Musical Watch: Pal Joey (1957)

Watched:  01/26/2021

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1950's

Director:  George Sidney

So, sometimes you watch a movie and it doesn't work out.  I did take a note that this movie, on paper, seems to have everything going for it, but it isn't well remembered.  Which, you know, can often mean something.  Starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak, and from George Sidney who has a list of quality directorial credits as long as your arm, it shoud have been a cinch.  But.

Pal Joey (1957) could be retitled Pal Joey - A Study in The Male Gaze or That's Problematic!  And this is coming from the guy who stands on soapboxes about modern audiences learning from and understanding the societal frameworks of a year in which a film was released.  

But we don't get thirty seconds into the film and our hero is being accused of trying to both get a minor drunk and maybe sleep with her.  Another two minutes in and blatant racism.  And then 90 minutes of misogyny and every possible shot they can get of the female form.

Comedy Watch: Anchorman - The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Watched:  01/24/2021

Format:  I lost my DVD somehow.  So, Amazon Streaming

Viewing:  Unknown

Decade:  2000's

Director:  Adam McKay

Maybe the best thing about Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), other than that Jamie - 17 years later still wanders around the house quoting the movie - is that it's a generous ensemble movie.  Heck, for the first time, I noticed Missy Pyle shows up for two seconds at the end and gets a line.  But, yeah, while the star is of course Will Ferrell, virtually every speaking role has someone who either was or became a person worth noting, and everyone is given something like an opportunity for a laugh and delivers.  

Hence - we all get a 90 minute movie that never really gets dragged down by too much plot.  Everything is an opportunity to be silly.  Even a fight between Veronica Corningstone and Ron Burgundy that gets nasty (and probably some of the name calling would get cut in 2021) becomes absolutely absurd as Christina Applegate hurls a typewriter at Ron and Champ is holding the crowd back with "they're just talking...  they're just talking....".  It's good stuff.

I know it's been a while since I've watched the movie in its entirety - and in the intervening years, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.  And in Game 7 of that series, 1B Anthony Rizzo was famously caught saying "I'm in a glass case of emotion" to catcher (now manager!) David Ross and Tommy LaStella (who played everywhere, and whom I miss a lot).

  

So, yeah, it's still a lot of fun.  You forget half the people who are in the movie.  Danny Trejo, Kathryn Hahn (who actually rocks 70's hair), Fred Armisen, the great Fred Willard...  the list just goes on and on.

And, while we can all acknowledge the main four male leads, Applegate deserves a mountain of praise for the very specific take she brought to Veronica Conringstone that I find hysterical.  Were we ever to meet, I'd insist she tell me whatever I'm up to "is Grade-A baloney".  

PODCAST: "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982) - A Signal Watch Canon Episode w/ SimonUK and Ryan

 

Watched:  01/22/2021

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Unknown

Decade: 1980's

Director:  Nicholas Meyer

for more ways to listen 

SimonUK and Ryan boldly get into a movie about aging, space pirates, sacrifice and making grown men cry when their space pal is taken out. We're tasked with talking about what a big deal this movie is for us, personally, as well as what it meant for Star Trek as a franchise. 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 136: "Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan" (1982) - Signal Watch Canon w/ SImonUK and Ryan

Music

Main Title - James Horner, Star Trek II OST

Epilogue, Closing Credits - James Horner, Star Trek II OST

Playlists

Signal Watch Canon

The Signal Watch PodCast · The Signal Watch Canon

SimonUK Cinema Series

The Signal Watch PodCast · SimonUK Cinema Series

Noir Watch: Witness to Murder (1954)

Watched:  01/23/2021

Format:  Noir Alley on DVR

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1950's

Director:  Roy Rowland

I think Jamie has become a full Barbara Stanwyck fangirl, and that's a feature, not a bug.  So, I used that to leverage spending our Saturday night watching Witness to Murder (1954), a great small-scale thriller with two terrific leads in Stanwyck and George Sanders - an actor I realize I may see in more movies by happenstance than anyone else.  

Our plot seems derived from Rear Window, but this movie came out just before the Hitchcock classic, and the structure is very different.  Before the credits finish rolling, Stanwyck awakens in the night and happens to look across the way out her window just in time to see a neighbor choking a woman to death.  Naturally, she calls the police, but the murderer, George Sanders, has figured what's happening and manages to stash the body when the cops drop by.

From here it's a game of cat and mouse, with Stanwyck certain of what she saw, but with no evidence to back her up and Sanders out-maneuvering her, and, in fact, beginning to plot against her.

The real villain of the movie is, curiously, 1950's attitudes about gender roles and women and their crazy lady brains not being good like man brains.  Curiosuly, this is focused through our upright cop/ love interest played by Gary Merrill (who never actually seems worthy of the attention of Stanwyck, but we'll just let that one go), as well as his parter played by Jesse White and the police Captain.  Sanders is able to leverage their "well, she has a crazy lady brain" predisposition against Stanwyck repeatedly and to to great effect.  

Muller took time in his post-movie wrap up to give modern critics a bit a knuckle-wrap for calling the movie "unrealistic", and I can't be sure how I would have thought of the film had he not made sure we thought hard on this before and after.  But here's what I know (SPOILERS) - putting inconveniently brash or argumentative spouses and children in psych wards was all the rage for a good chunk of the 20th century.  With psychology on the rise in post-war America, and using science as a blunt instrument, it didn't take much to get someone tossed in a hospital.  

It's played up for dramatic effect, I guess, but I think the most frustrating bit is that Stanwyck keeps cozying up to the detective who "wants to believe her", but just can't.  And, frankly, the script and Sanders himself do a great job of giving him the upper hand as the devious sociopath versus Stanwyck just being smart and plucky.  But, yeah, you want to have Stanwyck just give that cop the business, and it just doesn't happen.

IE: I agree with Muller that this movie is not "unrealistic" in how folks dismiss a single, late-night witness to a murder that doesn't appear to have happened to a body that no one has seen.

You don't need me to tell you Stanwyck is great in this, or that Sanders is terriific as the killer (and, btw, he's a Nazi, too!).  The direction is fine, but with John Alton as the DP, the movie looks like a million bucks based on some of those set-ups alone.  

I find myself digging thrillers like this.  This same script would have turned into something tedious by the late 1980's and through to today, with a post, Athony Hopkins killer and a chase scene that would go on for, like, a year.  I feel like Crawford's Sudden Fear is in a similar vein of small-scale thrillers from this era, or even Lupino and Ryan in Beware, My Lovely.  

Here's to hoping Jamie continues to volunteer her time for more Stanwyck pictures, because Barbara made, like, 100 movies.  I'm sure we'll keep finding good stuff.

Angry Animal Watch: Day of the Animals (1977)

Watched:  01/22/2020

Format:  Amazon Watch Party

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1970's

Director:  William Girdler

I think the *weirdest* thing about this movie is that it genuinely feels like famed filmmaker James Nguyen of Birdemic fame may have taken inspiration from Day of the Animals (1977) for his 2010 opus.   The second weirdest thing is seeing Leslie Nielsen in what was likely one of his last dramatic roles before drifting into his particular brand of comedy (of which I am a tremendous fan).  

This movie is not a sequel to, but is a spiritual partner to, 1976's Grizzly by the same director and both films feature Richard Jaeckel (a classic "oh, THAT guy" actor).   Both are about humans in the woods with animals out of control, I guess.  But the scale here is much larger/ more hilarious.

Our plot:  a bunch of people have signed up for a "survivor's" trek through the wilderness, but are all dressed like they're headed for the supermarket.  Over the course of a few days they'll rough it in the mountains of California, but reports are coming in that animals are acting funny.  We're introduced to our parade of stereotypes/ tropes, all of whom explain who they are as they come down the exposition line at the beginning.

Well, crazy thing, the ozone is bad something something, higher elevations, and the animals have become homicidal.  I mean, MORE homicidal.*  They particularly have it in for us slow-moving humans.   

Anyway - the movie is a bit of a mess, but has two major thrusts - 1) the escalating attacks on the walking person buffet, and 2) the interpersonal conflict that needs to arise in any of these films.  In our case, it's the increasingly irritable ad man played by Nielsen who winds up shirtless and baying at the moon before the film is over.

There's an indication that things have gone awry in the sleepy mountain town where our adventure begins, but the budget wasn't there to show too much of that, so all we get is the aftermath and the indication that SOMETHING happened.  But, yeah, there's a storyline for the Sheriff that just abruptly ends.  We sort of get a story about a little girl who is maybe the only survivor of... something?  And a deeply unsatisfying story about a pair of quarreling lovers that, against all common sense, leave the group after being attacked by a goddamn wolf.  And, man, why anyone would follow Leslie Nielsen's character in this movie is impossible to understand.  

And, yes, for reasons unexplained, the entire multi-day crew of people has no radio to call down in need of help.  Which seems like an oversight.

But the women's hair and make-up remains on point despite a half-a-week of running from cougars.

Anyway - what the movie does have are frequent animal attacks, and from a wide array of animals.  If you're like me and enjoy movies about people losing to the Wild Kingdom, and only a few escaping to look traumatized afterwards: I have a great movie for you.

*Animals tend to eat other animals and people if you give them a chance, really.  

Friday Amazon Watch Party: Day of the Animals

Day:  01/22/2021

Time:  8:30 Central

Amazon Prime Streaming

Link Here for a watchin'

I have never seen this.  It looks insane.  It is free to watch with Amazon Prime.  

And it is one of my favorite themes in movies:  animals turning on humans, to eat them, hopefully

JOIN US AS THE POODLES TURN ON MANKIND

PodCast now (also) on YouTube - Entrusting the Archive to Corporate Overlords

For a long time I've been somewhat nervous about the hosting of the Signal Watch PodCast solely at SoundCloud.  Look, SoundCloud is a good, easy-to-use service, but it's also a company, and those go under, get bought out, change strategies, etc... 

I've used RSS to push the content to other podcasting platforms, and that's been nice - but I genuinely don't know what happens if the SoundCloud goes away.  Will those go away?  What if Stitcher dries up?

Right now those kids at "Google" seems like they know what they're doing.  But, YouTube wants to be about video, and so moving the podcast there had challenges.  When I looked a while back, all the recommendations were about manually transforming each episode into a video - which, individually, not a huge deal.  But multiply that by 135 episodes and a handful of extras, and I'd be hand-converting episodes til next Christmas.  

I changed how I phrased my search parameters for how to get the podcast to YouTube, and up came a service called "Repurpose.io".  They seem legit.  The service is super, super simple to use, and while it costs money, it also works really well.  As of this posting I believe all episodes have made their way to the YouTubes.  

Check out our YouTube here.  It's also where we've posted some sketches, taste tests, etc... So, all your Signal Watch needs.

Look, I used to work in digital audio and video preservation, and it's a bear of a field.  And I don't have any memory institutions like a museum, archive or library clamoring for episodes of The Signal Watch.  But right now, I expect that YouTube, which lets me host there for free, will outlast either me or my ability to care about whether these episodes continue to exist.  I mean, maybe when I'm 90 I'll be like "what DID I have to say about Streets of Fire?"  But probably not.  I'll be too busy seeking out water in the wasteland deserts of Trumpland Sector 35 (brought to you by: Confederate Burger).  

It's the same reason I'm like, sure, Blogger.  They're still here.  And owned by spooky ol' Google that's using this blog to mine data and sell ads, but, look.  You people didn't want to join my Patreon, so here we are.

Anyway - I need to do some curation inside of YouTube, so bear with me as I get all that straightened out.  But I do plan to do some curation there and not just dump episodes.

Oh, and, hey, Repurpose.io lets me use the images I already had tagged to the episode, so it's surprisingly easy to navigate on the YouTube menu.

So - YouTube also does this amazing thing where - when you upload audio at least - it checks for copyright claims.  About 85-90% of the videos have some copyright claim due to my use of the music involved.  So, even if the videos went wildly viral, I won't make a red cent.  And, hey, the song owners might!  Good for them.  

The only claim that totally blocked the video from release was "Hungry Like the Wolf" from Duran Duran, which is hilarious.  Fortunately, YouTube just lets me cut out the song.  So - easy, squeezy.  No more Duran Duran.  I can deal with that minor hiccup.

We'll see what other pitfalls await me, but so far, so good.

Happy Birthday, Dolly Parton

 

Today is Dolly Parton's 75th birthday, and if 2020 gave us anything, it's yet another wave of well-deserved Dolly-mania as Dolly showed us all, once again, what it looks like to be a decent human being who can also make grown adults cry with a song.

We're experiencing our own wave of Dolly-mania here at League HQ, so join us.

And here's Dolly's gift to us - a reminder that things can and will be better.

Phil Spector Passes

It seems Phil Spector has passed.

In this era it's hard to remember what it was like not knowing every crazy thing someone famous did or had done, and  in a pre-social media era, it was maybe easier to conflate madness and genius.  And Phil Spector managed to leverage his gigantic cultural shadow to protect himself from consequence, terrorize and generally make miserable some of the foundational acts of American pop music.  

Spector is perhaps one of the original producers to earn a name beyond the music industry, and is definitely the longest sustaining name of a producer people still recognize.  

Look, I love the Wall of Sound stuff.  Back to Mono was one of the first big outlays I ever made for a boxed set when I couldn't afford it and somehow made it work.*  The Crystals, Ronnettes, Darlene Love... totally my thing.  But I'm also well aware of the nightmare Spector made their lives.  

In the end, he murdered actress Lana Clarkson - then managed to dodge jail for a few years and was eventually convicted.  

Since learning of his various and frequent abuses, I've not been able to reconcile Spector's work in the studio with what he did in his private life.   By the time the news about Clarkson's murder hit, I knew enough about the guy that I wasn't that surprised.  I just thought he would have more self-preservation instinct than to actually draw that kind of attention to himself.

Anyway - you don't have much choice but to sometimes separate the artist from the art.  But, man, is it hard to do so sometimes.  

*back then skipping meals was always an option for saving money - I could just be dizzy for a bit til dinner

Noir Watch: The Glass Key (1942)

Watched:  01/16/2021

Format:  Noir Alley on DVR

Viewing:  Not sure

Decade:  1940's

Director:   Stuart Heisler

Measured by the fact I think this is the fourth time I've seen this movie, you can take it at face value - I think pretty highly of The Glass Key (1942).  But, it is based on a novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett, co-stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and has a large supporting role for William Bendix - w, yes.  I'm pre-disposed to like the film.  

We're going to cover Miller's Crossing on the podcast at some point, an early 90's Coen Bros. film, and one of my personal canon.  I think I was in early college when I read my first Hammett on JAL's recommendation and got a few pages into Red Harvest before saying "wait a minute, maybe the Coen Bros. weren't so darn clever after all...".   Because, honestly, Miller's Crossing is the love child of The Glass Key and Red Harvest, both Hammett books.*

I did read The Glass Key before seeing this film (and just learned via Eddie Muller there's an earlier version starring George Raft - which may lead to me skipping it) - and, sure, the book is better, yadda yadda.  But, the film is terrific all on its own - a twisting, double-double-crossing political/gangland yarn that adds up perfectly, but the first time through can be hard to keep track of all the parts of the equation.  

Ladd plays the lieutenant to a political boss who, upon meeting the daughter (Lake) of a reform candidate  decides to back the reform candidate.  This gets his boss crosswise with another, shadier, political boss, and all of a sudden Lake's brother winds up dead on the street.  

The movie has a similar tone to a Hammett novel when it comes to casual brutality and unsavory characters.  That includes our lead, who never really throws a punch, but he's not exactly a knight in shining armor as he works angles, falls out with his boss, and tries not to fall for Lake.

The movie is difficult to discuss, but the characters in it are terrifically drawn, each instantly knowable in broad strokes, even if in the framework of the story, they're all capable of anything - which is part of what keeps the mystery of the story rolling.  

Frankly, this is a "could be a TL;DR post" kind of movie, and I'm not going to do that.  Maybe I'll podcast this movie one day instead.  But in the meantime, I highly recommend the film.  Just go with that. 

*and a bit of visual flavoring from The Conformist