I watch a lot of movies over my weekends. I watch movies during the week, but with work and family, and other obligations, I don’t always get to watch one every night. But on the weekends, I squeeze in as many as I can.

I don’t really have the time or energy to write full reviews so I thought it would be fun to do a weekend wrap-up.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)

After watching Hellraiser (2022) Friday night I had a little more time before sleep came crashing down so I threw on this little French horror flick from Jess Franco. It is surprisingly good, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. A young woman comes home when she learns her father has died. There she finds an assortment of oddballs and freaks who either want to seduce her or kill her or both. I hope to have a real review of this for my Foreign Film February segment later this week.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

On my way to the convenience store Saturday morning for my usual 32 ounces of Dr. Pepper, I heard Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” playing on the radio. Realizing it was from the soundtrack to this Sam Peckinpah film and that I happened to own a copy of it on DVD, and that I had never seen it caused me to rush home and pop it in.

It’s terrific. There are actually a variety of cuts of this film out there, and I’m not entirely sure which one I saw. This is one of those revisionist westerns that were popular in the 1970s. Pat and Billy are old friends, but Pat Garrett (a wonderful James Coburn) can see how the county is changing and has decided to be on the right side of the law, whereas Billy (a fascinating Kris Kristofferson) can’t do anything but be an outlaw. Neither of them wants the inevitable confrontation to come, and the film prolongs it for as long as it can in the most interesting ways. Dylan not only did the wonderful soundtrack but he has a small part too. It is a lot of fun watching him on the screen.

Fist of Fury (1972)

The Criterion Collection put out an excellent little boxed set of Bruce Lee Blu-rays sometime ago and I bought a copy last year. But I’ve been putting off watching them for one reason or another. So I decided to watch this one this weekend. I was disappointed in it. The story is forgettable. A gang of Japanese dudes keeps harassing Bruce Lee’s club. Naturally, Bruce Lee has to kick their asses. The action sequences are mostly great, but there is a lot of dull padding to get through between each fight scene.

Cujo (1983)

When I was a young teen we didn’t have cable television. Or maybe we just didn’t have the pay channels like HBO and Cinemax. Whatever, my mom’s friend Beverly had everything and she was willing to tape anything I wanted on VHS and give it to me. Each week I scoured the TV Guide looking for interesting movies for her to tape for me. One time she taped Cufo for me. I only remember this because I let my friend Justin borrow the tape and he raved about the film. I can’t remember now if he never gave me the tape back or if I just never got around to watching it, but it went unseen by me until this weekend.

I actually bought a special edition DVD of the m movie last year based on that memory. I don’t know why I decided to put it in this weekend but I did and I’m glad for it.

Like a lot of Stephen King books this film takes its time getting started. It gives us a feel for its setting. It spends time with its characters, letting us get to know them. Unlike a lot of Stephen King books this film never makes me care for any of that. I just kept waiting for the rabid dog to trap the lady and her kid in that junky old Pinto. Once the dog does trap the lady the film gets pretty terrific, but it takes it a long time to get there.

Mr. Wong, Detective (1938)

Boris Karlof plays Mr. Wong, a Chinese detective that was clearly invented to cash in on the Charlie Chan craze at the time. There is absolutely no other reason for him to be Chinese in this film, which makes it doubly unfortunate from a modern perspective. The story is rather dull.

Dark Alibi (1946)

Another white guy playing a Chinese detective. This time it is Sidney Toler playing Charlie Chan, a role he would play more than 20 times to great success. This one is actually quite good. The mystery is standard stuff but Toler is fun as the brilliant detective who throws around a lot of silly bits of wisdom and constantly puts down his son and chauffeur.

A Study in Scarlet (1933)

I guess I couldn’t get enough detective movies this weekend. This is an extremely loose adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story. So loose in fact that it has nothing at all to do with the book other than the title. Apparently, the producers could only afford to secure the rights to the story’s title and the use of the characters, but not the actual story. Reginald Owen is so forgettable as Holmes I kept forgetting which actor was playing the character while watching. I only put it on because Anna May Wong is second-billed, but she appears in it for less than ten minutes. Completely and utterly forgettable.

I keep meaning to do stuff like this and I keep forgetting. In various places like Twitter and Reddit physical media collectors love to share their recent purchases and pickups. As I continue to try to make this blog my own personal social media space, I hope to do this here more often.

This collection is a mixture of things I recently bought, something my mother gave me and a few review pieces. The local used media shop periodically sends me coupons and last week I got a buy one get one deal and so I picked up a DVD copy of Criterion’s release of The Killers which is actually two films, two adaptations of the same Hemmingway story and Dario Argento’s Trauma. The films in the middle are all review copies which I’ll link to soon. The Dietrich book I picked up at a used store a few weeks back and my mother gave me a copy of The Irishman – I loved that film so I’m interested to see how the book is.

What have you guys picked up lately?

Many years ago, not long after I had moved to Texas (don’t worry, I didn’t stay in that state long :)), I was invited to someone’s house for food and games. We played this game where everybody sat in a circle and this little computer tablet was passed around. The tablet displayed a word and whenever you were handed the tablet you had to try and get anybody else to say that word. The trick was you weren’t allowed to say it yourself. So you had to describe the word or say something that would remind others of what that word was. It was a bit like that old TV gameshow The $25,000 pyramid if you remember that. Once your word was guessed then you passed the tablet to the person next to you and they had to do a different word. There was a timer, and when that timer went off, whoever was holding the tablet was out.

It was a fun game. One of my words was “fin”. My mind immediately registered it as the French word for “end.” Except I didn’t actually know it was a French word, I just knew it was used at the end of a lot of the foreign language films I liked to watch. I spent several minutes trying to explain that it was the word you’d see at the end of a foreign film, before I realized that the easier way to do it was to talk about a fish.

I don’t remember the first foreign film I watched (and yes, I know “foreign film” doesn’t mean movies not in English to large portions of the world, but I’m a dumb American and that’s the way I use it in this context). I was probably a teenager as my parents weren’t exactly the type of people to watch movies in a language they didn’t speak. If I were to guess I’d say it was probably something on Bravo, the cable TV station. They used to show lots of cool art house movies before becoming nothing but reality TV fashion shows.

If I’m being honest, I started watching them because European arthouse films were a lot more relaxed with sex and nudity than American films were at the time, at least the ones my parent’s let me watch. Or maybe Bravo was a lot more willing to show those things than other basic cable channels were, at least back then anyhow. As a pubescent boy a naked breast on television was quite exciting. This was long before the internet made nudity so easily accessible to young boys, you understand.

But the thing is, I found I rather liked those films outside of the excitement that overcame my own budding sexuality. They were different – exotic even – and widely interesting. As I grew as a cinephile I learned to watch more and more films with subtitles.

A few years ago I latched onto the idea of Foreign Film February and here we are. I’ve decided not to come up with a list of films I want to watch this month. Honestly, I just forgot about it until last night and I was too tired to come up with a list. But foreign language films are also really easy to find on most streaming services and in my own library. Much like 31 Days of Horror and Noirvember, I’ll try to write about as many foreign films as I can this month. I hope you enjoy.

We watch movies, we read books, we listen to music, but what do we do when we’re talking in general about all art? I used to say we consumed it, but now that brings up negative connotations. In the movie world, the people who finance movies and television shows – studios and streaming services like Netflix – speak of movies and shows not as if they were creative arts but as content. Something we consume like we consume potato chips, Snickers bars, and wet wipes. But art is so much more than something we just casually consume. So I need another word when talking about partaking in art.

I’m always fascinated by the ways in which I consume Art. Sometimes it is random, like when I put my music collection on shuffle mode, or grab a book off my bookshelf when I’m headed to the bathroom for a visit. Sometimes it is intentional like the movie I watch in October or Noirvember. Other times the Art informs what I watch (or read, or listen to, or consume) next.

So, for example, earlier this month I watched Caliber 9 (1972) an Italian crime thriller. I liked it and so I watched another one, then another one…I watched five in total. Sometimes these types of films are called poliziotteschi, kind of like how a subgenre of Italian horror is Giallo. I first heard about poliziotteschis a couple of years ago and I’ve been watching them ever since, but they aren’t something I necessarily go looking for (unlike Giallo which I regularly hunt down). But because I randomly watched Caliber 9, I can now say I’ve seen five other films in the genre.

I don’t know why that is so satisfying to me. It scratches the same itch that collecting every one of Bob Dylan’s LB# or the Grateful Dead’s shinds.

It is like how I watched Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks and then had to go back and watch the first story from that season and then the one after. Or once I watched Reservoir Dogs (1992) I had to then watch Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997) (and remind me I started writing a whole separate post for Tarantino’s first three films.)

There is some weird part of my brain that likes to organize things, and collect them. I’m endlessly fascinated by how my brain connects the things I consume and leads me to something else. I mean, usually, it isn’t that complicated. Those Italian films were featured on The Criterion Channel, and I suspect lots of people have watched Tarantino’s first films in a row like that. But I still find it interesting.

In January 2023 I watched 50 films. 41 of them were new to me.

Letterboxd allows me to see who my top actors and directors are in a given year. I always like looking at that. For January my top actors are all Italians who starred in those crime dramas, and the top director is Fernando Di Leo who directed them. That’s not surprising. It will be interesting to see who beats them next month.

Lastly, 26 of the films I watched this month were made before I was born. I always count the movies I watch that was made before I was born because I’m a huge classic movie fan, but defining what constitutes a classic is complicated.I used to have cable television and my favorite station was Turner Classic Movies. I no longer have cable but I’m still connected to various fansites for TCM and there are endless debates on what constitutes a classic movie.

When I was growing up classic movies were films made in the 1930s and 1940s. That was simple enough. Bu that was the 1980s, that classic movie were made 40+ years earlier. But now it is 2023, and movies made 40 years ago were made in the 1980s. So, where do you draw the line? I draw the line at movies made before I was born. I was born in 1976 so there you go.

And here is the complete list:

The Bride Wore Black (1968)
Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
The Predator (2018)
The Damned (1962)
Prey (2022)
The Net (1995)
Murder by Contract (1958)
Hud (1963)
The Wailing (2016)
The Wanderers (1979)
American Gigolo (1980)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
White Woman (1933)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Enola Holmes 2 (2022)
Sharky’s Machine (1981)
The Mutations (1974)
John Dies at the End (2012)
T2 Trainspotting (2017)
Trainspotting (1996)
Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol (1988)
Doctor Who: Dragonfire (1987)
Kidnap Syndicate (1975)
Shoot First, Die Later (1974)
2 Days in the Valley (1996)
Zardoz (1974)
Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks (1988)
The Boss (1973)
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964)
The Vampire Doll (1970)
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Italian Connection (1972)
Caliber 9 (1972)
Decision to Leave (2022)
Playing with Fire (1975)
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
San Quentin (1937)
Nope (2022)
The Black Phone (2021)
The Ninth Gate (1999)
The Card Player (2004)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The Last of Sheila (1973)
The Earrings of Madame de… (1953)
Anna Christie (1930)
It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964)
What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963)
The Big Shave (1967)