Before watching the movie:
I’ve had this physically on my shelf (or thereabouts) for over a year, and it’s high time I got to it. A classic, obviously. The evocative title is frequently referenced and parodied. But what is it? Nobody seems to go into that. There’s a telephone, and a murder, and that’s about it. The box says there’s a love triangle, and a murder arranged by telephone, but it’s still pretty vague. I expect somebody overheard on a party line, but otherwise, I’ve got nothing.
Before watching the movie:
I had some other options for this week that rose to the top due to impending expiration. Then Harold Ramis died, and the internet was covered in Ghostbusters. But he wasn’t just Egon Spengler, and as the week went on, I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t seeing anybody that seemed to remember even that he was one of the leads in Stripes, and I only saw an indirect mention of SCTV. None of the classic and cult movies he wrote or directed were at all mentioned, which is perhaps understandable, since writers and directors are less visible.
However, Ramis was a guiding hand behind the camera for many more beloved movies than he acted in, and so many of them are so prominent that there are hardly any left I haven’t seen. So here we have Multiplicity, a Ramis-directed film about a man who clones himself to keep up with all his commitments. Perhaps appropriate to honor a man wore so many hats to make movies people loved.
Before watching the movie:
One more Michael J. Fox movie from the set I found years ago, which I believe completes it. I previously covered For Love Or Money and Greedy, and now, finally, this one. Possibly the one I was most interested in, if I recall correctly.
Here we have a slick Hollywood actor shadowing a tough cop to research a role, much to the annoyance of said cop, who is played by James Woods. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything Woods has done in live action, but I’m quite fond of some of his voice performances, and I’m looking forward to getting to know him on camera.
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Before watching the movie:
So. Toys come to life. War toys are violent. This sounds familiar. But it has a cult following, it’s been praised for its writing, it has some familiar names I like, and I’m in the mood for a violent comedy right now.
The marketing is entirely focused on the living toys, so I actually have no idea what the overall aesthetic of the movie is. I really want it to be stop-motion style toys in a live-action environment, but I expect I will be disappointed. For one thing, I want them to be in 12 frames per second, but that would clash with the live action as stupidly as the ED-209 did in RoboCop.
Before watching the movie:
The 80s, a camping trip, a family rivalry, two comedy legends. Why didn’t I know about this sooner?
I just found this while looking for something lighter, since I intentionally tried to keep January dark to offset my tendency to hit recent comedies, and it’s time for a short break.
So, Dan Aykroyd smugly one-upping John Candy on their family vacation in some mountainside lake area it is.
Before watching the movie:
According to the box, this is a departure for Marylin Monroe. As opposed to her typical lighter fare, here she’s taking a dark turn as a woman plotting to kill her husband. While I think the term is never used on the cover, this sounds like a noir in the style of Double Indemnity.
I’m looking forward to seeing her playing a femme fatale. It seems to suit her more than the giggling, often airheaded bimbo she always plays in her comedies. I know she knew how to control a room with her sexuality, she even built a career on it. I always watch her other movies waiting for her to drop the act and get exactly what she wants because she knows people will give it to her, and that looks like what happens here. Or at least, she tries.
Before watching the movie:
It seems like this is Jules Verne’s most-adapted story, and it’s widely different from version to version. That’s probably because from what I remember of the book, there isn’t so much plot as an excuse to go on a low-tech sci-fi adventure. Exotic locations, exciting science, and fights with dinosaurs. If anyone else had been doing what Verne was doing at the time, we might consider him a pulp author.
So coming into this, I’m mainly expecting some high-budget, relatively innocent excitement. The blockbuster movie of the 1950s. I’m also interested in seeing how much of the parts of Verne’s book that aren’t “dinosaurs underground” still remains.
Before watching the movie:
It occurs to me that “Time travel romance” is rather an oddball genre. I can think of two or three other examples (Assuming The Lake House counts), but it still seems more common than it ought to be, though less than it could be.
This movie somehow reminds me of Time After Time, even though the premise is almost entirely opposite. This is a modern person going back in time for love, the other is about a Victorian coming to the present and finding love accidentally.
Oddly, my conception of Christopher Reeve’s acting style is less from Superman and more from Noises Off! There may be more Superman, but I’ve seen Noises Off! more frequently.
Before watching the movie:
Yet another that’s been sitting on my list forever, continuing what will hopefully be a trend for the next few weeks.
I first saw this on a library shelf what seems like millennia ago. It probably was last millennium, actually. I recall it was during my period shortly after connecting the Robin Williams from Flubber to the voice of the Genie in Aladdin and deciding I wanted to see everything he’d ever done. That came to a halt long before I came close to doing that, though, which is why I can review this now.
Why didn’t I take it from the shelf then? I think the idea of building toys to go to war gave me a sense it was darker than I wanted, and also I was probably under the age of 13. We took “Parental Guidance, possibly inappropriate for children under 13” very seriously in our house. I did sneak Jakob the Liar once sometime when I was twelve. I probably would have been better off with Toys.
I’m kind of glad I didn’t see it then, though. Not only is it going to provide me with review fodder now, but I’ve also lately been revisiting some things I saw at a very young age and musing on how I wasted my First Watch of them when I wasn’t capable of appreciating the subtleties of storytelling and acting. And I wouldn’t have known who Michael Gambon was then.
Before watching the movie:
Here’s one I’ve been putting off for a while. I almost went with it once, but then wasn’t available to me anymore, and only recently came back. I feel like my selections have been getting monotonous again, so I decided that since this was newly available, I’d get it out of the way.
I’ve been reluctant because I expect an extremely dark, probably graphically violent story. It’s a Vietnam War movie based on a book about colonial Africa. Hardly anything concrete I’ve seen come out of it necessarily backs that up, but since it’s about tracking down a guy who’s gone crazy and set himself up as a warlord, and is rated R, it seems very likely that this is the sort of movie I’ll be gladder to have watched than to watch.
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