Criterion is having a 50% off flash sale as I write this. I had some discounts for their site due to me being a member of the Criterion Channel. I just picked up a 4K UHD copy of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for $5.
That’s not the reason it is this week’s pick, but it’s still pretty cool. You can read all about why I picked it and what else is coming out today over at Cinema Sentries. You can read my review of the film right here.
On the old music site, I used to periodically do a Shows in History post where I’d link to all the shows that had taken place on today’s date throughout history. It was a fun way to highlight a bunch of different shows, and I always enjoyed seeing the wide variety of acts one could potentially have caught on a particular day.
Though I no longer post download links to shows, I still think that idea is a fun one.
I am going to try and actually listen to one of the shows that was performed on today’s date (whatever date that is) and maybe give a short review of it or some random thoughts. I know that won’t happen every day, as some days are weird, and busy, and I won’t have time to sit and listen to a full show.
Knowing me, this will be the only time I do this at all.
Today’s show is from the Grateful Dead back in 1986. That’s no one’s favorite year for the Dead. It is the infamous year that Garcia’s addictions/poor health put him in a diabetic coma in July.
But while this is certainly not Peak Grateful Dead nor the best that Jerry ever did, this is a pretty darn good show. The big news here is they played “Box of Rain” something they hadn’t regularly done in over a decade and a half. They’d played it a few nights before in Hampton, which was the first time they’d busted it out in some seventeen years. So it wasn’t a complete surprise when Phil started singing it this night, but you can hear the crowd roar in exultant joy.
The first set is well played but not spectacular. The second set features a very nice “Lost Sailor>Saint of Circumstance” with Bob doing a weird little rap in the transition about freedom. Weirdly, the set ends with just one song being played after the “Drums/Space” combo, but it’s a very nice version of “Morning Dew.” It all ends with a quick little “In the Midnight Hour” for the encore.
So yeah, not the greatest of shows, but still a very good one. If you’ve written off 1986 entirely, I’d give this one a go (and you can do just that over at the Archive)
Here’s the full setlist:
Grateful Dead
3/24/86
The Spectrum
Philadelphia, PA
–Set 1–
Alabama Getaway ->
Greatest Story Ever Told
Dire Wolf
Little Red Rooster
Brown Eyed Women
My Brother Esau
Ramble on Rose
El Paso
Box of Rain
–Set 2–
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo ->
Man Smart (Women Are Smarter)
High Time
Lost Sailor ->
Saint of Circumstance ->
Drums ->
Space ->
Morning Dew
–Encore–
In the Midnight Hour
Other shows that took place on this day:
Jackson Browne – Osaka, Japan (03/24/77)
Led Zeppelin – Los Angeles, CA (03/24/75)
Bruce Hornsby – Daytona Beach, FL (03/24/87)
Bela Fleck – Dublin, Ireland (02/03/24)
Queen – Himeji, Japan (03/24/76)
Eric Clapton – Charlotte, NC (03/24/78)
Steve Earle – Dallas, TX (03/24/89)
Those links just go to show information; there is nothing to download. I feel a little guilty that I spent some fifteen years providing you all with thousands of shows to download and then just one day stopped and transitioned to talking about movies.
Maybe someday I’ll go back to sharing shows, but that won’t ever be on this site. But I still want to talk about music more. That seems only fair. One idea I have is to do regular show reviews. And maybe provide lots of information about the different shows – setlists, artwork, various reviews, etc. That’s a lot of work, and I get so involved with my movie stuff that I forget to do that sort of thing. So this is like a step in that direction. I hope you like it. If you do, please leave me a comment.
Jean Gabin played Maigret, the great Parisian detective from Belgian writer Georges Simenon, three times. This was his final attempt. It is the worst film of the three, but it’s still pretty good if you like Gabin or detective stories. You can read my full review here.
I find that while I absolutely love the way John Woo shoots action scenes, I tend to find his drama and especially his comedy a bit too goofy for my tastes. Once a Thief leans heavily into the comedy, and I was mostly bored. But there are a few good action scenes, and the finale is absolutely brilliant. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
A Bridge Too Far is an epic, star-studded war movie about the failed Operation Market Garden, where the Allies tried to secure a single road and several bridges across the Netherlands right to the German border. It is pretty good, but also a bit too long and somewhat confusing.
Kino Lorber just released a 4K UHD disc, and I’ve got your review.
In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower.
From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.
Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.
With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.
That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.
It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival.
Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.
Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.
One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse.
Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again. It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another.
It is a film best left with your brain checked out. Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks. Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.
But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.
We’re big fans of cozy British mysteries in my house. We watched a couple of episodes of the first season of Shakespeare and Hathaway a while back. It was charming, but we got distracted and didn’t return to it.
There was a bit of a thing that happened over at Cinema Sentries, and the person who was supposed to watch this DVD set of Season Five was unable to, so I decided I’d pitch in and help out.
There was no need to prep myself on all the episodes I missed; this isn’t that kind of series. It is about a couple of detectives who like to dress up and solve murders. It is very light and very silly and you can read my full review here.
Whenever I write these posts, I tend to think about my pick in two ways. First, if I had unlimited funds, which new release would I buy? And second, which film am I really interested in watching, that I haven’t seen? Normally, that first part trumps everything. This is a series about physical releases after all, so my pick should be about which physical release looks the coolest.
But sometimes there isn’t anything coming out that looks all that interesting in terms of its packaging or extras, and I move to that second tier. If I can’t pick something that thrills me with its packaging, then I can at least pick something I really want to see.
Once in a blue moon I have to go to a third tier. When there aren’t any special releases and none of the movies are calling out to me as something I have to watch, I just kind of pick something and hope for the best.
It is in these moments I tend to think about what might bring the most readership. What is the most popular thing coming out that might get folks to read my thoughts?
Which brings us to this week’s pick.
The Housemaid is a film that keeps showing up in my feeds. It stars Sydney Sweeney, who I’ve quite liked as an actress in the few films I’ve seen her in, but who has become rather controversial of late, and Amanda Seyfried, who was beloved for many years until her personal life imploded. She’s made a bit of a comeback of late.
Anyway, Sweeney plays a woman down on her luck who gets a gig as a housemaid for Amanda Seyfried’s character. But as these things turn out, Seyfried and her husband have a past, and things get dark and scary and other stuff. It was directed by Paul Feig, so I’m guessing things don’t get that dark. I’ve heard mostly good things about it, especially Seyfried’s performance, and this week that is enough to make it my pick.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
The Big Risk: Criterion brings us this French thriller. It stars the always great Lino Ventura as a man who’s been hiding out in Milan for the better part of a decade, but decides to bring his family back to Paris despite the fact that he has a death sentence hanging over him. He is accompanied by his appointed guardian (the always great Jean Paul Belmondo.) I’d never heard of this film before, but that sounds great.
Mimic: Kino Lorber is bringing this rather silly, bug-infested horror movie from Guillermo Del Toro (you can read my review of the film here.)
Anaconda: Sometimes Hollywood’s obsession with remakes and the like gets really silly. Anaconda (1997) was an unintentionally hilarious action/horror film starring Ice Cube and a giant, CGI snake. It was the kind of film people loved to hate on. Or that the MST3K guys could have a ball with. They remade it last year with Jack Black and Paul Rudd, but this time they are in on the joke. Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but the reviews have been bad.
Zodiac Killer Project: Charlie Shackleton was trying to make a documentary on the infamous Zodiac Killer, but the project fell through way before it was completed. But being a big fan of true crime shows, he decided to point his camera inward and make a film about true crime and how that genre bends our perception and why we are all obsessed with serial killers.
Is This Thing On: Bradley Cooper directs Will Arnett as a stand-up comic having to come to terms with how his life is falling apart.
Dead Again: Kenneth Branagh directed this film and stars as a private detective who meets an amnesiac woman (Emma Thompson) whose life intersected with his in a previous incarnation. You can read my review here.
We Bury the Dead: Daisy Ridley stars in this drama about a woman looking for her husband after a terrible military incident, but as she looks for his body amongst many other thousands, she finds that some of them seem to be coming back to life.
Good Boy: This horror film takes the dog’s point of view as his master is overcome by supernatural forces. You can read my review here.
The Boy and the Beast: Japanese animated film about a boy who enters a world of strange beasts.
Testament: Criterion presents this drama about the life of a family after a nuclear attack.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a big, bold movie that takes a lot of big swings. It didn’t always work for me, and it is a lot, I mean a lot, to take in, but what did work was amazing, and I’m so glad films like this still exist.
In the original novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus the creature longs for a mate, a companion, someone he can spend time with and who will not be repulsed by him. Victor Frnkenstein begins creating a female creature but destroys it before he brings her life.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935), James Whale’s sequel to his classic adaptation of the story, ponders what would happen if his monster did get a companion. It doesn’t end well. The bride only shows up at the end of the film, and her screen time (played to perfection by Elsa Lanchester) is only a few minutes.
The Bride! lets her live and gives her a modernity not found in any adaptation of the story that I’ve seen. It begins with the book’s author herself, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), dead and stuck in some sort of purgatory. She decries that she had more of the Frankenstein story to tell, but death robbed her of it. So she does what dead authors often do: she possesses the body of a 1920s gangster moll, Ida (also played by Jessie Buckley).
Buckley’s performance here (and everywhere) is magnificent. As Shelley possesses her, she swings from Ida – brashy with plenty of New York accent and attitude—to Shelly – reserved British accoutrements, but full of anger and resentment. At first she struggles with keeping her thoughts and voice under control. She repeats words and phrases and winds up spilling the beans on the mob boss. This last bit gets her thrown down a flight of stairs to her death.
Enter Frankenstein (Christian Bale). Yes, technically he’s Frankenstein’s monster, as Frankenstein was the mad scientist. The film acknowledges this but still allows the monster to call himself Frank anyway. He finds Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning), who has been working on the reanimating of dead flesh. He tells her he wants a companion. They dig up Ida and reanimate her.
The process leave her with blood stains across her face and her hair strays straight up in a way that makes her look vaguely like the Bride in James Whale’s film.
Frank is obsessed with an actor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), and he takes Ida to see all his movies. After watching one of them, they go to a vaguely queer underground party that feels like it belongs in the 1970s or ’80s, something from Studio 54 perhaps, not 1920s New York City. Or perhaps not. What do I know about underground parties in the 1920s? I know very little about regular parties of today. I’m such a homebody.
They dance wildly, and it is in these moments that I enjoyed it most. The early parts of the film have this wonderful energy about them. They feel joyous and electric. Later the film will get bogged down in its plot and its deeper meaning, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
After the dance, Ida is assaulted by some dudes. Frank intervenes, brutally killing them. This brings police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) onto the case, and with him, his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). She’s really the brains of the outfit (and yes, her name is awfully close to Myrna Loy, the classic film actress, and that surely isn’t a coincidence. This film is stuffed to the gills with those kinds of things.)
Myrna is the real brains of the operation, but she can’t be a detective because she’s a lady. The film will use this to make several nods to sexism and the like, which mostly didn’t work for me. I’m pro-feminism and equal rights, but the film doesn’t really dig deeply into that angle. Instead it just sort of nods to it, and expects us to cheer when she does make detective, gets sneered at by a bunch of redneck cops, and still saves the day. It is one of many thematic strands that don’t get much attention. The film is trying to do so much, and it just doesn’t have the time to give some of them the time they need.
Frank and Ida are now on the lam, crisscrossing the country, going wherever one of those movies is playing. When watching one of those films, Frank often imagines himself and Ida on the screen doing those dances, singing those songs.
Bonnie and Clyde is the clear influence on this film, but it also references things as diverse as Wild at Heart, classic song and dance movies like Top Hat, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Thelma and Louise, Metropolis, and so much more. Gyllenhaal clearly has a lot on her mind, and she’s trying to do it all in this film. Amazingly, most of it works. And even when it doesn’t, I admire the ambition.
It does start to run out of steam toward the end. I had a lot more fun watching these two run around the country getting into trouble while pursued by the cops than I did watching them try and figure out who they are and what it means to be alive.
I suspect this will be a film that will grow on me in time. Further viewings will allow me to take more of it in and enjoy it. But until then I can say I loved how big it swung and how hard it tried.
120 Minutes first aired on MTV on March 10, 1986. My social media feed was full of remembrances on this 40th anniversary, and I meant to say something myself. Then I got distracted and forgot. But those thoughts are still in my head, so I thought I’d get them out anyway.
I was born in the late 1970s, was raised in the 1980s, and came of age in the early 1990s. I grew up listening to hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Bon Jovi, but I also dug pop stars like Tiffany, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.
I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma; I didn’t have access to truly alternative bands. My brother was a lot cooler than me, and he turned me on to bands like R.E.M. and The Cure, but even then it was just their bigger songs.
Then Nirvana broke. That changed everything. Suddenly alternative was popular. I can’t remember now if I had watched 120 Minutes before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released or after. I probably knew about it before then because I was an MTV junkie, but I don’t think I tuned in every week.
But at some point it became a fixture in my life. Again, I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma. I had very few outlets for discovering alternative music. The local radio stations certainly didn’t play anything but popular music.
I subscribed to Spin magazine and Alternative Press, and they were great at tuning me into new music, but that was only print; they didn’t give me any ways to actually listen. Sometimes I’d go to a Tulsa record shop and buy one of the records those magazines raved about, but I wasn’t rich, and that was taking an awful chance. There is nothing worse than spending your hard-earned money on a record and finding you don’t like it.
Discovering 120 Minutes was like discovering the Holy Grail. Suddenly, every week amazing alternative music was being beamed into my living room. I could now listen to (and watch the cool videos) music I previously would have never been able to hear. It was amazing.
Alternative music became more and more popular. One of the Tulsa radio stations became “The Edge” and played alternative tunes. MTV created a nightly show called Alternative Nation. Record shops in the malls even had an alternative section right next to rock and roll and heavy metal.
But nothing ever beat 120 Minutes for me. It felt more real than all that other stuff. The Edge, Alternative Nation, and everything felt like they were hitching themselves to a bandwagon. 120 Minutes was there before alternative became cool. You could tell the VJs really got the music and loved it. I loved it too.
themidnightcafe.org 