Until Lower Decks and a few one-off episodes, one of the few attempts at light comedy/action in the Trek franchise, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1987) caps off the trilogy that started in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, bringing our crew finally back to Earth after giving us the thrill of seeing them wandering the streets of 1986 San Franciso as a slightly disheveled away team.
I am 85% sure I've written this one up before, so I won't do it again. It's the one with the whales.
A Mighty Wind (2003) is not the same, tight-knit ensemble film we got in Waiting for Guffman, and doesn't have quite the laugh-per-minute ratio or Best in Show, but, man, is it watchable and weirdly moving. Which, in itself is a trick.
This one centers on a rush to put on a memorial show for a former producer and promoter of folk acts from the 1960's - and thus jumps the awkward bridge of time a lot of us saw on PBS in the 1990's as concerts of folk favorites like Peter, Paul and Mary became staples of fund-raising weekends - an attempt to appeal to the nostalgia of the boomers and their wallets.
We assemble the finest trio possible to take on the third in the Salkind's Superman franchise - this one inexplicably very heavy on very adult comedian Richard Pryor. It's a future-shock story of the magic of computers and how they can make a Superman a grumpy gus. Join SimonUK, Stuart and Ryan as they get super excited over the sharp turn the franchise took into goofiness.
Viewing: I dunno. First? I don't remember 95% of this if I saw it.
Decade: 1980's
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Staying Alive (1983) is the un-asked-for sequel to the 70's cultural phenomenon, Saturday Night Fever. If you've not seen Saturday Night Fever in a bit, it's not all about Travolta as king of the disco, it's also a story about directionless young people, misdirected energy, and generational schizms in a traditional family.
Staying Alive picks up six years later and is terrible.
Look, the point of the first movie was realizing the world was bigger and better than a disco on a Saturday night, but six years later, Tony has made maybe incremental progress and danced his way to a 0% bodyfat physique. Stephanie from the first film is just... gone. She has a surrogate character in Jackie, who is doing her best to look like a JJazzercised Anne Murray. Jackie is Tony's friend with benefits. I thought she was supposed to be the female lead from the first movie, but she is not. So, we basically know nothing about her aside from the fact that she's a doormat who Tony steps out on and then TELLS HER ABOUT IT.
A year ago today marks the day the pandemic toppled our lives. In the morning, I saw a message that my employing institution was closed and we were to not come to campus. We spent the day scrambling, setting up impromptu work stations with our laptops we'd been instructed to take home nightly for weeks at that point.
By late in the evening, Jamie had gone to bed and I was left with myself, sorting through the erupting confusion and fear, and then I saw the video of famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing the familiar tune by Dvořák. I won't lie - I sat here in this same spot on my sofa watching the recording on this same laptop and I sobbed.
Exhaustion, crippling uncertainty... After a day of scrolling endlessly through stories of what was coming, what we didn't know, and the posts and communications between friends and family offering what we could in support and all feeling the same darkness closing in, Ma reached for kindness - a prescient kindness - with his simple recording.
In a year that has seen horror and cruelty, that seemed to set the world ablaze over again each morning, I'm still stunned by how he seemed to know and know what to do.
"Goin' Home" is a sentimental song even without lyrics - it had some retroactively applied years after the song was originally penned. And even with all of us stuck in our houses, "Goin' Home" - returning to a place of comfort, to a time when we can see our parents without masks, share a meal with friends - is something that made sense then as we peered into the unknown, and all the more a year later.
At the outset of the pandemic, celebrities tried to read stories or write poems and stay in touch with their audience. Patrick Stewart gamely read Sonnets. Ma partnered with painist Kathryn Stott and put out an album - the proceeds of which will support musicians struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic.
Viewing: 1st as an adult who could follow the movie
Decade: 1980's
Director: Walter Hill!
D'aw, hell. It's a Nick Nolte movie.
On the heels of Coming 2 America, Jamie began pondering what Eddie Murphy movies she hadn't seen, so she dialed up 48 Hours, the 1982 blockbuster starring Nick Nolte and a ready-for-stardom Eddie Murphy.
Reviewing the movie about 40 years after the fact is a bit of a challenge. This was in my lifetime, and I remember both the attitudes, the casual racism and names associated. And, I did actually see this movie a couple of times as a kid, which... maybe wasn't great? But in the 1980's, who was paying attention to what the kids were up to and we had easy access to HBO at our friends' houses.
Here's a thing I never remember - Staying Alive was directed by Sylvester Stallone.
I saw this movie in part or in whole in 4th grade, and my memory was "this is kinda goofy and weird".
It's now 35-ish years later. What will I think?
The sequel to Saturday Night Fever (which is a very, very good movie, by the way) that no one asked for - this one says "yes, but what if that kid in that movie had decided to pursue... BROADWAY?" Which was absolutely nowhere on the map or in the meaning of the original, but here we are.
Apparently the second most famous name in this movie is Finola Hughes, so that's... something.
Anyway, I just got my first shot of COVID vaccine, and we're still here a year into March 2020, so to celebrate that we're stayin' alive, we're doing Staying Alive.
29.3 million cases of COVID. Now over 530,000 dead as of 11:37 PM on 03/11/2021.
Since I quit writing posts we had an election, and Trump was shown the door. But then we had an attempt at a violent overthrow of the US Congress as they moved to certify the electoral college on January 6th of this year. You can look it up - it was very bad. In the wake of the election loss, the GOP has more or less dropped the final bits of illusion suggesting they give a shit about democracy or decency. Meanwhile, the Democrats remain the same spineless twits they've always been.
Vaccines started appearing at the beginning of the year, and as of this writing, Jamie has her first shot, my parents and my brother have both of theirs, as well as my father-in-law and cousin. The way they've rolled it out is intended to first serve the most vulnerable as the disease tends to hit, so first take care of older people and people with medical conditions. But even as I write this, the picture is changing on a daily basis. The White House is working on its plan to get vaccines available, and it seems to be actually working. Meanwhile, the governor of Texas decided he's done with COVID and we're opening everything back up. So, look for our numbers to spike uncontrollably for a while.
I'm not really sure what qualifies as an indie film in this day and age, or even what constituted an indie movie in 2010 when Meet Monica Velour was released. But it had been a while since I'd watched a lower-budget film like this one - and it almost hums with "this is an indie film" in a way the big studio releases I've been watching simply do not.
The movie pitches itself as a "career high performance" for Kim Cattrall, and I'll argue - maybe! I have only seen a fraction of her catalog, but she is, indeed, very, very good in this movie. I totally get why she jumped at the chance to play this character, especially when the general TV and movie audience was associating her with her character on Sex and the City. And, frankly, she nails it.
Trying to be an Audrey Totter completionist, I had planned to watch this movie at some point, but just never got to it. Had I known how many people are in the film, I probably would have watched it years ago.
Beyond Totter, the headline stars are Clark Gable and Alexis Smith, but there's also: Barry Sullivan, Frank Morgan, Mary Astor, Wendell Corey, Leon Ames, William Conrad, and a whole bunch more you're going to recognize.
I thought it was *fine*, but I just checked and - holy cats - do people seem to hate this movie. There's complaints about "this movie takes place within a casino and doesn't moralize about gambling" which is... a take, I guess. It kind of misses or dismisses the actual morals of the film (don't forget your family on your way to #1, the path to friendship and respect is via truth, honesty and fairplay no matter what you do for a living), but don't let that get in the way of a good complaint.
It's certainly not the first movie to show a man in crisis/ at the end of his rope and how it resolves in a single night as all the threads come together. But it's the earliest one I've seen that I can think of. Until I think of one I've seen from earlier.
I admit, the movie moved a bit slowly, and despite plastering Audrey Totter all over the poster, she honestly wasn't in it much. Still, she's having fun playing the bad girl and fed-up wife (something she was doing a lot in this era) of Wendell Corey. It's nothing I'd go out of my way to recommend, but once I clocked to what they were doing, I did enjoy it a bit more.
