It’s about monster movies, and some teens interested in each other, with the Cuban missile crisis as a backdrop.
Most reviews seemed to love it, but I didn’t. And I mean contemporary reviews, where they surely don’t remember 1962 any more than I do, so it’s not nostalgia for the stuff of childhood.
Some mention that the movie-within-a-movie is the best part, and I absolutely agree, although to be fair putting together an entertaining 10–15 minutes is easier than an entertaining hour and a half.
What bothered me the most was the relationships. They weren’t played satirically that I could see, other than that there was a criminal-slash-beat-poet type as the older bad boy villain. Kellie Martin’s still into the villain and he’s still into her, but for whatever reason she also takes on Omri Katz, who’s not playing a type that she’d want. His character is kind of nervous with the novelty of her. And the central character gets involved with a girl who might be as close in height to his much younger brother as to him. She just looks so young like maybe she is old enough to have a crush on a boy, but would he be interested back?
And the villain threatening and attacking Omri Katz reminds me of being bullied growing up.
I kind of liked Cathy Moriarty. I’ve never seen anything else she was in.
Yes, John Goodman is watchable, but I don’t find that character all that hugely appealing.
Oh, and the music behind it all. So Hollywood awful. Reminded me of Spielberg movies when I was a kid.
I did see something mention that the ending shot could be a suggestion of how Vietnam was just over the horizon for these kids. That’s interestingly dark.
I didn't really write what I meant in my mind. I meant before dial-up internet came to the public and they were using those other services.
Even though I was too poor and rural for internet services, I am old enough to remember the analog days, and this is very interesting what you're saying about the narrow perspective and then broadening it.
Like I remember the nightly national news on television and accepting it in the way of a kid who's bright but hasn't seen anything of the world very far from his house. Maybe the wider world seemed like something that happened only on television. Whatever Tom Brokaw said seemed like probably what was happening out there.
But I think I would have expected at least a Southern cop to fuck anyone over whom he didn't know, and we knew that cops liked to sit at the bottom of a hill with an unexpected speed limit and ticket the public all day.
I can remember being a little bit aware of adbusters in the late 90s (IIRC, they were trying to sell something called black spot sneakers, and I kind of suspected they were just being like any company except with different rhetoric), can remember seeing that there was some company called Loompanics (I think) that sold every kind of crazy book. I knew that alt.2600 existed, but I didn't really understand it.
But, beyond that, I don't think I recall the broadening as clearly as you do. There was probably a good bit of waking up that I didn't do until the 2000 election happened, saw how the people around me regarded it, etc.
I've never heard of Spin! I'll watch it now.
Did you have to spend a lot of time fending off weird, dorky guys?
Was your family reasonably well-to-do?
I was half-expecting you to say they got the first bill and hit the roof because no one had really grasped what was going on.
I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.
They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.
When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)
Yes, a cool artifact. Thank you. Did you (or your family) end up using CompuServe much?
I’m old enough to have experienced some of the analog days, but we were too rural and poor for me to participate online.
I read an article in some magazine back in the day where the author talked about using email, and it did sound so amazing. And then when I eventually had internet access, yeah, when I traded emails with someone in Italy, mind-blowing. I thought the internet would make everyone outgrow small-mindedness!
I suspect cloud storage would have sounded old-fashioned and "mainframe" at the time.
Was it fascinating? Did it feel like the amazing future? Were you all too aware of the mounting cost relative to what you were actually doing?
Hmm, I have had olive oil be a bit peppery…but I can get that from pepper… Sometimes people talk as if good olive oil is a life-changing experience, but… I think of the day when someone insisted to me that plain fat, like a hunk of fat from a piece of meat, was supposed to be tasty to chew and eat by itself intentionally. (He was enough older than me that he was giving me some dad attitude as if I were simply wrong because I was younger.) I’d never guessed someone would want to do that. But that was his taste perception somehow.
I don’t think I’ve ever perceived crayon smell.
Interesting that you’d mention fishy. I recently read where some described canola as always being fishy to them.
Is the oxidation bad for you after a certain point in general? I seem to recall, when trying to fry doughnuts and such years ago and things would talk about what was happening with the old fry oil that you mentioned, somehow it was supposed to be not great for you. I remember it would deepen in color, and maybe it could have been described as something like wet cardboard.
When I’ve tried olive oils, I’ve always been indifferent to them and thought I almost might as well be using soybean oil. And people will say “you’re not buying a fancy enough one”, but it’s hard to imagine it could taste a dollar an ounce worth of wonderful. I did buy a cheap enough one once to think it smelled like acetone. “You have to get it this month of the year from this supplier who will probably send you a new enough batch and maybe nothing will happen to it in shipping” is tiring to think about.
I’ll read how a cooking oil will become rancid, or the oil in nuts, or the oil in whole-wheat flour. But I never notice. I never find that something has now become disgusting in that way.
(Although I’m not crazy about nuts to begin with, and I’ve never had a fresh one from a tree or anything, so it’s possible I’m reacting to something there.)
How much do you notice rancidity? Do the people around you detect it similarly?
Some discussions online mention rancidity in connection with supertasting, but I strongly suspect I am a supertaster because I have to go very light on most bitter ingredients, cut back on sugar in a recipe so it doesn’t just taste like sugar, find too much fat to be gross, and so on. [Reading about supertasting is such a blend of sadness and vindication. You mean grapefruits are genuinely supposed to taste good? And an avocado all by itself? And raw pineapple? Honestly?]
Tom Schiller film with a strong SNL connection. Never really properly released. Today known as a more or less lost film that has Bill Murray. I was curious about it because it was obscure and because I had been looking for the Schiller shorts from the early SNL days that had Belushi, Radner, etc.
Zach Galligan plays it so blankly; maybe he was told to.
It’s all a love letter to the golden era of Hollywood, but I don’t like the golden era at all, so this was a real slog for me. It’s odd, but not nearly as interestingly odd as Guy Maddin.
From reading articles online, I began to get the feeling that the whole film was just a studio trying to get out of a contract they’d made with Lorne Michaels as cheaply as possible.
Oh, I forgot:
- They’re eating outdoors all the time, and when they’re inside, the windows are open, but there aren’t flies all on things. Is France not full of flies in the way that North America is?
I’ve meant to see this for a few years. The English Wikipedia article says “anti-melodramatic” and “unsensationalistic”, which is very appealing.
I didn’t think it would matter that I know only a few very basic facts about Van Gogh, but in seeing it, it seemed there was a lot you were supposed to recognize. And with events, not knowing whether they happened or whether Pialat was inventing, often left me not knowing what to think about them.
Thoughts, in order
- It must be a pain in the ass to get all that period stuff for a film set in like 1870 or whenever.
- Everyone at this new place is integrating him into things (whether he wants it or not). Is France 150 years ago a warmer place than anywhere I’ve known?
- Why is this girl so into this old guy? Life doesn’t seem that slow and boring for her that I would buy this. Was this in particular a real event at all, or was Pialat just liking the idea that of course pretty young girls want old guys in the arts? I did see one other Pialat movie some years ago, which was about a girl and her dalliances and how she didn’t really love anyone except her daddy, who so-coincidentally was played by Pialat himself.
- The man playing Van Gogh was rather still compared to everyone else, in the way that a non-actor would be. Apparently this guy did some acting but was mostly a singer.
- The girl was a bit inexperienced compared to the rest, and this came out in emotional scenes where there wasn’t quite enough body language sometimes.
- Around the two-hour mark, they and Theo hang out way too long in a brothel. I suppose you’re supposed to be engrossed by the polygon of Van Gogh and Theo and the girl and the prostitute Van Gogh has long had a thing with. The girl trying to not care, etc. But you are two hours in at this point.
- I did like that, in the last minutes, life was resuming for everyone else. Because that is what happens. Even though it is hard to believe that the world will continue without our selves.
I’m not being very positive in this, I know, but I still appreciate the existence of anything anti-melodramatic and unsensationalistic.
One of the flop Saturday Night Live movies based on one-note characters stretched out to feature length.
When it was trying to be serious about psychological health, it was relatively all right, but every bit of “comedy” fell so absolutely flat. Al Franken must have wanted to say something genuinely helpful but was limited by the shape of the opportunity at hand. Both needing to be a comedy in general and needing to keep his character as somewhat ridiculous.
Stuart had a family of stereotypical screw-ups. His brother’s role was too broad where he had to be both a beer-drinking football-fan kind of idiot at times and insightful at other times.
Stuart was obviously gay, but they couldn’t really touch the issue in 1995, so he had this female friend who was unrealistically around at all times when you need another person to observe or smile at whatever is happening. Although it mentioned that she was his sponsor in some self-help group, and maybe being a sponsor requires being around all the time.
I made it through an hour before starting to fast forward.
Set in New York City in live television of the 1950s, a show like Sid Caesar’s, an aging alcoholic movie star like Errol Flynn.
In reviews, everyone loves it so much. Maybe they all remembered the fifties. One commented that it would look questionable to today’s audience that the viewpoint character chases an uninterested woman, wears her down, and she finally gives in and then likes him. Yes, it did indeed.
Overall, I suppose it was okay. It did feel like wacky events were presented a little too straight in some way so they would come across to me as unrealistic rather than comedic.
It tries to be touching about the movie star being brave and reconnecting with his daughter, but it didn’t get enough screen time.