My Movie Journal is Better Than Yours

DVRfest 2024 (11.08.24 - 11.10.24, 12 movies)

Date Viewed	Movie	Director	Notes
11.08.24	Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood	Quentin Tarantino	Well folks, it's that time of year again. DVRfest! Out of the blue!!! This is the 20th DVRfest, which means this site is 20 years old. I had loose plans to really do it up this year, take a full week off work, really jam a ton of movies in, but then two things happened. 1: I had to semi-emergency take two weeks off work to go to Arizona which ate up all my time off, and 2: I got the flu about two weeks ago so I spent several days sitting here in front of my computer with not enough energy to play video games so I watched a bunch of movies. Movies I had kinda-sorta earmarked for DVRfest. So... in the end, this very round number 20th anniversary festival has been hobbled to the normal length if not a little shorter since I didn't even take Veteran's Day off... with any luck, next year I can do it up. When this site turns 21... or 22 or 23... one of these years I will really do it up. This year would've been nice but what are you gonna do, ya know? I still have a few things lined up of course so it won't be as casual as a few years have been, but also since We've now hit 20 years I figured it was time to lift the already-super-light rules a bit... so I'm starting off the festival this year with a double feature of movies that I've seen before. Gasp! What's that you say? We all know the rule is I am only allowed to re-watch one movie per year! The Spirit of the fest is to catch up on movies that I've been meaning to watch, clear out the titular DVR (which has long been replaced with my hard drive and multiple text files filled with lists of movies available on random streaming sites), so what am I doing re-watching stuff? Well, it's my festival so I get to do what I want. Part of the purpose for this site was to document how my feelings about a movie evolve or change on repeat viewings so I do feel like it still somewhat applies. And I don't really re-watch movies that much anymore which I miss. In the heyday of my movie-watching hobby, I'd watch a movie in the theater, again when I bought the DVD, kinda-sorta again when I listened to the commentary, and maybe again again if I picked up the Blu-Ray. Nowadays, even movies I love I only see once, unless it's some random craving like Goodfellas or Zodiac. Damn... I could watch Zodiac again right now. Hmm... no, no, can't get side-tracked. No, we're starting with Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood. I've only seen this once in theaters with a group. I read and disliked the novelization, I've heard Quentin talk about it ad nauseum on random podcasts, and even his own podcast he dedicated two fake episodes to the death of Rick Dalton and watching his movies. I was keen to see it again because the first viewing has this massive weight of destiny with the story... I basically spent the whole movie waiting for the inevitable events of the end. So seeing it again, knowing the plot, I suspected any suspense or tension around expected real life events would be traded out for reveling in late-60s Hollywood and just hanging out with Rick and Cliff. I found that to be mostly true. Some sequences like Spahn Ranch and shooting Lancer deflate rather quickly when you know how they resolve, but all the driving shots and movie / show inserts and format changes are more fun this time around. Also the ending is a real hoot so it almost has an opposite effect of you're looking forward to the ending rather than dreading it. Stuff that's become memes like Rick Dalton pointing at the television with a beer in his hand is more fun the second time around, hearing their chatter while we all watch Dalton's episode of The FBI together. Plus Austin Butler and Sydney Sweeney were in Charlie's Kids! I didn't know who either person was in 2019. Great music but I feel like the real star of the soundtrack are the radio ads and commercials they lay in. Even the end credits has Batman and Robin Adam West and Burt Ward doing a promo spot for a local radio station. That kind of stuff puts you in the era just as much as the vintage decorations on Hollywood Boulevard and the Van Nuys Drive-In (I still can't remember if that's the drive-in we went to when I was a kid or not. I think most of my drive-in excursions were when I lived in Boulder but I do remember going a couple times in LA as well but have no clue which. Anyway, the scenery is arguably the most effective element of the movie. The short montage of neon lights turning on as evening turns to night is perfect. I was not alive in the late 60s but much of that stuff was still around in the early 80s. It wasn't on Hollywood Boulevard but I remember us driving by a Pussycat Theater all the time in the valley. I never went to Musso & Frank but my family did go to Lawry's Prime Rib so I remember seeing similar signage the one time I was allowed to go. So that stuff really did it for me. It's not quite showing Cupid's Hot Dogs like Licorice Pizza did, but they are sister films in many ways. I did still enjoy myself. It did have a bit of a hang-out vibe... not as potent as Dazed and Confused but still there. Mostly you can tell so evidently how much Quentin loves movies and television and show business in general. Ok next up, another movie that's crazy that I've only seen once.
11.08.24	No Country for Old Men	Joel Coen	I believe I've only seen this once and not only was it in the theater but it was opening night at the Alamo Ritz. I sat in the (unfinished) balcony for it which was an experience unto itself and I remember loving the movie but also expecting to love it because I'd read the book but also the first experience in a new Alamo Drafthouse was a huge thing for me at that time. Since then it feels like I've seen this movie multiple times because I've seen clips so much and most recently I watched some youtube videos of Bill Hader talking about the film which put me in mood to see it. hey! I just checked my notes here and I've seen this not once but three times! I guess I went back to the Ritz to see it in a normal screening then watched it again when I got the DVD. Ha! No memory of that, but I guess that's why the whole dang thing was still familiar in my mind. There wasn't a scene I had forgotten. What this movie does a heck of a lot of is showing people figuring stuff out without dialogue. I am such a sucker for that. Scenes where people are crafting something or showing some kind of skill or especially if they're detecting, like the "fuck" scene in The Wire... To me that's as close to pure cinema as you can get. No words, just the images and editing tells you what's going on. That really engages my pleasure centers. And this movie does a ton of that. I don't think the story is ever moved forward via dialogue at all in this movie. Lewellyn and Anton are on their own silent missions, the mexicans are a wild card, and by the time Stephen Root brings Woody Harrelson in they've already decided what they want to do with Anton. But we have Tommy Lee Jones coming in after the fact, doing their own detecting and picking up the pieces but they're always behind both the other characters and us the audience. The one time he's not makes for such a gut-punch. It's a huge moment and SUCH a choice for the movie to throw away the main protagonist how it does. Oh it's so so good. This is basically a perfect movie. I can't remember anything about the book so i don't know what was changed or omitted, but this is the Coens at the top of their form. I remember it was such a comeback for them after Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers and since then they've delivered mature but more niche vibes or genres. This is them adating stellar source material that plays right into their strengths. Maybe their best movie? That would take some thought but it's up there. Up next is... an audible. I'm watching Zodiac again.
11.08.24	Zodiac	David Fincher	No real justification for watching this again other than I wanted to see it and I guess it came out in 2007 like No Country. This makes the 7th viewing of this movie. I first saw it at a preview screening I think mostly for Aint it Cool folks that I learned was happening through a friend but was told I'd need a cover to explain my presence there lest this friend get in trouble or something. Some usual aint it cool bs nonsense. So thankfully Kier-la was going to watch it too and Lars let me in. Looking back, I find it pretty funny how a love of movies cultivates this fandom for every level of the industry. I'm not sure what had to happen to line up this early screening in the first place but I'm sure several emails or phone calls had to be made. I don't remember it being a normal press screening (I snuck into a few of those too back in the day) where the studio set it up and hit up their local press lists. I remember the only folks in the theater being Alamo and Aint it Cool people... although that was still when Harry had some clout so maybe he made it happen. But certainly that would not have been business-driven... almost certainly the screening happened because Harry wanted to see it before everyone else. And so did I. I was rabid to see it the first chance I could. But for the Alamo folks I got the sense that it was more like a break from work for them. They were already in the building, why not? I'm sure Kier-la thought it was funny in a puppy dog way or something how excited I was just to watch the movie. I remember her thoughts afterwards were that the music was too on the nose for the era and that it was just OK and that she could have a career as a music supervisor because she'd be able to come up with deeper, more evocative and interesting cuts. In any case, that was back in 2007. Since then a DVD came out with a typically-great making-of doc on it. I really miss those days too. Fincher discs were always so meticulously put together. Releases for movies I didn't even love like Panic Room and Benjamin Button came with hours and hours of produced-content. I suspect his more recent work for Netflix would also be great if anyone bothered to do that anymore outside of boutique manufacturers like Criterion and Arrow. I think I'd wind up liking The Killer a lot more if I saw the attention to detail that went into everything. Do I have anything new to say about the film itself? Probably not. I love it. I think it's still super interesting. It's full of odd details that only come from real life, like how the kid at the beginning is wearing a lot of layers because he's cold even in July. I love the enduring mystery of the finger print and the hand-writing despite these suspects and how the movie doesn't answer them. It points pretty directly at Arthur Leigh Allen but also what's up with the movie poster guy? What's up with Rick Marshall? Were there multiple people working together? Also, how hard would it be to beat handwriting analysis back then? If you deliberately changed the way your wrote your Ks... but also why bother if you could type it out? There's definitely an element of ego there, daring the cops and the public to catch him/them that is so interesting. And serial killers in general in California in the 70s and 80s were such a rich time (narratively speaking, I'm definitely glad they're not still running amuck these days. or maybe they are who knows with the state of news media). Ok that's enough notes I think. I fell asleep for the last half hour of this so I'm writing on Saturday and eager to start watching the next day's movies.
11.09.24	Something Wild	Jonathan Demme	Day Two! As has become custom, today will be another edition of Criterion Random Roll. The thought here is I have a bunch of Criterion discs that I bought with good intentions but have failed to get watched over the years. Some are DVD, some are Blu, all have yet to be watched. Some of them I bought because I felt like I "should" see them, others I do want to watch but my habits never draw me to the physical shelves anymore, still others are worthwhile views but something makes them difficult to decide to watch. So this is a way to force my way through that section of my shelf via rolling dice. I have them sorted by spine number and whatever position I roll I have to watch. This year, the list is down to four! That means that I will watch all these movies today, it's just a matter of which order. Nine years ago I started this experiment with 30 films on the shelf. Now I'm down to four! The end is in sight! Let's do this! --- roll: 3 spine: 563 This is one of those movies I should've seen a long time ago but it just fell through the cracks. I wonder if this is the first of this micro-genre of uptight guy meeting manic pixie dream girl who injects chaos and excitement into his staid life. Madonna did it to Griffin Dunne, Sandra Bullock did it to Ben Affleck, Jen Anniston did it to Ben Stiller, Zooey Deschanel did it to Jim Carrey, even Strange Darling plays on the genre trope but I think my favorite take is a 90s Tom DiCillo movie called Box of Moonlight where John Turturro gets lured by a mixtape even though Catherine Keener and Sam Rockwell and several others also help him along so it's not always the allure of sex with a wild woman is the catalyst... although... I mean... mostly it is. And who could argue with 1986 Melanie Griffith right? There's a shot when she gets in her car and she hikes her dress up to give her legs some room and we see the tops of her stockings and that's it. We're along for the ride just like Jeff Daniels is. Super young Jeff Daniels, super young Ray Liotta, and not-too-young Melanie Griffith are all so electric on camera. Blue eyes everywhere. Also though, I think even more than the actors, I feel an excitement from Jonathan Demme. The little bit of New York City fits right into that golden era of NYC character but then the movie becomes a road trip and we see New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Virginia. We see Daniels' life really take a vacation as he's swept up by Griffith's charisma, but she's a super chic east village new wave musical taste girl so the car radio is always some top-form reggae or David Byrne or X track. It's such an interesting facet of 80s music that things can be so Valley Girl new romantics synth pop stuff but it can also be so many other things. The music here is credited to John Cale and Laurie Anderson which is just... crazy. It's a version of 1986 that is so much cooler than many others. And of course, I think the reason why this movie's on criterion is Ray Liotta. The movie takes such a tonal shift as soon as he appears. You see the menace in his eyes. It's a party that goes on too long, or when the weed stops and the coke comes out, or when shit gets real. I bet it was even more of a shock based on the poster and trailer for the film. I kinda knew it was coming but I still felt it when it happened. God I loved the dog on the motorcycle. There's so much vibrance and character on display around the edges of the frame. Kids on bikes, shopkeepers with a Sherlock pipe, the gas station attendant that dresses Daniels in a Virginia is for Lovers t-shirt, New Yawkers gabbing in the restaurant, they all complete every frame as a painting. So I thought this was great. Lots of talent showing what they got, even for the story being potentially archetypal for what was to come there were still lots of interesting twists and moments augmented completely by the performances. Plus it's got Charles Napier playing "Irate Chef." So many movies would be improved by the inclusion of Irate Chef. ok, the day's gotten behind me. Gotta bust these next ones out before I fall asleep. Next!
11.09.24	La Haine	Mathieu Kassovitz	roll: 2 spine: 381 This has been on the shelf a while. I'm familiar with these french guys as actors but I don't think I've seen any of Mathieu Kassovitz's work as a director. Seemed like it looks cool and sounded interesting though so let's see. I liked this ok. It's interesting to think this came out the same year as Kids. This is much more politically charged though with flashy camera moves and a heck of an ending but it's also about some kids with nothing to do all day getting into trouble. Although if they were supposed to be teenagers all three main actors looked way too old. The story plays a bit differently if they're supposed to be in their late 20s but I think they're supposed to be teenagers? I'm not sure now that I think about it. Anyway, this was ok. Worth watching for sure but It didn't totally grip me. I think I'm seeing it too late. If I saw this along with Kids and Clerks and Reservoir Dogs I bet I'd have loved it. How'd it get so late so quick? I don't know if I can fit two more in but leaving one on the pile is not an option. Next!
11.09.24	Barcelona	Whit Stillman	roll: 2 spine: 807 After I liked Last Days of Disco more than I thought i would, I picked up Stillman's other two so-called "doomed-bourgeois-in-love" series and it's been nice seeing them over the past few years. They're so similar I'm not sure how a triple feature of all three would go, but one a year makes for a pleasant enough endeavor. I think I wound up liking this one the least of the three but it was still fine and indicative of Stillman's unique voice. The 90s indie scene really was something and I still associate most of these actors with that time. I guess I also know Taylor Nichols from Mike Binder's HBO show too but Chris Eigeman for sure. One stand-out here is an early pre-Mighty Aphrodite performance from Mira Sorvino who plays a Spanish girl. Most all of the women in this are gorgeous but she does stand out... hard to tell if it's just because I know her face or what but I think it's evident even for 1994 audiences. So the setting has changed to late-80s Spain here with some political turmoil as a backdrop but the story is still about intellectual precocious white dudes overthinking their search for love. It's kind of a typical sequel-not-sequel to Metropolitan in that it just kind of delivers more of the same with a tiny bit more money for a special effect explosion and a camera mount for a forklift shot. Pleasant but the minor note between the first and the third for me. Next!
11.09.24	The Scarlet Empress	Josef Von Sternberg	roll: 1 spine: 109 And we come to the last movie on the shelf. This movie, along with Salo and Wild Strawberries, is the reason why the Criterion Random Roll exists. I've owned this movie for more than 20 years and never watched it. It's sat on three different shelves in three different houses and apartments and never made it to a DVD player. I think I bought it when I was reading Bogdanovich's book of director interviews and his short interview with Von Sternberg picqued my interest. I'd read about his famous pairing with Marlene Dietrich and their intense working relationship and figured I should educate myself a bit more and check some of them out. Fast forward to today, I've seen Dietrich in a few movies (Touch of Evil, Rancho Notorious, maybe Witness for the Prosecution or Stage Fright, Destry Rides Again) but still no Blue Angel, no Shanghai Express, no Blonde Venus, no Devil is a Woman, no Dishonored, no Morocco, no Von Sternberg movies at all. I don't know why I never watched it, I just didn't. Until Now! Well that was a movie alright. I don't really know anything about Catherine the Great and russian history is not super high on my list of interests and it's been quite a while since I've seen a movie from the 30s and that early-sound pacing... all of which to say I didn't like this. Watching it felt like a chore. But, I will say there was some great shot design here, some great double exposure montage work, some great sets and costumes and production design and all the non-screenplay elements were vivid and ornate and impressive. So I think I see why this film is notable to some, but I bounced completely off the story. It was almost like a silent picture with all the title cards explaining the plot, making all the dialogue feel mostly needless. I guess it wasn't torture like Tales of Hoffman, but I didn't love it. But I watched it! And that's that. If you're wondering what I'm gonna do now that all the criterion discs are cleared from the "unseen" shelf after nine years of doing this, I've got two words for you: BOX SETS
11.10.24	Mysterious Skin	Gregg Araki	I'm starting Day 3 with a triple feature I'm calling Second Chances. These are movies I've heard are good but they're from directors I've more or less dismissed. I do have a few people where if I see their name in the credits I opt out. I don't watch enough movies nowadays to waste my time on stuff I know I'm not gonna like so these directors are all on that list for one reason or another. I recognize that's kind of harsh though and sometimes peoples' tastes change and my tastes change and it seems petty to hold to some grudge if they're making good movies now. First up is Gregg Araki. I attribute him being on my list for largely a misunderstanding. I rented a bunch of his movies as a teen because he was putting music and band members that I really liked at the time into his movies. I remember seeing parts of The Living End on cable and seeing that one of the characters wears a Ministry t-shirt, and Skinny Puppy make a cameo in The Doom Generation. So I rented these movies and watched them for the music and cameos and wound up exposed to Araki's world which I did not sign on for. It was my first exposure to queer cinema other than the time we watched half of Rocky Horror because my friend and I thought it was an actual horror movie. So the more Araki movies I watched the more I thought his movies were actually crap and they weren't saying anything but just trying to be shocking. I think I watched half of Splendor on cable as well because I thought Kathleen Robinson was hot but found that the throuple movie was largely frivolous and, like all his others, more style than substance. So I skipped out on his next one which got rave reviews and for 20 years I'm the only guy in the circle of friends who hasn't seen Mysterious Skin. Not anymore! Watched it. It was as good as everyone said. I'm most struck by the maturity that Araki handles the material. It's the most intense and authentic look at child abuse that I think I've seen. Very frank, brutal in its honesty. And unexpectedly restrained. It's very possible that I'd like his earlier movies more now that I'm older and seen lots more movies and can place them back in their 90s indie scene context, but this one is the work of a confident director. No need to be flashy with the camera, no over reliance on music-video editing. Perhaps the script was source material was strong enough that he knew he couldn't rely on his normal bag of tricks for this one. Whatever it was that made him make these choices for this film, it worked. I can't say it's a pleasant watch, but super affecting. Very good movie. So After this, I'm kind of curious to revisit more of Araki's work and see how I react to it. It looks like he's mostly doing TV these days so I guess it's good that he's working but this seems like the pinnacle of his film career.
11.10.24	The House of the Devil	Ti West	Next up is Ti West. I saw The Roost and hated it but his name kept popping up as part of that late-2000s class of horror like Adam Winguard and Simon Barrett, intertwined with those mumblecore directors (another genre I hated) like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers. Plus many of those guys found a modicum of heat from Fantastic Fest so they came to Austin a lot around that time and I didn't really like any of their 'tudes. It further reinforced my decision to not bother with the actual movie industry and just keep my love as an audience member. I think I liked Ti's performance in You're Next better than anything I saw him direct. He made a thinly-veiled Jonestown movie that would've been decent if he called it Jonestown but as such it came off feeling kind of fake. And did I mention how much I did not like The Roost? But then he made this damn movie which everyone said was great. Then The Innkeepers which people kinda liked, and now he's found success on Netflix with these Mia Goth movies so I figured what the hell. Let's give this a try. The one thing I'd heard about this was that it was a slow burn. Yeah right. More like absolutely nothing happens for 80% of the movie. He's going so hard for a 80s slasher vibe here but without the slashing. Going for Rosemary's Baby, getting Rosemary's Cousin. I will say I thought it was ok. It was fun to see Greta Gerwig again pre-Frances Ha when I thought she wasn't that great (I thought she wasn't that great here as well, but I did like Lady Bird and her career as a director has really taken off thanks to Barbie). It's also great casting. You can't ask for a creepier couple than Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. AJ Bowen I went to Salt Lick once and he was very personable, always struck me as a genre version of Ryan Reynolds. And a cameo from Dee Wallace is always welcome. Lead Jocelin Donahue also delivers a good performance, there's just not enough going on for me story-wise to really engage me. Thanks to the title and the movie's existence I know the creepy couple is up to something creepy so it's just a lot of waiting around until it finally happens. The ending is decent but still falls into a few logic traps (why didn't she take the gun? why didn't she shoot Noonan first? the audience wants more! As I recall, that's what made You're Next better than it should've... a lead character who's not a complete idiot). Better than The Roost, but what isn't. I'm in no hurry to see X or XXX or Pearl.
11.10.24	Split	M. Night Shyamalan	Rounding out this second chance triple feature is A number 1 on the list: M Night Shyamalan. Yes, I liked The Sixth Sense when it came out; the twist totally got me and I thought it was brilliant. But I didn't like Unbreakable, and Signs pissed me off, and The Village pissed me off even more, and as I recall I refused to pay to see Lady in the Water, I made Jarrette pay for my ticket because he wanted me to go see it with him, and as bad as I thought it was, my opinion lowered even further when I read that book about the making of the film. I think morbid curiosity led me to watch The Happening and it was as bad as everyone said it was. At that point I decided to add Shyamalan to the list and forget about the rest of his career. And for a long while that seemed like a wise decision. But then he made Split. It was a secret screening at Fantastic Fest a year I didn't attend and people said it was surprisingly good and the big twist is that it was a return to the Unbreakable universe. And since this movie he's more or less had a career again. People see his movies like they're not frustratingly terrible, the world forgave him for Lady in the Water. So... I'm trying my hardest to keep an open mind here. I like James McAvoy, it's always fun to see actors chew on multiple personalities. Let's give Split a watch. Well... ok so the reason why Shyamalan is on the list isn't because he's a bad filmmaker. I think he has a great control of the craft of making a movie. His frame is interesting, he's very effective with his camera movement, he pays close attention to color and costume and production design. My problems with him come mostly as a writer where he doesn't mind consistently detaching from reality in order to deliver some bullshit surprise. It worked once so he made a career of it and failed every other time (to me, I know his movies have made a lot of cash). So his movies that bug me the most - Signs and The Village - bug me so much because 60-70% of them are really fucking good movies. Then it all comes crashing down in the most infuriating way. And the ego of putting himself in often pivotal roles also irks me. And many of the performances he gets out of his actors are terrible. But mostly it's the story stuff. It got to where I could count on laughably ridiculous things happening that ruin any vibe or immersion that I had with the movie, so why bother. Split. Great performance from McAvoy. I firmly believe he brought all of that with him. It's a standout performance. Also Anya Taylor-Joy which I didn't realize was in this. This is part of her ascension. She has less to do than McAvoy by a mile but she's still good. And for the most part the story is good. You think it's a psychological thriller until it becomes a horror movie in a pretty nice turn. But then the twist has to come and we learn that no, this can't just be a good movie, it's gotta be a bullshit origin story for a super villain in the Unbreakable universe. Couldn't leave good enough alone. Granted, I thought it was a better origin story than Unbreakable so there's that. As far as world-collapsing shitstorms of endings goes this one isn't nearly as terrible as most of his others. It's really the closest I've seen him do without a huge twist at the end. I guess that's why people liked it. For me it was mostly McAvoy's performance that made it worth watching. The relatively low Shaymalan-ness also worked and, like I said, I believe he can make a good movie. He knows how to put scares in the frame, how to bring the audience along on the edge of their seat. This was a grudgingly good movie. Still not interested in seeing more though, unless people talk about how great it is like they did with this. OK, that concludes the Second Chance triple feature. To be honest, from here on out I don't have a plan. I'm still not sure if I'm taking off work tomorrow so the next one might be the last? I have a ton of movies still on the HD though so let's see if we can cherry-pick some fun ones, eh?
11.10.24	A Man Escaped	Robert Bresson	I think this is the first Bresson film for me. I learned of this thanks to Bill Hader bringing it up in relation to No Country, apparently the Coens really like this movie and took a lot of that silent process-oriented direction from this. Since that's my favorite part of No Country I figured I should watch it. Didn't even realize it was on Criterion! I recently subscribed the The Criterion Channel, mostly in a weird effort to give them more money. I do think they're physical releases are overpriced and pretty much only buy their discs during 50%-off sales, but I never subscribed to Film Struck and in a perfect world that streaming service would still be around and going strong. Instead we get like 5 old movies on stupid-ass Max and Criterion had to scramble and start their own streaming service. I actually got to use it for this though which made me feel very good. This movie is a French prison break film set in Occupied France during WWII. It's mostly told through voice-over with small amounts of dialogue, usually followed by a guard yelling "No talking!" in German. It follows the same format as your typical prison escape story, but with the same feel of authenticity as Escape from Alcatraz. According to the Imdb trivia they even had access to the real makeshift hooks used by the real guy to escape the same prison they shot at. I loved this. I'd like to have something clever to say about Bresson as a director but I spent the whole movie caught up in the story. It's got exactly what I love about prison movies and heist movies now that I think about. I mean what's a heist sequence if not a reverse prison break? Chipping away at stuff, formulating plans, fashioning rope... all great. Nothing extraneous, but you can easily follow what's happening. Very clear storytelling. Love it. It's late now and probably a work night but I gotta try and fit one more. I'm still on the fence if this is the end or if the fest continues tomorrow... but if not there's another movie I've been holding off watching so I could include it in the fest.
11.10.24	The President's Analyst	Theodore J. Flicker	I learned of this thanks to the Movies That Made Me podcast. Joe Dante and Josh Olsen screened this in LA and they sold it pretty hard without saying anything about what it's about so that sounded well worth tracking down. Wow this was pretty wacky. James Coburn plays a psychiatrist who's enlisted by the CIA and FBI to offer his services to the president. At first he's overjoyed to get such an exciting client, but then security concerns (like he talks in his sleep) quickly lead him to feel isolated and paranoid like everyone around him is a spy. Uh, the story goes on from there but I feel like part of the joy of the film is discovering which twists and turns it takes. I'll recount everything for my own memory down below in a spoiler section but before then, I can say in a spoiler-free way that this movie really does take some turns. But with a late 60s, pre-watergate, swinging swanky Lalo Schiffrin score, young-ish James Coburn kind of light-heartedness that we'd never get today. Things are much too dystopian now for such frivolity. Even in the 90s we got Will Smith in Enemy of the State. This is still infused with a wackiness akin to James Bond spy spoofs. It's really fun. Instead of a Checkov's Gun there's a Checkhov's Gong. The one weird part is that I guess they couldn't call the FBI and CIA by name so they put up a title card talking about the "FBR" and "CEA" and all through the movie whenever anyone says the acronym it's ADR'd in, often very clunkily. I suppose the phony initialisms add to the 60s surreal comedic nature of the movie, but it's an odd thing. My favorite part is the family that James Coburn meets on a white house tour. They'd ironically be right at home today. "By 'liberal' I don't mean left-wing." Damn, I really can't say anything without spoiling. BEGIN SPOILER SECTION Ok here's the rest of the plot. Feeling overwhelmed, Coburn wants to stop being the President's Analyst so he convinces a tourist family to take him home, but the dad is a gun nut, the mom is into suburban karate, and the kid is an aspiring spy himself. In the meantime, all of the actual spies who have been surveilling Coburn (including his girlfriend) learn of his defection. All the international spies want to grab him and take him back home to extract all the secret info that he now knows thanks to being in the president's confidence. In order to keep that from happening, the FBI orders his assassination. The CIA learns of this and is a tiny bit more sympathetic but recognize that if they can't get to him first they'll have to kill him too. So he's basically on the run without knowing it at first until he's accosted outside a chinese restaurant. Thankfully the gun nut dad and his karate wife mistake them for muggers and start shooting them dead and kicking the shit out of everyone. From there, Coburn hides out with a hippie band that was supposed to be The Grateful Dead. He makes love to a hippie chick in a field and there's a fun sequence of all these different spies sneaking up to him in the tall grass while they're doing it, but the various spies keep taking one another out so they can grab Coburn. It goes on so long that the love-making ends and there's a pile of bodies in the grass. Someone finally gets him when he's on stage with the hippie band playing the gong, but then he uses his powers of psycho-analysis to win the russian agent over to his side. However, they stop at a phone booth (after disembarking from the boat via a hilarious hydro-car) and Coburn gets locked inside and abducted. Turns out, the phone company (TPC) was a player in all of this as well, listening in to every phone in the country. They have an idea to implant a phone into everyone's brains. But then the CIA and Russian agent storm the place, Coburn is shooting phone company employees with a machine gun all of a sudden as they save the world by killing the phone network and the movie ends with everyone having a jolly Christmas party but the phone company, as always, is watching. Whew. END SPOILER SECTION So this was quite fun. I really went into this blind so it took a minute to figure out what kind of movie it was but once Coburn pretended to be shot in a restaurant and literally everyone in the place pulled a gun on each other I figured it out and sat back to enjoy the ride. But I think I'm calling it here. I have to wake up for work in the morning and there's a DnD game scheduled so It'll be hard to fit more movies in tomorrow. That makes this a pretty short DVRfest but I knew it was compromised from the start anyway. There's always next year. Ok let's do the numbers. 12 movies in the past week (1.71/day), 32 in the past month (1.07/day), 74 in the past year (0.2/day), and 3522 in the past 20 years (0.48/day). You know, for not being in top form since 2007 when my daily average was up to 2, watching a half a movie every day for the past 20 years still sounds like an achievement to me! I think I'm past the guilt of not watching so many movies anymore. Maybe I'll get back into the hobby in retirement or something but the truth of the matter is I'm working, I play a bunch of video games, I watch a decent amount of TV, and I've got other shit going. Back in 2006, 2007, all I did was watch movies. Can't sustain that even when you love it as much as I do. Now that I'm not doing Fantastic Fest either, that's ~30 movies/year that I'm not seeing which used to be my saving grace, but on the flip side I still have so many movies on my hard drive and virtually everything is available now so when I hear about a movie I can watch it whenever I want. The world is different. The state of Hollywood might be dire but there's a hundred years of great movies out there, still stuff I've never heard of like The President's Analyst and A Man Escaped. And even bullshit hacks can make decent movies like Split and The House of the Devil, so movies as entertainment, as a hobby, aren't going anywhere. Even my "unwatched" shelf, the single-disc criterion releases were just one small part of it. I think as long as the Internet exists and I can host this site I'll still be doing DVRfest. And maybe more. I'm already thinking of some kind of sister-fest where I can only re-watch movies I've seen. Nothing new. We'll see if that comes together. In the meantime, I gotta go to work!