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Film: Poltergeist II: The Other Side
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Talk to most any horror nerd and you’ll get a great deal of love for Poltergeist, one of the best arguments that making a good, scary PG movie is entirely possible. You won’t get a great deal of love for the sequels, making the Poltergeist trilogy the Matrix trilogy of the ‘80s—great first movie, and then straight down hill. But Poltergeist II: The Other Side was available to me, and I’d seen the pictures of the skeleton-faced dude enough times to think I knew what I was in for. And, boy, was I wrong.

Poltergeist II: The Other Side picks up about a year after the end of the first film despite the fact that a good four years have passed in reality and the kids are noticeably three or four years older than they were in the first film. Four of the five Freelings—father Steven (Craig T. Nelson), mother Diane (JoBeth Williams), middle child Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest child Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) have moved to Phoenix and are living with Diane’s mother, Jess (Geraldine Fitzgerald). The oldest child Dana (Dominique Dunne) was likely to have been written out of this film anyway, but could not be included since the actress was murdered by her boyfriend shortly after the release of the original film.

Proud Mary

Films: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Format: DVD from Lena Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I’m not sure where to start with What’s Love Got to Do with It? except to say that I’m a fan of Tina Turner despite not really being a huge fan of her music. I like her attitude; I think she’s bad-ass and I don’t think I need to love her music to think that. I’ve been trying to get this movie from NetFlix for some time, but it’s always on a very long wait, so I finally broke down and ordered it from a library. I didn’t want to see this specifically because it’s more or less Tina Turner’s biography (although Turner herself claims it’s not really close to factual) but because it stars both Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and I really like both of them.

So, as I just said, this is essentially the biography of Tina Turner, but highly fictionalized. From what I understand, it covers the broad strokes without getting much right in the way of detail. I think I’m okay with that, although I often object to a complete rewrite of history, but it does present an interesting problem with the film. The fact that Ike Turner (Fishburne) was an abusive asshole and Tina (Bassett) had to fight for her right to perform independently and keep her own name is pretty well known. Because of that, it’s the details that are of interest here, and evidently the details aren’t close to the reality.