The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

  I can't believe I've never reviewed any of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I'm also kind of astonished Tyler thought we could watch all the extended edition versions on Thanksgiving.  Is that a thing?  They do kind of lend themselves to a post-turkey coma but I've never heard of making them a Thanksgiving tradition.  It didn't matter because we only got through the first one and then switched to Prometheus in my ongoing attempt to make Bethany watch all the Alien movies.  (Yes, we even watched Alien:  Resurrection the night before.)

Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) is charged with bearing the One Ring to its place of destruction.  He is joined by a complement of fellow hobbits, two representatives of men, an elf, and a dwarf, as well as the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan) in an effort to stop the ring from falling back into the hands of Sauron or one of his minions.  The ring's corrupting influence is strong, however, and Frodo must watch for treachery from within as much as from without.

The extended edition really feels like a lot was added just to retcon in the Hobbit films since they came along later.  It gives you a little more at the beginning with Bilbo (Ian Holm), a little more with the elves, and a little more backstory for Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen).  Nothing you can't live without if you don't feel like sitting through 3+ hours.

The movie itself is worth revisiting.  Even coming up on twenty years later, the CGI looks as fresh as ever, the performances are solid, and the epic grandeur remains undiminished.  This is truly a series to stand the test of time, despite the shameless (but still entertaining!) cash grabs that would follow.

Willow (1988)

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I continued my mission of educating Bethany and Tyler in the classics by showing them Willow and Labyrinth as a double feature.  Again, this holds up very well for its age and really deserves to be rediscovered by a larger audience.  

Originally posted 12 Jul 2012.

Every once in a while, Christy (she of the Experiment) and I will call each other up, set our blu-rays, and watch a movie together.  Now that our show (So You Think You Can Dance and don't you dare judge us!) has gone from two episodes a week to only one (which I am not happy about) we now have potentially more time to do stuff like this.  But let's face it, it's rare for her and me to agree that a movie is worth watching. 

In this, though, we are of one mind.  We were both too young to see Willow in the theaters but clearly remember watching it multiple times on video.  It will always hold a special place for us.

It is a time of magic and prophecy.  A babe is born who is destined to defeat the evil Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh).  Spirited out of the queen's realm, the baby winds up in the care of Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis), a poor Nelwin farmer.  His village wise man (Billy Barty) decrees that the child must be taken to the crossroads, in the hopes that one of her own kind will care for her.  However, all Willow finds is the reprobate Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) imprisoned in a cage.  Against his better judgment and at the urging of his travelling companions, Willow frees Madmartigan and turns the child over to him.  This turns out to be a poor decision as the child is stolen almost immediately by Brownies, forcing Willow to rescue her and make sure that she survives long enough to fulfill her destiny.  To this end, two Brownie guides (Kevin Pollack and Rick Overton) lead Willow and the reluctant Madmartigan to rescue the sorceress Fin Raziel (Patricia Hayes) without getting caught by Bavmorda's daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whalley) or her right-hand man General Kael (Pat Roach).

As a sword and sorcery epic, the effects hold up pretty well.  They used blue screen for the Brownies, which is not terribly great, but the practical effects for some of the sorcery is awesome.  The trolls on the bridge gave me goosebumps as a kid, though Christy said she found General Kael's skull mask to be more frightening. 

I always forget that this was brought to us by the combined might of George Lucas and Ron Howard, probably because neither one of them ever did anything like it again.  But for all those blissful hours of repeated video viewings, I thank them.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald (2018)

  Did you know the Smithsonian Institute museums have IMAX theaters?  Because I didn't.  Then I saw an event on Facebook about a speakeasy-themed reception and showing of the new Fantastic Beasts movie at the Museum of American History.  I almost never go into DC but for this, I made an exception.  I bought a flapper dress and a new wig and Tyler put a Slytherin robe over his regular clothes and away we went.

The reception itself was great, minus a drinks line that was way too long but free.  There were themed cocktails, a DJ, photo backdrops from the movie, snacks, a henna artist, and so many people in their finest '20s garb.  Everybody was friendly and mingling, and it was only a little weird that we had to keep circling around the Batmobile in the center of the floor.  (Which sparked the discussion of which Harry Potter house Batman would be sorted into.  Tyler says Slytherin but he says that for everyone.  I say Ravenclaw because research is Batman's middle name.)

I wish I could say the movie was half as fun as the party.  There were a couple of extraneous factors against it like it was only in 3D, which I hate in general, and I was seeing it in a room of rabid Potterheads.  You know how I feel about fandoms I'm not generally a part of, unless you don't in which case, I don't like it.

Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) just wants to collect and study his creatures but the Ministry of Magic keeps trying to recruit him to go after Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), the Obscurial that almost destroyed New York City in the last movie.  Credence is hiding out in a magical circus in Paris while also trying to find his real family.  Newt is not interested until he learns that Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) is assigned to look for him.  Meanwhile, Gellert Gridlewald (Johnny Depp) has escaped from custody and is also looking for Credence because the boy's power will be very helpful to him in establishing a wizards-only world order.

This very much felt like it was just a filler episode to set up for the big showdown that is coming between Good Guys and Bad Guys.  The story felt pretty rushed and also like it was relying on the audience to fill in the gaps on what was supposed to be happening themselves.  That seems like lazy writing to me, but I'm not a superfan.  None of the other audience people seemed to have the least concern following the plot or picking out the details so maybe that's just my outsider-ness showing.  I have read a few reviews/think pieces pointing out some of the inconsistencies in the timeline or noting that the female characters get short-changed here and that last point I can absolutely agree with.  Tina and her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) were vital to the first movie but are given so little to do in this one, you almost wonder why they're there at all.  Tina spends 90% of the time giving Newt a cold shoulder because of a newspaper typo linking him to marry Leta Lestrange (Zoe Kravitz) (who spends most of the movie wringing her hands and looking beautifully sad) and Queenie falls off the fucking deep end, bespelling Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), the adorable muggle, into wanting to marry her.

Personally, I would have liked to see more interaction between Newt and his brother, Theseus (Callum Turner).  I didn't really care about the love triangle between them and Leta but I would have liked to know more about their internal dynamics.  I really enjoyed the first Fantastic Beasts but this one really seems like it's for die-hard fans only.  I heard this is planned to be a 5-movie set so hopefully the next iteration is more inclusive.

Lion (2016)

This was supposed to go up on Monday but I got distracted and then I blinked and it was Friday.  I don't know what happened.  Happy belated Thanksgiving, Americans!    I know this is based on a true story and it's very amazing that this guy managed to find his family from a handful of scattered memories, some math, and Google Earth, but this movie is really not worth the investment of your time.

Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is five-years-old when he accompanies his brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), to a potential night job.  Being a small child, Saroo falls asleep on the platform while Guddu goes off to see about the arrangements.  Saroo wakes up, doesn't see his brother or anyone else, climbs aboard one of the trains, and falls back asleep.  What he doesn't know is that the train is decommissioned and is being returned to its home base in Calcutta, 1600 km (almost 1000 miles) from Saroo's hometown.  He is again a very small child from an illiterate, impoverished family who does not have ID, money, or even really any idea how to get back home.  Authorities are useless and Saroo eventually winds up in an orphanage where he is sold to a loving Tasmanian couple, Sue (Nicole Kidman) and John (David Wenham) Brierley.  Saroo (Dev Patel) grows up fully embracing his adopted nation and parents until a chance encounter at a college party reawakens all those old childhood memories.  He then spends the next four years trying to backtrace the train's route to his birthplace in an attempt to find the family that believed him lost for over two decades.

If you're really interested, I would suggest reading the dude's book instead of watching this boring adaptation.  Dev Patel is moody and emo, Nicole Kidman cries a lot, and Rooney Mara is... just kind of there? I guess. 

One of my other major problems with this film is how it presents Saroo as being totally insulated by his adopted privilege.  He spends four years dicking around on Google Earth but never manages to find time to take a single class on Hindi?  He has to rely on a random villager to translate for him when he finally locates his birth mother.  It would be one thing if he just impetuously hopped on the first plane to India as soon as he remembered his original family and then just spent however long riding the trains until he found the right one, but FOUR YEARS sitting in front of a laptop and he never considered that learning ANY of the local languages might be helpful?  Yes, India is the second largest English-speaking country in the world, behind the U.S., but there's no reason to assume that understanding is universal.  (This is also a pet peeve of mine for American tourists.  You don't have to be fluent but take the time and at least learn how to say a handful of common phrases.   You are a guest.  Be a gracious one.)

Suspiria (1977)

  There is a brand-new remake just leaving theaters by the same guy who directed Call Me By Your Name but I wanted to see the old one first just to make sure I wasn't going to miss anything.

Susie (Jessica Harper) has been admitted to a very prestigious ballet school in Germany but upon arrival finds it in the middle of a great deal of intrigue.  An expelled student, Pat (Eva Axen), was murdered just after a tumultuous exit and the school's blind piano player (Flavio Bucci) soon follows suit.  Susie, a fish out of water in many respects, must navigate the increasingly labyrinthine hallways to determine what real dangers lurk around the corners of her new school.

It's considered a classic of the giallo style of horror but I was honestly not impressed.  The plot is nonsensical, the score (by prog rock The Goblins) is grating, and the set decoration will make your eyeballs bleed.  There are moments of beauty but for the most part it is not worth the slog.  Perversely, I think all that makes it perfect for a remake. 

Tarzan (1999)

  I remember seeing this in theaters as a teenager and not being impressed at all, a rarity for me having grown up on all things Disney animation.  I know it was a big deal with Disney debuting some new CG background style but I hated the story and found the Phil Collins soundtrack a total misfire.

It's been damn near 20 full years since then so I thought I'd give Tarzan another shot to see if I had grossly misjudged this animated take on Edgar Rice Burroughs' timeless tale. 

Nope.  It's still awful.

Kala (Glenn Close) the gorilla loses her infant to a leopard and adopts an orphaned human over the objections of her mate, Kerchek (Lance Henriksen).  The child grows up to be a strange, quasi-accepted member of the troop, content with his place until he stumbles across a pair of explorers.  Professor Porter (Nigel Hawthorne) and his daughter Jane (Minnie Driver) have come to study gorillas in their natural habitat but are unprepared to meet what they believe is the missing link.  Their "guide" Clayton (Brian Blessed) is more interested in hauling the apes back for a profit than conservation and believes the naïve Tarzan (Tony Goldwyn) is his ticket to finding them.

Animated movies live or die on the strength of the side characters and this film falls flat in that regard.  Terk (Rosie O'Donnell) and Tantor (Wayne Knight) seem like watered down rejects from The Jungle Book and the aforementioned Phil Collins score is bland and uninteresting, not offering even a single song for the characters to show any personality.  ("Trashin' the Camp" is fucking noise, not a song.  Don't @ me.)

There could have been more drama mined from Tarzan's fish-out-of-water confrontation with his foster family but the film opts for a lazy kidnap and rescue instead.  Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen a good Tarzan adaptation so maybe I'm just being super harsh. 

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Happy Veterans Day (observed), everyone!    This was a hard movie to watch.  There's not really a protagonist to root for; it's basically just watching a civil war happen with both sides committing acts of terrorism on the other.

In the 1960s, Algeria was starting to really fight against the colonial occupation of France.  In the capital city, Algiers, a well-organized revolutionary underground attacked police, only for the police to retaliate by bombing Arab neighborhoods.  The violence escalated on both sides until the military was called in to establish martial law.  A handful of rebel leaders continued to commit coordinated bombings while the military used every method at their disposal to root them out.

If I had to describe this movie in one word it would be "bleak".  There are no good guys here.  It doesn't help that it's filmed in a documentary style that never shies away from the violence, but never seems to glorify it either.  The camera remains dispassionate, or at most, condemns both sides.  I don't know if you could make a movie like this today.

Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

  This is another one of those films from the 80s that I completely missed growing up.  Unfortunately, the sensibilities espoused within have mostly not aged well and watching it now (minus one exceptionally hilarious cameo) is mostly an exercise in cringe.  (Sorry, Hollie!)

After being stood up, teenager Chris (Elizabeth Shue) takes a babysitting job for two kids in the suburb, Sara (Maia Brewton) who is obsessed with Thor, and Brad (Keith Coogan) who is obsessed with Chris.  After about five minutes of being in the house, Chris receives a panicked phone call from her friend, Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), who has run away from home, run out of money, and is stuck in a train station in the middle of Chicago.  Chris agrees to come get her so Brenda won't have to call her parents and the two kids plus Brad's obnoxious friend Daryl (Anthony Rapp) tag along for the ride.  On the way into the city, Chris's car has a blow-out sparking a chain reaction of events ranging from dangerous to highly improbable.

I don't know if it's because I never lived in a suburb growing up but this concept of people being terrified to venture more than fifteen miles from their houses is unreal to me.  Chris and the children have such extreme reactions to every single stranger they meet it's hard to believe they aren't shut-ins from a bunker somewhere. 

And yet, when faced with actual potential danger they are somehow completely nonplussed.  Chris gets hit on repeatedly by a guy (George Newbern) at a frat party who does not back off even after she tells him she is in high school and eventually follows her to the house she is babysitting but that is treated as charming and endearing instead of a PSA against date rape.

Also, the fascination of yuppie white kids with being allowed entrance to and finding acceptance in predominantly black spaces is an 80s trend that should never be revisited.  Chris and the children manage to sneak into a blues club and are told they cannot leave without singing the blues.  Chris comes up with a narration on the spot that viewers are to believe is so relateable that not only are they not booed off-stage, they are celebrated with applause and encouragement.  Weird Science has a similar scene where Lisa takes the boys to a blues club to prove they are "cool" by gaining acceptance therein.  I would like to think that is deliberate irony but it's probably just racism. 

The only thing that made this movie worthwhile was Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as a mechanic who bears a striking resemblance to a certain god of thunder.  I don't think I have laughed so hard in my whole life. 

Vantage Point (2008)

  This movie squanders a perfectly good cast on a boring gimmick that adds nothing to the story and is irritatingly repetitive.

The President of the United States (William Hurt) is shot on live TV while giving a speech in Spain shortly before the event is also bombed.  His Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid), a tourist with a camcorder (Forest Whitaker), a Spanish cop (Eduardo Noriega), and the TV producer (Sigourney Weaver) all have different perspectives of the attack which must be strung together to make a comprehensive picture.

Except they don't and what you see is the exact same event told over and over again from people you have no reason to care about.  There's no character development because everything is a series of flashbacks so all you see are character rewinds.  It's almost like Groundhog Day but the clock keeps getting reset earlier and earlier while the end result never changes.  An irritating film and one worth going out of your way to avoid.

Solomon Kane (2009)

  Based on the synopsis, I had originally thought I was going to include this in my Horrorthon but according to both Netflix and Wikipedia, this is not a horror movie but a "dark action" film.  I'm not sure where that distinction is drawn but whatever.  It's not like I didn't have a glut of movies to watch for the month.

Solomon Kane (James Purefoy) was a sea captain ostensibly out to further the reach of Christianity by despoiling foreign temples but was really just a greedy, amoral sonofabitch who used it as an excuse to kill non-Europeans and steal their shit.  When he is confronted by a literal demon who tells him Kane's soul is being earmarked for Hell, Kane gets religion very quickly and holes up in a monastery.  Eventually, however, the priests tell him to go looking for redemption on the road and Kane falls in with a family of Puritans headed for the coast.  The daughter, Meredith (Rachel Hurd-Wood), is abducted by minions of an evil masked rider (Samuel Roukin) and Kane is forced to put aside his pacifism to rescue her.

This isn't a terrible movie but it's definitely in the B strata.  It's based on a pulp comic created by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame and those sensibilities are evident in the hammy acting and obvious CGI effects.  This might have been amazing if it had been released around the same time as Blade but falls a little short when you realize it came out after Iron Man.

Venom (2018)

  This movie was so much funnier than it had a right to be.  I am not one of those people that think antiheroes (or superheroes in general) have to be grim, joyless, brooding sacks of violence.  Humor and its relatability are what creates genuine pathos when it is needed, and for an antihero to work, you need empathy from your audience.

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a successful street journalist until he goes up against CEO Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) and finds himself fired, broke, and broken up with by his fiancée Annie (Michelle Williams).  Desperate for redemption and maybe with a little axe to grind, Eddie follows up with a story from one of Drake's scientists (Jenny Slate) about ethical violations surrounding Drake's newest venture:  a handful of alien symbiotes collected from a comet.  Eddie accidentally bonds with the symbiote Venom and must find a way to stop Drake as well as keep the alien consciousness from eating the faces off random people.

One of the biggest talking points before this movie came out was if it would be R-rated.  The producers decided to go with the more audience- (and box office-)friendly PG-13.  Personally, I would have preferred a hard R so you could actually see the gore that is just implied by Venom.  Otherwise, I don't see how the rating would have made much of a difference.

I read a lot of reviews comparing Venom to superhero movies from the 90s and I feel like that's accurate but also not a negative.  We don't need every single movie to follow the Marvel formula.  Sometimes it's nice to see one follow Blade.  So there you go.  This is the buddy-cop, superhero, action comedy you didn't know you needed.

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

  You guys know how I love old movies.  For the most part, the ones I watch are lauded classics.  It's pretty rare for me to hit on a film that is just utterly ham-handed in its presentation of race or gender relations.

Welcome to The Crimson Kimono!  I can't remember where or when I added it to my Netflix list.  It's never been available and I finally got tired of it and looked it up online.  About ten minutes into watching it, I realized precisely why it was so hard* to find.

When the stripper Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall) is murdered, detectives and war buddies Sgt. Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) investigate.  They discover that Sugar was putting together a new act based on Japanese geishas and had hired a local artist, Chris Downs (Victoria Shaw), to provide mock-ups of some of the costume and set designs.  Bancroft goes to track down the artist while Kojaku attempts to locate the guy hired to play a samurai opposite Sugar's geisha.  Bancroft is surprised and pleased to discover that Chris is actually Christine and spends the majority of his fact-finding repeatedly hitting on her because he apparently went to the same police academy as Steve Guttenberg.  Things really get weird, however, when Chris is also targeted by the mysterious killer and the two detectives decide to move her into their apartment.  Bancroft continues to pitch the woo as the kids say but Chris is more interested in Kojaku.  But oh no, what if he doesn't want her because she's white?  How will they ever work as an interracial couple in Los Angeles?  Meanwhile, Kojaku flips the fuck out at Bancroft, accusing him of being a racist when Bancroft seems stunned that Chris would choose Kojaku over him.  Somehow, in all of this, these two terrible cops manage to actually solve the murder, and the film ends with Kojaku apologizing because he had wrongly perceived Bancroft's jealousy as racism.

Hey, People of Color, did you know racism is just all in your head?  According to this movie, it is!  So you should never, you know, accuse White People of being racist, even though there are literally hundreds of years of documented cases because they might think you're rude for projecting what is clearly a persecution complex on your part and not a systemic degradation of who you are as human beings woven into the fabric of every institution in America!

Look no further than the poster which shows an "American" girl being kissed by a "Japanese" man, even though Kojaku is just as much of an American citizen as Christine and an Army veteran on top of that.  But that's all secondary to his race, which is clearly the forefront of this movie.

It's not exactly a hot take to point out there was racism in movies from the 1950s, but I think it is worth noting the ideology of trying to undermine people from calling out the racism that they experienced by saying that they're just being too sensitive about it.  Here, it's pretty ham-handed and might be written off as just a shitty script but what I'm worried about are all the ones that weren't so clumsy, that were just accepted as part of the status quo.  Because that's where the real danger is, the message that already conforms to what you believe and reinforces biases you didn't even know you had.  That's why representation is so important.

I know this is already waaaaay longer than most of my posts but I'd like to take a minute to talk about James Shigeta as an actor.  He got fucking robbed, y'all.  That man had charisma for days and in a just world, would have been a huge romantic lead through the 70s before scaling back to elder statesman in a few prestige pics.  Instead, he was relegated to side character, got one major film lead in a predominantly Asian cast, tried to get another off the ground, flopped, and then got stuck doing bit parts until he was Tanaka in Die Hard.  He deserved so much more.  And that's my hot take.




*And by "hard" I mean it took more than 30 seconds to click on links until I found one that seemed legit.  I'm so very lazy, you guys.