Fateful Findings is perhaps the only one in ‘bad-good’ territory. Id recommend it for the shower scene and the beyond self important ending. feel free to fast forward.
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Alien Earth. It’s okay. Feels like a collage of characters, themes and situations cobbled together from other sources (including the Alien franchise, obviously).
And finished up the Devo documentary, which was very good! I’m embarrassed to say I had completely forgotten that Mark Mothersbaugh scored Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
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I enjoyed seeing him in the ‘Victoria’ series as Lord Melbourne.
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Last night I viewed ‘A New Kind of Wilderness’ on PBS’ POV. Very moving. Over30 years I’ve only seen a few of their mini-docs and they’ve all been excellent.
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I loved the last couple of episodes with Allison Janney. Should be interesting next season.
Watched the first episode 2nd season of Marlowe Murder Club. Enjoyable and so very British. Some of those small scenic villages are full of murder and mayhem.
Slogging through the last two episodes of the Bear. If they tightened up the pregnant drawn out pauses in dialogue we could speed things up considerably. I think I’m just kind of done with all the angst and lots of the drama seems to be a bit stale and been there done that.
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oh good to know. We liked the first 5 seasons a lot.
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we just finished The Survivors.
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Finished watching Wolfs on Apple TV+, had to split it into 2 parts because it was so bad 
I don’t mind Pitt as an actor, but was never a fan of Clooney. I guess this is the kind of movie 2 rich and handsome bff’s make when they’re bored and taxes are due…
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I’m so glad we stopped watching after the first or second episode of S2. Sounds like we’ve not missed anything, just more of the same.
Totally agree. Seemed gratuitous.
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I never bypass Fargo if it’s on!
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Re watched Raising Arizona last night, man I love that movie 
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Classic. I want to do a few double feature movie nights in the winter with Coen brothers’ movies 
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May I suggest: Fargo, followed by Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, followed by No Country for Old Men .
Thematically, they are all very close siblings. Raimi and the Coen’s have been long time collaborators, going back to 1985’s Crimewave. Raimi consulted heavily w/ the Coen’s when shooting A Simple Plan, especially about how to effectively get shots in a white, snowy environment, ala’ Fargo. Raimi was 2nd Unit director on Hudsucker Proxy.
Here’s a whole thing on it:
I think A Serious Man would go particularly well with Burn After Reading. Man is powerless in the face of an uncaring universe. Sometimes hilariously so.
My favorite Coen-based double feature idea is surely The Big Lebowski paired up with P. T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice. They are both inside out “film noir”, but where Lebowski is 70% comedy and 30% philsophical, Vice basically flips those ratios.
of course, ‘noir’ inspires Blood Simple paired with Miller’s Crossing (another personal favorite).
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3 in one night is pushing it for my crew. Some of us even have daytime jobs 
I’d pair Raising Arizona with Burn After Reading, Lebowski with Fargo, Miller’s Crossing with Blood Simple, and maybe let No Country be its own thang. Couldn’t get into A Serious Man. Not sure I’ve watched the entirety of Hudsucker Proxy.
Aren’t two new ones (coming) out (soon)?
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Honey Don’t, currently in theaters, is Ethan Coen’s latest, with a script, like his last film, Drive-Away Dolls, co-written with his wife, Tricia Cooke. It’s the second in a planned “lesbian noir” trilogy. I haven’t seen Honey Don’t yet. I thought Dolls was amusing, but relied way too much on a goofy pastiche of hard-boiled dialogue. It felt slight and very ‘surface level’ compared to their previous work together.
Joel Coen did Macbeth with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand (married to Joel, if you didn’t know). I thought it was really great. All black and white, it felt like a really artfully photographed version of Macbeth put on by a modern ‘black box’ theater. He’s currently working on another solo project, a thriller tentatively titled Jack of Spades.
Supposedly, they are planning to reunite after Spades and do a horror film, which, yes please!!!
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Spectacular. Once I got used to the aspect ratio.
I’m new to this topic, but I just finished the Thursday Murder club on Netflix. Just enjoyable with so many famous British actors.
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Ah, the lesbian noir movie! A friend’s husband did the camera work for that one, but I haven’t seen her in forever so I had no idea it was out already.
I’ll hold off on Honey Don’t until it’s streaming.
Cruel Jaws (1995) - dir Bruno Mattei (credited as “William Snyder”)
Ok. Neil Breen and Tommy Wisseau are over on the “Ed Wood” side of bad filmmaking. That is: they have that magical quality of being oblivious to (or simply disregarding) their own incompetence. Cruel Jaws (also released under the titles Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws and The Beast) has no innocence to fall back on. The director, producers, and editors (and a large portion of the cast) knew exactly the sort of film they were making, and they more or less ran with it. It is both deliberately ridiculous AND a blatant ripoff/cash grab, and it is absolutely entertainment GOLD!!!
In the realm of cheap knockoffs and other “mockbusters”, Cruel Jaws is in a special category. It’s one of the many films that was cobbled together by simply taking portions of existing films (most often the expensive effects or stunt shots) and then writing a new film on the cheap, and cutting in the first film’s scenes. One of the most (in)famous is Turkish Star Wars, which takes all the spaceship footage from Star Wars, often seemingly from bootlegged or other questionable sources a couple of generations removed from a final print, and cuts them into a Z-grade sci-fi pastiche, with frequent (unauthorized) use of the Indiana Jones soundtrack. Cruel Jaws does the same sort of thing, using a selection of shark footage from Jaws and all its sequels, as well as at a couple of other sharksploitation knockoff. Additionally, the score of the film is made of snippets including the very obvious intro to the Star Wars main theme, which cuts off and fades into another piece just as it’s about to launch into the main section. The first time it happens, it makes your brain slip a gear, and you wonder if you actually heard what you think you heard. But then it happens, again. And again. And again. And finally it becomes absolutely hilarious.
The plot is the typical “big business vs. little guy” where “little guy” is one of those cheap Florida tourist traps with the sort of dolphin/sea lion show that is frowned upon these days. The acting is a who’s who of “who’s that?” including a couple of folks I can only describe as “dollar store Hulk Hogan” (the good guy) and “dollar store Patrick Swayze” (the head bad guy enforcer). There’s a killer tiger shark out there, eating pretty girls that go swimming with their semi-drunk boyfriends (i.e. the entire opening to Jaws) and a local fisherman. There’s a marine biologist, the sheriff that wants to close the beach, the mayor that doesn’t, doesn’t, yadda yadda. The acting is awful, but only in that it’s clear that no one is trying very hard. The editing is absolutely hysterical, with smash cuts from a victim’s screams to the barking of sea lions, and all the ‘shark attacks’ are a mix of sloppily cut stolen footage and unfocused shaky-cam to (poorly) hide the obvious seams.
Unlike films by Breen or Wisseau, Cruel Jaws invites you to laugh at it. It knows EXACTLY what it is, and manifestly does not give a damn about being ‘good’, or even legal. It is terrible in the most entertaining way possible, loaded to the gills (sorry) with opportunity for hilarious commentary and riffing from clever folks. Invite some friends, break out the hard liquor, and go nuts. I’m sure the only reason it hasn’t been hit by the MST3K/RiffTrax guys is the grey-market status of the film.
1 out of 5 stolen shark attack scene as an objective quality assessment, but really, 3 of 5 for total entertainment value.
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