cross of iron is good cuz it’s low budget though
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A friend recommended I watch The Monkees’ cinematic tour de force, ‘HEAD.’ I obliged, since it’s all up on YouTube. Turns out that it owns bones: An indictment of capitalism and the record label grift, and an admission of how trapped the band felt by their corporate-produced public image, and also just a montage of really stupid vignettes they thought made for funny ideas / made them look like assholes or idiots. Produced [and supposedly edited] by a coked-up Jack Nicholson, and including a cut to footage of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem that somehow feels totally earned despite coming out of nowhere.
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Head rules.
Edit: and yes Jack Nicholson locked himself in a hotel room for 72 hours wirh a bunch of drugs. Jack Nicholson is someone who clearly got a career in Hollywood because he knew where drugs were.
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Also every scene in Hoffa his nose is visibly dusty and I’m settling for that approximation because I simply stopped counting
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in righting wrongs yuen biao is dragged along the runway by a propeller plane while hanging on to a rope. he then hangs from that rope thousands of feet in the air while attempting to enter the plane. hong kong cinema will never be equaled.
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i watched ‘the quick and the dead’ over the past couple days and i honestly thought it was great. i guess i kind of get why it bombed but in retrospect i feel like it has a kind of pure 90s feel that i really miss. probably the best use of sam raimi style cartoon ultraviolence
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I like it until Sharon Stone grows A Character and that character is Now I Am A Woman-Type, Wracked With Emotions!
Much better as a generic grim hardcase imo.
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The first sequence leading up to her entering the saloon is amazing, then Plot starts to happen
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I’ve not seen either in the longest time but this and Last Man Standing were my favorite Trash Westerns growing-up
Time for a reappraisal methinks
EDIT: Walter Hill’s Yojimbo is a slightly overlong rendition that features hard-boiled Bruce Willis as a duplicitous anti-hero dual-wielding crackshot superman who kills scores of Irishmen and deceives Italian mafiosos for money and dames while shooting more bullets that are required to kill a man while slugging as much whiskey as I do any given evening
Fun cameos include Hill veteran David Patrick Kelly as a Little Big Man, Michael Imperioli in a similar mold and Christopher Walken playing the Token Psycho/Himself
Also acoustic slide guitar
C+
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I watched Strange Days earlier this week, which is one of the best apocalypse movies ever made? and a seriously fucking cool, bad-ass action movie?? it’s a gorgeous piece of indulgent Hollywood cinema that just vamps in an effusion of colored lighting, smoke, set decoration and colored textures on everything all teeming with movement and depth. I do not trust Kathryn Bigelow, but this movie made me wish I could.
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Yeah, I rewatched it recently and I was kind of surprised at how much I still thought it was a great time. The only part that rang false was the happy ending where the elusive ‘good cops’ showed up. Was a totally credible portrait of a culture of racism and police brutality and the decadence of white liberals who can afford to look the other way up until that point.
Real smart choice making Angela Bassett’s character the ethical heart of the movie
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Totally. I kept thinking it was going to create a dilemma out of having this hot evidence but no one to give it to that they could trust, but no they just give it to the cops and it works out fine lol
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It’s so tonally out of place (though I appreciate the two characters feeling some sort of reprieve from everything they’ve gone through up to that point) that it feels more like a dream sequence than an actual ending
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big bigelow low point foreshadowing moment
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wow, but also yes
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beautiful moment from flaming brothers
It is a James Cameron script, reworked by another Old White Dude under the guidance of a Kathryn Bigelow who was fired up over the Rodney King tape + subsequent miscarriages of justice/public outrage? Wealthy, well-meaning, ostensibly liberal white people all the way down. Probably a Return to Stability after Bad Apples are rooted out of the Otherwise OK System was the extent of their conceptual reach.
It was the 90s!
I fold my hands and bow my head and thank the great Warners Brother in the sky every day that Cameron did not shoot this movie himself, so we were spared his particular inflection on first-person sex-criming.
edit: also not really into Angela Bassett being enough into Lenny for public shows of affection at the end? he’s just such a sleazy fuckup and she’s so not a sleazy fuckup and his turn from obsessive gross vr ex-fucking reexperiencer to "oh dang love was in front of me all along!’ being met with anything but a sigh feels almost as contrived as Good Cops Baaaayyybeeee
I guess the heart wants what it wants.
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rudie where is your review of The Eagle has Landed & Where Eagles Dare
Saturday nights are pizza+movie night & we take turns picking, I’ve chosen Harryhausen flicks for most of lockdown so we got to watch a cyclops stomp a man to death, nice
my wife’s picks have been interesting, highschool drama anime with magic shapechanging powers? only on netflix
tomorrow night is dialogueless cgi ladybirds
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I have different feelings on Bruce Lee now. He’s been a legend since I’ve been alive. I got the criterion set and have been working through it. Confession I usually don’t like Martial Arts Movies. Even if I would describe myself as a martial artist.
Like for years Jeet Kun Do was mocked and revered and I’ve heard the descriptions. I am sure the modern art is trying to chase something of Bruce’s style. The actual idea of Bruce’s fighting/performing is much simplier and cleaner. Yes you should and can learn from a bunch of different schools but that should boil down into something unique and works for you.
The first two films The Big Boss and Fists of Fury aren’t the best and are padded with talking like a Toho monster movie. The Big Boss has more weirdness and I laughed twice at it while FoF has more of the iconic Bruce Lee stuff but that’s taken from 5 films.
It is clear Bruce Lee jumps off the screen and is the best thing in them.
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As I start The Way of The Dragon need to mention the Golden Harvest logo is one of the best and the opening credits for all these films have been so terrific and inventive and of course I’ve been let down by the films.
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