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The last film you saw -- and what would you grade it


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Little Women - C+

 

I came out of the theater not liking it but when my friends and I talked, I was reminded that most of the things I didn't care for a really mandated by the book-the saccharine nature of it all and the one-dimensional quality of some of the characters. And some of the other things that made me wince a little have been a trend anyway-especially for remakes.

 

It was just cloyingly sweet. The 4 Little Women spent every moment on-screen (when they were all in the same scene) embracing each other, playing with each other's hair, play-wrestling and wrapping all their limbs around each other. They embraced each other's heads and acted like they had to have as much contact with each other's bodies as possible, laying their heads in each other's lap and ****. It was like watching a litter of 8-week-old kittens without the fur. And they all talked at the same time, all over each other, in each of these scenes. I missed a lot of that dialogue and it was little maddening but it's also much more like real sisters this close would talk. And Laura Dern was absolutely wasted as Marmee-she was only there, apparently, to knit her eyebrows together and give away all the March's food and blankets to neighbors. Then, Father got home from the war and much joy ensued-for about a minute-then, we didn't even see him again.

 

 

I thought the cinematography was beautiful and the costumes were gorgeous-although, it seemed like the only complaining the girls did was about how poor they were-how destitute and how much they hated it-yet each of them had scores of beautiful, voluminous dresses and gorgeous hats an accessories. But that's just movie stuff, right?

 

Also, the way everyone spoke was very contemporary yet everything else was IN the Civil War era. (Was "capital" actually used as an adjective at this time?) The liberties they took that I liked; much more info on Jo and her writing career and when 2 of the characters broke the 4th wall and addressed the movie audience-although it only happened those 2 times and felt very out of place-it was interesting.

 

When I look at it knowing it's a remake of a remake and all of that? It's not so badly done. Through that lens, I'd go B-.

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I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)

B+

 

 

Scorsese just does not care about crime. His obsession is with sin and the absence of sin! (He said, confidently, despite having left unseen far too many of Scorsese's films - incl. some stone cold classics he's never bothered to get around to!) The absence of sin is what characterizes his best films Kundun (1997) - shot by Deakins, scored by Glass! & The Last Temptation Of Willem Dafoe (1988); and its presence is shot through the obvious ones but/and also The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Silence (2016). Criminality, and v. spec. the Mafia, are the paint! The house is sin! What we do to each other, and what we fail to do for each other, the acts of social trespass and the fear of damnation, these are his concerns! There's a good section in Jack Cady's The American Writer where he goes on and on about how for hundreds of years everyone in America, certainly everyone literate in the English language in America, believed starkly and fully in a very very real hell, a literal place of fire & brimstone that we will go to after we die, and that it is right for us to go there. He talks about how it shaped the American imagination, this sense of ultimate destination. Scorsese is maybe the last major force in American imaginative life to truly and really believe in hell, in damnation, to take it as an article of faith that things will get worse for us (he's talked about this in interviews, re: his Catholicism, that he knows he's going to hell when he dies because he lived in sin with his wife, but it's more than that); Scorsese doesn't just think he's going to hell, he knows you're going to hell too. He knows we're all doomed! It's not so much that that he's the last Christian director, or even the last monotheistic director, he may be the last director working in Hollywood who truly believes in the Devil, that the Devil is real, the Devil has a plan for all of us!

 

I think this is what makes the movie which should otherwise be nothing much more than an interminable slog wherein a CGI monstrosity that closely resembles Al Pacino must choose between his love for hanging out w/Joe Pesci & Pals and the easy intimacy of pajama parties w/Al Pacino (spoiler : he goes w/Pesci!) into something that's ACTUALLY riveting, that rewards rewatching, and that truly feels like vital & necessary work for an uncountably large audience. The secret sauce is the theology of it, the flesh of the beast and the gold ring and the silver chalices and the fruit of the vine and the bread from the earth. That's what takes this movie and spreads the secret sauce upon its surface and makes it good : it's not about a mobster. It's about man. Capital M. Man. We are born in sin, the institutions we build are thus sinful, the only question remaining is a simple one. What do we do with what we have? The Kai's Power Goo parody of Pacino is offered that as a choice and given as much time to ruminate upon it as any movie character ever gets and, yeah, he chooses poorly. He rejects the productive and lifegiving although nonetheless corrupt & tainted forces of Jimmy Hoffa for the false camaraderie and counterfeit power of ... wait, what was the name of Joe Pesci's character? Anyway, the scene with the daughter in the classroom where she lists everything good about Jimmy Hoffa and unions is the key to the movie, that's the movie laying out what Frank has thrown away, the key difference between his two besties, and it's also kinda Scorsese coming to terms w/how the Catholic Church is evil but could have been a force for good in this world. The other key to the movie is the scene where they're in the car and Jesse Plemons is driving and they're talking about fish : that too is about the Church!

 

Frank can drive 'em but he can't fix 'em, and he can only respond with a shrug to the question of why he couldn't tell the back of his truck was empty, that he was driving a light horse. He knows it's empty. He says so. But, even if he hadn't been the one to swipe the goods, he truly wouldn't be able to tell that it was empty beforehand. And maybe none of us can. We just live our lives for as long we live and hope not to be the ones who have to buy our own coffins. But in the end we're all just like those soldiers, digging our own graves with gusto and thinking if we do a good enough job, well then, maybe the guy with the gun will change his mind. But he won't because he won't (how much yardage does this movie get out of tautologies? Lots & lots!); because we can ask for the door to be left open a little but there is no door. We're already here. What's the line from The Godfather : this is the business we've chosen. We're all going to die!

 

 

 

Frozen II
D-

 

 

Felt less like a proper real sequel than a smoosh of, like, three things :

 

1) a direct-to-video/DVD sequel; the kinda thing Disney used to push out all the time, just with much better production quality on the animation (albeit the songs were just about up to that standard, certainly didn't exceed it).

 

2) the first season of the spinoff TV show, like the Aladdin show, but with suspiciously taut plotting of a season-long arc, somehow incomprehensibly edited down to a mere ninety minutes.

 

3) the inevitable live-action Frozen remake, but for some reason they decided to animate it?

 

After the first fifteen minutes of exposition establishing all the rules, stakes, background info, I kind of assumed that'd be basically it but the entire rest of the movie is just peppered with exposition, everyone's spitting out kernels of exposition, Josh Gad is doing it (when he's not babbling in CBT-speak or regurgitating old Internet jokes), Idina Menzel is doing it, I kept expecting the reindeer to say something like "There is a sixth & seventh spirit of nature!", I guess they'll leave that for Frozen III : This Time Kristoff Is Crowned Queen, Everyone's Gonna Get Their Turn. No good musical numbers (best of the bad lot were, individually, Olaf's and Kristoff's but even they each had a big syntax breaking moment where their faces got too close to the 'camera'), a plot that borders on incomprehensibility, and a climax so misjudged on the terms of the story being told that one has to wonder what was going on behind the scenes. Did they come up with the appropriate ending and change it to a bad one because there was a limit to their wishy washy good intentions? (No, they were probably just so overwhelmed by the success of the first one that devising a coherent sequel was a task beyond them so they had to settle for the best they could manage in the time they had.) Anyway, amateur tip : if the grandpa is bad, and the ruling family has been told lies as children, and the kingdom itself is founded on lies, then, yes, destroy the kingdom, tear down the foundations of Arendelle, destroy that which was taken, if you can not return what was stolen its use must be foresworn, go beyond Laffer; Elsa coming in on the magic horse and saving their homes from the rock giants is wrong under the movie's schema because they must all become Northlanders or whatever they were called, they must set aside their divisions and become transformed in the Enchanted Forest, Arendelle itself is a lie, so now Anna sits on a throne of lies, she experiences a catharsis but denies this same profound transformative experience to her subjects so she is a false queen and her reign must end, peaceably one hopes but in violence if we must,

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Bad Boys For Life (2020)
D-

 

Did I miss Bad Boys III : Whatcha Gonna Do? (2009) or did they just inadvertently assign the perfect title for Bad Boys IV to this movie? Why did I fall asleep in the middle of an action movie? Why did they go back and do re-shoots and make the Main Bad Guy Will Smith's son but forget to take out the scenes where they were clearly establishing the big twist being that Main Bad Guy was a cop? Why did they make Vanessa Hudgens look like a young Demi Moore? Why did they choose some random director to imitate Michael Bay but forego nearly all of his signature pathologies? Why was DJ Khaled in this movie? Why did La Croix and Gatorade pay for product placement? Why did they think these two guys who are nearly like Three Stooges level of broad comedy could be burdened with existential angst and ennui over their place in the world - they invade Cuba w/o consequences in the last one but you're expecting me to believe that they have to face the ravages of time's cruel hand and fate's even crueller machinations? Why'd they kill Joe Pantoliano if they wanted to do sequels? Why didn't they use the robot drone with machine guns more? Final scene of the movie should have had Will Smith and Martin Lawrence cradling and singing to the robot drone not some dumb baby!!! (Oh, and mid-credits scene should have had the robot drone floating behind Will Smith when he visits his son in prison). (Oh, wait, final question : what was that great re-mix of "Rhythm Of The Night" during the club scene?)

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

NOIRVEMBER II : THE FIRST NOIREL / JANOIRARY

 

Remember the Night (1940)
B+

 

 

I do think this counts as a noir! It's not just the casting, not just the way it looks; Preston Sturges' script has been butchered enough that the ending is actually an unhappy one : these two doomed lovers, each unable to get the other to do what needs to be done, each w/their own sense of propriety mangling the circumstances that would actually make them both happy into ones that leave them miserable. She's going to prison! It's a story about two city mice, more by habit than by birth, forced to return to the country that bore them and faced with the possibility of actual happiness fleeing right back into their respective cages. The sharp cynicism typical of the genre isn't there on the surface of the movie, it's mostly just witty repartee, but I do think it's there, yes. And there may be no gunplay (but plenty of guns, or rifles at least) but I still think it counts as a noir. They even flee to Canada (I have a pet typology for noirs : I think they're all either about fleeing south to Mexico or fleeing north to Canada, occasionally every now and then you get one where they're about fleeing to Europe). I'm counting it! It counts! (Regardless : it's a good flick!)

 

 

 

Nightmare Alley (1947)

C?

 

 

Ends badly and @ inordinate length. Some good scenes (when they're in the truck driving together near the beginning, Tyrone Power doing his shtick for the hobos nearer to the close) but mostly unimpressive stuff. Helen Walker, as the psychologist grifting the grifter, is p. good; Coleen Gray is hot hot hot (so hot sparks are a'flying!), and the way Joan Blondell pronounces 'tarot' had a certain odd appeal : wait, I'm just putting together what this movie w/3 heavily featured female parts and a focus on the supranormal is about about no wait I lost it. Maybe it's worth a re-watch? I don't know.

 

 

 

Caged (1950)
A

 

 

The roll call scenes, the picture's cynicism (a hallmark of the genre, yeah, of course, but seriously : they can't reach a doctor over the phone because he's having a poker game and his secretary insists he's "off on a case"; the mother's absolute refusal to raise the baby, a brutal beating that is all the more horrifying in its impact for how the audience fails to actually see it), I can't decide if the thing w/the kitten is a touch too far or not but on the whole, yeah, this was a great movie. Probably the origin story of too many fetishes ("Thanks for the haircut!" indeed) to count.

 

 

 

Ruthless (1944)

D

 

 

Nope! Basically just Citizen Kane with a bad head cold.

 

 

 

Body And Soul (1947)

C-/C

 

 

I probably shouldn't feel the need to take a nap forty-five minutes into a movie, but, then again, that may be more on me than anything to do w/the picture. Not half bad! The flashback, the montage showing Garfield's simultaneous material rise & moral fall, and boxing scenes are all v. well handled. I still can't pin down who Joseph Pevney (guy went on to direct fourteen Star Treks; actually he may be the unheralded hero of the franchise because at a quick glance all the episodes he did are the ones that are everyone's favourites and/or the ones that made a big impact on pop culture, Marc Daniels cleans up the rest w/Khan and the Mirror Universe and the one they ganked to make the first movie but otherwise most of what makes Star Trek itself was directed by Pevney) reminds me of. I think the story has quite a good deal of heft to it, actuellement, would be entirely different if they re-cast Canada Lee and John Garfield, as is, the movie is about way more than it's about because of this. I didn't much care for the love story in this'n, but I think what's off about it may come pre-baked into the larger premise of what makes the movie special, can't really get into it w/out elaborating @ further length.

 

 

 

Born To Kill (1947)
B+++

 

 

I have two-and-a-bit pages worth of notes on this movie so, uh, it's gonna have to suffice to say that I liked it but I'm not sure others would.

 

 

 

Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950)

C-

 

 

Boo! Ends happily enough for the main characters (albeit improbably, Gene Tierney forgiving this guy for putting the frame-up on her father just because HIS father was a criminal doesn't really pass muster) but inappropriately for the genre. I'm not sure if Preminger just straight up re-uses a shot of a taxicab pulling up to an apartment building or merely stages the two events similarly (like he does w/the rest of the sequence) for intended effect. This is one of the ones that couldn't really hold my attention but the language of it is primo noir : lot of mugs, hoods, dusters, nickel rats, jams, heels, people get "all knocked up" and there's a "rub him out" and, according to ImdB (I missed it) "all bummed up like a barrelhouse vag".

 

 

 

Blast Of Silence (1961)

C+/B-

 

 

77 minutes! The narration is not so much over the top as it is several dozen AUs above the top; between the top and the narration lie three heavenly vastnesses so far beyond our mere mortal understanding that to name them with human tongue is but insult to the Creator : first, the רָקִיעַ, where the amshaspands dwell, next, the שְׁחָקִים, where fiery thrones and frosty dominions rotate in their spheres, last, the Unknown Regions, which is gloomy because it borders upon the iniquities of man. What I mean is, well, the narration is a little much! There's also a fair amount of bongo drumming in the film, about twice what I'm comfortable with in the average flick. Basically, this movie is just a guy moidering another guy, then moidering the guy he was originally sent to moider, then going back home to get moidered hisself. Is it a masterpiece? I don't think so but I'm not your boss, I'm not your mom, this isn't Noir University and you're not taking Noir 101 with me, there's certainly a rough appeal in how the movie strings together words into sentences like "Without a gun in your fist you're nothing" and "A killer who doesn't kill gets killed.", it's shot and edited and scored nicely enough, makes a decent Christmas flick, go with God.

 

 

 

The Captive City (1952)
B+

 

 

The opening chase leading into the framing device is great. During the phone call shots everyone seems a shtickle too close to the camera (do I dare doubt Robert Wise? I guess so). It is a beautiful looking and edited picture otherwise : the stark bleak darkness of the outdoors in the door-opening shots, the way the discovery of Mrs. Sirak's body is handled, the narration, I mean, the narration is often the most iffy parts of these movies but this one nails it. Ends w/a U.S. Senator staring straight into the camera and earnestly exhorting the audience to, uh, fight crime.

 

 

 

Crossfire (1947)
C

 

 

Kind of a waste of Robert Mitchum. Robert Ryan being the murderer doesn't seem like such a stretch, he's the first guy who shows up in the picture who isn't a cop or the vic's girl. The opening, what w/the moider and then the police interrogating the dame in the same room as the corpse is done well enough but eventually things just start Rashōmoning out of control.

 

 

 

Brute Force (1947)
C+

 


This is one of those that couldn't really hold my attention. Even so a handful of really good bits made themselves apparent : the moment about ten minutes in when Munsey enters the mess hall and the entire room hushes & stills; planning their escape while whispering in the chapel; conversations between the Doc and Munsey; the prisoner seeing the guard coming by being on the look-out w/his shaving mirror. And, of course, yeah, the torture and the ending. I don't much like each of these guys flashing back to their dames; cut this picture to the bone, get it down to fighting weight, lose all that excess and have it be seventy-four minutes long and it'd probably rate a lot higher in my estimation.

 

 

 

The Big Clock (1948)
C

 


A bit of a snoozefest. Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester are great in it, though. There's a good bit w/the window in a door, Ray Milland seeing his pursuers coming his way and then sneaking around in the shadows. It does feature one of my favourite things from old movies : when a night on the town is represented by extra-diegetically showing the neon signs of the visited places overlaid on top of, like, champagne bottles going off (I think I like it so much because it's v. comics-y) or what-have-you.

 

 

 

Gun Crazy (1949)
A

 


Extremely good! Very hornt! Even when accounting for this particular genre's high H quotient this film is nonetheless amongst the most horny I've seen in noirvember so far. Peggy Cummins has a real Geena Davis vibe to her and John Dall's skinny dope-y look plays well against that; they make a real good couple, they look like a couple that could exist today. There's a bit w/a baby, that baby is kind of not a good actor, that baby is just v. psyched to be hearing adults in conversation around it and really really wants to go with Peggy Cummins in the car as part of the police chase in the final reel, go back to Juilliard instead, baby!

 

 

 

Criss Cross (1948)
D-

 

 

Takes nearly an hour to get itself good and going. Yvonne De Carlo (Lily Munster from The Munsters! Moshe's wife from The Ten Commandments!) has a stylish albeit understated dress sense in this'n. Skippable.

 

 

 

Union Station (1950)
C+/B-

 

 

Noir, as a genre, is about crafting environments populated by stark dichotomies : cop vs. criminal, man vs. woman, sin vs. virtue, black vs. white. Through the clashing of these polar opposites meaning is generated, elaborated upon, and then eventually dismissed. The questions asked (and, more often than not, left unanswered) by noir are stark & simple --- What are we? What will we do under pressure? Can mug ever trust dame, can broad love mook?

 

This is perhaps best epitomized by this particular movie in a manner so simple & perfect it left me practically flabbergasted w/delight : a guy gets run over by a stampede of cows! The movie's not much good but the cow scene is a real treat! And, yes, I think it is the genre at its best. No noir movie has ever been more noir than this one, death-by-cow is genuinely among the best ways to kill a man in a noir movie.

 

 

 

Where Danger Lives (1950)
B

 

 

I didn't notice the long uninterrupted shots w/o cuts - which makes them good! Mitchum spends what feels like a lot of the picture lurching about, grabbing his head, unaware of what's going on. Her taking the rap for him @ the end after trying to shoot him, good. There's a cut in this'n that feels v. modern, ahead of the period, where Faith Domergue is holding up her diamond bracelet and saying "It's worth" ... and then we immediately cut to the pawnshop owner mid-sentence saying "Nine thousand dollars". Claude Rains & Ralph Dumke are in this'n.

 

 

 

Tension (1949)
:shrug:

 

 

Can't really remember what I thought of this'n (I liked the opening?). It does the mirror thing (a character is looking at themselves in the mirror and then looks away and by the time they look back again someone else has shown up in the mirror) and that's always something I enjoy in movies.

 

 

 

Ride The Pink Horse (1947)
C-

 

 

Ride The Pink Horse? More like Paint The Face Brown!

 

Wanda Hendrix's accent in this is SO BAD. There's a bit (she finds the injured Robert Montgomery and says "I will stop the bleeding" and furnishes him with a makeshift tourniquet) where she actually sounds like she's doing a Werner Herzog imitation. Andrea King has been dressed like something out of the 80s. Thomas Gomez has the line of the movie (and the genre!) when he says in reply to Thomas Montgomery insisting he's gonna get the money : "Yeah. Lots of people gonna get lots of things. But they don't.".

 

 

 

The House on 92nd Street (1945)
D+

 

 

A full fifteen minutes or so @ the beginning is just loud declarative voicover explaining what the F.B.I. is, what it does, what it's for, how it works, where it is, what World War II was, who fought in World War II, where World War II happened (in ... World?), to the point that one begins to wonder if the movie was maybe made by and for space aliens. Five minutes later the titular house fulla Nazi spies is properly established and the movie gets going in earnest but by then it's too late. Also, every once in a while, in this movie about the F.B.I the F.B.I will just stop, take a smoke break, put on the projector in their dark office, and watch scenes from the movie we were just watching!

 

 

 

Detour (1945)
B+

 

 

Solid! The movie leaves some questions pleasingly unanswered (some, indeed, unanswerable) : is it moider? is it love? who can hear the music? what's a cuspidor? can a woman be a goon (always seemed like kind of a gendered noun to me but I guess it isn't, or at least wasn't in '45)? I don't know, man, I don't have much to say about this'n, it's sixty-eight minutes long, go ahead, give it a watch, decide for yourself what you think of it!

 

 

 

Angel Face (1952)
B-

 

 

Much of the movie is fairly tame, just Mitchum sorta bouncing between Jean Simmons & Mona Freeman, but that ending! Wow! Even though it's set up so well (she wants to confess and be punished for her crimes but simply can't, she wanders through the empty home, the shot of her looking out over the gully) it still comes as such a shock & surprise!

 

 

 

Out of the Past (1947)
B-

 

 

Shave away the Virginia Huston solo scenes in the latter half of this movie (not to mention the flashback structure accompanied by narration, earlier) and I think it'd work a lot better for me. A beautiful looking picture - their warm breath in the cold air, the smoke trailing off the cigarette butts, the framing of Mitchum as he moves through corridors in and out of light & shadow.

 

 

 

Gilda (1946)
B

 

 

I wasn't really feeling it! Can this thruple survive the internal pressures of Rita Hayworth's hairstyle, legs, and general demeanour combined with the external pressures of a tungsten monopoly? Uh, I guess it sort of does? Needed either way more musical numbers or one fewer.

 

 

 

Dark Passage (1947)
B+/A

 

 

Bogart & Bacall are playing things so subdued and close-to-the-vest but all the minor guys (Shimen Ruskin, Clifton Young, Leonard Bremen as the driver, the heavy, and the bus ticket clerk; respectively; oh, and Agnes Moorehead too) go so big and broad. It works! Bogart is kind of the original of a type in movies & tv, the guy who when he gets angry gets angry in a crybaby way, Olyphant is that way, Justin Theroux is that way, I guess it's sort of a staple of HBO shows in general maybe?

 

 

 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
B?

 

 

This is another one of the classics that didn't quite grab me and, yeah, yet another one that may have left grooves on David Lynch's young brain. Lana Turner's introduction and dénouement is so well handled, the violence generally speaking isn't (w/the exception of John Garfield just whaling away on Alan Reed, the voice of Fred Flintstone hisself), noirvember favourite Audrey Totter has a brief role and she makes the most of her small part. See it or don't see it? Well, that's between you and your pastor, hombre.

 

 

 

Affair in Trinidad (1952)
C/C+

 

 

Couldn't really keep my eyes open for this one (w/the exception of the musical numbers, which are, uh, bloodrushingly good). Kind of boring overall, to be honest. And yet no movie where a guy gets his monocle knocked clean off can be entirely bad.

 

 

 

Raw Deal (1948)
C+

 

 

Great looking! But just kind of turns out kinda all right for the narrator? There's a trick the movie pulls repeatedly, where she interrupts her own narration, that's something I always like. Raymond Burr plays a great heavy, natch.

 

 

 

The Big Combo (1955)
C+

 

 

Cornell Wilde delivers one of the great lines in all of noir in response to being told "I know how you feel" after the death of his girl : "Nobody knows how another person feels." Lee Van Cleef is in this'n but for the longest time I just did not recognize him, I blame the lack of 'stache. There's a great death scene, too, when they execute McClure. I don't know, man, I wasn't really feeling this one.

 

 

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
A+

 

 

Amazing! Perhaps the first one of these ever made (the shortest too, maybe) and practically unequalled!

 

 

 

Call Northside 777 (1948)

:shrug:

 


Reminded me a lot of Kurt Busiek's Astro City. The Chicago setting and Polishness of it all probably accounts for that but there's something of it in there beyond that, a certain shared quality, the overcoming of cynicism in a weary world. I don't know.

 

 


The Breaking Point (1950)

:shrug:

 


Wait, which one was this again? I think this is one of those classics that I wasn't really enthused about but it's been a few weeks since I saw it and once I forget to sum up my initial impression of a film, well, if it wasn't one I loved or outright hated then any attempt to recall what I felt about it is an exercise in futility. Ralph Dumke was in it, I can tell you that much, he played the rich husband. Patricia Neal has a fairly heavy Chloë Grace Moretz vibe to her.

 

 

 

Crashout (1955)
C

 


Not too bad! Wastes no time getting started and the ending is a killer. Lacklustre love stories towards the end, the presence of each in turn kind of drawing away power from the other and the second one is just downright improbable (Beverly Michaels warms up tout suite to this guy who has held her, her son, and her elderly mother at gunpoint : but not to the level of absolute infatuation and Stockholm Syndrome-y where it would feel plausible; she just treats him a little too kindly and cuts off a kiss w/him a little too late). Beautifully shot.

 

 

 

99 River Street (1953)
D

 

 

Skippable. Handles the voiceover poorly, even accounting for the genre's peculiarities re:voiceovers. The leads don't really shine at all, Peggie Castle is probably the best of 'em but she gets killed early enough in the picture (which feels way too long at a mere 83 minutes) that she doesn't get the time she needs. Ian Wolfe, who I thought was in a bunch of these but ImdB doesn't cough up too many so he must just seem real familiar to me because he was the holographic Mr. Atoz from that episode of Star Trek where Spock gets trapped w/a cavegirl in the past (and was also in the ancient Rome planet one, too, but I remember him from All Our Yesterdays) has a bit part in this'n as a director.

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

The Gentlemen (2019)
C

 

 

More like, uh, c-word!? AmIright or amIright? Not sure what I expected, to be honest, roughly twelve percent of this movie is one of a handful of top-shelf actors just spouting the c-word over and over and/or solemnly intoning the word "respect" shortly thereafter. It all has the trademark Guy Ritchie zhuzh (and the movie's dénouement begins w/a bombast flex on his behalf, literally just him looking @ the audience and being all "I am Guy Ritchie and here is what I have wrought!") but certain aspects of what he usually brings to a film are noticeably absent or subdued this go around : fewer needle drops, much less overt heterosexuality, the Qabbalah monster has apparently been exorcised too. And there's the not-entirely-unwelcome element of him changing w/the times, softening in some respects (nearly every line of dialogue is downright comprehensible! the racism is, uh, not quite as racist as it used to be - the racism often features the closest Guy Ritchie can get to a sly wink and some actor being all "Yes, I know what I'm saying and how it sounds but I don't mean it meanly" or, rather, "Eee, the wee gaffer's gone off his barmy codge, wut!" or what have you) and there's the addition of a sort of open and honest commercialism in this movie (f'rinstance, there's literally a rap video during the end credits!) that I sort of all kind of liked!? If even Guy Ritchie can change, and grow, and become something more than he's been in the past, well, there's hope for the least among us. (Is there? Maybe not? All I know is this movie got a grand total of one (1) laugh out of me. That was when Charlie Hunman told Hugh Grant, "It's hot", after Hugh Grant love actually'd his notting hills.)

 

 

 

Ordinary Love (2019)
A+

 

 

Hell yeah! It's a cinema! Unafraid of cliché, of repetition, of breaching its own realist cinematic language when called for, unafraid of risking its main characters appearing unsympathetic, appearing ugly, appearing unfinished. Unafraid of anticlimax! Just a fearless goddamn piece of work on every level. Liam Neeson salting his soup ONLY when Lesley Manville went to the door to pick up the mail was in and of itself worth the risk of spreading the coronavirus to the audience of genteel elderly retirees who piled into the tiniest theatre in the local multiplex to see this with me. Thank you, old people! Make sure to suck on some zinc lozenges!!!

 

 

 

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)
B+

 

 

Pretty pretty good. Not sure if it was worth dying of the coronovarius in six weeks time (I know what you're gonna say - I'm not an old person, they're the ones who are most at risk of croaking from covid-19 but I can tell deep in my back teeth I'm gonna beat those odds, your boy is gonna be the first of the statistically anomalous under-40s to start kicking the bucket, I will be among that first wave, youbetcha) yet a lovely picture nonetheless. Sky and sea and skin! If I go, tell the world I was a Sophie shipper, I was rooting for the plain jane to win out the whole time, wanted her to come out on top, get the love that was merely sublimated up to that point between Marianne and Héloïse, and once the movie took its turn towards the full CINEMAX® route, well, leaving her out of that, I was disappointed.

 

 

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--- SPECIAL CONTENT UNLOCKED ---

 

I started going to gym. From around Wednesday December 18th to Monday March 16th I went to gym a grand total of 108 times! I went to gym so much, so often, and for so long that gym quit on me. Gym quit before I did! Gym just sent me a little e-mail; said it had to shut down, said it had to be properly sanitized, said it was not available for use under any circumstances.

 

I think we all know why gym did this. I choose to consider it my first victory against gym. [Correction : no, it is my ONE HUNDRED AND NINTH victory against gym.]

 

In recognition of my historic triumph over gym

 

&

 

in the hope of providing just a little more in these particularly trying times of whatever merest minute-st scintilla of comfort or insight or cautionary example or quote unquote value my words have ever had to you

 

I now present my treadmill movie/tv diary, hitherto unavailable to all but ultra-premium subscribers. Below (but placed behind a spoiler box for your convenience and lightly redacted for reasons of privacy & redundancy) are its one hundred and twelve entries! Every movie, every television show, every ... YouTube (?), every podcast, is listed along with the year of its initial release. Roughly seventy percent of the entries even have brief commentary attached! (No letter grades, tho, I went a little Montessori-style for my time on the treadmill and the elliptical and the stationary bike.) (Also, for much of the serialized entertainment I neglected to mark down which episode it was. Sorry!) Free to all.

 

 

 

The exercise episode of THE CHRIS GETHARD SHOW (2017)

A rewatch. Obviously apropos to the circumstances of viewing and just classic bit after classic bit a'bumping against each other.

 

Thoroughbreds (2017)
Solid! Unafraid of silence.

 

DICKINSON (2019)
Great! I think the appeal of this to any individual audience member can be easily demonstrated by the dance scene and the John Mulaney as Henry David Thoreau scenes. If you like those, you'll like this show. (Maybe also : Zosia Mamet as Louisa May Alcott saying, "Yeah. That's an actual fact about me.") Toby Huss great in this'n, as always.

 

Shattered Glass (2003)
A rewatch. Hayden Christensen plays a character whose enthusiastic and outstanding service to a venerated legacy institution is called into question by his own possible moral lapses --- and every step he takes to extricate himself from these circumstances only forces him into deeper and deeper trouble; the movie is a tragedy about a liar among other liars who merely lies in the 'wrong' way. So, it's Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, just w/way better acting! An absolute murderer's row of talent in this film, top to bottom favourites : Hank Azaria, Melanie Lynsky, Peter Sarsgaard, Steve Zahn, Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson.

 

Knives Out (2019)
Look, a minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding piece of work will be far more apparent than a handful scattered throughout middling-pleasing stuff. Which is to say this : Chris Evans' service for a summer as Christopher Plummer's research assistant needed to be established earlier in the film (not, like, to make a big thing of it : just have Michael Shannon spout something about how his prick brother couldn't even hack it working for the old man for more than six weeks while he's helped the business grow & thrive for ten years; everyone is talking about Ransom on and on and over and over before he shows up so it shouldn't be hard) rather than having Ana de Armas ask him about it and then confirm immediately afterwards that she knew that about him but had merely forgotten it. Other than that, well, I've been a complete mark for Rian's stuff since the beginning (I mean, Brick (2005?) is like a Darth Sockimus premise brought to life but it works, it's great, it's so good!!!) so me liking this a lot comes as no surprise.

 

Frozen 2 (2019)

 

The Irishman (2019)
Rewatched the first seventy-five minutes of this on the treadmill and then finished off the remainder of it cooling down after. Great way to see it again! Much like Mr. Hoffa, well, I too enjoy my ice cream. Was awfully tempted to eat some ice cream while watching but wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose of the quote unquote working out? Probably not - not really aiming to lose weight here or gain muscle, just get the health benefits of regular exercise everyone seems to think is unambiguously proven beyond a reasonable doubt (show me the longitudinal co-twin control study w/o disqualifying flaw conducted in our sinful hell of an earth and I will backtrack, I will believe you that alcohol can be good for you too, go ahead, bring it on) - the other big craving watching this is for the good grape juice & the bread to dip it in which makes up Joe Pesci's repeated repasts. That's what this movie is about in the end. It's a conflict between ice cream sundaes and Communion. And it's about Martin Scorsese realizing, belatedly, that ice cream sundaes are the true body of Christ!

 

The Spirit (2008)
Rewatch. Yeah, this still bangs, this still slaps, this still whips, this still whatever verb the kids use nowadays. You're either on board for Frank Miller doing his Looney Tunes interpretation of Eisner's seminal work or you're not, I am, I was then and am now, they should bring this back for a Netflix TV show. (I'd add in a few little bits and bobs : I think it'd have been great to cut away mid-sentence from The Spirit on top of the elevator monologuing aloud to the HPoAs' beneath him listening to his muffled speech in puzzlement; and I think the lack of the classic cityscapes-as-credits/titles really detracts from the whole). ScarJo in this after ScarJo in Taika Waititi's film is a fun contrast!

 

THIS TIME W/ALAN PARTRIDGE (2019)
Rewatch. Sitcoms in general tend to come pretty jokepacked but I think that moment for moment this is practically unequalled.

 

Prevenge (2016)
Great!

 

I Kill Giants (2016)

Look, I'm just happy to see Joe Kelly cash a paycheck, okay? I think his run on Superman was underrated, certainly didn't have the art it needed on every issue. I was going to call him the David Michelinie of his time but, actually, they're both the same age! (Wait, what, that can't be right. Okay, no, I'm an idiot. Joe was born in '71 and David is 71.)

 

Allied (2016)
I can't hear it when they whisper and can't figure out how to get subtitles onto my tablet, okay? Good enough w/o being actually good. Brad Pitt, one of our last real movie stars (I don't always think of him in that fashion but only a movie star can get the mileage he does out of small pieces in this film : when he stops to take a sip of coffee after killing that Nazi before fleeing the scene, well, that's a total movie star move) and 9/11 truther Marion Cotillard (my jet fuel would sure like to melt her steel beams!) are in this, haven't reteamed since tho despite having reasonably good chemistry together, also Jared Harris and Lizzy Caplan and Simon McBurney. August Diehl, also, highlighting how the movie is basically Zemeckis & Co. stitching together a movie out of other better movies.

 

Always Shine (2016)
Persona (1966) with coeliac disease.

 

THE NATURE OF THINGS (2019)
I saw the one about the trimates (narrated by Sandra Oh!), the one about the lone wolf stuck on an island off the coast of Vancouver, the one about colour perception, and the one about the Arctic.

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)
Is ... David Wain sick? Has he started doing P90X or something? Was he on this show before and I just missed it or does he look really different? Is it just the ravages of time or does he look really ill - or like he's lost a lot of weight?

 

THE GOOD PLACE (2020)
Aww, this is almost finished! There's been a noticeable drop-off in the quality of the show's endings over the past few years, for a while there in the first season or two every single episode ended amazingly.

 

The Perfection (2018)
Whelp, running on a treadmill sure does wonders for my movie-watching brain because I found each and every one of the surprises surprising!

 

Creed II : The Constant And Unwelcome Presence Of Sports Commentators In This Lacklustre & Moribund Sequel Does Not Enhance The Proceedings One Iota, And, In Fact, Diminishes The Whole To The Point That It Makes One Want To Shout At The Screen, "Shut Up! Shut Up And Let Me Watch This Movie! Stop Telling Me What's Happening And What It Means! Who Needs This?" (2018)

GETTING STRONG NOW

 

In The Fade (2017)
Fantastisch! Five stars! Recommended! Beautiful split diopter shots!

 

A Simple Favour (2018)
What's that meme on twitter/tumblr of the blonde bottlefeeding the brunette with the mascara streaked face? That's kind of what this movie is, just, uh, repeated over and over frame by frame for way too long. (Parenthetically, cheered by the cameo appearances of Chris Owens (Young Cigarette Smoking Man & Jeffrey Spender from X-Files!) as a cop, Patti Harrison (the woman just incredibly disappointed at the poor reception of her joke in that one sketch from I Think You Should Leave) as a fashionista, Olivia Sandoval (Janet from Lodge 49) as the insurance agent, well, basically, because this is an Allison Jones joint everyone in it is supergood, I could go on).

 

First Man (2018)
Justice for Michael Collins (Lukas Haas)! He's barely a part of things - other than offering Gosling some gum he may as well not be in the movie! I mean, yeah, the movie is about Neil and Neil's wife and Neil's daughter, sure, but it still manages to find something for Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) to do & be in the narrative.

 

LODGE 49 (2019)
I saw this the first go'around in the usual stationary fashion (although I watched it in an upside down order; started with Season 2 carrying on to the finale and then went back to the beginning w/Season 1. I'm glad I did it that way, actually, because there are a handful of minor aesthetic missteps in the early episodes of the show that'd probably have turned me off it if I'd come to it from the beginning w/fresh eyes.) but rewatched much of Season 2 comme ça, sweating away. What a great show!

 

THE NEW POPE (2020)
Hell yeah! Saw the first season of this'n twice - probably among the best shows ever. The new episode kinda comes close to putting its full weight behind the long simmering (mixed metaphor much, uccch) theory of Lenny maybe being the literal Anti-Christ. I know it sounds like a Mark Millar comic but it, uh, sure fits. (The other alternative is that we are seeing what we're seeing, yeah, Lenny is a saint blessed by the literal one true God, he heralds the return of the Bleeding Christ, the stone that breaks all hearts, and the ultimate reconciliation of Ecclesia, Synagoga, and Masgidion.)

 

De Palma (2015)
Rewatch. The great thing about this is seeing Brian De Palma slowly and intermittently open up about his life and you realize his life and his movies are, like, the same thing (his cold distant dad was an orthopedic surgeon who cheated on his hot babe of a mom, he used to go see his dad perform surgeries and then later would follow his dad around w/a knife trying (with success, too!) to find evidence of his affairs --- and as he grew up he became a sort of remote observer and occasional participant in the lives of the great and the good but never the king of the castle for long enough to matter; the successes didn't last, the marriages didn't last) in between the meat of the thing, just De Palma going one-by-one through his cinematography. This may be the best (or only!???) movie Noah Baumbach's ever gonna make. But what do I know, I mean, I liked Mission to Mars (2000), still like it even now, Mission to Mars (2000) > Interstellar (2014), no question.

 

The Night Comes For Us (2018)
Watched the last fifty minutes of this, haven't seen the first hour and ten minutes of it since the movie came out. Not the best way to watch a movie, no.

 

Good Time (2017)
Great! Matt Furie is the John Amos of this film!

 

Resolution (2012)
Good enough! Probably enhanced by the circumstances of viewing, seeing as nearly each step was bringing me pain and I was figuratively (literally?) praying for the movie to end so I could just stop, please God, let me rest.

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)
There's a great gag in this'n' (a guy perplexedly selects cereal with his own face on the packaging) and Dean Norris stops by. Do you think Mark McKinney's continuing role on a network sitcom for all these years makes any difference to the terms of the divorce settlement Dave Foley has with his ex? The initial terms of that was predicated on the money Dave was making back in the 90s - which he justifiably claimed he'd never no way no how be able to make again - but if Mark can do it (although, one assumes Mark's not making what Dave was making, that was then and this is now plus wasn't Dave the main guy on Newsradio whereas Superstore's main guy is ... Ginsberg from Mad Men? Ugly Betty from Ugly Betty? Wait, who is REALLY the sine qua non of this show? Is it Lauren Ash? I think it might be Lauren Ash; I don't think the show works w/o Lauren Ash.) then why can't he? There are people I can ask about this who would be able to give a good guess at the answer; not sure why I'm typing these words out here and now.

 

THE GOOD PLACE (2020)
Wait, was that the end of the show? No, the Internet is telling me there are two more. Is Jason Mendoza from Jacksonville going to be revealed to in actuality be an emanation of the one true Godhead, lost & amnesiac within his own flawed creation? I think since we met his dad it's way more of a longshot than it used to be. For quite a while that was my assumption, that was my uchh blecch 'fan theory', that's where I assumed the show was going.

 

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (2020)
Saw the final two episodes of this after the first three in the last calendar year. Those were watched stationary, sitting down, just pleasantly absorbed in seeing unintelligible nonsense being artlessly thrown at the screen. I haven't seen the Supergirl show in a few years, so now there are all new people on it (including ... Brainiac 5? The guy who is apparently Brainiac 5 is doing a tremendous accent, kudos!), everyone's in new costumes and w/new haircuts; I never saw more than a few episodes of Flash and I think maybe one or two episodes of the Forgotten Heroes show, don't think I've ever seen even a minute of Arrow, basically I've given the Berlantisphere a fairly wide berth. So this television event wasn't really for me (I mean, it's an unending spool of nerd bait & cameos and tie-ins and references, it's all totally for me, I just haven't been watching enough of it so far to care) but I kind of liked it nonetheless. Maybe way more than if I'd been an eager & attentive fan of all these five or six different television shows inexpertly knitted together into an inadequately sized blanket which simply can not retain body heat --- if these five episodes were your only protection against the cold, well, you'd freeze. But as a treat, as a special little treat, they're not too bad! Come on, folks, we gotta kick these Shadow Demons again and again and again! Come on, let's all stand in a circle around the Anti-Monitor and fire bullets at him and Care Bear Stare him and shoot blue lasers out of our eyes at him --- pourquoi? Oh wait, they made that pretty clear, we were doing it for Oliver. And for Marv, but not for George???? Did George Pérez get a cameo in this and I missed it? Was he too sick to travel to Vancouver? Gosh, I hope he's okay. Did you know comics basically kicked Marv Wolfman out for trying to start a union? But it's fine because a lifetime later he gets to see his stuff ripped off for the small screen and even play around a little with it, too. Fun! Everything's so fun! *gunshot*

 

Fat City (1972)
Great! Good use of 'The Look of Love' during that bar scene! The bar scene itself - great!

 

Dark Waters (2019)
There's a bit at the beginning where Anne Hathaway is making some spaghetti - that spaghetti looked delicious! Feed me some of that spaghetti, Anne! Feed me it though it be poison! (Robbed of a Best Picture nom, yeah. That scene at the end where Mark Ruffalo shouts "The system is rigged. They want us to think it'll protect us, but that's a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies. Not the scientists. Not the government. Us." probably did in its chances real good; Hollywood is way more comfortable with the vague noblesse oblige instincts embodied by the Tim Robbins character than the real thrust of what this movie is, that we're all doomed, we're all damned, we're all sinned against and sinning, we're all sick, we're all going to die, we did this to ourselves. This is the world we've made! We could've made a better one but we didn't.) (I kinda think both Anne Hathaway and Bill Camp deserved Best Supporting nods, too, and Mark Ruffalo for Best Actor, yeah, maybe a win for him, also.)

 

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019)

Pleasingly clunky albeit, yes, inessential. I think I watched this in, what, three chunks? Four? Couldn't really hold my attention. I wouldn't swear to it in a court of law but Patrick Stewart's voiceover comes out of King Arthur's mouth during the intro so I was surprised when he turned out to be who he turned out to be (also, uh, the character only really really needed to be Patrick Stewart for maybe two of his scenes). I'm not really the target audience for this, if you're grown & liked Joe Cornish's last flick you're not really the target audience for this neither, the target audience for this is ... maybe nine years old?

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

What was that Douglas Adams book that he didn't write, just worked on the computer game that it was adapted from, Starship Titanic? That's what this reminded me of.

 

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2020)

This show has been overburdened w/praise for years and years so once a while back I gave it a chance and watched six or seven episodes, all the ones that seemed interesting or potentially promising from the ImdB summaries, across season after season of it, and each and every one was terrible. Bloated, repetitive, untrusting of its audience; every single episode no matter when it was from looked and felt like it was written, shot, edited, and scored on a Palm Treo by the unfunny half of a college sketch group. This new stuff isn't any better but at least it looks better, y'know? I think whatever scam they were pulling where they hoovered up all the money in salary and left nothing for production, below the line costs, what-have-you, really worked for them. Over the course of decades! And now everything's caught up to them, it's a High Flying Bird world now, and you can make anything look great for not very much money at all.

 

The Bedford Incident (1965)

Wasn't feeling it. Although, uh, is this where half of Ron Moore Trek & BSG comes from? Oh, and that's a young Donald Sutherland in the sick bay, folks, watch this movie if you want to see a young Donald Sutherland in glasses!

 

THE NEW POPE (2020)

Hell yeah! Cardinal Gutierrez (Javier Cámara) for life! Cardinal Newman for life! Ghost Pope for life! Malkovich for life! Let's keep the living things alive!

 

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

 

SHELF-REGULATING SYSTEM (2020)

 

Wakefield (2016)

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)

 

THE GOOD PLACE (2020)

 

SHELF-REGULATING SYSTEM (2020)

 

The Florida Project (2017)

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

 

Take Me (2017)

 

THE NEW POPE (2020)

 

Hazard of the Game (1980)

 

Vox Lux (2018)
I liked this but given the sweaty structure, inadequately distributed voiceover, inconsistent accents, heavyhanded writing, bad music, and general undergraduate thesis feel of the film's points I'm gonna have to chalk up my approval as an artifact of the treadmill. Just happily plodding along interested in what's gonna happen next to Natalie Portman, I suppose. Oh, nothing happens? Cool!

 

Black Narcissus (1947)

Hell yeah! It's a cinema!

 

THE TERROR (2018)

'God lies in all realms.'

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)

Second episode is a bit better than the first. Is Alison Pill's character gonna be revealed to be a robot? Yeah, I bet she is!

 

youtube: bad? (2020)
Yet another bit of potential evidence that each and every innovation offered by the Internet postdating approx. 2002 or thereabouts is naught but the work of Satan or The Devil or The Evil Inclination or The Angel of Death, possibly all four working together in concert. (Also, of course, has a counter-argument in that a suitable alternative title for the piece could have been 'podcasting: good?').

 

THE TERROR (2018)

4th episode, also fifth, sixth, a bit of seventh. 'God grants us many gifts in this world but God does not grant us ghosts.' - paraphrased.

 

THE GOOD PLACE (2020)

Awww. Good ending! It didn't make me cry but Ted Danson trying to piggybackride on Kristen Bell did make me laugh so good enough!

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)
Has the show only done two wedding episodes? I think so - just Cheyenne's and this'n. Am I forgetting a wedding episode? Gonna have to look at ImdB and check if I missed one.

 

The Literal President Of These United States Sundowning Before Our Very Eyes (2020)
Every once in a while I do this to myself, my own v. particular form of self-harm. This time it was an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan followed a few hours later by a rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

 

THE TERROR (2018)

Rest of the seventh episode. I feel like the worst kind of dumb dumb bottom-feeding clickbait-crafting übernerd when I watch a work of semi-serious television drama and think to myself 'Hey, that guy should play The Joker, he should be The Joker and he should fight Batman!' but, yes, Adam Nagaitis should play The Joker. I think the last time I felt this feeling was maybe 2011's THE SHADOW LINE, but then it was twice over in quick succession, Rafe Spall as The Joker and Freddie Fox as The Joker. Geoff Johns' Three Jokers, kids, coming soon to a theatre near you!

 

The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts (2020)

 

Jackie Chan's Kung Fu is "Fake" and That's Okay (2019)

 

THE YOUNG POPE (2020)

 

THE TERROR (2018)

'Are we brothers then, Francis? I should like that very much.'

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (1978)

 

BROOKLYN-99 (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (1978)

 

HIGH MAINTENANCE (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (1978)

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (1978)

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (2020)
The seventh episode. Has my favourite bit toward the end : "Well, mum, we passed the Mount of Olives and went down into Jerusalem. Those on horseback as usual got in and kissed the Holy Sepulchre and Saladin let them see and kiss Holy Cross. We thought we could on foot. Saw the tomb where God's body laid. I was gonna leave a silver penny but a man said the Saracens stole 'em so I gave it to one of our prisoners in slavery there. I saw Mount Calvary where God died and kissed the ground. And Mount Zion on the left where God's mother went and kissed it, and the holy table where God sat and ate, and kissed that too. Then I went with the others to Siloh and saw her tomb and kissed it. Then I went in great fear into the cave where God was when those who took him slew his precious body. This place I kissed and wept and you'd have wept because the devils kept their horses there which is why I wish we'd won Jerusalem and not come here because they let us."

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)

Scott MacArthur guest-stars! My growly boy! Love a good growly boy on a TV show! Angus Sampson (Fargo), he a growly boy! Chris Sullivan (The Knick), he a growly boy! Put more growly scowly gruffies on TV shows!

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (2020)

I think this was one of the ones that has my other favourite scene : the one where the German Emperor, Duke Leopold, and King Philip are bargaining for Richard's ransom.

 

STRUCCIREADS : FEAST FOR A KING (2020)

 

THE DEVIL'S CROWN (2020)

 

HIGH MAINTENANCE (2020)

So far the two new episodes have been somewhat disappointments (haven't disliked it so much since the episode w/the shallow Instagrammer that ended w/her crying for no reason, that character wouldn't cry over nothing, she'd have a real crying jag over something trivial) but this show is a real favourite, a Twilight Zone for our times, and I'll keep watching 'em so long as they keep putting 'em out. This one is better than the last one, on second thought, mostly because after a moment's consideration it becomes clear that it does not end happily at all (the intimacy co-ordinator has pulled her own lil' magic trick on this poor guy, stretched him out to match her existing lines, and it's only a matter of time before he reverts to his original shape), it's just we're conditioned to think kissing & laughter in an ending means everything's going to be okay. This is probably one of the greater things about the non-diegetic dancing stuff that caps each episode, too, it forces the audience to try & assimilate what they've actually seen before because the final moments can feel simultaneously jarring but somehow also soothing (does that make sense? no, but what I mean is that my brain sees the slow-mo incongruous dancing and tries to contextualize the spectacle of The Guy w/what came before and CAN'T while simultaneously being amused because, hey, fun party time on screen) and out of that clash arrives a pleasing sense of finality to each week's little short story.

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

 

Sam Morril - I Got This (2020)

Great voice! The ending is well structured enough, at least, tying back to two bits earlier w/o calling too much attention to itself by doing so.

 

Manufacturing Consent : Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
Towards the beginning, where in a public speech he calls the NY Times, and I'm paraphrasing here : "lapdogs to a naked emperor", well, hah!

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)

 

BROOKLYN 99 (2020)

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)

 

FUMBLE DIMENSION (2020)

Jon references THE TERROR, there's an alligator / crocodile joke I liked, a dig @ the city of Houston too.

 

STAR WARS : THE CLONE WARS (2020)

I like how in 1977 the words 'Clone Wars' were nothing more than a dumb piece of unnecessary background detail (the sort of thing from earlier drafts that just got cut out of the script mercilessly) and then that was it for years, nothing in Empire, nothing in Jedi, a smattering here and there in licensed material, and now since about '03 or so it's been all Clone Wars all the time, over and over again. Sometimes it goes away for a little while, takes a rest, a lil' breather, but before you know it the Clone Wars are back in business baby. Just gonna be more and more Clone Wars until civilization gives up the ghost, nothing can stop 'em!

 

I liked seeing the tarantula guy again (was he a cyborg last time? I think he was a liiiiittle bit of a cyborg but got more so this time around, not going to bother checking on the wiki) and sure it's fun enough to listen to Dee Bradley Baker yell @ himself for twenty minutes. I watched it while running at a fairly full clip on the treadmill so I don't really know what happened during it (they're doing a sorta riff on Dirty Dozen or Kelly's Heroes or what-have-you; they shot a bunch of robots, gonna have to go into outer space and shoot a bunch more robots next week) and can't really speak to its quality.

 

THE PROBLEM W/APU (2017)

Hari Kondabolu's own parents not being 100% on board w/his point of view on this thing is kind of funny, I think. Not sure if it undermines his point (or affirms it???) but it's probably the best bit in the whole documentary. I don't know. Is it a hate crime? Would it be less of a hate crime if they stopped (apparently, they have, Hank Azaria's not going to do the voice no more)? Isn't the damage already done; are the children of today even aware of The Simpsons, like, at all? There should definitely be some sort of meet'n'greet at some point, no matter how long it takes to happen, narratively we need as an audience for someday down the line a greying Hari and a wizened Hank to sit together and break bread and discuss their respective crimes. It's clear that Hari's mad at himself, mad for letting himself feel bullied, mad for the years he spent doing jokes at his own expense, and that's what this is really about.

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

OVER THE GARDEN WALL (2014)

A delight!

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)

Wait, Rios is played by the same guy who was Isaac Mendez (the guy with the drug habit whose eyes would go white and then he'd paint the future) from Heroes? Raffi is played by Michelle Hurd from ... well, she's Garret Dillahunt's wife! Robot Girl is played by Isa Briones who was born in ... okay, just going to go lie down for a while.

 

OVER THE GARDEN WALL (2014)

 

BETTER CALL SAUL (2020)

Well, I came away from the first three episodes eager to learn what Hamlin wanted to have lunch w/Jimmy about and also excited by Kim's turn towards the dark side so I guess I'm gonna stick w/this show to see what happens next!

 

SUPERSTORE (2020)

Tawny Newsome guest-starred! And also Timothy Simons' mom from Veep!

 

BROOKLYN-99 (2020)
Look, I think Vanessa Bayer is a straight dime, no question, Dawn Lazarus on SNL is one of the best things ever, yeah. But I think the freedom the show's gotten from living into its golden years and switching networks might not be the best thing for it - that pegging gag a few weeks back, the blurred/bleeped profanity this week, I don't know ... it's not really a welcome addition to the formulae.

 

STAR TREK : THE NEXT GENERATION (1988)
'The Child', the Season 2 opener. As clumsy as it is, well, still better than what we got thirty-one years later!

 

HIGH MAINTENANCE (2020)
Uch. Like a parody of the show, really.

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)
Come on, man!

 

AVENUE 5 (2020)

 

BROOKLYN-99 (2020)

 

HIGH MAINTENANCE (2020)

 

CLONE WARS (2020)

 

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS' PUBLIC HEALTH ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION (2020)

 

UNRAVELED (2020)
The Kirby episode. Good enough, but the way they did it is nothing but a well you can only draw from once.

 

BETTER CALL SAUL (2020)
Oh, that's what lunch was about. And looks like Kim's not all the way to the dark side, just dipping her toes in the water some.

 

INSIDE NO. 9 (2020)

 

STAR TREK : THE NEXT GENERATION (1993)

Good enough! The 'Geordi falls in love w/murderer' old movie rip-off from Season 6.

 

STAR TREK : PICARD (2020)
Blech.

 

JOE PERA TALKS W/YOU (2020)

 

THE RELENTLESS PICNIC (2018)
Their Mark Leidner interview.

 

A Podcast Interview W/A Rabbi I Kind Of Know (----)
I kind of don't, though? There's kind of a saying, sort of, "It's a shame. Those who you can talk to, you can't daven with. And those who you daven with, you can't talk to." I've bungled it, but yeah, that kind of maybe gets across how he straddles that particular divide.

 

Radio War Nerd (2020)
Ep #222, their interview w/'Annibale' who is quarantined in Italy. This may be the last entry of Treadmill Movie/TV Diary - the gym's closed for the duration!

 

 

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