rocketdave

I don't love most of the movies I watch and that applies even to ones that are highly rated among critics, which most of the ones in this list are. That doesn't necessarily mean I hated any of them, but some I didn't care for. Some I was ambivalent towards while others I thought were good but wouldn't necessarily want to watch again or anytime soon. A few of these titles I didn't have anything to say about, but for those you can assume that I liked them well enough, but maybe not enough to formulate any specific thoughts on.

Bonnie & Clyde I'd been wanting to see Bonnie & Clyde for a long time and when I finally did, I'm afraid I was fairly underwhelmed. I wonder what it says about me that the main thing I took away from this film was how relatively easy it made robbing banks look, at least compared to modern times. I discovered from reading the trivia that the lady who played Bonnie's mom in this movie was a non-actor who had just shown up to watch the movie being filmed and got recruited to appear in a scene. She was so stiff, though, I didn't need to read the imdb trivia to guess that she wasn't a professional actor. I mean, there are definitely examples of non-professional actors being cast in a movie or TV show and turning out to be good, like R. Lee Ermy in Full Metal Jacket or Jameela Jamil in The Good Place or Stu in What We Do in the Shadows, but this lady just sucked. It reminded me of this really brief moment in Moscow on the Hudson when chaos erupts in the department store after Robin Williams' character announces his intention to defect from the Soviet Union and this store manager chastises one the security guard played by Cleavant Derricks. She was so bad, I tried to find out if she was actually a manager at Bloomingdale's to whom they'd given a speaking line. Turns out she was the director's wife, which is kinda sweet, but when someone's line delivery is that noticeably awkward, maybe it's best not to give them dialogue to deliver. I'm focusing a lot on a really minor part of the film, but I wasn't terribly impressed/entertained by the movie overall, so I can't think of much to do except complain about the weird decision to randomly cast this old lady with clearly no acting experience into a motion picture.

In Bruges

Among the movies in this particular list, this is probably the one I was most entertained by. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are two hitmen sent by their boss to lay low in Belgium after a botched job. It's weird how I kind of hated Colin Farrell's character at the start of this movie, but actually liked him more after they reveal the unforgivable thing he did, which should make anyone hate him more, though I guess you're inclined to sympathize with him at least somewhat after learning how much his guilt is consuming him.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore It wasn't until after I watched this Scorsese movie that I found out that it was the basis for the sitcom Alice, which I've never seen a second of. I was pretty "meh" about this movie.

The VVitch I hated that I eventually had to turn on the subtitles while watching The VVitch in order to follow the ye olde English everyone was speaking, especially when one of the subtitles spoiled something that was going to happen a split second before it did. I wonder how I would have fared had I seen this in a theater where subtitles were not an option. The Lighthouse

I almost feel bad saying that I wasn't a fan of The Lighthouse since I would think that some weird, artsy black and white movie would be more up my alley.

Anomalisa

Another movie I almost feel bad for not really liking, given all the time and talent that obviously went into the very impressive stop motion animation.

Meet Me in St. Louis

After The Wizard of Oz, this might be Judy Garland's most famous movie. I thought it started out pretty entertaining, but dragged after a while.

Lincoln

The Departed

Broadcast News

Mona Lisa

Thumbs up. Bob Hoskins is a recently released criminal who is hired to be a bodyguard for a high-class prostitute. Good movie, though parts a little uncomfortable.

The Italian Job (1969)

Too silly.

Get Carter (1971)

I watched this right before it left Netflix and sort of wished I'd left myself more time to watch it over again because I had some trouble keeping track of who was who and following the plot.

Mr. Turner

The only Christmas presents I got in 2020 were a book on J.M.W. Turner and the DVD Mr. Turner, which my dad gave me after he read about the artist in a book by Boris Johnson (ugh). I actually didn't know a lot about Turner, but I had actually been wanting to watch this movie since I'm a bit of a fan of both Timothy Spall, who stars in it, and Mike Leigh, who is the director. I mean, I haven't seen a ton of Leigh's work, but Secrets & Lies is one of my favorite films, so I think that's enough to call myself a fan. Well, I did like Mr. Turner, but maybe it's a bad sign that it felt overly long at two and a half hours. I mean, that is fairly long for a movie, and yet, Leigh's Secrets & Lies is almost as long as Mr. Turner, but it doesn't feel like it. Another one of my favorite movies is Auntie Mame, which I think is also about two and a half hours. Fiddler on the Roof, My Fair Lady, The Lord of the Rings films and Zack Snyder's Justice League all hold my interest better than Mr. Turner, even though each of those is longer by quite a bit. I got to a point where I thought Mr. Turner had to be almost over before realizing I had about fifty minutes left. I might have appreciated the film more if I had a grasp on who some of the historical figures that appeared in it were. For instance, Turner interacts with someone who I later learned was a very famous art critic, but the way he's portrayed in the film, I thought he was just some rich fop.

I've become well acquainted with the actress Dorothy Atkinson from seeing her in the Britcom Mum (which stars Leslie Manville, who is also in this movie), but I watched the whole of Mr. Turner not recognizing her at all as Turner's housekeeper. Of course, the character she plays in this movie is miles removed from the insufferable snob she plays in that sitcom, which I guess just goes to show her range as an actor.

Parasite

Did Parasite deserve the best picture Oscar? That's impossible for me to judge since I didn't see all the movies that were nominated. As I said in a previous journal entry, I've seen probably less than half a dozen movies that came out in 2019. I did think that Parasite was a very good movie, but it might not necessarily have been my choice for best picture, just because I found it to be such a downer. My personal favorite 2019 movie that I've seen is Knives Out, but that wasn't nominated... not for best picture anyway. At any rate, I'm kind of glad Parasite won, if only because it pissed off the racists. It was a little funny to see the viral YouTube video of that one ignorant neckbeard freaking out because Joker didn't win, sputtering about how Joker tackled economic and class disparity, completely oblivious to the fact that Parasite did the same thing and far more successfully.

Snowpiercer

Starts out interesting and gritty, then gets more and more absurd.

Working Girl

I watched this mainly because it was spoofed in Bob's Burgers and I wanted to understand the reference. Melanie Griffith plays a secretary who poses as a businesswoman when her backstabbing boss (Sigourney Weaver) is incapacitated. The entire time, I never entirely wrapped my head around exactly what sort of business these characters were supposed to be in. I guess I'm not too bright. Still, I enjoyed the movie.

A Most Wanted Man

The Disaster Artist

Tim Burton's Ed Wood, which most people liken this to, is one of my favorite movies. The Disaster Artist was okay, but it was no Ed Wood.

Annihilation

Based on the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy of novels, this movie follows a group of scientists tasked with exploring an area where the normal rules of nature and physics don't apply after being hit by a strange meteorite or something. I didn't know it was based on a book until I was informed of that fact by my sister, who is kind of an expert on the series. And by "expert," I mean that when the movie came out, she was quoted in some article as an authority on the books and the difficulties inherent in adapting the novel into a visual medium (iirc, the example she used was how the book simultaneously describes something as a hole in the ground and a tower). Also, she spoke on a panel about the trilogy and she told me afterward that she and her fellow panelists weren't crazy about the film. Well, I doubt I could come up with anything one tenth as intelligent or insightful as whatever her thoughts might be. I'll just say that alien phenomena that are beyond human comprehension is the sort of idea that attracts me to science fiction in the first place. However, when said phenomena is used mainly for the purposes of horror, that's less interesting to me. The scene with the bear was pretty good, though.

Painted Desert

I'm glad that I finally saw Painted Desert, if only so that I can now say that I understand what the Merry Melodies cartoon "She Was an Acrobat's Daughter" was parodying. But it was such an odd movie that I'm not sure I liked it that much.

Mystery of the Wax Museum I'm more familiar with the Vincent Price remake, which I've been fortunate enough to see on the big screen in 3D. This movie by itself is less interesting than the story behind its restoration. The ending of this version was so bad that I literally booed the TV screen. Vincent Leonard Nimoy's one man show about Vincent Van Gogh. I was surprised to realize that Nimoy actually doesn't play Vincent in this, but rather portrays his brother. I watched this on Tubi TV hours before it left that service. I assume it was only a coincidence that the next day was actually Nimoy's birthday. St. Vincent Bill Murray plays a curmudgeon who is humanized when his neighbor hires him to babysit for her. Things take a more serious turn in the third act when Murray's character has a health crisis which freaked me out more than some horror movies. I'm kind of a hypochondriac and I'm more scared about the idea of having a stroke than I am getting killed by the wolfman. My Cousin Vinnie Kind of uneven, but the courtroom stuff is fun once Vinnie figures out what he's doing. Still Alice Downer of a movie in which Julianne Moore finds out she has Alzheimer's. Spoilers: Part of the movie involves a secret plan she makes to commit suicide once her condition deteriorates to a certain extent, but things don't work out the way she hoped. I half-expected that a member of her family was going to find out about her plan and allow her to go through with it, which is possibly what I might have done in that situation, because I don't know if I'd personally want to go on living in that state.

She's Out of My League I like the song "She's So High," which features in this film, of course, but I also kind of hate it because the message is rather depressing, being told from the point of view of someone who is in love with a girl that he feels he has no chance with. It's not uncommon for guys in movies and TV shows to have love interests who are way hotter than they are, though it's not often commented upon, let alone made the main focus of the plot. Let's face it; I watched She's Out of My League because the idea of the awkward guy getting a really hot girlfriend is not unappealing to me, but I had pretty low expectations, figuring it would be a dumb wish-fulfilment movie. However, I actually liked it a bit more than I thought I was going to. I actually liked that Alice Eve's character has a somewhat realistic and not entirely flattering motivation for initially agreeing to date Jay Baruchel. Affair in Trinidad I guess Columbia Pictures wanted to replicate the success of Gilda by bringing Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford back together, and it apparently worked, as this film did well at the box office. I'm not really a big fan of Gilda; Hayworth's and Ford's relationship in that movie has got to be one of the most dysfunctional ever committed to celluloid. I don't know if it's much healthier here. Ford travels to Trinidad to see his brother, only to find out he just died, then becomes upset when his brother's widow (Hayworth) seems to be immediately falling into the arms of another man... not because he thinks it's disrespectful to the memory of his late brother, but because he's jealous. What he doesn't realize is that Hayworth's character is working with the police to try to catch the guy they think murdered her husband. It's somewhat plausible that the cops wouldn't want Ford's character to know the truth because it might compromise the investigation, but it seems like it creates more problems and is really only there for the sake of drama, annoyingly.

Predestination Interesting sci-fi movie starring Ethan Hawke, but although it takes numerous twists and turns, I sort of knew exactly where the plot was going from the start. That may be because I once read the synopsis of the Heinlein story upon which it's based or maybe I've just read and seen enough stuff involving time travel paradoxes that it's difficult to surprise me. Murder by Decree Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) and Watson (James Mason) investigate the Jack the Ripper killings in a movie directed by A Christmas Story's Bob Clark. Something about this gave me the sense that it was like an unofficial direct continuation of the Sherlock Holmes movies that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce did (or at least the first couple that were set in the proper time period), though with a somewhat more sophisticated touch.

If you know anything about the most famous conspiracy theory surrounding the Whitechapel murders, you might be able to guess where this movie is going with its plot. The title is a pretty big clue. This wasn't a bad movie, but I don't know if it's that satisfying to build an entire story around Holmes failing, which you know in advance is going to happen because this is about one of the most infamous strings of unsolved murders in history.

Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way: Donald Sutherland plays a psychic, and the movie wants us to believe his powers are genuine. The only reason a psychic should be in a Sherlock Holmes story is if Holmes is going to unmask him or her as a fraud.

Wargames

This is meant to be an '80s classic, but I just wasn't all that impressed by it.

Absolutely Fabulous the Movie

I liked Absolutely Fabulous as a kid, but I never felt like I 100% understood it or the world that those characters existed in. I also wasn't used to watching a show where the main characters were so horrible. The movie was a letdown. It felt like there was possibly stuff on the cutting room floor that might have made the story a bit more comprehensible, like there's this conflict between Saffron and her daughter that seems to come out of nowhere. Also, Chris Colfer is in the movie for some reason, and I found his unexplained presence confusing enough that I actually had to check to make sure he hadn't been on the show at some point. There's a nice moment near the end where Edina finally apologizes to Saffron for being a shitty mother. I could have used more stuff like that.

My Best Friend is a Vampire

The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books is not the kind of thing I would have normally chosen to read on my own, but my sister sent them to me during a time when I was making a stronger effort to read more. They're not that good, but they were an okay way to pass the time. Last year, I finally got around to watching True Blood, the show based on the books, partly just to better understand the parody of it that Sesame Street did (which is also the same reason I watched the first couple seasons of Homeland). I did kind of like True Blood, but I absolutely hated the way it ended, and that's saying a lot since I'm the sort of person who thought that people were way too hard on Game of Thrones' ending.

One of my biggest problems with the TV show is the same one I had with the books: namely, the way they tried to paint vampires as a persecuted minority. It could have worked, but it ended up being a really terrible analogy because, with few exceptions, most of the vampire characters were amoral, murderous monsters. My Best Friend is a Vampire is a lame movie, but it at least did a way better job with the whole oppressed minority angle. I watched it mainly because it was recommended to me by a friend after I happened to mention that I was binging True Blood. Coincidentally, I had only learned about the existence of the movie a short time earlier when I was searching for a different movie. I was trying to find Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and My Best Friend is a Vampire showed up in the recommendations because Fannie Flagg is a member of the cast. I just knew her as the author of Fried Green Tomatoes; I didn't even know she was an actor. The plot description had me hooked after I read that the teenage protagonist becomes a vampire after being seduced by an older woman.

Vamps

Another comedy with a sympathetic take on vampires. Somewhat entertaining, but it feels like a real step down for both director Amy Heckerling and star Alicia Silverstone after Clueless. Oh, according to this movie's lore, if a vampire dies, everyone they've turned into a vampire will turn back into a human, which I guess is the sort of thing I've seen elsewhere. I didn't question it in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but here it was harder to suspend my disbelief for some reason. I mean, if someone with COVID dies, it's not like everyone they infected is instantly cured. I know, apples and oranges.

Son of Kong

How good could this sequel be when it was rushed into production and came out only nine months after the original? Well, it's obviously nowhere near as iconic as the first one, but I don't know if the quality is really that much worse. I will say that I appreciated that the plot dealt with the inevitable legal trouble Carl Denham would be in after the giant ape he captured ran amok in New York. Watching the original, I wasn't sure that the screenwriter was fully aware of what an irresponsible guy Dehnahm is, especially at the end when the public is still treating him like a respected VIP despite all the chaos that's occurred. I also like that in this movie, Denham shows genuine remorse for upending Kong's life and taking him away from the Skull Island.

The Boy with Green Hair

I have to give kudos to the filmmakers and star Dean Stockwell for defying RKO's new conservative owner Howard Hughes and delivering an anti-war movie, especially during a time when it would have been more controversial than it might be today. That said, the plot is fairly bizarre and I still don't get how the existence of a kid with green hair is supposed to remind people that war is bad.

The Werewolf

Apparently, this was the only werewolf movie to come out in the '50s. What's weird is that the movie seems to want us to feel sympathy for the werewolf, and yet, at the end, the "good guys" gun him down in cold blood for no reason, even though he's not posing an immediate threat to anybody.

The Man with Nine Lives

Boris Karloff starts out the movie as a well-meaning scientist with an experimental cancer treatment using cryonics, but his work is sabotaged by a group of stuffed shirts who barge into his lab, inadvertently kill the patient he was treating and freeze him and themselves until they're discovered years later and thawed out. Unfortunately, one greedy jerk, the nephew of Karloff's patient, finds out that because he's been declared dead during the time he was frozen, he'd missed out on his chance to inherit his uncle's money, and destroys the formula for Karloff's treatment in a fit of anger, causing Karloff to kill him and then hold the rest of the officials hostage and use them as guinea pigs. At the end, the Hays Code dictates that Karloff pay for the lives he's taken, but not before he's once again found his cancer cure, causing him to be posthumously hailed as a hero, which sends a troubling message about the ends justifying the means.

I'm back to once again relate my pedestrian thoughts on some movies I viewed during the previous three years... not that I expect anyone to give a s***.

Dark Passage

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did four movies together. This is the last one I had yet to see and it may be their weakest. There's an awkward gimmick in which you don't see Bogart's face for almost the entire first half of the film and it's not until a half hour or more into it that you figure out why. I didn't dislike the movie overall, though.

Stuck

Partly based on a real event, a newly homeless man (Stephen Rea) is the victim of a hit and run driver (Mena Suvari) and lodged in the windshield of her car. The panicked woman parks her car in her garage and callously waits for him to die. Honestly, watching this guy becoming homeless made this movie scary enough to me even before the whole hit and run part.

There was apparently some controversy over Suvari's casting in the role of the female lead since the woman in real life was black, though I'm not sure who would be upset over that. Sure, casting a white lady deprived some black actress of a job, but A) the movie is not meant to be a factual portrayal of the actual event and B) she's hardly a sympathetic character. Around the time I watched this movie, I saw some grumbling online when Stephen Moffat denied that the eponymous character in his Dracula series would be bi and all I could think was, "Is a murderer really the type of representation you want?" Same goes for this movie. I don’t know if this was the thinking, but because I often have worried about inadvertently sending the wrong message with my work, I could understand if perhaps the filmmakers wouldn't want to make a movie where the only two main POCs (the driver and her boyfriend) were villains. Obviously, minorities can be bad guys, but what I’m saying is that I’d hate to make something that might accidentally reinforce racist opinions.

I say Suvari's character isn't sympathetic, and she's obviously not, though maybe I could empathize with her to a tiny degree in the beginning. If I were in her shoes, I certainly would like to think I'd do the right thing, but I guess you never know what you're capable of until you're tested. I'm scared all the time, so who knows how I'd react if I were in that situation?

Brother John

Sidney Poitier plays the titular John, a mysterious character who somehow knows to return to his hometown to be by his dying sister's bedside, just as he did for both his parents, even though nobody knows where he's been or what he's been doing since he left home. Because his arrival happens to coincide with some union trouble, the local authorities believe he's some sort of agitator in the employ of a foreign government. The town's doctor has a more outlandish hypothesis about what sort of work John has been up to.

I had to decide between watching this movie or taking a nap. Even though it's not the sort of thing I used to do, I chose to read the synopsis on Wikipedia, because I thought then I wouldn't need to watch the movie, but because it was so vague about Poitier's character, it intrigued me enough that I opted to stay awake and watch the movie and I'm glad I made that choice. I learned that part of the reason Wikipedia's plot summary is so vague is because the movie never explicitly lets the audience know who or what John is, though at the end, we're led to believe that the doctor was correct in his assumptions.

I've said that I hated the movie Joker, partly because it seemed to promote the idea that humanity is beyond redemption. Well, that would seem to be the message of this movie as well, but that seems a little more valid in a story about the experiences of a black man from the American south. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Poitier's character would have a more favorable impression of the world and particularly the U.S. today, considering the way fascist theocrats are moving heaven and earth to drag us back into the dark ages.

When Marnie Was There

I could potentially be inviting trouble by relating the following anecdote. In late 2020, I was contacted by someone via the chat feature on this site - let's call him Bobo - who wanted free art from me. That's not a totally unusual occurrence. What was somewhat unusual was that even when I said no, he persisted in bothering me for weeks and then months with inane conversation. I didn't know a polite way to get rid of Bobo and was too nice to block him, even after he revealed himself to be a raging homophobe. I guess I felt sorry for him because he was obviously a troubled, mixed-up kid who had been warped by his religious upbringing.

Bobo is obsessed with shipping characters from a certain popular hundred+ year old fantasy literary series for which I've drawn fanart. I've never been hugely into shipping myself, but I admitted that I thought there were two female characters from said books who would make a good couple, which Bobo, being a rightwing bigot, naturally took great exception to. This guy took it upon himself to try to argue with me and anyone else who showed signs of shipping those characters. It was pointless to try to argue with this kid since nothing I or anyone else said got through his skull. Bobo eventually got on my nerves so badly that I felt motivated to do something I'd actually wanted to do for years: I drew a pic of those two female characters as a couple, which caused Bobo to send me a threatening, profanity filled note, this time from a sock account, because by that point I'd finally had enough and blocked him.

The reason I say that talking about this at all, even in vague terms, could be inviting trouble is because, for all I know, Bobo may still be monitoring my dA activity. In the past, I made two or three passing remarks on here about how I was being harassed by a homophobic pest - without identifying this person in any way - and that was enough to cause Bobo to flip out and post at least a couple very public, very vicious personal attacks on me, accusing me of "bullying" him and calling me some stuff that I will not repeat here. I've been way nicer than I need to be by not retaliating. However, I have written a detailed account of his interactions with me and I've made it clear that I will lose any compunctions about making it public if I find out that he's pulled any crap like that again.

I bring that up because I wondered what Bobo's reaction would have been to my first impressions of When Marnie Was There. When Marnie Was There is a Ghibli movie about a girl named Anna who, while vacationing with relatives, becomes very close friends with a mysterious girl named Marnie who seems to be a ghost of some sort. For a large portion of the film, I thought I was picking up serious gay vibes from those two girls. Bobo would probably say it's because I have a "reprobate mind" and that I just see homosexuality everywhere I look. Not so. I watched all of Fried Green Tomatoes without picking up on the fact that Idgie and Ruth were supposed to be an item (though it was more obvious when I read the book). More recently, I rewatched All About Eve and was kind of shocked when I looked on Wikipedia and learned that Eve was apparently coded as gay. I googled When Marnie is There and found out that I was far from alone in assuming there was a romantic connection between Anna and Marnie, so if that wasn't Ghibli's intention, they seem to have done a poor job. I don't want to spoil the movie, but let's just say that I was pretty embarrassed by my interpretation when I got near the end of the film. When Marnie Was There is not a bad movie, but it's not one of Ghibli's best.

Miss Potter

Some of what I know about Beatrix Potter comes from memories of this great graphic novel, The Tale of One Bad Rat, which is about a teenage runaway with an affinity for that author. I may have conflated some things about the fictional protagonist of that story with the life of Beatrix Potter. Specifically, because the girl in The Tale of One Bad Rat was a victim of sexual abuse by her father, I guess I erroneously believed that Potter dealt with something similar. Well, until her success allowed her financial independence, her parents apparently made her miserable, wanting to dictate how she lived her life and who she married, which is still bad, but just not quite as dire as what I originally thought. This biopic is from the same director as Babe, one of my favorite films. This movie, on the other hand, I mostly just thought was okay. The filmmaking device of having Beatrix Potter occasionally interact with animated versions of her creations was cute, but may have not been the best choice because it did give me the mistaken impression that the author suffered from a mental illness of some sort.

Frances Ha

Greta Gerwig plays a dancer struggling to achieve her dreams and pay the rent in NYC. This black and white mumblecore indie film made me nostalgic for the glory days of IFC. However, the main character's money woes stressed me out enough that it was difficult to fully enjoy the movie.

Crossroads (1942)

William Powell plays a French amnesiac whose early life is a complete mystery to him, though doesn't really mind since he's found happiness and success in the years following the accident that cost him his memory. But things start to unravel when it comes to light that he may have a criminal background which threatens to derail his expected appointment as France's ambassador to some South American country. Crossroads came out in 1942, when things were obviously not going so well in France, but the movie itself is set like a decade earlier, so although the character doesn't realize it, of course, the audience would probably be aware that in a few years' time from his perspective, it might be extra desirable to be someplace other than France.

Funnily, this is one of two movies in which William Powell played an amnesiac and upstanding citizen with a shady past or at least is implied to have a shady past, though the other movie, I Love You Again from two years earlier, is a straightforward comedy while this is a drama. I had a pretty good guess as to how I thought Crossroads' plot might be resolved and I ended up being mostly correct, but I found the movie enjoyable regardless.

A Stolen Life

Bette Davis plays an artist whose boyfriend is stolen by her identical twin sister (also played by Davis, natch. When tragedy befalls the less likable sister, the artist decides to take her place. Weirdly, years later, Davis played twins once again in another movie with a very similar premise. Actually, this made me think of the sadly short-lived Sarah Michelle Gellar CW series Ringer, which I was quite into. Davis has two potential love interests in this movie and I wasn't really rooting for her to end up with either one because they're both kind of jerks. One was fickle enough to allow himself to be seduced away by her sister while the other guy is extremely rude. I have to say that the movie magic that allowed Davis to act alongside herself actually looks pretty good for the 1940s.

The Love Witch

The director might disagree, but the most interesting aspect of this movie (to me) is how hard it is to tell that it wasn't shot in the late '60s (apart from the shots where contemporary cars are visible or someone uses a cell phone).

Venom

I have avoided so many Marvel movies; I don't know why I decided to see this one. Well, it helps that it's a standalone film and not part of the MCU, so I didn't feel like I had to watch a fuckton of other movies in order to not feel lost. I'm not sorry I saw Venom. I am sorry, however, that I sat through the credits in case there was a post-credits scene. There wasn't. There were a couple mid-credits scenes, but one was just a preview clip for Into the Spiderverse which I'd actually just seen earlier in the week.

I've liked sitting through the credits of movies ever since I was a kid, though post-credits scenes were far more rare back then. The first couple Muppet movies may have also conditioned me to think that there may be something at the end of the credits of any given film. Besides, I'm never eager to be thrust back into the real world. I made my family sit through the credits for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which I think at the time actually held the record for the longest end credits ever, though that's since been surpassed by numerous films, including Venom. Venom's credits were almost as long as any of the credits for the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings movies, except I didn't mind sitting through LOTR's credits because at least I was treated to Howard Shore's excellent score for those films. With Venom, on the other hand, I was sitting in a dark theater by myself with this unpleasant death metal assaulting my ears.

Tamarind Seed

Worth watching, if only because Julie Andrews wears a bikini in one scene.

Before I get to the documentaries I watched between the start of 2019 and the end of last year, I need to add two more movies to the list of ones that I didn't like which I neglected to include in my last journal entry. They may be a couple of the worst, so it's strange that I forgot about them, unless I just hated them so much that my mind tried to obliterate them from my memory, as one might a traumatic event.

The Astronaut's Wife

Charlize Theron senses her astronaut husband (Johnny Depp) is different after returning from space. I knew that this movie had poor reviews and a low score on imdb, but I watched it anyway, thinking it might at least be entertainingly cheesy. My bad. Instead, it was one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever willingly subjected myself to. Well, how was I to know? It has the exact same score on imdb as Aeon Flux, a poorly reviewed Charlize Theron sci-fi movie I actually kinda like.

Leaving Las Vegas

Roger Ebert called this the best movie of the '90s. I mean, who am I to argue with Roger Ebert? I'm not saying that this is a bad movie. It may in fact be a very good movie, but I found it a mostly miserable viewing experience. I fail to understand why someone would feel compelled to make a movie about a guy deliberately drinking himself to death or what sort of audience would want to sit through it.

Okay, on to the documentaries:

The Green Girl

Being the Trekkie that I am, whenever I see artwork of an attractive green woman, my mind almost always goes to the Orions from Star Trek, though more often than not, they turn out to be pics of She-Hulk or Elphaba or Gamora or (now that we know Orions can have red hair) Miss Martian, etc. So, I was a little surprised when the subject of this documentary turned out to be exactly what I thought of when I saw the title: Susan Oliver, who played the original "green girl" in the first pilot for Star Trek. I learned a lot about Miss Oliver, who of course had a prolific TV career beyond that one guest appearance on Star Trek, though some of what I learned I almost wish I didn't know. Her life wasn't entirely happy. As she got older and acting roles were harder to come by, she tried to transition into directing, but it seems like few people were willing to give her a chance. She couldn't even land a gig directing Star Trek: The Next Generation, which seems like bullshit since they let Leonard Nimoy's son direct an episode, even though, unlike Susan Oliver, Adam Nimoy had no professional directing experience up to that point.

What We Left Behind

Until a few years ago, I was a somewhat avid listener of Mission Log, a podcast produced by Rod Roddenberry and hosted by John Champion and Ken Ray, who had discussions of the Star Trek franchise, one episode at a time, beginning with The Original Series and moving through each subsequent spinoff. They managed to make talking about Star Trek fun without coming across as excessively nerdy. However, my interest began to wane around the time they finished The Next Generation and moved on to Deep Space Nine, which may actually be what I consider to be the best of the Trek series (though I'm perhaps just as fond of TNG, if not more so). The problem was that it became abundantly clear that DS9 was not Ken's favorite, which is fine, except his attitude towards the show appeared to frequently shift between boredom to flat out annoyance, not to mention one time in which he seemed positively enraged. When they reached the two-part episode "The Maquis," the normally mellow Ken went off on an angry rant that was actually a little scary to listen to.

John and Ken once described themselves as "your Star Trek pals" and that was honestly what it felt like to me. I felt as though I was on a journey with these guys and this had been a leg of the journey that I'd been looking forward to. So, when one of them strongly conveyed the impression that they no longer wanted to be there, you can't blame me for being disappointed. I know that I wasn't alone in feeling this way because John and Ken talked about some less-than constructive feedback Ken had gotten from DS9 fans who apparently advised him to quit. I hate that a few listeners were giving Ken a hard time, but also think it was unfair to label everyone who was unhappy with him as unreasonable jerks, as John and Ken seemed to do. Obviously, not everybody has to love the same stuff I do, but why would I want to listen to a podcast about one of my favorite shows where one of the hosts just sounds miserable most of the time?

Well, Ken did actually move on to other things for supposedly unrelated reasons and John has a new co-host now, and yet it's been a long time since I last listened to an episode. Therefore, evidently, as I'd already suspected, my flagging interest wasn't entirely Ken's fault. Even though I have more time on my hands than the average person, apparently I don't have the time to spare to listen to an hour long (or longer) discussion of every TV episode I watch. Maybe if I had a few extra lifetimes.

What We Left Behind is a crowdfunded documentary about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and actually one of only a couple crowdfunded projects to which I've contributed (the other being the campaign to bring back MST3K). Most people seemed pretty happy with the end result, but I'm a little more ambivalent, perhaps because I'm not sure it was worth my money, especially seeing that the documentary has been available for free on YouTube for months now. I contributed enough to get the DVD/blu-ray, but I just don't know when I'm ever going to want to watch it again. It's a good thing it was a combo package, since although I had assumed I would have a blu-ray player by the time the documentary finally came out, I still don't. The production was delayed when DS9's former showrunner, Ira Stephen Behr, who put this thing together, belatedly had the bright idea to give the clips from the show featured in the doc an HD remaster, which I personally wasn't excited about (though I may have been in the minority). I can't even really tell that the footage looks different from when it originally aired.

Oddly, my main complaint is how inaccessible this documentary is for non-Trekkies. I mean, my dad watched Shatner's Chaos on the Bridge, which was about the tumultuous early days of TNG, and he found it interesting despite the fact that he didn't even watch TNG, but I can imagine someone unfamiliar with DS9 watching this thing and just being lost. I guess it's difficult to sum up seven years of a series as complex as DS9 in one feature, but What We Left Behind feels to me more like a movie-length DVD bonus feature than a proper documentary. Also, perhaps they spent too much time bemoaning DS9's status as the Trek franchise's redheaded stepchild, which I assumed it had outgrown in the intervening years, but then again, perhaps it hasn't entirely, given Ken Ray's reaction to the show. There, see? I didn't just go off on some rambling prologue about the Mission Log podcast for no reason.

Feels Good Man

As someone who has long aspired to do comics, etc., this documentary about underground cartoonist Matt Furie and how he watched helplessly as his character Pepe the Frog became co-opted as a symbol of the alt-right was something I found particularly disturbing. Imagine how sickening it must be (assuming you're a decent person) to find that the main thing you're famous for is creating something that, through no fault of your own, is indelibly linked in the minds of the public with nazis. Maybe it's extreme paranoia to worry that anything similar could happen to me, but this is just one of the things that makes me terrified to express myself creatively.

Beware the Slenderman

Here's another documentary about a fictional character being misappropriated for evil purposes, in this case the infamous Slenderman stabbing which took place in my home state of Wisconsin, just several towns away from where I live. I can't say Slenderman is something I ever knew much about, but I'm kinda fascinated at how he began as an entry in some silly Photoshop contest and then evolved as the character captured the imagination of the internet. I can't help thinking it's a shame the way his story was perverted by depraved individuals to commit a monstrous crime. I remember when my local CBS news affiliate harangued a Halloween store for selling Slenderman costumes, which seemed a little unfair to me at the time, especially since there doesn't seem to be anything within the "official" Slenderman mythology, if there even is such a thing, concerning human sacrifice, though I can understand how it would be viewed as being in bad taste when the stabbing was still fresh in people's memories.

At the end of the documentary, there's some text explaining how the woods where the stabbing took place have been chopped down, though they fail to elaborate why. The implication almost seems to be that it's because of the attempted murder, which, if true, seems excessive and could almost serve as a metaphor for how some people just think the two perpetrators are irredeemably evil and want to lock them away and throw away the key rather than getting them the mental help they clearly require. I mean, they definitely deserve to be locked up, but anyone who has such a difficult time telling fantasy from reality is clearly mentally unwell and I admit to feeling some degree of sympathy, though, of course, most of my sympathy does go towards the victim who thankfully survived. Understandably, the victim declined to participate in this film, so you get to know her would-be murderers more than you do her, which is maybe why I ended up feeling slightly compassionate towards them. I probably would feel differently if something like this had happened to me or someone I care about. Then again, sometimes I'm too quick to forgive, even with people who don't deserve it. I've had friends and acquaintances turn on me, but at least none of them have ever tried to murder me... so far.

Too Funny to Fail

Even though I never watched it, I recall the day The Dana Carvey Show premiered because I remember my dad, who must've heard an interview with Carvey on the radio or something, coming home and telling me a show with "an impressionist" was going to be on that night. I guess he didn't know who Dana Carvey was, though I'm one to talk since my parents had us go to bed early on Saturdays, so I only ever watched SNL episodes once they were syndicated on Comedy Central. Consequently, I was always pretty far behind when it came to the cultural zeitgeist. When the Wayne's World movie came out, I thought it was just a Bill & Ted rip-off.

Although I didn't watch The Dana Carvey Show, I did find this documentary entertaining. Despite the many talented up-and-comers who worked on it and then went on to great success elsewhere, I can't say it really convinced me of the unappreciated brilliance of the short-lived series, but I did laugh pretty hard at a clip of one sketch featuring a character named Grandma the Clown. I also laughed just as hard at a promo for Home Improvement they played, which demonstrated just what a bad idea it might have been for ABC to air Carvey's relatively edgy show immediately after Tim Allen's corny, family friendly sitcom.

Batman & Bill

I'm actually subscribed to Noblemania, the blog of Marc Tyler Nobleman, the guy who literally wrote the book on Bill Finger upon which this documentary is based, and yet somehow I was unaware this documentary existed until I stumbled across it on Hulu. Nobleman was probably the most vociferous champion in the quest to posthumously get Bill Finger the recognition he never got in life for being the co-creator of Batman. Finger, who by all indications was far more responsible for shaping the character we know today than Bob Kane ever was, died in obscurity and poverty while Kane took all the glory and wealth. It's a sad story and an all-too common one in the comic book industry.

I just reread Alex Robinson's graphic novel Box Office Poison, which is, in part, the fictional tale of an aspiring cartoonist fighting to get the elderly creator of a Batman-esque superhero the credit and money he deserves, inspired no doubt by similar real-life stories. The old guy in the graphic novel is named Irving Flavor. Hmm, Flavor, Finger. Seems too similar to be coincidental.

The Brainwashing of my Dad

As some reviews pointed out, this crowdfunded documentary about the deleterious effect rightwing media has had is mostly preaching to the choir, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

Speaking from my own experience, I honestly cannot say how much of an impact a steady diet of fox news has had on my dad. I was never that aware of what his political views were when I was growing up, but since my Mom once told me that she had to get him to stop using the n-word when I was a baby, I think it's safe to say that he's never been especially liberal. I mostly just try to avoid talking politics with him. While he was a Bush fan, I wasn't 100% positive whether or not he was a supporter of the previous U.S. president until I accompanied him on a car ride to visit my sick grandmother and he started whining about late night comics (who he doesn't even watch) being mean to the cheeto-in-chief. Since I had to spend the next few hours with him, I bit my tongue, though there were quite a few things I would have liked to have said.

I don't have a high opinion of myself - I know I have a lot of problems - but at least I can say that I'm about a thousand times more moral than anyone dumb enough and/or awful enough to think that some racist, infantile, pussy-grabbing con artist is worthy of admiration and respect. To put it more simply, I don't like bullies and I don't like people who like bullies.

Knock Down the House

For a while, I would rewatch the last ten minutes or so of this documentary when I wanted to try to cheer myself up.

Gilbert

Documentary about Gilbert Gottfried. Worthwhile if you want to know more about the actual guy rather than the character he portrays on stage.

American Oz

PBS doc about L. Frank Baum. Apparently, it stirred up some anger among people who were previously unaware of Baum's inexcusable call to wipe out the Native Americans, though this should be old news to most Oz fans. Oz enthusiast Tori Calamito did a video on YouTube that summed up my feelings on the subject more eloquently than I could. IIRC, in a nutshell, she said that, in her opinion, it makes no sense to "cancel" Baum, since he's been dead for over a century and the world he created has grown beyond him... unlike J.K. Rowling, who is very much alive and profiting off her work while continuing to use her position to harm a marginalized group.

Okay, since in my last journal, I talked a little about the movies I loved or liked the most out of the ones I watched over the previous three years, now I'm going to list some of the movies I disliked the most. In case it needs clarifying, these are just movies that were new to me that I saw in that time period; they weren't necessarily released between '19 and '21.

An Officer and a Gentleman

I watch a lot of reaction videos on YouTube and it often bugs me when the reactors don't get the references in the shows or movies they're watching. That's probably an elitist attitude since I know it's impossible to be well acquainted with every piece of culture that might be referenced, but sometimes I can't help slapping my forehead at how ignorant some people seem. For example, I saw someone react to The Big Lebowski and was annoyed when John Goodman's character says "Goodnight, sweet prince" and the YouTuber watching the movie responded with, "Is that where that's from?" A lot of people say the exact same thing when they watch The Shining and Jack Nicholson goes, "Here's Johnny!" Another example is the guy who watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit and confusedly thought the mention of Little Bo Peep was a Toy Story reference. I mean, how can you not have heard of the nursery rhyme? He also didn't even know who Bugs Bunny was. That really stung. Oh, then there was the person who got through half of Hairspray before realizing that the movie is set in the early '60s and not the present.

Currently, I'm watching a couple YouTubers react to Community and I once again facepalmed when they assumed that repeated mentions of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H in one episode were references to the Marvel character. I felt similarly prior to that when I watched this particular channel in which a group of friends reacted to the entirety of Community and a lot of the references went over their heads. As a Trekkie, it was particularly dispiriting that they didn't get any of the Star Trek references: They thought that Abed's "dreamatorium," an obvious nod to TNG's holodeck, was an X-Men reference and that the idea that goateed evil doppelgangers originated with South Park when South Park was spoofing Star Trek when they did it. On a related note, they obviously knew nothing about Roots, since they jumped to the conclusion that Britta was being racist when she referred to Levar Burton as Kunta Kinte, one of his most famous roles.

Anyway, I bring all that up because one of the episodes in the last season of Community had a scene that spoofed the famous ending from An Officer and a Gentleman, and of course nobody in that reaction video recognized the reference. However, to be fair, I'd never seen An Officer and a Gentleman myself. I'd previously seen that movie spoofed at the end of an early Simpsons episode and I didn't get the reference at the time either, though I was just a kid, so of course that's a movie I was unlikely to have seen. I do remember watching that ending scene with Homer and Marge over and over, though, mainly because I really liked the music, which I didn't realize was actually from An Officer and a Gentleman. It's the music upon which the song "Up Where We Belong" was based. Ironically, I'm not really a fan of that song.

That's a long-winded way of explaining why I though it was high time I finally watch An Officer and a Gentleman myself. Now that I have, I don't know if it really deserves to be that well known. Louis Gosset Jr. won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as the tough drill sergeant, which is not a character I liked at all. I know I'll probably sound like too much of a bleeding heart to certain people, but I just feel like brutal hazing and homophobic slurs aren't the best way of trying to whip people into shape. Sure, it works for Richard Gere in this movie, but I can't help thinking that the same sort of treatment could just as easily turn someone crazy and suicidal, like Vincent D'Onofrio's character in Full Metal Jacket.

Joker

"Your majesty, I'm a clown or something. I've got makeup on my face cuz my mommy and daddy didn't give me enough attention!" (from the Mr. Show episode "The Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost")

Hey, how about a movie in which the serial killer from Se7en is painted as a sympathetic figure? It's easy to make audiences feel bad about one of the most evil villains in movie history when all you have to do is literally change everything about the character.

Seriously, though, I was actually really looking forward to Joker at one point, especially after seeing the trailer. I wonder what my opinion of the movie would have been if, by the time I finally saw it, I hadn't had any of the controversies surrounding it in the back of my mind or read any of the dumb shit director Todd Phillips had said. Honestly, my belief is that I would have felt let down regardless.

I feel like this is a movie that wouldn't have gotten a fraction of the recognition it did were it not for the novelty of inserting a comic book character into this Scorsese rip-off. At the time the 2020 Oscars came out, I hadn't even seen any of the other films that were nominated for best picture, but I was very relieved that Joker didn't win. Personally, I don't think it even deserved to be nominated, though I'll grant that maybe Joaquin Phoenix was deserving of his best actor nomination at least.

While I will say that maybe some of the concerns that swirled around this film were overblown, I do have to question whether we needed a movie that was centered around trying to make us root for the Joker at this point in time. Perhaps Todd Phillips would argue that that wasn't his intention, but if so, he did a miserable job. I watched a couple videos of reactions from theater audiences that people recorded and uploaded to YouTube and I was disturbed to hear the crowds cheering during moments that no decent person should have been applauding.

That's not to say that I'm against humanizing bad guys. Some of my favorite fictional characters have been villains, especially when they're given sympathetic backstories. The Joker already had that in the famous Alan Moore comic The Killing Joke; I'm not sure what the point was in giving him a whole new origin. Obviously, Heath Ledger's Joker didn't fall into a vat of chemicals, but it didn't really matter because the core of the character remained pretty true to the comic books. If you changed the names of the characters in this movie and removed the clown motif, it would probably be totally unrecognizable as having anything to do with Batman. How does this guy even end up becoming Batman's nemesis when he's a middle-aged man and Bruce Wayne is still a little kid? By the time Bruce is ready to don the cape and cowl and fight crime, this "Joker" will be a senior citizen.

I wish I could say that my opinion wasn't somewhat influenced by the sort of people this movie has attracted, but I hate to think what it says about a not-insignificant chunk of fandom that they'll fawn all over a movie that deifies a crazed murderer and then go apoplectic over a superhero show set in Gotham where the protagonist is a woman. I'm not even saying that Batwoman is such a great show... though I don't find it worse than any of the other series the CW has put out... but seeing the disproportionate amount of hate that series had gotten since before it even came out suggests that such reactions stem from misogyny/homophobia more than anything else.

I saw a comment on YouTube that said that Joker promoted the idea that humanity is not worth saving by the Justice League or the Avengers. I'm sorry, but that's just not the kind of message I'm looking for in comic book movies.

What sucks is that I quite liked the song "That's Life" and now I can't play it or sing it without someone making the connection to fucking Joker.

Blind

Demi Moore plays a woman who, as a form of court mandated community service, has to read to a blind professor played by Alec Baldwin and of course the two end up falling in love. The script was so bad and hokey, I don't understand how these actors agreed to do it.

Death Takes a Holiday

I've never seen Meet Joe Black, but even if it isn't great, I'm willing to bet that it's quite possibly a rare case in which the remake is an improvement over the original. I don't see how it could be worse. In this movie, in case you don't know, Death temporarily takes on a human form in order to understand why people fear him so much. As one review I read pointed out, Death has got to be incredibly thick if he's gone through the entire existence of the universe without being able to comprehend why someone might fear the probable cessation of their existence.

It's super apparent that this movie is based on a play. Plenty of great movies have been based on plays, but something about the writing and performances here feel extra stagey to me. Frederic March portrays my least favorite depiction of an anthropomorphized death that I've ever seen. His performance brought to mind some kind of sinister vampire. I wasn't alone in thinking that, since a few reviews I saw after watching the movie compared him to Dracula.

There's little plot to speak of. March woos three different women, but they feel more like cyphers than people; they're like the porridge/chairs/beds in Goldilocks; the first two have some specific "flaw," but then the third girl, of course, is "just right." After I was done with this movie, I had to rewatch The Seventh Seal, a far superior film that meditates on life and death.

Space Jam

I never had much interest in seeing Space Jam, which is a little strange since I love the Looney Tunes and I went nuts over the blending of live action and animation in Roger Rabbit a few years earlier. This movie, on the other hand, just seemed kinda stupid. Maybe if had come out when I was younger, I would have been less discriminating. I rather think that this is the kind of movie one needs to have seen as a kid in order to think fondly of it. Funnily enough, though I was bored by the original Space Jam, I actually enjoyed Space Jam: A New Legacy, which seems to be the converse of the majority of filmgoers' opinions, though I think a lot of them are viewing the original through the haze of nostalgia. I'm not saying that Space Jam 2 is a great film, but I personally thought it was an improvement over the first one.

Ginger Snaps

I'm not a big werewolf aficionado, but in my time on Earth, I seem to have seen the majority of the better known werewolf flicks, so as something of a completist, I felt somewhat compelled to check out Ginger Snaps, which gained enough of a cult following to generate a couple sequels. The plot concerns two sisters, Brigitte and Ginger, who share a fascination for the macabre. However, Brigitte learns the hard way that death is no joke when she watches helplessly as Ginger metamorphosizes into a soulless killer after being bitten by an ugly, plastic looking werewolf. I will say that Ginger Snaps probably captures the horror of seeing a loved one transform into a monster better than anything I've seen. Unfortunately, that also makes it one of the most depressing movies that I've seen. And here I was expecting it to be more of a dark comedy. The sequel sounds just as bleak; I actually read the synopsis on Wikipedia so I wouldn't feel the need to watch it.

Happiest Season

Happiest Season got a lot of attention for being the first lesbian themed Christmas movie. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis play a couple, Abby and Harper. Harper impulsively invites Abby home with her for Christmas, then when it's too late to turn back, she reveals that she lied about coming out to her mostly terrible family, so now Abby is forced to pretend to be Harper's straight roommate for the duration. I thought the worst case scenario was that I'd find the movie dull. I didn't anticipate that the primary emotion it would elicit in me would be blind rage.

I learned from quite a few articles that I wasn't alone in thinking that Harper was a horribly toxic girlfriend and that Abby would have been better off dumping her and hooking up with Harper's cool ex, played by Aubrey Plaza. Of course, it's not that kind of movie. Daniel Levy gives a speech near the end about how everyone's coming out story is different, which is as may be, but I don't think it excuses Harper's shitty behavior. Also, the movie could have been funnier. Abby is forced into many awkward situations, a la Meet the Parents (a movie I wasn't crazy about either), and I was too uncomfortable to find much humor in that. I think this was intended for theatrical release, but was then forced to go straight to Hulu due to Covid, which honestly might have been the best thing for it since I doubt it's much of an improvement over the type of holiday fare that Hallmark and Lifetime churn out.

Incidentally, this was only the second thing I'd ever seen Kristen Stewart in after Panic Room. She's good; I just wish the movie had been better/funnier/less infuriating.

To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar

To Wong Foo is like the poor man's Priscilla Queen of the Desert and I didn't even really care for Priscilla Queen of the Desert that much. The tone is wildly uneven in To Wong Foo. On the one hand, it feels like it wants to be this broad comedy in which we're supposed to buy that a group of obvious drag queens could be mistaken for cis women (not unlike Some Like it Hot), but there are also uncomfortable scenes of domestic abuse and near rape. I think Patrick Swayze is pretty convincing as a drag queen, however.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

Ray Harryhausen's last film and definitely not one of his best. I was genuinely surprised when I realized that this movie came out in 1981 rather than a decade earlier. I mean, when you compare it to other special effects-heavy movies from around the same time, like The Empire Strikes Back from a year before or Blade Runner which came out a year afterwards, Clash of the Titans looks especially crappy and old fashioned, and I'm saying this as someone with a real fondness for stop motion. The movie just doesn't really work for me, even as a nostalgic throwback. With the exception of the scene with Medusa, I found the film to be inferior to Harryhausen's more memorable films from earlier in his career.

Welcome to Me

Kristen Wiig plays a woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and uses the money to buy airtime on a struggling TV station. I've seen some reviews from people saying that this is an inaccurate portrayal of BPD and others saying that it's relatable. I don't know anything about BPD myself, so I can't say who is right. All I know is that I wasn't very entertained.