The Man in the Moon (1991)

  We continue our Weekend of Women, I guess, with another coming-of-age story, this time debuting a baby-faced Reese Witherspoon.

Fourteen-year-old Dani (Reese Witherspoon) has a crush on the boy next door, Cort (Jason London).  He (correctly) thinks Dani is too young for him and sets his eyes on her older sister, Maureen (Emily Warfield), sparking jealousy between them.

Honestly, this movie is pretty stupid.  Maureen states that she's going to college in like two weeks so all Dani has to do is wait and she'll have Cort's undivided attention with zero fuss.  But that's not apparently the point of the movie.  Anything more involves a major spoiler.

Cort feels icky about a three-year age gap between him and Dani, which plays well to modern viewers but is not apparently a sentiment shared by the camera, which delights in lingering over her pubescent body.  It's not quite as egregious as Fear but it's close.

If you grew up with this movie or it resonated with you for whatever reason, you probably still like it.  It's not nearly as condescending as some coming-of-age stories I've seen.  The only casting note is that Sam Waterston feels like the wrong choice to play Dani's dad.  He doesn't project authority to me.  Everybody else is fine.  

It's currently streaming on Kanopy.

Mermaids (1990)

  Finally, a coming-of-age story I semi-relate to!  Mostly because I, too, went through a phase in my teens where I wanted to be Catholic (specifically stigmata).  Then I got a little older and realized what I actually wanted was Attention.  And divine favor, which is really just Attention+.  Anyway...  Content warning:  child endangerment (drowning)

Charlotte (Winona Ryder) is a nice Jewish girl desperately wishing she could be a Catholic nun and tired of moving across the country every time her free-spirited mother (Cher) gets dumped.  When they land in a small town near Boston, her problems are intensified by a hard crush on the caretaker (Michael Schoeffling) of the local convent.  Her mom hits it off with a shoe salesman (Bob Hoskins) but her pathological fear of commitment stands to ruin both her's and her daughter's relationship.  

I remember watching this as a (very literal autistic) kid and being bitterly disappointed that there are no actual mermaids.  It is not a fantasy film at all.  So just in case you too were misled by the title.  I still have no idea why it's called this.  It's based on a book so I'm assuming it gets explained there.

The performances are mostly great.  Cher and Hoskins are magnetic together and this is the debut of tiny Christina Ricci, who is also good considering she's like 8-years-old.  I love Winona Ryder but Charlotte's voiceover/internal monologue was irritating as fuck.  I don't think I'd ever watch it again, now that I've completed it (I left it unfinished when I was a kid and it has always bothered me because autism) but it's not terrible if you like period pieces --the 1960s, New England in the fall, Cher, Bob Hoskins, or problematic age gaps.  (The caretaker is 27 or 29 and Charlotte is 15.)  It's currently streaming on (sigh) Max.

Jackie Brown (1997)

  I don't get why this is considered a classic.  It's fine? I guess, but I wouldn't call it something to write home about. 

Stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is stuck between a rock --her gun runner boyfriend Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), for whom she ferries money back and forth to his partner in Mexico-- and a hard place --the ATF agent (Michael Keaton) who will bust her for possession if she doesn't cooperate in their sting to take Ordell down.  But Jackie is nobody's fool and with a little help from a lovestruck bail bondsman (Robert Forster), she might just turn the tables.

This feels like a period piece of the mid-90s.  Tarantino is a lot of things but you can't say the man isn't consistent with the things he likes.  Including feet.  It's basically one of his auteur trademarks at this point.  This one just didn't gel for me.   It feels like a debut that's a little unsure, a little off-step, but a solid start for growth.  Finding out this was actually his 3rd feature was a little bit of a shock.  IMDb says that he drastically toned down the violence after receiving criticism and maybe that's what makes this feel like a weaker entry.  

If you want to see it, it's leaving Tubi on April 30 so you might want to hurry.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Happy Earth Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie!  The Movie Club pick for this week was Eyes Without a Face but I just watched that a couple of years ago and I already re-posted They Live this week, so I thought I'd swap out one highly regarded black-and-white 60s horror for another.  

A handful of survivors hole up in a farmhouse as they are beset from without by the undead, risen as a result of cosmic radiation from Venus, and from within by paranoia and selfishness.  Ben (Duane Jones) is trying to keep them all together and uneaten but is hampered by Barbra (Judith O'Dea) being completely useless as anything but a doorstop and Harry Cooper's (Karl Hardman) sweaty cowardice.

This is the OG of zombie movies, the innovator that spawned an entire sub-genre, the undead Coke Classic, if you will.  It remains a gold standard despite being made for approximately $42, adjusted for inflation, because it doesn't try and get cute or over-explain.  We know precisely as much about the characters as we need to for this moment and any information we get otherwise is the same as what they get.  That keeps us the audience rooted in the moment, which keeps the whole film feeling fresh as a deodorant commercial.  

The 2016 restored version is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.  Plus, you might get lucky and catch it the way God intended, streaming at 2 a.m. on their new Criterion 24/7 feature.  Give it a shot.

The Garden of Words (2014)

  This was so beautifully animated but the story was so gross it completely took me out of the experience.  

An emotionally vulnerable teenaged boy (Miyu Irino) skips class when it rains to sketch in a gazebo in the botanical garden.  An emotionally fragile woman (Kana Hanazawa) shares the gazebo while she works through a major depressive episode.  The boy develops a crush.  The woman encourages it.  

I've never been to Japan and I don't know how their culture works with regard to age gaps in relationships but a 15-year-old is a fucking child and no 29-year-old should be interested in pursuing them.  And before anyone jumps in with "oh, but they're just friends and kindred souls and she didn't do anything," please note that she fucking lies to her boss and says she's been meeting with an old lady.  If she didn't think there was something wrong with the relationship, she wouldn't have lied about it.

That being said, holy Cheezit Christ is there a bullying problem in Japanese schools.  There are waaaaay too many movies and shows about kids being bullied to suicide in East Asian countries.  (In America, you just get shot so it's not like we have room to throw shade.)   

This is the kind of shit that makes me grateful to just have cats.  I mean, they're still bullies but they weigh 8 lbs and don't have opposable thumbs, so they're manageable.  

This is on Criterion Channel but I say skip it and watch something else.

They Live (1988)

Finally, Movie Club picks a good movie!  Just kidding, they're all good movies, Brent.  The dialogue is super dumb and relentlessly quotable while drowning you in a firehose of late-stage capitalist dystopia.  Much like Idiocracy, the only thing separating horror-comedy from documentary is time.  A lot of people do get killed by cops, specifically, so that might need a trigger warning.  Originally posted 23 May 2010.    John Carpenter really is the master of the B-grade horror movie. I feel like I shouldn't love his movies as much as I do, because they really are crap. But they're the best kind of crap! Come on, where else are you going to get Roddy Piper as the headlining star of a movie about alien yuppies destroying the world through consumerism?

Yeah, that guy is the star. Are you intrigued yet? You should be.

Rowdy Roddy is a drifter who stumbles upon the Truth: that aliens are among us...and they want us to buy stuff. He finds a pair of sunglasses that show through the aliens' subliminal messages. Somehow, they also allow him to hear the subtle announcements to "Obey, Consume" and "Don't Question Authority". Don't fight it, they're scientific glasses. Named after a doctor and everything. Sure, it was the doctor that invented LSD but that shouldn't bias you.

John Carpenter wrote (under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage"), directed, and composed the score for this movie. Fun fact: Frank Armitage was chosen as a nom de plume as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft. It's also the character name of Roddy's sidekick.

Because when you have an inside joke, the only thing to do is beat it to death. Otherwise people might mistake it for subtle and not see how clever you are.

This move is certainly not The Thing. Hell, it's not even Big Trouble in Little China but it's not bad. The effects of the aliens are very old-school Twilight Zone. I thought they were pretty groovy. It definitely belongs in "Cult Classic" territory, right next to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

A Night at the Opera (1935)

  One of the Movie Club picks for this week.  I thought I had seen it before but I was just confusing it with the three other Marx Brothers movies I've seen.

Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) convinces Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont) to invest in the New York Opera Company by bringing over famed tenor Rudolfo Lassparri (Walter Woolf King).  Lassparri is an entitled asshole and insists on bringing his soprano, Rosa (Kitty Carlisle), to New York with him, mostly so he can pressure her into dating him.  Rosa is in love with Riccardo (Allan Jones), another tenor, who is friends with Tomasso (Chico Marx) and Fiorello (Harpo Marx).  The three men stowaway on the ocean liner taking everyone to New York and convince Driftwood to their cause.  Through the sheer power of chaos, all is made right.

If you've seen a Marx Brothers movie, you know whether or not this is your jam.  There's nothing new or revelatory.   I don't think it's as good as Monkey Business but as always, your mileage may vary.  The two original songs aren't great and there is actual opera being done so that might be a factor.  

It is currently streaming on Tubi with ads.

Voyage of the Damned (1976)

  Based on the title, I thought this was a horror movie so I started watching it in October only to discover it was Real Life Horror, not Fun Fictional Horror.  Content warning:  suicide, anti-Semitism, Nazi imagery

In May 1939, a cruise ship is allowed to leave Hamburg, Germany with 937 Jewish passengers bound for Havana, Cuba.  En route, Captain Schroeder (Max von Sydow) is informed that the passengers will not be allowed to disembark once they reach their destination.  Nazi propagandists organized the stunt to demonstrate that Jews were unwanted anywhere and therefore the world could raise no moral objection to Germany's treatment of them, making every nation that refused them as refugees complicit in the Holocaust.  With very few options available and running out of time before they will have to return to Germany, Schroeder and Morris Troper (Ben Gazzara), a Jewish activist, work to keep the increasingly desperate passengers from panicking while exhausting every diplomatic channel to find them a sympathetic port.

This is based on a true story.  The MS St. Louis was turned away from multiple ports, including the United States, because of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fears of provoking Hitler.  Sixty years later, people apologized so I guess that's okay.  

Really wish this didn't feel quite so prescient.  

Anyway, the movie stars a whole lot of famous people including Malcom McDowell, Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, Jose Ferrer, James Mason, Katherine Ross, and was the debut of Jonathan Pryce.  It's relentlessly depressing but serves as a timely reminder that it's always moral to punch Nazis in the face.  It's streaming on Amazon or the Roku Channel with ads.  Don't watch it with ads.  It is extremely jarring to go from passengers grappling with the terror of an uncertain future to an ad about dog chews.

Back to the Future Part III (1990)

  This is my favorite of the trilogy but I was having trouble articulating why until I realized that this puts the focus back on Doc.  Christopher Lloyd is THE reason to watch this and he gets way more screen time in this, as opposed to Part II, and even more than Part I.  

After receiving a letter telling him that Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) was accidentally transported to 1885, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is seemingly stuck.  He finds the Doc Brown of 1955 and convinces him to help repair the DeLorean that 1885 Doc helpfully buried in an abandoned mine.  The pair stumble across 1885 Doc's grave, with a death date only a few days after the letter was written.  Instead of returning to his original time of 1985, Marty decides to go back a century and save his friend.    

Not only does this rectify the previous film's mistake of Not Enough Doc Brown, it also provides him a love interest!  The (frankly, not terribly well-written but a step in the right direction, kind of a Manic Steampunk Dream Girl, if you will) schoolteacher Clara Clayton, played by Mary Steenburgen.  Their romance was way more compelling than Marty's terrifying constant brushes with incest or abandonment of the conveniently unconscious girlfriend.  

It wrapped up all the threads of Part II and provided a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.  And so far, nobody has tried to remake, reboot, or reimagine it, thank God.  

Before Sunrise (1995)

  I thought this was set in Paris but maybe that's the second one?

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are strangers who meet on a train leaving Budapest.  Jesse is an American trying to cure a broken heart with a Eurorail pass and Celine is returning to college after visiting family.  They have an instant connection and Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna and spend the night walking around the city before he has to get on a plane back to America in the morning.

Ha ha.  I've done this.  Except it was a plane in Venice.  What?   I was a hot 20-something once.

I had seen Before Midnight, the final entry in the trilogy because of the Oscars which removed a lot of the will-they-won't-they from the end.  That and it's 30 years old.  This is 100% not my kind of movie but a lot of people really love it.  It's got that pseudo-profound coffeeshop dialogue that all young people think they invented spoken by attractive actors in a beautiful location.  I mean, that's half the work right there.  As a travelogue of Vienna, it's not great.  I would have liked the city to feel more like a character but it looks like budget was an issue in that regard.  

It's currently streaming on Criterion Channel as part of their One Night feature.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

  Were you watching Jesus Christ Superstar and thought "God, I wish there were more movies about Judas Iscariot.  Also, I really love Westerns."  Believe it or not, there's a movie for you!

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) used to be part of Billy the Kid's (Kris Kristofferson) outlaw gang but when he takes a job as Sheriff, it puts him on the opposite side of the law.  He tries to balance the betrayal by half-heartedly pursuing but when his corporate sponsors put a minder on him in the form of Poe (John Beck), Garrett has to show results.  

This is a very good Western but it's a Sam Peckinpah Western, which means it's deeply misanthropic and nostalgic for a hyper-violent past that romanticizes anarchy and calls it freedom.  Which is not to say I don't agree with him.  Garrett's "law" is basically a forerunner of today's ultra-capitalist cops that protect and serve monetary interests over human ones.

Garrett and Judas are both selling out a friend, but Judas did it to protect the status quo because he feared violent reprisal and Garrett did it to secure a future of comfort in a land rapidly being forced into conformity.  Both had a heaping spoonful of jealousy and love mixed in to make it all spiky and conflicted.  

Pat Garrett works better than JCS because Peckinpah was absolutely not interested in criticism and made his Jesus stand-in a multiple murderer with no compunction while Norman Jewison panicked and tried to censor Rock Star Jesus to appease people and ended up just neutering his art.

You can find a full copy on YouTube but I couldn't hear any of the dialogue and the subtitles/closed captions were only in Spanish so I broke down and rented it from Amazon.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

  Continuing our noir theme with a 70s classic.  Content warning: domestic abuse (off-screen), a woman gets glassed with a Coke bottle

Private detective Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is incensed over being arrested as an accessory in the death of his friend Terry's (Jim Bouton) wife's murder.  He is released when Terry turns up dead in Mexico from an apparent suicide.  Marlowe doesn't believe it and begins investigating.  Sort of.  He takes an unrelated case in the same gated neighborhood when a housewife (Nina van Pallandt) needs help finding her missing husband (Sterling Hayden).  He solves that almost immediately and then uses it as an excuse to keep poking around.  A local mobster (Mark Rydell) helpfully points him in the right direction by showing up demanding the money Terry supposedly owed him.

There are many Phillip Marlowe stories.  This might be the worst one.  But a bad Marlowe is like a bad martini.  It's still drinkable; you just switch to something else after.  

This is the youngest I've ever seen Elliott Gould and the quality of the cinematography is so bad, I'm still not really sure I saw him.  Everything seemed very slightly fuzzy in the way of the time.  He is certainly in this movie though.  Also, the recently deceased Henry Gibson in a small inexplicable role but still welcome.  And keep your eyes peeled (though you don't really need to, he sticks out like a sore thumb) for a young Arnold Schwarzenegger near the end.

It's definitely not my favorite noir.  Nothing really grabbed me and it felt very paint-by-numbers.  And this is just a personal irritation, but the overuse of the title song got super old, super quickly.  Was Johnny Mercer getting paid by the minute?  Anyway, I had intended to watch this on Criterion but missed it by a couple of days as it left their library at the end of March.  You can still see it on Tubi, however.

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

  Continuing our noir theme, we have a Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis entry.  

Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is a press agent for small acts in and around Broadway.  He is beholden to columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) to publish Falco's promotional materials.  Hunsecker, a vengeful megalomaniac, has frozen Falco out until Falco breaks up the relationship between Hunsecker's younger sister, Susan (Susan Harrison), and jazz musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner).  

This is definitely noir and Lancaster has never made a bad movie, but it just didn't stick the landing for me.  The climax peters out instead of detonating.  I wanted this movie to have shrapnel.  Still, it's very highly regarded in film circles and does showcase a sweaty, sleazy Curtis as well as a solid supporting cast.  If you're a Lancaster completionist or interested in All Things Noir, give it a shot.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy with a library subscription or Tubi with ads.