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...