I tend to underestimate the speed and degree with which globalization has made aspects from other cultures to permeate our own, but periodically I am confronted with things like this that completely stop me in my tracks. The first fifteen minutes or so of this film, in which the protagonists (and, we assume, the audience) has to be told that Muslim women don’t like having their veils ripped off, Moroccans eat without silverware, and that using the left hand while eating is considered fairly rude. These are all things I knew at about age three, so the idea that they needed to be explicitly stated to adults 50 years ago is jarring.

All that aside, the film is pretty much an excuse for the eleven minute dialogue-free segment. I don’t mean that as a complaint, as that sequence is very impressive. I don’t really think of Doris Day as a particularly skilled actress, but she does convey the anguish of someone choosing the objectively wrong (but completely understandable) option remarkably well.

El had never seen Aliens, and I haven’t seen it since the early 90’s, so, given Stan Winston’s recent passing, it seemed like a good time to watch it. Winston’s work is pretty clearly the best part of the film. His expansions on Giger’s designs are really impressive and pretty much make the whole thing worthwhile. Undercutting things is Cameron’s general tendency toward bloatedness, which robs the film of a lot of the tension it ought to have. I do wonder, though, how much of that is just dated editing techniques – in my memory, Aliens is incredibly taut. Maybe I’m just so conditioned by modern editing that this just feels sluggish.

Also, and totally unrelated except that I came across it on Wikipedia while making sure that the original Alien design was properly credited to Giger alone, apparently Jodorowsky was planning an adaption of Dune that would star Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dali in the mid-70’s. This may be the never-made film I most want to see.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen the original, so I can’t entirely speak to the comparison between the two. The mutants seem a little more monstrous than I recall, which seems like a somewhat odd choice (given the overall unlikeability of the protagonists). It sort of seems like a film where you end up wanting to support the freaks, but the film never really gives you that out, so you end up watching a bunch of jerks trying to kill each other for a couple hours. Not entirely engrossing, but still contains some very nicely executed pieces.

I probably haven’t seen this film since, at latest, 1990 and never on a big screen. I was a little concerned about the crowd (who felt a need to heckle the trailer for the The Driver), but they calmed down pretty quickly (perhaps aided by the fact that the film was largely inaudible past the first three rows, so they couldn’t hear anything to make fun of). The movie holds up well. I must have seen it a half-dozen or so times as a kid, so it breezed right by (though the actual running time is much longer than I would have guessed). It’s certainly more racist and misogynistic than I registered as a kid, which is somewhat unfortunate, but somewhat offset by my increased appreciation of the set design. I still don’t quite get the layout of Goldfinger’s combined horse stable and lodge, but the lodge is just gorgeous. I want that for my living room. Preferably with the model of Fort Knox that rises from the floor included.

Seems fairly ambitious to make a film about a character whose main interactions with the world take place in a non-visual realm, so hats off for that. I was actually not that into the film at first, but Dustin Hoffman’s performance, though utterly jarring and strange, manages to shake off the air of crusty Euro-prestige that was dominating the film up to that point. I don’t tend to think of myself as a Dustin Hoffman fan, but I really enjoyed him here and thought he gave the film enough of a jolt to sustain it. Once he’s out of the film, things get weird enough to keep things going (though I’m still not entirely clear on the enfleurage process – I suspect the book makes it more clear). The ending sequence is certainly impressive and not really where I expected the movie to go, so I guess that’s something.

Holy cow, was this awful. I don’t even know where to start. I guess the most horrible aspect was the “hip” suit-wearing screenwriters in the apartment arguing about racism and working out the worst post-Tarantino indie gangster movie ever (though the film they were working on sounded unnervingly like Smoking Aces). Though, the sexy chiropractor scenes with Elizabeth Hurley (who inexplicably falls in love with Denis Leary) were awkward and weird. Or the scenes in which Steve Buscemi worries he might be gay (which go nowhere). Or maybe the problem is that none of these various storylines ever really congeal into anything resembling an actual movie. I don’t know what happened to DeCillo. He used to be good, right?

I wasn’t really sure if I’d seen this one before based on the description/cast. I was about 85% sure I’d seen it, but I figured, with Pollack’s recent passing, it wouldn’t hurt to watch it again. It’s better than I remember it. I’m not sure if it’s due to having seen at least the first couple installments of Scenes From a Marriage or just having seen more of Allen’s faux-Bergman films, but I liked it much more than I remembered. The acting (even by the standards of the 80’s era Allen repertory) was excellent, particularly from Judy Davis. Even Juliette Lewis was excellent. This one has certainly moved up in my list of Allen films.

I should also point out that I’ve only got 2 1/3 of the theatrically released Woody Allen-directed films left to see. Very exciting.

This is nice enough, but I think its real credit comes in it being a “guy leaves fiance to take up with previous flame” story that never takes a single cheap shot at the fiance. She’s nice, she’s understanding, she’s intelligent. The protagonist is just being kind of a jerk with no particular reason. It’s a level of self-loathing (given that Reed Fish wrote the screenplay) that I always appreciate in a film.

My complaints about this film aren’t remotely unique, so I feel kind of bad rehashing them here, but, you know, why not? First off, this is an uncredited adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel (I listened to a lot of Dean Koontz novels back when I was driving cross country regularly, since they’re long and don’t require too much concentration). Now, I don’t feel too bad that Koontz didn’t get paid – I’m sure he’s got more money than he knows what to do with – and I don’t even fault Aja’s choice in source material (Koontz is a total hack, but his fondness for chase scenes (and many of his books are about 90% chase scenes) seems like it would make for better movies than they have), but there is something that feels a little shady about using 85% of a novel without credit.

The other problem stems, obviously, from the 15% of the story he didn’t take from Intensity (which is the ending, so if you’re spoiler-averse, stop reading). I certainly understand the theoretical idea behind conflating the killer and the final girl, but it’s not a twist you can pull off without at least doing a little work to keep the audience from saying “Yeah, but, wait, that makes NO sense at all.” And it wouldn’t have taken much. Have them pass the van on the side of the road near the house as they arrive (so as to imply that she snuck out and stole it). Have the scene in which she talks her to friend occur while the killer is urinating outside (so as to explain how she is able to be in the back of the van while she’s driving it). I guess maybe Aja’s refusal to make such concessions to plausibility has some intentional purpose behind it, but I have no idea what he’d be trying to say/do by doing so. If someone can mount a defense, I’d certainly be willing to hear it.

I really can’t complain too much about this movie, since it’s Philip K. Dick/Grant Morrison style narrative is pretty precisely keyed to the sort of story I like. Plus I’m a pretty sizable Hope Davis fan, with no particular ill will toward Ryan Reynolds or Melissa McCarthy. Still, there’s something that didn’t quite work here. I think it comes down to two problems. First off, the entire second act was kind of a weird choice, and would have worked significantly better had I not recently watched The TV Set, which was roughly the same movie, but longer. I’m not accusing August of ripping things off, but there’s only so many stories (which is to say, one) to be told about the TV show development process to be told and it’s not nearly as interesting once you’ve seen it. I certainly get what he was going for, but anytime wealthy TV writers gripe about how much they have to compromise their artistic vision in order to make obscene amounts of money, my sympathy is pretty low.

The other problem is at the end of the first act. The film cuts away abruptly for no particular reason except to hide information from the viewer that will be revealed at the end of the second act. I think this is just more jarring since each act is structured as, effectively, a self-contained narrative, so it just highlights that August deliberately withheld critical information just for the sake of doing so. It makes the reveal seem less like a viable payoff and more like August felt like inserting a 30 minute gripe about working in TV for no particular reason. It’s narrative cheating, and it bugged me.