Exuma, Catherine

I'm thrilled I had an excuse to revisit this one. There's really nothing like it. Every track is so unexpected, and some of them—"Seance in the Sixth Fret particularly"—are hardly songs at all in the traditional sense. Experimental music can sometimes bore me to tears (or make me irrationally angry), but this is tethered to so much personality and history that I find every single sound so incredible. I never knew I needed frogs and crickets and whistles and howling wolves and ZOMBIES but I don't wanna go back. I know Tony McKay / Exuma never saw true mainstream success, but I think that's a testament to his unwavering singularity. I love that this album tells a complete story. In the first song he introduces himself to us, coming down to Earth on a lightning bolt and into his mama's belly, and in the final track, the angels call him home. Heaven, hell, birth, and death in an unending cycle. Obviously my takes on the album I chose won't be a surprise to anyone, but I love the lyrics, I love the sound, I love the album—full stop.

Album of the Week: Exuma

Catherine is choosing her first album for Record Club today. I just counted (from the list here, after you scroll down), and she is the 81st person to choose an album for this club over the years. Welcome to Record Club, and welcome to the ranks of RC captains, along with such past captains as the bassist of Real Estate, Stephan's grandmother, and the boyfriends of every classmate I had in grad school.

Record Club:

archives | supplemental

spotify playlist | youtube playlist

choose | writing

WEEK 403 — October 18-24, 2026

Exuma

by Exuma

LISTEN:

Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp | Apple

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PICKED BY CATHERINE

CATHERINE'S PITCH: "I can't remember how I first stumbled across Exuma, but I revisit this album a few times a year for a palette cleanse when I get stuck in a musical rut. The '70s Bahamian folk style is like nothing I'd heard before. It's cool, it's catchy and it's even a little scary—perfect for this time of year. As an extra cherry on top, this album partly inspired Jordan Peele's Nope."

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ALBUM DETAILS

TITLE: It's called Exuma, but all three streaming services insist on calling it Exuma, the Obeah Man. I don't know where that came from, or how it was collectively decided. Don't get distracted, this is a self-titled album.

GENRE: Psychedelic folk, Caribbean folk music, wyrd folk, Junkanoo, calypso, goombay

RELEASED: April 1970

LENGTH: 38:41

TRACKLIST:

1. Exuma, the Obeah Man
2. Dambala
3. Mama Loi, Papa Loi
4. Junkanoo
5. Seance in the Sixth Fret
6. You Don't Know What's Going On
7. The Vision

LYRICS: Genius.com

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ARTIST DETAILS

PRONOUNS: he/him/his

ABOUT: Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey was born on February 18, 1942, on Cat Island, the Bahamas. He was known professionally as Tony McKay, or Exuma. His Exuma persona, as well as his lyrics, were influenced by the West African and Bahamian tradition of Obeah, a system of spiritual and healing practices developed among enslaved West Africans in the West Indies, practiced by many on the islands of the Bahamas. McKay denied any "voodoo" imagery, stating "it isn't voodoo or witchcraft, not in the way that the man goes home at night and makes a secret potion." After releasing his first six albums, he created a musical stage production titled Junkanoo Drums, which led to him becoming a regular performer at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. In the 1980s, he created his own record label called Inagua Records. He spent time in Colorado and Miami before moving back to the Bahamas and passing away in his sleep in January 1997.

DISCOGRAPHY: This is Exuma's first of ten studio albums. The last and most recent album listed on Wikipedia is 1982's Universal. The first six albums are the ones with hyperlinks, including sophomore album Exuma II, released the same year as Exuma.

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ADDITIONAL INFO

READING SOME SHIT: a 50-year retrospective from Rolling Stone in 2020

WATCHING SOME SHIT: "Exuma, the Obeah Man" on what looks like a public broadcasting show called Soul!

RECORD CLUB CONNECTIONS: RC alumnus Andrew Bird wrote about this album briefly for Pitchfork back in 2009. "You Don’t Know What’s Going On" was featured in a 1970 comedy called Joe, 54 years before RC covered R&B artist Joe. 

MENTIONS ON THE BLOG: Nothing yet! I haven't even seen Nope!

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RECORD CLUB ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

This week's discography dive album: The Incessant by Meat Wave

This week's follow-up album: No Excuses by Blaqbonez and hopefully The Time of Dragons by Tori Amos finally

This week's keeping up album (probably): Dopamine Chamber by Fontaines D.C.

Listen with us! Keep your favorite Record Club artists in the rotation!

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COUNTDOWN:

69 Weeks Until Week 420

We are tracking and counting down every week from here on out till Record Club Week 420. We started this countdown 69 weeks out. During Record Club Week 420, we will be covering Donny Most by the esteemed Happy Days virgin Donny Most. The goal for Week 420 of Record Club is that it will feature 69 reviews from 69 different people. 

THIS WEEK: We are 17 weeks away from Week 420.

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Happy listening, RC family!
Have a great week!

Never Seen It #337: In the Heat of the Night

Now, look. I got no wife. I got no kids. Boy, I got a town that don't want me. And I got an air conditioner that I have to oil myself, and a desk with a busted leg. And on top of that, I got this, uh... blog. Now, don't you think that'd drive a man to watching 500 movies he's never seen before? I'll tell you a secret. Nobody comes here. Never.

In the Heat of the Night

1967

Norman Jewison

Thanks to all those valiant Film Club members who watched a movie and wrote about it. See our thoughts below!

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Catherine

I accidentally stayed up way too late watching Sidney Poitier's Oscars acceptance speeches and mini documentaries about his life and now I have to do this stream-of-consciousness/bullet style, apologies:

• This was somehow my first Sidney Poitier film, and I can't believe it took me this long. He's such a haunting, captivating performer with seemingly little effort, and every time he was on screen, I couldn't look away.

• 

  (Favorite shot of dozens of unbelievable frames)

• The film's presentation of racism is devastating in its accuracy because it denies us any real payoff for Tibbs or growth from our prejudiced characters to make the audience feel better. By the end, hearts and minds aren't really changed. Virgil Tibbs did his job in spite of every obstacle thrown his way, and we know this uphill battle will follow him for the rest of his life. And Gillespie is definitely still racist. He merely acknowledges Tibbs' humanity a bit more than he did in the beginning, and with a quiet final handshake sends him on his way.
• It was a wild feeling realizing I've been missing a classic cinema reference in a Disney film for nearly thirty years. I'm talking, of course, about Pumba screaming, "They call me, MISTER PIG!" in The Lion King. I applaud any cultured five-year-old who understood the joke at the time.
• On a critical note, the twist ending/whodunnit reveal didn't really pay off for me. They kinda seemed to follow flimsy Scooby-Doo rules by setting up a pretty obvious red herring (Endicott), then suddenly bringing back an unassuming character from the beginning to pin it on. Slightly disappointing.
• Poitier/Steiger had some incredible chemistry as Tibbs and Gillespie. I really enjoyed the scene at the end where Gillespie is housing a bottle of Wild Turkey and finally asks Tibbs about himself. "You ever been married?" "Ever been close?" Close is all we'll ever get to learning about who Tibbs the homicide expert really is. And I love the mystery.
• Finally, what happened to the family Tibbs was staying with? He meets them, they get a room ready for him, then we never see them again. Was this intentional? It's entirely possible I'm wrong and just forgetting a scene.

Fantastic film, 4/5 pukes

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Chelsea

This feels like the type of movie the Hollywood loved to crank in the '90s: a fish-out-of-water police procedural designed to soothe white guilt by assuring us that racism is over because two cops bonded over their love of... justice, I guess? Which is to say, I feel like I've seen so many lesser versions of this movie that it's easy to forget how boundary-pushing it was at the time of its release, although even then some critics called out the uneasy friendship that develops between Tibbs and Gillespie for being trite and convenient. I agree with that critique to some extent, although I will say that the performances of the two leads helped sell me on the complicated kind of respect that evolves over the course of the film. Sidney Poitier, who already had an Oscar under his belt at this point, is pulling off a tightwire act as Tibbs. It would be easy (too easy) to play this character as patient and dignified to the point of saintliness, but Poitier is able to show that Tibbs's poise masks a rage and obsessiveness that for a time derails the investigation while he tries to prove the murderer is the racist plantation owner Endicott. Though innocent of murder, watching that guy get open hand slapped by Tibbs was the highlight of my week so far. 

Rod Steiger, chewing gum with more commitment than I would have thought possible, is also doing a bit of a balancing act as Gillespie. While definitely racist as hell, he immediately clocks that Tibbs is more capable that anybody on the force, and is able to convey a vulnerability that drives his resentment. Nobody in town seems to like him or think he deserves his job, and he is constantly being upstaged at every turn by the guy he initially accused of the murder. He gets a little redemption arc, and while it's definitely a bit pandering to a liberal audience, it doesn't feel totally unearned. 

As far as how the film operates as a procedural, it certainly kept me guessing, and although the ending didn't have the sort of satisfying "I never would have guessed it was them but OF COURSE it was them" a-ha moment, it mostly worked for me as a murder mystery. The actor who played the murderer is like an unholy redneck amalgam of Anthony Perkins and Crispin Glover, so the vibe was spot on, and his rubber band flicking tick that the film opened on, and then revisited during his confession, was a nice little bookend. That said, the film does seem more interested in the thematic and socio-political elements of the story than the actual murder mystery, which almost felt like an afterthought at some points. 

Ultimately, the thing that struck me the most about this movie was the feeling that it is trapped between two times. Not just thematically, although obviously the film is very directly speaking to that. I'm talking more about the visual language of the movie. There was the sense at several points that the director was experimenting visually with ideas that we would see fully fleshed out later in the American New Wave movement. The POV car shots early in the film were so effective in making the audience complicit in Officer Woods's voyeurism and gave that scene a creepy immediacy. These opening shots felt like baby steps towards the kind of visceral POV car stuff that Friedkin would do later in The French Connection. In some cases, these experiments were a little clunky, like in the fight between Tibbs and the gang in the warehouse. The director keeps cutting to a low angle shot with only Tibbs in the frame, and I'm not sure what he was trying to express exactly, but it wasn't as effective for me at conveying danger as a more conventionally shot wider frame would have been. Nonetheless, it was a moment where I felt like I was watching the language of film evolve right in front of me, and I could see the throughlines that other directors would be using with greater deftness in the '70s. That was really cool. 

Final thoughts: Quincy Jones as music supervisor? Okay!!! I am also a sucker for featuring a song in the movie that contains the title of the movie! 

Overall 3.5/5 for me!

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Joe

I know it's stupid, and privileged, to still be shocked by racism. Also says something about geography, I guess, since I am from the place that Virgil Tibbs is from, and would probably be shocked by the amount of racism in small-town Mississippi too if I traveled down there 60 years ago. But mostly privileged. I am a white man watching this film. A Black man watching In the Heat of the Night would probably not be as shocked to see this particular portrayal of racism, I think. This film takes place 60 years ago, which is not so long ago when you think about it. Philando Castile was shot ten years ago, in the same way that the mayor and the police chief speculated it would've gone with Virgil in the '60s South—"claiming self-defense"—and ten years ain't fucking nothing.

I liked In the Heat of the Night for a few reasons, first of which was it didn't try to portray Chief Gillespie as fully reformed, or changed in large ways, and certainly not any sort of "white savior" or whatever. He was a complicated man who maybe is just beginning the very first stages of questioning the pillars of the reality that the racist South had constructed for him. I think that it'll be easier to fall back on old ways once Virgil Tibbs leaves and makes his way back to Philly, and I think that this is truer to life, unfortunately. It's easy for us, the audience watching this movie in 2026 who are willing and able to believe that racism is a pox on society and should be eradicated, to understand the lesson here, but it's harder for the good ol' boys of the '60s South to hold onto that lesson. The complicated juxtaposition of Bill's upbringing versus the facts in front of his face is... well, it's what earned Rod Steiger the Best Actor Oscar for sure.

I guess what I'm saying is that the movie was never patronizing. It never beat you over the head with the fact that racism is bad (despite the fact that it is). It instead allowed you to take that journey with the chief, whether you needed to or not. And Sidney Poitier was perfect for the role as Detective Virgil Tibbs. He was so fucking good at acting in a way that you could tell he was angry as fuck but learned over the course of his life that he needed to hold it in. It was a righteous anger that occasionally escaped, and it made you feel for him even more that he even had to hold it in in the first place. I saw online the scene at the plantation described as "the slap that shook the world," and that was something that made me reconsider what I had just seen. Because I had trouble not viewing it through a modern lens, and missed how extraordinary that scene must have felt back when racism was more outwardly portrayed in society. From my vantage point, I'm thinking, "okay, Virgil got slapped first, it makes sense that he slapped back." And the fact that characters in the movie and I'm sure many people watching in the theaters during its initial run must have been shocked by the idea of a Black man slapping a white plantation owner... it just acts as a marker for me on how much we've changed as a society, but also how far we still have left to go.

The final thing that I loved about this film was that it was a sort of twist on a genre that everyone is already familiar with. The "who done it" murder mystery is technically how this film is designed, on the surface. But at its core, it's a sociological drama about race. There is conflict to be found in the murder plot, but the true conflict is the battle over Bill Gillespie's soul. It's the conflict between right and wrong, and the conflict that comes about when different people have different definitions of right and of wrong. And it's the conflict of the past and the present, how someone like Gillespie is forced to consider a man he views as so different than him ultimately as his equal, and, in the opposite direction, how someone like Tibbs is forced to consider a man like Gillespie, despite the hell that people like Gillespie have put him through in his life, as someone who is similar (in that they have similar desires for justice, I guess). It's not just a who-done-it, in other words. The layers are what makes it a great movie.

Just because we as a society have basically learned nothing from In the Heat of the Night doesn't make it any less important. And just because it remains important today doesn't mean it also can't be a fun and fascinating film in its own right.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

Call me MISTER Puke in the comments.

(NEXT TIME: Some blogging bodies are watching Bodies Bodies Bodies.)

Never Seen It #334: After Hours

My husband was a blog freak. Actually, he was particularly obsessed with 500 movies that he'd never seen before. He talked about them constantly. I thought it was cute at first. On our wedding night, I was a virgin. 

After Hours

1985

Martin Scorsese

Thanks to everyone who watched our latest film and wrote about it! Write-ups for After Hours below.

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Allison

Ah, New York in the '80s. How awful. After Hours is a bleak, dark comedy, likely disavowed by the SoHo Tourism Board. Paul Hackett is all of us. A listless young professional stuck in the dregs of corporate America. Looking for a little action, a little adventure, he leaves the comfort, safety, and boredom of his uptown apartment to meet up with Marcy, the original manic pixie dream girl. Or is she just manic?

While I had some laughs, I didn't really enjoy this. What is Marty trying to do here? What is Marty trying to say about the New York art scene? What is Marty trying to say about women? Nothing positive.

My biggest takeaway and the most distracting issue with After Hours: that's not how fucking paper mache works. Anyone who has ever dabbled in DIY or made a model volcano for the science fair knows it takes at least 24 hours to dry, and that's if you have the proper airflow. In an artist loft, maybe. In a dank punk club basement? Absolutely not, no way. He would start to mold before he ever dried. It completely took me out of the movie.

Also, did you know that Cheech and Chong were in the Scorseseverse? I found them distracting.

That said, I liked the ending. Breaking out of his (inconceivable) plaster disguise/prison, Paul ends up right where he started—back at the office. The message is finally clear: there's no escape. Back to work, yuppie. Time to make the plaster-of-Paris donuts...

2.5 stars

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Catherine

I’ve been waiting all summer for tickets to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, even though I'm not a fan of the story and I have no idea what 70mm means (I'm just insufferable like that), but it's been sold out in NYC for months.

After Hours is my Odyssey.

Paul is Odysseus, and I'd watch him for countless hours traversing the bowels of SoHo, his siren song the tinny wail of Catherine O'Hara's ice cream truck. Stuck between a rock and a plaster place, Paul slips into hijinks spanning from light-hearted to deeply traumatizing (Marcy aside, remember that throwaway MURDER??), all because he took a chance on companionship for the evening.

"I just want to live."

Lots of us have had some nights out that sound barely believable the next day, but something that tickled me a little bit extra is Paul is sober the whole time. He's got nothing to blame but his own rotten luck and the consequences of his perfectly functioning executive reasoning for the worst night of his life.

I love how Griffin Dunne played Paul. I've been mulling it over for about 24 hours now, but I still can't decide if Paul is "good" or "bad," and I like that a lot. He makes some mistakes here and there, he slips up, he can be selfish, but even when he snaps at someone, he usually apologizes and tries to be as polite as he can muster while clinging to the end of his rope. There was something so laugh-out-loud funny about that to me. All he wants to do is go home and go to bed before he dies of exhaustion, but he's somehow reluctantly petting Terri Garr's beehive at 3AM at her request so he doesn't seem rude.

"I just want to live."

I also like that this movie is a stuffy '80s New Yorker's fever dream of what goes on below 14th Street at all hours of the night. And, as a modern day New Yorker (at least that's what my electric bill says), seeing gritty, no-good SoHo, the place where I see billionaires' jobless children line up outside of the Supreme store and I feel out of place if I'm not wearing a designer dress less than $1,000, it was fun to see how it's evolved.

I have too much to say about this movie, but I really enjoyed it. I keep seeing Kafka-esque thrown around, but sadly I'm not well-read enough so I'll call it Safdie-esque with a lighter, more slapstick feel, and I had a hell of a time.

I happened to see a friend's Letterboxd review of this movie that I appreciated:

"The mom AND the dad from Home Alone???!!!?"

Amen.

4/5 Plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese paper weights

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Joe

I don't know about this one. I liked it but I have my doubts that it's important. It was funny but there didn't seem to be all that much behind the irreverent humor. It kept my attention but I don't think I'll be remembering it for too much longer. Here's where I knew I was "out" instead of "in": when Paul Hackett (played wonderfully by Griffin Dunne) witnesses a random murder through a bedroom window and mumbles to himself "I'll probably get blamed for that." It made too plain what the movie was trying to do, and betrayed the fact that it was all just a little too loose and shaggy for me to be satisfied.

I just don't think that After Hours had anything interesting to say. The story itself was interesting, and fun. I saw it described as a "labyrinth," and that feels accurate. Paul keeps trying to escape the night, but then keeps returning to the same locations and meeting the same people and rightfully becomes disoriented at how all the little details start adding up. That was fun as fuck, and I sincerely appreciated the various loops that the film was building (e.g. I was dying laughing when Cheech and Chong showed up yet again to steal the same statue for like the third time, but this time with Paul encased inside of it). But what does it all mean? Anything besides "this is a fun way to spend 90-ish minutes"?

Maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it. I acknowledge that I tend to switch back and forth between different outlooks on movies in general—sometimes it's enough for me that the story is fun and that's where the importance lies, and sometimes it's not enough and I need more, something profound. I'm at the latter for After Hours. Do I have higher expectations because Scorsese is the director on this one? When I was a young shit-stirrer, I feel like Scorsese earned a lot of my adolescent ire, but I've matured enough and I've come around. The man is one of our greatest American filmmakers, yes. So is this why I'm feeling the desire for more? Because I know that he's capable of more than this?

I empathize with the desire for After Hours to mean more. I read that there are themes of "emasculating" and "castration" throughout, and I guess I did notice that (the doodle of a shark biting off a dick was pretty memorable). This is where I struggle with interpreting movies, I think. I have no issue with accepting the fact that such a theme was purposeful and clear. Where I take issue is that this is supposed to mean something. What is the point of sprinkling in various references to emasculation? What does it lead to? Am I missing something? Am I being obtuse? Am I supposed to empathize with the character because I know what feeling emasculated feels like, or am I supposed to feel distant from the character because the film makes it known that he should feel emasculated? I get the sense that the emasculation theme was just something sprinkled in to create another throughline with the various scenarios and characters and locations.

And that's all well and good. I even like it, the fact that there are depths here to explore, but I remain slightly unsatisfied. I could attempt to talk about the theme that seems sort of there and sort of not, but the one that would mean something to me if it had landed properly—Paul is an office drone, and he is being punished for it. There was one part where he yells out, almost like a non-sequitur, "it was just a word processor!" That, plus the film being bookended by drab office life, makes me think that After Hours is trying to say that... oh jeez, what? I should know this, as an office loser myself. It's either "this is boring and you should be punished for it" or "it's boring but you should appreciate it because look what happens when you try to mix it up."

Either way, there wasn't enough in After Hours to make any of that clear, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to try to shoehorn it in too much. I'd feel like the poor Wikipedia editor who had to come up with a whole damn paragraph about how a theme is emasculation. It's all just a lot of hot air.

But damn, sometimes that hot air felt like it was lifting a whole damn hot air balloon. The escalation of these conflicts in this film, though many of them contrived, were pretty fun to witness. I thought that the Catherine O'Hara character was a step too far (though it was fun to realize that Home Alone was an After Hours mini-reunion of her and John Heard), but I did like how her ice cream truck added to the tension of angry mob chasing Paul.

All the little callbacks were amazing too. My favorite was Paul lying about ordering a hamburger as he runs away from the diner, and then he coincidentally ends up back at the same diner and is served his burger. It would've been cool if they managed to fit everything into it. Like that Wizard of Oz monologue about the husband yelling "Surrender Dorothy!" every time he came. Did that ever come back? I laughed, but I don't recall a callback, unless I missed it. And the aforementioned murder-through-the-window thing didn't come back at all, which means it existed solely for the fourth-wall-breaking quip, which saps it of its power.

I'm open to the idea that I'm missing something here, but until then, the impression I got was: fun, and literally nothing else.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3.167 pukes out of 5

Scream like a papier-mâché sculpture in the comments with us!

(NEXT TIME: Allison and Brittany both chose Amélie for their Already Seen It film, so let's see what that's about.)

Reality Awaits, Catherine

I like the Strokes. That feels like a question when I say it. I like the Strokes? I like the Strokes!! I've listened to this album for what feels like a dozen times, and for the first eleven, I couldn't hear it. I constantly lost focus and let it melt into background music. Over and over and over. But something recently clicked, and now I'm bopping around the subway on my morning commute humming "I did that yesterdayyyyyyyyy..." It's undeniably fun.

I'd have to dive into their discography to say this with any authority but I'm gonna go for it anyway: this album kinda feels like the Strokes doing an impression of themselves. It doesn't have quite the same heft as some of their older stuff. And I understand they're known and loved for those unique distorted vocals, but the auto-tune was out of control on this one.

That said, I hear it more and like it more every time I listen—am I relenting or just evolving? I can't tell. Stay tuned, I guess!

3/5 dancing walton gogginses

Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Catherine

It's tough judging a debut album when you already know how much more an artist is capable of, but as far as I'm concerned, the rest of the tracks here could be banging pots and pans as long as we get "The Sound of Silence." Nestled among a few dated hymns and covers is one of the greatest songs of all time, and that's automatic hall of fame consideration for me.

I've listened to this album a few times now (most recently on Wednesday morning at 5 AM, so close!), and my perception has evolved a lot. It first struck me as a little frivolous with clap-along church songs, like their parents sat them down and only let them choose family-friendly tracks so grandma could listen. But the privilege of living in the future stops me from criticizing too harshly.

This is our first taste of legends in the making. I'm extremely biased here, but S&G are very much my shit. They're medieval troubadours who fell through a wormhole into the post-beatnik era. Give me black turtlenecks and hand-painted protest signs and smoky Greenwich village poetry readings and I'm so very sold. They were introduced to me by my mom who never got to see me become an adult, and I can't explain the attachment fully, but listening to them feels like getting to meet her as an adolescent.

"Take my arms so I might reach you."

Sorry, getting a little maudlin for Record Club, but if you're in the mood to be moved—not wallow, necessarily, but indulge in a little spiritual melancholy—these are your guys. Poetry, seraphic harmonies, lyricism! This is certainly not my favorite Simon & Garfunkel album, but it's fascinating to see how they started and how they evolved, and I can very much appreciate it for that.

I got a chance to see Paul Simon's farewell concert in 2018 in his hometown of Corona, Queens. He finished his last song as I squeezed my way to the front, and he thanked the crowd saying, "It means more to me than you'll ever know." I cried, hardly able to believe I was lucky enough to be in attendance for this final, historic moment.

Anyway, that son of a bitch has continued touring ever since.

Never Seen It #323: In the Mood for Love

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window blog, the 500 movies he's never seen before are something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

In the Mood for Love

2000

Wong Kar-wai

Welcome back to another in our Film Club mini-series, "Already Seen It," in which a member of Film Club chooses a movie from the least they've already seen, and makes me watch it. Catherine has already seen In the Mood for Love, and she sent me this prompt after I let her know that I watched it too.

"With the title and the idea of 'mood lighting' and color psychology, I'm curious if you felt color played a more significant role in the film than usual."

See, this is the kind of shit that I need from my more film-inclined friends in FC. I need prompts that involve ideas that I would have never been able to think about on my own. Catherine apologized that it was a "leading question," and I know what she meant, but I'll confirm it in another way: it was leading in the way that it literally leads me to think about shit that is all new to me, way outside my normal film-watching routine. I can confirm with y'all that I was watching In the Mood for Love and not once during its 98-minute runtime think about the color palette.

But that's the point of this exercise, to explore new ideas, so let's explore it. The first thing I found was that the color was updated from the 2012 version to the 2021 version (both via Criterion). I think I watched the more recent one, with the yellow tinge. I appreciated that someone in those reddit comments said that the yellow one is more accurate to the director's intentions, and I especially appreciated the comment about how the newer one reminds the audience of an old photograph that you'd find in a grandparent's shoebox from way back when. The whole movie is of a specific moment in time, and does feel like we, the audience of the 21st century, are looking back at something from long ago, peering in on a decades-old secret or private moment.

I also read through a few articles. This New Yorker one was particularly nice (you can click the link, but I can't imagine that it works very well on mobile, there was a lot of cool movement on that website when access on the desktop). It spoke mainly to the general aesthetic of the film, both the color and also the style and manner and setting. In the Mood for Love is highly influential in this way, and that article gives a lot of side-by-side comparisons to films that were explicitly influenced by this one.

I don't know if either of these sources speak directly to the "color psychology" that Catherine mentions. I'll be completely honest with you, I am hesitant to adhere to this particular thought process, that certain colors symbolize certain feelings or ideas. I know it's a real thing, and I know that it makes a difference sometimes, I'm just weary of it. I'm talking about something like this, where we the audience can say that there are lots of uses of the color red in the film, and that this red traditionally symbolizes love. I don't believe that's untrue, but I just wonder if that was actually the intention of the filmmaker, or if it's something that we as the audience assign to it.

Like, of course red "symbolizes" love and romance. We see the color everywhere on St. Valentine's Day, for example. But it's a question of chicken-and-egg: do we use red because we feel love and feel compelled to choose red to match that emotion, or are we told that red symbolizes love, and thus are compelled to feel an emotion like love whenever we see red? I think it's relevant to a discussion about In the Mood for Love because 1) red really is present throughout the film (even without thinking about color psychology, I noticed the startling red curtains in the hotel), and 2) the director may have had intentions on invoking certain feelings by choosing certain colors to match with those feelings. Red for love, yellow for nostalgia, green for newness, that kind of thing.

And I of course back wholeheartedly the idea that a director is creating a world that we get to live in for an hour and a half, and that the director is going to be making purposeful decisions, from that macro to the micro, from dialogue to such minor details as what color the curtains should be. All of that makes the film feel that much richer and more important and easier to think about in contexts such as film club discussions and blog posts. I was pulled almost immediately into the world of In the Mood for Love. Just because I wasn't conscious to the decisions like color palette doesn't mean I wasn't subconsciously affected by what those colors were and how they (again, subconsciously) affected how I felt about it in that moment.

If you had asked me what about this film pulled me in so thoroughly before I was asked about color psychology, I would have said that I am fascinated with the ways in which human beings connect and form bonds and examine those bonds in real time and constantly reevaluate what we mean to other people and what other people mean to us. I loved how understated the plot was, how it took me probably a little longer than intended to figure out that these two main characters were connected because their respective spouses were having an affair together. It was an effective film because it didn't feel the need to make it overdramatic. Finding a small spark of connection within the sadness of such a situation was truer to life than any melodrama we would have felt if we had, for example, even seen either spouses face at any point!

(A thought I had about the color stuff in relation to the intriguingly understated plot—I wonder if, like the New Yorker article states, this is one of those movies that requires rewatching. I mean, I know people say that about every movie that's even slightly more complicated than, like, Happy Gilmore, and it's been said throughout this Film Club plenty of times. But my specific thought this time was around wondering who might read such a New Yorker article filled with spoilers about this film. Do people read such articles before watching the film. And, if I were the type of person who could read such spoilers, and then watch the film for the first time, might that first time not allow me more space to think about things such as color palettes? If I'm not trying to keep up with the plot, since I already know it? I'm not going to change my ways because of this thought, but it's a thought were putting out there anyway.)

To me, this felt like a beautiful inverse of one of my favorite movies ever: Brief Encounter. There's the overarching similarity of two people crossing paths and knowing full well in that moment that the paths are not converging but simply crossing. But the difference is the circumstances that bring them together, and the ways that they are kept apart, and how they choose to address that inevitability. I love how both movies have the fucking balls to examine (not "to question," I think that would be overstating it) the idea of monogamy. How there's love in finding your forever person, and then there is a different kind of love in the margins and in the cracks in between, a love that is similarly powerful but a completely separate tone and taste.

All that could be chalked up to "seeing what I want to see," of course. Just like the color palette. But I do want to see it, that's the thing. I really do appreciate the idea that a film is using the sense of sight to its full advantage to move the audience with the emotions it intends to. Color, I can see now, would be an important function of that. Mood lighting too, even though I haven't touched on that yet. I saw the lighting as more indicative of the space that the character inhabit, the crowded apartments versus the quiet moments with just Chan and Chow, the mood lighting reflecting the gentle moments of connection. As with the color, it's not that hard to imagine the director purposefully choose lighting to directly inform what emotions the audience is feeling.

Do I think that these pieces of the film played a significant role? That's hard for me to say, but only due to my own deficiencies when it comes to understanding the art of film, and my lack of confidence. Thinking about it now, though, I can see how such factors lay the framework for an effecting movie about love and one ultra-specific way in which love could find us, wallop us, make us feel pain in its absence. I don't know if color is significant in its role, but everything, color included, certainly added up to me feeling something powerful about In the Mood for Love. Watching this movie felt like unplugging the hole in the wall and listening to the secrets shared within.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We have our Juice discussion on Zoom on 7/22/26 at 9 PM! Followed by a discussion blog post the next day!

Unorthodox Behaviour, Catherine

As a Film Club interloper, I felt a little out of my element with this one. I've never reviewed/analyzed an album like this before, and I was unprepared for JAZZ FUSION with NO LYRICS on my first crack at it, so my mind resorted to making up stories to accompany every track. Forgive me. Here's what I came up with:

• "Nuclear Burn" — Quiet bank heist in a small California town. Everything pulled off seamlessly by a smooth operating bandit, clad in a tan suit and sunglasses. He executes his deed almost gracefully, barely brandishing a weapon. Hurried but calm, he coolly tucks his stash under an arm and rides off into the desert. It's not clear even to him why he does what he does, but it isn't greed. It's innate, the only way of life he's ever known.
• "Euthanasia Waltz" — Life between heists. Scrambling to make a train during rush hour only to have nothing to do at home. Call a woman. No answer. Take a walk. Too quiet. TV? Nothing on. He almost misses the excitement of the commute. Tomorrow he'll try again to feel alive.
• "Born Ugly" — Flashback to the mystery man's youth. Funky. Sleek cars, wide pants, nights out. Blowing all the money he saved at a shitty summer job. Excruciating crush on a coworker. Too much cologne. Wanting to be noticed. A kiss! A rival lover gets jealous. Uh oh, am I just picturing West Side Story? Anyway, it doesn't work out because his dad never lets him borrow his car. He never fully recovers.
• "Smacks of Euphoric Hysteria" — Back to the present. A new heist! And this time he's got a girl with him. She's wilder than he is, bloodthirsty and unpredictable. Shooting at cops. This won't end well, but, god damn she's beautiful. He spins out of control. Fireball in the desert.
• "Unorthodox Behaviour" — Years have passed. He's a corporate man now. At work. New identity, carrying an air of aloof apprehension. He rides the elevator and avoids eye contact. Monotony of office life. Police sirens make him jumpy. He has flashbacks of his old life. Highs and lows. Is that screaming? He misses it desperately.
• "Running on Three" — That's it. One last job. He's getting too old for this and he knows it'll probably kill him but he can't stay away. Dust off the old suit. A little tight, but not bad. Sunglasses cover the crow's feet. He's back. It's not about the money but, hey, that doesn't hurt. The breeze whips his face as he flies down the highway. Is life even worth living unless it feels like you're about to die?
• "Touch Wood" — Deathbed musings of a career criminal. He sees his life in watercolor. Slow and meaningful. Sure, he was bad, but he didn't hurt anyone, right? Except that one cop, but that was her fault. Ultimately his nature gave him so other choice. He'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

2/5 pukes (do we do that here?)

This rating is based purely on preference. It's clearly a polished album by highly skilled musicians and I do not begrudge its critical acclaim whatsoever. But I DO resent it for forcing my simple mind to come up with stupid little plays.

Never Seen It #316: Mad Max

The chain in that blog is high-tensile steel. It'd take you the length of 500 movies you've never seen before to hack through it with this. Now, if you're lucky, you could hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go.

Mad Max

1979

George Miller

Thanks to all those who watched Mad Max and shared their thoughts below! Remember to wear your seatbelts!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Allison

"More Like Mid Max"

Mad Max is a mid-octane tour de farts that begs the question: Is it dystopian or is it Australian?

Little baby antisemite Mel Gibson, still more than 20 years away from calling a lady cop "sugar tits," gives a shockingly flat and boring performance as the bad-assedly named Max Rockatansky. Is this the role that catapults him to stardom? Multiple action franchises and TWO Oscars? He wasn't even that mad.   

Was this a good movie? No. Did I have fun watching it? Mostly no. The last thirty minutes are far and away more interesting than the first sixty, but it didn't make up for the fact that I just didn't care. I did find myself wondering what happens next, but only because I don't understand how this movie turned into a franchise. What did I miss? How much movie time elapses between this and the fucking Thunderdome? 2015's Fury Road fucking rules. But I don't see how these are at all related, let alone in the same cinematic universe.

Two parting thoughts: Is the solution for the male loneliness epidemic roving homoerotic biker gangs? These men are not lonely enough! And finally, everyone saw the baby playing with the gun, right? What the shit was that about?!

1.5 stars, but only for the promise of an eventual Tina Turner 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunny

I was on a plane once, and the guy in the row ahead of me was watching this movie on his laptop. Probably for a blog or something. I watched maybe ten minutes of it, fairly enraptured, before I figured I shouldn't ruin the movie for myself since I can't hear and barely see. But the people sitting next to me were also watching (yes, I was middle seat). Something was that compelling about the movie.

It is a compelling movie. Yet I didn't like it quite as much as I thought I would. It's sort of threadbare, maybe due to the age. Near-apocalypse Australia feels not too different from Australia in my mind today. The kiwi accents and names make 20% of the movie indecipherable. The stunts and effects, being real, feel real, and that's really great. You can tell where they pulled back, but the action scenes are still quite visceral—car flips, squibs, real stunts. The movie killed off people I didn't expect faster than I expected. MASSIVE kudos for keeping it a tight 90. Characters' motivations are pretty unclear, but who cares. All this and more was addressed in Fury Road. Between that and Babe, George Miller can do no wrong. I won't comment on Gibson, but at least his accent is muted and he doesn't say a lot.

3.5/5

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Catherine

This film probably falls into my rating territory of "not mad about it, but not for me." I'm glad I finally saw the original just for context / pop cultural literacy, but I think they've significantly improved upon the source material in recent years.

I did find it interesting how far we begin from the post-apocalyptic decay we see in the newer sequels. I was expecting the same level of chaos and anarchy, but 1979 Mad Max's world is only on the precipice

of collapse. They still bother trying to have cops! Cute!

I feel for Max and his poor wife, she just wants companionship and a pair of pants. And I do love a cartoon-world movie where parents can just leave a baby on the ground with a single toy and go about their day. But, maybe it's because I'm coming fresh off of Escape from New York, I felt like it lacked a little pizzazz. I can't help but see Toecutter and miss Isaac Hayes driving around in a Cadillac with a big-ass chandelier hanging off of it. I'm also surprised at myself for this take, but there's a lack of violence that I felt was... kinda required?? I'm getting bloodthirsty in my old age, I guess.

Finally, I desperately needed Australian-to-American English subtitles for about 30% of the movie, but that could just be me.

Overall, fun watch that I probably won't revisit.

3/5 pukes!

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Sean G.

I didn't know what to expect from the first Mad Max movie of the series. I'd only ever seen a few minutes of Beyond Thunderdome in college. My roommate, Pat, loved it and I caught some of it during one of his many watches. I figured this wouldn't be as unhinged as the antics of Master and Blaster. Before today, the only Mad Max movie I'd seen in full was Mad Max: Fury Road. I also guessed Mad Max wouldn't have the nonstop circus of action that is Fury Road.

I did a quick look on Letterboxd and read a few brief things about some people finding the original Max Mad boring or too slow. Compared to Fury Road, obviously Mad Max is slower. 

But I do not agree with those assessments that it's dull or boring. 

I feel something this movie gets so right is its pacing. The editing was something I took note of within the first few minutes of Mad Max. It's tight as hell, especially in the driving sequences. It's creative—the flash cuts to the bulging eyeballs is uncomfortable and exciting. I loved the overall pace of this movie: thoughtful and quiet during the domestic moments with Max and his family, and supercharged in the crashes, chases and showdowns.

The cinematography is also outstanding. Miller's placement and use of cameras really feels unparalleled and innovative. As seen in Fury Road, he's an obvious master in knowing how to combine fantastic camerawork, quick editing, and kick-ass stunts to create an exhilarating payoff.

I love Mad Max as its own movie. A story of a cop who no longer likes how it feels to be a cop but maybe realizes the world is too dangerous for him to quit. It was dramatic, disturbing, and cool as hell. The villains steal gasoline, but other than that seem to have no real motive other than they're evildoers who don't give a shit about anyone else. They rape, they kill, they kidnap. They DGAF. Watching Max take them out and know they would get theirs was thrilling. 

Loved the score. It felt inspired by the swelling strings of a 1940s American epic, Hitchock's greatest suspense sequences, and the melodrama of something from the 1950s.

I know most people like Road Warrior a lot more than Mad Max—and I might too once I watch it. I've read that people think of Mad Max as a blueprint/training wheels for what George Miller would go on to do in the franchise. That's probably true! Regardless though, as its own film, I think Mad Max is a brutal, fun, quiet-when-it-needs to be, thoughtful, perfectly edited, masterfully shot, beautifully scored piece of art about revenge and people trying to survive as the world goes to shit. I had a blast.

Also, duh, Mel Gibson is not a great guy, obviously. But I have to say he was great in this and it makes sense why he became a superstar. 

4.25 pukes out of 5

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Zach

One thing I'm trying to become more aware of is when I feel compelled to say the phrase "it's not for me." "That girl isn't for me because she trends more introvert." "That music isn't for me because it's too heavy metal-y." "That coffee shop isn't for me because it's too fast-paced." Or: "Mad Max isn't for me because it's too hard to follow and has too much violence."

This was the thought I had when watching the beginning of this movie. I really didn't know what was going on, and the intense violence was too much, and it was too fast-paced, and what was the person saying over the radio in the background and was it important? I relied heavily on the plot section of the movie's Wikipedia page to understand at all what was going on. Without it, I don't think I would have gotten exactly what was happening, and that's frustrating to me, but I'm generally slow when it comes to getting movies. Still, the violence was a lot, and I kind of wanted to turn it off. It felt like a chore to have to get to the end, even though it's only 93 minutes long. I also felt ashamed having to look at the Wikipedia page—why do other people understand what's going on, when I don't? There's no way I would have understood why the biker gang exists (because of the breakdown of law and order due to oil wars and ecocide). 

As the movie went on, though, I found myself inhabiting the space and the energy of the film, more and more. The violent and graphic deaths made sense within the world of the movie, so the charred Goose and the hanging dog were less disturbing. The child being killed was pretty terrible, and I didn't love that, but it did make Max's desire for revenge more stark. It feels like a movie that needs a sequel, although I wonder if a sequel was planned from the beginning (I am guessing the answer is no). 

The movie made me feel things. I felt like I had gone through an intense wringer by the time it was over. I also like that it didn't stretch things out too much; ending with a satisfying explosion of a villain, and then the open road. The Australian landscapes here are pretty cool, too. 

The idea of someone trying to "leave it all behind" and then have danger catch up with him is a scary one. Max can never leave the force, even if he wants a quiet life with his family. Not in the world of the movie. It makes me think about our own lives. Can we ever really fully leave something, even if we want to? I think about generational trauma and how it stays with us, even if we try so hard to heal.

So was it a movie "for me"? Who cares? I want to expand my mind, not limit it to things I already know I like. It was a movie I watched and processed in the way I wanted to right now, and that's what matters.

Mel Gibson has said some pretty terrible things before, in his life, and has physically abused women, so that does leave a bad taste in my mouth. He has made an effort at repentance, though, so there's that. I'm all for redemption and repentance. But I am curious how much his attempt at redemption excuses anti-Semitic comments like "Fucking Jews... the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world... are you a Jew?" and his battery of Oksana Grigorieva in the eyes of Hollywood and in the eyes of anyone who watches his movies.

Rating: 3/5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe

It was to my detriment that I became familiar with this franchise through 2015's Fury Road. It set the bar for insane visuals that its 1979 predecessor could not hope to match. Not with a budget 1/50th the size, anyway. Though who knows if anything would've changed if they had more room to film George Miller's wilder visions back then! It's more my assumption that the series took great creative leaps in the intervening two films, for reasons beyond the budget—as the movies go along, we can assume that they get crazier and crazier, that the creativity keeps one-upping itself.

Because I'll be honest, just based on my experience with the third sequel, I was shocked at how... grounded this seemed? And I understand the use of the word "grounded" is ridiculous when referring to an action movie featuring colorful roving gangs of sadistic murderers in a near-apocalyptic world on the empty highways of Australia, I'm more just painting a comparison between a movie and a sequel to that movie. Mad Max is extremely grounded when compared to Fury Road. It seems within the realm of possibility that the events of Mad Max could indeed unfold "a few years from now." Fury Road is more or less a cartoon come to life.

The contrast, however, is only in terms of scale. As far as "how I watched them" goes, I think they are actually pretty comparable. This is what I mean: there are movies that get by because what you are seeing on screen, and not what you are comprehending from what you see. I watched both of these movies, ten years apart, and both times I didn't really understand exactly what was going on most of the time. But I was never bored, because the visuals were big (again, relative to each movie's respective limitations, or lack thereof), and the scenery and characters and general mise-en-scène were absolutely fascinating. A movie is able to hook you on just that alone, even if the plot is hit or miss.

I think Mad Max was "out there" enough that it avoided the usual pitfalls of apocalyptic movies. Mostly talking about "wow, this is what's happening now, in our world!" which is unfortunately true (trump's gas prices comparable to Mel Gibson's gas prices, and so on), but kinda droll and cliché. I've definitely written that about every film in this Film Club that is even vaguely apocalyptic, and I guess I'm getting tired of it. Tired of what I am doing, to be clear. No criticism of the movie in this regard. I mean, I assume Australia has been this hot and sweaty for a long, long time, so it makes sense that the people down there are going to react extremely when the oil runs low.

If I had to speak to something else that meant something to me during this viewing, I think it would be how fucking bleak it was. I don't think they wanted us to think that the last scene was triumphant, right? Because even though the bad guy probably deserved it, it still felt like an incredibly sad ending. Like maybe Max is finally going all-in, becoming the thing he's been fighting against the whole time. And how about the brutal killing of little Sprog? I wonder how many people watching this are conditioned to think that the cute little toddler is gonna find a way to escape? Count me as one of them. That they went ahead and killed him makes sense for the development (devolving?) of Max, but it doesn't make it any less rough to witness. Were the villains, Toecutter and his crew, too cartoonish? I think sometimes. On the other hand, I think the over-the-top nature of their characters was necessary to undercut the severe pessimism at the heart of the film. Would've been too much otherwise.

If there are any criticisms of Mad Max, they come from expectations not being met. But that's what happens when you watch the third sequel first. I needed more, and I needed less. Apparently the first sequel is also great? Maybe if I manage to cut my ankle off before finishing these 500 movies, I'll check it out.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3.042 pukes out of 5

Rev your engines down below in the comments, let's see what else there is to say about this thing.

(NEXT TIME: Our next already-seen-it pick with Sean G., as we check out Ikiru.)

Never Seen It #311: Escape from New York

In 2026, the blog rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great blog of Puke on Your Birthday becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A list of 500 movies we've never seen before is posted. There are no editors inside the blog, only bloggers and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.

Escape from New York

1981

John Carpenter

Thanks to all those who watched the movie and shared their thoughts! Check 'em out below.

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Stef

I was hooked by the premise of this movie being a dystopian lit junkie, so I was thrilled with this watch. The plot was fun, but even mores o was the setting and practical effects. 

Firstly, the version of NYC presented here is what I believe flashed before the eyes of my suburban mother when I signed the lease on my first city apartment. The burned out buildings, overgrown landscapes, warlords driving disco-themed Cadillacs. Generally, it was just cool to see New York so similarly portrayed to its own reputation as a city in the '70s/'80s. A dystopian setting that's relatively implausible now, but surely could've fooled the suburban moms of this era. 

The effects in this movie were so cool, particularly the miniatures. It's possible that CGI has lowered my bar, but I was so distracted trying to figure out "how did they do that?" that I may have missed some major plot points. I was amazed at the amount of creativity and detail that had to go into some of the shots. And it paid off as far as I'm concerned.

4!!!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bobby M.

I first watched this movie in grad school. I wrote an essay about depictions of urban space in cinema post-urban renewal. This movie was best example of negative urban depictions at the time—NYC, the biggest city in the country, was not only facing bankruptcy, but 2,000 murders a year, and serial arsonists burning down enough housing to displace 250,000 (!!!!) residents. The NYC of today is nothing of the city when this movie was made. (In my self-indulgent grad school essay, I then moved onto how Sex and the City marked an inflection point in depictions of the city, but I'll spare you the details.) In this context, it makes sense that NYC is depicted as a literal prison run by the inmates. And outsiders who didn't understand the nuance of NYC's situation probably agreed with the inference that the city is lawless, anarchic, and dangerous. 

The movie itself is great. A comedy is supposed to make you laugh. A drama is supposed to make you cry. And a movie like this is supposed to make you say "Hell yeah." I said hell yeah a lot while watching this movie. The more you think about the plot, the less sense it makes. So don't think! Just take it for what it is. 

I think the movie shines visually, and is its best feature. I loved the "futuristic" computer graphics, and the style of prisoners in NY. Two things that stuck out to me: the more natural physique of the characters (compared to the 'roided up action stars of today) and practical effects made this movie a great watch. I'm glad I rewatched it.

4/5

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Brittany

My first thoughts were how it is kind of sad that we watch movies that were "new" when we were kids and now they seem like the equivalent to movies from the 1950s when we were kids. So insane how far cinematic effects and technology have come, and absolutely mind blowing how different the graphics are today. Another first thought was... I was immediately on the side of the criminals in the jail, more so than I was on the side of the President and police. No surprise there I guess. 

I have always wanted to watch this movie—I enjoyed it, for what it was. I also found humor in it... like... yeah ok, we're going to give criminals Manhattan? We'd give criminals Alabama or something like that. And the crime rate increasing 400%—clearly some arbitrarily high number that John Carpenter was like, YEAH 400% seems CRAZY, that should do it! I did enjoy the movie's simplicity—how ridiculous it was to handcuff a suitcase containing a single tape cassette to your arm?  I did think the ending had a nice twist and was really cracking up at "destroying the tape cassette."

One negative: I did feel like the relationship and character development were lacking severely, but what can you do? I was really wanting to know what happened to Snake's eye, but this movie just wasn't that deep. I bet Kurt Russell was just like, you know what would be so dope? Me wearing an EYE PATCH! and everyone was like, yesss, great idea! But yeah, I enjoyed it overall. It was an easy watch with not a lot of depth, so not too much emotional investment, which is nice sometimes.

I'll give it a 2.5

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Brianna

Sci-fi is always an interesting genre, somewhat hit or miss for me depending on the movie. Interstellar? Hugest hit. Escape from New York? Unfortunately, it falls into the latter category this time around. So why?

For starters, I found the story kind of lame. On paper, I was intrigued. Manhattan is a prison! The president is kidnapped! Russell Crowe [editor's note: I'm leaving it] wears an eye patch and has a time bomb injected into his neck! But in practice? It fell majorly flat for me. Everything from the world building to the technology was lackluster on the big screen. 

If I hadn't been told that Manhattan was a prison, for example, I don't think I would've picked up on that. There were glimpses of chaos this kind of imprisonment would entail, but nothing ever quite met the intensity and claustrophobia I think one would feel if dropped into it pretty much against your will. 

I think about other older sci-fi movies, like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alien, and am reminded about how interesting the technology looked and behaved. Even decades after those films were made, there is sometimes still futuristic about the way the sets were designed. And, listen, I'm sure it's not easy to imagine what future tech could be, but surely we can do better than a glider landing requiring a grappling hook to get the job done? 

Even the characters were very blah to me. Duke and his chandelier/disco-ball-decorated car aside, I found myself wanting more from the prisoners of the super prison. Like if we're going to say this is some high-techie future, couldn't we play that up more with these guys? Hear me out: what if Duke's gang of criminals were more like the neon gangsters of the Gotham of Batman Forever? Now THAT would've been much more fun than the vaguely homeless looking crew they rolled out instead.

In the end, it certainly wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen, and let's get real, any movie with Harry Dean Stanton is worth the watch for performance alone. But good? Meh. I'd give it 2 out of 5 pukes at best. Maybe Escape from L.A. is better? Someone let me know.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Catherine

I may have endured too much hype and waited too long to dive into this cult classic, OR maybe I was just in a weird mood, but I have to say up top that this one didn't do it for me.

From the jump, the pacing seemed way off. What felt like five straight minutes of credits first thing certainly didn't help, but once we got started, I was expecting nonstop breakneck action, and my man Snake barely broke a sweat. I was bored, plain and simple. And this is coming from someone who could watch Kurt Russell read the phone book. I love him. Isaac Hayes? Sign me up. Harry Dean Stanton?? Huge fan. But it just wasn't for me.

Hey, I've dabbled in theater. I understand at least the very basics of performance. So, at the risk of stepping on some toes, I feel confident in asserting that it probably would've been wise of John Carpenter to suggest Kurt PLEASE... STOP... WHISPERING. I'm not sure who told actors that tough guys should be barely audible, but what if you let the audience in on the secret just this once? To me, the plot felt paper thin and the characters zero dimensional and I wanted so much more.

I know I'm shitting all over this so far, but I should begrudge that I didn't have a bad time watching it, I just thought it would be so much MORE. Snake Plissken has been such a dominant figure in pop culture (and the Brooklyn Halloween parties I've attended) like an elusive legend that I almost felt like I knew him. I was sure that there would be so much more to him. But we got NOTHING. He's a decorated veteran who went bad and robbed the Denver federal reserve... for some reason. That's interesting. Tell me more. What happened? What makes him tick? Can anything make the man crack a smile for the love of God?

I more than respect the idea and the premise, I just wish this movie had turned up the volume in any direction. That being said, I'd probably watch 1981 Kurt run around in an Under Armour tank top for two more hours.

2.85/5 Chandeliered Cadillacs

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunny

SNAKE: Colonel, I'm at the drop site.

COLONEL: What's the situation Snake?

SNAKE: Looks like a single elevator down.

COLONEL: Just as I thought. Snake, the mission is to infiltrate the base at the center of the Escape from New York post and rescue the Blog EDITOR.

SNAKE: The EDITOR is in there?

COLONEL: At 5:55 AM, Michigan Upper Peninsula separatists kidnapped the EDITOR and transported him to the core of the post. We realized something was wrong by 8:02 AM. They're planning to use him as a negotiating chip, but they've threatened to exterminate him if we don't follow their directions. We have to be covert. That's why you're solo on this one Snake, and your gear is POA (procure on arrival).

SNAKE: How'd they find him? I thought the EDITOR went into hiding.

COLONEL: That was the story. Snake, when the government declared Blogging illegal and had all Bloggers systematically exterminated, the official story is the EDITOR found diplomatic immunity in Thailand. The truth is the EDITOR has been working at the Pentagon for years.

SNAKE: What?! But why? What about the government's War On Longform Writing?

COLONEL: Snake, that war's been a smokescreen for their real aims. In 1967, the CIA established operation CHAOS, telling the public they would uncover foreign influence in the country. We now know it was actually experiments into mind control and shortform shit posting.

SNAKE: I thought those experiments were just a rumor.

COLONEL: Were they Snake? Have you ever asked what happened to Borders? Books-a-Million?  

SNAKE: Amazon?

COLONEL: Once the pentagon understood shit posting was more addictive than crack, they knew they could subdue the populace through simple replacement. A Yammer here, a Twitter there. They knew that once things tipped, all they would need is one or two Bloggers producing and cut up their work into bite sized pieces.

SNAKE: But how could they just topple the old Blogging complex?

COLONEL: Simple—disrupt their communities, seed dissention, and eliminate high profile figures. Then the followers were ripe for tweeting. The British didn't have to force Opium on the Chinese, Snake; they just nudged a cart down a hill. The terrorists know the Pentagon is desperate; they probably only have a few days of banked content. If shortform dries up, civil unrest could bubble over.

SNAKE: What do I expect on the inside?

COLONEL: There are gonna be rough spots. The plot doesn't totally make sense, the pacing drags in the middle, and some characters' motivations are obtuse. The whole place feels like its age, which you might find familiar, or off-putting. It's also really, really dark and quiet in some rooms.  

SNAKE: What about the score?

COLONEL: Snake, you've got an amazing score to work with; the master is cooking in there. Russell delivers a simple but satisfying action performance. Supporting characters like Brain and Maggie and Duke and Cabbie are a delight when they show up. The plot, while kinda dumb, is also fun, and fits in the anti-Reagan vibes without being hammy. The whole conceit of the place is cool. You're not going to be burdened by backstories about eye patches or taxi medallions. And obviously the inspirations, Snake: Neuromancer, Metal Gear Solid. It's exactly the sort of movie they used to Blog about.

SNAKE: Got it. Alright, Colonel. I've got the EDITOR's tracker online. His vitals are reading 4/5 pukes. 

COLONEL: One more thing Snake: we need to get the EDITOR out in 22 hour or less. In his cargo pants is the outline for a Blog post that could put an end to the war. It could finally end the center of regressive thought and destroy podcasting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe

Fuck, dude, I love a movie with a crazy premise. Crazy in a good way, I mean. Like the type of movie that when someone asks you "what is it about" you get this smirk on your face because you know that they too are going to find it interesting and perhaps irresistible. "Crime goes up high enough that they turn the entire city of New York into a prison" is just some straight-up great shit. I know I go into these experiences trying to know as little as possible, and I had no fucking clue what Escape from New York was about until I was watching it, but I'm telling you now, if someone had clued me in on the fact that this movie was about New York City as a prison and Kurt Russell trying to escape said prison with the president, then I'd be like, holy shit, when can I press play?

As such, there are no deep themes in Escape from New York, nothing to really ponder about life. It's a popcorn flick. Nothing wrong with pulling some shit out of it based on my own feelings about life and how this popcorn flick might apply, but let's just stop and appreciate for a second the idea that some movies are just meant to be fucking fun. That sometimes it's not deeper than that. I'm actually really glad that coincidence lined up this movie and Face/Off in the same week, since they are both cut from similar cloth. Both just have fucking absurd premises, and both manage to stick the landing in terms of seeing those premises through and making them maximum fun.

My sincere hatred of New York has been well-documented on this blog, and so it tickled me that, in this world, New York is a prison. Perhaps we should view it as a metaphor? Is our real-world 2026 New York City not also a prison of sorts? I'm mostly kidding, especially now that NYC has the country's best mayor, and I'm finding that with every Mamdani headline I see, my warmth and appreciation for the people of New York grows. But yeah, fuck yeah, turn 1980s NYC into a prison, that's extremely appropriate. You know what wouldn't have happened if America had actually gone through with this genius plan? September 11th. That's right, because you left NYC open and free, you caused a terror attack to happen.

Speaking of which, I liked the idea that I was on the side of the terrorists at the beginning of this film. As far as what the rebel hijacker was saying in the intercom on Air Force One, name the lie. We can joke around about a big prison in the country's worst city, but were such a thing to actually happen, it would indeed be fascist, and racist, and deserve to be destroyed. The prison industrial complex has only gotten worse and more bloated and more powerful in the time since this movie was made. I was glad to see that the sequel to this movie had the balls to make the president the bad guy. He is, and probably always will be, so as long as presidents continue to support prisons for profit.

I try not to make a habit of criticizing aspects of movies that were absent, since that misses the point, but I'll say this: the idea of an entire human ecosystem evolving within a city-sized prison was one that intrigued me, and I wanted more of it. We saw a couple weirdo aspects to it, like the musical theater production, and soul legend Isaac Hayes as a self-appointed leader. But that wasn't enough for me. I am intrigued about what else is happening in New York Prison in the 1980s. That could be a whole different movie that I would watch. I almost wish that the sequel had revisited it, instead of moving to Los Angeles.

Wait, now that I'm typing it out... what do you think happened to the non-criminals who lived in New York City when the decision was made to convert it into a prison? Were they displaced? Did they fight back? No mention of any of this in the film. This is why you could never have an Escape from Philadelphia, because no one wants to leave, and we'd fight back to the point that it wouldn't even be worth it for the government to try to imprison us all.

I'm mostly joking. The joke is in service to my original idea that some films just do not require any level of nuanced thinking. When I start speculating on off-screen aspects of the plot, you know I've gone too far. Escape from New York doesn't require any heavy thinking. Just sit back, put your feet up, and enjoy an eye-patched Kurt Russell tote a gun around a dark, trash-filled New York (very accurate description of the city as we know it now), and shoot some bad guys.

Did anyone ever write about Russellmania on this blog? Looks like Bridget mentioned it in her Your Favorite Movie interview. She's referring to the other Sixers Sister, Maeve, who had her 29th birthday party themed as "dress as your favorite Kurt Russell." This was like eight years ago and I had seen way fewer Russell movies at that point, so I don't think many costumes registered with me. I have to assume someone was dressed as Snake Plissken though, right? An eyepatch and leather jacket would have done the trick, that's easy enough for a 20-something who just wants to get drunk as easily as possible. And you know why that would've been a good costume? Because it's that type of movie. You don't have to take your costume at a 29th birthday costume party seriously, and you don't have to take Escape from New York seriously either. In both cases, you're just there to have fun. And in both cases, I had a lot of fun.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3.264 pukes out of 5

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(NEXT TIME: Our second solo outing of the quarter, as we watch Atonement, as chosen by Brianna.)