Amazing Dave

Before we get into Dave Made a Maze (2017), a little housekeeping. A few days ago, I wondered what I was going to do when Netflix stops sending out videos. It's a small thing, but I decided to link all streaming videos I watch to their JustWatch page. The way movies come on and off different services, I needed to find a stable link, and I hope this will be it.

So. We meet Dave (Nick Thune) when his girlfriend (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) is out of town. He does some painting, some carpentry, makes a little music, but nothing for very long. We get the idea: He is talented but unfocussed. When Kumbhani gets back, she finds a few boxes taped together taking up the middle of the apartment. It's Dave's fort, or maze.

She can talk to Dave through the vents and airshafts Dave has built in. He explains that he can't find his way out. He warns her not to come in because of all the boobytraps he has built. When she tries to pull it apart, we hear crashes from within and Dave screaming in terror. He asks her to get his friend Adam Busch. Adam in turn calls another friend, and they wind up with two more friends, a documentary filmmaker (James Urbaniak, looking distressingly like a young Kyle MacLachlin), his cameraman and boom operator, two Belgian tourists, and a random hobo who just came along for the laughs. 

Finally Kumbhani gets fed up and goes in - alone, she insists. Of course everyone follows her. The find that it is bigger on the inside - a multi-room cavern of cardboard. They wander around looking for Dave, and find odd wonders, like a giant head and living, flying origami birds. They also find deadly boobytraps. One woman steps on a foot switch and is decapitated by a cardboard sawblade. But instead og blood, red yard and confetti spurt from her neck. She's still dead though.

After many travails, wonders and senseless, yarny deaths, they come across Dave. They decide that to destroy the maze, they need to destroy its heart. But Dave forgot to make that part. He feels that the only way out is to finish building the maze. He's desperate - since he can never finish any of his projects, he just wants to finish this one. Even if it is killing his friends.

This is a fun and interesting movie, although I feel like you get a lot of it from just knowing the premise. It kind of struggled with the girlfriend, of course. So many of these movies are made from a man's point of view, a man who doesn't quite get a woman's point of view, who may even forget that she has a point of view. But Kumbhani gets a better role than that. She is exasperated at Dave for building the maze, but she neither a scold about it, or devoted follower. She's his friend and partner, and will help any way she can. In a lot of ways, it's more her movie than his.

The cast is made up of comics and TV actors for the most part, who do a great job. You'll be happy to know that most of them get out of the maze, but if you die in there - you don't come back.

Feather

I was considering avoiding TÁR (2022) - not sure why. Maybe too political, like it would angry up my blood. But Ms. Spenser wanted to try it out, so we did.

We meet Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) being interviewed on stage by (the real) Adam Gopnik (didn't we see this trope in The French Dispatch?). Her speaking style is the perfect cod-intellectual style we expect of TED talkers. She discusses her drive to record all of Mahler's symphony, especially the Fifth. 

We get to see her teaching at Juilliard, where students are conducting a "difficult" atonal, percussive piece. She challenges them to return to the more emotionally engaging classics like Bach. A black student says he can't relate to a white, cis, hetero breeder like Bach. Their dialog gets a little heated, and is of course, recorded.

We meet her mentor, a rich old banker. We meet her devoted, timid assistant Noemie Merlant. Tar is also married to Nina Hoss, her first violin. They are raiding a little girl together. All seems fine for a talented, engaged artist. But she also gets messages from a young woman who she apparently mentored - a woman who later kills herself. Tar scrambles to delete all emails and evidence of their relationship. Even Merlant seems to find this troubling.

Tar also meets with a Russian cellist, and manipulates the orchestra into making her the sololist for an Elgar concerti. She also tries to ease out her assistant conductor, a somewhat stodgy Alan Corduner. He doesn't take it well. So she's making enemies and stirring resentments, and she is also having troubling dreams, and even hearing screams when out jogging. 

When a somewhat edited version of her fight with the Juilliard student goes viral, it all comes crashing down.

I was afraid that this movie was going to be a sort of a Disclosure-style, reverse sexual discrimination thing. It wasn't that at all - it was more a look at talent, power, hubris, ambition and humanity. Lydia Tar is arrogant, but could back it up with great conducting. But she cut so many corners, built so many myths and false facades, that she had to fall. She winds up in Thailand, working with children, scoring comicbook movies (video games?). A fall for sure, but also, like so many of the "cancelled", far from complete obscurity. 

So, very interesting and nuanced plot and characters. Add to that some lovely filmmaking - partly just what I call the special effect of Cate Blanchett's face (I might have said that about Tilda Swinton actually, another striking, pale and androgynous face). The music was ravishing, but frankly, I wished there had been more of it.

I expected this movie to give more attention to the various lesbian romances. I was thinking of this as a sort of follow up to Todd Haynes' Carol. But this movie is directed by Todd Field, a totally different cat. 

Only a Boingo

Here's a weird one: Forbidden Zone (1982), a Mystic Knights of Oingo-Boingo production. Before they were a rock band, the Mystic Knights were a theater troupe, directed by Richard Elfman with music by his brother Danny. When the whole thing got too cumbersome to stage, they decided to make it a movie.

It starts with a pimp and dope dealer played by Ugh-Fudge Bwana (yep), depicted in the dark as a pair og\f big white cartoon eyes and big red lips. Not at all offensive, right? He discovers a portal to the Sixth Dimension in the basement, and promptly gets out and sells the house to the Hercules family - a hillbilly dad, Edith Bunker wife, a French daughter (played by Richard Elfman's wife Marie-Pascale) and a greying, bandaged Boy Scout. Their other transsexual daughter is lost in the Sixth Dimension. 

The siblings head to school and meet their gay submissive classmate played by Toshiro Baloney (yep), stuffed in the garbage can. He tells them he saw their transsexual sister in the Sixth Dimension, but declines to help them find her - he's too chicken. The class is total anarchy, except that the flashy dressing black kids have a quiet dice game going. 

Eventually, we get to the Sixth Dimension, and find that it is run by King Herve Villachaize, his sexy queen Susan Tyrell and the Princess, Giselle Lindley, who never wears more than long line panties (and maybe a whip). There's a frog butler, some torturers and perverts, and eventually Danny Elfman as Satan.

This is all scored with old jazz, such as Cab Calloway, or new Oingo Boingo compositions that sound like Cab Calloway. The production is very expressionistic (lots of cardboard backdrops). There's also a pervasive sexual perversity - anytime the Hercules boy and his gramps (who look about the same age) see a woman, they grab her and start humping. It is most bizarre.

But is it fun? Kind of - although there are some disgusting moments. Also the offensivity is off the charts. The gay or trans characters are sick sluts, the black characters are pimps and dealers, women (and girls) are sex objects, short people... The music is fun, though, and the low-budget art direction. And we get to hear Danny Elfman's early days as a film composer. So I'm glad we watched it, and can cross it off the list. 

The Big Bowtie

Here's another first-time watch of an iconic movie: Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985). I've seen lots of the memes, but never the movie.

It stars Paul Ruebens as odd man-child Pee-Wee Herman. We see him get up, let his Rube Goldberg machines feed him breakfast, then head out on his beloved bike. Fellow adult child and rich brat Mark Holton tells Pee-Wee that it's his birthday, and he gets anything he wants - and he wants the bike. This leads to an iconic exchange of "I know you are but what am I" insults. 

Pee-Wee heads downtown to stop at the magic store for some tricks, then the bike shop to upgrade his treasure. The best bike tech is Dottie, E.G Daily. who has a crush on Pee-Wee. But Pee-Wee turns her down with the iconic "I've done things you wouldn't understand. Things you couldn't understand. Things you shouldn't understand." I've heard this any number of times, but I don't think I ever heard Dottie's punchline: "I don't understand."

But when Pee-Wee comes out - his prized bike is gone. Little did he know that Holton has his henchpersons steal it for him. He finds a fortune teller who tells him it's in the cellar at the Alamo. But how can he get to the Alamo without transportation? 

And so on. The movie is really about the friends Pee-Wee meets along the way. These were a little surprising to me (because I didn't see them memed). Like, an escaped convict picks him up, and they quickly bond, because they are both outlaws. It's actually fairly sensitive (considering) and a bit romantic (!?!?). He wins over almost everyone he meets due to his openness and sincerity. Even the biker gang warns to him when he does a go-go routine to "Tequila".

All this was as funny as we expected and a bit weirder. Pee-Wee actually has a bit if an edge, if you're looking for it. I hear Big Top Pee-Wee is a flop, so this is probably one and done for us.

Death of the DVD

Did everyone hear the news? Netflix is officially getting out of the DVD delivery business as of Sept this year. It seems like only yesterday when they announced that they were spinning the DVD service off into a company called "Qwikster" (snicker), then backpedalled. But the writing was on the wall.

The value proposition for Netflix DVDs used to be: pretty much everything released that isn't too new is available for one subscription price, but you can only get a certain number at once and you have to wait ~1 week to get them replaced. But discovery is relatively easy, and it isn't hard to manage your queue. Streaming has a different approach: You can watch as many of a small number of movies/TV shows as you want for a subscription price. If you want to watch something we don't have, you have to subscribe to a different service. So you wind up either watching whatever they put in front of you, or juggling multiple subscriptions. 

Which reminds me, I'm subscribed to Netflix streaming for the Great British Baking Show, but have run out of episodes. OK, I just cancelled.

Also, discovery on streaming sucks - they really just want you to watch the first thing that looks barely watchable. Netflix in particular wants to make their own movies and shows and wants you to watch them. Some have been good, some bad, some in between. But that's not why I watch movies.

I'll skip the rant about streaming quality, given our connectivity issues. Honestly, I have trouble with scratched/broken DVDs too. I had to send back The Trouble with Angels just last week.

So what happens after Sept? Maybe I'll try some of the better quality streaming services - Criterion, TCM, what else? I can always go to the public library, although their selection is pretty small compared to old Netflix. I might even break down and start buying digital movies online from Apple or Amazon. I've resisted this because subscription seems more economical, but who knows? 

And this blog? It was supposed to be about my Netflix DVD queue (and some cocktails), but that won't fly. I could just make it into a random film blog - and I probably will. I could switch over to Letterboxd.com, but I prefer to own my own content. Maybe I'll just shut it down, or go over to a recipes blog or something. We'll see.

In conclusion, shout out to JustWatch.com, which compiles streaming availability for all the movies you cam imagine. I have a feeling I'll be leaning on that a lot.

Big Baboons

Some weird movies have been coming off my "Wait" list. For example: Sands of the Kalahari (1965). I think I read about it in one film blog or another, and was mainly intrigued by the poster of a gang of ravening baboons. It's been on long or short "Wait" status for a while, and it just showed up.

It starts with Susannah York, Stuart Whitman, Theodor Bikel, and a few others stuck overnight in some African town, when their flight to Johannesburg can't take off. A few of the passengers decide to charter a small plane to make it a little faster. The plane runs into a huge cloud of locusts, and crashes in the Kalahari desert. Stanely Baker cuts his leg badly in the crash, but everyone gets out. Whitman even goes back for his hunting rifle. 

Their only chance of survival is to head for the mountains about 20 miles away. after a grueling trek, they find not only shade and water, but a cave for shelter. The only drawback, other than isolation, is the troop of baboons living nearby - they don't seem friendly. but keep their distance. 

One of the group volunteers to try to hike out to find help. Meanwhile, everyone else putters around under the leadership of Whitman - he is a survival expert and also has the only gun. When he gets York alone, he demands sex from her. When she resists, he threatens to hit her, and she tells him to do anything, just don't hurt her. She may have a thing for strong, violent men.

When Whitman and another survivor are out alone, he "volunteers" them to walk out to find help, or be shot. He does this to everyone but Baker, who can't really walk, so that he will be left alone with York. But Baker knows what's up, and if he ca convince York, Whitman may be foiled.

Director Cy Endfield seemed to make a lot of classic adventure movies, and this is sure one of them. It was filmed mostly in the actual Kalahari, so there is a lot of authentic desert (I think the mountain oasis is largely studio based). As you might expect, there are almost no black Africans on screen, except for a funny encounter with some San bushmen. They find one of the expelled survivors, give him some water and prepare to leave him. He begs them to take him with them, and they just shrug and let him follow. Crazy white man.

In fact, it looks like most of the guys Whitman kicked out make live. One gets arrested for trespassing on a diamond mining operation. Still, beats dying of thirst.

But aside from being a great adventure, this movie is just too unpleasant to be enjoyable. Whitman with his strongman murdering, York with her sexual kinks, and so on. In the end, the baboons were the most likable characters.

Less is More

Can't remember why I queued up A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Maybe because it's a rom-com directed by Danny Boyle, and Blank Check podcast has just been doing a Danny Boyle series. Whatever, this wasn't quite my cup of tea but I'm glad I ordered.

It starts in heaven, which looks like an clean whitewashed sleazy police station - male angels are cops, female angels are the hookers sitting on their desks. Why not? Chief Dan Hedeya tells angles Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter that their record for fostering lifelong relationships is not good and they need to form a solid couple - or it's the Bad Place (Earth).

On Earth, LA specifically, Cameron Diaz is a spoiled rich girl lounging by her pool and shooting apples off the head of her father's butler. She also rejects dentist Stanley Tucci's marriage proposal, unless he agrees to the William Tell routine. He does but flinches just as she shoots and gets it through the hand.

At her father's corporate headquarters, Ewan McGregor is a slacking janitor. He tells his co-workers that he's writing a novel - one so obvious that they guess the ending and most of the middle before he finishes telling them the set up. He's fired, to be replaced by a cleaning robot. When he tells his bartender girlfriend, she tells him she's leaving him for her aerobics instructor. When he gets home, he finds that he has been evicted by the Firm but Fair Collections Agency, run by Lindo and Hunter.

The next guy, McGregor goes back to the company to demand his job back, and bursts in on a meeting between Diaz and her father (Ian Holm) - he's threatening her with a job. When Holm calls security, McGregor tussles with them and grabs a gun. When he's disarmed, Diaz kicks it back to him, and eventually gets him to take her hostage.

He thinks he's kidnapping her, but she kind of seems to be the brains of the operation. For example, she notes that he hasn't even asked for a ransom. When he does, he's so polite and deferential that he lets Holm talk right over him. Later attempts don't go any better. It looks like Diaz is going to have to do everything if she wants to get enough money to be independent of her father.

Meanwhile, Lindo and Hunter of the old Firm but Fair Agency get the contract to recover Diaz for Holm. They decide that the best way to get Diaz and McGregor together is the old Jeopardy ploy - put them in danger. So Diaz and McGregor get put in a lot of danger, some by angels, some by Diaz's wildness, some by McGregor's fecklessness. So, happily ever after? No, not even a love letter ploy seems to work. This one's going to take divine intervention.

This was fun, and sometimes a little dangerous. I love Cameron Diaz, just for her bubbly personalty and Goldie Hawn smile. Her kooky rich girl persona here isn't a shallow as it could have been, but is still a bit manic-pixie. I understand McGregor is a fine actors, but, like in Down with Love, his attractiveness and charm elude me. Here, with his spiky, floppy hair and 80's shirts, he just doesn't look that impressive. Maybe Diaz just wants to mother him. 

I guess I'd say this was an ordinary rom-com, but adding Lindo and Hunter as sleazy angels ups the rating at least a half-point. It's better than ordinary, actually. 

Flawless Victory!

I've got to say, Mortal Kombat (2021) looked really stupid. The kind of stupid that we love! Also, it features some (but not a lot) of one of Ms. Spenser's faves, Sanada Hiroyuki.

In fact it starts with him, in 17th century Japan. He is living peacefully with his wife and little baby, when Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) and his crew attack. Fight scene ensues, and Sanada-san's family is wiped out, except for his hidden baby. In the aftermath, Lord Raiden (Asano Tadanobu) picks up the baby to raise in another realm.

In our time, Lewis Tan is Cole Young, a not so good MMA fighter, whose only strength is the ability to take punishment. Since there is a a prophecy, and a magic birthmark, and stuff, Taslim attacks Tan - but now he has freeze powers and calls himself Sub-Zero. Tan is getting beaten when Mehcad Brooks as Jax Briggs shows up to help. Tan gets away, but Brooks loses his arms. 

Tan runs to Jax's friend Jessice McManee as Sonya Blade. She gives him the info dump about the Mortal Kombat tournaments, the prophecy, and the birthmarks. Turns out the birthmarks can be inherited or won if you kill someone, Highlander-style. I didn't pay attention to this, and also never played the game, but I don't think it matters much.

McManee has captured an obnoxious Aussie mercenary named Kano (Josh Lawson). When they are attacked, he helps out and becomes one of the group. They all go off to Asano-san's temple for training. You see, people with the birthmarks can get a superpower. Lawson, for ex, gets a laser eye. Tan gets nothing - for now.

Look, there's a lot of lore here. I'm not sure you need to pay much attention to it. Mainly, you get kick-ass fights and Lawson's Kano being obnoxious comic relief. 

When Tan does get his powers, it turns out to be magic armor - his capacity to take punishment. There are a number of (cool) fights, and Taslim takes Tan's family hostage. So Tan manages to manifest Sanada-san (his ancestor, of course), who defeats bad guys and frees hostages. Then he and Asano-san retreat to another realm, I guess, and get ready for the next tournament. Which will include Johnny Cage, who people who play the game or saw the 1995/1997 movies will recognize. Heck, I recognized it, just from the movie podcasts, etc.

When I say this movie is stupid, I don't mean it makes no sense or is poorly written. It actually seems to be well constructed, considering the source material. The acting is fine, production values are high, and the fight scenes top-notch. But it's really only the last part that matters. I guess it's the audience that's stupid, in the best way. We turn off our brains and enjoy the spectacle. And we did. Looking forward to the sequel.

In conclusion, there were lots of game references like "Flawless victory!" and "Finish him!". I only know that from osmosis. But I bet it blew a lot of people away.

Freak Out

Although I intended this blog to be about my Netflix queue, I do get movies elsewhere. For instance, I got Moonage Daydream (2022) from the library. The link may not be much use to you unless you live in my neighborhood. But I wasn't really sure what I should link to. Netflix doesn't have this in their catalog yet. 

I'm also not sure what to call this movie - it's not quite a documentary. Maybe a collage. It tracks the career and life of David Bowie from approximately the Spiders from Mars through his death. But there aren't any talking heads (except Bowie and his interviewers) or discussions or philosophizing (except from Bowie and his interviewers). It includes lots of concert footage, starting with "The Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud". There are lots of interviews with Bowie, who is very smart, open, and honest in conversation. There are scenes from his movies, like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, The Hunger, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But there are also lots of interpolated material - one or two seconds from Metropolis, This Island Earth, and similar oddities. 

The movie shows Bowie's NY, LA, and Berlin periods, and talks about why he went there, as well as why he constantly changes his look and style. It talks (Bowie) talks about his older brother who introduced him to Burroughs and Kerouac, then became schizophrenic. It doesn't talk about the drugs and the (rumors of) gay sx. It doesn't mention his first wife or his son Duncan Jones, although they signed off on the film. It has some very touching things to say about his wife Iman. But mostly it's about his music and philosophy, mixed in with some odd visuals.

We enjoyed this (it's a little long at 2 hrs 20 min) but didn't find it that deep. But it was a lovely tribute to Bowie, a lovely human and great artist. 

Next Time

Funny how many Philip K. Dick stories are made into movies, and how few are real successes. Still, I decided to try Next (2007), even though it stars Nic Cage.

Cage is a not great magician in Las Vegas, but he does have a real magical power - he can see a few minutes into the future. So he makes a little money in the casinos and keeps a low profile. But one day he "sees" a guy with a gun try to rob the casino teller and shoot a guard. He jumps the guy and grabs his gun, which looks like an unprovoked attack. He evades the guards by simply knowing when they will be looking the other way and slipping past them. 

But while casino security is watching this on their monitors, government agent Julianne Moore is also watching. She thinks his powers can help her find the terrorists who have stolen a nuclear bomb before they detonate it. 

Cage goes to a particular coffeeshop every day at a certain time, because he has had a vision that he will meet the love of his life there. This is the only one of his visions that happens more than a few minutes in the future. When she does show up, it's Jessica Biel. Her ex-boyfriend is bugging her, so Cage intervenes - which ends with her blowing him off. But that was just a future vision, and he can change the future. So he tries a few other approaches until he finds one that leads her to accepting him, even offering to give him a ride to Flagstaff, where she's heading. 

After a stop at a Havasupai reservation, where Biel teaches (?), they settle into a hotel. But Moore has been following them, and she explains the situation to Biel. She gives Biel a drug to give to Cage, so she can take them in. But Biel decides not to, so now they are both on the run from Moore, and more or less officially together. 

But the terrorists are following Moore, and when they try to kill her, Cage uses his powers to save her. As Moore says, no good deed goes unpunished. So he is taken in.

I'll skip over a bit here, and just say that there's a great shoot out in a factory, with Cage knowing where every bullet is going to come from. This scene and the casino chase are my favorite parts of the movie. I guess modern movie making knows how to make action scenes with a gimmick shown clearly and with tension and excitement. Or maybe New Zealand director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) does.

Anyway, I had the ending spoiled on some podcast or other (the only reason I'd even heard of this film), so I'm going to spoil it for you. The bomb goes off, and everyone dies. Then Cage "rewinds" time back to the hotel, and this time he's going to get it right. Kind of a cheat, but also kind of cool.

Now, I don't like Cage very much, maybe because I watch mostly his oddball or over the top performances. But I think he makes a good Dickian protagonist. He seems like the kind of sad-sack nerd who has a secret power which may or may not let him win in the end. So I found this successful as a Dick adaptation. Your mileage may vary.