Movie Watch 2012: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

"Well," as Jamie said as we pulled away from the theater, "That was most definitely a Wes Anderson movie."

I have a hard time criticizing directors or musicians for continuing to employ some of their trademarks in their work.  Anderson's barely-there dialog direction, the same four or five shots he uses over and over in a rhythmic pattern (usually punctuated with a particularly lovely and well framed surprising shot: think the kid in the pool in Rushmore).

Nor can you hold the fact that none of his narratives ever really see closure against him.  His are not movies that end with a wedding (well, maybe Royal Tenenbaums) but suggest that this is a particularly important juncture in the lives of many people: now let us observe.

If any of Anderson's affectations irritate you, you've been put on notice by his prior work, and this film is not for you.*  This is most definitely not the movie where he changes things up and goes for a Dogma 95 verite style.  If you're familiar with his work and somehow still keep paying to see it, then this may be a movie for you.  I'm fond of Anderson's aesthetic, which may have overwhelmed The Life Aquatic and, to a degree, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, but I appreciate that he's got his own thing going on.

In some ways, much as I wanted to grab 15-year-old me and take him to see Rushmore, I would have loved to have had 12 year old me in tow for this one.  It definitely understands the inevitability of a Lord of the Flies scenario when dealing with boys of that age, of how confusing and useless adults can seem (and how they have their own messes) and even the passion you might have applied to reading X-Men comics or scouting skills that you might also turn to a girl who actually pays you heed at that awful stage in life.  Imagine were love requited at that age...

The cast is better than I'd heard by word of mouth, and Tilda Swinton was typically amazing even in her small part.  But Jason Schwartzman's small role, no doubt written specifically for him, is pure gold.  The herd of child actors, especially the two leads, are pretty great.  And the moment of decision for the Khaki Scouts in their treehouse was the sort of monumental scene for kids that felt true, even in its ludicrousness.

In short, I enjoyed it.  No real surprises, even down to <spoiler> the needless death of a pet </spoiler>.  But it was a lovely film, and a nice bit of counter-programming to all the sci-fi and superhero stuff of the past year.  This I say with tickets bough to see Dark Knight Rises next Saturday.




*seriously, if I hear any of you tell me you didn't like anything since Royal Tenenbaums but you still went to see this and you're complaining?  What are you doing?  Also, the people who trapped us so they could watch the credits?  Stop it.  You're not impressing anyone seeing who 3rd Best Boy was on the movie.  I assure you he'd already left the theater before his name rolled.

Movie Watch 2012 - Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians

A recent episode of NPR radio documentary program This American Life featured bits of the story from the 2011 movie in telling its own version of the story of a gang of card counting Christians, Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians.  It's currently streaming on Netflix, so you can check it out for yourselves.

The doc follows a group of young people, mostly under 30 I'd guess, who are a wide variety of youth ministers, parishioners, pastors of small congregations and then just friends and hangers-on who follow a few leaders in the group into the wacky world of card counting in order to try to beat the house at casinos all over the country.  They form a small business which actually raises investment capital from folks they know and within the group, and then redistributes the winnings back out among the investors, the management and the gamblers.

Movie Watch 2012 - "Rio" (2011)

Huh.

So, I wasn't particularly interested in seeing Rio (2011) when it was released in theaters.  Goodness knows I like going to see kids' movies, especially those by Pixar and Disney, but Rio struck me as the sort of movie that's become standard fare from Dreamworks and other animation companies, and which has plagued Disney animation itself since Aladdin scored huge bucks at the box office.  And, truthfully, I'm not sure the animation companies are exactly wrong in their assessment since they keep making money...

But the idea is this:

Anything said in a wacky voice = funny.
Wacky voices include: anything that doesn't sound like a standard non-regional American accent.  Thus, George Lopez is assured work in animation until he goes mute or dies.
The faster a line is delivered, the wackier and thus, funnier a line is.  Even if it's just "I'm going to wash the dishes".  Say it with zing and a hint of latino flavor and BAM.  Comedy.
Also:  characters must pop into a new pose every 2-5 seconds unless experiencing the pre-requisite pity party for all animated leads, in which case they must move extra slowly, and with terrific slouching.

Again, I blame Aladdin.   Somehow Robin Williams burned through the last of whatever appeal he'd had channeling through Genie, and every movie since has been struggling to replicate the (at the time) shocking appeal of a character that pushed the boundaries of what we expected in a Disney movie, breaking the fourth wall, indulging in anachronisms and basically acting as a chaos agent.

Movies like Shrek decided this was good fun, and basically made a whole movie that was Genie.

Because kids are always being made fresh, and they tend to laugh at things that go boom or squish, the idea that Walt Disney had that he was animating storybooks for an all-ages audience has been mostly forgotten and is now the domain of a way to kill 90 minutes where you can only half-focus on your kids as they half-focus on a screen, and to keep their little attention-deprived brains on the flickery, pretty lights, everything in every animated movie has become Genie.

You guys remember that Beauty and the Beast was up for an Academy Award as best picture?  It was.  It's a really beautiful, all-ages, film, still.

So, that's a lot of pre-amble to explain how I felt about Rio.

Rio is a technical masterpiece using a phenomenal palette, the Escher-esque ziggurat of Rio de Janeiro as the setting, deft 3D animated camera work, astounding character design and realization of bird and monkey characters...  to create a completely forgettable, derivative and in-no-way funny movie in which birds basically get mangled repeatedly as one of them attempts to unite with his owner.

It's not a bad movie, but it's not a good movie.  It's an incredibly poorly scripted movie that could have used someone with an actual sense of humor to touch up the script and make it relevant to an audience older than the age of 5 or 6 who has never seen this storyline before.  Or, you know, to add actual jokes to the movie that so, so badly wants to be funny but feels like that kid in your class in high school who just repeated impressions from Saturday Night Live and drew a low chuckle from people remembering Phil Hartman's skit rather than anything the kid actually did (and, of course, if you don't chuckle a little, you're going to break the little bastard's heart).

The whole movie, in this way, is sort of an echo of better movies with better plots, actual songs, comedy, etc...  and feels so utterly unnecessary.  Wordlwide, it made a half billion dollars, so I'm thinking nobody really gives a crap about any of that, but they do want to get the hell out of the house with the kids and remember what it was like going to the movies before the kids, with the hope that one day they will see one of these movies that isn't just a trainwreck.

It's made by some of the same folks who keep trotting out the really, really not good Ice Age movies (people, you do not have to keep seeing these movies.  The first one was awful.) if that gives you any idea of what you're in for.  Celebrity voices.  The occasional poopie joke.  And!   Lots!  of!  Quick!  Line!  Delivery! With!  Snap!!!!!

In other words, I may not have been the intended audience for this movie.

Movie Watch 2012: "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Godzilla: Final Wars"

Bond

It was Bond week this week at Austin's Paramount Theater.  Sadly, I was pre-occupied and unable to make it to the screening of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which I really wanted to see.

One summer when I was in middle school, Jason and I would go to the video rental place, return the last Bond movie we'd rented and check out another.  In this manner, we watched every Bond movie but Thunderball, which I still haven't seen.  The problem with this method was that within two years, all of the movies had sort of bled together in my mind, so I could only remember specific set pieces and the occasional Bond girl.

Thanks to TBS and a few other sources, I've watched several Bond movies over since then, and I do like catching the movies over again now, but I make an effort to watch them pretty far apart so they don't blend together again.  And, for the record, Connery, of course.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) stars Roger Moore as Bond, and it's from the point where the Bond franchise became a bit too enamored with quippy one-liners and just took it for granted that women melted under Bond's icy gaze.  It's a fun movie, and it has some great Q gadgets, a phenomenally cool villain base, gadgets and private military (sherbet colored uniforms?  Where do I sign up?!).  The plan is pretty poorly sketched, but whatever.  It's post-Connery/ pre-Timothy Dalton Bond, and its not all that different from what we'd see with Pierce Brosnan later.

And, hey, this is the one with the Lotus that turns into a submarine.

The movie makes an attempt to give Bond a sexy female Russian counterpart, but, truthfully, the base misogyny of the Bond franchise hadn't quite sort through itself, leaving Barbara Bach mostly standing around beside Bond as he Bonds his way around.  I'm not sure Bach is also the most compelling Bond girl, but she does the job.

It's not my favorite Moore entry (For Your Eyes Only, probably), but it does feature "Nobody Does it Better" performed by Carly Simon, which is a pretty great Bond theme - and has a Bond opening sequence that well reminds you why they changed those for the Daniel Craig years, even if it's pretty brilliant.

Godzilla

Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) was Toho's "we can't top this" ending to production of Godzilla movies after 50 years.  I'd heard they'd planned to stop making them prior to the US produced Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick, but after that trainwreck, they felt like they needed to keep making their own films.

I will give Godzilla: Final Wars this:  you have no idea where this movie is going when the movie begins.  I can promise you:  mutants, aliens, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and a dozen other Kaiju, super ninja fights, matrix-style battles, sexy biologists and reporters, international/ interplanetary intrigue, the destruction of a half-dozen cities on at least four continents and a wildly out of control costuming department.  Oh, and a really amazing mustache.

I don't really know how to sell this movie other than to say: hold tight and leave expectation at the door.

And, f-yeah, Godzilla.

Signal Watch Watches: The Amazing Spider-Man

I think it may have been Tom Spurgeon who commented that, to him, Spider-Man was this thing that occurred between 1962-1972 or so.  And if you've ever read early Spider-Man, it's not hard to see why that might be.  So much of what came afterward has been either retread or adding unnecessary baggage to the Peter Parker formula that seeing the story about the kid who puts on tights to fight crime and super-villains got lost somewhere with alien symbiote suits, clones, clones of clones, clones in symbiote suits, etc...

I've read probably the first 100 issues of Spider-Man in Marvel's phenomenal Essentials collections (and that artwork sings in black and white.  Trust me.).  I can't exactly remember when I first came to Spider-Man, because he was on The Electric Company, starred in TV movies, was in the paper, and was on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.  I don't remember either the first Spidey comic I read, nor the last.  I do remember reading the wedding issue when it hit the newstand (it was such a big deal, guys).  But reading Kraven's Last Hunt totally wigged me out and made a bit of a Spider-Fan of me.*

For some reason we watched "Something Wild" (1986) and ponder a bit on "Manic Pixie Girls"

I dunno.  The other night it came on HBO and I was messing with uploading photos, etc...  And I did say "every movie in 2012".

The movie is probably most remarkable for the 1980's-ness of the idea and overall feel.

Of the sub-genre of movies now referred to as "The Manic Pixie Dreamgirl" movie, Something Wild (1986) follows the adventures that follow when a straightlaced stocks and bonds man (Jeff Daniels) gets hi-jacked by Melanie Griffith channeling Louise Brooks for 1/3rd of the movie (the character goes by "Lulu", among other names).  I've never really understood the appeal of Melanie Griffiths, and I'm not sure this movie did much to change that perception.  She's not a bad actress, but she seemed much more important in the 1980's than necessary, and while she's fine in the movie...

The idea behind the Manic Pixie Girl movies is that the right girl will find your poor, lost soul and save you from the comfort zone that you've spent decades building but which now, clearly, doesn't work anymore.  She's often an iconoclast, seemingly invulnerable and always sexually charged.  Sometimes the movies can be a bit creepy, if the Manic Pixie Girl is significantly younger than our hero, or even underage.

I'm not going to say the right girl can't shake things up for a guy in real life, but there's something odd about way these movies work that always feels a bit strained.

There's a certain weird high-school or undergrad take on women, a possessive object-oriented approach to character that I think calls back to how far away girls seem in younger days when you have absolutely no idea how to communicate with the object of your desire, especially someone who seems perfectly happy without you (ie: has no idea you exist).  And I guess I get it, I just sort of see characters skewing towards the one in this movie as "unstable, crazy people who you can enjoy in your personal life, but you have to know might explode at any minute".  But the idea vs. the reality of a person is, maybe, one of the best realizations is a worthy topic for movie making, I think.

Curiously, movies deal with this stock character differently.  Some stay manic pixie girls and dance out of frame mostly untouched by the lead character by movie's end, and in other cases they're Melanie Griffiths here, where their "growth" means abandoning the MPDG character and becomes...  sort of boring by films end.

But I mentioned the 80's-ness.

The movie begins in New York, I believe.   With a blond-haired stock broker on the make.  The soundtrack, including Paul Simon-friendly World Beat tunes and touching lightly on primordial but suburban friendly hip-hop.  Griffiths' lack of self-consciousness at wearing a huge Africa medallion for a chunk of the movie (we were still working some stuff out in 1986).  The utter mistrust and difference between city and country.  The movie devolves into this weird thing where Daniels and Griffiths have to fight a young and scrappy looking Ray Liotta to the death.  It was like the movie forgot what it was about somewhere at the hour mark or a near two-hour film.

There's a subplot about going to see Lulu's mom that doesn't really go anywhere except to set some baselines for who Lulu is that seem like they could have been better handled.  I dunno.

The movie was directed by the very talented Jonathan Demme,  The cast is fine, but the material feels oddly dated.  I dunno.

This is probably enough talk about a movie I was barely watching.

Signal Watch Watches: Superman vs. The Elite (2012)

The latest release from DC Animation's feature group is an adaptation of the Joe Kelly penned, Doug Mahnke penciled issue of Superman, #775, actually somewhat known by the issue's tile of "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way".


For simplicity's sake, the movie has been retitled Superman vs. The Elite, more or less letting the casual observer that this was Superman in a super fight against a bunch of punky superheroes and that they're in for big Superman fights, if that's what they're looking for.  

Too much background

At the time of the release of the original story in the comics (a single, double-length issue), for a number of years Superman had been dwindling within the DC Universe as a featured player.  In an era of trying to make superheroes "realistic", the idea of a guy with incredible super powers, a flying dog and who disguised himself with a pair of glasses didn't fit with what the aging fans of comics, guys who were into Schwarzenegger movies, saw as the proper mode for an action hero.  The sort of Roy Rogers take on Superman that had been his primary mode of existence wasn't working very well for an audience that was turning to Reservoir Dogs as it's idea of an action film.

Noir Watch: Desperate (1947)

Woof.

Desperate (1947) feels very much like a movie that was made because somebody needed a thriller and they needed one fast.

One of the things I like best about noir can be the the tightly woven plots that fit together like a Swiss timepiece.  Desperate is not an exemplar of this mode of noir-making.

The world's most illogical criminal gang, led by a pre-Godzilla Raymond Burr, decides that to make their heist run well, they should just hire a truck from a guy Raymond Burr knew when they were kids.  So, they hire the incredibly potent newlywed Steve Randall, played by Steve Brodie.

Steve is onto their scheme after showing up and letting the guys who announce "hey, we found some furs!" load their stuff onto his truck at a warehouse, but gets twitchy when one of them shows his pistol for absolutely no reason.  The gang decides to hold Steve in the truck, but in the cab of the truck where he signals a security officer with the lights.  Bullets fly and mayhem ensues.

Desperate to see the closing credits, maybe.

Signal Watch goes all Teen Angsty with "Rebel Without a Cause"!

Just FYI: I DVR'd this a while back and finally watched it Friday night. It's playing again Saturday on TCM as part of their Natalie Wood-a-thon if you're looking for a night in.

this is the part where I admit I cuffed my jeans in high school because I thought James Dean made it cool.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is one of those movies I suspect a lot of people know from the iconography of the poster and can probably tell you it stars James Dean and Natalie Wood, but I don't think most folks around my age have bothered to ever watch.

When I was in middle school a friend's dad who had been of age when the movie came out insisted we get sat down and watch the thing.  At the time I didn't find much of the movie terribly relatable, and I recall we kept having to stop the movie to basically explain the 1950's to us kids in a context that didn't involve Olivia Newton John and John Travolta.

I watched it again in high school, and it felt far more relevant at least in its depiction of the gulf between the world of parents and what's going on with their kids, but that was about 20 years ago.

Rewatching the film highlighted some of the excellent work by director Nicholas Ray, and to see the relationships between the characters through the eyes of an adult (physically, perhaps not emotionally) was most certainly interesting after all this time.  I don't think I really noticed how intensely compressed the timeline of the main action actually is during the film (the last two thirds occurs over basically one day, I believe).  I was far more acutely aware of the cues from Sal Mineo toward James Dean's Jim and that was some pretty bold stuff for a 1955 film.  And, most definitely the relationship between Jim and his parents feels less staged as a plotpoint and more as a condemnation of conflicting parenting styles.  Of course in 2012 a character enjoying having three adults in their household is probably considered excellent parenting above criticism, so, you know...  different times.

Some smaller details stuck out.  I realized that not only do you not really see smokers on the big screen anymore, you never see teenagers smoking, which was a staple of films when I was a kid and goes utterly unmentioned when Natalie Wood and Jimmy Dean light up (to mention it would be uncool, anyway).

Despite being the film he might be most associated with (I guess Giant is the other contender), the movie was released posthumously for Dean.  The fatal car wreck that took his life occurred just a month before the film's premier.  Still, Giant wouldn't hit the screen til after Rebel, and perhaps that's fitting, as the performance and film have greater scope, but it's tragic that Dean would never see the reaction to either.

Dean's performance is of the school that you can recognize from Brando and Newman and other contemporaries who had stepped away from the traditions of the stage actor and played to the intimacy of the camera.  In the mumbling world of the teenaged male, it seemed only too appropriate for the seeming prisoner within his own skin to need a camera snooping closeby when nobody is watching to see what's going on with Jim Stark.

I'm not sure sure that this is the first movie that moved beyond depicting teens as spunky, can-do mini-adults, but the film's impact and potency still resonate in even the goofier teen sex comedies as kids struggle to communicate with their folks and to gain their acceptance/ legitimize whatever the heck it is they're going through (see:  The Breakfast Club).

Because of the age of the characters, it's also a bit easier to understand the decisions made by the protagonists and antagonists in the film, their motives and stakes are worn on their sleeve.

One bit I always liked in the movie, that goes undiscussed, is that the guy who seemed ready to kill Jim early in the film extends a hand of friendship, adding to the tragedy that drives the rest of the movie.  Of course, it says nothing great about Natalie Wood's Judy that she seems to bounce from Buzz to Jim mostly because Buzz is no longer with us, but high school girls...  they're screwy.

Anyway, if you've not seen Dean's defining role and you'd like to see an extremely young Dennis Hopper playing a fellow named "Goon", this is your chance.

Jimmy Stewart Double Bill: "Anatomy of a Murder" and "Harvey"

Not very long ago at all I posted about my reverence for actor Jimmy Stewart.  This week the Paramount Summer Series featured a pair of classic Stewart films, Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Harvey (1950).

You really couldn't hope to find two more different films, and that's what Paramount Summer Series programmer Jesse Trussell was attempting to highlight.  Stewart's affability is most certainly present in both films, but Harvey provides Stewart with a fantasy role in the sort of polite small town atmosphere of mid-century Broadway shows, where old ladies are silly hens and polite misunderstandings are the thing of great screwball comedy.  Meanwhile, Anatomy of a Murder is a fictionalized account of small town murder and the attorney who takes on the case despite some terribly gray areas and open questions (ie: what I believe most defense attorneys are doing when they take on a case).

Signal Watch Watches: Mothra (1961)

Well, of COURSE I watched Mothra (1961).  It came on right after Rodan, so I recorded it to my DVR and watched it later.

Uh...

So, I don't know how many Toho Studios Kaiju movies you've watched.  I've seen about 10-15% of their output, and I've always liked "the twins", the two mysterious faeries that popped up and sang and seemed to be friends with all the giant monsters on Monster Island.  I had never seen the original Mothra movie, but had seen the giant flying bug in other Godzilla films, and not found her without her charms.  But after the super rampage that was Rodan, something about this film seemed a bit too tame, and sort of pre-sages the era of movies wherein we'll lose focus from steely-jawed scientists, wise-cracking journalists and other adults in the lead and devolve into an endless sea of kids in bad shorts named "Kenny" as the protagonist of the film.

Movie Watch 2012 - Rodan (1956)

I have no idea why, but when I got home tonight from Boston, I watched almost all of kaiju super fest Rodan from 1956.  

The movie attempts to find the same mournful tone as Gojira, but misses by a bit while still sticking a bummer of an ending onto an otherwise pretty spunky movie.  Jamie was not a fan of Rodan, either as a movie or a muppet.  I thought it had its charms, but Rodan's lack of atomic-fire-breathw as apparently a big red "x" against our flying petaranodon (or however the movie spelled pteranodon).

Rodan!

I also liked their models in this movie.  They actually moved WHILE shooting.

Signal Watch Watches: Prometheus (2012)

Look, this thing is full of spoilers, so don't bother unless you've seen the movie.

Re-Watch: Trollhunter (2010)

Last night Jamie was out of town, so a few pals came by and our gameplan was to eat lousy Greek food, make a drink and then watch Crank 2.  Tragically, this was not to be.

I opened the NetFlix sleeve, popped in the disk and was ready to roll when we received an error message from the player.  The disk was for some PS3 game, and most certainly NOT for Crank 2.  So some poor 19 year old out there is wondering where his copy of Battlefield went.*

Plan B was to watch Troll 2, but that was deemed "@#$%ing unwatchable" by some in attendance, so Matt said "if we're going to watch something with trolls in it**, let's watch Trollhunter".

So we did.

Here's what I said about the movie when I caught it in the theater almost exactly a year ago.

I'm not sure I really sold the movie back then as well as I could have, but its a really fun flick, and not scary at all, if that's your concern.  Its just a fun time, and, as Matt said "definitely one of the best of these 'found film' movies."

I loved the discussion of the physiology of trolls, the shadowy Troll Security Service, etc...  all good stuff.

Anyway, its on Netflix Streaming, so check it out.



*I've got it!
**I'm not sure "trolls" was our only criteria, but it made sense at the time.

Signal Watch Watches: Stardust Memories (1980)

Interesting.

So, as some found horrifying, I didn't take to Allen's 1979 film Manhattan.  I've generally basically liked the Woody Allen movies I'd seen, so I gave Allen's follow-up, Stardust Memories (1980), a whirl and hopefully my positive reaction will get me back in your good graces as a watcher of cinemaaaah.

Basically, Stardust Memories solves the problems I had with Manhattan in many ways, or The Problem I had with Manhattan, which was that I finished the movie thinking "and so what?".  It seemed as if in Manhattan Allen had found he had a particular patter down from Annie Hall, found he could play himself in his own context, and it didn't really matter if the story went anywhere or was basically upperclass urbanites mistaking their high school-ish romantic tangles as interesting enough for the rest of us (yes, I got the thing that Allen's character could only connect with a high schooler.  All well and good til you consider his real life marital woes, which...), and the clumsy, flailing quest for something "deep" by self-medicating and spending too much on therapy that went nowhere as a pursuit unto itself.

Stardust Memories acknowledges all the questions, perhaps a bit too on the nose from time to time, but it at least tries to move beyond Allen in one of his stand-in roles, but challenges the character, adding on the layer of the frustrated artist at a crosspoint in his life of the guy who has made it, and all the expectation and responsibility inherent.  The trials of the filmmaker, piled on top of the usual hand wringing Allenisms over the allure and complications of women drive the character conflict, and create enough of an arc to give the movie the weight that Manhattan sought for but never achieved.

I guess if you're going to have a "character driven story", this is a pretty darn good example of what that can look like, even if its hard not to guess how close the "character" is, as pre-usual, just Allen casting himself against good looking women.

Watching the movie, I still grapple a bit with some of the line delivery and Allen-patter, and 70's-era signposts for intellectualism that had become a parody of themselves by the time I came of age, but I won't hold it against the film, especially as it pushes the narrative boundaries a bit, and effectively at that.  Further, while Manhattan is always the movie that gets the credit for the visual love letter to New York, I'll take the work in this movie.  Even without the dialog and banter, it seems to use the frame less to show and more to tell the story.

Anyway, fear not Woody Allen fans.  I have not sworn off the man's work.

Signal Watch Watches: Best Worst Movie (2009)

After a steady diet of terrible flicks over the past two decades, something I had somehow come to enjoy in my teen years, seeking out bad movies is something I'm now limiting in my intake as I realized a man can only watch R.O.T.O.R. so many times, and there's actually stuff you can enjoy because its actually worth watching.  But for a long, long time I felt like I was fairly well in tune with what we all considered the worst of the worst.

And yet, somehow, I'd missed the phenomenon of Troll 2.

Of course, I was also living in Phoenix when The Alamo figured out how to turn genre-film and midnight screening material into part of their bread and butter, getting people excited about movies that they had never seen, or getting them to pay good money to see movies they'd seen for a far more modest cost on late-night HBO a decade before.

The first time I ever heard the words "Troll 2" was, curiously, at an improv show performance where one of the actresses mistakenly believed that repeatedly making callbacks to a movie few people have not seen nor remember was comedic gold.  I swear she dropped the movie's name four times, hoping for a laugh.  She was greeted with stony silence, but the fact that she kept going back to the well made me realize "oh, this is one of those things today's hipster kids are into.  I get it.  But, seriously, naming something funny when you aren't doesn't draw a laugh.  STOP IT NOW.".

Best Worst Movie (2009) tracks the circa 2006 fad (I'll go ahead and call it that) of being really into Troll 2 from the perspective of the folks who participated in the creation of the movie, including the stars, writer, director, extras and, of course, some of the folks making midnight screenings happen.

The film's former wanna-be child star, Michael Stephenson, actually does an amazing job directing the documentary, collecting all the folks from the film together, getting them to talk honestly both about the film, where they are now, and how they related to the film then and now.  A lot of the questions I had left over at the end of Rock-afire Explosion are nowhere to be found in this film.  I mean, sure, you can still have some questions, but those might be of a nature that you can sort out for yourself.  Basically, the film doesn't raise more questions than it answers, and its pretty honest about what's going on.

Signal Watch Watches: A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Y'all, I finally watched A Shot in the Dark (1964)!  Please check one of those movies off the list that everybody else saw 20 years ago.

And, sure enough, it totally lived up to the hype.  I haven't ever seen that many Sellers movies or Blake
Edwards films, but, yeah, I get it.  Sorry it took me so long.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, before The Pink Panther, Blake Edwards directed a movie starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.  A Shot in the Dark did well enough to spawn a sequel you may know as The Pink Panther.  This spawned not just several Pink Panther movies and a favorite movie theme by Henry Mancini, but a Pink Panther cartoon based upon the opening animation for the Clouseau movies (I watched the cartoon in repeats on WGN in middle school), a brand of pink insulation, and, eventually, a reboot of Clouseau under the Pink Panther banner, but with Steve Martin, which did better than you'd expect.

Sellers, of course, died far too young.

I won't go into too much detail, but its worth a watch some time.

Signal Watch Double Bill: Shock Corridor (1963) & The Naked Kiss (1964)

Holy hell, y'all.

I'm not familiar with the work of writer/ director/ producer Samuel Fuller, but he has one of those names you always hear.  And, I haven't had opportunity yet to visit the Paramount yet this summer for the summer series, nor had I ever been in the State Theater on Congress, side by side with the Paramount.  Wednesday night provided a great opportunity to knock some items off my list, and so I caught both Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), two movies that earned their bonafides.

Of the two films, Shock Corridor may have dated more poorly, even if it still holds up very well from a narrative standpoint.  It follows a newspaper journalist who knows he can earn a Pulitzer by going undercover into an mental hospital to solve a murder the police have been unable to crack as the only three witnesses were hopelessly mentally ill.  He recruits his stripper girlfriend, played by the lovely Constance Towers, into posing as his sister who files charges of attempted sexual assault.  With training from a psychologist, Johnny Barrett sneaks in undetected.

And then learns that a mental hospital run under the common practices of mid-20th Century medicine was no picnic.

When they make my bio-pic, tell them this is exactly what I want the poster to look like, but with Jamie dancing in the corner.

Signal Watch Watches: The Rock-afire Explosion (2008)

My experience working at Chuck E. Cheese Pizza is fairly well documented, and so I am unsurprised that I might have a pre-disposition for an interest in the backstory and current state of part of the weird world of Pizza Parlors that double as Robot Music Shows.

The 2008 documentary, The Rock-afire Explosion (available on Netflix Streaming) seeks to uncover, really, one man's ongoing love of the robot band that made his childhood magical and the engineer who created the Rock-afire animatronic band and performances that made the Showbiz Pizza chain possible.

Honestly, it's maybe a little messed up.

see the face of your Mayan Apocalypse and behold your DOOM

I cannot begin to guess the original intentions of the filmmakers as they set out to begin interviewing private Rock-afire Explosion band owner Chris Thrash (I imagine they thought just getting Thrash and his band was plenty for a short film), but the final product is a mostly-feature-length, warm-hearted look at a man and his quirky dream.  One assumes that through Thrash the filmmakers got in touch with Aaron Fechter, the creator of the band, and an interesting guy himself.

Flechter seems a bit one part Willy Wonka/ one part Ahab, a guy who struck it big with an idea when he was very young, and who built a company that he very much cared about.  The failure of the overall Showbiz Pizza company and the fate that shook out for the animatronics group he owned is still very clearly present for the man, and there's something a bit tragic about the guy when you see what he's kept from the old days (and it certainly makes you wonder about his business acumen).

Signal Watch Watches: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

It'd been a good long while since I'd seen Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway starring film loosely retelling the story of the very real life depression-era gang that cut a path through the central united states, from Texas to Iowa.

It's a great piece of filmmaking and one of those movies that both said quite a bit about the time of its release and manages to act one of the points of demarcation between filmmaking that had preceded it and what was to come as the 70's roared into cinemas.

I've talked before about how much I love Gun Crazy (1950),* and its not hard to see a bit of mashing of the facts around the Bonnie & Clyde case and the spirit and plotting of Gun Crazy in this movie.  But, of course, unlike the 1950 film, Bonnie and Clyde is one of the earlier adopters of obvious violence on screen, not shying away from putting bullets in the faces of bankers or showing Faye Dunaway getting riddled with bullets (I'd say spoiler, but if you don't know what happens to Bonnie and Clyde, you guys need to seriously start watching more TV).  It's also beautifully shot, well edited and the audio of the film presages a lot of what I think you'll hear in films to come as the mix attempts for naturalism, blending in the wind of the plains, a score that's semi-regional and period.