movie diary'17

recorded off El Ray. possibly not the weirdest Godzilla movie, but definitely the most "extreme". An elite force of mutant soldiers have trapped Godzilla in Antarctic ice, but must free him to save the world when invading aliens unleash an army of kaiju across the globe. Our mutant heroes engage in crazy Matrix-style fights and cross the globe in a submarine that can drill through the Earth's crust. All this craziness is invigorating for a bit, but quickly grows numbing and dull.

recorded on tcm

netflix disc

netflix disc 2/9/17

Netflix disc 3/9/17. rented... last frickin August

syfy on demand. insanely gory even in this neutered for tv version, but lacking in characters we care enough about even to despise. very dodgy visual effects; the opening, in which Richard Dreyfus inadvertently opens up a whirlpool leading to an ancient subterranean lake, looks like a Roadrunner cartoon.

nflix dvd

subjugated to this nonsense after it was recorded by the wife off of Starz or some such. These rehashes are terrible. I'll allow one exception, which is last year's "Pete's Dragon" remake. Disney, stop doing this *beep* Your animated films are your legacy, and remaking them with cheap cgi cheapens that legacy.

on vacation, re-watch with friends off Amazon video, who properly enjoyed it

off hbo 7/3. Previously watched on dvd, which was a frustrating experience; glare on the screen obscured the image no matter how dark the room was, and even with the sound up all the way the dialog, minimalist by design, was a frustrating mumble. I fret a lot about proper presentation, and I hate it when movies are cropped, but this time at least I wasn't struggling to see and hear the movie.

I still wouldn't call it an unqualified success. Initially the mystery is intriguing; where lots of scifi pummels the audience with exposition, Nichols never tells us anything extra, conveying a lot of information in short scenes without a lot of dialog. The magical little boy is just a bit too precious, and he ultimately comes off as a big trope, especially after he is healed by the sun. Still, the film is anchored by a powerful performance by Michael Shannon, the father of the boy, and his struggle to give his son a better life is a moving story.

Off tcm. 7/18.

8/18 on demand, in censored form.

streaming, with numerous technical difficulties. excellent thriller

A big, splashy cartoon with one-dimensional characters, this did not have a lot of replay value. I absolutely loved it in when I saw it in theaters. However when I rewatched it on a home theater projector incapable of high definition; without a crisp image, the weird synthetic sets and backgrounds seem like those of a bad video game. Abandoned halfway through due to buffering problems.

streaming. implausible and convoluted thriller. Rapace is an intelligence agent who finds herself embroiled in a deadly conspiracy. An intolerably smug Orlando Bloom is a thief who partners with her to find out who framed her and stop a terrorist attack.

After turning doomsday into farce in This Is the End, Rogen and Goldberg turn their satirical gaze toward a more pressing apocalypse, of an impending nuclear war with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It's funny, and perhaps a bit unnerving, but these guys just seem to keep making the same movie, one shaggy, violent stoner comedy after another. Randall Park is very funny as Kim Jong-Un, and though the character does embody a lot of the contradictions we see in the real-life Kim, like voraciously consuming western media while threatening war with the US, there's not a true attempt at verisimilitude here. That goes for Franco and Rogen, too, whose characters aspire to be serious journalists, but they're so inept that they don't seem capable of putting on their own tabloid tv show, much less surviving a mission for the CIA.

streaming. a dudes whining about feminism and bewailing their lives in a fascist matriarchal alternate universe. abandoned due to being intolerable. in lieu of a review, why don't you just read about Men's Rights hero Paul Elam's personal journey https://www.buzzfeed.com/adamserwer/how-mens-rights-leader-paul-elam-turned-being-a-deadbeat-dad?utm_term=.ns0ppDEQWG#.lvoggl4V3G

Verhoeven's infamous skin flick is a Hitchcockian fever dream. seen streaming on netflix

caught this streaming on netflix on its last day of availability. A fascinating and madly stylish study of relationship. Knudsen and D'Anna are lovers in a world seemingly without males. When Knudsen, a revered entomologist, isn't collecting butterflies and giving lectures on cave-crickets, she is playing the dom in their sadomasochistic sex games, forcing D'Anna to clean the house and punishing her for any lapse or disobedience. The kinkiness of the sex, the baroque set design, and the gorgeous cinematography lend flavor to a simple, if ultimately rather tricky, question: how do two lovers with very different lives and interests make their relationship work?

off dvr at the in-laws. The expected Disney sentimentality, with eight adorable huskies stranded in a remote part of Antarctica during a harsh winter storm and fighting to survive. Per IMDB's trivia, this is rather loosely based on an expedition where 15 dogs were stranded, of which 2 survived; nobody wants to see that movie, I think it's safe to say. Walker, as their trainer, is a credible presence out on the ice, time and again saving the life of hapless scientician Bruce Greenwood with grit and know-how. But the action hero gets frog-marched back to civilization by his boss after getting a bad case of frostbite, and is forced to leave the dogs behind. For much of the film he goes around browbeating his friends and lobbying bureaucrats to go back and save the dogs, and this is rather less compelling; here Walker comes across too often as petty and passive-aggressive, especially toward the people least able to do anything about his predicament. The dogs are cute, and they carry the film a bit better, but it's not exactly Ibsen.

Cartoonish rehash of the old culture-clash comedy with a lot of painful mugging from an eclectic and largely misused cast. It's weird to single out Jim Varney for praise, but the man who was Ernest P Worrell is amusingly deadpan as Clampett patriach Jed, and merits an honorable mention in a wretched ensemble. Spheeris' comedies tend to be over the top and silly, but this one doesn't have a charismatic force at the center to carry the story and to find the humor in her anarchic sensibilities, as Carvey and Myers do in "Wayne's World".

ntflx original. Gugino, a housewife left helplessly chained to the bed after a sex game gone awry in a secluded lakehouse, must contend with a wild dog, desperate hunger and thirst, and visions of a skeletal boogeyman as she struggles to survive somehow.

much enjoying Jenji Kohan's new show, so I watched this on ntflx. I was utterly unfamiliar with the 80's wrestling show, but this look at the program is fascinating. The real women of GLOW are such indelible characters. It's thrilling to see them in their heyday, and they remain charming in interviews from the present day.

Sundance on demand. Not, unfortunately, w/out commercial interruption. Good movie.

tedious Jaws ripoff, showcased on the fannish movie show "Svengoolie". "Svengoolie" itself was... not great, a showcase for a bunch of hacky, poorly paced jokes, a confusing distraction from a dull flick. The movie itself soon loses the clumsily staged aquatic gore in favor of a half-baked conspiracy plot, and ends abruptly with its dull heroes cut down in a hail of gunfire.

seen on youtube. not a pleasant experience.