Heavy Candy

I was reminded of Heavy Metal (1981) by a very dumb movie podcast. Of course, I remembered the movie well - I saw it in the theater and more recently on CD. But I had forgotten, or never knew, that John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Eugene Levy had done some of the voices. So we had to watch again with this knowledge.

If you don't know, this is the movie based on the adult comic magazine of the same name. It is basically a series of animated shorts, tied loosely together by the tale of a malignant glowing meteor. Heavy breasted nude women are heavily featured. There's a lot of heavy rock on the soundtrack, although the metal is a bit on the light side (Grand Funk Railroad, Sammy Hagar, Blue Oyster Cult. Cheap Trick?). The animation styles are varied, with a lot of rotoscoping. The biggest influence is the French artist Moebius. I remember hoping that the movie was going to tackle Jerry Cornelius' Airtight Garage, a classic Moebius strip, and being disappointed because there was so little Moebius influence overall. I can see now it was more subtle, but it's there.

And as for Candy et al.: they don't really stand out. The exception is the Den section. It's about a geeky Earth teen who is magically transported to a barbaric land, where he is a huge, muscular, bald dude. He fights the evil (large breasted, nude) priestess and rescues the ritual sacrifice (also large breasted and nude). It's a good story, but having Candy narrate in his squeaky geek voice really made it special.

In conclusion, the movie is about as good as I remembered it: fun, not 100% great. Decent music, including the score by Elmer Bernstein, but could have been better. Knowing that the SCTV guys were doing voices was interesting, but not really crucial. 

Produced by Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, etc), which probably explains a lot.

Damn, Buster

I queued up The Dam Busters (1955) mainly because I vaguely remembered a ska version of the theme song. It's a pretty good theme played straight too. 

It starts in England 1942 with Michael Redgrave with bleached white hair and round Leslie Howard glasses. He's playing in his back garden, skipping marbles off a tub of water, over a clothesline and onto a table. His children are measuring the landing point. His wife has called a doctor on a pretext, to get him to check out Redgraves for exhaustion (and/or madness). But he isn't crazy, he's working on a new weapon for the war, which he can't explain. He just needs a little money for research.

At the Vickers plant where he works, he gets a little money, and we see him running experiments with bigger marbles, and tiny dams. You see, German steel manufacture is concentrated in the Ruhr Valley, and depends on the water from three dams. But they are so big and strongly constructed, it would take an enormous bomb to break them - greater than anything an airplane could carry. The dams are protected from the surface by booms, and below by torpedo nets.

Here I got the idea that this was a mad scientist story. Redgrave would work obsessively on his invention, destroying his health and family, to achieve an end that will kill millions in terrible floods. There was a warning that the film contained offensive material that is no longer acceptable. But that really isn't it. We see him running tests, making calculations, and facing resistance from the bureaucracy. But his results convince them, and his plan is put into action.

The plan is to skip a bomb across the surface, over the booms and nets, and then let it gently roll down, exploding in contact with the dam. It's just crazy enough to work.

The next act concentrates on Michael Todd, the wing commander who will select and train the bomber crews to deliver these bombs. Todd also has a sweet big black dog named Nipper or Knicker (I firmly believe). He gets his crews together, and they begin training, as methodical and careful as Redgraves.

Finally, the bombing run. This is a beautiful sequence, combining aerial photography, night shooting, and miniatures. It's a success - and we don't worry about how many Germans are killed, They manage to kill eight bombers worth of British.

This is an interesting movie in a lot of ways. For one thing, it's based on a true story. Redgrave's look is based on the actual inventor. Also, the methodical way an idea is tested, calculated, tested again, and so forth has a kind of anti-dramatic drama. There's a lot of stiff upper lip to the acting - there are a lot of Leslie Howard accents as well as his glasses. And the final bombing run was a lovely set piece for this kind of action.

So we liked it a lot. But in the end, I think Guns of Navarone makes a better ska tune.

When the Moon Hits You

 We mainly watched Moonfall (2022) because it got so much love from the How Did This Get Made podcast. Like them we loved it (as far as that goes).

It starts with astronaut Patrick Wilson, along with Halle Berry and some guy in a red shirt on a routine space shuttle mission. They seem to be attacked by a weird black cloud or swarm. They lose the red shirt, but Wilson manages to land safely. NASA blames the incident on him, and he is forced to resign in disgrace. His wife leaves him and marries Michael Pena, who, as they repeatedly discuss on HDTGM, owns a Lexus dealership.

Meanwhile, John Bradley is close to proving his crackpot theory: That the moon is an artificial hollow megastructure that will be turned into a weapon against Earth. When he sends his data to various agencies, he doesn't get much support. But it's Astronaut Day! He realizes that an astronaut will be meeting some school kids at Griffith Park Observatory. And once he finishes sleeping off his hangover, that astronaut is Patrick Wilson. Who also ridicules the theory.

But we soon find out it is true. NASA sends a mission to the moon, and finds a bottomless pit that shouldn't be there. They get ready to go down, but that black swarm appears and wipes them out. So I guess NASA believes Wilson, along with Bradley. In fact, NASA official Donald Sutherland admits they knew it all along, but didn't want to cause a panic. 

While this plot is going along, we are reminded that Roland Emmerich is directing this. So there are floods, earthquakes, and destruction. Gravity is acting weird, sometimes screwing things up, sometimes allowing a Lexus to jump a destroyed bridge. Eventually, it allows Wilson, Berry, and Bradley to get a space shuttle out of a museum and fly it to the moon. (Space shuttle now bearing the graffiti, "Fuck the Moon". Yeah!) At least they didn't drive a Lexus there. 

Ok, megastructure, nanotech, ancient aliens, black hole, white dwarf, yada, yada. This section had a lot less of the sensawonda than I was hoping. Big Dumb Objects in SF can be awe-inspiring, or just sort of drab. Maybe we were just getting worn out by this time. Anyway, it all ends happily, except for the millions who died and the cities that were destroyed. I can't imagine how they will handle the sequel. Probably as well as ID2.

Girl Fight

The 355 (2022) showed up kind of by mistake. I wasn't watching my queue closely enough, and this just bubbled up. I know I said I'm getting tired of female-lead action movies, but here we go again.

CIA operative Jessica Chastain is part of a team staking out a Colombian druglord. It turns out that he's trying to sell a cyber-McGuffin to master criminal Jason Flemyng, when the whole thing goes sideways. DNI agent Edgar Ramirez gets away with the McGuffin. 

Chastain and Sebastian Stan go on a mission in Germany to buy it back, but German agent Diane Kruger swipes the money bag (thinking it was the McGuffin) and everything does sideways again.

So Chastain recruits Lupita Nyong'o and Penelope Cruz to help retrieve the gizmo and/or the money. There's an auction in Shanghai, and Fan Bing Bing shows up to help out. So we've got about 5 women agents from various agencies, working for or against each other, looking for the McGuffin.

The movie is set all over the world - Colombia, Germany, England, Morocco, Shanghai. There are tons of action scenes, with guns and hand-to-hand combat. The stars are the women, all action stars you love (Diane Kruger wasn't familiar, although she played Helen of Troy).

It's definitely not a bad example of this kind of movie. It may even be a good example - an Expendables for women. But it wasn't enough to overcome our ennui over this genre. I do want more, but I want better.

And about the title - the movie gives you no clue. So google it if you care.

A Handbag!?!?

 A colleague mentioned The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), and I of course thought she meant the 1952 version. I'd never even heard of the "Colin Firth" one.

It turns out that Firth is Jack/Ernest Worthing, with Rupert Everett as Algy Montcrieff. France O'Connor is Gwendolyn, and Reese Witherspoon is Cecily. And of course, Judi Dench is Lady Bracknell. It starts with Everett evading the police and dropping in on Firth. This sets up Algy as a bit more of a bounder than I am used to. There is also some stuff  (based on material Oscar Wilde cut) about Jack, or Ernest as he's known in the city, skipping out on dinner tabs to maintain his reputation as Jack's imaginary scapegrace brother.

Other than that, this is mostly just Wilde's play that we know and love. There is a little bit of daydream imagery here and there among the lovers, but nothing too out there. 

I think everyone plays their part well, but you want to know about Lady Bracknell. Dench did a fine job, but delivered the line "A handbag?" in a sort of shocked whisper. I guess after Dame Edith Evans' big delivery, you have to try a different spin. But the later line, "The cloak room at Victoria Station" hits it just right.

We enjoyed this, since it was Wilde well delivered, but I don't think they beat the 1952 version. It would be hard to do.

the Two Jakes

Ever wonder what Denis Villeneuve did before breaking out? Watch Enemy (2013), you might be surprised.

It starts in a sophisticated sex club where a woman erotically crushes a tarantula under her Cuban heel. Then we meet Jake Gyllenhall as a depressed history teacher in Toronto. He has a beautiful girlfriend, Melanie Laurent, with whom he has depressing sex (not clear what the problem is, though). When a colleague asks him what he does for fun, he doesn't know how to answer. The colleague suggests watching movies, like a light comedy he saw. So Gyllenhall rents it.

It doesn't seem to cheer him up much. But he does notice that one of the actors in a minor role looks a lot like him (played by Gyllenhall, of course). He finds out who the actor is and starts stalking him. He goes to the actor's agent, and everyone there thinks it's him. They even give him a confidential letter. He calls the actors place, and his wife (Sarah Gadon) assumes that it's the actor playing a joke. 

After quite a bit of this, the doppelgangers meet, and find they are indeed identical. But the actor is simple, happy, a bit thoughtless, maybe even threatening. When they split up, the actor starts stalking the teacher. When he sees Laurent, he likes what he sees. So he accuses the teacher of sleeping with his wife, and demands a chance to sleep with his wife to make it even. Although this doesn't make any sense, the teacher agrees. Maybe he's just that gormless, maybe he's interested in Gadon. Maybe it's something deeper. 

I'll skip the denouement, except to mention that there's a touch of surrealism to it. The movie has many scenes of smoggy Toronto, with thick yellow air. But in one such scene, a huge spider, taller than the CN Tower, walks through the city. 

There wasn't much of the grandeur and beauty of, say, Arrival on display here. Most of it is very drab - on purpose, I am sure. There's also the drabness of the teacher character, another man too depressed to lift his head. The subplot of the crushing fetish pays off in the end, or does it? All in all, not a very fun movie, and less thought-provoking than I expected. 

However, Isabella Rossellini played the teacher's mother, a somewhat cold bohemian sculptor. She assures her son that he doesn't have a twin, and I wish we got to see more of her.

The Battinson

We were sort of surprised that The Batman (2022) arrived - we expected it to be "Long Wait" for a while. Is it because everyone saw it on streaming? Or did the hype just blow over? Now that we've seen it, I have to say, I don't remember that much.

This is the first Robert Pattinson Batman. We get to see him all Goth, with the mask off and the black eye paint running like Robert Smith, mourning his parents, and crime and stuff. When a weird criminal starts murdering city officials, Batman shows up at the crime scene to do some detecting. A lot of the police are hostile, but not-yet-commissioner Gordon (Jeffery Wright) wants his help. Especially when clues in the form of riddles for Batman show up. 

Clues lead him to the Penguin's club. Penguin here is just a regular villain, a mobster under Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). But he's played by Colin Ferrell under a ton of makeup and prosthetics to make him older, fatter and with worse skin. 

At the nightclub, Batman notices Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle, which gets her into the story. As Catwoman, her and Batman have some steamy scenes together, which generate no heat. In fact, I mentioned the love interest to Ms. Spenser, and she didn't know what I meant. Maybe lack of chemistry, maybe Pattinson is just too much of a stiff in costume. 

You see, a lot of this movie is Pattinson moving slowly and stiffly through a scene. Maybe it was supposed to look deliberate and strong, but I thought it looked wooden. It was like an overused slow-mo effect, but at normal speed. He might have made a better Bruce Wayne, but we don't get to see much of him.

It all ends with Batman failing to stop the Riddler (Paul Dano as a sort of doughy, dweeby Ed Nashton) from blowing up the seawall and flooding lower Gotham. Who knew that was an option? Is Gotham in Louisiana? So they herd all the citizens into a sports arena, which is unfortunately underground (and then underwater). This all makes little sense, and little more dramatic sense. 

Which is too bad, because in general, this was a good, maybe too generic, Batman movie. There are several nice Batmobiles, including 70s muscle car style. Batman does some detecting as well as punching, etc, and the grounded mob and corruption-based plot is refreshing. But I don't think it really brought a lot to the table that's new or fresh, and I don't think Pattinson is our best Batman - although I did detect a hint of the old Val Kilmer in his chin. 

Will still watch the next one. 

Pink Lagoon Beach Party

Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (2006) looked like a stupid gay parody of a 60s science fiction horror movie. And it was! Even in black and white.

The setup: There's a chemical plant near the Exit 5 rest stop by the Pink Lagoon that is causing a mosquito-borne virus to mutate (or something like that). We see a man bitten and then his funeral. A group of women are gossiping about him: "He was buried in a kimono and a pinky ring." When one doesn't understand, they use ever more far-fetched euphemisms to explain: He was "light in his loafers", "playes for the other team", a friend of Dorothy",  but she still doesn't get it. Finally, they explain: "He was a figure skater." Later when everyone leaves, a hand (with a pinky ring) bursts out of the grave - and then the wrist goes limp. If this sounds funny to you, you'll love this.

Platinum haired Nick Garris is a sweet young thing riding around with his rough trade friend. He wants him to come to his birthday party so everyone can see how nice he really is. Instead, he drops Garris off by the side of the road and goes cruising at Exit 5. Will we see him again - alive?

The party is at a beach house (filmed in the PNW), owned by a swishy black gay and his hunky boyfriend. Also attending are a shy, not quite closeted nerdy boy, and an older, bitter queen with a sharp tongue (ooh!) and his latest "conquest". There's actually a lot of cute but outrageous stuff here before the zombies even show up. 

But of course they do, in makeup that would embarrass Ed Wood (if that's possible). In fact, everything about this movie is cheap, down to the sign for Exit 5, which is clearly several 8"x10" sheets of paper with "Exit 5" printed across them, stapled to a board. The acting style matches the cheapness, and so does the dialog and jokes. There isn't much info available about this, but it looks like a lot was cribbed from The Boys in the Band (haven't seen it, don't know).

But there are a couple of decent original songs, and of course, show tunes save the day.

This was actually a lot of fun, although maybe not as much as, say, Monster Beach Party or Psycho Beach Party. Maybe they should have put "Beach Party" in the title.

Chocolate Manhole Covers

I'm mot  particular fan of PT Anderson - more or a Wes or Paul WS guy. But Licorice Pizza (2022) looked interesting, so I figured, why not?

It's about a 15-year-old boy, Cooper Hoffman, who meets and woos 25-year-old Alana Haim (of the band Haim). She's the photographer's assistant when he's getting his school picture taken, and he asks her out to a classy steakhouse. You see, he was member of the cast of a popular sitcom, so he has a little money to throw around. She's a bit at loose ends, so she takes him up on it. And although she tries to shut him down repeatedly, they become friends.

Hoffman's character is based on a childhood friend of Anderson's. He was a child actor who was always hustling - getting in on the ground floor of the waterbed craze in the early 70s. He knows a bunch of adults from the biz - agents, directors, other actors, and also has a bunch of other 15-year-olds working for him. Although he is kind of chubby and has a terrible haircut, he's full of confidence and ambition.

Haim, on the other hand, is a bit adrift. She lives with her parents and sisters, all played by her real-life parents and her sisters, the band Haim. She gets a lot of ribbing about not having a boyfriend. Wait until they find out who she's hanging around with.

So they have kooky adventures. They deliver a waterbed to Barbra Streisand's boyfriend, Bradley Cooper playing Jon Peters. Since he acts like an asshole, they flood his house and try to make an escape, but due to the gas crisis, run out of gas. Hoffman gets Haim a role as a hippie girl in a movie with Sean Penn, doing a riff on William Holden, directed by Tom Waits. She gets drunk, and the famous guys move onto drunken shenanigans, losing track of her. But Hoffman doesn't lose track of her. And so on.

They adventures are all set in a very specific time and place - early 70s, the Valley. They are often dramatic, but in the end, there are no consequences. Jon Peters never tries to get revenge. We don't find out if Haim made the movie. Hoffman gets arrested for murder, then immediately released when they catch the real guy. But that's sort of right for the time - nothing stuck, nothing mattered. It couldn't go on, and it didn't.

But it's really about out two main characters. Hoffman's playing an interesting riff on the kid from Rushmore. Full of himself, confident beyond his years, and with just enough talent to pull it off. Oh, and in love with an older woman too. 

Haim's character is a little different. You're bound to switch the genders and think about a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man, and go "eww". But that isn't as big a problem as you'd think. It's partly because Haim is played like she's closer to 18 than 25. She even claims to be 28, then correcting herself to 25. I wondered if she wasn't meant to be exaggerating that, but that didn't seem to be it. She wore the fashions of the day, like a corduroy minidress that read very "high school" to me. 

But it was mostly her aimlessness that gets her stuck in Hoffman's orbit. I almost wish the movie had been more about her, her life and dreams. But Anderson actually knew the Hoffman character, and had to imagine Haim's.

It's interesting that Ms. Spenser and I were coming of age right around this time. We got our licenses just in time for the gas crisis. But we're East Coasters, far, far from the Valley. Still, like Almost Famous and The Nice Guys, this movie hit our nostalgia buttons hard. I wonder what the kids (people under 60) think of it. 

Top of the Charts

I didn't have much hope for Uncharted (2022). It looked pretty stupid. It was and we loved it.

It starts with Tom Holland falling out of a plane. I guess this comes from the computer game the movie is based on. Then we get the back story. Two orphan kids are breaking into a museum to steal the Magellan map. They are caught - the older kid jumps out a window to avoid getting caught, leaving his younger brother behind, because he's too young to be on the run. That kid grows up to be Tom Holland.

We meet him as an adult tending bar, chatting up the ladies and stealing their jewelry. Mark Wahlberg shows up with a proposition. Wahlberg was working with Holland's missing brother to find a certain cross related to Magellan. Now he has a line on it, and he plans to steal it from the auction where it will go up for sale.

The man who wants to buy it is Antonio Banderas, descendant of the group that financed Magellan. He has a henchwoman played by the very stylish Tati Gabrielle. The plan goes wrong, mayhem erupts, Holland swings from the chandelier, etc.

Next stop Barcelona, where we get 0 shots of the Parque Quell and only a short one of the Sagrada Familia. But we do meet Wahlberg's ex-partner/lover/enemy, Sophia Ali, who has the other cross that they need. So they fight a little and then team up. And off they go to the Philippines and fall out of the airplane...

I feel like I just spent too much time explaining the McGuffin - it doesn't matter. It's just one clue that leads to the next clue, and so on and so on. There are heists, fights, and outrageous set pieces. Holland and Wahlberg bicker and banter, but it's not overbearing like, say, Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson. It zips along, the action is good, locations are pretty. I'm easy to please but even Ms. Spenser, much less a fan of mindless action, enjoyed it - even thought she might watch it again. 

Oh, and there were a number of callbacks to the video game and a set up for a sequel. We didn't get any of the callbacks, and I wonder if we'll get a sequel.