What have you been watching lately?

Not About Food
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Finished watching it last night. Really liked it for several reasons: I have a bit of a temper issue myself, so I can def identify with the initial premise :grimacing:

Some of it was certainly over the top, but I thought it gave great insight to some of the cultural predilections of Asian Americans to suppress rage, the pressure from family/parents to succeed, how much the protagonists have in common, the artful intro & strange episode titles… I also really loved the cast, including the criminal cousin, but especially Steven Cheun & Ali Wong. It’s nice to see more AA actors in movies and shows, and this is an almost exclusively AA cast.

It’s not a feel-good show for sure, and none of the people in it are likable (I’m sure many folks hate Succession, too) but the ending is a real surprise.

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We also enjoyed Reacher, earlier this week.

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That has my daughter written all over it! She gets funny shaped dice for Christmas.

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At the risk of alienating some HOs, you are one of the only HOs whose assessments of film and television I can read. You’re clearly informed and that really helps. I don’t dispute the taste of others, and agree with some at some times, but thoughtful assessments that seem to draw on the pools of knowledge accumulated through watching, reading, and maybe knowing about the screen industries certainly helps. I also like your expansive tastes-- no snooty declarations of high brow v low brow (which do, as one might imagine, read as solidly middle brow).

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487

BEEF is totally on my to watch list. I haven’t gotten to it yet because I feel it deserves more attention than I can give right now (especially as I balance some other shows/ films that need watching). But the cast is outstanding and I have heard only good things.

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Some films I have really liked (loved):

  • Rye Lane: As most of you are in the US, I believe this is available on HULU. It is delightful and while I’m glad to have caught it in the cinema, I will recommend watching it any way you can.

  • Joyland: Exquisitely acted and terribly moving, although if you are like me, you will be crying a lot, so be warned.

  • Hello Dankness: more sample cinema from the magnificent duo, Soda Jerk, who brought us Terror Nullius. It’s not easy to find although I believe a screening is coming up in NYC for those of you in the area. Absolutely hilarious and very intelligent work.

  • Ninja Baby: Comedy-Drama from Norway about a young woman who finds herself pregnant.

  • Broker: It’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. Need I say more? Probably since I can’t be sure all of you are familiar with this brilliant filmmaker, but as always, he manages to hit beats of tenderness without going maudlin and is one of the best directors of child actors out there.

Just a few films from the past two months.

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489

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

remember when this came out, and all my little gradeschool friends were, briefly, convinced that we would all grow up to be ‘outlaw truckers’, for a life of harmless fun speeding down the road making fun of hapless good ol’ boy lawmen. The Bandit (Burt Reynolds) and the Snowman (Jerry Reed) are two truckers that have to go from Atlanta, GA to Texas, pick up 400 cases of beer., and get back to Atlanta in 28 hours, without proper shipping permits, w/o getting arrested

Burt Reynolds is at the peak of his “just smile and wink and you got 'em” powers, Sally Field is cute as a button, and Jackie Gleason is chewing on the scenery like starving dog and the whole enterprise just sorta… works.

I was worried, having not seen this in at LEAST 30 years, that this film would have aged… poorly. Shockingly, that isn’t the case. Gleason’s Sheriff Beauford T. Justice is a a terrible caricature of a Texas lawman, with hints of racism and all, but he’s the object of straight up ridicule. And that’s about as close as this film comes to ‘problematic’ content.

So, you’re left with Burt and Sally and Jackie and a Trans Am jumping a river and a whole lot of great practical stunt driving, all directed by Hal Needham, one of the 20th centuries maestro stunt professionals.

Amusingly, the whole plot hinges on Coors beer’s rather short-lived status as forbidden fruit. Because it wasn’t pasteurized, through the 70’s and early 80’s, Coors couldn’t be shipped father than a few states away from its Golden, CO plant without refrigeration, and the plant didn’t have capacity to supply a national distributor. So for anyone east of the Mississippi, Coors was some sort of rare treat. That status seems rather quaint and laughable these days, like coveting Burger King because your town only has McDonald’s. Coors got national distribution in 1986 (my first year of college) and I can remember, you had arguments between freshmen who brought in cases of Coors like it was a trophy and others already being snotty about it “it’s nothing special…” Thankfully, I didn’t (still don’t) drink, so I was able to avoid getting drawn into it all too deeply.

Keep the hammer down, good buddy.

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490

You have me wondering how The Apple Dumpling Gang and The Bad News Bears have aged.

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491

When I saw The Bad News Bears for the first time (in the theater, with my grandparents!) I was 8, and it was possibly the funniest movie I had ever seen. Kids! My age! SWEARING! My poor grandmother was mortified, while my grandfather found the whole situation hilarious. My brother and I demanded to stay through to watch it again (remember when you could still do that?)

I saw it again at a rep theater in L.A. 10 or so years ago. It’s STILL hysterically funny, and seems even MORE extreme from today’s perspective. We have Walter Matthau as Buttermaker, barely functional drunk ex-pitcher, arm-twisted into coaching a team of juvenille little league rejects formed because of a lawsuit filed against the league for excluding the kids from the league for a variety of sins: being black, hispanic, fat, asthmatic, socially awkward, or generally unathletic.

Matthau’s alcoholism is played for laughs. We see him topping off his morning beer with whiskey (right into the can!) driving while drinking, with kids piled into his open top convertable and riding while sitting on the trunk of the car. The utter irresponsibility of this ‘adult’ trying to be an authority figure to kids is just WILD. Yes, it’s supposed to be funny, but as the 2005 remake would prove, a lot of what would very clearly be called ‘child endangerment’ was toned down.

It’s absolutely worth revisiting. It’s definitely ‘of its time’, but hasn’t crossed lines like some other classic-but-now-very-problematic films, like, say, Revenge of the Nerds. Nobody, but NOBODY, plays the put upon everyman like Matthau.

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492

Two of my favorite films from my childhood are ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I think both have aged really well, the latter especially given what’s possible with CGI/special effects nowadays.

I absolutely hated that they replaced the cop’s guns with cell phones in the ET re-release.

As someone who played softball between the ages of 9-27, Bad News Bears was a def favorite as well.

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493

My first movie in the theatre was Pete’s Dragon, which I found scary.

I remember seeing the Benji movies in theatres, as well as the first Star Wars. I saw the Herbie movies on a projector at school.

Re: Matthau
Maybe The Big Lebowski can thank Matthau.
:joy:

The Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House, Sixteen Candles, all painful to watch now.

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Close Encounters is an absolute masterpiece in almost every aspect. Fantastic script, great performances, amazing camera work and editing, special effects work by Optical Effects god Doug Trumbull, and a soundtrack that’s a cultural touchstone.

E.T. is possibly Spielberg’s most personal film 'til you get to ‘The Fableman’s’, and as a freshman in high school, I was sold on it immediately. Now, I find it a little bit schmaltzy in that very Spielbergian way, but that’s sort of what you sign up for with him. I worked at ILM when the revamped E.T. came through. In fact, I worked on early versions of the digital E.T. model for a Progressive Insurance commercial that Spielberg ok’d only because it would get the model built and tested on someone else’s dime.

No one thought replacing the guns was a good idea. Even Spielberg now says he regrets it.

Bonus: If you look very closely in some of the senate chamber scenes in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, you can see a pod full of E.T.'s. Same model.

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I just watched S&TB in its entirety a couple nights ago. Think I like it more each time. One small touch that always gets me: The fetching young lady with the CB handle “Little Beaver.” LOL

Also, it struck me that the Bandit’s real name is a good bit of trivia. (It’s Bo Darville)

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Nerds and Candles, definitely. I will never turn on Animal House.

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That’s fascinating info. I will never watch Star Wars Epi 1, so I’ll take your word for it :wink:

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I will not judge you at all for not watching Ep 1, or any of the prequels, really. They are not, on their own, very good movies. Lucas famously dislikes working with actors, and doesn’t seem to think the performances themselves are a big deal. Add that to working with a child actor, and, well… yeah.

BUT- If you are a Star Wars fan, and care at all about the overarching story and universe, I can tell you that the animated Clone Wars series actually makes the prequels, if not better, then more understandable in terms of plot and character motivation. It’s poor construction if you have to have outside material to fill in gaps in a given story, and nothing will fix the awful line readings or the lines themselves… (“I hate sand…”) But if you consider the story itself with all the context that Clone Wars provides, it almost justifies the prequel movies’ existence.

There IS a decent story in there. It’s just that no one was willing to tell Lucas to get out of its way.

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499

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) - Dir: Lotte Reiniger

Widely considered to be the oldest known surviving animated feature-length film (the current surviving version has a runtime of 68 minutes, but it’s known that footage has been lost). The film is animated using cutouts made of cardboard and thin sheets of lead, backlit and shot frame by frame. The prints were then color tinted. It tells a story based on elements from One Thousand and One Nights, including the tale of Aladdin and the lamp.

The visuals of the film are striking, looking similar to Javanese shadow puppet presentations, with sheets of various densities creating various tones through backlighting, and the intricate cutouts, (sometimes hundreds of separate pieces) all combining to create rich, expressive scenes and characters.

While many of the visual depictions of various ‘foreigners’ are very ‘of their time’, the plot and characters themselves feel quite contemporary. There’s an evil sorcerer, a handsome prince, a princess in distress, a kidnapped queen, a powerful witch… Chase is given, battles are fought, including one between the sorcerer and the witch that undoubtedly influenced Walt Disney. It’s easy to see the references to this in Fantasia segments like Night on Bald Mountain and The Sorcerers Apprentice, and even to the battle of Merlin and Madam Mim in The Sword and the Stone. The story even has some rather feminist elements to it, in that it’s the witch, rather than either of the two male protagonists, who is the key to defeating the evil sorcerer. Given that Reiniger apparently did much of the work on the film including the animation and construction of the cutout pieces all by herself, this could be intentional.

Unless you have a particularly quirky local theater, you’re unlikely to find this out there being shown publicly, but it’s available both on physical media (DVD’s) and streaming. The Critereon Channel has it, as well as Fandor.

There’s a vimeo link of what appears to be a recording an older DVD. Worth checking out:

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500

Cozy private detective with bread business sideline:

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I am reminded of my brother. He is in that “movie business”, as my mother would say.

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This is post 500 in the thread, so what the heck:

The BIg Lebowski (1998) - Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

It’s the 25th anniversary of the gloriously shaggy dog, inside-out tribute to film noir. Inspired by Chandler’s *The Long Goodbye", we have the form of a classic detective story: A rich, hostile old man, a pretty young wife, a down on his luck 3rd party coincidentally sucked in to the whole mess, kidnappings, the deaths of innocent parties…

Only the whole thing is just a hilarious, incompetent scheme, attempted by idiots and ‘solved’ by sheer happenstance. In the end, no lessons are learned, except that, much like The Dude, it is perhaps best to adopt a truly zen attitude. Be attached to nothing and you need nothing. Sure, the rug tied the room together, but there are other rugs. If you go where the wind blows you, you will always be where you are.

The Coen’s have always had a deep love for film noir and old crime dramas and a strong streak of existentialism. Miller’s Crossing is at least a partial adaptation of The Glass Key. Even their first film, Blood Simple, has all the markings of film noir plot. Lebowski functions as a noir film turned inside out and backwards. Our setting is not the grim night and rainy streets of New York, but the bright, sunny fake-world of Los Angeles. Our hero is not a brilliant detective with a keen mind. He’s a barely functional stoner who has little interest in anything outside his immediate interests. Each time The Dude attempts to take action and to change the course of events, it goes badly for him. Listening to Walter convinces him to visit Big Lewbowski. That leads to them involving him in the kidnapping. The single time The Dude attempts to do something remotely clever, using pencil rubbing to try and see what Jackie Treehorn was writing, he discovers… a drawing of a penis… Existentialism: The universe is arbitrary. Not malicious, not beneficent. INDIFFERERNT. Things will tick on and will continue to do so regardless of your resistance, or lack thereof.

No, The Dude was not meant to be a hero. He is meant to “take it easy for all us sinners.”

If you ever feel like really diving into this sort of discussion, I highly recommend a double feature with Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice (2014 - dir P T Anderson, based on the Pynchon novel). If Lebowski is 75% a comedy with 25% philosophy, Vice is the inverse ratio. But both are essentially similar themes: Looking for answers doesn’t find you them. Answers find you. OR they don’t. Let the wind take you and you’ll end up somewhere.

Feels like advice we could all take to heart a little bit…

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