Jack Nicholson – Yesterday's Movies

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

December 4, 2023temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

December is Oscar Bait season and on Yesterday’s Movies, this December is for those canonized movies that have become unquestionable in film culture.

I have seen mainly seen two opinions about this movie: glowing praise for Louise Fletcher, and faint repudiation of the depiction of mental health therapy techniques, particularly electroconvulsive therapy. I have this impression of a bleak slide into despair under the oppression of a corrupt and abusive mental health system. I also think this is one of the movies that made Jack Nicholson famous (or at least one of his earliest roles anybody talks about), so I’m curious to see if he’s got his recognizable style or if he’s more of a blank slate.

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The Fortune

April 23, 2021temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This is a lot of big names for a movie I’ve never heard of. Though I’m probably not familiar with most of Beatty and Channing’s work, I am surprised that it hasn’t come up as a Jack Nicholson movie.

I’m surprised just how often the Mann Act comes up in movie plots. While it does have exceptionally broad language thanks to 1910s euphemisms (“immoral purposes”), the number of times I’ve seen movies from before the 80s invoke it about men who take their girlfriends on a trip and run afoul of the law is starting to make me think that Hollywood writers were as ticked off about it as the Hays Code and anti-communist blacklisting.

The comedy arising from a pair of con artists trying badly to con a mark reminds me a bit of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but there’s no bet or competition, from what I can tell. They’re not sabotaging each other, they’re just honestly bad at this.

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Anger Management

February 15, 2019temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

This is another movie I’ve been pretty sure would show up here eventually since almost the beginning. Back when Adam Sandler made movies people wanted to watch, I guess.

It’s been quite clear that this is about a guy and his therapist living together and driving each other crazy, but it wasn’t as apparent until I saw what I’m looking at now that the patient isn’t actually all that explosive, except around his eccentric therapist.

The “client and patient shackled together and nearly kill each other” concept is similar to Analyze This and What About Bob?, the former to the point (at least on the surface) that if this movie and Analyze This weren’t five years apart I’d call them duelling movies.

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The Shining

January 4, 2013January 4, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Well, we’re out of a stealth theme month. First person to send their guess as to what December’s theme was to me via Astral Projection wins a genuine No-Prize.

Here’s another selection from the “how did you miss that one?” files. As I think I’ve discussed previously, I avoided horror movies for years because I didn’t like being scared, and then when I started catching up on them in my 20s, I found myself at best unaffected, and at worst cringing at the cheese. This one seems to be mostly psychological horror, so it should be better than the classic slashers I saw previously.

Thanks to pop cultural osmosis, I know more about the movie than I’d prefer to be going in with, but that’s usually the case when The Simpsons parodies a movie wholesale.

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Mars Attacks!

August 26, 2011temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’ve always expected this film to be modern camp. A film with modern sensibilities and humor that’s unashamed to be cut from the same cloth as old-fashioned B-movies. That’s the story sold by the advertising anyway, which isn’t always the most trustworthy.

This is definitely offbeat, but it doesn’t seem like Tim Burton’s style of offbeat. For one thing, it appears to have a distinct lack of Johnny Depp. This must have been one of his last films before he started making the same movie every time.

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