The Last Movie You Watched

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I was watching "Killing Reagan" and a lot of the movie is about John Warnock Hinckley Jr who shot Reagan and what a creep he was which is of course all written by an even bigger creep Bill O'Reilly. There are scenes where Hinckley harasses women - something that Bill is all too familiar with.

So is creep writing about another creep an irony or hypocrisy?

It's profitable. Nothing else matters. To the hacks who write that shit, anyway.

[Brian37]

Spent my Christmas day watching the rerun of the original Die Hard.

I still love the movie, but some parts looking back are bat shit absurd. 

The one scene that makes me laugh looking back at it now,his how McClain tries to lower himself in the air/heating shaft, by wedging the machine gun and lowering himself with the strap, and it fails, and he falls, only to suddenly grasp the opening of another vent with his fingertips.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Spent my Christmas day watching the rerun of the original Die Hard.

I still love the movie, but some parts looking back are bat shit absurd. 

The one scene that makes me laugh looking back at it now,his how McClain tries to lower himself in the air/heating shaft, by wedging the machine gun and lowering himself with the strap, and it fails, and he falls, only to suddenly grasp the opening of another vent with his fingertips.

Did you see Snape's face when he fell? They had practiced that shot with a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown. But when they actually filmed it they let go on "3".

[onlinebiker]

Once upon a time in Hollywood.


Quentin Tarentino doing what he does best - with some real talent...


The one objection I had --- when Bruce Lee gets thrown into the side of a 1967 Lincoln Continnental 4 door - it dents the shit out of both doors.

I owned 2 of those cars. They were tanks.

The only thing that would have gotten dented would have been Bruce Lee....

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Gotti. So, basically, this is another of John Travolta's passion projects, like Battlefield Earth, but this is less of a non-starter than that film was. It's the biopic of famous mobster John Gotti, which wouldn't seem like a bad idea for a movie. So...



Well, Richie Cusack, let me count the ways:

• It jumps all over the place with little rhyme or reason. One scene he's in his prime, the next he's old and terminally ill, the next, he's a bit younger, then it's 1971. There are movies that really do benefit from a nonlinear storytelling. Hell, John-boy starred in one. In Pulp Fiction, it helps with dramatic tension, like you see Jules and Vincent wearing T-shirts and shorts, telling Marcellus that they don't want to know why they look like dorks, but we do, and then we see it. I know a lot of this is framed through his trying to convince Junior to not take a plea deal (which doesn't explain why he refers to Junior in the third person), but this random structure does not help the  story at all.  Especially when we see Junior going from a five-year-old to a college student to a slightly older kid in three consecutive scenes. As a result, we have no narrative through-line to give a shit about these mob guys.
  
• "Motherfucking these guys." No, I didn't mistype "These Motherfucking guys," Gotti uses "motherfuck" as a verb. I have been swearing for well over a decade, and I know that motherfucking is not a motherfucking verb! Fun fact: Stephen Wildish has a section of his book How to Swear that talks about the use of "motherfucker" as a noun and an adjective. Not as a verb. I have never heard this in the wild, and rarely in the media, because it's really fucking awkward.
  
• In the later-period scenes, John Travolta needs to wear old-age makeup to portray Gotti. Thing is, on the day Gotti started principal photography, John Travolta was 267 days OLDER than John Gotti was when he died. I know actors are vain, but this is really ridiculous. 
  
• After a couple dozen scenes where we switch back and forth between timelines, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this movie has a concerning bias in favour of John Gotti. We have long scenes of him doting over his kids, and the crime (you know, the reason people are going to want to see a movie about a famous mobster) is really rushed over. There's a scene of him making his bones by killing a guy in a hotel room, and the movie rushes this over like, well, imagine that you go to a motel because you left a book there, go to the room, see it on a table, and jog back to the car. That hit is pretty much played like that, except instead of getting a book, he shoots a guy in the chest. And I used the word "jog" instead of run, because while he gets back to his car quickly, it's not like the typical "I need to get out of here before the  cops show up" run, it's just a jaunty run. Apparently, Travolta was a friend of the Gottis, and his pro-Gotti bias really shows. And it really gets in the way of an interesting story. Hell, near the end of the movie, they include testimonials from supporters in the street, and, well, I wasn't a fan of this when Spike Lee did the same for Malcolm X. Do you really think I'd give it a pass here?
  
• You know how, in Suicide Squad, they had a trailer company to help with the editing, and they put these stupid-looking introduction scenes that might be fine in trailers, but look horrendous in an actual film into it because the movie as it was was a mess? They do the same for this movie. Admittedly, they're lower-key, but we keep seeing all the miscellaneous mobsters they failed to properly develop getting captions explaining who they are because the film failed to develop them in any meaningful way. 
  
• At one point, they have to explain what the five boroughs of New York are to John Gotti. Gotti was born in The Bronx, grew up in Brooklyn, and eventually spent most of his career in Queens. Manhattan. Staten Island.
  
• Apart from that, I liked it a lot more when it was calling itself Goodfellas.
  
• Also, one strange note: the studio noticed the movie was getting bad reviews, so they created ad campaigns claiming that critics are "trolls behind a keyboard" and that critics "don't want you to see it." In reality, 40% of the people who saw the movie on its opening weekend were given free tickets by Moviepass, who are affiliated with the studio. And the film was not screneed for critics. This tends to happen because A) the studio does not want any advance information leaking before the release, B) the studio knows it's not likely to get good reviews, or C) it's Christopher Robin. Looking at the "Not Screened For Critics" page on TVTropes, I can remember exactly five of the films listed actually being worth watching. And Piranha 3D and Snakes on a Plane were both So Bad They're Good movies.
  

[Rev. Rye]

This week's Deep Hurting Project Part 1: The Nutcracker: The Untold Story. Okay, fun fact: Andrei Konchalovsky was a prominent Soviet film director, who started his career co-writing Andrei Tarkovsky's first two films, and eventually made a few films in America in the Eighties, including Runaway Train (a film that was originally to be directed by none other than Akira Kurosawa) and Tango and Cash. When the Iron Curtain fell, he returned to Russia, and around this time, he started to craft a passion project, based around E.T.A. Hoffman's classic story and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's iconic music for The Nutcracker. 20 years later, it was released, and, well, let me put it this way: it made the Deep Hurting Project. Do you really think it was any good?

Shit you can tell from the first fiften minutes:

• Well, we're off to a great start when you've got music from near the end of the ballet ("Sugar Plum Fairy") and you score your opening credits to it. I'd put Richie Cusack in there if not for the fact that, well, it is one of the most famous pieces from the musical, more than this: 
  
  
  
• The first actual scene is stranger: It's a shot on what looks a lot like the Rink at Rockefeller Center, except it's clearly not, because it's set in Vienna in the 1920s, and there's a restaurant on the sidelines with waiters that ice-skate (and a damn good illustration of why it's a bad idea when one of them drops a tray and breaks a glass), and then, at the end of the scene, there's a streetcar full of musicians in an orchestra just playing. Dafuq? I know Vienna is a very cultural city, but Dafuq?
  
• Elle Fanning's acting is horrible in this film. She puts about as much effort into screaming her lungs off as she does the most mundane aspects. This is not a good thing, as she doesn't put in any effort into the mundane shit. She's better in other films,  before and after, so I'm inclined to think this was just her knowing she was in a shit film and not giving a shit about not being given anything to deal with.
  
• And what the fuck is Albert Einstein doing in this movie? What thematic connection does Einstein have with The Nutcracker? What is he doing in Vienna when he's clearly supposed to be in Geneva working for the League of Nations at this time (and was never based out of Austria, as far as I can tell), and why is he celebrating Christmas when he's JEWISH? 
  
• Come on, you call the Nutcracker NC? Are you embarrassed that you're doing the Nutcracker? And why does it have this derpy, dead-eyed face? This is our title character and this isn't a horror movie. And it doesn't even crack nuts? 
  
  
  
  
• Nathan Lane gives the first song in the music, and it's simultaneously the most obvious and most left-field thing. On the one hand, it's the most famous song of the ballet, and if you're going to have Albert Einstein sing about anything, it'd be the theory of relativity, even if it is an absurdly neutered concept that children can understand. On the other hand, what the fuck does it have to do with anything?
  
  
  
  
• The kids are named Mary and Max. Go fuck yourself, Konckalovsky. Okay, maybe he wasn't aware that a far better film was being made with similarly-named leads on another hemisphere, but still, you're reminding me of a better movie in the middle of this shit.

Past that point:

• When The Nutcracker NC comes to life, it sounds like Moaning Myrtle (because they're voiced by the same woman, and it's clearly a woman voicing him, making it all the more alarming when he says girls are no good at military strategy) and its mouth moves he's a Canadian from South Park.
  
• Early in the movie, Albert Einstein gives the kids a dollhouse. And then it comes alive (and the size of Elle Fanning). The Residents of the Dollhouse: a John Wayne Gacy-lookalike clown named Tinker, an uncanny CGI monkey named Gielgud, and Jamaican drummer boy who's clearly a girl not even trying to pass for male. I am so not in the mood for a discussion of trans identity. They barely appear in the movie, fortunately. At least for the first hour or so, and then, they're (well, Tinker and the drummer girl, since Gielgud at least does shit) flat enough and have little enough to do that they may a well be part of the furniture.
  
• Why is Elle Fanning's Not-the-Mama Snow Queen wearing a dress that's clearly CGI? And why do they interpolate shit that sounds like it's coming from my synth downstairs into a proper orchestral arrangement befitting Tchaikovsky? And okay, I have to ask, why did Elle Fanning turn into the Nutcracker's size? Or how? They usually explain when shit like this happens. In this movie, nothing.
  
• And why does the maid give so little of a shit when she's destroyed one of her pillows? 
  
• And the other songs aren't better than "Relativity." They're just dime-store Tim Rice lyrics put to wonky arrangements of Tchaikovsky (mostly Nutcracker, but one song is from the second movement of Symphony No. 5. And the finale comes from the instantly recognisable climes of the opening of the first Piano Concerto. If they were going to cannibalise other Tchaikovsky works, could they at least have used "Capriccio Italien" for the climax?
  
• And apparently, she can fly and turn the NC back into a real boy 30 minutes in. Why didn't they use the boy's voice instead of Shirley Henderson's?
  
• THE RAT KING HAS A SKYSCRAPER/DICKSHIP THAT FUNCTIONS AS A TANK THAT POPS OUT OF THE STREETS OF VIENNA.
  
• He's afraid of sunlight, so he has to keep a cloud going. With smoke factories. To burn children's toys. And his minions look like they were in the SS. Way to completely destroy the fun with a Holocaust parallel in the next scene. And, yes, later in the movie, we see children's toys in a pile that looks like shit I've seen in photos of the liberation of Auschwitz, with people dressed in drab colours that can't help but bring Schindler's List to mind.
  
• And why the fuck did he never think of shutting down the factory to defeat the Rat King until Elle Fanning told him to?
  
• And why does the Rat King look like David Bowie in Labyrinth? How the fuck does that match with anything? And he put a shark in a tank just so it can electrocute it with its overhead light? And way to cement the Holocaust connection by having him claim that his empire will last ... a thousand years (and yes, that pause is in the actual movie).
  
• And then the movie decides to stop the plot completely to reveal that the film may or may not be a dream. This happens in the middle of the movie for over ten minutes. And Albert Einstein even decides to break the fourth wall to announce that he's investigating (apparently, his Uncle Albert sense was tingling). And then they confirm it was a dream all along at the end, so what's the point of that? Besides making this remind me of Atlanta Nights, that is.
  
• And Albert Einstein is the paragon of imagination in this world? You know, there are better Austrian artists to fill this role. Stefan Zweig comes to mind, but then again, he's also Jewish, so his presence in a Christmas movie is still a bit inexplicable.
  
• And did he really have to explain that his tale of the pebble was about Josef? That should have been obvious from the context. And he's carried the pebble around this whole time?
  
• Hot damn, Gielgud pulls Elle Fanning into a mirror, and we FINALLY have a proper magic device to explain why any of this shit is supposed to be happening and how it's supposed to be reconciled with real life.
  
• All of a sudden, the Rat King has an actual rat mouth, and it is creepy as fuck.
  
• He sings a song about opposing the slightest glimpse of light in what is clearly a sunny day. And, while trying to figure out which piece he was basing "Ratification" on ("Spanish Dance", BTW), I discovered something. The man credited with the music for the film? It's not Tchaikovsky. It's more heartbreaking: it's Eduard Artemyev. He created some very unique and fascinating scores for Tarkovsky's three middle films, particularly Stalker, a score so haunting I actually name-dropped it in a story I wrote a while back. And he was the one who turned the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky into this horseshit. How the mighty have fucking fallen. You know what, I used up the three-videos-per-post limit about 12 minutes into the film. 

In conclusion, fuck this movie with both fists, I'm going to find one of the music threads  to post "Meditation" from Stalker as a cleanser. See you in a few days (possibly even tomorrow) when I subject myself to An Action Star Christmas.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project Part 2: David DeCoteau is a director who made his bones with Roger Corman (one of many, including Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and James Cameon). Unlike those four, his Corman works are easily the artistic high point of his career. At this point, he has 159 directing credits under his belt, half of which were made in the past 11 years. Obscurus Lupa said that "David DeCoteau has two specialties at this point: homoerotic fantasies and really stupid family films. The only difference between the two is that in the family films, there's less guys showering." Well, that and the family films are probably going to have some Z-list actor putting in as little work as possible. Case in point: A Talking Cat?!, a movie I would have added to the project if only my local library had a copy. The title role is voiced by Eric Roberts. His audio sounds like it was literally phoned in. In reality, it was filmed in his living room in the space of 15 minutes. And there's a lot more where that came from. Case in point: Santa's Summer House (AKA Action Star Christmas).

It's basically a Christmas movie about a van full of martial artists (played by actual martial artists who don't actually do any martial arts in this film, so this is entirely pointless), one of their teenage sons, and a van driver, who get lost on the way to a resort, and end up in a mansion (the exact one in A Talking Cat, and I'm willing to bet a lot of his other films because it's his own home), that is apparently owned by Santa Claus, and his wife.

• This Christmas Movie starts off by explaining it's not even Christmas. And this kid who can't act stumbles around that fact, and even bringing up that, in Australia, it's snowy during the summer months (because Australia, being part of the Southern Hemisphere, has its seasonal cycle off by half a year from the Northern.)
  
• Well, this over-long Windham Hill-sounding version of "The First Noel" is at least more pleasant than the over-long theme from A Talking Cat?! That said, it gets tedious rather quickly. 
  
• We have Several long establishing shots of the beach near DeCoteau's home for no reason. And they're given transitions like they're supposed to be scenes in themselves. In reality, they're just padding. And it keeps happening between sequences. Even though the whole film's set in this mansion (with some short scenes early on and near the end of them driving that doesn't even have the dubious charm of the long driving scenes in Manos: The Hands of Fate). And that's nowhere near the biggest example, because there's a 10-MINUTE SCENE OF A CROQUET GAME. To be fair, there are better movies that include Croquet scenes, but at least Heathers uses it as a little reflection of the coming psychodrama in the clique and their members' privilege. This is pretty much a home movie, and has no real bearing on anything (except that one character might have thrown the game as a gift to his wife). 
  
• So... what the fuck is a rocket scientist working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory doing in a van full of martial artists?
  
• So, they just decide to have them all stay in the mansion for the weekend, treating it like a resort. And it has no wi-fi. This sounds like a setup for a horror movie. 
  
• For the record, the people who own this house, they're mostly called "Nana" and "Pop," and they're actually Santa. And what does Santa look like here?
  Yes, this Santa looks fuck-all like Santa. This is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the world, and he looks nothing like normal. And he can't even get the "Ho Ho Ho" right.
  
  But he does look suspiciously like someone else:
  
  Yes, this is Christopher Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's son, playing Santa. I consider Night of the Hunter to be my Third-favourite film of all time. So, just to spite this movie, I'm going to say this is the third-worst movie (non-asterisked) that I've ever seen (behind Kiara the Brave and One Missed Call.) This may or may not change by the time I finish the Project. Hell, I get the impression that this could possibly be worse than even Kiara. Honestly, the DeCoteau "charm" from A Talking Cat?! rubbing off on the film (and that weirdly fragmented car that he keeps in his living room), the inoffensive template (if undeniably glurgey), and the symmetry with Night of the Hunter is the only thing keeping me from definitively saying that.
• And why is the guest list on a scroll, and why is that scroll clearly a denuded flagpole for a miniature American Flag you wave at Fourth of July parades?
  
• So, we have two sisters, and one wants the other to abandon their dreams of being a photographer so they can work together on a business. Because it's not like I've spent several years balancing writing an Anglotopia column and a job at a candy store. Or, more to the point, say, a woman can balance being a nanny for 40 years with taking over 150,000 photos, which eventually turned her into a hugely famous artist.
  
• Am I the only person who finds it odd that it's the teenage boy who latches so quickly onto Santa?
  
• Also, in A Talking Cat, there's this subplot with a kid and his male friend, with whom he has more chemistry than his love interest, and one scene where one teaches the other to swim and it's really homoerotic. There's a similar scene where the teenaged boy is in a hot tub with Santa and this guy I've forgotten who he was who looks like G.O.B., though it looks like Santa, thankfully, isn't really a pederast. Still, Dafuq?
  
• It takes 55 minutes for the movie to confirm that it's Santa. Through badly-composited photos of Mitchum and Cynthia Rothrock, with Mitchum in a clearly fake Santa beard in locations around the world. And, of course, he played Prospero, bringing these misfits to his summer home..
  
• So, bizarrely, after I admitted I forgot who Bryan (the rocket scientist who looked like G.O.B.) was, Santa has a huge scene where he infodumps his whole backstory, that his parents divorced and he wanted these impossible toys, they spend an entire time quizzing each other about toys, and how he became a rocket scientist so he could create the toys that didn't exist. This probably could have been an interesting backstory in a much better film.
  
• How did she know he liked rockets? Because he kept mentioning rockets and how he planned to go to the Jet Propulsion Lab?
  

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'The Mask of Zorro' (1998).

I was expecting to hate it, pleasantly surprised that I didn't.  Perfectly credible performances by the principal actors (particularly Hopkins), reasonably faithful to the source material, and enough humour to keep the whole thing from bogging down into a revenge pic.  7/10.

Boru

[Duty]

Once upon a time in Hollywood.


Quentin Tarentino doing what he does best - with some real talent...


The one objection I had --- when Bruce Lee gets thrown into the side of a 1967 Lincoln Continnental 4 door - it dents the shit out of both doors.

I owned 2 of those cars. They were tanks.

The only thing that would have gotten dented would have been Bruce Lee....

That's the last time I take a film recommendation from you onlinebiker. Made it a whole 1:10 through the thing as have been a real fan of his other films, but this...irredeemably dull, plot-less "what's it like to work in the film industry" naval gazing. David Cronenberg did this too, another of my fav directors, naval gazing film industry esoterica, and I couldn't watch/gave up on that one too. Meh.

[onlinebiker]

Once upon a time in Hollywood.


Quentin Tarentino doing what he does best - with some real talent...


The one objection I had --- when Bruce Lee gets thrown into the side of a 1967 Lincoln Continnental 4 door - it dents the shit out of both doors.

I owned 2 of those cars. They were tanks.

The only thing that would have gotten dented would have been Bruce Lee....

That's the last time I take a film recommendation from you onlinebiker. Made it a whole 1:10 through the thing as have been a real fan of his other films, but this...irredeemably dull, plot-less "what's it like to work in the film industry" naval gazing. David Cronenberg did this too, another of my fav directors, naval gazing film industry esoterica, and I couldn't watch/gave up on that one too. Meh.

I'm going to guess you didn't grow up in the 1960s....

It is a film for those who did I guess....