Beanpole is about war and the remnants it leaves behind. It is about what people do after the war is over and how they get on with their lives. It is a devastating film. And brilliant. I wrote a review of it here.
X (2022) & Pearl (2022)
When I wrote about House of the Devil (2009) I indicated that I watched it because I’d heard good things about these two films which were also directed by Ti West. Well, I finally got around to watching them, and I’m glad I did.
Much like House of the Devil, X is an homage to gritty 1970s horror. It is more influenced by rural terror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Last House on the Left (1972) than the occult slasher that so influenced Devil.
The plot involves a group of young filmmakers who head off to a secluded Texas farm to produce a pornographic film. It takes place in 1979 when hardcore films had obtained a certain amount of mainstream success. But that success doesn’t lead to acceptance in rural Texas which is why the producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) didn’t bother to tell the elderly couple (Stephen Ure and Mia Goth under a lot of prosthetics and makeup) what they were planning to do. That will come to haunt (and murder) them later in the film.
But much like House of the Devil, X takes its time getting to the overt violence and gore. X is a lot more fun, and funny. Shooting the porn scenes creates a lot of humor. Mia Goth (without the prosthetics) plays Maxine, an exotic dancer who thinks this film will make her a star. Brittany Snow plays Bobby-Lynne, an old pro at pornographic movies. She has no aspirations of being a mainstream star, but would really like to make enough money to buy a house with a pool.
There is one scene in which Bobby-Lynne is performing with Jackson Hole (Kid Cudi) and he says something that makes her genuinely laugh. The film’s director RJ (Owen Campbell) – who thinks of himself as some low-budget, arthouse auteur – zooms in on Bobby-Lynnes’s laughing face. It is perhaps the only authentic bit of acting she’s ever done. The moment Bobby-Lynne realizes the camera is capturing her laugh, she immediately switches to porn-actress mode and makes the requisite “oohs” and “ahhs.”
There’s also the producer of the movie Wayne (Martin Henderson) who is attempting to cash in on the adult film craze of the moment, and the boom mic operator Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) who is also RJ’s girlfriend and had no idea they were making a porno.
I enjoyed the slower moments much more than I did the graphic violence. Once the blood-letting began the film became a lot less interesting to me.
Pearl is a prequel to X which acts as an origin story to the old lady who does most of the murdering in that film. She’s Pearl of the title and is again played by Mia Goth, but without the old age makeup. She grew up on that same farm. Her father has been paralyzed by the Spanish Flu and her domineering mother (Tandi Wright) constantly criticizes her. Pearl loves the movies and dreams of being a star.
Where X was shot like a gritty 1970s horror movie, Pearl is made like a 1940s melodrama with some classic musicals for inspiration, too. It is full of big, bright colors, and there are a couple of wonderful fantasy sequences.
It also feels completely unnecessary. I was reminded of The Conjuring Universe where you have the main movies and then there are all these side stories where relatively unimportant objects in the main movies get their own films. Pearl is a prequel that no one would have asked for.
But it kind of works. It is well-made and entertaining. Mia Goth is magnificent. But I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, whereas I’ll most likely watch X many more times in the future.
The Gilded Lily (1935)
I love me some Claudette Colbert, and Fred MacMurray, and Ray Milland. I love me some screwball comedies. I should have loved The Gilded Lily, but as you’ll see from my review, I did not love it. It isn’t a bad film, but it lacks that certain something to make it really great.
Shenandoah (1965)
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I liked all kinds of movies, all sorts of different genres. I’ve recently come to really love old westerns. But sometimes Westerners are hard to watch through modern eyes. Their treatment of Native Americans is shoddy at best, and racist at worst. Shenandoah does ok by Indians, but its treatment of the Civil War and slavery is a little muddy.
I try very hard in this blog to not get political. I have political opinions, of course, but I want this site to be a place where all sorts of views can come and enjoy what I have to offer. This was especially true when I was just sharing live music. But now that I’m writing more reviews some politics will inevitably slip in. It is difficult to review certain types of art without letting some political opinions in. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.
That being said there are certain opinions that I will let out proudly. I think it is pretty safe to say that slavery was bad. It was a great evil in this country. That’s not controversial, and if you want to argue that point then you can just see yourself out.
A lot of westerns are set during the Civil War. Very few of them are pro-slavery, but their treatment of that institution, and of black people in general, can be suspect. The older I get the more difficulty I have watching Civil War movies that make folks fighting for the Confederacy into heroes. I know not everyone who fought for the South owned slaves or was particularly pro-slavery. Lots of young men fought for the South because that was their patriotic duty, many probably had no opinion on slavery whatsoever.
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with this. Shenandoah is a pretty good movie starring James Stewart. He plays a character who wants nothing to do with the war. He has no love for slavery, but neither will he lift a hand to help fight against it. My review wrestles with what to do with a character like that. It is something I wrestle with every time I watch a movie with outdated stereotypes. Sometimes I love the movie, but it is difficult to parse that with the way the movie handles certain issues.
Anyway, you can read my review here.
Alien Nation (1988)
It is interesting to me how there are movies that exist in my memory banks that I haven’t actually seen. What I mean is that there are some films that came out when I was young that were part of our collective culture. Maybe they were big box office successes, or maybe they were endlessly discussed in the media, or maybe they were just talked about over and over with my friends. Many of these films were actually watched by me, but some of them weren’t. Yet because they were discussed in my culture and clips were viewed in various TV shows, it feels like I’ve seen them.
Alien Nation was one such film. It is possible that I actually did watch it at some point, but I don’t have any specific memory of watching it and I couldn’t remember a single plot point as I watched it yesterday. The movie did spawn a short-lived television series so it is possible that I watched some of that. What I do remember is how the aliens looked with their big, bald heads, and the basic buddy cop banter the two leads regularly engaged in.
Within this world, an alien spaceship landed on Earth sometime in the recent past. It was filled with a race of aliens that were bred by another, unseen race of aliens, as a slave class. These aliens are known as “Newcomers” by polite society and “Slags” by the less polite. The world’s governments have decided to welcome Newcomers and the United States has made them citizens. However, a great many humans are disturbed by the Newcomers. They are disgusted by the way they look, what they eat, how they get drunk on sour milk, and don’t always speak good English, etc. Often Newcomers have to take lowly jobs and they tend to be poor and often live, grouped together in run-down sections of the city.
The metaphor is not hard to understand. The film is not too subtle in this regard. The Newcomers are stand-ins for any number of minorities and immigrants that have historically been mistreated over the years.
In the film, James Caan plays Det. Matthew Sykes, is good at his job, if a bit old-school at it, and quite bigoted towards the Newcomers. But when his partner is killed by some Newcomers he agrees to take newly promoted Newcomer Sam Francisco (one of the films recurring gags is that humans got bored naming so many Newcomers when they arrived that they started giving them joke names – Har Har). He’s played by the always wonderful Mandy Patinkin.
Naturally, over the course of the investigation, Sykes learns to respect and even care for his partner and thus learns the important lesson that racism is bad.
As I said the messaging is really heavy-handed. The Newcomers have a distinctive look (which basically amounts to some prosthetic headgear) and are given a few distinguishing traits like getting drunk on sour milk and eating uncooked meat, but the film doesn’t delve very deeply into who they are.
Mostly the film is a typical 1980s buddy-cop action flick with an alien as the straight-laced foil to the wild, no-nonsense partner. It more or less works as that. I have great nostalgia for those types of films and this one landed neatly in that category. It disappoints because it could have been so much more interesting, but if you take it for what it gives, it isn’t bad.
Murder, He Says (1945)
The Criterion Channel is featuring a number of lesser-known screwball comedies, and I randomly picked out this one to watch this afternoon.
Fred MacMurray stars as Pete Marshall who works for the Trotter Poll company, which he says is the “same as the Gallup Poll, only we’re not in as much of a hurry.” He’s polling people in rural areas to see how they live in modern life. One day he comes across a redneck family called the Fleagles. Ma Fleagle (Marjorie Main) carries with her a bullwhip which she uses to keep her twin boys Mert and Bert (Peter Whitney) in line and to catch flies. The boys tend to carry shotguns and aren’t afraid to “splatter” folks who come around getting nosey with it.
As it turns out Bonnie Fleagle (Barbara Pepper) robbed a bank some time ago and left $70,000 stashed away somewhere before she got hauled off to jail. She’s not too keen on the rest of the Fleagle clan and has not told any of them where the money is hidden. She did tell Grandma Fleagle the secret, but she ain’t talking.
Grandma is close to dying and her head ain’t screwed on so good so they figure Pete can pretend to be Bonnie’s boyfriend and get the secret out of her. What she tells him is pretty cryptic and doesn’t make much sense, and she’d only tell it to him when the rest of the family was out of earshot.
Just as the family is trying to get the secret out of Pete a woman claiming to be Bonnie shows up. She’s really Helen Walker (Claire Matthews) and she has her own reasons for wanting to get that money.
There is also Mr. Johnson (Porter Hall), Ma Fleagle’s third husband who is a scientist working with some experimental radioactive materials which makes people (and dogs) glow in the dark.
Like all screwball comedies Murder, He Says is very silly. At times it is also very funny, but mostly it stays in the entertaining and silly category. Fred MacMurray is always fun to watch and Marjorie Main is a hoot. The gags come fast, and the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it is quite enjoyable.
It makes for a perfect Sunday afternoon movie which is just how I watched it.
Bloggy Blog
I started this blog in the Autumn of 2004. That was when blogs were first becoming a very big thing. In those days it seemed like everyone had a blog. There were music blogs and movie blogs, political blogs, and book blogs. There were blogs about just about anything you could imagine. But mostly, people were just blogging about their lives. They’d share pictures of their families and pets, and they’d talk about their everyday happenings. Then Myspace happened, and then Facebook and social media took over. There was no reason to blog about your life when you could just post things to your social media of choice.
Blogs are still around, of course. But they mostly seem to be about something, people don’t blog so much about their personal lives but about their hobbies. When I started this blog I was journaling the year my wife and I spend in France. Eventually, I started writing reviews of movies, music, and books. By the time we came back to the States, I was a full-on pop culture blogger. Every day I would talk about various artistic endeavors that I had enjoyed (or not enjoyed as the case may be) but I was also finding odd little things on the Internet and blogging about them. Whether it was the world’s highest bridge or what Michael Jackson would have looked like without plastic surgery, I was regularly posting all sorts of stuff.
Eventually, that included writing about bootlegs and then sharing them. Over time that overtook pretty much everything else and for years that’s all I did. I loved sharing all that great music with you all.
Then Amazon Drive told me they were shutting down a few months ago and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this site ever since. Truth is I think I’d like to go back to those old days.
The thing is I haven’t really used Facebook in ages. I gave up on Instagram a couple of years ago. Up until recently, I’ve been a big user of Twitter, but there has been a big dustup in ownership over there and things are becoming a lot less fun. Especially since most of the cool people I followed over there are jumping ship. There are a few sites that are vying to be the new Twitter but the thought of moving to a new platform and trying to build a following just sounds exhausting.
But here I am with a blog that already has something of a following. Why not treat it like my own personal social media site?
Here’s my idea:
I will still post music. I’m still holding off until April when my Amazon Drive account will deactivate and I’ll hopefully have all my shows listed and sorted (I’m doing good on that front and I think I’m still in line to complete that project in April). But when that time comes I’m thinking about once a week I’ll do a post where I’ll share a bunch of shows from a tour or a venue or something. I’m not quite sure how the post will look but hopefully, you’ll have a way to both look at setlists and sources and then download what you want.
I’ll post movie reviews and continue to do things like the Friday Night Horror. I like the idea of doing daily posts about interesting things. I could link to other blogs and sites that put up download links to music, but also link to interesting articles and setlists, kind of like Expecting Rain does now.
But then I also might post a picture of a beautiful sunset that I took that morning or be excited about some TV show I just got into, tell a funny story. This will become my personal space. Hopefully you all (and others) will enjoy it too.
That’s the idea anyway. Truth is I’ve had this thought rattling around in my head for weeks and I’m just now posting about it. Actually doing this is another thing altogether. I have to get into a groove in order to post random things every day. I don’t know if I’ll find it again. Maybe I’ll just write the odd review now and again until I start posting live music again. Maybe once I do, I’ll wind up just posting music and nothing but music.
Or maybe this idea will take off. If it does then you are now forewarned that I’m gonna be posting all kinds of stuff, whatever floats into my brain as interesting.
The Hour 2
One of the things I used to do at Cinema Sentries is review television series that were made in countries not named The United States of America. I love movies from around the world, and I’ve learned to love television from across the globe as well.
The Hour was a British series about a news show from the 1960s, and the struggles it undergoes trying to report hard news rather than fluff pieces. That sounds rather boring, but the series is excellent. Reading my review just now reminds me of how much I liked it and makes me want to watch it again.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
I suppose for those who are not Alfred Hitchcock aficionados the version of The Man Who Knew Too Much they know is the one with James Stewart and Doris Day. That’s a fine film in its own right, but most people don’t realize it is a remake of a film from 1934. Both films were directed by Hitchock making him one of the few directors to ever remake themselves.
The earlier film was from the director’s British period and stars Peter Lorre in his first English language movie. It is an excellent film and a few years ago Criterion gave it a humdinger of a Blu-ray release. I reviewed it for Cinema Sentries and you can read that review here.
Casino Royale (2006)
One of the fun things about going through my old Cinema Sentries reviews is reading some of my old work. Ok, sometimes it is less fun than it is cringe-inducing, but I still enjoy reading what I wrote many years ago. I wrote a review of the first of Daniel Craig’s James Bond outings back in 2012. Truth be told I have no memory of writing this review. I thought I had only written a review of Octopussy for the Cinema Sentries Bond-a-thon, but I guess I wrote this too.
Weird.
Sometimes reading my old reviews sends me back to when I wrote them, but not this. It is literally completely lost to my mind. But hey, you can read it now too, if you like. Just click here.
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