YouTube keeps recommending me its free movie section which appears to be jam-packed with fake movies that all sound exactly like the movies in this thread and I really felt like I needed to come here and grovel in tribute to this hell you’ve created for yourself lest it begin to spill over and engulf the rest of humanity
3 Likes
hey now i’m pretty sure Deadly Dance Mom is the MOST real movie
also relatedly I looked up to see if YouTube Movies is still hosting the chemtrail themed thriller “Toxic Skies” but it has apparently been rebranded as “Containment” for the sake of topicality and has nearly four million views as a result. thank you youtube for your commitment to excellence.
7 Likes
I could only hope us Seattleites would meet our end in such a spectacular fashion as a chemtrail apocalypse
I’m In Love With A Church Girl (2013) - I guess this is more like a romantic christian movie than a romantic comedy, but since there hasn’t been much churchgirl related content so far I figured it was good to branch out. In this one Ja Rule plays an ex-drug kingpin turned independently wealthy old school funk night promoter who meets Adrienne Houghton at a party and before you know it is drawn into the strange and intriguing world of “church”. He visits her where she works, which turns out to be as the manager of something called a “faith-based product store”, and is very impressed by the christian hip-hop stylings of T-Bone on the store radio. He visits her church, a very bizarre sports center / planetarium-looking place (thanks, martin luther) with a streetwise pastor who drives a lamborghini. He meets her family, who give him a personalised bible with his name on the cover for his birthday. The initial family meeting scene is my favourite part of the movie as they each just wander into frame one at a time while delivering aimless NPC dialogue and yelling to locate one another. There is a pleasing amount of really formless exposition here in general, if you enjoy having casual bible exegesis broken up by scenes where characters say things like “sorry big dog” this is a movie for you.
An interesting thing about this one is that the drug runners he’s friends with are actually treated pretty sympathetically, while the FBI surveillance team shadowing them around is presented in a much more threatening light. It probably doesn’t help that the latter consists of Stephen Baldwin, Martin Kove and weirdly Michael Madsen, who shows up for like fifteen seconds of running time and who I believe has one single line. As it turns out Baldwin is also christian, or a “man of faith” as characters prefer to be called in this movie for reasons obscure to me, and this is what eventually ends up winning him over to Ja Rule’s side when the IRS eventually pull him in at the end. Actually it doesn’t seem to make that much difference since he seems to win his own freedom in the end just by asking if they have any specific charges against him, whereupon they immediately just give up. But the ultimate villain of this one is more or less God, who not only kills the hero’s mom (right after be booked her an all expenses paid trip to a Sandals resort! incidentally this movie was probably sponsored by Sandals), but also puts the titular churchgirl into a COMA. This prompts Ja Rule to start yelling threats at God in front of a big stained glass window, unfortunately in the end he just accepts his place in the cosmic order and gets baptised after she recovers. Did not collect enough power crystals to get the true ending in which all the characters team up to destroy the baleful demiurge and break the cycle of fate in order to forge their own destiny. I mean I guess since God is listed as executive producer for the film itself he never had much of a shot. House always wins.
13 Likes
select button
(thanks, martin luther)
6 Likes
I said “oh my god” out loud, what a line
i shamefully admit that i am really enjoying the new rom com subgenre where a ltr couple rekindles their love for one another by having a date interrupted by crime and bloodshed, but funny
i guess that weird tina fey movie date night was one of the first of the current generation but both Game Night and the new one The Lovebirds with Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae that just came out are like, just watchable enough to hold your interest without being so good that it gets, like, stressful
1 Like
i don’t really watch movies so much but saw most of this on TV in bed at the Grand Canyon’s El Tovar Hotel
Loving Leah (2007) - When a georgetown yuppie’s orthodox rabbi brother dies, he decides to practice the ancient custom of yibbum and get married to his widowed sister-in-law so that the name can live on. Hijinx ensue!!! This one is actually a Hallmark movie, which was very weird to me considering their, uh, traditionally quite WASPy brand. But it did make more sense as the film went on since it has a very educational-movie-of-the-week vibe to it at times, there are many moments where characters stop to earnestly recite wikipedia articles to each other regarding various traditions and so on.
So I enjoyed that, and the heroine is actually more likeable than usual, in part because she avoids making any of the kind of crazed and needlessly dramatic decisions that characterise these types of films. But that’s OK because the male lead more than makes up for things in that department. He propositions his sister-in-law abruptly midway through the renunciation ceremony they both have to go through to get out of the marriage because doing it made him feel guilty (in his defence, the ceremony involved her spitting at him and then effectively calling him a chickenshit). He then gets married to her without saying anything beforehand to his existing fiancee, and doesn’t understand why she gets mad at him for this. When his new orthodox relation-wife moves in (she agrees to a sexless fake marriage so that she has a place to crash while she goes to college) he somehow manages to appear shirtless in front of her within the first half hour that she’s in the house. At one point the original fiancee asks him to just get a divorce again - he immediately agrees, and then I guess just changes his mind again without saying anything. The most long-suffering GF in romcoms.
It eventually gets kind of surreal, like at the point where he and the wife have to share a room in order to trick her mom into thinking it’s a real marriage. In most romcoms this is the point where the boorish male lead reveals he’s secretly a gentleman by letting the lady have the bed while he sleeps on the couch or something. In this case he immediately just climbs into bed and leaves her to sleep on a tiny chair in the corner until she gives up and climbs in with him (following the construction of a pillow buffer in between). The parts where he tries to talk to the mom are played exactly like someone fucking up the conversational QTEs in a David Cage game. At one point the wife is talking about her fondness for old movies and he says “Ya got spunk, kid” in a generic 1930s guy voice and then waits a beat and says “Bogart.” It’s kind of mesmerising. The fact that he plays all the scenes like an After Last Season character or SyFy movie protagonist greatly add to the effect.
According to the script writer, “I didn’t see it as a Jewish story. It’s a love story, and for a love story you have to have a great hook that brings them together. And the hook in this case was that ancient Jewish law.” I support this high-concept approach to the meet cute. Ricki Lake appears in it as a female rabbi.
10 Likes
are there any like
overt references to Onan?
1 Like
Way to bury the lede!
2 Likes
The Gourmet Detective (2015) - A single-mom cop (yeah, I know) must team up with the mysterious Gourmet Detective in order to solve the murder of a journalist at a fancy restaurant function. This is the movie that feels most like it’s been adapted from a Nintendo DS puzzle game. The Gourmet Detective, named for his popular cooking blog, has developed exceptional powers of observation from his many years as a fancy chef; in addition to this, he’s always dropping pieces of food trivia, telling other characters to eat better, appearing at their houses to cook them fancy meals, and thinking through the case aloud while in the process of making a luxury souffle or something (“You know I think better when I’m cooking”). Also since the case revolves around a pair of competing fancy restaurants it is believable that all the suspects would be snooty weirdo grotesques with names like “Layton Leopold”. So all of that was fun and did make me think of some kind of Cooking Mama x Professor Layton hybrid character placed inside a Phoenix Wright murder case. When will Hallmark finally set up a videogames division and when can I be in it.
I guess a different way to see it would be that, in the same way that the previous Hallmark Movies & Mysteries film was about Sexy Amish Farmer, this one is about Sexy Monk (the TV character, not the religious vocation). What if Monk was a handsome globetrotting blogger who loved to cook you fancy omelettes in addition to being an exasperating savant? So it’s sort of funny in that it simultaneously presents this guy as total wish fulfilment but also as being very annoying in a day to day sense for exactly those same qualities. Also, it’s worth noting that there are currently five movies in the Gourmet Detective franchise and that I guess each focuses on a different food-related murder. So the romance element of this one isn’t as closed down as usual and is more devoted to the kind of will-they-won’t-they dynamic of a longrunning tv show than anything.
In terms of the police procedural parts there isn’t much to comment on. A character’s shady past is revealed when they check her file and find she was “arrested at a political rally”. Gasp… One of the initial suspects is launching a book called “The Gourmet Conspiracy” about how eating at restaurants is for suckers, and I guess we’re meant to consider at least the possibility that she commits murder for the sake of her anti-restaurant agenda…? The main cop lady gets outdrawn and chained to a radiator by an aspiring gourmet restaurant owner, which imo should put a bigger dent in her tough customer credentials than the movie seems to think it does. But I have to admit there is something weirdly compelling about watching a Hallmark romance movie where there’s always the possibility that somebody’s about to pull out a gun.
7 Likes
Glad to know that this obvious TV pilot did result in 5 movies, would have been very sad otherwise
1 Like
3 Likes
Moonstruck (1987) - I still think fondly of Alex Rocco’s great, weird performance as the dad in The Wedding Planner so should have known that a movie full of middle-aged italian character actors would be good. This one commits to the bit early on by starting off with a montage of the NYC skyline set to “That’s Amore”! As it turns out, the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie is an important recurring plot point of the film. There are shots of the full moon throughout, all the characters have scenes staring wistfully at it (and in one case howling) or talking about how the moon is “big as a house” today, after a while all the moon shots make it start to feel like a Suda51 game, especially when so much of the dialog takes the form of weird epigrams (“The moon takes the woman to the man”, “I can’t sleep any more, it’s too much like death”, “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice!”). Also important to note is that the last line is yelled by Nicolas Cage as he waves a prosthetic hand around wearing a grimy vest. That’s our introduction to the film’s love interest!!
The main protagonist is played by Cher(!) who just got engaged to Danny Aiello (oh shit, Sal from Do The Right Thing!!), as a condition of their engagement he requests that she get in touch with his estranged brother who still blames him for the loss of his hand in a tragic shredder mishap. As mentioned the brother is played by a good, manic Nic Cage, not quite in full Vampire’s Kiss mode but surprisingly close. In her efforts to win him over Cher visits his apartment and then accuses him of deliberately cutting off his own hand in order to get out of an engagement(!?) like a wolf from a trap, to which he responds poorly, and after screaming at each other (“A BRIDE WITHOUT A HEAD!” “A WOLF WITHOUT A FOOT”) he pushes over the kitchen table and they start to make out.
The extremely chaotic nature of all the film’s romances is something I enjoyed, especially after many months of mostly watching Hallmark stuff, another is that there are more or less constant and similarly chaotic scenes playing out among the film’s nameless background characters. I especially liked that when Nic Cage gives his angry speech (“Bring me the big knife! I wanna cut my throat!”) in the basement of the bakery where he works, and then storms out, one of the ladies who works there solemnly declares “I’m in love with that man.” We never see her again… I guess that really is amore. As the quotes so far suggest the extremely dramatic and bizarre writing is also a highlight and there are some good threats in particular.
Another small pleasure is the movie’s impressive variety of headwear:
Also, the Pope makes a short cameo appearance creepily reaching in from the edge of the screen.
17 Likes
Chrissy bring me the Big Knife!!
4 Likes
yeah i think maybe you slipped and fell onto a real movie here
5 Likes
Moonstruck is absolutely incredible and it has no place among the Hallmark fake movies that populate the rest of this thread. That wolf without a foot conversation is so fucking good. One of the ultimate entries in scruffy Nic Cage canon.
1 Like
i can’t believe everybody hates hallmark. i mean ok actually i can think of several good reasons to hate hallmark but even so. imo everyone just needs to meet a beautiful horse lady at some kind of pumpkin festival who will teach you the magic of living in an incongruously huge rural mcmansion filled with stock art.
3 Likes
hallmark movies just take place in an alternate timeline of the gilmore girls universe in which people have discovered quaaludes
edit: i would also compare them to ernie bushmiller comics that just involve the endless, aimless permutation of fixed symbolic elements in some kind of void
edit2: so basically a kind of genteel legacy-media version of all those youtube vids about pregnant elsa making friends with spiderman
5 Likes