Tag: #Film

  • That Guy in That Thing

    When I moved to New York City nineteen years ago, with the help of a friend, I got a job working at a theatrical rehearsal studio. It wasn’t a bad job; helped me get a financial foothold in the City. Made some pretty good friends while doing it, as well. But the most interesting aspect of that job was always having this “deja vu” feeling while watching tv, especially when seeing commercials.

    Follow me on this…

    Working at a rehearsal studio meant that I was in contact with hundreds if not thousands of actors. Not only were actors coming in and out for rehearsals, but lots of castings were held in the studios; plays, musicals, tv shows, reality tv shows, movies, and tons upon tons of tv commercials.

    On the whole, actors are a pretty out going and friendly group. Some can be strange, and others can be “chip on the shoulder assholes” but by and large, good people. Chatty people, too. Everyone had a story to tell, or a show that they were in that they wanted you to come and see. Hell, I would try to talk them in to seeing one of my puppet shows, and they would try to get me to go to their staged reading – it’s how the industry works. And it was fun talking to people.

    Then I would go home, turn the tv on to watch something, and there in the Raymore & Flannagan commercial was the guy who was telling be about the reading he was in. Or I would see the woman who was at the second call back for a new musical playing a dead body on Law and Order. Or, I would see a TD Bank ad and wonder to myself, “Don’t I know that guy at the teller widow?” Or “Isn’t that the gal who was warming up in the hallway today in the Jeep commercial?”

    Then a couple of days or weeks would go by, and that actor would walk into the studio for an audition or rehearsal, and my mind would trigger back to that commercial, and I’d say to them, “Saw in that Ben and Jerry’s ad.”

    Other times, I wouldn’t see them again to tell them good job, because they started to work their way up the ladder. Slowly, ad after ad, no lines, then one line. Then featured in an ad, then a background character for some show. Then an under five, leading to a featured role.

    Still to this day, when I’m watching a show or a movie, I’ll still get this feeling when an actors comes on in a small role, that I met them before, a long time ago. I can never prove it, but I do wonder.

  • Short Story Review: “Something Out of a Horror Movie” by Mario Aliberto III

    (The short story “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” by Mario Aliberto III appeared on February 27th, 2025 in Milk Candy Review.)

    (Image from Milk Candy Review)

    When I was a teenager, and well into my twenties and beyond, I spent hours debating with my friends about the mechanics, tropes, and clichés of horror movies. How most horror movies, more than any other genre of film, are made up of an uncountable number of rip offs and copies of more successful horror movies. For myself, as a person who loves awful movies, bad horror films are an entertaining gift that just keeps on giving.

    So, when I started reading Mario Aliberto III’s “Something Out of a Horror Movie,” I was intrigued as to what he was wanting to accomplish is this flash fiction story. It reads like it was written but someone who loves the awful character clichés of the genre. What I appreciated in this piece was that as I started reading it, I couldn’t put my finger on if this is a story about characters in a horror movie, or if they are characters in “real life” that find themselves in a horror movie situation, or if these are characters that have seen too many horror movies and went to that places because of the situation they were in. By doing that, structuring the story that way, left me feeling off balance which played very well to the theme of the piece, and ultimately the climax of the story.

    But what I enjoyed most was that this story took a stock clichéd character that I have seen in millions of horror movies, and made me think of her differently, and also made me view her actions in a fully well-rounded way for that character. Aliberto does this rather effortlessly, and compactly. The last paragraph is just great.

    I will never look at the Bad Girl trope character the same way again.

  • Showing My Kid “Cool Hand Luke”

    I’m not the best father. I have very good intentions, and I show up, and I am dependable, but outside of that, I’m floundering around here.

    One of my flounder moments of late is trying to show my kid good movies. Like really good movies, the best movies, movies that had a huge impact on storytelling, movie making; you get the deal. I am way too eager to do this, and I have to remind myself that most of the beast movies ever made aren’t appropriate for a nine-year-old.

    So, of late, I have just been showing her the start of movies or very famous scenes. Amazingly, this has worked out very well. After watching Barbie together, I thought showing her the opening “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be a good idea, as that part is parodied in Barbie. And I was delightfully rewarded showing it to her, because she was able to visually follow the story, understood the importance of the bone/tool, and how tools good be used for good and bad. And she especially understood what Barbie was parodying.

    After having such a rewarding experience with 2001, I decided that I would press my luck and show her one of my favorite movies, Cool Hand Luke, a film I consider a great movie and if nothing else, it’s Paul Newman’s best performance. Unfortunately, the only streaming service I could find that had the movie came with commercials. What this availed to us was two minutes for me to answer questions, which is to be expected, as I do have a very curious and inquisitive child. Mind you, we only got 1/3 of the way through the movie.

    The questions she provided me were; Where are the girls? Why does everyone smoke? Don’t they know that’s bad for them? Is there a prison for women and do they do the same thing? Do they have air conditioning? Are the guards allowed to shoot people? If the guards shoot people, do they get in trouble? Why isn’t “The Box” illegal? Are there bugs and rats in “The Box?” And my favorite – How do you play poker?

    I don’t mind her questions, that’s how you learn; you ask questions, right. What I forgot was how much of a huge jump in her experience it is to see a movie made in 1967 about people living in the South during the early 1950’s. It’s just on the very edge of her understanding. Such as, she sees the cars and the trucks, those are things she can relate to and understand. But no air conditioning? She doesn’t know a world without A/C. And then I had to explain to her what parking meters were – how you had to put change in a machine, and turn a handle, and it counted down until you had to put more change in it. That kind’a blew her mind…

    And we haven’t even got to the egg eating scene yet.

  • Personal Review: Road House; Both of Them (1989, 2024)

    (It’s my way, or the highway.)

    So, I’m a huge MST3k fan, and as such, I join in that show’s admiration of the Patrick Swayze epic that is Road House from 1989. It is a movie that was made specifically for pre-teen and teenage boys, and I happened to be that in the late 80’s. I watched it many times over at a friend’s house, as his parents didn’t care what we did, and my mom would have grounded me for years if she knew her twelve year old angel was illicitly watching an R rated movie. It is not a good movie, but it is a good-bad movie.

    I can’t say the same thing for the new Road House, staring Jake Gyllenhaal, which I watched over the weekend. To put it bluntly, it’s a movie that wants very badly to be included in the joke – as if it could laugh along with us at how bad all of this is. What that creates is an uneven affair. At times, this is a movie that attempts to take these characters seriously. Then, at snap of the neck speed, the film turns around and wants us guffaw at how silly and over the top they are. I mean, the main villain, played by Billy Magnussen, was only missing a moustache to twirl in his overly melodramatic performance. As for Conner McGregor’s Knox, who must have drawn inspiration from Wile E. Coyote, his character survives accident after accident, and just keeps popping back up. I felt the worst for Gyllenhaal, who had nothing to work with other than the stock “trauma” trope, which is revealed half way through the movie, per usual for movies like this. This Dalton has no bouncer skills, no knowledge about the world of bars which would make him an expert. No, this Dalton is just a guy who is good at fighting. If you took the fighting away, there’s nothing interesting or unique about him. This a movie is just a vehicle for some fights.  

    This gets me back to the original Road House – and again, not a good movie, but a good-bad movie – which I watched last night. Swayze has an earnestness in the role of Dalton, which at times can be charming, and also very cheesy. But Swayze sticks with it, and never breaks or hints that he knows that a story about the world’s greatest bouncer, is just silly. The tai chi on the riverbank, the monster truck, Sam Elliot being Sam Elliot, Ben Gazzara chewing the hell out of the scenery, the flat characters; it’s all over the top, but it never spins out of control. I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review of the film, “Road House exists right on the edge between the ‘good-bad movie’ and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie. But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.”

  • So, That Was the Oscars

    I’m a sucker for the Oscars. Not award shows, just the Oscars. As a theatre guys, I don’t much care for the Tony’s. But if it’s the Oscars, I will be there for all their hokieness, and over the top showmanship, and fake glamor. Because at the end of the day, the Oscars are nothing more than a room full of very successful and rich people giving each other gold trophies and saying, “You did very good last year!”

    For about five or six years in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I was seeing every movie that was nominated for all the major categories. It was when I was living my poorest life, but I always found a way to scrape the money together and get to the movies. Living outside of Dallas also afforded me a couple of arthouse movie theatres, so I was able to take in international movies, independent stuff, as well as midnight and cult films. I was also lucky enough to have a solid group of friends that was committed to seeing these movies. We debated endlessly about what were the best films of each year, and we were a very film literate group, most of us worked in video stores, so we did know what we were talking about.

    But when you constantly see good and great movies, you start to understand that the Oscars truly don’t award the best movies of the year. It’s a popularity contest. Sometimes it’s a fun popularity contest, but it always is, and forever shall be, about who is the most popular.

    It’s probably been 12 years since the last time I saw all the movies that were nominated for best picture, and that was due to my wife gifting me tickets to a two-day marathon at a theatre in Manhattan that showed all the nominated movies. (And that was the best experience, because it was nothing but great movies. But don’t forget your tissues.) But I still get a welcome level of enjoyment from the Oscars. Movies are wonderful make-believe and brilliant storytelling when in the right hands. It does feel that good movies are on the rise against, and the ‘splosion fests are on the wane. I’ll catch most of the best pictures streaming on this or that platform, which is fine. Though, to be in a movie theatre with an audience enthralled by a movie is a bit like a religious experience; one that I do miss.