Monty Python's The Meaning of life with the SO.


She doesn't quite get MP, and thinks I' m weird, that I do.

(January 22, 2019 at 11:11 am)onlinebiker Wrote: Monty Python's The Meaning of life with the SO.


She doesn't quite get MP, and thinks I' m weird, that I do.

I'm 25 and MP at some points get super dry and shtick-y. I think a lot of it simply doesn't translate to my generation... not all jokes/comedic styles age well. That being said, there are some Monty Python sketches that have made me laugh so hard I cried. Love some MP when I'm in the mood for it.

...

Just recently watched Apocalypse Now, which I've somehow just see for the first time in 2019. Holy fuck that movie is nuts. Can't believe that came out in '79 that must have been like a shock to people's psyches. Intense stuff... good moive.

Meant to be watched stoned, like Firesign Theater.

Adrift 8/10
Ant man and the wasp 6/10

Birdbox-- the suspense was really well done. Considering what a big challenge suspension of disbelief was with the story's very simple but unbelievable premise, the movie came out quite good.

I figured this would be the place to explain why I started the Deep Hurting Project:

The initial idea for it started in November, when a show I watch on Channel Awesome had a theme month called "Noooo-vember," covering initial impressions of some of the worst films ever made. The next month, a blog I follow, 366 Weird Movies, finally reached its 366th Weird Movie, and I mused about how my favorite movie and the worst movie I've ever seen made the list. Then, I wound up watching IHE's review of The Amazing Bulk and he posed the question of "when is a movie not a movie?" He concluded he couldn't rightly even call it a movie, especially since most of the movie was basically shot on a digital backlot, except that almost all those digital assets were purchased elsewhere (this was admitted in the commentary and the end credits even cite them) with only about six or seven being custom-made for the film. This started to make me think about what could be the worst movie I ever saw.

My previous candidate was Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.



By this metric, perhaps Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny doesn't count as a movie. The thing is, it's basically a random frame story for another film that was made years prior: a version of Thumbelina (or Jack and the Beanstalk, depending on the version). They don't even edit out the credits to that version. The Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny plot in the new footage? Only about 33 minutes long. Roughly a third of the actual piece.

I also put another asterisk on another film called Fun in Balloonland



This does pretty much the same thing as SATICB, except even worse. This barely deigns to have a plot and gives it up entirely after 15 minutes to show more stock footage, this time, not of another pre-made film, but of a parade. Specifically, the 1964 Philadelphia Thanksgiving Parade. And it's narrated by a woman who sounds like she's had just enough hits of acid to not think she could fly and jump off the roof of whatever building they recorded the narration in.

But there was one more recent discovery that could have been worse if not for one thing:



Santa's Christmas Elf Named Calvin was made by one of the people behind SATICB, and does it even worse, but in a much more elemental way. If you look at it, you might notice the problem: there is no motion. It's all a still-show of poorly framed and darkly-lit photos of shitty knock-offs of Rankin-Bass puppets telling a boring story told by someone who was clearly just there for a paycheck. And it's not animated because that takes far too much time and effort. You know what, here's a counterpoint: Chris Marker's La Jetee. It was a short about time travel that's good enough to have made the Criterion Collection, and became the basis for 12 Monkeys 30 years later. It was made the way it was because Chris Marker only had access to a proper movie camera for one day, and he used that day to show a woman smiling. And once again, it's still a pretty strong work that haunts me even to this day. There is nothing in Santa's Christmas Elf Named Calvin to recommend it. It fails at being a movie because it fails to move. And not just move my soul, but portray motion at all.

Thinking about this, I found myself wondering: what was the worst movie I've seen that could really be called a movie? And I couldn't for the life of me find an answer. I briefly latched onto Red Zone Cuba, but Cherokee Jack and even that fucking theme song were more than enough to say "No, that's not the worst." So, I decided to go to TVTropes' "So Bad It's Horrible" and check out all the films that were on the list and available at my local library to see if I can find that answer.

(Note: as I wrote this, I've considered that perhaps The Brute Man might actually be the worst proper film I've ever seen, if only for its shameless exploitation of Rondo Hatton's acromegaly and the fact that literally everybody's a fucking asshole who keeps passing the buck on the Creeper investigation because Truman. Perhaps I'll find a worse film before the year's out.)

(January 22, 2019 at 11:11 am)onlinebiker Wrote: Monty Python's The Meaning of life with the SO.


She doesn't quite get MP, and thinks I' m weird, that I do.

Time to trade 'er in!

'Ant-Man And The Wasp'. Only take away:  Michael Douglas is aging well.

Boru

(January 29, 2019 at 6:12 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: 'Ant-Man And The Wasp'. Only take away:  Michael Douglas is aging well.

Boru

I've got that on hold at the library. I'm like the bazillionth person in line. It got good reviews, but sometimes that's not enough.

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is The Disappointments Room. What's a disappointments room, you may ask? Well, here's the HGTV clip that inspired it:





Yes, a horror movie based on a segment from an HGTV show. That alone should tell you how scary this film really is.

This film is probably the least scary horror film I've seen since I was still regularly watching MST3K. It's really saying something that the best performances in the film easily come from archival footage of The Magic Garden that the kid is watching in one scene. From the video of the real Disappointments Room, and the fact that it's a haunted house movie, and the fact that about a third of the way through, the kid's telling his mom that he's worried she'll get sick again, well, most everything you expect to happen does happen. Literally the only unexpected plot detail is that they decide to move away from the haunted house in the end. About the only thing that distracts from this is the fact that there is virtually no structure to the film. One scene, Kate Beckinsale's meeting with an old lady who tells her about the disappointments room in the title and about the paranormal activity involved, and the next scene, she's haggling with the handyman about his prices for roof repair while her son gripes about being hungry. I have no idea why one scene follows another in this film. The main plot of the dead girl haunting the home is treated like  B-plot at best, taking a back seat to some really mundane family shit.

And for a horror film that relies on the "could it all be in their heads" card, Kate Beckinsale's portrayal feels way too mundane for it to work. In a competently made film, they'd have the protagonist thrust into a weird situation where their actions would seem to be fairly sensible, at least until we step back and they reveal how strange they really are. Like, say, in this film, she'd be concerned about the possibility of the house being haunted by the dead girl and once she sees how much in danger she is, she decides to take drastic action that seems like it could save her family, only for it to be revealed how off-base it really is. In this film, she starts to do some really strange things (like destroying paintings) even though there's no reason for it, and doing it all with very little emotion. And somehow, I doubt that's what they were going for. And then she accepts that she was having a nervous breakdown about a minute after her husband catches her almost going Oh Dae-Su on her son with a hammer.

Also, the effects on the ghosts look like utter shit. The girl's deformity and the judge's bashed-in head look like they were made by Troma, and yet this was a $15 million movie with a lot of talent behind it. And the special makeup effects were designed by a studio that won an Emmy and an Oscar for their work, and is currently working on The Walking Dead. Dafuq?

And now for the obvious joke literally everyone made about the film: