this movie meant so much to me for real. the fact that it’s not just about the young phenom powering his way to the top of the jazz world (which doesn’t exactly pay good anyway), but about the friend who is swept along and finds himself burning with a passion to play. the talented kid on the inside track of the scene who realizes he’s phoning it in. the bartender with the secret wall full of records. the old man who comes by purely to watch the drummer improve. the man on the street who comes on a whim and is transfixed. all moved by the power of this music, all part of the jazz community. it’s a communal art form about the power of being an individual
one thing this movie talks about a lot is “believing in jazz”. they never define it but as someone who’s been trying to learn the music for a year and a half or so, it made perfect sense. the art form is always “dying” and people in the movie reference that a lot, but at the same time you can see they all fervently believe in it. it’s a beautiful thing that jazz never died and won’t die as long as people believe in it, play it, go listen to it
An absolute banger of a soundtrack, sasuga Hiromi (well known Japanese jazz pianist and composer). It wouldn’t have worked without this absolutely virtuosic music
seeing it again tomorrow and will probably cry again lol
I tried to watch Pet Cemetery: Bloodlines the other night at the shady hotel, but, as the “Bloodlines” subtitle could’ve probably clued you in, it’s pretty boring. Things happen, but they don’t mean anything, and they’re not interesting. I don’t really give a shit about Judd Crandell or whatever the fuck his name is if he’s not being played by a Munster. Pet Cemetery 2 was pretty decent for a random-ass sequel, so it’s really hard to give any sort of a pass to something this boring and homogenized. I wound up turning it off. Has anything with “Bloodlines” as the subtitle that wasn’t Castlevania ever been good?
I also tried watching X at the shady hotel but the Roku froze up when the two old people were about to unionize and I wasn’t really feeling the horny old murderer stuff. Seems to have a lot of references to other movies via shots – I definitely saw a Texas Chainsaw Massacree and Zombie 2 shot and a few I couldn’t pinpoint specifically but could definitely recall seeing elsewhere.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and all that was really on was The Odd Couple, so I watched that again. The size of people’s apartments back in the day is such bullshit. Guy probably pays for an 8 room apartment what people now pay for a studio apartment. I love the rant about the little notes on his pillow – that bit of dialogue was in Life with Mikey (Michael J. Fox plays a washed-up former child actor turned child talent agent) which I watched a ton as a kid. I need to watch that again – I don’t get to see enough people eating cereal with chunky old milk these days.
AMC has been showing the Halloween movies all day. Right now they’re on 6 (arguably one of the worst – Paul Rudd is so bad in this it almost distracts you from how big of a fucking mess this movie is). I think my ranking would be: 4,3,5,2,1,H2O,Resurrection,Hellbillyween 1 (never saw 2),6,Kills;Ends. Kills and Ends are so boring and forgettable and rely far too much on people recognizing names from the first movie. If you’re going to capitalize on people’s nostalgia, why not have your movie continue from where 4 left off and have it be Jamie Lloyd as the killer twenty-some-odd years later.
Resurrection also really annoys the shit out of me. How is Busta Rhymes going to chastise people at the end asking about Michael Myers when it’s his goddamn fault anybody was here in the first place this time around? What an asshole. I also really hate that guy that looks like the dickhead scientologist from That 70s Show dressed like Lenny Kravitz. Why would you think this guy could pull off Lenny Kravtiz’ wardrobe? Lenny Kravitz can barely even pull it off.
I Confess I must have watched this years ago when I did that big Hitchcock watch through. Montgomery Clift never looked more handsome than this movie. He fails to play a tortured priest and just has his hurt puppydog face for 90% of it.
The Professionals extending my From Here To Eternity watch around here is Burt Lancaster as a womanizing dynamitist given one more job. Beautiful giant landscapes that reminds you why Westerns Are Made. The cast also has Lee Marvin and a (brown faced) Jack Palance. The movie never lands it’s moral footing (the backstabbing CEO gets away and a bunch of named mexican revolutionaries are killed by our heroes.) Not great but I had a good time with it.
Smokey And The Bandit: my favorite podcast Jordan Jesse Go is doing a bonus feed about Burt Renolds movies and they make a point that this is the best one of a low bar. It is good. Just southern fried men and women. Love the clothes. Love the y’allism. Loved seeing Georgia. Love that it doesn’t really make sense or hold together. I was not prepared for what the actual performance of Bufford T Justice would be and got him confused with the guy from the Roger Moore Bond Movies (which I may like that performance more.) it’s a good 36 ounce styrofoam gas station Coca-Cola of a movie. They’ll even sell you the hotel-minibar whiskey to throw in.
WHO WANTS TO DO A MARATHON WATCH OF MY SMOKEY BOX SET IN PENNSYLVANIA
We’d just watch the two Burt movies I’m not gonna watch that other shit even if Hal Needham directed some of them. Maybe slip the wrestling movie he did though, haven’t seen that one. It’s got Roddy Piper, Captain Lou, Ric Charles Nelson Reilly, Billy Barty, Ric Flair, AND Tanya Roberts!! WOW!!
I’ll watch Smokey and the bandit 1 and 2. Im always thinking about how jackie gleason was supposed to play both sheriff buford and the bandit in the third installment which was originally called smokey is the bandit
All the music ry cooder made for stroker ace ended up in streets of fire (???) which is insane to me. Also I apologize to everyone for knowing strange details about the career of burt reynolds. I made my dad watch gator once and he fell asleep halfway through, but i think it is a premiere jerry reed role
I watched TerrorVision. I started with an upload on YouTube and then switched to a proper DVD rip, and I think the low quality of the YouTube version really helped with that weird sitcom-within-a-movie feeling this movie has. It feels like a long episode of Monsters or something – goofy shit happening to an over-the-top modern 80s family. I definitely regret not watching this earlier – I think the name made me conflate it with other things I had seen so I just assumed it was something I had seen already.
Definitely recommended, especially if you like 80s horror anthology TV series and Stay Tuned. This would’ve been one of my favorite movies if I had seen it when I was 11 or 12.
Elemental feels like it was made by someone who saw Zootopia and thought the problematic parts was “too much furry shit for perverts” and then doubled down on the race/inherent disposition crap. voice actor for the male character sounds like someone overracted to the casting director firing Jack McBrayer for not sounding like enough of a WASP
I guess the experience of being judged based on appearance and culture could reflect the lived-experience of the creators. but uncritically repeating those same prejudices in your work isn’t a statement or message, it’s lazy perpetuation
C.H.U.D. II seems like it’d be goofy fun based on its premise, but it’s just kind of boring. It’s one part Re-Animator, one part Return of the Living Dead Part II, and one part Day of the Dead, but not as good as any of those.
Pyewacket is a whole lot of nothing – which makes sense since it’s named after a witch’s familiar that never did anything and what’s scary about a useless imp with a gross name? My mother had a cat named Pyewacket in the early 2000s that I never referred to by name because I always thought it was the ugliest name.
I put on Jessabelle, which I thought was a Lindsay Lohan movie and I was like, yeah, this being bad makes sense, it’s a Lindsay Lohan horror movie, but it’s not even Lindsay Lohan, it’s just some lady that looks like her. Alex Mack (of the Secret World) is in it for a minute as somebody’s upset wife.
Before my finger slipped and hit post I wanted to talk about seeing all of THE IRISHMAN. I went looking and couldn’t find a lot of impressions on it. Then I thought about my own impression:
For an indulgent last-time it was okay. The very old men in young men makeup just made them look like old men. I’ve seen the Godfather Part 2 recently I know what young DeNiro looked like!
Being stuck in bed recovering from my covid shot…it was fine. Scorsese is usually pretty good about women characters but boy the actresses were given so little.
“You don’t even know who Jimmy Hoffa is do you?”
Yeah Marty remember how often you made Al Pacino say slurs for a feature length amount of time. I don’t think she’d have good things to say about Hoffa either.
I watched Possum, which was like a mixture of a lovecraftian horror story about being british and a silent hill game right up until the ending which was also good albeit not drunkenly so like you expect for these things
Urban Menace was one of the first DVDs I ever bought
How much screen time does Snoop actually have in it, I remember it seemed a lot like Plan 9, just some other tall dude in a hoodie on security cameras for most of the movie
The real MVP of Urban Menace is TJ Storm because he really sells a gunshot wound and a broken leg by wailing and gnashing and screaming every time he has to do anything in the last 20 mins of the movie. Snoop however does a naruto run in the big black robe at least once. I couldn’t get over the instant transmission noises when he would teleport around to kill people with the knife from Cobra. Also it’s hilarious that after being like a menacing grim reaper he talks completely normally when he finally has dialogue. He is in what i’d say is a good portion of the movie but also half the movie is Big Pun running out of breath a quarter of the way through his line while being framed like hes giving you a mission briefing in Command & Conquer.
not so good is Fat Joe saying the n-word like 5000 times while all of his other dialogue sounds like he is trying to land a part in Kingpin: Life of Crime. and honestly at that point albert pyun could have just cast Necro instead for the same effect
also i watched Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D which is not nearly as bad as everyone says, probably because I’m a disgusting freak who just marathoned 7 sniper movies, but like it was just some extremely late era italian guy film making… there’s a lady with the worst wig ever who shows up like 8 times and it’s because he thinks she has nice boobs. admittedly it looks awful and theres only one scene in the movie that uses 3d and everyone sounds like they were dubbed by the guys who play all the NPCs in the Frogwares sherlock games. I already can’t remember most of it but Rutger Hauer was drunk and started instagibbing all the characters when he appeared. dario made sure i saw his daughter naked at least three times. He is the guy in opera who says “I jerk off before I shoot a scene”
