Current Music: "The Redeadening" Soundtrack
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It's an open-ended ticket, for world travel. You leave for Greece on Monday, after that, it's all up to you.
Okay, finally posting today. I need to play catchup badly, and while the move - and all the housecleaning required at my new address - is a great excuse for not posting in so long, I'm kind of embarrassed. Fortunately, I haven't seen that many movies since then.
UConn won the Big East Tournament last night. Duke lost the ACC Tourney today. Life is good.
Awwwwwwww, kid, why the long face?
I saw an ad for Fox's 'The Swan.' Run for the hills.
AFTER HOURS (1985) - d. Martin Scorsese
I love this movie. Weird that it ended up on HBO 37 this weekend when I just dissed the Grif-meister. It's sad that Scorsese completely lost his sense of humor and humility. If only he'd gone down this path instead of the one which lead to 'Kundun.'
'What could have come over me?'
'Lack of discipline.'
Why isn't this on DVD?
NIGHT OF THE CREEPS - d. Fred Dekker
Someday, there'll be a full-time horror channel. There's probably already one toiling away in obscurity, not yet touched by the gods at Time Warner or Comcast, but I think it's safe to assume that it sucks. Word on the street is that there's a major one in the works. In a perfect world, it would be a movie channel, rather than something like Sci-Fi (which, honestly, I'm glad sucks), and they would have a series on SFX. In a perfect world, it wouldn't be a total lame-ass gothfest and/or cater solely to guys who can't get laid. Until that point, horror is kind of hit or miss on cable, but when it rains, it pours.
I've wanted to see this movie forever. Fred Dekker is the 'Savage' Steve Holland of light horror. He wrote 'House,' he directed 'Monster Squad' (and 'Robocop 3') and made one of my favorite 'Tales from the Crypt' episodes (aka a 'Tales from the Crypt' episode I actually remember). This was his first directing gig, and was something of an El Dorado for me, because you can't find it on video or DVD. Watching it, I realized I'd seen it before, probably on video when I was a kid. All I remembered were the space leeches, but the rest of the movie doesn't disappoint.
The plot doesn't exist, there might be two genuine scares, but the movie's fun, the effects are good, the humor's there, and it features, among other things, Rusty from 'European Vacation,' a super-young David Paymer, space leeches, and a kid on crutches as one of the leads. The girl in the movie, her last name's Cronenberg, and while I'm not sure I caught it right, I think they all attend Corman University.
Now that's what I'm talking about.
THE BELIEVERS (1987) - d. John Schlesinger
It's a good night on cable when you get 'Return of the Living Dead' and 'The Believers' in a back-to-back on Flix. That was last night. I didn't catch 'Return' because I was busy watching the Huskies, but this one, which I've probably seen four times now, I had to watch.
Nothing stands between me and my voodoo; it's one of my favorite horror subgenres - mostly because of the multi-cultural element it injects into long-exhausted tropes. 'Serpent and the Rainbow' may be deeply flawed, but it's still way cool and, for my money, 'I Walked With a Zombie' is a better Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton talkie than 'Cat People.' I really liked this movie when I was younger, probably because it tries to explore a clash of cultures and at least tries to be a 'smart' horror film.
We all do stupid things when we're young. Thinking that this movie was good is up there.
For about 16 years, John Schlesinger was one of the greatest - and, to this day, most underrated - filmmakers on earth. In the 60s, he stood at the vanguard of the New British cinema, surpassing his peers - Lester, Loach, Losey and others whose names start with L - with an unbelievable command over complex characters and the storytelling craft. His early period English films - 'Far From The Madding Crowd,' 'Darling,' and 'Billy Liar' - were great and he then went to Hollywood and made some wildly successful studio features. He wasn't the world's most prolific director, but 'Midnight Cowboy' might be the best film of the counter-culture epoch, and 'Marathon Man' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' - two films wildly divergent in style - are also among the best the 70s cinema had to offer. After 'Marathon Man,' he wasn't quite done, but 'Cold Comfort Farm' and the slight-but-fun 'Pacific Heights' are the best he could muster. For the most part, everything after 'Marathon Man' was a train wreck, and he really hit the beach with his teeth on his final film, Madonna's 'The Next Best Thing,' which I haven't seen but am utterly convinced sucks beyond belief. Then he died.
The 80s for Schlesinger were a lot like the 80s for Hal Ashby. I have no idea if there were drugs involved, but you could be forgiven for thinking that he was spending too much time on the point earning money for rock. He had one near-miss, 'The Falcon and the Snowman,' which is somehow less than the sum of its parts, but basically he just kept going from failure to failure. Now that I've seen it again, there are some strong spots, but 'The Believers' belongs in the same gutter with the majority of his post-'Marathon' work.
The shittiest thing about this movie is how easy it is to see the good stuff in it. It does a damn good job of being more than a genre movie for the first hour or so. It treats Santaria beliefs with more respect and curiosity then you'd ever expect from a studio film. It casts Latino actors who aren't Edward James Olmos or Raul Julia - I'm thinking of Raúl Dávila, Jimmy Smits (right after 'LA Law' started) and Carla Pinza - even though it's a socially conscious Latino-centric film from the 1980s. The Voodoo priest guy is really scary. The Voodoo priest guy has a really nice suit. A lot of the scares are genuine, and they're earned because the characters and their plight are rooted in believable emotions. By the way, is Martin Sheen ever not-good? Is talent something which skips a generation in the Estevez family?
A side note - New York is, most of the time, the dullest possible 'exciting' location for a movie. That's not the case here. New York feels more like a living, breathing city in this one than 99% of other New York-centric studio movies. Unless you've lived there, it may be hard to understand how important that is, but it matters. It matters a lot. I'm of the opinion that NYC really hit its peak in the 1980s - when it actually was the center of the universe - and it's too bad there isn't a broader/deeper/high quality celluloid record of the era.
On the downside, the movie takes forever to get going. Even though it starts with the most fantastic spilled-milk-meets-coffee-maker-on-the-fritz scene in cinema history, there's almost nothing going on for the first hour or so (the downside of trying to be more than a genre movie), just ugly yuppie angst and romance. Then Harris Yulin shows up and starts sacrificing children and you start wondering if you wouldn't rather just opt for lethal injection. A note to all directors out there: No one wants to see movies about secret cults of rich people. Great filmmakers have gone down this pat ('Eyes Wide Shut'), as have not-so-great ones - see Rob Cohen's masterpiece, 'The Skulls' - but that shit never works. Never.
Anyhow, you take the good, you take the bad, and you got a movie that sucks. Boring and sucky. We miss you, John, we just don't miss your misfires.
WISHCRAFT (2002) - d. Danny Graves
I wish I hadn't seen this. The main character is seriously named Brett Bumpers. I'm ashamed of myself, but I am proud of Meatloaf. So proud.
I need more art in my life.
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