Sirens (1994)

  There are no mermaids in this movie.  Just in case you were wondering.  There are a bunch of mostly naked women.  But no mythological creatures of any kind.  Move along, fishfuckers.

A young vicar (Hugh Grant) and his wife (Tara Fitzgerald) discover more than they expected about themselves while visiting an artist (Sam Neill) and his harem of models in 1930s Australia.  The vicar tries to convince the artist that his painting of a nude Venus at the Crucifixion is blasphemous while the models try to convince the vicar's wife to get naked.

Despite the presence of 90s supermodel Elle McPherson and a young Portia de Rossi, this isn't a very good movie.  It's pretty boring unless you are incredibly repressed.  Even then, you should probably just discover the internet.  It is streaming on Peacock and on Paramount+ should you fail to heed my warnings.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)

  Tim Burton Club continues with his directorial debut.  Yes, children, before there was Beetlejuice, even before there was Batman, there was Pee-Wee Herman.

When his beloved bicycle is stolen, Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) embarks on a cross-country adventure to find it.

I remember watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse as a kid but it never interested me enough to seek out anything else about it, so I was surprised to learn that it's actually a kid-friendly version of an HBO special of Reubens' stand-up.  This character was a beloved figure in thousands of childhoods and the movie has an outsized impact on pop culture.  

I have to say, though, I didn't think it lived up to the hype.  Maybe because I watched it after my second panic attack of the day on Saturday, maybe because I was under-the-gun (self-imposed) to finish it before Movie Club, but I found the pacing to be interminable.  It's essentially one vignette after another, toppling like a row of dominos to a meta ouroboros ending.  I'm not going to say it's bad, because like I said, a lot of people really love this movie, but I didn't enjoy it.  The jokes didn't land for me and I had zero emotional connection.

There are a number of cameos (including a very rare non-Elvira Cassandra Petersen performance) and it is Burton's feature-length debut, so if you're interested, you should check it out.  You will probably have to shell out some digital cash for it, however, as it is only available for rent or purchase.

Barbie (2023)

  I missed a post yesterday because of a near death experience.  My bad.  Hey, look, it's the Barbie movie!

Barbie (Margot Robbie) has it all: the DreamHouse, the pink convertible, dance parties, friends, and a killer wardrobe in Barbieland, a utopia run by Barbies.  But when she has a sudden existential crisis, she must turn to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) for advice.  To her horror, Barbie has to journey to the Real World and find the girl playing with her doll to see why that girl's sadness is bleeding over into Barbie's life.  Ken (Ryan Gosling), desperate for Barbie to notice him and favor him above Ken (Simu Liu), stows away in the backseat of the convertible.  They are both shocked by the Real World.  Barbie is horrified to see that women are not, in fact, in charge of every aspect of life.  Ken is elated.  Finally, a world for men.  While Barbie searches for the little girl with her doll, Ken begins researching the patriarchy.

I can't even count the number of times I screamed while watching.  This movie is hilarious.  The entire cast is perfect (except for Will Farrell, who felt weirdly out of place, like a Lego Movie cameo gone wrong).  I was fully prepared for Gosling to be my standout, because he is somehow still underrated as a comedic actor, but it was America Ferrara with an incredible soliloquy that might have been on-the- nose, but I still needed to hear it.

The production design deserves an Oscar, if nothing else.  Every detail was spot-on, including Barbie being 23% larger than her surroundings.  Amazing.  Incredible.  I was never a Barbie girl growing up.  I mean, I was a girl so people gave me Barbies but I was never invested in them.  (The only Barbie I would have sold an organ to have was the Bob Mackie Barbie based on Cher's costumes.)  I was shocked how many Barbie-related things I remembered from commercials I saw when I was a kid.  And, if I'm honest, a little weirded out at how effective the marketing was.  Mattel is truly a soulless corporation but damn if they don't know their jobs.

I'm not the biggest Greta Gerwig fan but I absolutely loved this movie and I'm going to buy it as soon as it comes out.

It's Been a While So Have Some TV

I've been watching a lot of TV recently, so I thought I'd do a recap because it's been a while and I'm trying to get ready for 31 Days of Horror which is kicking off in about a week.

I tried to watch The Sopranos, consistently rated one of the best shows ever made, and I just couldn't get into it.  I just didn't care about any of the characters and I was annoyed by the whole thing.  A mobster reluctantly sees a therapist in order to work out the problems in his life.  Gave it three episodes and it just wasn't for me.  It's streaming on (sigh) Max.

I finally got around to watching season 3 of Riverdale and it was exactly the kind of trashy fun I was looking for.  Season 1 was a murder mystery, season 2 was a serial killer, so to keep upping the ante, season 3 features an evil cult and references the Satanic Panic, Dungeons & Dragons, Fight Club, and Silence of the Lambs.  I love that this show is unabashedly wearing its heart on its sleeve for the things it likes.  It's streaming on Netflix.

The Pretender is one of those very rare shows I wouldn't actually mind seeing rebooted.  It was made in the 90s and the plot is that a super-secret private organization has been training Very Special Children to model and predict events until adult Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) runs away and uses his chameleon-like abilities to right wrongs while trying to find information on his birth family.   The parallels to autism are very in-front and I like that his superpower is basically empathy.  It's streaming on Amazon Prime.

Tyler and I watched season 1 of The Diplomat and I fucking loved that show.  I'm super excited it's getting a second season, although in these uncertain times, that means nothing until it's actively in front of my eyeballs.  A career diplomat is prepared to receive an assignment to Afghanistan but is shocked to find herself transferred to the UK.  It's a wildly different posting that she is determined not to turn into a fluff piece, unaware she's being groomed for something larger.  It's streaming on Netflix.

Once we finished that, we started season one of The Bear on Hulu.  We're only about four episodes in but we like it so far.  A highly-acclaimed fine dining chef moves to Chicago to take over the sandwich shop bequeathed him by his dead brother and finds himself embroiled in all kinds of emotional entanglements as he tries to bring order and standards to the shop.

Tyler is a big Star Trek (star anything, really) fan and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds came to us very highly recommended by our friends, the Ballards, so I (a casual watcher at best) strapped in.  I was very pleasantly surprised by how entertained I was, and we blew through seasons 1 and 2 before I even knew it.  I loved the musical episode so much.  La'an Noonien-Singh is my favorite and I would die for her.  The storybook episode?  My heart.  It's streaming on Paramount+.

On my own, I tried to watch Nip/Tuck because it was again highly recommended to me by my cousin, Christy.  I made it through three episodes but I could not get into it.  The misogyny was so built-in that I couldn't take it.  Two Miami plastic surgeons deal with professional and personal hijinks while trying to build their practice and manage their personal ethics.  It's streaming on Hulu.

I'm currently watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl season 2 on Tubi.  The video quality is bad -- it's extremely fuzzy -- but after a few minutes, I can just ignore it.  Independent escort Belle (Billie Piper) navigates managing her clients while mentoring a young protégée and trying to find a work/life balance between her persona and her real self.

And lastly, Tyler and I have been watching Ahsoka over on Disney+ (see, I told you about the star thing).  He watched Star Wars Rebels and has a much deeper knowledge of what the hell is going on between the characters but even as a neophyte, I found it easy enough to follow.  Ronin Jedi Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), former padawan to Annikin Skywalker, is trying to stop the Empire from regaining control of the universe and bringing back Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), who has been exiled to an unknown location.

So you can see that I've been very busy sitting on my ass in front of my TV.  All for you, readers.

The Red Turtle (2016)

  I have no idea what the meaning of this allegory is.  It's definitely an allegory, but that's as far as I got.  

An unnamed castaway (Emmanuel Garijo) is shipwrecked on a desert island.  He tries to build a raft to escape but it is destroyed by an enormous red sea turtle.  Every time he tries to leave the island, the turtle is there to ensure that he doesn't.

Anything else would be kind of spoiler-y but I will say that it is extremely French.  It's a co-production with Studio Ghibli, and by extension Disney, who reached out to writer Michael Dudok de Wit after seeing a short film he did.  

The animation is very minimalist, in keeping with the nearly wordless narrative.  There's no dialogue, per se, just emotional interjections.  This is not a cartoon; it's animation.  It reminded me of an adult version of Ponyo with a little Island of the Blue Dolphins thrown in.  If this sounds like faint praise, let me assure you that it is an incredibly beautiful movie of clean lines and meditative expanses.  I just don't know what it's trying to say.  It's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon.

Big Fish (2003)

  I would say this was Tim Burton's most humanistic movie.  

All his life, Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) had to listen to his father's (Albert Finney) tall tales.  It was fine when he was a kid, but the stories didn't change as he grew, leaving him feeling like he never really knew the man, or worse, that the truth was being deliberately withheld.  When his father is admitted into palliative care, Will moves home with his very pregnant wife (Marion Cotillard) to be there and try to unravel the mysterious life of young Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor).

It is a familiar feeling to Southerners, listening to half-truths and embroidered tales because they make for more entertaining stories.  Weaving a yarn is as natural as breathing to some.  My grandfather could charm the birds from the trees when he wanted, and I've been known to spin a tale myself.  

Watching it again, I realized for the first time, that this was actually The Odyssey, one of the very oldest of our big fish tales.  The monsters are there, the trials, the triumphs, but filtered through a lens of Spanish moss and swampwater.  

So many of Burton's films center on the outsider, a weird-looking loner misunderstood by the cookie-cutter clones that surround him, but Big Fish shows that you can look the same as everyone else, and still feel out of place. 

It's currently not streaming but you should own this one anyway.

Edward Scissorhands (1990)

  This is probably my least favorite Tim Burton film for all its iconic imagery.  I've just never liked it.

An Avon saleslady (Dianne Wiest) makes the cold call of her life when she finds a young man named Edward (Johnny Depp) in a crumbling mansion.  Edward was created but unfinished at the time of his maker's (Vincent Price) death, leaving him with shears for hands.  Undaunted, Peg takes him to the suburbs, where he struggles to fit in and obsesses over Peg's teenaged daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder).

It's a nicer version of Frankenstein, sure, but there's something about it that just doesn't land for me and I think it centers on Kim.  Her character has no depth, perpetually whines, and her wig falls into the Filmmaker's Poorly Disguised Fetish category.  Everything else in the film works: the characterization of the suburbs, Alan Alda as the clueless but supportive dad, Depp still trying to be the second coming of Buster Keaton, the dogs, the topiary, the mini-malls, the mad scientist aesthetic.  Everything but Kim.

In fact, if you removed her from the movie, pretty much nothing would change.  You'd lose the framing device but nobody remembers that anyway.  

I won't go so far as to say I hate it, but I've never owned a copy and I would never have watched it again if it weren't for Movie Club.  It's streaming on (sigh) Max right now.  See it once, if you haven't, and then go watch something better.  

Ed Wood (1994)

  This will be a very heavy Tim Burton week.  Someone in Movie Club admitted that they had never seen Beetlejuice, which kicked off an entire movement to watch the highlights as it were.  

Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) desperately wants to be a filmmaker and when he hears about transgender activist Christine Jorgensen's life story being given the film treatment, he knows he's the man for the job.  The film turns into Glen or Glenda, which flopped hard but gave Wood the boost to continue following his truth.  He is bolstered by legendary actor Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), now fallen on hard times, and a string of underdogs and misfits trying to make their Hollywood dreams come true.

This is such a sympathetic portrayal.  It was back in the 90s, when Depp and Burton were still actually trying, and it shows in the meticulous attention to detail.  The opening credits alone are spectacular B-Movie glamour.  Landau won an Oscar for his Lugosi and rightfully so.  His daughter, Juliet Landau, also has a role here.  Continuing the nepotism streak, Burton's then-wife Lisa Marie plays OG video vixen Vampira.  

It is a truly great film about art and staying true to oneself in the face of criticism and doubt.  Even when your art is truly, objectively terrible.  It's currently streaming on (sigh) Max but I watched my copy on the server.

The Fencer (2015)

  This follows all the Sports Movie tropes without really adding anything new or different.  

A P.E. teacher (Märt Avandi) at a small Estonian secondary school reluctantly starts a fencing club for the kids.  But when they want to attend a tournament in Moscow, he must decide whether or not the risk of being arrested is worth the payoff of watching them succeed.  

Plucky Economically-Disadvantaged Youths led by a Gruff Yet Secretly Kind Former Athlete Tortured by His Past take on Rich, Spoiled City Kids in a National Tournament to Restore Their Honor.  Just sub out fencing for hockey, baseball, basketball, football, or soccer and you have an entire sub-genre of movies.  This one has a little sizzle with Stalinist secret police and gulags but it's basically the same.  Which is fine if you're into that sort of thing.  The movie is low-key, quiet, no bombastic soundtrack, so it's nice if you're too hungover for The Mighty Ducks.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

Cure (1997)

  I thought about saving this for October but Spooky Season isn't just one time of year; it lives in the heart.  Content warning:  moderate gore, implied animal torture

A detective (Kôji Yakusho) is on the trail of a serial killer who never touches a single body.  All the murders are committed by others, random people who kill in a fugue state and remember nothing of their actions.  The only clue is that all the victims are marked with the same symbol.  

This doesn't quite stray into the supernatural though it gives the same kind of feel as the Denzel Washington thriller Fallen from around the same time.  I'm generally not a Vibes kind of person but the atmosphere in this movie is incredible.  It is so claustrophobic in how it follows the detective and so expansive in how it follows the killer.  Like all modern horror movies, it's about grief but also about the petty frustrations of life and specifically the creeping exhaustion of being a caregiver.  The detective's wife is suffering from some kind of neurological disorder affecting memory (the movie doesn't specify further) and he has to deal not only with her actions but also her inability to understand her condition.  He is drowning and she's blissfully unaware.

It's an incredible film and much more polished than Pulse, which is the other Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) I've seen.  This is a stone cold classic J-horror and well worth the look.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

The Dresser (2016)

Happy Labor Day!  Here's a movie about appreciating the people who keep your world turning.  I thought I would like this more than I did.  I love it when actors play actors.  It just didn't grab me.

During the Blitz, a theatre group struggles to put on plays to lift morale.  The lead actor (Anthony Hopkins) is in the middle of some kind of breakdown and his dresser (Ian McKellen), stage manager (Sarah Lancashire), and lead actress (Emily Watson) are all trying to keep him on track to star in the night's production of King Lear.

This should have been a slam dunk but there was just something off that kept me from enjoying it.  Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for a movie where everyone is the villain.  However, if you've only ever seen Ian McKellen as Gandalf or Magneto, it's definitely worth it to watch him simper and fawn over Anthony Hopkins.  

It's bitter where it could be funny, mean where it could be sweet, and seems designed to punish an audience in the name of catharsis.  It's based on a stage play and there are several other adaptations.  Maybe one of them is better?  I don't know and frankly, I'm never going to watch it again to check.  This version is currently streaming on Starz.

Things I DNF'd this week:  The Comebacks, Kindergarten Cop 2, The Sopranos, and Thelma and Louise.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

  This might actually be the worst Super Mario Bros. movie and I've seen one where Dennis Hopper turns into a dinosaur.

A broken water main in Brooklyn is an opportunity for Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) to get their fledgling plumbing business off the ground, but a weird pipe accidentally sends them into an alternate dimension.  Separated, Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom while Luigi winds up in the Dark Lands and is immediately taken prisoner.  Mario asks Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) for help.  Fortunately, she was already planning to recruit allies to stop Bowser's (Jack Black) reign of conquest.  She and Mario travel to meet Donkey Kong (Fred Armison) and his son (Seth Rogan) to get a large enough army to challenge the Koopa King.

The big controversy was Chris Pratt as Mario instead of longtime Mario voice actor Charles Martinet, even after Martinet said it was fine.  Studios always want to slap celebrity voices into animated movies but it is very rare that people push back on it.  Well, I have watched it and I'm here to tell you... the voice acting is not the problem here.

This entire movie feels like it was written by a committee of 50-year-old men who thought making a kid's movie was going to be easy.  It is nostalgia bait masquerading as a plot.  There's no character development, all the jokes are obvious, and there's no emotional core.  It is just as shallow as the original side-scroller, where each set piece is just another obstacle to get to the end.  The nicest thing you could say about it is that it's fine as background noise while you play games on your phone.

What really sucks is that the animation is incredible.  It's crisp, vibrant, color-saturated, and felt like it had weight.  And it's completely wasted on a shitty cash grab of a film.  The 1990 Super Mario Bros. may have been a laughingstock but at least it took risks.  This version is overshadowed by fear of failure at the box office, so every edge has been rounded down until it's completely inoffensive, bland, boring, and tasteless.  What a waste.

It's streaming on Peacock if you need a two-hour nap.

Throne of Blood (1957)

  The Kurosawa streak continues with the adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

General Wazishu (Toshiro Mifune) receives a prophecy that he will become the next Lord of Forest Castle.  At first deeply disturbed by the implications of treason against the current lord (Yoichi Tachikawa), Wazishu grows more accustomed to the idea of usurpation, helped along by his wife, Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada).  But the paranoia of ruling soon begins to unravel the pair, leading to more and more bloodshed.

It's always interesting to see different interpretations of literature, especially through the lens of a different culture.  Kurosawa took several liberties with the source material to make it more specific to feudal Japan, but that really only makes it seem more universal in concept.  Envy, greed, and ambition are not unique to 16th century Scotland, after all.

The cinematography is cold and forboding, and feels very stiff compared to some of Kurosawa's earlier work.  It feels like a stage play.  Mifune's face does a lot of heavy lifting in the film.  His Macbeth counterpart wears his emotions on his sleeve, allowing the audience to practically see every thought he has.  Yamada, by contrast, is icily calm, lending her paranoid suggestions the veneer of reasonability.  Of course, Wazishu should kill the Forest Lord.  Didn't he kill his predecessor to get the title?  Doesn't Wazishu deserve it?  After all, it's been foretold.

Despite my admiration, I found it hard to pay attention.  The Scottish Play is one of my favorites and I am very familiar with its story beats.  I was struck by the costumes, however, which are incredibly lush and (I assume) period-accurate.  Wazishu's sigil is the centipede which was odd enough that I looked it up and according to Wikipedia, the centipede has a positive connotation with the God of War but a negative one because of its association with death.  So it too represents the wheel of fortune that Macbeth faces.

It's currently streaming on Criterion Channel and (sigh) Max.