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...