Movies

Commune (2005) A Donna movie. Documentary about the archetypal hippie commune, Black Bear Ranch. I dislike hippies and all they stand for except female nudity. If you need to see a movie about this sort of thing this is probably as good as any. As a lover of solitude and order, I found it kind of horrible. 6/10

Recent Viewing

The Egg and I (1947), Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), Ma and Pa Kettle Go To Town (1950) We both read The Egg and I a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it - it's full of fun and crazy stuff, and lots of amazing food stories. We both still recommend the book. The movie was, apart from a few high points, rather contrived and ultimately disappointing - the earthiness of the original couldn't possibly be conveyed onscreen at that time. The spinoff, also known as The Further Adventures of etc., was even more contrived and tiring. Strangely, the third movie was a lot funnier and more enjoyable even though they spend most of it in New York. If you have to see any of them, see that one.

Movies

Big Man Japan (2009) Depicts the pathetic life of an inept and cowardly superhero, the last and least of an illustrious line, who is enlarged by electricity to combat the few rare monsters that still occasionally plague Japan. The deliberately slow pace can be tiring, but there are moments of jaw-dropping and exorbitant weirdness. Extremely well presented, and unique. 9/10

Movies

The General Died At Dawn (1936) Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll in a muddle of oriental intrigue. Odd, uneven, with some directorial and editorial choices that made me exclaim in puzzlement. Akim Tamiroff is wasted in a faux-asian role, William Frawley is thrown away as a reprehensible unappealing boozer, but Philip Ahn is convincingly reptilian and threatening. Really not worth it. 4/10

Recent Viewing

Peter Ibbetson (1935) Gary Cooper stars in what starts off as a kind of schlocky costume romance of long-lost love, which suddenly turns convincingly romantic and then takes a strange turn into weird mysticism when the permanently separated lovers reunite in shared lucid dreams. Ended up being far stranger than I ever imagined, and thus far more satisfying. Cooper seems uncomfortable in costume until he is chained and paralyzed in a prison cell and Donald Meek should not have tried to do that accent. 7/10

The Great Moment (1944) Watched with Donna on the recommendation of one of her friends. Preston Sturges oddity, ostensibly depicting the discovery of anesthesia. Joel McCrea does not end up a mad slasher like Karloff did in his film on the same subject, and this one similarly embroiders upon the historical fact of the matter. Able support from Sturges regular William Demarest, and universal favorite Franklin Pangborn sports remarkable facial hair. Maybe a little more eccentric than it really needed to be. Something about Sturges does not connect with me. Unique, and mostly interesting. 6/10

Sleep Dealer (2008) Mexican cyberpunk? Yes, and one of the few genuinely intelligent and well-made Science Fiction movies I have seen in recent years. Takes the migrant worker phenomenon into the near future where people with bootleg neural nodes go to labor factories and plug in to operate work robots somewhere else in the world, or upload their memories to a youtube-like website which offers them up for sale. Actually has enough ideas in it for a full movie, rather than becoming an extended chase scene half-way through. The situations are complex and compelling, the characters are appealing, and the details are handled with brains and wit. Highly recommended. 10/10

Movies

Donovan's Brain (1953) Watched on TV with Donna. The daddy of all "brain in a tank" movies. Considering the premise - a disembodied brain telepathically controlling a man at a distance - it's intelligently written and quite entertaining. Nancy Davis is remarkably unappealing, but her role was not very demanding. It was fun to see a monster movie in which the monster is a capitalist. 7/10

Movies

The other night: Design For Living (1933) Noel Coward, Ben Hecht and Ernst Lubitsch poured into one big shaker and decanted as a scintillating cocktail that should have brought on screen censorship that very moment. Gary Cooper has youthful charm, Frederick March is a genuine actor, and Miriam Hopkins is a lambent flame. Bright, witty, charming, sexy. World's sexiest wedding gown. I didn't mind that Franklin Pangborn only had two lines once I saw Hopkins in her final skin-tight glittering gown which surpasses mere lingerie for its spectacular toothsomeness. Edward Everett Horton provides comedy input throughout. A big big 10/10!

Movies

Haunted Office (2002) Three directors create three interlocking ghost stories about the least frightening place on earth - a Hong Kong office building. One story is visceral, one humorous, and one conceptual that ties them all together, each is effective and entertaining. There seems to be a Chinese cultural aptitude for the ghost story and they do it well. 8/10

Movies

Santo y Blue Demon en el mundo de los muertos (1970) Starts right off with a woman being chained up and whipped, half a dozen guys being burned at the stake, and a Black Mass. Blue Demon is summoned in a puff of smoke as an emissary from the Prince of Darkness, and Santo is a sword-fighting caballero with lace collar and cuffs. Then it's 300 years later and the satanic witch returns to possess Santo's girlfriend. Plenty of head-scratching features - when Santo is thrown out the window of his bachelor pad by the gray-faced burned-at-the-stake guys who have crawled up out of their graves, it seems to be located in a cheap looking Old West Town. Santo is stabbed in the chest at the end of a match with a dagger protruding from his bloody chest - he is rushed to the hospital and a couple of minutes of actual open-heart surgery footage is inserted, and with no recovery time at all he is right back fighting the gray-faces again. The finale, in which he descends somehow to the realm of shadows to rescue his girlfriend's soul, is a great example of what can be accomplished with a red filter and clips from more expensive movies. A real muddle and almost entertaining at times. More fun to write about than to watch. 4/10

The Arrival II, a.k.a. The Second Arrival (1998) Included on the disc with The Arrival, ostensibly a sequel but really just a cheap knock-off direct-to-video looking thing made in the hope that some dope like me would think because they liked the first movie they might like the second one maybe half as much but they would be WRONG. It was so crummy looking and boring in the first five minutes I decided I would just give it 20 minutes and see if maybe there were some crappy CG effects or something. In that time there was a Completely Naked Woman, okay but not great, but mostly just people walking or driving or looking at something while ominous music implied that something would eventually happen. After the time was up I skipped ahead to see if anything ever did happen but mostly it was more of the same only they were driving faster and running and hiding. The writer, director, and producer probably aren't sensitive enough to be as ashamed of this lame-ass piece of crap as they ought to be. Interesting to see how amazingly lousy it was. 0/10

Cruel Gun Story (1964) Finally something worth seeing. Jo Shishido is recruited to pull an armored car heist - he just wants to pay for an operation for his kid sister but everyone else wants to betray everyone else. An amazing amount of guys being smacked around, shooting and mayhem, including throwing dynamite down a man-hole, though the guy at the bottom doesn't look all that blown up later. A heist always goes bad but Murphy's Law for gangsters comes into play here and at one point I said, "NOW what could go wrong??" and then it did. From the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir series. I hope they eventually make some of the ghost and horror movies from that period available. 7/10

Movies

The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave (2000) Humor is when somebody gets hit with something and the bigger the thing they get hit with the funnier it is. Seen on broadcast TV. 2/10

The Arrival (1996) Charlie Sheen is the only one who knows the aliens are attacking. Mindless fun in a classic vein. 6/10

We're Not Dressing (1934) Bing Crosby is a deckhand on Carole Lombard's yacht. When it is sunk by drunken Leon Errol, they land on a desert island (occupied only by Burns and Allen) and Bing proves the superiority of the skilled laborer over the idle rich. With Ethel Merman and Raymond Milland, back when the world was young and they were beautiful. A determined effort to be as trivial as possible, with not enough rest between Bing's songs. 5/10

Movies

Santo en el museo de cera (1963) Santo, masked wrestler and scientific crime fighter, prevents a mad scientist, proprietor of a wax museum and creator of deformed monstrosities, from carrying out his plan to transform a beautiful captive into a leopard woman. There is a large bubbling vat and an exposed electrical panel, both of which invariably lead to disaster. In Spanish so some of the subtleties were lost on me. Nice old time b/w studio sets. 5/10

Death Note II: The Last Name (2006) Second and final live action adaptation of the Death Note manga. Death gods give humans a notebook that allows them to kill anyone just by writing down their names. Sort of a horror/cop melodrama, examining notions of personal responsibility and vigilante justice. A bit long, but quite as adequate as the original in re-creating the manga. Probably of little interest to anyone reading this. 7/10