Sci-Fi in July

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After a month without a theme, I wanted to come in strong. Science Fiction isn’t a genre that I love. Or maybe I should say it is a genre I don’t watch all that often. I love many science fiction films – from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Alien, Jurassic Park to Mad Max Fury Road. But again it isn’t a genre I necessarily turn to regularly.

So, I thought it would be fun to watch some this month (and I just love me some rhyming monthly movie themes).

Sci-fi is a genre that’s hard to define. In a pinch, I’d say it takes place sometime in the future and deals with technology and ideas that we’ve not yet thought of. But that just scratches the surface. The genre often blends with fantasy. What’s that old line about technology becoming so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic? And stories set on alien planets with alien life are not so different from magical creates in fantasy stories.

Looking at the sci-fi genre on Letterboxd turns up all the Marvel movies and Star Wars and where do you draw that line?

I don’t know. Don’t really care. I’m gonna watch films I think fall into the science fiction category and we’ll leave it at that.

I think this is going to be fun.

The Movie Journal: June 2024

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I watched 43 movies in the month of June. 35 of them had never been seen by me before. 20 of them were made before I was born. Eight of them were made in the last two years, which is an unusually high number for me.

There was no theme this month which is nice sometimes. I just watched what I wanted to watch. Although it did mean I hardly did any reviewing this month as I really need that theme to push me into it.

As we are six months into the year I’ll talk a little bit about how my year is going. I’ve watched 238 movies this year. That’s an average of 34 per month or 9.1 per week. Unsurprisingly, I watch most of my movies on the weekend.

Drama is my most watched genre with 97 films watched in that category. This is followed by Thriller (97 films), Crime (71 films), Horror (60 films), and Mystery (57 films).

English is my most watched language with 202 films being in that language. This is followed by Italian (11), Japanese (10), French (5), and Silent Films (3).

187 of the films I’ve watched were new to me, leaving 51 of them as rewatches. I try to keep my new watch-to-rewatch ratio at 75% and I’m at 78.6%.

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As you can see the actors field has stayed more or less the same. The Doctor Who cast bumped up one (save for Carole Ann Ford who left the series at this point) and Barbara Stanwyck made the list with four films watched.

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Terence Fisher joined the directorial ranks with two films (two Hammer Horrors) and Lucio Fulci jumped in as well with two.

Several months ago I posted one of these things to my Facebook account and a friend of mine noted how these fields are full of white dudes, with hardly a female or person of color to be found.

That hit hard as I know it to be true. There are excuses I could make like how Hollywood is run by white dudes. But I have been making an effort to watch films directed by women and people of color and to seek out actors in that same way. But I’m afraid my top draws continue to be white dudes.

Some favorite new watches from the last six months include The Great Train Robbery (1903), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Love Lies Bleeding (2024), Edge of the City (1957), and Sherlock, Jr (1924).

Anyway, here’s the June list.

Cemetery Man (1994) ****
Scotland, PA (2001) ****
Beware, My Lovely (1952) ***1/2
No Man of Her Own (1950) ***
Dark City (1950) ***1/2
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) ***1/2
Dream Demon (1988) ***1/2
Macbeth (1948) ****
Act of Violence (1948) ****
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) ****
Barbary Coast (1935) ***
Klute (1971) ****
Risky Business (1983) ***1/2
Top Gun (1986) ***
The Devil Rides Out (1968) ****
Demonia (1990) **
The First Omen (2024) ***
Doctor Who: The Rescue (1965) ***1/2
Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) ***1/2
Godzilla Minus One (2023) ****
The Deep (1977) **1/2
Drive (2011) ****
A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) ***
The Fall Guy (2024) ****
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) ***
Love Lies Bleeding (2024) ****1/2
Late Night with the Devil (2023) ***1/2
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) ***
Candyman (1992) ***
Edge of the City (1957) ****1/2
Saigon (1947) **1/2
Corridors of Blood (1958) ***1/2
Comrade X (1940) ****
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) ***1/2
The Burglars (1971) ***1/2
Flatliners (1990) **1/2
Wicked Little Letters (2023) ***1/2
The Good Die Young (1954) ***1/2
Sylvia Scarlett (1935) ***
Night Terrors (1993) **
Immaculate (2024) ***1/2
The Wrath of Becky (2023) **
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) ***

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2014)

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In my review of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears I noted that while I liked the film I was not likely to ever watch it again. And yet my review of the film makes me want to do just that.

It is a strange, almost incomprehensible film – one filled with beautiful, dark, blood-soaked images. I barely remember it. I need to rewatch it.

My full review is here.

Borgen: The Complete Series

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Being an amateur reviewer is fun, but sometimes exhausting. Because I have a regular full-time job, a family, and sometimes I pretend I have a social life finding the time to sit down and watch something and then review it can be complicated.

Ok, let’s be real here. Obviously, I have the time. I watch a lot of movies. I talk about them here so I can’t pretend that I don’t have the time. Let me start over. Being an amateur reviewer is fun, but sometimes I want to watch whatever I want to watch and not have to write about them afterward.

That’s better.

Being an amateur reviewer does take a lot of time. When I write an official review I try to do a good job. I spend quite a bit of time in research mode. I’ll read about the making of the film. I’ll read new reviews and reviews that were written at the time the film came out. I like to dig into the history of genres and filmmakers. Etc. That stuff doesn’t always come into the actual review, but I like to do my research.

But reviews also have a deadline. PR people want you to have the reviews up the week the film comes out (or in my case when the Blu-ray is released). When things go well that is no problem. But sometimes they don’t actually give me a copy of the film until after it has come out. Sometimes I’ll request quite a few things and then find myself having to watch and review half a dozen films within a few days.

Or sometimes, as is the case with this series, I’ll get a multi-season collection and have to get my review out quickly. Binge-watching a series is one thing. Bing-watching multiple seasons in a few days and managing to write something coherent is something else. With stuff like this, I tend to watch a couple of episodes then skip a few and work my way through the entire thing like that. There just isn’t enough time to watch every single episode.

So, Borgen is a Danish series that is often likened to The West Wing. I remember watching it, and liking it, but the whole thing is a blur. I know I skipped around quite a lot with it and now I really want to sit down with it, taking my time to enjoy it.

You can read my review here.

Wizard World Tulsa 2014

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Comic Cons and the like have become big business. I remember hearing about the huge one in San Diego for years. That’s where the big names come and preview all the big nerd-centric movies and television series that will be released that year. I suppose there were Star Trek conventions, etc. in various cities for years, but these days it seems like there is some kind of con going on just about everywhere on every weekend of the year.

In 2014 we got one in Tulsa and I got a press pass to go. It was a little daunting but fun. I came back the following year and the year after. Each time the con got a little smaller, the celebrity names a little more b-lister. I guess Tulsa just isn’t a big enough city or something.

I got kind of tired of it, too. I like looking at the costumes people wear, and some of the doo-dads people sell are cool. The whole celebrity thing is weird, though. I have no desire to pay a lot of money to get a celebrity autograph or to snap a picture with them. The talks can be fun, but more often than not the celebrities seem kind of bored and they tell the same stories.

I’m not knocking it. If you enjoy that sort of thing then by all means enjoy it. But after a few times going myself, I’ve had enough.

And now my daughter is getting into all that. She actually loves to cosplay and wants someplace to go where she can be with like-minded people. I’ve taken her to a couple of them and we’re going to another one here in a couple of weeks. So the circle of life comes again.

Anyway, I did a little write-up on that first con I went to, and you can read it here.

Puck: What Fools These Mortals Be!

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I pay very little attention to politics these days. I know I probably should, I know it is important. I do get enough information to make what I think is an informed enough vote, but there is so much vitriol out there that I can’t take too much of it in.

I used to pay close attention. I used to argue about it on social media thinking I was making a difference. Then one night I realized I was lying in bed at two o’clock in the morning trying to make the perfect argument to convince an old college friend on Facebook of something or other.

I didn’t convince him of anything. In fact, we got into a pretty good fight and stopped talking to each other for a long while.

My blood pressure can’t take that crap.

And that’s how I make an introduction to my review of a book that is full of political cartoons from a century ago! Puck was a hugely important political magazine that ran from 1877 to 1918. This book covers that history and presents a whole bunch of the cartoons that ran inside its covers. As you can read in my review, it is quite informative and rather dull to this non-history buff reader.

Intruders (2014)

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I read all of these old reviews of mine before I post them to the site. I mostly enjoy reading my thoughts on things I watched many years ago. Reading this review, of a sci-fi/horror series from Britain released in 2014 I suddenly realized Millie Bobby Brown was in it. She is now known as “11” on Stranger Things.

Back then she was just a kid, and now a well-known one. It is funny to think I saw her in this series and wrote her name in my review, but had no idea how big of a star she would become.

Not that it really matters, I just find it interesting. Like I didn’t know who she was then, and until just now I didn’t realize she was in that show (of which I have the vaguest of memories watching.)

Anyway, you can read my review of the series here.

The Rolling Stones: From the Vault – L.A. Forum (Live in 1975)

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I know for many of you my movie/Blu-ray/book/whatever reviews are not the primary reason you come to this site. At a guess, I’d say there are quite a few of you who wish I’d stop writing them. This site used to be about the music, man, I can almost hear you say.

I appreciate that you all tolerate these things, and never complain.

For once I’ve got a review that is about the music, man. The Rolling Stones have released quite a few concerts on video in their From the Vault series over the years. I got a couple of them to review a while back and here’s one of them.

I’m not by any means a Stones superfan. I definitely can’t break down their discography or which years are best in terms of performances. But I dug the hell out of this show as you can see from my review.

Earth to Echo (2014)

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I truly have no memory of watching this. I did enjoy reading my review and noting how movies had kicked into nostalgia overload (the review was written in 2014) and chuckling about how quaint that sounds today.

I guess the movie was a mash-up of a bunch of 1980s family adventure films, but not nearly as good as any of them. This is probably why I don’t remember it. I’m sure I sold the Blu-ray so all I have left is this review.

Dr. Katz Live Album

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I’m a huge fan of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist – or I should say I was a huge fan. Nothing happened to cause me to not be a fan, I just haven’t seen it in years so I have no idea how it holds up, or if I’d still find it funny.

I definitely found it funny in 2014, when they released this audio-only, live version of the show. The series was always basically comedians doing their bits in an animated format. Here is it comedians doing bits in audio format, pretending to be an animated show.

I dug it back then, as you can see from my review.