Avengers Infinity War

Really good film.

9/10

Agree on Infinity War. That's the good shit.

We watched "Baby Driver" last night. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

The Giant Claw: Really, really, terrible. A must see.

The Cloverfield Paradox. The third film in the Cloverfield Trilogy.

(May 7, 2018 at 12:21 pm)Kit Wrote: The Cloverfield Paradox.  The third film in the Cloverfield Trilogy.

The middle one was retrofitted to the ... trilogy ... I think.

Avengers Age of Ultron

"The Post."  The publication of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  Great stuff.

The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960)... just finished watching this on a free streaming channel called tubi, which only does old and/or obscure films. It's just so surreal... I've watched two films on there now (the other one being Day Of The Triffids) and so far it's only had one advert... ad breaks as usual but every single time, the same single advert. It's just so surreal and funny... it seems the whole channel is funded by this single advert... and I have no idea what they expect to achieve... it's never gonna be a magnet for advertising, with the sort of selection it offers... so no idea why they're bothering. But that said, I think there will be a few gems in there to supplement my Netflix, youtube, and Amazon, and Little Shop Of Horrors is one of them I think; great film, and very funny in it's way. I recognised Jack Nicholson in it... the youngest I've ever seen him... and I don't think I'll ever see him in the same light after his strange role in this.

I finally got around to watching the King of Jazz Blu-Ray I bought shortly after it finally came out, and it's a very unusual film. There's no real plot, just a set of musical numbers and set pieces with a few very short sketches. It was made in 1930 with an early colour process which couldn't do blue properly, which is kind of awkward when one of the numbers is "Rhapsody in Blue."





If you're down with the sort of Jazz-lite music played by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (Bix Beiderbecke had left by this time, but at least Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti remained in the rhythm section) and some old vaudeville routines, it's a very fascinating watch. Even if you're not, it's fascinating to see how strange some of it can get; the "Rhapsody in Blue" number has a giant piano with five or six people playing at it whose inside is big enough to fit the entire band, string section and all (and the actual pianist is in a corner somewhere). One of the little skits is basically the plot of Nightcrawler pared down to about a minute with an all-female cast and the rapid-fire dialogue of a screwball comedy from later in the decade. The Rockettes (back when they were named The Russell Market Girls) appear in the film, but have a big number where they don't get out of their seats. One number involves a man going into a remarkably epic violin take on "Pop Goes the Weasel" with some strange alternate, borderline Hendrix-esque techniques all before using a bicycle pump to play "Stars and Stripes Forever." One's a monologue from a New York comedian who goes into a strange monologue/song about owning a fish store and almost dying in the War, while naming random cards he's carrying, doing so with such a frenetic energy that you don't care that none of it makes any sense. Walter Brennan (John Wayne's sidekick in many of his best films) actually appears in several of the skits, but he's pretty non-descript, possibly because the accident where he lost his teeth (and he discovered his niche) hadn't happened yet.

And what may be even stranger to modern audiences: throughout it all, they just barely acknowledge the existence of black people. For about ten seconds, a little black girl is sitting on Paul Whiteman's lap during one number, and "Rhapsody in Blue" is introduced by an acknowledgement of the "Voodoo Drums of Africa" (more a Haitian phoenomenon than an African one) as an influence on Jazz music, followed by a brief dance by a man in blackface (admittedly less stereotypical than one might expect; at times, the dancer almost looks like a Seal album cover, only for his unpainted arches to give him away). The big "Melting Pot" musical number of the end shows musicians of all nationalities (well, the European ones anyway), turning into Jazz-obsessed Americans. The black people who had an incalculable influence on the music do not appear at all. It can be galling to some that a pudgy white man called himself King of Jazz around the same time Louis Armstrong was making his Hot 5 and 7 recordings and Duke Ellington was breaking through into the mainstream.

Then again, given the blatant racism that not only permeated the era, but was explicitly codified in law (to the extent that movies could be, and were, banned from certain major cities because THEY TREATED THE BLACK PEOPLE IN THEM TOO WELL, showing that the political problems that led to casting Tilda Swinton as Doctor Strange's Tibetan master are nothing new), easing them into accepting black culture by giving it a non-threatening white face was probably the most feasible way of doing it. As annoying as it seems, there's a reason Pat Boone's version of "Tutti Frutti" was more successful on the charts than Little Richard's original.

The film is technically available on Youtube, but the copy there is a shortened version cobbled from whatever sources they could find dubbed from a VHS Copy that was probably printed before I was even born. Now, Criterion came out with a longer version (including a couple links that exist only on the original Vitaphone discs, and thus had to have stills from the film play over them until the picture came back, and at least one skit that did not appear in the old version I'm familiar with.) And while it's not all perfect, a lot of it looks shockingly good for a film that's 88 years old and languished in obscurity for most of its life. It's expensive, as one would expect from Criterion, but worth it if you're at all intrigued by what I've been yapping about for all this time. Here's the link to its page on Criterion.com, and if you find out that there's a 50% off sale (either on Criterion or one of Barnes and Nobles' 50% off sales on Criterion that happen every July and November) this may (assuming you don't have any of the other 900 or so films in the collection in your sights) be the one to spring for.

Also, I'm surprised this song doesn't get much play:





It could be because Bing Crosby (in his first film role, he does appear in several other scenes, mostly as part of the Rhythm Boys) was supposed to be singing this, but he ended up in a DUI before filming this scene.

"Bad Samaritan" - genre horror, predictable, but effective.