My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

  TOMBSTONE Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Dana Delany, Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Hollywood Pictures, 1993 Some history. While our filmic portrait of Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer shifted from silent-era mythmaking like THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON to John Ford's FORT APACHE and later works depicting Custer as a vainglorious fool who led his men to certain, and preventable, massacre at the hands of Sitting Bull and a few thousand angry Sioux warriors, the story of Wyatt Earp & Doc Holliday at the OK Corral has never shed its mythos onscreen, despite telling the story in about every conceivable way. There's good reason for that. Boiled down, the true story suggests the Earps, with or without Holliday, gunned down a group of business rivals, who may/may not have been armed at the time. Evading prosecution, Wyatt Earp went on gilding that lily for the rest of his life, until the saga of the wronged Earp Brothers and their holy crusade became inext...

  JOHN DIES AT THE END Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Fabianne Therese, Clancy Brown. Dir. Don Coscarelli, Magnet, 2012 I first watched JOHN DIES AT THE END in May 2021. I saw a brilliant, self aware satirical scifi-horror movie I thoroughly enjoyed. BUT. SPOILERS!!SPOILERS!! John does not die at the end. He dies halfway through, & not for long. SPOILERS CONCLUDE!!SPOILERSCONCLUDE!! I had a few Jack&Diets that night. My sense of literalism threw a temper tantrum. I threw a tantrum. In the generally forgettable PENN & TELLER GET KILLED Penn&Teller do, in fact, get killed. They die at the end. I expected the same approach from PHANTASM's Don Coscarelli, & he partially delivered, killing John, if not at the end. In a fit of inebriated pique, I wrote the following piece, which my subsequent writeup replaces. JOHN DIES AT THE END is great scifi-horror-satire. Why can't Don Coscarelli get movies made every year? It's a crime. ***** SPOILER ...

 JOHN DIES AT THE  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.  SHARE

  LOGAN'S RUN Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Farrah Fawcet Majors, Peter Ustinov. Dir. Michael Anderson, MGM, 1976 "Never trust anyone over 30." -- Abie Hoffman In the 23rd century, according to Michael Anderson's film of LOGAN'S RUN, trusting folks over 30 will not be a challenge because no one lives to see 31. The world has suffered nuclear and environmental cataclysm. All that remains of humanity in the US live in one great city, covered and sealed off from the outside world by massive, opaque domes. Within, this remnant race lives in a sybarritic paradise of pleasure and indolence. Few work. The human body can be remade however people desire with laser surgery. Sex is available in clubs and the home 24/7. Everyone has all the food they want. Everyone has a home. As the onesheet in '76 read, however, "There's just one catch." It's a doozy. A great computer, called only "Computer," runs the city and its citizens...

  DUNE PART I Timothy Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard. Dir. Denis Villeneuve, Warner Bros., 2021 Sometimes the films hardest to write about surprise me. DUNE makes a good example. I've read the novel a ridiculous number of times since 1984. I've seen David Lynch's flop version an equally ridiculous number of times, (though never the miniseries.) It ought to be a breeze to assess Denis Villeneuve's new version, right? Wrong, and for the simplest of reasons. It's only the first half. Whatever Lynch got wrong he did manage to compress the entire book into 137 minutes. With Villeneuve's two-part take, it's harder to make pronouncements, particularly of characters, because the audience can't say or see how their story arcs conclude, nor do we know how Villeneuve plans to complete the saga. Timothy Chalamet did not sell me on his viability as Paul Atreides, but with another three hours to go he may yet turn into the...

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD by Quentin Tarantino, HarperCollins, 2021 In 1986, my best friend & I attended a sneak preview of Rob Reiner's STAND BY ME, which came free for buying a ticket to see RUTHLESS PEOPLE. As I remember it, we enjoyed RUTHLESS PEOPLE, but we did not laugh a great deal for 3/4 of the film. A chuckle here & there as we enjoyed the story, but no howls of mirth until the final 20 minutes, when a pair of pay phones drives poor Bill Pullman half-insane. Those last 20 minutes paid off a film I had begun to think would rate no more than a shrugged "Whatever," if asked about it later. That, I believe, marked one of my first experiences of gestalt, that condition wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quentin Tarantino's first published venture into writing fiction for the book market, the novelization of his 2019 magnum opus, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, makes another case, though far from the first, of the whole being mo...

  SUPERMAN III Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Annette O'Toole, Robert Vaughn. Dir. Richard Lester, Warner Brothers, 1983 I turned 16 on November 24, 1983, which means I spent most of that year as an attitudinal, hormonal, suicidal/homicidal 15 year-old. Which is to say I found myself at an age where much of childhood still called loudly, yet the call of "maturity" competed, ever drawing my friends & I to a vocal, showy display of putting away childish things. That, combined with an inability to form a macro-view of Richard Pryor's career & articulate it, helped make Richard Lester's SUPERMAN III the franchise instalment to reject & mock, based on lackluster reviews and our few friends' bemusement upon seeing it. 1983 was also the summer of RETURN OF THE JEDI. In a time of competing summer blockbusters & poor press, SUPERMAN III proved easy to disregard & dismiss. The concept of contempt prior to investigation had yet to reach me at 15...

  LAYER CAKE Daniel Craig, Colm Meany, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller. Dir. Matthew Vaughn, SONY, 2004 Matthew Vaugh produced Guy Ritchie's comic sendups of classic UK & US crime films, LOCK, STOCK, & TWO SMOKING BARRELS & SNATCH. That association, though used heavily in marketing Vaughn's film (I used it a few days ago), proves misleading. In their commentary, Vaughn & Ritchie identify about half the film's biggest laughs as "completely unintentional." In their partnership's division of labor up to '04, Ritchie made the funny movies, and Vaughn intended to make the serious ones. At which he succeeds, in spectacular form, where LAYER CAKE's concerned. Indeed, it's much more the UK's belated answer to/update of Mann's '95 HEAT. Vaugn works with the same outsized canvas, brings if anything even more style than Mann, and fashions a plot that, to discuss it at all, threatens to implode the souffle. Daniel Craig plays West...

  HEAT Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Val Kilmer, Jon Voigt, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora. Dir. Michael Mann, Warner Bros., 1995 On twitter I'm one of a few dozen people tweeting their four favorite movies for a given year, one year per each successive day. We started, as far as I know, at 1959. Today we're tweeting for 2014. (Mine:BOYHOOD, LEGO MOVIE, FURY, INTERSTELLAR.) No one says much, but years perceived as especially good get shoutouts, which means 1999 got its share of love. IN '99, as I recall, THE INSIDER made all the critical lists, did the awards-season tour, & movie fans, those I talked to, waxed rhapsodic. I also recall establishment critics of the time loving THE INSIDER & being divided on HEAT. In the '99 lists I saw, THE INSIDER is no longer part of the 1999 discourse. HEAT never goes out of style on twitter. Everyday I see tweets of action stills, onesheets, whatever, leading me to tweet the movies I wish film twitter would STOP talking about ten d...