Before watching the movie:
I’m not sure if this movie would be more effective for me if I was more familiar with Rudolph Valentino, but actually the fact that I know he existed and had such a reputation is probably more than I could say for a lot of my generation.
I’d like to say more, but there really doesn’t seem to be more to this than a Valentino parody. And Gene Wilder being Gene Wilder when he’s not being Valentino.
Before watching the movie:
This was a random find. I’m not even sure what got it recommended to me, but it looks fantastic. I somehow got the impression it was from the 30s/40s era it claims to be spoofing, but was rather surprised to find it’s from the early 60s.
Anyway, here’s a star-studded cast of horror actors (and Basil Rathbone) in a comedy about a mortician who takes a proactive approach to getting clients. It looks like it’s been unfairly forgotten.
Before watching the movie:
Often, one never realizes how little one knows about something until one has to describe it. I know this is a riotously funny movie with John Cleese. Possibly his first big thing after Fawlty Towers. I think I’ve heard something about some character’s fish friends. I did not know until I decided to watch it that it was about three crooks trying to find out where the captured fourth stashed the loot.
I almost called Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline up and comers, but while they’re younger and more current than Cleese and Michael Palin, I think they were actually pretty well established by the late 80s.
Before watching the movie:
I used to make a point of saying why I chose a movie, but I stopped because it was often just “it was on the shelf/streaming service”. However, this one has a particularly unusual path. Several years ago, I got a CD of Halloween-themed film music. One of the tracks was “Super Sleuth, from Without A Clue”. The name didn’t fit, the music didn’t fit, the source didn’t fit, it seemed an all around poor choice. However, it directed my attention to a movie that had the potential to fit my tastes very well. I don’t think I got around to looking it up on my rental service for another few years, but whenever I added it, it’s taken until now to get to the top of the list.
Frequent readers of this blog should know that I have a particular attraction to variants of Sherlock Holmes stories. I’m intrigued by the halfway application of the literary agent hypothesis, but mostly I just want to see Michael Caine play a bad actor trying to be Holmes. Ben Kingsley seems a terrific choice to play a straight man in a double act, and Michael Caine is terrific in everything.
Before watching the movie:
The more I learned about this movie, the less I expected to like it. Since it’s got work of art status and it’s about a romance, it sounds dull to me.
Then I learned that Woody Allen basically wrote the part for Diane Keaton and they had been a couple, which was a red flag since nepotism tends to make films worse (I read a book about awful films with potential, and one of the most recurring themes is that someone was dating someone else).
Finally, this movie is the B-plot salvaged from an awful mystery in the edit. How often does “fixing it in post” work out? Well, four Academy Awards say I’m wrong.
Before watching the movie:
When I read the blurb, I realized I’d let the title trick me into thinking of it as a direct parody of “Space Odyssey”, which is a reasonable assumption but unusually late. It appears that it’s more a genre parody that got stuck with the title because everything got titles with “2000” in the late 90s.
I’m hoping this is more “enjoyably passable” like Spy Hard than “barely tolerable” like the Scary Movie series. Continue reading
Before watching the movie:
I was kind of expecting this to be funnier than the show (which I’ve never seen, but am familiar with through homage), but I didn’t know when I first selected Dragnet that it’s intended to be a parody. Maybe if I was a fan of the original show I’d be worried, but Dragnet plays to parody so well I see a lot of potential to be the definitive parody (displacing the Stan Freberg audio sketches).
This movie seems to afford an increasingly rare opportunity to see Tom Hanks do comedy.
Before watching the movie:
Well, I reviewed Nightmare on Elm Street, so it was only a matter of time before getting to this one. It also happens to be a time where three important factors come together: the post goes up on a Friday the 13th, I remember I have this movie in the lineup, and I don’t currently feel it’s too cheesy to do Friday the Thirteenth on Friday the 13th.
I think this codified the modern slasher film, so I’m probably going to have to overlook a lot of apparent unoriginality and formula-reliance. Also, this is one of those stories that our culture doesn’t allow one to be ignorant of the end. But I’ll still be courteous to any rock-dwelling, internet-connected cinephiles. Continue reading
Before watching the movie:
This was a consideration for May’s classics theme, and probably would have been a better fit than one of them. I was actually planning to include it before I realized that May might have had five Thursdays (the day I write on), but only four Fridays (the day I publish).
Anyway, here’s the Marx brothers doing political satire. On what? I don’t recall, but I think it’s about contemporary US foreign policy.
I had fun keeping up a theme for a month. I’m thinking about doing another themed month soon, but it won’t be July.
Before watching the movie:
I get the sense that the 90s were a rough time for sci-fi movies, especially the early 90s. However, I can’t back that up with anything, and all the examples I can come up with are good.
I was never very interested in this movie as a killer vs. killer in the future action flick, but I’ve recently learned that it makes culture shock jokes about how society has changed, which is an interest of mine. I like to think about how the future will get us wrong, and otherwise how foreign it would probably be.
As an action sci-fi this never stood out. As a sci fi action comedy, Demolition Man might actually be a fun experience. Continue reading
Yesterday's Movies 