My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam. Dir. Terry Jones, Columbia, 1979 BLAZING SADDLES Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little, Madelaine Kahn, Harvey Korman. Dir. Mel Brooks, Warner Bros., 1974 My free range parents - was I a free range child? I've never gotten that cliche right - took me and my brother to see WIZARDS, dropped us off at THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES when I was nine, my brother seven. Liberal '70s parents. Who drew the line at R-rated movies. Nope. Not gonna happen not taking you to R-rated movies we ever hear of you seeing an R-rated movie you're at least grounded. I must've understood their weakness. After taking us to see WIZARDS, a relatively filthy PG movie, how could they refuse me LIFE OF BRIAN?  I didn't use that gambit, but I prevailed. LIFE OF BRIAN became my first R-rated movie. Dad took me when it played the Esquire, the local second-run house with the 40-foot screen. I ...

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986 Style over sex, minus substance. That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic.  I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff.  Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting...

 THE GRAND DUEL (aka STORMRIDERS, aka THE BIG SHOWDOWN)  Lee Van Cleef, Alberto Dantrice. Dir. Giancarlo Santi, Mount Street, 1972 (half of 2013 Mill Creek Bluray) FAIR WARNING: The following writeup contains references to both STAR WARS & GEORGE LUCAS. Yesterday, I tweeted my Sunday Western triple feature consisted of THE GRAND DUEL, KEOMA, and THE BEGUILED, the original version. Too ambitious, by 2/3. Though I particularly intended to write up GRAND DUEL and KEOMA since they're part of the same Mill Creek Bluray, I nodded off during the latter, worn out from staring at my phone for three hours as I wrote about watching THE WITCH Saturday night. When I woke up I decided to knock off the movies, smoke, and relax with NPR's HEARTS OF SPACE & ECHOES, yet now, 7.5 hours later, I'm still awake and keen to write about Giancarlo Santi's 1972 Spaghetti Western. I guess I can always write KEOMA up here later and retweet the expanded piece. I don't like goin...

 Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. Dir. Robert Eggers, A24/Lionsgate, 2015 People have a tendency to tell me I think too much. I used to feel ashamed and guilty when someone said that, but these days I shrug and snort. The comment pretty well gives truth to the idea that when we point our finger at someone, the other fingers point back at us. Those who need to shame someone for the quantity of their thought tells me much more about them than the accused. Once in a while, however, they're also correct. Sometimes a movie or book or song et al will stimulate a cascade, or even a deluge, of free association as I consume it. The associations, particularly if I'm on my first joint of the day, come too fast to keep organized so I can explore them in logical order in a later writeup. Robert Eggers's 2015 directorial debut, THE WITCH, stimulated just such a flood last night. The principal association reminded me of a paper I wrote in college about the psychological s...

 James McAvoy, Betty Buckley, Ana Taylor Joy. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, Universal, 2016 My phone, my only link to the online world, went sideways last Saturday, the screen blanked out as if stuck in charging mode. It took until today to figure out how to get it working, but I spent all last weekend watching more movies in my Unwatched/Unfinished pile and re-watching a few I hadn't seen since I got them. These include: SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, ROB ROY, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, KEOMA, SPLICE, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN's SPLIT. Reading some of the Film Twitter discourse surrounding the release of Shyamalan's OLD interested me, particularly the point that changing Shyamalan's surname to "Shyama-lama-ding-dong" is racist. I worry that we toss that word out there too easily, but I have to admit that I've never done similar to a white filmmaker. I've never goofed on Spielberg's name, nor Scorsese's, nor John Ford's. I further con...

 Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Max Von Sydow, Paul Dooley. Dir. Dave Thomas & Rick Moranis, MGM, 1983 Evan Williams is a bastard. More accurately, Evan Williams black label turns me into a surly bastard, but if I go with my first sentence I get to blame him rather than myself for my underwhelmed response to STRANGE BREW, one of my more embarrassing '80s oversights, when I finally saw it last year. It had to have been the bourbon, because I finally re-watched it today, stoned, and laughed my ass off. Of course, the last time I got super high after a few sober days and watched movies, I gave THE GREAT OUTDOORS an ecstatic writeup and criticized UNCLE BUCK for being too dark, so...yeah. That happened. As I've said before, my movie fandom blossomed in the '80s when I was a teenager/young adult and I pride myself on having seen most of the '80s-movie staples at the multiplex or on VHS by the end of the decade. It's inevitable to miss a few, I suppose, but I'm al...