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DVRfest 2025 (11.12.25 - 11.17.25, 25 movies)

Date Viewed	Movie	Director	Notes
11.12.25	Eddington	Ari Aster	Yes you saw the event right. It's time for motherfuckin DVRFEST 2K25 AIRHORN AIRHORN BUH BUH BWWUUAUUUHHH! This is the 21st DVRfest, marking 20 years of me doing this shit. Last year I wanted to beef it up a bit but ran out of PTO but this year I didn't so let the beef commence. 6 days of movie watching, baby! Got the house to myself, a bunch of junk food, and a hard drive full of movies. The last several years I've fallen into a pattern with DVRfest where, as it approaches, I think about what I've been meaning to see and I track down copies. Well, each year I never quite get to everything I procured so my data drive is literally full. So to take this auspicious event back to its initial roots, this year I didn't download shit. This is all stuff that's on the HD (or the physical collection) already. I'm deleting as I go, and if I can't bear to watch something this week then it's gone. Clearing the HD just like 20 years ago! That's not to say I have a bunch of shitty movies that I'm not looking forward to seeing. No, I've got more than enough to fill my time and I got all these movies for a reason. So let's get to it! Kicking the fest off with Ari Aster's latest. I think I'm on record here liking Hereditary but not loving Midsommar as much as everyone else. Well, I've probably softened on Midsommar a bit over the years. A few scenes stuck with me like the old guy jumping off the cliff and the old guy sitting there on fire, but I never got around to Beau is Afraid which seemed to have no discernable draw for anyone to watch. This one was reviewed very favorably by Bill Hader talking to Aster on the A24 podcast so that piqued my interest. Well, I'll give it this. The last act went places I didn't expect. Definitely did not expect that plane to land with those people on it. I'm so conditioned by unreliable narrators I expected the whole climactic sequence to be in Joaquin's head. I'm glad it wasn't though. I guess that turn of events accounts for the extra 30-45 minutes of run time that the movie indulges itself in. I don't mean to complain but too many of these movies are two and a half hours long. I don't really have a problem with the pacing of the first half, but should a movie like this saying what it's saying really need more than two hours? Up for debate I suppose. I think ultimately my main reaction to this movie is it's too close to home. Bill Hader described it as "stating the problem. I don't know what the solution is, but this is the problem," which I agree with. However, shit's pretty wild out there right now. I don't need to see extra made-to-look-real shit in addition to all the actual-real shit going on. Maybe if by some miracle everything turns around and gets much better in ten years then this will be a nice artifact of how crazy things got, but I don't need it right now. Also, there's one undercranked shot of a truck driving over hills. I don't think I've seen an old-school sped-up shot like that for 30 years. Head scratching.
11.12.25	Sly Lives!	Questlove	AKA The Burden of Black Genius. This is a doc about Sly of Sly and the Family Stone directed by Roots drummer and what-have-you Questlove. I liked his Summer of Soul, I think he did a great job with the SNL50 music doc, and now he goes over Sly's career, ups and downs, typical structure, with mostly archival footage mixed with interviews from prominent black musicians / questlove's friends like Andre 3000, Q-Tip, D'Angelo, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Vernon Reid from Living Colour. I quite like Sly's music but have never done a deep dive or anything. I fell in love with If You Want Me to Stay when it was used in the movie Dead Presidents, fell in love with A Family Affair a little later when I think Ryan played it for me. So this was fun to watch even though it doesn't exactly surprise you with its format. I do think Questlove did a good job assembling and editing this. He's got a great sense of mixing as well, laying in interview snippets over songs, keeping the song's tempo going in the edit, that type of thing. Very solidly made doc. I don't know that you'd love it if you didn't like the music, but that tier of documentary is VERY rare. This is as good as you can reasonably expect. I'm behind already... slacking off too much taking the trash out and making dinner. Let's see if we can squeeze in two more tonight.
11.12.25	Weapons	Zach Cregger	This turned out to be the last movie of the night. The first day is always tough to set aside distractions and get into the groove so there was no 2AM final picture. Which is ok because this was good and a good movie to end the night with. A classroom full of children disappear one night. Julia Garner is the teacher who's under suspicion, Josh Brolin is a dad of one of the missing kids, with fun supporting roles by Benedict Wong and the guy who played young Han Solo and Amy Madigan in a role similar to Nic Cage in Longlegs. Hopefully that's not a spoiler, pictures of her are all over the Internet now that the movie's been out a while, and from her first appearance on-screen it's pretty obvious she's not playing a normal housemarm. I liked this one quite a bit. Lots to appreciate here, but I think first and foremost I like how the story develops and unfolds and takes you places that also satisfies the original mystery. I feel like it's pretty hard to set up a head-scratcher entry point that still makes sense by the end, so the fact that it makes total sense that the kids in one particular classroom went missing I very much appreciated. I also liked the commitment to gore when called for. Similar to Eddington, this is mostly a creepy movie and not a gore-fest so the few moments where it pops up it's important to go ham. Also good performances and all that, the movie's pretty gloomy in the night scenes but also has a decent amount of daylight footage reminding you that this happened in some normal suburban town. and I really loved how messy the ending is. Yeah there's a resolution but... what now? There's no going back in this kind of situation. No setting things back to how they used to be. And that's the best feeling a good horror movie can deliver. Yes you feel some victory or the tension is released, but the horror you felt lives on with you. Love that. The movie does borrow structurally from Barbarian which I suppose isn't a bad thing. To be honest it helped me remember that this is from the Barbarian guy and not the Longlegs guy because a lot of the tone is pretty similar to Longlegs. Also, Noah Oppenheim and Kathryn Bigelow and everyone else who thought the House of Dynamite script wasn't complete dogshit, this is how you do it! You can totally rewind time and play it back from different points of view, IT JUST HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE! Plus I appreciate how, in a kind of Pulp Fiction move but done with more subtlety, the same events differ according to each POV character's perception. Great little touches that reinforce who you're following at that moment. The only thing Logic-brain me had an issue with is not having a final title card saying "Weapons" when the POV leaves the kid and we start following everyone during the climax of the film. So yeah. I liked it a lot. No surprise, I'd heard it was good and was looking forward to watching it and this was the perfect way to do so! Day one down!
11.13.25	Hopscotch	Ronald Neame	spine: 163 roll: 1 If the spine and roll didn't give it away, Dat Two of this year's fest is another installment of the now-traditional Criterion random roll, where i let fate decide which Criterion discs on the shelf I finally get around to watching. Keen-minded readers who followed along last year might recall that I had dwindled the list to... nothing! What started out as a pile of 30 discs finally became zero, opening the gates to a whole new tier of the Criterion Collection that I didn't include in the initial list: box sets. Now, This movie I got as a gift on my birthday, so technically speaking the non-box-set list count went up to 1... all bizarre internal logic to say I felt the need to watch this before diving into the boxes. This is a perfectly light and charming spy comedy where Walter Matthau plays a spy who's sidelined by buffoon boss Ned Beatty and decides to go on a merry romp across several continents while riling up his former bosses and every other intelligence community with a tell-all book delivered chapter by chapter. It might seem like the same premise as the Coens' Burn After Reading but the tone is drastically different. This one is playful and ebulliant and Matthau is always two steps ahead leading everyone on a merry goose chase. And nobody gets shot in a closet. I recently watched a show called The Sandbaggers which was about as serious a take on cold war spy politics as you can get so it was quite fun to throw all of that out the window and watch Matthau's parade of disguises and accents and twists and turns play out. Ned Beatty, perhaps one of the original punch-able faces, is perfect as the asshole manager and a not-grey-yet Sam Waterson is great as the younger agent mentored by Matthau. You get a bunch of late 70s location stuff including the Hofbrauhaus in Munich at the start of the movie. There's some stunt flying, there's a hovercraft, there's a concorde. It's not gritty like Charlie Varrick at all but just a fun cloak and dagger romp. Loved it. Glad to own it. I've seen a lot of renewed interest in "physical media" lately, particularly a few podcasts by The Ringer featuring Tracy Letts and his massive 15k disc collection. I have to say it makes me want to get back into the game a bit. All the boutique publishers that used to have stands set up at Fantastic Fest are lovingly releasing all sorts of stuff from outright trash to hidden gems and previously-unavailable titles. I don't know if I have the space to start buying more discs, but I feel the impulse. But I suppose this is not about buying more shit but watching the shit I already bought, so let's dive in to the box sets. My criteria remains the same as single discs. I'm only including the films I haven't seen, so although I still haven't watched my blu-ray Citizen Kane disc, I'm not counting it because I've seen the movie. So with that in mind, I have four criterion box sets containing movies I haven't seen, and four eclipse sets. That's not including the golden age of television set which... I don't know if i'll ever see to be honest, or Carlos the 6-hour mini-series that I want to see but not on a day like today. I'm also excluding the Godzilla book because I think it would be weird to watch 13 of the 15 movies in there, like skip the first Godzilla movie and go to the second? Also, it would be weird for me to watch those out of order, so that will be a separate thing. Of what remains, I have 39 titles on the new list. Bigger than the initial list! So for the first few roles I'll be using a d4 to divide by 10, then a d10 to pick the movie (if i roll 4/10 i'll just re-roll). Ok enough nonsense. It's time to roll.
11.13.25	Monte Carlo	Ernst Lubitsch	roll: 3 / 9 Spine: Eclipse series 8: Lubitsch Musicals I can't even remember when I bought this set. Back in my covering-the-classics phase of movie fandom, perhaps when I was most snobbish, I was led to believe I should love Lubitsch. To hear greats like Billy Wilder espouse stuff like "what would lubitsch do" and stuff like that, he had to be great. I watched Ninotchka and understood the significance of Garbo smiling but it didn't really work on me. I did like To Be or Not To Be and The Shop Around the Corner (waaaaaay better than You've Got Mail) and Heaven Can Wait, I might've seen a few others as well? Like one of The Merry Widows? So even though I didn't like the one I was supposed to like I did like plenty of others, so when I saw the name on the eclipse set I bought immediately. Now, who knows how many years later, I'm finally cracking it open to watch this pre-code musical about... a runaway bride who goes to Monte Carlo and meets a hairdresser who's secretly a prince or something? I do for the most part like these pre-Sound of Music (or whatever the first movie was to make the songs not part of the physical world) musicals where they felt the need to explain why people are singing, so they most often involve a show that characters are putting on. But I have to say that it's been quite a few years since I heavily dosed on TCM movies and the 1930 pacing really bounced off me. I'd be lying if I said I paid full attention for the whole running time. Most of it just kind of passed me by, to the point where I already can't remember any of the songs or most of the story. I suppose I knew this would happen which is why this set is so dusty, but at least I can say I've seen one now. Hopefully my next roll is something quite different.
11.13.25	Wanda	Barbara Loden	roll: 3 / 2 spine: 965 (part of CC40) This one is actually a double dip as I had a copy on my hard drive before I bought this massive 40-film set. Life seemed to want me to see this a few years ago when David Simon mentioned it as the type of film Maggie Gylenhaal's character might make in The Deuce, then it was announced by Criterion and everyone started talking about it. Well, I didn't watch it then but I finally am now. A down-and-out woman wanders around until crossing paths with a criminal and joins him for a time. This is definitely one of those drab downer movies that became en vogue in the 70s. Something akin to Five Easy Pieces where the protagonist doesn't seem to want anything from society or anyone else and society doesn't want anything to do with them, except when Jack Nicholson does it he's a rebel and when a woman does it it's just incredibly sad. You get the sense that this woman's drawn to this criminal because even though he's unstable and rude and somewhat abusive, he pays attention to her. Like a drop of water to a starving plant, even though it's unhealthy she likes it because it's better than nothing. The movie is very slow and not much happens, but I found myself more drawn into this than Monte Carlo before it. The climax of the film is also heart-wrenching in its own low budget minimalist way. At first I thought Loden wasn't doing much but by the end I found her performances to be very powerful. Michael Higgins' performance is great as well. A lot of his line deliveries remind me of Bill Hader's tough guy accent. "Get over there. Stand there. Make me a sandwich." I don't know that I'll be in a hurry to watch this again but I'm keen to check out the special features sometime because something about this was very captivating.
11.13.25	First Man Into Space	Robert Day	roll: 1 / 10 spine: 365 (monsters and madmen) My mom actually bought this box set before I did. She liked it so I think she got it for me as a gift. I have to imagine that for her this is a throwback to drive-in movies when she was a teenager. For me, it's a fun collection of b-movies that I've always meant to sit down and watch but just never got around to it. Even though I don't hear much about this in criterion circles, I think the box set has some fantastic artwork and booklet design and is a rare example of the usually highbrow art house company giving some love to b-movies. This one in particular is a sputnik space race yarn where an experimental rocket pilot defies orders to turn back because he wants to be the titular first man into space, but space immediately fucks him up, sending him back to earth encased in a latex meteor outfit (it has a shirt and pants as well as mask and gloves) that turns him into a struggling rampaging monster. He eventually finds his way back to base where he goes into a high-altitude chamber in an attempt to save him. This was fun. It's clear how limited the shoestring budget is because it's pretty much all a couple dudes talking to each other interspersed with stock footage. Still, there is something charming about 1950s cultural attitudes toward space and the unknown. I recently watched the old Quatermass and the Pit TV mini-series which had somewhat similar vibes. No one knows what's out there but it could be anything! Beware! Not much more to say about this than that. Fun to watch, happy to finally get around to seeing it, not a favorite or anything but good enough fun. It's late but I'm gonna try one more roll of the dice. Let's see what I'm signing myself up for.
11.14.25	A Woman Under the Influence	John Cassavetes	roll: 1 / 5 spine: 253 (CC 40) i'm not a spaghetti man! Ok, another two and a half hour movie. I had to split this in half and finish it the next morning. The John Cassavetes box set I think is one of the most popular call-outs in criterion closet youtube videos. Actors especially love these movies. Raw performances and wonderful creative processes and all that. Back when I had IFC, that channel also loved these movies because they were, like, the first independent film or something. I bet there are plenty of examples that predate Shadows but maybe not? who knows, I don't. In any case, I was never interested these Cassavetes movies. All the stuff they're lauded for are not the aspects of cinema that top my list. And I think I've seen several documentaries or segments of other docs about movies that showed stand-out scenes and interviewed Peter Falk or Ben Gazarra about what it was like and all that stuff. I think I saw Gloria pre-this journal but otherwise I never felt the need to sit down and watch this stuff. So what do I think of it now that I have? Well... I will say there was more story than I imagined, because I imagined there was zero story. Instead, in two and a half hours there's like six scenes. I will say that Falk and Gena Rowlands are acting their hearts out, but... I dunno, man. What's up with them? I guess Falk is a hothead and Rowlands is nuts? I think I spent most the movie grasping for some kind of narrative. Is she crazy because he's a hothead sometimes abuser? Is he driven to abuse from dealing with a crazy wife? Are they just crazy in their own way on their own? Is this the point of the movie? to wonder about this? Because they both do weird shit for the whole movie. So... I regret to say my opinion on this movie has not changed much. I can finally say that I've seen this which is nice, but it's just not for me. OK, that ends Criterion Random Roll for another year. 36 titles left? ooph, it was much more exciting when it was down to 4. And these box set titles, like, many of them I bought the box for other movies so this process might be rough. Rewarding too, but I'm definitely reminded why I came up with this format to begin with. Now for day 3 it's back to hard drive movies!
11.14.25	Michael Clayton	Tony Gilroy	I saw this once when it first came out and thought it was decent to good but not incredible. Since then, Tony Gilroy's become a more prominent figure in the industry and made some stuff I liked quite a bit. Everyone seems to really love this movie and it's generally regarded as one of Clooney's best performances so I felt like I should give this another viewing and see if I missed something or what. This did hit harder the second time. I remembered the basic gist of the story - a fixer gets pulled into a case by a crazy Tom Wilkinson then grows a conscience - and I remember the last scene with Clooney and Tilda Swinton but all the details were lost to time so in many ways I watched this fresh. I think the main thing is how fast the contexts switch to keep you on your toes throughout the film. I can see where someone might get more and more out of it with repeat viewings since many scenes start (and some end) with you not knowing what the hell is going on. It all makes sense in the end though and the actual story could probably be told in a few sentences but all the little details that are collected along the way make it more interesting. It does feel like the plot doesn't kick in until three quarters of the way through the movie but that's fine. By the time we come back around to the beginning stuff the asshole who hit a guy with his car feels totally insignificant. This strikes me as a deft and clever screenwriting thing? You get your cake and eat it too type deal with the flashy intro scene to set up what kind of character Clooney is then throw it away because it's really only used to set up what kind of character Clooney is. Tom Wilkinson's suicide scene was a real stand-out for me this time around. Really the whole last 30 or 40 minutes is riveting. And Clooney does give a good performance even though... I dunno man, it's movie star acting. Nobody's trying to forget that's George Clooney, so let the guy be a movie star and not worry about his performance. Really he's just in a good movie. So... anyway, yeah. I liked this a lot more this time around. Turns out people were right! Still doesn't save Andor Season Two but whatever.
11.14.25	Cruising	William Friedkin	Things are getting a little naughty with tonight's main double feature starting with this Al Pacino undercover cop movie where a serial killer is preying on gay men in the NYC leather bar scene. This movie is pretty notorious for the clapback it received by the gay community at the time, i think it's a little more arguable these days where the line between exploitation and friedkin using that scene as a rich tapestry falls but it's undeniably a shockingly mainstream big studio take on this super underground scene for its time. I also recently read an excellent book called Love Saves the Day which is a history of NYC dance music during the 70s. It covers disco but also the birth of DJ and club culture in the states and briefly touches upon this movie and the various clubs it was allowed to shoot in, most were not dance clubs but some were. That was actually my favorite scene where Pacino's cornered into dancing and huffs a little amyl nitrate from a handkerchief and starts going off. Not exactly the Paradise Garage but still pretty funny to see tightly-wound Pacino try to let loose. Anyway, from my perspective in 2025, this movie is most valuable as a cultural artifact of gay sexuality and expression at its height, which is to say post stonewall, pre AIDS. The Deuce had a single scene that was somewhat similar to this but there's a ton of panning tableau shots of all these leather daddies dancing and making out and... uhh... more... I can totally see how your average gay guy who preferred men could see the guy greasing his arm in crisco up to his elbow cut to a guy suspended in stirrups moaning and groaning would be appalled at what the rest of about-to-elect-Reagan America must think about the community as a whole (no pun intended), but I was raised on HBO and the Internet so I feel like gay fisting's no big whup. These shots, presumably featuring real patrons of the bars Friedkin's shooting at, show a time where an oppressed minority could congregate and feel at ease, which ended like right after this movie came out, so good for these guys. Get it. My problems with the movie are more with the plot. Specifically the bullshit last shot ending. Friedkin does a thing where he uses multiple actors to portray the serial killer, which I thought was a nice trick to not let the audience get ahead of Pacino in rooting out the real killer. It's a move David Fincher would expertly use in Zodiac. But you see too much of the actors, so it gets confusing when the guy you thought was the killer is now the victim. But that's all relatively minor and it makes a nice vague ending where the presumed killer does not confess and there's another murder so maybe there were multiple killers? but then goddamn Pacino has to look at the camera and, what, he's a killer? The gay urge turns him from a cop to a killer? He looked into the darkness of gay bdsm subculture too long and the darkness looked back at him? Ugh, give me a break. Also, minor spoilers here, but the scene where Pacino lures his suspect into a short-term hotel room that's wired and we stay with the radio unit and their difficulty hearing what's going on so a bunch of cops storm the hotel then arrest them both, Pacino's tied up naked on the bed and we kinda sorta hear him tell the suspect that he want's to be tied up even though the suspect isn't into it. How, the fuck, was Pacino gonna not get stabbed if that was the real killer? Why is he urging the dude to tie him up? At first I thought it was a real telling scene showing how confused Pacino's become and he's now enjoying this s&m stuff, but what the hell dude. You're stil a cop right? You took him there because you thought he was gonna stab you? So maybe don't get hogtied? There's infamously about 40 minutes cut from the film. So much so that James Franco made a movie with his made-up interpretation of what might be included. Lots of trivia tidbits about it being hardcore pornography specifically put in to game the MPAA into letting Friedkin keep what he really wanted. I wonder if there's any more explicit stuff with Pacino in that cut footage because I feel like the real crisis of his character is that... he's doing this gay stuff right? He's going off with some of these guys. He's trying hard to hold onto his hetero side by railing Karen Allen but... he can't be too embedded in that scene and not, like, do stuff right? Oh, and why after Powers Boothe specifically tells you that the yellow handkerchief means you're into golden showers would you specifically pick that one? And what a great name for that supporting role: Water Sport. The cut up body parts never come back into it. Joe Spinell and Mike Starr as the absolute skeeziest late 70s patrol cops you can imagine never really come back into it. All the disco music's replaced with punk music which wasn't a thing yet in that scene (yes, I know The Germs recorded like 5 songs for the movie but they only used one), and we clearly see that the killer in the end uses a different knife than from the restaurant. Intentional or mistake? who knows... So... I guess yay for the glimpse of the NYC lower west side late 70s gay scene. Nay to the questionable undercover police murder mystery plot. Let's flip the record and take a look across town next.
11.14.25	Looking for Mr. Goodbar	Richard Brooks	Diane Keaton plays a liberated woman struggling with her individuality, her burgeoning career, and needing some dick. This is based on a real event but I think the movie lays it on thick with the women's liberation movement and modern mores through the mid 70s which is where I think aspects of the film become problematic today. In doing so, I think it's justifiable to say Brooks might have been using the real life crime as a message to women to be careful what you wish for, or this is what you'll get. There was a period in the early 2000s where I moved back home after graduating college and had a "pre-life crisis" of sorts where I was not at all interested in using my degree to get a job. I'd burnt out on my major as a junior and spent senior year floundering with what the hell I was going to do with my life. Thankfully, my parents let me move back in and, after several years of basically living in my room, my dad kickstarted my career by putting me on a contract he won. So for 18 months I worked for my dad and earned enough to move out here to Austin, where for 2 more years I worked long-distance for him maintaining his small business' website in exchange for a couple grand a month. During that time living with my parents again, I watched a shitload of movies. This journal started at the very tail end of that period right before I moved here in 2005, but these were the days of tivo and on-demand movies and taping stuff off cable. We still got TV Guide so I fell into a pattern of going through all the movies in the back of each week's tv guide and circling everything I wanted to see and if it didn't play on a channel with commercials I watched it or taped it and watched it later. The single channel I taped the most from was TCM. These were prime Robert Osbourne years where he'd intro most every movie and give a little context for it. They'd also put together these impressive little pastiche interstitial bits and they had these charming little intro cinematics like afternoon matinee and late night nighthawks-inspired scenes and early-morning sunrise stuff, and since I was programming my vcr left and right I was getting stuff from all hours. This is when I saw the majority of film noirs (until the studios started releasing everything on dvd) and this helped me finish off the AFI Top 100 list and pretty much any other movie I was mildly interested in I saw. Such is the case with Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Unbeknownst to me, this movie has been pretty hard to see for the past 20 years, just finally making it to physical release via vinegar syndrome late last year. The reason is apparently music rights, with a good dozen disco hits playing throughout all the bar scenes. The songs are even credited in the main titles grouped by record label. But TCM played it no problem. They only played it once every year or so, but if you were on the ball you could catch it. They did that for a lot of movies as I recall. Stuff that was commercially unavailable would still pop up on the channel from time to time. I think that's how I saw The Green Slime with the amazing theme song. Anyway, when I saw this 20-some years ago (pre-journal), I remember just a couple scenes and being absolutely punched in the face by the ending. The ending to this movie has stuck with me ever since, very vividly written onto my brain. It is harsh and raw and brutal and a little twisted, which I'll get into later. So with this disco book I read and thinking about NYC in the 70s in general, I wanted to go back and watch this again to see if it was as good as I remember and if the ending is amplified in my memory or not. For all it's problematic angles, I still liked this quite a bit. More than commenting on the dangers of women's lib, my take on this movie is that Diane Keaton's just trying to be her fully realized self but all men are assholes (and murderers). It does feature some dancing though. I have to say that William Atherton lets loose much better than Al Pacino, but they both pale in comparison to a young Richard Gere hopping around doing fake karate in a jockstrap holding a glow-in-the-dark switchblade. I very much like how the movie flits into fantasy sequences in Diane Keaton's mind. It happens often at the beginning then dwindles more than I'd like it to but one in particular stuck with me where she pictures cops raiding her apartment and finding the drugs and pills she has stashed in various places and arresting her and ruining her life, which causes her to flush it all down the toilet. But Atherton, Gere, the married professor, all the randos, none of them are what Keaton wants. And I think it was pretty sensational at the time to see this kind of brazenly sexual woman depicted on screen (especially from Diane Keaton who bares a lot of skin here), but, very similarly to Cruising, from a 2025 perspective this is an artifact of that post-birth-control, legalized-abortion, pre-AIDS world where it was actually ok to be hedonistic for a tiny little while. SPOILERS I think that's what makes the ending so affecting. Tom Berenger can't get it up because he's a self-hating gay who's left his wife to shack up with a boyfriend, he's violent and unstable, he starts to throw Diane Keaton around, she fights back, throwing stuff, struggling, he gets her on the bed and starts to rape her, and she says "Do it! Do it!" then while he's raping her he stabs her and she dies and it's all done with a strobe light effect and ends in silence. Absolutely brutal but I think the worst part is that moment where she WANTS the sex. It's the same thing that gets brought up all the time with the rape scene in Straw Dogs. It's very problematic for a woman to have complex feelings about non-consensual sex, and maybe movies written and directed by men are not the right forum to explore that issue, but I know in modern kink communities consensual non-consensual encounters are a thing so part of me thinks it can be bad and complicated at the same time. Certainly I don't think Diane Keaton's asking to be killed in that moment, but the whole movie's about her sexual and general independence so maybe a part of her's enjoying the rough play? I don't know... but that one little bit really sticks with me. I can't imagine sitting through that ending in a theater with other people. Ok, it's very late, there's no way I'm making it through another movie, but I have to try. This one was somehow almost two and a half hours as well so I'm picking something that's 80 minutes but sticking in NYC.
11.15.25	Ms .45	Abel Ferrara	This is Abel Ferrara's follow up to driller-killer and I think what got him some acclaim? Put him on the map? It's about a mute girl who has very bad luck one day coming home from her job where she's raped at gunpoint by a masked stranger then returns home to find a home invader where she's raped at gunpoint again. She gets the second guy's gun and shoots him, then, trying to figure out what to do with the body, hacks him to pieces and keeps him in garbage bags in the fridge until she can drop them off in random NYC trash bins one at a time (gotta avoid the nosy neighbor don't you know). After that, she starts shooting dudes who I think she decides are creeps? So it's somewhere between a a revenge movie and a vigilante movie and a rampage movie with a dash of They Call Her One Eye. I'm tagging this as Vigilante because it looks like a lot was taken from Death Wish but it's not an exact fit. I can see how this movie has a following. The lead, Zoe Lund, is in my mind a model that Abel Ferrara found somewhere and convinced to be in his movie. She's got a striking look and is photographed adoringly but doesn't have any lines for perhaps conspicuous reasons, so she's basically there to look pretty and strike these poses which she does very well. Her red lipstick and especially her nun outfit with the stockings where she's Travis Bickle-ing in the mirror, with the gun in her garter, feel iconic. It's probably better that she doesn't speak. There are also some touches of humor too though. Thana trying to walk the neighbor's body-sniffing dog into traffic and pointing her gun at it made me chuckle (dark humor for sure). A couple random conversations were hilarious like the guy who changed his mind about getting a vasectomy. The parts that don't work for me, as usual, are the logic bits. I don't know if the movie is clear enough about why these guys are targeted. Some of them, sure, I see that she sees that they're bad guys but one dude was just kissing his girlfriend? Maybe it's general trauma around any sort of affection? Unclear. By the end she seems like she's shooting random dudes with a seemingly limitless supply of bullets. But it's not that kind of movie. I think at the end of the day Ferrara made a grindhouse movie with a hot girl shooting people that's better than it should be.
11.15.25	Mona Lisa	Neil Jordan	Day Four begins with this Bob Hoskins crime drama from Neil Jordan. I didn't know anything about this other than what I just wrote and that it's often listed along with The Long Good Friday as Hoskins highlights. As it turns out, Hoskins plays an ex con who just got out of a seven-year stint who gets hired on by his old boss (Michael Caine) as a driver for a high-price call girl. There's a search for a girl lost in the life of prostitution similar to Hardcore and a young Clarke Peters (from The Wire) plays a pimp and Hoskins finds himself in some hot water. Most of the movie seems to be about Hoskins and the girl who plays the prostitute getting to know each other and Hoskins learning to empathize with her situation, at least until they find the girl they're looking for. I liked this pretty good. It really wasn't what I thought it might be - if I'd known there was so much stuff revolving around London's red-light district I could've watched it yesterday to fit with Cruising and Looking for Mr. Goodbar - but it easily held my attention. I almost listed this as drama until the last ten minutes or so, which made for a satisfying ending. Also, I have to say, there's a shot near the end of the film as Hoskins walks down the Brighton boardwalk that's pretty wild. I think they were either handheld or on steadi-cam then zoomed in as they circled around him then zoomed back out and tracked him from the other side with the ocean in the background. it's a really intense shot focusing on Hoskin's heartbroken face. Very effective.
11.15.25	Saturday Night Fever	John Badham	"one pork chop!" "You know, I work on my hair a long time, and you hit it. He hits my hair." I last saw this movie, i dunno, pre-journal so maybe 24 years ago? It's crazy to think that it's been as long since I last saw this as it was since the movie was made. Our culture really hit the shitter in 2001. Maybe just as an adult I don't notice things anymore but this world of the mid 70s was so completely foreign to me, but I have shirts from 2000 that are still good. They're plain black shirts, but that's beside the point. Anyway, I've been meaning to watch this again because of a book I read called Love Saves the Day which chronicles NYC dance culture in the 70s. It talks a decent amount about this movie and its origins as a magazine article that was largely made up and how the author of the book felt it grossly misrepresented dance culture of its time. Stuff like dance clubs as meet markets, horny italian young men on the prowl, and solo-ing the dance floor showing off with fancy moves did not match any of the extensive research that he did for his book. From what he wrote, he not only didn't like the movie but felt it hurt the culture and pretty much brought about the "disco sucks" movement and the end of the genre. Well, I can see that. I mean, they shot at a real club from what I've read. that 2001 Odyssey was a real place, and Travolta said he spent time there watching the regulars and modelled a lot of his behavior on what he saw so even if the source material was a fraud, it's not like places and people like that didn't exist. But also, and I think this is a big point, the movie is not ABOUT dancing. Just like so many other movies, that scene is just used as a hip novel setting to tell a story about a fuckup kid with just a glimmer of hope of pulling himself out of a stuck life. The marketing of the movie and mostly the soundtrack MADE it a dance movie, and there are dance scenes to be sure, but the movie is not in service to that culture. So I can see why Tim Lawrence (the author of the book) doesn't care for it because it gets stuff wrong, but most movies get stuff wrong because they're not documentaries. Disco is just the setting for Travolta's character's story. Arguably a more disco-centric movie, Skatetown USA is only about disco. Well, roller disco. The story there exists just to play music and show people skating. It's also a much cheaper movie made to exploit the popularity of that music and not as good of a movie as this, but I suspect Lawrence would have a better time with it. So what starts to sink in here is that, yes this movie was massively popular and the soundtrack sold millions - the Bee Gee's biggest hit I believe - and even though it may have gotten the NYC disco scene wrong, so many people in so many places saw this movie that it MADE disco culture INTO what was in the movie. Everyone wants to be Travolta. His poster's on the wall just like his character had Serpico. Then record labels threw the term "disco" on a bunch of shit, flooded the market, and killed it. It's a weird journey that way. You can't call this NOT disco because in many ways it's the quintessential piece of disco media. Never mind that it enjoyed five or so years of underground status incubating and innovating until this point. Three years after this movie, the genre would be so dead and so un-cool that people would joke about it for 20 years. Disco Stu doesn't advertise. But enough about the soundtrack. How's the movie? It's good. I would've liked to have had a hot take and be able to say I prefer Skatetown USA *sniffs snootily* but this is a good movie. Travolta's great in it, Badham directs the hell out of it, it's shot well (all those iconic hazy dance floor scenes spoofed a thousand times), the music elevates it to the point where even though you hear some songs more than once you don't mind, and the script is surprisingly deep with pathos. I mean, it's such a 70s movie that Travolta gives away the trophy he won then there's a gang rape in the backseat of a car followed by a kid dying. Nothing joyous about that shit, but you do get moments of watching Travolta do his thing that are objectively fun to watch. Everyone's smoking cigarettes and taking speed with 3% body fat, what's not to like? So yeah, all the good shit people say about this movie, they're right. I'm on board. I seriously don't know where the time went this week. It's already past midnight and I'm just two movies down. wtf.
11.15.25	Split Second	Tony Maylam	"We gotta get bigger guns!" "Well, Satan is in deep shit!" I rented this when it came out because I think I saw a picture of the monster in an issue of Fangoria magazine. I remember nothing about it except I thought it went by super fast and you barely see the monster and Rutger Hauer and Kim Cattral are in it. The year is 2008. Global Warming has caused 40 days and nights of rain in London, flooding the entire city and resulting in near total night. Police have hovercrafts, it's a dark future. Hauer has the circle shades and motorcycle boots and leather duster, his job title is unclear. He's chasing a serial killer who killed his partner. The killer's modus operandi? He rips their hearts out. I'm a big fan of early 90s Rutger Hauer. HBO would invariably play them and I ate them up. Blind Fury, Wedlock, Surviving the Game, and I'm on record unironically loving Blood of Heroes. It's all good cheeseball video store fun. This particular entry, dripping with early 90s style and making absolutely no sense, distinguishes itself by crossing over from cop mystery into supernatural horror. Hauer has a psychic link with the killer (possibly due to his shoulder pads). It's kind of a weird thing for a big-ass demonic monster with claws to use a shotgun, but I'm cool with it. The creature design is somewhere between Giger's Alien and Venom with fish-hook talons and long teeth and smooth black skin. You really barely see it which I guess means it looked terrible but with the help of a little imagination it's pretty badass. Couldn't tell you where it came from or how it came to be except to say it's something to do with the occult... or something, but, you know, how important is that stuff anyhow? For this movie, not very. Good fun.
11.16.25	8 Million Ways to Die	Hal Ashby	Jeff Bridges is an alcoholic ex-Sheriff's who becomes entangled when a high-price call girl comes to him because she wants to leave town but is afraid of her pimp. Rosanna Arquette plays another call girl and Andy Garcia is a... drug guy or something. Maybe I started this too late at night and having to split the viewing in half doesn't do it any favors, but I am not feeling this one. I forget why I got a copy - maybe because Jeff Bridges?, maybe in the context of going back to 80s movies that fell through the cracks? - but I swear I'm not trying to give this year's fest a theme of high priced call girls and red-light district sleaze. I think I'll have to pick today's movies more carefully. So why didn't I like this? Well, I think it was going for a neo-noir crime thriller vibe but it's a 70s movie made in the 80s. I don't actually love Bridges in this part, probably because he's basically The Dude now so seeing him shooting people and acting tough doesn't totally work on me. "Hand over the drugs, Maaan!" I think there are also some problems with the script and pacing. What should be very exciting climactic confrontations between Bridges and Garcia are played like casual conversations. And above all else, the 80s score killed this for me. It's that horns and synths beat-to-shit stuff you picture in your head when you try to think of 80s crime thrillers. It's so loud in the mix and plastered all throughout the film. I hate it. It might just be me. When I think of 80s I think of action heroes and franchises. I remember watching Tequila Sunrise because, hey, Kurt Russel and Mel Gibson, and scratching my head the whole time. I think maybe watching this movie was an effort to go back and see those types of films to see if I was just too young to understand what was going on (I definitely was) and maybe they're good movies, but this one was not it for me. It was just a bad time. Car phones, early computers (the shot of Garcia's goon holding a Mac mouse like it's a remote control is hilarious, and they held on it for so long!), hair gel, pony nubs... does not age well. And I've read enough Stephen King books to know this is not really how AA works? Maybe it was at the time but I thought stuff like being in love after 5 weeks sober was frowned upon. I guess when you're meeting's on a fucking beach it's allowed. Anyway, crossed that one off my list.
11.16.25	Thunderbolt and Lightfoot	Clint Eastwood	Let's give Jeff Bridges another chance with this Clint Eastwood movie directed by Michael Cimino that I think netted Bridges an Oscar nomination. Speaking of Cimino, It was the uncut version of Heaven's Gate that I recorded off IFC 20 years ago that was partially responsible for this festival. It spent so long on the DVR waiting to get seen that it passed the DVR's default retention window that I didn't know about existed. So it disappeared and I learned a valuable lesson to go into the movies I want to keep and select "keep forever." But it also got me to say "gee, maybe I should clear all these other movies I've had on here for months off of here" and 20 years later here we are. So this is more what I'm talking about. Clint Eastwood is a charlatan priest who meets car thief Jeff Bridges and strikes up a friendship. Meanwhile, ex-cohorts George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis (he's been in a thousand things, you'd recognize his face) are hunting Clint down over a soured bank job. The movie really kicks in though when they all meet and decide to band together to rob the same bank again then it turns into a heist movie. I have to say, hanging in a car with Eastwood, Bridges, George Kennedy, and Geoffrey Lewis is the coolest thing. I love George Kennedy. There's also a few other familiar faces popping up in supporting roles. Gary Busy has a nice small role, as does Slim Pickens' right-hand man from Blazing Saddles. Daisy Duke also makes a glorified cameo. Jeff Bridges is wonderfully cast here. He's young and charismatic and a perfect foil for stoic-ass Clint. He really does steal the movie. I'm a sucker for heist movies so this is right up my alley. Total redemption for The Dude. Glad to finally see this. amazing supporting cast
11.16.25	Hollywood Boulevard	Allan Arkush, Joe Dante	I semi-regularly listen to the trailers from hell podcast with Josh Olsen and Joe Dante and anecdotes from the making of this movie regularly come up. I'm a pretty big Joe Dante fan so I figured I should check this out, at least to stop confusing it with Hollywood Shuffle. A naive but optimistic actress moves to Los Angeles to become a famous actor and winds up with a group of people making exploitation movies where someone is killing off the actresses one by one. Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel play the lead actress and the director, Jonathan Kaplan plays Scotty - what HAS to be an homage in Boogie Nights - and that guy Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley the agent. In truth, I wasn't expecting much from this. I heard they shot it in 10 days on short ends with the absolute minimum resources, almost like Roger Corman let Joe and Allan do it just to keep them as trailer editors. But I think it's a triumph that they constructed a movie out of this and can see the promise that a bunch of other people probably saw that led to Pirahna and Rock n Roll High School. I had a pretty good time with it. I thought it was a clever idea to make an exploitation movie about making exploitation movies. There are a lot of tits in this movie and some blood and some action and some laughs but it certainly isn't shy around the tits. They probably got to be a little lax about film equipment lying around on set because the sets were supposed to be movie sets, and they have an excuse to do these segments where they shoot films that just happen to look a lot like existing films that had extra b-roll footage. So as you watch you start to notice how much stitching there is, to the point where some reverse angles are from other movies like Mary Woronov offering to feed the dogs. You can also tell, though, that they stretched every second they had to hit that 80 minute running time. There's a montage of freeway signs that just serves to segue between acts, there's a music video for some reason, there's an unedited old commercial from the 50s that I don't think is fake even though it's hilarious. At one point the characters go to the drive-in to watch their own movie and we get to watch the intermission commercials as well as repeated scenes of what they shot presented as them watching it on the big screen. All very clever but you can feel the scrounging... hey, what can we get into this movie? None of it feels tedious at all though which is saying something compared to the number of weird wednesday movies where I sat there watching someone walk through the woods for ten minutes or open the door, come into the room, close the door, cross the room, sit down, then answer the phone so the scene can begin. Nah, this is fun and funny. It's not frantic like a George Romero movie but it is very well edited. And did I mention tits?
11.16.25	White Line Fever	Jonathan Kaplan	"Fellow shit-kickers, this here's Carrol Jo Hummer and I'm commencin' broadcastin' to you today from my new bucket, which will from now on be known as the Blue Mule. We're in business for ourselves, me and the mule, and we aim to get our butts outta hock so all you turkeys better watch out we don't get all the work." "Well bless my ass!" Jan Michael Vincent, perhaps as a precursor to Stringfellow Hawk, plays Carrol Jo Hummber, a vet who buys a truck like his dad used to and just tries to making a living of it until he learns his dad's friend, played by Slim Pickens, is forcing truckers to put contraband in their trailers. He says fuck that but it turns out there's a whole conspiracy going on so Big Trucking tries to intimidate him, incapacitate him, and ultimately neutralize him. Not just for standing up to them, but also because he's showing other truckers they can also operate independently and perhaps form a union. This was good mostly due to Kaplans direction I think. Once scene in particular, where Hummer storms back into Pickens' office with a shotgun and demands a load since he's been blackballed and can't get work anywhere else, that's shot like a western shootout. There's gotta be fifty setups of people reacting, whooshing by them, zooming in, craning up to show Martin Kove on the roof of the trailer. Hummer's swinging his shotgun, everything's real tense, then he gets in his truck and drives away but Kaplan shoots the everloving shit out of it and it's amazing. Everyone gives pretty good performances, that guy Dick Miller pops up as a trucker, I even liked Jan Michael Vincent's performance, perhaps for the first time. The music gets a little grating after a while but they're going for that folksy country cracker thing so harmonica and fiddles are de rigeur I guess. The movie's also shot in Arizona, primarily around Tucson. Having spent a decent chunk of time in Southern Arizona recently, it's cool to see the town back when it was pretty small and wide-open but with the same mountains in the background. One road is called out by name in a courtroom scene and it's like an urban road now but if it's really the same road in the movie then it was out of town. There's also some beautiful shots of Monument Valley covered in snow. Just gorgeous. I think I tracked this down when Kaplan died earlier this year. He's primarily been working in TV for the past long while but Over The Edge is like the quintessential Teen Angst in Suburban Hell movie for me and Truck Turner is S-tier blaxploitation. This one's a lot of fun as well.
11.16.25	They All Laughed	Peter Bogdanovich	I forget where exactly but I read or watched or listened to Peter Bogdanovich discuss his career fairly in depth... It might've been a TCM podcast? Well wherever it was, he called out Saint Jack and They All Laughed as personal favorites to make, coming on the heels of three humbling bombs after the stratospheric success of his "first" three movies. Small crews, shooting fast and loose, particularly on this one running and gunning without permits in Manhattan. I watched Saint Jack a while ago and remember liking it very much but never got around to this one. I liked this very much as well. I would call it a romantic comedy but it's a romantic comedy like Say Anything's a romantic comedy in that it's completely from the male perspective and really it's kind of a male fantasy rather than a female fantasy. You have Ben Gazarra with all these girlfriends and everybody's more or less happy for him even his exes as he pines after Audrey Hepburn and you have John Ritter pining after Dorothy Stratten and friend-zoning Colleen Camp after she was ditched by Gazarra. There's also this cab driver who sleeps over with Gazarra? They're literally surrounded by supermodel beauties and the guys are just traipsing along following them all day and night falling in love with them. I don't think the movie's misogynistic - I believe all the romance came directly from Bogdanovich who was currently falling in love with Stratten - but I don't quite know who the movie's for. Aside from that, this movie is like 50% non-verbal visual storytelling at a super high level. There are TONS of scenes of the guys following these women... I guess I should say they work for a detective agency so their job is to follow these women married to guys to see if they're cheating or not... so they're following these women and giving each other hand signals and pointing this way or that and the ladies are crossing the street and getting in cabs and in roller rinks with no bras and you can follow the whole thing no problem super clear. You don't even notice how little talking there is. It's fantastic. There's a guy in this movie called Blaine Novak. He kind of upstages both Gazarra and Ritter I think. He has a huge mop of curly hair and a fu-manchu mustache and wears sunglasses all the time and carries around his own roller skates. He's the third guy working for the detective agency and he's written as super smooth and fending off women left and right. A real Sam Rockwell energy. In addition to acting, Novak co-wrote the script with Bogdanovish and co-produced the movie. Who is this guy? I've never seen him in anything else, I don't think his name ever popped up for me anywhere, his imdb credits are minimal. How did he pop up out of nowhere and make this movie? Longtime readers will know that Bogdanovich was one of two main inspirations for starting this journal. I've been a big fan of his work for years. I've had an evolving opinion of him as a person over those years, but that's separate. He can make a good movie and this is one of them. I'd talk more about the trivia behind this movie but I think I'll save that for the next entry. UPDATE: Apparently I saw this in 2007! I had no memory of that. Did I see it around the same time as Saint Jack? I just read my 18-year-old comment and it's remarkably similar to this. I even called out Blaine Novak as a highlight! Well I guess it proves and disproves the point of this journal. I can look back and see what I thought circa 2007, but very little has changed!
11.16.25	One Day Since Yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich & the Lost American Film	Bill Teck	This is a documentary about Peter Bogdanovich's career focusing on the making of They All Laughed, his love affair with Dorothy Stratten, and her murder. It talks to just about everyone you'd want to hear from and tells the story in a serviceable way. The interviews lack some polish in sound and lighting though which gives it an amateurish look. I can kinda see why this just played some festivals then landed online. I didn't know it existed until I was looking at trivia for They All Laughed and saw this referenced. I was already pretty familiar with Stratten's murder. Bob Fosse made Star 80 about it (which I remember liking and being affected by the ending similar to Looking for Mr. Goodbar) , it's come up in just about anything having to do with Bogdanovich, he wrote a book about it (which I haven't read). So mostly I wanted to see this for insights about the movie They All Laughed. I was surprised to see that it was even more autobiographical than I thought. Of course Bogdanovich had a long-running relationship with Colleen Camp. Of course he also had a fling with Patti Hansen. The only actress he hadn't "known" was Audrey Hepburn but Ben Gazarra beat him to it! I saw that it's his real kids playing Gazarra's kids but didn't know all their dialogue was basically taken from real life, replacing "Colleen" with "Christy" and whatnot. So Gazarra's playing Bogdanovich, John Ritter's playing Bogdanovich, and pretty much all the women are playing themselves. I did get one mystery sort-of solved. Blaine Novak was Bogdanovich's personal friend. Someone here mentions he was a distributor but mostly a friend. It's also mentioned they had a falling out during Bogdanovich's financial and career suicide, so maybe that's why he hasn't done more work or been more visible? Still somewhat mysterious because he's really good in the movie, but also the part was written for him and he's likely mostly being himself so he's really set up for success, as they all were. There was one other scene which I really liked in this doc and that's that you get to (quickly) see the actual index card reviews! The reviews that Bogdanovich kept for (what he says) 19 years. I thought he told me 17 when I asked him in person long ago but I could be wrong. Anyway, for all I've heard about them I never actually put eyes on them before. There were a lot! Maybe more than 3200? Probably. If I'm brutally honest with myself, this journal has been on casual mode for like 15 years and I sure as shit haven't made The Last Picture Show nor will I. So it's not a competition but it is an inspiration and it's cool to actually see on video.
11.17.25	Real Genius	Martha Coolidge	And here we are. The final day. This one's weird because Molly comes home today and most of the movies I watched this week were after 8pm so I don't know how many I can fit in. At least one, maybe two, probably not three. I'll leave all the pondering for the end though. For now, let's get another film off the hard drive. I've seen this multiple times but I guess not in the last 20 years. This movie came up, along with Top Secret and many others, when Val Kilmer died. Everyone else in the DnD group seemed to like and remember it more than me so I thought I'd give it another viewing. This was pretty good! I remember thinking as a kid it should've been more fun and outlandish like movies like Ski Patrol or One Crazy Summer . More pranks and sticking it to the dean. But aside from the ice scene and the indoor beach scene there's not much 80s wackiness, or rather, it's a nerdier smarter brand of wacky that I think I was a little young to appreciate when it came out. Watching it now, I appreciate that a little more attention was paid to logic and reality vs. those other movies. I also remember really actively disliking the character of Mitch and the actor who portrayed him. This time around I wasn't bothered by either so I don't know what was going on there. He's the prototypical Mitch upon which all other Mitches are based. He's certainly not as punchable as William Atherton. That guy made a whole career playing unlikeable guys. He might be one of the most famous punchable faces in Hollywood? I mean, for his performances, not his personal life I don't know anything about his personal life I'm sure he's a nice guy at least I hope he's a nice guy but I don't know either way so step off. I also noticed a nice cameo from Stacy Peralta as the astronaut space gun pilot pitch video which opens the movie. Because the credits are ordered by screen appearance he's actually got top billing so it's not exactly a secret, but I didn't know who Stacy Peralta was back then and I do now. I also saw Valley Girl herself there for a glorified cameo. Gotta love Martha Coolidge reusing the actors she liked. And also the movie ends with a contemporary, unironic use of Tears for Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which I found surprising and refreshing. It's a good song. Ok... running out of steam with these notes now. Let's fit one or two more and call it.
11.17.25	Life	Daniel Espinosa	A multinational coalition of astronauts manning a fictionally beefed-up international space station retrieve soil samples from Mars and find a single-cell organism that reanimates and grows into a troublesome space octopus. This has been on my hard drive since 2017. I don't remember why I wanted to see it but I'm guessing because of the cast and it's space horror. Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, and Jake Gylenhaal together is worth checking out, at least it was in 2017 before pandemics and streaming takeovers and everything else. this was mediocre to ok. I imagine the actors got pretty sick of swaying and acting like they were in zero-g. The wires were erased but sometimes the seat of their jumpsuits look pretty distended. And it's funny how the CG blood floats but not sweat. I also took issue with how smart the creature gets, like from single cell to using tools in like a week, month tops, but you know whatever. The creature's just CG gobbledygook to create tension and kill people off. The fact that it grows (very quickly) by eating blood or knows how to maneuver in zero G or has superior strength or can cut communication lines or how to get out through an air vent or in through a thruster or how it can survive in the same environment humans can even though it came from mars is all just part of the willing suspension of disbelief. Ignore all that and it's fun enough for a 90s minutes or so. This would be a poor note to end on so I think we're gonna do one more.
11.17.25	The Invitation	Karyn Kusama	A guy grieving the death of his son gets an invitation to a dinner party by his ex and new partner where something doesn't feel right. You spend most the movie wondering which hammer is gonna drop. It seems like the ex is now in a cult but who knows? maybe it's something else? SPOILERS It's a cult. But I guess the twist is that it's a grief-based cult? And they can erase their pain by killing all their friends? Who knows. This was a recent recommendation on the Halloween episode of the Joe Dante / Josh Olsen podcast where Josh and Mick had a lot of good things to say about it. I think I'd skipped it up till now because it seemed like one of those slow low-budget movies Fantastic Fest would program. It may have for all I know. It is a slow burn low-budget movie, but there are several actors I like in it and Karyn Kusama knows how to direct a movie. That is to say it's not a trial to watch and I wasn't checking my phone or anything, but at times it did feel like I was waiting 75 minutes just for the last 20 to start. I will say, the ending is pretty nice. And... I refuse to let the fest end. I'm going to fit in one more later on tonight.
11.17.25	One Battle After Another	Paul Thomas Anderson	An ex-revolutionary in hiding has trouble come looking for him and his daughter. DiCaprio is the ex-revolutionary and Sean Penn is the trouble. Sometimes, when you watch a lot of movies, you might catch yourself checking where you're at to see how much time is left in the movie because you're ready for it to be over. That's usually a bad sign. Other times, you catch yourself checking where you're at to see how much time is left in the movie because you don't want it to end. Even at two hours forty minutes I didn't want this movie to end. It's so much fun. Such a... I don't want to say achievement because that sounds too technical. It's "what if PTA made an action movie?" PTA making an action movie isn't like Tarantino making a WWII movie. You kinda know what you're gonna get there. Yes there are some surprises but you expect surprises from Tarantino. You expect the movie references, the playful use of time, the needle drops, the familiar faces. It might not make you less excited to see it, but all of his trademarks translate to that genre just fine. But what are PTA's trademarks? beautiful magic hour lighting? deep, well-developed characters? Jonny Greenwood score? What would a Jonny Greenwood action score sound like? Yeah, it makes you scratch your head a bit to think about. It might not work, right? This movie worked so well for me. I'm gonna get into spoilers so if you're here for the festival run-down and haven't seen this movie yet I'll mark where the spoilers end. Just scroll down a bit. SPOILERS BEGIN I... where to begin? It's hard to talk about in specifics. Guess I'll just go all over the place. Let's start with Benicio Del Toro. How good is Benicio Del Toro in this movie? Yeah his performance is pitch-perfect but how good is his character? So calm, so balanced. He's a sensei! "Bob, Bob, Off the tatami." The unfolding of his character is just so amazingly well done. Every sequence is amazingly well-done but Benicio's in particular. Moving from room to room, wrangling cats, multi-tasking, calm, balanced. What time is it? It's 8:15. And in the end he's heard of French 75. Sympatico. And I kinda don't want to type out the inciting incident of this plot because of how I know it reads, but I have to. Sean Penn, Colonel Lockjaw, wants to join a Christmas-themed secret society of racial purists so he lies about being with a black woman then has to use the full force of the US government to track down this girl to see if she's his daughter or not and kill her if she is. Sean Penn is so unbelievable in this movie. Talk about commitment. I don't know if I've felt this way about a villain since Alan Rickman in Costner's Robin Hood. The danger is real but he's also so completely unrepentantly ridiculous that he's also hilarious. The way PTA shoots the back of Penn's head, his walk, his posture... the way Penn licks his comb in the elevator. It's funny that he does it at all but the WAY he licks it is... imdb trivia says that was taken from real life and shown in Fahrenheit 9/11 but Penn's loose lips elevate it to something truly special. And jesus christ how Jim Downey or any of those actors got through any of that Christmas Adventurers Club dialogue is beyond me. They probably didn't have blaring Christmas music playing on set but still. "Hail, Saint Nick!" The actual scariest guy in the movie is the interrogation dude. imdb says he's a non-actor and real interrogator which I believe. This tonal shifts feel so dangerous to me. And the VistaVision! I watched this on my monitor in 1080p so I can't claim any religious experiences, but I can still look at the shot compositions and know they took full advantage of the larger format. There's still plenty of hand-held though with fantastic lighting throughout. The harsh brightness in the dojo, the baking sun in the desert, the reflecting police lights in the riot. Everything's as beautiful as it could be juuuuust shy of distracting. And the score. So much drums and percussion, really up my alley. But with loud lush strings too, Greenwood style. Idiosyncratic, unique, enhancing. Leo... DiCaprio is a good actor. He's a movie star and a good actor. He's so funny in this movie. So I loved Licorice Pizza when I watched it in a previous dvrfest, but I felt the meat of that movie were almost disconnected vignettes. Scenes that could play in any order. Amazing funny scenes like Bradley Cooper's performance as Jon Peters, that casting agent lady meeting with Alana Haim, the flight they take out to that tv show taping, the local convention. It feels in my memory now that all those scenes are connected with them running around the valley. The plot itself is secondary to the characters, which I think you could say about all PTA movies. This one though, each scene feels like a result from the previous and causes the next. Even the weird stuff never gets so weird as to make you forget what's happening, where all the characters are at, and what everyone is trying to do. For me this is like the flip side of Inherent Vice. I need to watch that again but all the insanity and bizarre shit that didn't really click for me in that movie totally clicks for me in this movie. It's juuuuust enough while still retaining a base of realism and propulsive plot to make these forays into absurdity or humor work. And that intro. It's like 30 minutes? The trailers were a little unclear where the time skip was going to happen but I'm glad it has the balance it has. PTA got to use a lot of interesting people to play French 75 members, that apparently are also almost all musicians. I thought junglepussy was Santigold for a minute, then learned she's herself. Teyana Taylor is AMAZING. She's got a lot to do in such a short time and she has a lot of help with the photography and costumes but don't you just believe people would get obsessed with her? Don't you just believe she's too wild for motherhood? That she's so wild her mom saw it? Those single long eyelashes are craaaazy. The hat brim with her jawline is craaaazy. This is my first exposure to her but I get it. Regina Hall's also very good, much more muted obviously but a nice counterbalance. Chase Infiniti is very good. PTA's great with young actors and got a good performance here. I guess I'm just listing all the actors now. The final chase scene with all those hills. Masterfully shot. But the story resolves in a very Coen Brothers way. I'm thinking more and more this is less of a PTA action movie and more a PTA Coen Brothers movie. SPOLERS END I guess that's all I got for this first viewing, without going through scene by scene. I'm just very taken by it. I think it's a home run of a movie. The time flew by, I stayed up way too late watching it, the next day (as I write this) was rough, but it's all worth it to end the fest on an incredible movie. Ok... that's that. Now for some numbers. 25 movies seen in the past week (3.57/day), 31 movies seen in the past month (1.03/day), 46 movies seen in the past year (0.13/day), 3568 movies seen in the past 21 years (0.46/day). That's 3278 movies seen 3568 times. The niche genres are falling away as my viewing habits continue to be minimal and pedestrian: top genres are 328 dramas, 325 comedies, 322 documentaries. If I could write this site again from the ground up the top thing I'd change is making genres multiple rather than single but oh well. Top directors: 18 Steven Soderbergh movies seen 21 times, 17 Oliver Stone movies seen 17 times, and 15 Werner Herzog movies seen 15 times. It feels like a while since I've seen an Oliver Stone or a Herzog movie so that's pretty stable although I'm surprised I haven't seen JFK more than once in the past 20 years. Top venue is still Netflix with 811 although Internet's catching up with 656, leaving Alamo South Lamar (and all those Fantastic Fest movies) at 473. I don't think I'm tracking separate streaming services including Netflix streaming so I bet 'Internet' takes over sooner or later. Most viewed movie is still and forever will be Snakes on a Plane at 11, although Zodiac's getting up there at 7 and Christmas Vacation is 5. I love me some Zodiac. but Christmas Vacation was a holiday tradition long before this journal started so... I dunno if it would top 11 but that and A Christmas Story probably comes close. The 2000s tops the decade list with 1021 (likely a product of me seeing basically everything that came out between 2005 - 2007), with 2010s following at 878, and a precipitous fall to 412 1990s movies and 339 1980s movies. Anything pre-2004 means new viewings weren't tracked though so these numbers make sense. I wish I could've started this a few years earlier to track my TCM and film noir phases... the 40s and 50s would be much better represented than the 60 and 65 I have logged. And in terms of calendar years, Barring me winning the lottery or retiring early, nothing will ever beat 2006 when I saw 679 movies, 2007 when I saw 534 movies, and 2005 when I saw 496 movies. 9 of the last 10 years I've watched less than 100 movies, with most years falling in the 50 - 70 range. I could give excuses about watching more TV, playing more video games, but the numbers don't lie. 4 months of this year I didn't watch any movies. I think that's the most movie-free months in any year of this journal's existence. I gotta watch at least one movie in December. So that's that. Another DVRfest in the books. If I ever go back and re-read these I hope it's fun and at least somewhat legible. I don't check visitor stats but I can't imagine anyone else is checking this too much these days, especially with Letterboxd taking off. I'm still chugging along though. I haven't made The Last Picture Show, or any movie, but my journal's been going longer than Bogdanovich now. Maybe these entries will make a book someday. Like Boyhood except with poorly-written thoughts no one cares to read. Most people don't read others' journals or diaries though (unless you're Anne Frank), so for myself it's certainly the longest running project of mine, and as a way to get myself to stick to journaling for longer than a month I'd say it's a success. To those that read to the bottom, see you next year!