My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

  Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult. Dir. George Miller, Warner Bros., 2015 #1 This writeup is for potheads. If you're prone to feeling a touch anxious when you get high, and if you get too high because you didn't smoke for a few days, and if you're hypertensive in the bargain, Mad Max: Fury Road is not your movie. It will start off fine, and remain so until the last 30 minutes, at which point director director George Miller has the tension ratcheded so high and is moving so fast you will have to turn off the TV and sit quietly and breathe until you don't feel weird anymore. I had to do just that 100 minutes ago. I ate a little, took a short walk. I'm almost calm enough to survive the last 20 minutes. If that's not a rave, I'm not fat. #2 After seeing Mad Max:Fury Road, you will never think of the abomination known as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome again. If, like me, your gold standard of relentless action movies has been Mad Max 2 since it was ...

 Fade to Black. Dennis Christopher, Eve Brent, Linda Kerridge. Dir. Vernon Zimmerman, Compass International, 1980 Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Dir. Bill & Ross Turner, Vinegar Syndrome/Utopia, 2020 I subscribe to one Youtube channel, Just The Discs, hosted by Brian Saur, a movie blogger/podcaster. Brian's work tends to focus on older movies he feels people should know about, though on JTD he confines himself to Bluray and 4k UHD releases. When Brian gets a shipment in from one of the boutique reissue labels such as Vinegar Syndrome, Shout!Factory/Scream!Factory, or UK-based Arrow Video, he does an episode of JTD previewing and talking up each title.  Our Man in the Valley, Marc Edward Heuck, recently sent me four films from Vinegar Syndrome following one of their sales. Two are Golden Age Porn, and I've decided not to write up porn titles, so I decided to lump the other two together and write about them, though they are very different films. I would say if this doesn't w...

 Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Romano, Anna Paquin. Dir. Martin Scorsese, Netflix, 2019 I've been addicted to movies ever since my parents took me to see Bedknobs & Broomsticks when I was five. I'm the kind of obsessive who went to the entertainment section of our local newspaper even before the comics when I was a little kid. I pored over the ads, reading the credits, learning the names of movie stars whose work I would not, in many cases, see until our street got wired for cable and we got The Movie Channel in 1982 (it was Warner Cable's never-worked QUBE Interactive back then.)  I have talked of these things before, but the most wonderful time for me as a fledgling movie-junkie occurred between ages 11 and 15, when I began to think more critically about what I watched, when I discovered I COULD think critically about movies, that they were more than disposable product, as my parents viewed them. Concurrent with learning to think differently about movies ca...

 FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO:FIRST BLOOD PT. II, RAMBO III, RAMBO, RAMBO:LAST BLOOD Sylvester Stallone, Brian Denehey, Richard Crenna, David Caruso. Dir. Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna. Dir. Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988 Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Ken Howard. Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Weinstein Company, 2008 Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega. Dir. Adrian Grunberg, Lionsgate, 2019 My friend Alice sent me a few movies she got into over the last months. These include Mad Max:Fury Road and The Triplets of Bellevelle, as well as all five of Stallone's Rambo movies. My thoughts on them run below. The problem inherent to the Rambo movies is they each revive a character from a surprise-hit movie, but not his ongoing story, because the first film's genius conceit denied him any backstory. The movies all feature John Rambo, human killing machine, ...

 Kris Kristofferson, Ali McGraw, Ernest Borgnine, Madge Sinclair, Franklin Ajaye. Dir. Sam Peckinpah, United Artists, 1978 Among the myriad charges subsequent generations have laid at the feet of Baby Boomers, one I've seldom, if ever, seen is what they did to racial diversity and progress in movies. From 1970 to 1976, blaxploitation pictures pretty much saved Hollywood studios still trying to rebrand and retool after television helped bring an end to the Old Hollywood's studio system. By '76, however, Jaws had established the era of the modern blockbuster, while Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, and Peter Bogdonovich pioneered the auteurist New Hollywood of more personal movies, made on the cheap and often covering the same genres as the great B-pictures of Golden Age H'wood, but breathing new life into them with grittier violence, nudity, adult language, and more nuanced characters and stories. The black-themed movies faded from m...

 Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance. Dir. Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros., 2018 A couple years ago, when bots started authoring news stories, I harrumphed quite a bit that "no bot can do what I do," and as I come across clickbait stories which I suspect must be bot-written I feel somewhat reassured but, at heart, my reaction is probably about the same as Paul Bunyan's bluster upon seeing the first chainsaw. I imagine any honest writer must feel a little like the cashier whose register stands beside the self-checkout at Wallyworld, eye to eye with her own obsolescence every day. This is pretty much how it feels to be a middle aged white dude, an analog champion in a digital world. New tech, new values, new standards, new ideas and here I stand, still convinced music videos and Swatches qualify as cutting edge. Shit, I still like compact discs. Whether or not there's value in being a dinosaur in a mammalian paradigm is anot...

 Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, Glynis Johns, Sean Connery. Dir. Lewis Allen, Paramount, 1958 Another Time, Another Place, Sean Connery's screen debut, figures in pop culture for more than just the first James Bond's starting point. In 1974, Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry titled his second solo record the same. I could accept that as coincidental, but Glynis Johns also starred in a British drama titled Flesh&Blood. Which, of course, is the name of Roxy Music's 1980 LP. Two coincidences seems a bit of a stretch. Naming his albums for UK films he may well have known as a boy - Flesh&Blood came out in 1951, Another Time... in '58 - fits with Ferry's sense of style, but the real question is, did Ferry have a thing for Glynis Johns? I'm sure some deep-diving online research could yield a definitive answer, but I find the suggestion tantalising and evocative enough as it is, and I want to talk about the very pleasant surprise I had in Another Time, Another Pla...