Moon (2009), Duncan Jones. July 4, 4:45pm. View count: One.
Road House (1989), Rowdy Herrington. July 4, 9pm. View count: One.

Well! This is a ludicrous pair of movies.

Moon was pretty charming, really, and did a great job of making its effects work difficult to notice. I had a problem with the ending, though, which I will discuss ( under a cut due to spoilery. ) Wasn't quite as smart as could have been hoped for, but it wasn't stupid, and I'm glad I saw it.

Road House, surprising no one, was the stupidest thing ever. We watched this in lieu of actual fireworks, and I think it was a good decision.

Patrick Swayze is a big-headed weirdo who is apparently some sort of super-bouncer at some bar, when a dude with two lines shows up and hires him away to be a bouncer at HIS bar, because his bar is needlessly rowdy and he is always "sweeping eyeballs off the floor" at the end of the night. Safety hazard, don'tcha know. So Patrick Swayze shows up, does a lot of pointless things, and somehow the bar gets nicer and nicer. But there is a bad man who owns the town, and he's a dick, and he sort of looks like a cut-rate mixture of Jonathan Pryce and Sam Neill. Patrick Swayze is also a Buddhist, according to the DVD box copy and nothing else, and he shows this by doing tai chi in a field while an old farmer with a beard blushingly wipes sweat off his head. And blah, blah blah.
It's all pretty awful, but if you have the right group of people, it can be respectably hilarious.

A Gnome Named Gnorm (1990), Stan Winston. June 21, 10pm. View count: One.
The Fountainhead (1949), King Vidal. June 23, 5pm. View count: Two.
Baby Face (1933), Alfred Green. June 23, 7:30pm. View count: One.

Hookay.
Gnome was a wretched pile. Really just horrid. I'm surprised we made it through the whole thing. So, Stan Winston directed it. Stan Winston's a pro at the effects, obviously, but perhaps not so much at picking half-decent scripts. This winner, Pen Densham, was one of two writers, and plus he came up with "the story." He produced, too. The other writer conspicuously was a co-producer on pretty much everything else that Densham worked on, so clearly they're buds and on the same gnomey wavelength. I haven't actually heard of much of the stuff they worked on, but it's probably for the best.
Anyhow, this movie was pure pain from start to finish. The titular gnome is trauma-inducing, whatsisface from The Breakfast Club is annoying and repeats things over and over in a Really Urgent! tone of voice, and guy from Law and Order kinda phones it in. Robert Z'dar is in this, and he's probably the high point. Weirdly, he plays (surprise!) a henchman, and his boss is named "Zadar." It's confusing.
In conclusion, the gnome likes to mutilate people's genitals.

Fountainhead I sat through most of again so I could show its bombast and Agenda Über Alles to JP, but I relented and doodled through part of it. It's not really a fun movie to sit through, even if you hear more about Ayn Rand on a daily basis than most people do. The lead actress has a neat face, though.

Baby Face was actually quite good, although we drew a version (apparently there were multiple versions, censored variously) that had the happy ending but contained most of the rest of the disputed material. Barbara Stanwyck was quite good, and she really managed to get across a lot of character. The lady playing her maid was great, too, with more of a part and definitely more fun than most maids of the time. The happy ending felt pretty undermotivated, but the unhappy ending would have also seemed a bit weird, so perhaps let's chalk it up to the times.

Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972), Robert Butler. June 6, 8pm. View count: One.

So supposedly this is the sequel to "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," which I've never seen, possibly because no one disliked me enough as a child to subject me to it. This one's bad enough, although pretty hilarious for several reasons: 1. Cesar Romero; 2. Kurt Russell as an alpha teenager; 3. Lots of terrible live-action Disney "invisibility!" effects.

There is, however, a high percentage of golf in this, and some terrible, pointless car chases.

Arguably the best thing about this movie is the guy who played the hapless redheaded sidekick went on to write the episode of DS9 in this exchange occurs.

We're No Angels (1955), Michael Curtiz. May 26, 2pm. View count: One.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Mervyn LeRoy. May 26, 4pm. View count: One.
Brute Force (1947), Jules Dassin. May 26, 7pm. View count: One.

We're No Angels is a cute little 'nice criminals' Christmas movie, wherein escaped prisoners threaten unconvincingly to be mean to a nice family in French Guyana. Everyone is nice, even the poisonous snake. Peter Ustinov is in it, and he is awesome. Oh, and Basil Rathbone as The Bad Guy! (He's not nice, but how could he be?) The surprisingly dark bits stand out all the more in such a 50s-pleasant context, which I think is pretty amusing.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a pretty cool (and surprisingly harsh in spots) depiction of a guy's life in and out of the titular chain gang. I was impressed by its portrayal of the Georgia (implied only - the state is never named, but apparently Georgia was insulted enough to ban the film and sue people) justice system, especially the part where a man stands up at a hearing to tell the court how beneficial the chain gangs are for an inmate. Not to mention a fairly pointed opinion on the fate of WWI vets, with a nice concise scene in a pawn shop. Good stuff, really.

Brute Force, if you cut out the flashbacks that mostly were pretty boring, would be a better movie. However, it's still a very watchable and occasionally impressively badass prison picture, with a sadistic guard-captain (who is really well-played), a violent and vindictive protagonist (who would be MUCH more fun without his sticky-sweet flashback), and prison-work activities that seem to actually include making license plates. If you watch this, be sure you make it to the end, though, as several (but not all!) of the most awesome (in the 'wow, he hit him with that!' sense) moments are placed in the last 10-15 minutes.

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Otto Preminger. Apr 28, 2pm. View count: One.
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Otto Preminger. May 1, 3pm. View count: One.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Otto Preminger. May 1, 8pm. View count: One.

The Man With the Golden Arm is an entertainingly abstracted movie, which seems like an interesting direction to go in given that the book it's adapted from is said to be rather complex and dense. I think it suits the subject matter rather well; the four or five sets, each seemingly visible from all the others, bolster the boxed-in atmosphere. Sinatra does pretty well as a dude from circumstances who is rather excited to have in mind a thing he wants to do for a living, only to have everyone around him practically shove heroin needles at him. (Note: everyone calls him 'Dealer' not because he deals drugs (he would then be called a 'peddler'), but because he deals cards in illegal poker games. It took me a while to figure that one out.) All the rest of the cast does decently as well; I particularly enjoyed the sidekick, who is apparently played by a comedian of the time; he's a guy who's ignored and pushed around by most, and that enables him to mouth off to a small but measurable extent, to keep a small but measurable amount of dignity. Kim Novak is described by someone on IMDB as "plant-like", which I now have to agree with. She's that Ideally Supportive Woman that is often to be found in movies, which makes her fairly dull.
The wrap-up at the end I found something of a cop-out; I've seen earlier movies that managed to lay a pall of pessimism or precariousness over a relatively up ending, but this one did not do this. It was just a happy, convenient ending. Preminger seems to do this a lot. Oh, and finally, there is a smooth-coated terrier of some kind which drinks beer out of an ashtray to please a woman. This will be revisited later.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is about a violent detective who just can't stop beating up bad guys. Occasionally he beats up non-bad guys as well. He also has a highly supportive lady that he likes, although that lady does not have a beer-drinking small dog. A lot of the movie is spent on detectives figuring things out, and trying to find one another in various bars and houses. The ending here is almost entirely a happy cop-out as well; I was rooting for something much more along the lines of "and he took the secret to the grave," but you know me and secrets and graves.

Anatomy of a Murder is apparently an adaptation of a True Story, which was accordingly Ripped From Today's Headlines (where "today" is defined as "sometime in the fifties"). It's in large part a courtroom drama, which is mostly entertaining enough. The real kicker, however, is the sheer number of times that Jimmy Stewart says "panties." It's punishment, but it's the kind of punishment that makes one still kind of want a little mp3 of each instance. I mean, what if I needed it?
Apparently the discussion(s) of rape that happens in the movie was fairly off-putting to at least some people, including Jimmy Stewart's father, who reportedly "was so offended by the film, which he deemed 'a dirty picture,' that he took out an ad in his local newspaper telling people not to see it." It does all seem fairly inappropriate for the fifties, albeit the late fifties, and, as I say, probably Jimmy Stewart's father was just reacting to the horror one cannot escape when Jimmy Stewart says "panties."
The rape victim is the one with the terrier that drinks beer from an ashtray (she, like the woman in Man With the Golden Arm, is utterly charmed by this for some reason), and the dog is even used to point out a stuffy man who does not like dogs. Oh ho ho, only bad men do not like dogs!
I would not exactly recommend this one; it has sort of a sunny tone which does not much befit the subject matter. However, the courtroom scenes are well-handled and don't drag, and you could do worse if you're looking for a movie with law in it for some reason. And Jimmy Stewart saying "panties."

Murder She Said (1961), George Pollock. Apr 4, 8:30pm. View count: One.
The Fountainhead (1949), King Vidor. Apr 21, 2:30pm. View count: One.

Murder She Said was an adorable 60s predecessor to the Murder, She Wrote series. The lady playing Ms. Marple was sort of a battleax in comparison to her television counterpart, but it was fun to watch her bluff her way around (as opposed to pretend innocence and obliviousness all the time). She witnesses a murder, and, when the police brush her off, she determines to solve it herself. She does, of course, and 60s music which invites one to do the Monkey plays. The end.

The Fountainhead, pardon me, I found... laughable? I suspect that not all of this need be laid at Ayn Rand's feet (she did write her own screenplay, though); Gary Cooper as the lead never quite seemed to be very much of anything. The female lead tried harder, as did the newspaperman; but really, the script is so didactic, and so simplistically so. "Why, this seems to be a world which supports my ideology precisely! What a pleasing coincidence! And everyone lived happily ever after, if they deserved it by behaving as I wish it."

Laura (1944), Otto Preminger. Mar 10, 2pm. View count: One.
Sita Sings the Blues (2008), Nina Paley. Mar 13, 9am. View count: One.
Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (MST3K version)(1996), Kenneth J. Berton. Mar 13, 9pm. View count: Three?

Whoops! Forgot to actually post this! And write it, I suppose.

Laura is an excellent whodunit-ish mishmash of events, with which really only the private dick could keep up. This is fine, because young Vincent Price is in it, as the secretly broke cad. Possibly due to his presence, I'd built up an impression of this movie (prior to seeing it) as a darker Poe-ish thing, but it isn't at all. The way everyone sort of worships Laura, though, is not un-creepy.

Sita Sings the Blues I'm pleased to have finally seen! It is a nice piece; the weird, highly Flash-oriented character designs work much better in motion (nearly all of which is quite solid). There's heavy use of cycles, but it works nicely. It's definitely a concatenation of styles and concepts, but it's pleasing to watch and the Annette Hanshaw soundtrack is welcome anytime. You can download it or watch it at this place which will also let you donate money (this is Nina Paley's business model, since the copyright-holders of the Annette Hanshaw tracks are not allowing her to sell DVDs outright).

Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders is a cobbled-together pile of silliness, another terrible movie saved by the MSTing. A thing that I learned from IMDB is that parts of it were filmed in Petaluma, a town that's kind of close to where we live, and that I know primarily for its big ol' "antique" store. (It's where I took all of these pictures of terrible things.) It's not hard to make the connection between the killer cymbal-monkey of the movie and that blown-glass angry clown, I tell you what.

Lady in the Lake (1947), Robert Montgomery. Mar 2, 12pm. View count: One.
The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton. Mar 2, 2pm. View count: One.
Out of the Past (1947), Jacques Tourneur. Mar 4, 1pm. View count: One.
Ace in the Hole (1951), Billy Wilder. Mar 8, 6pm. View count: One.

Lady in the Lake is a highly clever Philip Marlowe story that's shown almost entirely in first person. It's a thing which some regard as gimmicky, but it worked for me. It's interestingly adventure gamey, really.

The Night of the Hunter is a seriously creepy Robert Mitchum piece, the original from which Cape Fear was made. If you want some scary-preacher-chasing-little-kids action, you want this movie.

Out of the Past is another Robert Mitchum one, where he plays an ex-PI. It's not a bad one, but compared with all these standouts, it's less compelling. Lots of noir basics, though, solid.

Ace in the Hole is a 'crooked reporter' picture. Well-handled, a couple of great lines. Kirk Douglas does a good job, makes the newspaper business look pretty terrible. Also features prominently the Hut Sut song!

Coraline (2009), Henry Selick. Feb 22, 4:30pm. View count: One.
STar Trek: Generations (1994), David Carson. Feb 22, 8pm. View count: Two.

Coraline! Finally saw it, want to see it again. Very good stuff. It's so interesting how its quiet natural character motion contrasts with the crappy crap in the trailers; one for Ice Age [n] stands out particularly (lame character designs, failure to overshoot or really push poses even though the timing and editing says 'I think I'm being very cartoony'). Only a couple of false steps in Coraline; a too-talky bit, some muddy decisions - but I'll take muddy over cookie-cutter simple any day. It's dense and complex, sort of like the difference between a drawing where you move the pencil lightly over a line again and again, and one where you grip it in your fist and scrape it across the page once. If that makes sense. Also: I am so gay for stop motion.

Star Trek: Generations is not really that good, by contrast, as if you didn't know. This is the one where Shatner dies anticlimactically saving the planet from Malcolm McDowell, who outclasses most of the cast. It's already fading from my memory. Oh, the Nexus wish-fulfilment thing was a wasted opportunity, barely touched before it was time to abandon it. Could have been a great Solaris ripoff.

Werewolf (1996)(MST3K version), Tony Zarindast. Feb 8, 8:45pm. View count: Two.
Soultaker (1990) (MST3K version), Michael Rissi. Feb 10, 10pm. View count: One.
Future War (1997) (MST3K version), Anthony Doublin. Feb 11, 7:30pm. View count: One.

Werewolf is, surprising no one, terrible. It's got Joe Estevez moping around looking blank, a crap-ass 'werewolf skeleton' with pointy skull-protrusions for ears, easily killed live werewolves, and a full moon that sticks around for weeks on end. Also a hilariously-accented female lead who just cannot be arsed to care about the movie.

Soultaker also has Joe Estevez, who pals around with Robert Z'Dar. They are reapers or something, and a bunch of stupid teenagers try to escape being reaped. This movie is co-written by the female lead, and the worshipful slow-mo shots of her getting ready for a bath are therefore extra yucky. The script is pretty bad in general, though, so it's hard to discern where the blame should go.

Future War leaves Joe Estevez behind but continues to carry Robert Z'Dar, who is a cyborg this time. Someone on IMDB renders the male lead as 'Jean-Clod van Dumb' and this is both cute AND true. This movie has very bad T. rex puppets, some fat guys, and a nun who used to be a hooker. It's so awful. There's this incredibly long sequence where a pipe hallway is very slowly traversed by our heroes, and it'll destroy your will to live if you let it.

Jaws (1975), Steven Spielberg. Feb 3, 9pm. View count: six?
Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Alexander Mackendrick. Feb 5, 8:30pm. View count: One.
Darkman III: Die Darkman Die (1996), Bradford May. Feb 8, 1:30pm. View count: Two.

Jaws is so brilliant, and I have no real theories about what could have happened to make it work out as well as it did. Maybe the legendary 'mecha-shark wouldn't work right' timing constraint caused the half-and-half structural pattern, with the whole first half of the movie being nearly sharkless and all about setting up the duty that Roy Scheider would have to carry out (and his reasons for doing so). Roy Scheider is not a divorced dad looking to find himself, he's a perfectly functional family man whose conflict comes from bureaucracy and politics. He already has his shit together, he already likes his children and his wife, so he can skip all the Special Spielberg Character Steps and show us his world and priorities straight away. (Although he does fail to protect a child, but that's under duress.)

Without seeing this on the big screen, though, a lot of the visceral aspects of the suspense are greatly dampened. The yellow barrels, which are such a good stand-in for a menacing agent, are actually scary all by themselves on the big screen, whereas on a television much of the impact is lost. A lot depends on being surrounded by the ocean, and the confinement of the boat, and this does suffer a bit.

There's a lot of hilarious stuff on the IMDB trivia page about who wanted to cast whom for which part, including the amusing "Author Peter Benchley's choices for whom to cast in the film were Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen." This would have been rather a different movie, to say the least. I personally think that an important aspect of Jaws' casting is the second banana-ness of all the main actors. Roy Scheider is a partner, a low-key backup guy, so when you shove him into having to take charge, it's very visible how unusual this is for him. Sort of similarly with Dreyfuss, who's really nebbishy by default, and each of them is set off by Quint chewing the scenery (which also emphasizes the unusualness of the decision to go out after the shark, when put up against the towny Martha's Vineyarders).

There's also this as regards Jaws as an anomalously good (to me) Spielberg film: "After the surprise success of the film, Hollywood insiders ascribed the film's effectiveness mostly to veteran editor Verna Fields rather than the little-known, 28-year-old Steven Spielberg. Although he undoubtedly learned much from Fields, Spielberg wished to prove his worth in following films and never worked with Fields again." I wonder how much merit there was to this.


Sweet Smell of Success is a great canonical noir film, with some seriously terrific dialog. Both the noir patter and the one-liners are gold.
For once the protagonist is a press agent instead of a private dick, so it's the world of ruined reputations and people who want desperately to be famous that the movie is concerned with, but the 'independent operator down on his luck' holds true. It's good, and unsettling in places.


Darkman III: Die Darkman Die is terrible and so 90s it looks like Tekwar's older brother. In fact, the drug guy who gets killed by Main Bad Guy at the beginning also plays Sonny Hokori in the Tekwar movies, and did an episode of Forever Knight. This is remarkable because Bad Guy's right-hand henchman is played by a Forever Knight main cast member. So it's all goofy before we even begin, and the poor movie is trying to retain Raimi's signature camera moves and wacky action, and also the guy who's now playing Darkman is trying pretty hard to do a Liam Neeson voice. Trying to fill Darkman's shoes with all these silly components. Well, sillier. I mean, you don't get a subtitle like this on any old movie.

Anyway, it comes out pretty lame, with a few WHAT moments like Darkman running along the tops of some barrels for no reason (I had remembered this as being a tireyard, but the foot motion is the same. It's stupid.), and the actual, serious replacement of 'Violence, Threat Of' with 'Social Embarrassment, Threat Of'. The hopeful little voiceover that wrapped things up right before the credits, all 'And... Darkman continued to fight crime and live in sewers and whatall' was a little heartbreaking, really. Darkman has not continued to do anything, although he does appear in the odd novelization.

Spider (2002), David Cronenberg. Jan 31, 8:30pm. View count: One.
Zombie Nightmare (1986) (MST3K version), Jack Bravman. Feb 1, 7:30pm. View count: Two.

Spider was a weirdly one-dimensional story with Ralph Fiennes performing pretty well within it. For the length of the movie, I kept waiting for an additional twist or slowly-building theme to make itself known, but it never did; the end result was something oddly simplistic. I remain a little baffled by it.

Zombie Nightmare was extra slow, even by MST3K standards. However, it had some of the most quick, succinct, and cute host segments I can remember in the Mike era; perhaps this was because the movie ran a little long. I support this. This movie did one thing, and that was to make me resolve to refer to all drive-in food establishments as the 'Twist & Crème.' (I think that's the right 'e' variant.) Oh, it did have Adam West, which was pretty good. He was involved in a great arbitrary ending, too. Oh, oh, and it had a teenage hooligan throw cold spaghetti at his mom. That was a winner.

La Règle du jeu (AKA Rules of the Game) (1939), Jean Renoir. Jan 28, 9:30pm. View count: One.

Jurassic Park (1993), Steven Spielberg. Jan 30, 10pm. View count: Three?

Rules of the Game we picked up due to its presence on a list of Best Movies of All Time, and its amusingly low price (used on Amazon). And, indeed, it's a really well-done piece. It slowly shades from what seems to be a fluffy rich-people drama into something more substantial, but without quite dropping the farce-inflected aspects. This makes the more serious moments (usually pretty French New Wave -style) stand out all the more.

Apparently this film was banned after a brief release, for reasons that largely escape me. IMDB says that the French government designated it 'bad for morale', and viewers seemingly hated it so much that theatres were threatened. I lack the cultural context, so this makes no sense to me. Orson Welles saw good things in it, though, which is very believable, as it's stylistically pretty reminiscent of his work.


Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs (CG) have aged surprisingly well, but the puppet versions still make me wince. Dinosaur puppets never work well (see: Walking With Dinosaurs). I think puppet motion is so recognizable that it can't be used for things like animals.

Spielberg is still knee-deep in his mindless worship of 'wonder' and 'emotions', very Captain Kirk style, at this time (he probably has not changed in that regard, but I haven't seen anything he's done recently, since I dislike his non-Jaws work). This means: lone dad-figure, resourceful and loving children (often displaying openmouthed wonder), and well-punished cynicism. You need to FEEL the science! Otherwise it won't WORK!

Another thing Spielberg persists in doing, and that I hate him for, is the misleading attentional shot. He does this over and over. A scene will be focused on an environmental thing, or a character, and other characters will be relating to that thing in ways that imply that they see what the camera sees (that they have the same information the viewer does). Then, after this, suddenly the camera will be in a slightly different location or at a different angle, and new information will come to light. The problem with this is that, if we believe in the attentional field of the characters in the scene, by all rights, they should have seen that thing already. This is a lighter variant of my most-hated Misleading Helicopter Scene in Close Encounters (where Dreyfuss mysteriously does not hear the very nearby helicopter until the soundtrack decides to let us in on the idea). The least you can do, Spielberg, is have your character turn around a little and notice the new thing, instead of placing them such that they would have been staring right at it all along.

Also bad are everyone's muddy arguments about why the park is doomed ('dinosaurs went extinct for a reason!' when they're really concerned with 'dinosaurs and humans aren't necessarily compatible'), the (aaagh) horrible chaos theory jibba-jabba, the embarrassing models for dinosaur sensory abilities and behavior.

Good: Laura Dern, now that I have seen Inland Empire.

Repo Man (1984), Alex Cox. Jan. 24, 10:30pm. View count: Um. Eight? That is a wild guess.

Nekojiru-so (AKA Cat Soup) (2001), Tatsuo Sato. Jan 25, 5:30pm. View count: One.

Invasion USA (1952), Alfred E. Green (MST3K version). Jan 25, 7pm. View count: One.

Repo Man: Love it forever. I have this specific well of love for works that have a consistent internal system, but which do not necessarily make this system clear to the viewer. Repeat viewings are rewarded. Still not sure if the Harry Pace/Happy Face thread is ever actually paid off or... used, but I wouldn't rule it out. Tiny beautiful character touches abound: Xander Schloss returning with the matchbook, the Rodriguez Bros. and their sodas.

Cat Soup: Great stuff, a very short film that's supposedly an adaptation of a manga. It's sort of a surreal-ish journey story, with excellent imagery and that particular variety of horror that comes from a childish thematic context.

Invasion USA is a goofy pro-draft(?) film that has the US getting invaded by... someone (Russia, I guess, who knows) in a dead parade of stock footage. As 343 pointed out, Dan O'Herlihy (the venerable Old Man head of OCP from Robocop) plays the weird guy at the end of the bar with the big ol' brandy glass! I support the MSTing of this movie, though, it's not exactly a shiner on its own.

Alien (1979), Ridley Scott. January 9, 10pm. View count: six? seven? This one was with commentary.

Rock and Rule (1983), Clive A. Smith. January 16, 10pm. View count: One.

Oh, I am so late writing these up.

Alien of course was extra-special as always; this time we watched it with Ridley Scott commentary, which was somewhat illuminating (he got bored by the hallways periodically (prototypical though they were), since he had to use some of them over and over again, and had them painted different colors). The commentary was very skewed toward the tech solutions for visual problems, so I'll stick to that. He mentioned that for the wreck that they investigate toward the beginning, the model was not large enough to pull off any serious camera movement or close-ups, and so he shot off monitors playing footage of it instead. The resulting lower resolution and much higher noise covered everything that could have been a problem. BRILLIANT. I love movies where you can see people doing great work around serious limitations. I was probably most bothered by the saliva-faucet the alien had implanted in its mouth, thinking back. That and the Ash-head match cut. Ridley Scott's cringeworthy moments were completely transparent to those who weren't actually on the set, like the fact that he knew crew members were shaking the ship's seats on takeoffs and landings. It looks great.

Rock and Rule on the other hand is almost pure deep hurting. It's so bad. It's got an unlikeable protagonist-sort, his girlfriend who is sort of a Mary Sue, two sidekicks that probably should have been one sidekick (and then that one sidekick thrown under a train), a bad guy with lips that had their own team of animators (not really, but they COULD HAVE [easily my favorite part of the movie]), three henchmen that wanted to be the Beagle Boys so hard (and I wish there were fewer of them too)... and they are all anthropomorphised somethings-or-other. The two leads are rotoscoped, and everyone else is full-on wanna-be Bakshi time. It really is not as fun as it sounds.
It doesn't look like people were really able to do anything really impressive or interesting visually (maybe outside of the background paintings, which were sometimes very nice); motions weren't often pushed into that interesting territory where you know that the animators are just having fun messing around. Instead it felt like they were trying to hit a more bland target, and were maybe having a little fun inside that.
The extra sad part is that the soundtrack is really passable. They got Debbie Harry, Cheap Trick (whom I've never gotten into, but, you know), and Lou Reed doing songs specifically written for the movie. And although sometimes the lyrics are pretty hurtful, the singing is usually quite good; one wonders how they got the stars to sign on.
Anyhoo, if you need a movie with an unpleasant aesthetic and a half-decent soundtrack to make fun of on some occasion, you could do worse.

Random Recipe Generator

Brandy Salad
Serves 3
You will need:

* 5 lime
* 100ml brandy
* 110ml water

Instructions:

1. pre-heat the oven to 210 C
2. fry the lime
3. melt the lime
4. throw the lime away
5. fry the water until browned
6. sauté the brandy
7. bake for 30 minutes and serve hot

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), Aditya Chopra. January 4, 7pm. View count: One.

In the bathroom at intermission, an indian lady who was at this movie with presumably a large proportion of her friends asked me why I was watching a hindi movie. I was completely unprepared for this kind of weirdness (even though we were about it for caucasians in the theatre, I only now realize), and said something like "Because... they're... good?" with an 'is this a trick question?' expression. I then totally whiffed by not being able to remember Sharukh Khan's name, and one of the heretofore silent friends piped up with it so quickly and witheringly matter-of-factly that I was glad when my sister freed up the stall and I could stop talking to them.
Because the ugly truth is that all of us white kids were watching that movie for about 50% hilarity value, really. We missed the first ten minutes, laughed at lots of non-intentionally amusing things (especially mangled subtitles), and didn't get all the fanservice we could have out of Kajol's cameo (I didn't even recognize her. I think it was the costume).

Anyhow, it is an entertaining movie. It's pretty strongly self-referential, which I love in a movie, plus it has Sharukh Khan playing a highly goofy double role (with a goofy moustache). Being Bollywood, it is also tinged with misogyny and melodrama, but at least most of this is acknowledged. There is actually, really truly, a sequence where Sharukh Khan is counselled to be more macho if he wants to make the girl like him. I think there is even a little song about it. Fortunately for everyone, in the next scene, the girl tells him, unprompted, that she hates macho guys, and the concept dies a quick, merciful death. Hooray!

Random highlights include: a barber who looks like someone stuffed Beast Rabban into hipsterwear from 2005, the sumo wrestler with the tattoo of Harley Quinn, the dance number that unironically includes the title of this post, the number that includes Chaplin-style costumes and chimney sweeps, and the stick-on moustache.

Well, last year we started out strong, but soon slipped from our proper moviewatching ways onto the HBO series path. You can tell when this happened: September and October. I may have to make a bar graph, if only because it's almost the exact opposite of 2007's pattern. Overall the count is 89 movies for 2008, which is somewhat better than the 50-something we managed last year. Hooray!


January: 12 movies
Solaris (2002) Jan 1 and 2
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) Jan 1
Blade Runner, Final Cut (2007, originally 1982) Jan 6
The Fisher King (1991) Jan 12
Ratatouille (2007) Jan 13
Marriage Is a Crazy Thing (2002) Jan 18
Persepolis (2007) Jan 20
Death Note (2006) Jan 21
Cloverfield (2008) Jan 24
There Will Be Blood (2007) Jan 26
El Espinazo del diablo (2001) Jan 27

February: 7 movies
Cabaret (1972) Feb 1
Helvetica (2007) Feb 3
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Feb 5
Cracked Actor (1975) Feb 6
Solyaris (1972) Feb 22
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Feb 23
The Fountain (2006) Feb 24

March: 14 movies
Beetle Juice (1988) Mar 2
The 400 Blows (1959) Mar 8
Stalker (1979) Mar 9
Brick (2005) Mar 15
Touch of Evil (1958) Mar 16
Paranoid Park (2007) Mar 17
In a Lonely Place (1950) Mar 19
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) Mar 20
Sunset Blvd. (1950) Mar 21
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Mar 22
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Mar 23
The Big Heat (1953) Mar 25
Ido zero daisakusen (aka Latitude Zero) (1969) Mar 27
The Blue Dahlia (1946) Mar 30

April: 7 movies
The Butterfly Effect (2004) Apr 4
The Big Sleep (1946) Apr 7
Wilde (1997) Apr 18
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) Apr 20
The Nomi Song (2004) Apr 26
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) Apr 27
Tôkyô nagaremono (1966) (aka Tokyo Drifter) Apr 29

May: 10 movies
Dai-Nipponjin (AKA 'Big Man Japan') (2007) May 2
Rope (1948) May 4
Mildred Pierce (1945) May 9
Murder, My Sweet (1944) May 11
The Third Man (1949) May 12
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) May 14
Soy Cuba (aka I Am Cuba)(1964) May 17
Justice League: The New Frontier (2008) May 23
Hard Target (1993) May 26
TekWar (1994) May 30

June: 16 movies
TekWar: TekLords (1994) Jun 1
The Killing (1956) Jun 1
Death and the Compass (1992) Jun 4
RoboCop (1987) Jun 6
Iron Man (2008) Jun 13
Hellraiser (1987) Jun 14
Hellraiser II: Hellbound (1988)" Jun 15
Kyo Kii... Main Jhuth Nahin Bolta (2001) Jun 17
Dead Man (1995) Jun 18
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) Jun 18
Ghost Dog (1999) Jun 18
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) Jun 19
Permanent Vacation (1980) Jun 20
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) Jun 20
Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) Jun 21
Wall-E (2008) Jun 29

July: 3 movies
Hellboy II (2008) Jul 12
The Dark Knight (2008) Jul 21, 27

August: 5 movies
S.P.L. (2005) Aug 2
The Killer (1989) Aug 3
Beetle Juice (1988) Aug 8
Labyrinth (1986) Aug 10
Runaway (1984) Aug 16

September: 1 movie
Day Watch (aka Dnevnoy dozor) (2006) Sep 13

October: 2 movies
Odd Couple (aka Bo ming chan dao duo ming qiang) (1979) Oct 4
Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) Oct 18

November: 6 movies
This Filthy World (2006) Nov 11
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) Nov 11
Futurama: Bender's Game (2008) Nov 12
Låt den rätte komma in (AKA Let The Right One In) (2008) Nov 16
Muthu (1995) Nov 22
Mitchell(MST3K version, of course) (1975) Nov 27

December: 6 movies
Django (1966) Dec 6
Inland Empire (2006) Dec 9
Muthu (1995) Dec 24
Aankhen (2002) Dec 25
The Muppet Movie (1979) Dec 25
RoboCop (1987) Dec 31

RoboCop (1987), Paul Verhoeven. Dec. 31, 10:20pm. View count: about eight for this (Criterion) version.
The Wrestler (2008), Darren Aronofsky. Jan 1, 6:40pm. View count: One.
Doctor Who (1996), Geoffrey Sax. Jan 2, 4pm. View count: One.

Robocop is the best way to ring in the new year. It was wrapping up around the year turnover moment, maybe about the 'Murphy, I'm a mess' point. Start as you mean to go.

The Wrestler is sort of surprising from Aronofsky, but a good piece of work. I understand its release is very limited, but it's definitely worth checking out. Charming performances from nearly everyone, especially all the various hilariously-named wrestlers, who are polite to a fault.

Also called Doctor Who: Enemy Within, this is the worst thing I can remember watching recently. It's terrible in that particular mid-90s way that reminds me of Forever Knight, but that's where the fun part ends. It's all very sad. Also boring.

Muthu (1995), K.S. Ravikumar. Dec. 24, 7pm. View count: Two.
Aankhen (2002), Vipul Amrutlal Shah. Dec. 25, 2pm. View count: Three.
The Muppet Movie (1979), James Frawley. Dec. 25, 8pm. View count: Four?

Muthu! Still hilarious.

Aankhen! Also still hilarious. Amitabh Bachchan speaks english really well and likes to say 'A dangerous game is about to begin.'

The Muppet Movie! It had been a while, but I still remembered that 'fork in the road' gag. Also, SO MANY CAMEOS.