My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Bradley Cooper. Dir. Todd Phillips, Warner Bros., 2016 Have you seen SCARFACE, TOP GUN, GOODFELLAS, BLOW, BLACKHAWK DOWN, LORD OF WAR, BODY OF LIES, AMERICAN HUSTLE, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, & THE BIG SHORT? Yes, of course you have. So have I. Which means we've pretty much seen everything WAR DOGS has going for it. That ought not stop people from seeing it, however. If you steal, steal good stuff, and do something cool with it. Todd Phillips does both in WAR DOGS, a highly entertaining, if not wildly original, comedy-crime thriller from 2016. Having said that, there isn't much else to say. Jonah Hill plays a more alpha version of his character in WOLF OF WALL STREET, fitting his patented shtik into another character who, if not as morally complex as his job would have him be, entertains me for two hours. When I like actors, they have to work hard to bore me. Jonah Hill has yet to bore me. Miles Teller plays a solid, if unremark

 THE GREAT OUTDOORS John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Annette Bening, Stephanie Faracy. Dir. Howard Deutch, Universal, 1988 UNCLE BUCK John Candy, Amy Madigan, MacCaulay Culkin. Dir. John Hughes, Universal, 1989 One problem with undermedicated mental illness, apart from what you'd imagine - it obliterates humor and perspective. (Ok, that's two problems. I'm a little OVERmedicated this morning, what do you want from me?) Marijuana works on my depression&anxiety better than any of the prescription meds on which I spent the '90s and '00s trying to live. When it runs out, though, the darkness seeps back in. The anger over nothing, and everything. Things that make me laugh when I'm medicated make me ragey when not. I get wrapped up so tight I can't think for shit. I watch the Youtube movie-collecting channels I usually watch, listen to the podcasts, and snarl. Or worse, sneer. Especially at "fun movies." Because, in that state, I am obviously fit t

 POSSE Kirk Douglas, Bruce Dern, Bo Hopkins, James Stacy. Dir. Kirk Douglas, Paramount, 1975 THE LONG RIDERS James Keach, Stacy Keach, Randy Quaid, Dennis Quaid, Robert Carradine, David Carradine, Keith Carradine, Christopher Guest, Nicholas Guest. Dir. Walter Hill, United Artists, 1980 As I probably ought to have noted in my writeup for FORT APACHE, the four revisionist westerns to which I devoted yesterday are: FORT APACHE, SHANE, POSSE, & THE LONG RIDERS. I'm skipping SHANE for the time being. I enjoyed it and am glad to get it off the movie bucket list, but my main response so far concerns itself with how much Eastwood's PALE RIDER borrows from it - virtually everything. PALE RIDER is about half an inch off being a straight-up remake of SHANE. Until 18 months ago the only movie named POSSE I knew of was Mario Van Peebles's 1993 film featuring Big Daddy Kane, Tiny Lister, and Tone Loc. Based on the box office totals, that doesn't make me much different th

 Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Shirley Temple, John Agar. Dir. John Ford, Fox, 1948 Setting aside Disney's THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG, my first westerns were THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and LITTLE BIG MAN. Given that, it does not surprise me that I gravitate to the revisionist western, often without consciously realizing it. I always thought of it as loving the underdog, but in all my favorite westerns the underdog is always the outlaw, the Native American, the figures the traditional western employs as its stock villains. Growing up in the shadow of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, it's perhaps a natural inclination to prefer the movies that questioned and/or rejected the common, received wisdom about the Old West. Yesterday felt like a good day to watch westerns. As a child, the independent TV stations in my hometown tended to feature westerns on their weekend movie-blocks. Saturday and Sunday afternoons sing out to me to watch genre films, from THE SEARCHERS to DIRTY HARRY t

 KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, DIRECTOR'S CUT Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Edward Norton, Ghassan Massoud, Jeremy Irons. Dir. Ridley Scott, Fox, 2005 ☆☆☆☆ A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS Paul Scofield, Alice Hiller, Robert Shaw, Susannah York, Orson Welles. Dir. Fred Zinnemann, Columbia, 1966 ☆☆☆☆ "Uncompromising men are easy to admire." - Ian Bannen, in BRAVEHEART Apologies at the outset for quoting Mel Gibson's epic exercise in homophobia, but the line came immediately to mind when thinking of both these films. In my callow youth I agreed with that statement. Now, as we fracture into tribes once more, each unwilling to bend for the other, I disagree with it. Uncompromising people look like overgrown 12 year-olds to me these days. And yet, what of people of conscience, who put their principles before most other concerns? Are they not both uncompromising and admirable? Are you saying, Russ, that Ghandi and MLK were overgrown 12 year-olds? No, I'm not. I'm saying, though, th

 Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George MacReady, Steven Geray. Dir. Charles Vidor, Columbia, 1946 My favorite erotic fiction deals with cuckolding. The stories fascinate me. As people, cuckolds don't seem to think they're worth nice things. Or happiness. On the other hand, the cuckolding partners and their multiple lovers don't come over as the clear victors, either. Part of the fascination - maybe most of it - lies in trying to decide which party comes out the MOST degraded.  Is it the submissive, sensitive husband and his unsatisfactory size/staying power? Is it the "slutwife" who finds satiety in being transformed into a fuckdoll to humilate her husband? Or is it the lover - often black - who gets to degrade the sexy white lady but who doesn't otherwise matter? As in bdsm scenes, if the cuck is most degraded, that means he also "wins," as his desires to see his wife turned into a promiscuous slut while he gets to be bi without shame are most fulfi

 Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr., Kaitlyn Dever. Dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, Cinedigm, 2013 Writing about the HBO miniseries version of Richard Russo's EMPIRE FALLS, I opined that sometimes the distance between an almost-great film and really-great one can be as wide as the Milky Way. It pained me to say that. I badly wanted to declare EMPIRE FALLS as masterful as Robert Benton's Russo-adaptation, NOBODY'S FOOL, from 1994. I couldn't, though. It wasn't great, it was almost great, and that made all the difference. I have to give that review again and it's twice as difficult, because Destin Daniel Cretton and his young cast, especially Brie Larson and Kaitlyn Dever get so much of SHORT TERM 12 exactly right. Even when the film staggers, as it does in its climax, it's not due to Larson and Dever but to Cretton, who veers inexplicably off into pat, trite, dishonest Hollywood bullshit to bring his story home. Cretton wrote and directed a short of SHORT TER

 Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin Ashley, Misty Wilkins. Dir. Steven Soderbergh.  Well I guess Steven Soderbergh is the King of Hollywood. Kurt Loder started his Rolling Stone review of Neil Young's 1989 FREEDOM, "Well I guess Neil Young is the King of Rock'n'Roll." I've always wanted to do the same for a filmmaker. Today, Soderbergh gave me the opportunity. Bubble tells one of the oldest stories we know: love triangle gone wrong. Jealousy, envy, insecurity, and opportunity lead to a bad end. Hollywood has told that story about a million times, in every genre, every style, and for every budget, including mega. Hollywood peopled those million with every likely and wildly unlikely actor imaginable, from grindhouse starlets to Hollywood It Girls. Some of those pictures became classics, and some make a viewer want to hurt himself, but they're all recognizably Hollywood productions. Steven Soderbergh, following up blockbuster OCEAN'S EIGHT, took less tha

 Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Anna Deveare Smith. Dir. Jonathan Demme, Sony Pictures Classics, 2008 Any conversation held about New Hollywood's giants which does not include Jonathan Demme is not a complete conversation. That's your basic bold, declarative statement and I, No One in Particular, stand by it.  I own, I think, four of Demme's movies. Not that many. I've seen most of the rest, though not CAGED HEAT and not BELOVED, but in every case, every picture knocks me out. Every picture feels like a master class in filmmaking in which the lecturer says nothing and lets the work speak for itself. I notice Demme's direction because I'm one of those guys, but you could have seen SOMETHING WILD, PHILADELPHIA, & SILENCE OF THE LAMBS back when, liked them all, and had no idea the same guy directed them. For some, that's sort of the kiss of death, I guess - they don't discuss a director like Demme because his pictures aren&

 Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber, Alice Braga. Dir. Miguel Sapochnik, Universal, 2013 Building a movie collection through thrifting/scavenging, I have to gamble. I find plenty of stuff I recognize and kind of remember hearing about but I'm not sure, so if it's a buck or two, I take the chance. Sometimes, like with THE BEAST or SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS or LOGAN LUCKY, I go home a winner. Sometimes, alas, I also get movies like REPO MEN. If REPO MEN only sucked, if it started bad and went nowhere, that would be one thing. A straight lemon.  REPO MEN, though, started out cherries, an intriguing premise, good cast, cool-looking dystopian world, and built my sympathy with Jude Law's Remy, an artificial-organ repo man, sent out to repossess hearts, livers, pancrii et al whose recipients can no longer pay. The recipient can be transported to an ER, but only patients with good credit live. Law kills people for a living, with legal sanction, but most of society, especially

 I make life difficult for myself. I moan that the world's rough enough as is without us being assholes to each other, but I'm an asshole to myself. When I found Jonathan Demme's '08 RACHEL GETTING MARRIED in the dollar-store Treasure Hunt bin yesterday, my eyes lit up. A Demme I missed in its time and need to see! Everything else today is all bonus as of right now, I thought, picking up INSIDIOUS, DEVIL, GHOST IN THE SHELL, REPO MEN, ENDLESS LOVE, SABOTAGE, & FRANKENWEENIE at the same time.  (I thought ENDLESS LOVE might be the Zefirilli original. I entertained visions of pairing JEREMY with ENDLESS love. What a fuckin' glorious writeup that would make. Of course, ENDLESS LOVE has been remade, god alone knows why, as a PG-13 YA romance. Of course, that's what I bought for a buck yesterday. God help me, at some point I'll probably watch it, too. Call me "Mikey.") Of course, I walked on home and watched THE ROAD WARRIOR and JEREMY and ignored

 Mel Gibson. George Miller, Warner Bros., 1981 Today, I watched two movies on BLURAY, George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR and Arthur Barron's JEREMY. A post-apocalyptic chase movie and an early-'70s coming-of-age romance. Not an expected pairing. I just bought a new BLURAY player. A friend sent me a box of movies. ROAD WARRIOR & JEREMY were the two about which I felt most excited. And yet. JEREMY may be a straight coming-of-age teen movie, but THE ROAD WARRIOR, in its way, also deals with childhood's end. ROAD WARRIOR begins with b&w news footage, repurposed from WW2, to stand in for WW3, showing the audience the failure and annihilation of the adult world, civilization. Shifting to the present, the desolate landscape roamed over by fanciful machines driven very fast by men in costumes, men with dyed mohawks, men in bondage wear, Miller shows us a world of people brutalized by and shocked out of humanity, other than in the most base, narcissistic, infantile w

 Robby Benson, Glynnis O'Connor, Leonardo Cimino. Dir. Arthur Barron, UA, 1973 Fun City Editions BLURAY reissue I always call myself an '80s kid, and that's wrong. I went to high school in the '80s, after which I refused to grow up. That's not an '80s kid. I'm a '70s kid. I didn't start to see lots of good movies until the early '80s, in my early teens, but that doesn't make me any less 3 in 1970, 13 in 1980. What bothers me about being a '70s kid is that, after 50 years of movie fandom, I've missed a ridiculous amount of films from my childhood, still. I mean, I knew Robby Benson as the teen hearthrob of ONE ON ONE and ICE CASTLES, not as a young actor who got a couple lucky parts. I emerged from the '70s without hearing of Arthur Barron's JEREMY, or even that Benson had done good work prior to his teen idol period in the late '70s. The guys at Pure Cinema Podcast and 70 Movies We Saw in the '70s started talk

 Pat Healy, Kene Holliday, Rebecca Mader. Dir. Craig Zobel, Magnolia, 2007 I wish I could write a lede for this that starts out gushing about how Craig Zobel tells us stories of people and of lives we all know exist but know nothing of, even as they happen around us. I cannot lead with that because in June of 2004 I graduated 3rd out of 30 from a private broadcasting school in Cincinnati. It sounds like the kind of online, for-profit scam academy our former President once ran, but it's better than that. Mostly. Upon graduation, about 20 of 30 found jobs in radio&TV in the Greater Cincinnati area. How many continue to work in the industry today I couldn't say, but I know most of my classmates had jobs in production that pay shit and never quite lead to the air studios where the money is, that most had not one but four jobs, including as an instructor at our school, and if they managed to get on mic knew their top takehome with the big commercial chains would be about 37k.