Buncha stuff. Mostly a mix of random eighties stuff and movies I hadn't watched for a while and figured I should see again.
Barry Lyndon: Because apparently there are Stanley Kubrick movies I haven't seen and I need to fix this (unless they're called Eyes Wide Shut). If you like slow-moving period dramas with gorgeous cinematography and classical music, this is pretty cool. For most people the answer to that is probably no, but I am not most people. Scenery Porn is in abundance and I cannot look away.
WarGames: This is hilarious just for the technology on display. Eight-inch floppy disks! Modems that require you to physically connect the telephone handset! Those reel printers that use the blue-and-white paper and go REET-REET-REET when they're working! Nostalgia bomb. It's actually a fun little movie, though. I liked the intro a lot: couple guys go to work manning a missile silo, just a normal day, bitching about their replacements being late, that sort of thing. Out of nowhere, THIS IS NOT A TEST, LAUNCH YOUR MISSILES AT RUSSIA, END CIVILIZATION, ETCETERA. (It
is a test, of course, but they don't know this and are quite viscerally disturbed.) I mean, yeah, it's a Matthew Broderick movie, you know that lovable little scamp's going to get away with everything, but it was a nice way of driving home that shit could go down and everything could end at any time. Most of the movie is fluff, but it's enjoyable fluff with a veneer of seriousness. Dated but still watchable enough.
Sneakers: Another one of those "I haven't seen this in a decade, so let's find out if it still holds up" rentals. It...kind of does. Story is fairly straightforward thriller material and there are plenty of plotholes, but ultimately it's just hard to care about that because every actor in this movie is goddamn badass. Ben Kingsley's too-brief appearances as the cynical, burned-out hippie of a villain are easily the highlights. I don't understand why this man is in so many bad movies. Really groovy jazz soundtrack here, too. I don't even like jazz, it just fit perfectly. More fluff, but more fun fluff.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: So I figured I should give this another viewing now that there's some distance from the hype and inevitable disappointment of the theatrical release. It is still pretty mediocre. Not anywhere near the level of travesty that the SW prequels were, but it still lets down the series legacy pretty significantly. It doesn't start out that bad; the setpieces in the first half aren't a patch on Raiders or Last Crusade at their best, but it at least seems like the movie might go somewhere fun. But then we get to the Amazon and everything falls to pieces: we get family drama (and not the endearing kind with Sean Connery), Indy instantly turns into a stereotypical worrywart of a father, there's giant ant silliness, goddamn monkey silliness, Shia whatshisface gets whacked in the crotch for cheap laughs, and just...bleh. I guess this was Lucas's half of the movie. There are a couple good lines spread throughout the movie and I can't say no to Cate Blanchett as a hot commie swordgirl, but this is really as complimentary as I can be here. Sad.
The Fall: I'm really not sure how fond I actually am of this movie, but damned if it isn't one of the most visually arresting things I've ever seen. It's worth watching just for that. Also has the most naturalistic performance I've ever seen from a kid. It's like no one told her she was actually in a movie. The plot, such as it is, concerns a crippled actor in a hospital entertaining a young patient with stories in the hope that she'll like him enough to steal him a bottle of morphine (which he intends to use to commit suicide). The stories get weirder and bleaker as the guy's mood sinks and the kid tries to take control of them and steer them (and by extension him) in a less destructive direction. The movie is, above all,
unique. I can see a lot of people being turned off by the quirkiness, but it's definitely worth a shot. It also has Charles Darwin. He looks like this:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3043/2698226653_bffe27f997.jpgLifeforce: I don't even remember how I stumbled upon this one. Was looking at some random list of movies on Netflix, saw the title and went, "Huh, that sounds vaguely familiar," clicked. First reviewer there described it as "the Citizen Kane of naked space vampire zombie movies." You know I had to watch it after that. It is eighties bad, so about what you'd expect. Directed by Tobe Hooper, who I'm sure is a hack (Poltergeist I attribute to Spielberg's assistance; if Texas Chainsaw Massacre is actually good, I'm guessing that's a fluke. I'm not likely to find out since I despise slasher movies). It really feels like they just couldn't figure out which movie they wanted to make here. "Okay, we're on a spaceship filled with giant bat corpses--no, now we're in a lab in London and this alien girl's doing the whole quickening from the Highlander thing on everyone--nah, that's no good, let's jump to...an asylum, yeah. And we can have the furniture fly around. Remember when I directed Poltergeist? That was cool, wasn't it? Wait, we need an ending...We haven't done the zombie holocaust thing yet, have we? Let's just go with that." Nothing makes any goddamn sense, the effects are quaint at best (I burst out laughing when Patrick Stewart's face started melting; it just came out of nowhere) and the villain is this gorgeous French chick who spends most of her screentime walking around naked. So all in all, this one was a winner.
Suspiria: Decided to check this out because Dario Argento is supposedly a really awesome horror director or something. Not really seeing the hype. Admittedly this isn't my genre, but there were a lot of moments here where I found myself asking, "Why is this scene being dragged out so long? Does this moment really need to be in the film? Isn't there something else the camera could be doing with its time?" Most of the events in the movie you can call in advance; this isn't always a bad thing, but pacing issues stand out more glaringly when there's not much investment in or reason to care about the characters. Just being a horror movie doesn't give you an excuse to ignore those things. I dunno. See below for a lot of what I thought this one was missing.
The Changeling: Okay, this was cool. Good old-fashioned ghost story: guy moves into abandoned mansion, supernatural stuff happens, we get suggestions that something horrible went down there in the past, etc. Familiar setup, good execution. Shit doesn't happen just for cheap scares--it happens because something is
pissed and wants to send a message. Everything that occurs is the result of a personal mission of the mysterious entity or of the main character. Everything has a direction that makes sense in context instead of being merely a calculated attempt to make the audience jump--and because there are actually, y'know, motives and stuff at work, it's much more effective at that. Nice little mystery with a creepy atmosphere. Also, George C. Scott. Definitely worth watching.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture: This is a bad movie. I knew it was a bad movie, but I hadn't seen it in like a decade and a fit of masochism took over, so, yeah. You can tell early on that something went terribly wrong in the production of this one. Our reintroduction to Kirk is...an inspiring shot of a square chunk of his face through the window of what amounts to public transportation. This is pretty emblematic of how the movie got everything completely backwards. Kirk spends like the first ten minutes talking to people we don't know about stuff that we don't care about; it's about half an hour before we see the goddamn Enterprise, and then we spend nearly as long LOOKING at the goddamn Enterprise. Seriously, it is Enterprise porn, and it just goes on and on and the audience can only lie there wondering when he'll be finished and roll over. I don't know what they were thinking. All of this is set to a Jerry Goldsmith score, which is cool, but the pomp is so overused as to make it boring. And they try to set up this character conflict where Kirk has to worry about whether he's actually a control freak who's just trampling people underfoot to get the ship back, but the writers never figure out what to do with this, it eventually gets subsumed by the actual plot, and then totally invalidated by the fact that his only apparent rival gets written out at the end of the movie. So uh. What were you guys doing, again?
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the movie's not
completely worthless--I'm a sucker for futuristic super-structures and I still think the interior of the alien spaceship looks pretty cool; I'm also sufficiently fond of A.I. as plot elements that the story is kinda sorta interesting once it finally gets going, but dear lord does that take a while. It's just an objectively terrible movie with some superficial elements that almost manage to make it bearable. I'm just glad this load was a hit somehow, or we would've never got Wrath of Khan.
