I finally saw: She's All That (sort of)

And wouldn't it have made a good movie for my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist if I'd thought of it rather than randomly coming across it on Netflix in our Air BnB in Rome?

But that is where I came across it, I already have my final two movies for that series picked out, and September is the wrong month to be watching a movie from the series anyway. 

I had consumed most of a bottle of very bad red wine when I sat down to it on Thursday night. We were eating on the balcony that night, a rare night on this trip when we weren't eating out. (But you can't eat out every night, or you will go even broker than you're already going by being on a trip like this.)

It wasn't really the magical experience we were hoping. We weren't able to find any actually fresh pasta, because the place we were staying was about three blocks from the Colosseum. That area is not set up for tourists to make their own dinners in their Air BnB's. It's set up for them to eat out.

There is oodles of not-fresh pasta, much of it intended to be bought and brought back with you from whence you came, to give as a gift to somebody. They don't care what you do with it, as long as you give them as much of your money as possible. (Am I getting a little cynical after a month on the road?)

Even though we have two kids who would never be charmed by an experience of eating on our balcony at sunset -- one because he is very ambivalent about the concept of eating food, the other because he is very ambivalent about the concept of showing enthsusiasm for anything, even the great wonders of the world we are seeing -- we nonetheless thought we could make this a sort of special experience. But then we also couldn't find any garlic bread that we could prep in the oven, my wife couldn't find a drink she liked (she's not into red wine anymore), and when we first boiled the water in our kitchen, there was some sort of weird scum bubbling on the surface of the water, so we had to throw out the boiled water, clean it thoroughly and boil some more, which still looked a little weird. (The apartment was otherwise beautiful and quite clean, so this was a bit of a mystery.) Anyway, the sun had long since set before we had the pasta dinner with the pesto my younger son likes -- the kind we'd been lugging around a month from Austrlaia -- ready to eat. 

The good news is, the not-fresh pasta actually tasted great. Though by this point I'd already committed myself to getting the most out of the experience by drinking myself as close to the bottom of this bottle of shitty wine as I could.

Because we had all this wrapped up by 9 o'clock, I knew that just watching an episode or two of Santa Clarita Diet -- which I have belatedly chosen as a trip TV show -- would not really get me through to my proper bedtime. I needed to find something that would go down easily while I was this drunk, and She's All That is such a part of our cultural conversation that I chose that when I saw it on Netflix on the living room TV.

The premise is, of course, the occasion for great ridicule. In our comparatively unenlightened era of 26 years ago, we bought the idea that Rachael Leigh Cook was "ugly" but that if you only removed her glasses and put her in a dress, she would not be. The movie has since become a conversational touchstone any time we need to evoke the narrow thinking of an earlier time. 

Strangely, though, I thought that being a movie people regularly referenced meant that it was thought of as a classic, even with the dubious thinking that underpinned it. Like, this movie could only be as prominent as it is in the cultural conversation if it was actually, you know, good.

Nope.

It has a lot of stars. Like, many more recognizable stars than you would think. Paul Walker is even in it. So is recent Oscar winner Kieran Culkin. 

But good? It is not good. In fact, I found it pretty terrible as a movie. In fact, I'm not even sure it is better than He's All That, the remake from a few years ago that I also thought was pretty terrible.

Since I am, still, on this long holiday -- Cairo currently, which I'm sure I will tell you about at a later date -- I'm not going to give you a deep analysis of why She's All That is bad. But it goes way beyond whether it has a solid theory about beauty and popularity at its core. Really, this is just a movie with very wobbly construction, a terrible "hero" in Freddie Prinze Jr., and few if any moments that struck me as iconic or enduring or quotable.

Then again, I only "sort of" saw it.

That first night -- yes, I watched it over two nights, remember how much of that wine I'd consumed -- was particularly shaky in terms of being sure I'd seen the parts of it I thought I saw. I know I closed my eyes for a minute or two here and there, but every part of the setup struck me as lacking, and even more indicative of the era of its creation than I would have thought it would be, given that we still talk about it today.

On the second night, when I'd had only one glass of wine (beyond what I had for our dinner out, which was a wine and a margarita), I was fully engaged but apparently it was too loud for my older son, who asked me to turn it down. I turned it down enough that I even turned on the subtitles, which I suppose added to a slight disengagement from it.

So yeah, I've seen She's All That, mostly, and I gave it 1.5 stars. It's shallow, it celebrates people who are lame (and demonizes people who are even lamer, at least), and I'm not going to entertain the possibility that I might have liked it more if I'd seen it in 1999, or when not drunk. 

I finally saw: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings

And oh by the way: Happy Opening Day.

Of the baseball season, silly.

I had to watch my Opening Day Eve baseball psych-up movie a night early this year, which was two nights ago now, because I'm out of town on another baseball-related endeavor: a three-day tournament for over 40 players. This is just a once-a-year thing for me since I no longer play regularly, and we'll see if it's just a one-off or actually once-a-year since it's my first time.

You've figured out the movie I watched if you're good at reading movie posters. Or in this case, DVD covers.

Yes it's John Badham's The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), and if you're wondering why I'm saying that I've "finally" seen this movie you may have never heard of, well, I'm about to tell you.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the second of an eventual four fantasy baseball leagues in which I've participated -- this is the 16th year of my current one -- a friend from college named his fantasy baseball team after this movie. His last name was, still is, Bond, so he called his team The Bondo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. (Yes, I believe the software we used gave him a sufficient character count to fit the whole thing.) 

Like you, I had never heard of the movie, but the naming of his team after it certainly piqued my interest. 

And then I proceeded to do nothing about that for the next three decades.

But this year I thought "I like baseball" and "I need a movie to watch the night before the baseball season starts, and I've watched a movie I'd already seen in that slot like three straight years, and this is a movie I have not seen" and I put two and two together.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this story of a barnstorming Negro League baseball team in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and it starts with the cast. Especially with the recent passing of James Earl Jones, it was great to see him up there on the screen with the long-passed Richard Pryor and the still-with-us Billy Dee Williams. I bet the first of that group and the last of that group would never have guessed they'd appear on screen together, of sorts, in one of the most iconic movies of its era, The Empire Strikes Back, just four years later. Maybe if Richard Pryor had played Lobot, we could have had a full reunion.

Right away I knew I was where I wanted to be with this movie -- and that the fact that I have never seen a movie that properly focuses on the Negro Leagues is an oversight I seriously needed to correct. Then again, maybe they just do not exist. Yes, movies like 42 spend some time in a Negro League context, but a movie about the Negro Leagues generally or any specific Negro League team? Other than this, I can't name one. 

Before Williams' title character forms the titular team, the players he amasses are either on other Negro League teams or not on any team at all, working regular jobs despite their ample talent. We see Long, a pitcher, facing off against Jones' slugger Leon Carter in one game, and we are immediately immersed in all the on-field rituals: players leading chants with the crowd, people juggling baseballs and otherwise clowning, sass flying freely between players on opposing teams (or sometimes even the same team) without the umpires interfering. In other words, it was a joyous environment in which competition was taken seriously but fun was never sacrificed. I would have loved to be there in those stands. 

And if I was, I would have been one of the only white faces. Because the other thing this movie immediately reminded me was how much Black Americans used to love baseball. We see how much the crowd adores these players and this pastime, and then we go out to the sandlots outside the park to see young kids pitching and swinging a makeshift stick to approximate their heroes. The fact that a sport that was once somewhere around 50% Black, probably reaching its height in the 1970s and 1980s, now has 5% or less players fitting that demographic is sad indeed. I wish Black kids still fell in love with baseball at an early age the way they obviously did back then. This could also be why we haven't had a younger Black filmmaker make the definitive Negro League baseball movie, which could be an excellent project in the right hands.

But let's not get sidetracked by the negative. This is a highly enjoyable, episodic adventure in which the titular team travels through the south in a couple fancy cars bearing their name, which they parade down the streets of the towns they are visiting to great interest by the locals, sometimes even getting out of the cars and hot-stepping it down main street in a synchronized group. At least, that is, when the cars are not being repossessed as payment for hotels and the like, as the team becomes cash poor through mishaps and usury by the people they encounter. Since they are trying to fight the Negro League owners who use and abuse them -- one of whom docks from their salary in order to pay for team financial needs for which they are not responsible -- they are constantly playing David to someone else's Goliath, even as they are always putting on a great show and presenting a great brand of the sport.

Even as this movie is always fun, it doesn't shy away from the realities of racism in the south and elsewhere in the U.S. at this time. We hear the N-word dropped on multiple occasions here, though because it was a different time, the usage is more incidental than employed specifically to drive home these racists' perniciousness. Badham and company want to show what these guys were up against, but also that it did not overly dampen their spirits. After all, it was just their reality, nothing exceptional.

As I watched this team go through its antics and have a hell of a lot of fun out there -- plus employ "novelty" players like a one-armed first baseball and a little person catcher (who is actually credited as "Midget Catcher") -- I was reminded of what the Harlem Globetrotters provide us nowadays. (Yes, I believe they are still touring, though obviously with new membership.) Black athletes have a history of being great entertainers, and if we ever see one of them showboating in a way that may seem out of sync with our modern ideas of how athletes should comport themselves, we should remember the sort of lovely history we see in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, and that they came by it honestly. 

I finally saw: Mauvais Oeil

July marks the 25th anniversary of one of the best and worst road trips of my life.

On July 26, 1998, two friends and I started out on a three-and-a-half week drive to see baseball games in 12 American ballparks, and two Canadians ones. It was supposed to be 14 American and 16 total, but we had to skip Detroit (had to fix an issue with our car radio) and Pittsburgh (end-of-trip exhaustion and one guy had to leave early for a job interview).

We ended up seeing games in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago (Cubs), Milwaukee, Minnesota, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles (Dodgers), San Diego, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Cleveland and Baltimore. Not too shabby. 

In reality, it was the best road trip, full stop. However, I can't say we weren't totally fed up with each other by the end, and I was almost out of money. I literally think I had less than $20 in my bank account by the end of the trip.

But the movie I'm telling you about today ties in to the very beginning of the trip -- the very first night, in fact. 

I had spent all the previous night moving out of my apartment in Providence, literally not sleeping as I again poorly planned how much time it would take to move out of an apartment. My last trip up to Boston, an hour drive, included so many things strapped to the roof of the car, and so much blocked visibility, and so much lack of sleep, that I'm surprised a) I didn't die or at least b) I wasn't pulled over by the police. And then after finally unloading all this stuff in my dad's garage, then I had to pack to go out on the road for nearly a month.

Our first stop was Montreal, and that meant all of the sudden reading signs in French. As if I weren't disoriented enough.

French was, in actual fact, the default foreign language of the school system the three of us attended. Our town wasn't actually that close to Montreal -- I believe it was a four-hour drive to get there on that first night of our trip -- but we were a lot closer to where people spoke French than to where people spoke any other language. (Spanish was eventually offered in middle school, and by high school you could take Italian, Latin and other languages.)

Our first sign of the change, literally and figuratively, was when we saw road signs advertising the different directions you could go on other roads. E was not an issue -- both the English and French words for "east" start with E. The thing that made us laugh was east's opposite, which was indicated by the letter O: "ouest." Tickled by this and only 25 years old, we over-pronounced the beginning part of that word.

The stadium in Montreal was called Stade Olympique, as it was built for the 1976 Olympics. This only increased my sense of oddness and disorientation. The Expos' stadium had this odd cobra-like tower sticking out over the top of the field, so when you looked up, it was looking down at you like something out of 1984. We were quick to label it dystopic. Here, see for yourself:

Sadly the web isn't obliging with a view looking up from field level, but suffice it to say it was ominous. 

I'm finally getting to the point of this post.

As we watched the Expos and Giants, a video ad for the new Brian De Palma movie starring Nicolas Cage played on the big screen. Students of cinema, we knew this movie to be called Snake Eyes.

Of course, in French it had another title:

Mauvais Oeil.

(Mo vays oy, if you want to know how it sounds.)

As proven from the highway sign example, we considered French words starting with the letter O to be funny. But that wasn't what made us laugh so much about this title. From eight years of taking French, we knew the actual translation of Snake Eyes would be something like Les Yeux du Serpent. 

This translation was:

Bad Eyes.

And actually, not even Bad Eyes but Bad Eye, singular, since the plural of "un oeil" is "les yeux."

We laughed and laughed, and it became the first meme of the trip. Many an utterance of "MAUVAIS OEIL," in the overly serious voice of a French ad copy reader, followed.

Twenty-five years later, I have finally seen this movie. 

(And please forgive the indulgent preamble.)

If I'd really wanted to honor the anniversary month of this occurrence, I would have waited a day to watch it. It was my final viewing of June on Friday the 30th. But at least I'm writing this post in July.

The movie is a bit of a hot mess, but that's probably exactly what Mauvais Oeiul should be: a mixture of the really good and the quite terrible.

Really good: De Palma opens the film with a 20-minute Steadicam shot inside an Atlantic City casino and boxing ring, at least 12 of which occurred in one take, with some hidden edits in the other eight. The degree of difficulty is high, especially coordinating all those extras, but the actual occurrences within the shot are fairly straightforward, mostly walking and talking. A movie like Extraction 2 might laugh at its relative simplicity, but for 1998 I suppose it was pretty impressive.

Quite terrible: Many of the other storytelling choices. De Palma uses character POV about three different times in this film, and there's a reason you don't see this device used more often. It's pretty hacky and it has the effect of making the character who's doing the viewing seem like a deaf-mute. Even if the character speaks during the scene, the voice has an alien, disembodied quality to it. The conceit of the film, rather poorly realized, is that different characters have different perspectives on the assassination of the secretary of defense during a boxing match, Rashomon-style. This POV approach is meant to approximate that. But because little new information is actually yielded from these differing perspectives, it just makes the awkward device all the more pointless.

The handling of Cage's character is a mix of the two extremes that tear this movie apart. It's admirable that De Palma attempts to treat this character with a modicum of realism. Cage plays a corrupt cop, and he's actually, really corrupt, not just a hero with a few blemishes that are easily smoothed over in the grand scheme of things. No, he really is on the take from criminal organizations and he really does look out for his own hide before anything or anyone else. Of course he has some maturation to undergo in that regard during this night, but he starts out as pretty crap.

The funny thing is that he also starts out pretty dumb -- and kind of stays that way. We'd at least expect Rick Santoro to be shrewd, and he is in some respects. However, he's also easily duped on multiple occasions, trusting people he shouldn't despite ample evidence that he shouldn't, and even making costly errors in keeping secret the location of the witness he's harboring (Carla Gugino). If we can't expect a hero to be morally spotless, at least we expect them to be clever, and Santoro is not. 

(Incidentally, I kept thinking of former senator Rick Santorum during this film, which made me laugh.)

I did appreciate De Palma's commitment to realism in terms of the medical realities of getting beaten up by a boxer. As most noir heroes do -- this is vaguely a noir -- Santoro gets roughed up as the villains try to extract the witness' location. When it's a professional boxer -- nay, the heavyweight champion of the world -- doing the roughing up, you don't recover from it quickly. Some movies would have had Santoro just bounce back, but Cage spends the latter stages of this film in a state of real medical emergency, his face all fucked up, his ribs broken and affecting his ability to walk properly. Instead of a cut on his cheek perfectly manicured by the makeup department, it's refreshing to see a hero, in his inevitable moment of ultimate triumph, with his eye drooping disturbingly toward his cheek, barely able to enunciate his words. Talk about a mauvais oeil. 

De Palma's status as a filmmaker who continually examines the darker side of human nature gives Snake Eyes -- sorry, Mauvais Oeil -- a little more staying power than it would otherwise have. But in reflecting on it a couple days later, I'm more inclined to remember the things about it that didn't work than those that did. 

One thing I thought was really random: The villain, played by Gary Sinise, is named Kevin Dunne. The actor Kevin Dunn also appears in the movie, and even has to speak the full name of the character Kevin Dunne on at least one occasion. There had to be a reason behind it, because you can name a fictitious character anything you want. Either the screenwriter had already named the character, and then they thought it would be funny to hire the actor into a different role in the movie, or they had hired the actor and as some kind of inside joke, changed the name of the character. I suppose they wanted to avoid questions by having the character have an E on the end of his name. Plausible deniability, you know. 

Anyway, this has kicked off another round of me saying "MAUVAIS OEIL" -- at least in my head -- and for that I am grateful.

I finally saw: Last Flag Flying

Whoa! Two days in a row!

Like Sharknado, which I wrote about yesterday, this was also one of the three films I watched on Friday when I was sick. The other one, the Kevin Hart vehicle Die Hart, I will not write about -- and not because I liked it so much that I just couldn't think of anything to say about it. (Plus, I can't have "finally seen" it because it only came out this year.)

The reasons the 2017 film Last Flag Flying qualifies as an "I finally saw" are:

1) I think of myself as a Richard Linklater completist, or at least a late-career Linklater completist. I still haven't managed to get myself in front of The Newton Boys, The Bad News Bears or Me and Orson Welles, but I'd seen everything since 2008 -- everything except this. Yes, even Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

2) It has a personal connection for me that goes back to college.

You probably heard, since it seemed to be pretty talked about to the extent that this film was talked about at all, but Last Flag Flying was envisioned as a "spiritual sequel" to the 1973 Hal Ashby film The Last Detail. Actually, I suppose it was called an "unofficial sequel," because the book it was based on, written by co-screenwriter Darryl Ponsican, was a sequel to the book Ashby adapted for his film. Except, the characters don't have quite the same names. One character who was called Larry Meadows is now called Larry Shepherd, a second character once called Richard Mulhall is now Richard Mueller, and then the third character has a new name entirely: Sal Nealon instead of Billy Buddusky. The reason for these seemingly unimportant yet slightly confusing changes may be known to someone, but not to me.

Those characters were played by Randy Quaid and Steve Carell, Otis Young and Laurence Fishburne, and Jack Nicholson and Bryan Cranston, respectively. Their races, their fundamental personality types and the dynamic between them are all intact between the two movies, so the slight name changes just cause us to scratch our heads more than anything else.

The personal significance of The Last Detail is not that it was made in the year I was born, but thanks for reminding me I'm turning 50 in four months. 

No, the significance of The Last Detail to me personally is that I saw it in college, shown in a lecture hall as an evening activity that tried to prevent students from going out and getting plastered. We did go out and get plastered much of the time, but on this occasion, two friends and I saw the Ashby movie.

And because we'd been a trio of guys going to see it -- a trio who lived together our sophomore year, though I think this was freshman year -- we ended up mapping our personalities on to the characters in the film as a bit of a joke that stayed with us throughout our four years, mentioned only infrequently but still good for a laugh amongst us. 

It was obvious Bryan was the Nicholson character, a guy with attitude and chutzpah and good at charming the ladies. (I can't actually remember if that character charmed the ladies because I haven't seen The Last Detail since then, but Nicholson certainly had that reputation in general.) The character who became Sal Nealon is not particularly successful with the ladies in Last Flag Flying, but this is 30 years later and he's not the young buck he once was. But Bryan did have a bit of a physical resemblance to Nicholson, less so to Cranston, though they do share the same first name.

Nico was Mulhall/Mueller, who in both cases was nicknamed Mule. Nico was white just like Bryan and me -- still is -- but there was something about his personality that made him seem like a good match for Mule. There may have been an actual reason -- was Nico dating a Black girl or something? -- or it may have just been that I was such an obvious match for the other character that Mule was the one left over for him. 

Yep, I was the obvious match for the Randy Quaid character, the virgin, who loses his virginity to a prostitute in the movie, and has a comically premature ejaculation. 

I'm not going to comment on any of the other similarities -- though it's probably worth clarifying that I did not lose my virginity to a prostitute. However, the reality is, I looked almost exactly like Randy Quaid looked in this film.

I'm not going to put up a picture of myself either from the time or now, but if you want to know what I looked like in 1992, which is probably when this viewing occurred, here is a pretty good idea:

I'm the one on the left.

In the movie, Mule and Billy -- whose own nickname is Badass, which Bryan loved -- are escorting Larry from Norfolk, Virginia to the military prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. (Did I mention these guys were military?) It seems that Larry was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in military prison for stealing $40 from a charitable fund. I guess 50 years ago, $40 would be more like $250 today. So yes, a capital crime indeed.

(Incidentally, Portsmouth was another personal connection for me, since I worked in the summers on an island off Portsmouth, and Portsmouth was where we spent our one day off per week.)

Since I have zero instances of theft on my record, the similarities between me and Larry Meadows ended at that point. But to my credit, I willingly accepted the Larry assignation. By 19 perhaps I had already lost any of my illusions that I could ever be Jack Nicholson.

So in the six years since Last Flag Flying was released, curiosity alone should have gotten me in the door even if Richard Linklater hadn't. But I'd heard this was a quizzical choice by Linklater to say the least, and perhaps by the time I'd seen Bernadette in 2019, it felt unwise to go back and dig up other quizzical Linklater choices.

Well, I really liked this movie.

For starters, the actors are great. Cranston isn't Nicholson but he really captures the guy's rough and rascally edges. He puts all his skills and technique into this one, and instead of that looking like a lot of work, it looks effortless. Fishburne's character undergoes the most changes of any of the three, as he's now a pastor instead of a rascal like his cohort, but he indulges in some moments that remind us of the old Mule, artfully dropping the word "motherfucker" when the occasion calls for it.

Carell also captures the mousy quintessence of Larry. I don't think of myself at all like Steve Carell, but he's definitely got the spirit of that virgin thief down pat. But he's also a figure of great tragedy in terms of the particulars of this story -- fresh off the death of his wife, he's also just lost his son in Iraq, and it's their transport of the body that makes up this film's eastern seaboard road trip. Carell probably has the least acting to do of any of the three, but his internalized quality really serves the material well and becomes emotionally potent.

But then I also really just liked Linklater's dialogue. I think Linklater's writing is sometimes accused of trying too hard, the way people accuse Kevin Smith of trying too hard. But I really think they both can be natural and sharp when they want to be, replicating the way people really talk more often than they are given credit for. The script is also clever about the era in which it is supposed to take place, 2003, as the characters each buy cell phones for the first time, and try to make sense of Eminem on the radio. 

And the story just worked for me. A road trip is always a sturdy armature for a script, and when you combine it with the reunion of a motley crew of friends, that armature only strengthens. However, this movie wouldn't be what it is without an undercurrent of deep melancholy, not only in terms of the tragedies that have befallen Larry, but in terms of the changes in personality and -- in a way, yes -- the tragedies that have befallen the others as they've aged. 

As it was for those characters, encountering each other again for the first time in three decades since their first adventures, it's just more than 30 years since I watched that movie with my own two cohorts back in college. I saw them both at Nico's wedding in I want to say 1998, and then I saw Nico again sometime in the early 2000s in Los Angeles. I haven't seen Bryan in those 25 years since 1998 and I haven't been in touch with either of them in nearly that long.

Last Flag Flying made me think how nice it would be to meet up with both of them on a road trip, and make sense of where our lives have taken us. 

I finally saw: Sharknado

I guess I'm hauling out all the recurring series this week. We haven't had an "I finally saw" since ... um ... March. (But before that it was 2020.)

The "I finally saw" tag counts for Sharknado in more than one way. Most of the time, I use it to indicate a film that's either culturally significant or personally significant that it took me longer to see than I would have expected. If one of those has to apply here, I suppose "culturally significant" is the one.

But in this case it's also because I have started to watch Sharknado twice before and never gotten past the first few minutes.

The first time, probably not long after it came out, it was a sudden, firm decision that this just wasn't the movie I wanted to watch tonight. It's possible I made that decision within only one minute of watching.

Then sometime in the last six months to a year, I made a real attempt to watch it. But I had some sort of streaming issue, and it got stuck after about three minutes. Although I was able to watch a different movie that night, I just couldn't get Sharknado out of its permanent state of buffering.

Friday was the sickest of my days in a week of having a cold, so after I stumbled to the end of a remote workday, I repaired to the garage for a movie on the projector or three. Sharknado was the third. 

When you watch Sharknado, of course what you are hoping for is that it's so bad it's good. But a criticism I think I have heard leveled toward this movie is that by trying to be so bad it's good, Sharknado can't capture this tricky balance -- a failure that has not prevented it from receiving five sequels to date, meaning it certainly spoke to somebody. (And here I would have thought all the nado-related shark activity was exhausted in this one film.) To really be so bad it's good, you have to come by it honestly -- which I understand a movie like Birdemic does. (Maybe that'll be next on my list of movies to finally see.)

I gave Sharknado 1.5 stars on Letterboxd, feeling that only 1 star would be giving it a win of some kind.

I always find it hard to decide what to do with movies that are terrible and yet you enjoy them. I believe Troll 2 has a half-star rating from me on Letterboxd, the same as movies that I hated. But I didn't want to give Sharknado the same sort of extreme rating because it suggests that I was either incredibly offended or tickled pink by it. Really I just felt like it was trying too hard to do something that was sort of funny as just a single joke rather than an entire movie.

I just checked and I actually gave Troll 2 1.5 stars, same as Sharknado. It's interesting how 1.5 stars can perform in two different ways depending on the movie. There, I think I wanted to indicate that Troll 2 was awful but that it achieved a certain glory in its awfulness. Here, I don't want to give Sharknado the credit it so obviously wants for being the next Troll 2. Same ratings, different feeling.

Let's get into the movie itself.

And let's start with the actors, those that I recognized. I don't know what direction or lack of direction Anthony C. Ferrante gave them, and whether he wanted them to be intentionally something or intentionally something else. So I am forced to take it at face value and conclude the following:

- Ian Ziering is actually pretty good and maybe sort of should have continued to have a career after Beverly Hills 90210. He was always decent on that show -- whatever you may have thought of it, acting wasn't really the problem. But like most of the other alums except Luke Perry (R.I.P.), Ziering faded into the background pretty quickly and had to be revived by Sharknado. Of course, then that also immediately stigmatized him or maybe pigeonholed him, because I don't see his name in anything legit on IMDB in the last decade -- though you'll be glad to know he survives at least the first four of the five Sharknado sequels. 

- Tara Reid is actually pretty awful. She may never have been a gifted actress, but in this movie she just looks confused most of the time. She was at least passable in her previous work.

- John Heard is ... in this movie for what reason? And not for very long. (Spoiler alert.) (Also, R.I.P.)

So I think one of the ways this movie envisions itself as pretty bad is to be utterly indifferent about the background conditions in which it is filming. The movie is supposed to take place during a hurricane in Los Angeles featuring numerous water spouts that distribute sharks around the city. Stipulated. This would of course result in every major road and intersection in the city being clogged with standstill traffic, and the specter of traffic does indeed figure into the plot at one point or another. However, then certain scenes are also shot on what appears to be the sunniest day in Los Angeles with traffic moving freely. You could argue that in hurricane conditions, people would stay home, so what traffic was on the road would move -- but if so, you have to film in those conditions. If it's clear, then people would be in a panicky, leave-the-city stage and then that's when traffic would be unmoving.

I think the joke is supposed to be "On a real no-budget film made by clueless filmmakers, they would be forced to film in whatever conditions happened to present themselves on the day of filming, and what's worse, they wouldn't care about or possibly even notice the continuity error." Sure. But in Sharknado they don't exactly play this up, so you don't really know if it's supposed to be that, or if there's some other explanation. I guess to wink at the audience would reveal that they were in on the joke, which they don't want to do, but as presented here, it left me unsatisfied because the hand wasn't strongly enough played if it was being played at all.

The density and aggressiveness of the sharks is comical and I suppose worthy of a chuckle or two. Even if you did have this strange phenomenon where sharks were caught in water spouts, you'd figure it would be a one-off, and not that every shark in the ocean was caught in a water spout and dumped on Los Angeles. In a typical scene there's not one shark they have to evade, but about 50. I suppose trying to analyze this with any relationship to realism misses the point entirely and plays into what the filmmakers are trying to do.

I will say that it climaxes with a great money shot. 

So what more or less did Sharknado need to be to work for me? It's hard to say, though I can venture some ideas. An obvious point of comparison, since both deal with fish, is something like Alejandro Aja's remake of Piranha from 2010, which I thought was an absolute hoot. That level of effects and humor would have worked for Sharknado. Then again, only a cheap-o company like Asylum actually thought it was an idea worth converting into a film, so this is the Sharknado we got.

I finally saw: Don't Say a Word

You'd be right to question the wisdom of going back to catch up with those disposable, interchangeable detective thrillers from the 1990s and early 2000s that you didn't see at the time. For the most part, they existed for that exact moment in time, and had no artistic merit that would prompt a critical viewer to go back and grapple with them 20 years later.

But Don't Say a Word did have that little sing-songy part of the trailer that my friends and I must have seen 50 times back in 2001: Brittany Murphy singing "I'll never tell ..."

Just to write out the words doesn't do it justice. "Tell" really has two syllables, like "teee-elll."

But if you were watching network TV in 2001, as I was in my first months after moving to Los Angeles, they played this ad constantly, so you'd remember it. And if you were like me and my friends, you mocked it out of sheer exhaustion from seeing it so many times.

So after an abortive attempt to watch Sharknado on Amazon due to technical issues -- another "I finally saw" candidate when I do get to it -- I switched over to Netflix and found this.

And two of the reasons I selected it were obvious:

1) An increased appreciation of the aging Michael Douglas, who I watched and enjoyed in The Kominsky Method, and who will not be with us forever;

2) An appreciation I always had for Murphy, who is already not with us.

I hoped the movie would be a real tete-a-tete between these two. The singy-songy "I'll never tell" certainly suggested that Murphy's psychiatric patient was toying with Douglas' child psychologist, and that the thing she wouldn't tell was something she was holding back for spite, in order to make Douglas squirm.

In reality, she isn't the antagonist, and the actual antagonist is far more banal. It's Sean Bean, who is both a jewel thief and a kidnapper, and that jewel thief also committed a bank robbery. So really, it's every cliche you can think of thrown into a blender and reduced to something colorless and bland. 

There's also a different protagonist than you might expect, or at least a third protagonist in addition to Douglas and Murphy, which is Jennifer Esposito playing a detective tracking a killer. Right, so Bean has also killed some people on his path to finding the lost jewel. A number in Murphy's head is the thing she won't tell, and that will lead to the jewel, or else Douglas' kidnapped daughter will be killed.

So yeah, it certainly would have been fine if I'd never seen it.

I finally saw: Gairkway Parkway

Some things you remember for absolutely no reason at all. This is one of those.

July, 1984. Cali, Colombia. No, this is not the start to some drug epic. It's the story of a ten-year-old boy who travelled by himself to visit a friend who had returned home from living in America. He stayed with him for about two weeks in a beautiful home that had its own swimming pool. And no, his host family was not part of the drug trade.

But the boy and his host family did indeed go out to the drive-in one night, to see the big new American release Breakin'. And for some reason, 36 years later, that boy retains a memory of having seen the trailer for a movie called Gorky Park, about a murder that takes place in frozen Moscow. It was released in December of 1983 in the U.S. and was finally making it to South America six months later.

It couldn't have disturbed me that much -- the most disturbing thing in this movie, the removal of the faces of the snow-buried victims, could not have appeared in the trailer. Could not have.

So why did this trailer, images of which I can still remember, stick with me for 36 years? It couldn't have just been that I remembered the Spanish pronunciation of the title as being Gairkway Parkway, could it? (I think "Gerkway" looks better, but I pronounce the first syllable as rhyming with "air," not "her.")

I won't explore the eccentricities of my ten-year-old brain here today. Instead, I'm here to tell you that I noticed this movie popping up on Stan earlier this week, and I watched it on Thursday night, scratching the itch of the ominous curiosity that formed in my brain 36 years ago and never left.

With all this build-up, I wish I had a more interesting payoff.

This was a fine movie. It didn't disturb me, though it had a good early 80s synth score (by James Horner, who could work in that mode apparently) that set up the possible conditions for that. It's a fairly average murder mystery, I suppose, though the detail of taking place in the former Soviet Union made it a bit more memorable in that regard.

My biggest takeaways:

- I was surprised there were so many actors I knew in this film. Having never even really looked up the film before now, and having not known who these people were back when I saw the trailer, I was surprised to learn that it starred William Hurt, Lee Marvin and Brian Dennehy, and that Ian Bannen (Waking Ned Devine) and none other than the emperor himself, Ian McDiarmid, make small appearances. I guess I figured that since it was a movie set in Russia, and that the trailer I saw was in Spanish, there was something doubly foreign about it. Except no, it's just a Hollywood movie, directed by Michael Apted.

- I was distracted by how handsome William Hurt is. I guess Hurt was probably always considered a heartthrob, but I hadn't remembered thinking of him that way previously. He's sparklingly beautiful in this film.

- The uncovering of the dead bodies with their faces removed was, indeed, pretty disturbing. Maybe that did make it into the trailer? But if so, why isn't that the thing I remember most? Maybe they mentioned it, though I don't believe that trailer had subtitles, though I guess the trailer was probably in English with a Spanish voiceover, though really, I'm just not sure.

One thing that surprised me was how many people seem to know about Gorky Park and have some affection for it, which is strange because I literally didn't think I'd heard a single other mention of it between 1984 and now. The next day I told a friend I'd watched it, and he recalled seeing it in the theater with his parents. As I was watching, my wife walked through the living room and got a little smile on her face, like she was calling to mind some fond memory. When I told her what movie it was, she said "Oh yeah," with that fond smile growing a little more definite.

Who knows, maybe she had her own Colombian drive-in movie experience with it.

I finally saw: Sophie's Choice

Is there a movie out there with more of a discrepancy between the number of people who know what it's about, and the number of people who have actually seen it, than Sophie's Choice?

I was one of those former until yesterday, when I finally watched a movie I had started nearly a decade ago and never finished because it was due back at the library or some such (as discussed here).

I suppose you could make the argument for something like The Human Centipede, but let's stick to movies you can talk about in polite company.

Everyone knows that Sophie's Choice, the Alan J. Pakula film adapted from the William Styron novel, is about a woman (Meryl Streep) who has to make a choice about which one of her children, a son and a daughter, will live, and which one will die. The phrase "Sophie's choice" comes up in all kinds of contexts in popular writing and entertainment, and I suspect very few people of a certain age have to ask what it means. The percentage drops on people who know the scenario in which the choice was made (the Holocaust) or which child she chooses (her son), but those details are fairly unimportant in terms of appreciating the horrible, impossible choice Sophie had to make, and the effect it would have had on her. (Interestingly, even though sending one of your own children to the gas chamber is no laughing matter, I hear the phrase referenced most often in a humorous context, as the person using it tends to be exaggerating the importance of a decision between two frivolous options.)

Given what I knew about Sophie's Choice -- which was everything except which child she chooses -- I was surprised to find that 80% of this movie is not a Holocaust drama, but a Tennessee Williams play.

I expected most of the on-screen action to be leading up to the choice, with the choice foreshadowed throughout. From my aborted viewing a decade ago, I knew that the movie started in America in quite a different setting than I had initially expected, but I didn't figure it would stay there long before transitioning into flashback.

In fact, you don't know until the 88-minute mark that Sophie even had children, and then not until the 137-minute mark that she had to make a choice between them. Leaving only 14 minutes of screen time for the choice to sink in with the viewer before the movie is over.

If Sophie's Choice had been made today, I'd venture the script would start on the scene of her being confronted with the choice, but not on her making it. Then we'd transition to post-war Brooklyn and her relationship with Nathan (Kevin Kline) and with her neighbor, the narrator and would-be novelist Stingo (Peter MacNicol). Then intersperse little flashes of Sophie fretting over her choice before finally revealing it at the end. That's not to say this would be better, but it would front load the conflict in a way that seems advantageous nowadays, as well as create emotional stakes by introducing us to the children earlier (rather than basically not at all).

Instead, most of Pakula's film of Styron's story reminded me of two other literary greats. One of those is the aforementioned Williams, whose fondness for southern hothouse environments is recreated here, even with the action taking place in Brooklyn. Stingo is a southerner and the relationship between Nathan and Stophie seems to be very Stanley Kowalski-Blanche DuBois. The third wheel here is not Stella but Stingo, and this is where the other literary reference comes in. As Stingo is an observer but not an essential participant in the relationship between Nathan and Sophie, he reminded me of another narrating observer of a New York couple, Nick Carraway watching Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Stingo does become more involved as the story progresses, functioning at first as a harmless source of jealousy to the combustible Nathan, and then ultimately a legitimate rival. Given the attention to the present-day, New York portion of the story at the expense of the portion set in Auschwitz, you'd be justified in wondering if the "choice" referred to in the title was between Nathan and Stingo rather than her two children. And while I suppose that double meaning is there, surely that's not what Pakula or Styron intended.

Still, the placing of her fateful choice within the narrative leaves it almost as a footnote, which is odd indeed. The speed with which she has to make the choice -- she's given less than 30 seconds -- was also a surprise to me, as I figured she had time to make a list of pros and cons for each kid, that type of thing.

Clearly it contextualizes what we know about her, and that's something, but the film itself doesn't really pause to consider it, to the extent that Stingo is controlling the direction of the narrative by serving as its narrator (actual narration provided by Josef Summer). After Sophie has revealed her secret to Stingo, his only reaction is carnal, as he transitions a session of comforting her into sex. It's not only his actions but his words that we have as evidence of this, as he begins narrating about the power of his lust, without even mentioning what she's just told him. Maybe Stingo is, in fact, the shallow hack Nathan accuses him of being.

The performance that won Streep her second Oscar (and kicked off her 30-year Oscar drought) is astonishing, as she masters the Polish accent (one of my son's friends has a Polish mum so I've been hearing it a lot lately). But the bigger pure revelation for me is Kline, who's giving a version of the larger-than-life character I fell in love with in A Fish Called Wanda, but with a menace I'm not sure I've ever seen from him. I truly never knew what he was going to do next and felt he could explode into violence at every second. There's a life and a deadness in his eyes that have a timeshare over the control of his persona.

Overall I was a pretty big fan of the movie, but it wasn't the least bit constructed as I expected it to be. I guess that's a good thing, given that films tend to surprise us less and less these days.

I finally saw: The Green Mile

Here’s your more traditional “I Finally Saw” after the last one was about a movie that had only been out for a month.

The gaps in a person’s viewing history sometimes defy explanation. I have always loved Tom Hanks, I have usually prioritized the viewing of Stephen King adaptations (there was a time, 25 years ago, when I had read everything he’d written), and I've had a special fondness for Frank Darabont’s previous King adaptation, The Shawshank Redemption (a fondness I share with many others, so I guess not so special). And in 1999, I was well into the era of ranking the films I saw each year from first to worst, meaning I tried to see most significant releases.

Yet not until last Friday night did I see The Green Mile, the only one of five best picture nominees from that year I didn’t see in the year of its release.

It might have taken me much longer except that the movie came up in this monthly challenge I’m doing through the Flickcharters Facebook group. This challenge involves watching the highest ranked movie you haven’t seen on the Flickchart of another member of the group, chosen randomly each month. So far for this series I’ve seen The Court Jester, Europa Europa, Henry V (1944), Explorers and Naked, and The Green Mile was my sixth random pick. It’s been a pretty good series as Explorers was the only one I didn’t like all that much.

It’s possible that one of the reasons for the delay was that the movie cracks the three-hour mark, though if that were the reason, it had slipped my mind long before now, such that I was surprised when I learned it again. I figured the thing probably clocked in at 2:25 for something, but three hours? It’s listed as 189 minutes, but the credits start at 180. That’s Lord of the Rings territory, not the expected length of a little prison movie about a Magical Negro. (Sorry, not my term -- that phrase refers to an unfortunate trope of which The Green Mile is probably the textbook example.)

The thing that surprised me so much, when I did carve out the time to watch in on Friday, was how little it really is. The movie has no more than two or three sets, and only one that they visit with any regularity, that being the death row building itself. The action only leaves these couple locations on a couple occasions, and not for very long.

Yet three hours pass, and you know what? You don’t really notice it.

I almost got the feeling I was bingeing a miniseries about these characters rather than watching one long movie, both because you know you’re settling in for the long haul, but then also because it goes kind of quickly when you actually get down to it. (Hence the term “bingeing.”) The movie is kind of constructed as a series of relatively short episodes, as well. But it has an undeniable forward momentum and keeps trucking along without ever wearing out its welcome. In fact, I suspect the only reason I did finally take a “nap” at the 2:30 mark was because it was late on a Friday night and I was drinking wine. Otherwise I could have made it to the end no problem. I’ll nap during movies that are less than half that length.

And while I did like it quite a bit, it’s no Shawshank. It did feel kind of like Darabont’s apology for Shawshank, though. Who needs an apology for Shawshank, you might ask? Well, how about prison guards? Assuming such a vocal faction of prison guards that must be placated actually exists, which I’m sure it doesn’t, it seems like this is Darabont’s way of saying “See, not all prison guards are bad.” As a matter of fact, there’s only one bad one this time, whereas the other four are basically saints. In fact, three of those four – Barry Pepper, David Morse and Jeffrey DeMunn – are basically rolled up into one saintly character for how little individual distinction they are given by the script.

Which is another miraculous thing about this movie. How could it go for three hours and basically never really develop the characters?

And yet it doesn’t feel slow, and it does feel satisfying. Maybe I wanted to well up at the end – I had been promised tears – but the eventual fate of Michael Duncan Clarke’s character didn’t get to me, probably because the movie had done such a thorough job preparing us for what was going to happen, and that he was ready for it.

So, solid movie that I obviously should have seen long ago, and probably would have liked even a little bit better if I had.

I finally saw: Crazy Rich Asians

SPOILER WARNING for Crazy Rich Asians.

I usually reserve the “I Finally Saw” label on my blog for movies that are genuine classics, or at least cultural touchstones that have stood the test of time, which I have gone without seeing until this point.

I’m changing the rules this time because it does feel like my viewing of Crazy Rich Asians was a long time in coming, especially with how it's become the center of our cinematic conversation over the past month or so. It's taken me longer than most to join that conversation.

My awareness of it dates back into the mid-summer, when I saw a poster at one of the theaters I regularly attend. If I’d seen this poster in the U.S., I might have done a double take. But in Australia, and in Melbourne in particular, it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. We have a huge Asian population here, and a couple of the big mainstream theaters tailor some 20 percent of their available screens to the latest imports in Asian cinema. It was easy to think this might be one of those, just looking at it at a glance.

My editor’s posting of his review way back on August 8^th didn’t do much to increase its visibility on my radar. I guess I knew that he didn’t usually review the random Asian action movie du jour, so that raised its profile a little bit. But only later did I realize that he was doing something he has a habit of doing, which is posting his review straightaway even if he sees the movie at a preview screening held a month before its release. I’m more of the old school journalist who would hold such a review until the moment of its greatest relevance to readers, but he doesn’t care about any of that. Damn millennials. (Note: He is over 30, and I don’t think that qualifies him as a millennial.) Because I didn't immediate detect this habit of his, I thought the movie was already out but that it was pretty small, which was why I hadn’t noticed it on any of the local marquees. In fact, I came to think I must have already missed it.

It was only about two weeks later when Crazy Rich Asians started to become the topic of thinkpieces and film podcasts, which I imagine coincided with its U.S. release. It was at this point that I started hearing people talk about it being the first major studio release with a predominantly Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club, which is just about the most astonishing verifiable fact I’ve heard this year.

It was about two weeks after that it got released here, and yet a further two weeks before I finally saw it. So, “finally” does make a bit of sense here.

And … damn.

I loved it.

I blubbered like a baby at the end. Not once, but three times. (Mahjong, airplane, and the final shot of Michelle Yeoh, for anyone scoring at home.)

I was dubious that I would be so moved by it, and not because I’m not Asian or Asian-American and can’t relate to its themes. Even people who said they liked it were quick to describe it as kind of “just another romantic comedy” but with Asians instead of white people in the lead roles, and I figured that was the reason that a couple Asian film critics I heard talk about it say they loved it. Which would make it similar to the African-American critics who admitted loving Black Panther more for what it represented than what it actually was. (I’m going to revisit it, but at this point I find the actual story of Black Panther a bit pedestrian in its execution, unfortunately.)

So as I got increasingly more invested in Crazy Rich Asians, and then blubbery at the end – I was a frigging mess – I thought “Wow, these people really undersold this movie.”

Okay, yeah, sure, it is a “typical romantic comedy” in some respects. But underlying that is a real thematic heft that struggles with identity and family and other issues I found very involving. When I read my editor’s review – he gave it only a 6 out of 10, but that's not actually a bad rating for him – I was shocked to see him use the word “slight.”

This is not a slight movie. Something so ornately designed – that wedding scene! – could never be “slight.” But even more than that, you’ve just got so much unspoken here that’s contributing to the film’s power. It may be wearing the costume of something slight, but there’s real passion here, real grappling with things that are meaningful.

I'm not even sure the order in which to talk about the things I loved about the movie, but let's start with the cast. With all due props to Henry Golding and Constance Wu, I texted a friend afterward that Awkwafina was my favorite character in any movie this year. Of course, Awkwafina is the name of the actress rather than the character, but I didn't think my friend would necessarily get what I meant if I'd written "Peik Lin was my favorite character in any movie this year." Part of that is that Awkwafina had to overcome two preconceived biases of mine, one against people who go by a single moniker (and one named after a bottled water at that), and two that I didn't like her all that much the first time I'd encountered her in Ocean's 8. Here I was on board and then some. I laughed at practically every line delivery, and the character's heart was ultimately the cherry on top of her performance.

Golding I'd already encountered, just last week, in A Simple Favor, where his undeniable charisma (and handsomeness!) rose above the rest of the material. Wu was new to me, and I think this will be the first of many encounters with her as Hollywood finally recognizes the box office power of an Asian-American lead actress (with apologies to Lucy Liu). (Crazy Rich Asians is just about at $150 million in the U.S., which is amazing.) I also wanted to make a mention of Gemma Chan, who I first encountered in Humans playing a robot. Something about her ability to do that allows her to contain an ocean of melancholy in those eyes.

I wish I had a coherent argument in favor of Asians rather than just the bullet point approach I've been presenting so far. But the movie just made me feel good, and sometimes that reduces you to structural disarray in communicating it.

I loved the bachelor party in international waters, thrown by the guy I still don't love all that much who plays Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (Jimmy O. Yang). I liked that the movie was willing to stray outside the comfort zone of a pleasant romantic comedy by showing us the fish carcass in Rachel's bed. I luxuriated in all the signs of Nick's fancy life (which he prevents from defining him), especially that upstairs area on the plane that I always want to get a better look at on my trips to the U.S. and back.

In mentioning the cast earlier I didn't mention Michelle Yeoh, perhaps because she's the villain of the piece and I was therefore a bit less magnetically attracted to her performance. But I can't deny that her performance allowed me to cry for the third of three times, at the very end, when she gives her little nod of approval to Rachel (after having given her son the ring to give Rachel). If not earlier, in that moment I understood -- as a parent myself -- what it means to let your children go and to allow them to live their own lives.

There's more I could say on Rachel's simple yet powerful disquisition on status during the Mahjong game, or that incredible shot of the bride coming down the aisle with the water streaming under her feet and the plant fronds waving above her, or any other divine moment in this divine movie.

Instead I'll just say if you haven't seen Crazy Rich Asians, like I hadn't until Tuesday night, well -- didn't you heed my earlier spoiler warning? But also: Go.

Because ... damn.

I finally saw: Vechoes

I've used my periodic "I Finally Saw" series to discuss finally catching up with broadly defined classics or other films of cultural significance I had not seen before now.

Well, there are exceptions to every rule.

Stir of Echoes was, as I recall, the first prominent horror movie to be released after The Sixth Sense had kind of retooled our expectations of what a horror movie can deliver. In other words, quality, not just schlock.

Stir or Echoes, of course, was not influenced by The Sixth Sense, in any other way than possibly its marketing. It was in the can before anyone knew Sixth Sense would be a hit.

And so, unsurprisingly, it's pretty much schlock. It's decent schlock, as it turns out, but nothing more than that. Nothing memorable.

So the reason I'm choosing to write about it here is because it's just the type of movie I should never have seen after a certain point. If I didn't see this by 2002, it should have gotten lost among the large quantity of Forgettable Genre Films I Will Never See.

And yet I did see it, as I randomly spotted it on the shelf at the library and thought "Huh, I did always expect that I would eventually see that." Eventually turned out to be 19 years later. And only because we ended up postponing our trip to the library, to return it and about 30 others, until Sunday, rather than Saturday, leaving me with it as a potential selection for Saturday night.

I also wanted to write something about it because it was one of a relatively small quantity of films for which some friends and I had a nickname. Not that we talked about it a lot, but when it did come up in conversation, we had a tendency to refer to it as "Vechoes."

The reason for this is probably evident, but I'll spell it out anyway. When you say this title quickly, the words kind of slur together, making the "of" less distinctive and allowing one of each of its letters to attach to the word next to it. So we felt ourselves kind of saying "Stirra Vechoes," which eventually just became "Vechoes."

So yeah, Vechoes was definitely decent. If I didn't admit I got chills a number of times I'd be lying. By the end, you don't feel a great payoff for the chilling moments, making them seem a bit weaker in retrospect, but I certainly can't deny their biological reality at the time they happened.

One thing I thought was interesting to note was that the film is largely devoid of any of the digital effects that would soon take over horror filmmaking. I think of a movie like the American remake of The Ring as being one of the real progenitors in (soon to be interchangeable) digital horror movies, and that was still three years off at that point. It was curious to feel myself waiting for something digitally grisly or spooky to happen, and it never happening. Maybe that's why the chills felt a bit chillier here -- they were refreshingly of the practical variety.

And now it is only practical that I cease discussing this forgettable movie.

I finally saw: Return to Oz

I was too young to know the word "blasphemous" in 1985.

But if I'd known it, the 11-year-old me would have certainly produced it upon seeing the trailers for Return to Oz, from which I ran screaming -- metaphorically, at least.

I could think of no more definite way to curdle the joy of the classic 1939 film than this grim and despairing sequel, 46 years later, populated with weird and frightening characters.

It turns out, from finally watching it, that my initial impression of Return to Oz was 100% accurate. However, I'm now less certain that this is a bad thing.

After finally watching Return to Oz, I can say with 100% certainty that it was conceived as a horror movie. Whether this was the right thing to unleash upon us is a different question. But what I once viewed as a colossal failure of tone is now more appropriately seen as a nightmare aimed at children.

The reason I even decided to overcome my apprehensions and give it a chance was that I'd heard some podcasters recently talk about how secretly awesome it was. Could all that twisted material and bad hoodoo actually be great? And what were these "Wheelers" that they were praising in particular?

So when I saw it in the kids section at the library -- the kids section -- I decided to give it a whirl.

If you are like me and ran screaming from this movie, I can tell you that it picks up a couple months after Dorothy's initial return from Oz. Turns out Dorothy -- now inexplicably about eight years old and played by Fairuza Balk -- did not live happily ever after. In fact, instead of resuming her life as a normal and compliant Kansas farm girl, she just wants to tell everyone about this magical place she visited. These being sensible Kansans in the year 1899, they don't want to hear any guff about a magical land with ruby slippers and emerald cities. But instead of benevolently humoring her, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry decide to take her to a doctor in an eerie hospital -- someone who plans to submit her to what appears to be electroshock therapy.

Dorothy, I don't think we're in The Wizard of Oz anymore.

If you told me this were the same hospital they used in Jacob's Ladder, I would believe you. Fortunately, with the assistance of a (possibly imaginary) fellow patient, Dorothy escapes during a perfectly timed power outage that struck just as they were about to power on the equipment. The two girls rush down to a nearby river and plunge in, the sinister hospital administrator hot on their heels. Dorothy grabs on to a crib that washes along in the river and awakens in what she soon determines to be Oz. Oh, and instead of Toto -- who does make an appearance earlier on -- she's got a chicken from her farm with her. A chicken that now can talk.

But it's not the Oz she remembers -- the yellow brick road has been reduced to rubble, as has the Emerald City. Most of its buildings are still standing, but all of its citizens have been turned to stone. Except for the Scarecrow, who was left as king -- and who may be key to the salvation of the city, if he can be found. As Dorothy collects companions -- a mechanical man named Tik Tok, who looks like a bronze and rotund version of the Pringles guy; an early draft of the character that became Jack Skellington, called Jack Pumpkinhead; and the trophy head of a moose that had been killed on a hunting expedition, which flies around a demented version of Santa's sleigh comprised of a couch and some other odds and ends, and goes by the name "Gump" -- she starts to figure out what has happened to her beloved Oz.

Hint: It involves these guys.

If that's not horrifying enough, let's pull out so you can get a better view.

Yep. That's a deranged man wearing a mask helmet with wheels for hands and feet.

"Jesus Christ," I said aloud upon encountering my first Wheeler.

As if these monstrosities -- this film's version of flying monkeys -- were not bad enough, we're just getting started. Dorothy then encounters a wicked princess who keeps a hall of disembodied heads, which belonged to Emerald City citizens whose bodies still remain frozen in stone, and which she switches out with her own depending on her whims. Eventually, she also comes face to face with an evil creature made of rock called the Nome King. The Nome King has rock minions whose faces appear in whatever rocks are near Dorothy, and report back on her progress. He has magic powers and can turn people into "trinkets." *shiver*

For about the first 20 minutes of Return to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "My goodness, this is just awful." It does indeed seem to be a catastrophic misunderstanding of what made The Wizard of Oz a classic. Even Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are unmoved by the prospect of submitting their niece to a regimen of suspicious medical experiments involving electricity. Then there are just the things that seem careless, like the fact that the cheery score is out of sync with a drab setting that owes more to the depictions of Victorian England on film than American frontier movies -- and not the cheery versions of Victorian England, but the realistic ones, like Roman Polanski's Tess.

But once she actually goes back to Oz you're thinking -- if you're sensible -- "This is no accident." It may have been an accident on the studio's part that the creators of this content got away with what they got away with, but those creators did not miscalculate. They made exactly the movie they intended to make. Taking their lead from the Grimm theory that fairytales are terrifying, they made a terrifying expedition into Oz, one that owes more to something like Alice in Wonderland (underscored by the aging down of Dorothy) than Victor Fleming's interpretation of L. Frank Baum's material.

Indeed, as much as we may credit (blame?) this film's screenwriters for their strange creations, most of them are taken from Baum's book Ozma of Oz. That's at least where Tik Tok, the Wheelers, the Nome King, the evil princess and the Deadly Desert come from (did I mention there's a desert which turns you into sand if you touch it? That happens to one poor Wheeler), though it would appear that Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump may be original creations. (Adding to the creepiness -- Pumpkinhead is a bit touched in the head. He's always worried about his head rotting, and he keeps asking Dorothy if she's his mother.) Wait, no -- they're from another of Baum's books, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

Most of what's creepiest about this movie works. Some of it doesn't. The quality of the visual effects/costumes/etc. varies at about the same extent. So while most lovers of rule-breaking cinema and anomalous oddities will be won over by Return to Oz, there are the parts of it that just seem sloppy and bad-weird as opposed to good-weird.

Still, I was ready to hate this and I so didn't. In fact, I'm looking forward to my next viewing.

A return to Return to Oz, as it were.

I finally saw: Labyrinth

The other day I was discussing other people's nostalgia. Here is another good example of that.

Labyrinth has not heretofore had any role in my 1980s nostalgia, because before yesterday, I hadn't seen it. But it seems to get referenced with some regularity, and by the time David Bowie died and it got a lot of mentions in connection with that, I had fully acknowledged it as a blind spot in my personal viewing. So seeing it available from the library made it not only a must-borrow, but a must-actually-watch-before-it's-due-back.

The thing that surprised me most about Labyrinth is how good it still looks. Perhaps that shouldn't have been a surprise, as puppetry does not date the way special effects date -- or rather, it always looks a bit old-fashioned, but charmingly so. As I was fresh off my first rewatch of Beauty and the Beast in 25 years, and was taken aback by how little that still seemed like cutting edge animation, I expected more of the same from Labyrinth. But it has the type of crispness and natural physical reality that people always cite when praising practical effects. Labyrinth is like Exhibit A for what we've lost with the onset of digital technology.

I was actually kind of amazed at what Jim Henson et al did with their practical effects, some of which actually looked sort of digital. I think in particular of one example where the lead (Jennifer Connelly) is interfacing with a pair of ornate door knockers, which take the shape of faces. Henson seamlessly blends the puppetry of their moving countenances with the rest of the door, so everything has the same steel gray appearance, yet part of the door is actually alive. When I say it looked digital, I mean the good of what digital can offer. If made with actual digital effects -- as the whole of Labyrinth surely would have been made today -- it wouldn't have had an ounce of the charm.

There were also a couple characters that seem so beloved that I can scarcely believe they never escaped the confines of this movie to become general cultural touchstones. Like, shouldn't I have known about this guy sometime before yesterday?

That's Ludo, a large creature who's kind of like a combination of a gorilla, a bear, a yak and a bison. Not only does he look cool and is he a sweetheart, but he also has the ability to move rocks with the power of his mind and neanderthal howl. How could Ludo have eluded me all these years? It's sad, really. He deserved to be better known.

I think why Ludo wasn't better known was that there's something inescapably strange about Labyrinth, something that would always keep it from entirely being embraced by the mainstream. It might be a bit dark -- both lighting and subject matter. It might be a bit garish. It might be more Return to Oz than Wizard of Oz (though I understand Return to Oz has its staunch defenders). But man, I loved it. It was delightfully screwy and truly visionary.

As essentially the only two humans in the movie, Connelly and Bowie both impressed me. Connelly is quite assured for a 15-year-old, though she was also good in Once Upon a Time in America two years earlier. Her reactions all seemed smartly calibrated and in the proper scale for what was happening to her -- bewildered and frustrated, but accepting the reality of her situation as perhaps only a daydreaming teen would be capable of doing. And Bowie is perfectly sprightly, clearly an adversary of Sarah's but also seeming like he's trying to lead her to the goal of trying to understand and appreciate the circumstances of her life. It's like he's putting her through a gauntlet toward greater maturity. I also enjoyed the perhaps unexplained melancholy of his character, particularly during their climactic meeting in the M.C. Escher staircases (Escher's estate actually received acknowledgement in the closing credits). There's a music video quality to his scenes, but not only because he's singing songs and he's a rock star. It's more that he's expressing inexpressible emotions in his songs, some of which seem to have little to do with his tete-a-tete with Sarah and more to do with some kind unquenchable sadness inside him.

So this movie is weird in all the right ways, and I really look forward to seeing it again.

The only part I didn't like was when Henson inexplicably chose to leave the lovingly realized reality of this maze and all its strange and wonderful denizens and present some of the action against a green screen. The green screen technology is not nearly up to snuff on its own, nor in sync with the practical reality of the rest of the sets, so it really stands out. That whole scene with those bouncing pink creatures with the removable heads, which look kind of like Animal from the Muppets crossed with a pink flamingo, should probably have been excised. The song isn't great, and the green screens are really distracting. Oddly though, other scenes involving camera tricks look completely believable, specifically when Jareth (Bowie) climbs the Escher stairs at the end. There's one particular trick where his body whips around a curve from upside down to right side up that should have been impossible to film realistically, yet it looks great. So no idea why it looks so bad in that one scene with the pink muppet flamingos.

Labyrinth was also nice to watch in the wake of Bowie's death, as it renewed the accompanying senses of sentimentality and loss. Not in a depressing way, though -- just in a way that reminded me how many facets this man had to appreciate. I borrowed his Ziggy Stardust album from the library after returning Labyrinth yesterday, just to keep the vibe going.

I finally saw: [REC]

In the fall of 2008 I saw and loved Quarantine, which made 2008 kind of a watershed year in terms of imaginative new ways to use found footage. That's because Cloverfield kicked off 2008. That movie blew my mind enough that I saw it twice in the theater and ended up ranking it in my top ten for the year.

Of course, both of those films were indebted to the Spanish horror film [REC] from 2007 -- one minorly, one majorly in the sense that it was actually a remake of [REC].

As sometimes happens, though, I never circled back to watch [REC], perhaps because I worried that by having seen its remake, Quarantine, I didn't expect much about it to surprise me. So even though I figured it was probably the superior film, I didn't make the time for it until last night.

Even last night, though, I carried in the same concerns. It's that worry you get about feeling like you cannot properly assess the quality of something whose tricks you have already seen copied ad infinitum. We live in an era in which the found footage horror has gotten pretty devalued, and even though I have been pleasantly surprised by more recent entries than I have disliked, it's still a genre with a lot of baggage. Even one of the granddaddies of that genre felt like it might not offer anything fresh, through no fault of its own.

But [REC] is only just over 75 minutes long, so committing to finally seeing it was ultimately a pretty easy decision.

And I'm certainly glad I did.

Although it's true that I was not surprised by any of the developments in the movie, Quarantine having copied those developments pretty much exactly (even down to using most of the same shots), I was glad to see that I was able to let my critical mind go free, and put myself in the shoes of audiences who saw this for the first time nine years ago. At the time, it had been eight years since The Blair Witch Project put found footage on the map, and the genre had yet to be used in a truly interesting way since then. It was easy for me to imagine last night the thrill of seeing something like [REC] roll off the screen at me, even if I wasn't experiencing those thrills with quite the same sense of freshness as those audiences did.

The trouble was how to provide this movie a star rating.

The experience I had watching it was probably a four. I can't deny that knowing how things were going to turn out dissipated some of the shock scares that the movie relies on. But in this case I felt like I had to award it an extra half star for the sheer ingenuity it demonstrated, not to mention its impact on future movies in the same genre. I have no doubt that the 2007 version of me would have given either 4.5 stars, or the five stars I gave Cloverfield.

But here's something interesting. As I check Letterboxd to ensure that I did give Cloverfield five stars, I see that I didn't. I see that I didn't even give if 4.5 stars. I see that I gave Cloverfield "only" four stars. Four stars to a film I saw twice in the theater.

Now of course, that was not a 2008 star rating. That was a retroactive star rating assigned sometime in 2012, when I first got started on Letterboxd. This provides an interesting window into how much my idea of how to provide star ratings has changed in just four years. It seems inconceivable to me that a film that I ranked in my top ten for a year could have gotten less than 4.5 stars from me. Perhaps in 2012 I was undergoing a slight lull in my appreciation of Cloverfield. As a matter of fact, looking back now, I saw Cloverfield for the third time in May of 2011, within a year of when I would have been providing that star rating. And I do remember being slightly less enthralled with it.

Well, it's definitely a different me now. Chalk up yet another 4.5-star review on Letterboxd. I'm hopeless.

But at least this means I'm seeing a bunch of good movies these days. And making up for the fact that I should have seen some of them long ago.

I finally saw: Gremlins 2: The New Batch

I was pretty good about getting to sequels of popular movies back in the 1980s and 1990s. That is, unless they were not all that popular with me.

The original Gremlins kind of fits that latter description. I've seen it more than once and everything, but its tone has never sat comfortably with me. It's too scary for a movie aimed at children, and it's too childish for a movie aimed at adults. I don't know that it scared me per se, but even back when I was 10 or 11 I realized there was definitely something off about it.

As the summer of 1990 was the one between my junior and senior year in high school, I probably considered myself even less prone to the juvenile but violent antics of Gremlins 2: The New Batch -- especially after I saw its trailer, which showed that the series had cut any tenuous tethers it had to the realm of realism.

And I might have gone to my grave without ever prioritizing a viewing were it not for this Key & Peele sketch, which was shared in one of my Facebook groups back in September:

Key and Peele
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Quite simply, how can you see something like that and not immediately throw in the movie?

It wasn't immediate, but after another inciting incident (to use a screenwriting term) I knew the time had come. My son came across it at the library the other day, filed in the kids section (!!!). He was drawn in not by the cute Mogwai peeking out of the desk drawer, but the reptilian arm of the cigar-smoking gremlin in the office chair. His imagination started to run wild about what that unseen monstrosity might look like.

I told him it was too old for him, too scary for him.

And then snuck it into the stack of videos we were borrowing so I could watch it myself.

That viewing transpired last night after I returned from the Australian Open, way too late at night to start a movie. I would have gotten started around 11 except that my wife was still finishing off the last 20 minutes of the movie she was watching. So I didn't actually get started until around 11:30. But in a way, that seemed like the perfect time of night for what I hoped would be a slice of glorious outrageousness.

It was as absurd as the Key & Peele skit suggested it would be -- but still not all that satisfying.

Oh, it's clear the makers of the movie were in on the joke. They basically decided they were just going to blow it all up and go for something that would make people laugh at how idiotic it all is. Though there's at least one gruesome death I can think of that resembles the ways the gremlins are massacred in the kitchen in the first movie -- one gremlin meets the business end of a shredder -- the attempt to genuinely scare anyone is gone from this movie. It's a full-on comedy.

So in a way it's probably slightly more appropriate for kids than the first movie. But being so much dumber, it's something I'm less likely to show mine.

I wanted this movie to make me laugh at the brazenness of these creative choices, and get on the same page of just viewing this as a full-on farce. Instead I really just felt myself shaking my head. I don't necessarily think the K & P sketch ruined the element of outrageous surprise, because the stuff they talk about was the kind of stuff that turned me off to this movie 25 years ago. If it was spoiled, it was spoiled ages ago. I think it's just that sometimes, things that are bad are not so bad they're good.

Still, the closing shot of the actor Robert Picardo, who plays the chief of security of the building the gremlins infest, reluctantly finally accepting the advances of a female gremlin approaching him in a wedding dress with the wedding march playing in the background? That put a bit of a smile on my face. The type of smile the movie meant for me to have all along.

In its very last scene, I sort of succumbed to Gremlins 2.