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zwolanerd

“I guess I just like liking things”

March 19, 2014 Jake’s Excuses

No Dire DVD entry today, folks, sorry!  When pressed for a reason, Lyn offered this:

(The real reason is she has schoolwork, so be nice to her!)

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March 18, 2014 Tuesday 10: Movies of 1992

When I say "90s," you say "this picture."

When I say “90s,” you say “this picture.”

Sometimes when I go through the list of movies released in a particular year to whittle it down, I’m surprised at just how much junk was released that year. My thought process goes from “movies I’ve heard of” to “movies I saw” to “movies I like” and then finally to my top ten. The drop-off from “all movies” to “movies I’ve heard of” this time around seemed particularly steep, as did the drop from that to “movies I like.” I should go back to previous entries in this category and work some percentages, because I wonder if it’s the same for every year and my perception’s just off for this one.

Here are the top ten from the box office in 1992, for reference:

1.Aladdin $504,050,219
2.The Bodyguard $411,006,740
3.Home Alone 2: Lost in New York$358,994,850
4.Basic Instinct $352,927,224
5.Lethal Weapon 3 $321,731,527
6.Batman Returns $266,822,354
7.A Few Good Men $243,240,178
8.Sister Act $231,605,150
9.Bram Stoker’s Dracula $215,862,692
10.Wayne’s World $183,097,323

And now my ten favorite from that year:

10. The Player – Robert Altman movies are a strange thing: huge casts, interweaving stories, lots of improvised dialogue. I always seem to like them, but can’t ever figure out the exact reasons why. This one is a little easier to figure out, as it’s a “behind the scenes of Hollywood” movie, and I’m a sucker for those.

9. Reservoir Dogs – Not my favorite Tarantino movie, but Tarantino movies are kind of like pizza for me. Violent, foul-mouthed pizza.

8. The Muppet Christmas Carol – While this is arguably the best “middle” Muppet movie (“middle” being one that came out after Jim Henson’s death and before the recent renewal movies), I didn’t take to it for a long time. I had an extremely difficult time adjusting to Kermit’s new voice.  It just wasn’t right, both in the sense of it didn’t sound right and because no one could be Kermit the way Jim Henson was, you know? I’ve since come to appreciate the movie, but I still have a hard time hearing Kermit.

7. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Beautiful and crazy. the style fits the story, but man is it crazygonuts.

6. Buffy The Vampire Slayer – Sure, the TV show improved on it in a million ways, but I’ll always like this movie.  It introduced Buffy to me, so it can’t be all bad. And if you haven’t seen Paul Reubens extended “death” scene, you are missing out.

5. Aladdin – I haven’t seen this movie in years, but I can still sing most of “Friend Like Me” from memory. Robin Williams in the form he was always meant to exist in: cartoon.

4. A League of Their Own – I don’t even like baseball that much, but I love this movie. I’m sure it plays fast and loose with historical facts, but it shines a light on the women’s league, and it’s important while also being fun and good.

3. Batman Returns – I always forget about that unfortunate nose-biting scene until it’s just about to happen. And Christopher Walken’s hair! But Michelle Pfeiffer will always and forever be Catwoman.

2. Of Mice and Men – The book is usually my answer to the “Favorite novel?” question, and this version is so good there will never be a reason to ever film another version. I’m not even kidding.

1. Unforgiven – My favorite Western and one of my favorite movies of all time. If I ever had the ability to make a TOP TEN OF ALL TIME list, I am fairly certain this would make the top five easily.

 

 

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March 17, 2014 Recommendation

I had a thing planned for today but this is so much better, even if it’s kind of a cheat post because I’m pointing you to someone else’s music thing.

That someone else’s thing is My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection. Sarah’s husband Alex has 1,500+ records, so she is going through them alphabetically, listening to each one even if she hates it, and writing about it. Start here for her explanation. She frequently has Alex comment on the albums, too, in an effort to explain why he got it, where he got it, and why.

I haven’t read every last one, but her responses to the music are genuine and funny. I hope she’s keeping track of what she likes and what she doesn’t, because I suspect that would make for some fun graphs after the fact.

So, yeah, nothing specific from me today, but I know there are several readers here who would enjoy this sort of thing quite a bit.

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March 14, 2014 Shut Up And Deal

theapartment

I did not set out this week to watch two black and white movies, much less write about them both. But here we are. I know, I know – for a guy who professes to not care much for old movies, I sure have been talking about them a lot.

Today’s movie was recommended a long time ago by a friend: The Apartment, from 1960. It won Oscars for

  • Best Picture
  • Best Director
  • Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen
  • Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White
  • Best Film Editing

and it’s not quite like anything I’ve ever seen. I guess I’d call it a “romantic comedy,” but there’s a suicide attempt right smack in the middle of it, so it’s not all light and fluffy. Oh, and spoiler alert for a 54-year-old movie, I guess.

Jack Lemmon plays C. C. Baxter, a low-level employee at an insurance company in New York. IMDb’s synopsis puts his situation this way: “A man tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but complications and a romance of his own ensue.” He has had a sorta-crush on Miss Fran Kubelik (played by Shirley MacLaine) for some time and finally asks her to go to a play with him,  but…

I started typing out a run-through of the plot, but I wasn’t doing it justice. It’s available on Netflix streaming, so give it a watch and then come back.

Back? Okay. See what I mean? great movie, right? The interesting thing to me is how it affected my view of modern rom-coms. I don’t tend to like like rom-coms (which is why I’m going to continue using the dismissive term “rom-com”!), but it’d be hard for me to articulate why. I’m just as happy about people falling in love as the next person, so it seems like I should like them, right? For the most part they’re too manufactured, too unrealistic. I can more easily buy science fiction than I can the premises like “she’s a quirky pet tattooist/he’s an architect for water parks: you won’t believe what brings them together!” Fifty years ago we didn’t have tablet computers, but people fell in love back then the same way the do now: usually believably.

And that’s where The Apartment comes in. It’s believable. The characters ring true, and they act like people actually do.  Well, except when they act better than people normally do, but that’s what you want out of your heroes, right? Several times Baxter lets people assume the worst of him as a means of protecting other people. There’s no attention drawn to it, no speech to the viewer about the struggle of doing it and how it’s unfair, no demanding of the other person that they acknowledge his actions and repay him somehow – he just does it.  Of course, he’s not perfect. Letting his married bosses use his apartment for meeting their girlfriends is not behavior one would call “heroic,” especially since he’s doing it to try to advance at work. But flaws make for believable characters, and the movie is full of them.

Fran is no Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and it’s refreshing.  (Normally a person uses “refreshing” when talking about something new that stands out, but in this case I had to go back about 54 years to find it.) I don’t have extensive knowledge of films from the era, so I don’t know if her character is standard or radically different, all I know is the Fran stands in sharp contrast to today’s group of female interests who want to pay for their meal with a song (which is a reference to a particular episode of Community that I can’t seem to find right now).

I’ll never be a film critic, as I’m terrible at finding, dissecting, and articulating themes and whatnot, but I know what I like. The Apartment is sad and sweet and funny, and I highly recommend it.

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March 13, 2014 Night of the Living Dead

I’m not a huge fan of zombies as a movie monster. I get that there’s social commentary and all that, but when you get down to it, it’s a reanimated rotting corpse that eats people, and that’s gross. I much prefer vampires as a movie monster (the mean kind, not the sparkly kind), but I’d probably go with aliens over them, even.

In spite of my general distaste for zombies, my wife and I have been watching The Walking Dead. Because we’ve been watching it, I’ve been playing the Telltale games, and because of those, I started playing State of Emergency, and because of all that, I’ve started reading the Walking Dead comics. I got a lot of zombies going on right now, is what I’m saying. This is all way over my general intake, which was basically Plants vs. Zombies.

notldBecause of all of these zombies, I decided to watch Night of the Living Dead. This 1968 movie is generally considered to be one of the most important zombie movies – it’s not the first, but it is the most responsible for how we think of zombies today – and this is in spite of the fact the word “zombie” is never mentioned in the movie.

The IMDb synopsis is “A group of people hide from bloodthirsty zombies in a farmhouse,” and it’s hard to add to that, really.  Here’s a slightly longer version, and I guess there are spoilers for an almost 50-year-old movie, so be careful I guess?:

Johnny and Barbra are visiting their father’s grave in Pennsylvania when Johnny is attacked and killed by a zombie. Barbra barely escapes and holes up in a house, and she is soon joined by Ben, who barricades them in the house while the crowd of zombies around the house grows ever larger. After they’ve been there a while, some other people come upstairs from the cellar where they’ve been hiding, and soon there is a lot of fighting over what they should do and what’s going on. The radio and TV only give snippets of information, but it’s enough to reveal that it’s happening all over the place. Pretty soon everybody’s dead except for the roaming posse of armed men who are trying to help manage the zombie problem. The end of the movie is a bunch of still photos showing the cleanup of this one area, with no indication of what’s happening worldwide.

It can be weird for me to try to watch older movies sometimes. They feel different than modern movies in ways I don’t completely understand. Part of it is the filming methods, part of it is the acting, part of it is… a bunch of other stuff. So aside from all that, here are some of the other things that struck me about this particular movie:

  • Ben, the main hero character, is black. In the context of this being made in 1968, that really stood out to me, especially since it didn’t really play into the story – by that I mean it didn’t seem like racial tension was a major theme. Sure, there was a white guy who didn’t let Ben back into the house immediately, and Ben did end up shooting him, but I don’t know if that was motivated by race or by the disagreement they had over what they should do. I’m sure many articles have been written about it by people more qualified than I to address the subject.
  • The zombies used tools!  On two occasions, a zombie picked up a rock to break windows. Another zombie used… a 2 x 4, I think? to break headlights. This was the thing I had the most problems with, because zombies don’t use tools, man. Very strange.
  • There was a scene that lasted a couple of minutes of the zombies eating parts of two people who died when a truck blew up, and I was very surprised by how gross it was.  Apparently the filmmakers used ham covered in Bosco to stand in for human parts (the movie is in black and white), and there’s plenty of chewing going on. So much more gross than I expected from a movie made in 1968.

Overall, I enjoyed it more than I expected to, much like you’d enjoy a history class, I think. It’s interesting to see how the zombie genre has changed over the years … and how much hasn’t changed. Well worth your time if you’re a fan of the genre at all. I’m planning to check out the other George Romero zombie movies, so I’ll let you know how far I get with those.