I saw Dancer in the Dark. I’ve never been able to look at David Morse the same again.
I don’t ever need to see that movie again.
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The Pee Wee’s Big Holiday thread is closed so I have to thank @jlw for posting up the positive review. When my sister came to town with her 18 year old exchange student, this worked out to be the PERFECT movie at the end of a night for our family.
We all want switchblades with our names on them now.
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I sort of knew what to expect having seen Von Trier’s prior film Breaking The Waves; and since Bjork was in it, Urb electronic music magazine ran a review that said they’d never been to a film where literally everyone in the theater was crying. Both great films but you’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there to watch 'em.
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Lars von Trier, the director, is known for making films one can only watch once. lol…
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The DVD for My Favorite Year came with a Richard Benjamin narration voiceover that is the second-most-worthwhile voiceover in DVD-dom (the first being Werner Herzog’s for Incident at Loch Ness)
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I don’t usually fool with voice-overs, so I don’t know from most-worthwhile. but I do know from funny, and after stumbling upon the cast’s voice-over on the Anchorman DVD, I can attest that it is actually as hilarious as the film itself, start-to-finish. assuming you’re into that type of humor, it simply can’t be missed.
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The new post reminded me…
Recent viewings
New Police Story: Directed Benny Chan and Jackie Chan was looking a bit like he was too old for this shit but is still a good fun if formulaic movie. The stunts and fight choreography is amazing as expected. The end credits showing the goofs do not look so painful as it becomes obvious they are making good use of modern techniques to remove the safety lines for some of what would otherwise be quite dangerous stunts.
Seven Warriors: Directed by Sammo Hung with a cast of late 80s hong kong stable action actors. A Seven Samurai taking place 1920’s warlord controlled China. A cool synth soundtrack that both works a bit and feels so 1980s but also is totally sounding incongruent with the period of the movie.
The Whisperer In Darkness: From the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. They did as good a job with this one as they did with The Call Of Cthulhu. Since this one takes place in 1931 it was done as a talkie.
A good adaptation of the story and a very competently produced and acted film for a truly independently made film.
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I think I’m just too old for Anchorman, I couldn’t watch the whole thing.
I play the voiceover if I find the movie interesting enough that I want to get more information about it. In the case of Favorite Year, it was Benjamin’s first film as director and a labor of love, and that really comes through in the narration. In the case of Loch Ness as I recall there were two voiceovers, the official one by Penn treating it as a serious documentary, and a hidden one by Herzog and possibly Penn with lots of behind-the-scenes information told in classic Herzog fashion. I had to listen to those because in their absence the movie left me with a whole “what the hell did I just watch?” feeling.
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Forgot to review Dheepan.
Go and see Dheepan.
If I was to find anything wrong with it, I would probably liked to have seen a little more development of the secondary characters, the focus was on the main two and sort of pushed out the others where there could have been some interesting interplay. However, the pacing, the depth of inference, the way in which very subtle yet complex narratives are evoked from the main theme, all very captivating.
A believable and human film which explores some difficult and complex emotionality.
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http://jtnimoy.com/blogs/projects/14881671
Underrated
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Spring schlock is upon me.
First film this quarter was The Equinox …A Journey Into The Supernatural. The non sexed up original version of Equinox.
Ahh teeagers? early 20somethings? The wilds of southern california, a missing professor, a strange book, strange men in caves ranting about demons… what could possibly go wrong?
No this isn’t a good film but it had a solid enough story and script and actually is not at all bad for something that is the project of 3 15 year old kids.
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And I got distracted thursday evening…
Anyway Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark. A couple inherits a nice big house and get warned to leave well enough alone about the fireplace in the what was locked up den.
Anyway the wife opens it up and lets out some gremlin things that are after her. Well acted and paced with Kim Darby, Jim (Tim’s dad) Hutton, William Demarest doing his standard cranky old man role and Felix (cousin Itt) Silla as one of the creatures.
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sigh… Why do they never heed the warning? So many problems would be solved if people just heeded the warnings.
Anyway, in the category of overrated: on the strength of good reviews, I watched 3:10 to Yuma (recent version), and apparently you can have people behaving in the most face palmingly unrealistic ways but as long as the lead actors give good performances critics will still give good reviews. Bale and Crowe were indeed good, but that doesn’t make my brain turn off.
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And this week Synanon a movie about dope junkies trying to get clean. Chuck Connors, Edmund O’Brien, Eartha Kitt and a lot of good character actors including Richard Evans who showed up (he lives in the area) to talk about the film and other Hollywood stories.
A decent film shot at the actual Synanon house even if everyone looked way to good to be ex-junkies.
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Can we do TV?
I just watched the first episode of No Heroics. It was quite funny.
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And this week Man Beast directed by Jerry ‘Wild World Of Batwoman’ Warren.
A young lass and her whiny beau are off to the California Mountains Himalayas to find her brother. They just missed him and none of the natives will take them up the mountain because of the Yeti. Enter another American who says if they leave right away they should be able to catch up. Well they catch up and it turns out the weirdo guide for the group they meet up with is half yeti and wants women to breed more like him… or something.
Anyway it was better than Invasion Of The Star Creatures.
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Asa Maynor, the heroine, was William Shatner’s stewardess in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.
Make up your own joke about working with near-humans.
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I loved “The Wild Wild World of Batwoman.” She looked like someone’s great aunt going to a swingers party. http://prolog.rs/upload/article/2882_The%20Wild%20World%20Of%20Batwoman%20(1966).jpg
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And the last movie till summer funtime session.
Horror Hotel aka City Of The Dead. A young and beautiful witchcraft student was a really good grade from her teacher Christoper Lee so she goes off to small town MA where a witch was burned in the past to do research. Well the witch is still alive and needs a sacrifice every year, oops. Well the boyfriend and brother come looking and mess things up for the 2nd sacrifice a few days later.
Not bad but also not good. It does have some good use of the black and white film and fog to set a mood.
ETA youtube link… even better archive.org link.
https://archive.org/details/Horror_Hotel
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I always thought the hype around Tarantino was a little overblown, but I like his movies. The thing that I realized is that for all the blood and guts, what he excels at and what I watch his movies for is dialogue. I think he writes very compelling dialogue, in part because it’s realistic. So often people don’t talk the way they do in the movies. With Tarantino, it’s not that people talk exactly like that, but there’s more verisimilitude to actual human conversation. I can absolutely imagine myself overhearing a Tarantino conversation at a Starbucks:
“Oh let me get you a chair.”
“No no, I go this one thanks.”
“Now where were we…”
“Fishsticks. Why is it adults don’t eat fishsticks? I mean we’ll eat chicken nuggets but as soon as you get out of elementary school it’s like they no longer exist.” Shifts his bomb vest under his suit.
He also uses it effectively in pacing. For some reason, I like listening to people wax a little about the mundane before talking about how they’re going to kill somone, there’s a sort of attention to detail in Tarantino dialogue that I really… just like. I can’t quite account for it.
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