As much as similarly aged me had a rather huge crush on River and even a bit for young Sutherland, no. It wasn’t a horror story, it was a coming of age story.
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I enjoyed the hell out of Lawnmower Man, mostly for the way it tried to embody the hippest of new concepts, while at its core it was a throwback to the horror/scifi films of the 40s. Of course, I only paid a dollar to see it.
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With respect, your thesis was “The Shining is the only King movie.” “Only” taken to mean “the only good one.” You did not qualify it as “…the only King horror film.” They were both penned by King. They were both good. (Of course, The Shining is ultimately best, though.)
/pedant
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Man, I don’t hear from you for months, and you go pedantic on me. Sheesh. BTW, you’re missing snowpocolypse 2016 back here. Might go sledding at Vet’s tomorrow.
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oh, hi! I wasn’t being distant, I hadn’t any good feedback to give on your posts for a while. I guess returning with pedantry was a bit off, though. But I’ve been liking your posts as I came across them (assuming I liked them, which is often as memory serves.) Only the first like shows up in your feed, though. You really have to hunt through Discourse to see all the likers. I blame that.
oy. it’s going towards a (still above-freezing) “cold-snap” down here at the moment, but it’s been highs in the 60s recently down here. I actually killed the power on my heater last week since it was just running the blower fan with no heat, wasting electricity.
I miss sledding a bit. every few years we do get the opportunity, though. Have a run for me, eh?
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That I do miss. I really need to see about getting to the ski areas as they do have sledding hills just that last time I looked it was quite a bit of dollars for it. Still I will happily take the Seattle winter over moving back to the midwest.
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The snow won’t last. It was 65 F this past Saturday, and is forecast to be 50 F by this coming Sunday. 
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I watched “The Lobster” last week
It’s rated at 7.2 on imdb but the thing with this movie is that rating this movie is very tricky. At times I felt like giving it a perfect ten at other times I was thinking to myself “what the fuck is going on here”
The movie is completely 
s but it hit all sort of nerves. I am still thinking about it this week, it left quite a mark on me.
On the other hand for an overrated movie I would like to nominate The Revenant
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Totes with ya on Halloween.
Love the stuff you cited (especially Dark Star!), but have soft spots for Prince of Darkness and, believe it or not, Vampires also.
Usual disclaimer applies re. Thing being his masterpiece of course.
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Had to check it hadn’t been mentioned already but has anyone seen Coherence?
God damnit I flaked on that movie 4 or 5 times before I’d gotten through the first 10 minutes or so but once I finally hunkered down and watched the thing I really enjoyed it.
Had read lots of reviews saying it was fantastic and worthy, which is pretty much the only reason I kept going back to it. Guess you have to be in the right mood for it to ‘catch’ but when it does it leaves a mark.
Check it out. 
My only advice (other than persevering) is to go into it cold. No trailers, no reviews, no expectations. Obviously, I didn’t do this, but I wish I had.
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I love experiencing films/books/art this way. nothing else compares. I went to NYC in 2000 with a fellow art student, so we went to MoMA and the Whitney and stuff, but she had done her homework and took us to the Brooklyn Museum because the Sensation exhibit was being shown there. This was the most important exhibit on US soil at the time and I had absolutely no idea. came to it completely cold (but at a time in my life when thinking about, making, critiquing and debating art was my everyday MO.) I was lucky. it was intense.
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I loved that one as a child, but I haven’t seen it in the past 25 years or so.
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And final movie for the winter quarter. The Incredible Shrinking Man. Directed by Jack Arnold and a screenplay by Richard Matheson based on his novel The Shrinking Man. A neat little film about a guy who is exposed to a cloud of ‘radiation’ while on vacation though what exactly it is we don’t know per the film. It has been a long time since I read the story but I wanna say it was an atomic bomb in the original story. Fast forward about 6 months and after an accidental exposure to insecticide he starts shrinking but all uniformly. Science tries and fails to stop the process and it ends with a meditation on the infinite and infinitely small of God’s creation.
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny - unsurprisingly, a pretty uninspired retread of the original, minus all that film’s charm and beauty, and inexplicably in English.
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The original was nice with the cinematography and had solid acting but otherwise I felt meh about it as I had a lot of exposure to Hong Kong cinema already. I can see where the general USAin audience would be much more amazed by it though.
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I hadn’t watched a lot before, and I’m not a big Ang Lee fan, but I really liked it. After that, and then Hero and House of Flying Daggers I was pretty much done though.
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All 3 of those movies were more pretty than anything else. I liked Hero the best of that lot as it had the best story. SPL has a lot of Shaw Brothers films.
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remembered another underrated joint:
187 with Sam Jackson and a young-ish Clifton Gonzales (who now goes by Clifton Collins Jr. whom you may know as Capote’s Perry; speaking of underrated: he is.) It came on network tv last night so it was all chopped up, but I watched it anyway. I never hear anyone talk about it, though. Maybe because the protag is morally ambiguous made it confusing for regular folk? That was a huge strength, to me. All the camerawork, compositions, and colors were tight, creative, and slick; which seems like it would give it a commercial appeal but this film seems to have been buried. Which is weird, because I thought Jackson would be a draw due to having already broke out with Pulp Fiction [checks] yeah, PF was 3 years earlier. I don’t recall a lot of buzz about 187 upon release and I guess it never broke out, but the youtube comments for all the soundtrack songs seem to indicate that it really resonated with fans. Jackson’s character is a teacher and perhaps the “beleaguered teacher” trope had gotten old by '97, but most of those movies were a lot cornier; 187 isn’t an uplifting morality play about getting the disadvantaged teens to read or whatever, it was more of a psychological drama. There was clear conflict with a couple of strong antagonists making the threat of violence central, but Jackson’s character is cerebral and subdued, adding to a potboiler style.
I must again note the soundtrack, the meditative nature of it mirrored the potboiler aspect extremely well; it also happens that it’s an excellent compilation of the then-emerging 90s downtempo/trip hop style, anchored by DJ Shadow, Everything but the Girl, and two joints from Massive Attack’s Protection album.
[Also, there’s an admirable cameo by Method Man (I believe his first film role) for all us Wu fans; but the performance IMO stands on it’s own fairly well apart from any rapper/actor baggage he brings along]
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CTHD is the only Ang Lee film I’ve been really keen on. The others I’ve seen have always been at least ok, but never as good as the hype. For some reason, I find myself having trouble caring about his lead characters. Even in CTHD, I was much more involved with the secondary characters, the desert bandit and Zhang Ziyi, than Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. I was quite into The Ice Storm until I realized that he wanted me to care about these people, rather than just enjoy it as satire. Hell, in Brokeback Mountain, I was more emotionally involved with the wives than the two leads.
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