The Wiz (1978)

  This is a classic musical that not only holds up, but is still depressingly relevant.

Dorothy (Diana Ross) is a schoolteacher afraid to move on from the shelter of her family.  Running after her dog, Toto, in a blizzard, Dorothy is transported to the land of Oz.  On her journey to the Wiz (Richard Pryor), she meets a scarecrow (Michael Jackson) in need of a brain, a tin man (Nipsey Russell) in need of a heart, and a lion (Ted Ross) in need of some courage.

If you don't want to support this movie because Michael Jackson was a predator, I completely understand.  It's a shame that his presence is enough to tarnish what is otherwise a landmark film.  The cast, the costumes, the songs, the choreography, everything else is phenomenal but it is all permanently tainted by his legacy.

I would actually be in favor of a full blockbuster remake just to ensure that future generations don't have to have a disclaimer to be able to enjoy this film.  Someone should get on that and ask Ava DuVernay to direct.  It's streaming on Prime right now.

Red Cliff (2008)

  This was supposed to have gone up yesterday but I was hosting a party so I didn't get to it.

In 208 CE, corrupt prime minister Cao Cao (Fengyi Zhang) declares the leaders of the rich Southern province, Sun Quan (Chen Chang) and Liu Bei (Yong Yu), enemies of the state in a bid to crush their power and elevate his own.  Liu Bei's chief strategist, Kongming (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Sun Quan's top general, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) form a partnership, marshaling their vastly outnumbered army and navy against the overwhelming might of Cao Cao's for a legendary battle at the foot of Red Cliff.

I don't know how much you know of Chinese history but this was all pretty new to me.  It's laid out really well, however.  The characters are immediately identified and lines are very clearly drawn.  Almost to its detriment, since it takes what I assume to be a very complicated political situation and basically tuns it into good vs evil.  Cao Cao is not only abusing his power to potentially usurp the Imperial throne, but he's also out to steal Zhou Yu's wife (Chiling Lin) because he saw her at her parents' house one day when she was young.  I could have done without that subplot entirely but it did allow her to be mournfully self-sacrificing and tragically beautiful, so yay?

John Woo has lost nothing over his many years directing action films.  There's no bullet-fu but there are tons of slo-mo shots and white doves all over the place.  The action is appropriately epic in scope with hundreds of extras supplemented by CGI falling, burning, and being peppered with arrows.  He's also mastered the ability of moving from giant-scale to individual, honing in on specific characters during the enormous final battle to keep the focus on the story and not just the carnage.

This is a great film that I think flew under the radar and deserves to be properly appreciated.  I watched it on Tubi but I'm planning on buying this one.

Eraserhead (1977)

  This is listed on Rotten Tomatoes as a horror movie but I wouldn't classify it as such, so much as it is just a deeply, deeply weird film.  David Lynch, the writer, producer, and director, has said that it was a metaphor for being a new father and ...yes.  That is definitely a thing I would say is in it.

Henry (Jack Nance) is forced to marry his girlfriend (Charlotte Stewart) after she comes up pregnant but the strain of a newborn puts enormous pressure on them both.

That's the most normal way to describe this film, which plays like it has been written for and by aliens with only a vague concept of humanity.  Like, an alien heard about humans once in a TV show and thought "those creatures sound horrifying yet somehow banal.  They will be perfect metaphors for the destructions of the socio-industrial complex of my society."  I'm on to you, Lynch.

Anyway, this movie didn't give me an existential crisis or anything (probably because I don't have children and never wanted any) but I also have a pretty high tolerance for weird.  I could definitely see the influence this has gone on to have on film-makers like Darren Aronofsky but I found it damn near unbearably boring to watch.  Sorry, film nerds.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

  I love this movie.  It hasn't held up perfectly but it is still one of the best 90s action movies ever made.


Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is an amnesiac.  She has hired expensive private detectives to search for her past to no avail.  Then, a convict (Joseph McKenna) sees her in a Christmas parade and her latest PI, Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson) catches a break in her case when a suitcase reappears from a former landlady.  Samantha and Mitch must unravel her past as well as a huge government conspiracy.

So, I hate to pick on children, especially child actors, but Yvonne Zima is the worst part of this movie.  It's not her fault, but she's given almost nothing to do except cry and her lisp is very distracting.  I don't think the actress actually lisped either, I think it was affected but I can't find anything to back that up in the 3 seconds of Googling I just did.  Anyway, I found her very annoying. Everything else in this movie is pure gold, however.  The dialogue alone is fantastic, courtesy of Shane Black, and Davis is a great action star.  It's a shame the 90s just weren't ready for a female-led franchise.  Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson and this is one of the most Samuel L. Jackson roles he's ever played.

I don't even know where you could find this on streaming but it doesn't matter.  You should buy a copy.  Make this one of the Christmas rotation.

Splinter (2008)

  I was going to watch Elmer Gantry but it's no longer available on Amazon Prime so I watched Splinter on Hulu instead.  I didn't have super high expectations so I was pleasantly surprised.

A biology PhD candidate (Paulo Costanzo) and his outdoorsy girlfriend (Jill Wagner) are taken hostage by an escaped convict (Shea Whigam) and his tweaker girlfriend (Rachel Kerbs).  They get trapped in a gas station when a parasitic lifeform threatens all their lives.

I was thinking this would be like a zombie-infection type thing but it's more like Slither without the humor.  That description makes it sound lesser, and it's not.  It's just definitely not a comedy.  The small cast and isolated location ramp up the tension and the creature effects, a mix of practical and CGI,  are very good.  I also really liked how characters' weren't just one-note.  They showed growth and didn't rely overmuch on archetypes like Tough Girl, Weak Nerd, Dumb Beefneck.  Not once did I want to scream "you fucking idiot" at the screen and I can't say that about all horror movies.

Like I said, it's streaming on Hulu so get into the October mood and say it with me now:  Fuck Camping!

You're Next (2011)

  I had intended to watch this last year for my 31 Days of Horror but it just missed the cut.  It's a damn shame too because this is a great slasher film, much better than The Strangers.

Erin (Sharni Vinson) is meeting her boyfriend's (AJ Bowen) family for the first time, which is a lot of pressure, especially when masked killers are targeting them.  Erin has to break out all the survival skills she learned growing up in the Outback to try and keep this dysfunctional family from being picked off one by one.

Honestly, this character is one of my favorite "final girls" ever.  Every time she Home-Alone'd some trap to fuck up the killers, my heart grew two sizes.  The ending is a little weak but still one of my favorite horror films of this year.  Unfortunately, the only place it is streaming is Tubi, which means ads, but the breaks aren't as jarring as they could have been.  Hopefully, these posts are getting you in the mood for Fall, and Halloween, and spooky things that go bump in the night.

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

  This movie is a great argument for birth control.

Cyril (Thomas Doret) refuses to believe that his father (Jérémie Renier) has left him in a foster home.  He is desperate for love and affection, so when a kind hairdresser named Samantha (Cécile de France) finds and returns the bike his father sold, he impulsively asks her to be his foster family.  She agrees to take him on weekends and the two form a tenuous bond that is threatened when a local gang leader (Egon Di Mateo) recruits Cyril to be his patsy.

Honestly, I'm not sure what all the hype was surrounding this movie.  Like, I don't know what about it qualified it for a Golden Globe nomination over countless other films.  You're literally just watching a kid go through his day.  Is that-- something that people are interested in?  Because I found it pretty lackluster.  This is just a basic character drama and we all know how I feel about those.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and also Hulu, I think.

Antiviral (2012)

I was going to watch a Golden Globe nominee from a few years ago called Carnage but I couldn't finish it.  I gave it an hour, realized it was a sunk cost fallacy and there was nothing that could possibly happen in the final 30 minutes that would make it have been worth the time so I cut my losses and moved on.  If you're curious, it's streaming for free through Amazon's IMDb channel.  Cannot recommend but also can't do a full post because I DNF'd it.  So here's a completely different movie.    It's not October yet but it's never the wrong season for a horror movie.  This has been in my queue probably since 2012 but it kind of fell off my radar because it never gets mentioned on any of the movie sites I frequent.  And it should be talked about.  This is what A Cure for Wellness should have been, plus added commentary on celebrity culture.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for the prestigious Lucas Clinic, specializing in selling diseases contracted by celebrities to their fans.  Favorite pop star gets chlamydia?  You can too!  It'll be just like you slept with them yourself!  On the side, however, Syd smuggles samples out in his own body, hosting the disease until it can be extracted and sold on the black market.  It seems to work until his company's biggest star, Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), dies from a genetically engineered virus.  Now Syd has to figure out who assassinated Hannah so he can save himself from falling to the same fate.

If you have a phobia of medical procedures, blood, germs, or disease, this movie is going to fuck with you so hard.  If you don't, it's pretty tame.  Jones puts in some work as Syd goes through the courses of the disease, while veteran Malcolm McDowell shows up just long enough to be weird.

The best part of the movie is just how dystopian and cynical it is.  Past the body horror, the fixation on celebrity, youth, and beauty is front and center of the whole movie.  It's beautifully dark.

This is streaming on Hulu and you should definitely watch it, especially right before you have a doctor's appointment.  Or buy meat.

Igor (2008)

  This could have been a great kids film if it had just managed to decide what kind of tone it wanted to have.  It could have either leaned towards spooky or goofy but tried to split the difference, ending up as neither.

All Igors in the cloud-covered land of Malaria are relegated to the role of henchman to evil scientists, but one Igor (John Cusack) wants to present his own inventions.  When his evil scientist Dr. Glickenstein (John Cleese) blows himself up a week before the Evil Science Fair, Igor seizes his chance to step out of the shadow by creating Eva (Molly Shannon), a creature designed to be an unstoppable killing machine.  Only Eva's brainwash doesn't go correctly and instead of being a force for evil, she thinks she's auditioning for the lead role in Annie.  Igor is happy to let her labor under the delusion because he is a little busy trying to keep rival evil scientist Dr. Shadenfreude (Eddie Izzard) from stealing Eva and presenting her as his own invention.

Having a secondary character (an Igor) step out to show he's more than the role assigned to him and creating a Frankenstein-ian monster that turns out to be sweet instead of scary?  Total children's movie.  Having a side character constantly attempting suicide because it hates being immortal?  Not so much.

Obviously there are a ton of spooky/Halloween-y themed movies appropriate for children.  This is not one of them.  It reads like someone took a Paranorman type idea and a committee of executives said "But will three-year-olds like it?" until the writers just gave up.  According to IMDb, Chris McKenna of Spider-Man:  Homecoming, Far from Home, and The Lego Batman Movie is the sole credited writer but with three other people (Tony Leondis, John Hoffman, and Dimitri Toscas) providing additional screenplay material.  To me, that looks like McKenna submitted a script that was bought by a studio who then brought in their own people to essentially rewrite it, but I'm just guessing.

It's streaming on Netflix but resist the temptation.  There are better titles out there.

Angel (1984)

  This is pure 80s cheese.  It's somehow both sleazy and prudish, poorly scripted, nonsensical, and feels like it manages to rip off every serial killer movie while predating most of them.  It also manages to spawn THREE SEQUELS.  "Angel" got more sequels than Iron Man.  You think about that.

Molly (Donna Wilkes) is an honors student at a prestigious Hollywood prep school by day.  By night, she walks the streets as "Angel," a tough but tender teen prostitute, with her best friends Mae (Dick Shawn), an aging drag queen, and Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun), former stunt double to Golden Age Western stars.  A killer (John Diehl) is on the loose, murdering prostitutes left and right and Molly/Angel catches a glimpse of him, making her his next target.  Can she balance being on a killer's radar as well as acing the big math test?!

This is bar-none one of the worst movies I have ever watched without the benefit of MST3K or Rifftrax commentary.  Surprise, surprise, it was written by two dudes.  Jury is out on whether either of them had ever talked to a woman before conceiving the idea for the script but one of them also directed, so he would have at least had to interact with the actors, right?  And I'm not even talking about tamping down on the jailbait hooker fantasy elements but just getting even one aspect of being a girl correct.  During the second of three unnecessary naked locker room scenes, a group of "high school" girls put cheerleading uniforms over their surgically enhanced "teenage" breasts and bounce boobily off to practice with not a bra between them.  I literally had to pause the movie and just wheeze over how painful that would be.  I get that sports bras would ruin your naked cheerleading fantasy, but Jesus Christ.  Any kind of support?

Molly/Angel is a hooker but due to the logic of 80s movie heroines, she can't actually have sex or show T&A or she won't be the "good girl" so she remains the most virginal hooker you've ever seen.  I'm sure this was billed as some sort of "she's so tough!  She has a gun!" but she spends more time crying about her lack of a father figure than she does anything else and SPOILER gets rescued at the end by not one, but two daddy stand-ins, while the gay supporting character dies because this is the 80s and we hate women and The Gays.  Seriously, there's another plot thread (again, completely unnecessary to the storyline of girl vs serial killer) where Molly's secret identity is discovered by high school jocks and her spotless reputation is shredded based on a rumor.  There is absolutely no reason to add this except to shame the character --and by extension all sex workers-- for earning their livelihoods.

This is streaming on Amazon Prime because we continue to live in the Worst Timeline but I got it through Netflix DVD because I didn't know that.

Wishful Drinking (2010)

    In addition to being princess in a galaxy far, far away, Carrie Fisher was an author, a comedienne, and the child of two huge Hollywood stars.  This one-woman show is based on her memoir of the same name and covers her childhood, the major scandals, her relationships, and highlights of her career.

Carrie Fisher was a wonderfully funny woman but I really don't think this show does her justice.  It came off as very stilted at times, I think because she talks to the audience as if she's giving a lecture, complete with audience participation.  I would almost have rather it been more detached, more theatrical, but I also don't watch a lot of one-person shows so maybe that's just more me being unfamiliar with the format.  If you didn't know a lot about her as a person, this is still a pretty valuable experience and even if you did, who wouldn't want to go back and spend some more time with her?

It's currently streaming through HBO which I have through Amazon Prime.

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Happy Labor Day!  In the spirit of honoring the American worker by having a day off, this is a repost.  After last week's total downer of Chinatown, I wanted to pick a movie for Bethany that was a little more light-hearted.  This is an absolute classic comedy and you owe it to younger generations to ensure that it is passed on.  If you don't own it, and really why wouldn't you because it's a goddamn classic as I previously said, it is streaming through Starz.  Originally published 21 Sep 13.    This is one of those rare movies that completely breaks free of its Saturday Night Live origins.  It's such a classic, both as a comedy and as a showcase for some of the greatest R&B, Blues, and Soul songs ever made.

Jake Blues (John Belushi) is released from a three-year stint at Joliet Prison and picked up by his brother Elwood (Dan Ackroyd) in an old cop car.  The pair travel to the nun-led orphanage where they were raised to see The Penguin (Kathleen Freeman), who informs them that the building will be sold to the Board of Education if they can't come up with $5000 in a week.  Their mentor, Curtis (Cab Calloway), sends them to see Reverend Cleophus James (James Brown) for inspiration.  Sure enough, Jake sees the light and decides to put their blues band back together to put on a show to raise the money.  This is easier said than done as the band members have scattered to pursue their own careers, Elwood is wanted by the cops for multiple traffic violations, Jake is ditching his parole officer (John Candy), and a mysterious woman (Carrie Fisher) keeps trying to kill them.

This movie used to be on TV every time you turned around, heavily edited for language and content.  I don't think I realized that until I saw it on video.  It caught me completely off-guard.  Nowadays, with the availability of cable and movie networks, I would think it would be more shocking to find the edited version. For some people, that might be enough to put you off the movie entirely but I hope not.  It really is one of the best movies of the decade.  I recently upgraded from VHS to blu-ray (I know!) and the transfer is amazing.  You really need the full surround-sound experience for this one with all the musical numbers.

Also, I'd like to give a shout-out to Lynn and Mark on their wedding day.  I don't know if they read this, but congratulations all the same.

The Grandmaster (2013)

  I'm pretty sure I added this back in 2013 and it was still only in the next 25 on my Netflix DVD queue.  Fortunately, it's streaming on Tubi (a free streaming service) with ads right now, and if you have more patience than I do, it's coming to Netflix streaming on Sep 26.

Ip Man (Tony Leung) is issued a challenge by the Grandmaster of the Northern styles of kung fu, Gong Yutian (Qingxiang Wang) and succeeds him as master.  He also receives a challenge from Gong's daughter and true heir, Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang).  Unfortunately for their budding romance, the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria happens and Ip finds himself essentially exiled in Hong Kong, unable to return to his family in southern China.  He opens a kung fu school of his own and slowly begins rebuilding the legacy of the grandmasters.

I am not as familiar with Wong Kar-Wai as I probably should be.  I've never seen any of his films, although at least three of them are in my queue right now.  I know his signature is really lush romantic dramas and The Grandmaster seems like a solid example.  It was weird for me to see a martial arts movie given the Anna Karenina treatment, but that's totally my fault for being so regimented in my thinking.

I was very excited to see that the fight choreography was by Yuen Woo-Ping but the editing almost ruined it for me.  There are a lot of cuts to feet in splashing water, the swing of silk sleeves, and rain bouncing off objects.  Pretty, sure, but I'm trying to see some stuntman get his face punched in, dammit.  So as a romantic drama, this is definitely some high art but as a biopic or as a martial arts film, I'd rank it much lower than the approximately 400 other Ip Man films.