Black Widows Everywhere

I haven't paid much attention - is Black Widow (2021) one of the hated or beloved Marvel movies? We kind of liked it.

It starts with two kids playing in a nice suburb in Ohio, 1995. The older, 10-12 years old?, seems a bit uneasy, but the younger, 5-6?, is just goofy. Their mother calls them in to supper, and their dad comes home. He announces that they are going on a big adventure. They grab a go-bag and some guns, but mom won't let them take a photo album. 

They wind up in a car chase/running gun battle with the police. They get to the airport, but mom is shot. Dad seems to be able to hold onto the wing of the small plane they fly out in. When they land in Cuba, it becomes clear - they are Russian spies, undercover. The kids are just camouflage. I never watched The Americans, but I bet it's a source.

Anyway, cut to "Present Day", in this case, during the Avengers Civil War. The younger girl has grown up to be Florence Pugh. In Budapest, she is trying to kill another woman, who turns out to be a rogue widow. Just before she kills her, she gets sprayed with a little vial of gas that turns off her programming. Now she's free and she's sorry for what she has done.

Meanwhile, the older girl is now Scarlett Johansson, hiding out from the Sokovia Accords. She gets a package from Pugh, which turns out to be the vials of deprogramming gas. She gets attacked by this super-soldier in a General Grievous mask. This is Taskmaster, who can copy anyone's fighting style, with a few extra tricks. Nonetheless, Johansson gets away, and with the vials, which were the target all along.

She heads to Budapest to find out what's up. After a cute little sister fight, they work out the plot of the movie. Sinister figure Dreykov has found a way to program perfect assassins, and has done this to Pugh, Johansson, and all the other widows. The gas can deprogram them - although Johansson doesn't need it for some reason? Anyway, they have to get to the place this programming is done, the Red Room. And to do that, they need their old fake American dad.

That's David Harbour, who seems to have perfected the Bad Dad in Stranger Things. He used to be the Red Guardian, the Soviet answer to Capt. America, but after glasnost, he's just a strong, fat, bearded guy in prison. So the girls break him out. But he can't really help. They'll need fake mom.

She is Rachel Weisz, a behavioral biologist living on a farm. She has training a pig not to breathe on command - until it dies, although she lets up at the last moment. They ask for her help, and instead she tells them that she has called the Red Room on them. 

So they wind up in the Red Room, which turns out to be a heli-carrier, like SHIELD's. Dreykov is Ray Winstone, a kind of fat old Russian version of a Hollywood macher. And he still has programming hooks into Johansson.

There's some confusing stuff here lifted from Face/Off, and it all ends with a lot of explosions and more than one freefall fight scene. We also find out the Taskmaster is Olga Kurylenko, horribly scarred as a girl by Johansson. Also, in need of deprogramming gas.

Like most Marvel movies, this seems radically overstuffed and full of ridiculous and wonderful action scenes. But it also has a real human heart, the story of the sisters and their make-believe parents forming some kind of crazy family. Harbour's role is played for humor - you get to see him grunt and strain to get into his old costume, hear him brag about fighting Capt. America, and try to get it on with Weisz. But also, you find that he's a blowhard who cares at least a little for the girls who he pretended were his daughters. Weisz seems almost comically evil, but also just needs a good example to find the courage to fight Winstone. 

So even though it probably had too much going on for it's two-hour-plus run-time, it's good stuff. The villains are programming, mind control, and submission to authority - that's about Russia, but also other authoritarian regimes. the heroes are cranky, guilty, and not entirely on the side of good, but they care for each other in some way. Also, lots of fights and explosions.

It ends after the Infiinity Wars. The Black Widow has died and Pugh is putting flowers on her grave. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss shows up at the end, offering Pugh the job of killing the man responsible for her death. So it looks like Pugh will be the new Black Widow, and her first job will be killing Hawkeye. I mention this because when I checked Wikipedia, I discovered that JL-D is playing the Contessa, a 70's Agent of SHIELD character I always wanted more of. 

And to top it all off, we get a couple of jabs at Rob Liefeld, including a poke about the super-hero landing crouch and outfits with a lot of pockets.

Heavenly Blue

For some random reason, we decided to watch another classic SNL pairing: Steve Martin and Rick Moranis: My Blue Heaven (1990). OK, SNL and SCTV.

This movie is sort of the sequel to Goodfellas (I guess, never seen it). When Nick Pileggi was writing Goodfellas, he spent a lot of time on the phone with Henry Hill. Pileggi's wife, Norah Ephron, got pretty fed up listening to Hill's bullshit, and wrote My Blue Heaven about his time in witness protection.

Basically, FBI desk jockey Rick Moranis relocates Steve Martin in Squaresville, CA outside of San Diego. Martin is a New Yawk mobster with a moussed haircut and some flashy suits. He has to lay low until he can testify in a murder trial. He soon discovers how many other mobsters are in protection in this town (including William Hickey as a pet shop owner). He also meets and makes an enemy of the cute but strait-laced Assistant DA in town, Joan Cusack. She's not his type, but he thinks he can set her up with Moranis.

So while Martin and friends start a low-key crime wave, he also tries to get Moranis to loosen up. When they go to New York for the trial, he hits the clubs with Moranis and teaches him to do the merengue. This is the reason we wanted to see this - to see Steve Martin effortlessly, and Moranis a little more clumsily, do this dramatic Latin dance.

Later, when Moranis takes Cusack to a party, he shows the lessons he's learned by slipping the band leader a tip and dancing the merengue with Joan. Since she's a head taller than him, it looks funny, until he takes off. It's one of my favorite dance scenes, and I have watched a lot of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. 

It ends happily for everyone, even Moranis' partner Bill Irwin. If you don't know Irwin, he's an incredible physical comedian. One of his gags is to try not to dance. First his shoulders twitch, then his feet move, and soon he's doing a wild rubber-legged routine, while trying to keep a straight face and tamp down the joy. 

One thing this movie reminded me is that Norah Ephron is a great screenwriter. In the hands of this cast, and director Herbert Ross, it can't miss.

Old Man Dracula

As mentioned previously, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) is available on Netflix streaming, so we (re)watched it. 

I wanted to watch it for the late period practical effects - mostly in camera or simple double exposure. There were shadow plays, painted backdrops, vamps gliding on hidden skateboards, and so on. We noticed a trick from Vampyr - the shadows cast by no visible bodies. F.F. Coppola's art direction was sumptuous and decadent, but also sort of retro. Or is that just what movies looked like in the 1990s?

Keanu Reeves played Jonathan Harker like a stiff with a very wonky accent. I see now how we (mis?)judged him as a terrible actor in the day. We love him now, of course. When Anthony Hopkins shows up as Van Helsing, he kind of fades away from the movie. Even Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, and Richard E Grant, as Lucy Westenra's (Sadie Frost) suitors, get more to do. And of course, Tom Waits' Renfield gets to have the most fun.

But the movie is really about Gary Oldman's Dracula, with a lot of different make-up looks, and Winona Ryder's Mina Harker. He got to play a lot of different types of role, from ancient to contemporary to bestial. She gets to play the victim as addict (possibly sex addict). 

I was more impressed with the look of the movie on this watch. But I think I felt the same way about the story as I did the first time: It doesn't really hold together. Too many parts jammed together, trying to do too much. Still, we did get to hear Oldman do the "I never drink... wine" line, and the one about the children of the night. 

Circle of Irony

I'm going to blame Circle of Iron (1978) On Rod Heath of This Island Rod. He explained this movie as a late 70s martial arts fantasy/mystical journey, and we had to watch it.

It starts by claiming that Bruce Lee proposed this story to James Coburn and Sterling Silliphant. Be that as it may. Lee did not live to make it (or turn it down), but Silliphant did write it. Coburn wisely avoided it. Instead it stars Jeff Cooper as a martial artist. He competes in a tournament held by Roddy McDowell and makes it to the final round. Then he is disqualified for hitting his opponent when he is already down. So he doesn't get to go search for the Zetan (in the end revealed to be Christopher Lee) and the Book of Knowledge. 

Except - who's stopping him? He follows the winner, but notices a blind man with a flute staff pass by several times. It is, yes, David Carradine, old Kung Fu himself. He follows the blind man and sees him fight off a tribe of bandits, using his whistling flute staff, and asked if Carradine would be his teacher. He is denied, but follows Carradine anyway, until he gets sick of his Zen-lite pronouncements.

He goes through a number of extremely odd adventures, like fighting a band of monkey people (with Carradine playing the monkey king). The monkeys tell him to seek a rose in the desert, so he heads that way. He comes across Eli Wallach in a pot of oil. Wallach is trying to dissolve the bottom half of his body to purify his mind, and when Cooper peeks in, sees that his "thing" is nothing but a tiny worm. But Cooper figures his vow of chastity will be enough, and declines to join Wallach.

It doesn't take him long to meet a desert warlord (Carradine again) who gives him one of his wives. So much for chastity. And so on.

The acting and production of this one the level of Ator, the Golden Eagle meets American Ninja. The deep "Oriental" philosophy is mostly on or below Kung Fu level. Yet, odd touches like Eli Wallach dissolving his nethers in oil keep this from being a total waste of time. This also goes by the title The Silent Flute - although it isn't silent, although Carradine can't see it. 

So if I've convinced you to watch this, forget it. Don't be like me. 

Blues in the Night

Now that Spooktober is over, we decided to catch up on a few odd whims we've had - like re-watching The Blues Brothers (1980).

I'm just going to assume that everybody knows this movie and skip the summary: Dan Akroyd and John Belushi play the Blues Brothers, two criminals who also had a blues band. They need to get some money fast to save the orphanage they were raised in, so they get the band back together and play a concert. But in the process piss off a country band, some Illinois Nazis, and several groups of police. Oops, there's the summary.

Here are a few things we noticed this time around:

• We had forgotten that John Candy was in this, as Belushi's parole officer.
• Ms. Spenser had forgotten that Carrie Fisher was in this, as Belushi's homicidal ex.
• We remembered that Pee-Wee Herman is in this, but forgot that his role is 1-second long, and he has like one line: "Very good, sir".
• Belushi is a lot less prominent in this than I remembered. It's pretty much Akroyd's movie.

Overall, the movie seemed to have some pacing issues - we felt like there was quite a bit of dead time between the (incredible) set pieces. The set pieces are incredible, with cop cars flying everywhere, and a mall demolished, etc. But what we were really about was the music. There are some great performances by some classic acts. Duck Dunne, Steve Cropper, and Willie Hall are basically the MGs. Matt Guitar Murphy and the SNL horn section all have speaking roles. But also:

• John Lee Hooker and band perform "Boom Boom" on the streets of Chicago.
• Aretha Franklin has an amazing number, and some fierce dialog.
• Cab Calloway does "Minnie the Moocher". You can see he's an older man, but when the curtain goes up and his black suit turns into a white tux, he delivers an amazing performance.

Ms. Spenser was a little annoyed at the racial subtext (musicians: Black. Audience: White. Saviors: White.). But getting these guys gigs was important, and (I hope) gave them a little late career juice. And we got to see Cab one last time. 

Vamp On

I am afraid that my picks for Horror-tober weren't as successful as some years. But I picked Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) for Halloween night, and that made up for a lot.

It stars "Julian West" (stage name for Nicolas de Gunzberg) as a student of the occult - but we meet him one a fishing trip. He is looking for a room at a lonely and somewhat creepy inn. That night, an old man wanders into his room, leaves a package inscribed "To be opened in the event of my death" and leaves.

West gets up to follow him, and in the dreamy day-for-night sees shadows dancing, leading him to a ruined building. One of these shadows is a one-legged soldier - who is finally joined by the actual person. West also meets a peculiar old man who later turns out to be the town doctor (played by the quaintly named Jan Heironimiko). When West leaves, we see the doctor attending to a stern and strong old woman.

The next day, West finds that the old man from his room is the lord of the manor. He has two daughters - one who has a strange wasting disease. But before they meet, the lord is mysteriously shot. In the commotion, the sick daughter wanders outdoors and we (but not the members of the household) see her being bitten on the neck by the old woman. 

When they get around to opening the package, they find a book about vampires (or vampyrs). It even mentions one Marguerite Chopin, an evil old woman from that very town. Although she is now dead (supposedly), there are still rumors...

I mentioned the dreamy day-for-night, but actually the whole film has a dreamy feel. The photography is soft-focused and a little over-exposed, giving some characters the appearance of being lit from within. The shadows without people attached isn't the only surreal special effect, although it is most prominent. And Marguerite Chopin, played by Henriette Gerard, is a different type of vampire, a female vampire who is not a sexy lesbian (although Le Fanu was a source for the story). Her strong masculine features are quite forbidding.

This was almost a silent film, coming from the earliest days of sound. But it doesn't have the static camera, locked in a sound stage that some early talkies have. Of course, there is very little dialog, so that must have helped technically. 

This is the first Dreyer we've seen. Now, we're keen to try more, maybe Joan of Arc. 

The Bad, the Good, and the Oh Well

 Since I'm almost caught up with the movies we've watched, I'm going to take a minute to discuss the whole Netflix DVD thing. 

Streaming is still streaming: The selection is poor, the experience is weak, and our internet connection usually drops at some point in the movie. Lately, another problem is that movies are scattered over 4-5 services, and you have to subscribe to all of them to have a hope of seeing what you want to see. And that seems to be mostly recent movies and movies that are loved by people who used to see them every weekend on cable. Amazon Prime used to have a lot of old movies, but they've been disappearing. At least, I think they are - the interface is almost impossible to use. I go to JustWatch.com, mostly, and it's interface isn't as good as it should be. So we still want DVDs by mail.

The Bad: let's say we get two discs a week, and watch them on Saturday and Sunday. They go in the mail Monday. That used to mean that Netflix got them on Tuesday or Wednesday, and sent out the new discs. We got them on Thursday or Friday - in time to watch on the weekend. 

But under the Improved Postal Service, you can't expect overnight service. So now Netflix gets the disc on Wednesday or Thursday, and ships them to us so we get them Friday or Saturday - if everything works out. If Netflix doesn't ship by Wednesday, I panic and tell them the disc is lost in the mail, and hope they mail it in time. 

The Good: They usually do this. In fact, they usually send at least one of the discs before they receive it. They sent an email explaining that the disc gets scanned in the post office, and they get informed that it's en route. So that shaves a day off, which is usually enough. I have had to hit the panic button a few times, but I've always gotten at least one disc by Friday. Possibly because I almost always send a disc back on Saturday.

That's right, the hypothetical above is a lie. I make sure we watch a disc Friday night, never a streamer.

The Oh Well part? The disc we tried to watch on Friday was unplayable. Tried it in two machines, tried a damp cloth, then soapy water. Nothing. It was Bram Stoker's Dracula, which just happened to appear on streaming the next week. Oh well.

Count Yor Blessings

Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) is a title I had heard many times, but never seen. With little more than that to go on, I queued it up. Once more we see the importance of adequate research.

It takes place in modern day LA. Several friends are meeting for a seance, held by the mysterious Count Yorga (Robert Quarry). The crowd is a little too rowdy for him to contact the mother of one of the crew. But Yorga does calm her down with hypnosis. When two of the others give him a ride to his canyon home in their VW microbus, they get stuck in mysterious mud puddle on their way back. They decide to sleep in the van until morning, but are attacked by Yorga and his henchmen. He is a vampire! Not a spoiler, it's in the title.

When the woman who was attacked starts acting listless and eating kittens, the crew starts to suspect vampirism. The visit Count Yorga in the middle of the night and try to get him to stay up until dawn, and then sunburn him. This is a long section of cringe - a couple of guys coming to visit at 3:00 AM who just won't leave. They aren't even good conversationalists. And it comes to naught, when the Count kicks them out before the sun rises. 

At that point, he goes into his basement full of undead women. Sadly, these women do not perform the traditional gratuitous interpretive dance scene. 

What else do you need to know? Quarry is an acceptable, but not great vamp. The rest of the acting is sub-TV production level, as are the sets, direction, etc. There's a little bit of 1970 LA location filming, as two guys have brunch and walk around while working out the plot of the movie in dialog added in post. That's about it for entertainment value here. There isn't even any semi-nudity or gratuitous go-go dancing. 

I'm not sure why this is considered a classic, or even if it is. I can say I've watched it now. If you haven't seen it, skip it. You'll be glad you did.