The Night Manager is a rather slow but still thrilling spy series starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. It also introduced me to the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki. Weirdly, some ten years after the first season, a second one has dropped. I haven’t seen it but I quite liked the first one. I’m thinking I need to rewatch it before diving into the second one. You can read my review of Season One over at Cinema Sentries.
Not to be confused with the Sam Raimi film of the same name, this The Quick and the Dead stars Sam Elliott, Kate Capshaw, and Tom Conti and was based on a book by Louis Lamour. I haven’t seen the Raimi film, but I’d bet my ten-gallon hat it is a lot better than this nonsense.
In the Wild West, Duncan McKaskel (Tom Conti), his wife Susanna (Kate Capshaw), and their 12-year-old son Tom (Kenny Morrison) are traveling to Bighorn, Montana, where Susanna’s brother is camped with Custard. The rest of the wagon train were stricken with consumption.
They come across an old, worn-down town and ask a man named Doc Shabbitt (Matt Clark) for help. He says they can stay in an abandoned house for the night, but Duncan decides Shabbitt’s gang looks a little too shabby, and they decide to move along.
That night Shabbitt’s men steal two horses from our heroes. And then comes Con Vallian (Sam Shepherd). He’s half Native American and a full-blooded badass. He’s also the kind of guy who likes looking at Susanna and saying things like “Your wife sure is a handsome woman.” And then says it again. And again. Seriously, half his dialogue is saying inappropriate things to her. It is all kinds of creepy, and he’s the hero of this film.
Anyway, Vallian tells Duncan about the stolen horses and how Shabbit took them. He also says if he doesn’t do something about it, then Shabbitt’s men will think them weak and will keep coming back for more stuff and his woman. Vallian says he’ll take care of it, but Duncan says, “No” it is his battle to fight. Vallian says “ok” and you get the feeling he wouldn’t mind if Duncan got killed so he could have some good times with that “handsome woman.”
Duncan goes to the men and demands his horses back and nearly gets killed for it. Luckily, Vallian came in behind him and saves the day. When they return to camp, the boy hails Vallian as a hero and she starts looking at Vallian like maybe he’s a handsome man.
The rest of the film is like this. Shabbitt or his men will attack, and Vallian will defeat them. Tom wishes his dad was more like Vallian, and Susanna finds herself taking waterfall showers within Vallian’s view.
What pissed me off about all of this is that Duncan is a good man. He’s smart and fair, and he doesn’t lack for courage. He goes after Shabbitt just as much as Vallian, and he’s not afraid to look Vallian in the face and tell him to stop saying such things about his wife. He isn’t as tough or masculine as Vallian or as good with a gun. But he still deserves respect. And he isn’t getting it from his wife, his son, or even the film.
Now I will say that Tom does sometimes say to Vallian that his dad is tough. That he fought bravely in the war. And other than one good kiss, Susanna doesn’t give in to her temptation. But it is still a weird and rather lousy way the film frames Vallian as a hero. This is a TV movie so thing do work out in the end, and if they hadn’t I would have thrown my boots at the TV.
The action is rather dull. Shabbit and his men aren’t particularly interesting or threatening, and the rest of the film never really goes anywhere. There is a romanticism to the Old West that I suspect comes from Louis Lamour’s book, but I sure hope he treats his characters better.
Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to go watch the Sam Raimi film in hopes it will help me forget this mess.
Once again we’ve run into a film that I had forgotten I watched. I pretty much request to review anything that is offered from the Criterion Collection because they are always good, or if not good, at least interesting. Seeing this title, I instantly remembered I had seen it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Reading my review makes me want to watch it again.
The story is about a Japanese kid who wants to be an actor but isn’t very good at it. He has to make many a sacrifice to hone his craft, as does his lover. The film dives into what it takes to make great art and if the sacrifice is worth it. You can read all my thoughts here.
Edward Snowden was a former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of documents proving the USA government was spying on its citizens. He was a complicated dude and not completely aboveboard, as one can assume since he’s become a Russian citizen, but also a hero for leaking those documents and letting us know what our government has been up to. This was all back in 2013, and considering everything else that has happened in this country since then, it all seems a little like “nothing much” which is a crazy thought in and of itself.
But I don’t like to talk about politics in these pages, and I’ll leave it at that. Of course Oliver Stone made a movie about Snowden, and I got to see it on the big screen back then. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
There have been a million adaptations of Agatha Christie stories. This French television did something original with it. They essentially removed Christie’s detectives (Poirot, Miss Marple, etc.) and inserted two original characters while keeping the plots.
I reviewed this back in 2016 and haven’t watched it since, but I’m thinking it is time for a rewatch. You can read my full review here.
The thing about watching a lot of movies is that I can’t always remember all the details of every film. Or any of the details. Or whether I’ve even seen the film. The thing about writing lots of movie reviews is that when I forget about a movie, I can go back and read my reviews to jog my memory.
So it was with DeadEnd Drive-In. I probably would have recalled seeing this if you had asked me about it, but I wouldn’t have any idea what it was about. But reading this old review makes me want to watch it again.
You can read it over at Cinema Sentries. And yes, this is me once again going through these old reviews and posting them here.
Somewhere in Time is a film I’ve always felt like people loved. I thought it was a revered minor classic. I watched it many years ago and was a little disappointed in it, but when I got the opportunity to review this new UHD release from Kino Lorber, I figured it was time to give it another try.
Furthermore, I was still disappointed in it. Apprently, I was wrong thinking everybody else loved it because all my Letterboxd followers feel the same as me and all the reviews I’ve read find it to be mostly average.
Christopher Reeve becomes obsessed with an old painting of Jane Seymour and finds a way to travel back in time to meet her.
Reeve and Seymour look beautiful, and the idea of the story is interesting, but I never really bought into the romance. And the film didn’t seem all that interested in the time travel aspects.
You can read all of my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.
For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel.
Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten.
If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.
Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.
They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late. Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.
One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.
To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.
The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it. It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf.
The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.
Hello, and welcome to another addition of Five Cool Things. I did good this time as I’m posting this just one day after it hit Cinema Sentires. This time I’m talking about Kagemusha, Port of Shadows, Five Star Final, Face/Off and a new movie trailer. Come on over to Cinema Sentries to read all about it.
In my first post of this series, I talked about the very first cassette tape I owned. This time I’m going to talk about the very first CD I bought.
The truth is I don’t really remember any other cassette tapes that I owned before I got a CD player. I’m sure there were some. I remember owning some kind of compilation album that had lots of 1950s-era hits on it – artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. I think I had the Stand By Me soundtrack and maybe cassette singles from Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.
Things get muddled a bit because even after I owned a CD player for my home stereo, I still had a cassette player in my car. Sometimes I’d record my CDs to cassette for listening in the car, and I often bought used cassettes at the local head shop. My memory of which tapes I bought before I owned a CD player and which tapes I bought just for the car gets muddled.
I just looked it up, and there were only five years between when Europe’s Final Countdown (my first cassette tape) came out and Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (my first CD). That’s not a huge period of time for me to have built up a big cassette collection, especially since I was fairly young during that time period.
Not that any of that matters; it’s just the way my brain works. I had intended for this series to be more or less chronological, and the fact that I can’t think of another cassette tape I bought before CDs came along bugs me.
I have a very specific memory of being in a Wal-Mart with my mother and my older brother Neal. He was trying to convince Mom that he needed a CD player. These were fairly new at the time, and he was excitedly extolling the virtues of this new technology. About how the sound quality was so much better, about how they lasted longer, and most importantly, you didn’t have to fast forward and rewind a CD, you could just press skip.
Mom wasn’t having it. She’d been through vinyl albums, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes. She didn’t want to have to buy all her old albums on yet another format. She argued that in a few years some new technology would come along and he’d have to buy everything once again. Cassette tapes were good enough.
My brother saved up and bought himself a five-disc CD changer. Some time after that, he joined the Navy and moved away, leaving his CD changer behind. I can’t remember if he actually gave it to me, or if I just started using it after he left. But I was so excited by it.
Truth be told, I can’t remember if For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the first CD I bought. It might have been U2’s Achtung Baby or Queensrÿche’s Empire. But whatever, the Van Halen disc was an early purchase. I thought the 5-Disc changer was awesome. I remember putting the first couple of CDs in it and wondering what I’d do when I got a sixth one. Then I’d have to decide which discs stayed in and which one had to wait. This was a big deal to me at the time.
Honestly, I was never a huge Van Halen fan. I absolutely loved “Jump” and enjoyed songs like “Hot For Teacher” and “Runnin’ With the Devil” but I’d never bought one of their albums and didn’t follow them in any way.
I bought the album primarily because I loved the song “Right Now” and I loved that song primarily because of the video. It is weird to think about how much time I spent watching MTV back then.
The video channel is gone now, but it was a long running joke to say that you remembered when Music Television actually played music. Like so many channels, they drifted in later years to mostly airing reality TV.
But the truth is, they played non-music-related stuff relatively early in their history. I remember a comedy show with Julie Brown, the game show Remote Control, and of course The Real World, which essentially launched the reality boom we are still living in today.
But they did play a lot of music videos, and I watched those all the time. Every day I watched their Top 10 countdown, but I’d also sit and just watch random videos whenever there was nothing else on to watch. Music videos were awesome. Not only did you get the great music, but they often did interesting visuals to match. I know people like Taylor Swift are still doing interesting videos for YouTube or whatever, but the late 1980s/early 1990s feel like the heyday of great music videos. Or maybe that’s just when I watched them.
Anyway, “Right Now” had a great video. They used big block letters running across the screen to discuss various social and political issues from the time. They’d say things like “Right Now No One Is Safe From Loneliness” and “Right Now Our Government Is Doing Things We Think Only Other Countries Do.” Behind the words were visuals that brought home those messages.
Watching it now, I find most of the messaging fairly simplistic, but at the time I thought it was amazing. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw it, so political messaging in a music video felt revolutionary. It touched on things I was thinking about. It. made me feel like Van Halen really understood me.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the album. I think I liked it, but didn’t love it. I certainly didn’t listen to it like I listened to Achtung Baby or Empire. At a guess, I’d say it was the first album that got taken out of the disc changer when I bought my sixth CD. Though I’d certainly pop it back in every now and again.
It is an album I haven’t listened to in a very long time. Listening to it now, I find it to be just okay. I still love “Right Now.” “Poundcake” is pretty good, and I like “Runaround” quite a bit. The rest of it is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.
Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant technical guitar player, but I’ve never really connected to him. I don’t want to say he lacked soul, but I don’t tend to connect to music that relies on technical prowess without having something deeper and more meaningful inside. It doesn’t help that a lot of Van Halen’s music focuses on frat boy antics and base sexuality.
But I don’t want to argue about that. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand all the technical stuff. I just like what I like. I connect to what moves me, and I don’t know how to explain it. But I also have no problem with those who connect to things I don’t like.
In the end, this is not an album I’ll probably ever listen to again. I didn’t add any of those songs to my playlists. Except for “Right Now” that song still rocks.
themidnightcafe.org 