The Crow (1994)

It is apparently my lot in life to proselytize The Crow to others.  I made Tyler set up the TV so I could make Bethany watch this movie for my birthday.  It remains a classic.  Originally posted 07 Jul 13.  

Don't judge me.  This movie was my world when I was about 15.  My friend Lindsey was obsessed with it and I quickly became obsessed as well.  I had the soundtrack and the score, plus a huge blacklight poster of Brandon Lee.  My mother thought it was ghastly, which only added to the appeal.

I cracked it open ahead of time (still in the B's) because Rob was reading an article about the proposed remake (currently with Luke Evans attached to star) and mentioned that he had never seen the original.

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and his fiancée Shelley (Sofia Shinas) were murdered the night before their wedding.  One year later, Eric returns as a revenant to exact revenge on the gang of thugs that robbed him of happiness. 

It's dark, it's twisted, and it has a ton of actors whose faces you'll recognize even if you have to IMDb their names.  Most importantly, it has Michael Wincott which makes it automatically awesome. 

I was really worried about showing this to someone for the first time, now almost twenty years later.  Sometimes the things we loved as children just don't hold up to someone else's scrutiny and there is nothing like the salt-on-a-slug shriveling feeling of someone looking at you, raising an eyebrow, and saying "you identified with that?"  Abashed, the devil stood, indeed. 

Fortunately, the film can still be an enjoyable watch, if you're willing to go with it. 

A Company Man (2012)

   I know I took a week off.  It was my birthday and I had just moved.  I needed a break.  Plus, we hadn't hooked up the TV or anything yet and while I love you random Internet readers, I am not going to watch movies on my phone for you.  That's lame.

But I am back now and with hopefully less existential crisis.  Oh, Chadwick Boseman died?  Super young? After heroically struggling with colon cancer?  On Jackie Robinson Day, a legend in his own right whose biopic catapulted the actor to stardom?  It was also Jack Kirby's birthday, the artist who created Black Panther?  I see, I see.  *Incoherent screaming*

Let's talk about this movie.

JI Hyong-do (SO Ji-seob) works for a company of assassins.  He probably would have said things were going well until he was asked to kill a temp (KIM Dong-jun) who reminded him a little bit too much of himself when he was young and full of dreams.  Worse, in offering his condolences and passing on the kid's paycheck, Ji meets the kid's mom (LEE Mi-yeon), a disillusioned former pop idol, and starts falling in love with her.  His higher-ups think that Ji now has less loyalty to the company and send assassins after him and his new family.  This doesn't end well for anyone.

This was much more of a condemnation of corporate culture than the bloody action movie I was hoping for.  Even my escapism is social commentary.  The film itself was a little slow for me and spent a little too much time on side characters that did nothing to advance the plot.  The action choreography was okay, not over-edited, but lacked a little of the panache I've come to expect.  It all felt very middle of the road.  Still, if you're in the mood for Korean assassins and you've already watched Man from Nowhere eleventy billion times, give this one a shot.  It's streaming on Tubi.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

   It took me a while to even decide to watch this movie because this summer has been such a shitshow psychologically, I didn't know if I could handle even a satire of fascism.  Turns out I can.  

Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is 10-years-old and fanatically devoted to the Nazi cause, even to the point where his imaginary best friend is Hitler (Taika Waititi).  He is injured after trying to prove his bravery at a Hitler Youth training weekend and forced to spend time out of school while he heals so he is given a job working for Captain K (Sam Rockwell), a disgraced army captain.  Coming home unexpectedly, Jojo hears a noise in his house and discovers that his mother (Scarlett Johansson) has hidden a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) behind a wall panel.  He slowly develops a friendship that will test all of his assumptions about right and wrong.

This movie really deserves every piece of praise that was heaped on it.  The actors are all wonderful, especially Waititi, and it is filled with humor leavened with the right amount of pathos.  Also, the soundtrack is excellent.  It's currently streaming on HBO, HBO Max if you got it, and Amazon if you have the HBO add-on.

TV TV TV

 Still trying to get through some TV.  I'm about 2/3 through season 2 of Hannibal on Netflix.  I had always heard about the slash fiction concerning Hannibal Lector and Will Graham and I thought it was just the Internet being horny, as usual.  But season 2 is waaaaaaay more homoerotic than season 1 so now I see where they're coming from.  

Also about 2/3 of the way through season 1 of Fargo.  I was steaming along through the first eight episodes but hit a wall at episode nine.  I don't know if it's the year time jump or if I thought the season was over at eight or what but I'm having a hard time pushing on.  I really like the show so I'm going to stick with it, just having a sticky spell.

I got through another disc of season 7 of Arrow.  Hopefully, it will pick up a little now that the Diaz storyline is over.  I was so so so sick of it in season 6 and it has really quelled my enjoyment of this show. Pretty much the only saving grace so far has been the (out-of-context) Elseworlds crossover episode.

Only one disc left for Birds of Prey and every episode just makes me mourn for what could have been.  

And I got through the 3rd season of Agents of SHIELD.  Next up is the Ghost Rider/LMD season, one of my favorites, so I'm looking forward to that.

In personal news, I spent all weekend painting my new living room.  Next week we fully move into the new place so don't expect to see a lot of posts between now and then, although I will try my damnedest.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

  Okay, so I tried to watch The Suspect but got thrown off by the shitty editing.  Then I tried to watch 20th Century Women but only made it 28 minutes.  I tried to watch The Newsroom but couldn't make it through the pilot.  A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood took me two days, but that's because I just bought a house and my attention has been, shall we say, divided.

Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is an investigative journalist for Esquire magazine known for his exposés.  He has garnered a reputation for hit pieces so his editor (Christine Lahti) assigns him a puff piece on Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks) for the magazine's heroes feature to tone down his image.  Initially accepting with bad grace, Lloyd finds himself confronted with the genuine humility, grace, and compassion of the beloved children's TV host which forces him to confront his resentment of his father (Chris Cooper) before it wrecks the relationship he has with his own son.

Tom Hanks doesn't look anything like Mr. Rogers but damned if he didn't nail that character.  The mannerisms, the voice cadence, the general spirit -- all perfect.  That's why all the critics made a big deal out of his performance.  But he is actually not the main character of the movie and the focus on him actually detracts from the film itself.  Tom Hanks doesn't "make" this movie.  The movie makes itself.

There is an astonishing level of detail that evokes the PBS show most of us remember from our childhoods.  I didn't even watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood a lot as a kid and I was stunned at how visceral a reaction I had to the models, the puppets, and even the grainy 70s-esque public television filming which leads up to a truly disturbing hallucination Lloyd has about 2/3 of the way through about being trapped in the puppet kingdom.  It is meticulously set up and executed flawlessly.  I've not seen Matthew Rhys in many things (his teeth bother me) but he is very good here.

It's currently streaming on Starz, which I get through Amazon Prime, if you are interested in a mostly soothing movie about dealing with life's hardships.  It's been that kind of year, frankly.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

  I did finally finish watching this movie.  It took way longer than I expected.

Seventeen-year-old Mari (Sandra Cassell) and her best friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are off to the city for a concert when they run into a gang of killers led by Krug (David Hess).  The two girls are kidnapped, taken to the woods, tortured, raped, and eventually killed.  But when the killers' car breaks down, they unknowingly take refuge in the house of Mari's parents (Richard Towers and Cynthia Carr).

This is a grindhouse take on The Virgin Spring and it absolutely still lives up to its classic status.  It has been remade, referenced, and resurrected for the last forty years and I don't see that changing anytime soon.  This helped kick off an entire sub-genre of revenge horror and the exploitative gore paved the way for the slashers of the late-70s and early-80s.

That being said, it is very much a product of its time.  The soundtrack in particular is pure 70s and by any stretch of the definition, this fails a political correctness test.  Hell, by the standards of the 70s, it fails a political correctness test.  It was designed to be shockingly violent, crude, and hard to watch.  Keep that in mind and you should be okay.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Can I Offer You Some TV in These Trying Times?

This blog has been a shitshow recently.  I'm aware.  I've found it difficult to use my normal process in these extraordinary times.  All the things on my TBW list are depressing Oscar nominees for the past ten years, grimdark prestige TV dramas, or humanitarian crisis documentaries.  I honestly didn't know I was going to be so badly affected but I have fucking struggled to get through them.  Even horror movies!  My life blood!  I got through an hour and a half of The Last House on the Left and turned it off.

So what have I been watching?

Crazy Delicious on Netflix.  It is bright, colorful, and British that almost soothes the ache of no new GBBO episodes.  But binge carefully.  There are only six episodes and they go by like a snap.

Tried to watch The Mentalist on Amazon.  Maybe in happier times I could have appreciated this for a fun, brainless watch-while-scrolling-on-my-phone show but I just couldn't get settled with it.  I think it was trying to be a darker, more serious Psych and it just didn't work for me.

Repair Shop is great if you need to cry at every episode watching people get cherished heirlooms repaired by master craftsmen with charming accents.  Watch out for s2 ep1 though.  It suckers you in with a sweet little old lady and then hits you with concentration camp survivor's story.  On Netflix.

Zumbo's Just Desserts.  I just tried the first episode last night while I was searching for something similar to Crazy Delicious.  It is an Australian dessert competition and it's more closely aligned to American shows than GBBO.  The judges are a little bitchier, freer with a backhanded compliment than their British counterparts.  Maybe you like that, though.

Hannibal is now on Netflix and I've been rewatching parts of s1 to refresh before I jump into s2.  Got bogged down by ep 10, though, so it's taking a bit.

Same with Agents of SHIELD.  I got through s2 again but I feel like it's taking too long.

Season 7 of Arrow is a masochistic slog at this point.

Tyler and I were watching Supergirl but got to the crossover with the Arrowverse and switched to The Flash to catch up.  We got up to season 3 of Flash but it has also bogged down because Barry is being an idiot and that annoys the shit out of Tyler.

Legends of Tomorrow killed off one of our favorite characters and we're mad at it.

Watched two episodes of Veep but I don't have the attention span for more at the moment.  It is funny, though.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  See, it's not that I'm not watching stuff.  It's just that I haven't finished anything.  I keep bouncing from thing to thing hoping for that one hit of dopamine but I haven't found it yet.  When I do, I'll let you know.