Category: Movies

  • ODDS and ENDS: Christmas Has to Go, Can You Believe It, Must Win, and Serious

    (It’s a trip… it’s got a FUNKY beat. And I can bug out to it!)

    This is the weekend that we are taking the Christmas decorations down. Normally, we do this on January 1st, as a sort of cleaning the house for the New Year. And I think you can read between the lines there and see that the wife and I have passed the days of staying up late and waking with a hangover. But this year, we didn’t get around to it. We put it off. Not that we had a good reason to do that, other than we wanted to lay around and not doing anything on New Year’s Day. The end result was that we got an extra week of Christmas, which has left me feeling like the holiday has over stayed its welcome. I like Christmas, but I really like it when it lives tightly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

     Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we live in a world where the movies Cocktail and Road House exist.

    And I need the Cowboys and Tottenham to win this weekend. Simple as that. If it doesn’t happen I will be heartbroken and disconnected from the universe.

    Some evenings, late at night, when I am alone on the couch while my family sleeps, I start to believe that the core of me is a very serious person. Alone and in the dark, I am confident in this pronouncement. And I say these things to myself when I am normally watching a terrible ninja movie, or something awful by Bert I. Gordon. That is when I know that I am a contradiction at all times. A silly one at that. I like walking funny and talking in goofy voices. I make up songs about doing mundane tasks. And I’d rather laugh than cry. I’d rather make you laugh; Try to make you happy through humor. I still attempt to rob an honest melancholy tear from people… but… I have never felt sure that’s what I’m best at. Yet, honestly, I have never felt sure about anything. And if I think too hard about that, I might start to wonder, worry, and then cry. Which is why I’d rather laugh. Hold it off, at bay, for a little while longer.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Yippie Dog, The Week of Black Friday, and a Movie Marathon

    (But I wanted a torta…)

    We have a new neighbor in our building, and they moved into the “Bermuda Triangle” apartment. That’s the unit no one stays very long in, maybe six months – tops. Anyway, they moved in, and I have only seen the person once. They seemed friendly and we exchanged pleasantries. But they brought something else with them; a little yippie dog. Oh, how that little dog likes to bark its yippie little bark. Day, night, walking by their door, and sneezing too loud. Yip! Yip! Yip! At first my dog was annoyed at the yipping, but of late, she seems to have resigned herself to ignoring it. We can block it out, and it’s more of a novelty of an annoyance than an actual annoying thing. Yet, I still have to wonder what it’s like in that apartment, as that dog yips and yips and yips day and night. Yip!

    So… “Black Friday” is a week-long thing now. When did that happen? I don’t really care that there is now a week of shopping deals – whatever needs to happen to sell TVs is fine. It’s the use of “Black Friday” to represent an entire week, and in some commercials, the whole month. It feels like this is the first year of the week- and month-long Black Friday title’s use, but I can also see retailers gaslighting me, saying that it’s always been like this. And I should be shopping more. Do I need a new TV? I should get a new TV.  

    As we are closing in on Thanksgiving, and I am a huge MST3k fan, this would be the time to start thinking about watching a marathon of awful movies while on vacation. Sadly, I don’t think I can get the wife and kid on board to watch a bunch of old Joel episodes, let alone actually look for some bad movies in general. (Maybe Rob Hill over at Bad Movie Bible should put out a list of suggestion awful movies to marathon through for Thanksgiving?) No, I think if I want to make this happen, I have to actually be rather creative in my movie selection. We have done all the Star Wars movies, and Harry Potter, and even did all the Marvel movies once upon a Covid. I think I might have to sub-genera it, like all the Spiderman movies. Or, maybe all the different versions of Fantastic Four? Or all the Marvel films? How about Bill Murray movies he later regretted making? Or Gene Hackman “paycheck” movies? This could be fun, come to think of it.

  • “Now and Then” The Last Beatles’ Song and Their Legacy

    I am biased toward everything The Beatles do; we should just get that out of the way right now. If you are looking for an objective opinion or review of their new song, “Now and Then,” this isn’t the place. In fact, I won’t review this song because even if it was the worst Beatle song ever, I would still like it. No, what I want to talk about is legacy and The Beatles place in music history.

    Here’s a little background on where this song came from. Back in the early 90’s, Yoko Ono gave Paul McCartney some cassette tapes that John Lennon had recorded songs on back between 1975 to 1980. The three remaining Beatles (Paul, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) got together to “finish” recording three songs from the tapes, for use on the upcoming release of the Anthology Albums and documentary series. Two of the songs were completed, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” but a third song, “Now and Then” was not completed. The story goes that though they had recorded a version of “Now and Then,” George objected to the sound quality of the cassette tape – specifically the quality of John’s vocal and how it could not be separated from the piano, as John had originally recorded them at the same time back in 1975-80. Jump ahead to Peter Jackson working on the Get Back documentary, where his team used computers and A.I. technology to clean up some of the audio and visuals from the original film and recordings in 1969. Paul and Ringo then had the “Now and Then” song worked on using this technology, thus separating John’s vocal from the piano, rectifying George’s objection to the song. Sadly, George did passed away back in 2001, but with the blessing from George’s family, his recoded parts of the song from the 90’s were reused, and Paul and Ringo rerecorded their parts, and there you have it, “Now and Then.” The Last Beatles song.

    And with this ominous “The Last Beatles Song” which is their words not mine, we are officially entering into the “legacy” period for The Beatles. The Anthology Albums and documentary series were not objective undertakings. That was defiantly the three of them getting to have a say on who and what The Beatles were As such, it felt more like a celebration, not really a history. Peter Jackson’s work on Get Back was breathtaking, if you are a Beatles fan, in how it showed the way the band created songs. But, it was also a push back against the idea that the Get Back sessions were the canary in the coal mine, predicting the impending Beatles break up in early 1970. Maybe “Now and Then” is a bit like cleaning out the closet; wrapping up that last project, before others get their hands on it once Paul and Ringo have passed on.  I won’t be surprised if there aren’t a few more nuggets of Beatles lore and music that come out in the following years.

    And I think it’s a good idea that they do this. I’m a huge Beatles fan, but I wasn’t alive when any of their original albums were released. My daughter was born when only two Beatles were still alive. Her kids are going to be born into a world of no living Beatles, and very few people who were alive when these songs first came out. I say all of this because that’s when the real objective study of The Beatles will begin. The first-hand accounts will be gone, and documentation will have to be studied. If Paul and Ringo want to set the record straight, they better get it in while they can.

  • I Can’t Say No to a Bad Movie

    Yesterday was a trying night in our apartment. The kid had issues sleeping, but even before that, I think we all ate too much sugar and were hyper beyond our expectations. I’m not kidding when I say this, as we made homemade cinnamon rolls with real icing in the morning, and that sugar rush made us jittery all day.

    I have been trying to make an effort, really trying, to get to bed at decent hour, and earn a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t always work, as my success rate for getting to bed in time for seven hours of sleep is like 5% on a given night. What is keeping me up is my desire to discover the worst movie I can find? Amazon Prime is a goldmine of schlock, but not a limitless resource; I fear I might be approaching the bottom of this well rather soon.

    And I should have gone to bed, I admit that, but this wouldn’t be a story if I did, right?

    I thought the best thing I could do last night, right before I went to bed was to check and see if Rob Hill had posted anything new on his Bad Movie Bible YouTube page…

    What I found was, “A Top 10 Best Worst Heavy Metal Horror Movies,” a subject matter very close to my heart.

    I have a particular fondness for this specific sub-genre of horror movies, as one of my favorite awful heavy metal horror movies is Rocktober Blood. (It used to be up on YouTube, but seems to have gone missing now. SHUDDER claims to have it, but you need to subscribe to be able to watch it.) There are a couple of songs in the movie that aren’t good, but are entertaining, especially “Killer on the Loose.”

    Though Rocktober Blood didn’t make Hill’s list, it does get a mention in the video, which I take as a sort of victory for the film. A film that has brought me many hours of entertainment.

    In the end, I stayed up too late again.

  • Christmas in July

    There are just too many bad Christmas movies out there, but luckily Rob Hill, of The Bad Movie Bible, has found 10 of the worst, and Hallmark movies are not included on this list. If you’ve seen the other videos, you know what to expect. So put your ugly Christmas sweater on, and turn up the air conditioning, and get ready for…