What I’ve Caught Up With, August 2023:
Film: Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002)
Both of my girls enjoyed the Hey Arnold! television show, and it was one I was always happy to have them watch. The movie is essentially a very long episode of the show, but it’s a good one. The Hey Arnold! show is pretty much unknown outside of the kids who grew up with it, but it was a solid cartoon and actually did well with a sort of worldbuilding that the film manages to live up to. It’s not a necessary watch unless you know the show, and if you know the show, you’ve probably already seen this. As television-to-movie adaptations go, you could do a lot worse.
Film: Blackfish (2013)
I’ve long had a love/hate relationship with zoos. They serve an important purpose in helping to maintain the existence of threatened species, but they also nothing good for the animals that are actually in captivity. Blackfish is a kind of exposé on Sea World and similar places, looking specifically at the deaths of orca trainers at several different parks. The film is controversial—a number of people interviewed for the film think they have been misrepresented. It’s hard to see what becomes of these animals, though, and it’s hard not to in some respects side with the whales acting out in frustration, no different than any other captive animal acting out.
Film: Design for Living (1933)
When you see a film like Design for Living, you have to wonder what we’ve missed when it comes to sex comedies when the Hays Code became a thing. This film is absolutely a sex comedy, and perhaps the first film that is legitimately about a polycule. Playwright Tom Chambers (Fredric March) and painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper) both fall in love with advertising artist Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins), who loves both of them equally. After essentially shacking up with each of them, she decides she can’t make up her mind. This is a film that is very explicit about the sex that Gilda (pronounced with a soft “g”) and the two men are having. It’s fun, but also pretty inconsequential.
Film: Spider-Man: Far From Home
I’m still struggling to get through all of the MCU material that I haven’t watched. I do like that they’ve finally found someone to play Spider-Man who looks the part. Spidey should be a high school kid; that’s what makes him interesting. Spider-Man: Far From Home takes the webhead and puts him in Europe on a class trip. It’s a bit contrived, but the action is good, and I like that they’ve gone with a new villain in Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio. It’s a solid film with good action sequences, and it’s also refreshingly short for an MCU film at just over two hours. Someone needs to give Ned super powers, because he’s regularly the best part of these films.
Film: The Black Hole (1979)
The classic science fiction story is a spaceship and a distress call, and The Black Hole fills that basic plot about as well as Alien from the same year. This follows a story similar to Forbidden Planet in some ways and is followed horrifically by Event Horizon. While not bad, this is a couple of years after Star Wars. There’s no reason that the effects in this should be this hokey. The plot is pretty good, and the idea of a ship orbiting a massive black hole is cool, but it really should look better than it does. Disney is doing tons of remakes these days. At almost 45 years old, this should be a worthy candidate.
Film: Machete (2010)
Machete started life as one of the fake movie trailers from Grindhouse, and while I would have really liked to see Don’t as a real film, I’m not going to complain about this one, because it really does feel like a grindhouse film. It’s ridiculous and over the top and very much has the feel of a film style that should end in ‘sploitation. Danny Trejo is an ex-Federale code named Machete whose family is killed by a drug kingpin (played by Steven Seagal of all people). Years later, Machete is hired to assassinate a Texas state senator, and all hell breaks loose. Interesting that at least a part of the target audience for this are the very people who would support the bad guys' “build the wall” ethos. One hell of a cast—Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson, Lindsey Lohan, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Tom Savini, and Robert Goddamn DeNiro make appearances.
Spider-Man: Far from Home I thought was an excellent film and a nice ending to the Infinity Saga while I am more intrigued by its aftermath as it relates to Mysterio and what he has done as I think it will be explored in Ironheart or Armor Wars though audiences are going to have to wait a lot longer for those 2 shows.
ReplyDeleteMachete was alright for what it is though the presence of Steven Seagal and Lindsay Lohan really hurt the film for me as Seagal is just a one-note tubby bitch while Lohan is just there in her dumb comeback attempt though she barely does anything. Jessica Alba is lucky to have something else to fall back on because as an actress, she plainly fucking sucks.
The Black Hole is an absolutely underrated film that I think gets overlooked in comparison to the sci-films that were coming out at the time as it was a bit more family-friendly but it had a lot of intriguing suspense and yes, I am for a remake of this.
I didn't care one way or the other about Lindsay Lohan in Machete. I agree with you completely on Seagal, who is a waste of space and oxygen.
DeleteI'm looking forward to the third Spider-Man film, which I'll get to soon.
Design for Living is a saucy and sly piece that slid in just under the Hays Code wire. For someone who hasn’t seen it before and thinks they are going to watch an old Hollywood film, its ribald edge can give quite a jolt. The three stars are at their respective peaks of attractiveness, and all do well with the material. Cooper was a last-minute replacement for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. who had to withdraw due to illness and I think the film benefited from the switch. Fairbanks was a genial performer, but he didn’t possess Cooper’s innate sexual spark nor impact. In this instance that was an essential component.
ReplyDeleteWhile I’m not a fan of censorship in general I do still love many of the films made under its sway. The Code forced the writers to be inventive to work around the constraints placed on them which led to some of the cleverest dialog ever written.
The only other one of these I’ve seen is The Black Hole. Its effects are hopelessly dated now and as I recall were called out as being behind the times even when it was out initially when comparisons to Star Wars were inevitable. I think it was because Disney didn’t start it as a major undertaking-the cast while full of respected performers weren’t A listers at this point in their careers and they saw it more as a tagalong to the disaster movie craze of The Poseidon Adventure/Towering Inferno genre than the incipient sci-fi era. Still, it’s an entertaining if not riveting picture.
I am sick to death of superhero movies but should give this Spider-Man edition a shot since Jake Gyllenhaal is in it. If nothing else for the irony that when the first film was made it was down to Tobey Maguire and he to play Peter Parker and now he’s the villain.
Design for Living is a bit of a treat. I get what you're saying about what was released under the Hays Code, but we would have been better off without it, I think.
ReplyDeleteThe Black Hole really needs a glow-up. A new version would be worth having, if only to have the better effects.
Gyllenhaal really is good in the role. He makes a good villain because he doesn't look the part. I always like it when someone plays against type.