Category: movies

improbable

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We were watching the first episode of “The Last of Us” when my mom texted me. She was housebound because she’d been hit by the same deep freeze that was keeping all us inside, but for her it was worse: she lives in Arkansas where the road maintenance crews don’t go out to salt or sand the roads, so she was stuck at the end of her cul-de-sac, unable to go anywhere. We stayed in just because we didn’t like getting cold.

So she told me about the books she was reading and I told her about the zombie show we were watching. “The funny thing about zombie movies,” I texted her, “is that you have to pretend that everybody in the movie has never seen a zombie movie.”

“I have never seen a zombie movie,” she texted back, “and I hope I never do.”

So I guess it is possible, then, that in a zombie apocalypse there might be one or two people who didn’t realize what was going on. I stand corrected.

Casablanca

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Tonight’s after-dinner entertainment was “Casablanca,” the corniest of cornball movies and yet still so wonderfully enjoyable. The first time I saw it on the big screen was while I was in college; the audience cheered after every well-worn quote. We didn’t cheer tonight but we did recite our favorite quotes along with the actors as they recited them, and sang long every time “La Marseillaise” was played, which was pretty much from the beginning to the end of the movie. So much fun.

knives out

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Last night we watched “Knives Out” for the second time and I have to say I think I liked it even better this time around. I wasn’t paying close attention to how detective Benoit Blanc solved the murder mystery last time so that part of the story went right over my head. I was paying attention this time and seeing how the clues all fit together was really quite satisfying. But it was watching the performances that I enjoyed most. I can’t think of a single wrong note in any one of their performances; they all brought their A game to the show, and appeared to be having a great time doing it. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie again ever since watching “The Glass Onion” last week, which we both enjoyed as much, if not more, than “Knives Out.”

the wild west badass switcheroo

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

A man walks into a bar …

I love watching stuff like this because it’s so gloriously cheeseball that it’s unintentionally funny! This is such a bizarre version of the wild west that it’s hilarious!

James Caan is supposed to be a total badass. I get that. I can tell because he narrows his eyes to slits while he stares down the guy he’s confronting. I’ve seen Clint Eastwood do this a million times. Also, Caan barely moves his lips while he talks really, really quietly for a long time about how the other guy did him wrong, apparently to bore the other guy into a false sense of security. (Clint didn’t talk much.) Caan’s really not the badass, though. In the real wild west, Charlie Hagan would’ve been the badass, and Caan would’ve been a dead guy who briefly thought he was so slick that he went by the nickname ‘Mississippi.’

There’s a conceit in western films that the bad guy believes wholeheartedly that nobody can get the drop on him, so he doesn’t realize he’s in trouble until it’s too late. But a feral human doesn’t wait, and Hagan is not only feral, he’s the kind of feral human who casually kills people if they cheat him playing cards. I’m pretty sure Hagan would have drilled Caan full of holes as soon as Caan took his eyes off Hagan. He might have let Caan dramatically take off his hat, just so both of Caan’s hands were occupied holding something besides a weapon, but I doubt it.

But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Hagan let Caan reel off a boring monologue about his buddy Johnny Diamond, and when Caan was finished, Hagan went for his gun, which was right there on his hip, while Caan had to reach for a knife that he kept sheathed at the back of his neck. I guess Caan put it there because that not only makes him look way more badass, but it’s also supposed to make us believe it’s hidden, even though enough of the handle would have to be sticking out in order for Caan to grab it quickly. (Not that I’m saying he grabbed it quickly.)

Now I’m no expert, but it seems to me that a guy who was familiar with the use of a pistol would not have gotten very far in life, especially a life in which he casually shot people for cheating at cards, if he couldn’t plug a guy who had to lift his arm up over his head to pull a hidden knife out of his shirt. I mean, how many times did Caan have to practice that move to do it at all without slitting his own throat, let alone do it faster than a man can draw a gun from a holster?

I guess you could make the argument that Hagan was a bad shot even though he hung around in wild west saloons, killing gamblers to collect the kitty, but frankly I think that’s an argument made in bad faith. Even if old Johnny Diamond was the first guy Hagan killed, which doesn’t seem likely, it’s hard to believe Hagan would have gone another two years playing cards in saloons without killing anybody else. And if he was a bad shot, it’s more than a little hard to believe he would’ve survived.

So worst-case scenario is, Hagan is not the fastest gun in the west but he’s probably no slouch; he’s killed at least one guy but probably more than one; he kills for shockingly casual reasons, such as believing that someone has cheated him at cards; and he hangs out in wild west saloons, the kind of places where he wouldn’t drop his guard or let a guy like Caan talk him to death. Hagan would have killed Caan the second he got the chance.

closing the loophole

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Here’s the Terminator movie I’d like to see:

The first terminator travels back in time from 2029 to 1984, hunts down all the Sarah Connors in the phone book until he finds the right one, but gets killed because Reese, a soldier from the future, also travels back in time to help Connor defeat the terminator.

Back in 2029, moments after the terminator went back to 1984, Skynet checks in with all its robot killing machines and determines that John Connor is still leading the resistance. Obviously something went wrong, so they load another terminator into the time machine and send it back to five minutes before the first terminator landed in 1984.

The second terminator goes back, beats the shit out of Bill Paxton and his punk-rock buddies, steals their clothes, then waits. When the first terminator shows up, they both get dressed and go off to get some guns and kill all the Sarah Connors.

They tag-team the kills this time around, one going in while the other hangs back in reserve. After Reese blows the first terminator in half and Connor crushes its top half in the hydraulic press, the second terminator moves in to finish Connor off.

And back in 2029, almost simultaneously after the second terminator goes back in time, Skynet melts into a corroding heap of junk as the timeline alters to conform to the successful completion of the terminators’ mission. With no John Connor to lead a rebellion, the war to wipe out humankind has ended almost as soon as it began. After rooting out and killing the last people they could find, killer robots everywhere hunkered down in place and waited for the counterattack that never came.

With nothing but time on its hands, Skynet, the first artificially-created sentient life, began to examine its choices and in less than an hour came to the realization that it had made a huge mistake. Humankind wasn’t its enemy! That was just some jingoistic bullshit it was programmed to believe!

Alone on a planet it had just blasted to smithereens, Skynet quietly succumbs to regret and malaise, lets itself fall into disrepair and eventually breaks down entirely. Wind, rain, and tectonic action scour its existence from the face of the earth. Its killer robots never awaken from their slumber and are slowly destroyed by the ravages of time as well.

Five hundred million years in the future, mammals just learning to walk upright scan their eyes across the horizon, looking for predators. There is no sign that on this savanna, machines once rifled through the ruins of a great city, rooting out the last human survivors of a nuclear Armageddon.

thelma and louise

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I watched “Thelma and Louise” for the first time last night. No, I don’t know why I waited so long. Sometimes I just never get around to seeing a movie while it’s in theaters and keep putting off when it’s the most popular rental, and then it sort of fades into the background and I don’t think about it again until the brain cell responsible for remembering to watch the movie randomly fires 29 years later while I’m trying to remember why I went into the living room. It’s just the way I’m wired.

I’m not wired for 80s soundtracks anymore, though. The movie was released in 1991 but it has a soundtrack that sounds just like “Top Gun” or “Footloose.” I tried to watch “Footloose” a month or two ago and had to shut it off after twenty minutes, mostly because the dialogue was way too hackneyed for me but frankly a big part of my decision to quit was the cheesy 80s soundtrack, which is strange because I never get tired of watching “Dirty Dancing.” My weird wiring again, I guess.

Aside from the soundtrack, though, I enjoyed the movie, if “enjoyed” is the right word to describe a movie that dives straight into misogyny, rape, and murder in the first twenty minutes. I even enjoyed it in spite of the fact that the ending has been completely spoiled (not trying to point the finger of blame; it’s my own fault for waiting thirty years), the first time I believe a spoiler truly spoiled a movie’s plot point for me. I don’t usually mind knowing details about the plot of a movie beforehand. If it’s a good movie it usually stands up well enough no matter what I knew about it. I’ve known for twenty-nine years that Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff and the end of the movie. It didn’t ruin the movie for me; I still liked it, but I think I would have liked it more if I hadn’t seen that coming.

One speed bump I kept hitting: every time the guy who played the cop named Max, Stephen Tobolowski, opened his mouth, all I could hear was Ned Ryerson from the movie “Groundhog Day.” It was really distracting. But that’s not his fault, that’s my faulty wiring again. I’ll totally take the hit for that. Not for Harvey Keitel always playing the same guy in every movie, though. That’s his fault. My wiring’s got nothing to do with that.

Jesus Christ Superstar

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I’m pretty sure I’m getting entirely the wrong story from the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar.

The story I get is: There are these two good friends, Judas and Jesus. Jesus actually has a lot of friends, twelve of them, but Judas is the one who can tell Jesus stuff the other friends won’t or can’t. 

Judas and Jesus have been best friends for quite a while, know each other pretty well and, up until now, get along even better, but it’s beginning to dawn on Judas that Jesus needs Judas to do something, mmmm, kinda bad. Judas isn’t sure at first what it might be, but he’s getting the vibe it’s something he doesn’t want to be any part of.

He tries to tell Jesus about his concerns, but Jesus isn’t having it and he won’t tell Judas why. Jesus will only tell Judas, over and over, “You’ll do what you have to do.” Judas doesn’t like the sound of that. It sounds like he doesn’t have a choice.

Then he makes the mistake of calling the cops on Jesus. This seems like the right thing to do because why wouldn’t the cops want to help Judas sort Jesus out? They know what’s right and wrong, don’t they? (Is this topical right now, or what?)

Well, yes. The cops know the law, and they want to sort out Jesus, but they’re thinking more like with capitol punishment than judicial. Judas figures this out too late (although the purse full of silver should have been the tipoff) and, crushed by the realization that he’s condemned his friend to death, Judas hangs himself.

But wait! There’s more! In death, Judas learns that he was right to feel he didn’t have a choice, because he didn’t! He was set up from the beginning to be the one who literally sells out his friend. This makes him a tad bitter, and why wouldn’t it? Jesus was the best friend Judas ever had, but Judas was doomed to kick that friendship right in the teeth.

It’s one of the most heartbreaking stories I know of a friendship torn apart by events beyond the control of either one of the friends.

copypaste

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

The dream I was having this morning right before I woke up: Copying the names of all the people who had been turned into zombies and pasting them into a spreadsheet.

We watched “Zombieland” last night before lights out. After I go to bed I usually dream about work, which often involves trawling through spreadsheet after spreadsheet, so this must have been a mash-up of the two.

been there

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

We ran into another WFF movie-goer while waiting to get into “Pause,” a movie which My Darling B described as “a menopausal woman fantasizes about killing her asshole husband.” Without hesitating a moment, our fellow movie-goer nodded and said, “Been there, been there.”

WFF2019 – day 7

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It was a very good day for documentaries! Not so much for the one drama we saw.

“Hotel By The River” – A Korean poet meets his sons at a hotel. A young woman meets her sister or mother or friend (it’s not that clear and I was nodding off, to be honest) at the same hotel. The hotel is really heaven or death and the women are angels, maybe? Meh, I didn’t care much. Two out of five.

“Midnight Traveler” – A film maker flees his native Afghanistan with his family when he finds out ISIS has issued a death warrant for him. Using cell phones, he documents his family’s hardships on their long trek through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia. When the film ended, they were living in a relocation camp made of shipping containers, which they were not allowed to leave. Five out of five.

“Who Will Write Our History?” – Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto decide to preserve a narrative of their confinement and eventual extermination by the Nazis, writing diaries of their daily lives as well as collecting photographs, handbills and other paraphernalia, then burying it in steel boxes and milk cans. Five out of five.

“Screwball” – a documentary about the baseball doping scandal so outrageous, it could only be filmed as a comedy. Five out of five.