Material Watch: Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)

Watched:  07/22/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Alek Kesheshian

It's probably a cultural bellwether that the biggest name in music right now is Taylor Swift, who is a fine singer/ songwriter and who is about as challenging as a pair of fuzzy socks.  Like, I get that she speaks to the suburban experience like no one's business, but she's not exactly out there getting angry notes from the Pope.

But not so Madonna circa 1990 when this documentary was shot and subsequently released.  The Material Girl was not poking anyone in the eye, but she was giddily pushing the envelope enough that she was constantly getting free publicity from outraged pearl clutchers.

I was something of a secret Madonna fan around the time this movie came out.  Attempting a persona as a fan of music which sat outside of pop and the Top 40, I didn't advertise that I knew all the words to La Isla Bonita.  That said, it was expected you'd seen Madonna's videos and knew her songs as both were inescapable through the mid 80's to the mid-90's.  And I wasn't avoiding Madonna.  She, uh, was not funny looking, and her songs were catchy, and on the radio, fairly non-threatening.  And, right out of the gate, she started with Like a Virgin, which always felt like it should be dirty, but you had to make it so, and so it landed on regular MTV rotation.  

Happy Birthday, Lynda Carter

Happy birthday to Lynda Carter!  

Women's World Cup 2023 Starts

Sport is funny.  If you are paying attention to a sport, it can appear everywhere.  But the minute you tune out, it's just a thing that exists that occasionally enters your line of sight.  

I don't watch NFL or NBA anymore.  NBA made itself too hard to watch via their TV strategy, and if I'm going to spend one day a weekend watching football, it's going to be college ball. But y'all know I also spend a ridiculous amount of time watching the Cubs and now Austin FC.  

Way back in '99, I somehow got wrapped up in watching Women's World Cup.  And, honestly, it's hard to top the excitement of that WWC win.  But I don't really even remember how I tuned in, I just remember being very onboard watching the team playing a sport I fundamentally didn't understand except for "ball goes in net gets you points".  

It's not that I didn't play soccer as a kid.  We all did.  But the rules for kids were different, and I played defense, so the "strategy", such as it was, was to stop whomever was driving the goal from doing so.  It wasn't brain surgery.  But once you start watching soccer a lot, you realize how *hard* this game is, how much strategy is in play as an absolute constant.   But I also know and understand how to folks watching, it can just look like 20-odd people in matching shirts running around a field of grass.     

Noir Watch: Impact (1949)

Watched:  07/17/2023

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Arthur Lubin

Over at Noir Alley on TCM, Eddie Muller does not guarantee that the movies are actually great.  He's providing a wide swath of the material that was offered up as what would retroactively be dubbed "noir", providing a survey of the movement's variety of offerings, the people behind those films and the forces that created the movies.  Crime stories and melodramas, mobsters, detectives, femme fatales, virtuous ladies, and well, well beyond.

Impact (1949) is a femme fatale story of *attempted* murder that has some interesting stuff bookending the film and a lot of tedious stuff in the middle, the portion of which is saved mostly by the existence of Ella Raines as human and co-star.  

I confess - I am not a Brian Donlevy guy.  He doesn't do anything *wrong*, he's in plenty of stuff I've watched and enjoyed, but he's just not someone I'd personally place as a lead in this film.  But this is an indie picture and Donlevy was a get as a former leading man of a decade prior, so I understand why they jumped at the chance to put a 49-year-old dude in the role, even if it feels like the women in the film would more likely see him as a fun uncle.

Donlevy is married to Helen Walker, who seems sweet and great and is completely two-timing him with another fella.  Posing as a long-lost-cousin of Walker, the fella hitches a ride with Donlevy where he attempts to bump him off with a crowbar to the noggin and rolling him down a hill.  In his haste to get away from the scene, he drives directly into a gas truck in the finest use of miniatures you'll see in many-a-noir.  

Donlevy recovers, winds up in Larkspur, BFE, and sulks before finding a job and life with Ella Raines.  As one does.  

Because his car done blowed up, folks think he's dead, and he's pondering let it seem that way, even as cops begin to put the pieces together and figure out what his wife was up to.  She's about to go to trial and maybe get the chair when Ella Raines convinces Donlevy to go back and get real justice.

The cops decide they were wrong and Donlevy's absence means he was trying to get his wife killed and he must have murdered the boyfriend despite any real evidence, and.... it's mildly exhausting.  And makes Ella Raines look like a jerk for putting her dude in this spot.

I dunno.  The movie is... fine?  It's not the best thing you'll see, and you can see what an indie picture could pull off in 1949.  It's not nothing.  I just suspect this thing needed some polish in the script room or in editing.  I won't think about it much after this post.  

It is definitely noir, I'll give it that.  It's got femme fatales and virtuous, wholesome women offering something else.  It's got twitchy guys and murder and bad luck.  The most novel aspect was the twist to Donlevy being held for murder, but that never feels like it'll stick.  But we do get Anna May Wong!

I just didn't love it, and that's ok.  You be you, movie. 

PodCast 249: "Repo Man" (1984) - a punk rock podcast w/ Matty & Ryan

Watched:  07/15/2023

Format:  BluRay - Criterion

Viewing: Unknown

Decade:  1980's

Director:  Alex Cox

For more ways to listen

Old pal but new co-contributor Matty brings us one of the staples of 1980's punk rock culture and cinema. It's one of the most quotable, most memorable films of an era! We get some drinks and go do some crimes.

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 249: "Repo Man" (1984) - a punk rock podcast w/ Matty & Ryan

YouTube

Music:

Repo Man - Iggy Pop 

Institutionalized - Suicidal Tendencies 

Matt's copy of the soundtrack on original vinyl

Sci-Fi

The Signal Watch PodCast · Science Fiction Nerdery!

WA Watch: Rushmore (1998)

I figure this is me and my nephew in about 8 years

Watched:  07/16/2023

Format:  Streaming Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Wes Anderson

Recently, I was watching some old Bugs Bunny cartoons, circa 1940, and I was surprised to see the name "Charles M. Jones" in the credits.  While "Chuck Jones" is synonymous with WB animation, he's really associated with a certain artistic style and flair that is characterized in certain styles of background, character design and with his comedic timing in everything from "What's Opera, Doc?" to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  But there was his name in plain text.

He had not yet timed how long it took an anvil to fall or for Wile E. Coyote to hang in mid-air before plummeting for maximum comedic effect.  He hadn't quite gotten the rise of an eyebrow or a sly look to the viewer.  But.  It's there.  

Jamie was the one who requested a watch of Rushmore (1998) a film we saw together way back at the Arbor IV upon its release.  And we've watched a number of times over the years.  And, for her, it was an academic exercise in "what was he doing in 1998?  and how does it true up to what's there in 2023 with Asteroid City?"

It's interesting how Anderson springs into a form we all would have been fine with here in 1998 and with his second feature (after the excellent Bottle Rocket).  He's locking in on some of the themes he'd return to (certainly distant, bad dads), certain camera shots/ edits, formal dialog fit more for a 20th century short story than a film in the naturalist mode, aesthetics of symmetry and retro-ism.  

It's also curious to ponder how much of the Wes Anderson story that Owen Wilson occupies.  The two were roommates at the University of Texas, and Anderson - maybe UT's brightest star in film - did not actually participate in the film program, but got a Philosophy degree.*  Bottle Rocket was a deep partnership between Anderson and the Wilson brothers and he'd co-star in the film as well as co-writing and appearing in Royal Tenenbaums.  And, of course, he appears in numerous other Anderson pictures, including French Dispatch, which I haven't seen yet.  

I assume the pacing of events means Anderson and Wilson wrote Rushmore while in their mid-20's to late-20's, and while there's certainly a level of goofiness to the proceedings and it is, in part, about a middle-aged man in a juvenile spat with a 15-year-old, there's some great character stuff that rings even more true here as I roll towards 50.  

I don't know that Anderson could do Rushmore again.  Maybe.  He's never quite given up on teen geniuses, including underperforming teen and adult geniuses.  He's still working through dead parents, bad parents, indifferent parents.  He's still invested in messy romance treated as a matter-of-fact.  I'm not sure a studio would be as ready to fund a movie about a teen and teacher with a complex relationship in the last 20 years.  

But, in general, there's nothing  - to me - about Rushmore that doesn't work.   

I'm glad it's shot in Houston.  Bleak, wintery Houston in all its no-zoning-laws glory and mix of industrial mess and bucolic park-like environs.  I love that dumb town.  

And, of course, it really gave the world Jason Schwartzman and a new view of Bill Murray.  Co-star Olivia Williams has remained feverishly busy, appearing in American works, from The Sixth Sense to Hyde Park on the Hudson (reteamed with Murray).  

But the film also has Brian Cox, briefly Connie Nielsen, Luke and Andrew Wilson, and the late Seymour Cassel.  Sara Tanaka and Mason Gamble seem to have retired from acting - but I think Tanaka is a cardiologist now?

Anyway, 25 years later, the movie still works as well as it ever did, and at this point, it's much more than a curious artifact of Anderson's early work - it's clearly pointing the way he's headed.

 

*Little tip for you brainiacs like me who burned through 5 years of college and panicked in their 4th year and also got a history degree

Dog Watch: Lassie (1994)

Watched:  07/13/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Daniel Petrie

Like all good Gen-X'ers, I grew up in the aftershocks of the baby boomers, and Lassie - the very clever collie - was certainly a character and concept we knew of, if not through direct experience, then by osmosis.  I guess there was a book, originally (1940).  Our canine hero starred in wildly popular movies beginning in the 1940's (it's where Roddy McDowall got his start as a lad) and television - running for a cool 20 years, from 1954-1974.  Plus several more movies and TV shows over the years people who are not huge Lassie fans probably are unaware of.

I know!  That's a lot of Lassies.  

The artificial monoculture created via mass media and limited outlets did, at least, give us a chance to have some familiar talking points, and you never knew where they'd coalesce.  Personally, I didn't watch Lassie in reruns.  Or the movies.*  For most of us, Lassie was one or two jokes about kids falling down wells and dogs alerting us to calamity.  Maybe we whistled the theme song at our dogs.  

This 1994 film is more or less an original story, but if you know anything at all about Lassie from the TV show, etc... this movie carries on quite a bit of the world's bravest, smartest, wisest dog *and* best friend to a boy who needs one.  This dog seems like it's ready to pick locks and drive cars.  Three cheers for Lassie.

Our story:  

WA Watch: Asteroid City (2023)

Watched:  07/11/2023

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Wes Anderson

So, I was as surprised as anyone else when I looked at Amazon to ponder watching something and up popped the new Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City (2023).  We don't get out to the theater like we used to, so I was a bit bummed that I wouldn't probably prioritize this with so much else coming out/ lack of time/ lack of money in this economy, etc...

Anyway, apparently I'd also been socking away "credits" on Amazon for purchase of digital services, like movies, so although the movie was pricey to rent or buy vs., say, free or $3.99 for something else, I basically paid nothing for it and now have a digital copy, so... go me, I guess.

It's a curious period to be watching a Wes Anderson movie.  Film Twitter has basically just decided that liking anything is bad, and Wes Anderson is nothing but a collection of well mannered tricks, both visual and in his direction of actors.  That's plainly reductionist and a take I can't take seriously.  

Asteroid City may be the most ambitious Anderson film to date, carrying with it all of the lessons of the prior entries I've seen (which is not all of them).  Framed as a documentary about a play from the very complicated 1950's which also shows the leads of that play recreating the play, the film is communicating on a multitude of levels - with the story of what an imaginary playwright (played by Edward Norton) told about a group of people who have come to a remote locale in the desert for a science camp for teen-sci-fi-geniuses.  I won't get into the issues of the far more normal adults, but they have them.  And then an alien shows up.

But the story Anderson is telling folds in on itself.  This is a dramatized telling of how that play came to be.  

It's a movie that challenges with everything it says and does - from consideration of the careers of the characters in the play, to the concept of the cosmos, to what it means to have a world-changing event happen right in front of you. Especially to a photographer (who is paid to observe and not participate) and an actress who knows how to play emotions more than experience them.  But it's also a movie that feels almost primordial in its location, and some of its allusions.  But, of course, there's a play that has to be acted and completed and understood, and you get the feeling the third layer is Anderson himself, commenting and commenting upon the creation of his work, upon the seeming meaninglessness of it to some, to what it means to make illusions and share them.

More so than even usual, the film is absolutely littered with recognizable name talent in innumerable roles, including walk on parts.  Sure, you have Jason Schwartzman - honestly the best I've ever seen him- and Scarlett Johansson as a mix of a number of Hollywood stars of the 1950's, but an original character altogether.  Tom Hanks plays a minor role as a sonuvabitch father-in-law.  But then there's Hope Davis in a scene with five lines.  And Jeff Goldblum in a faceless, voiceless role.   The IMDB on this is nuts, but we're also now getting the movies that were made during the pandemic when folks had @#$%-all else to go do.  

As always, Anderson gets how just a few things can be hysterical.  Kids, for example.  Or a line delivered just so.  The right visual gag like a dancing road runner.

But, god, this movie is gorgeous.  And, I think, shot on Kodak.  

I'll need to watch it again.  It practically begs for it, but in a way that doesn't feel like homework, like "oh, you need to rewatch it to get it".  Nah, it's easy enough to get.  But it seems like a rewatch would be deeply rewarding, and - of course - give you time and brain space to appreciate what's there all the more.  

But, yeah.  I know there's plenty out there who will focus on the very quotable lines or the visual gags, but, man... you have to appreciate how astoundingly well crafted this movie is on every level.       

Drac Watch: Renfield (2023)

Watched:  07/06/2023

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Chris McKay

I had actually intended to see Renfield (2023) in the theater, but it seemed like before I knew it was released, it was gone and being offered on VOD.  Here we are about 2.5 months out from the release date, and I saw it on Peacock.  So, we are in interesting times.

Longtime followers of the blog may know I'm a bit of a Universal Monsters fan, not least of which is 1931's Dracula.  I've seen a few other versions, read the novel, seen a stage play, etc...  I figure I've done my Drac homework.  And so it was that seeing a movie pitched as a goofy, dark comedy about the woes of being Dracula's familiar (Renfield from novel and the 1931 film, played by the great Dwight Frye) with no one less than Nic Cage as Dracula had a strong appeal.

The trailer featured Renfield (played by Nicholas Hoult, who I think people rightly say they dig), attending group therapy for folks in abusive relationships, which, in retrospect, is maybe not innately hilarious to the twitter generation.  So I expected the movie was going to be Renfield and Drac's odd-couple relationship with some gross-out gore humor.  And that's... partially correct.

Weirdly, Awkwafina, who had just come off of Shang-Chi, and twitter's flying attempt at a good canceling, was not featured in the ads at all.  And she's arguably as important to the movie as Hoult or Cage.  She plays a police officer in a cartoonishly corrupt New Orleans police department whose father has been murdered by the Lobo crime family - who are also not in the trailer but feature Ben Schwartz as a wormy heir-apparent and the always phenomenal Shohreh Aghdashloo.  

Here's the thing I did not know:  the movie is an action-comedy-horror film.  There's a whole plot about Renfield maybe wanting to be a better person and it leading to him performing heroic deeds/ teaming up with Awkwafina, and Dracula thinking he's been thinking too small.

If you're like me, and you find acts of horrific violence geared for comedic value to be, in fact, funny as @#$%, this may be a good reason to stream it on The Cock.  This movie realized a little CGI blood costs about the same as A LOT of CGI blood, and they went bonkers.  But, honestly, the best parts of this movie are:

• the use of Dracula (1931) as a set-up and perfectly recreating scenes from the film
• Nic Cage's unique (in the best way) version of Dracula - that kind of makes you wish someone thought to cast him as the center of the Dark Universe giant mess Universal pondered a few years back.  Like, you realize, this totally makes sense, even when he's having a goofy scene with Hoult.  
• Shohreh Aghdashloo in general
• Brandon Scott Jones is absolutely perfect as the therapist/ pastor.  Give that dude more work.

I wish I could say it all hangs together, but it feels weirdly rushed - like director Chris McKay decided all the scenes were too long, and so the movie never really breathes and nothing lasts long enough for a comedic beat even when funny stuff is happening.

The movie did get some advertising, but I can't figure out what the thinking was.  It's *possible* heavily referencing a 90-year-old movie was not the right choice for The Youths.  Or that the premise sold in the ads didn't appeal.   Or that Dracula is more of a concept these days than something people actively seek out (which is probably worth discussing).  I dunno.  But it does feel like 2023 audiences are incredibly finicky and aren't going to drop $17 or whatever on a ticket for a 90 minute movie unless it's going to be a slam dunk.

PodCast 248: "Orca: The Killer Whale" (1977) - an Angry Animals Podcast w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Watched:  June 23, 2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1970's

Director:  Michael Anderson

For more ways to listen

Simon and Ryan join up for a whale of a movie! We set sail for a curiously novelistic take on man vs beast and man vs himself and man vs ice berg as Richard Harris spears the wrong sea-mammal and has to deal with a whale with a death wish! We're talking post-Jaws sea-ploitation!

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 248: "Orca: The Killer Whale" (1977) - an Angry Animals Podcast w/ SimonUK and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

We Are One (Orca) - Carol Conners and Ennio Morricone, Orca OST 

Angry Animals PodCast

The Signal Watch PodCast · Angry Animals