Everything Is Terrible! Presents: The Great Satan

2017 Satan movie

Rating: 14/20 (Josh: I forgot to ask him.)

Plot: Satan.

The Everything Is Terrible! folk rolled into town to collect some Jerry Maguire video cassettes and show off their latest construction made from thousands of recontextualized snippets of 80's VHS wonders. This one, as you could probably guess from the title, focuses on Satan, and it's a irreverent blast. Nothing is sacred as the crew have waded through hours and hours of cheapo children's ministry shows, B-movies, instructional videos, and various other cheesy offerings to lovingly piece together something that manages to poke fun at religion, albeit in a way that really isn't all that offensive, and Satan himself despite that "great" in the title. The Everything Is Terrible! people are so good at finding connections, exploiting motifs, and juxtaposing these bits to get laughs. Fans will recognize some repeats (Hi, Duane!), and there are plenty of "Why the fuck does this even exist?" moments among the mayhem. Connoisseurs of bad movies might also recognize some familiar faces (Hi, John De Heart!). I liked this most when the snippets were really obscure, but of course Tom Cruise had to find his way in here, and there's not way I can criticize the use of Chucky Cheese.

If you enjoy the work of this collective of found footage horders, you're going to like this, too.

The show also featured some costumed skits that were probably a little too silly, and the whole thing ended with forced audience dance participation. Luckily, Josh and I were sitting in the back row.

Searching

2018 computer screen movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A guy's daughter is missing, so he looks for her. Grace, from the Will and Grace show, also helps out.

A mystery flick with this many twists and turns likely shouldn't be this boring, but once the novelty of watching an entire movie's plot unfold on a computer screen wears off, which happens about as early as you would probably expect, this offers very little. Facebook exploration, Facetime chats, Facetweeting, Facegram. It's as if the writers were more concerned with including every single form of computer communication available instead of having an interesting plot. Watching a big screen that is displaying the activities on a tinier screen isn't something that I found especially gripping anyway. It was kind of like watching those old Google commercials where you'd see a series of searches that ended up telling a tear-jerking narrative except extended to a little over an hour and a half. Take away the semi-original idea, and you've got a very weak story. The acting hurts things, too. Searching isn't a found-footage movie, but it suffers in the same way those do when less-than-stellar acting gets in the way of the authenticity.

Millennium Actress

2001 cartoon

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A couple of documentary filmmakers interview an aging actress.

Interesting ideas, but I didn't like this as much as I liked the other two Satoshi Kon movies I've seen. Maybe it was the cheap-looking animation. Maybe it was the redundancy. Maybe it was an uninspiring central character--the titular actress--and unrealistic romantic feelings. I did like how this so effortless bounced between movie imagery and real life and reality and fantasy.

Little Murders

1971 black comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: No.

This is the type of fun and subversive dark comedy that could only be made in the seventies.

There are some terrific performances here, and they all seem to get their chance at some outrageous monologue. Doris Roberts and John Randolph play Elliott Gould's parents and are both great. Gould's great, too, and so is his love interest played by Marcia Rudd. Donald Sutherland comes in and blows the doors off the joint as he officiates a wedding, but then director Alan Arkin comes in for about five minutes of baffling screen time and delivered this ultra-eccentric character who just about made me wet myself. Blackouts, random shootings, obscene phone calls. I'm not really sure what it adds up to now, and I'm not sure what it would have added up to in 1971, but I dug it.

Juliet, Naked

2018 romantic comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The girlfriend of a college professor obsessed with a retired and reclusive singer/songwriter begins exchanging emails with that singer/songwriter.

Hearing Ethan Hawke perform "Waterloo Sunset" was pretty special, but that might be a spoiler. I should confess that I only went to see this to hear Hawke singing what I'm assuming will be the Oscar winner for best original song, a lovely tune called "Sunday Never Comes" by none other than Robyn Hitchcock. The other songs aren't bad, but I kind of wished they had all been written by Robyn Hitchcock.

This got a ton of laughs in the theater, some of them deserved. It's really charming, and Chris O'Down was very funny. Hawke's playing a much different character than he did in First Reformed. This one almost seems a little too easy for him. There are dimensions, but they're the kinds of dimensions you would expect to see in a movie from the 1990s. Rose Byrne's as cute as a button, and there's a kid played by Azhy Robertson who is really good.

Frustrating details aside, I really liked what this has to say about the unknown contexts of works of art and the different meanings a work of art might have for the artist and the audience. I'm not sure this movie's trying to say anything all that profound, and it works as a simple story of redemption and second chances.

Oscar award winning songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. That sounds great!

The Devils

1971 religious movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A priest and the city he tries to protect run into trouble when a hunchbacked nun falls in love with him.

"Take away my hump!"

Vanessa Redgrave is so awesome in this, impossibly bent and laughing like a female Nicolas Cage. Unhinged looks good on her. There's something terrifying this character's insanity.

There's something terrifying about the movie's insanity actually. It's unhinged, but unhinged looks good on it. It beings with this elaborate staged dance number before launching into this stream of skeletons on spinning wheels (speaking of them--that's some final shot, no?), hunchbacked dream sequences, giggling doctors with hornets, alligator/sword fights, crucifixion fantasies, protestant shootings, nun masturbation, exorcism enemas, odd character choreography. It's a barrage of imagery that would make Mike Pence blush. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my favorite kind of imagery.

Actually, that's all I want in life now. I want to watch the orgy/possession sequence with Mike Pence.

American Graffiti

1973 blast of nostalgia

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Four guys spend a night cruising as they contemplate their futures.

I'm not sure why I avoided this for so long. As a blast of nostalgia featuring kids nocturnally cruising these idyllic small town streets looking for smooches, booze, or just a good old time with a backdrop of over forty rock 'n' roll hits, this is almost exactly what I thought it would be and just as good as I thought it would be. I can't remember a movie meeting my exact expectations this closely actually. And I can't remember watching a movie for the first time and almost being fooled into thinking it was a second or third time. Maybe that's why I never got around to seeing the movie. It was already somewhere in my subconscious or something.

You could accuse George Lucas of leaning too heavily on nostalgia in this ode to late childhood. Indeed, he lays it on pretty thickly. But I like the more subtle aspects of this so much. Without explicitly stating anything about regrets, fears, dreams, fears of your dreams, lost loves, lost lusts, and American ideals, the movie says a lot about those and a whole time capsule full of other things. At the same time, Lucas never really specifically addresses the time period immediately following the events in these kids' lives--the assassinations, the racial tensions, the Vietnam war--but it would have been impossible not to think about in 1973 when this movie came out, and it's clearly juxtaposed with all of this technicolor nighttime fun with these smiling kids and their smiling butt cheeks and their colorful hot rods and their hamburgers and Wolfman Jack howling at them like an ornery Jiminy Cricket, the voice of their conscience that they don't have any reason to really listen to because he might just be a recording from some distant land anyway. These kids aren't aware of the rest of this decade or of the rest of their lives or of the fact that Mel's Diner is very likely going to be torn down by the end of the decade and replaced with a generic Burger Chef that doesn't even have a single roller-skating waitress. And it's that lack of awareness, a little slice of dramatic irony in this blast of nostalgia, that almost makes this more of a tragedy than most people would imagine.

Words appearing right before the credits at the end let us know all about these boys' futures, but Lucas should have known that any sort of epilogue was unnecessary. Their future and our past exists without any of that.

I enjoyed the wide-eyed cast here. Young Richard Dreyfuss reminds me so much of Paul Rudd here. Ron Howard and Cindy Williams remind me a lot of Ron Howard and Cindy Williams. Charles Martin Smith had a bit of a Rick Moranis thing going that made his character really appealing, and he got most of the funniest moments. Paul Le Mat (translation: Paul of the Mat) doesn't give a great performance, but he has this great mix of tough guy and tortured soul that makes him seem like he's straight from an S.E. Hinton book. And I'm a sucker for all Three's Company connections, so it was great seeing Suzanne Somers as the haunting gorgeous blonde in the white car whom Paul Rudd pursues for the better part of the night. Oh, and then there's Harrison Ford in a cowboy hat.

You have to pay close attention, but Lucas has some really boss things with his camera in this, too. Some of these shots, if this had the amount of fanboys as the Star Wars movies, would have a chance to be almost as iconic.

Eat The Document

1972 collection of home movies

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Bob Dylan tours England with the Hawks in 1966.

With Tarantula, Bob Dylan proved he couldn't really write a novel that would appeal to any sort of audience. And with Eat The Document, he proves his skills as a director are just about as good. This is more like a collection of home videos edited together (poorly) than an actual documentary. It's choppy and nearly incomprehensible, adding nothing at all to D.A. Pennebaker's great Don't Look Back. Dylan and his pals come across like drugged-out douche bags in this mess, and if that was Dylan's point as he put this all together--the one big idea he wanted everybody to know--then I guess he succeeded. Conversations that I didn't really care about were cut off without warning. Songs that I might have cared to hear were similarly abridged. The movie might capture the chaos of a tour like this, but more than that, it just seems to be something pieced together by somebody who doesn't really give a fuck.

Johnny Cash and John Lennon both make appearances. The former is in a nice moment where the two are seated at a piano and singing a song together. Lennon is only in a snippet and represents a completely wasted opportunity. They're in the back of a car. Lennon seems to want to show off a bit for the camera but has nobody to bounce anything off of since Dylan can do nothing but fight through some sort of sickness or, more likely, a hangover. There's no rapport at all between the two before that scene, like all the other ones, just ends without really proving it had any reason to be there at all.

This can be avoided even by Dylan fans.

Goodbye Uncle Tom

1971 time-travel mockumentary

Rating: 9/20

Plot: A pair of time-traveling documentary makers go back in time to investigate how Americans treated their slaves in the 19th Century. Spoiler: It wasn't very good.

"Thanks for closing your blind eye to a few transgressions I'm planning for tonight." That's the prayer of a slave owner as he's preparing for an evening of forced deflowering. That display of hypocrisy is probably the lone moment in this "shockumentary" that I thought was clever although the time-travel premise was an interesting idea.

This is a really ugly movie, probably appropriate since it's a well-researched and realistic look at a really ugly period in American history. There's a part of me who thinks it's probably not supposed to be entertaining at all. Another part, however, thinks they trying to make something that will be perversely and exploitatively entertaining. The set pieces are elaborate and grand, much more than you'd expect something with this much low-budget grime. But the filmmakers don't seem to know when to stop, and there are sequences that seem endless. I'd give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and say that that's all part of some scheme, but I just don't see evidence that there's anything nuanced about this whole thing. Dopey music adds to this tacky tone. Shocking nudity, shocking violence, shocking humiliations. It adds up to something that sickens, but I had trouble understanding if I was supposed to be sickened by the history or by the filmmaking. Maybe it's both.

Attempts to implicate the audience in this whole thing also offended me. At the halfway point in the movie, it was almost like the director was telling me to go ahead and shut the movie off. I almost did, but I would have felt guilty about checking this off a list that I'm trying to complete.

I did almost like the ending with an angry black man reading Nat Turner quotes popping a poor white kid's beach ball. I have a hunch that that was supposed to be a more powerful ending than it ended up being. Maybe when all the beach balls are popped, this country can begin to heal from the damages done by slavery and racism.

The Abyss

1989 underwater sci-fi adventure

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Underwater aliens.

Yes! More hatch-to-hatch action! I give that a sphincter factor of 9.5!

As a fan of David Letterman, I have a special place in my heart for big, goofy Chris Elliott. Still, I'm not sure people put him in movies like this. Maybe he's not as distracting for people who aren't unapologetically fans of Cabin Boy, but whenever I see him as a boat guy in a movie like this or a robber in New York Stories from the same year, I'm distracted by his big, goofy presence.

This movie was way too long to hold my interest. I didn't really enjoy the characters or the romantic subplot between the always-boring Ed Harris playing the appropriately boringly-named Bud Brigman (Is that a pun? I think that's a pun.) and the equally-boring Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Speaking of her, James Cameron seems like he might have been angry at women when writing this. There are probably too many opportunities in this for characters to refer to her as a "bitch" or something. The bad guys are over-the-top thuggish SEALS, and the auxiliary ocean explorers wearing their cowboy hats or playing around with their pet mice are eccentric for really no good reason. I don't like the dialogue in this, mostly because the characters are way too clever in situations where they should probably be shitting themselves. They rarely respond like actual human beings at any point in this. I mean, we're talking about underwater aliens here, so you'd think the characters would seem like it's not something they've seen before.

The effects themselves are things we've all seen before, but in 1989, these special effects were pretty revolutionary. Cameron always does that sort of thing well, and I loved how the underwater scenes look. Cameron seems to know just where subtle hints of light need to be to shift moods and enhance the thrills. The alien stuff is simultaneously cool, silly, and improbable, but it always looks pretty good, even the scene where the water alien worms around the submarine so that it can exchange funny faces with the boring characters.

Storytelling is Cameron's weakness. He's trying to balance hurricanes, Russians, aliens, and pressure-induced psychosis, and it's not always cohesive. I also really really hated the Alan Silvestri score. I'll have to look through his oeuvre actually because I might hate all of his scores. 

Captain Crunch product placement, probably because that's the only cereal that would make sense.

Driving Miss Daisy

1989 comedy/drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Miss Daisy's a terrible driver, so one of the Ghostbusters gets her a chauffeur.

I should just stop after that plot synopsis and wait for my Pulitzer.

I think a good use of Sunday afternoon time would be to look up titles of porn parodies for this.

Yes, I definitely should have stopped after that plot synopsis.

Why am I even doing this blog anymore?

Sea of Love

1989 thriller

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Nope. No time.

This wasn't a very good movie, but at least we got a Tom Waits song out of it. Pacino plays the perfect sort of character for him, one that he could probably play in his sleep. John Goodman plays a chubby cop. Oh, and one of my favorites, William Hickey, is in this for a little bit.

The Happytime Murders

2018 comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: A disgraced former puppet policeman gets back together with an old partner to try to find out who's behind a bunch of puppet murders.

Nothing but frustrating wasted potential in this, a puppet noir movie that probably could have been written by pot-fueled high school drop-outs. There wasn't a single laugh for me in the entire thing. It's poorly written, the writers leaning on nothing but juvenile jokes and having no original story to tell. They try to get a lot of mileage out of having puppets cursing, the sort of thing that might have seemed fresh back in the late-80's when Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles. And the noirish story doesn't really lampoon anything or even attempt anything clever. It just kind of exists so that the puppets can curse or sometimes ejaculate.

I do not like Melissa McCarthy. She's the female equivalent of Will Ferrell, just kind of showing up and doing her thing (a thing I don't particularly enjoy) in a half-assed production.

My favorite things about this dreadful Brian Henson dreadful movie: watching a puppet smoke and some well-timed product placement for Fiddle Faddle.

I should have just watched the trailer for this one a few times. The movie doesn't actually offer anything that wasn't in the trailer.

I would love to know what Jim Henson would think about this shit.

Miss Firecracker

1989 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: I don't have time.

I don't have time for this either, but this made me question whether or not I actually like Holly Hunter.

The Bear

1988 bear movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A recently-orphaned bear befriends another bear as the two try to survive some dastardly bear hunters. Bear.

This was not on my radar as I was putting together a "Favorites of 1989 List," but I'm really glad I stumbled upon it and gave it a watch. I'm not into nature movies exactly, and I'm not sure animal movies are my bag either, but this one grabbed me with stunning shots and a pair of incredible performances.

You might even say they were beary good performances. A few weeks ago, I raved about Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in My Left Foot, but you know what? Bart the bear might be better than Daniel Day-Lewis. There are some very tender moments, there are a lot of action sequences, and there are a lot of times when Bart gets to show off a range of emotions. There wasn't a single moment in this movie when I didn't think I was watching a real bear. Youk the bear, the younger bear, is almost as good. At times, it seemed like they were dubbing these little bear whimpers, and I didn't like that so much. I did like the amplified lip-smacking, chomping, and belching sounds though. I'm not usually a fan of hearing the act of eating (in fact, I may have snapped at a daughter who was doing that a little too loudly this morning), but those enhanced sounds added to this experience.

The lack of dialogue also enhance the experience and help the story unfold more naturally. There isn't any dialogue at all until the 16 minute and 40 second mark, and the hunters spotted throughout the movie are the kind of quiet tough guys who know when to shut up and let the visuals speak for themselves. There's really some great visual storytelling here, right from the beginning with shots of rock and a butterfly that illustrate both sides of nature and continuing to the very end with some of the most beautiful snow you'll ever see in a movie.

I don't know if cinematographer Philippe Rousselot or director Jean-Jacques Annaud deserves most of the credit for some of these shots. Some of them just seem too perfect. What an eye! I'm almost positive that this was a case where hours and hours of shit was filmed with a whole bunch of cameras and then spliced all together into the somewhat cohesive story. So maybe editor Noelle Boisson deserves all the credit. Just watch the intensely violent dog/bear brawl on a rocky cliff side. Or a scene where Bart the bear is shaking a tree, shown both as a medium shot and a long shot. Or a scene where the bears chase and then devour a deer. Or this very quick shot of the two bears standing up in unison. So much of this seems like the product of happy accidents.

I also enjoyed some of the odder moments--the little bear high on shrooms and a couple of strange dream sequences, one with a frog that I think might have been the product of some bad honey.