The Ritz (1976)

  I can't believe I forgot to post this.  I was so excited about it.  It's been ages since a random movie pleased me so much.

Gaetano Proclo (Jack Weston) has a problem:  his gangster brother-in-law, Carmine (Jerry Stiller), has put a hit out on him and there's nowhere in the city to hide except The Ritz, a bathhouse for gay men.  But Guy's problems are just beginning.  Googie (Rita Moreno), an aspiring starlet, thinks he's a big-shot producer there to see her act.  Claude (Paul B. Price) thinks Guy is the love of his life.  Detective Michael Brick (Treat Williams) is a honeypot, paid for by Carmine to catch Guy in a compromising position that would allow Carmine a legal defense for murder.  And Chris (F. Murray Abraham) is just a guy trying to have a good time caught in the middle of all this nonsense.

I do not associate F. Murray Abraham with comedic roles and that is a damn shame because he is hilarious.  He is so camp and so over-the-top and it is an absolutely joyous thing.  

I am honestly shocked this movie seems to have fallen through the cracks.  It should be up there with The Birdcage and To Wong Foo as gay classics.  It is only available to rent or digitally buy (which you shouldn't do) from Amazon.  A print copy will run you about $50.  I got it on disc from Netflix and you don't know how tempted I was to just steal it.  It's worth the rental, at the very least.  And if enough of you show interest, maybe the price will come down?  

Oh!  There's also a brief cameo by John Ratzenberger in his film debut.

The Club (2015)

  Content warning:  suicide, description of child molestation, animal death

This is a dark one, folks.

Four defrocked priests live essentially under house arrest in a small Argentinian town, placed there by the Catholic church to hide its shame.  Father Ortega (Alejandro Goic) kidnapped babies and sold them to foster parents, Father Silva (Jaime Vadell) is a straight-up war criminal, Father Ramirez (Alejandro Sieveking) has been there so long nobody even remembers why, and Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro) is just gay.  They live in relative peace, training their greyhound and following the rules.  But when a new priest (José Soza) shows up, is confronted by one of his molestation victims (Roberto Farías), and kills himself on the lawn, an investigation must be made.  Father Garcia (Marcelo Alonso) is dispatched from the Vatican to make problems go away.  The four ex-priests and their ex-nun jailer/accomplice (Antonia Zegers) must figure out how to get rid of Father Garcia before he shuts them down.

This would be an excellent double feature with Spotlight, but you're going to want something a lot lighter as a chaser.  It's listed as "darkly comic" and maybe.  If you consider the litany of Church abuses on display as a highlight reel.  

Pablo Larraín is going to be one of those directors with an entire film course devoted to him in twenty years.  The man is an incredible filmmaker.  As hideously uncomfortable as The Club is to watch, it's a great movie.  Not a fun movie, but extremely well-done.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

I took last week off from posting because it was my birthday and my gift to myself was not watching depressing-ass movies like this one.  I don't know why anyone likes this movie.  It's schmaltzy melodramatic tripe pretending to be philosophical.  Content warning:  suicide (off-screen)

Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) hates being stuck in a one-horse town.  He just keeps going through the motions, never actually living, taking care of his developmentally disabled brother (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the crumbling house his father died in while his mother (Darlene Cates) is lost to her grief, and his two sisters Amy (Laura Harrington) and Ellen (Mary Kate Schellhardt), cope in their own ways.  The arrival of an out-of-town girl (Juliette Lewis) is the first thing that has giving Gilbert some spark of life once more, leading him to question his quiet desperation.

There is a lot about grief and sublimating your personal desire for the good of your family, but it comes off as hollow.  Women do that shit all the time.  In fact, his sister Amy performs exactly as much, if not more, labor as Gilbert with zero focus on her.  Lewis is the precursor to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, appearing as a fey waif dispensing nonjudgmental chaste sweetness and advice while asking nothing of the protagonist.  The whole movie feels like some dude whining about how life is so haaaaaaard.  And the ending is some serious WTFery.  It's presented as a happily-ever-after but falls apart if you give it more than ten seconds of thought.

Yes, DiCaprio probably should have won the Oscar.  But then we wouldn't have that great line in Tropic Thunder, so there.  Yeah, you know which one.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is streaming on HBO Max.  I guess watch it before the service implodes.

Uncharted (2022)

  Continuing my trend of fun summer blockbusters, I watched Uncharted.  Knowing it was an adaptation of a video game, I had extremely low expectations so I mostly had a good time.  

Sorry for the delay.  I had to take my cat to the emergency vet (she's fine now) and yesterday was kind of a wash after that.

Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is working as a bartender as well as a decent pickpocket when he is approached by Sully (Mark Wahlberg), a treasure hunter looking for a rumored fortune in gold supposedly discovered and hidden by Ferdinand Magellan's crew.  Sully knew Drake's brother, who went missing from Nathan's life ten years before, and recruits this second sibling based on his shared knowledge.  And because he's pretty sure Drake the Elder was holding out on him.  Despite their mutual mistrust, the duo actually make headway on finding the treasure, running afoul of the hereditary claimant, Moncada (Antonio Banderas) and his henchwoman, Jo (Tati Gabrielle).

This is very much a bros-before-hos kind of movie, but I didn't mind it.  It had a joie de vivre that's been missing from blockbusters recently.  Holland is definitely channeling his Spider-Man persona but it was really nice to see Gabrielle in something other than Sabrina, the Angsty Witch.  Hopefully this leads to juicier roles for her, because she was killing it every time she was on screen.  

Uncharted is currently streaming on Netflix.

Prey (2022)

  I couldn't take another Oscar nominee.

Naru (Amber Midthunder) has been training her entire life to become a brave of her Comanche tribe but always finds herself in the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers).  While on a hunt, Naru comes across the tracks of something very different, a Predator unlike any she'd faced before.  

This was a fantastic Predator movie.  Taking an alien and just dropping him into the 1700s is so genius.  Naru is an excellent protagonist, utilizing brains over brawn to overcome the technology chasm between her and the thing hunting her.  

Now, you know how I feel about dubbing in movies (I dislike it) but Hulu has a Comanche dub of the film.  It is unique and smart and inclusive.  I still didn't like it because I feel like it adds an extra layer in between the actors and the audience that can strip nuance, but I highly approve of it existing.  This isn't really a spoiler, but I know it's important to some people.  There is a very good dog in the movie and she totally lives; nothing bad happens to the dog.

Prey did not get a theatrical release and is instantly available on Hulu.

The Salesman (2016)

  So here's the problem with trying to watch all the Oscar nominees every year.  I inevitably miss some and they end up clumping together in my queue, which means I get bogged down in depressing drama after depressing drama.  CW:  sexual assault (off-screen)

Forced to move from their home, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are grateful when a friend finds them a temporary apartment.  This quickly turns into resentment when Rana is assaulted and the couple discover the previous tenant was a prostitute.  Emad begins searching non-stop for the former john, putting his career, family, and mental health at risk.

Asghar Farhadi has made a splash with his contemporary looks into Iran.  A lot of people find them compelling.  After having watched The Past and A Separation, I have to say I'm not a fan.  I don't like this kind of messy human drama.  I find them very hard to watch.  This one especially.  Now, there are some cultural differences at work here and I want to be respectful of those.  Farhadi incorporates elements of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman as a kind of play-within-a-play (which I had to look up because I've never actually seen it) and it works.  There's definitely a correlation between how a man is perceived and how he actually is in both works.  I'm just extremely annoyed that he chose to use a woman's pain and suffering to accomplish it.

They never use the word rape but it is heavily implied and Emad immediately makes it about himself.  It becomes a stain on his honor by proxy and only uncovering the perpetrator will give him a sense of justice, even after Rana tells him she wants to just move on.  It's sexist and regressive.  Nonetheless, it is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016)

  Hey, remember the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent housing market collapse?  Remember how zero (0) people went to jail over it?  Remember how the government gave $700 billion in taxpayer money to banks?  Well, it turns out there was one (1) indictment that came out of it.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced prosecution against Abacus Federal Savings Bank, a family-owned, 1st-generation American-founded bank of six branches primarily servicing an immigrant community in Chinatown.

This documentary, produced by PBS' Frontline program, details how the Sung family discovered one of their loan officers creating fraudulent reports and actively extorting money from borrowers in the form of cash gifts.  They fired him, did an internal investigation, fired several more people, and reported their findings to the government watchdog organization.  In other words, they did everything they were supposed to do and still got expressly targeted as a scapegoat for the entire mortgage crisis.

This is the kind of infuriating shit that makes me want to burn down entire institutions.  If you too want to be angry, Abacus is streaming for free on Kanopy and is also available through PBS.  And then join a credit union.  Because fuck 'em, that's why!

St. Vincent (2014)

  This was supposed to go up yesterday but I didn't finish it in time.  It's another of those movies I tried to watch at the start of the pandemic and just gave up about ten minutes in.  

Oliver (Jaeden Martell) and his mom (Melissa McCarthy) have just moved, which means a new school, new bullies, and a new neighbor in the form of Vincent (Bill Murray), an alcoholic and gambler who reluctantly agrees to watch Oliver while his mom works.  The two strike up an unlikely (except that every other movie about a curmudgeon and adorable child is exactly like this) friendship.

It is a very well-worn trope and this brings nothing new to the table.  I personally found Murray overrated in the part and Naomi Watts is just slumming at this point.  Honestly, she's given incredible performances in the past and this is a step down.  The story is trite and saccharine and the message of "you have to go beyond the surface and people are really good deep down" is misguided.  Nobody is any one thing.  You can be an asshole and still be a good pet owner.  Pablo Escobar had a bunch of people murdered but still went to all his kids' birthday parties.  Sure, there are gruff-exterior-heart-of-gold types but there are also gruff-exterior-selfish-interior types too, and hoping the latter will turn into the former with a long enough CareBear Stare burns good people out and makes them bitter.

This could have had a more nuanced view of the various facets and flaws that make up a person but chose to paste a halo over it instead.  It's streaming on Netflix but I guarantee every single actor in it has a better movie you could watch instead.