Alright, so it’s become painfully obvious that if I’m ever going to catch up and be able to start reviewing new movies again, I’m going to have to race through the backlog of flicks that I haven’t written about yet. With that in mind, here are some quick thoughts about a bunch of movies I saw over the past couple of months.
(r) = repeat viewing
Laura (1944) (r) – Every time I watch this alleged noir classic, I like it a little bit less. That said, I’ve probably only seen it a handful of times, but that’s plenty. My wife and I got on a kick of watching old noir flicks on Saturday nights and decided to give this one more shot, even though this has never been one of my favorites. It’s pretty lame and frankly barely qualifies as a noir, if you ask me. The story follows a detective who’s investigating the murder of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), a young protégé of bitchy newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker. There’s a point about half and hour in where the detective falls asleep in a chair after drinking a bunch of booze and being told he’s become obsessed with the dead woman. As my wife pointed out, everything from that point on is probably just the detective’s dream, as Laura shows up alive, helps him investigate, then falls in love with him. The obvious fantasy elements of the story are one thing, but the mystery itself is also kind of stupid. When they figure out what “actually” happened, the reveal doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why would he hide… But wait, I’ve already spent too much time writing about this tepid flick, other than to note that I’m really baffled as to why this is considered such a hallmark of the genre.
Pitfall (1948) – Speaking of not-so-great noirs, here’s Pitfall! I suspect I may have seen this before; it’s certainly forgettable enough. Dick Powell stars as an insurance man whose suburban ennui drives him into the arms and eyebrows of sultry Lizabeth Scott. The dalliance ends up irritating local detective/stalker Raymond Burr, who fancies Scott’s mesmerizing brows for himself. It all leads to murder and a moralistic finale that’s as sexist as it is unsatisying. The above-average cinematography checks all the noir boxes, but this flick is pretty much of a dud.
Room 237 (2012) – This wafer-thin yet overlong documentary chronicles the invented passions of a group of Stanley Kubrick fanatics who read various meanings into his horror classic The Shining. One guy thinks that it’s a metaphor for the Holocaust because there’s a German typewriter in it and they mention the number 42 twice. One woman believes that it’s really a version of the Greek minotaur myth, because she somehow sees a poster of a skier as actually showing a minotaur. And there’s a maze. Another guy says the whole flick is Kubrick’s mea culpa for helping NASA fake the moon landing, because Danny has a rocket on his shirt and the carpet looks like a launch pad. Sigh. Every once in a while, the filmmakers accidentally land on some interesting bit of film scholarship, such as pointing out the way Kubrick uses blends between scenes to create juxtapositions or meldings of the images. But the whole exercise is pretty dumb and every one of these so-called cinema theorists relies on the old film school canards that “nothing in a film is there by accident” and “the filmmaker’s intent doesn’t matter.” I’ve never bought either one of those premises, nor do I buy most of what these Kubrick nuts are selling. Although there are some wry laughs to be wrung out of some of these folks’ theories, this doc is ultimately kind of a big waste of time.
Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk (2017) – I’m old-school NorCal, so I jumped at the chance to catch this documentary centered on the East Bay/Gilman Street punk scene. Mostly I was excited to catch some old Operation Ivy footage, because they were awesome in every way. Little did I know I’d be settling in for two and a half hours of the most exhaustive examination of any punk scene anywhere that I’ve ever seen. There must not be an East Bay punk band that played between 1979 and 2017 that doesn’t get a few minutes to tell their story. It’s too much. There are really only a handful of really great and/or notable bands from that scene: Op Ivy, Rancid, Jawbreaker (maybe), and Green Day. But these bands are often shouldered aside by stories about some Neurosis gig from thirty years ago. The flick was financed by Billie Joe Armstrong, and the filmmakers take pains to make it not as Green Day-centered as you’d expect. If anything, they bend over backwards to include everyone from every part of the scene for its entire history, from artists to maximumrocknroll assholes. Overall, the flick was just OK, and only really came to life for me when Op Ivy showed up on screen. Which wasn’t nearly enough. Because they were awesome in every way.
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) – Watched this with my son a couple of months ago and already it’s faded almost completely from my mind. I seem to remember it being enjoyable enough while I was watching. Decent soundtrack, although the flick really leaned into those old 70s tunes to make it seem charming, if I remember correctly. Ripped off a lot of their look from the old 1980 Flash Gordon flick, I think. You can see what kind of impact this flick had on me. Meh.
Stargate (1994) – As the opening salvo in what has become a massive multi-media Stargate empire, when I saw that this flick was on some streaming service, I figured “What the hell?” Kurt Russell’s always good, right? Meh, not so much. From the opening Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off I knew I was in trouble, and that feeling was cemented in the next scene by what is probably the clumsiest exposition I’ve ever seen. Two cops are discussing former officer Kurt Russell’s problems, and their conversation is literally: “He’s a mess.” “How’d he get that way?” “His kid died. Accidentally shot himself.” Yipes. The rest of the flick is about on that level. Russell is enlisted into some group of scientists and hotheads that travels through the Stargate and finds itself in an odd, Egyptian-esque world beyond the stars. Luckily, they speak English, though, so Russell and vaguely-defined scientific guy James Spader can help the enslaved masses rise up against their androgynous, power-mad king Ra. Yes, at its heart this is another flick about the heroic white guys who save the day for a bunch of hapless ethnic types. Plus, no single element of the plot or script makes any sense at all. Okay, so it is about interstellar Stargate travel, but sci-fi flicks need to be internally consistent, at least. Spader is introduced speaking at an archeology seminar, but then he’s hired as a “translator,” but then he’s an expert on astronomy and ancient constellations, but then Kurt Russell says he’s a “linguist.” Hmm. Once the American helpers go through the Stargate, one of them says, “We can’t open it from both sides.” There’s no way he can possibly know this, and no one bothers to try, but the rest of the whole flick relies on this supposition. At one point, they read the story of how Ra banned reading and writing so that no one would know his true origins. So who wrote the story of the banning of writing? And Ra’s whole nefarious plan for global domination rests on a cascading series of paradoxes. His plan is to send a bomb through the Stargate to Earth. But he needs some access codes to do that. But then he seems to have had the codes all along. So then why did he wait to use them until a bunch of scrappy Americans showed up to thwart his plans? It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a shitty script called Stargate.
Wonderful fun as always. Because Popwell is awesome in every way! 😉