Best F(r)iends (Volume One)

2018 comedic thriller

Rating: 10/20 (Josh: either a 4/20 or a 10/20)

Plot: A homeless drifter befriends a mysterious mortician, and the two develop a business partnership involving the selling of gold teeth. Then, things get really confusing.

As Josh says, this is a hard one to rate. On the one hand, I don't think I've laughed this much in a movie theater in my entire life. If this is intended as a comedy, it's a complete success. The weird thing is that even with my experience appreciating bad movies, I'm still having a difficult time knowing whether I'm laughing at this movie or with this movie.

In fact, I'm not even sure it's possible to be with this movie. The plot, the characters, the little twists and turns, and the nuances are all so completely bizarre that it's hard to connect with anything that's going on. Supposedly, Sestero based this screenplay on real-life experiences with Tommy Wiseau and a road trip. It's doubtful that the experience actually involved any teeth, a mysterious ATM machine, the tragic death of an entire clown family, or creepy masks. Sestero is clearly covering up the reality in mounds of metaphor, and somebody with any background on Sestero and Wiseau's relationship--like, somebody who's read Sestero's book The Disaster Artist was adapted from--will see some parallels. The problem--and I don't want Greg Sestero to read this because I don't want to hurt his feelings--is that he's just not enough of a writer to pull this sort of art-house flick steeped in metaphor and symbolism off.

It's easy to find bad movies where the director failed at horror or failed at comedy or failed at drama. My favorite bad movies are the results of writers/directors who are absolutely full of themselves. I'm not accusing anybody who helped make this as being full of themselves, but it's clearly an attempt at an artsy, Lynchian sort of movie. And to see something like that fail so spectacularly is a unique opportunity.

Here's what I expected going into this project. I knew that Sestero had written it, and I knew he had written it with the specific purpose of giving his friend Wiseau a part that would be perfect for him. After seeing previews, I really did think it might succeed as an artsy kind of film, the kind of thing where the natural oddness of Wiseau could be used in completely unnerving ways. Josh and I both thought that with the right direction, Wiseau maybe could not be so bad. He could be a fringe character in a David Lynch movie, the kind who pops in to one scene and talks about how it's hard for him to find pants that fit because his legs are two different lengths and that there's always a frog in one of the pockets and then is never heard from again.

This shattered those expectations. Tommy Wiseau is a fucking force that is impossible to ground. You just can't control Tommy Wiseau, and if he wants to wear high-heeled boots that he can barely walk in or pretend to lick a car or improvise lines or sing random lines or mess up a line and quickly correct himself, there's just no point in stopping the guy. His character looks ridiculous, sounds ridiculous, and is ridiculous. No character like Wiseau's Harvey actually exists on this planet even though the character clearly tells another that he is from planet Earth at one point. But you know what? Before I saw The Room, I didn't know there was a person like Tommy Wiseau either. And he singlehandedly takes something that would nearly be unwatchable with an absolutely oppressive soundtrack, pretentious editing with incoherent montages, and a narrative that doesn't make a lick of sense into something that is enormously entertaining. You just can't take your eyes off the guy when he's on the screen. Every bit of dialogue. Every movement. Every scene when he gets to display his athletic prowess (in this film, it's basketball). Every flubbed line. Every exaggerated gesture. Every laugh. Just everything the guy does here is completely magical.

Is he good? No! If Sestero wanted to write him a character that would be perfect for him, he failed. He wrote him a character that Wiseau is going to play exactly like he would play every other character he gets the opportunity to play--ineptly. He clearly can't remember his lines. He doesn't understand the character's motivations. He doesn't understand how one actually interacts with another human being. He's hilariously awful! But I'm pretty sure anything else would have been a disappointment.

Sestero isn't much better. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, I thought he was a mute, and I didn't think he would have handled that nearly as well as Sally Hawkins. There are times when he and Wiseau have some chemistry, the kind of chemistry that I don't think Wiseau could have with anybody else, but there are other times when even Sestero seems befuddled by what his friend is doing in these scenes. And the other actors and actresses seem even more lost in scenes they have with Wiseau. In a way, it makes things even more uncomfortable.

There are a few nods to The Room (like that aforementioned basketball scene) in this that might have been a little too obvious. I did appreciate how weird this movie was willing to be. I mean, that clown family. A very strange trailer for Volume Two (which comes out in June) was shown after this (along with about 20 minutes of other bonus footage including a music video) that makes it seem like it might be even stranger than this first installment.

So if this is a comedy, it might be a resounding success. If it's a straight thriller, it's a laughable failure. Whatever it was, I was about as entertained as I've ever been in a movie theater. And I can't wait for Volume Two!

I got to see this with my fiend Josh.

The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians

1981 comedy adventure

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A guy tries to rescue his betrothed, an opera singer named Salsa Verde, from an evil bearded guy in a technologically-advanced castle.

It's sad that I'm eventually going to run out of movies by Oldrich Lipsky, my new favorite director, to watch. Not only is this directed by Oldrich Lipsky, my new favorite director--it's also co-written with Jiri Brdecka, who wrote some of Karel Zeman's movies, and features some "special props" from Jan Svankmajer. If this isn't right up my alley, I don't know what is! Holy smoke and gun powder!

It's a lot of fun, sort of in a Python-esque way. There's a lot of absurdist visual comedy here--blowing kisses over the phone, a ridiculous-looking surveillance device, the contraption the villain's henchman rides around in, the awakening of a storyteller who sleeps in this cloud of hair, the random singing of the protagonist that kind of serves as his superpower as he's capable of breaking things with his voice, the reversing of a rocket launch, a painting that sings when it's stabbed, guns that pop out of the henchman's chest when he bops himself on the head, a winking villain breaking the 4th wall, the marching of the comical and likely inept police, some cool animatronics ("All she is good for now is to polish silver with.), the Svankmajer "special prop" that is the professor's gadget hand, an "Up the trees!" escape from a cascade of boulders, how amused the characters are with self-opening doors, death by cello. There's just so much humor packed into this very slight story. It's a blast!

Maybe the best compliment I can give it is that it's very Czechoslovakian. 

Whimsical anachronisms, a castle design that is very elaborate with all of its working parts and eccentric details, and a story peppered with unexpected moment after unexpected moment all make this about as much fun as a comedic adventure story can be.

Bad Movie Club: The Lock In

2014 Christian found-footage horror movie

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (J.D.: 5/5; Josh: 4/5)

Rating: 3/20

Plot: A trio of teenagers discover the dangers of filthy magazines when they sneak one into a church lock-in and somehow unleash a demon.

Christian found-footage horror movie. Just let that sink in for a bit. Are you automatically expecting something really embarrassing and terrible, because if you are, I'd like to remind you of Matthew 7:1: "Judge not lest ye be judged." Because maybe you're the one who is embarrassing and terrible.

No, you'd actually be right. This is exactly what you would think a Christian found-footage horror movie about the dangers of dirty magazines would be. I'm too lazy to put any research into this, but I'm fairly positive this is funded by a Baptist church, and if you add "church-funded" to the "Christian found-footage horror movie about the dangers of dirty magazines," it makes it sound even worse, right?

What's the one thing that could automatically kill a found-footage horror film or mockumentary? Bad acting, right? Well, this is filled with bad acting from the top of the credits to the bottom with the exception of a little demon kid who pops in and doesn't have any lines. It's hard to give a performance that is bad enough to stand out in a sea of bad performances, but the kid who plays Justin in this manages to do it. He's mostly behind the camera, only adding his occasional voice to the story. It's when we finally get to see him that we understand why they chose to keep him off-screen as much as possible. He's terrible. He can't even sit and do nothing in a way that seems realistic, and when he's given other things to do--like engage in a conversation or try to expel a demon by yelling about Jesus and gesticulating wildly or nearly drowning in a baptismal--he's even worse. I was actually embarrassed for his entire family, and if he gets to the pearly gates and sees Peter pull out a dvd copy of this movie, he should probably be worried.

Attempts to ape Blair Witch are obvious here, and I thought this was going to end a little like The Blair Witch Project did. The filmmakers (Rich Praytor who directed and played, I'm guessing, the pastor and Beverly Banks who wrote and played, I'm guessing, the mother who prays for her son to keep his trap door closed in one of the most wonderful movie prayers you're likely to ever experience) fooled me though, throwing in a twist that really doesn't make much sense followed by another twist that makes even less sense and a final twist that brought on stigmata and ruined one of my favorite shirts. The film ineptly combines footage the kid is shooting with surveillance camera footage into something that was supposedly whittled down so that the elders could know what happened. I'm not sure why that was necessary since all the elders are really going to discover is. . .

Well, I can't share that. It would spoil one of the movie's twists, and I wouldn't want to do that.

"Father, help Nicky keep his trapdoor shut." I swear a line very similar to that is in this movie. What part of a male adolescent's anatomy would be the trapdoor?

As you might expect for a church-funded movie, there are some impressive special effects. We get to see an invisible demon opening a door, for example. That or somebody was able to push the handicap button without being in the shot. There's a demon-possessed trashcan that flies across a hallway. That was pretty solid. There was a window that wouldn't break no matter how hard that kid swung a chair at it. Maybe that would fall into the "great pantomime" category more than "great special effects" one. The creepy demon kid doesn't look too bad actually, but I think it was the sound effect used that helped that moment work.

Two more favorite moments:

1) An impromptu scene where the trio of boys make puppets of themselves out of cups, presumably to try to forget that all of their friends are dead and that a demon is likely to get them, too. Because that makes total sense.

2) A guy walking into the shot by mistake during the big baptismal drowning sequence.

This is on YouTube if you'd like to endure it and discover for yourself how pornography (well, dirty magazines) can get all of your friends killed and make preachers turn to selling insurance. It's the best argument I've ever seen to keep my trapdoor shut.

A Perfect Day

2016 dark comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Aid workers in war-torn Yugoslavia try to extra a large corpse from a well.

Dragica Stojkovic, the old lady who played "Cow Lady" in this, will probably never appear in another movie.

If I have to watch a war movie, I'm more likely to like it if it's a dark comedy. This really isn't a war movie although war surrounds these characters. It's more about the absurdity of trying to get a job done and how difficult it can be to find something as mundane as rope and how, even if you find your rope, it might not even matter in the end.

I enjoyed spending time with these characters played by Tim Robbins, Benicio del Toro, and especially Fedja Stukan. And of course Dragica Stojkovic who played "Cow Lady."

The Sweet Hereafter

1997 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A lawyer rolls into a town dealing with a tragedy and tries to put together a lawsuit.

This was not the feel-good movie of 1997. It might have been the feel-bad movie though.

It's a very honest look at grief and what tragedy can do to a community's past, present, and future. It grips, kind of pulls you under its spell, and gives you all these fragments that, when you put them together, adds up to a devastating complete picture. The movie's not a puzzle. You don't really have to figure out how to put pieces together or solve anything. You're really given everything you need right at the very beginning, but the storytelling still has this abstract quality that makes it more like an impressionist painting than a straight narrative. And that's appropriate since grief is one of those emotions that really can't be defined in a specific way or with any clarity.

The Dark Crystal

1982 puppet fantasy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: It doesn't really matter a whole lot.

Surprisingly, I had never seen this despite my love of Henson's work and puppet in general. I think it had a lot to do with the look of the Gelfing characters. They just don't look like puppets I would want to spend any time with. So even though a movie that is apparently the first live-action movie with no human actors should have been right up my alley, I just never bothered watching it.

It popped into my local theater, however, and that gave me the perfect opportunity to see it. I'm glad I did because of the puppet work, the impressive and elaborate set design, and the great special effects. The puppetry here is as innovative as you'd expect from something Jim Henson and company poured so much energy into, and there's a lot of stuff in this that is just stunning. With every scene change, you're in awe of just how big this particular setting is, how much movement there is on the screen at any given time, and the creative forces that went into making this variety of characters. There's a depth to the sets, and the creatures range from grotesque to strangely beautiful. Frequently, you find yourself not even seeing these things as puppets but as organic living things from some strange world. The voicework doesn't always seem all that inspired--aside from Frank Oz's Piggy-esque work--but it's a lot of fun seeing all these puppets popping up throughout this story. At one point, I turned my left and said, "This must have been like the Avatar of 1982, don't ya think?"

There wasn't anybody sitting next to me, and that's good because I hadn't showered in several days.

Like Avatar, unfortunately, the visuals are much better than the story and the characters. Essentially, this is a Lord of the Rings knock-off but with a crystal sliver taking the place of a ring. There are characters who are good and evil in ways that you'd expect them to be in a 1980's fantasy movie, maybe until the end when things get a little more blurry. The journey this Jen the Gelfing hero undertakes isn't anything that hasn't been seen countless times. It's a narrative that hits all the beats that a fantasy flick like this is supposed to hit, and if it wasn't for the spectacular puppetry and visuals, this lifeless story and characters would not be remembered today and surely not shown in a movie theater in 2018.

I have showered since watching this movie. I was starting to smell like Aughra there for a bit.

Taste of Cherry

1997 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A guy drives his truck around in search of somebody who will bury him under a tree after he commits suicide.

Roger Ebert famously despised this movie, and I can understand the arguments he makes that it's not very engaging, that it leaves too many questions unanswered about the protagonist and his motivations, and that there's a pointlessness to the deliberate pacing. I think it's a near-masterpiece that has this ability to say so many things in such simple ways. Simple shots of landscape or the meandering truck, dialogue between the suicidal guy and one other person at a time with simple camera shots by Abbas Kiarostami himself from one seat or the other in the truck, and a complete lack of flash give this a gritty and poetic tone. In a way, that matter-of-fact tone and complete lack of cinematic flair make the single moment in time that this movie focuses on that much more profound. As with all movies that give the audience this much space, Kiarostami almost forces you to consider what is happening with the protagonist and how difficult the favor he's asking of others might be.

All the ironic shots of bulldozers or other large digging and dirt-dumping machines while this poor guy can't find anybody to bury him. A soldier, a religious fellow, a taxidermist. What's the significance of those roles? Is there a sneaky humor below the surface of all the melancholy? What are we to think about the meta-rific surprise after the story's denouement?

I really liked Homayoun Ershadi in the lead role, mostly because of how flat he is. He plays this part with almost no emotion, and although that could make the whole thing very cold, especially with Kiarostami's minimalistic approach, it really does more to create this haunting mystique.

Grizzly

1976 bear movie

Rating: 8/20

Plot: It's like Jaws but with a really big bear.

Imagine Jaws, but replace the shark with an 18-foot bear and, since 18-foot bears aren't usually found in the ocean, place all the action in the woods. You've just made the movie Grizzly in your head, so congratulations, you budding genius director!  Coming just a year after Spielberg's blockbuster, this is one of the more blatant rip-offs you'll ever see. Google Damon Packard's remixed Grizzly trailer if you don't believe me which cleverly combines the visuals of the bear movie with the voiceover of the Jaws trailer. You can barely tell.

Speaking of Packard, I actually watched his "redux" of Grizzly where he humorously adds exaggerated sound effects, really juicing things up with demonic bear grunts and growls, big action movie helicopter sounds, and general thrashing; hilarious off-screen voices; footage of confused-looking extras and even himself as a clumsy auxiliary character; and lots more gore. It's unclear what the point was, but it was entertaining.

SpaceDisco One

2007 science fiction movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: I'm not really sure, and since you don't care anyway, it doesn't make sense for me to even bother.

Damon Packard is either a genius or insane or, mostly likely, a combination of both. Whatever the case, his particular brand of playful avant-garde goes a little over my head here. At about an hour long, this unauthorized sequel to both Logan's Run and 1984 is stuffed with ideas. There's stuff about technology as you might expect, the low-budget spin showing off Packard's boundless creativity and sense of humor. There's a bunch of meta stuff, scenes showing the film crew and the director, venturing into mockumentary territories at times. There's stock footage of roller rink action that Packard spices up with cheap computer graphics to give it a chaotic and beautiful sci-fi psychedelic sheen. It's possible that there are too many ideas in this thing as it's a very sloppy hour, but it's difficult not to appreciate his skills as an editor, his idiosyncratic approach, and just his enthusiasm for the material.

Love, Simon

2018 great love story

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A gay teen, who hasn't come out to anybody, befriends a mysterious gay guy at his school through email. When an annoying kid finds out, he creates some problems for Simon and his friends.

It seems that this movie is really important for some people, and that's great. I'm glad it resonates with an audience that is probably more of an intended audience than me. The movie's got a lot to love about it. The characters, though they're the types of kids with the types of friendships who could only be seen in a movie, are really easy to like. There are some really terrific moments--like a surprise dance sequence that looks like it belongs in La La Land more than a coming-of-age love story like this. A lot of the soundtrack is really good. Some characters--moms, dads, school drama club directors, Buster from Arrested Development--jump in and say just the right things at just the right moments. The movie's got an effervescence that makes it extremely watchable. There's some great humor, a lot from Tony Hale and Natasha Rothwell's vice-principal and teacher characters. "Stop pretending that trumpet is your penis. It's a rental." That might be my favorite line of the year. And I really liked the young actors, especially Nick Robinson who plays the titular character. I thought he was really good although I would have been fine with less narration.

But there are issues that really distracted me and kept me from really feeling this movie. The tagline says that "Everyone deserves a great love story." As a liberal-minded person, I completely agree with that sentiment. I'm just not totally sure this is a great love story.

At the center of the movie's problems is that the connection between the two characters doesn't feel real. Simon falls in love with the guy he's exchanging emails with, but I can't really figure out why. They have similar plights, they're both gay, and. . .well, if there's anything else revealed in those email spurts, let me know. I understand why they would connect as individuals working through nearly identical issues, but I just didn't buy them as soulmates. It was almost like Simon was desperate to fall in love with anybody--the guy blowing leaves outside his house, any of the characters he imagines could be Blue, probably anybody in that school who is not Tony Hale or female.

The unrealistic, overly-written-for characters didn't help either. You've seen these character types in countless movies before. They seem to be characters who have wandered into a 2018 movie from 80's television shows about adolescents and schools, and I don't mean that in a good way. Schools don't really look like this. Principals don't act like Tony Hale. Teachers don't talk like Nathasha Rothwell talks to students. Bullies certainly don't act like the bullies in this movie. And the kids' friendships, though I can't say it's not fun to watch, just don't feel like friendships that could really exist. It's probably true that the caricatures made the movie a little breezier or a little more vibrant, but it also hurt the story's credibility.

A huge problem for me was the story's main conflict. This might be a little spoilery, so you can skip this paragraph if you want. There's a boy who finds out about Simon's secret and screenshots his emails. He then uses those to blackmail Simon into getting something he wants. I just didn't really buy that this particular character, though he was annoying in that way an 80's television show can make a kid annoying, would go about things the way he did, and I didn't really buy any of Simon's actions because of all that.

Though I think gay teens probably deserve a better love story, this is still an entertaining enough movie. It's also probably worth checking out just because you get the added satisfaction of knowing that this is the type of thing that makes Mike Pence's blood boil. That's something.

Chickens in the Shadows

2010 musical mockumentary

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A pop duo from the late-70's called Toasters 'n' Moose reunites for a trio of shows.

This is Vincent Gargiulo's only feature-length film. He's got a bunch of shorts (including "The Muppetless Movie" which is a trailer for a fake movie that features humans playing the Muppet characters), but I'm not watching them after seeing this and "The Muppetless Movie," a trailer for a fake movie that features humans playing the Muppet characters. That and Chickens in the Shadows (no idea why the movie is called this, by the way) are funny ideas, but they never move beyond funny-idea territories. Gargiulo should probably just pitch ideas to other writers and filmmakers.

Toasters has a line in here about how something is "funny because it's unexpected and it doesn't make any sense." Gargiulo seems to assume that his movie and characters are going to be funny because there are moments when things are unexpected and don't make any sense. Unfortunately,the ideas are so poorly written and executed, and there's very little in this movie that is actually funny. The no-budget filmmaking would be excusable if the material was better, but these jokes just don't land. Terrible acting also gets in the way, ruining any chance at authenticity needed to make a mockumentary like this work at all. If the acting was better, I'm still not sure this would work because they've got nothing at all to work with. Estelle Piper, in her first role, might give the worst performance, but that might have more to do with her having the most lines. Really, they're all pretty bad at this.

I did almost enjoy the appearance of a "singing pervert" and one song with the lyrics "Taste the biscuit, taste the goodness of the biscuit" that was performed in a secondhand store. That almost sounded like a Ween outtake.

Force Majeure

2014 family drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A family of four on a skiing vacation find their relationships tested because of the response of the father during an avalanche scare.

One of my favorite things in movies is beautiful shots of inconsequential things. Ruben Ostlund's movie is filled with those. A lovely shot of snowy mountain peaks against a nighttime sky backdrop with an unidentified flying object that turns out to be a drone, a wall of shoes, ski-lift mechanisms, lots of skiing, a character disappearing in this chilling fog. Of course, some of those might not be inconsequential. But anyway, this is a beautifully shot movie, and I would contend that it's even a movie you could understand without having any dialogue. There is language, the kind you have to read at the bottom of the screen unless you happen to speak Swedish or whatever language these people are using. But is the dialogue in this really necessary? So much of this story is told through the imagery and the body language and the way these characters are shot. Most of what is going on with this married couple isn't spoken anyway, but these two can't conceal their issues because Ostlund just won't let them.

A plot synopsis might make this sound like a downer, a film all about a disintegrating marriage. Knowing that two kids are also experiencing trauma because of how their parents are acting or that a bearded pal of the father also gets sucked into the whole thing makes it seem like even more of a downer. A film that dives into an investigation of masculinity, contains a scene where characters are sharing primal screams, and showcases characters who are the "bloody victim[s] of [their] own instincts" just sounds like a hoot, doesn't it?  Force Majeure, however, is definitely a comedy. My favorite funny moments involved the patriarch of the family being called "the best looking man in the bar," the contradictory arguments (instinct vs. logic) of his friend after hearing the story about the avalanche, some hilarious whimpering, and some windshield wipers. The windshield wipers even made me laugh out loud.

Two knock-out parallel scenes: synchronous teeth-brushing, urinating, sideways glancing, and lowering of toilet seats. Those scenes show so much about this couple's feelings toward each other without a single word exchanged.

This was pretty enough and fun enough that I'd like to see it again soon. I have questions about the colors of the children's coats, why we see three out of four of the family members urinating at some point in the movie, and what smoking has to do with anything. And the irony of using the "Summer" part of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in a movie that won't make anybody think of summer. That's got to mean something, right?

Oh, I almost forgot to mention my favorite character--a nosy, wordless (as I recall, at least) janitor who kind of watches a lot of this unfold at the same time we do. He's great!

Unsane

2018 psychological thriller

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A woman is committed to a mental health facility against her will and is then terrorized by a figure from her past. Or is she?

The stupid title of this movie should have been warning enough. Unsane? That's not even a word.

After Logan Lucky and this, it's clear that Steven Soderbergh should have stayed retired. I was semi-excited for this one because Soderbergh was experimenting again and making a genre film. Maybe, I thought, Soderbergh's ideas are forcing him out of retirement. Sadly, anybody at all could have made this movie, and there are loads of other directors (Sean Baker, for instance) who could have done a much better job. This fails to thrill, the characters are as flat as you'll ever see in a psychological thriller or horror movie or whatever you want to call this, and the iPhone filming style utilized much more effectively in Tangerine adds nothing to the story or the experience.

There were lots of snickers from the crowd during this one. There might be some moments that you could call darkly comic, but for the most part, this plays out like a straight thriller. The main problem is that it just doesn't thrill. It's predictable and really dull, and I never really connected with the character or her plight. I don't think that's Claire Foy's fault although I did think her performance as our troubled and fairly unlikable protagonist was wildly uneven. It might have been partially Joshua Leonard's fault. I don't want to say much about who he plays or what his character's role in this whole thing is because it would spoil the whole thing, but there are a lot of times when the combination of his bad acting and the bad words he's given to say completely wrecked the tone that Soderbergh needed to establish. The other actors and actresses are capable although there are times when the characters almost seem to be asking, "What am I doing here again? Why does this character exist?" They're background, but they don't do much more than the gray walls to bring this setting to life.

The final 20 minutes or so reminded me of late-70's or early-80's movies, and that very well could have been what Soderbergh was going for. The blend of those older psychological thriller tones with this newfangled iPhone filming technique could have been fascinating, but neither side of that equation seems fully realized. I thought the iPhone thing could have given the filmmaker an opportunity to throw in some guerrilla-filmmaking moments or give this a more intrusive quality, but it doesn't do either of those. I also suspected Soderbergh wanted to say something about the effects of smartphones on our lives, but it doesn't seem like there's anything there either. There are some moments when the style is cable of making the audience feel like voyeurs, but for the most part, it just makes the whole thing seem very cheaply made. That's fine--I like a little grit in my movies. But other than one chaotic moment with some cool-looking double-exposure effects, I didn't feel like the style of this added anything at all. Weird camera angles, oppressive close-ups, and shots through foliage really served no purpose. One wonders if Soderbergh's justification for filming this with phones would be something as shallow as "Well, I wanted to prove that I could seem like an indie filmmaker or even a complete amateur even though I'm a well-known director who has worked with Brad Pitt."

I haven't even mentioned anything about the story. It really makes no sense, but I can't really say much about that without spoiling things. Suffice it to say that eye-rolling moments abound, especially during an ending that I think was supposed to be some kind of twist.

Evan Almighty

2007 comedy

Rating: 9/20

Plot: New congressman Evan Baxter is harassed by God until he agrees to build an ark.

I was on a family vacation where we didn't have any free time at all. On our lone day off, I was flipping through channels, and this one was just beginning. I was starving for some movie entertainment, so I watched the entire thing.

There's a lengthy ark-building montage where Steve Carell, a guy I really do like, keeps falling down, hitting his thumb with antiquated hammers, and getting slapped in the balls with boards. I'm actually not sure I'm remembering that last part right. He might not actually suffer any testicular trauma in this movie, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he did because that's the sort of rich idea the writers (Steve Oedekerk is the name, but there are four other credited writers) and Pet Detective (and Patch Adams) director Tom Shadyac seem to think is comedy gold. That's not a complaint that this gets too crude or anything because it's not that type of movie at all. In fact, I think you could probably get away with showing it in church. And who knows? Maybe Trump supporters could be fooled into thinking it was based on a true story. So it's not crude humor; it's just unimaginative, bland humor, something that Steve Carell must have been attracted to mostly because he was getting paid lots of money to do it. It's the type of idea that seems like it could probably write itself, but not in a good way. Everything is so obvious and on the nose.

That includes a superficial attempt to attach some sort of environmental or political message to the whole thing. It's like Shadyac had to make this as part of a homework assignment, finished it all quickly, and then checked the assignment details or the grading rubric the teacher had provided and noticed that he had forgotten to add a universal theme, didn't think the whole "trust God" thing was strong enough, and tacked on the environmental stuff.

The modern-day Noah story could have maybe worked in my delicate hands, but this is Tom Shadyac and 2007, so Noah needs to be louder and the special effects need to be big. Note that I described them as big there, not as good. The animal stuff works in some cases, but at times, the CGI animals look ludicrous, and bad special effects during the climax are distracting.

I'm surprised this wasn't followed by Dale Almighty, a modern-day Abraham retelling where Morgan Freeman convinces Will Ferrell to kill his own son. That would be a hoot!

After this, Bruce Almighty came on. I'm not sure why the channel decided to show them in that order. By that time, I was getting ready to leave the hotel and couldn't pay much attention, but I did watch enough to be reminded that Jim Carrey, when he wanted to, was capable of singlehandedly ruining a movie with his acting.

I'm thinking of writing my own "Almighty" movie based on the story of Onan, the Old Testament's most notorious masturbator. Paul Rudd would be perfect in that!

The only other movie I was able to watch was Les Diaboliques. I already wrote about that movie right here and have nothing to add. It's better than both Evan Almighty and Bruce Almighty. We also saw Coco last night after we got back from our trip (my wife and Abbey's first times), and I have nothing to add to my thoughts about that one either. I did cry again though.

Going Places

1974 anarchic movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A couple of pals travel around France with a couple of pairs of testicles.

I prefer The Testicles over Going Places for the title of this one. Watching the opening sequences, that former title would make you wonder if this is all about the possible damage Gerard Depardieu is doing to his testicles by running around in those ridiculously tight pants.

There's no character arc here, and the decisions this pair of protagonists--and the third traveler they spend large chunks of the film with--make are often difficult to understand. Their freeflowing romp through France feels naturalistic, and at times, it's almost poetic, at least in a grimy way. It's poetry like Ginsberg's though, typed furiously on papers taped together into a roll so that time isn't wasted removing and replacing pages. Or was that Burroughs? I'm not completely sure what we're supposed to learn from any of it and probably prefer Bertrand Blier's original ending where the characters die in a car crash. The 1940s would have preferred that ending, too.

The Testicles!

The Hurricane Heist

2018 hurricane heist movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Just read the title.

There's a moment when one of the bad guys, racing to keep distance between the big rig he's driving and the menacing CGI "eye wall" of the hurricane, pokes his head out of the window, looks up at the storm about to envelop him, and screams, "Damn you!" I think he might even have shaken a clenched fist when he did it. In my memory of watching The Hurricane Heist, he did shake that fist.

Sometimes you just want to watch something really dumb, and if you can watch something on the big screen to make it both really big and really dumb, it's even better. This satisfies although I have to admit that I was a little worried at first. The opening scene shows two young brothers watching their father get silo'd to death during a hurricane and clouds form the shape of a skull, and although I did laugh inappropriately and elicit a glance from somebody sitting in front of me, the CGI storm clouds looked pretty good. The scene drips with schmaltz, however, and my brain was already trying to write a future scene in the movie.

"And that's when that silo killed our daddy."
Or, "I 'member one storm with as much fight as this 'un--the one that killed our daddy."
Or, "Red, Omaha, hike hike! Let's avenge our daddy's death now by killing this hurricane!"

But then things got downright scientific as the boring characters start discussing an impending hurricane. I worried that this movie, which I might have seen only because the poster teased by saying it was from the creator of The Fast and the Furious, was going to take itself a little too seriously. I also worried that there was going to be a body count of zero in this because the main bad guy, a D-grade Liam Neeson, kept getting lines about how he didn't want to kill anybody. Gradually, the characters start screaming half of their lines at each other and things devolve into scenarios and action sequences that are less and less plausible. And there's plenty of violence, the implausible trio of action heroes and heroine even spattered with enough blood to make them look like they just walked off the set of an Evil Dead movie. It's ludicrous fun for the most part even though it is still guilty of taking itself a little too seriously at times.

Loving Vincent

2017 animated biopic

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Following the death of Van Gogh, a guy who delivered letters to his brother sends his son to get one last letter to Theo. That sends the son on a journey of discovery as he tries to get to the bottom of what happened to the troubled artist in his final days.

With thousands of hand-painted images swirling around my television screen, this really is beautiful to look at much of the time. I especially liked the contrast between the black and white flashback scenes and the impressionistic current day stuff, and there were some gorgeous transitions from one scene to the next. You see a lot of locales and themes that are familiar because Van Gogh immortalized them in his work--his room, a cafe, fields, even some crows. It was cool to see those moving and animated characters interacting within them. I'm not exactly sure how they animated in Van Gogh's style like this, but it was a nice tribute to the artist and appropriate way to tell his story.

Unfortunately, there's not much to that story. There's a mystery here, but I was a little bored with it. At one point, I had convinced myself that I was into the whole thing, but then I said, "Nope, I'm still a little bored." The novelty with the animation style wore off, and after a while, it felt like that style was making the story and the characters a little stiff. All the characters seemed arthritic and oddly expressionless. If that's the sacrifice that needed to be made to tell the story this way, it's probably worth it, but it didn't help create a narrative that was as engaging as it should have been.

Van Gogh himself remains enigmatic. There's nothing wrong with that, and in fact, I might prefer he remain an enigma. But this telling of his story doesn't do anything to make the enigma any more fascinating.

It's easy to appreciate the ambition and the craft and the love that went into this, and it's absolutely worth a watch for anybody even remotely interested in the artist or art in general or animation. I prefer the 1999 watercolor movie version of The Old Man and the Sea to this one although that one's only about twenty minutes. Maybe I prefer it because it's only about twenty minutes actually.

Jabberwocky

1977 fantasy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A beamish boy stumbles his way into a quest to take a manxome foe--the Jabberwocky!

Really great timing with this one. RIP, Terry Gilliam.

I'd seen this as a youngster soon after watching Brazil, Time Bandits, and Munchausen and deciding that Gilliam was probably my favorite director. Always a little more lukewarm with Monty Python, I was disappointed that this was more like Holy Grail or Life of Brian. My memories of the thing were not all that positive, but although there are still some growing pains with Gilliam's first solo work, it's entertaining enough and foreshadows some of Gilliam's later and greater work.

Gilliam's always one of those fervently creative spirits, a guy with no shortage of ideas. Here, that's not necessarily a good thing. You almost wonder if he wasn't sure that he'd get another shot to make his own feature film and decided to try to use every single idea he had. Of course, restraining a mind like Gilliam's would have been foolish because a lot of the times, even the parts of this that fail are a lot of fun. There are really great set pieces featuring hints of that fantastical but grotesque imagery that he'll later be associated with. The whole film looks grimy, and it seems like the actors must have been absolutely filthy for most of the shoot. I always thought that I had watched a bad print of this or something the first time, but the Criterion release doesn't quite get rid of all that grime. It's not a flaw though--it adds a bit of authenticity to the proceedings.

A lot of Gilliam's typically askew humor almost works here:

Palanquin pissing contests
Some of the names of these characters, especially the royalty: Olaf the Loud, Bruno the Questionable, Fishfinger
Conversations like "I ate three toes off my right foot." "That ain't your right foot." "What are you a doctor or something?"
Wad Dabney, inventor of the inverted ferkin
A knight helmet with a ridiculous dog head on top of it
A Rube Goldsberg-esque blacksmith shop destruction
A jousting tournament devolving into a shiny game of hide and seek
That guy who depeditated himself
Multiple scenes where characters urinate on other characters, the kind of thing that's always a crowd pleaser

And the monster itself? Well, Gilliam doesn't show us a monster until the exact moment when he needs to. It's impressively non-impressively, perfectly so in fact. It's a director saying, "Hey, audience! Nobody wants to give me any money for this thing, so here's a monster that might be causing the makers of The Giant Claw to roll their eyes."

The most impressive monster action is right at the beginning, before the title screen if I'm recalling correctly, and that doesn't show the monster at all. Instead, you get a little monster-cam with a thrusting and swooping camera, close-ups of the poor foolish victim's face, and quickly shifting background foliage. It's very reminiscent of the demonic attacks in the woods in Evil Dead, but this movie predates Sam Raimi's work by four years!

I wish the movie had a little more depth. Gilliam pokes fun at both royalty and religious zealots, has some interesting ideas when priests and businessmen are arguing about the possible virtues of having the monster around, and includes some dialogue near the beginning about craftsmanship vs. business that could almost serve as some sort of personal cinematic manifesto. None of the ideas are fully realized though.

All in all, it's a fun debut that doesn't vary enough from the Python stuff or come quite close enough to the peaks of Gilliam's career. Fans will find something to love here.

A Field in England

2013 mushroom movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: In the midst of a 17th Century Civil War, four men try to find a treasure in a field in England. Things get wacky.

With a unique rhythm and skimpy narrative with unclear character motivations and connections, this was tough sledding at first. Or plowing. I guess you'd plow in a field, not sled. The lovely black and white cinematography kept my interest, but it wasn't until I realized there was a sneaky sense of humor with this thing that I was able to fully invest. Slyly surreal before transforming into more wild psychotronic shenanigans, director Ben Wheatley seems to borrow from a lot of artsy oddball independent things made way before 2013 while ultimately making something that is refreshingly different.

References to human excretion, the literal unearthing of a character, violent palpitations, quirky dialogue, a quirky hypnosis, hallucinogenic drug trips. It's a strange story, but it's appropriately strange in quiet ways. It's unclear exactly what this thing is about. I suspect it's a parable, that each of the four characters represents something and that the treasure is something either very specific or not specific at all. I can't pinpoint exactly what any of those pieces might be though. I thought the performances were very good--Reece Shearsmith as the closest thing we have to a main character, an alchemist's apprentice; Ryan Pope as tough and constipated soldier Cutler; and Peter Ferdinando and Richard Glover who play characters who are either drunk or dopey or maybe both. Eventually, out pops (literally) Michael Smiley who, following a sequence where he gets all dressed up, has a grand moment where he gets himself all gussied up and strikes a pose in the dusty light. It's such a great shot.

There are lots of great shots of this field in England. I like how the characters are shot, especially when they're urinating, but the way the field is shot almost makes it something more than just land with some weeds on it. It almost becomes something living and breathing itself. This is all before things get especially wild during a sequence that contains lovely bits of black and white psychedelia. That made the warning at the beginning of this--of "flashing images" and "stroboscopic sequences"--make sense anyway. 

Tickled

2016 documentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: An investigation into the sinister world of competitive tickling.

Faithful readers might recall that I had this on my "most anticipated movie list" a couple of years ago because it's a movie about competitive endurance tickling. Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed in the finished product. A documentary about competitive endurance tickling is maybe the sort of thing that is always going to be better on paper maybe?

Part of the problem was that I didn't like the documentarian David Farrier all that much. I'm sure he's a pleasant individual, and I'm sure I'd get along great with him if he tracked me down to ask me questions about my own experiences appearing in competitive endurance tickling videos. But so much of this movie centered on his detective work here as he tried to unravel the mysterious and possibly nefarious presences lurking in the shadows of these fetish videos, and I just didn't care for his style.

That mystery itself was only somewhat gripping. I think Farrier sets us up for a big revelation that just never really comes. There's a moment later in the documentary that you get a little excited for, but when it happens, it's kind of a dud, like a firecracker that you thought would go BANG but instead just kind of sat there and looked smug. I felt like I had been strapped down on a table to be tickled before being told that the tickler had forgotten to bring his fingers.

This is one of those documentaries that would have been great fun as a 30-minute installment of a television series, the sort of thing I think Farrier does in New Zealand. Stretched into a feature-length documentary, the novelty of the idea wore off quickly and the investigation just wasn't as intriguing as Farrier wanted us to believe.

Tower

2016 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A retelling of the mass murder at the University of Texas in 1966 when a gunman started shooting people from a tower.

This might be the most vibrant narrative documentary I've seen since Man on Wire. I'm not sure if it should be as vibrant as that one since it deals with tragedy and horror instead of a whimsical Frenchman, but with an original style and structure, Keith Maitland managed to create something vibrant.

This doesn't focus on the shooter at all. I think his name was used a single time actually. Instead, it focuses on some of the victims, some of the witnesses who did nothing but observe and try to keep as safe as possible, and some people who risked their lives to either comfort or save people who have been shot. And of course the pair of cops and the deputized civilian who ended up on the tower with that gunman. Even if you would have told me what had happened to all of these characters, I think it still would have been edge-of-the-seat drama throughout. This unfolds almost in real time, telling the story chronologically except with one Donovan-aided flashback that gives a little backstory for a pair of characters. Going in, you know how many people were killed and how many were injured. You know what happens to the gunman. And you still find that you're eagerly waiting to see what happens next. It's great storytelling.

What makes it vibrant, however, is the style. Maitland uses interviews, real news bulletins from the day, pictures and video footage from 1966, and animated recreations, all mashed together into one unique documentary soup. The rotoscopic animation--sometimes mixed right in with real settings and people so that we sometimes see an animated car driving along a road with real cars--gives the whole thing an otherworldly feel. I'm not sure if that was the intent although I'm sure this whole thing had to feel otherworldly to anybody on that campus that day. My fear would be that it would almost take away from the real characters, somehow make them seem less real, but I don't think that was the case. In fact, there's one animated sequence (that flashback I mentioned up there) that nearly brought a tear to my eye because of how human it made the victims. Maybe it was just the Donovan "Colours" that does it for me.

That tower is a beautiful structure, by the way, but I can't imagine what it must symbolize for people who experienced this. It's haunting seeing it here, whether it's in modern day shots, an animated version, or from 1966 footage.

The Square

2017 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Problems escalate for the curator of a modern art museum after his wallet and cellphone are stolen.

Another 2017 look at empathy, this time while skewering the art world and all its pretensions and hypocrisies. I was surprised at two things here: 1) That the movie was so funny. 2) That the guy featured on most of the posters I'm finding of this (the shirtless one standing on a table) isn't in all that much of the movie.

I enjoyed this movie a lot, and it was the same part of my brain that enjoys The Big Lebowski. Especially with the first half, I thought it had a less-wacky Lebowski vibe. It wasn't the dialogue or all the bowling or anything especially Coen-esque. It was just a vibe, the way the story flowed. The movie's arguably too long, especially since some scenes don't really seem to impact the characters or the narrative, but I can't think of a single scene I'd want to lose. I mean, how are you going to take out that powerful and intense and darkly humorous scene with that shirtless guy on the table? Or the scene with the random chimpanzee? Or the scene where a guy with Tourette's blurts out "Show us your boobs!" and "Camel Toe!" during an interview with a pompous artist? Or the scene where the main character and a love interest are arguing over a prophylactic? Or a later scene when the two are discussing the meaning of their lovemaking beside a noisy art installation and a nosy museum guard lady? Or a scene where the main character and his partner-in-intimidation are jamming to a raucous electronic song on the way to do something dangerous, setting up a great bit of irony? Or a hilarious "Pick out the onions yourself" scene that you could almost argue is the heart of this movie?

There's great humor, but there's also a great, timely message at the center of this. In a way, it's a nice European companion to Three Billboards even though they're entirely different sorts of movies. Or maybe not entirely.

I can't compare this to any of the other Best Foreign Picture nominees because I haven't seen any of the other ones.

April and the Extraordinary World

2015 French cartoon

Rating: 14/20

Plot: In an alternate reality of 20th Century Paris, a girl looks for her missing parents and grandfather who, like a lot of scientists, have been kidnapped by lizard people.

The world-building, this imagining of a steampunk Paris with talking cats but no real technological advancements past the turn of the century, is much more impressive than the storytelling here. The story and the action get a little too goofy although I did like the characters and at least one theme that I pulled out of this.

I wish this felt a little more French. Is that a valid criticism?

A Night to Remember

1958 boat movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: It's the same as James Cameron's movie about Titanic except Kate Winslet isn't naked in it. There isn't a Kate Winslet in the movie!

You might assume that I'd be in the "No Leo = Bad Titanic Movie" camp, but it's totally not true. Sure, it might not feel like a Titanic movie without that idiot standing on the prow and screaming, "I'm king of the world!" But this movie, without the bloat of a distracting love story and framing device about some stupid necklace, is the superior film about the tragedy.

The best Titanic movie will treat the ship like a microcosm of humanity dealing with the stresses of the apocalypse. This almost does that. It hits all the beats you might expect if you've seen other Titanic movies or documentaries--the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the guy dressing up as a woman in order to have first crack at a lifeboat, the captain's lonely despair, the band playing as the ship sinks--but it keeps its head above cliched waters and manages to be very human and real. The constructed sets help that realism as there aren't many moments here where I didn't think these people were actually on the Titanic. The camera moves a little too flamboyantly to fool anybody into thinking this is documentary footage, but it's not as far off as you would imagine. The acting is good because it's natural. You understand the fears and the loves and the sacrifices of these people, and you understand the impudence of these people, their belief that they are really more powerful than icebergs, without the points being hammered into your head.

Despite how well the human stuff works in this, my favorite two moments aren't human related. One is a great shot of a rocking horse as the boat starts to tip. The rocking horse swoops toward the camera in a menacing way. I was really rooting for that horse, and I was happy to see that it was floating in a final shot right before the "The End" appeared on the screen.

The second was an obvious dummy being used in a scene where they're pulling a child out of the water. I love obvious dummies in movies as much as I love naked Kate Winslets.

The Fits

2015 movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: At a gym, a young girl transitions from spending time training for boxing to practicing with a dance team. Suddenly, the girls on the team start having seizures, and nobody knows why.

This is a thrilling debut from Anna Rose Holmer. It's also an impressive debut for the young actress at the center of the story--Royalty Hightower. Just watching her gradually--realistically and gradually--evolve as a dancer would be enough to win me over, but she's great throughout this. I loved watching the transformation of her dance-punching the most. There's a confidence to the performance, but there's also a fragility to the character that comes out in the performance. It's strong.

The direction is equally confident. Holmer is a director who knows exactly how she wants to tell her story and then tells her story exactly that way. The narrative is economical, not wasting any dialogue or shots at all. There's really not much dialogue at all in this, but the words that are used, especially in teh first half of this, really feel like they matter. Holmer isn't interested in giving all the answers here, and she's not really interested in the details of these characters outside of their experiences in the gym or community center or whatever it is. She utilizes space impressively, really knows how to shoot young Hightower, and even throws in a little magical realism at a time when it really works.

I really liked the score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. It's haunting, even more haunting because its whining ambiance doesn't always match the action.

The Door in the Floor

2004 drama

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A writer and his wife, following a tragedy, decide to separate for a while, mostly because she won't let him put in a swimming pool. A young intern comes along and starts masturbating all over the place.

This was recommended by my friend Josh. Even though it was a while ago, I'm pretty sure that he told me it was funny. It's based on a John Irving book with a hilarious-sounding title--A Widow for One Year. And it's a movie about how stories are capable of keeping not only people alive but also trauma and tragedy. Sounds like uproariously funny material, right?

The strange thing is that this does have humor. Jeff Bridges' character, more than a little full of himself, is the kind of comic character you might find in a Noah Baumbach movie. He gets to talk about his penis with a child. He gets to act like a guy who is acting like an artist. The fruits of his labors, when we finally get to see them, made me laugh out loud, by the way. He gets lines like "For a child, I imagine seeing it done doggishly must seem especially animalistic." He gets a chance to be angry, screaming "Leave it!" when his intern/driver tries to turn off a hip hop song about licking pussies and cracks that he says he loves. And he gets to wear a ridiculous floppy hat. Bridges is so good here playing this character who you kind of want to hate right from the beginning. And I'm telling you--nobody drinks like Jeff Bridges, that rapid wrist flicking tip. You know the move I'm talking about, right?

Basinger's performance is a little more one dimensional. She plays somebody who is grieving, and while I guess that's believable, I wish there was a little more going on with the character. She spends most of the movie being breathy and lifeless, occasionally tossing in some sultriness.

Four standout moments for me:

1) A mention of Air Jordans. It fits thematically, but it also feels like it could be the most inappropriate product placement in movie history.

2) A masturbation scene where the intern, after covering up children's exposed feet in a photograph of Basinger, is nearly busted.

3) A piece of Bridges' character's artwork finding its way to a windshield.

4) The final shot which may or may not involve an actual door in a floor.

A question, without getting too spoilery: Bridges makes a reference to the intern looking like one of the sons. What's the point of that? Should I have been less disturbed than I was?

A Wrinkle in Time

2018 sci-fi fantasy

Rating: 5/20

Plot: I don't feel like talking about it.

Well, there goes Oprah's chances of being president. Nothing Trump has done is more embarrassing than being in A Wrinkle in Time.

Poorly directed, aurally offensive, and frequently ugly, this is wrong on almost every level. I can't think of a movie with this kind of star power and this kind of Mickey Mouse money behind it that ended up this wrong. During some particularly painful early moments that show unrealistic school dynamics and the kind of bullying that can only happen in a big glossy movie like this, I thought, "Well, Ava DuVernay isn't nailing the human elements of this, but surely she'll get the fantasy stuff right." But when the fantasy stuff rolled in, it was clear that this was going to be a tedious and agonizing experience.

Oprah's exactly what you'd expect her to be here only more special-effecty. I like Mindy Kaling from her television work, but the character quirk they give her is obnoxious, and it doesn't seem like she's got the hang of working with so many special effects assaulting her. Reese Witherspoon, the other Mrs., is terrible. Chris Pine is OK, and Storm Reid, who plays the girl, probably has a future in this business. I wish Zach Galifianakis would find something better to do with his time. Most offensive was this Deric McCabe kid who played Charles Wallace, the little brother who for whatever reason had to be called "Charles Wallace" every single time anybody speaks to him. I don't typically feel the urge to take swings at children, but Deric McCabe almost got me there.

I'm embarrassed that I typed that, and a less honest reviewer would probably delete the whole thing and pretend it didn't happen.

Don't be fooled by previews which promise cool CGI imagery and imagination. There are moments when that's definitely in there, but it's a mere distraction from the swarming and eventually enveloping suckiness that is A Wrinkle in Time.

I saw this movie Saturday night and ended up having to call in sick both Monday and Tuesday. That can't be a coincidence.

The Corpse Grinders

1971 crappy horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A doctor and nurse, who decide that detective work is more important than their doctor and nurse work, try to find out what's behind an epidemic of feline violence.

I'm working on my masters in Bad Movies, but watching The Corpse Grinders shows how much I have to learn. It's not that it's not quality good-bad movie fun or anything. No, it's that I watched this as a continuation of my Ray Dennis Steckler Fest, but Steckler has nothing to do with it. Whoops!

This was directed by Ted V. Mikels from an Arch Hall Sr. script. Or maybe calling it a "script" would be more accurate for the guy responsible for Eegah. I'll have to check one of my Bad Movie textbooks.

Despite the lack of Steckler, I'm not disappointed that I watched this. Persistent cats, cat attacks featuring the special effect known in inner-circles as "hurling a cat at an actress," the really gross output from the grinding machine, a gravedigger who looks a little like Rupert from Survivor (who I know as the reality show contestant who ran for office here in Indiana), the gravedigger's wife who looks like she stumbled out of a John Waters' movie and who carries a doll around with her for reasons that are never explained, a laughing mortician, a deaf woman who appears to be using nothing even close to real sign language, the wooden creaking sound that accompanied the opening of an iron gate, and a doctor and nurse who can apparently leave the hospital at any time to investigate potential criminal activity and who also have books about cats at their workplace.

My favorite acting in this was from Charles Fox. I've seen all of Charles Fox's credited roles, but unfortunately that's just this and The Undertaker and His Pals. Here, he's Charles "Foxy" Fox, a decision that likely didn't help his chances of winning an Academy Award.

Toni Erdmann

2016 comedic drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: After his dog dies, a guy who really loves wearing fake teeth and a wig and playing jokes tries to reconnect with his workaholic daughter.

This could have used a shorter running time, but I liked it as a dual character study. I don't think the relationship evolves quite as realistically as it should for a movie this long, but there's one moment that's great because it's strange, one moment that's great because it's really touching and strange, and several moments that are great because they're humorous.

Peter Simonischek's performance as the dad is really good, and it does feel natural. He never does anything exceptionally wacky, and his emotions never feel as false as the teeth and wig he puts on when he's in character as Toni Erdmann. Speaking of those teeth, it's really amazing how much a set of fake chompers can completely transform the appearance of a human being.

This movie has a little to say about the guises we put on to interact with various people in our lives, but I've got a terrible cold and don't feel like putting any thought into it.

This, by the way, is being remade with Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig. I believe Will Ferrell is somehow involved, too. Although it'll be nice to give Nicholson a chance at one more great character and performance, I don't have high hopes that Hollywood will get the sentiments of this one right.

Edit: I forgot to mention my favorite scene, a rendition of a Whitney Houston song that managed to be both really silly and poignant at the same time.

Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen

2012 plundercinematic experience

Rating: 16/20

Plot: It's a love story, the same one you've seen many, many times before.

Any plot synopsis is going to make this sound like something you've seen hundreds of times. And that's because you've seen this story played out hundreds of times. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they get married, and they deal with conflicts that potentially disrupt their chances of a happy ending. I'm pretty sure, however, that that's part of the point as Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi--the guy behind Hukkle and Taxidermia, two of my favorite films from a few years ago--assembled this movie by splicing together clips of 450 or so films. Some of those are blockbusters (it begins with a shot from Avatar), some of them are Hungarian movies I've probably never heard of, and some of them are classics you'd find on any cinephile's greatest films list.

Part of the fun is just in the recognition. You see these familiar film clips featuring everybody from Chaplin to Kinski to Nicolas Cage used in completely new contexts. The film opens with that Avatar guy waking up, and then we're given variations of that same guy-waking-up theme. He shifts form and showers, shifts form and continues showering, and shifts form to shower some more. Then, he shaves and shaves and shaves. You get the idea. Eventually, the dozens of variations of this male protagonist meets the dozens of variations of the female protagonist, and hundreds of clips show their courtship and eventually marriage.

It's a movie lover's playground. The juxtapositions are frequently hilarious, and I did laugh out loud a few times at the absurdity of the whole thing. Especially revealing are how similar a lot of the shots are. It's not just what's happening; it's similar camera angles and cinematic cliches that are shown in quick succession. At the same time, it's fascinating to see how different eras, directors' styles, and technological advancements shape these moments--both the really mundane ones and the life-altering ones--differently. Not that you have much time to think about any grand statements Palfi is trying to make about the evolution of movies or human life. The cuts are quick ones, and there's just not much space to contemplate much of anything. But boy, it sure is a good time.

The visuals worked better than the audio for me. Final Cut lifts music from various films, most very recognizable snippets of score, and they're usually launched by a scene from the films they come from. So a shot of John Travolta gets "Boogie Shoes" started. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But seeing Chaplin dance to a disco hit seems like the type of idea that Palfi had that got this whole project off the ground. Palfi was probably sitting around thinking, "It would be hilarious to see Charlie Chaplin dancing to the Bee Gees," but knew just mashing those together for no reason wouldn't make sense. So plundering and juxtaposing shots from 450 movies was just the excuse he needed to make it happen.

My favorite part, as you might expect, was a wild sex scene. You know, because I'm a pervert. Honorable mention goes to a surprising appearance by Yoda. I'm not sure if it was the best choice aesthetically or artistically to include Yoda and the blue Avatar guy, but the laugh Yoda got from me certainly makes it seem like a good choice.

Highly recommended. And you can find this on YouTube although one of the uploads was without sound at all and the other didn't have subtitles for the non-English movies in there. So I had to play them both simultaneously and watch the one that had the subtitles, pausing every once in a while to try to get them better aligned.

Bad Movie Club: Overkill

1987 action movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 3/5; Fred: 2/5; J.D.: 3/5)

Rating: 4/20

Plot: A cop in LA teams up with a Japanese fellow to bring down the yakuza.

I've seen the name Ulli Lommel a few times when researching for Bad Movie Club, but this is our first dip into his filmography. The best-worst thing about this movie is the editing. I can't believe how poorly this thing was edited. There's a scene early on that makes it clear that Lommel or whoever put all this together doesn't have any idea how to tell a story visually. The hero, a guy with a mustache who apparently doesn't own any shirts, and his girlfriend are in a pool where I figured she was about to get shot and end up naked and face down in the pool like in a Neil Breen movie. And then it cuts to the two of them in a kitchen where they talk about having intercourse. The hero really seems to want to do it right there in the kitchen. And she says that they should do it in the pool instead, so it cuts to them in the pool once again. Why the hell did we need to go to the kitchen?

The jumpy editing keeps things largely incoherent throughout, but the action sequences give them some competition for the most inept thing about Overkill. Body parts are lopped off, bloody bullet wounds look incredibly fake, and lots of people fall in pools. There's a big climactic shoot-out near what I thought was the end of the movie, and I had trouble figuring out who was shooting at whom and why they were doing it. There's a random masked character who is decapitated (oh, spoiler alert), and I didn't have a clue who that was even supposed to be or what side he was on.

A dope 80's score, a shocking twist, and a touching scene involving a guy and a horse nearly save the day.

American Honey

2016 drama

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A teenager falls under Shooby Leboof's spell and joins a caravan of driftless door-to-door magazine salespeople.

The idea of this movie is a lot better than its execution. Shooby Leboof electrifies things. Early on, he seems to be having trouble keeping his finger out of his eye, but he gives his character a rhythm that I liked, and the unpredictability of the character kept things interesting. And he has a fanny pack. And if you're in to this sort of thing and enjoyed his sex scenes in Nymphomaniac, you get to see him have some movie sex in this one.

Of course, at a little under three hours, there's a good chance that you'll end up getting to see these characters do nearly everything. That's probably the main problem with American Honey--its length. I'm not sure there's enough here to justify that running time. There's not a lot of character development, and any conflicts really only simmer rather than bubble to life. The film's episodic, but there's not a lot of variety between the episodes and they have this same cadence that makes things feel redundant pretty quickly. Things picked up a bit when the main character befriends some old cowboys, but that scene is disrupted by something that doesn't make all that much sense. And then it goes back to that same tired rhythm the movie had before the cowboys showed up. There's just not a lot of substance to the whole thing, and the character arc for Star--the protagonist--doesn't feel authentic. There's such a clash between the cinema verite style and the more plastic emotional bits. . You just don't buy those aforementioned sex scenes, Star's interaction with some children, clashes with her boss, or an encounter with a turtle.

At an hour and a half, this movie might have been something that I liked a lot more. And maybe a lot of scenes where Sasha Lane just isn't very good could have been cut. There are times when I really liked her performance, but it was uneven to the point where the character didn't even make much sense. Only in the most maudlin bits of this--the plastic parts--did I really feel like I knew what was going on in Star's mind. It's an intriguing first performance though.