Chiroptera Watch: Bats (1999)

Watched:  03/17/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Louis Morneau

So, I like a good movie about people being attacked by animals.  This is that.  It will not surprise you that Bats (1999) is about bats.  Attacking people.  And the people who are quite cross that they are being attacked by bats.  

Mutant bats, but bats.

So, anyway, it's about pretty much nothing else.  There's no real sub-text.  It's just a movie about trying to stop bats from eating you and the medley of challenges that arise in the pursuit of stopping bats.  No intentional analogies, but it IS about bats with a weaponized virus that is accidentally released, and threatens to doom humanity if not contained and.... ehhhhh.....  that reads pretty weird here in 2023.  

It borrows heavily from Alien and Aliens from sound FX to character choices.  The bats are shown in close-up, they are terrific puppets, and I have no notes.  Love the bats.  Well done.  The movie never lets itself think it needs sub-plots, so expect no romance.  But I do think they must have decided to do some green-screened insert shots in a few dialog bits, because it really seems like the lighting is weird and the characters are shot in a weird single mid-shot dead center of the frame dropping jokes or whatever.  Maybe the first go-round was too grim for what it was?

This isn't a criticism, but Lou Diamond Phillips was featured less prominently than I'd figured or hoped for - he's in it, but he's featured supporting. Our star is Dina Meyer, who was having a moment in Hollywood, but they chose to straighten her magnificent curls, and I am against that decision.  

she's lovely here, but just sort of bleeds into the wall-paper of 1990's young female white-girl actors

just look at those spectacular locks

Anyway - I actually liked the movie!  It did what I hoped it would do.  It didn't weigh itself down with misguided moralizing, and it set up an internal logic and stuck to it.  Animals got the upper hand for a while and the puppets were neat.

There's probably more to say about Dina Meyer as a star, but we'll save that for another day.  And certainly LDP, who is always good.  And there's a dissertation worth of discussion about the mononymous Leon playing "Jimmy" and the role of African-American males in horror and horror-adjacent films, especially in the late 90's as audiences expected tropes to be addressed.

 

Friday Watch Party: BATS

So.  I've never seen this.  But it's 90 minutes, stars Lou Diamond Phillips whom we all love, has Dina Meyer which you will not hear me crying about, and is about (a) mutant bats (b) in a small Texas town.  

Texas does, in fact, have a ton of bats.  So will this movie make me fear them?

"hi!  how ya doin'?"

those are not birds

Anyway, let's check in with Lou, see what's what, and how one deals with mutant bats and why they're a problem.

Day:  O3/17/2023

Time:  8:30 Central/ 6:30 Pacific

Cost:  $0, I believe

JOIN US AT THIS BAT TIME AT THIS BAT CHANNEL

(link live ten minutes before show)

PodCast 237: "Drive" (2011) - A Neo-Noir PodCast w/ SGHarms and Ryan

Watched:  03/01/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing: Third

Decade:  2010's

Director:  Nicolas Winding Refn

For more ways to listen

Steven and Ryan will give you an hour and twenty-two minutes. For that time, you're theirs as they talk a fairly divisive bit of neo-noir from a curious inflection point in cinema. Join us as we put the pedal to the metal and get under the hood of a cult favorite that dares to ask if you can really hammer home an idea, and is Albert Brooks just a cut up?

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 237: "Drive" (2011) - A Neo-Noir PodCast w/ SGHarms and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

Nightcall - Kavinsky

A Real Hero - College w/ Electric Youth

Noir at The Signal Watch PodCast

The Signal Watch PodCast · Noir Watch

WWII Watch: Watch on the Rhine (1943)

Watched:  03/12/2023

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Herman Shumlin, Hal Mohr (uncredited)

I had never seen Watch on the Rhine (1943), which is a bit odd.  It stars Bette Davis, who is tops in my book.  But, the real reason is: back in the early 1990's I was a high school drama kid.  In the spring of 1992, I worked tech support and understudy on Watch on the Rhine, which my school took to UIL One-Act Play competition.  We trimmed the show down to a 40 minute version of the 1941 stage play,* which I guess I ran through dozens and dozens of times.

The play was a formative experience  for multiple reasons, not least of which included pondering the content of the play every day for months on end.  But, still, I was sixteen when I read the play and just turned 17 when the experience was over.  So my perspective was widened but life hadn't come at me.  I didn't yet fully grasp the forces at work, what had happened in the decade or more before the war, how WWI led directly to WWII, and that the world is not a simple place and always 100 times more complex than you believe at first blush, ways that inform the movie and play.

Noir Watch: The Killers (1946)

Watched:  03/10/2023

Format:  Amazon Watch Party

Viewing:  Fourth?

Director:  Robert Siodmak

Way back sometime in high school I read the short story The Killers by Hemingway, and like most 17 year olds reading Hemingway, it hit me over the head like a sledgehammer.*  It's a taught bit about the nature of the inevitable - by those who dole it out, those on the receiving end, and those caught up in its wake.  

About twenty years after publication of Hemingway's story, it was adapted into a film starring a fresh-faced actor by the name of Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster hadn't really acted before, but he walked into movies with a natural talent, charisma and muscley torso that kept him working long enough that I knew him as one of the retirement age gangsters in Tough Guys released 4 decades later.   

The movie also introduced Ava Gardner to mass audiences, and broke her as a major star for decades to come.  Bonus: If you need to get an idea of what to put next to "femme fatale" in the dictionary, Gardner's Kitty Collins is a phenomenal example (then put Jane Greer next to her).  

But the movie opens on an empty small-town street with two men in the forms of William Conrad and Charles McGraw entering a cafe and - for the next ten minutes the movie mostly re-creates the scene from the short story, nearly word-for-word, minus some racial slurs and some logistical stuff.  And, if you were a 17-year-old once who read Hemingway, its wild to see Nick Adams as a minor supporting character in a movie.

It's a hell of a scene.  Taught stuff that movies have been trying to recreate now for almost 80 years - almost 100 if you count back to the release of the short story.

The rest of the film has the tough chore of going back and starting at the beginning and working its way back to the opening sequence.  Eventually, it earns the sequence, but the tone never quite matches the first ten minute again.  Using the flashback-via-investigator framing made famous by Citizen Kane (released 5 years earlier) the movie relies on Edmond O'Brien to play an insurance investigator trying to find out why a man set up a woman he met once as his life-insurance beneficiary.  But I'll be dipped if I can say what he's actually investigating and why.  It seems like he answers work-related questions by the film's halfway point.  I don't know if he was looking to deny the payout or recover the money the Swede took.

What the film does do is create a good detective story infused with what would become hallmarks of noir.  Femme fatales.  Flashbacks.  Disposable hoods.  Character actors being characters.  A scramble for money.  Low-level gang bosses with more hair tonic than brains.  And all the secrets to come spilling out in the final reel as no one escapes their fate.  The only thing it's missing is Elisha Cook Jr. 

Anyway, I very much enjoyed a rewatch.  It's a kick of a movie.

*my understanding from social media is that Hemingway is no longer fashionable with the kids because (gestures at everything about Hemingway).