Innerspace (1987)

  This was recommended to me by my friend Hollie five or six years ago.  I finally got around to it!

A test pilot (Dennis Quaid) is miniaturized in a top secret experiment but an attack on the lab sees him injected into the body of a hypochondriac (Martin Short) instead of a rabbit.  Now he has to guide his unwitting host to avoid corporate espionage, attempted murder, and falling in love with the pilot's ex-girlfriend (Meg Ryan).  

Short does most of the work in this film.  Basically, Quaid sat on set and talked into a mike for almost all of his screentime.  Also, his character kind of sucks.  We're supposed to root for him to get the girl in the end but he's an alcoholic with a death wish and that really doesn't change by the time the credits roll.  It would be much more compelling if the romance were between the two men but in 1987 that was probably a bridge too far.

Innerspace was directed by Joe Dante.  In a hilarious bit of coincidence, I found out the Movie Club picks for this weekend include Gremlins, also directed by Joe Dante.  And, one of the people I visited with over Thanksgiving has never seen Gremlins.  So now I have to force *ahem* introduce her to this most magical Christmas classic.

Fantastic Voyage is the better "shrunk inside a human body" movie but it's not currently streaming except for rent.  Innerspace is a fun, mostly kid-friendly watch that is streaming for free on Kanopy.

The Gold Rush (1925)

  This spans like three holidays so it's pretty good for this transition period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Unless you are a godless heathen who already has a tree up.  You sicken me.

A gold rush brings prospectors of all stripes up to the harsh wilderness of Alaska to try their luck, including an intrepid Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin).  He faces starvation, attempted murder, frostbite, and heartache pursuing his dreams.

It is wild watching this movie from damn near a century ago portraying only a generation back.  It's set in 1898 which was less than 30 years from when it was filmed.  Imagine how modern they thought they were.  And now we're looking back three times as much distance and it seems insanely far away.  

Also, everyone in this movie is wearing real fur.  And there's a real bear.  Insane.  

Story-wise, this isn't great.  It's very simple, more a series of vignettes than a throughline.  The love story in particular didn't work for me.  The technical aspects of film-making and the setups of the physical comedy gags, however, are astonishingly good.  They are why Chaplin is so highly regarded despite being a d-bag.

The Criterion Channel has the restored 1925 version as well as the 1942 re-release Chaplin re-edited.  

SPL - Kill Zone (2005)

  One of the things I really love about Asian cop stories is that they don't even pretend they're not corrupt.  They're just like "what if the corruption occasionally works out?" which is great.

A dying cop (Simon Yam) is desperate to take down a mob boss (Sammo Hung) before he is forced into retirement.  He is supposed to turn over his team to an incoming go-getter (Donnie Yen) but keeps side-stepping to enact a rougher form of justice.

The plot is just shy of nonsensical and mostly serves to string together action sequences, of which there are many and awesome.  Donnie Yen is obviously the modern big name but Sammo Hung is an OG and absolutely whips ass here.  

(BTW, this is the sluttiest role Donnie Yen has ever played.  Whoever in the costume department decided he should do the final fight in a shirt with only one button deserves a gift basket.  Like a really nice one.  And a gourmet chocolate assortment for that white tank.  Mwah!)

If you're trying to catch up on Yen's back filmography or just want something kind of dumb but action heavy to lull you while you're processing your turkey leftovers coma/Black Friday bruises, Kill Zone is streaming on Tubi.  Just drink water every time there's a commercial break.

Unfriended (2015)

  This almost made it onto my 31 days of horror feature this year but just missed the cutoff.  But it's Black Friday so a movie about the dangers of mob piling feels very appropriate.  Content warning:  suicide, bullying

Five teenagers find themselves stuck on a video call with an avatar using the account of a dead girl.  One by one, they are forced to reveal their secrets or die, seemingly by their own hand.  

This was better than I thought it would be.  I had never seen a "screen life" movie, where everything plays out like it's showing on a computer, but it's increasingly popular.  Makes sense.  It has limited application but it worked here with such a self-contained story.  Especially because everyone who used Skype ten years ago is very familiar with the freezes, trails, and pixilation you got with a bad connection.  I never would have thought to mine that for horror, but good job.  It also helps that all the kids in this are unlikeable.  You believe that they would have dogpiled a girl to death so their comeuppance feels righteous.  

Bullying is bad, kids!  Just because you can make an anonymous account and say awful shit to a person doesn't mean you can't be found and punched in the mouth and/or harassed by an invisible entity of revenge.

Unfriended is streaming on Criterion but only until the end of November, so hop on it.

Land of Mine (2017)

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans!  Be grateful you're not clearing a beach full of land mines!  Content warning:  amputations, blood, some gore, dead animal (dog), hazing/bullying

In 1945 Denmark, German prisoners of war are assigned to clear the thousands of landmines they laid on beaches.  Sgt. Rasmussen (Roland Møller) is given a squad of ten POWs, all of them teenaged boys.  

Yeah, this movie is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.  Schoolboys conscripted when Germany knew it had already lost, left behind to bear the brunt of the ire of the invaded.  It's, uh, not a fun watch but it is really engrossing.

Don't actually watch this on Thanksgiving.  Maybe give yourself a couple of days.  Or do.  Fuck it, I don't know your life.  It's streaming on Amazon Prime.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

  This delightful rom-com is also brought to you by Movie Club and is one of the reasons I'm glad I joined.  I would never have watched this in a million years otherwise.  Content warning:  past CSA (discussed, not shown)

Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das) is getting married.  But only her favorite cousin, Ria (Shefali Shetty), knows that she's still hung up on her married ex (Ishaan Nair).  Meanwhile, the event planner (Vijay Raaz) has fallen head-over-heels for Alice (Tillotama Shome), a servant in the Verma household, and the father-of-the-bride (Naseeruddin Shah) is taking out loans to pay for the wedding and dealing with the influx of guests from around the world, in addition to meeting his arranged son-in-law's parents for the first time.

It's very My Big Fat Greek Wedding in terms of scope and lively characters, but a little earthier and with less fish-out-of-water.  It's about half in English, half Hindi and I had a bitch of a time finding a way to get closed captioning to not cover the subtitles.  Being hard of hearing is annoying.  That being said, I very much enjoyed this movie.  It was joyful but not frothy; there was a substance to it that made the emotional payoffs work.  A lot of that comes down to the performances from Shetty, Shah, and Raaz.  

If you're looking for an intro to Bollywood but don't know where to start, this is kind of like wading into the shallow end.  A primer, if you will.  It's only available for rent but it's worth it.  Also, would probably make a good post-Thanksgiving-crashed-on-the-couch family movie, as long as your family is cool with somebody occasionally getting called a motherfucker.

Brigsby Bear (2017)

  Weirdly, this is a very good representation of what Autism feels like courtesy of Movie Club from last week.  

James (Kyle Mooney) has lived his whole life in a bunker thanks to an unspecified catastrophe.  His parents, Ted (Mark Hamill) and April (Jane Adams), have done their best but James is really only living for the weekly installments of The Adventures of Brigsby Bear, his favorite TV show.  Then the cops show up and it turns out James was kidnapped as an infant and Ted and April are kidnappers who invented the whole thing to keep him from being curious about the outside world.  At 25, James is suddenly "reunited" with his birth parents, Greg (Matt Walsh) and Louise (Michaela Watkins), and teenage sibling Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins).  The world is vast and incomprehensible and worse yet, no one has ever heard of Brigsby Bear.

When I saw that this was produced by The Lonely Island comedy group, I thought it was going to be cringe/slapstick comedy.  It is not.  It is stunningly earnest, sweet-hearted, and pure in its intentions.   James is trying his hardest to adapt to a world that seems alien and filled with strangers and everyone else is trying their best to meet him on, if not the same, a complementary wavelength.  It's nice???  Mark Hamill is obviously a complete standout but everyone involved did a great job.  

I felt so seen by this movie.  And that's the highest compliment I can give.  It is only available for rental (or LookMovie.to) but it's worth it.

Life, Animated (2014)

  Whoo boy, I hated this movie so much.  Yikes.  

As a child, Owen Susskind started becoming increasingly withdrawn and non-verbal.  His parents took him to specialist after specialist and finally one diagnosed him with Autism Spectrum Disorder.  The communication breakthrough occurred when the Susskind's realized they could relate to Owen through animated Disney movies.  Now at 23, Owen is ready to move into a halfway house designed to gently introduce him to the overwhelmingly neurotypical world.  

As an autistic adult, this was the most sanitized, coddling infantilization of neurodivergency that I have ever seen.  It was fucking infuriating.  Everything revolved around the parents and how tragic their struggle has been dealing with an autistic child and how brave and understanding they are for everything they've done to improve his quality of life.  

Now, every single autistic person is different.  Sometimes wildly so.  Spectrum.  And there seems like a lot this documentary is leaving out in order to focus on its feel-good message.  We don't see Owen struggle, break down, lash out.  We only see him awash with wonder and repeating lines from Disney classics.  Good PR for Disney, bad for anyone with ASD hoping to be taken seriously.  It's an incomplete portrait that has been massaged into a roughly 2-hr commercial for a megacorp.  Avoid.  

Nope?  Want to see for yourself how bad it is?  Streaming on Kanopy and the Roku channel.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

The Nice Guys (2016)

This held up exactly as well as I thought it would.  Another Tyler pick that I saw in theaters.  He kept saying "This is like a D&D game." so take from that what you will about the chaos inherent within.  It's currently streaming on Netflix and if you missed the original run, you should definitely check it out.  Originally posted 23 May 16.    This isn't necessarily a film you should rush to see on the big screen but I'm coming off of a couple of bad theater experiences so I was really looking for something to wash the taste of those out of my mouth.  Luckily, The Nice Guys delivered.

Private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling) and local fixer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) start on opposite sides of a problem.  One has been hired to find Amelia (Margaret Qualley) and the other has been hired to discourage anyone from finding her.  Once Healy realizes that Amelia's life is in danger, he teams up with March to locate her and keep her safe.  The two quickly realize they have stumbled into a much larger conspiracy involving the Detroit auto industry, a porn kingpin, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

You have probably heard the name Shane Black in connection with the Iron Man films and the Marvel Universe in general.  What you may or may not know is that Shane Black is the godfather of the buddy film.  He paired Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, Robert Downey, Jr. and Val Kilmer, Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, and now Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling.  The man shits comedy gold.  I have a feeling that this film is just going to slide directly under people's radar and disappear in the night and that will be such a shame.  It is absolutely the kind of comedy that is only going to get better with successive viewings.  By all means, wait for the rental but see this film.

The Fifth Musketeer (1979)

  This has been on my list for ages.  No one had it.  Not a single streaming service.  Not even Netflix disc.  I had to use LookMovie.to to find it.  But I did!  You can run, movies, but you can't hide!

Philippe (Beau Bridges) has been raised pretty happily in Gascony by the famed Musketeers D'Artagnan (Cornel Wilde), Athos (José Ferrer), Porthos (Alan Hale, Jr.), and Aramis (Lloyd Bridges) without ever knowing his true identity as twin to the spoiled, cold-hearted King Louis (also Beau Bridges) until he is kidnapped and put in the Bastille in an iron mask.  Philippe is meant to be the target of a faked assassination while the king is safely away with his mistress (Ursula Andress).  Well, the assassination part was supposed to be real, just set up by the king's advisor, Fouquet (Ian McShane).  But Philippe survives, thanks to the training from his four dads, and ends up meeting Marie Theresa (Sylvia Kristal), the Spanish Infanta who is supposed to marry the king.

Yes, this is The Man in the Iron Mask under a different title.  The camera tricks used to show the "twins" are the only truly interesting things.  Beau Bridges does a great job in the dual role, and McShane and Rex Harrison are excellent supporting players.  According to IMDb, I watched the American release of this movie, which excised all the nudity and cut sixteen minutes of run time.  So if you were hoping to see all of Andress, you are shit out of luck.  But it happily does cut an extended version of the attempted rape scene, so mixed blessings.

The 1998 version remains my favorite interpretation of the story, but this wasn't bad.  Just hard to find.

Looper (2012)

Tyler made a list of movies he wanted to watch (so proud!) and this was one of them.  I hadn't seen it since the theater run.  According to him, the only things that could have made the movie better would be a hot redhead and a spaceship.  Otherwise, he thought it was a great time travel movie.  And I agree.  It's currently streaming only for rental so we watched it on blu-ray.  Originally posted 09 Oct 12.    This is one of the movies I was most looking forward to seeing this fall.  I love JGL in just about anything but his previous work with director Rian Johnson, Brick, was an absolute tour-de-force.

Living thirty years before the invention of time travel, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper, a hit man who disposes of problems sent back through time.  His boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), runs the Loopers and the Gat Men, a private security force.  Every Looper knows that they will eventually have to close their own loop and murder their future selves.  When this happens, they get a payment in gold bricks and released from their contracts to live the next thirty years in peace.  Unfortunately, the future existence of a new boss, the Rainmaker, starts closing all the loops.  Joe (Bruce Willis) knows that his time is up, but instead of letting himself be killed by his younger incarnation, he decides to let his loop run in the hope of finding the Rainmaker before he can ruin everything.

It's a well thought out, beautifully executed movie.  I wish the theater audience I saw it with would have had a higher appreciation for it but I guess you can't have everything.  Some of the reviews I read called it an instant sci-fi classic but I would go even further and just call it an instant movie classic.

Jane (2017)

Happy Veteran's Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie!  Having just come off a month of horror movies, this was the kind of quiet palate cleanser I was looking to see.  Unfortunately, it feels like only half a story.

Jane Goodall dreamed of going to Africa from a young age.  When famed scientist Louis Leakey was looking for an unbiased research assistant, Jane jumped at the chance.  She had no training, no degree, but boundless enthusiasm, patience, and interest in studying chimpanzees in their natural habitat.  She became a pioneer in the field, the foremost expert on chimp behavior, and a global ambassador for conservation.

This documentary, produced by National Geographic and Disney, was so sanitized and watered down it was basically pablum.  It focused on Jane: Wife and Mother instead of Jane: Scientist, which feels a little one-sided and patriarchal.  It glosses over any and all negative experiences, barely touching on the polio epidemic that wiped out a number of her original subjects, or the war that took out a second wave, or even her divorce.  The result is a fluff piece for a trailblazing woman who frankly deserved better.

It's currently streaming on Disney+.

Better Off Dead (1985)

  It's the return of Movie Club!  This was actually one of the picks for October but it's a classic any time of the year.

A young man (John Cusack) finds himself with nothing to live for after his girlfriend (Amanda Wyss) dumps him for the local ski jock (Aaron Dozier) but his half-hearted suicide attempts just cause more trouble than they're worth.  

This is a strange teen movie, as in it is for strange teens.  Maybe you can't relate, but I found the horror-adjacent maximalism on display to be highly enjoyable.  This is one of my favorite Cusack movies, even if some of its elements haven't aged well.  The entire "ha ha, you're under constant threat of sexual assault" sub-plot with Monique, for example, plays more callously than cute.  Nonetheless, if you are interested in the filmography of young Cusack, this is a great entry point.  It's currently only available for rental, but keep an eye out.  It comes back around periodically.

Night Hunter (2018)

  A rare Tyler pick!  Too bad it wasn't very good.  Content Warning:  blood, torture, suicide

A cop (Henry Cavill) teams up with a judge-turned-vigilante (Ben Kingsley) and an FBI profiler (Alexandra Daddario) to track down a killer who has been kidnapping and torturing young women.

This is a lot of noise, a lot of flashing lights, and a very grimy Cavill for no decent payoff.  Worse, it's painfully predictable.  Everyone in it is wasted, maybe especially Minka Kelly who gets maybe four lines of dialogue.  There's no style or originality to any of it and the whole things feels like a bad throwback to the early 00s.  

It's streaming on Amazon but don't do it.  All of these people have much better performances on offer.  Avoid.  

The Westerner (1940)

  Hope everyone had a good Halloween month.  We are back to our regular programming.

Drifter Cole Harden (Gary Cooper) finds himself caught in the middle of a dispute between self-appointed Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennen) and a group of homesteaders led by Jane Ellen Matthews (Doris Davenport).  Judge Bean is firmly on the side of the cattle ranchers and heavily opposes the homesteaders fencing their lands, imposing draconian penalties against them tantamount to murder.  

Gary Cooper always chose such interesting roles.  Cole could have been sly or sniveling but Cooper plays him so nobly.  It might be his name on the poster but Brennen walks away with this show.  Such a good character actor, even here when he's basically the villain.  He's so likable it's hard to root against him.  

I should probably have waited until closer to Thanksgiving because this would be perfect for a post-turkey family viewing, but I actually watched it a month ago and I was worried I would forget about it.  It was streaming on Kanopy but that might have changed.  If you can find it, give it a shot.