I'm Not There

  WTF Rachel? If I mention the Family Matters episode entitled "The Life of the Party" you probably wouldn't know it's from Season 2 or what it's about.  However, if I say "the one where Urkel got drunk" you will know exactly what episode I am referencing, and chances are, if you are a dude, you also have a prostate exam coming up. Old ass. The episode centers on Maxine being excited to have a birthday party.  Not just any party but what 80's and 90's TV shows refer to as a "boy/girl party."  Her parents apparently got new carpet and thought it would be a great idea to have their daughter's party on the roof of the apartment building instead.  Look at the picture above, the height of the wall is about 3 or 4 feet tops.  Max's parents didn't give a good damn about her or any of those kids. You're telling me you thought that inviting and letting loose a bunch of hormone driven teenagers on the roof of your building was a g...

 Unresolved Trauma: The Movie Watching Malcolm and Marie has really messed me up which is unfortunate because It is 12:35AM and I was about to go to bed.   It made such an impact that I had to write something to expel some of the bad energy.   I think great art leaves a lasting impression and this definitely has done just that. It makes you think about what you were just put through and will give you a taste of anxiety if you don’t already know what that feels like.     I haven’t felt this amount of cinematic uneasiness since sitting through Uncut Gems last year.   Prior to that, I related anxiety to the helicopter scene in Goodfellas and just within the last year alone, these two films have made Marty’s movie feel like missing a math problem on a third-grade timed test.   I am not sure what that says about our culture or maybe my viewing habits.   In any event, Malcolm and Marie is reminiscent in tone to Marriage Story and Revolutionary Road ...

   I'm back witches!  Isn't that so funny and clever?  NO?  Then stop buying crap with stupid puns on it.  Anyway, just wanted to drop by and make my first post of the year.  Haven't seen you since a little before Halloween and there is a reason for that.  Trash ass 2020 and Covid took away a lot of activities and things to post about.  However, during this pandemic, I have been keeping busy and spending my time with someone.  I realized today that up until now, I have never been thankful for a person. Most of us have said we're thankful for family during Thanksgiving right before eating Cambodian food or whatever but this is different.  Seeing someone go out of their way for you will do that, sometimes to another damn state.  Being exposed to new things and ideas has always been important to me and now I know about Teena Marie and Aunt Kim.  Also, replacing crappy memories and experiences with positive great ones has been...

    Hey, Kid!  What are you doing? As we all know, the 1980's was a fertile time for horror films.  We had great original movies like An American Werewolf in London as well as a bunch of sequels and remakes.  Freddy and Jason were arguably the "favorite" children of the 1980's and we also got a Psycho sequel for some reason.  Fright Night is an original movie that spawned a sequel and a reboot but the 1985 original is predictable and falls a little flat.  Essentially, a kid named Charley Brewster realizes his neighbor Jerry is a murdering vampire and enlists the help of his friends Edward and Amy and for some reason, a horror host names Peter Vincent. That's it, the whole movie is them battling the vampire with some close calls until he inevitably turns Amy and a big fight ensues where he die s. Looking at this movie now (with 2020 vision, get it?), it just feels plain goofy. This is not necessarily a bad thing, a lot of movies during this time ...

  The absence of love is the most abject pain. The scariest part of Nosferatu the Vampyre by far,   was the opening shots of mummified babies and whatever the hell Gollum is.  Interestingly enough, these mummies are very real and located in Guanajuato. Mexico.  A long way from Transylvania, but still strange why a vampire would decide to keep all these dried up and leathery cadavers around after drying them of blood.  To deter intruders for decor?  Freak.  The rest of the film is not so much scary but rather wonderfully composed.  I will posit that the reason the film is not centered on scares is that we already know the story of Nosferatu and Dracula.  By 1979, there had been many iterations of Bram Stoker's  story projected on the screen.  Speaking of Stoker, the copyright to his novel Dracula  had at this point expired and so Werner Herzog could use the names of Dracula, Harker and Lucy without having to ...

  Smilers never lose and frowners never win. After doing this for eleven years, I'm still learning a lot about film, life and myself.  It's really surprising that it took me this long to remember not to eat while screening these movies.  Last night, this was engrained in me forever after watching The Autopsy of Jane Doe.  The opening scene we get shots of pretty grizzly corpses that made me put away my pizza for a little bit.  It reminded me of that time when I was eating a delicious turkey sandwich and then I saw the opening scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I haven't had a Ralph's sandwich since.   In any event, this movie was suggested to me by a Buffalo and it's probably one of the best  horror/thrillers I've screened. I would call this movie "Hitchcockian" in its masterful control of suspense.  We start out with  so many questions, trying to piece together a gruesome crime scene, imagining the scariest and worst scenario...

  Baby Diaper Not even going to bury the lead on this one, T he Terror of Hallow's Eve  was powerfully disappointing. It had so much potential and it all fell apart in the end.  It's like when your kid plays soccer and during practice, he's fast and scores a couple goals but when the game comes around, he keeps getting off sides and gets hit in the face when he tries to attempt a header.  You know the potential is there but he just keeps blowing it, he or she, whichever is worse.  Anyway, it's not clear if there were production difficulties or the budget ran out but the end result is similar to three different movies frankensteined together to make a thing.  The main reason this is so disappointing is because the movie starts pretty solid.  Cinematically it pulls you in to the story of a kid who is suspiciously good at making monsters and practical effects but misses his father and is bullied.  We also get a cameo from Eri...