What old media are you watching? - Since new media isn't worth watching

[Caporegime]

Lupin III and Seijun Suzuki's Films with Jo Shishido. Currently waiting for Criterion to release Pistol Opera.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Flower Drum Song (1961)

Having dismissed 95% of musicals as unwatchable noise, Flower Drum Song is actually decent. It’s your standard “old ways vs. young bucks” generational tug-of-war; low on self-importance, and short enough not to become a hostage situation.

Clueless Chinese immigrants straight off the banana boat are forced to mingle with their Americanized counterparts. Nancy Kwan plays Linda Low, a party girl who flashes thigh like it’s currency. Her boyfriend Sammy Fong (Jack Soo from Barney Miller) is a lounge lizard cut from the Guys & Dolls mold. Sammy didn't exist in the book; the whole nightclub angle was cooked up for the musical. Jack Soo was working as an emcee when Gene Kelly scouted him.

Meanwhile, the immigrant girl’s been set up to marry Wang Ta, a college bro who’s more “Starbucks and Spotify” than “tea and tradition,” and he’s thirsty for Linda Low, who is allegedly with Sammy, but since he hasn’t taken Beyoncé’s advice and put a ring on it...It's a love polycule of doom, folks.

Sammy gets his due in the form of a mail-order bride he doesn’t want, leading to a song that any man can grimly laugh at.

No heavy handed message, no flag waving. If anything, it lightly satirizes both East/West extremes.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

my dad had on an old western tv show, that week's episode featured a troop of black soldiers who were big mad about injuns, led by the bloodthirsty Sammy Davis Jr!

 

[Captain Syrup]

My Man Godfrey (1936) stars Carol Lombard and her soon-to-be ex-husband William Powell playing the one vaguely sober guy in a sea of rich lunatics.

A homeless man is living in a Hooverville, until a pack of heiresses show up looking to collect “a forgotten man” for a scavenger hunt. Lombard brings him home and makes him the family butler. Shockingly, he stays, mostly because the family is a black hole of dysfunction. They burn through servants the way Elon burns through ketamine.

This is a feel good movie. I usually hate screwball comedies, even the ones with Powell in them, because they tend to devolve into the same war-of-the-sexes slapstick nightmare. Lombard’s character isn’t trying to ruin Godfrey’s life for sport, she’s trying to help him, in the most deranged way possible!

And yes, it’s a comedy about class and identity but it’s also just 90 minutes of a man with incredible bone structure not losing his cool.

 

[Kamway]

The first 2 seasons of the 2004/2009 Battlestar Galactica TV series before the writers crawled so deep into their own assholes there was no getting them back out.

 

[dongykung]

ive been watching Star Trek the next generation for the first time it is way better than I thought

 

[Captain Syrup]

The Searchers (1956)

A problematic uncle shows up at his brother’s frontier house with a fat sack of suspiciously pristine coinage. He’s supposed to be just visiting; but nope: Comanches show up, burn everything down, and kidnap his niece. What follows is five years of Ethan roaming the frontier like his own personal Fallout map,

Everyone knows the twist: And when he finally finds find her, she’s like, “Actually, I’m okay here,” and he immediately tries to blow her head off like Old Yeller. But don’t worry, he never tells her fiancé about this, and was also just going to yeet her off a cliff for racial impurity if things had gone a little differently.

Putting aside any debates about whether John Wayne is showing complex emotion (John Wayne emoting is just John Wayne yelling louder) if you're expecting a do-gooder you're in for a surprise. People compare it to Outlaw Josey Wales, but that movie at least gave him backstory. Ethan Edwards shows up already angry, and stays angry for five years. He treats the law like a suggestion and anyone who isn’t white like a potential target, and we're supposed to think he’s haunted, but the only thing haunting him is his inability to kill more Indians! Ethan is not Gary Cooper saving the town and he’s not Clint Eastwood mumbling about gold. He’s... something else. The movie sure doesn’t tell you.

The film is visually stunning. Do not watch it your phone.

It’s an odyssey across Monument Valley.

Jeffrey Hunter is a fine actor and clearly too beautiful to live. Natalie Wood gets top billing and then says maybe three lines, all of them delivered like she just woke up from a coma.

 

[millais]

The Searchers (1956)

View attachment 7435716

A problematic uncle shows up at his brother’s frontier house with a fat sack of suspiciously pristine coinage. He’s supposed to be just visiting; but nope: Comanches show up, burn everything down, and kidnap his niece. What follows is five years of Ethan roaming the frontier like his own personal Fallout map,

Everyone knows the twist: And when he finally finds find her, she’s like, “Actually, I’m okay here,” and he immediately tries to blow her head off like Old Yeller. But don’t worry, he never tells her fiancé about this, and was also just going to yeet her off a cliff for racial impurity if things had gone a little differently.

Putting aside any debates about whether John Wayne is showing complex emotion (John Wayne emoting is just John Wayne yelling louder) if you're expecting a do-gooder you're in for a surprise. People compare it to Outlaw Josey Wales, but that movie at least gave him backstory. Ethan Edwards shows up already angry, and stays angry for five years. He treats the law like a suggestion and anyone who isn’t white like a potential target, and we're supposed to think he’s haunted, but the only thing haunting him is his inability to kill more Indians! Ethan is not Gary Cooper saving the town and he’s not Clint Eastwood mumbling about gold. He’s... something else. The movie sure doesn’t tell you.

View attachment 7435723

The film is visually stunning. Do not watch it your phone. View attachment 7435740 It’s an odyssey across Monument Valley.

Jeffrey Hunter is a fine actor and clearly too beautiful to live. Natalie Wood gets top billing and then says maybe three lines, all of them delivered like she just woke up from a coma.

But Uncle Ethan is cool with tards, Mexicans, Scandinavians, and even half-breeds, as long as they can help him in his mission to hunt down the Comanche.

 

[Captain Syrup]

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)

It took me a while to appreciate Bing Crosby. He always looked like the kind of guy who thought wearing shorts made you a

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court claims to be based on Mark Twain’s story. Haven’t read the book, but as I recall, in Twain’s original the guy goes back to medieval times and introduces capitalism, and the result is a Porky Minch hellscape. In the movie, Bing ends up in Camelot after concussing himself on a tree. He immediately gets challenged to a duel by a guy in a Jimmy Saville haircut who tries to hype him up as some kind of Final Fantasy boss.

King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay are here, technically. Bing gets paraded around, almost executed, then saves himself by inventing basic slight of hand magic, and is promptly made the court wizard, He says he wants to stays in the past because he’s thirsty for Lady Pendragon and he enjoys being a blacksmith. Bing is about as convincing a blacksmith as Liberace. He might as well have shown up in a tux while holding a golf club.

The plot then forgets to exist, and the movie just kind of vibes. Then the movie just ends, as all musicals from that era do: Bing wakes up in the present, sees a modern version of his medieval thot, and everything wraps up lazily.

The good news is the songs are actually great. “Busy Doing Nothing” and “If You Stub Your Toe on the Moon” are so catchy I found myself humming it while brushing my teeth.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)

View attachment 7507994

It took me a while to appreciate Bing Crosby. He always looked like the kind of guy who thought wearing shorts made you a

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court claims to be based on Mark Twain’s story. Haven’t read the book, but as I recall, in Twain’s original the guy goes back to medieval times and introduces capitalism, and the result is a Porky Minch hellscape. In the movie, Bing ends up in Camelot after concussing himself on a tree. He immediately gets challenged to a duel by a guy in a Jimmy Saville haircut who tries to hype him up as some kind of Final Fantasy boss.

King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay are here, technically. Bing gets paraded around, almost executed, then saves himself by inventing basic slight of hand magic, and is promptly made the court wizard, He says he wants to stays in the past because he’s thirsty for Lady Pendragon and he enjoys being a blacksmith. Bing is about as convincing a blacksmith as Liberace. He might as well have shown up in a tux while holding a golf club.

View attachment 7507995

The plot then forgets to exist, and the movie just kind of vibes. Then the movie just ends, as all musicals from that era do: Bing wakes up in the present, sees a modern version of his medieval thot, and everything wraps up lazily.

The good news is the songs are actually great. “Busy Doing Nothing” and “If You Stub Your Toe on the Moon” are so catchy I found myself humming it while brushing my teeth.

tbh it should have been "somethingsomething The Rat Pack shows up in Ye Olde England, immediately take over, have wacky adventures against dragons or some shit"

 

[Captain Syrup]

So I watched Sergeant York, that old-ass movie where Gary Cooper plays the most polite sniper in history. He gets flash-banged by Jesus (really), and goes "I’m gonna stop shooting people and start killing them... for God."

This guy wasn't always Aw shucks about life. Before he becomes God's Sniper, he starts off as this turkey-callin' hillbilly stewing in moonshine fumes. He almost murders a guy over a land dispute and some Appalachian baddie who they were both trying to smash. Alvin York's drunk as hell, mad, armed, and with every intention of commiting a redneck crime of passion, and then God's like "nah, bro." God straight up does a Final Destination lightning bolt and just zaps the gun out of his hand. That night Alvin stumbles into church like, "I done seen the Lord's electricity."

He’s like a religious Rambo. He gets drafted and is like, “I dunno if Jesus wants me to shoot people,” and the army’s like, “Too bad, retard, here's a Springfield.” Then he’s in France doing a 360 no-scope on the Kaiser’s whole bloodline.

He captures like a hundred dudes.

One guy in the platoon is a city guy. He is obviously there to get blown up for emotional stakes. He’s cracking wise with York like “Back in the Bronx, the only trenches we had were full’a rats, not krauts!” And you’re watching like, “Okay yeah, this guy’s definitely gonna eat a grenade to the face in like twelve minutes.”

Shout out to the actor, though. He cooked. 10 out of 10 would cry again.

The last scene of Sergeant York is him turning down money, medals, a Brooklyn Dodgers endorsement deal, whatever, and going back to his hovel in Tennessee. Which, okay, cool, but it’s filmed like he is more than a man...he is AMERICA. (And same with Pride of the Yankees. Lou Gehrig’s dying and they got him giving speeches like he’s Moses on the mountaintop.)

Gary Cooper is hot in it. In a “my grandpa looked like that before the asbestos” kind of way. Very World War I sexy. Lots of khaki.

And the wildest part is, it’s based on a true story. Alvin York. Actual Tennessee farmer turned holy killing machine. He was a conscientious objector who literally said, “I don’t believe in killing,” and the U.S. Army was like, “Cool, we’re still gonna ship you to France." He killed like 25 Germans, and then he captured 132 more. "I brung y'all some Germans "

 

[millais]

@Captain Syrup I think the story is that Gary Cooper met the real Alvin York and learned his story firsthand in preparation for shooting the movie, as he wanted to make his performance as authentic and faithful as possible. Gary Cooper insisted on using the same model of Springfield rifle and Colt M1911 pistol as York, but at the time, there were no good commercially available .45 ACP blanks, so the production substituted a 9mm Luger P08 for the M1911 and lied to Cooper that the Luger just a temporary stand-in and that they would re-shoot all the blank-firing scenes with a real 1911 later. This pissed him off when he found out that there was no 1911 and the Luger was going to end up in the final edit as York's sidearm.

 

[Captain Syrup]

This pissed him off when he found out that there was no 1911 and the Luger was going to end up in the final edit as York's sidearm.

This reads like a nitpick only gun nerds would make, but yes, @millais is right: it’s weird seeing York toting around a Luger.

I guess the lesson here is: “We’ll fix this in editing,” means absolutely nothing gets fixed.

 

[Captain Syrup]

The 2000s kicked off this whole wave of girl power, and Spice World was sort of the foundation of that era's media: She-Spies, D.E.B.S., Totally Spies, basically women fighting crime in crop tops while the soundtrack plays “Trouble” by Pink.

Your enjoyment of the Charlie’s Angels reboot hinges on how much irony you can mainline without your brain oozing out your ears. Cameron Diaz looks and acts like a golden retriever. She's perky. She dances. Drew Barrymore co-produced, which explains her bafflingly central role. She's not terrible, but it's like watching Lizzie McGuire do krav maga. Lucy Liu is in stilettos. That's all I've got.

Sam Rockwell is the best part of the movie and I started rooting for him to destroy the Angels, blow up Charlie Townsend, and put the world under tech surveillance.

Tim Curry and Bill Murray are in this. Bleak. I’ve never seen two men so openly humiliated by Hollywood machinery. They each have three scenes and could be cut from the movie entirely without affecting the plot. Method acting Nosferatu Crispin Glover plays the grunting henchman, and they just let him cook. He is entertaining, but in that way that makes you concerned for the people around him.

---

It made less money than the first one, which euthanized the idea of a Charlie's Angels franchise.

This is Demi Moore’s movie. But it’s really the end of her punishment tour after The Scarlet Letter, Striptease and G.I. Jane.

The script gives her Batman-tier omnipotence.

There’s a sapphic face-suck scene between her and Cameron Diaz, which, much like the spit-string in Cruel Intentions, limps across the finish line on fan service alone.

Apparently Murray was a pain in the ass on set, so we get Bernie Mac, who has slightly more blood flow to the brain. The dumbest thing is the reveal that there are infinite Bosleys.

But then there’s Justin Theroux doing some kind of Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away accent. They wanted to give each Angel her own villain, and I couldn't maintain my attention span.

---

We didn’t need another reboot. But here we are. And right out of the gate, the film saddles itself with some of the most widely-hated actresses in recent memory, and just for good measure, a Disney remake alum. Elizabeth Banks promoted the film in a confrontational way and Kristen Stewart admitted she was depressed and pissed off during shooting...but is there ever a time when Kristen Stewart doesn't look depressed and pissed off?

They also scaled back the fan-service this time: fewer ridiculous costumes, which, oddly enough, I’d count as an improvement. But then comes the heavy-handed pivot toward feminism, and the result is the LinkedIn of spy movies.

The twist of Bosley being the bad guy is telegraphed so early and so lazily.

Good Lord, the “global” Angels org. If Men in Black: International taught us anything, it’s "don't turn your cozy, localized fantasy into a United Nations NGO." You’ve got hundreds of interchangeable Angels lining up like it’s Buffy season 7.

---

RANKINGS:
Best film: The first. (Not because it's well-written or makes sense.)
Least Annoying Angel: Alex Munday. Doesn't mug for the camera. Shows up with a flamethrower. No notes.

Most iconic bad guy: Dead heat between Eric Knox and Madison Lee.
Too Much Screentime: Elizabeth Banks cast herself as a Bosley and then gave herself all the best lines, which is like, okay queen, slay...but also you deliver every line like you're chewing on a pool cue.

Least Menacing Villain: I kept waiting for Patrick Stewart to die of natural causes before the finale.

 

[Captain Syrup]

The creator of Sledge Hammer! resurfaced in 2012 with six episodes and the mandate: “Make Sin City, but Canadian and on a budget.”

Gunter (Max Williams) is a gangster whose lover, Martine, shoots him in the face. He miraculously survives because the police give him a transplant from one of the cops he literally just murdered. He’s wearing the face of the guy whose badge is now in Gunter's pocket. Martine ends up seducing her boss, Tannhäuser (Eddie Izzard), while shacking up with Racken (Eric Roberts), a mafioso who's in a turf war with Tannhäuser. Martine’s playing them both so she can install herself as queen of crime or whatever.

Max Williams is doing this deranged Joker/Klaus Kinski thing. He says every syllable like he's trying to get kicked out of Austrian art school. Every funny line gets pipelined straight to him like he’s the only one with a functioning brain. Unfortunately, the universe did not reward him for this, and he vanished into mid-life crisis spiritual mumbo jumbo on Instagram Reels. Justice for Max Williams.

Gunter’s sidekick Hagerman is basically Max Payne after sensitivity training; all whiny and neutered. Eric Roberts these days can’t get gigs because he refuses to learn his lines, so he just drunkenly sits there reading cue cards. Somehow he gets by. Eddie Izzard shows up playing his usual dumb crook. He’s been stuck in that role since forever. You can tell he’s winging half his lines. Improv city.

It’s definitely aiming for the under-30 crowd, so if you’ve got an adult brain, the plot’s frivolity will start to wear thin pretty fast. The best parts are when the show momentarily forgets it’s a zany cartoon and slips into this psychotic anti-USA Network procedural parody. Like Gunter entrapping a dentist who moonlights as a hitman. That whole scene could’ve been from Burn Notice if Michael Westen just started waterboarding people.

There’s also this running bit where Gunter’s face is rejecting his transplant and his old face (Robert Smith midway through anaphylactic shock) is kept in a jar somewhere. This goes nowhere.

The show looks like it was made on a shoestring budget. But somehow, between the stylish costumes and those grimy neo-noir sets, it tricks you for a hot second into thinking you’re watching Suicide Squad.

It ends in mass death and explosions. Like Sledge Hammer! season one, where Sledge nukes the city. The difference here is, this time, no one was asking for season two.

 

[GilaCutter]

Ever watched a movie where the phrase "troubled production" might as well be the subtitle and shows on the screen?

Because that's what 1987's Terminus feels like. If I had to describe it with one word, it'd be "abrupt". That's a word that's normally used to describe a sudden ending to a movie, but here half the scenes give away that feeling. Stuff happens suddenly, sometimes out of nowhere and usually without much explanation, and even when it happens with an explanation, it still feels like there's something missing, like a whole third of the movie ended up on the cutting room floor.

I first discovered this movie through the classic act of buying it blind on VHS in a thrift shop, and I remembered enjoying it. Weird thing is, despite all the glaring flaws that I now see in it two decades later, I still don't hate it. Visually speaking it's definitely a bit more on the unusual side, probably thanks to being a Franco-German production mostly shot in Hungary, which then was still part of the commie bloc, so the production team didn't have to work very hard to make the world look drab and dreary. It's not like it's badly made either, none of the performances feel phoned in, except maybe Karen Allen's, and considering she gets killed off like 15 minutes into the film despite receiving top billing, I definitely get the impression the movie everyone got into making was very different from the movie that actually ended up coming out of the editing room. The whole thing just kind of falls apart under it's own ambition, and probably a few other factors as well.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for this specific type of cinematic failure. Nothing perks the imagination like "what could have been", after all.

 

[Miller]

Just re-watched Das Boot. God it’s so Kino (expect for the last 2 mins)

The germans remade Das Boot a few years ago and of course they had to shove a gay couple in it.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

An earlier post mentioned Sherlock Holmes performed by Jeremy Brett. I said then Jeremy Brett was as good as Basil Rathbone to perform the role of Sherlock Holmes.

The same could be said when David Suchet performed Poirot so well and I think it'll be hard to equal his performance for other actors who want to perform the role of Poirot in future movies.

 

[Not A Bunny]

In the last three months, I've been going through a roster of "comfort" movies: movies I know and don't have to pay much attention to but feel good to watch. The older ones include Beverly Hills Cop and Major League.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Okay, I’m weeks late with this but I watched my annual Fourth of July double feature and wanted to talk about one of them: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) which, if you don't mainline TCM, is a biopic starring James Cagney as George M. Cohan, the Broadway song-and-dance guy responsible for like half the music in those grainy army recruitment ads and who at one point convinced the country he was born on the Fourth of July (he wasn't).

So Cagney plays Cohan in this wartime hagiography where the framing device is that Cohan, now in his twilight years, gets summoned to the Oval Office in the middle of WWII, and thinks he’s about to be hit with a government gag order for, like, writing a SNL sketch about FDR calling his wife a lard ass suffragette or something. But no! FDR just wants to give him the Congressional Medal of Honor for Services Rendered to Vibes.

Now, it’s funny because Cagney, in real life, was basically on a watchlist for being too pro-union in the ‘30s. So this movie was basically his way of climbing back into the good graces of the CIA. (Like a lot of New Deal guys who got spooked by hippies, he left the Democratic Party later.)

Anyway, the movie itself is a banger. It’s self-mythology, sure, but Cohan was the kind of guy who treated reality like it was a pitch meeting for a musical, so it works. The man faked his birthday.

There are a bunch of little character moments, like when Cohan’s dad, who’s been hyping his kid like Joe Jackson, suddenly has to discipline him when he costs the family a fat contract. Or when Cohan and another songwriter get kicked out of a producer’s office for being hacks and start their own theater company.

There’s a weird subplot that theater nerds love to bring up where one of Cohan’s songs gets stolen by a grande dame of the stage, Faye Templeton, who in real life was the opposite of a swan necked society girl. (Basically the Linda Ronstadt of 1905.)

Overall though, if you want an intro to Cagney that doesn’t involve him shoving a grapefruit in someone’s face or dying in a hail of bullets, this is the one.