My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 Chase Williamson, Brea Grant, Graham Skipper. Dir. Jackson Stewart, IFC Midnight/Scream Factory I missed the whole mom'n'pop video store era. The iteration of said in our neighborhood earned my ire when they never had PINK FLOYD THE WALL. Yes, we have it. No, it isn't stolen. We have no idea what time is good to check back. Sorry. Month after month. Bite me, local video store. Life intervened before that relationship had a chance to develop. Not long after graduating high school, I went into freefall, which sounds better and more succinct than "drank my way out of college after six months-moved home-got a DUI-went to treatment-went to AA-tried school again but dropped out and got a job and started drinking again-dropped acid for the first time-got evicted and fired and tried to kill myself-went to treatment again-moved home and got kicked out-got another place and had one of first prolonged depressions-got evicted again-moved home again-got a job again-and repeat ...

 Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Celine Lomez, John Candy. Dir. Daryl Duke, StudioCanal, 1978 I watch movies I've never seen almost everyday. Most of them are good. Some are fun. Many are great. Once in awhile, though, one comes along greater than usual, a picture that lights me up from its first frame to its last, a nigh on perfect film. Daryl Duke's 1978 heist thriller, THE SILENT PARTNER belongs in the last designation. It's as smart, sexy, cool, well paced, and ingeniously plotted a film as I've seen in the first half of 2021. I don't often do this, but I copied&pasted the first two grafs of Wikipedia's plot synopsis. It sets up the basic situation more neatly than I would, giving away nothing of what's to come. "Miles Cullen, (Elliott Gould), a bored teller at a small bank in a large Toronto shopping mall (the Eaton Centre), accidentally learns that his place of business is about to be robbed when he finds a discarded h...

 Narrated by Robert Evans. Dir. Nanette Burstein&Brett Morgen, USA Films, 2002 "[I believe] there is no objective truth in life or in cinema... the only honest approach to film is the subjective experience." --Brett Morgen How people feel about the above idea may well shape their reaction to Nanette Burstein&Brett Morgan's superb documentary about the career and life of producer/production chief Robert Evans. From the editorializing modifier it ought to be obvious I loved it. A friend of mine, applying to med school, wrote an essay claiming to objectively prove Pink Floyd's DARK SIDE OF THE MOON the best album of the rock era. All my protests that taste is inherently subjective fell on deaf ears. Only one school accepted him, but whether the essay played a part I don't know. Taste is subjective because life is subjective, as Brett Morgen says. I experience life from inside my body and behind my eyes. I have no idea how others perceive me at any giv...

 Alexandra Essoe, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Pat Healey. Dir. Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmeyer, Dark Sky, 2014 "As men go, you at least seem not to see all women as sex objects," a close female friend of mine said to me on July 4, 2016. I always struggle with compliments, but that one made me squirm more than usual. Said with all sincerity, I at once reflected on a lifelong and unhealthy relationship with porn, unsure whether my friend's kind words felt true. A year later, the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke open, inspiring both #MeToo and #TimesUp. Those events forced me to look at my own problematic behavior without my usual fallback, "I have more women friends than male." Which, while true, has nothing to do with whether or not I've always acted honorably toward women. I haven't. Millions of other men have not, either, and many of those have done far worse than I, but that doesn't excuse my transgressions. What others have done does not fr...

 Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blount, Jeff Daniels. Dir. Rian Johnson, SONY, 2012 The Unwatched Film Festival is my name for the ongoing project of watching the movies I bought yet never watched over the last few years of collecting. Having acquired some 1200 movies in just under five years, stuff is bound to get missed. Which breeds shame in my frugal heart. Consider these reviews expiation of that sin.  "Selfishness, self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles." -- Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book, p. 52) After almost 30 years of going to AA meetings and relapsing and going back and leaving again and going back and all that drama, I finally put the bottle down on my own resolve and walked away. That was a year ago next month. I have not had a drink or a desire for one, and now I can see what friends of mine saw and tried to tell me for years, that I was so broken and lonely that I convinced myself I belonged in AA to have something to c...

 Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien, Charles Gray. Dir. Jim Sharman, Fox, 1975 I want to tell you about the night I lost my virginity. Appropriately, it happened at midnight on a Saturday in a darkened room. I was about two months shy of my 16th birthday. Unlike many deflowerings, that room was packed with people, many of them men wearing women's lingerie and makeup, the rest dressed in their '80s finery: denim, leather, pleather, parachute pants, skinny ties. Most of them under the influence of something. A man in lingerie and wig demanded of the room it offer up its virgins for auction. We were herded into a central aisle as half-sober hipsters yelled out bawdy and downright obscene bids. "Sid Vicious's shit!" "Betty Ford's mastectomy-scar collection!" "Betty Ford's other teat!" I don't recall what the winning bid was for me. I was introduced to my new owner, a small Asian American woman, who sm...

 Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austin O'Brien, Charles Dance, Robert Prosky, Anthony Quinn, Art Carney, Mercedes Ruhl. Dir. John McTiernan, Columbia, 1993 I wanted to start out this writeup saying I cannot remember the last time I completely let go with a movie and let it take me wherever it wanted, but that's not true - I did the same Saturday morning with ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. Regardless, I did let John McTiernan's 1993 meta-action comedy LAST ACTION HERO have its way with me tonight and I'm better for the experience. Four years ago, at the start of my collecting career, I picked LAST ACTION HERO up for $1 at a local thrift store. I knew it flopped at the box office and with critics, but I kept reading good things about it, so I took a gamble, brought it home, and turned it off after five minutes, convinced it was too stupid to bother. That's called contempt prior to investigation, and it makes fools of people who buy into it. People like me. The guys I follow...

 Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Stephen Graham, Leelee Sobieski. Dir. Michael Mann, Universal, 2009 I've been a fan of director Michael Mann ever since I caught his first feature film, THIEF, starring James Caan, on cable in the early '80s. I missed his next two pictures, BAND OF THE HAND and MANHUNTER, the first filmed version of Thomas Harris's RED DRAGON, featuring a then-unknown Brian Cox as the notorious Dr. Hannibal Lecter, though I ultimately did see MANHUNTER sometime in the Aughts, and loved it. It's sort of sacrilege to say so now, but I think Cox gives Anthony Hopkins a run for his money as Lecter. The funny thing about collecting based on what I find in the thrift stores is that some of my favorite directors barely exist in my collection, where others predominate. I have something like nine Spike Lee joints, about 18 Scorsese pictures, and around half of Eastwood's filmography, both as star and director/star. On the other hand, I own fo...

 Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Terence Howard, Warwick Davis, Curtis Armstrong. Dir. Taylor Hackford, Bristol Bay/Universal, 2004 Jamie Foxx, nominated for both Supporting Actor and Best Actor at the 2004 Academy Awards, won Best Actor for Ray and, watching Ray tonight for the first time in about 15 years, I'm glad it went down that way. Tom Cruise gave a career-best performance in Collateral, for which Foxx received his Supporting Actor nod. It's a great performance, too, but no moreso than Cruise, ignored by the Academy, so it feels right to me that Foxx got his statuette for the movie where he didn't share the spotlight with a star of Cruise's magnitude. Not that it would make much difference if Foxx had some high-voltage costar in Ray, because the movie simply doesn't exist without Foxx and his essay of Ray Charles. Not unlike Coal Miner's Daughter, the other music biopic whose star picked up a Best Actor, Ray occurs from Ray's point of view, so ther...

 Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Jennifer Carpenter, Colm Feore. Dir. Scott Derrickson, Screen Gems, 2005 I spent eight months being a caregiver for a friend's three young daughters (9, 6, & 4.) The time I spent with them rates as some of the best of my life. Children have a unique ability to help me understand I'm not worthless and useless, as I often feel about myself. When th 4 year-old took my hand and looked up at me and said, "Russell, you are very kind," I felt blessed to be offered such love.  My friend and I were both involved in one of the 12 Step fellowships. When I started smoking pot again, my friend banned me from seeing the girls, saying, "You're surrounded by dark forces. You've been darksided." She truly believed she could see a black aura around me. I know another guy here in my town who claims he can see demons surrounding me, eating my soul. If you've never had such an encounter and if, like me, you're a rationalist,...

 Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Peter McNichol. Dir. Frank Oz, Universal, 1992 Silly. Just pure silliness, and not in a way I can commend to others. Steve Martin plays associate architect Newton Davis, who builds a dreamhouse as an engagement present for Becky (Dana Delany), who promptly declines his proposal.  A few months later, the house unsold, Davis has a one night stand with waitress Gwen, who confesses to being something of a con artist before proceding to appropriate the house - in Davis's hometown of Dobbs' Point - while Davis works in Boston, unaware Gwen is posing as his wife and constructing an elaborate history for them. When he discovers the deception, Davis decides to play along, convinced his improved status as a married man will win him Becky and a promotion at work.  I suppose a wife could be seen as "housesitting" her husband's house. If not, there is no other housesitter in Housesitting, nor is that specific term ever used. It does...

 Away We Go Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski, Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhall, Melanie Lynski. Dir. Sam Mendes, Focus Features, 2009 I've been thinking about Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 domestic drama, Grand Canyon, all day. I have not seen the movie in at least a decade, nor am I especially jonesing to see it again. Grand Canyon featured a series of interconnected vignettes and characters in Los Angeles in 1990, each vignette a meditation on some aspect of coupling, dating, parenting, and generally loving in these modern times, tied together by Kasdan's attempt at a profound summation, that being: if we look at something huge and incredibly old we will more effectively shame ourselves into gratitude for being relatively affluent in Southern California in the late 20th century. It...lacks something, right? Gravitas. Moral clarity. Thematic heft. Actual meaning. I thought of the Kasdan picture because I watched Ron Howard's 1989 Parenthood today, follo...

 Anthony Michael Hall, Daryl Hannah, Alan Ruck, Shirley Jones. Dir. John Gulager, The Asylum, 2013 For those unaware, The Asylum is a film production company specializing in cheapo horror and action titles, most subgeneric ripoffs of whatever horror/scifi/action titles are popular that year. Referred to as "mockbusters," these low budget achievers look like their big-money brethren, often featuring solid B-list casts, as Zombie Night does. Though The Asylum has attracted a following, the more serious, hardcore fans of el cheapo horror (et al) tend to turn up their noses at most Asylum product. Marc Edward Heuck, Our Man in the Valley, summed it up thusly: "I don't watch much Asylum fare, because frankly they're not awful enough, they're just mediocre. Like, they're not content to just have the monster or the topless girl and the requisite scenes therein and otherwise leave talent alone to be unique like Roger Corman was, they micro-manage all the pe...