My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Stece Buscemi, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Dir. Joel&Ethan Cohen, Polygram, 1998 What can I possibly say about one of the great cult classics ever, certainly among my favorite movies of all time? I can, and have, devoted New Yorker-length writeups to other favorites such as Do the Right Thing and The Godfather, but those movies are not the Coen Brothers' late-'90s slacker noir. In their usual genre-demolishing way, the Coens pay tribute to the spirit of Raymond Chandler with an LA-set mystery in which, at a certain point, neither the mystery nor its solution hold the least interest for an otherwise-rapt audience. If that solution seems obvious to some early on, by the time it arrives they may not even notice. In that moment, John Goodman's bodyslam of David Huddleston usually has me convulsed in mirth rather than resolution. Besides, what's resolved in the end is what was established at the beginning: The Dud

 Voices of Christopher Meloni, Victor Garber, John Laroquette, Tricia Helfer, Michael Madsen, Larry Drake. Dir. Lauren Montgomery, Warner Bros. Animation, 2009 Early in the proceedings of Lauren Montgomery's straight-to-video origin story for Justice League mainstay Green Lantern, members of the council of immortal, intergalactic Guardians governing the Green Lantern Corps spend one scene establishing the film's basic theme of not judging by appearance, reputation - really, just not judging, by, of course, judging the living shit out of humanity in the form of its unknowing proxy, Hal Jordan. The scene brought to mind one of my favorite album titles, Dave Edmunds' Subtle as a Flying Mallet. Whatever a flying mallet lacks of the former, it usually compensates for in its brute effectiveness. A blunt instrument has its uses. First Flight and Montgomery, in the first reel, appear either unaware of the fact, or unwilling to exploit it, outside of kicking our ass with its Big

 Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, Columbia, 1992 I don't like Winona Ryder. Even if pressed I'd find it difficult to list ten great roles for her in movies. I'm not much more of a fan of Keanu Reeves, but I'm fed up with the received wisdom that Reeves ruins Bram Stoker's Dracula all by himself. First of all, it's a good, even very good, film so there's no ruining to be done. Secondly, Winona Ryder matches him beat for beat in craptastic acting. How do people blast Reeves's British accent while saying nothing of how dreadful Ryder's accent sounds? Reeves makes an easy target, but he is no worse over his career than Ryder. Though they don't destroy Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation, it's difficult for me to pardon Coppola for giving such atrocious acting a pass. Having said that, Bram Stoker's Dracula may well stand as one of Coppola's last consistently good,

 Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown. Dir. Don Coscarelli, Magnet, 2012 Spoiler alert: He doesn't. Because he doesn't, I'm ignoring all this film's many virtues. I'm ignoring its anarchic sensibility. I'm ignoring its hyper-aware, self-referential humor. I'm ignoring its deliberately-cheesy effects. I'm ignoring Paul Giamatti, who exec produced and gives a terrific performance, and veteran character actor Clancy Brown, who has a great deal of fun. I'm ignoring everything that ought to make me ecstatically recommend this movie. If the title is John Dies at the End and John doesn't die at the end, the best you can say of yourself is that you're too clever for your own good. The worst you can say is that your film is a lie and a failure. John Dies at the End is too clever for its own good. Fail. 

 Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, John Cazale, Christopher Walken, Jon Savage. Dir. Michael Cimino, Universal/EMI, 1978 Anyone who even knows about The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino's 1978 Vietnam drama, knows it takes almost half the movie to get to 'Nam. Cimino spends eons building the working class, Eastern Orthodox, steeltown world from which the principals come, establishing the traditions, the interpersonal relationships and dynamics of the characters, their illusions and ideals, pre-war. Ever since I first saw the movie on cable in the early '80s the 2nd-most controversial aspect, after the Russian roulette scenes, is how long Cimino spends building the US world relative to Vietnam. Some I know love it, others loathe it. I side with the lovers. I wish, years ago, I could have told them Cimino's reason for structuring the picture that way is simple, summed up in two words, one name. John Ford. Ford was Cimino's favorite director. Even a few years ago, I knew so

 Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Sam Shepherd, Barbara Hershey, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum. Dir. Phillip Kaufman, Warner Bros., 1983 I'm told I saw the Moon Shot. A year and nine months old that night in August 1969, I don't remember watching Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the lunar surface. I do remenber seeing the last couple Appollo launches and splashdowns and understanding, even at that young age, what astronauts were, what NASA was, etc. What I didn't have until a few years later was the sense of wonder at the scale of achievement. In 100,000 years of human history, the moon had been a divinity, an old man, goddess of the hunt and harvest, enabler of lycanthropy and monthly lunacy. Then, in fewer than 20 years, one country decided to put men on the moon and did that. Almost two years after my birth. The space program, NASA, the Mercury and Apollo astronauts, the Moon Shot - that's where my sense of wonder begins. I'm not any

 GoldenEye Pierce Brosnan, Famke Janssen, Sean Bean, Judi Dench. Dir. Martin Campbell, United Artists, 1995 It's the early 1990s and you're Albert and Barbara Broccolu, exec producers of the James Bond movies. Your franchise, maybe the most durable in history, is in trouble in its biggest market, the US. Though box office worldwide made your two Bond pictures with Timothy Dalton as 007 hits, the Americans have stayed away from theatres as never before. Though Dalton brings a reckless ruthlessness to Bond, a darkness Connery only hinted at, he's too much, or too little, for the US market. A change has to be made. So you draft in Pierce Brosnan, your choice to replace Roger Moore going back to the mid-'80s, when NBC refused to give him time off from Remington Steele. You update 'M' to Dame Judi Dench, and you continue as with Dalton, positioning Brosnan as an all-around action star regardless of an individual film's story, steering clear of the Strombergs

 Harper Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, Janet Leigh, Robert Wagner, Lauren Bacall. Dir. Jack Smight, Warner Bros., 1966 Paul Newman, pretty much the top box office draw of the mid-'60s, flexed his star power on the development of mystery novelist Ross McDonald's shamus, Lew Archer, into a movie character, requiring the detective's surname start with an "H," as the movies The Hustler and Hud were great successes for him. (He went on to do another two "H pictures," Hombre and Hudsucker Proxy.) So Lew Archer became Lew Harper and this 1966 homage to the classic PI noirs of the '40s birthed a new generation of detective movies, spanning everything from Klute to Altman's The Long Goodbye to the farce Murder By Death. Of the best-known literary private dicks, Lew Archer, despite being LA-based has never struck me as much better than an imitation of Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, and John D. MacDonald'

 Bustin' Loose Richard Pryor, Cicely Tyson. Dir. Oz Scott, Universal, 1981 I. INT - a typical studio exec's office on the Universal lot. Studio Exec Guy (SEG) sits behind his big mahogany desk. Hopeful Movie Pitcher (HMP) sits across from him. We start as HMP pitches. HMP: So the idea is, Edgy Comic of Color plays a parolee blackmailed into driving a social worker and eight unwanted children from Philly to Washington State to live on a farm. Along the way we lens a number of seriocomic vignettes as ECoC discovers his worth while helping the kids find their own. It's kind of a heartwarming, humanistic road comedy." SEG: Fabulous. Some notes. You say Edgy Comic of Color plays a parolee. So he's been in prison? HMP: Yes. SEG: Where he was held wrongfully and now he's out to get his own back? HMP: Well, no. He's been in and out of trouble most of his life and now, in his mid-30s, he's running out of chances. SEG: Because of all his arrests fo

 After almost five years of movie collecting, I've become that collector with at least one good stack of stuff I've never watched. I had some reason for buying, but I've never gotten to or never finished some. It's embarrassing. It feels wasteful. Decadence does not come naturally to me.  I've got Grumpy Internet today and I've run "out of" movies, which is to say I depleted the newest stack, not that I'm actually "out of" movies. It will take over a month to run all the way out. What better time to dredge up four likely candidates and watch them? Today's Unwatched Movie Fest entrants: Brewster's Millions Bustin' Loose Harper The Enforcer (1950) Brewster's Millions Richard Pryor, John Candy, Lonette McKee, Hume Cronyn. Dir. Walter Hill, Universal, 1985 Walter Hill would seem a strange choice for a screwball comedy adapted from the same 1902 novel as six other classic pictures, and Brewster's Millions makes

 Daniel Craig, Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Katie Holmes. Dir. Steven Soderbergh, Bleecker Street, 2017 Sometime in the early 'Teens, director Steven Soderbergh retired. His retirement proved difficult to discern, since he immediately proceeded to direct all the seasons of The Knick, with Clive Owen. Reiring again after that, Soderbergh then reemerged to direct Logan Lucky in 2017. Please, sir, for movies this good, and for their fans, please stop retiring. Daniel Craig is a redneck safecracker who gets himself arrested and sent to jail as an alibi for when he and his cousins, Adam Driver and Channing Tatum, rob the cash room at the Coca Cola 600. They plan to rob a much smaller race, but a scheduling conflict forces them to go for the bigger score. I don't want to say much more than that, except Tatum seems to do his best work for Soderbergh. He and Driver and Craig are hilarious together. I will also say Logan Lucky is sort of Soderbergh's redneck-remake of his own

 Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning, Clarke Peters. Dir. Andrew Renzi, Samuel Goldwyn, 2015 When I lived in the SRO hotel-styled facility for mentally ill homeless people, we couldn't drink alcohol on-premises. They could not prevent a resident from sitting at Carl's tavern all day getting drunk, but they could, and did, search the drunk resident's backpack as he came in ten minutes after the beer store closed. Obviously, illegal drugs were illegal, which doesn't mean a fair amount of weed and crack were not smoked in those sleeping rooms. They were. I smoked some of it. The staff patrolled the halls of the upper floors, however, pausing to sniff, to listen, authorized to key-in to a room if they suspected - almost anything. I smoked stuff in my rooms, others smoked in theirs, but the risk was sufficient I ended up walking around the block smoking a joint about as often as blazing up inside. My god, I'm off track. Because we couldn't safely imbibe/ingest/inhale in

 Sam Worthington Jim Sturgess Anthony Hopkins. Dir. Daniel Alfredson, Alchemy, 2015 Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, and their two best mates are stereotypical English Lads, living abroad in Amsterdam, where they own a successful contstruction company. Fluctuations in the market force them to sell their assets to meet payroll, sending them to a bank seeking a loan. The bank unjustly declines to lend money to the Lads, whose personal, now-sold, assets consisted not of bonds and portfolios but sports cars, pleasure boats, and race horses. Denied access to more of same, what are four victims of oppression, and likely Lads, to do? Why, kidnap Freddy Heineken, the man who made Heineken ale a billion-dollar brand and ransom him for £35M, of course. What else? If you're thinking our protagonists sound like less than put-upon victims of injustice and more like entitled prats with a deeply challenged sense of morality, welcome to Daniel Alfredson's clever, stylish Eurothriller, Kidn

 Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, David Bowie. Dir. Tony Scott, MGM, 1983 I wish I could have been in the screening room when the execs at MGM sat down to watch the Euro arthouse erotic new wave thriller Tony Scott made of American author Whitley Streiber's vampire riff, The Hunger. Considering MGM forced Scott to shoot a new ending that contradicts the rest of the narrative, didn't spend much promoting the picture, and it lost money, acquiring the ever-popular cult following at repertory cinema showings/cable/vhs throughout the '80s and '90s, one imagines no one gave him a medal and thanked him for making the best Roman Polanski horror movie since Rosemary's Baby. That's the scale of Scott's achievement, though. The Hunger holds up unbelievably well over the last 38 years, indeed has acquired increased richness over the decades.  For me, anyway - David Bowie's third of the movie compresses all the horrors and gross betrayals of the flesh into 45 hor

 George Dzundza, Jason Patric, Steven Bauer, Stephen Baldwin. Dir. Kevin Reynolds, Columbia, 1988 Yesterday I sat down and watched all the action titles I picked up last week, many unknown to me, one unseen for 20-odd years. The results were mixed, which is what one hopes for, I suppose, and included one movie worthy of being culled and spotlit on its own merits. The movie never made it to bluray, has a small cult following, and gets around $8 on ebay, which isn't shabby for a used dvd these days. It's called The Beast, and it's as striking, peculiar, and thought-provoking a war picture as I've seen in some time. Directed by Kevin Reynolds, who lensed one of Kevin Costner's first pictures, Fandango, then reunited with the star for the unfortunate popcorn picture Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the utterly tragic Waterworld, one of the great flops of film history. Between these, he helmed his one terrific picture, The Beast. Set during the Russian occupation

 Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones. Dir. James Bobin, Disney, 2011 I need to say, at the start, that whether or not I'm qualified to write about Jason Segel's 2011 reboot of The Muppets, I am not remotely objective. I am fairly sure I cannot be. I was a toddler when Sesame Steet made its public television debut. I would not know about stations airing Popeye and old Looney Tunes shorts until elementary school. My earliest TV memories involve Kermit the Frog, when he starred on PBS not his syndicated TV. The syndicated show is, of course, a touchstone of my tweenhood, as are the first two feature films. We owned Sesame Street-branded merchandise - Kermit's face was a constant part of the first 14 years of my life. No, I won't be giving you objectivity - I sobbed when Kermit plucked the first notes to "Rainbow Connection." Deduct a few points for terrible original songs, composed by Flight of the Conchords's Bret MacKenzie, and two more

 Sam Heughan, Arabella Oz, David Arquette. Dir. Adam Sigal, Cinedigm, 2016 Along with The Beast, When the Starlight Ends was my great-unknown buy on my last trip. Found for $2 in the Dollar General clearance bin, it looked like some micro-indie romantic drama, maybe an ensemble piece, that somehow got enough distribution to turn up in an Oxford DG. Might be a cool discovery. Might stink. $2 made it worth the gamble. Watching it, not as much. First off, When the Starlight Ends is exactly what it appears, a microindie rom-dram, starring a star of Starz's Outlander series and his two famous friends, Sean Patrick Flanery and David Arquette, in cameos lending what looks like a student film with a good grant some dubious accociation with celebrity. Its best moments all owe to cool cinematography moreso than performance or story. A driving scene either resurrects real rear projection or some digital version thereof, but looks really cool either way. The story - I mean, it's more

 Harry Anderson, Richard Thomas, Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid, Annette O'Toole, Tim Curry. Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace, Warner Bros., 1990 I had one problem with the 1990 TV movie (run over two nights back in '90, NBC called it a miniseries, but as a dvd-feature it runs three hours and six minutes, a little longer than Avengers:End Game) and it's a big one. I loved all the stuff with the cast as kids, in the first part. Only Seth Green among them went on to be household-name actors and their anonymity at this remove gave their performances a spontanaeity and freshness that helped me buy them as screen versions of the novel's characters. The adult versions, essayed by an ensemble of B-listers and small screen stars, however, didn't do much for me.  I'm willing to lay that off on a poor screenplay to some extent, but IT proves definitively that Harry Anderson, despite two hit sitcoms, cannot act. At all. It goes on to prove that Richard Thomas, Dennis Christopher, An