Fishing from the Dead Pool

[DFA1979]

See I thought Medium Cool was great but then I was more engaged in the film's politics than its characters. Also the movie is a tad dated.

[baby doll]

Also the movie is a tad dated.

You say that like (a) it's a bad thing, (b) there are films that are not dated, as if a film could be produced on a higher spiritual plane of abstract ideality, one uncontaminated by the messy contingencies of history (or, failing that, could actively suppress any traces of historical contingency so that they are not apparent to the film's spectator), and (c) people are more enlightened today than they were in the past (all of history being one linear story of progress culminating in the present moment), and therefore, films are deficient insofar as they diverge from contemporary attitudes.

[DFA1979]

No I said that because the movie is set in 1968 and is explicitly centered around the Democratic Convention in Chicago in....1968. Sometimes I think you just look for shit to argue about.

[baby doll]

Sometimes I think you just look for shit to argue about.

That's exactly what I do.

[Grouchy]

Yaphett Kotto, one of the gods of character acting, plays an antagonistic FBI agent in Midnight Run, which feels like the gold standard textbook example of the buddy crime comedy sub-genre. De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a chain-smoking, grumpy bounty hunter who conceals a past as a "disgraced honest cop" screenplay trope. Charles Grodin is a far more surprising character, an aggravating, purely cerebral thief accountant who is actually in the verge of Asperger's. Their interplay is glorious, astoundingly acted on both sides and clearly the only thing that made it memorable. You get to care about these two people on a very real level while enjoying a dialogue filled with genuine insanity. The movie surrounding them, though, is stale, filled with clichés and car chases and action stunts that must have already felt old in 1988. It has an amazing cast that sometimes gets to shine (as is the case with Dennis Farina and Joe Pantoliano) and at times feels wasted in thankless roles, as is the case with Philip Baker Hall and, unfortunately, Kotto. The late guy said about the shoot:

DeNiro is very spontaneous and it always helps to work with an artist like that. But Marty Brest! "Herr Director" shot so many takes of the scenes that I lost all joy in doing the film. It became hard and tedious work. Then he stopped eating during the shoot and became thinner and thinner each day, until he looked like a ghost behind the camera. When I met Marty at the Universal studio with DeNiro, he looked healthy and strong, but as filming went on, he began to turn into someone you'd see in Dachau. It was weird. I got sick and for the whole of the film I had a fever and was under the weather for most of it ... I was shocked when it came off so funny ... It sure wasn't funny making it.

Cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky shot Somewhere in Time, a classic science fiction romance adapted from the novel by Harlan Ellison. The movie takes an old fashioned approach to a story of time travel and impossible love. It's crafted with genuine passion, from the image to the beautiful soundtrack, and I loved the face-off scenes between Christopher Reeve and (the also late, although it's not his turn yet) Christopher Plummer. There's something very poetic about the way time travel works in this movie, with the characters undergoing almost a ritual self-hypnosis. I feel that the screenplay doesn't fully work - perhaps it's too slow or it underestimates how much an educated audience will try to anticipate its surprises. But it's so gorgeous to look at that it's hard not to recommend.

[DFA1979]

Midnight Run is a lot of fun and is very funny. I agree it works despite having multiple cliches.

[Grouchy]

Eastwood started his directing career with Play Misty for me, a harassment thriller calling back to the Italian gialli. Jessica Walter is magnificent as a disturbed woman completely obsessed with Clint's womanizing radio DJ. Eastwood's direction is already interesting, quite stylish and deliberate - loved the opening credits, for example. The movie strangely comes to a halt at one point to become a jazz documentary of Monterey for a while and then picks up the plot again. Weird move, but I guess Clint would eventually get his wish to make a music doc with his participation in The Blues.



Bertrand Tavernier moves the action of a hard-boiled Jim Thompson novel (Pop. 1280) from its original western setting to a post-WWII colonial town in Africa in Coup de torchon, which means something like Blank Slate. The translation allows him to comment on inequality and racism while delivering an effective sordid crime tale. The atmosphere that provides the backdrop is composed of unkempt public restrooms, starving black children and flies. Our protagonist is Lucien, a cowardly sheriff who bows down to the local pimps and bullies that humiliate him but secretly craves vengeance and will go about it in a sly, smart way. There's plenty of dark comedy in this beautiful-looking film and a very young, barely recognizable Isabelle Huppert is the acting highlight. The hand-held camerawork is also worth noting and somewhat ahead of its time.

[Grouchy]

For some reason I didn't go as deep into Fulci's filmography as I did into Argento and Bava's, and that's a mistake I will try to fix. It's fun to stay away from 'giallo' films for a while and then come back and be reminded that they're not only an exotic genre but also a different cinematic language - they exist in an alternate reality where reckless dubbing, dream (or should I say nightmare?) logic and disturbing levels of sadistic violence appear to be the norm. The Beyond, with sharp poster artwork by the late Enzo Sciotti, is a beautiful film with a level of visual poetry and romantic atmosphere that makes it stand out among its peers. It also features some of the most haunting imagery I can remember in a Horror film combined with low budget gory goodness.



What a ride! I was expecting a much more conventional film from Richard Rush's The Stunt Man and was pleasantly surprised by a meta-cinematic romantic comedy that explores a film director's God complex as it constantly weaves in and out of reality and fiction. The screenplay is carefully constructed to constantly provide impossible twists and surprises as it always draws an unlikely but possible logic behind all of them. There's an European flavour to the style and approach of The Stunt Man and that might account for its absence from most American canons of the '80s. While the lead actor is somewhat wooden, Peter O'Toole's performance (based on David Lean) and Barbara Hershey's scene-stealing turn are more than enough compensation. I'm in love with Barbara Hershey, at any age. Never a dull performance (or even film choice) from her.

[Idioteque Stalker]

I recently watched The Stunt Man and really enjoyed myself as well, though I agree the lead drags it down. Quirky movie I won't soon forget. O'Toole is terrific.

[Spun Lepton]

I adore The Beyond, even though I recognize it's not a particularly coherent or exceptionally well-made film. Those fake spiders. Eeek. You should definitely check out Fulci's City of the Living Dead if you have not. I think it better encapsulates Fulci's "dream logic" ideal than The Beyond does. It's extremely gory and features zombies that are killed when they have a church cross jammed into their crotches. (I don't think it was Fulci's intent to have it look like they were being stabbed in the crotch, but that's what it it looks like.)

[DFA1979]

I love most of the Fulci I have seen except for The Beyond which I'm not a fan of. I tried twice to like it. However The House By The Cemetery and City of the Living Dead both rock as does Zombie which is one of my favorite horror movies. Also I like The New York Ripper more than most do.

[Spun Lepton]

Also I like The New York Ripper more than most do.

Too sleazy for me. It even manages out out-sleaze Maniac.

[DFA1979]

Too sleazy for me. It even manages out out-sleaze Maniac.

A double bill of both would be neat imo. 100% utter sleaze.

[Grouchy]

Extremely underwhelmed by Stephen Frears' The Queen. I was completely uninterested in the subject matter, but hey, that has never stopped me from enjoying well made movies before. However, I found this stale both visually and verbally. Everyone's speech seemed forced, with character introductions in particular being just a resume quoted out loud. Of course the actors are great - Helen Mirren and the late McCrory. But I lost interest way before it was over.



I watched Ride in the whirlwind back when Harry Dean Stanton passed and now, because of Monte Hellman, I finally added its companion movie The Shooting. Both define what has come to be remembered as the "acid western", the hippie point of view of Easy Rider applied to the Old West. The Shooting is poetic, sometimes even nightmarish, and completely different both from classic Hollywood flicks and the spaghetti westerns that were peaking at the time. It also plays a bit like Funny Games in the desert although a lot less traumatic. Nicholson gets in a great early performance as a sadistic gunslinger and he has a rocking wardrobe. The ending frankly confused me, and it took a while before I figured it out, but it's really clever once you think about it. I can see why it took a while to get distribution, though - Hellman plays his cards too close to the chest for the average expectations of audiences.

[DFA1979]

The Shooting is almost great but doesn't quite get there. I'm not sure I get the ending.

[Grouchy]

The Shooting is almost great but doesn't quite get there. I'm not sure I get the ending.

It went over my head! A guy on the internet pointed me in the right direction, then I re-watched it, watched a bit of the beginning and it makes all the sense.

[

Show Spoiler

When Warren Oates arrives at the camp he learns that his brother accidentally ran over a child in town and fled the party to avoid hanging. Then someone (presumably from the town) shot his other companion. Then they find the girl who wants to be taken to a place called Kingsley. Oates eventually realizes (way before I did) that the girl is the one who shot Leland and she's after his brother for revenge, we have to assume because he killed her son/daughter. In the ending she finds her prey, they shoot each other dead and we learn that he and Oates were twins.

]

[DFA1979]

It went over my head! A guy on the internet pointed me in the right direction, then I re-watched it, watched a bit of the beginning and it makes all the sense.

[

Show Spoiler

When Warren Oates arrives at the camp he learns that his brother accidentally ran over a child in town and fled the party to avoid hanging. Then someone (presumably from the town) shot his other companion. Then they find the girl who wants to be taken to a place called Kingsley. Oates eventually realizes (way before I did) that the girl is the one who shot Leland and she's after his brother for revenge, we have to assume because he killed her son/daughter. In the ending she finds her prey, they shoot each other dead and we learn that he and Oates were twins.

]

Oh yeah. I caught some of that but it didn't quite register for me at the time.

[Grouchy]

As I said back when I started this thread, you won't believe some of the movies I still hadn't seen. I've never been a Trekkie and all I had watched from the franchise (First Contact, the Abrams reboot) was more a result of inertia than actively seeking out those movies and TV shows. And so to homage Robert Fletcher, who designed the new suits for the films, I watched both Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan for the first time in my life. The original movie seems to have set the standard for feature film adaptations of TV shows - essentially being a reunion and a special episode with more epic events thrown in. This makes even more sense sense when one reads about how the project came to be - the original idea being to create a new TV show which changed when Paramount took notice of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind being huge box office hits. The Motion Picture's most glaring influence, though, seems to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it goes light on adventure and big on sci-fi high concepts and numerous outer space epiphanies. Reviews at the time focused negatively on this trait, displaying their famous wits to nickname it "The Slow Motion Picture". Technically, they are not wrong, but there's a unique charm here that carries even the slowest scenes. And, also, I get it - the miniature work by Douglas Trumbull still looks charming and beautiful. At the time it must have blown people's heads off - I don't blame the editors for letting those shots run as long as they did although it feels so weird today.

The Wrath of Khan fixes this and a lot of other problems by becoming what's esentially a pirate adventure with spaceships. Whereas the first movie did not have a strong conflict or villain, this one introduces a barbarian hellbent on vengeance against Kirk. Some of this movie's quotes and scenes have made their way so deep into pop culture that it's impossible to have a completely virgin experience. Still, I can say this movie taught me to respect and even love the Starfleet's crew. The chemistry and camaraderie between Kirk and McCoy continues here, but there is also a bigger spotlight (sort of) on Uhura, Sulu and Checkov that genuinely made me crave more of them. And the ending carries a huge emotional punch which explains the endurance of this movie's popularity.



Driven by the death of veteran actor José MarÃ*a Marcos (who almost starred in a short movie I made early in 2020, but couldn't due to his super busy schedule) I watched Santiago Mitre's political thriller The summit. I'd almost seen this many times before because the premise (a thriller starring Ricardo DarÃ*n as the president of Argentina attending an international summit in the Andes) sounded appealing, but I was expecting a much more conventional film. This is hard to review because there are so many ideas and interesting angles that I want to like it, but I also have to consider it a failure of sorts. The film's screenplay is penned by Mariano Llinás, a filmmaker who is known for being subversive and going against expectations (his latest film The Flower is 14 hours long), and presents us with many layers. There's a political tension based on a decision Blanco (the fictional Argentinian president) has to make, but the bulk of the film concerns the mystery of what is going on inside the head of his troubled daughter, played by Dolores Fonzi. The script moves awkwardly between those two storylines, ever refusing to marry them in any way. Every scene between DarÃ*n and Fonzi is intense and interesting but many of the other big moments fall flat. The scene between him and Christian Slater, for example, is inert and way too long despite the actor's obvious appeal. The hypnotism scene, obviously intended to be a tense moment, is too awkwardly directed. Llinás deliberately sets up many angles that won't pay off. I'd be willing to engage in conversation with someone who loves this to see what they took away from it, but right now I feel it's interesting but too ambitious for its own good.

[Skitch]

I adore TMP. It feels so epic. The comparison to 2001 is apt, but I still dig it.

[Grouchy]

I adore TMP. It feels so epic. The comparison to 2001 is apt, but I still dig it.

Agreed and I liked it! But it's undeniably weird how passive most of the action is. A huge chunk of the film is the characters just reacting to freaky lights.