Friday, February 17, 2023

Friday Watch Party: Come Celebrate Raquel Welch with "Kansas City Bomber"



Sadly, this week we lost movie star Raquel Welch.  

Let's remember this singular movie star with a movie that shows her acting, her toughness and let's Welch look terrific while elbowing jerks off a banked track.  

Day:  Friday  02/17/2023
Time:  8:30 Central/ 6:30 Pacific
Service:  Amazon
Cost:  $3

(link live 10 minutes before showtime)


Noir Watch: Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948)




Watched:  02/15/2023
Format:  TCM
Viewing:  First
Director:  Norman Foster

Boy, they really used to know how to name a movie, didn't they?  

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) is post-war noir, filmed in Hollywood doing it's darndest to look like post-War London, and populated by British ex-pats and Burt Lancaster.  You get Joan Fontaine!  How can that be wrong?

This film is the darkest of noir, and an interesting example of the movement.  Normally I think of noir as including either a person who is in a morally corrupt world because of their choice of job as a detective, but much more often as a person who is corrupted by a compulsion (here's where you get your femme fatales leading morally shaky fellows astray) and their world turns upside down.  But this movie has a flawed protagonist who is also the victim of what we'd now call PTSD - a veteran of the war who saw no point in going back to the U.S. and is adrift in London.  

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Raquel Welch Merges With The Infinite



Raquel Welch, star of screen and stage, has passed.

Let's be candid.  In sixth grade, my science teacher took a rare break from biology, electricity and all the other things we studied that year and showed us Fantastic Voyage, because it's actually a really cool way to discuss the human body and what we knew about it at the time of filming.  And, of course, the movie co-starred Raquel Welch who seared herself into my budding consciousness as a wildly attractive woman of great intelligence, which is just the killer formula for making a lifelong fan of a kid.

I recall reading an interview where Welch mostly thought of herself as a working actor trying to make a living as a single mom when she found stardom, and while she was fighting blood cells with lasers, or fighting dinosaurs, she was thinking about making sure her kids had shoes.  That certainly skewed my perspective on her as a performer.

Fortunately, Welch went on to fame and fortune, only really retiring about five or six years ago.  IMDB credits her with 73 roles, a producer on 2 projects and a writer on 1.  She had more or less walked away from the spotlight since and hadn't conducted interviews in a few years.

A few years ago, I had opportunity to review a newly released BluRay of One Million Years B.C., and found it absolutely terrific.  And I feel I did a fair job of giving Welch her due in a movie with no spoken lines.

Because Welch never lost her beauty or glamour, I suppose I didn't realize she was aging like the rest of humanity.  I'm very sorry to hear she's gone on.


Tuesday, February 14, 2023

PodCast 232: "Cutthroat Island" (1995) - A Movie of Doom w/ SimonUK and Ryan



Watched:  02/05/2023
Format:  Amazon
Viewing:  Second
Decade:  1990's
Director:  Renny Harlin




Yarrr! Shiver me timbers! 'Tis the 1995 movie that made us voluntarily seek Davey Jones' locker. We walk the plank of 90's spectacle filmmaking to reconsider a movie that no one boarded, and it still sank to the ocean floor despite extravagant sets, seemingly real boats, giant cannons, a monkey and the always watchable Geena Davis. ...and yet...


SoundCloud 


YouTube


Music:
Cutthroat Island Main Theme - John Debney 


MOVIES OF DOOM!

Happy Birthday, Danai Gurira



Happy Birthday to Danai Gurira!  


Happy Valentine's Day from Us at The Signal Watch

May you have a super day of romance 






Monday, February 13, 2023

Watch Party Watch: Birdemic III - Sea Eagle (2022)




Watched:  02/10/2023
Format:  Amazon Watch Party
Viewing:  First
Director:  James Nguyen

You can't really write about a Birdemic movie as a movie.  You could, I guess.  But what's the point?

A Birdemic film is an experience.  It's there to make you ask an infinite number of questions like: why?  So many "why's?".  So many "what's?".  And "how's?"

Jamie, Steanso and I attended what was one of the very earliest public screenings of the original Birdemic,  It was during a period where I wasn't blogging, so there isn't a record, I guess.  But I do have a record of seeing the sequel.