What did you watch over the weekend?
Monday, July 20, 2020 at 1:23PM 
This weekend, in a fit of extreme laziness and desire to stay right next to the air conditioner, I turned into one of those people who binge-watches a whole season of TV. (I'm not judging, it's just not how I personally do television). The show was Amazon's scifi comedy and socioeconomic satire Upload. It's quite uneven in its laughs and execution -- a giant suspension of disbelief is necessary for its premise of life after death via technological upload, but the 'rules' within the show's universe were ridiculously inconsistent -- but overall I found it endearing and loved the female lead, Cameroonian-American actress Andy Allo. Have any of you watched?
What have you been watching? Please say "1991's Oscar nominees". The Smackdown is on Sunday!
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Decided to check out Peacock, and one of my old faves was on there: Alan Alda's The Four Seasons. Did not hold up in these more woke times, but was a nice nostalgia trip.
Then, because for some reason I needed more Sandy Dennis, I revisited Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean. Loved it more than I remembered (Kathy Bates! Sudie Bond!). I know it wouldn't pass muster in 2020, but it was quite well done. I heart Altman!
Finally, because I'm a glutton for punishment, I watched Grease 2 on Amazon Prime. Ugh, it was even worse than I remembered. Poor Michelle! Only a true talent could survive that awful mess of a film.
Tenet is postponed “indefinitely”.
2020 sucks!
Corey -- yeah, i've seen GREASE 2 a few times out of my love for Michelle and i am always shocked when i realize that people unironically love it as it is relentlessly terrible. but La Pfeiff is delicious at least.
The Vast of Night really lived up to the hype - very special film. I also finally saw The African Queen which was so delightful!
Watched the entire first season of I May Destroy You. My favorite show of 2020. Michaela Coel should be a front runner for the Globe.
The Tie That Binds 1995 Daryl Hannah
Battle of the Sexes 1960 Peter Sellers
You Should Have Left 2020 Kevin Bacon
Mimic 1997 Mira Sorvino
Three Billboards 2017 Sam Rockwell
I did a mini Yorgos Lanthimos/Albert Serra marathon because of some pieces I wrote for a Portuguese website. Also watched Streisand's THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES for the first time and I can't believe Lauren Bacall was considered the frontrunner for the Oscar back in 1996. How?!?
A Kathleen Turner Birthday Marathon
Body Heat
The War of the Roses
Prizzi's Honor
Serial Mom
In & Out and some 1991 picks: Madonna: Truth or Dare, L.A. Story, Naked Lunch, Bugsy, & La Belle Noiseuse.
I watched Galavant, a musical comedy from ABC. First season was good but second season was really terrible.
Saw the Hulu doc "We are Freestyle Love Supreme" about the early days of Lin Manuel pre-pre-fame and his improv group. More illuminating than I imagine.
Also watched the last of National Theatre's weekly "At Home" series where they make avail plays from their NTLive series for free for a week, a balm for me the past few months itching for live theatre again. It was their production of AMADEUS, which I only found out this weekend was a play BEFORE a (great) movie.
And of course I put on CLUELESS to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
Still watching the 1991 Smackdown films (only 1 left to go) and also mired in Pose S2, which I'm enjoying...meanwhile, RuPaul's All Stars S5 will wrap soon and I will be going through RuPaul withdrawals.
Cape Fear
Life is Sweet
The Prince of Tides
Hamilton
The best thing I watched (other than a rewatch of Vera Drake) was Loves a Blonde - very funny but with a bitter aftertaste. I also enjoyed the new Korean coming-of-age film House of Hummingbird and Palm Springs.
I watched Coco and got overwhelmed by feelings.
Also got to watch The Shape Of Water with my boyfriend and it was his first time seeing it. He was literally on the edge of his seat at the end. That final scene with Richard Jenkins's voiceover is just beautiful.
This week, I watched:
-American Graffiti (1973)-always great,
-Beach Party (1963) Frankie & Annette. Best of their films together. Kind’ve wondered why Elvis Presley & Annette couldn’t film something cheesy together. He’s red hot and she’s an Ice Queen and that friction would’ve sparked them both. Guess E needs to sing every song, but he shared a tune with Nancy Sinatra in Speedway. Perhaps with Ann-Margaret making VLVegas work, Annette might’ve helped make a bad mid 60s film somewhat better.
- Dodge City (1939) Errol Flynn/Olivia de Haviland.
-Match Point (2005) - what a revisit. The chemistry between ScarJo and that Jonathon R-M is electric. She has this Lana Turner-ish Postman vibe on her. You could almost picture Lana & John Garfield doing a sanitized ‘40s version of this.
-Nightmare in Elm Street 4 - The Dream Master (1988?). Still trying to get through my 20 year old Nightmare box set. Each sequel gets dumber and you could care less about every teenager’a death. I will hand it to Freddy that he has some funny lines. Laughed at scene-teenage boy lying on his waterbed doing homework & looking at a pin-up model poster. He dozes off-next thing, the model in the poster swims underwater to the surface of the boy’s waterbed. He smiles, then the poster girl turns into Freddy who claws open the waterbed, yanks the kid into the water, belly slices him dead and turns the water a bloody red. Freddy exits the waterbed and ends the scene with ‘How’s that for a wet dream?!?’ Again-dumb killings, yet funny zingers.
-Dark Alibi (‘40s)-Charlie Chan movie. Will give it to CC, he also has good, ancient sayings. When a murder suspects comments to CC about his very talkative #3 son, Charlie tells the man that this son ‘is the woodpecker of the family tree.’
-The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968). More retrospective should be given to this vast collection of Walt Disney original family movies that just aren’t made nowadays. What I thought would be a cheap, early 20th century pioneer rip-off of The Sound of Music turned out to be a modern-day guidebook of Democrats vs. Republicans and each side learning to make this an UNITED States of America...
-Pick-up On South Street (1953/TCM).
Portrait of a Lady on Fire Criterion blu-ray.
Obviously not as good as seeing it in the cinema but pretty close. This disc is beautiful and everyone should own a copy. Especially if you love gorgeous feminist lesbian love stories-and if you don’t, I don’t care to know you.
I've been watching the final season of "Streets of San Francisco" on DVD.
I'm here for the Grease 2 is better than Grease conversation.
Rewatched 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' for the first time since it came out. As much as I enjoy it, it was remarkable that the film garnered 4 nominations. Had forgotten how shaky the aesthetic was, had to keep looking away from the screen to steady myself.
1991 Oscar Nominees (x5)
Always here for a Grease/Grease 2 debate. We watched Doctor Sleep (oddly shaped, doesn't land as emotionally as it should, but some very unsettling moments and performances) and are working our way through The Great on Hulu.
I watched “Dawson City: Frozen documentary about the trove of silent films discovered in the Yukon. It was completely mesmerizing. And best docs, it was about so many things at once — a document of the settling of that region, a history of early cinema, an archive of the news and culture of that era. And that Sigur Ros soundtrack!
Re-watches of RED, Andre the Giant, Everybody's All-American, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop (I liked that film and Roger Ebert was right about the film) and first-timers in David Lynch's short film I Have a Radio and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.
I watched Extraction, allegedly Netflix’s most watched film and Jonas, a Tv film produced by Arte and starring Felix Maritaud, the sensational leading man of Sauvage
It was San Diego Pride this weekend so I ended up marathoning LOVE, VICTOR on Hulu which I really liked. Filmwise, I caught PALM SPRINGS at the drive-in theatre (good but I expected more) and LONG SHOT on DVD (really loved this).
I watched THE STING for the first time and boy they don't make movies like that anymore and Redford IS so dreamy; also watched two of Glenn Close's earliest Oscar nods, first THE NATURAL , (Redford again, I Know....) but for me the GG were right in nominating Kim Basinger instead of Close, she's just ok; on the other hand she totally deserved her nod for GARP, what a weirdly beautiful film and Close is brilliant in it.
I watched "The Greyhound". Tom Hanks as a capable sea captain in World War II was just the tonic I needed.
I really liked Upload! The season finale was the most disappointing part for me because it seemed to slow things down a bit after some unexpected developments, but I thought the rest was fantastic. Looking forward to season two!
I saw The Living End (1992) for the first time on Criterion Channel. Guerilla filmmaking at its purest, this road movie was among the first films that ushered the New Queer Cinema movement. I thought the soundtrack which deployed post-punk and shoe-gaze music perfectly complemented the countercultural aesthetic that Gregg Araki imbued the film about two renegades on the run. The acting performance is amateur: uneven but can be genuinely touching. There is more than a whiff of tragedy that you feel is coming by the film's end but I was not prepared for that tender ending. I will not be watching this again anytime soon but I will check out Araki's other films (I have only seen Splendor and Mysterious Skin).
The Devil, Probably (1977) -- latter-period Robert Bresson set in contemporary France. This existential and dialogue-heavy tale is about a haunted, tormented and disillusioned soul and his growing misantropy. It can get heavy-going in terms of the diatribes spoken, but a Nouvelle Vague vibe keeps it from becoming a slog. There is an inherent nihilism which I attribute more for the writing/directing than the actors themselves. I know where this will all end but when what I expected happened, I still marvel at the stylised way it was realised.
I Was Born But ... (1932). An early Yasujirô Ozu's domestic examination of estrangement and familial piety. There is so much to love in this film -- not just the inexpressive sadness kids go through when confronted with parental betrayal, but also the examination of class, power, and sibling relationships. Yet also funny in an offbeat way especially involving the two brothers' meaning-making travels from their limited landscape of home and school. While there is a resolution to the story, Ozu's film's strengths lies in showing viewers characterisations and subtle shifts via tiny and minimalist gestures.
First Cow (2019) -- one of Kelly Reichardt's finest, even better than my favorite Old Joy. Essentially a love story in uncoventional terms happening in a time and place where, as one character says it "history hasn't gotten here yet". How an act of theft led to a series of outcomes, this well-narrated, well-punctuated, well-paced, brilliantly-scored film is not intent on big moments (like all of Reichardt's film) but in throwaway lines, and in almost accidental movements -- like what Agamben calls gestural cinema. My favorite film of the year so far.
Charlie's Angels (2019) -- It was on Netflix and I wanted something different from the 'unbearably slow' (my wife's terms, not mine) films I have been watching, so I watched this film directed by Elizabeth Banks. It was enjoyable if a bit off-kilter. I don't know what tone it is trying to achieve but when I surrendered to the visual feast, it was rather enjoyable. For one, it has a real plot. Another, because Kristen Stewart (an actress I like) was quite wrong as Sabina yet she stayed in character and in the end she won me over. There is a feminist subtext swimming upstream from the heterodoxies of this genre and I appreciate Banks' effort to put that in, but this beautiful mess of a film entertained the living daylights out of me.
Smackdown films. I sense a robbery because of panelist bias/grudges, but in lieu of fairness I hope it's an entertaining one.
Boop -- i'm not trying to be defensive but i hear this a lot and find it so baffling. I send out lots of invites to critics and actors and directors and the like and whoever accepts generally chooses from a handful of years I offer them. I don't really *know* 75% of the people who come on and the other 25% are a mix of people i know socially and people i've met a couple of times at industry parties but don't really know at all ..
so how could i ever stack the deck to get the result I wanted? I dont think people realize how much work these smackdowns are. It's a herculean enough effort to get a group of 5 people on a zoom call together after asking them to watch 5 movies and writing blurbs... if i tried to also plan for the result I would literally never be able to pull one off let lone a few each summer (or in this case 7 or 8 of them!)
YES!!!! Finally someone who can join me on the Andy Allo bandwagon!
Watched "Harriet" premiere on HBO Saturday night. Ummm, no lol. But Cynthia Erivo did that. Deserved Oscar nomination. The film left much to be desired though.