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LawrenceA
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Joined
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Days Won
246
Posts posted by LawrenceA
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EricJ - I like Halloween III and Airplane II. I have Street Fighter on disc as well, but as part of my so-bad-they're-good collection.
SansFin - You first told me about Kondom des Grauens, and I sought it out, watched it, and liked it. I also own The Grapes of Death on disc.
Nippy - I have Dark Star on Blu-ray!
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Yep, I liked that one, too.
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2 hours ago, CinemaInternational said:
Everybody has some. And instead of doing another thread like the one involving films you dislike/hate that everybody seemingly loves, it seemed appropriate to tackle the other side of the aisle. Feel free to choose some from any era.
This is difficult to answer for me. I don't know if I can find a movie that I haven't heard someone else also liked. There's a lot of genre stuff that's frowned upon by most of the people around here, stuff like Star Wars or some of the superhero movies or horror stuff. But there are other sites that I read where most of those films are admired by a great number of people. Just as they dislike some of the "pretentious arthouse and foreign flicks" or "boring old codger movies" that I like and are liked by many around here.
There may be some of the so-bad-they're-good movies that I like that I don't recall anyone else saying they liked, such as Black Devil Doll from Hell, or Runaway Nightmare, or Wizards of the Lost Kingdom.
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13 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
If I ever got to be a guest programmer, I would pick Bull Durham as one of my movies, if TCM would let me. I have one friend and fellow baseball nut who also loves it. Otherwise, while I believe it's been generally pretty well critically praised, I don't know if I've met anyone in my personal life or on these message boards who much cares for it.
I liked it. So there's one more.
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7 minutes ago, UMO1982 said:
Three.
JUDY barely made $3M in its opening weekend and Variety is now trying to claim it a hit. Diane Keaton's Poms opened with $5.3M and was announced as a bomb from the getgo.
Poms opened on 2750 screens, Judy on 461.
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12 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
Woody and at least one of his biographers have also alleged that the incident as described the Farrows mirrors closely the lyrics of a song written by Dory called "Daddy in the Attic", written before Woody and Mia even met. Dory was Mia's friend until Andre divorced her to marry Mia.
Maybe that's what I was recalling, something about Mia having heard the story, down to specific details, years earlier. I tried to find a source earlier to no avail. Thanks for the clarification!
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King of the Hill (1993) - 8/10
Coming-of-age drama set in 1933 Missouri, from director Steven Soderbergh, based on the autobiographical book by A.E. Hotchner. It's the height of the Great Depression, and the family of young boy Aaron (Jesse Bradford) is struggling to survive. Younger brother Sullivan (Cameron Boyd) is sent away to live with relatives, mother (Lisa Eichorn) is sick with a serious illness and must be sent to a hospital, and salesman dad (Jeroen Krabbe) must travel far and wide for his job, meaning Aaron is eventually left for fend for himself. Also featuring Adrien Brody, Karen Allen, Elizabeth McGovern, Katherine Heigl, Amber Benson, Lauryn Hill and Spalding Gray.
This is one of most evocative Depression-set films that I've seen that weren't actually made during the Depression. The performances are good, with Bradford a standout in the lead. The supporting characters are vivid and memorable. I only vaguely recall hearing about this movie when it came out, and nothing really since, but it should be better known. Recommended. By the way, the author of the source book and the character played by Bradford, writer A.E. Hotchner, is still around, turning 102 earlier this year.
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Just now, jamesjazzguitar said:
The film only covers less than 1% of his life. It was my understanding he liked to move a lot and had lived in England a few times before this latest move and had stayed there for decades (as well as France, Italy etc..). That makes sense to me since it would get boring living in the same place for so many centuries and rumor has it that English blood is like a fine French wine!
Also, if only in England a month,,,, where did he learn to speak English? Oh, wait, must have been at a Hungarian/Romanian/Transylvanian night school!
I added to my previous post while you were responding.
No, there's no mention in the story of Dracula having ever lived in England previously. There's passing reference to battling the Ottoman Turks centuries ago, like the historical Vlad Tepes did, but that's about it. In the novel, one of the reasons given for Dracula insisting that Jonathan Harker stay in Transylvania after the property deeds are signed is to teach Dracula more on English manner and customs. Remember too that in the story Renfield had already been sent to Transylvania at an earlier date to set the preliminary land acquisition deals in motion, during which time Dracula I'm sure practiced his English. (In the film the stuff that happens with Renfield in the beginning happened to Harker in the book).
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7 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
Yea, but after living in a English language country for many centuries, I would have expected him to have lost the accent!
But he only moved to an English-speaking country at the beginning of the story. He's only in England a month or two.
Bram Stoker didn't spend much of the story detailing what Drac had been up to for all those centuries in Transylvania. He should have been brushing up on his language skills. Or maybe he did, but English wasn't one of them. Maybe he spoke flawless Mandarin, or Portuguese.
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Ninja Zombie (1992) - 3/10
Ultra-low-budget action/horror/comedy tries too hard to be cult, and fails because of it. An archaeologist is threatened by a gang of spider-themed martial artists who want a relic that's recently been unearthed. The archaeologist's buddy is an expert fighter, but he's killed by the bad guys, so the archaeologist gets a mystic to raise him from the dead to act as an undead bodyguard. This was shot on 8mm and remained unseen by most people until 2015, when the film was released on video. There's some tiny bit of cleverness to parts of this, but not nearly enough to make it worth seeking out by any but the most masochistic of bad-film lovers.
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Midnight's Child (1992) - 5/10
TV-movie chiller with Marcy Walker as a hard-working wife and mother who hires Swedish nanny Anna (Olivia d'Abo) to help care for her 7-year-old daughter Christina (Elisabeth Moss, later of Mad Men and The Handmaid's Tale fame). Of course Anna is up to no good, and it has something to do with devil worship. With Cotter Smith as Walker's ineffectual husband, Jim Norton, Roxann Dawson, and Judy Parfitt. This is the kind of thing that used to appear on Lifetime every other weekend. It's not terrible, but it treads well-worn ground.
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Maximum Force (1992) - 4/10
Low-rent action flick with Sam J. Jones, Sherrie Rose, and Jason Lively as LAPD cops recruited by Capt. Fuller (John Saxon) to wade a clandestine war against powerful crime boss Max Tanabe (Richard Lynch). With Sonny Landham as a pimp, Ken Davitian from Borat as a low-level gangster, and Mickey Rooney (!!!) as the corrupt police chief. The cast is the only memorable thing about this standard shoot-em-up.
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Dark Harvest (1992) - 3/10
Very cheap and dumb horror flick, with a group of tourists getting stranded in the California desert. They have outdoor gear so they make camp, but are attacked by supernatural killer scarecrows, as well as murderous locals. Badly made and even more poorly acted, this is one to avoid.
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Bitter Moon (1992) - 7/10
Erotic thriller from director Roman Polanski. Staid British couple Nigel (Hugh Grant) and Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas) are on a romantic oceanic cruise. They meet wheelchair-bound American writer Oscar (Peter Coyote) and his young French wife Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner), and Oscar regales the shocked Nigel with tales of Mimi's sexual adventurousness, leading to Nigel becoming obsessed with her. This was savaged by the critics when it came out, but I didn't think it was that bad. The acting was good, although Seigner (Polanski's wife) was weak in spots.
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Bodyguard Kiba, Takashi Miike, Japan (1993) - 6/10
Routine gangster action picture based on a manga series. A low-level yakuza member steals a large amount of the gang's loot and hides it away before being sent to prison for 5 years. Upon his release, his hires the services of the title character, a karate expert. As the duo attempt to get to the stashed money, gangsters and other dangers stand in their way.
This was the fifth directorial credit for Miike (he now has over 100), and it was the first of his movies to garner much attention. In the late 1980's and 1990's there was a high demand for cheap straight-to-video genre fare to fill store shelves. The two most prolific types of movies being made in this milieu were horror (leading to the "J-horror" boom), and violent yakuza films. Miike came to prominence with the latter, and this is a typical example. The production values are a bit higher than others of its kind, but it still looks low-budget, and the music is terrible. The acting is only passable, but the action scenes are decent. A couple of sequels followed.
Japanese films show an unusual morality and censorship. Some grotesque acts of violence are clearly depicted, but other things are strictly forbidden, or were at one time or another. Explicit nudity is frowned upon, and certain body hair is forbidden to be shown, and will be pixelated out if filmed. In this movie, one character is shown preparing and then shooting up heroin with a syringe. Both the act of preparation (drawing the boiled solution into the syringe from a spoon) and the actual injection are pixelated out.
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2 minutes ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
So you're calling for suppression of content? That out of respect for great artist to 'go in peace' movies shouldn't be made about negative aspects of their lives?
Those comments reminded me of a couple of (in my opinion) lesser music biopics from the last several years: Miles Ahead (2015) about Miles Davis, and Nina (2016), about Nina Simone. Both films focused only on difficult latter parts of their subjects lives, and were the worse for doing so, or so I felt. I'm not saying they shouldn't have been made, but I would rather see a more comprehensive film about the duo than those films provided.
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1 minute ago, DougieB said:
You're a gentleman and a scholar and I think most of us know it. Anyway, now the new trigger word seems to be "hag". I'll let others go to bat on that one.
I appreciate the compliment, but can that truly be applied to someone like me who just finished a movie called Ninja Zombie?
Yeah, I saw that "hag" comment and thought that it would go over real well.
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Just now, laffite said:
My comment was based on the link that Andrea Doria posted. That included an open letter to the NYT wherein she says there were repeated instances. I see by reading your link that she has commented at length elsewhere about all this. The "single incident" I gather is the one that was subject of a formal complaint (accusation). I am one of those "not up to speed on the specifics." My response to Cigarjoe's comment above therefore seems not so valid, now. I retract it. It's possible, for instance, that she may embellished some of the history there "for a piece of the pie.". Not saying that she has done that, just that it's possible.
I don't think that Dylan is after any financial gain. In fact, I think she probably believes that the incident occurred, as many people begin to see truth in a story repeated often enough.
Personally, I don't think it happened. I think Mia Farrow was (understandably) emotionally devastated by the Allen/Soon-Yi relationship, and that she coached Dylan to accuse Woody as a form of retribution. Multiple accounts have testified to Mia's horrible temper and mercurial nature, which would put using the child as a way to strike against Allen in the realm of possibility. I've also read that the account of the supposed incident closely mirrors that of an incident that occurred to one of Mia's relatives when Mia was a child, a story that she heard growing up many times.
Combined with the professional analysis and court testimony that ruled in Allen's favor, and the later editorial by Dylan's brother Moses stating that the incident was fictional and concocted by Mia, and I have to side with Allen's innocence in regards to the Dylan abuse allegation.
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25 minutes ago, DougieB said:
And I get you. You're one of the livelier ones around here and I generally love your humor. I think it was the baldness of the statement, without your usual clever embellishments, which made it stand out to me. Less offense was taken than my post probably indicated and I don't intend any offense to you.
Perhaps then I'm the villain for clicking the LOL emoji? It's removed.
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36 minutes ago, laffite said:
By that, do you therefore mean that she is lying? That's a curious statement in that she is not talking about, say, a single incident, which would be easy to lie about. Her story involves systemic abuse over a long period. Unless you feel she is making the whole thing up. It doesn't read that way to me but of course I don't know.
I've only heard the accusation made that there was a single incident.
Here's a fairly exhaustive article on the situation, for anyone not up to speed on the specifics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Allen_sexual_assault_allegation
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53 minutes ago, alleybj said:
Variety disagrees. Says Judy hits a high note box office-wise, given the small number of screens.
From the article:
"As awards season kicks off, Roadside Attractions’ “Judy” hit a high note at the specialty box office. The Renee Zellweger-led Judy Garland biopic amassed $3 million, enough to crack the top 10 despite opening on just 461 screens. The movie, which is already generating Oscar buzz for Zellweger’s transformation into the troubled star, appealed mostly to older females. Among inaugural crowds, 60% were women and nearly 80% were over the age of 35. The studio will continue expanding “Judy” across the country next weekend."
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/box-office-abominable-judy-opening-weekend-1203353001/
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1 minute ago, cigarjoe said:
No.
How about if it was in black & white, and there was a sultry dame that came between Capt. Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans? It all ends in a shoot-out in a smoky dive bar, and the only thing in color is the blood.
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It's Robert Helpmann, I think.
I've seen the movie, as well. I thought it was awful.
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The Sect (1991) - 6/10
Strange Italian horror film from director Michele Soavi and writer-producer Dario Argento. An American school teacher (Kelly Curtis, older sister of Jamie Lee Curtis) in Frankfurt is targeted by a mysterious cult with sinister purposes. Also featuring Herbert Lom, Tomas Arana, Mariangela Giordano, Michel Adatte, Carla Cassola, Angelika Maria Boeck, and Giovanni Lombardo Radice.
This slow, long (117 minutes) film has good production values and decent acting, but the script is beyond bizarre, and it takes a long time for things to come together in any comprehensive way. I expected the usual devil-worshipers-trying-to-foment-the-antichrist type of thing, but that's subverted, as the cult has something to do with an insect that went extinct 10,000 years ago but has recently been re-discovered in Antarctica. So you've got some Rosemary's Baby mixed with a little of The Thing as well as Prince of Darkness, as churning well of mysterious blue liquid is found under the protagonist's house. It's all very odd, and there's a bit of gore, too, with one scene reminding me of something in Hellraiser. This was also released in the U.S. as The Devil's Daughter.
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Bodyguard Kiba 2: Apocalypse of Carnage, Takashi Miike, Japan (1994) - 4/10
Terrible sequel to 1993's Bodyguard Kiba, with karate-expert Kiba hired to escort a young woman to Taiwan to take care of some business before heading to the U.S. to marry her fiancee. Unfortunately, when they get to Taipei they have to face off against local kung fu thugs as well as a man bent of personal revenge. This runs barely over an hour, but still seems too long and dull. There are several ill-advised comedic moments (one scene in a nught club is particularly cringeworthy), and a lot of English dialogue spoken with such thick accents that it's subtitled. In fact, the dialogue jumps from Japanese to Cantonese (?) to English frequently. Despite the title, the violence isn't that extreme, especially by Miike standards.