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).  

PodCast 236: "Elvis" (2022) - a rock n' roll episode w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Watched:  03/06/2023

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing: First

Decade:  2020's

Director:  Baz Luhrmann

For more ways to listen

Your two hunks o' burnin' love take on the Luhrmann-ized retelling of the life of The King. We ponder the nature of biopics, fame, Dutch accents, appropriate management fees, pink suits and the power of shaking one's hips. It's another Oscar-contender episode!

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 236: "Elvis" (2022) - a rock n' roll episode w/ SimonUK and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

That's All Right - Elvis Presley 

Unchained Meldoy - Elvis Presley 

Friday Watch Party: The Killers (1946)

This one is a straight up banger.  The Killers (1946) brought the world Ava Gardner (we're celebrating her centennial) and Burt Lancaster.  It's based loosely on a short story from Ernest Hemingway, directed by Robert Siodmak and is the noiriest noir that ever noired.  

Also features Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Sam Levene, and a dozen other "hey, THAT GUY" type actors.  

I say "this is one of my favorite movies" a lot, but this one IS one of my faves and genuinely solid.

Day:  03/10/2023

Time:  8:30 PM Central, 6:30 PM Pacific

Cost:  $4

CLICK HERE TO EAT THE BIG DINNER

(link live ten minutes before showtime)

Cyd Charisse at 101

Happy late birthday celebration to actor, singer, and - above all - dancer, Cyd Charisse.  Cyd would have been 101 yesterday on March 8th.  She passed in 2008.

If you've only heard of Ginger Rogers as the ideal dance partner, that's a fact.  No shade on Ginger.  But I can only encourage you to look into Cyd's work.  There's no one else like her in movies.  

Charisse was a force of nature as much as Astaire and Kelly, and while she didn't play the lead as often, she was in demand to work alongside them and she carried a few of her own films.  Graced with a physique that allowed her to be athletic, graceful and sexy as hell.  And, man, was she talented.  Thus, she moved seamlessly through dance genres and eras, always a highlight of the film's in which she appeared, even if just for a sequence.

Speaking of - she's the femme fatale in Singin' in the Rain's "Broadway Melody" movie within a movie, one of film's most justifiably memorable sequences.  

From "Broadway Melody":

which pairs well with "The Girl Hunt Ballet" from The Band Wagon with Astaire.

which segues us to "Dancing in the Dark".

Cyd Charisse is not solely responsible for my interest in checking out musicals that predate my birth, but she certainly was a key feature as I looked for her work quite often in my early days of classic film exploration.  

I do recommend her movie Party Girl in which she plays a starring role, but she's also the lead as girl gone bad!

Happy belated b-day, Cyd.  

PodCast 235: "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022) - a high-flying SimonUK and Ryan PodCast

Watched:  02/19/2023

Format:  Amazon?

Viewing: First

Decade:  2020's

Director:  Joseph Kosinski

For more ways to listen

Simon and Ryan feel the need for speed! These two misfits should be thrown out of podcasting, but they're just too damn good. Instead, they're being sent to watch another sequel 30 years in the making. Join us as as we talk this Oscar contender, why it hit, what it does right and how it gets a pass for what it does wrong. And, against all odds, they don't dwell on Connelly for too long.

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 235: "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022) - a high-flying SimonUK and Ryan PodCast

YouTube

Music:

Main Titles (You've Been Called Back to Top Gun) - Harold Faltermeyer

Top Gun Anthem - Harold Faltermeyer

SimonUK Cinema Series

The Signal Watch PodCast · SimonUK Cinema Series

Watch Party Watch: Strangers on a Train (1951)

this tagline is wildly misleading

Watched:  03/03/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Hitchcock

Well, that was certainly a good way to get to watch a second Ruth Roman movie in a week.  

I'd been mentally abusing the watch party participants recently via my choice of movies, so it seemed like time to watch an actually good movie with the team.  And my memory of Strangers on a Train (1951) was that it was a strong film, but I couldn't remember anything after the initial train sequence but a sense of how utterly @#$%ed the guy was who was not Farley Granger (Robert Walker*).  

Hitch is the most discussed director in Western cinema, and this movie gets no small amount of ink, so I don't feel terribly compelled to weigh in.  But I will say:

1. this movie and Shadow of a Doubt certainly share a lot in common, and I'd want to dig more into that, and how he gets from here to Psycho by 1960
2. The cops are directly responsible for manslaughter as well as considerable chaos and danger to the public through ineptitude in the final scenes
3. Farley Granger's character never really has a compelling reason to not tell the cops what is happening, all things considered
4. Robert Walker is phenomenal
5. No one much mentions the dead ex-wife other than as a plot point.  Granger doesn't head home to the funeral, he doesn't mourn her in any way.  That's maybe the most suspicious bit of all, really.  
6. I appreciate that Ruth Roman's character is given reason to believe Granger but wasn't entirely unsure he didn't kill his wife.  
7. Pat Hitchcock co-stars in the film, and she's actually really good.  If your career is going to be the product of nepotism, might as well shoot for the moon

Anyway, this is what thrillers are for.  If you've never seen it, recommended.

*Walker passed shortly after the making of the film, while working on a new film. His biography on imdb is grimly fascinating