Skatetown USA

Saw Skatetown USA, the first film Patrick Swayze appeared in.  It was enjoyable but not very good.  The film is mostly about roller disco skating and jokes, however the plot is that the good guy and the bad guy are competing for the top prize at a roller disco.  The good guy is good because we don't get to know him at all.  The bad guy is bad because he's in a gang. Swayze plays the bad guy.  It's deeply 70s in style and execution.  It's a trip.

Because roller disco is only interesting to watch for so long, the film tosses in a lot of outrageous but mostly pg-13-rated humor.  We are always jumping from comic relief to comic relief.  There's a pair of idiot chefs who start off insulting each other but wind up throwing dough into each other's faces and pouring popcorn down each other's pants.

Meanwhile, the evil Swayze is plotting sabotage of all kinds at all levels to stop the good guy from winning.  He blackmails the judges, he seduces his dance partner for the couple's dance, he even tries to murder him by rigging his skates!  (How much does he need this prize!?)

The film is very strange.  It's got a lot of attractive people, which is nice, but not a heck of a lot else, which is not so nice.  The comedy is very broad and comes at a rat-a-tat pace which wearies after a bit.  The over-the-top lunacy on display is a lot of fun, but relatable and clever it is not.  It was basically a porn film, only instead of sex it's disco dancing and broad jokes.

Road House

Saw Road House, a winningly stupid film about a cooler (which seems to be some kind of super-bouncer) being hired to work in the saloon of a small town.  He drifts into town like a Kurosawa samurai, all cool restraint and manly stoicism.  Later on, the bad guy drives a monster truck through a car dealership.

The film follows the main character's attempts to clean up this dirty small town and in the process get himself a girl (of course) and impart some stirring, half-nonsensical pearls of wisdom ("pain don't hurt.")  The film stars Patrick Swayze at his Swayziest.  Attractive, stoic, friendly and lackadaisical but ready to give a kick to a bad guy.  I found it all very winning.

I really hate action movies that celebrate asshole behavior.  Late-series Die Hard did this a lot, with John McClane transformed from put-upon every-man to growling, caustic thug.  Similarly with the awful Walking Tall, the noble sheriff fighting cartoonish bad guys with a 2x4 of justice.  In this movie, in contrast, I sympathized with the character a lot more.  I felt like he was slow to violence, preferring it as a tool to shut down conflict than as a pastime.  The ending of course has its share of violence and deeply questionable vigilante justice, but then again they do establish that the sheriff is on the take, so what can one do?

The film is fairly fun.  It's deeply ridiculous and treats women as smiling dolls who all desire a taste of the Swayze.  Swayze's character has its share of stupid myth-building (he has a phd in philosophy!  And yet he's a bouncer?  This guy has layers!) and unnecessary father figures as well.  It's fun though.  The bad guy is smug and bad, Swayze is attractive and good.  It's a cheese-fest but still I liked it.

Uncle Frank

Saw Uncle Frank, a film about a gay uncle of a southern family in the less-tolerant time of 1973.  It's a fairly touching drama which never quite reaches above being just a frothy drama, but it does involve gay people and doesn't involve AIDS, so that's nice.

The film is told from the perspective of Beth, the niece of the gay uncle.  She feels ignored and taken for granted by her sprawling family.  Only her quiet, gentle uncle from New York listens to her and urges her to make her own way, to embrace her own destiny.  She travels to NYC for college and visits the uncle constantly.  Soon his lie is exploded and his equally perfect-in-every-way boyfriend is revealed.  Then the family patriarch dies and the gay uncle is called home one more time to say farewell.

The film then comes to life.  It revolves around the struggle to come out or to stay closeted and let sleeping dogs lie.  This is complicated by the poisonous effects of homophobia and internalized homophobia.  This film deals with those issues fairly frankly without making the family come off too badly.  I feel there's an element of rose-colored glasses here (it was only the 70s after all) but the focus of the film is self-destructive hatred and so it has other things on its mind than intolerance.

I enjoyed the film.  Most gay films either focus on AIDS or on intolerance.  These are usually proselytizing films which are pulling the heart strings of straight audiences.  This one seems more focused on the gay guy and his struggles.  He urged the niece to choose her own life in spite of her family's opinions, but he's not totally comfortable with the life that was forced onto him.

The film is sweet and touching, sad at parts of course, but generally interesting to watch.  It's a solidly alright film about a gay guy which is something of a rarity.

Men in Black 3

Saw Men in Black 3, a much-improved sequel to Men In Black 2.  Once again, an alien baddie must be stopped by the human protagonist alien-police.  This time the evil alien has a hive of insectoid creatures living inside of him which do his bidding (ew).

This film contained many call-backs to the previous films.  We get to see old characters again, we see more celebrities who are revealed to be aliens, we literally travel back in time to the far funkier 60s.  It's a very backwards-looking film.  It came out in 2014, in the nostalgia-heavy times of the early 2010s when it seemed everyone wanted to go back and revisit their childhood.  This conservatism would of course eventually find its way to the ballot box.

Anyway, this film indulges in some nice past-revisiting.  Being also a prequel, it allows the mythos of the Men In Back-iverse to be deepened a bit.  There's some fun in-universe twists that are revealed.  Also, the effects are a lot better now.

Generally a good film!

The Beyond (1981)

Saw The Beyond (1981), an Italian horror film about a woman who inherits a hotel only to discover that this hotel is actually built on top of one of the seven entrances to hell.  Sometimes a gal just can't catch a break!

The film is interesting but a bit lumpy.  I enjoy haunted house films generally and I liked the malevolent, seductive way that the house welcomes the main characters deeper into creepy shit.  I liked the bizarre, futuristic morgue that bodies wind up at.  There's some nice strange, unusual creepiness to be had.  There's a theme of sight and vision throughout this film.  Few eyeballs make it through the film un-popped!

Some of the creepiness is more bewildering than creepy.  There's a blind girl, for example, who plays creepy music in an abandoned house who may be a ghost.  She's a sympathetic character and gives the protagonist many clues throughout the film, but there's no explanation of where she comes from.  Is she a ghost?  Is she homeless?  This ambiguity comes off as slightly clumsy, but I like the ambivalence of it - this is a world in chaos, falling apart.  Maybe a blind girl just slipped through the cracks?

Unfortunately, I could only find a dubbed version to watch online, so I had to put up with the main character's inconsistent southern accent and he film was made a while ago, so there's some unexpected shittiness from the main character's boyfriend (on first hearing of these infernal shenanigans, he scolds her to stop lying to him.  Dude, why?)  There's also a fairly inevitable zombie scene.  Zombies are completely boring to me now and I actively resent their presence in this otherwise original and quirky film.  I'm not even a zombie fan and I must have seen like 20 of those movies by now.  Enough!

So the film is not stellar, but it's very original and interesting.  The effects have aged a fair amount and for my viewing experience, the dubbing was the cause of much frustration, but the idea of a house with secrets appeals to me, and the sinister, magical effects are still fun to watch.  It was not great but interesting.

Men in Black 2

Saw Men in Black 2, a not-very-good sequel to the original hit from the 90s.  Here's the plot: there's a shadow society of aliens who walk among us normal humans and a police-force armed with amnesia-rays who police this shadow society.  In the original, they had to deal with a very mean alien who was killing everyone.  In this one, they again have to deal with a mean alien who is killing everyone, but this time it's a girl.

The movie is alright but very inferior to the original.  It feels more like we're watching a sitcom season finale than a movie.  The protagonist pairs up with a talking pug dog.  The antagonist extends plastic-looking CGI tentacles.  In one scene these tentacles poke into someone's ear and emerge out of his nose.  It's a fairly wacky movie for wackiness's sake.  It passes the time.

The movie is an effects-driven film.  Those are nice, however CGI-heavy, but the rest of the film is clearly a distant after-thought.  There's a love interest that doesn't really go anywhere, there's a Bourne Identity-style series of clues to keep the plot moving.  It's not unpleasant, but a completely forgettable movie.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Saw The Wolf of Wall Street, a biopic about the rise and sort-of-fall of Jordan Belfort, day-trader.  The film depicts grotesque excess and outrageous law-flaunting.  It was fairly depressing for me.  I felt like it wasn't very satisfying but it was evidently reasonably accurate and the real world, alas, is often depressing.

The protagonist is this dude who only cares about money.  He parties and has sex with super-model ladies, stays high on the finest drugs, and lives in the biggest yachts and the biggest houses.  His life looks like a lot of fun, however the character is constantly staying just a hair's breadth out of trouble that his own excesses get him into.  He is tacky and empty.

I found the film depressing in its depiction of big-money excess.  The way the characters take pride in their foul mouths, in their lack of taste, in their willingness to lie and cheat to get a stock sale.  This is a life that, if I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't turn down, but one that's pointless.  The drugs they take short-circuit any need for meaning or fulfillment in their lives: just take another pill, you'll be fine.  This is a sour sort of dream that's being promoted, a boring sort of excitement that wears on you after a while.

So yeah there's that, but I also feel like there's an element of sour grapes in what I've written above.  His life looks a lot more fun than mine does if nothing else.  In the en of the film (spoilers here) he never really faces consequences, but that's true to life, I feel.  I think this is one of those films where if you're kind of upset and made uncomfortable by it, that means you were paying attention.

Then again, if the point is for us to be outraged, why is the outrageous behavior so entertaining?  This film came out in 2013 and in those happier times, I think no one really took the poisonous impact of greed and narcissism seriously.  The puckish protagonist is much less fun when he's the president.

The real life person that this film was based on apparently styled himself after Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) who was himself based on an amalgam of stock brokers Oliver Stone knew.  Thus the culture celebrates and perpetuates itself.  Nowadays of course stock brokers are quaint relics of the 90s - replaced by high-frequency trading algorithms that don't even need cocaine.  The culture of Wall Street excess however has stayed alive in Silicon Valley and in those trading companies and whereaver money is to be made.  How depressing.

From Hell

Saw From Hell, a Johnny Depp vehicle (of all things) based on the comic book of the same name by Alan Moore.  It follows the Jack the Ripper murders in London.  Whereas the comic was much more about making obscure connections and following the why of what was done, this film focuses much more on the mystery of it - the who and how.  This makes for more compelling watching, since we get to see a mystery unfold, but it sort of removes the point of the story for me.

The film is very nice to look at however.  It's one of those films set in Victorian times that goes overboard in bucking the trend.  Instead of everything being seemly and lovely, everyone's a prostitute addicted to opium and most unseemly.  There's a nice ugliness to everything however it is a bit excessive at times.

In keeping with the darkness of the material, the setting is similarly smokey and dark, obscure and shadowy.  The filmmakers are clearly making a mystery film.  Because we're more interested in following the thread of clues that leads to the killer, we spend less time on metaphysical freak-outs.  We get some, but nothing compared to ravings about the fourth dimension and occult architecture.  We get some nice opium visions, but these are fast, flickering montages.

The film, while not bad, doesn't hold up to the dry creativity of the comic book and I didn't really enjoy it.  I feel like I wasn't trying very hard to be objective here, and you may have a different feeling about the film, but it left me sort of cold.

The People Under the Stairs

Saw The People Under the Stairs, a particularly appropriate film on this, the day after the 2020 election as results come in.  The film is a horror movie directed by Wes Craven about a distinctly Ronald Reagan-ish looking dude and his sister-wife who steal children and who are landlords for a nearby slum which they're sucking dry and gentrifying.  The whole thing comes crashing down when a plucky black kid sneaks into their house and unleashes their basement monsters.

The film was a created as a pointed allegory/criticism of Reagan-era economics.  The wife raves about God and purity while the husband take barely-restrained sexual enjoyment from torturing others (he hunts the plucky protagonist in a full-on gimp suit.)  To outward appearances, they are wealthy and quietly elegant, but as soon as the cops leave, they drop the act and start snarling and shouting all over again.

As a caricature of reactionary politics, they have not aged super well.  I feel like the current avatars of subjugation and repression are not self-described decent people with sundresses but shouty fat men wearing camo and playing soldier, not the ultra-wealthy but the just-barely-not-poor.  Someone with a sneaking suspicion that they are being laughed at.  It's fairly depressing to see this caricature and to think how much tawdry and obvious it would become.  People now proudly video themselves doing things that are completely beyond the pale, that are self-parodying.

Anyway though the movie was alright - it reminded me a lot of Nothing But Trouble in as much as there is a gorgeous and sinister house.  The plot and characters are a lot better here of course and the conclusion is more satisfying.  I was a little annoyed at the involvement of the Community at the end, but it was the 90s and mobs didn't yet have a bad name.  Not a bad movie.

Lord of Illusions

Saw Lord of Illusions, another Clive Barker film.  It was really good!  It followed a private eye who becomes mixed up in the sinister aftermath of a dissolved cult.  The cultists have mostly gone into lives of sort-of-magic; stage magicians, palm readers and such.  Of course, this being a horror film, the cult was actually on to something supernatural and the evilest twink in the world is trying to resurrect the dead cult leader.

The film is very lush - full of gorgeous colors and satin and mahogany.  The private eye gets his fair share of noir-y stakeouts and melodramatic drawing-room scenes.  Of course, the bulk of the film is taken up with supernatural doings and murder and such, but what mystery there is is given a fair shake.  There's a David Lynch-ish mixture of the bizarre and the mundane.

This film seems to be about love and coupling mostly.  There's only one fairly chaste sex scene, but the main motivations of the characters wind up being mostly about other people: wanting to spend eternity with them, devoting their lives to them, staying together out of gratitude (and explicitly not out of love!)  Characters are almost never alone.

I enjoyed the movie.  The cult stuff is great - the art on the walls in particular.  The baddies were strange and off-putting and the heroes attractive.  The visuals were interesting and the antics of the cult worrying.  It was a good movie which I think only didn't do well because the antagonist evil twink was given so much screen time.

Nightbreed

Saw Nightbreed, a strange and convoluted film about a dude who is being framed for murder by his serial killer psychologist.  Guided by dreams, he flees to a cemetery on the outskirts of a nearby town where he discovers a city of monster-people who have lived there secretly for many years.  There's a lot going on.

This is one of those films that has a dozen differently edited versions.  I watched the "director's cut" but it was sometimes a bit choppy.  I found myself sort of wishing someone had given it another edit, just to clean up the sloppy bits.  Even as-is, there's a ton going on in the film and a lot of world-building.  This feels like the first in a series or something.

Anyway, this is a film where the "monsters" are sympathetic and turn out to be the good guys.  I was impressed that the monsters actually are fairly monstrous however.  They have children and make jokes and are scared of humans, but they also cavort with rotting corpses and are grotesquely deformed.  Some are even regarded as dangerous and uncontrollable by each other.

The monsters can easily be read as a minority group which has been shunned and marginalized by society.  It's interesting and sort of uncomfortable that the film seems to acknowledge that mixed in with the "monsters" there are also actual monsters.  It's also sort of uncomfortable to see the monsters attacked by over-armed and trigger-happy cops and by a convoy of good ol' boys, piled into trucks and looking remarkably like the Trump caravans of today.  

The film is very dense.  It's not bad, but very busy and fairly messy.  I sort of wish they'd stuck only to the serial killing or to the monster town - both at once is a lot.  Add on top of this the varying levels of world-building and sequel-setup the different cuts provide.  The film blossoms in all directions at once, like a chrysanthemum.  If you dig it, this is maybe a plus, but it seems excessive.  Maybe it's ripe for a remake?

Speed

Saw Speed, a much-loved blockbuster film that, while it doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, it does have a bus jumping over 50 feet of missing interstate, which is probably enough.  The film starts Keanu Reeves as a sort of meat-head.  He's still got the doofiness of Bill and Ted but is here spouting one-liners and generally being a softer John McClain.  It's an interesting alchemy and I guess that's why he's now in action movies a lot.

The film is alright.  I prefer hysterics generally so this was not quite my cup of tea, but there's plenty of action-movie hijinks to keep you entertained.  The soul of the movie is in watching Keanu struggle against some new obstacle, the odds ever-lengthening against him.  After a while, it does get a hair contrived however.  For example (and I don't want to give anything away but...) after they get off of the bus, they then get onto a completely different out of control vehicle which they can't stop!

The film has a slow-burn romantic sub-plot to keep the film some momentum and stop it from descending into a meaningless challenge/solution series.  The struggles of the cops, also, to stop the out of control bus is fun to watch, as is the cat-and-mouse of the mad bomber vs Keanu and the cops.  A lot of it is transparently for the sake of spectacle however which I didn't like.  The famous gap-jumping scene is one of the more egregious in this regard.

Before the bus happens, there's a 20-minute elevator rescue sequence which I feel is a better version of this film: tight, taught, and exciting with the spectacular set pieces (that crane) deftly woven into the action.  I guess bottom line: this was a good film, just not meant for me.