"Point Break", anyone? Swimming and fishing in toxic, south bay beaches and witnessing the aftermath of botched bank robberies on TV was part of my youth. And it wasn't until last week I saw this in its entirety. A real work of art.
"Point Break", anyone? Swimming and fishing in toxic, south bay beaches and witnessing the aftermath of botched bank robberies on TV was part of my youth. And it wasn't until last week I saw this in its entirety. A real work of art.
There was a memorable Strut beef about Kathryn Bigelow going from this, complete with gratuitous Reagan wielding a petrol pump like a flame-thrower scene, to Abu Ghraib torture apologist.
"Cape Fear"; both films. The daughter of a retired LAPD detective who was my father's best friend used to babysit me when I was very young She's a lawyer now. We reconnected a few days ago. According to her, clients holding a grudge is common. Scary shit.
I had watched The French Connection as a young car-chase-obsessed man, kinda just for the chase scene, but I just revisited it and watched its sequel for the first time. Really good, but it doesn't feel like a pair of movies that could be made today - not just cause Popeye Doyle drops an n-word early on in the first one. In fact that kinda feeds into why I feel you can't make this.
When you watch them, you feel partly the traditional cop-show propaganda motivation of wanting him to "get his man", catch the bad guys, stop the shipment of heroin to NYC and so on, mixed with marveling at him being dumb as shit, insanely reckless to the point of shooting another cop to death on accident and losing the big bad smuggler in the climax of the first movie, and getting loads more cops killed in the second too.
Like, he is not just an antihero, he's not even likable as an antihero. He sucks. I'd venture to say it's more successful than most movies in making an antihero you genuinely don't like or identify with - see the legions of idiots who think Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas were about a bunch of cool guys being cool. No one would make that mistake with Popeye Doyle.
His "loose cannon" moment in the sequel is burning down a flophouse, loads of innocent people narrowly escaping death. Like, not a "crazy but gets results" guy but just "crazy and fucks things up". They make an actual honest, non-corrupt cop character still seem like Nic Cage Bad Lieutenant.
Also in the second one there's like 45 minutes of him getting kidnapped, cuffed to a bed and forced into heroin addiction and then locked up in a jail cell in withdrawal when he's given back to police. It's bananas, like sticking Panic in Needle Park into this cop movie.
It's just an interesting mix of "will he or won't he catch this definitely bad man" and "Jesus, the bosses are all right about him, he is a terrible cop and should not be one", which I can't think of a good parallel in movies. I guess maybe McNutty from the Wire?
Anyway Gene Hackman rules in this and most everything he did.
Also in the second one there's like 45 minutes of him getting kidnapped, cuffed to a bed and forced into heroin addiction and then locked up in a jail cell in withdrawal when he's given back to police. It's bananas, like sticking Panic in Needle Park into this cop movie.
That's the only scene I remember from the sequel. In real life, that must have been hell on earth.
Fun fact: the Popeye's fried chicken restaurant chain was named after Doyle and not the spinach-eating cartoon character.
Whoa, no way. I mean the character, and the first movie at least, were based on a real guy who seemed to merchandise out his life story to loads of different concerns - I learned from wikipedia there was a Popeye Doyle TV pilot made in the 80s! - so it's not crazy to think he'd hire out his name to somebody selling chicken.
i'll just think of them basing it on gene hackman.
by the way, if you live in the kitchener-waterloo area, and have not seen the old movie, MONSOON WEDDING, i've got a free screening going at the Princess Twin tomorrow night/Monday
I thought Dirty Harry's various partners always had short lifespans - Imagine being Popeye's sideman! You'd last about as long as a Higgs boson (less than a trillionth of a billionth of a second or, more precisely, 1.6 x 10-22 seconds.)
I thought Dirty Harry's various partners always had short lifespans - Imagine being Popeye's sideman! You'd last about as long as a Higgs boson (less than a trillionth of a billionth of a second or, more precisely, 1.6 x 10-22 seconds.)
To be fair, Roy Scheider makes it through the first movie. He is mysteriously absent from FCII though... Had me wondering, did Popeye get trigger happy again between the movies? Like how he unloads a full revolver into the federal agent he's supposed to be working with at the end of the first movie and kinda just keeps rolling.
Damn thinking about this further, in the second one he does say they sent him to France because he was the only one who could identify Charnier. I'm sure Roy got a look at him in the first one. Logically, he is deceased.
"Psycho 2": I think this is up there with "Terminator 2", "Before Sunset", "Death Wish 2", "The Color Of Money", "Creed" and "Goldeneye" on the list of belated sequels which improve on the originals. The director had large shoes to fill and included some twists where one of the most infamous movie villains, wanting to adjust to normal life, is a victim of circumstance.
Now THAT'S a hot take! I'm intruiged enough to re-check it. Will report back.
Started this the other day and plan on finishing it:
Ben (Gary Farmer) and The Man (Stephen Ouimette) are homeless during an icy Canadian winter. Their only hope for salvation is an unopened space heater -- still in its box -- that they share. The problem is they don't have anywhere to plug it into. They decide to trek to a shopping mall to redeem their sole possession for cash. It's a negligible sum, but the idea motivates them. What follows is a journey to the mall, in which they meet a plethora of quirky characters.
Got around to watching Blade Runner 2049 over the holidays, which made realize I hadn't seen the OG since high school. Watched that one again last night - the """definitive cut""" - and 1. it's fucking amazing; but 2. I'm not sure how this version is different from the old one? I feel like there's less of that ambiguity over Deckard being a replicant or not, but maybe my impression of that was shaded by the new film and the fact that it had been a good 20 years since I'd seen the OG. Either way, fucking fantastic and it's awesome how a movie from 1982 is just as technically amazing as one from 2017, and the OG feels way more atmospheric and alive than the new one.
Also watched Avatar 2 because I had nothing better to do, and it only reiterates my feeling that all of these VFX movies filmed with actors alone in a giant green room are mostly garbage and hopefully we'll look back on this era with all the fondness we have for something like the Michael Keaton vehicle Multiplicity.
Did you like it, ultimately? I'd say it's worth watching, especially if you also enjoyed the 82 OG.
The effects these days are so good we just take them for granted. It gives me more respect for the way they made the 82 version. In 2049 they are seamless and it's impressive. I've seen it a few times with different people and it's got better on each viewing, although I think I said at the time, Leto and the resistance both seem to want the same thing - replicants that want to live as equals and can reproduce. I suspect Leto's version would be more Aryan than humanity would like. I didn't like Leto first time around (because I don't like Leto full stop) but on repeated viewings, he and especially his henchwoman Luv were actually great as ruthless psychos and Joi was gorgeous and believable given what ChatGPT is already achieving. It's a credit to Ana de Armas that you actually feel her pain and question what format the trait of humanity could actually manifest in.
I was still left wondering how the bees are surviving with no plants, because they are struggling as it is. There are a few questions I wanted answering regarding how the world got to be like this but the official 2049 prequels (which I didn't know about before I first saw it) are pretty good:
I did enjoy 2049, although I have the same beef with Leto. From what I understand there's a 3rd film in the plans, or at least there was when they wrote this one. I thought the resistance or whatever you call it part was a bit flimsy but I imagine they planned on fleshing that out in the next installment. All the stuff with Ana de Armas was great.
I saw they made those prequel shorts, I'm curious to check those out
Saw In The Mouth of Madness for the first time. Soooo 90s and Sam Neil is fresh off Jurassic Park (and over a decade away from Possession) and really hamming it up. But the plot is also fun and intricate, so pretty watchable. Gonna re-watch Prince of Darkness next - haven't seen it since I was a teen.
She's excellent in the first "Knives Out" film where she's playing a plain-dressing care giver. She manages somehow to make you forget how gorgeous she is, that's how well she plays it.
I'm not sure how this version is different from the old one?
If you're referring to the approved by Ridley Scott version which was screened here ten years ago, the lack of voice over and head squash scene were the most noticable. When Dad and I used to go to the autograph conventions in Burbank, we met Joanna Cassidy to get a "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" signed still. She explained to us how she was called back to choreograph the glass breaking sequence to make the original less awkward looking. I just watched "2049" now. Damn good.
"Laura", "The Right Stuff", "Bananas", "Das Boot", "The Hospital", "Mirror", "Bye Bye Brasil", "Threads", "Road Games", "The Star Chamber", "Heathers", "Doctor Zhivago" and "Cabaret"
I read a big article about Robert Altman's insane attempt at satirizing the teen movie genre, O.C. and Stiggs. I loved it as a teenager and it still holds up to me. When it was made it got shelved for three years and released for one week to DOGSHIT reviews at the time, but I think it was light years ahead of every other 80s comedy. It's almost nihilistic, and every character is somehow simultaneously three dimensional but also aimless and empty in the way that as a kid I was starting to see white middle class America as. Phony, I guess you'd say, if you were into Catcher in the Rye. But yeah, the movie took aim HARD at that culture and its main characters were chaotic balls of calculating rebellion against it. While the movie's probably a failure to most people, to me, it's like a rough proof of the potential that teen movies had to go beyond like, will she get a date or will he make the football team or whatever. It's a satirical hallucination of upper middle class suburbia like you can't make in Hollywood now, and barely could even then.
I dunno, even though it's dumb and weird, it's kinda better than all the 80s teen shit that made it into the canon.
I found a copy of this last summer and had to try three times to get all the way through. The soundtrack and cameos are worth sticking it through for, but it's clunky. I watched part of an interview with Altman where he talks about being asked to do a teen comedy and how he attempted to lampoon the genre itself, but I think the studio tried to undo all of that with the cut that released.
Creepy Czech horror film with a mostly amateur cast. I think this is a relatively ubiquitous TV movie in its home country, but I went into it blind and was not disappointed.
Post 'Nam, Rambo inspired flick, where Tommy Lee Jones plays both the hero and the villain, and is somehow neither. In attempt to instill some Ghostbusters II style community spirit into NYC, Jones single-handedly fights off the NYPD and at least one Vietcong, to control the entirety of Central Park. The plot is thin at best, but it's fun.
I'm almost guaranteed to enjoy any movie set in a thinly-populated post-apocalypse, regardless of budget, but this one really stuck with me. There's a noticeable absence of some of the usual tropes and it feels a little more unhinged.
I'm 100% guaranteed to love anything Bartel/Woronov related, and though this only features Woronov in a bit part (as a favor, I think), it draws heavily from their brand of camp.
I read a big article about Robert Altman's insane attempt at satirizing the teen movie genre, O.C. and Stiggs. I loved it as a teenager and it still holds up to me. When it was made it got shelved for three years and released for one week to DOGSHIT reviews at the time, but I think it was light years ahead of every other 80s comedy. It's almost nihilistic, and every character is somehow simultaneously three dimensional but also aimless and empty in the way that as a kid I was starting to see white middle class America as. Phony, I guess you'd say, if you were into Catcher in the Rye. But yeah, the movie took aim HARD at that culture and its main characters were chaotic balls of calculating rebellion against it. While the movie's probably a failure to most people, to me, it's like a rough proof of the potential that teen movies had to go beyond like, will she get a date or will he make the football team or whatever. It's a satirical hallucination of upper middle class suburbia like you can't make in Hollywood now, and barely could even then.
I dunno, even though it's dumb and weird, it's kinda better than all the 80s teen shit that made it into the canon.
I found a copy of this last summer and had to try three times to get all the way through. The soundtrack and cameos are worth sticking it through for, but it's clunky. I watched part of an interview with Altman where he talks about being asked to do a teen comedy and how he attempted to lampoon the genre itself, but I think the studio tried to undo all of that with the cut that released.
Yeah, I mean no question it's a failure of a movie by all the normal measures. I still think it rules though, for capturing what it does.
The original issue of National Lampoon that it was based on was waaaay more mean-spirited and nihilistic, and you kind of get that this was a watering-down of a watering-down of something that would've been kind of horrific to adapt to film faithfully.
Loved this. US and A chestbeating and all, but the casting was spot-on. Blowing contest (ayo!) is a life-lesson.
I wonder what was the real purpose of having to nut into a test tube, though.
Yeah, it's a flag waver and the film took some liberties, but these guys had bigger balls than I do. For example, I am still scared of heights...the potential fall and the sudden stop at the end, that is.
Comments
There was a memorable Strut beef about Kathryn Bigelow going from this, complete with gratuitous Reagan wielding a petrol pump like a flame-thrower scene, to Abu Ghraib torture apologist.
Great film, and it’s got Gary Busey.
He's probably a reasonable dude but I was so over the Chillis at this point.
"ALREADY SEEN 'EM."
When you watch them, you feel partly the traditional cop-show propaganda motivation of wanting him to "get his man", catch the bad guys, stop the shipment of heroin to NYC and so on, mixed with marveling at him being dumb as shit, insanely reckless to the point of shooting another cop to death on accident and losing the big bad smuggler in the climax of the first movie, and getting loads more cops killed in the second too.
Like, he is not just an antihero, he's not even likable as an antihero. He sucks. I'd venture to say it's more successful than most movies in making an antihero you genuinely don't like or identify with - see the legions of idiots who think Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas were about a bunch of cool guys being cool. No one would make that mistake with Popeye Doyle.
His "loose cannon" moment in the sequel is burning down a flophouse, loads of innocent people narrowly escaping death. Like, not a "crazy but gets results" guy but just "crazy and fucks things up". They make an actual honest, non-corrupt cop character still seem like Nic Cage Bad Lieutenant.
Also in the second one there's like 45 minutes of him getting kidnapped, cuffed to a bed and forced into heroin addiction and then locked up in a jail cell in withdrawal when he's given back to police. It's bananas, like sticking Panic in Needle Park into this cop movie.
It's just an interesting mix of "will he or won't he catch this definitely bad man" and "Jesus, the bosses are all right about him, he is a terrible cop and should not be one", which I can't think of a good parallel in movies. I guess maybe McNutty from the Wire?
Anyway Gene Hackman rules in this and most everything he did.
That's the only scene I remember from the sequel. In real life, that must have been hell on earth.
Fun fact: the Popeye's fried chicken restaurant chain was named after Doyle and not the spinach-eating cartoon character.
are you serious? that's bizarre, and definitely making me want to eat there more.by the way, if you live in the kitchener-waterloo area, and have not seen the old movie, MONSOON WEDDING, i've got a free screening going at the Princess Twin tomorrow night/Monday
To be fair, Roy Scheider makes it through the first movie. He is mysteriously absent from FCII though... Had me wondering, did Popeye get trigger happy again between the movies? Like how he unloads a full revolver into the federal agent he's supposed to be working with at the end of the first movie and kinda just keeps rolling.
Damn thinking about this further, in the second one he does say they sent him to France because he was the only one who could identify Charnier. I'm sure Roy got a look at him in the first one. Logically, he is deceased.
Started this the other day and plan on finishing it:
Almost excruciating to watch, but worth it.
On Xmas day I watched a 1965 movie, award winning duh, from Japan
Kwaidan
in 4 parts, mesmerising, thought provoking, beautiful; it will live with you forever
Did you like it, ultimately? I'd say it's worth watching, especially if you also enjoyed the 82 OG.
The effects these days are so good we just take them for granted. It gives me more respect for the way they made the 82 version. In 2049 they are seamless and it's impressive. I've seen it a few times with different people and it's got better on each viewing, although I think I said at the time, Leto and the resistance both seem to want the same thing - replicants that want to live as equals and can reproduce. I suspect Leto's version would be more Aryan than humanity would like. I didn't like Leto first time around (because I don't like Leto full stop) but on repeated viewings, he and especially his henchwoman Luv were actually great as ruthless psychos and Joi was gorgeous and believable given what ChatGPT is already achieving. It's a credit to Ana de Armas that you actually feel her pain and question what format the trait of humanity could actually manifest in.
I was still left wondering how the bees are surviving with no plants, because they are struggling as it is. There are a few questions I wanted answering regarding how the world got to be like this but the official 2049 prequels (which I didn't know about before I first saw it) are pretty good:
Kwaidan is
She's excellent in the first "Knives Out" film where she's playing a plain-dressing care giver. She manages somehow to make you forget how gorgeous she is, that's how well she plays it.
If you're referring to the approved by Ridley Scott version which was screened here ten years ago, the lack of voice over and head squash scene were the most noticable. When Dad and I used to go to the autograph conventions in Burbank, we met Joanna Cassidy to get a "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" signed still. She explained to us how she was called back to choreograph the glass breaking sequence to make the original less awkward looking. I just watched "2049" now. Damn good.
I found a copy of this last summer and had to try three times to get all the way through. The soundtrack and cameos are worth sticking it through for, but it's clunky. I watched part of an interview with Altman where he talks about being asked to do a teen comedy and how he attempted to lampoon the genre itself, but I think the studio tried to undo all of that with the cut that released.
Yeah, I mean no question it's a failure of a movie by all the normal measures. I still think it rules though, for capturing what it does.
The original issue of National Lampoon that it was based on was waaaay more mean-spirited and nihilistic, and you kind of get that this was a watering-down of a watering-down of something that would've been kind of horrific to adapt to film faithfully.
Loved this. US and A chestbeating and all, but the casting was spot-on. Blowing contest (ayo!) is a life-lesson.
I wonder what was the real purpose of having to nut into a test tube, though.
Yeah, it's a flag waver and the film took some liberties, but these guys had bigger balls than I do. For example, I am still scared of heights...the potential fall and the sudden stop at the end, that is.