YAKETY SATAN

It just had to be done.

Movies

Donna and I both enjoyed Scott Prendergast's short film The Delicious so much when we saw it a while back, we thought we would try his feature film Kabluey (2007) for Family Movie Night. Luckily I had a backup ready because after a seeming eternity of SCREAMING HORRIBLE CHILDREN scenes we just couldn't take any more and will never get to see whether it is really any good or not. The backup was Caveman (1981), which I wasn't able to easily obtain when we were going through caveman movies a couple of years ago. The animated dinosaurs are the real stars of this not entirely funny comedy, but at least nobody was SHRIEKING continuously in it. 5/10

Addendum: Donna says she is going to try to watch the rest of Kabluey, after reading more about it online. I have wished her luck.

I got back to work after that and watched Beast of the City (1932), a hard-edged prohibition drama. Walter Huston is the police chief dedicated to cleaning up his gangster-infested town. A clear backlash against the gangster movies of the day, and it doesn't pull any punches. The Hollywood Ending was not mandatory at that time and it gets pretty rough at the end. Includes Jean Harlow as a scheming gun moll and Mickey Rooney, a tiny speck of a kid. 7/10

Movies

The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) A Quirky Independent Film (QIF). I ordered this from the library because I saw a review that said it embodied everything that's wrong with Indy Film. I'd go even farther and say that it is the standard by which all QIFs should be judged. It has more quirk in the first five minutes than most other films have in their whole runtime. Doofy looking goobers with bad haircuts who dress funny and stand, squinting. An Eccentric Vehicle. An inexplicably multi-ethnic family. Hyperactive and/or deranged secondary characters. Voice-over by a child. 1970s furniture. Abrupt insertion of a plaintive duet. Incident and oddity instead of story and character. I admit I quit after half of it had wandered aimlessly by, because it really didn't matter whether I finished watching it or not. Comes in a two disc set, the second being short films by the filmmaker, and by people in the movie who were either into filmmaking before, or got into filmmaking after being in this movie. I didn't watch any of them, or read the booklet either. 10/10 but not in a good way, just because it is the absolute ideal of its kind.

Oh look. Trading Cards.