The great Pierino with the Fontane Sisters singing ‘A’ You're Adorable in 1949:
Movies Watched -- You Were Never Really Here (2018)
95 minute running time … I loved this one! Really well made, violent, disturbing, weird. I’m not sure if the story made any sense, but it was so stylishly made that I could cut it some slack. Joaquin Rafael (born in Puerto Rico) Phoenix is a little younger than me … he’s a little guy but a talented actor (Best Actor award at Cannes for this? I had no idea). I guess this movie was previously titled “A Beautiful Day,” don’t know why they changed the name? The sound design is really good too.
Tony Lane is right to say “some strains of this fearsome film, to be honest, feel overworked and arch,“ but it’s still good enough to get a coveted green-go rating.
‘A’ you’re adorable, ‘B’ you’re so beautiful, ‘C’ you’re a cutie full of charms….
Movies Watched -- Searching (2018)
101 minute running time but I went to fast forward after 20 minutes since the gimmick of placing all the action on a computer screen got old fast … grimacing Korean-American father on the webcam, enough already … hot Tiger Mom dying young from cancer pretty grim … so the lady cop was a bad guy? Had a happy ending looked like. Bad. You can give this one a miss.
“All those typed Google searches and text message exchanges grow wearying to the viewer’s eye … in a clunky resolution, the story turns as flat as the screens that contain it.“ — Steven Winn
“The failure of ‘Searching’ is, conversely, an inability to integrate much of life at all into the world of screens.“ — Dick Brody
Hot Mom Gone Too Soon
Movies Watched -- The Destroyer (2018)
120 minute running time so at least a half hour too long … terrible movie … Nicole made up to look like death warmed over …. convoluted story-telling with multiple flashbacks. You can miss it.
Inexplicably spent her whole life scrappin’. Jealous, hungry, scared.
Movies Watched -- The Commuter (2018)
105 minute running time but felt much longer … idiotic story, just made no sense, start to finish … big budget action though with a CGI train crash .. dumb dumb dumb, waste of a borrow. Do not see this.
I am Hester Prynne
Movies Watched -- Serenity (2019)
107 minute running time but I went to fast forward after 20 minutes … this was terrible. Why would Anne Hathaway get involved in something like this? Does she need the money? Matthew McConaughey is one of those troubled guys so who knows what he was thinking … his pecs look amazing, he must spend five hours a day in the gym, his body looks fantastic for a 50 year old (he’s my age). I guess it was some kind of virtual reality bad stepdad revenge killing fantasy in the end, who knows. The F word every other word. What crap, a waste of a borrow. 20% on RottenTomatoes, sheesh.
Dick Brody writes, “‘Serenity’ is … full of ludicrous trivializations that bypass the story’s troubling implications.”
Rex is a little more direct: “…moronically written and directed with shocking, amateurish ineptitude by Stephen Knight, it’s a pointless bomb.”
Dad, I did something real bad. I made a terrible movie.
Breaking the Proscenium Arch
From John Leo’s interview on Booknotes.
“McLuhan was really right about a lot of things … basically he said that any new medium, any one of the many new media that come along, will totally disrupt the society and produce a new personality type, and we're seeing it now and we saw it with print. Basically, if you apply McLuhan's analysis to the electronic media, you're saying that everything that print produces is now on the way out. In McLuhan terms, print produces privacy, a linear approach to things, a logical, orderly approach to things and sequence. The electronic media breaks all that down. There is no left to right; there is no sequence. In the electronic media everything's all at once, and if it isn't all at once, it's -- there's no sense to the sequence. You see a killing in Vietnam, you see an ad, you see a puppy story in the news -- it's just a jumble of things happening. McLuhan predicted that each new media would change the world, and I think he's right.
McLuhan forces us to think how important the media are to the culture and what they do to the culture. People are always up in arms about the content of the media -- too much violence or too much nudity. But McLuhan said, it isn't the content that will do you in; it's the form of each medium itself. ‘The medium is the message’ was his cliche, aphorism. What he meant by that is, don't worry about the content. The content is always the old medium. When the movies came along they thought they were stage plays, and they kept presenting movies as stage presentations. They didn't know that the form demands action; it breaks the proscenium arch; it's a whole different approach. Anyhow, McLuhan understood that when the electronic media came, that it would produce what he called the "global village," that just as CNN, C-SPAN are binding us together, all around the country, all around the world, we no longer have the privacy of individual print cultures. We're going to have a universal language; it will be electronic language.”
Movies Watched -- Unsane (2018)
97 minute running time … turned out to be more of a horror movie than a thriller … weird camera angles to make you uncomfortable, but the story here was kind of dumb … how would the stalker know she would be admitted to that facility? A flaw like that kind of ruins it completely for me … unnecessarily violent, esp. the ending … lame Millennial movie, give it a miss. Had no idea it was a Soderbergh movie, that means the critics will be overly kind. Don’t see it.
Two nights at the Hyatt Regency
Movies Watched -- Galveston (2018)
93 minute running time … I would have cut the scene with the black ex-girlfriend to tighten it up … this wasn’t terrible, but it’s also not good enough to recommend … it’s grim, not a feel-good story … heavy True Detective vibe (despite the director’s best efforts) … Ben Foster is getting a lot of work, he was in Leave No Trace and Hell or High Water (neither of which I liked), but you can tell he tries hard as an actor … never seen Elle Fanning before, but she has pretty good white trash stringy blonde hair and can weep at length … very violent and the story is totally contrived and doesn’t make much sense, but again, it wasn’t bad, the actors got a chance to work hard (and it’s obvious when they can’t pull off a scene despite their struggles). Not terrible though, which is high praise for a recent movie.
You’re disgusting.
Movies Watched -- Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
This version 113 minutes long, cobbled together and thought to be close to Pabst’s original intention … his last silent picture … another great movie from the Weimar era (I guess the greatest? was The Blue Angel (1930)) … Louise Brooks, so beautiful and a talented actress to boot … morality tales well told … lots of ascending and descending stairs, money changing hands, and a firm grip on shoulder or back of neck (!) if you enjoy your obvious symbolism. John Farr liked it (“arch condemnation of moral corruption at the heart of the German soul“), and I too give it a green-go rating.
Ein wenig mehr Liebe und niemand kann verloren sein auf dieser Welt!