He loves the production design!
DeEvolution is a thing. I think we may be witnessing it right now.
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Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1987) - dir. Alex Proyas
Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds is the debut feature of director/writer Alex Proyas, who would go on to helm two bedrock films of 90’s goth culture fame: 1994’s The Crow starring Brandon Lee (and a banger soundtrack), and 1998’s Dark City, an eerie sci-fi noir with Kiefer Sutherland. Seeing what came later, it’s a very curious start.
Out in the Australian outback, many years after some civilization-ending calamity, Felix Crabtree lives with his sister Betty. Betty is a bit ‘touched’, as they used to say, and is full of religious mania and paranoia, courtesy of their long-deceased father. Felix is confined to a wheelchair, the result of an accident while trying to create a flying machine to escape his desolate cabin on the edge of nowhere. Wandering in from the desert comes Smith, who is running from… something, but agrees to help Felix rebuild his machine in the hopes it will take them all over the mountains to safety and, hopefully, a better existence.
Compared to the dark nightscapes and moodily lit interiors of his next features, Spirits is shocking in the sheer saturation of color. The outback skies are a bright, rich blue that seems to glow against the landscape of reds, browns, and golds. The sunlight is unrelenting. Dust motes float through beams coming through windows. And the Crabtrees’ ramshackle cabin is cluttered with brightly colored bric-a-brac and religious assemblages. It’s an aesthetically fascinating film, really capturing the isolation and loneliness of the landscape, and the claustrophobia of the house through a use of wide angle lenses that distort perspective, and make intimate things TOO intimate, while pushing distant things even farther back. Terry Gilliam’s Tidelands (2005) is a super-downer fantasy that shares a lot with Sprits, including surreal touches on an exotic landscape and a deeply melancholy feeling.
Alas, after Dark City, Proyas had a number of false starts and unrealized projects. His later films have all been relatively generic stuff like Knowing or the deeply unfortunate Gods of Egypt. Still, knowing he was once going to direct Casper, the Friendly Ghost at least gives you the chance to ponder what a very different film that could have been…
3.5 out of 5 surprisingly competent visual effects shots for a low budget, pre-CG feature.
Most of the way through the Devo doc, and I knew nothing about Devo, it seems! I am happy to be more educated now.
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Watched that tonight and loved it. Neither of us knew what a trailblazer for integrating Black artists he was.
Hard to believe this was less than a 100 years ago.
Or not.
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Season 6 of Unforgotten on PBS.
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Watched first episode of Unforgotten and first episode of last season of Upload on Amazon. I’ve really enjoyed Upload and it’s very quirky and funny. Created by Greg Daniels of Parks and Rec, The Office and King of the Hill fame.
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The Quick and the Dead (1995) - dir. Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi is a master at combining tones. When you think of a “horror comedy”, you might think of a movie where there’s a scary scene, with monsters and scares, and then a funny scene, with comedians and jokes. They are, essentially variations on Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. And that’s true of MOST -comedies. An action comedy has a big action setpiece full of exciting stunts, and then jokes about the stunts (Bad guy falls off cliff. “Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark…”)
Raimi is one of the few folks who know how to TRULY combine them. Evil Dead II is a masterpiece of horror-comedy, because the scary stuff is also the funny stuff! Bruce Campbell is genuinely horrified at his dead girlfriend coming after him, then cartoonishly grossed out by a fire-hose of blood, and then mimicking Three Stooges routines with zombie trees, not only all within the same scene, but often right in the same moment! In his fantastic Spiderman (2002), Spidey’s action scenes are ALSO funny scenes! In Spiderman 2 we have action-horror as well as action-comedy AND horror-comedy!
So it’s genuinely puzzling that The Quick and the Dead falls so flat. This oddball western has a truly strange mix to the cast: Sharon Stone, a baby-faced Leo DiCaprio, Lance Henricksen, and Gene Hackman. A barely-there plot posits a miserable town where Hackman, as the big boss, conducts an annual gunfighter tournament. Into town rides the rest of the cast, each looking forward to killing Hackman for their own reasons.
That would be a perfectly fine setup for what essentially boils down to a sports movie ‘big tournament’, but with bullets. But as is his wont, Raimi adds in big doses of surreal comedy. People get shot, and big circular holes appear, to make amusing shadows. There’s typical slapstick stuck right up against real ‘this is supposed to hurt’ violence. It almost feels like the actors all shot a straight western, and then ‘comedy’ was added in through reshoots and edits. The tonal whiplash isn’t exhilarating, like Evil Dead or Spiderman. It’s jarring and confusing. All we’re left with in the end is a by-the-numbers plot with a bunch of goofy nonsense bolted on.
1.5 out of 5 quickdraws.
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Thanks so much for that recommendation! Very fun & funny 
Twisted Pair (2018) - dir. Neil Breen
Bad movies come in all sorts of flavors. There’s the intentionally silly, like Sharknado or Velocipastor. There’s cheap cash-grabs, think TransMorphers and all those not-Disney “We have Frozen at home!” knock offs. There’s the inexplicable disaster from people who should know better, say, Battlefield Earth or Halle Barry’s Catwoman. And then there’s the kind created by a huge sense of self-importance confidence, regardless of any talent or knowledge. Probably the most famous of these is Tommy Wisseau’s The Room, but there are other ‘classics’ of the ‘genre’, like Samurai Cop or Manos: The Hands of Fate, or the granddaddy of them all, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.
If Tommy Wisseau make Ed Wood look like Orson Wells, then Neil Breen makes Tommy Wisseau look like Martin Fucking Scorcese. Breen is a, let’s say, singular talent. There isn’t another filmmaker out there like him, and thank god for that.
Twisted Pair is written, directed, produced and stars Breen as twin brothers Cade and Cale, who are transformed into superpowered “humanoids” by aliens. But Cale doesn’t do well, and his powers are stripped. Meanwhile, Cade must save the world from… something to do with “A.I. Forces”. The plot sounds vague because it barely exists. Profound statements are made to no one in particular. Dialogue often consists of seemingly random phrases. Breen clumsily lays badly matted green screen footage of himself and others over stock footage backgrounds with questionable, but occasionally unintentionally hilarious results. Every scene feels like it was filmed in exactly one take. Actors stare off into space for long seconds before responding to lines. “Music” (really, vaguely futuristic bleeps and bloops, ‘composed’ by Breen) start and stop with no apparent relationship to what’s happening on screen. The pace is glacial, and in all honesty you could cut these scenes together in any random order and they would make an equal amount of sense. The end credits reveal a host of fictitious people and companies, all of which are Breen, himself. They even threaten a sequel! Which exists!
It is tempting to think that just maybe, this is a brilliant, Andy Kaufman-like piece of “anti-art”. But, no. In interviews and at screenings, he is genuine, and seems to have almost no self-awareness about his utter lack of talent or ability.
This is one time where you can actually make the joke: “What’s the movie about?” “About 80 minutes, and they’re some of the longest of your life.” A Neil Breen film is less ‘watched’ than ‘endured’. I cannot, in good conscience, advise ANYONE to purposefully seek out any of his films (there are 8 in total!). However, if you happen to find a public screening, or have some particularly funny friends and a large supply of intoxicants, or you revel in schadenfreude and can find a deserving group to inflict this upon, there is a deeply perverse good time to be had.
No stars. No puns. No jokes. No nothing. The blackest of black holes.
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… TFTOFTT? 
Thanks for taking one for the team.
Yeah. My occasion for seeing this was a “mystery movie” at my favorite microtheater. These screenings are ALWAYS somewhere on the “so bad they’re amusing” scale to varying degrees, but this one, I suspect, will not be surpassed for quite a long time.
I sort of want to see some of his other films, including the most infamous one, Fateful Findings. But even I don’t hate myself enough to watch that alone, and I’m absolutely certain that my partner would make me move out if I attempted to foist this upon her. She, quite wisely, has no patience for this sort of thing. She sat through The Room for my sake, admitted it was “amusingly bad” but has never felt the need for more. I have gone back several times, Rocky Horror-like. Clearly, something is wrong with me.
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Saw a blurb for The Diplomat - season 3 coming to Netflix in October.
It kind of jumped the shark in season 2 but It does have Rufus Sewell in it.
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Coming Back Soon:
Only Murders in the Building: September 9.
The Morning Show: September 17
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I give you credit for watching it. I watched the review of it by Red Letter Media and that was more than enough for me!
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Ok, but is it worse than Things?
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I have seen Things, courtesy of Shudder and Joe Bob Briggs.
It’s a close thing, and my one and only viewing of Things was a while back, but as I recall, Things had something that sort of resembled a plot, or at least, consisted of a series of events happening to characters. Twisted Pair struggles to contain even that. Large elements of the ‘plot’ are just Breen voiceover while people wander around on screen in a community college after hours.
I would say Things is a better film, but in the way that getting your hand chopped off is better than losing your whole arm.
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Got it. Yeah, my viewing of Things was also courtesy of Joe Bob. Oof!
