I Know Where I'm Going!

1945 romantic drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A woman tries desperately to get to an island so that she can marry a rich guy. A guy in a skirt invades her personal space, and ugly people sing loudly.

This starts whimsically, suffering from too much 1940's scoring, but it gradually turns into a wonderful love story thick with symbolism. The imagery is the real star of the show, all these silhouettes against foggy or watery backdrops. A chaotic trip in a boat where Roger Livesey smokes his pipe upside down dates things, but I loved the discombobulation and the perverse angles. Deprived of chances to see nudity both in real life or on the screen, I kept halfway expecting Wendy Hiller to disrobe and had to remind myself that I was watching a movie from 1945 and would therefore be disappointed.

Cop Car

2015 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Young runaways stumble upon a cop car and decide to take it for a spin. The sheriff tries to find it.

This feels like Coen Brothers lite, but here, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. I think what I liked best, other than the sneaky humor, is how much space it gives the story to breathe. Honestly, there's not a great deal of story here. You've got a handful of characters, all with unclear motivations, and not much happens until it all happens at once. It's a narrative that neither starts or finishes, just a collection of happenings that capture this Coen-esque off-kilter conflict that feels tragic in a way that is distinctly American. I suppose the final five minutes won't satisfy a lot of people who check this out, but I loved it.

I also loved Kevin Bacon here. There's this odd physicality to the character and combined with a pervy mustache, you just know there's something off about the character from the start. Like all the other characters, there's not really enough development to make the character really stick, but it's an antagonist who's fun to watch because it seems like Bacon's having fun playing him.

I also liked the music in this and the atmosphere created by the imagery. It felt a lot like Breaking Bad at times, especially a key scene with a windmill sound effect. The dialogue's fine when it's there, but it's the extended moments of silence where this really shines.

The Republic of Rick

2014 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Rick fights for Texas' independence.

This movie isn't funny, and its budget limitations give it an amateurish haze that makes the mockumentary format hard to believe in. I lost interest very quickly and was never able to regain it.

Thief

1981 crime drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A safecracker longs to live a normal life with a normal family.

Gritty, stylized 70's crime drama made in the early 80's. I like my heist movies that really dig into the job with visual details. Mann's camera sneaks into the dark innards of these safes, and watching Caan go to work, you're almost fooled into thinking he's not a professional actor but an actual safecracker hired to do a movie. It's a great performance because he manages to make his character an Everyman, and the movie, which is more of a character study than any actual crime story, works better because of what he does with the character.

The great Tangerine Dream provides the score, all synth and robot percussion, and it perfectly compliments all these shots of urban loneliness with those gorgeous washed-out 80's film colors that feel like home to me, a person who was a kid in the 80s.

There's a great monologue by Caan when he's talking to Tuesday Weld in a restaurant that shows off acting that is as good as you'll ever see.

Time Travel Movie Fest: Happy Accidents

2000 romantic time-travel movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Ruby, a gal who's had problems finding a nice man to sleep with, finally meets a guy who may or may not be from Dubuque who seems almost too perfect to be true. However, warning signs start popping up which suggest he's not being entirely honest. Finally, he drops a bombshell--that he's from around 400 years in the future. He's a horny future man.

No, the Time Travel Movie Fest is not happening again. What happened was I went back in time to last year when the Time Travel Movie Fest was happening, watched this movie that I couldn't find at the time, and then came back to the present to write about it. I should have time-traveled myself to a time when I was writing on this blog consistently because now I've forgotten the finer details of this movie and will have to dust off the old time machine to go back in time and have a conversation with myself about the movie right after I've seen it. And then I'll have to have sex with my own grandma while I'm at it.

I have a thing for Marisa Tomei because I'm secretly George Costanza, only not portly or bald. And my wife knows I have a thing for Marisa Tomei which is why I had to watch this in secret, too bad since she has a thing for Vincent D'Onofrio. I think he's a weird-looking guy, but she's also attracted to Lyle Lovett. And me. So I guess she's into weird-looking guys. D'Onofrio's performance as that horny future man is really wacky, like he's hopped up on amphetamines or something. He's very difficult to take seriously, those wide eyes just a little too much. Tomei is in her cuteness prime, and I was distracted during the movie because I couldn't stop thinking about how much I'd like to bite her on the butt. I think that's why I was able to ignore the plot holes and more illogical moments. Their love story is predictable and splashed with too much Hollywood, but it's never not likable and a fine addition to the genre of time-travel love stories.

This movie starts with a Tom Ze song that is just wonderful.

Fury

2014 war movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Some brave men fight some other brave men with a tank and some of the other brave men have tanks and some of them don't but they all have guns and a desire to kill one another because that's what war is all about.

War movies generally aren't my bag because like Smokey, I'm a pacifist. But I was reminded that this was supposed to be pretty good when noting that Suicide Squad director David Ayer helmed it, and I was in the mood to see Shooby LeBoof do his thing. It's a War-Is-Hell stew of a movie with all the ingredients you'd expect to see in a War-Is-Hell stew movie--brutal violence, bravado, machismo, tough talk, motherfuckers, military circle jerking, good old boys, grease, spit, blood, sweat, tears, explosions, general ugliness, shocking deaths, tense sitting around, a big score, a fair share of Jesus, weapon fetishism, wasted youth, and naturally, hellish imagery. Ayer concocts this stew and then grabs the back of his viewers' heads and shoves faces right in there, screaming, "War! Huh! Good god, y'all!"

The characters are stock characters. You've got a greenhorn, a Bible thumper, an irritable dullard, a foreign guy, and Brad Pitt's typical brand of stoicism. They get themselves filthy and then pretty much do everything anybody would expect them to. They're anti-heroes at times and scared kids at other times, and their enemies are, for the most part, completely faceless. Pitt kind of sleepwalks through the role, but LeBoof really stands out as that Bible thumper. Apparently, he didn't shower, pulled out his own tooth, and repeatedly cut his face to add some realism to the character and the character's experience. It worked because I could actually smell him through my television screen, so way to go, Shooby. I also liked Jon Bernthal's good as a character named Coon-Ass. Either he's actually good or I just wanted a reason to type Coon-Ass.

Ayer wanted a film that faithfully reconstructs the WWII experience, and I wouldn't know if he succeeded or not because I've never been in a war at all. The tank ballistics looked like Stormtrooper blaster shots to me, and the characters' language didn't feel all that authentic. But I'm far from an expert on that sort of thing. The claustrophobia of tank life and the anxiety of knowing that a tree could start shooting at you at any moment has an authenticity though. All in all, it's not a bad war movie though I'm not sure there's anything new here. I did really enjoy the closing credits, however.

By the way, imdb tells me that LeBoof became a Christian during the shooting of this movie. Here's what he had to say: "I found God during Fury. I became a Christian man, and not in a fucking bullshit way--in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page, but . . . it's a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control."

Housebound

2014 horror-comedy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A young woman is put under house arrest in the home of her mom and step-father, the former who is convinced that the house is haunted. Kylie starts to believe it might be herself and tries to solve the mystery of what's behind some of the strange occurrences at what has to be her home for eight months.

I'm actually a little impressed that this was actually so watchable despite being riddled with so many horror movie cliches and not making much sense at all. It didn't succeed as a horror movie until the revelation with the first of what seemed like about 18 different twists, and it never really worked as a comedy either. It's trying very, very hard with both of those though. I really didn't like the main character enough for this movie to overcome its flaws.

Mean Streets

1973 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Charlie wants to advance in the ranks of the mafia as he works to collect debts for his uncle, but his loyalty to a crazy friend stands in the way.

Here's a movie you should let your kids watch instead of The Angry Birds Movie. Its great performances and gritty poetry and urban fetishism is much more delightful than watching cartoon eagles urinate.

I hadn't seen this in a very long time, and I'm surprised at how similar the series of events and the relationships here are to what happens in Rounders, a movie that I've seen at least three times since the last time I watched this. Watching this in 1973, people were seeing an actor do something that I don't think was done before. De Niro's performance is so good, and it's even better because it's something that is imperfect. He doesn't hit all the notes, and for whatever reason, that makes it all better. Keitel is really great, too.

This has the feel of something very personal to Scorsese, and I love how he isn't afraid to dwell on smaller, seemingly insignificant details here. It creates this texture that I'm sure is exactly what Scorsese was going for. Great soundtrack choices, superb dialogue, perplexing relationships between the characters, and some uniquely tense scenes help him hit the bullseye again and again with this.

The Angry Birds Movie

2016 animated fecal matter

Rating: 7/20 (Buster: 20/20 [She also rated the end credits separately and gave those a 20/20]; Jen: 13/20)

Plot: Flightless birds slingshot themselves at ramshackle fortresses built by green pigs.

I hated every minute of this movie. It's vile.

There's a scene in which an eagle urinates into some water that the birds were just swimming in and drinking up, and I don't want to sound like a prude or anything, but the scene goes on for around five minutes. That's five minutes of alternating shots of a yellow stream of urine between an eagle's legs and shots of the birds with disgusted faces on their countenances. I'm not sure if that bothered me as much as some of the cheep puns though.

Did you catch that cheap pun of my own? I swear on the life of this blog that it was more clever than anything in this movie.

Avoid this, and don't let your children watch it on their own either. They might like it because they don't know any better, but there are other movies for them to see that don't have extended scenes of urinating eagles or lines like "pluck my life."

A Hologram for the King

2016 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Tom Hanks goes to the desert.

This is a strange Tom Hanks movie that likely won't appeal to many Tom Hanks fans or people who like strange cinema. It's a much more subdued follow-up to Cloud Atlas, co-directed by Tom Tykwer, but it's definitely not clean. It starts with a Hanks rendition of the Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime," and has several too-cutesy touches along the way. Hanks is his generally reliable self, a likable everyman who, as he ages, seems more willing to show us what his body looks like. There are interesting opportunities missed, an almost-touching romance, and a great, funny character played by Alexander Black. The problem is that the story is a complete mess, and it never seems like anybody involved ever had a grasp on what they wanted this to be. Is it some sort of commentary on happenings in the Middle East? Is it a comedy? Is it a dark comedy? Is it a romantic comedy? Is it about a potential business transaction? Is it about a father-daughter relationship? Is it about a guy who might have cancer? Is it a love story? In the end, it's just both too sleek and too sloppy to recommend.

Bad Movie Club: Def by Temptation

1990 splatter-filled morality movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 2/5 or 3/5; Tami: no rating ["I am not sure how I feel about tonight's movie."]

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Some sort of demon woman known to slobber, fart, gag, and shit is killing off horny men, and she's got her eyes on a young preacher man.

Writer/Director/Star James Bond III dedicated this to his father and grandfather, who I'm going to guess were named James Bond II and James Bond respectively. His message to them? "I'm the last one now." For whatever reason, that made me laugh.

This was also the last (and only) movie that James Bond III wrote or directed although he did act in some other things. Or, more likely, "act" in some other things. The tone of this is what makes it kind of unique. It's very clearly made as a way to push religious values, but at the same time, there's a lot of cussing, some sex and nudity, and some graphic violence including a scene where a guy gets eaten by a television that has a papier-mache Ronald Reagan poised behind it. If you're a liberal who can watch that scene without having nightmares for a week, then you can survive this whole Trump thing.

And yes, as promised on the poster up there, Samuel L. Jackson is in this movie. So now you Samuel L. Jackson completists have to check this one out. Take that!

Things become dull and predictable for the first two-thirds of this, but get wacky in the final 25 minutes or so with that aforementioned death, some terrible and gross special effects, a surreal scene in a bar, and a grandmother whose wet dreams involve her grandson. The grandmother was played by Minnie Gentry who gave my favorite performance of the movie, and she'd go on to play an elderly woman in the Bad Lieutenant where Keitel shows his junk.

The best reason to check this out is probably to fill out your repertoire of pick-up lines, including gems like "I'm on a first-name basis with pussy, know what I'm sayin'?" That's guaranteed to work every single time.

Knight of Cups

2015 impressionist drama

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A guy wanders around Los Angeles and Las Vegas in search of love.

Terrence Malick has lost his fucking mind. There's part of me that really wants to appreciate what is happening here with Malick's visual storytelling, the poetic drama, and the impressionistic portrait of a lost soul. Visually, the movie is simply stunning, and I'd have trouble arguing with somebody who wanted to tell me that this is the product of a virtuosic visionary at work.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't add up to anything, and after the barrage of images for twenty minutes or so, you start to realize that most of the pretty pictures don't even really matter. The acting is almost universally stilted, like Bale and company are trying to convince everybody that they belong in an artsy-fartsy movie like this. The Tarot card references zip right over my head and, I'd reckon, the heads of most people. Yet the point of the movie seems easy to grasp, and after spending a little bit of time with this completely unlikable character played by a semi-unlikable actor, you get it just fine and start to feel exhausted as Malick wants you to get it even more. Overlong, exceptionally dry, and about as fartsy as a movie can be, this was about as unpleasant as a movie can be. It really had the feel of a two-hour commercial for perfume or something, the kind with a voice over whispering the name of the product over and over while actors and actresses appear bemused.

A major disappointment, especially since The Tree of Life, a movie with a similar style, was so good. I didn't see To the Wonder, but this makes me wonder whether Malick should go back to his one-movie-a-decade schedule.

The Witch

2016 supernatural horror movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A family in 17th Century New England has ninety-nine problems, and a witch is one.

"Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?"

At the point in the movie where that butter line is uttered, I actually thought to myself, "Wait a second. Have I missed that this is actually a comedy?"

It's really not though. It's a creepy horror movie that is less effectively when it's overtly horrifying and much better when it's just kind of getting under your skin. It unfurls in surprising and shocking ways without ever seeming cheap. No, I'm not sure if the thing makes a lick of sense, but the surreal shades (raven breastfeeding, an expelled apple) give the movie a unique flavor. It's all pretty to look at, but it's also unsettling and builds to a very memorable final fifteen minutes or so.

Sleuth

1972 battle of wits

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A rich guy and a poor guy engage in an elaborate pissing contest.

I haven't seen the remake of this from 2007 with Jude Law and, well, Michael Caine, but I can't imagine it's nearly as good as the original. This movie is just so well written, biting dark comedy at the fringes and some great irony, and the two leads--the only two performers in the movie, are stellar. It's a slowly-unfolding cat and mouse game that has you on the edge of your seat even if you already know how it's all going to wind up. I never made the connection, but this was written by Anthony Shaffer, the same guy who wrote the screenplay for The Wicker Man.

The Last Wave

1977 mystery

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A lawyer takes a homicide case involving some Aborigines and beings having mysterious apocalyptic dreams.

This entices with creepy vibes, visually and sonically. It's dense, perhaps even impenetrable, as references to dream worlds and other dimensions are foreign to most people.