Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
I have had an urge to watch some old slashers what I haven’t seen before. I decided to give “Slaughter High” from 1986 a shot. It’s supposed to be a comedy. It’s neither a very good slasher nor a remotely funny comedy. There’s a kill with a lawn-tractor that was kind of cool, but overall, a big ol’ dudski.
The abrupt transition to fall weather definitely has me in the Halloween mood early this year.
After an unplanned summer hiatus I have returned.
Greetings once more from my hovel on the shores of the bow.
Clearly I couldn’t be assed to write anything here what with my summer being just jam packed with such exciting activites as sitting in this basement watching movies and trying to prevent the tiny anarchists who live in my house from doing grievous bodily harm to themselves and each other. Every day is an adventure.
I binged all 4 of the Michael Winterbottom Rob Brydon/Steve Coogan “The Trip” movies in the last 24 hours. At a time when one cannot go out it was great fun to watch these two travel around picturesque locations and bicker in duelling impressions of 1970s film and tv performers. I’ve heard the quadrilogy compared to the Linklater Before trilogy and I can see the similarities. These are much funnier and probably not trying as hard to say something prescient about relationships (though a more convincing and relatable dude-friendship is hard to think of on sceen). My favorite of the 4 is probably the first, but Trip to Greece is a pretty close second. For no reason other than I just thought of doing it I now present to you my suggested pairings for The Trip movies with the Before movies.
The Trip and Before Sunrise.
The Trip to Spain and Before Sunset
The Trip to Italy and Before Midnight
Halfway through typing those I sort of lost all enthusiasm for and confidence in the idea but didn’t want to delete any of it in case it triggered some kind of gnawing, existential dread about my writing and I stopped blogging for another 2 months. So, in the interest of maintaining momentum you got to read that utterly useless bit… and this bit explaining it. You’re welcome?
Glad to be back.
I went to a drive-in movie yesterday!
The Calgary Underground Film Festival is on right now and they managed to salvage their festival by partnering with a brewery with a giant parking lot and making a drive-in! It was great. If the pandemic brings back drive-in theatres then it will… still have been completely awful and not worth it even a tiny bit… but, drive-ins are cool.
The movie was an indie horror-comedy road movie called “UNCLE PECKERHEAD” and it was a perfect thing to see in the venue. It was funny, gory, silly and full of heart. I enjoyed the hell out of it and if you ever get the chance give it a watch.
One negative of this adventure though was that I learned that I can eat junk food (in this case pizza) OR stay up past midnight, but I can no longer do both of those things. Today I feel like absolute shit. I assume this is what hungover people feel like. I’m tired, I’m dehydrated and I’m dealing with acid reflux like you read about. In short, I’m not a happy bunny.
Going to go gobble some more antacids and think wistfully of the old days which were obviously better, otherwise why would all these old people constantly complain about the newer generations?
…and party on, dude!
Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
Showed a friend Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure for the first time last night. That movie holds up INCREDIBLY well. It’s such a cute and above-all JOYFUL film. A delightful, lighthearted comedy from a time before cynicism and irony and sarcasm in mainstream comedy. Bill & Ted is the true antithesis of what I hate about modern comedies.
Everyone in modern comedies sounds alike, they’re all aloof and ironic and snide. The jokes are all mean-spirited (when there ARE jokes instead of lightly edited, shitty improv), the characters are all unlikable and every single one of the films is interchangeable. Bill & Ted, by contrast is this beautiful, slight adventure about being decent and sweet that is unlike anything else. I really hope the coming Bill & Ted Face the Music captures that same joy that Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey managed so effortlessly.
Also, Excellent Adventure gave us one of the all-time greatest lines in the history of cinema:
Currently Playing: Random Japanese 80s Citypop Compilations
Currently Reading: THE FLOWERS OF EVIL COMPLETE EDITION VOL. 1, Shuzo Oshimi
The title has nothing to do with anything, I just saw the title of the film “Wife VS Secretary” and thought of the perfect way to improve it. Creativity in action.
Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
This week, let’s pretend I am King and my first decree is to force everyone to watch movie double features of my choosing! Here’s today’s:
DUCK SOUP (1933)
Directed by Leo McCarey.
Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) is named president/dictator of the country of Freedonia and they end up declaring war on the country of Sylvania and it’s chaos and it’s hilarious and Groucho packs more jokes into 30 seconds than most modern comedies have in their entire runtimes… and speaking of countries being run by buffoons who don’t know what they’re doing resulting in millions of people who aren’t them dying horribly…
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
One of the funniest films of all time, and one that sadly never stops feeling completely relevant. This would also pair nicely with Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL if you wanted to extend to a triple feature. Basically, nobody is driving, the people in charge don’t know what the hell they’re doing and it’s going to end up getting everybody killed! The feel-good comedy of the season.
Currently Playing: Tosca Tango Orchestra – “Waking Life Original Soundtrack”
Currently Reading: I’ll get back to ya.
He’s been murdered by me and then I covered him up with a blanket and hat so you’d think he was sleeping on this 11 hour flight while I escape through the landing gear and rescue my daughter before her captors realize I’m not on this plane.
Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
So, yeah. I watched COMMANDO (1985) for the first time. That’s a pretty incredible movie. The stunts are great and it takes itself seriously, but not so seriously that it’s joyless and laughable. It’s sort of like the platonic ideal of 80s tough-guy action. The stunts are great, the one-liners walk the line between cool and hilarious perfectly. When things begin to get a little too testosteroney there’s a character to cut to who will make a joke about how absurdly macho what is happening is and lets us know that the movie is in on it. It’s really quite a remarkable piece of action writing… plus, Arnold Schwarzenegger kills like a zillion dudes with a machine gun. I want someone to lift me up and play with me like Arnold does to baby Alyssa Milano in that movie…
The reason I watched it was I watched two documentaries about action movies. IN SEARCH OF THE LAST ACTION HERO (2019) and IRON FISTS AND KUNG FU KICKS (2019). Between the two I’d recommend the latter more as I was more interested in hearing about martial arts movies, but they’re both worth a watch.
Currently Playing: Phish – “Sigma Oasis”
Currently Reading: DEADLY EDGE, Richard Stark
Wasteland dispatches are dead. Long live references to semi-obscure Nintendo 64 games!
Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
Retiring the Wasteland Dispatches series. With no likely end in sight for my confinement I’m tired of it. Time for something else.
I started watching The Mandalorian. I hated Force Awakens a LOT (watch it again, now that your excitement of new Star Wars has worn off and you’ll see what a terrible movie it is) so I never bothered with Last Jedi (though my most trusted sources inform me it’s even worse) and I skipped Rogue One because of a moral repulsion to the concept of putting CGI Peter Cushing in a movie. (Peter Cushing is my favorite actor of all time and the idea of putting dead people in movies is a repugnant one). When the trailer for Skywalker’s Rise Up 2 The Streets or whatever the hell it was called came out I watched it and didn’t even feel curious about it. That’s not something I expected. I have loved Star Wars as long as I can remember loving things. I even like the prequels!
Anyway, Star Wars, even when it’s shit, LOOKS cool. Amazing costumes and sets and just general production design. So when I got a weird hankering to look at some Star Wars stuff I figured I’d give the Mandalorian a shot, plus this thing’s got Werner Herzog AND Carl Weathers! How bad could it be?! After one episode I think my answer is: “It’s fine.” It’s not bad, it’s not great, but it does bring the great set/costume shit I was looking for… and Werner Herzog, so I guess I’ll watch the rest. But if CGI Peter Cushing shows up? I’m gonna go nuts… fucking Disney.
Currently Reading: DEADLY EDGE, Richard Stark
It was a holiday here yesterday so I took the extra day off from the blog too. I promise I didn’t do anything exciting.
Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.
I rewatched the original Ghost in the Shell last night. It is still brilliant, even moreso than I remembered. The moments of stillness (the montage of environmental storytelling, in addition to being beautiful is some of the best examples of character development through slow cinema you’re likely to see) really stood out to me this time. The way Oshii lets shots linger and give you time to take everything in and sit and think about what’s happening. Without intending to I seem to have begun a bit of an Oshii retrospective as last week I also watched the original Patlabor OVA series with some friends. We’re watching the first Patlabor movie tomorrow and I suspect I’ll just continue on and watch as much of his work as I’m able to get my hands on.
Rewatching Ghost in the Shell also has me wanting some more cyberpunk up in hurr, so I’m finally getting around to reading the final installment in William Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy”, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE. I also kind of want to rewatch The Matrix? At least the first movie. I haven’t watched it in years and I suspect have seen way more of the things it’s riffing on (and in many cases just referencing directly) and that seems like it would be a fun thing to do.
Currently Playing: Kenji Kawai – “Ghost in the Shell Original Soundtrack”
Currently Reading: MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, William Gibson
If you ever want to see real magic on film you need to watch Jean Cocteau’s 1946 “La Belle et La Bete”
For those of you who don’t speak portuguese, that means “Beauty and the Beast”.
As near a perfect fantasy romance film as has ever been made. The whole film feels like it’s floating. Every shot is something you’d hang on the wall. The designs are haunting, surreal and utterly gorgeous. The actual makeup and costume for the Beast looks amazing (and they didn’t even have to have theater owners download a patch so that James Corden would stop giving people nightmares… more than usual, I mean) and if there’s ever been a more radiant vision on celluloid than Josette Day as Belle then I’d sure like to see.
You know the plot, but you’re here for the atmosphere and just the VIBE.
I think it’s available to stream on The Criterion Collections streaming service, but I also highly recommend the Criterion bluray. It’s got an optional secondary audio track that is the Philip Glass Opera which is a pretty gorgeous way to watch it a second or third time.
Currently Playing: Temple Ov Saturn – “Meditations”
Currently Reading: MEDDLING KIDS, Edgar Cantero
The Color Out of Space is one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories. It’s genuinely scary and a great place to start if one were wanting to get into Lovecraft’s weird fiction. It helps that it doesn’t have as much of the virulent racism, misogyny and xenophobia one has to contend with in many of his other famous works.
The story concerns a meteorite that crashes into the Gardner family farm in the rural area outside one of Lovecraft’s many fictional New-England townships: Arkham, Massachusetts. The interstellar rock gives off a strange light outside the visible spectrum, and eventually poisons and warps everything around it.
Richard Stanley’s new adaptation is his first feature since Marlon Brando drove him crazy in the making of The Island of Dr. Moreau back in 1996 (if you haven’t seen the documentary about the making of this film and the unmaking of Richard Stanley I highly recommend the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau). His new movie seems to me to be something of a triumphant return.
It’s surprising to me that The Color Out Of Space has been adapted at all, let alone more than once (the 2010 German adaptation Die Farbe is excellent). Lovecraft has something of a spotty record with adaptation, largely I’d suggest due to how un-cinematic his stories are in the first place. The horrors in Lovecraft’s tales are always about the unknown and indeed the unknowable. The titular color in this story is referred to in the text as being “only a color by analogy“… I mean… so, what the fuck is it then?! Well, that’s sort of the point in his writing. So, to try and take a thing thats chief descriptor in the source material is that it’s indescribable seems challenging to say the least. Lovecraftian horror, in my estimation, stems chiefly from two things: DREAD and THE WEIRD
THE WEIRD is that which I’ve already described. It’s horror of the uncanny, indescribable nature of what is being observed. Phenomenon from outside the bounds of human understanding. Ancient, elder Gods unbound by the laws of physics as we understand them and completely uninterested in the goings-on of a species so beneath them as the human race.
DREAD is slow, creeping, unsettling horror. The slow-burn, where something just feels slightly off and by turns grows more upsetting and the tension builds and builds and builds until it explodes in a crescendo of existential PANIC. There aren’t a lot of jump-scares or gross-outs in Lovecraft. The horror comes on slow, the weirdness mounts and elevates until it’s rattling the windows of sanity itself. These are both difficult things to pull off in a movie. Especially in modern mainstream cinema which rarely allows the silence and slowness necessary to really build a mood.
Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space seems to focus mostly on one of these aspects: THE WEIRD. There’s not a lot of “creeping dread” in the film and any cosmic nihilism is mostly implied. After a short intro THE WEIRD starts to ratchet up FAST. Of all the Lovecraft films I’ve seen this one definitely delivers the weird. Fantastic lighting, good creature design, some really excellent performances from the whole cast (particularly Nicolas Cage who, as always, really makes some CHOICES that deliver in spades) and a really tremendous final act make it a very enjoyable ride. I highly recommend it, I suspect it will be unlike most films you’ve seen before.
If you think creeping dread would be more to your taste I would again heartily recommend the 2010 adaptation Die Farbe which doesn’t have the budget to get too WEIRD (though it does pretty well considering its scale) but definitely delivers the DREAD.
I understand Stanley plans to adapt The Dunwich Horror next, another very strong Lovecraft story, so hopefully this one did well enough to convince whomever needs convincing to give him the money to do it justice.
I have a great deal of notes on Lovecraft and his writing so I expect I’ll revisit the topic here in the future.
Currently Playing: David Bowie – “Heroes”
Currently (still) Reading: SLOW HORSES, Mick Herron
joezone 