Up all night
AccuWeather said we were going to have an exceptionally brutal winter, but it's turned out to be not so cold nor snowy. That hasn't stopped me from staying indoors most of the time. When not trying to catch up on my TV stories, I'm usually watching movies. Here's a sample of some films I've seen recently.
"Vamp" - I have known about this Grace Jones vehicle since it hit theaters in 1986. Despite its possibly promising premise concerning frat guys tangling with vampire strippers, I never had an urge to see it until recently. I think I read something about it in some book within the last several years (couldn't tell you which), and when it showed up as a Watch Instantly suggestion on Netflix, I said, "Sure, maybe it's a minor '80s horror-comedy classic I've overlooked." I guess this is the sort of thing I'll watch when I have a gigantic selection of video "rentals" at my fingertips and I don't have to deal with care and transportation of a physical copy. So, you've got these two douchebag frat pledges, played by the wimpy kid from "My Bodyguard" and the dude who hung around with Robert Downey, Jr. in "Weird Science," who are supposed to get a stripper for a party as part of their initiation. They convince an obnoxious rich kid ("UHF"/"Sixteen Candles"/"Sesame Street" icon Gedde Watanabe) to drive them to a seedy strip joint run by a mostly silent Jones, who is secretly a powerful ancient vampire who preys on her desperate male customers. The T&A content is pretty low, considering the setting, and the flick definitely has tone and pacing problems. It doesn't integrate its comedic and horrific elements as well as many of its contemporaries did, so you get scenes of zany party dude humor awkwardly inserted between cool monster movie shit, including a few decent gore shots. Despite its flaws, some of which can be forgiven due to an obvious low budget, I enjoyed this relic. The vintage '80s vibe is thick from the crazy neon lighting to the amazing fashions, and the plot keeps your interest by unfolding breezily over a single night. However, the reason to see this is the freaky sexy alien demon creature that is Grace Jones, who puts on one of the coolest displays of performance art erotica ever filmed. If this is what strip clubs were actually like, I'd consider going to one.
"The King's Speech" - Feeling particularly tony, and perpetually about a year behind on Oscar winners, we settled down one evening with the widely acclaimed tale of Great Britain's King George VI's attempts to deal with his stuttering problem when he was suddenly thrust into the public eye and ear, and his relationship with the unorthodox Australian speech therapist he begrudgingly let help him. In case you have been avoiding this movie because it sounds like dull, sappy pabulum or mawkishly redemptive white people hokum, I understand. There's a reason it languished in our queue for more than a year before I finally bumped it up. It looks like the kind of film you should watch rather than the kind you want to watch. For Christ's sake, they actually re-released it to theaters with the swears cut out in the hopes that American parents would pack their "Wizards of Waverly Street"-conditioned kids onto church group buses and force them to endure two hours of gray-tinted English people talking in gray rooms. Having seen it, I can tell you that was a mistake, as "The King's Speech" is something only certain kinds of modern kids would appreciate. Through the awesome efforts of Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, this very basic, ultimately predictable true-life yarn cuts through all the finery and shows us relatable people who, when the chips are down, naturally and effectively deal with a problem none of them created. The typically excellent Guy Pierce and Michael Gambon are perfect as Firth's sneering, aristocratic arsehole relatives. Nothing happened here that I didn't expect, but I cared that it worked out, anyway. I was kind of shocked at how the storytelling sucked me in, so if you're a crank like me, don't let the feel-good marketing scare you off.
"I Think We're Alone Now"/"For the Love of Dolly" - Both of these Watch Instantly suggestions are independent documentaries about frighteningly dedicated fans of female singer/actresses. Yes, I'm sure a few of my wife's ratings and selections influenced Netflix to suggest these for us. However, if there's one thing Netflix has taught me, it 's that our tastes often dovetail in interesting ways. We were both totally engrossed in these microbudget snapshots of damaged obsessives. "Alone" is about two people who, um, follow Tiffany, beloved singer of a hit gender-switched Beatles cover and recent star of "Mega Python vs. Gatoroid." One is a middle-aged man with Asperger's, the other is an "intersexual" victim of a childhood accident. Although their extreme behavior is shockingly inappropriate and often hilariously awkward, some sort of saddened sympathy cannot help but arise when the circumstances of their lives come into wider focus. "Dolly" profiles a larger number of folks who are completely nuts for Dolly Parton, the buxom country singer, theme park founder and recent star of that dueling-fiesty-church-singing-group-leader movie. Dolly's fanatics run the complete range. There's an innocently fixated, relentlessly positive, developmentally disabled kid who makes his own sweatshirts featuring pictures of himself with Ms. Parton all over them. There's a memorabilia-hoarding gay couple with a house obscured under charity auction purchases, and in which one of the guys interminably toils to hand-sculpt countless Dolly dolls to dress up and love. There's a spinster who has Dolly's signature tattooed on her body several times, recreated Dolly's Smoky Mountain country cabin home in her backyard and sneaks onto a used car lot because Dolly's best friend's old car is there and she wants to lick the passenger side seatbelt. Watching these two films in close proximity will help any megageek put their own obsessions into perspective, if only to be reassured of their own restraint.
"The Sentinel" - Chalk another one off my long list of must-see cult horror titles. The only horror film from the director of the first three "Death Wish" films, "The Sentinel" centers on another unsavory side of city dwelling: the terrors of communal living quarters. This is one of these movies where a woman has just gotten out of the asylum and has to confront something even more unnerving than what sent her there, crossed with the prevailing '70s religious horror craze and maybe a dash of Polanski's "The Tenant." Our emotionally fragile heroine, a suicidal model with dead daddy issues, moves with her husband to a building where the neighbors are all-star wacky. There's a hammy Burgess Meredith throwing a birthday party for his cat, a naked Beverly D'Angelo furiously masturbating in front of company and poor old John Carradine, sequestered in the attic for the bulk of his screen time as a blind priest guarding an entrance to Hell. Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Jerry Orbach all have bit parts, while Ava Gardner, Jose Ferrer, Eli Wallach, Arthur Kennedy and Martin Balsam join Meredith and Carradine as the geezers on hand. So many '70s studio horror movies were packed with older actors, perhaps in an attempt to add some legitimacy to what they saw as tawdry demonic spookshows. Contrast this with today's studio horror films, where no one older than 40 usually has any real bearing on the plot. Anyway, the picture's a slow-burner, the leads (including Chris Sarandon) are pretty bland and you can see the ending from the cheap seats, but it occasionally builds up a tense, uncanny atmosphere and the famous faces keep it interesting. If you can handle a giant monstrance full of Catholic mysticism and the exploitative use of real deformed humans (a horde of them show up for the climax), this is a decent picture fully deserving of its "hidden gem" status, in that not everyone could enjoy it, but those who eventually make their way to it won't be sorry they did. If you have a thing for all cinematic progeny of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist," it could make a fun double feature with "Beyond the Door."
"Midnight Madness" - Now, this title was nowhere near new to me. The cable classic "Midnight Madness" is among a handful of movies I taped from television when I was a child and proceeded to watch relentlessly until I knew every piece of dialog, with perfect inflection and timing. Along with "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," "The Neverending Story," "The Last Starfighter," "Transylvania 6-5000," "Gremlins," "Clue," "Cat's Eye," dad's bootleg copy of "Back to the Future" and an edited ABC airing of "Jaws 2," this zany PG-rated Disney flick helped prepare me for my later "Rocky Horror" rituals and my subsequent lifetime of film fandom. It's funny, because these days, I actually avoid watching movies over and over so as not to get burned out on them. Because of that, recent movies that I really love can still kind of surprise me when I re-watch them. The opposite is true of "Mignight Madness," which remains firmly embedded in my aging noggin although I hadn't seen in about a decade. If you haven't had the privilege, it's a goofy comedy about a college scavenger hunt organized by a creepy dude named Leon who looks like he hasn't worked or showered in years, but exercises possibly diabolical powers of charisma to organize and attract enthusiastic participation in his elaborate game. He manipulates five thirtysomething college kids into finagling their friends/associates for an all-night romp around Los Angeles, wreaking havoc through famous spots like the Griffith Observatory, the Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery and LAX airport. The picture is basically a procession of ridiculous characters and dumb but hysterical gags, although it's pretty clean for a college-age comedy (Disney bankrolled it but kept their name off it, probably due to the whimsical beer guzzling and chaste boob jokes). Michael J. Fox and Paul Reubens have early bit parts, and the cast is jammed with semi-famous people including "An American Werewolf in London" star David Naughton, Stephen "Flounder" Furst and immortal nerd character actor Eddie Deezen. Silly and corny and sometimes awfully surreal, "Midnight Madness" is an American treasure which should be watched by all people over the age of 7. If you have a lousy time watching this movie, you are a total jerk.
"Vamp" - I have known about this Grace Jones vehicle since it hit theaters in 1986. Despite its possibly promising premise concerning frat guys tangling with vampire strippers, I never had an urge to see it until recently. I think I read something about it in some book within the last several years (couldn't tell you which), and when it showed up as a Watch Instantly suggestion on Netflix, I said, "Sure, maybe it's a minor '80s horror-comedy classic I've overlooked." I guess this is the sort of thing I'll watch when I have a gigantic selection of video "rentals" at my fingertips and I don't have to deal with care and transportation of a physical copy. So, you've got these two douchebag frat pledges, played by the wimpy kid from "My Bodyguard" and the dude who hung around with Robert Downey, Jr. in "Weird Science," who are supposed to get a stripper for a party as part of their initiation. They convince an obnoxious rich kid ("UHF"/"Sixteen Candles"/"Sesame Street" icon Gedde Watanabe) to drive them to a seedy strip joint run by a mostly silent Jones, who is secretly a powerful ancient vampire who preys on her desperate male customers. The T&A content is pretty low, considering the setting, and the flick definitely has tone and pacing problems. It doesn't integrate its comedic and horrific elements as well as many of its contemporaries did, so you get scenes of zany party dude humor awkwardly inserted between cool monster movie shit, including a few decent gore shots. Despite its flaws, some of which can be forgiven due to an obvious low budget, I enjoyed this relic. The vintage '80s vibe is thick from the crazy neon lighting to the amazing fashions, and the plot keeps your interest by unfolding breezily over a single night. However, the reason to see this is the freaky sexy alien demon creature that is Grace Jones, who puts on one of the coolest displays of performance art erotica ever filmed. If this is what strip clubs were actually like, I'd consider going to one."The King's Speech" - Feeling particularly tony, and perpetually about a year behind on Oscar winners, we settled down one evening with the widely acclaimed tale of Great Britain's King George VI's attempts to deal with his stuttering problem when he was suddenly thrust into the public eye and ear, and his relationship with the unorthodox Australian speech therapist he begrudgingly let help him. In case you have been avoiding this movie because it sounds like dull, sappy pabulum or mawkishly redemptive white people hokum, I understand. There's a reason it languished in our queue for more than a year before I finally bumped it up. It looks like the kind of film you should watch rather than the kind you want to watch. For Christ's sake, they actually re-released it to theaters with the swears cut out in the hopes that American parents would pack their "Wizards of Waverly Street"-conditioned kids onto church group buses and force them to endure two hours of gray-tinted English people talking in gray rooms. Having seen it, I can tell you that was a mistake, as "The King's Speech" is something only certain kinds of modern kids would appreciate. Through the awesome efforts of Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, this very basic, ultimately predictable true-life yarn cuts through all the finery and shows us relatable people who, when the chips are down, naturally and effectively deal with a problem none of them created. The typically excellent Guy Pierce and Michael Gambon are perfect as Firth's sneering, aristocratic arsehole relatives. Nothing happened here that I didn't expect, but I cared that it worked out, anyway. I was kind of shocked at how the storytelling sucked me in, so if you're a crank like me, don't let the feel-good marketing scare you off."I Think We're Alone Now"/"For the Love of Dolly" - Both of these Watch Instantly suggestions are independent documentaries about frighteningly dedicated fans of female singer/actresses. Yes, I'm sure a few of my wife's ratings and selections influenced Netflix to suggest these for us. However, if there's one thing Netflix has taught me, it 's that our tastes often dovetail in interesting ways. We were both totally engrossed in these microbudget snapshots of damaged obsessives. "Alone" is about two people who, um, follow Tiffany, beloved singer of a hit gender-switched Beatles cover and recent star of "Mega Python vs. Gatoroid." One is a middle-aged man with Asperger's, the other is an "intersexual" victim of a childhood accident. Although their extreme behavior is shockingly inappropriate and often hilariously awkward, some sort of saddened sympathy cannot help but arise when the circumstances of their lives come into wider focus. "Dolly" profiles a larger number of folks who are completely nuts for Dolly Parton, the buxom country singer, theme park founder and recent star of that dueling-fiesty-church-singing-group-leader movie. Dolly's fanatics run the complete range. There's an innocently fixated, relentlessly positive, developmentally disabled kid who makes his own sweatshirts featuring pictures of himself with Ms. Parton all over them. There's a memorabilia-hoarding gay couple with a house obscured under charity auction purchases, and in which one of the guys interminably toils to hand-sculpt countless Dolly dolls to dress up and love. There's a spinster who has Dolly's signature tattooed on her body several times, recreated Dolly's Smoky Mountain country cabin home in her backyard and sneaks onto a used car lot because Dolly's best friend's old car is there and she wants to lick the passenger side seatbelt. Watching these two films in close proximity will help any megageek put their own obsessions into perspective, if only to be reassured of their own restraint."The Sentinel" - Chalk another one off my long list of must-see cult horror titles. The only horror film from the director of the first three "Death Wish" films, "The Sentinel" centers on another unsavory side of city dwelling: the terrors of communal living quarters. This is one of these movies where a woman has just gotten out of the asylum and has to confront something even more unnerving than what sent her there, crossed with the prevailing '70s religious horror craze and maybe a dash of Polanski's "The Tenant." Our emotionally fragile heroine, a suicidal model with dead daddy issues, moves with her husband to a building where the neighbors are all-star wacky. There's a hammy Burgess Meredith throwing a birthday party for his cat, a naked Beverly D'Angelo furiously masturbating in front of company and poor old John Carradine, sequestered in the attic for the bulk of his screen time as a blind priest guarding an entrance to Hell. Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Jerry Orbach all have bit parts, while Ava Gardner, Jose Ferrer, Eli Wallach, Arthur Kennedy and Martin Balsam join Meredith and Carradine as the geezers on hand. So many '70s studio horror movies were packed with older actors, perhaps in an attempt to add some legitimacy to what they saw as tawdry demonic spookshows. Contrast this with today's studio horror films, where no one older than 40 usually has any real bearing on the plot. Anyway, the picture's a slow-burner, the leads (including Chris Sarandon) are pretty bland and you can see the ending from the cheap seats, but it occasionally builds up a tense, uncanny atmosphere and the famous faces keep it interesting. If you can handle a giant monstrance full of Catholic mysticism and the exploitative use of real deformed humans (a horde of them show up for the climax), this is a decent picture fully deserving of its "hidden gem" status, in that not everyone could enjoy it, but those who eventually make their way to it won't be sorry they did. If you have a thing for all cinematic progeny of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist," it could make a fun double feature with "Beyond the Door.""Midnight Madness" - Now, this title was nowhere near new to me. The cable classic "Midnight Madness" is among a handful of movies I taped from television when I was a child and proceeded to watch relentlessly until I knew every piece of dialog, with perfect inflection and timing. Along with "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," "The Neverending Story," "The Last Starfighter," "Transylvania 6-5000," "Gremlins," "Clue," "Cat's Eye," dad's bootleg copy of "Back to the Future" and an edited ABC airing of "Jaws 2," this zany PG-rated Disney flick helped prepare me for my later "Rocky Horror" rituals and my subsequent lifetime of film fandom. It's funny, because these days, I actually avoid watching movies over and over so as not to get burned out on them. Because of that, recent movies that I really love can still kind of surprise me when I re-watch them. The opposite is true of "Mignight Madness," which remains firmly embedded in my aging noggin although I hadn't seen in about a decade. If you haven't had the privilege, it's a goofy comedy about a college scavenger hunt organized by a creepy dude named Leon who looks like he hasn't worked or showered in years, but exercises possibly diabolical powers of charisma to organize and attract enthusiastic participation in his elaborate game. He manipulates five thirtysomething college kids into finagling their friends/associates for an all-night romp around Los Angeles, wreaking havoc through famous spots like the Griffith Observatory, the Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery and LAX airport. The picture is basically a procession of ridiculous characters and dumb but hysterical gags, although it's pretty clean for a college-age comedy (Disney bankrolled it but kept their name off it, probably due to the whimsical beer guzzling and chaste boob jokes). Michael J. Fox and Paul Reubens have early bit parts, and the cast is jammed with semi-famous people including "An American Werewolf in London" star David Naughton, Stephen "Flounder" Furst and immortal nerd character actor Eddie Deezen. Silly and corny and sometimes awfully surreal, "Midnight Madness" is an American treasure which should be watched by all people over the age of 7. If you have a lousy time watching this movie, you are a total jerk.
posted by SoulReaper at 11:16 PM
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