excellent analysis from Adam Nayman on The Empty Man
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I want to live in the world where Angelina Jolie can just let her face age as far into Robert Z’dar as it wants to.
Meanwhile Taylor Sheridan further secures his place in the Alex Garland Writer of Portentous Potboilers He Should Have Handed to Another Director to Improve in the Filming & T-Mobile Memorial Arena.
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I watched May (2002) tonight for the second time in like over a decade, and really liked it. Manages to be kind of sad and sympathetic at times despite its overwhelming disturbing bent and dark comedy moments. It also has The Official Cutest Boyfriend Ever in it, James Duval from Doom Generation!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/movies/charles-grodin-dead.html
Loved Charles Grodin, always wanted him to be in everything. I didn’t watch Beethoven a lot as a kid (didn’t like the movie), but I watched Clifford a shitload, as well as stuff like Midnight Run and the Great Muppet Caper. It’s been so long since I’ve seen So I Married an Axe Murderer (like, 1994? 1995?) that I completely forgot he was in it. I keep seeing it on Amazon Prime, so I’ll probably re-watch that even though I don’t really want to listen to Mike Myers do dumb voices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMX3i492iFI
Anyway, on topic, the only thing I’ve really watched all the way through recently was Dream Lover. Which I’ve seen a few times. I can’t really watch these movies about rich yuppies anymore, but I have a soft spot for Dream Lover because it’s mostly just James Spader and Madchen Amick. It falls apart hard at the end (and that ending is super unsatisfying), but up until that last like, 20 or 30 minutes, it’s pretty enjoyable. Something about the movie feels isolated, like, for most of the movie, the rest of the world doesn’t feel like it exists, which is an atmosphere I like.
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Dang, I’ve been in the Grodin Zone for the past few weeks: The Heartbreak Kid, Real Life, Midnight Run, Beethoven, Clifford… RIP, my perpetually frustrated movie dad.
Gotta love how they probably spent most of their budget on Dinosaur World which is the only thing I remember as a kid cuz I’d stop flipping channels every time I came across it.
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RIP Grodin. I have to admit I was constantly getting him confused with John Ritter for some reason, so I thought he was dead already.
Clifford is one of the most bizarre movies of all time
the thing that gets me about him dying is that I didn’t know he was so old
Beethoven/Clifford-era Grodin was a hair under 60! he sure as fuck didn’t look it! I wish to age as gracefully and be having fun doing asinine stuff like he did
Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar: I wasn’t into the ridiculous nature of this movie until the absurd and obnoxious conversation about the adventures of Trish they had on the airplane at which point the movie and my brain were on the same wavelength and it just kept going as stupidly as possible. it’s basically a McKay-Ferrell film except with female leads (they produced it so it only makes sense)
alternatively, I am brainbroken and my sense of humor is bad
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Clifford is a horror movie about a demon child barreling into the life of somebody who’s on the precipice of being happy and successful, and destroying it all because he can’t fucking wait like, three days to go to Dinosaur World. And then that Demon Child joins the Cloth so he can ruin even younger lives.
Yeah, I saw a photo of him a few years ago, and he was so old. I didn’t realize he was as old as he was until that point, since he always looked pretty young. I saw a clip of his talk show he apparently had c. the OJ Simpson trial, and even then he still looked pretty young, just a bit more worn down and tired.
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grodin looked like he was thirty-five years old for forty years
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i just realized this is because Grodin is the dad in Clifford and Ritter is the dad in the Problem Child franchise, which is another deeply malevolent piece of cursed cinema that corrupted my youth
honestly just remembering these movies exist makes me feel kind of like im about to have a panic attack
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films watched over last 2 weeks:
Abbott & Costello Meet The Killer - have never watched any of these movies before, found the title pair to be kind of charmless and mechanical in their clowning but the hotel sets were nice and it was fun to watch them enact these goofy comedy routines with a constantly increasing volume of mysterious corpses. Boris Karloff plays a menacing hypnotist. The “killer” of the title has a very effectively creepy look of baggy and featureless mask tucked away between a hat and a raincoat.
Trans-Europ Express - the Robbe-Grillet one, I liked it OK, the crime thriller part became less fun once the plot turned out to revolve around a ridiculous act of self sabotage but at best there was a sense of the dreamy, aimless, semi-erotic restless distraction of a long train ride.
What A Carve Up - I thought Jonathan Coe invented this for his novel! But it’s real and actually very fun. Early 60s british horror comedy with Sid James stuck in an old dark house where the guests are all being killed over the course of the night. Good background grotesques and endearing gags.
“don’t open that door unless it’s me.”
“how will i know it’s you?”
“i’ll burst into song.”
“which song?”
“do you know you’re beginning to get on my nerves?”
“no, but if you hum i might remember-”
The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini - another Old Dark Houselike but this time abruptly interrupted by a busful of teens straight out of Beach Blanket Bingo, who spend the rest of the movie doing horrible beach party dance moves around the pool or else being chased by a gorilla. Nancy Sinatra is in it!! The titular ghost in the invisible bikini is a greenscreened blue lady with a translucent void where her swimsuit would be, which is a good example of the film’s mix of extremely stupid and also more inventive than it needed to be. In addition to the gorilla there is a killer mummy, a henchman named J Sinister Hulk and a showdown in a secret underground wax museum.
A Bucket Of Blood - very fun Roger Corman movie which takes the old “statues with human corpses inside” thing and transposes it to a giddy beatnik setting. Dick MIller plays a hapless but murderous aspiring artiste - he starts with a cat, which his boss discovers but doesn’t tell anyone about, and there’s a great reaction shot when he hears Miller guilelessly talk about his desire to start depicting human forms.
X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes - another Corman one, partly written by Ray Russell who also did some fun gothic pastiche horror stories incl the one Mr Sardonicus is based on. Can definitely see why this became a pulp modernist touchpoint, there’s some goofy melodrama in the plot and the inevitable joke about getting to look at naked people, but there’s also a sense of real and lucid interest in the idea of exploring ever-deeper levels of altered perception which both the actor and writing sell more than you’d expect. The kaleidoscopic skeleton effects are good too.
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Watched Cosmopolis again, and still love it. Want to read the book some day.
i understand none of this.
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I recently downloaded Problem Child because those first two movies were something I watched faaaar too much, but by the end of it, I realized it was Problem Child 2 I had all of the fond memories of (outside of Smiley Pies, or whatever the fuck and, “Clowns. I hate clowns!”). The Problem Child in part 2 has the coolest goddamn room on the planet. They even have a pinball machine and an arcade machine in their living room!
Add another Ben to the Ben pile:
And it has Amy Yasbeck looking like she was formed from diamond dust and fell from a star.
JRS DAD
I never noticed as a kid that the principal’s office is covered in blood.
I’ll refrain from posting screenshots from the vomit scene even though that’s the scene everybody remembers because it is kind of gross.
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I kind of admire them for doing this but I’m also really glad no one expects kids to actually like shit this grotesque anymore. I really feel like it sucks to have grown up in the era in which an adult’s idea of what was entertaining to a kid was mostly about like barf and farts. I mean yes they will probably enjoy it, but at what cost
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I do feel like the HW Bush era stands out as an unequalled peak of bored dirtbags being able to work with big studio money, as well as the expectations of subversiveness
like every aesthetic movement that I really love deep in my heart started then
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I remember gross-out stuff being huge in the early-ish 90s. Like, you couldn’t watch a kids show without somebody talking about or showing their scabs or snotting up all over the place, or just grotesque-looking imagery (my assumption was always that the Garbagepail Kids instigated all of this, but I’m probably wrong since I wasn’t actually around at that point). I could deal with blood and guts, but like, bodily stuff always grossed me out, and still does. I’ll still cover my eyes or look away if something is gross (that spit scene in that Adam Sandler movie with that dumb kid from like, 1999 grossed me out so goddamn much and I still get a shiver down my spine when I’m reminded of it over 20 years later).
I spent a lot of time home alone as a kid so movies like Problem Child 2, where the kid in that movie has a cool dad and a cool house and shit were what I escaped into. Problem Child, Space Camp, Clifford, Heavyweights, The Sandlot, The Tin Soldier (where a new kid in school gets accepted into one of the local school gangs, I bet that felt nice), Blank Check, 3 Ninjas, Rookie of the Year, all of that bullshit were what kept me company (I guess cable was cheaper than a babysitter).
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