Roland Young in Heart

 The Young in Heart (1938) is something that we don't see that often anymore, an old black and white ("classic") comedy that we hadn't seen yet. When we do find something like that, it's usually a <70-minute B movie. But this looks like it had some David O. Selznick prestige.

It starts in Monaco, with Roland Young winning some money at cards off a suspicious American senator. The camera pans around to show Young's son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. romancing the senator's unattractive and shallow daughter, while Janet Gaynor is being wooed by a handsome but not very rich Scotsman. (Amazingly, this "Scot" is played by Richard Carlson, "Tom Stewart killed me" from MST3K's Tormented. And he's great - amazing what an accent can do.)

Young is Col. "Sahib" Carleton, along with his wife, Marmie (Billy Burke). But, as the police who pick them up note, he has never been to India, is not named Carleton, and is in fact, a confidence man, and his son and daughter are trying to nab rich spouses. And so they are given tickets on the next train to London and kicked out.

They aren't even very good con artists - Sahib is always overplaying his hand and Marmie can never remember their cover story. 

On the train, Gaynor runs into Carlson, who knows she's a crook, but will give her one last chance, then never see him again. An old lady. Miss Fortune (Minnie Dupree,) overhears the argument and invites her into her private compartment. Gaynor manages to get her to invite the whole family in, and even picks up the tab when Young orders dinner and champagne. She is lonely, and recently quite wealthy. 

When the train derails on a bridge, they manage to get her out of the compartment and make her comfortable. So she invites them to stay at the mansion. Score! They soon devise a plan to become heirs - they will entertain and endear themselves to her in hopes that she will change her will.

To look respectable, Young and Fairbanks have to find jobs. They look at people laboring at a construction site and wonder, "but what joy do they get out of it?" They run into Carlson again, who doesn't believe they really want to work, and offers Young a job selling cars - the Flying Wombat, a rather futuristic sportscar. Although it almost kills him to show up, he turns out to be a great salesman. 

Fairbanks gets a job as a mailboy because he wants to get closer to receptionist Paulette Goddard.

Ready for the twists? Dupree's lawyer finds out the truth, but Dupree just thinks it's sad that they have to live such desperate, lonely lives, and decides to write them into her will. At a celebration, attended by Carlson and Goddard as well as the con artist, Dupree falls very ill - she may not live. The lawyer lets them know - the fortune she inherited is almost gone, and she will probably lose the mansion if she lives. But by now, the gang has gone human. They love the old girl, and don't care about the money at all!

Epilogue: Fully recovered, Dupree is driving her nurse and lawyer in a Flying Wombat, back to the small home she shares with Young and Burke, and their offspring, now married to their respective loves. Happily ever after.

This is not just funny, but charming and heart-warming. The leads are all first rate, even Carlson, in his first and maybe best film. I don't know if it would have worked with a different cast. Minnie Dupree, as a sweet, kind, and wise old woman, who had lost the love of her life early, made a real impression on us. She only made one other film, but it seemed that she married a tycoon before the turn of the century. So that's OK.

Generic Ghost Stories

We assumed that Ghost Stories (2018) was just a random horror movie, but it turned out to be a little something more. The previews of coming attractions were all for IFC arthouse horror. That raised expectations a little. 

It stars Andy Nyman as a kind of shlubby psychic debunker. In flashbacks, we see that his father was a conservative Jew whose rigid ideas destroyed the family. That gives Nyman his impetus for his debunking TV show. He also considers champion debunker Leonard Byrne to be an inspiration. Byrne disappeared years ago, but Nyman gets an invitation from him.

When he visits, he finds an old man living in a trailer. Byrne tells Nyman that his show is shit, and that he can't explain all psychic phenomena. He gives Nyman three dossiers of cases and challenges him to explain them.

The first is a hard-drinking night-watchman Paul Whitehouse. When guarding a decommissioned insane asylum for little girls, he is haunted by a girl in a yellow dress. He is also cranky, having lost his wife to cancer and has a daughter in hospital with locked-in syndrome.

The second is Alex Lawther, a twitchy goth kid who does everything wrong, and is constantly arguing with his strict parents. One night, driving without a license, because he was afraid to tell his parents that he failed the driving tests, he runs over the Devil - or at least some pink goat-person. 

Finally, he meets with Martin Freedman, a rich snob who takes him shooting on the moors. He was troubled by a poltergeist when his wife was pregnant. She died delivering a monster of some sort, who is still alive, poor thing. Freedman then puts his shotgun under his head a pulls the trigger.

The first two stories are told in more-or-less full flashback style, but this isn't really one of those anthology horrors. The frame story about Nyman is too prominent. Also, there are odd repeating themes, and spooky apparitions only Nyman sees. He sees himself inside his car, screaming in terror and trying to get out. The girl in the yellow dress returns as a doll. Freedman shines a flashlight in his eyes like a doctor checking the dilation reflex. There's something to do with a string of numbers. And so on.

Not to spoil it, but in the end, several layers of reality are peeled back. We get one final horror story, this one without anything supernatural, from Nyman's childhood. And finally, the horror story of the frame is revealed. 

I guessed that it had something to do with Judaism, because Nyman is Jewish, the Goth kid is Jewish (his father tells him he can't schmooze out of it this time), and Freedman is casually nasty about "you people". But I was wrong.

In the end, although there were some arty shots, and the twists were interesting, this did turn out to be a pretty standard horror movie. Ms. Spenser liked it OK, maybe more than me, but neither of us was blown away. Maybe it was too cluttered, maybe not scary enough. Well, that last part was pretty scary, and maybe too real.

Welcome to Michael Jai White

We watched Welcome to Sudden Death (2020) for Michael Jai White. We've loved him since Black Dynamite, and love him just as much as this. 

It starts with White in Afghanistan (or wherever) being interrogated by the bad guys. Of course he gets loose and kicks everyone's butt, but they set a bomb. He winds up with shrapnel in his back. In the next scene, he is home in bed with his beautiful wife Sabryn Rock. He is out of the services and now a security guard for a basketball arena. He is planning on taking his two kids to work, and let them watch a game. Nakai Takawira is 10, mouthy, and loves her daddy. Lyric Justice is a little older, and thinks his dad is kind of a loser, just a rent-a-cop. 

His co-workers at the arena josh around with him, calling him "Tight Shirt", and being amazed that those cute kids are his. He takes it in stride - he's serious about his job. One of his friends is Gus, a janitor played by Gary Owen. He gets the kids in their seats and goes to work.

Meanwhile, LA mayor Kristen Harris, lame rapper Anthony Grant, and the arena's owner, wealthy thought-leader Sagine Semajuste, show up and are escorted to the owner's box. Semajuste looks just like Kamala Harris here - I don't know if this is intentional or just random. The movie was made last year, so could be, I guess.

These guys are the target of the gang of 8-10 terrorists who have managed to infiltrate the arena. No guns are allowed, even for security, but these guys have 3D printers and some random parts to assemble guns out of. No idea how they get the bullets in.

They take the crew in the owner's suite hostage, and demand one BEEEllion dollars (pinky to corner of mouth) in Bitcoin. They just have to keep things quiet while the transaction is verified, which takes about a quarter of the game. Oh, and the bad guys eventually get White's daughter to keep as an additional hostage.

This is somewhat bloody, but also very silly. When White figures out that all the security force has been replaced by terrorists, his only help is Gus, who always just says what he's thinking. When they run into one of the phony guards, he says, "She's lying" and goes to apprehend her. Good strategy. Then she and White have a nice close hand-to-hand fight, where he has to keep her from getting her gun pointed at him. By the way, the actress, Gillian White, is Michael Jai White's real-life wife.

I guess this is a remake of a van Damme film, Sudden Death, which we haven't seen. There were a couple of Die Hard jokes, but I probably missed some other references. Also, it seems that everyone hated this, but we had a great time. It was silly and the fights were good. Also the kids were cute - although it was mostly Takawira mouthing off to the terrorists. 

And Michael Jai White. He's gotten pretty big as he's gotten older, and solid. His style of fighting is fast, but very centered and grounded, with a lot of stillness at the core. He's an imposing presence, but also doesn't take himself too seriously. Something like the Rock, but not as big and not as goofy. You can buy him as a solid family man, doing an unglamorous job as well as he can.

But there was one thing in the movie I just couldn't believe. White tells his son to stay in his seat in case his sister comes back - and he does! Even when he sees his dad and sister up in the rafters fighting with the terrorist boss. Kids never do that in movies!

Rhythm Method

The Rhythm Section (2019) is very much a cliche movie: ordinary woman is wronged, becomes a badass and gets revenge. But I like this cliche - so the question is, how well is it executed?

It starts with sun-drenched home movies of a happy, loving family. We find out soon enough that these are flashbacks or cellphone movies that Blake Lively took before her family all died in a plane crash. Now, she is a drug-addicted prostitute, looking pretty rough. Raza Jaffrey, an investigative journalist, finds her and tells her that the plane was actually blown up to kill one of the passengers, a middle-eastern reformist. After having him kicked out of the brothel, she looks him up to get the story. 

Then she steals everything he has of value and buys some junk - and a gun to kill the man he told her built the bomb. She loses her nerve, but he must have gotten wise. When she goes back to Jaffrey, she finds him dead.

From a clue on his big wall-of-clues, she travels to coordinates in Scotland - just like 39 Steps? There, she meets Jude Law, a disgraced MI6 agent living in an abandoned training site. She asks him to train her, and he refuses, but she persists, and he pushes her to the limit, yada-yada. When she's ready, he sends her out on a mission to kill one of the gang who did the bombing. She'll go in dressed as a prostitute - work with what you know. 

After this seasoning, he has her impersonate assassin Petra Reuter, who is dead, but they never found a body. She will work her way through the assassin underground until she finds who ordered the hit that killed her family.

So the outline is pretty standard. How well is it handled? The early section, where Lively is a junkie whore, then an assassin in training, are pretty brutal. She is a lot more believable than, say, Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return. Her training sequence is good because she never gets exactly great - a fair shot, lousy hand-to-hand fighter, etc. She tends to hesitate before a kill, and he hand shakes when she's holding a gun on someone. But the movie does sort of move on rails after she becomes an assassin, losing some of the intensity of the first section. 

Jude Law, older, with a beard, can't do much to get out of the grumpy, reluctant mentor role. 

Even the couple bankrolling the operation, parents of the killed reformist, are good but not exactly new. Played by Nasser Memarzia and Amira Ghazalla, he is suspicious and treats her like a scammer, while his wife is willing to put up the money, just in case. They play it well, but the rich Indian or Mid-Eastern couple where she is the real backbone has been done more than once - in TeneT for ex.

So, a little more depth than, say, Anna, but maybe not as good action. A fine popcorn movie, with Lively giving it a little more harrowing realism in the first act. But I want to say, the idea that she could be a badass, even as a skinny, addicted, bruised prostitute, is not as far-fetched as the movie wants you to think. If it was Renee Zellwigger or someone, it would be a cool transformation. 

In conclusion, the rhythm section refers to your heartbeat and breathing, which an assassin needs to learn to control. They missed a lot of chances to set action to a hot rhythm track - only used it once. 

Polar Express

Arctic (2019) is a stripped down arctic survival movie. It stars Mads Mikkelsen, who says very little, and Maria Thelma Smaradottir, who says nothing.

It starts with Mikkelsen next to his crashed plan in the arctic wilderness, checking his fishing lines. He moves through his daily routine, catching fish, climbing a peak to crank his emergency radio beacon, and clearing the snow off of the big SOS he has scraped clear down to the black rock. You don't get any flashbacks to the crash, no voice-over, but you do get the idea he has been there a while. When he takes off his socks, you see he is missing a toe - an old frostbite wound, probably. So you know he's used to the polar regions. 

After a bit of this, he spots a helicopter, and pulls a flare. They see him, and then crash. He goes to the site and finds the pilot dead, and a woman, maybe the pilot's wife (Smaradottir), badly wounded. He loads her up on a sled, as well as anything good he can get out of the wreck, and takes her back to his plane. He tries to reassure her that her friends will come after her soon. She can't speak, and can barely squeeze his fingers to let him know she is conscious.

Well, her friends don't come to rescue her. She is not healing well. A map from the helicopter shows a "seasonal shelter" a few days walk away. So he leaves a not in the plane, loads up the sled and trudges off.

The trip doesn't go well, even considering they are in arctic conditions, with little food other than trout and some ramen, and a little stove. The route he choose has a cliff he can climb, but can't get the sled up. His reaction is a sour laugh and "I don't believe it" (in Danish). So they have to go the long way around.

And that is pretty much the movie. SPOILER - Maria Thelma never recovers enough to say a word. We don't even know her name. Her ID card is in the Thai alphabet. Note - I thought it looked like an indigenous alphabet, and that she was a Canadian First Nations member. But, no, Thai, although the actress is mixed Thai/Icelandic. Mikkelsen plays a very competent, very careful man. His sleeping, waking, fishing, signalling, are all timed to the beeping of his wristwatch timer. But as strong, competent and clever as he is, the Arctic may beat him.

This movie has some beautiful, deadly scenery, and the occasional polar bear. It has Mikkelsen's dogged determination to save the woman whose husband died trying to save him. It has almost nothing else, a story stripped to the bone. This is YouTube star Joe Penna's first feature and we'll be looking for the next. 

Songs in the Key of Skeleton

The Skeleton Key (2005) is an odd little film - a small, ordinary Southern Gothic horror with an absurdly over-talented cast.

It stars Kate Hudson as a hospice nurse in New Orleans. Her father died while she was away, and she seems to be compensating. She gets a job way out in Terrebonne Parish, at a creepy old mansion surrounded by oaks, Spanish moss, and swamp. It is owned by aging Southern belle Gena Rowlands (!), who is having trouble caring for her husband, John Hurt (!!), mostly paralyzed by a stroke. Rowlands doesn't think a yankee like Hudson can understand the house, but their lawyer, Peter Sarsgaard convinces her and Hudson to try it out. He's a pretty minor character, but has a certain smarmy charm, like Tom Hanks in Volunteers. 

Rowlands is pretty antagonistic, but gives Hudson a skeleton key, which opens every lock in the house (which brought to mind The Others, with all the locking and unlocking). She doesn't exactly forbid Hudson from going up into the attic, but discourages it. When Hudson does go up, she hears noises from behind a door that her skeleton key won't unlock. On a later trip, she gets in and finds a hoodoo room, full of candles and chalk diagrams on the floor.

All this time, she is getting the idea that John Hurt is afraid of his wife Rowlands. He can't talk, can barely move his eyes, but they sure look haunted.

I won't talk about how it all turns out, except to mention Burnt Offerings - even to the creepy presence in the attic. I will just say that this was not a bad horror PG horror movie, not scary enough to freak me out, but twisty enough to keep me interested. 

But I can't figure out how Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, and Peter Sarsgaard wound up in this little trifle. (OK, I don't know if Sarsagaard is that surprising.) It has some nice atmosphere, and some arty camera angles, but never looks like either a "big" picture or like "arthouse". Are these actors all getting to be past it and have to appear on the equivalent of Love Boat now? 

Love and Death

A Band Called Death (2012) doesn't have much snow in it, but enough to qualify. Mostly it's about music and brothers.

The brothers are the Hackneys, Bobby, Dannis, and David - three black kids who grew up in the 60s in Detroit. Their father was a Baptist preacher, but he encouraged them to listen to all types of music. Seeing the Beatles got them interested in music, but later on, they saw the Who when they came through Detroit. Now they wanted to be rockers.

This was pretty strange for a black group in Detroit, home of Motown. But David, in particular, was kind of a strange kid. He wrote hard rock songs for the trio, and named the band Death. (I've heard he was inspired by Arthur Lee's Love, but it isn't in the movie.) They had a raucous, punked out, garage sound, like a stripped down MC5. It actually went over pretty well, except with the neighbors, who just wanted them to TURN IT DOWN!

They got a lot of attention from agents and labels, but nobody was going to sign a band called Death. But David was adamant - a Christian and a mystic, he believed in the name, and his brothers had his back (although they would have changed the name in a split second for a good contract).

They recorded an album that they couldn't sell to a label, so they pressed a 45 on their own dime. It got some airplay, but, still, that name. They left Detroit to visit relatives in Burlington VT, and Bobby and Dannis settled down (in the snow, as mentioned above). David got homesick and headed back to Detroit. 

The Vermont brothers formed a reggae band, which didn't please David much - he thought they had sold out. But what else could a bassist and drummer do in the 80s? They had kids, who talked about how great their uncle David was. But they wished they'd known him before he started drinking. But it was the cigarettes that killed him.

Life went on. Unbeknownst to the brothers, the Death single was becoming famous to punk DJs and record collectors as a cherished rarity, eventually coming out on a garage anthology. Bobby Jr. heard it and recognized his uncle. He knew his father and uncle were in a reggae band, but had never heard about Death. And so they were rediscovered.

I heard about Death from the New York Times article in 2008. I hadn't heard the music, and it sounds great, but to be honest, I haven't sat down to listen to their album. But the movie is only partly about the music. It's mostly about the family, love, faith, and loyalty. Also about fame and fate, talent and luck. In a lot of ways, it's like the story of Sugar Man. He was also from Detroit, although he had a completely different style. I'd say they were closer to the Stooges.  

So, a great documentary, very uplifting and warm. The Hackneys kids have a band that plays both Death songs and originals. Bobby Jr. is a funny kid (young adult), big but kind of shy and geeky. But punk as hell on stage. These guys aren't exactly "rock stars", but they ar e playing the music they love and getting recognition. It's enough

Hollow Wolf

Continuing the theme of "snow", we watched The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020). It was touted as a low-budget horror with a touch of comedy, and that's what we got.

Snow Hollow is a small ski town in Utah. We meet a young couple who have rented a cottage with a hot tub. They have dinner at a diner and he harangues some locals for using the F-word for homosexuals as an insult. Nothing serious. This is all cut together slightly out of sequence, off-kilter. There is also a sort of unsettling close-up of her, looking straight at the camera. Then, the guy comes back to the hot tub with some beers and finds her brutally killed and chopped up. 

The police show up lead by Sheriff Robert Forster, looking very old, and his son, director Jim Cummings. Forster is a strong leader, but is physically past it. Cummings is his second in command, but seems to be struggling with leadership. Maybe due to anger issues. He confesses this in the AA meeting he was attending when the police are called.

There are a lot of theories about the killer, including wild animal. The clean incisions look more like a knife or scalpel, though. Also, Cummings knows there's no such thing as werewolves. Besides, it's probably a one-off - disgruntled ex-boyfriend or something. 

Then we see the next woman killed - and see the monster, a 7-foot tall wolf on its hind legs. You can't complain that this horror movie doesn't show the monster until the end.

As the killings mount, Cummings becomes more and more unglued. His small police department doesn't like him much. The exception seems to be Riki Lindholm, as a sort of Marge Gunderson type. She tries to tell him he can't take the weight of the world's problems on his shoulders. But he can't help it - he has to live up to his dad's example. He also wants to protect his teenage daughter who kind of hates him, both for being over protective, and being an alcoholic. Oh yes, he starts drinking again.

So we have a nice monster in the snow movie, combined with a psychological portrait of a man at the end of his rope. The style is a little flashy, with some non-sequential editing, and the odd close-ups of  the victims at some point before they are killed. Cummings, both star and director, is both realistic and just enough over the top to be funny. Most of the humor is small, like how everyone ends their conversation with "You have a nice day, now". 

I won't spoil the end, except to say that Cummings was right about everything, and still manages to be a terrible policeman. In the end, it's Lindholm who becomes sheriff when Forster dies - and she deserves it. Even if she is doing a bit from Fargo.

I should note that this is Robert Forster's last film, a small role in a little indie-ish horror film. He was in Medium Cool and Jackie Brown, and a lot in between and since. I think it was a good ending. 

Where'd You Go, Werner?

I may have mentioned that Ms. Spenser likes movies set in the polar regions, so of course she requested Werner Herzog's Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World (2007).

The story is, Herzog was invited by the National Science Foundation to go to Antarctica to make a film - and that's pretty much it. He interviews several people and finds that they are often interesting, accomplished and intense people who had a burning need to go where few others had. So you wind up with theoretical physicists doing dishes, and refugee aid workers driving the bus. 

There is a certain amount of fluffy penguin footage, although he wants to know if penguins ever go insane - and we meet one of the crazy ones, taking of in the wrong direction, away from the sea, probably to starve and die. But perhaps the central scene is some underwater photography. Under the ice cap, "the frozen sky" is full of strange animals (although some are microscopic, or almost). Herzog's narration drops out here, and he uses a haunting. almost atonal women's choir from Georgia set the mood.

Music also comes into play when two of the scientists break out their electric guitars and jam out on the roof of a hut at 1:00 AM. Because they are so close to the pole, it is daylight around the clock, so it looks like late afternoon.

The background music is in general lovely guitar, which gives you a clue to some of the minds behind the scenes. It is Henry Kaiser and David Lindley playing, and it turns out that Kaiser is one of those people who wind up in Antarctica. Grandson of a Santa Cruz philanthropist and cult-famous free-form guitarist, he is also an arctic diver. Herzog saw some of his underwater footage, and that's where the idea for the movie came from. 

Herzog's narration is mostly factual, but sometimes dryly humorous - at least I think he's being humorous. He can be grumpy - he laments the all-day sun, which he "loathes" for it's effect on his skin and his celluloid. Some of his voice-over is so stereotypically "nature documentary" that I assume he is being ironic. Hard to tell with the old German.

It's funny how the theme of "encounters" is mirrored in Where'd You Go, Bernadette. She was an architect who works as a mechanic at MacMurdo, just so she can stay down there. Must be the kind of thing people notice.

Tongue in Cheek

Carole Lombard: The Glamour Collection: Disc 4- True Confessions (1937) is a bit of fluff, a bagatelle. Right up our alley.

Carole Lombard is the young wife of Fred MacMurray, a poor but honest lawyer. In the opening scene we see him refuse to defend a man accused of stealing a truckload of hams - because he can't pay until he sells the hams. Lombard, on the other hand, is not honest at all. She is an aspiring writer and inveterate liar. When she gets the urge to lie, we see her frown and thrust her tongue in her cheek. She sort of oversells this "tell", but on her, it's cute. She gets her friend to ditch work and come see her by saying that she took the wrong pills and is feeling faint. When her friend Una Merkel gets there, it turns out she just wanted to tell her about the job she has taken, as secretary for a rich man, at a ridiculous salary. At least Merkel knows what's coming.

The butler at the rich man's home (and office) is Fritz Feld, acting all arch and knowing. The rich man is John T. Murray, looking very George Saunders. He chases her around the desk a little, and she slaps him and runs out, leaving her hat and purse. When she comes back with Merkel as moral support, she finds the police. Murray has been shot, and Lombard is arrested by Edgar Kennedy, the slow burn guy.

Since Murray is a lawyer, he will be defending her. He thinks he can get her off on self-defense. She insists that she didn't do it, but he doesn't think the court will accept that. So her tongue goes back in her cheek and she "confesses".

A drunken fop and "criminological genius", John Barrymore, sits next to Una Merkel every day at the trial, making himself obnoxious and insisting that Lombard will fry. The prosecutor, Porter Hall (who looks like what R. Crumb was going for), is pulling out all the stops. But MacMurray's lawyering and Lombard's skill at tale-spinning get her acquitted.

In the last act, Lombard and MacMurray are no longer poor. She has written a best seller about her travails, and he is now a well-respected defense counsel. They have a lakeside house and Hattie McDaniel as a maid. But MacMurray isn't happy - he can't stand the idea that his wife is a murderer, even if justified. So she tells him the truth - and now he feels even worse, because everything he's done has been a lie. And then Barrymore shows up to blackmail them, claiming to be the real murderer.

The plot to this is a little wobbly, but the number of great character actors, along with Lombard and MacMurray, make it totally worthwhile. Two complaints: Fritz Feld disappears after his one scene, and MacMurray has a dreadful pencil thin moustache. Not really a good look.

Once I saw the lake setting - filmed night for night, it looked like - I realized that we had seen part of this before. We came early to the second part of a double bill at the Stanford and saw the end of this. It looked like it would be fun then, and it was.

The Idiot

I'm not the world's biggest Iggy Pop and the Stooges fan: Like everyone, I know "Lust for Life", like everyone, and for some reason, "Five Foor One". Ms. Spenser is more of a fan, although she is just in awe of his shirtless ripped snake torso. So I queued up Gimme Danger (2016) mainly for her.

It starts with director Jim Jarmusch interviewing Iggy - it looks like he is sitting on the floor leaning up against a washing machine. He is talking about the low point of the Stooges, in 1971, when drugs, bad attitude, and general malaise caused the band to break up. But let's go back to how it started.

A lot of this movie is about the early years: Jim Osterberg, later known as Iggy Pop, grew up in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a trailer with his parents. He played drums - and gives his parents all gratitude for not killing him for playing drums in a trailer. He formed a band with some locals, the Asheton brothers and James Williamson. They met with and were mentored by the Paul Butterfield Band. Iggy decided to go to Chicago where the real musicians these guys emulated were. He even played drums for a few of them. He came back and formed the Psychedelic Stooges, under the wing of the MC5. They went to New York, and hung out with the Velvet Underground and Nico. And so on. 

But here's the weird thing - this is all before 1970. The Stooges and the Grateful Dead are more or less contemporaries. In New York, they even recorded an Om-and-drone number - John Cale was producing. I lived through all of this, but had no idea. 

Through it all, Iggy is gracious, open, and articulate. If you were expecting a primitive, brutish type, you won't get it. He talks about how the MC5 pressured them to get political, and how they refused (or woudn't even engage), but continually praises them for their sound, their honesty, and their generosity to the band. He's like that with almost everyone he talks about. He has some nasty things to say about pre-fab music biz bands (singing a whiny line or two from Crosby-Stills-Nash), but that's about it. He talks about being given the Pink Fairies and says that they were just doing what "MC5 and Alice Cooper" had already done. Interesting pairing.

So, the Stooges break up. Iggy then says he met David Bowie and went to Europe. But all he says about that is, "David was cool." And then Jarmusch picks the story up in 2003, 30 years later, when the Stooges were "reunified". The last act is about the deaths of a few members, the big festivals they played, and the newer bands they influenced. Mike Watt from the Minutemen became a late bass player, and J. Macsis got some of the gang back together when writing music for The Velvet Goldmine. Which is all pretty interesting (and a little confusing, what with people coming, going, dying, etc).

My guess is 1) Jarmusch wanted the story to be about the Stooges, not just Iggy. So they just kind of skipped the solo years. This fits with Iggy's open spirit too. He acknowledges the people he works with. That may be why "Lust for Life" isn't even mentioned. But I suppose there might be some of 2) He doesn't want to talk about Bowie. It's personal.

Jarmusch doesn't have a lot of old Stooges film to work with, so he uses period-specific stock footage, TV shows, and funky animation. It's too bad, because what does exist is amazing. The Stooges weren't very technical, but had, well, Raw Power. And Iggy might not be a great singer, but he dances like a snake - writhing and twisting, bend back until his head touches the floor, all shirtless with rippling reptile abs. 

In conclusion, it's not in the movie, but I heard he was interviewed way back when. They asked him what he thought he would be doing in when he was in his 70s. He said, "singing 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'". And so it came to pass! Hail Stooges!

Tri, Tri Again

Triangle (2009) is a horror movie with a few twists that I thought Ms. Spenser would enjoy. I wound up liking it a lot more than her. By the way - tons of spoilers for this.

We start with single mom Melissa George getting her autistic son ready for school: comforting him about a nightmare, cleaning his fingerpaints off the floor, assuring him that the mess on the floor is gone, and he doesn't have to look. The only odd thing is that her doorbell rings, and there's no one there. There are some hints that she is pretty stressed, but there is a note on her fridge about a boat named "Triangle" in the marina.

The Triangle is a large sailboat, captained by Michael Dorman, a nice guy who met George at the diner she works at. His friends Henry Nixon (a fratboyish rich jerk) and Rachel Carpani have brought along their friend Emma Lung, hoping to set her up with Dorman. Carpani thinks George is after his money, but she really means that a waitress with a kid on the spectrum is below their social class. Dorman doesn't care - his mate on the boat is a 19-year-old hunk (Liam Hemsworth) who he found homeless and gave him a place to live.

But when Hemsworth shows up with George, he says he doesn't think she's ok. He asked where her kid is and she just blanked for a while. Doesn't matter, they're all going cruising!

Then the wind stops, the radio doesn't work, and a huge storm comes up, capsizing the boat. Everyone makes it up onto the hull, except Lung. We don't see her again. Then an old cruise ship comes into view, and they come onboard. But they find it deserted. 

Two things here that Ms. Spenser wanted to know: 1) Why didn't they start the motor when the wind died? 2) Why did they spend so much time messing around on the boat, instead of heading straight for the bridge?

Anyway, they start noticing weird things, like messages written in blood. Then the murders start. A masked figure with a rifle kills pretty much everyone but George. When she tosses the figure overboard. she sees the upside-down Triangle with all the survivors, including herself on the hull. It's a time loop movie now, as well as a slasher. (Spoilers 1 and 2.)

As she watches the party repeat what they did the first time, she realizes that she had caused some of the weirdness from last time. She tries to save everyone, but soon learns the trick (second to last spoiler) - when everyone in the party is dead, it repeats. When it repeats, if she keeps them from getting on the ship, they might get rescued. So she now has to kill everyone on board to get another chance. That's right, she was the masked shooter.

And since she was the masked shooter, who she threw overboard, she eventually gets thrown overboard herself (last spoiler). She wakes up onshore! She can get back to her kid! And it's still the morning she left. So we see the events I mentioned at the top, and find out what they really mean.

Now, aside from the two issues mentioned above, Ms. Spenser's big complaint was that this whole thing looked like it was going to be a Ghost Ship story, which she likes. Then it became a slasher, which she doesn't like, then a time loop story, which is fine, but she wanted a Ghost Ship, damn it! 

On the other hand, I thought it was kind of clever. They sort of tease that George is cracking up, with memory problems - like did she just forget who rang the doorbell? Hemsworth in particular thinks she's nuts. Well, he gets a particularly gruesome death. 

But I have to agree, they should have done more Ghost Ship stuff. 

Happy New Year Post

Happy New Year's everybody! Guess we're glad to see 2020 go. But a word of warning: remember 2016 when "everyone" (Prince, Bowie, Carrie Fisher, ...) was dying? How much better was 2017? 

Considering we spent most of the year on some sort of COVID-19 lockdown, you'd think I'd have more to say about the movies we watched. I wrote more blog posts this year than any year previously, but not because I saw a lot more movies. I had to work from home, so I was not lying around watching movies every night. My company forced us to burn a lot of vacation time, so we did watch a few more than usual, but those mostly came from my own collection or from streaming - and I don't blog those.

As for themes, I'm not sure there was one. We watched three grown-up game-night-type movies: Ready or Not, Tag, and Game Night. Since we are not big gamers, I don't know why. These were very different movies, that's about all I can say about them as a group.

For superhero movies, usually a staple, we started and ended with X-Men: X-Men: Dark Phoenix to The New Mutants. These were critical bombs, but I liked them. I think I know why - I already had an emotional investment in these characters from the comics. I think that is a valid way to enjoy a movie, but maybe not how to make an artistic statement. Other than that, there was Spider-Man: Far from Home. There may have been some indie superhero movies in there, but nothing big. Waiting for next year.

We watched a lot of horror (for Ms. S), mostly on the mild side (for me). A couple of haunted house movies where the protagonists turned out to be the ghosts, a lot of zombie movies (comic and otherwise), and just some random movies that looked good. Not many stand out. Leigh Whannel's Invisible Man did stand out. I think it had the best combination of story and looks out of all the horror we saw, even including Parasite. I also liked Fantasy Island, although I wouldn't recommend for anyone else's year end list.

Between Emma. and Little Women, I got a pleasant dose of costume family drama. I might even put Little Women as my #1 of the year. 

But, as every year, my #1 movie is Bringing Up Baby. We didn't watch it this year, but I'm sure that wouldn't change my mind. Sometimes I think I should chose a Marx Bros. movie, but there are too many to choose from, which dilutes the voting. We watched Duck Soup and Horse Feathers along with some Three Stooges for New Year's Eve, as is traditional.

As for cocktails, I may have to withdraw from that part of this blog. I've just gotten too boring, always with the margaritas. For New Year's I tried a few things: I had high hopes for a passionfruit-Maraschino champagne cocktail. The bright citrus of the passionfruit was supposed to be brought out by the dark, sweet Luxardo Maraschino. But instead, it tasted kind of muddy. I had better luck with sour cherry syrup (from a jar of cherries for a pie) and Maraschino with bubbly. The dark red color is to be interpreted in the Asian way (celebration, luck), not the Western way (blood, danger). 

As for where this blog, and our movie watching, is heading, I don't know. Sometimes, I think about giving it up - I have ~0 readers and blogs aren't much of a thing anymore. Also, the old 3-discs a week routine is giving way to more streaming (most of which I don't blog). So maybe I'll resolve to blog more streaming content. Or maybe not - I've got a formula, and maybe I'll stick to it.

In conclusion, regardless of what I said in the opening, I expect 2021 to be a lot better than 2020. Not just because of a sane president and widespread vaccination. It will be a better year, because we will make it better. That's my resolution.