We're moving in order through Tora-San movies for the moment, although that's not set in stone-- I may jump around. This is the 21st movie in the series. Opens with a UFO dream sequence and has an oddly funky soundtrack.

Searching around trying to find another Bond movie that we like. Tried to watch Moonraker but Roger Moore was just too much of a dud. This one (with Sean Connery) was good. One thing that really struck me is that the initial bad thing that the bad guy does, which is the reason that the Bank of England (!) tells Bond to go after him, is that he's buying gold in one location and selling it at another location where it's worth more money. That may be against the best interest of the Bank of England but come on, that's not morally wrong by any stretch of the imagination. Also Goldfinger's ultimate plan is to 10x his investment, which honestly seems kind of paltry by today's standards. I mean if you're kind of evil and you already have 10 million dollars, I imagine you'd be able to get to 100 mil in a fairly short period of time, without ever personally pulling a trigger or vivisecting a rival by laser. Not to say that this guy's a dummy, but rather, that times sure have changed. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like today's financial crimes are enshrouded in law.

I had this idea of "a Pollyanna" as a sort of goody-goody character, so I wasn't really that interested in seeing this for a while. Finally I did and I really liked it. There's a bit of a Moomin feeling, where there's a likeable character in a griping and grousing Hell world, constantly beset by miserable operatives hung up on their own hooks. This made me anxious for the first half, and I was thinking "if only Pollyanna was with other Pollyannas, then she could start really lifting some serious weight". But then wouldn't you know it, she transforms the hell world into a glad land. This movie rekindled my interest in what I call "the ice cream bullshit 1910s". It's a weird mood to pin down but architecturally it's like the Addams Family but everything's brand new.

I went looking for more movies set in the ice cream bullshit 1910s and someone suggested this so I looked it up. Usually I watch a movie all the way through but this one I had to stop, it was an unrelenting cavalcade of displeasure. I watched this on YouTube and the comments let me know exactly who's digging this in the 21st century-- bitter old dicks. "What a wonderful movie, it was a time when everyone knew their place and stayed there". Yuck! Wikipedia says "The more he rails against his staff, his cook, his wife, his horse, salesmen, holidays, his children and the inability of the world to live up to his impossible standards, the more comical and lovable he becomes to his own family who love him despite it all." I didn't find this loveable at all, I found it tiresome and unbearable. William Powell stars and a young Liz Taylor fails to charm in this vile and contemptable stinkeroo.

Jason Statham / Guy Ritchie movie that is simply not good. It's not bad, but you can tell that the formula is way off. Ritchie adapted this from a French movie, and it's like in order to make it "his" he had to go ahead and topload the first half with ennnnnndless quips. Quite frankly there's too much quipping in this!!! You can't have everyone quip all the time, it's tiresome. They keep ragging on this one guy, saying he's gay and he likes kissing boys and so on, and he just rolls with it and you're like, wait, are they being homophobic or is he actually gay and they're trying to be supportive in their own shitty way? They never clear that up. Anyway it's just quips and people shooting at each other, I didn't like it. They do the thing where you see something happen and it makes sense but then later you see it again with more information and it makes a different sort of sense-- generally I like that in a movie. But like I said I didn't really like this. It's neither well made nor passionate and I need one or the other, ideally both. Statham plays his trademark tough but fastidious guy, but unlike his better films, not once in this does he prepare a nice meal for himself, or even take a bite of any food. At one point he orders "a burrito" but he doesn't even say what he wants in it, he just tells the guy "burrito" and the guy goes "coming right up". And then he doesn't even eat it, he just drops it on the ground! How are you going to make an action movie if you skip lunch like that??? The worst part is that the crux of the movie is that he's avenging his son's death but the only thing you learn about his son is that his name is Dougie and he's a college kid who doesn't believe in global warming.... Neither of these things inspire sympathy.

Lily's on a noir kick where she reads the book then watches the movie, and I started lurking her Letterboxd account for recs. This one was good-- the main guy is unpleasant but it doesn't really matter, and if he was contemporary-likeable it would've made the movie worse. He's a guy wound pretty tight trying to get something for himself. Something really weird that I loved was that the guy gets really physically messed up and basically loses his mind for a while-- I mean that certainly seems like it could happen if you got stabbed and had to keep running on empty, you just don't see it in movies very often. Most of the time when people get hurt in movies they either shrug it off or not-- you don't really see the reality-fogging agony of a bad but ultimately non-fatal wound. There's a really great merry-go-round operator in this that starts off as a friendly loudmouth who's taking advantage of the main guy, but then the main guy is like, hey, I like your spirit. I love it when a thriller has a festival component and this one has a good one: the Fiestas de Santa Fe, when the giant marionette Zozobra is burned, along with as much of the town's sadness and woe as can be written on scraps of paper. I looked up "Zozobra" on wikipedia-- this is a real festival and furthermore:

Zozobra is a Spanish word for distress. The Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga has used the term to describe a specific form of existential anxiety related to uncertainty and ambiguity, following its usage by the poet Ramón López Velarde.

The term has been used to describe the feelings of uncertainty and distress in the United States due to the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political events of the Trump presidency and 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Not really relevant to the movie but anyway, wow!

another noir from Lily's list. Great cast, and the main guy is dynamite as a kind of pleasant weasel, "just trying to be somebody". He's got brains and he's got guts and he's just pointed in the wrong direction, "an artist without an art" as his cool neighbor says. His girlfriend Gene Tierney is so striking that it's almost unbelieveable that she'd be with this zero but that's how it goes sometimes. Herbert Lom is smoking of course. And there's some great wrestlers in this too, including one of the greatest legitimate wrestlers of all time, Stanislaus Zbyszko, who basically plays himself. Zbyszko was famous in his day for wrestling legendary undefeated grappling demigod the Great Gama to a somewhat undignified technical draw in 1910, and the movie treats him with enourmous respect. Jules Dassin directs.

Third Lily noir of the weekend. Now I'm just echoing Lily's Letterboxd account but Robert Mitchum really nailed this particular flavor of old Boston accent. At one point one of the titular friends says that he's a bulldozer driver, and does bank robbery because the bulldozer thing is seasonal, and it got me thinking that crime does pay but not really very much. I mean this guy does 3 bank robberies and that's equivalent to 6 months of a regular job? And the bank robbery is probably harder, with all the scouting and the stress. And then Peter Boyle is a hitman who feeds info to the cops for a measly $20 a week???? OK, adjusting for inflation from 1974 to 2022 that's about $120, and over a year that's like 6 grand, but still, come on! Not only is he getting paid shit, he's risking his life for it! If I was a crime guy I'd tell my dudes, listen, if you're hard up for cash, come see me, I'll find you some more work. Don't rat me out just so you can afford to buy a used car in rough shape.

the 22nd movie in the series. Reiko Ohara co-stars as the love interest, a recent divorcée. Ohara was voted "Japan's most adored actress" a whopping 14 times in her career, and as far as I can tell, really was a recent divorcée during the filming of this movie, from frequent co-star Tsunehiko Watase. Her life was made into a TV program, "Actress Reiko: Like a Flame", I wonder if her appearance on Tora-San is included in that?? I'm assuming this is the same Reiko Ohara who sang "Peacock Baby" in the 60s, although her bio doesn't mention a singing career. Great tune nonetheless-- [youtube]

as fans of the Fast and Furious franchise, we capitulated and watched this isotope starring 2 of the main actors from F&F and 1 actor who plays a recurring role. I love art heist movies and movies involving Fabergé eggs, and of course I love The Rock, but I really don't like Ryan Reynolds, and there was way too much quipping, it was overworked. This was made for Netflix and it feels like it-- it's not poorly made per se, but it does feel like someone just checking off boxes. When Netflix started making movies I was kind of interested-- I mean they have tons of data so presumably they could recognize a gap in the market for, for instance, a buddy cop movie with orcs (Bright, 2017). I thought they'd grind out a bunch of weird entries like this that stacked search terms in novel ways, but I was wrong. I guess once you capture a certain chunk of the market you don't need to innovate anymore, you can be lazy and just do "some people you know in a familiar setting". Once a year I housesit at a place with Netflix and it blows my mind that people pay for it. There's really nothing on there and there's less and less every year.

Another one and it's pretty good, although they really steered into the "shaky camera" look. Who started this trend for action movies? Bourne is a cool character-- a trained assassin with amnesia. This gives him a funny edge over all the other trained assassins coming to get him, in that he only has instinct. The other guys can remember their training and that limits them-- they think about things and consider options and waste valuable microseconds. Bourne has a hunch that something is possible and nothing stops his body from giving it a go. And by avoiding decisions entirely he lands at undecidable outcomes. It's like I always say- for any consistant axiomatic system there will always exist statements that are true but unprovable within the system. Took me a sec to recognize where I saw the font they use in this series, but then I fuckin pinned it on the first guess:

There's no revelation here, it's not iconic enough to be a clever reference or anything, and there's no connection as far as I can see, I'm just shocked that I got this on the first try.

OK this one was alllllmost too shaky for me but I liked it. I wouldn't want to watch an action movie shakier than this one. Julia Stiles reprises the role she had in the first two of these movies but she gets a bigger slice of the narrative pie this time. She basically plays a continuation of her "cyberpunk teen" character from the PBS television program Ghost Writer (1994).

I don't usually include nature docs in these write-ups because I think of them as "television" rather than "movie", but that does them a disservice. I watch them all the time and they're honestly better than most movies. And each one gets better and better, due to the advances in knowledge and in camera technology. This one has a lot of stop motion plant photography that really puts you in the plant's time frame and allows you to see the drama. The research, patience, editing, sound design, and pacing, combined with the childlike wonder of David Attenborough, all add up to make a truly delightful and inspiring program. Hopefully by naming this "Green Planet", they attract the viewership of the stoned browser clicking through titles at home, for whom the entire Attenborough oeuvre is miraculously perfect.

I liked how many flip phones and burners there were in the first couple of these movies, and this one's right on the cusp of smart phones everywhere. There's a not-bad-but-sketchy snake-voiced guy in this that's clearly based on Julian Assange and a surveilance tech social media company that's kind of like Facebook but with the culture of early Google, and they're called "Deep Dream", which is also the name of software that Google came out with in 2014. The head of the tech company is named Aaron, which made me sad thinking about Aaron Swartz (who died in 2013) but I don't think that was a direct riff, I think they just had to name the guy something. The cyber cop lady in this was the same person who played Tomb Raider in the latest movie of that name (2018), and I finally looked it up-- she didn't go to Brown University, she just kind of has that look. Not sure if that makes sense. Aaaaanyway I feel like the first one of these is the best one, the rest are just objects in its wake. Though to be clear, I had fun watching this.

I loved this absolutely bonkers kung fu movie with really great fight sequences AND psychedelic "what is this movie" parts. There's some Indiana Jones parts, and an ET theme with a cute kid and a papier mache alien, I guess that's how you sell a movie to a distributor in 1986. But there's also a lot of innovative stuff, including a completely original sequence in which a guy wakes up and his feet and hands have switched places. And the fight sequences are top notch. This is currently on youtube and I strongly recommend it. With Cynthia Rothrock in a supporting role. Also released as "Fight To Win".

A slasher film in the style of early Woody Allen, and honestly it was pretty good! I know that set-up sounds kind of cringey but there's a surprising amount of good jokes in this and we had a lot of fun watching it. The main character runs a strip club, and as with Times Square (1980), the music is crazy, the dancing is fun, the clientele is varied, and I would definitely hang out there.

bizarre and blatant ET rip off that is absolutely full to bursting with product placement for McDonalds and Coca Cola. I've never seen so much product in a movie. The alien's design is completely repugnant, absolutely disgusting, with a little butthole mouth that can only sip Coca Cola from a straw, no other food or beverage or energy source. IMDB suggests that if you like this you may enjoy Garbage Pail Kids (1987), which I think is true and also very damning. "If you like this you may enjoy lying face down in sewage being screamed at by children and bitten by rats." I mean I had fun watching this but I was with a small crowd, I'm starved for human contact so being with friends doing anything is a blessing, AND we were all pretty drunk. CW: the kid gets shot and killed by cops at the end but it's ok because he gets Lazarused by these nauseating aliens.

A great supernatural 80s gym horror with all the leotards which that setting requires. Need I say more??

Really nice Brendan Fraser rom com with Alicia Silverstone, Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek, and Dave Foley. About a family that seals themselves in a bomb shelter in 1962, and come up in 1997 when the shelter's 35 year locks disengage. This is the second "guy from the distant past emerges from underground" movie for Fraser, after 1992's Encino Man. After this of course he did the Mummy trilogy, but he didn't play the underground past man in those, it was someone else. And then in 2008 he did "Journey To The Center Of The Earth", which I didn't see but I'm thinking that must've been like a prequel? This one has music by the Cherry Poppin Daddies and it's honestly a great part of the movie, I think it's the least I've ever been annoyed by a swing revival band. To be honest this was fun and everyone was great in it. Brendan Fraser is great. This is a long shot, but if you're reading this Brendan Fraser, I thought you were great in this. I watched this with some friends and afterwards we all said "you know what, that was really nice, and Brendan Fraser seems like a really good guy". I hope all is well.

Wes Craven wanted to make a macabre love story with a teen interest, to try and break free from his catalog of gory movies. But when the initial cut of the film was shown to a test audience of Craven fans they were like hey buddy, where's the gore?, and the studio insisted on additional filming. So what we're left with is a fun little movie that periodically veers into beheadings and ends in total nonsense. I enjoyed it but that's an agonizing situation for any filmmaker.

Like many children of the 80s / 90s, I love ninjas. Sneaking around, having cool tools, being invisible, having a secret... Unfortunately when you really get down to it the life of a ninja basically sucks. This movie is about that. I mean there's the good stuff and the bad stuff. It's based on a series of popular novels that were serialized in a popular magazine, and that's why the movie just sort of twists and turns-- it was born as an episodic page turner with regular cliffhangers and now you're forced to breeze through it all in one go. There's a mid-movie reveal that's positively Lynchian, where it's revealed that this guy's rival is actually the guy himself in disguise-- I would have lost it if that dropped on the last page of this months installment of some adventure magazine, but in a movie it was weird that it just happens and now we're moving on. Well anyway yeah the life of a ninja sucks and large narrative arcs are phony anyway. I know that you need to know if there are throwing stars in this and the answer is: big time. There's no other cool ninja weapons but there is poisoning someone via a viscous liquid running down a long thread, wearing black pajamas, and moving silently with extreme intent. There are a few movies in this series and I'm probably going to watch them.

Really fun Australian biker movie where the bikers come across as wild and gross but ultimately a reasonable response to bullshit society. Really makes a good argument for being a biker! Everyone looks cool and even the main guy's dopey Paul Revere look grew on me. Almost everyone in the movie admires the bikers to some degree, I wouldn't be surprised to learn this was biker-financed. Cool soundtrack that also had a lot of well-placed silence-- you don't see a lot of positively charged negative space in movies, much less in biker flicks, but this movie's got it baby and it's a groove. A few of the actors reappeared in Mad Max (1979), and there's even a guy named "Bad Max". The description on the box will make it seem like them being Satanists is going to be a big plot point, but in the movie the bikers treat it like a tax dodge or something-- it gets them out of certain requirements via the Religious Freedom Act of Australia. I'm not saying that as a dig, just as a warning to those expecting supernatural fare.

I love the Fantômas books but I never watched any of these old silent serials until today. This one's pretty good. Silent films always seem sort of unwatchable at first-- you see a bunch of people talking and then you read a summation of what they said? That seems unreasonable. But then once I get in there I'm having a great time and letting fly any number of my classic movie-watching catchphrases like ahhh this fuckin guy, and watch out lady, and (in the case of Buster Keaton especially) you wouldn't catch me up there doing that. I watched this on youtube and the quality of the picture was extraordinary, and I got to feeling like the silent film is a viable format after all. Fantômas is a great character-- he's the villain and he's absolutely diabolical and he always (spoiler) gets away. He's constantly in costume and in the books you're like "is that Fantômas? is he disguised as the milkmaid? or the aide de camp?" and it's like an early workaround for having an unreliable narrator (which had yet to be invented). In the movie though you know who the hell it is right off the bat because they show you a montage first thing of "all these people are Fantômas in disguise" and they're all crossfading malevolently to drive the point home. And besides that, the guy playing Fantômas is so scintillating he burns a hole in the screen with his piercing eyes and eats up the scenery with his sharp little teeth. You see him a mile away. Luckily the majority of the blockbuster 1913 audience had read the fantastically popular book, and likely ditto for the miniscule audience of 2022. We're not here for surprises, we're here to see a horrible man with sharp little teeth escape the titular guillotine. In a rave review from Chronique Cinématographique, critic Maurice Raynal wrote that "There is nothing in this involved, compact, and concentrated film but explosive genius." The year Is 1913. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiers in Paris, the Mona Lisa (stolen in 1911) is returned to France, Albert Camus is less than one year old, the notorious Bonnot Gang have been put to trial after a massive shootout in Choisy-le-Roi, and the people want LURID CRIME in service of ANARCHY. Unfortunately what the bigwigs cooked up for them was World War I, which sold more records than societal upheaval but no one really liked (see also Little Richard / Pat Boone).

My friend from growing up is in this, Eric Robert Bradshaw Bennett, he's the truck driver who can be seen in his truck for 2 seconds singing "Rock You Like A Hurricane" at the top of his lungs. As I remember the story, Tom Cruise didn't like the look of the guy who was cast as the truck driver, and said "now that guy looks like a truck driver", and pointed at my friend, who was working on the movie doing lights. So my man got plugged in! He's got big mutton chops, he looks great. I don't know if the song was an improv or what. The last time I really talked to Eric was many many years ago, he told me his favorite part about being a lighting technician was when he got to be the moon. They send you way up in a huge crane with a bright light, and stunt drivers are whizzing around you, and you're just up there being the moon. That's so nice! Eric if you're out there, hi, how are you? Have you been the moon lately?

---

links / misc

• If you can't get enough of the "lists of movies" format, you can read the previous list, which encompassed all of 2021, here: [link]. The 2020 list is here: [link]. The 2019 list is here: [link]. Gonna do these quarterly from now on.
• as far as like "actual movie review" blogs, my two favs aren't being updated very regularly but they're still there, and if you've never read them they're new to you. Of course I'm talking about Bubul and Harms At The Movies [link], and Flan Flips For Flicks [link]. They're both really good and fun to read, even if you've never seen the movie in question or have any plans to.
• Thank you for the nice comments about last week's maddening blast. This green skeletal hand points especially to reader ANTHONY, who wrote to say that Madball (band) is named after a billiard ball in a sock, used as a weapon. Thanks Anthony!
• longstanding friend of the castle Mindy (dba VIRUSSE) is going on tour for the next week with noted publisher and musician Leah (dba HOLY PEOPLE). If they're playing in your area (Providence, Philly, Richmond VA, Chapel Hill, Asheville, Atlanta, Baltimore, Brooklyn) and you're up for a gathering, check it out. Here's the info, listed on a jpg flyer: [jpg]. Virusse is contemporary synthpop, here's the bandcamp link: [bandcamp]
• Greg Harvester has a new zine coming out, or it's not his but he's publishing it-- it's called "Death By A Thousand Nostalgic Cuts (vol 1)" and it's a book of photos by Karoline Collins. The subject of the book is the Naked Cult of HICKEY, with many previously unpublished photos of this storied band. There's a pre-order up now on Greg's website, and the book will be out by the end of April: [link]
• Kevin Huizenga has been adding to his website lately, in addition to running a nice little Patreon. Kevin has a practice of making these "mind maps" as he thinks something over and they're fun to look at it, it's really like looking at a cartoon character's thought bubble as they read, for instance, Jameson's Allegory and Ideology. the blog is here: [link] and there's links from there to the Patreon. As I understand it the Patreon is like hiking up the mountain a little and getting cool meltwater from a crystal stream, and the website is like swimming around in the reservoir. Both are nice.
• the magazine at the top of the page is by Molly Colleen O'Connell, it was part of a fantastical newsstand installation she made for the big Chicago Comics show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Museuolly Collart O'Contemporary. She's been selling off these single mags and they're all great. Her website is here: [link] and her instagram is here: [link]

---

If you got here through a link, click here to go outside and come back in: [outside]

Archives of previous posts is here, in the coat room: [coatroom]

To sign up to get these posts in your email for free, click here: [substack]

To write me a nice message, use the contacts page: [link]

To leave a little donation to help in the maintance of this castle, OR to simply hear the sound of a large bell, which is good luck, visit the temple area: [link]

As always, if you're bugging out or need a respite from endlessly scrolling the feed, you are welcome to hang out in the castle as long as you want. :)

printable version of this page