Not So Good

We're big Michael Jai White fans, and it looks like he's making a bunch of direct to video films these days. So, I decide to watch a bunch, including As Good as Dead (2022).

Set in Mexico, it starts with student Luca Oriel being shaken down for lunch money by a local gang. This is the gang his brother runs with, but he's in prison now, so he has no one to turn to. But he has noticed Michael Jai White, a mysterious gringo recluse, doing martial arts training. So he he starts following his exercises from afar. White chases him off a few times, them starts training him.

When Oriel's brother gets out of jail, he and his fellow gang-bangers go to White's trailer to tell him to stay away from the kid. So he whoops them all. Doesn't make them love him, although Oriel is pretty proud. 

At an all-comers cage match, Oriel volunteers to fight a local big man, and beats him, due to his training. Specifically, he uses a distinctive defensive stance with fists up, elbows out and fore-arms protecting the face. Someone videos the fight and the video gets back to the US and Tom Berenger.

It seems Jai White is hiding in Mexico from some bad trouble in the US. And now Tom Berenger knows where he's hiding. So the last act will be White, Oriel, and the chastened gang against a militarized American force.

I'm afraid I can't say much good about this. White wasn't a big presence in this, and there are only a few real fights. The Mexican setting seemed a bit cliched, although I liked the way the gang was humanized (a little). Still, White is a real presence, and the whole thing was fun enough. Not great, but no complaints. 

Intolerable Hilarity

Speaking of movies that I saw before this blog that I'm watching again: Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The Blank Check podcast reminded me of how much I liked it, and I chanced upon a copy, so...

It starts with TV producer Geoffrey Rush coming home to his Hollywood home to find his wife messing around with the poolboy - and they don't have a pool. As divorce is imminent, she goes to divorce lawyer Miles Massey (George Clooney), who gets her a big settlement, even in the face of infidelity. He's just that good. 

Cedric the Entertainer is a scumbag private eye whose specialty is videoing indiscretions for divorce cases. He catches a politician in bed with a blonde, and nails his ass. That's his motto, "Nail his ass!"

The politician is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who wants a big divorce settlement. In fact, she makes a practice of marrying and divorcing rich men for money. But this time, the husband hires Clooney, and Zeta-Jones gets nothing. 

She sets out for revenge. She marries Billy Bob Thornton, an oil heir. But she insists that they get a pre-nup - the famous "Massey pre-nup", which has never been broken. So she will not be able to profit from the marriage. After the wedding, Thornton tears up the pre-nup, leaving himself exposed. There's a lot of gasping about being exposed. 

Then, when Billy Bob dies, and she's left a widow (and a rich one), they begin a romance, and get married. But will they have a Massy pre-nup?

This is a very screwball movie. The patter is snappy, and the romance and deception go hand in hand. In fact, the offended woman romancing for revenge was the driver for, for instance, The Lady Eve. And of course, the chemistry between our two beautiful leads is off the charts. Of course, Clooney knows how good he looks - we meet him at the dentist getting his teeth whitened. We see him peeling back his lips to inspect them in mirrors all throughout. And the plot is as twisty and nonsensical as any screwball. 

The Coens fill the movie with other great characters, like Billy Bob and Cedric the Entertainer. Cedric and Rush even get happy endings, as Rush is now hosting Cedric's TV show, America's Funniest Divorce Videos, where he shows you how he will "nail his ass!"

Let There Be Music

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up very well. I've been taking a long vacation, at home, watching lots of movies. But there won't be a lot of blogging. A lot of my viewing has been rewatches. But I've also been watching some musical performances. For example, I watched Glass: The Perfect American (2013), the Philip Glass opera about Walt and Roy Disney.

I watched this on YouTube, but I was actually trying to watch another Glass opera, Satyagraha. When I couldn't get it, I gave this a try. It was inventively staged, with projected animations and sometimes ranks of animators in the background. There was an animator who complained about never being recognized by the brothers. The timeline was flexible, and in many scenes, Walt is delirious, dreaming or dead. This was all great. The music, however, did not really strike me. It was not deeply minimalist, more classical modern with a touch of minimalism and a few blues/jazz passages. Fun to watch, less to listen to.

A friend recommended Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025), a documentary made with input from the surviving members and some past interviews with Bonham. It was interesting to hear about the old days before they formed up, since they all had musical careers already. I was interested in Page's desire for Zep to never have a hit single - he made too many of those as a studio guy. He wanted Zep to be an album band! But because the doc was based on their interviews, I felt like it presented a cleaned up version, without as much personality as I could have hoped for. Maybe I'm spoiled by listening to THe History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs, which tends to go pretty deep. Still fun.

I also watched a lot of YouTube world music type concerts. I loved  Ben Aylon, who plays the Senegalese xalam, a lute with a skin soundboard. I also like Constantinople, a trio of kora, setar and percussion. YouTube's algorithm is very good about feeding these to me.  

And I hope to continue this, even as my vacation draws to a close. 

Naked with a Bullet

Ms. Spenser was pretty skeptical about The Naked Gun (2025), but I'd heard good things, so I threw it on while she was working. She ended up liking it more than me. 

It starts with a bank robbery. A little schoolgirl trapped among the hostages turns out to be... Frank Drebbin Jr., Liam Neeson. So he defeats the robbers wearing a plaid skirt. But he doesn't notice the head robber, Danny Huston, getting away with the contents of one safe deposit box, which turns out to be the P.L.O.T Device.

Because Neeson was a little bit over-zealous in the bank case, he is busted down to traffic. He arrives at the scene of a seeming suicide - someone drove their electric car right into the water. But back at the office, Neeson meets the man's sister, Pamela Anderson, who doesn't believe it was suicide. But she's a crime novelist, so she would. 

But you didn't come for the plot. You came for the jokes. And there are a lot of them. A cute runner is Neeson and the other cops getting handed a coffee every few minutes. Less cute is the long scene with Neeson suffering diarrhea from his disordered eating, then berating himself, then pigging out again. This wasn't so cute. I think percentage of tasteless jokes has risen a bit from the original trilogy. But this one has very little O.J. Simpson, so I guess it's a wash.

Also, a lot of the gags are straight up stolen from other movies - sometimes as homage, sometimes just a lift. That doesn't bother me, especially if the jokes are any good. But I did feel like there were fewer than there should be. The jokes in the background were still there, but I felt that the density wasn't. Maybe I'm idealizing the originals. though. I should rewatch, maybe (hard to sit through the O.J., though).

Neeson did a very respectable Drebbin - he has no trouble playing it straight and stone-faced. Pam Anderson was great as the dame, looking and acting the part. Of course, she's competing with Priscilla Presley and Anna Nicole Smith, so she doesn't have to stretch much. But it is nice to see her getting a middle-age return, looking lovely and a little more natural. 

So I laughed but felt a little let down. Ms. Spenser laughed (when she looked up from her work), and was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it's a question of expectations. 

The Count and the Vampire

Ms. Spenser was ready for some horror, and we thought The Vourdalak (2023) might fit the bill. Did it, or was it more horror-comedy?

In the 18th-century, the Count d'Urfe. a French delegate to a conference on the Russo-Turkish conflict, is robbed and separated from his party. The delegate, played by Kacey Mottet Klein, is left stumbling through an Eastern European forest in his court clothes and white makeup. The first habitation he finds turns him away, telling him to leave this forest - it isn't safe in the day and worse at night. But he does get directed to the Gorcha family that may help him out.

 He meets the family a few at a time. The middle son is a pretty young man who wears flowers and make up. The daughter is a rough beauty. The older son, who is out fighting the Turks, is married and has a young son. When he returns, having failed to kill the Turkish leader, he promises to the count that he can have a horse the next day. The patriarch, old Gorcha, has left to fight the Turks as well. He has left a note saying he will be back in six days. If he returns after six days, it won't be him, but a vourdalak, a kind of local vampire.

That night is the sixth. They find old Gorcha collapsed at the edge of the property. Even though the six days has elapsed, the eldest son doesn't believe in vourdalaks, and doesn't care that the old Gorcha looks like a gruesome puppet. And so they take him in.

As you can imagine, things don't go well for anyone, and in ways that are pretty horrific. However, the horror is a bit nonchalant. The tension isn't as tense as it could be. This may be a dramatic choice, showing how insidious horror can be - how easy it can be to accept violence and death. 

More seriously, the count and old Gorcha are both rather ridiculous. The count looks like a clown, in his white makeup with rouged cheeks. Old Gorcha resembles the puppet in Saw more than a Nosferatu. 

But we did like it a lot. The characters were interesting and fully formed, the setting unusual, and the horror horrible. But I think we enjoyed Mario Bava's take with Boris Karloff better. 

Head Fake

Well, I was looking for some stupid action, and Heads of State (2025). certainly filled the bill.

It starts in Spain, during the annual tomato-throwing festival (real thing, look it up). A news crew are actually a joint US/UK security operation, looking for Russian arms dealer Paddy Considine. There are a number of Considine look-alike decoys, so they call on ECHELON for gait recognition. But it's all a trap to get access to ECHELON. The ops are all killed, and Considine gets away.

Now we meet our stars. Idris Elba is the new British prime minister, embattled in the polls. John Cena is the ex-action star, now popular US president. Elba is a serious, slightly depressive type, Cena a gung-ho America-Fuck-Yeah type. They don't get along. A reporter at their joint press conference asks about the disaster in Spain, raising the tension even more. To show US/UK unity, Cena reluctantly offers to give Elba a ride on Air Force One to a conference in Trieste. But on the way, they are attacked and blown out of the sky.

Our two world leaders get out in parachutes, and make their way to a Warsawsafe house, manned by a kooky agent, Jack Quaid. Since the plot against them must have been an inside operation, they can't trust anyone. And so the race is on to get to Trieste, before the whole world order is overthrown.

I want to say this movie is much better than it has to be. The action is very good, almost too good - the downing of Air Force One is a little intense for an action-comedy. Of course, it was made by the director of Nobody, Ilya Naishuler. Coincidentally, Quaid was in another "normal guy meets action plot", Novocaine. The leads are charismatic as hell (of course) and have a nice Odd Couple chemistry.

But there are problems, mainly due to the current state of US politics. Cena plays a populist who mistakes movies for real life, like Reagan. But the US is under a very different kind of populist. Part of the plot of the film is that the bad guys want to disrupt and break up NATO, and Cena and Elba want to prevent that. Whereas the current US president is working hard to dismantle NATO, for the benefit of Russia. And so on. it makes it hard to laugh at some of Cena's antics. The movie also makes Elba, who wants to make careful, seem to be a bit of a killjoy, while a lot of uis would kill for a thoughtful leader. At least it turns out that Elba's prime minister was a real soldier and low-key badass, not just the movie version. 

I'm leaving out a bunch of good supporting actors, like Stephen Root, Carla Gugino, and Sharlto Copley, but now I've mentioned them. That's about all I have to say about the movie. I think it will be a lot more fun to watch in ten or twenty years. At least, I hope so. 

Angels on High

It's a little late for a Christmas movie, but we still wanted to watch We’re No Angels (1955).

Here's the set up: it's late December on Devil's Island. Three escaped prisoners are lounging around by the docks, Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov. As long as they are mistaken for parolees. they don't need to worry. Just just need some money and civilian clothes to get off the island and make a clean break. 

They go to a store run by Leo G. Carroll, and start swiping stuff. They want to rob the register, but it seems everyone buys on credit, and there's nothing there. Carroll is a nice but ineffectual man, and the boys offer to fix his roof (as an excuse to stick around and see what else they can carry off). Peeking down through skylights (like angels on high), they find out that 

• Carroll's cousin in Paris really owns the store, and the place is basically broke.
• His wife, Joan Bennett, loves him and is pretty shapely for a middle-aged mom.
• Their daughter, Gloria Talbott, is in love with the son of the owner, although the owner forbids this romance.

Although they are scoundrels, our escapees begin to feel for these poor people. Then, the store's owner (Basil Rathbone) shows up, along with his son. John Baer. Rathbone is a bully and a jerk, who plans to throw Carroll off the payroll and possibly into prison for not keeping clean books. His son, theoretically in love with Talbott, is engaged to marry the daughter of a rich shipbuilder. 

Now Bogart is a forget and confidence man. He can easily clean up the books given a little time. And if they don't get that time, the other two are murderers, and Aldo Ray is carrying around a little pet viper...

Now, Ms. Spenser loves her some herps - she has a (nonvenous) snake or two herself. So she was disappointed we didn't actually see the little viper. But she loved the the human snakes. Bogart is his usual cool, competent self, politely selling hairbrushes to a bald man and leaning on a credit customer for some cash. Ray is dumb and strong, with an eye for the ladies (and sometimes a pinch). Ustinov is lovely as a somewhat perverted, creepy criminal with a weird laugh. Of course, they're no angels - or are they. 

This would be pretty lightweight and sentimental if the three "angels" didn't have a nice edge. Ray is strong and could be menacing when women are concerned. Ustinov is creepy - he killed his wife. It was all his own fault. He should have written that he was coming home for Christmas. And of course, Bogie is Bogie. 

I'm not sure how funny this would be without these great characters, but with them, it's a Christmas murder miracle.