring… with a chain hanging off it at the exact perfect length for no human being to think it looks good. The length of that chain is the chain-length equivalent of the amount of time that Talia Shire closes her eyes that one time.

A new conflict emerges where Tommy is going to sign with Fake Don King. It turns out Rocky had no interest in making any money. You can't blame him really. Rocky's all "don't sell out". But. Dude.

Okay so Tommy Gunn, having divorced Rocky and married Fake Don King, wins the title fight and becomes the new champion. The crowd boos, and they also cheer "Rocky". Rocky is not there. Rocky is watching the fight on TV in the basement and also punching a thing because he can't help it, but the crowd at the fight is like "Rocky" and "boo". I don't quite get it.

This press conference is kind of clearing it up, see, no one thinks it was a legitimate fight, it seemed fakey. There is pandemonium and insultation! It is clearly building to some silly insistence that he, Tommy, should fight Rocky.

Tommy shows up at the bar and he's hopping mad because he ain't nobody's robot and will you accept my challenge Rocky! Fake Don King thought this would turn into an actual arena event, but it's turning into just a back-alley fight like in that Fight-y movie about that Club.

It escalates thusly. As Rocky endures cinematically beautiful flashbacks to fights from earlier movies, they punch each other beneath rumbling trains. I sound mocking but some of it is pretty visually interesting.

Interesting enough to serve as an abstract explanation for how, once again, Rocky is supernaturally good at punch-game. It may be a street brawl this time, and we may have to do without Adrian closing her eyes Just So, but once again the Rocky movie ends with him winning the fight and everyone being very very excited about that. He punches Fake Don King because of how smarmy he is, and even the priest is delighted.

There is a denouement of Rocky and Kid bonding genially by the famous steps, and then the credits roll in front of touching stills from all five movies, and an Elton John song that didn't have as much cultural impact as some other songs we've heard recently.

I guess I like the montages and the quick cinematic choices that are to be found here and there in these movies, but mostly when I think back on them it seems like they are arrangements of familiar modules. In this one, the modules were held together with more flimsy material. I was wrong to think that this movie would be less formulaic. Soon I am done with this project. Soon. SOON.

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 18: Rocky IV

(previous notes: Rocky III)

The Cold War one! I was in high school when this came out, and it seems like the Rocky movie that has most endured in pop culture for people my age, and even younger maybe? I haven't seen it in a very, very long time so I'm wondering if the Rocky-versus-All-Of-Communism logline is going to seem like a pathetically irrelevant conflict. Or, frankly, if that sentiment is going to sound like the dipshits that attacked the US Capitol just a few short months ago. It's definitely going to feel like just a slight twist on a formula that's been working, right? Let's see…

Totally different intro from the rest of the series, and surprisingly the recap of the end of the last movie also includes the hit single from the last movie. But also there is a thing about an American-flag glove and a Soviet-flag glove punching each other into an explosion.

They were so happy with the chummy chit-chat at the end of Rocky III that they just gratuitously include that whole scene here. It is a cheap way to eat up a couple of minutes.

Oh My God. The first actual new scene in this movie serves the important purpose of documenting for all time how dazzlingly technically advanced things were in 1985. For Paulie's birthday party, he gets a ROBOT! It talks… ROBOT-style! Paulie is whelmed by how robot-y it is.

"Open your prize," Rocky tells her when asking Adrian to open her PRESENT. Why did he say "prize".

MEANWHILE IN SOVIET UNION… They do a quick montage that only vaguely suggests something about a boxer and the USSR.

Apollo Creed spots an innocuous news story about Russian boxer Ivan Drago coming to America to participate in sportsmanlike fighting. AC is PISSED! A Russian being competitive, oh hell no.

At least Drago has a female companion so there will be an actual female character who isn't played by Talia Shire.

"Commies Are Evil" isn't the only theme of this movie; there's also "The Marvels of Technology". Drago's unmatched strength is demonstrated for the press in a very electricity-filled gym. And the robot has been in three scenes already in the first fifteen minutes! Oh I hope they aren't going to get me to fall in love with Robot Character only to have it lose in a boxing match to The Commies.

Big press conference to announce that AC will be fighting Drago in an exhibition match. AC is all cocky and Drago literally says nothing the whole scene. He is characterized as perhaps yet another robot character. But his wife and some other Russian guy do all the talking, and if they're supposed to seem like the Bad Guy, I don't see it. They are perfectly diplomatic and AC is just acting like a tool.

0:23:23 - I remember this scene, we all do, oh yes we do. The Fight That Does Not Go So Well. It starts with a super flashy intro; they're at the venue in Vegas and there are showgirls and pretend fighter planes and Actual James Brown singing this movie's legit hit single, "Living in America", singing it all At The Russians as AC descends in front of a monster thing in spangly Uncle Sam garb. AC actually dances alongside James Brown and around Drago. What they're doing, these diabolical filmmakers, is going to make what happens next sting the audience pretty bad.

Right before the fight, Drago's first line is "you vill lose". Monotone. Robotic. Technology! #1985

Drago beats him to actual death, he twitches on the floor as Drago robotically says things like "I will not be defeated". It is a bummer, this turn of events.

New press conference. Rocky is going to fight Drago. "No money. It's not about the money." That's weird, addressing money in this press conference. They're not really addressing the monumental fact that Rocky is sitting next to the guy that killed Apollo Creed.

This time, the Soviets are less diplomatic. Rocky barely says anything, but the old Russian dude calls him little and weak. They have a good point, though, about how Drago gets death threats in the US on account of he is a killer of an American hero, even though the wife also says he is not a killer. But that's why the fight will be in Russia.

New montage with a very 80s pop song. Worth noting that we have not heard any of the famous music from the first movie. This montage also looks very 80s, with it's flashbacks using a lot of different, highly techologically sophisticated frame rates.

0:42:41 - Adrian eye-close sighting! Thank you so much for that, it is what we all want and only you, Rocky-movie, can provide it.

Flashbacks to all the other movies. He is thinking about it all as he anticipates The Hell Of Going To Russia. Remember when he pointed to the jacket in the window that one time? Rocky does. Remember when he looked at his statue? Rocky does. He even somehow remembers Adrian closing her eyes. This is a music video with mostly recycled footage from the whole series.

0:48:35 - Another "modern" pop song, I think it's the band called Survivor again. Were we supposed to love all the catchy tunes and go out and buy the soundtrack? We only remember the James Brown one in 2021.

It is snowy in Russia ha ha! Paulie has joined him on the trip because he is part of Rocky's staff, but he doesn't like how cold it is ha ha.

Rocky's quarters consist of a log cabin dripping with icicles at the foot of some really pretty mountains. I play Geoguessr a lot and I don't ever see pretty mountains like that in Russia, but they must have them, right?

Rocky has been assigned minders. He is told they will go wherever he goes. I'm pretty sure that's not an unfair characterization.

He's got Apollo's trainer guy there with him, but Rocky makes it clear that he just has to do this training stuff on his own or whatever blah blah.

Now a montage going back and forth between Drago training and Rocky just running through the snow-covered countryside. ON HIS OWN. Plus also sawing wood and displacing boulders on his own. Oh and being the dog in a dogsled pulling Paulie! Locals look at Rocky because, look, a man doing something, that's new and confusing. Drago has electric machines. Rocky fells trees! Drago is inside comfortable facilities. Rocky is growing his beard out! The minders observe it all. The minders observe it all.

There is a subplot about how Adrian is dealing with this whole thing. She had been unconfident earlier, and did not join Rocky in USSR. But surprise, she is now there in Russia suddenly because love! Rocky continues to train, not so alone-y now and with a new rock song with more major chords. That is Drago's weakness! Communism hates major triads.

Gotta have inspired running, right? This time Rocky runs up a snowy mountain, running so hard that the minders can't keep up! At the peak he does his trademark cheer howl in that pretty place… but he is saying "DRAGO!!!!!!!!!"

Just like that, we're at the big fight. This time it's in Russia and it's mostly uniformed soldiers in the crowd.

Ugh. Quick cut to Rocky's kid watching at home on TV with friends. He says "that's my dad" and one of them replies "what do you think we are, nerds?" Ladies and gentlemen, the wit of Mr. Stallone: Screenwriter.

Do we need to talk about Drago's hair? He has very styled hair. I think it looks like Vanilla Ice hair. Is that a strange choice? I don't know how to think about hair, I guess.

"I must break you". That's what Drago says to Rocky right before they fight. I remember it. It is an above average dialogue choice compared with other Rocky-movie-right-before-the-fight dialogue choices.

Drago punches Rocky a lot, and the commentators make sure we know that Rocky might lose and they may even have to stop the fight. But also, yes, it does just look like Rocky is taking a lot of rough beating.

"He's not human. He's a piece of iron." So speaks Drago in unbecoming monotone. I don't know what that means.

It's a montage now, an appealingly edited summary of a whole bunch of rounds. The two boxers are both doing well and maybe not doing well, both. Montage.

I guess I'm experiencing what I remember noticing back when I first saw this in the 80s, which is that they really did convince us that Drago was indestructible, and now we're seeing him be damaged and it's kind of satisfying.

1:21:15 - Whoa, I forgot about this. The Soviet Diplomat Man is giving Drago a hard time about not winning yet, and Drago lifts him up violently by the neck and says something about I Will Win For Me, For Me. It's a little like we're supposed to think Drago is increasingly inspired by American Freedom, maybe? But it won't help him if he's still the bad guy in a Rocky movie.

This fight is taking a long time. A lot of this movie's running time is being consumed by this fight.

Eventually Rocky wins, because it turns out that he is just better because Freedom, and it's that same tiresome "Rocky-won" music, maybe arranged a little differently.

What does he say in the mic at the end? What is his message? "During this fight, I seen a lot of changing…" he says that during this fight, like during the actual boxing match, they all grew to appreciate each other. And it's better to do boxing than do nuclear annihilations. The whole crowd cheers for Rocky! Even the important Soviet Boss Men, startling even themselves with their abrupt adoration of The Wise American. Then when he says Merry Christmas Kid to his kid at home, well this whole entire crowd clearly thinks Rocky is better than their whole entire country. We don't see Drago any more. We don't know if he, too, is moved by Rocky's profound monologue. And we never find out what Drago and Robot Character think of each other.

So that's it, that's the end of Rocky IV. I get why it fires people up in a simple way, but I don’t think it's good. It totally assumes you'll understand that Rocky wins because the USSR just kind of sucks. Or you won't care that it's improbable that Rocky wins because it's just so gratifying to see Drago falter. Which they achieve by making him look very perfect, and having no charming characteristics.

It's true, though, how cocky we were about technology in the mid-80s.

(next: Rocky V)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 12: Rocky III

(previous notes: Rocky II)

Because now that Rocky has done the unthinkable and become The Champ, we want to see him tackle the next challenge… win AGAIN.

I remember seeing this in the theater with my buddy. I don't know if I liked it. I'm pretty sure I found Mr. T to be as charismatic and as terrifying as they wanted. I'm pretty sure when I bought the ticket I hesitated and asked the cashier, "hey, wait, we get to see him do some variation on the triumphant steps jogging moment, right? Otherwise never mind I'll go see Poltergeist again". If I'm paying good money for boxing sequels, I want to be assured that the formula has not been altered.

Okay let's go.

Once again, this is Un Film De Sylvester Stallone.

Slight variation on the fanfare with the title, now there's a close-up of the Important Belt Buckle Of Punchsport.

Then we see the climax of the previous movie, maybe edited slightly for time. But not very noticeably different.

That segues immediately to a montage of Rocky doing many successful beatup games, scored by the enormous pop hit "Eye of the Tiger". I suspect this isn't the last we'll hear of this number.

The montage morphs into a different story, one starring Mr. T! He's watching Rocky win stuff and he is not pleased. He can also fist-game, it seems. But the montage makes it clear that it is our hero Rocky who is the star of commercial endorsements and marriage love.

I mock but this visionary filmmaker has indeed opened this movie with energetically cinematic choices.

0:8:40 - Arcade games! Paulie goes to an arcade and it is like the arcades I went to when this movie was out and I see games that I played! But Paulie doesn't like the Rocky pinball machine. It seems he is a sore brother-in-law.

Rocky is now very dashing. Paulie is drunk and whiny about how Rocky is such a big shot now, but he has a point about how prettied up he has become.

Later that night Rocky and Adrian are in their bed and it has a rich person headboard. The director, also visibly present in front of the camera, clearly instructed the production designer to create a bed that would reflect the elite level of financial flexibility that the protagonist has reached.

So apparently Rocky has gotten himself into the strange situation where he has to do a charity boxing match against a wrestler played by the increasingly famous Hulk Hogan. I had forgotten that Hulk Hogan is in this movie. Mr. T is watching this match and he looks intensely the same way he only ever does.

Whoa Hulk Hogan is way taller than Sylvester Stallone. Is that allowed? The rules have changed! And this whole thing is not boxing it is wrestling and it is that silliness instead of boxing. This is a long scene that is the same as a typical Wrestlemania thing, all manufactured drama made to seem like fighting and true menace, but at the end we see that they are just professional coworkers and we have all learned a valuable lesson haven't we.

At a statue-unveiling, Rocky announces that he is maybe retiring. MAYBE. But then Mr. T shows up talking smack, and ladies and gentlemen we have ourselves an end-of-Act-One.

As Act Two begins, we have a scene that was an A+ homework assignment for the screenwriting teacher of Rocky III's screenwriter, who you will recall is the craftsman Sylvester Stallone. Burgess Meredith is like "I quit! I won't help you with this fight! Mr. T is too hard to beat!" But then they talk it out to advance past that scripted complication. And now Rocky and Mr. T are training for their fight in their separate worlds.

Speaking of worlds, in the World Of Rocky, the famous theme that was introduced in the score of the first movie is actually known to the characters in this movie as Rocky music. They play it for him publicly to celebrate their pride in his violence accomplishments.

Apollo Creed appears to be retired, but he is a commentator at this Rocky/T fight.

0:40:00 - They're about to do the fight, but Mr. T is so The Way He Is that the wants to fight on the way TO the fight. That results in some tumult that makes BM have health problems. It was vague what happened, it seemed like BM was shoved aside by all the mad/scared/fighting people, so then he has a conversation with Rocky in a back room where he's like, don't stop the fight even though I am suddenly vaguely frail. He sort of clutches his chest like maybe there's a heart attack but just one of those everyday ones. I have those every time I click send on a work email. My friends should not be discouraged from championship fisticuffs when that happens.

This is the first Rocky movie to be made after Raging Bull came out, and I detect some influence in the boxing footage, like with close-ups of Mr. T.

Rocky loses that fight pretty quickly, and maybe the problem is that he didn't do a pre-victory steps jog. But the movie is telling us that BM is dying on a table in the back room and that's the real problem.

BM dies and SS has done some pretty ambitious cry-acting. Then the funeral is in one of those indoor above-ground file-cabinet-style cemeteries, which is not the normal cinematic choice so nice job there.

I can already tell that we're going to have another thirty minutes of a bummed-out Rocky to fill out Act Two before it starts to look like the setup for a fulfilling climax can begin. It's what I would have told him to write if he were my student at the third-rate community college where I'm a part-time screenwriting teacher in this scenario.

Apollo Creed has shown up to try to pep-talk Rocky, and he keeps saying "eye of the tiger" because of marketing departments. But also, he is a more mature person than in the first two movies. Even though it's a character shift, I do kind of buy it. It seems like another side of the character we knew slightly.

0:59:00 - Another scene beginning with dialogue that sounds like it was improvised by people who don't know what real life is like. "Come on you're going to be late to the airport!" "Maybe you should have packed another sweater" "no in California it's not too cold". AHA THEY ARE GOING ON A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA I AM ON TO YOU ROCKY III

When they go to Los Angeles and show us people on the street and the people have been told to look and act super different so that the audience will be like, wow California is different, then, well, we are at this part of Rocky III did you know.

Although there was my earlier expectation that we were going to have a prolonged funereal story arc, but what's happened is that Apollo is invested in training Rocky so they're showing us that side of Apollo, and that's interesting. But also it's the template of "Rocky is training and he doesn't look like he's going to get there, but then inspiration will hit and he will look like he is going to get there". S. Stallone, noted filmmaker, is using montages and flashbacks to show how recent bad news moments for Rocky are haunting him. It is working.

Adrian performs a pep talk monologue for Rocky. I don't understand her point. It's like a box of those refrigerator poetry magnets jumbled up together and spoken as movie script lines. I guess the gist is "don't give up" and he starts to think maybe he shouldn't give up. Then it's a new training montage, and it's got the classic "running far now" Rocky theme so we know it's going well. The twist on the classic cheering-atop-stairs cadence is it's Rocky and Apollo on the beach, and Rocky is a little faster than Apollo and that is great news for them both.

Now we're right before the final fight, and we heard Mr. T tell a reporter that he "pity the fool". I didn't hear the rest of what he said, I was just so happy to hear him say "pity the fool".

Oh but shortly after that he is asked what his prediction is, and he looks at the camera, OUR camera, at US, and says "PAIN". Submitted without comment.

That face-to-face moment right before the fight starts, Mr. T says "imma bust you UP" and Rocky says "go for it". Advanced Scripted Dialogue with Professor Stallone.

The final fight happens, and it's mostly the same as how the other ones went except without a montage summarizing a whole bunch of rounds. I think this whole fight ended in three rounds. But it ends with the exact same music that I'm getting sick of….

BUT! There is a follow-up scene this time! It's some other day later on and Apollo and Rocky are just palling around at the gym. And THEN the movie ends. I feel that the producers must have implored Stallone, artisan that he is, to just end the movie on that climactic moment right after the fight ends, just like the other movies, but he said NO. That is not ENOUGH for a SYLVESTER STALLONE FILM. We will have an additional scene with INCONSEQUENTIAL BANTER. It will last OVER ONE MINUTE. And here we are. Rocky III: it's like Raging Bull, but better!!

I think Talia Shire is the only female actor with any lines in this movie.

One thing that's very much worth saying about this movie is that there is WAY more actual boxing in this movie. The other ones had almost no scenes where there were live boxing matches, but this one had lots. Plus that wrestling one! And as I observed, the directing style with this one also had a newfound sense of visual pop. But the story seems like it changed not at all from how it was described in the first studio board room meeting where jackass producers blurted out what Rocky III might be like.

(next: Rocky IV)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 10: Rocky II

(previous notes: Rocky)

When this movie came out I was a little kid living in Northern California, and we used to go to huge drive-in movie complexes that had like six screens. No matter what movie you were watching, you could see other movies from your lot. I don't remember which movie we were watching at the time, but I remember being distracted by a nearby screen showing Rocky II. I totally watched the ending in suspense. It was eventually on cable a lot so I was able to see it for real, but still like 40 years ago.

Anyway, I wonder if this movie will have the effect of dulling the charm of how the first movie ended, so climactically and with appealing suddenness.

Also, is this the only one of the first four movies that doesn't have a rollicking hit song emerging from its soundtrack?

Stallone famously wrote each of these movies all by himself, and starting with this one he is the director of a bunch of them as well.

Same kind of intro with the fanfare, except the music sounds very clearly, to me at least, to not be playing on real horns. I think it's synths. "Modern".

We're now just watching the end of the first movie. We get to relive the intense experience of seeing Adrian's face in closeup closing her eyes for one and a half seconds. The drama.

The whole first five minutes is the whole last five minutes of the first movie. That's weak. Cheap.

Then the whole opening credits follows, and it's following the ambulance that's taking Rocky to the hospital because of all the punchplay. Not a good use of this time. But more importantly: are they going to address the eyelid situation.

Rocky and Apollo confront each other in wheelchairs in front of the press at the hospital. They're still fired up.

After Rocky gets out of the hospital he rambles a lot and it's like an amateur improv scene where he's figuring out on the spot some things to say about where they are. He gets the idea to have Rocky propose to Adrian, then when she accepts he does a Tarzan wail. What a cheeky clown that Rocky is.

His eye seems fine now.

0:18:20 - the a cappela street musicians are still at it, still not very complex with the harmonies. Isn't Sylvester Stallone's brother a singer named Frank, and does he look like the guy in this scene? I bet it's him.

I'm pretty bored of this movie so far. It's like the people were clamoring for an answer to the question, "what happened after the fight", and Stallone's enthusiastic answer was "just regular stuff like you'd guess!!!!!"

Oh my. It's their wedding night and they talk like dumb, uninspired newlyweds and then kiss, and it's like the director, who remember is Stallone, directed the two of them, one of whom is also Stallone, to perform slow, exotic lip dancing and no one told him that's a thing called kissing which is normal and common.

Rocky has some money now so he and Adrian are looking at buying a house. The realtor is all "this whole place is supported by solid steel" and Rocky is all "yo Adrian that would be a great spot for a radio". It's like porn stars that have been told to ad lib for a few minutes in the beginning of the scene. Except that we aren't about to be rewarded with porno.

0:28:05 - Adrian is pregnant! They talk about it. They talk about it in small talk. "What if it's a girl" "Oh a girl I didn't think about that can you imagine".

So one of the adventures of post-the-first-movie Rocky is that he gets to do a commercial. They show the filming of that and that it doesn't go well because of his Rocky personality. And the next scene he has realized that he needs a white collar job so he's at an employment agency office and asks for a job where he gets to sit. But he's not a good fit there. So he goes and gets a job at a butcher place. He promised Adrian he was done with boxing so now we have this boring part of the movie which isn't short enough.

Okay it's definitely going in a direction of not-boxing-is-sucky-for-Rocky, because he lost the butcher job and had to sell his car to Paulie. He said "it's a great car, buckle up for safety!" Do you think Stallone actually scripted that line or did he improvise it and the director, who you may recall is also Mr. Stallone, thought it was really good and kept it in

0:46:30 - He goes to visit Burgess Meredith at the gym. BM is not helping Rocky's morale, tells him he's washed up POI-manently. He begs for a job doing menial tasks at the gym and BM tells him everyone will think he's a loser but okay. Stallone does okay looking humble about that.

When he comes in to the gym everyone is laughing at a very stupid editorial cartoon in the local news publication, it shows Apollo doing harm upon Rocky-as-a-chicken with the ingenious caption "APOLLO CREED VS THE STALLION CHICKEN". It was clearly "STALLION CHICKEN". That does not make any sense.

BM was easily persuaded by Apollo's cockiness and so he then shows up at Rocky's nad easily persuades him to accept the rematch deal. Feels like movie formula but at least it's about to be less boring.

I like BM's voice.

They're doing a thing going back and forth between Rocky training and Apollo training. Apollo's is going better, partially because his facility is kind of luxuriously spacious. Then they stuck a scene in the middle of that of Adrian working at the pet store all preggo, but having trouble lugging a weighty thing and listen my friends, I think Talia Shire acting is not good acting.

We're in a long sequence that's about how Adrian had the baby prematurely and she slipped into a coma or something, and it's made clear that she had health problems because she was stressed out and overworked because of the heavy things at the pet shop and the husband who went back to boxing. Big old guilt trip taking up a lot of the middle of the movie. Adrian is in a coma. They don't show the baby. It's all just sadness about comatosity of Adrian.

But! She eventually wakes up! And after the first ever conversation they've ever had about what to name their newborn son, Adrian inexplicably changes her tune and tells Rocky she wants him to win. "Win!" That's what she tells him. Then she says it again. Stallone writing, Shire acting, what more could you want.

Now an upbeat training montage that's more hopeful and he's obviously high energy. He must be hitting the punching bags better because just look at how confident he looks.

1:29:35 - It is the sequel to the famous running montage from the first movie. The inspired updates include a new recording of that same song but with children singing "flying strong now" or whatever, and also children following him on his majestic dash to the steps of that municipal facility. Someone probably said "do the running scene again just exactly like in the first movie", but no. Stallone was not satisfied. "We will change it a little," he proclaimed. And lo.

Oh I hope there will be a sequel to the shot of Adrian closing her eyes for considerably longer than a blink. Do you think when people stop her on the street they're like "do the eye close thing do the eye close thing! My friends will all ask if you did the eye close thing and I need to tell them yes she did I saw it and it was even better in person"

We're at the fight now. It's about to start. It's all going as expected. I truly believe that everything will be okay.

Before it starts, Apollo tells Rocky, "you're going DOWN". So maybe it will NOT be okay after all…

Seems like the shots of this fight are not as varied or interesting this time, and they're relying more on the announcer commentary telling us what to think compared to the first movie.

Now the obligatory montage to show us the rounds moving forward and them still going at it. Not the same style as the first movie, but whatever it's working fine. I'd maybe watch a boxing match if it were shot and edited like this so that it's just ten minutes.

I swear I remember seeing this imagery from across the drive-in way back in the 70s, I don't care if you believe me or not it's the truth.

Look, I know I don't know nothin' 'bout boxin' but it seems like you're supposed to use your forearms as shields kind of, and Rocky doesn't do that like at all.

The dialogue is telling us that Rocky is maybe losing going into the final round. I wouldn't have thought so… thanks dialogue!

"YOU'RE GOING DOWN" repeats Creed. Such writing I tell you. Rocky II - A Film By Sylvester Stallone.

I will never forget the carefully choreographed climax of the movie. They both crumble onto the floor and the one-to-ten countdown all slow-like as they maybe try to get back up and Apollo doesn't and Rocky barely does so he is the new world champion. Then the last couple minutes of the movie is the same basic energy as the first movie. It's like the first movie's ending was a template and they just replaced a couple of things.

They kept making more of these movies! I'm going to keep watching them! I'm going to do this notes-about-them thing!

(next: Rocky III)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

April 6: Rocky

I have learned that the six Rocky movies (so all of the Rocky ones but not the Creed movies) are available on HBO Max. I was looking for a new watch-and-take-notes-and-post-the-notes project, so yo. Check it.

I've seen all six of these movies. I saw most of this one in the theater, like, back then! I was terribly terribly young! Maybe 7. I remember my friend Greg really wanted to see it, but our parents wouldn't let us. So we had them drop us off to see Capricorn One, but Greg made us sneak in to watch Rocky instead. He was so excited about it he wanted to play-punch afterward, but it hurt and I didn't like play-punch. I also didn't care about the movie. You know what movie is decent, though? Capricorn One. Although the supporting performance from O.J. Simpson might throw ya.

Anyway, since its release the reputation of this movie has remained very strong. It won Best Picture in an extremely competitive year. It is very much the Rocky Balboa of that year's awards contenders! But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be watching this first movie and admiring its scrappiness, then watching the subsequent ones and rolling my eyes at their formulaic-ness.

The opening fanfare sets the atmosphere really awesomely actually.

Oh also I don't care at all for boxing. And yet it seems like the idea of it is good drama fodder, I mean the idea of a sport of just two people punching each other until one of them is the winner at that.

So the first scene is a boxing match in a little church somewhere. Some people are in attendance who apparently like to pass the time watching punching. Rocky is bloody and hangdog. After the fight, which Rocky won, both fighters convalesce next to each other in a back room, kind of indifferently. But we have learned that punch-sport is a part of Christian life.

Rocky walks home through the gritty streets, past his friends who sing rudimentary a capella music on a street corner. They should work on the complexity of their harmonies.

Rocky is home and his home is gritty also. Atmosphere. He has a tank with animals in it. I cannot tell what the animals are. He talks to them. Personality.

He has a mirror he looks at and the mirror is decorated with pictures of Young Sylvester Stallone. They are totally pictures of him as a boy and young man. But Sylvester Stallone was not in character as Rocky Balboa when he took those pictures. It is a little jarring.

At the pet store the next day we are introduced to Adrian. That is the spelling, I checked. She is very very very shy-acting. The director told her to act shy, and she was like OH I'M GOING TO MEET AND EXCEED THOSE EXPECTATIONS.

Rocky's next stop is The Docks. I am surprised that Philadelphia has a dock area with such large ships, but I guess that's real. But I'm also surprised that he's there on the business of being the muscle for a loan shark. I didn't remember about that side of Rocky's complex, complex personality.

That scene just ended with a very 80s-teen-movie moment; a fellow thug rolled down his window and bullyingly yelled, "so long, meatbag!" We feel so bad that Rocky doesn't have the respect of his coworkers in the loan shark gang.

After getting dressed down by his gangster colleagues, he then goes to his gym and there's this whole thing about how the coach guy is so sick of Rocky's boxing mediocrity that they gave someone else his locker. It seems like that wouldn't happen. On his way out, the other boxer taunts him by saying he's pumped to be in receipt of Rocky's locker which is a very fine locker. We saw it, though. It was just a locker.

Adrian again. Broad caricature of an introverted person. I don't buy it maybe. Then a scene in a bar and the conversation with the bartender is also dumb fakey acting.

He later came upon a bunch of jerks on a corner, but among them was an awkward teenage girl that he knows. He makes her leave with him and tries to give him avuncular advice, but that scene ends with her telling him, "screw you creepo!" The exposition of this movie has a very opaque strategy.

0:30:00 - A scene with Apollo Creed does some more very unnatural exposition, setting up the premise that some local underdog is going to get a chance to fight him. This doesn't seem like an acclaimed movie. This seems like a scene in a cheap romance movie where the Handsome Man confesses to his best friend that what he's really looking for in a woman is someone not so pretty.

AC is flipping through a straight-up book, looking for a good boxer to fight on January 1, 1976, to celebrate the bicentennial. I'm a little "wha?" about some of this. He chooses Rocky Balboa because of his catchy "Italian Stallion" nickname and remember because Columbus was Italian so

Rocky and Adrian go on a date. It's Thanksgiving but that happens anyway. It does not bristle with romantic energy. It reeks of social obligations. It seems like the beginning of the kind of loveless relationship your grandparents began in the 1940s in their dustbowl-decimated agrarian community.

They are back at his little shithole apartment and he is a persistent man and I do not root for this relationship.

Things escalated kind of quickly. Rocky got invited to an agent guy's fancy office and offered a chance to fight for the World Heavyweight Championship. The next scene, everyone knows about it and he's on TV. He seems like a dumb lug. How can he possibly succeed. Good job contrasting his character with the big celebrity, though.

Burges Meredith is oddly appealing as this surly, pirate-talking boxer-coach-manager guy. He comes to Rocky's apartment sucking up, and Rocky isn't receptive, I'm pretty much buying BM's different emotions, and Rocky's.

1:11:24 - Pretty sure my friend and I talked a lot about this scene when we saw it back then, he fills a glass with raw eggs and drinks it up. All one shot, baby.

This scene with Paulie, Adrian's brother who is Rocky's friend, I don't like. Paulie is a bad friend. That scene ends with Rocky beating up pig carcasses. They should have just had that part.

His hands are bloody when he punches the meat things. That's his blood, right? That's not like animal flesh?

We just had a very melodramatic scene with Rocky and Adrian and Pauly, and Pauly just went nuts. This time, at least, Rocky and Adrian react to him the way you'd think people normally would.

1:30:55 - Famous training montage. I think as this movie series progresses these montages get more stylish. As it is, it's going for just a rousing moment of "he seems confident as he trains", as the music pumps you up with the profound lyrics, "trying hard now" and "getting strong now".

They have actually explained almost nothing about the specifics of boxing. I realize that now as Rocky says "no one has ever gone the distance with Creed". Which I think means something about going all 15 rounds, right? But the point is that I haven't had to hear much about stuff like that, and I honestly don't mind that.

1:44:30 - Ew, some actually kind of bad stock footage of the crowd at the fight. Oh, but then a cameo by actual Joe Frazier, probably.

As the fight begins I gotta say I have been effectively made to root for this underdog hero. I've been indifferent to most of the movie so far, and I'm indifferent to boxing, but ferrealz I'm excited to watch this fight.

It's cinematic with lots of angles that you don't see when you're watching actual fights (I assume), but also the actual fight-acting by Stallone and Carl Weathers seems like they're getting it right. That can't be easy, right? I mean, it's punching! Faces!

1:54:11 - Oh shit I remember this ahhhhhh his eye his eye, his EYE is swollen shut and he tells them to cut it open! That, like, what? He's going to go back out and fight with his eyelid literally slashed open WHAT

They weren't even that careful doing that slice

I thought they would be relying more on the commentators as narrators to tell us what to feel, but it's really all the cinematic storytelling that is getting it done.

But the aftermath of the fight is like opera, everyone is passionate and yelling and it doesn't work on me as well as it must for most people. I don't even exactly get what the outcome of the fight is (partly because I don't understand boxing). But that's the point, at least a little bit; in the heat of passion he just wants to tell Adrian that he loves her. That works well for this movie. And the way it just ends in that swirl of excitement, no denouement, it's really effective.

So overall there are lots of things about this movie that I don't care for, but there are some things to appreciate. It's not a fancy movie, but it seems like they did a particularly good job with the final boxing match feeling like exciting movie drama while also seeming like authentic boxing. As if I know anything about authentic boxing.

I don't agree that it should have won Best Picture over Network, All the President's Men, and Taxi Driver.

One last observation: looking back, I'm pretty sure that scene with the teenage girl is a result of the observation that the movie greatly lacks females.

(next: Rocky II)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 31: Strangers on a Train

After suffering through more Friday the 13th movies than anyone deserves, I’m rewarding myself on the evening of October 31 with a viewing of what I've often said is my favorite Hitchcock movie. I put it that way because I don't remember a ton about it, or even how long it's been since I've seen it. It seems unlikely that it's my favorite Hitchcock movie. How could I make such a claim when Rear Window is, like, RIGHT THERE.

This came out in 1951. Hitchcock was already a big star director by then, but most of his most well-known movies were still to come. I'm not familiar with any of the actors in this movie. Okay, let's take another look!

(SPOILERS AHEAD, of course. I'm going to describe the movie as I'm watching it.)

Farley Granger is top billed. You'd think with a name like that he'd be more famous. That's probably the whole reason he's named that in the first place. Fail!

Pretty highfalutin writing credits - Raymond Chandler wrote this screenplay based on a Patricia Highsmith novel.

It starts with this "cinematic vision" that almost feels like marketing - we see legs of people getting out of cabs with luggage, heading into a station. It's all nothin-but-legs for a minute or two until two Actual Strangers on a Train strike up a conversation.

The strangers are Bruno and Guy; Guy is a famous tennis player that Bruno recognizes. I remember enough about this movie to know that we are not wrong to find Bruno irritatingly forward as he brings up Guy's personal information that he's read about in the society section of the paper. Between this and The Talented Mr. Ripley, it seems like Ms. Highsmith had a knack for making drama out of uncomfortably doting dudes.

Eight and a half minutes in and Bruno is already starting to propose a murder of Guy's wife. It seems hasty for this conversation to have gone down this road, but it's cool that we get to this movie's cool idea so quickly. Bruno proposes killing Guy's wife in exchange for Guy killing Bruno's father. They'd both be killing strangers so it would be super hard for detectives to figure it out. Guy clearly doesn't take Bruno seriously.

For 1951, it seems surprising that these characters are so casual about the breakup of a marriage because they both have new lovers and the wife is already pregnant from her new man. I think of early fifties American culture as way too stuffy to be okay with that in a mainstream movie, but that is this movie's storyline.

Guy's wife... her appearance is kind of curious. I wonder if it looked more dislikeable at the time, but she looks like a harmless librarian. But her dialogue about blackmailing Guy to stay with her makes her unambiguously villainous.

Guy and his wife are in a heated argument in the shop where she works, and he is grabbing her and shaking her, and she looks scared! A man nearby notices and interrupts them by saying, "this isn't the place for a family quarrel!" Now THAT'S the early fifties American culture I've come to know and love.

Bruno and his mother. They are having tea or something. They are clearly tight, maybe to a dysfunctional degree. What is this household? Swanky. Bruno is wearing a silk robe. I do not understand. There's this weird thing about a painting his mother made; he delights about how it looks just like Father, and then we see it and it is some kind of abstract monster. Odd. I think it means he's nuts.

That scene ends with Bruno having a short phone conversation with Guy; Guy hangs up on him but we gather that Bruno knows that Guy's wife won't let them divorce.

So now begins what has always, for me, been the most memorable sequence. Bruno clearly thinks it is his duty to murder Guy's wife, so he follows her with two flirty young dudes to a carnival at night. I like how the lights at night look in this black & white cinematography.

Bruno is not even hiding the fact that he's following her! He just tags along behind the three of them, very visibly, and sort of smirks playfully every time she notices him, and it looks like she kind of likes the attention. Things were different in 1951.

After remaining behind her and her fellas for a couple carnival attractions, he follows them onto a Tunnel of Love boat ride. They all drive little boats along a route through the water, into and out of a cave, and to a more secluded area. There is shadow imagery in the cave that ends in a fakeout. Then there is a moment where she is alone at the secluded area and he strangles her.

There's a thing about a lighter. When Guy and Bruno were chatting on the train, Bruno noticed Guy's lighter. I didn't catch how Bruno ended up with it, but they made it very clear that Bruno has it now. And the imagery of the murder includes the lighter, as well as a stylish closeup of her glasses on the ground reflecting the murder.

0:30:50 - Bruno has shown up at Guy's pad to show him the glasses and let him know the deed is done so now it's Guy's turn. Guy is shocked, but Bruno is effectively guilt-tripping him. Guy's behavior is still pretty rational. But he's still holding onto Dead Wife's glasses. That seems like a dumb move.

Guy is now at his girlfriend's place; their chemistry is steamy, and it now seems to me like the look of Dead Wife was meant to contrast with his sultry girlfriend.

The police are investigating, and the plot kind of thickens because Guy's alibi during the murder is just a drunk guy on the train. Seems like there's enough information that he should still be okay, though, right? Hm, doesn’t look like the cops are satisfied.

More importantly, Bruno is starting to be a shadowy figure dogging Guy. One must wonder what is gonna happen… Bruno did seem to have an easy time killing that woman… has he done this before? I'm actually asking; I don't remember.

0:48:00 - Ha, Bruno went so far as to send Guy a diagram of his father's house and a key!

The next scene is cool - a relatively quiet tennis match, and the whole audience is following back and forth with their heads, but one head is not moving! It's Bruno who is just staring down Guy from the other side of the court!

Anne is Guy's girlfriend, and she is not only more glamorous than Guy's dead wife, and not only is her voice ever so sexy with its smoky alto, but she's smart enough to immediately notice that something is up with this Bruno guy, as well as with Guy's behavior w/r/t Bruno.

Oh, and then there is this strange scene - so Bruno has decided he has to insinuate himself into Anne's family's circle, which is where Anne starts to notice things. But then there is Anne's sister, who has more of a librarian look, not unlike Dead Wife… and Hitch's bold direction makes it very clear that Bruno also notices the resemblance between Dead Wife and Anne's Sister! Very strange. I don't know where it's going. I can't tell what either of them are thinking, but it's made to seem very important.

Bruno has totally created a new character for himself and is frankly being very Talented Mr. Ripley at a party where Anne's family and a bunch of fancy people are being fancy. But that goes in a strange direction… Bruno started chatting with a lady about murder, and he starts to demonstrate strangulation, but Anne's sister sees him, and they both have freakout looks on their faces, then Bruno passes out plus also he has been actually strangling that lady. I’m just reporting what I’m seeing here, folks.

Aha, we're starting to get that much-needed explanation… when Bruno and Anne's Sister noticed each other, Bruno was flashing back to killing Dead Wife because of the resemblance. And Sister noticed that he seemed to be strangling her in his mind, and she's totally right.

And Anne is such a smart cookie that she noticed the whole thing and thinks, correctly, that Bruno was flashbacking to killing Dead Wife while he was pretend-strangling the lady and seeing Sister. This one's a keeper, Guy, as long as she'll keep you.

1:04:20 - Guy and Anne seem to have an idea of how to unfuck this situation, so Guy calls Bruno and says, yeah, okay, I'll do the thing, what do I do. He doesn't really intend to do the murder, does he? I don't think the movie is actually trying to get us to think that. But I must say, I'm super glad that I don't remember how this turns out.

Oh, it's coming back to me as it's unfolding. Guy sneaks in and, in darkness and shadows, approaches Bruno's Father's bed just as if he's gonna do it, but just like we're thinking we'd do, he starts to tell the father about what's going on. But then it turns out it's actually Bruno in the bed! It's tense for a bit, but Bruno lets Guy leave, but says he's going to think of a clever way to get him back for breaking their deal. A bit anti-climactic.

Anne is endlessly proactive, I must say; just like that, she is paying a call to Bruno's mother to warn him about Bruno. But Bruno's mother is clueless. And now, before Anne leaves, here's Bruno, back in that Liberace robe. He's unloading a bunch of bullshit on Anne, trying to convince her that Guy actually did it. But come on, we have seen how smart Anne is, she's not gonna fall for that, right? Bruno references the lighter; he says something about "Guy wanted me to go back for the lighter but I couldn't do it". So yeah, the lighter stuff is coming together.

Okay, now it's going to get all tennis-y because Guy has a tennis match before a very large crowd. He and Anne have an idea about dealing with the lighter, I think, but Guy has to play the match or it will be suspicious to the cops who are constantly observing him. Oh, if only he could win the match quickly! We're watching them try for that. This is a sports drama. Do you think this movie inspired Rudy?

I think they think the lighter is actually at the murder scene, right?

WHO will WIN the TENNIS MATCH?! And HOW QUICKLY?!

1:21:20 - Wait, what was that about garments in the cab? Sister had to go get the cab ready so they could amscray right after the match, and they showed some folded clothes in the back seat. A red herring? A Maguffin? A proverbial damning lighter?

Meanwhile Bruno is lurking around, and he accidentally drops the lighter into a sewer drain! And he gets some people to help get it out, but he keeps calling it his cigarette case. Not lighter, “cigarette case”. Is that part of it? Our minds reel… the lighter! The garments! The cigarette case! The glasses? The tennis match! THE TENNIS MATCH! Oh what a tangled web.

I mock, but it is suspenseful.

You guys. Bruno got the lighter back out of the sewer. And guess who won the tennis match. Why, it was our hero, Guy! But the cops who are tailing Guy will be suspicious if he hustles away from the match to go get a clue from the murder scene, so Sister does some distracting. Also, the garments were something for Guy to change into so that the cops might not recognize him later. Now I get it. Only NOW do I get it.

None of that worked, though; the cops easily figured out that Guy is going to the murder scene.

Bruno is already there, though, at the carnival, but he wants to plant the lighter after dark. He asks a carnie what time it gets dark around here. What the carnie should have said was "dude, you're from close enough to here, why do you think you need to demand this information from a carnie?" The carnie doesn't say that, but at least he is pretty rude to Bruno so it's okay.

Is Bruno planning on tipping the police to the presence of the lighter? Not exactly sure what his scheme is.

Ooh! Bruno is spotted by someone who remembered him getting off a boat after the murder! Busted!

Oh, I don't think that's how carousels work… okay so after people started pointing at Bruno, he freaked out and fired his gun… and shot the nearby carousel attendant, whose death-collapse makes the carousel go way too fast! You know, because he slumps on the lever and the carousel thinks that means GoTooFast! And Guy is on there with Bruno! They tussle! They tussle! Fast carousel!

A heroic old carnie says he can make the carousel not spin so fast… he then goes fully prone and crawls under the runaway carousel! Why in tarnation is THAT the solution! He is an old, old carnie! Maybe it is the same one who was rude to Bruno. That means we really love this brave fool.

Bruno and Guy are still rasslin' on the carousel, plus a kid got injured. It's all so terribly dangerous, and suspenseful!

Whoa, the carnie accomplished his mission of getting to the middle area to pull the carousel lever and it totally borks the fast-spinning carousel; all kinds of damage is done, people and plastic horses and wood things go flying everywhere and it is a super bad disaster. But everything is ever so close to being resolved. Guy just has to convince the cops that Bruno, who is pinned under a pile of broken carousel components, has the lighter with him. It's kind of hard but eventually they see it in his hand. It's all over! Everything is okay.

The denouement is that Guy and Anne are on a train ride feeling terribly relieved that everything is okay, and a stranger wants to chat so they leave in a funny huff.

So that was just fine, but certainly not "the best Alfred Hitchcock movie". Definitely a really good one, though! Bruno is a unique and compelling villain, and they kept the suspense going very consistently.

Using the tools of the Age of Information has uncovered some other interesting nuggets… Bruno is played by Robert Walker, who died at age 32 shortly after this came out! He had struggled with alcoholism and mental health issues, having actually been an asylum patient at one point. He had also been married to, and divorced from, no less than Jennifer Jones. Another interesting cast member is Patricia Hitchcock, Albert's daughter; she plays Sister. Much is made of Hitch's sly, maybe-vain cameos in his movies but also sometimes his daughter had actual speaking roles. She is still alive at age 92 as I type this.

One more note is that I’m pretty sure that I saw Throw Momma from the Train before I saw this, when it was in theaters even maybe, but even then I knew it was kind of a comedy sorta-version of this, obviously referencing it but also being very much its own thing. Now I find myself probably needing to see that again.

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 26: Friday the 13th Part VIII - Jason Takes Manhattan

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood)

I know that this is devastating news for you but I'm almost done watching the Friday the 13th movies and posting here about them. Believe me it hurts me a lot less than it hurts you. Or something. Whatever, I'm not enjoying these movies so I look forward to moving on to a slightly more worthwhile project, such as those Fantastic Beasts movies. That's a joke get it, those movies blow.

So to recap… Jason drowned as a little boy in Camp Crystal Lake and his mom perceived negligence on the part of horny teenage camp counselors so she kills a couple of them before her son even drowns and then twenty years later she takes up that cause again bigly. She gets beheaded but Jason, still a boy in the lake, pulls his mom’s killer in the water which makes her very whelmed. Then a few years later Jason is an adult-sized monster who stalks that camp and the houses in the area, violently murdering everyone he can, and in different methods whenever that is feasible. At one point he gets so stabbed that he is apparently definitively dead enough to get buried in a spooky graveyard, but the guy that originally stabbed him so effectively thinks he needs to dig him up and extra-kill him. But lightning strikes a pole that got stuck in Jason so he just stops being dead and goes back to being a murder monster. He eventually gets anchored to the bottom of Crystal Lake but a girl who lives on the lake has powers which mostly involve moving things with her mind, but she also was able to inadvertently will Jason up from the lake so he could just keep doing the same death stuff. After many killings and poorly-thought-out chases through the woods, the magic girl uses her power to have her dead dad come up from the lake and pull Jason into it in such a manner as to convince her that Jason is just gone forever.

So then how can there be another movie I don't understand.

Maybe the first seven movies were all a dream, and this one is just a movie.

What does it tell you that I'm putting off starting this movie.

Again I haven't seen this eighth movie. It came out when I was 18, but even though it promised a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, campy experience I just didn't fit it into my busy schedule of wanting girls to like me even a little. I do remember kind of rooting for it to be fun and funny, but based on having just watched the first seven movies in the series, my confidence that there will be any decent humor here at all is very, very low. Okay. It is time. This truly is the beginning of the end.

It begins and an unfamiliar narrator describes the intensity of The City as we see Manhattan-at-night imagery. Totally doesn't seem like the other movies right off the bat. Oh also the score is a pop song that sounds like it is approximately 36 months older than this 1989 movie.

Okay… we're actually apparently back to Crystal Lake, and now that narrator is apparently a radio DJ who is giving a shout-out to the graduating kids of Crystal Lake. For some reason he cares about them and says something that is strangely both welcoming and mournful about them coming to the city.

These two attractive people are getting busy on a large boat on the lake. It is Crystal Lake, that is established, but this boat is too large for this lake. This is like having a Jet Ski on an above-ground backyard pool.

They drop the anchor and it catches on a high voltage cable that is running at the bottom of the lake! It makes sparky electro-fire under there, and it jolts probably-Jason's body under some of the collapsed dock stuff and he un-dies and climbs out of the water! We even hear a warlocky "ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!"

Jason goes into the room where the couple is having another go, and he shoots a harpoon at the girl but misses! But he has some other stabby thing and he stabs the guy with it. The girl got away, but he finds her where she's hiding and kills her kind of slowly. Like, he very slowly bears down on her as she screams and it's like they have time for someone to save the day. But there is no one. No one saves the day. The day ends with her just getting stabbed with the harpoon.

Now it's new characters in a new place. Looks like the eastern seaboard, an ocean port, and some students are getting on a boat that is going to New York. It's the graduating students the DJ was talking about. There is a girl who interacts with a woman who is apparently her admiring teacher and a man in a suit who is her legal guardian. Something about her being troubled. Then there's this captain, and he's talking to one of the kids like they are father and son. His name is Shawn and he is handsome like a movie star.

0:16:00 - Whoa, Jason is suddenly on the ship! This is totally not Crystal Lake, and the ship has left the port, but Jason emerged from the water and grabbed onto the ship! Then Shawn runs into a creepy deckhand who tells him this cruise is doomed. That is important to the formula, apparently. It is then established that Shawn is the boyfriend of Troubled Girl. How troubled can she be if she has a boyfriend who looks like he was rejected by New Kids On The Block for being handsomer than the rest of the group.

The rollout of this motley cast of characters continues with a rocker girl and a longhaired filmmaking auteur. The rocker girl walks around with her guitar rocking, and the auteur films her for a video. But then they part ways, and she goes down below decks to experience the primo echo acoustics or something. She just rocks down there by herself with nothing but her rad axe. Not even an amp, even though she succeeds in playing loud rock music. But Jason shows up! He chases her a bit, gets his hands on her electric guitar and bashes her to death with it.

0:23:14 - Whoa, surprisingly ambitious shot they pulled off! In all one shot we see Jason come down some stairs onto like a promenade deck, then he looks at the porthole window of a room, and the camera goes through the porthole and continues through the room in a way that is not at all obvious to understand how they did it! Good job!

It's Troubled Girl's room. She has a vision of a drowning little boy. Little Boy Jason, I guess. If I’m supposed to know her relationship to Jason, I must have missed it.

So suit guy is Troubled Girl's uncle, I get that now. But also he is chaperoning the kids on this cruise so he's like a teacher. And he is very stuffy.

There are two new characters, boy-crazy girls, and between them and Troubled Girl there is a lot of hairspray in this movie's budget.

Uncle Suit walks in on Boy-Crazy 1 & 2 doing cocaine! He doesn't quite catch them in the act, so he just says something menacing about how one of them has a project due. But aren't they graduating? And on the "we made it" celebratory cruise? One of the Boy-Crazy girls (2 I think) is played by Kelly Hu, who has had plenty of success these past 30 years. But for now she is just Boy-Crazy 2.

Someone is in the sauna, this little ship has a sauna. I have no idea who the boy is in the sauna because he covered his face with a towel. Jason comes in and grabs a scalding hot rock, way bigger than the hot rocks that usually are in saunas, and kills the boy by shoving the big rock through his chest.

Boy-Crazy 1 has gotten it into her head that Troubled Girl is the one who got Uncle Suit to walk in on them doing drugs, so she bumps Troubled Girl into the water! Before getting fished back onboard she has a vision of Little Boy Jason pulling her down. Some other unrealistic interactions take place when she gets back on deck, but then she has really scary visions in the bathroom.

0:35:00 - In perhaps the most gruesome scene in this series so far… Boy-Crazy 1 is in her cabin wearing a silk robe. Uncle Suit walks right the fuck in and gets all huffy at her about "where's your biology project". He's serious! And she is ready for that question because she jettisons the robe to reveal that she has drawn some artful anatomy references on her underwear'd body! She's unambiguously seductive and kisses him and pulls him into bed! He is mostly not having it and eventually wriggles his way away from her scoldingly. But Auteur was filming! It was all a blackmail plan of some kind.

The next scene is Boy-Crazy 1, just moments after blackmailing Uncle Suit, getting out of the shower in her bathroom as Jason comes in. She sees him come in and look around and decides to just stay in the bathroom and be scared. But he smashes his arm through the door, tosses her around a little, smashes the bathroom mirror, and after another drawn-out approach, stabs her with a piece of the broken mirror.

In the very next scene, the ship's pilot is piloting when Jason creeps up from behind and kills him with something long and sharp and snippy. Then the Dad Captain comes in and finds the body, and just like that Jason is behind him with a knife. It's just a run-of-the-mill throat-slash but it's edited with a stylish frame-rate effect so it's still fresh and exciting.

Shawn finds this carnage right away and since he's the Captain's son he has some ship cred, maybe he can get the ship back to shore! But when he tries to radio for help, Jason cuts some cable somewhere to thwart it. And he just seems disappointingly clueless about what to do otherwise.

Everyone assembles in the cockpit - what do you call a cockpit on a ship, I forget - and Creepy Deckhand repeats his warning that the cruise is doomed, and this time he says he knows Jason Is on the ship to kill everyone, but Uncle Suit is so mad at that story that he grabs a knife and comes at the creepy deckhand! Others are around though so the fight is broken up.

Boy-Crazy 2 wasn't with everyone who went to the cockpit; she decided to go look for Boy-Crazy 1. But when she finds her body, she runs around screaming! And instead of ending up someplace where there is anyone, she ends up in the unoccupied disco. Loud music is playing. Lights are swirling. Sensory overload. And Jason is there! He kills her by strangling her to the kind of music that all the kids like nowadays.

Auteur always has his camera, and now he is shuffling around the ship with his camera in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Someone suddenly appears in front of him and he accidentally shoots the guy. He starts to feel bad about that, although continuing to film, but then Jason shows up, knocks the camera away, and chases him. He kills Auteur by picking him up and throwing him so hard at an electrical console that all the electricity blows up and makes him be on fire and twitchy and dead!

Shawn's friend from before is just wandering scared on the decks when he runs into Jason, so he climbs a ladder up a mast. Even though he climbs up way past Jason, Jason can still somehow reach up and throw him on some stuff, we don't see what stuff, but it makes him be Dead Friend.

Pretty chaotic on this ship; Jason watches some of them trying to figure out a place to be. Uncle Suit, what is his deal. He had an argument with someone about using the flare gun. There's a storm so no one will see it, someone says, but Uncle Suit makes some sinister comment about there only being one person that needs to see it. The fire is super problematic from Auteur getting killed, and now the ship is flooding for some reason? Is the storm just that bad?

Uncle Suit yells at Shawn, he says "this is all your fault!" What the hell is he talking about. Shortly thereafter Creepy Deckhand shows up and Uncle Suit aims the flare gun at him, he just thinks he needs to shoot Creepy Deckhand with the flare gun, that was his strategy all along! That and blame all these violent murders on one of the kids who fancies his niece. But the flare gun does nothing and Creepy Deckhand was already about to die anyway because there is an axe in his back.

The survivors have all now gotten into a lifeboat, and now they are just rowing away on a lifeboat. It's taking forever to get anywhere, just how far off shore were they? Their rowing is extremely weak and devoid of urgency to a level that puts it among the more unbelieveable things in this movie.

Uncle Suit literally snarks at Shawn, "I hope you can find shore soon, CAPTAIN! We don't all want to drown out here!" I admit, if they make his death really violent it will be satisfying. Yes indeed. Well played, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Well played.

1:03:40 - Oh, the reason it was taking them so long to get anywhere in their little lifeboat is that they had to end up in New York harbor, right off Manhattan! They find a dock area and start looking around for help… and Jason also climbs up on the dock because he just was able to follow them there somehow.

Also, by the way, Troubled Girl's beloved dog came with them in the lifeboat.

They get mugged right there at the dock. Because Troubled Girl is pretty, the muggers take her away! They take her to their little headquarters in a gap between two warehouses, say "welcome to the casbah sister" and inject her with liquid narcotics… but Jason shows up and finds the needle that just got used, and he actually stabs the first mugger with the needle! Because he's Jason, he can stab someone so hard with a three inch needle that it writhes painfully all the way through his body and kills him! Another mugger tries to shoot Jason, but mugger bullets are no match for Jason Voorhees, so he clangs the guy to death on a metal pipe while Troubled Girl runs away.

One of the remaining students somehow runs afoul of Jason shortly thereafter, not sure how he got separated from the rest of the group. But Jason chases him onto a roof of a nearby building, and I'm sitting here typing this as many, many of this movie's seconds are spent with this student trying to beat up Jason with his fists! He just punches him and punches him and punches him repeatedly for a while, and Jason just sort of barely notices. Finally, Jason takes one swing and knocks the guy's head off.

Just as quickly as they all got inexplicably separated, the four remaining people from the cruise all run into each other with an NYPD cop, so it looks like everything is going to be okay… but when they get into the squad car, a mugger head is on the dashboard! Jason is there! He gets the cop! The rest are in the car so Troubled Girl drives away… but she has a stylish vision of Little Boy Jason, and that ends with Actual Jason on the ground inexplicably unmoving, the cop car ramming a building and exploding violently, and Troubled Girl's hair looking more fabulous than ever before. Three of them got out of the car before it exploded, but the teacher who was nice to Troubled Girl at the beginning isn't with them so maybe she blew up with the cop car.

1:17:00 - Oh a flashback! Young girl who is probably Young Troubled Girl is lake boating with Uncle Suit. POS that he is, he tells her that she needs to learn to swim or Jason Voorhees will get her, and he even pushes her into the lake so that she'll learn the hard way! What a tool! Little Boy Jason is down there, we see, grabbing at her ankles to hold her down.

Back to the present day, she confronts him about it and runs away. Then Jason gets up and walks at Uncle Suit! Why, he wasn't dead at all! Then a very strange thing happens which I don't think was a fully baked cinematic setpiece… Uncle Suit runs away into a building. Seconds later, Jason throws him out of a second floor window of that building. Then Jason is next to him in the alley where he fell, and he grabs him and shoves him in a barrel of sludge until he drowns.

All that's left are Troubled Girl and Shawn. She reveals that one of the reasons she's so troubled is that her parents died in a car accident and she was at school when she heard the news. Well of course she's a basket case, it's no wonder no one understands how to deal with her. That is the most intense story I've ever heard in my life. Or they just never got around to writing a more interesting story for this moment in the movie. But anyway, she and Shawn then shove their mouths together and it looks like that's the first time that's ever happened in all of human history. But Jason interrupts them and it's a chase down into the subway.

They get on a train. So much graffiti! What a dystopian nightmare! Is this the future the liberals want???!!! Jason is there though. There is no escaping Jason.

The train stops and Jason chases them down the tunnel. Shawn tackles Jason very bravely, and boy does that work out well for him because Jason totally fries up from touching that rail so hard. Shawn is fine though even though he was also rolling around and touching rails.

Troubled Girl and Shawn get up to the surface and are momentarily blinded by the dazzling lights of The Borough Of Manhattan, America's Most Exciting Borough, but then Jason, just fine as always, shows up. He chases them into a diner, makes some trouble there, and then chases them into a dead end alley. There is one way out though… through a manhole and down into the sewers!

They actually run into a sewer worker down there. Much of Manhattan has been inhabited only by gangs in this movie, so this is a pleasant surprise. He tells them that the sewer is about to have its regularly scheduled nightly flood of toxic waste so it's a good idea to not be in the sewers pretty soon.

But Jason catches up with them and kills the sewer worker by taking his wrench and clubbing him with it in a way that is cool shadows and blood spatter on the sewer wall.

Jason comes after Troubled Girl, but she spots a vat of toxic liquid and douses Jason with it! It messes him up! They are able to climb up a thing but all it gets them is a few feet above Jason’s head. But he can't follow because he's been toxic'd and that is making him gravely flummoxed. We hear the abstract sound of a drowning boy crying for help as a flood of toxic liquid rushes through, but just below where Troubled Girl and Shawn are clinging. It drowns Jason and when it goes away he is a little drowned boy. Shortly thereafter, they are strolling along Times Square and that dog finds them. It is the last thing that happens in the eight Friday the 13th movies that were released between 1980 and 1989.

So this movie was not campier or wittier than any of the others, and it didn't really try to be. It very much changed the setting, even though most of it was on that ship. It wasn't good. You should not watch it. I would advise against it. But if you do, may I please review your notes?

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 25: Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part VI - Jason Lives)

Two more movies remain in order to fulfill my commitment to watch these eight Friday the 13th movies and share my thoughts. After watching the first six movies, I must say I wish I could have come away with more appreciative observations. When I ask myself what these artists are most proud of with these movies, my first thought is "they were easy to make and we made a lot of money". You might suggest that there was solid craftsmanship in the makeup effects, but An American Werewolf in London and The Thing both came out before the third Friday the 13th movie, and those two movies make these effects look like high school projects.

But the biggest missed opportunity I'm sensing so far is the idiotic humor. If there were actual funny people on the creative teams of these movies, they were probably just told to shut up by the cocky assholes who outrank them. "Just get a funny looking actor, tell them to act funny, boom, there's your funny." Maybe having actual humor in horror-comedy was more of a foreign idea in the 80s. Whatever the excuse is, it's what I'm observing now. So here I go with the one whose title promises some blood that is new.

I have not seen this movie. Will it surprise me. In any way even at all. Nope. Nope it won't. Unless it does!

This one is beginning with a montage with narration. There are shots we've seen in the first six movies, plus some new imagery of the grave that was a big deal in the last movie. A good couple of minutes of the end of the last movie reminds us, with the help of, again, a narrator, that Jason is chained to the bottom of that lake.

After one unambiguous shot showing Jason down there, we cut to a little girl who doesn't like hearing her parents fight, so she gets in a boat and goes out on the lake which apparently they live right next to. When the parents go out after her she tells them she wishes they were dead… and lake magic responds by making the dad's dock structure thing fall into the lake!

Her name is Tina, and we cut to her as a young lady, apparently remembering that incident from her childhood. She and her mom are driving to Crystal Lake because she has been seeing a mental health professional who convinced them that she needs to go back to where it happened in order to not still be bad-brained.

Or… maybe I misinterpreted it because what seems to be happening in her session with the Doctor is that he's trying to get her to do telekinesis! He thinks that's what happened All Those Years Ago… and he's right! He motivates Tina with aggressive yelling and she does some telekinesis.

What happens next is she gets emotional and runs outside to the dock where her dad had died before, and yes, it's only now confirmed that he died because the dock collapsed with him on it. She vocally emotes that she misses her dad and wants to bring him back. She concentrates on doing lake magic. That gives Jason the ability to escape the chain and rise up out of the lake! It also became nighttime at some point.

There is a group of other characters that we're learning about bit by bit. They are Exciting Young Friends who have rented a house next to Tina and her Mom. A surprise party for one of them is being planned. But I must offer a word about the Doctor. Because what is up with him? He is at their house and is maybe staying with them? I mean it's nighttime and he's still there as if Tina is his full-time occupation. And he doesn't seem too fazed by her supernatural abilities.

Anyway, a couple of the Exciting Young Friends didn't quite make it to the house because of car trouble, so they walk through the woods to get to the surprise party. But Jason is there and he kills them with a spike thing. Like in the last movie, they use that same music that gets used in The Shining, which I looked up and can tell you that it's from the fifth movement of Hector Berlioz's Fantastical Symphony.

0:23:25 - Okay we're at the Exciting Young Friends party, and it's a similar dynamic to the fourth movie, where it's a bunch of young adults with awful social skills, renting a house next door to the nice family. So just as the movie has started to ramp up its vision of getting us to laugh at characters that are dorky, nay BECAUSE they are dorky, Tina has a vision of the killings that just happened in the woods. Do you think anyone will believe her? Before you say "of course not Bobby! What a question!" remember that Doctor has a peculiar curiosity about that stuff.

Another couple is camping. We saw them earlier getting busy in a van, but now they have a tent. It's possible I'm confusing them with other Exciting Young Friends; they're hard to distinguish. The guy goes to get firewood and Jason kills him real quick, but then he finds the girl in the tent, and he slashes his way inside. He then zips her up in the sleeping bag she's in, grabs it and just thwacks her to death on a tree!

It's the next day, and Tina is having a get-to-know-you moment with a local boy with a very thick neck. The conversation is useful to us because it confirms the basic premise that was drawn kind of weakly earlier. She opens up to him that she's insecure about being kind of crazy.

Then Tina and ThickNeck go to the house where the party was. The rest of the characters are unappealingly quirky in a manner familiar to those of us who have been watching these movies every night for the past week. In partiuclar, these girls are supper catty; they really want to make each other feel like shit. But when one of the catty girls picks on Tina for her mental health situation, Tina has kind of a Carrie moment and telekinesises her necklace apart right off her neck! Then she runs to her house and is still freaking out and the TV levitates.

That night one of the couples heads out to the lake for a skinnydipping. Jason just walks up to the dude and machetes him. The girl had already gotten in the water, but she looks over and sees that he is now dead boyfriend, and suddenly Jason is in the water grabbing her and I guess drowning her, but also hurting her in other ways, lots of underwater thrashing.

0:39:40 - One of the young guys is a character they clearly put a lot of thought into. They wanted him to be The Weird Guy, and he's very, very weird. But not in a way that actual people ever are. The writers of this movie don't know what a weird person is, but they had to make a weird character so he just says things like "star monkey" and puts colored things on his torso.

There is something going on with a uniquely shaped spike. Doctor goes for a walk in the woods and finds one of the dead bodies, and finds one of those spikes near the bodies. Then Mom is in his office, which, why does he have an office in their house, with a desk that's full of his stuff, it's not like he's there all the time. But Mom goes through and finds another of those spikes in the drawer. He comes back and she confronts him. Tina listens at the door and hears him say he's going to have her committed so she gets in the car and bolts…

…and she sees a vision of Jason totally gutting Mom! It makes her break the car and return home on foot probably.

One of the Exciting Young Friends puts makeup on because a catty friend shamed her earlier, and then for really no good reason she enters the scary woods looking for someone despite being obviously terrified and also not having a reason to do that. Jason is there! Ch ch ch! Ha ha ha! Chase chase chase! There is a cabin! Hide in the cabin, glowup girl! She does and thinks she has a good hiding place but Jason bangs through the wall and kills her with a scythe.

Three couples within the Young Energetic Gang are shown having sex in different places. One couple is doing it in a van, and because the Exciting Young Friends are there to throw a surprise party, this movie's set decorator decided that the inside of the van should be thoroughly decorated with happy birthday decorations, as if that's where the party was going to be. But I don't think that's where the party was going to be.

Jason kills the guy when he goes to investigate a noise, and it's very bloody how he just crushes the guy's head. Then he kills the girl who is still in the van, I think with a funnel. I think he had a funnel and he shoves the "pointy" part of the funnel into her brain.

Tina has met up with ThickNeck and for some reason they are in the woods where that last body was found by Doctor, so now they have seen that same body.

0:56:55 - Cool shot, one of the guys that had just had sex is down in the kitchen for some food, and some lightning reveals Jason hiding in the corner in a cool way. Then stab.

Tina and ThickNeck have decided to snoop in Doctor's desk. They find the spike, which is meaningful to Tina somehow, and in his desk there are clippings about Jason, so she realizes that's who the lake monster man was before. Her emotions make lots of things move in the room. That Tina, she really is the… New Blood.

Another of the guys is in the house just chillin' after having his romp with one of the catty girls cut short because she is catty. Jason kills that guy. That guy will never get the chance to find a girl who appreciates him and who sincerely wants to share a night of lovemaking with him. I think a great idea for a movie would be one that isn't this one.

One of the Catty Girls Who Just Got Laid is going into some rooms in the house because she doesn't know where the guy went. There is a fakeout, which we haven't had as much of since they went way overboard with those in the earlier movies. The fakeout is a cat in a closet! It made a noise but it is just a cat! A cute kitty. They become friends, but then she sees that a head, a straight-up HEAD, is sitting there on a thing in the room! Then Jason comes through the door and what does he do? What does Jason do when he sees her in the room with the head that he must have put there? He JASONS HER!!!! By throwing her through the window.

Then, wait, what? Mom and Doctor have gone into the woods. Looking for Tina I guess, but also still arguing because frankly Doctor is not very transparent. Jason joins them and after a moment they decide to see if running away might help. It doesn't really; Jason impales Mom with some sort of implement, right in front of Doctor who watches it happen. Not with any glee, mind you, but he doesn't seem concerned for his life.

Tina and ThickNeck get separated and she heads into the woods for reasons of I don't know. She is looking around and she sees Doctor who looks super suspicious. He lies and says Mom is back at the house and she calls him out so he's like "fine she's dead" and Tina freaks out. Then Jason shows up behind him with a really cool power tool. It's like eight feet long and has a spinning buzz saw at the end! This time Doctor is worried; Jason chases him down and uses this new equipment advantageously against this adversary.

After stumbling upon Dead Mom, Jason and Tina wind up in a standoff in front of the house. She uses her powers to attack him with cables from the power lines and the puddle he's standing in! It works for a second, but then he just stops being affected by that and chases her into the party house. She telekinesises some door closing but that doesn't help any more than if she'd used her hands. But she tries some more stuff and eventually makes a porch roof fall on him. She is proud of her work.

She finds ThickNeck in a room somewhere with The Cattiest One and brags about having killed Jason. The Cattiest One winds up getting punished for not believing anyone's been murdered when Jason comes to the front door with an axe and makes her his axe murder victim. See, Jason hasn't been killed after all!!!!!

The chase gets to the point where ThickNeck is laid out on the floor face down and Jason is about to kill him by stepping on him real hard, but Tina does some telekinesis things to thwart that plan. It turns into a basement fight with Tina coming up with more ideas to have telekinesis be useful in battle. Tl;dr - Jason is very much on fire and the house totally explodes.

But just when Tina and ThickNeck think they're safe out on the dock, Jason, who by the way busted out of his hockey mask a while ago and looks like the Tales from the Crypt mascot but way grosser and with brain-ooze all coming off his head, shows up again and tries to get him!

The thing to know about the climactic moment that ensues is that in the world of this movie, when someone dies in this lake, their body just stays there forever. They don't fish it out and bury it or cremate it like they do in the world that you and I inhabit. What I'm saying is that Tina's dad is still down there for some reason. And Tina determines that the solution to her immediate predicament is to use her mental powers to have her dad's nearly intact body come up from the lake and pull Jason in. Moments later in the back of an ambulance, Tina tells ThickNeck that the Jason problem has been taken care of forever. Credits roll!

So this movie was much like the other movies, except that they introduced a character who has X-Men abilities. Did I mention that I own this movie and can watch it whenever I please for the rest of my life? I don't even have to get permission.

(next: Friday the 13th Part VIII - Jason Takes Manhattan)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 24: Friday the 13th Part VI - Jason Lives

(previous notes: Friday the 13th - A New Beginning)

This, my fortunate acquaintances, is my lovingly prepared gift to you. These words, composed from the heart with precious little advance preparation, are meant to reflect my sincere and scholarly reactions to the Friday the 13th slasher movies of Hollywood, America.

So yeah, I'm watching the Friday the 13th movies and posting my extemporaneous (though cleaned up a bit after the fact) notes. We're at the sixth movie in the series. I caught some of this on cable when I was in high school and I remember telling people it was the worst movie of all time, even though I probably only watched a half-hour middle chunk of it. It's probably much, much better than I'd given it credit for. It's probably so good. It is probably so god damned good. My upper lip is trembling as I engage the “play” functionality on my movie playing device.

So far my favorite thing about it is that it's on the same disc as the previous movie so I didn't have to change discs. Ooh, I bet that means it isn't too long either!

It starts with some quick, effective exposition. It's Tommy and a friend of his, driving somewhere. It's not even the same actor that played Tommy last time, but they are very clear with the dialogue that they have sneaked out of the institution to go to Jason's grave and "send him to hell". The friend has clownish mannerisms. Whenever they want us to think someone's funny, they don't actually use creativity to generate humor. Someone just tells someone to behave the way funny people behave.

Ooh, they came to Jason's grave and dug it up. They open the coffin and hoo boy that is a very maggoty, wormy corpse.

Remember, Jason wasn't even in the last movie in a he's-real way. So the last we saw of him was when younger-Tommy killed him all by himself two movies ago. The acting by this Tommy actor guy is effectively conveying that that was a big deal for him.

Oh my god, the movie just got way worse. In a Shakespearean moment of passion, Tommy stabs the corpse of Jason with a spear-rod-thing that was in the graveyard. But lightning strikes it and it reanimates Jason! Other than being very rot-faced behind the hockey mask, Jason is now the same old Jason we've come to know and love. Clownish guy tries to club him, but Jason just shoves his boney arm through Clownish Guy's body really easily. Tommy runs away…

…and two fast movie references happen. For some reason, a music cue uses that same memorable theme that was used in The Shining that's actually something else; the idea clearly is "we'll use the Shining music in here". It’s Beethoven or something, right? But also, the title happens and is an overt lampooning of the openings of the James Bond series. The whole looking through the gun sight thing, but it's Jason throwing a machete instead of James Bond shooting his gun. This movie comparing itself to those movies is pretty haughty.

Tommy goes to the police, and they don't care what he says, he's trouble! They lock him up! I don't think he mentioned that his friend got killed.

Now a middle-class-looking couple is driving through the woods. The guy is played by Tony Goldwyn whose career as an actor and director has risen well above this movie. Wasn't he like the main guy on the show Scandal? Anyway, he doesn't last long in this movie; Jason blocks their way and stabs the car, and then stabs TG, and then stabs the girl. With a spear, each of them. Probably the one that helped reanimate him.

Uh oh, the cop who locked up Tommy has a daughter who is in a group of camp counselors! They're going to go be camp counselors at a nearby camp! They are flip about the legendary murders! No one will listen to Tommy!

0:19:55 - Here's a twist… the counselors get to the camp and continue to joke dismissively about murder… and a bus arrives full of children! This movie is going to take place when the kids are actually at the camp! We haven't seen that before. Why did I ever say anything bad about this movie.

Nearby there are some corporate business people playing paintball as a work retreat! Jason is watching them. Ch. Ha. One of them we never even see speak to anyone runs into Jason and Jason kills him by grabbing him by the arm and throwing him face first into a tree so hard that his face just liquefies, plus the arm comes off.

So here's what happens next - a group of three paintballers gets killed by Jason who just shows up in front of them and machetes them all in one swipe. But nearby there is another paintballer who we saw a little bit before, and he is a comically bumbling buffoon. Like, when they cast him, they got the ten nerdiest looking men they could find and told them to all act as bumblingly foolish as possible, and they cast the one who was the most bumblingly foolish. But he gets away.

The plot kind of stays around Jason's grave because the gravedigger had come upon the disturbed grave and cleaned it up. He muttered a monologue about making sure no one thought he was a bad gravedigger. Now this movie is comparing itself to Hamlet. So now Tommy tries to convince the cop/dad that his story about Jason is true... but the grave is normal looking and that contradicts Tommy’s story. What a disaster for Tommy. But that gravedigger sure saved face.

0:30:00 - Now it's nighttime and some people are in the woods. There's this new couple, which includes a guy played by a TV personality named Roger Rose that I recognized when I saw this scene back then. It is stunt casting, and yet he is an extremely obscure personality for us in 2020. But also the gravedigger is just wandering in the woods all drunk. Jason kills them all. He's just been using the machete; there's no ingenuity about death types on these last ones. And they're just quick scares. Just kind of unremarkable. Part of what you’re looking forward to if you like these movies is the revelation of how he kills someone, but we’re missing out on so much of that sweet joy.

We return to the camp and see the kids asleep in their barracks. I so dare you to convince me that there is a better word than “barracks” for this room full of kid beds. Anyway, one of the kids, age approximately 7, had fallen asleep reading No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre! What kind of nutty Friday the 13th movie is this anyway.

Young couple doing an odd sex dance to 80s music in an RV. Perfect fodder for Jason. Ch ch ch ch ch! Ha ha ha ha ha! Jason cuts the power cord to the RV so they can't do their sex bop. They are afraid so they drive away, but Jason is inside! The guy is driving and reveling in the fact that he chose loud rock music to listen to as they drive away, but Jason kills the girl by pressing her face so hard into the wall of the RV that it makes an imprint. Then he kills the guy, still driving the car, with a knife right through the head. Very quick edits, minimal gore. The RV overturns but Jason emerges triumphantly.

News of the last bunch of murders has already reached DadCop, and he concludes that Tommy is doing murders in a Jason-esque manner just to "prove" that "Jason" is "real". You can't fool DadCop; he has seen it all before.

One thing I remember noticing back in the 80s is that Jason was invariably shot in a very stark, non-dramatic way. Just a character like the other ones. He's not shadowy or mysterious. Earlier movies achieved more tension by doing POV shots instead of just regular he-is-walking shots.

Tommy and Daughter had a conversation on the phone that sets up that the two of them are going to collaborate on Tommy's plan. Daughter is pretty committed, but also her whole attitude is inappropriately amused. She's smiling about everything like "ooh fun what exciting hijinks are we getting into, whatever it is I'm game".

One of Daughter's counselor friends just got killed. Jason pulled her through the window from outside and twisted her head right off her body. I think Jason is stronger than he's been in other movies.

Daughter and Tommy totally get busted by her father. She thought she could get away with going somewhere but DadCop is too smart for her. No going-somewhere for you, Daughter!

For a second there we saw Jason skulking around the actual sleeping kids, but then he is seen skulking somewhere else. A Little Blond Girl seems to be a little observant about creepy goings-on so she has been complaining, and Jason keeps an eye on that situation ch ch ch ha ha ha.

0:56:45 - Hey, I like this couple of shots! A counselor is reassuringly tucking Little Blond Girl in, and as she stands up, Jason is watching them through the window. Right next to her and very big and visible, but the counselor isn’t facing the window, so she doesn’t see him. She walks through the room and we see Jason through other windows following her, they did a good job.

A couple of minutes of spooky, decently-filmed suspense happens as that counselor is alone and worried. That ends with Jason coming in and Jasoning her. A smear of blood appears on a window, and a moment later her body gets thrown through it in a way that truly looks icky.

Tommy and Daughter came up with a cunning plan to bust out of jail and continue working on Tommy's End Jason Once And For All project. We see the movie's attempt to give them romantic tension, and although it isn't very good, I've probably seen worse. I've seen a lot of movies. I've seen I Love Trouble.

DadCop and two deputies get to the camp just in time because the kids are now without any counselors. The two deputies go separately to search the grounds and one of them gets killed with an arrowhead or something like that in the head, Jason flings it with admirable precision at his forehead. The other one actually found Little Blond Girl who tells him about the scary man. Then the scary man is there! The deputy shoots Jason several times from just a foot away but nothing happens to Jason. Jason grabs the deputy's head and just smooshes it. This exact thing has happened to me several times.

DadCop comes upon Jason and shoots him with a shotgun. That causes Jason to lie down on the ground for 1.5 seconds, then get back up again. DadCop tries this several more times with the same results, then runs away.

The kids are scared and hiding, but one of them has a couple of uninspired wisecracks that I could type out here for you but my fingers won't let me, they know I would regret it, they know me so well these fingers.

Also Tommy and Daughter have arrived and seem to not be unified about how to proceed. While they are working through that difficulty, Jason found DadCop and killed him by folding him at the waist in a way that honestly probably wouldn't be immediately fatal but it looks so awkward that you'd probably just want to be dead, just think how people would stare.

Tommy is on a boat trying to lure Jason into the actual lake where he had drowned, and he has a chain-plus-boulder contraption that he has prepared for the occasion. Also part of the plan involves drizzling some gasoline onto the surface of the water and lighting it. Jason walks into the middle of the lake toward him and Tommy lights the lake on fire. That must be possible because I'm seeing it with my own eyes.

After using their arm limbs to flail at each other, Tommy actually succeeds in throwing the chain-boulder-thing around Jason and anchoring him to the bottom of the lake! But somehow he can't extricate himself from Jason's grasp and very quickly drowns. Also the boat broke in half.

Daughter swims over there to try to save Tommy and Jason grabs at her while still anchored. A series of deliberately unrevealing angles makes it look like she can, and does, start up the boat engine and kill Jason with the propeller. She then drags Tommy to shore and saves him.

But Jason is still anchored down there, we see, and he's alive and looking at the stuff that is in front of his face. That's the end of the movie! I think they sincerely hope that you had a good time watching it, and also they sincerely don't mind if you don't ever think about it again for the rest of your life.

(next: Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 23: Friday The 13th - A New Beginning

(previous notes: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter)

In case you're just joining us, I have committed myself to the task of watching each of the eight Friday the 13th movies that came out in the 80s, taking notes as I watch them, then posting those notes. I'm about to watch the fifth movie.

And hey, is it time to just recap the "story" so far? I mean… sure, I guess. It all started in 1958, when a little boy named Jason drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. Supposedly the camp counselors responsible for keeping an eye on him were distracted with their recreational boinking. That's how the story goes… however, what we see in 1958 is two camp counselors boinking and then getting murdered by someone with ostensibly no related drowning event. Anyway, Twenty years later Jason's mom stalks some camp counselors that are at that camp and kills them very violently. She gets beheaded before she can kill the last counselor, but then that counselor gets pulled into the water by ghoulboy Jason; she survives this only to be murdered by him in her house at a later date.

Meanwhile another facility down the shore from Camp Crystal Lake (and I might add that the actual eponymous lake doesn't appear to be any bigger than the apparel section of a Target) has some new counselor trainees on a retreat of some kind. Jason has quickly matured from a swampy child-monster to a hooded, but otherwise sharply-dressed psychopath who doesn't say anything. He kills everyone at this retreat except for one girl who seems to kind of get him. Also maybe her boyfriend survives, we never really get an answer on that, but she is familiarly hauled away by an ambulance and forgotten about. Jason keeps his killing spree going quite indiscriminately, but focusing on another group of young people that are hanging out at a nearby ranch. He kills everyone there, plus some other people he found, except for one girl who survives long enough to get pulled into the water by a ghoul that is probably a Jason's Mom Thing. We don't know what happens to her, but she definitely did not stay dry.

The hospital where that last batch of victims ended up got a little bit murdered up. Jason was in there because he was thought of as one of the victims somehow, maybe a deliberate playing-dead trick because he does like to do stuff like that. He heads back to the woodsy area around Crystal Lake and decides to pick on the residents of two area houses. He does lots of killings but a brother and sister from one of those houses stab him so many times that he just can't get up an murder them. But in the process of that, the brother might have caught some evil. Is this the final chapter. Will there be a new beginning. Soon the contents of Disc 5 will reveal all.

(I have not seen this movie btw)

It opens very differently from the others… someone on a raincoat is walking urgently through the woods during a nighttime storm. It's Corey Feldman! He approaches Jason's grave in the woods! Like totally a grave with a headstone that says Jason Voorhees. But also two hooligans were on their way to that grave; they want to dig Jason up! CF is hiding and watching that; the hooligans don't know about him. They want to see Jason's body, and when they succeed with that, it stabs them to death because Jason was buried with a bunch of his favorite weapons. Plus also wearing the hockey mask. He's about to kill CF when whoever was dreaming this dream wakes up in a van that appears to be for crazy people of some kind. I don't recognize anyone, but maybe the dreaming person is grown-up CF? Probably that. Not played by CF, though.

His name is Tommy. I think that was CF's character's name so yeah it's him. I wonder if he's still into video games. He's being delivered to an institute of mental health. A nice couple is in charge, a Nice Woman and a Nice Man who make it sound like it will be Nice there.

Tommy looks wistfully at a picture of his mom and sister. The sister survived the last movie ostensibly so what is the deal with her.

Reggie the Reckless is a character that introduces himself to Tommy quite confrontationally. He is only about 11 and he likes to scare people; he clearly thinks he's going to totally pwn Tommy with pranks, but Tommy is apparently still into monster masks so he responds in a horror-mask way that earns some cred with Reggie the Reckless.

We get a glimpse at the motley cast of teens and young adults that populates this youth mental facility slash work farm place… and then two old killjoys show up to scold everyone for being crazy. These two killjoy characters are the most broadly performed caricatures we've seen since the "you're all doomed" old guy. Their acting is the kind of acting you see at the Renaissance festival, except without the half-assed English accents.

One of the kids at the institute is just a well-meaning dork with chocolate smears on his face that everyone hates… one guy hates him so much that he murders him! With an axe! Chocolate Smear was trying to strike up a conversation with a man who was angrily chopping wood, and bothered him so much that he axes him right there in front of others and in broad daylight! This story I tell you, it is a veritable New Beginning.

New characters. Leather Jacket Assholes, are talking about the murder at the nuthouse. They are in the woods nearby and one of them goes to take a leak while the other tries to fix something wrong with the car. They both get some kind of killed! The first one, the killer shoves a lit flare in his mouth, and the other one gets his throat slashed while he's acting very cocky and charismatic in the front seat of the car. Lit flare death is better even though it looks very fake.

But now we're back at the workhouse institute place and they're all mournful because of that odd and traumatic axe murder. Someone tries to be playfully scary with a monster mask and Tommy flips out and beats him up! This is a drama about the dysfunctional relationships between the involuntary residents of a workhouse.

Ugh, now we're back on the Killjoy characters. They are extremely unpleasant to behold. I hope Jason really is still killing people and that he takes care of those two irritants.

New characters, a waitress at a café and a hot doggin' yuppie in a muscle car trying to impress her, It seems like it's always important in these movies to have loud asshole characters, but there are really a lot of them in this one. If it's because they think we want to see assholes get killed… they have a point.

Hot Dog was doing some coke lines in his car waiting for the waitress when he very abruptly, but not unpredictably got axed right in his bald spot! Then the waitress comes out to find him and gets axed in the sternum. Those two, and the leather jacket dudes, don't have any ostensible relationship to the workhouse kids, although the leather dudes mentioned hearing about the murder there. Are we supposed to suspect that Jason is following Tommy and killing randos in the area surrounding where he is?

So there's this couple, a frisky, playful couple that are, I think, residents at the mental health facility, but they smolder with the carefree lust of what can only be described as camp counselors. They sneak off into the woods to get naked and fool around! An old man is watching them! The old man gets knifed in the gut! Then the girl of the couple gets sheared to death while the guy is taking a break somewhere. But he returns to find what happened to her - we see that he sheared her right in the eyes, it's gross! Then he gets a very good death; the killer secures him to a tree with a leather strap, which he tightens and tightens and tightens with his makeshift branch-crank until his skull is crushed! This consistent ingenuity of homicide methodology can only come from the one, the only, the master, Jason Voorhees.

New character alert… I kind of like this part! So Reggie the Reckless is given a ride to visit his big brother at the trailer park where he lives. Reggie and Big Brother are really happy to see each other! They get along very, very well! Big Brother even offers Reggie an enchilada! We don't see the enchilada! They're in a van, not even a trailer, and the dialogue plainly tells us that Big Brother has an enchilada next to him that he makes available to Reggie! Reggie does not accept the proffered enchilada! It is funny that we do not see what the enchilada looks like! What does an enchilada in a van look like!

Meanwhile Tommy gets into big trouble because someone nearby with this movie's requisite asshole level notices him waiting around near the trailer park, and correctly surmises that he is from the nearby mental health facility. This asshole starts a fight and Tommy has incredible martial arts skills so he beats up the asshole. Why does he have those skills.

Big Brother had to go to the outhouse immediately for enchilada-related reasons after Reggie left. He and his girlfriend have a cute exchange while he's in there, and just when I think that I like it when this movie's assholes die and plus I also like Big Brother, he and the girlfriend get killed. Big Brother gets perforated with metal spikes that are shoved at him through the walls of the outhouse. I am disappoint. This is probably this series' version of the first ten minutes of Up.

Oh, so the Killjoy characters… one of them was the guy that Tommy beat up, and the other one is his mom. Yeah, they hate the mental health facility, so it make some sense that he would pick a fight with Tommy so rashly. He returns home on his motorcycle but he's so mad about getting beat up that he just rides around outside his house, raging loudly about getting thumped and demanding that his mom do something about it! But he gets beheaded by a knife that takes advantage of his perpetual motorcycle operation. Then a butcher knife comes through the window at his mom and she's dead, face down in some soup cauldron she'd been obsessing over.

A word about the character with the speech impediment. One of the workhouse kids stutters. Inclusion! He just had some awkward interactions with the couple of ladies in the house and then turned around and saw a raised butcher knife. No more stuttering guy.

I should mention, the glimpses we've gotten of the killer are very, very unrevealing. The movie is making sure we don't have enough information to conclude for sure that it is Jason, although sometimes Tommy has visions of Jason standing somewhere and looking at him.

Another character died that's in that house. A girl gets naked and goes to bed, sees the body of the stuttering guy that has been placed there to frighten her, and then gets macheted through the mattress.

Then another killing. This character who has been vividly characterized throughout as "girl who is only always ever listening to music that she is clearly super into so much that no one is able to talk to her", she's being like that in her room and the killer just goes in and stabs her in the gut.

Reggie and the Nice Woman find those last three bodies stacked on a bed, and they run away, but on their way out of the house, Jason, total actual Jason, bursts through a door at them! He has great posture and wears a clean jumpsuit. They run away into the nearby woods and see an old-fashioned station-wagon ambulance. They open a door of it and a body is in it! I don't recognize the victim but there have been a lot lately. But also look.. Jason! Nearby! They run away.

The two get separated and Nice Woman comes upon Nice Man spiked through the head into a tree, so very dead! I don't remember what we last saw of him.

She runs back to the main house, and the cook, who is Reggie's grandfather, is thrown through the window at her! He has been murdered! Murdered I tell you! She runs away.

Jason is slowly chasing her with his machete as she stumbles through the mud. He is about to kill her but then he is distracted by a tractor coming at him, operated by Reggie! Reggie actually runs him down with the tractor! It's actually a bulldozer. He bulldozed Jason!

He looks dead but then he grabs her leg. And then they run away.

A very exciting confrontation ensues in the nearby barn where they run. Jason slowly pursues them in there, and the woman comes at him with a chainsaw. They sort of swordfight but with chainsaw and machete.

Tommy, who has been we-don't-know-where, arrives and the dynamic changes because of the strange connection Jason and Tommy have. Or at least Tommy thinks they have a connection… Jason just walks up to him and slashes him with the machete.

Everyone moves up to the loft of the barn. Tommy looks very badly laid out, so between Reggie and the woman a big struggle happens. But it ends with Jason getting his hand chopped off by Tommy, and Jason falling onto the ground which has this odd grid of metal spikes that kill him just fine.

But! The mask comes off, and it isn't Jason! Isn't Jason at all! It's one of the men we've seen around, I forget who.

Oh, the next scene explains it all. It was "Roy". Roy was one of the cops, or paramedics (?), who responded to the weird axe murder of the Chocolate Smear kid. It turns out that he is the father of Chocolate Smear, and he did all the murders as a very unstable response to that. And The news clippings he was carrying out explain that he decided to make it look like a Jason murder spree.

The movie ends with Tommy having a dream about murdering the woman, waking up in a hospital room and having a Jason phantom vision, then looking at a hockey mask that is in a drawer of his hospital room's dresser! Then there is a quick final couple of shots that suggest that he has insanely put the hockey mask on and is gonna knife the woman when she enters the room to visit him. The credits roll as he's about to probably stab her.

So this was kind of hard to get through. I mean, they are all bad movies, and objectively it seems like number 4 was worse than this one. But I was less inclined than normal to fight through the disinterest. It's worth noting that they were clearly trying for some semblance of a "new beginning", and they even managed to make it that while also explaining how this is a continuation of the Jason story. And there was all the grisly death you could want, which is what we're here for in the first place. But none of the scares were good or memorable, and they're making no effort to one-up the earlier movies in terms of gore effects. And I really lost track of the characters. Except for the ones I hated.

(next: Friday the 13th Part VI - Jason Lives)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 22: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part 3)

I'm on movie number four in this eight movie project, and for the first time I'll be seeing one of these movies that I haven't ever seen before! When I do my watch-a-movie-and-take-notes projects, I generally do them for movies I've already seen before so that it's not too frustrating to simultaneously watch & type. But I'll make an exception for these Friday the 13th movies in light of the fact that they suck.

I remember this being out at my local theater in 1984, when I was 13, and even thinking it might be fun to see it, but I never got around to it.

It really must have been bittersweet for audiences at the time, knowing that this would be the final chapter. Each time they had a positive moment of enjoyment with this movie, they had to remember, "oh, I'm really going to miss this. It shall all be gone. Once the lights come back on, the days of new Friday the 13th movies will never return."

unless

Okay, watching this now for the first time ever.

Again beginning with a rehash. This time however, it's a montage of moments from the first two movies. Wait, now here's some of the third movie. But it's all framed by one of the monologues from the second movie. Much shorter and less of a cheap move than the last two movies did.

The title has a new title-plus-mask image… and then THE FINAL CHAPTER arrives to blow that image up with fire and splody-sounds!

The credits promise the likes of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover, so that's exciting.

Okay, now it looks like we're at the ranch where the third one took place. They're hauling bodies out of the barn & other buildings. It looks like Jason's body is one of the bodies because hockey mask!

Actually, I think that first shot was a long-ish crane shot. Cinematically ambitious I guess.

We don't know yet what happened to the girl at the end of the last one. It's weird because this scene is at night, but the last movie ended with daytime paramedic activity at the ranch. I'm confused. Please help me. Please tell me that it will all be okay.

One of the covered up bodies has stirred! Jason is probably up to his not-be-dead-after-all tricks!

This scene is about a pair of frisky hospital workers in the "cold room" where there is at least one body, plus a television where the girl "just wants to watch the news". But 80s-style aerobics is what's really on the TV. And she kisses him after all and gets quite flirty, but then takes it all back because he is so insensitive or something. They show the aerobics a lot. It's all pelvic and prurient. Then Jason kills the guy with a bone saw and then goes and finds the girl and kills her with something else because diversity.

Then an abrupt cut to daytime joggers in the woods somewhere!

Now we are learning about the family of the joggers. They live in the country where there is a legend of a psycho, so I guess we're in the Crystal Lake area. The youngest child is Corey Feldman and his personality is "likes video games and wears a monster mask while playing them".

Now we are learning about the kids that rented a house across the street. Crispin Glover and another dude are in a car, talking about a girl and they clearly don't know how to have this kind of conversation, and the writers don't know how to pretend like they do so the other guy does a gag about how an invisible computer told him that CG is bad at sex. It is an unappealing intro to these characters. We even know there are a bunch of other people in the car, way too many honestly, but we don't get to know them. Just the two people who talk like broken robots about a woman.

Just to keep the mood where it ought to be, a hitchhiker they drove past gets impaled by Jason!

CF, a tweenager I should point out, is peeping-tom-ing at the canoodling couple in the rented house, and it is interesting to speculate as to whose idea it was for him to act the way he does when he watches them. He bounces excitedly and slams his head repeatedly into a pillow. Whose idea.

Now there's a skinny dipping scene. They definitely have arrived to the point in the series where they feel it's important to show pretty girls without any clothes.

For some reason, CF and the adult older sister drove to where the skinny dipping was happening, but they bolted when they realized that's what it was. There is ch ch ch ch ch ha ha ha ha ha on them as they have car trouble in the woods as they head home, plus also as two of the swimmers are hanging out. But they both turn out to be fakeouts! No one is dying at all! At least we'll always have the hitchhiker. They can't take that away from us.

The fakeout with the CF subplot is that it was just some handsome man that comes along to help. He says he is this deep in the woods because he is hunting for bear. CF totally calls him out! There's no way he's hunting for bear! No one is just like "it is bear hunting season and I am enjoying some leisurely bear hunting time". CF is no fool.

They decide to take Bear Hunter in as a guest for perhaps the afternoon. Because of the bubble of this movie, CF shows the Bear Hunter his monster toys and Bear Hunter shares in his enthusiasm.

0:37:13 - Now we are choking down this awkward scene where the young people are hanging out in their house trying to deliver dialogue that is not consistent with normal human psychology. The gist is that the men want to be sexual with the women but there are subtle social obstacles.

!!! Crispin Glover really is interesting! His screen presence absolutely towers above the rest of the cast, when he reacts unfavorably to being teased. But seriously all these interactions are so painful.

For our next murder project, we have an inflatable boat made of thin, vulnerable rubber for a person to get stabbed through. It requires assuming that Jason's magic powers allow him to just hide under water, waiting for a naked lady to lie down in the boat at night. This project was completed on time and under budget.

Seriously, the most terrifying scenes in this movie are the ones where the sexually frustrated young adults are hanging out and attempting to use words.

Another death just happened because the boyfriend of the recently-killed naked lady went to check on her, found her dead, then was Jason'd with some implements that I couldn't really understand. Something with a handle shoved into him somehow. It is filmed weirdly and then we just move on to Bear Hunter, camping nearby.

This is a disturbing turn… we're back on the uninteresting young adults, and one of them announces that he has found something very interesting! We see that it is old movie reels. They start watching them. It's old, old film of naked people. They laugh and laugh and laugh. Maybe this is art?

Pretty cool visual with this next death, we just see the shadow of Jason coming at her and killing her with a something. Looks cool as a shadow thing, plus it isn't "those stupid characters talking" which is a HUGE bonus.

We're back to CF's family; Mom saw something that startled her but we don't know what, and CF and Big Sister are… driving home in the car? Where were they, why did they drive somewhere, I forget. Maybe they had to run into town to pick up a packet of it-doesn't-matter-we-just-needed-Mom-to-be-alone.

Just like that, Older Sister went looking for Mom, but ends up taking shelter from the rain in Bear Hunter's tent. Bear Hunter, in a very predictable fakeout, slashes a hole in the tent because what is she doing in there anyway.

But we cut back to the young adults and CG gets a very ugly death! He's all "hey where's the corkscrew" and Jason makes his hand be corkscrewed and makes his face be stabbed!

Then he kills one of the other young adults just right afterward by being outside her second floor bedroom window and pulling her out the window SO HARD. Seriously it must be a hard job coming up with different ways to kill them, give them a break.

Back to Bear Hunter; he's fessing up to his true motive which is to hunt Jason. His story is hard to believe, and Big Sister is taking it in very diplomatically.

The one guy in the group of the young adults who is the biggest asshole is also the one most amused by the old films. We see them a lot, these old films they are watching. It is the silent era's version of soft core porn - women dancing naked. Anyway, the asshole's death happens when he gets the idea to be close to the projector screen, enabling Jason to stab him through it and making it look kind of cool and be a scene that ends with the projector-still-running cadence.

New death - guy is taking a post-coital shower and Jason comes in and shoves his arm through the sliding glass shower door thing and very effectively crushes the guy's head against the wall. Then the girlfriend comes in and discovers him; she runs down to the front door, but she can't open it, she just can't open it, it just won't open, and it ends with somehow Jason axe-killing her through the door from outside. They don't show it very well and no one probably ever clearly explained to anyone how it was supposed to work.

1:09:20 - This is followed immediately by a scene that is also poorly choreographed - Bear Hunter returns with Big Sister but it's a fakeout because for some reason they break the glass of the side door to get in, even though CF is right there. They are all frightened as if they know about deaths happening, even though they don't know about the deaths. It's just that the power has been spotty; that’s why things are urgent, as far as they know.

They decide to investigate the house where the young adults are staying. They are gingerly surveying the living room, and they walk right by where the projector screen murder happened, but they see no evidence of that crime.

1:11:55 - Bear Hunter tells the big sister "you stay right here with Corey". I'm pretty sure that just happened. I think he was referring to CF, whose character is not named Corey and who also is not with them.

In a shocking piece of non-linear storytelling, a dog jumps out a window in slow motion. Art. ART.

Jason kills Bear Hunter right in front of Big Sister, and even though his mission in life has been to hunt Jason, Bear Hunter doesn't even fight him off, he just begs Big Sister to run as Jason pounds on him. Big sister does run, but each of the house's exits has a dead person surprise that's too scary for her to go past so she's stuck inside with Jason!

But CF has heard her screaming and comes across the street to be with her. Oh but wait, I think they are actually now back at their house. I missed how that happened. That chase ends with a moment where she has reason to think she might have killed him by hitting him pretty hard with a cathode ray television set with an approximately 15" screen. But no, he changes back from almost-dead to regular-Jason and chases them around some more.

1:21:45 - They must have felt like their secret weapon for this movie was slo-mo thrown-through-a-window situations because Big Sister ends a portion of being chased by Jason by throwing herself through a window and landing painfully on the ground outside. Jason's all "you won this round Big Sister, but I'll be back. This is not The Final Chapter of this story!"

Everyone seems to have wound up back at the young adults' house, and CF has come up with an ingenious idea - he shaves his head to confuse Jason! Then he and Big Sister stab Jason a lot and it's all very gory and climactic.

The way the movie ends is that Jason's body twitches a little on the ground after they mostly kill him, and CF freaks out and stabs Jason many many, many more times! Cut to later on when Big Sister is in a hospital bed being told it will all be okay by some Caucasian men in white coats. They suggest that CF was pretty crazy for a minute there but that will pass. CF comes to give her a hug… but he looks scary! You guys, look, he looks scary! The big finish is that CF has a sinister look on his face. Cut to credits.

We never saw what happened to the Mom. Or the main girl from Part 3. Also it seems like there were some other young adults that just stopped being in the movie. How dare they.

Okay so I am halfway through this ridiculous project. I have watched four of the eight Friday the 13th movies. I watched them all by myself at my home during the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenging times I tell you.

(next: Friday the 13th - A New Beginning)

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 21: Friday the 13th Part 3

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part 2)

We're on a journey, you and I; a journey through the first eight Friday the 13th movies. And now we're at the only one that I actually saw in the theater! I was 11 when this came out, and I asked my dad to take me and a friend to see it in 3D. I remember mostly being excited about all the cool older kids that were in the crowd, plus also not being at all disappointed in the overall experience of cinematic violence.

And now I'm going to see it for the first time since then… and sure enough, I have it in 3D! I wonder if on my deathbed when I'm doing a mental inventory of my lifetime of experiences, if I will realize that I saw Friday the 13th Part 3 twice, both times in 3D. Will I wish I had the 2D experience at least once? Will I wonder if my life might have been different it… okay I'll shut up and watch it now, here goes…

Oh yeah, it does kind of suck to try taking notes while wearing the 3D glasses. Good thing this is just a Friday the 13th movie.

There is a card at the very start saying that the ladies and gentlemen of the audience must wear the glasses even though it won't be 3D right away!

Same director as the second one. He went on to do pretty successful non-horror movies, as I recall. The writer and director of the first movie weren't involved in any of the sequels at all, right?

Oh, the reason the beginning isn't in 3D is because it's a rehash of the end of the last movie. I wonder if they'll make it so that that ending sucks less. That's what I would do.

It's not even edited down, it's just the whole entire end of the last movie…

…oh, except, no, there is a new shot of Jason skulking away! And now the credits have started and there is a rockin' new theme, and I actually remember kind of thinking the rockin' theme was cool.

OMG the 3D here is going to be a huge problem. It is 3D, but it's broken. You know how when you look at a 3D thing without the glasses and there's the double vision thing? It's like I'm seeing the 3D effect AND the double vision. Am I supposed to have 50s-style red/blue glasses? I don’t have those. This is terrible to look at and despite everything I've noted above I am not going to watch it in 3D after all. (I tested another 3D Blu-ray and it looked fine so this is clearly just a shitty Blu-ray product. Oh well.)

The first scene after the credits is playfully doing 3D effects at us which I now cannot experience. Woe. Woe is me.

Woman in curlers is watching the story of the last movie as a news story on TV while worrying about a lurker outside. She's a little worried but she also realizes it's time to take the laundry in from the clotheslines.

Not even sure what the setting is here. The news reporter called the murders from the last one "the worst crime in local history".

The exposition has taught us about this couple who lives on this property that is a rabbit farm and a grocery store where the husband just grazes on the food. We know there's also a lurker! But there's also a snake in a rabbit cage that has mutilated a rabbit, and that snake jumps at the camera in some sort of Three Dimensional Effect! Plus also, lurker. Ch ch ch ch ch ha ha ha ha.

Husband checks a room and is butcher-knifed shockingly! These are not camp counselors. What did they do wrong. The wife gets killed quickly afterward, but with a different weapon, an arrow or something! Variety!

Now we're on some new characters. Fun lovin' young adults! One of them is a silly prankster who is insecure about his appearance. Will that play into the story later? Oh I hope so.

They all just arrived at a friend's house to pick them up for something. But uh oh… the van is on fire, look at the smoke! They are alarmed! But ha ha ha, no, it turns out there are hippies in the back of the van smoking grass ha ha! It’s their friends that had been deliberately a secret from us until this moment.

A merry Cheech/Chong scene ensues where they think the police are on their tail so they all have to swallow the drugs! But the police just pass them and it was all for nothing ha ha.

Unlike the first two movies, this Blu-ray transfer is riddled with marks and flaws.

The next tale in this saga, this veritable Odyssey, involves an old man lying on the road, obstructing their van trip. What is wrong with him! It turns out he's crazy; he is the sequel to the crazy old man from the first two movies. He is holding an eyeball maybe, and he tells them that his handheld eyeball means he has to warn them about doom or whatever. It doesn’t look like an eyeball. I am watching this movie.

The place they are at is some kind of ranch, not even a summer camp I don't think, but Chris, who it seems like might be the main girl, is reacquainting herself with a house on the premises that is adorned with many paintings. Maybe I missed where they explained who they are and what this place is, but it seems like they're just a bunch of young people who are spending a weekend at this ranch place where Chris used to hang out or live.

Insecure Guy played a trick which resulted in the 48th fakeout of the movie so far, he makes it look like he's been hatcheted, but it was just some clownin' with gore makeup. The dialogue is very, very unnatural.

Um, an incident just occurred at the grocery store! A different grocery store from where the opening murders happened. Insecure Guy was there with a friend, and some TUFFS show up to make trouble! They bully our protagonists and make them feel bad! That ends with Insecure Guy running over their motorcycles in a heroic moment for him. His character has a complex arc!

The TUFFS broke the windshield of the car, and all the characters are oddly tolerant of that.

The TUFFS apparently tracked our heroes to the ranch and are there to get some revenge. They gotta even the score! They're going to do that by siphoning gas from that stoner van apparently. But the TUFF that is a girl decides to go exploring. And someone we can't see is watching her! Hey, what kind of movie is this anyway? She is unnaturally amused by the various props on display in the barn she's exploring. She is so pleased with her decision to go exploring.

But she hears a noise! In the barn she has trespassed into! She decides to vigilantly investigate! But a moment later we see that she noticed the rope that hangs from the side of the barn and she swings on it. She is delighted! "This feels good", she actually exclaims while just swinging a little bit on a rope. I'm not sure the writers of this movie have ever met a person.

One of the TUFFS goes after her and finds her pitchforked! Then he gets pitchforked! Then the last remaining TUFF goes in there to investigate, having executed the masterful chess move of stealing gas out of the van, and gets in a fight with an assailant whose face we can't see, but who appears to have clean, pressed slacks. The last TUFF gets clubbed real good.

Insecure Guy tries to tell a pretty girl that he likes her. She responds by saying "no. I’m going to go outside for a little while, and when I come back inside, we'll talk." That's really how that exchange went. Have you ever been in an exchange like that.

We're on Chris now, and she's finally spilling the tea about her past. It turns out she was attacked by a grotesque man with a knife in the woods near her house. Just some mysterious man with a bad face. It ended with her losing consciousness and waking up with just that story which was apparently unbelievable to her parents. Glad we got to the bottom of that. Do you think this is a true story.

The way they're showing the killer makes him less scary than in the other movies. You see it's a male adult that has clean clothes and a casual, confident gait. We can't see his head at all but what we can see is well lit. Sometimes it's a fakeout because it isn't really the killer. But sometimes it is. Like just now the stoners went to investigate a mysterious noise in the barn. They don't find anything, but we see the killer, from the chest down, seeing them. Ch ch ch ch! Ha ha ha ha!

I think we just saw the first appearance of the hockey mask! Insecure Guy played another devious jape upon the pretty girl he was hoping to woo - she's sitting on a dock and he grabs at her ankle from underwater! Wearing a hockey mask. For some reason. He had a mask earlier, but it was a different one. Maybe his identity is "mask guy". Because in a way are not we all Mask Guy.

Jason, I guess, just killed that girl with a spear gun while wearing the hockey mask! It was a 3D gimmick death. Shot her right in the eye. I think when they had their first meeting about making this movie they just said "okay, let's just make a list of some different murder weapons and send it over to Fred, he'll write it up as a screenplay."

One of the guys just got macheted! I think I do remember that from before because he was a handstand walker-arounder and he was walking on his hands when Jason came upon him and swung the machete down between his legs! It didn't actually show it, but you know how he got sliced and ow.

That guy's girlfriend was in the shower when that happened, and when she comes out, she is distracted when she comes upon a very enticing issue of Fangoria magazine. They're in a bubble, the makers of this movie.

But that scene ends with her seeing her dead boyfriend in pieces above her in the rafters, and they are very gory pieces, and then she gets bowie-knifed from under the hammock as she's laying in it! Many deaths. Oh, the many deaths.

We didn't see Insecure Guy get killed; we only assume he's dead because Jason has the hockey mask now.

Oh, I had just typed that when Insecure Guy arrives at the stoner girl's door with a slashed throat. She doesn't believe it's real because he is such a fooler. Plus also maybe because it's not a very good gore effect by any standards. Suddenly her boyfriend is getting killed somewhere else in a manner that has to do with an electrical box, it all happened so fast! Then she herself gets run through with a hot poker! Jason is being very diligent about killing each victim in a different way.

Pretty sure all that's left now is Chris and her boyfriend, who were off somewhere talking about her terrible experience with a grotesque man. They are returning now, and we will soon see them realize that they are in a world of murder! murder! murder!

The boyfriend has a very square jaw. One of the squarest, really.

The most Hitchcock-y shot so far - Chris is looking out the front door and calling out for Square Jaw… she can't see him but we can, around the corner, being muzzled by Jason just out of her view! Then she goes back inside and Jason just squishes his head with his hands! Eyeball pops out and it is 3D. Unless it isn't, which in this case is what it is(n't).

Chris is exploring the campus trying to get some answers, and the body of one of the TUFFS is suddenly dangled in front of her from like a tree branch or something. Then she goes inside and wonders what oh what will become of her, and Square Jaw's body is hurled through the window. Each movie has multiple instances of bodies getting inexplicably thrown through windows and suddenly dangling out of the sky at just the right time for it to be scary.

She comes upon Jason in the house and they tussle! She stabs him in the leg with a knife that she extracted from a body that was conveniently nearby! He pulls it out and throws it at her with Olympic-caliber precision, but she still gets away.

She runs to the van and has the keys and starts it up even! Drives away and everything! But it runs out of gas so she literally just runs back to the ranch. Like, "back to the drawing board" I guess.

I can't stress enough how odd and disappointing it is that Jason just walks and dresses like a normal man, other than the fact that above the neck he is disguised by the mask. He doesn't limp or lurch or hunch, and again, he has clothes that, while plain, are oddly presentable for someone who is some kind of supernatural homicidal forest hermit.

Here now is another thing I remember from seeing this in Actual Nineteen Eighty Two; Jason's hanging from this pulley thing where she thinks she has him killed or immobilized or something, and he be-s alive at her, and even lifts up the mask to show his grotesque face! It's so that she can realize that he's the same guy that attacked her in the woods in the story she told from several years earlier.

He's about to get her… but one of the TUFFS is not dead, and emerges to fight Jason. That ends badly for the TUFF, he gets de-handed and just beaten down badly, but meanwhile Chris axes Jason in the head.

And here is what happens the next morning to blow our minds at the end of this movie. She has gotten in a canoe to get a good night's sleep. All tuckered out, time to hit the canoe, right? Then in the morning she wakes up in the canoe and spots Jason with a big head wound from her axe, he's just looking at her through a window of the house. He's totally going to come get her. But instead of him getting her, a lady emerges from the lake and pulls her in! It's maybe Jason's mother? But she's all ghoulish so we don't really know. Seems like that's the same sweater though. But also, her head is attached to her body, whereas the movie began by very clearly reminding us that Mom's severed head is a cabin somewhere else. But anyway, just like in the first movie, the consequence of that surprise waterborne attack is that she is being cared for by paramedics a little later, all confused.

This is a bad movie! So bad! From this team I expected so much this exact thing.

(next: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter)