Never Seen It #320: Gates of Heaven

When I turn my back, I don't know you, not truly, but I can turn my back on my little blog and I know that he's not going to jump on me or bite me. But watching 500 movies I've never seen before can't be that way.

Gates of Heaven

1978

Errol Morris

I am a member of a higher than average number of "clubs" that involve group discussions (only "higher than average" because I assume that the average for the human races hovers somewhere between one and zero), and I think about why that is sometimes. What motivates me to go out to the book club and the film club and chat with people? You can maybe even rope in the propensity to "interview" people to the point I'm trying to make here, the interviewing happening a lot more back in the day but still remaining an important part of my personality, and my career too, now that I think about it. My point is this, though: I think I'm motivated to do all this shit mostly to get to the heart of the human condition. Because I can feel it sometimes, like maybe once per club meeting, just for a moment, that brief flash of inspiration, that we got there, to the deep molten core of this thing we call life. Something that someone says blows me away on an emotional level, something that is so fucking true that I just can't help but marvel at it in that moment. That makes the effort worth it.

The moment that I knew that Errol Morris felt the same way was the monologue by the old lady in the middle of this movie. It's the only possible reason that the camera could've continued to roll through it all, way beyond any semblance of this monologue having anything to do with pet cemeteries anymore. Like when she started ranting about her son hauling sand, I knew that it was something special, and that Errol Morris absolutely fucking knew it too, in that moment. That somehow we—the director, the audience, the old lady, all of us together—were putting our human consciousness together and touching the divine.

Frank, who is the Film Club member who chose Gates of Heaven for his "Seen It Already" pick this quarter, sent me two questions that make me know that he's thinking about this movie in the same way:

1) Do you think it's possible to really capture genuine humanity on camera?

2) Are you as compelled as I am by people treating small everyday things as the most important thing in the world?

The old lady answers question number one beyond any shadow of a doubt, but really, the rest of the movie does almost as good of a job. This documentary is about... hmm, what is it about? Ostensibly, it's about pets and what owners do with their pets after those pets die, and it's about people who care deeply enough about this to design resting places for those pets. But is it really about that? There are some really nice tangents scattered around this beautiful movie. Like the wayward sons of the cemetery owner, one of whom plays music throughout the canyon where the cemetery is located. Or all the thoughts about what happens after we die, with the money line that everyone quotes from this movie about what makes pets move, and how it must be their spirit.

Question two probably speaks more to the heart about my thoughts about pets in general, both in real life and in my reaction to the pet owners in this film. I've traditionally been anti-pet, and have a hard time understanding why people would own flesh-eating monsters dogs at all, but when you boil it down, the inner conflict is probably more that I can't understand why these particular people treat this particularly small everyday thing as the most important thing in the world. I can't understand why you'd keep a dog after, say, they bite your aunt's nose off, ya know? Just bury 'em in the graveyard after that, c'mon.

But when put that way—"isn't it compelling?"—in the context of this beautiful film, I definitely get it. I think it's helpful that there is no narration, so I'm not being told to care about these pets in the same way that their owners are. I think it's also helpful that there aren't too many actual pets featured in Gates of Heaven, just humans (the big exception is the dog toward the beginning, whose owner spends a solid three minutes forcing to "sing," and this is by far the worst three minutes of the film). The salt-of-the-earth human beings that we spend time with throughout the documentary gave me the space to appreciate what they were trying to say about this small, important part of their lives, and I did absolutely get there. The still shots of all the pet graves, and their beautiful little etched sayings (e.g. "I knew love; I had this dog"), sincerely got to me, and choked me up a little.

It's not that I now understood the thing with pets, it's that I continued to understand the way of humans. And Gates of Heaven had a beautifully understated way of showing that genuine humanity. It felt like that moment in book club, when someone says something simple and pure and it just takes my fucking breath away. I love that feeling.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: Our small group discussion turns toward Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino no doubt does something noteworthy, I guess we'll find out!

Never Seen It #306: The Battle of Algiers

It's hard to start a blog. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But, it's only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin. In short, Ali, there's still so many of the 500 movies I've never seen before to watch.

The Battle of Algiers

1966

Gillo Pontecorvo

Thanks to all those who survived the battle and lived to talk about it below.

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

Sean G.

"The army is here for you. Trust in it." No thanks.

This movie reenforces my anti-war beliefs, and angers me that some humans will always want to control other human beings. 

This was a beautiful bummer. I don't know what else I could say about The Battle of Algiers that hasn't been said. The realism and the documentary feel is incredible, and has obviously been inspiring movies since its release to tell stories in this style. 

The camera work is dazzling. Ennio Morricone's score is so great. The pacing and the editing are patient when they need to be and suspenseful and swift when it calls for that. The sequence of the women dressing down to sneak bombs out and blow up the bar and restaurants was totally compelling. 

The violence feels so real and painful. Heartbreaking shots of women, men, and children crying. The poor guy they "interrogate" (torture) at the beginning who gives up the hiding place who we see again will be haunted by these moments as long as he lives. So much senseless violence. Obviously so relevant today and forever more. Now I get why Leo's character in One Battle After Another watches. Does he have the Blu-ray or VHS? Is he just happen to be catching it on TCM? 

I also knew absolutely nothing about France's occupation of Algeria and this conflict and the war. Deserved the legacy it has. 

5/5 pukes

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

Catherine

There's a haunting familiarity to this film, even at 60 years old. Watching bodies pulled from rubble as dazed loved ones look on has become so disturbingly common lately, so much of it could easily pass for footage from today. Roger Ebert mentioned in his review that the movie holds a universal frame of reference and I have to agree.

There are so many hard truths to grapple with in this story. In the face of torture and oppression, you yearn for a perfect protagonist to save everyone—but we don't have a wholly "good" hero to root for. The FLN is content to execute their own ne'er-do-wells to clean up the streets, and they can calmly scope out a café with babies and other innocents and still plant a bomb and walk away. Surely the Algerians still deserve their autonomy free from under the boot of the French government, but the film doesn't hold your hand to tell a perfectly packaged good vs. evil story. It peels back a tattered curtain and offers a glimpse at some uncomfortable realities that can be hard to swallow. What's fair in war? How far is too far in the quest for freedom?

Even the respect the French colonel has for the FLN was unexpected and fascinating juxtaposed with the atrocities carried out by his army. It all seems like a dark game to him, and he admires a worthy adversary.

The film highlighted well how war crimes, civilian casualties, bloodshed, and mass destruction are perceived differently depending on who holds power. When the Algerian rebels attack, it is barbarism. When the French military unleash their bloodshed, it's just plain old war. What can you do?

The propaganda employment was also interesting. French soldiers parade Donkeys though the streets to deliver bread to impoverished children in a show for the UN, as they blast speeches throughout the Casbah assuring the residents that they are the ones who truly care for their wellbeing, not the dastardly FLN. 

At certain points, the film almost felt like a Bond movie, with clandestine meetings, secret notes, trap doors, and over-the-top assassination plots, and I was rapt. And since this movie was released only four years after the war for Algerian independence ended, when everyone's feelings on the subject were surely still extremely raw, that makes its existence even more bold and impressive.

"It's hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But, it's only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin."

This is one of those quotes that I'll probably have to mull over for the rest of my life—just leaving it here for some thought.

Anyway, I think I just saw a masterpiece. 5/5 pukes

~~~~~~~~~~

Frank

I'm currently in an international cinema class, and Film Club lined up perfectly this past month with viewing The Battle of Algiers.

I will be brief in saying that I think this lived up to the hype and there were parts that I think will be seared on my soul. 

Knowing that there were real members of the FLN cast in this is extraordinary to me. I can't get over the fact that this film has been used by both police and terrorist forces as a textbook for how to go about their respective businesses. 

As I enter the final weeks of my film school, I don't think I'm capable of one coherent thought, so here are some strays:

I think that it is fascinating how women are used in this. It struck me that the film spends almost more significant time with the three women bombers as they do with any other "character" in the film. Women are crucial parts of any revolutionary group, and yet I couldn't help but wonder out loud if these women knew the oppressive setbacks that a fanatic theocratic regime would have on their lives after the revolution. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss indeed. 

The French colonel defending himself to the journalists. *how can you call me a fascist? I literally fought with the French Resistance against Nazism* this hit me in two ways:

1) Someone in class said "Fascism is Colonialism when it happens to White People" and I cannot stop thinking of this. 

2) It makes me so angry that someone who fought Nazis couldn't see the hypocrisy. Or maybe even more mad that they can see it and don't care because in war there is just us and them. Freedom bought through blood has its own costs perhaps. 

It struck me that the colonel felt the need to win over a liberal media (albeit a French-bent liberal media, still in accord that France holding onto Algeria as a colony was a divine right). Like he wants the world to agree with him, think he is actually doing something necessary and aligned with French values etc. etc. Just compare that need for (deep ironic quotes) "full transparency" with say a government invading another country that actually has realized they can say or not say whatever they want and no one will really do anything about it. It deeply pained me that somehow our real life villains have somehow gotten more cartoonishly evil. They've figured out public opinion actually doesn't matter as much as we'd like to think. But then again, public opinion actually DID turn in France on Algeria. The government was overturned and Charles DeGalle, ultimate symbol of French Resistance, brought back in charge. So maybe there's still hope. 

The progression of visceral violence builds steadily as the tension boils over into inevitability. In the beginning of the movie, we catch the immediate after of a torture session. When people are shot, it's cartoonishly bloodless. As the movie ramps up, we steadily see more blood. more of the actual torture. more dead children and French Algerian citizens. Until finally we reach the crescendo of the actual Algerian revolution a few years later. 

Something else that someone in my class brought up that I have been digesting: Ali la Pointe was a violent criminal before he was radicalized. Revolutions seem to often be built on the backs of those for which unpleasant means are needed. I wonder if it makes it ultimately a poisoned fruit. But I also have no alternatives against oppression. 

This was such a barrage of sight and sound, I definitely think I will have to revisit it a few more times. 

4.5/5 

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

Joe

A classic in the subgenre of "Wow, this is exactly what's happening in America right now!" This is a subgenre that I have created in my own mind. The subgenre lacks nuance, of course. But what it lacks in nuance, it makes up for in pure spirit. I'm a dummy about the world just like anyone else, but I know that it feels wrong, what's going on around me right now, here in this country, and so it's always pretty fascinating—and perversely comforting, perhaps—to know that we Americans in the 21st century are not unique snowflakes, that this has happened before, that history is cyclical, that there have been other people in the grand story of mankind that have persevered.

Here is the story of the Algerians in the late 1950s and early 1960s that fought the French imperialists for their independence. Some of us have been conditioned, or maybe even feel it within the very depths of our souls, to see the oppressed as the "good guys" and the oppressor as the "bad guys." The Battle of Algiers goes out of its way to make it more complicated than that, and honestly, at the end of the day, it should be. It should be complicated but also not complicated at all. There are subtleties among the binary but ultimately it's a binary. The Algerians were right to want to be free and the French were wrong to do everything they could to prevent that freedom.

It's complicated because the fight for freedom seems to require violence. The one FLN character discusses the idea of terrorism, and how it's necessary at first, but then can't be sustained, and the fight for freedom requires something more than that. It's tough to unilaterally say that the Algerians were completely right if they are killing people with bombs. You can make similar arguments all over the globe in 2026. You can talk about how the U.S. is bombing Iran, and how maybe there are complications in the fact that the Iranian government seems to not treat their own people very kindly either. You can talk about how the Israeli government is slaughtering Palestinians and murdering children and their soldiers are taking gleeful pictures of the Palestinians' suffering, and how maybe there are complications in the fact that the Jewish people who populate Israel have been suffering and oppressed for millennia. There are complications, but those complications do nothing to change the score here of who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed.

It's complicated here in the U.S. right now because not everyone (and in fact, possibly not even a majority of people) supports the government's senseless slaughter of humans overseas and the bombing of children's schools. It's complicated too because a certain subset of the American populace has been somehow conditioned to take the oppressor's side. That seems like a uniquely American thing, but I don't think it actually is. I think that some people are just attracted to power. It's like how people somehow think that Skylar White was the bad guy in Breaking Bad, even though Walter clearly was—Walter has the power, and that's why a certain type of person will exalt him.

Maybe you can watch The Battle of Algiers and think of the French, who hold all the power, as the heroes of this story. Colonel Mathieu's mid-film speech was pretty convincing! The rebels were dangerous, and he was there to protect the people from their own destruction! There's an assumption on his part that the French people are behind him. At one point, he lays it out: there is a conflict because they don't want us to be here, but we want to be here, and so where does it go from here? It takes an extra step, however, for the audience to then ask this question: wait, why do the French forces want to be there so badly? To answer that question, you have to understand what it means to be an oppressor and what it means to be oppressed, which is not a capacity that some human beings have. To not know you are oppressed means that the oppressor is winning.

I was aware of this film's existence prior to the creation of the Film Club movie list in two ways. First was that I'm a big fan of the band Algiers, and it says right there on their Wikipedia page that they named the band after the movie. Their art is also embedded with the same righteous violence that is embodied in the film—Algiers makes punk rock music of the oppressed. Second was that former PoYB film correspondent Fisher made a rare sojourn into classic film to see this one, and had a lot of good things to say. I'm glad to say that he was right on the money in terms of this film speaking to the truth about fascism and that it's important for films like this to raise questions about the subject, if only to allow its audience to answer them. This is not just a good movie, it's an important one.

The way that it goes about making its importance known is itself important, I think. I'm talking about the cinema of the thing, and not just the politics therein. The Battle of Algiers is like a documentary, on purpose. The unseen FLN announcer acts as a narrator, explaining what's going on. It plays out like black-and-white newsreels. It was filmed so soon after the actual battle that there were people who took part in the real-life conflict acting in the film. All this is in service of making the film feel "real," which is integral to its purpose. You wouldn't get the message if it didn't seem real or felt exaggerated. Yes, this is real. Yes, fascism is real. Yes, you are being oppressed right now. Yes, there is something you can do about it.

It took me maybe half the movie to really appreciate what it was trying to do. Thus, the first half was slow for me. But when it sped up, it did so exponentially. The first hour was tough to get through, the next 50 minutes were exciting and I was into it, and the last ten minutes or so found me stunned. I think this probably mirrors how these things happen in real life, too. It happens gradually, and then all at once. The movie even pointed out the quick escalation, how the French quelled the uprising but then over a year later, there was a large and spontaneous uprising in the street, so strong that independence was won soon thereafter. The Battle of Algiers made me wonder if we'll ever see something like that in the U.S. Maybe we already did in Minneapolis. Maybe we never will, with half the nation licking cops' boots and a government who is more than willing to murder its own citizens if they're on the wrong side of the political divide.

I appreciated the fact that this movie has been used as a "training documentary" for organizations like the IRA and the Black Panters, re: urban terrorism in the fight for independence and freedom, and I also appreciated the fact that the director was quick to say that it wasn't that simple. Pontecorvo was correct to paint the theme of The Battle of Algiers more broadly, that it was more about the fragility of the human existence, and that there needs to burn within us a sense of justice in order for us as a species to survive. You see America crumbling because an agent of the state murders a mom in her car in cold blood and half the country defends the murderer. Something about The Battle of Algiers needs to speak to all of us in order to survive.

When I watch this film, and films like it, I find hope. I was thinking about hope as I considered the music of The Battle of Algiers. There is a musical motif that comes up again and again, and I'll admit, it's not very melodic. It sounds more like a broken car engine, loud and noisy. It's rhythmic, a loud clanking, in 4/4 time. I think it's supposed to sound like a beating heart, and I think that heart belongs to the human race. There is hope in the fact that the rhythm appears again and again in the film, that it never stops until the credits roll. The hope is that it never stops for any of us, that the heartbeat of the human race can continue, on and on, past any atrocity that might befall upon us by our oppressor.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~~

GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 4.75 pukes out of 5

Meet us in the secret comment section behind the false wall.

(NEXT TIME: We take the battle of the human spirit to the parking lot, in 2024's Rap World.)

Never Seen It #290: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

You can check your blog all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don't watch 400 movies you've never seen before. You never know what it might be attached to.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

1984

W. D. Richter

Grab your oscillation overthruster, it's Bonzai time. Let's see what everybody thought of this.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank

"What does that look like to you?"

".....that's your hand, Buckaroo."

Why did I like this so much? The question I kept asking myself is why does this work for me where Howard the Duck or Dick Tracy didn't? I think it shows that the line between crap and camp is razor thin, and I THINK relies on a couple things:

Pitch-perfect casting that understands the assignment. Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, John Lithgow, Dan Hedaya, just a murderers' row of rattling off insane or silly technobabble monologues with total commitment, and all made me smile wide in this. And Peter Weller. Man, between this and RoboCop, he might have the belt of overdry acting on purpose. Every time Buckaroo had to say something like "pure evil, lectoid invaders from the eighth dimension, get them!" I hoot and hollered. 

It doesn't take itself seriously, but it also has genuine affection for itself. This movie is clearly taking the piss out of how serious a Star Wars or Star Trek takes itself. It's clearly taking the piss out of '80s movies styles. But it also loves those things? And loves 1930s space fantasy serials and comic books. Where a Dick Tracy captured the look, this captures the joy, with a big wink. It made so much sense to me when I found out the writer of this also wrote Big Trouble in Little China, which I love and also is super aware of how stupid this all is ("Buckaroo, I've got the President on the line, he wants to know if everything is alright with the alien space cloud or if he should just go ahead and destroy Russia").

My gripes: Peter Weller is too 100% white to be half Japanese. I get that that's the joke, but it still gave me the ick. And my other gripe is my personal pet peeve when movie musicians are supposed to be the best and then the music stinks. Dewey Cox proves the music can still be good even when you're parodying a thing!! 

Anyway, it was quirky and weird and probably a cocaine-fueled fever dream and I loved it.

4 out of 5 stars 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Catherine

I'm glad I happened to watch this one with my boyfriend—henceforth known as Ian—who highlighted some pivotal moments ("this rules!"), and pointed out fun things I definitely would have missed ("Is that a flux capacitor?"), because I fear without him, this entire review would have been something along the lines of: THIS STINKS, NEXT!

Buckaroo Banzai doesn't stink, though. Not completely. It's tempting to write it off as a corny Mystery Science Theater-level B-movie, but it's way too self-aware, and I appreciated the humor and the limitless confidence it took to make a film that covers roughly 100 genres and doesn't stick to any of them.

It's laugh-out-loud funny, and I could watch John Lithgow chewing the scenery and screaming Bigboote (almost) all day.

Sadly, I found it too chaotic and confusing to fully enjoy myself. The president, suspended upside down in his hamster wheel, summed up my thoughts perfectly when he said, "Lectroids? Planet Ten? Nuclear extortion? A GIRL NAMED JOHN??"

"Holy shit, it's Mike from Breaking Bad!" —Me & Ian

Maybe I'll be diplomatic and just say it's not for me. I do have an extreme prejudice against the '80s aesthetic that I'm trying to work on, but huge hair, drab gray color palettes, and overused synth music always throws my attention span out the window.

This movie feels like a low budget sci-fi romp made by a bunch of scrappy dreamers, which really enhances the charm, but Wikipedia informs me this was a $17-million-dollar (that's about $300000 billion in 2026 money) endeavor from seasoned filmmakers distributed by 20th Century Fox, and I just cannot abide. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

At certain points, it seems like Buckaroo Banzai is daring you to understand what the fuck is going on, and I can see how some people might get a kick out of that, but I'm a beginning-middle-end kinda gal, and I've been too spoiled by straightforward narrative structure to go back now. All that said, I recommend this as a two-person+ viewing experience to laugh at the absurdity, because absolutely no one will believe what goes on in this kaleidoscopic nightmare unless they see it with their own eyes.

2/5 pukes

~~~~~~~~~~~

Allison

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a campy, irreverent sci-fi romp that could have been America's answer to Doctor Who or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy if only the studio hadn't fumbled the ball so hard. It had everything going for it: a stacked cast, multiple opportunities for spin-offs and merchandise tie-ins, plus a theme song that I can't get out of my head. So, what went wrong? To start, the plot is as unpredictable as it is incomprehensible. The movie can't strike a balance between excessively explaining what's happening and waving away other plot devices as "eh, it's something galactic, move past it."

A brief exchange between New Jersey and Reno (two names that needed punch-ups) highlights the movie's dismissive tone:

New Jersey: "Why is there a watermelon there?"

Reno: "I'll explain later."

Of course, he doesn't because the watermelon doesn't matter.

Then there's a big glaring issue: Peter Weller isn't a leading man. His performance is too flat, too one-note, to portray Buckaroo Banzai as this badass multihyphenate. He can't sell the science, he can't sell the coolness, he can't sell the overt nods to Japanese culture. And he sure as hell can't sell the romance. The love story is shoehorned so clumsily into the plot without any regard to character development or chemistry. ("You're my presumed dead wife's long-lost identical twin sister. Move past it. Let's smooch!")

All that said, I had a great time watching. Sure, I was baffled by a lot of it, but it's silly and goofy, and the supporting cast carries the film. I'm not always tickled by Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum, but this role did it for me. John Lithgow is fully committed to an insane Italian accent. Clancy Brown is... hot? Move past it. Christopher Lloyd (one year away from an iconic role in a sci-fi premise that actually works) gives a surprisingly subdued performance; of course, he's in full alien prosthetics for most of it, so I forgot it was him a few times. But during the film's climax, he throws up an aggressive middle finger behind John Lithgow's back, which caught me so off guard, I doubled over with laughter. And, sure, let's throw Yakov Smirnoff in the mix so we can't possibly forget that it's the '80s. Speaking of the '80s, that club scene could have gone on forever. I needed so much more music from Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers (is this a problematic band name? I don't know, move past it!). When Penny, sobbing and singing along, brings the gun to her head—I've never laughed harder at a thwarted suicide attempt. I'll be thinking about that for a long time.

In closing, Doctor Who? More like Doctor What the Fuck.

3.5/5 stars, but the intergalactic kind

~~~~~~~~~~~

Joe

Sometimes, the desire to know film feels like a heavy albatross hanging around my neck. I didn't like this movie. At times, I hated it. And yet, I felt this nagging sense that I was missing something. Even if I wasn't actually missing anything, even if this actually is a brazenly nonsensical movie, designed to confuse instead of engage, even if that's true, I still feel the pull toward optimism. A jealousy, perhaps, of those who are able to view such garbage and see gold. I want to feel that way too! It would be so much easier to watch Buckaroo Bonzai and say this sucks and move on. I wish I could sit here and use the requisite 1000 words to list everything I hated about it and say "this is the movie's fault!" and then forget about it forever.

But I can't do that. It bothers me when people do that, I don't understand that human tendency to think that way. The theory has been repeated enough on this blog that it deserves official naming today—the Everything Everywhere Butch (EEB) Theory, after the idea that my father-in-law was excessive dismissive of Everything Everywhere All at Once, simply because he did not understand it. The EEB theory states that if you do not understand a film, then that is your fault, not the film's fault. For the vast majority of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, I did not understand it. This is my fault. This theory is a heavy, heavy burden. It means that the remaining few paragraphs of this write-up will probably read as positive. That's because it's interesting to me to consider the idea that a bad movie is actually good. It does not actually mean that I thought it was good. The grade at the bottom will hopefully reflect that. I am simply enamored with the very existence of a person or people who watch this shit and think, this is good! And such an idea really does soften the blow for me, the blow of having watched a bad movie.

I think this is a good movie to test the EEB theory because I believe that a lot of it doesn't make sense on purpose. Or, at the very least, it is very obtuse on purpose, and purposefully goes out of its way to not explain anything beyond an opening crawl of text that gives background to the character of Buckaroo Bonzai. My assumption, going into this thing, was that this was an homage to old comic books or something, Buckaroo Bonzai being a sci-fi cult figure from the '60s or '70s that some fanatic filmmaker is lovingly adapting for the big screen. Something like Dick Tracy, right? But as it turns out, this is not the case! Buckaroo Bonzai is totally homegrown! The sense that I got that there is a story before this movie and after this movie is true, but not in other media. Instead, the story outside of the edges of the frame lives entirely in the fucked-up mind of the scriptwriter, and in the dozens of discarded drafts for other Buckaroo Bonzai movies stuffed into the sock drawer of his bedroom dresser. The film, then, is audacious in the way that none of the audience members could possibly be familiar with this character or this story, and yet it plows ahead as if you were anyway.

I also thought that the tone was inconsistent, to its detriment, but I can understand why people appreciated it. I honestly do think that the film believed it was being subversive by inserting humor into otherwise hard sci-fi proceedings, and by inserting impenetrable jargon into an otherwise lighthearted adventure film. To my eyes and ears, however, the jargon overshadowed everything. I couldn't get past it. I thought there were some moments when the sense of humor peeked through (mainly, the gag about Orson Welles, and the idea that the U.S. President had a "short form" declaration of war). But it was surrounded by so much fucking nonsense gobbledygook that I almost wouldn't have noticed.

So I have this other theory called the Tár theory, and it applies to both movies and life. It's named for the opening scene in Tár, in which Cate Blanchett's character talks for like five minutes straight about conducting music. I have no fucking idea what she's talking about, but I loved listening. I was thinking about the theory the other night when I was privy to a few of my friends talking lovingly about weed and the ways in which they smoke it. There were so many terms being thrown around that I just literally had never heard before, but man, it was so cool listening in. I just like hearing people being passionate about something, ya know? But the theory doesn't apply to something like Buckaroo Bonzai. Yes, it's 100-plus minutes of characters saying words who meanings I would have no reason to know, but there's no passion. The sci-fi jargon is, to these characters and the world they live in, mundane. It's kind of funny that Christopher Lloyd is in this film, since his Dr. Emmett Brown showed how to do it the very next year, yelling about a "flux capacitor," something that I would have no interest in knowing about if Doc didn't holler passionately about it!

It wasn't just the verbiage, though. Just the overall feel was off. Depending on how you think about that kind of thing, maybe that's a good thing. If it's off then it's like nothing you've ever seen before. I could maybe imagine being a pre-teen and coming across this one late at night and having my mind blown that a film could even do this, just throw a bunch of shit on the screen and pretend like you should know it even though there's no way you could. There are overt efforts to make things weirder than usually, like the conch shell spacecrafts or the insane cast of characters with no depth or the fact that Buckaroo Bonzai isn't just a suave doctor scientist action hero but is also in a ROCK BAND. This is an '80s thing, right? That characters must be in rock bands? Felt very Howard the Duck to me. Hey, at least rock music is a language that is accessible to me, more so than a frothing-at-the-mouth John Lithgow gibbering about parallel dimensions.

See how hard I'm working here? To understand a movie that never asked to be understood? That I'm hanging onto a scene that takes place at a bar featuring rock music, a scene that even the characters in the scene itself were quick to point out how weird it was? I don't think it actually matters, to understand something, but in this context, in a blog post about a movie, it's important to me. Either I understand it and I like it or I don't understand it and sweat it out trying to understand. Under no circumstances will I not understand and then use that lack of understand as the reason for criticism. But I wish I could. It would be a lot easier.

It's funny, because I'd like to think there was a brief moment at the end where it started to click for me. It didn't, but the moment made me believe that it could click, if I tried a little harder. It was the end credits. They were cool! Probably because of the music again, I love that whack-ass '80s goofy shit. But also because I liked all the weirdos walking around to the rhythm of that song. I think maybe you could view this as a thesis statement, how Buckaroo Bonzai isn't a person but an ideal, how his desire to do good in this world attracts people and support. But then also, it was like, who the fuck is that guy to Buckaroo's left? Some fucking dork-ass weirdo with toe-separator shoes? I've literally never seen this guy before. Was he in this movie? Did he have speaking lines? Okay, never mind, this movie is stupid. I don't get it. Where you go, there you are, and I am here, head in my hands, perplexed and lost.

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~~

GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 2.75 pukes out of 5

See you in the 8th dimension (the comment section).

(NEXT TIME: Another small group takes on The Amityville Horror on Thursday, see ya then!)

Monday Morning Mixtape 052: R.I.P. Rob Reiner

Welcome to Monday Morning Mixtape, a PoYB Contributor-curated playlist of songs, made just for you at the start of each week.

"R.I.P. Rob Reiner"

In honor of our fallen Meathead, we're looking for parodies, satires, jokes, or otherwise silly songs

chosen by Sam

Spotify

YouTube

"Big Bottoms" by Spinal Tap

from This Is Spinal Tap (soundtrack), 1984

I don't know if this is my favorite Spinal Tap song, but it's the one that gets stuck in my head the most. Rob Reiner has a songwriting credit on every single song in the original soundtrack. That's pretty impressive for a person who doesn't perform any of the songs. As I'll highlight in a different post, I don't think this is my favorite Christopher Guest movie, and that might be because it's really a Rob Reiner movie. But I have to hand it to him for really pushing the bounds on parody in film, if not in music.  —Sam

"Gimme Some Money" by Spinal Tap
from This Is Spinal Tap (soundtrack), 1984

You could pick "Big Bottoms" and you wouldn't be wrong, but for my money, Spinal Tap's first hit as a British Invasion band can't be topped. Reiner brought us spontaneously exploding drummers, "shit sandwich" reviews, and, maybe most importantly, brought Guest and McKean together and taught them they could essentially improvise through a movie, leading to future collaborations in Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. —Frank


"Hell Hole" by Spinal Tap

from This Is Spinal Tap (soundtrack), 1984

Watching Spinal Tap in high school was revelatory. Being late to pop culture, I hadn't seen any of the Christopher Guest movies, or really any great parodies, and it just immediately expanded the landscape. A key ingredient for a good parody is that the actual material within is catchy/fun on it's own rather than just in jest (see also: Popstar, Walk Hard, Nashville).  —Sunny

"Aleph Bet Gimmel" by Shlock Rock

from Bring Back That Shabbos Feeling, 1993

Shlock Rock was the band most played in my parents car on cassette tapes growing up. A band that covered famous songs with jokey Jewish lyrics. Peak nerdy '90s, but the source of lots of nostalgia for me. My eighth birthday party was at a Shlock Rock concert at my synagogue. This song imitates what Hebrew language class was like for us in school growing up ("aleph bet gimmel" being the first three letters of the Hebrew language). Here we have a Michael Jackson cover. This is a song I associate a bit with going to baseball games in the '90s, as it was played between innings (or was it the tweety bird song? Maybe it was that one). This one brings me back.  —Zach

"Nobody" by Trout Fishing in America
from Big Trouble, 1991

I didn't grow up with Trout Fishing in America. My parents were lame B101 parents, not cool XPN Kids Corner parents. My dad would put on Sundays with Sinatra sometimes, or Car Talk. Anyway, I didn't discover this song until I met my wife. It's great. So fun to sing. And a great talking point when toddlers are trying to wrap their heads around identities and songs with play on words break their brains.  —Frank


"The Good Book Song" by the New Main Street Singers
from A Mighty Wind: The Album, 2003

A Mighty Wind just nails folk music so perfectly. The parody is so good that it is almost in distinguishable from this particular era's folk music. It probably fails because a song like this is a little too clever, but it doesn't prevent me from enjoying it all the more.  —Sam

"Born to Add" by Bruce Stringbean and the S. Street Band
from Born to Add, 1983

I will admit that this is probably not the mixtape for me. Something holds me back, man. These parody songs. I can't do it. Even if the parody is done well. Even if the parody is accurate. It's not that I don't do silly songs. I can appreciate a catchy song, no matter its intended audience. I also don't want to say that I think I'm "too cool" for these types of songs, because that's not accurate. I'm not cool, man. But I think that I just have a specific sense of humor, and Music that is intentionally designed to be a joke is just not aligned with my sense of humor. That's the best way I can describe it, without being an asshole. I remain committed to encouraging people to find their lane when it comes to music, and if that means listen to parody music, then so be it. Also, my feelings are way more nuanced than anything I've written in this blurb so far, but I don't have time for a ten-paragraph blurb today, so instead, you get a Sesame Street parody that I really like.  —Joe

"Dracula's Lament" by Peter Bretter (played by Jason Segel)
from Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Original Soundtrack, 2008

(not available on Spotify!!)

What Garden State felt like when I was fourteen, Forgetting Sarah Marshall felt like when I was eighteen. I'm not sure what I mean by that, other than both films felt incredibly formative and important to my personality, I lowkey felt ashamed to admit I loved them, and had kind of faded from my mind within ten years. By the time (500) Days of Summer came out the next year, the spell of "Sad Sack obsessed with Manic Pixie Dream Girl" films had lost its hold on me, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall still makes me laugh, and the Dracula puppet play led Segel to getting the Muppets movie greenlit. I will let you know when the Muppets are no longer a part of my personality.  —Frank


"Lemon Pound Cake" by Afroman

from Lemon Pound Cake, 2022

I don't think that you need to like a song to appreciate what it's trying to do. And I don't think just because a song is a lazy parody means it can't also contain a good message. Do we need Afroman parodying "Under the Boardwalk"? Probably not. Is it a stretch to say that some asshole sheriff was actually distracted by the pound cake on Afroman's kitchen counter? Probably! But ACAB, and if doing a parody of "Under the Boardwalk" is what it's going to take to get under some smug fuck cop's skin, then I welcome it. And it worked! Little baby pussy-ass cop tried to sue Afroman! What an asshole!  —Joe 

George's answering machine message (parody of "Theme from The Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not)"), recorded by George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander)
from Seinfeld, S08E15, "The Susie," 1997
(only available in instrumental form on Spotify!!!)

Rob Reiner greenlit Seinfeld. One of the best things about the old music sharing sites like Napster was downloading small snippets like the George's Answering Machine bit or "It's all coming up Millhouse," and throwing it on mix CDs you make someone as interstitials between songs like you are a morning zoo DJ. People love that, it personalizes it. Girls love... you know... my lack of girlfriend situation in high school... oh no... oh god... was this not cool?  —Frank


"Stand by Me" by Ben E. King

from Don't Play That Song!, 1962

I don't think the movie and this song have anything to do with each other. It's a common enough phrase after all. But the movie's good and the song's good, so here we go. When I first heard Stand by Me was a Stephen King book, I thought it would be horror, then I heard it was directed by Reiner and thought it would be comedy. Turns out it's neither, really.  —Sunny

"Silly Love Songs" by Wings
from Wings at the Speed of Sound, 1976

It's a parody if you squint. McCartney wrote this song because of a constant criticism that he was only good at writing "silly love songs." There's only two ways to address that sort of criticism. You write something that is the opposite of a silly love song, or you write something that is a hyperbolic example of a silly love song. And he had already written "Helter Skelter," so in all honesty, in 1976, he only had one option left. There was a time when I was too young to hear "Silly Love Songs" as anything other than a silly love song. We're all born stupid, and thankfully, not all of us die that way too.  —Joe


"Angry White Boy Polka" by "Weird Al" Yankovic

from Poodle Hat, 2003

My brother memorized this song by Weird Al, every word. And it's hilarious, honestly. No one is like Weird Al. And I think Weird Al is a blog favorite, no? What if all the blog favorites got together for a fundraising concert? HAIM, Weird Al, and the National sharing the same stage. I'd travel thousands of miles to see it. Weird Al's series of polka songs is one of his signature achievements.  —Zach

"Jellyman Kelly" by James Taylor ft. Howard Johnson and kids

from Sesame Street, S14E1800, 1983

I did grow up with this song from a Sesame Street Silly Songs VHS. The segment is top tier. The tuba, the kids, the diddy. I love little kids suddenly getting very loud when it gets to a point in the song they can remember. I think my wife hates not much more than me screaming along with the kids "OOOOO JELLY COME HOME JELLY KELLY COME HOME JELLY KELLY COME" I've got bad news for her, my kids have inherited my troll gene.  —Frank


"Steve's Lava Chicken" by Minecraft Steve (played by Jack Black)
from A Minecraft Movie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2025

This is a shoutout to my kids, who love this stupid little song. There's an extended version out there, but it's some lazy shit. "Steve's Lava Chicken" is not a great song, but it's a song that could be great if it was tastefully extended with an extra verse or something. Instead, if you come across the extended version, you'll basically hear the same song twice, with some movie quote samples in the middle. I mean, let's not get carried away here—no one is expecting anything to do with A Minecraft Movie to be artful. I'm just saying it's a missed opportunity, especially if there are bloggers on a blog in the year 2026 who are willing to give an opening to a sincere appreciation of music from this soundtrack. I can't do that now, though, because this is some tossed-off bullshit. Fun, though, if you ask the kids.  —Joe


"Dream of the '90s" from Portlandia

S01E01, "Farm," 2011

(not on Spotify!!)

The opening sketch for the first episode of my favorite show. It reads like a mission statement for an era that's gone—the Obama-era 2010s—where things were just a little more simple, where you could make fun of vegans and hipsters and call it a day. Now we've gotten way too intense. Lots of people say they don't like Portlandia, but when you mention specific sketches to them, they always, always say "oh yeah, that is funny." So I think everyone likes this show, even though there's something in it that makes people say they don't like it.  —Zach

"I Lost on Jeopardy" by "Weird Al" Yankovic
from "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D, 1984

This happens a lot, when songs are sampled, but I don't know it's a sample, and then I'm blown away to find out it's not an original song. Best example will always be Will Smith's "Men in Black" and the shock of hearing "Forget Me Nots." Anyway, even though I know Weird Al almost EXCLUSIVELY does parody covers, you could still blow me over with a feather the first time I heard "Jeopardy" by the Greg Kiln Band. And you know what? Al's is better.  —Frank

"Abracadabralifornia" by Jon Daly

a single, 2014

(not on Spotify!!)

Is it worth the mental bandwidth to make Anthony Kiedis feel stupid? I have a more or less neutral opinion of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and their impact on western civilization hasn't harmed anyone. I don't think the main players in the band are bad people, though many in the group have struggled with substance abuse. Still, they are so silly and so successful that is appropriate to take the piss out of them a little bit.  —Sam

"Let's Go to the Mall" by Robin Sparkles (performed by Cobie Smulders)
from How I Met Your Music (Original Songs from the Hit Series How I Met Your Mother), 2012

I really thought Jason Segel was the bee's knees in the early 2010s. Muppets, I Love You, Man, HIMYM, aforestated Sarah Marshall. I never finished HIMYM, because it was the show that I watched with my college girlfriend, and then it made me sad after she broke up with me, and by the time I was no longer sad to watch, I had lost interest. Seven seasons and no mother found for me! "You just got slapped" and "Nothing suits me like a suit" get honorable mentions, but Sparkles brings home the mixtape gold.  —Frank

I can't say "you should read my blog post about this" in real life, because that's how you earn wedgies. But there's been a non-zero number of times in the past ten years when people have tried to talk shit on How I Met Your Mother, and for the last three years, there's been a blog post just sitting there, waiting to be read by all naysayers. What does a guy need to do to get his niche pop culture theories out there into the universe? Actually, I was thinking about this the other day...

...when Pam sent me a link to an Instagram reel (I had to turn on my data plan briefly to watch it, and there is not a single person on earth I would do this for other than Pam, so don't fucking send me Instagram links please) that featured "five things you didn't know about Muppet Christmas Carol." (I knew two of them already.) My first thought, of course, was "I fucking love this fucking movie." My second thought was, "why am I watching some pudgy dork talk to me about one of my favorite movies?" This could've been a blog post, these five facts I allegedly didn't know. But instead, it was a video, with film clips, and also some dork sitting in front of those clips, talking directly to the camera. Why was this man here? I read it as vanity, and I don't like it. But I also wonder if that is just how it's done these days. If I read my HIMYM blog post out loud in front of a camera, and behind me were clips of Ted Mosby and Robin Scherbatsky, would more people know how I felt? Is this the price that people pay so that others know one's truth?????  —Joe

"Muffin Top" by Jenna Maroney (performed by Jane Krakowski)
from 30 Rock Original Television Soundtrack, 2010

My muffin top is all that, whole grain low fat, I know you want a piece of that, but I just wanna dance! Every 30 Rock song is a bop.  —Frank

"I Think I'm a Clone Now" by "Weird Al" Yankovic
from Even Worse, 1988

My childhood hero maybe owes the biggest debt to Reiner and Spinal Tap, bringing song comedy into the mainstream and out of the Dr. Demento / "Purple People Eater" underground radio world. There were so many Al songs to pick, but this was track 1 on the Weird Al CD my dad burned for me when I was ten, instead of forking the money over for the new Running with Scissors album that I had asked for. My dad hasn't always nailed or understood my vibes, but man, am I grateful he guessed right on this. I don't know why then, and I don't really know now, but "just a test tube and a womb with a view" made me cackle while singing along.  —Frank


"(I'm) Like a Rolling Stone" by Titus Andronicus

from A Productive Cough, 2018

This probably doesn't deserve to be on this mixtape, but its inclusion is my dogwhistle for my discomfort engaging with the music on this mixtape in toto. It's a cover, but not a direct one. The POV is shifted from second-person (in the original Dylan version) to first-person, in an attempt at humility, I guess? Titus Andronicus is all about that shit, the constant self-evaluation and constant self-flagellation, and that's why I love this band. The song even dips into sincere parody eventually, when Stickles stops talking about himself as the titular rolling stone, and instead starts naming members of the band the Rolling Stones ("And don't forget Lisa Fischer!"). Is this silly? I don't know. I think it's silly. I laughed. But I understand that maybe what I'm laughing at is not necessary what other people are laughing at.  —Joe


"My Ding-a-Ling" by Chuck Berry

from The London Chuck Berry Sessions, 1972

The amount of mainstream depravity that used to exist is funny to me. Are we as a society beyond the nonsense of Porky's or American Pie? Is that better or worse? Is there any space for a song like this today? If not, is there a nostalgia or some sort of internet group that wants to reinstate that's nonsense? Nothing in the song is as good as any Cryptkeeper Christmas song.  —Sam

"Never Did No Wanderin'" by the Folksmen
from A Mighty Wind: The Album, 2003

Bringing the members of the Tap together again as the Folksmen in Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind is infuriatingly good. I don't even think these songs are funny, I genuinely think the entire album is good. The trick to satire bands or parody bands is you actually have to care and be good and treat it with respect in order for it to work. Like, you can't pretend to play the instruments, you know? It might seem obvious, but it dawned on me when I saw Weird Al in concert. Like, it's a full band that is bringing it every night the same way a "real" band would.  —Frank

NEXT WEEK: "Auld Lang Syne" — Songs whose titles begin with any of the following words: "old" (auld), "long" (lang), or "since" (syne) (chosen by Joe)

Never Seen It #279: To Have and Have Not

You know you don't have to act with me, blog. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything, you don't have to watch 400 movies I've never seen before. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, blog? You just put your lips together and... blow.

To Have and Have Not

1944

Howard Hawks

Thanks for Group G for their takes on this classic film. Check 'em out below!

~~~~~~~~~~

Frank

I hate going into this with only vaguely remembering this movie billed as "not-as-good Casablanca" and then thinking... it's not-as-good Casablanca. 

Read an anecdote that Howard Hawks and Ernest Hemingway were *i don't remember what they were doing, probably a pullup contest while slapping each other's bellies* and Hawks bet Hemingway that he could successfully adapt Hemingway's least successful novel. If I were Hemingway and I saw the final picture and saw that Hawks only took the first fifteen minutes of my book and then drastically changed the rest of the plot I WOULD NOT PAY UP, that is TOO LOOSE an interpretation of ADAPTATION.

Pretty crazy that William Faulkner worked on this script too. I hope its just the "put your lips together and blow" line. I really hope it's not the "bit by a dead bee," a question that seems like it's going to be thematically relevant, and then is just not.

It's undeniable why this movie has stood the test of time, though, why it's even worth mentioning: Lauren Bacall. She is a capital-M movie star right out of the gate. I know that this is true because her character is completely superfluous to the plot of the movie, and affects things in less ways than Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But every interaction she has with Bogey is pure dynamite. She is a so-so to maybe lousy singer, and I was completely captivated by her. Also, as a non-smoker, her smoking in this convinced me that smoking is actually cool and all the cool kids are doing it. This movie should be about her and her mysterious past and her con artist ways and Bogey trying to figure out if he's getting conned and did she sell out Walter Brennan or something? 

I really liked the first part of this movie, by the way, so credit to Hemingway I guess. The middle gets a little boring for me, I thought the scene of smuggling the Resistance couple took FOREVER. But I can forgive that for them just liking having Walter Brennan / Humphrey Bogart moments.  I just don't understand the ending, I feel like the movie sets up all this tension of "will they get out of Martinique" and "will Eddie crack under withdraw" and "will the mysterious wife of the French Resistance actually be a spy." The movie set up a lot of dominoes and then kind of just shrugs "eh it all works out, just like Casablanca remember?? Also remember the piano player in Casablanca, we have one of those too! Money please!"

I think I'm just more frustrated than I would have been otherwise because I love Humphrey Bogart and I love Lauren Bacall and it is really something to see them together for the first time on screen, and it lives up to the hype, and there is a good movie somewhere in here, but they just kind of botched it, which to me hurts worse than when a movie just outright stinks. 

The damn dead bee bit me.

2 out of 5 pukes

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

Joe

I think about movies that I've seen before I've gotten "locked in." I don't know when I locked into the art of film, but I suppose it was in the past three years or so. The point where it finally turned and I was able to at least take a stab at the "themes" of a movie, instead of focusing on flaws and being confused and on my best days just going along for the ride. That's how it was for most of my life, and then it changed, through perseverance—i.e. just watching a shit ton of movies—and now I am at least interested in thinking about the What It All Means. Even if I'm wrong, I can feel it as the credits roll, I can feel something. The only flaw in the plan is that I don't really have time to go back and rewatch much of anything, and so there are so many films stuck in purgatory in my mind, e.g. I saw Citizen Kane when I didn't know fuckall about basically anything, and it's forever on a "seen it!" list, but at what cost, etc.

Bringing that up to say that, yes, of course I've seen Casablanca. It was a big fucking deal on the blog. But that was almost five years ago now. That was before I knew what the fuck I was doing. Okay, fine, I still don't really know, but there's a difference, however slight. I can feel it. I can watch To Have and Have Not and at least pretend to "get it," ya know? And so that means that it's confusing to see that a criticism of To Have and Have Not at the time was that it was a "repeat of Casablanca." I don't really know what that means, because of the divide caused by both time and mental capacity. There also runs the risk then of saying something stupid like "I think I liked To Have and Have Not better than Casablanca," which is not true, at least not yet. I'd have to rewatch Casablanca to know for sure that it's not just me liking who I am now versus who I was then.

Taken out of that particular context (now that we've overdone it in explaining why that context doesn't apply to me), I really liked To Have and Have Not! And if I were to take a stab at the theme (as I heavily implied that I might be able to at this point in my life), I'd say that it's right there in the title, that our hero Captain Morgan (don't even ask) is told that he has to choose a side, and for a long while he refuses, until finally he does, not because he wants to but because he has to. He cannot have and have not. It must be one or the other. It is unnatural for humans to straddle the fence like he does for the first third of the movie or so. He must take a stand. Even if his beliefs are being formed in real time, he must stand up for them.

It's also a love story, both on screen and off (the 44-year-old Bogart divorced his third wife so that he could marry nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall). I thought that maybe parts of this were underdeveloped, like the jealousy for the French stowaway, but then again, maybe that's wrapped into the character development of Morgan growing a spine and choosing a side.

It's also a quip machine, with Bacall flashing those doe eyes and doing so little to smirk that you start to question if the corners of her mouth aren't just twitchy, and Bogart letting the smart aleck remarks pour out of him like so much cigarette smoke. This is, after all, a 1940s big-budget Hollywood production, and there's a healthy dose of entertainment mixed in with the character development of the lead. Factor in the genial drunk Eddie, and there are plenty of chuckles to go around.

It's also a... musical, I guess? Hoagy Carmichael gets room to perform like three whole songs, and Lauren Bacall does pretty good singing along to some of them (oh that she could've gotten a whole song to sing in Dogville). I'm definitely familiar with the name Hoagy, just because it's an absurd name and it makes me hungry, but like I definitely would've been able to tell you that he was an old-timey jazz performer. Who knew he acted too. I still don't know what songs he's famous for. I can guarantee you they are not on my iPod. But it was pretty charming to just hear some songs (the non-racist ones, anyway) being played while Humphrey Bogart smirked in the corner.

But ultimately, it's a movie that simply asks its main character to do the right thing, and it slowly builds it up so that it makes sense when that character finally does that thing. It's the "making of a hero" story. A reluctant hero, but still one who gets the job done. I don't know shit about WWII-era French history, and I don't think "choosing to help the French" is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm more generally talking about choosing something instead of nothing. Choosing nothing is worse. It makes you a coward. Harry/Steve Morgan ain't no coward.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~~

GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

Take $825 and my passport and meet me in the comments!

(NEXT TIME: Hopefully there's a lot of iPods in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist)

Never Seen It #268: 10 Cloverfield Lane

I know that this isn't the blog that you prefer, and that it's been hard for you to come down here, and watch 400 movies you've never seen before... but I really want us to be a happy family, you and me. The mess is all taken care of... so, I'll go get dinner started.

10 Cloverfield Lane

2016

Dan Trachtenberg

Group G makes their first appearance in the bunker. Help them break free and meet us in the comments.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Stef

Menacing zaddy alert! This is John Goodman's bunker thirst trap. Every time he ladles chili or slams a door, you're torn between unsettling fear and asking for another bowl. His character radiates hot dad energy: protective, paranoid, and really working the cargo pants. The movie's tension is cool, but let's be honest—the real thrill comes from catching feelings for your doomsday captor. How could anyone resist? John Goodman doesn't just steal the movie; he locks it in his bunker, feeds it chili, and makes it feel emotionally confused.

GRADE: 2 out of 5

~~~~~~~~~~~

Zach

This movie, for me, had nothing to do with aliens. It more had to do with what we believe and what we don't. 

For most of the movie, I wasn't really sure if Howard had imprisoned Michelle because there was an alien attack or there wasn't. I wasn't sure if Emmett was in on it, even after Michelle starts to confide in him. Maybe he and Howard were working together? Clearly, at the end of the day, we know that Howard has the potential to imprison someone against their will—he did it with Mary. I suppose that in this case, he did actually save Michelle's life? I think this review feels more like me working out questions about the movie and Howard's intentions than a review of the movie itself.

If Howard was so depraved, and capable of this type of madness, why didn't he touch Michelle? That is one question that I was left with, for sure.

I didn't care about the alien parts. For me, the final twenty minutes of the movie could have been cut out. This could have easily been a psychological thriller about Howard, Michelle, and Emmett, and if it was, the tension could have been ratcheted up even more, and the story could have been deeper. The alien part could have been left as a final twist at the end—yes, there were aliens, thank you very much, Howard actually did save her life! But I didn't need to see her fighting aliens, or being a hero by driving to Houston.

What happened to Ben? What happened to Mary/Brittany? I know they're both dead, but it still feels unsatisfying. Maybe this says more about me than about the movie itself—I care less about the supernatural angle, and more about the human side of what's going on. I could do without the fantasy side of things.

2.5/5

~~~~~~~~~~~

Frank

I wanted to like this movie a whole lot more than I did. I just think at the end of the day it suffered from the fatal flaw of A) not making me care if any of the three characters lived or died (movie's fault), and B) all media where a woman is trapped in a bunker by a crazy man makes me think of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and then I get the theme song stuck in my head the whole film (no fault of the movie). 

I think it could have benefited from quiet tension more? Or maybe some real doubt? It never created real doubt, it just pulled bait and switches like six times or answers questions immediately: Is Howard making the whole thing up? No, something awful did happen outside he was right to be paranoid, he's just a little weird and intense! But no wait he's actually still a bad guy after all! Does freezing the lock not work? Nope it actually does on the second try. Is the air actually breathable and the suit was pointless? Well yes but there are aliens with poison gas so it will come in handy after all! 

I know the movie has to move and be tight on a smaller budget, but it never gives any of the stakes or tension room to breathe, it just plows right through onto the next level.

Speaking of the aliens... I really hated the last 20 minutes of this movie. I think having absurd aliens undercuts Howard as a really good, really human villain. I know that this movie was another script just about the bunker that JJ Abrahams got his mitts on and forced into his Cloverfieldverse for marketing purposes. However, I feel like there had to be a more elegant way to fold it in other than *shrug* I guess there are aliens now.

Two last gripes: I think "not Jim Halpert" from The Newsroom is kind of bad in this, or maybe just not given a ton to work with. Sorry "not Jim Halpert."

Separately... how long were they in the bunker? I wish I knew, kind of wish it was like a year or two, I think that would raise the stakes. What if it was less than a week?

Also, does she have enough gas to get to Houston? Also, why would Howard go out of his way to show her a picture of not Meghan? He didn't have to! Ugh, that peeved me.

Now that I'm done picking nits, I really liked John Goodman in this. I think he did a really good job of keeping you guessing whether he was just intense or evil. Also how his whole demeanor changes when he shaves his beard after his main sexual competition is gone: genuinely unnerving. 

I also really loved the "I think we're alone now" montage. I wish the movie had more moments like this of world-building, the set design was really excellent and I wanted them to live in it more before the curtain was pulled. 

2 out of 5 stars

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Joe

The last fifteen minutes or so piss me off. One, because it made for a worse movie (dropped a half a puke, I'd estimate), and I just want movies to be the best versions of the themselves that they can be, ya know? A glaring misstep doesn't make me feel good. I'm not a snobby critic who revels in this shit. I just wanna watch good movies, and 10 Cloverfield Lane really, truly was a good movie, up until everything got upended.

And then two, I'm a little pissed off, because those last fifteen minutes dominate any conversation that you can have about this otherwise great film. Examine the other voices in this very blog post—did anyone forget to mention the fact that there are aliens in the movie all of a sudden, and that now it's gotta be shoehorned into some fucking franchise with a couple scenes of generic "fight the monster" bullshit? I'm sincerely asking, as I'm writing these words before anyone else submits an email about 10 Cloverfield Lane. Maybe I'm wrong and that everyone wants to concentrate on the first 90 minutes, and we get to chat about the excellent, thrilling acting, the Hitchcockian subversive creepiness, the guy who voices the lawyer in Bee Movie playing a great horror villain, etc. Honestly, I hope I am. That would be cool.

But what are the chances? Okay, let me be clear what I'm talking about here, what exactly I take issue with. I'm not saying the movie immediately steers into the dogshit when the Cloverfield aliens appear. It just lingers too long. The sight of the aliens, and Michelle mumbling "shit" when she sees the alien spacecraft, is really cool, and works very well. This is because it answers the film's central question in a completely unexpected way. The question: "Is Howard right, or is he crazy?" When the spacecraft appears, the answer becomes: both! He's absolutely insane, and pretty much got all the details wrong, and also, ya know, drove a woman off the road just so that he could keep her captive in a bunker. But also, there was a wild threat outside the bunker, and they absolutely would've been safer to stay in that bunker for a few years. 

I saw Cloverfield four and a half years ago, and was generally aware that this film was connected. So I wouldn't say that the existence of the aliens at the end of this one was necessarily a "shocking twist" or whatever. But even so, I still think that the moment landed, just because of all the work that was done in the bunker to lead up to that point. Even if you know there are aliens out there, Howard's ramblings about aliens (and Russians, lol) are just too boilerplate crazy to take at face value. I'm telling you, man, if this film had cut to black when Michelle saw that alien spacecraft, I'd be singing 10 Cloverfield Lane's praises.

Instead, we get to talk about how a completely different movie is grafted onto the end of it, turning on a dime from tense psychological thriller to generic fight-the-baddie action film. I think I understand what we're going for here—we are seeing the results of Michelle's progress, starting the movie running away from her Bradley Cooper-voiced problems, and ending it a self-sufficient badass who knows she's strong enough to survive. Hence the 90-degree left turn toward Houston so that she can continue to fight the baddies. But that journey would have already been complete had we ended right after the escape from the bunker. She was helpless, and then she proved that she was able to help herself. Her journey was complete. To then have to watch her fight generic alien #1 with a Molotov cocktail was unnecessary. I don't know why it pissed me off so much, but it did. Maybe I'm just hyping myself up too much by writing about it. But it really did upset me that a great movie got bumped down to a good movie because of some extra-textual franchise building. 

If we're putting all that aside... I mean, we can't but let's say we did... then I'd be writing about the really tense, tight, condensed story that we witness for the majority of the film. So many aspects of this movie's first 90 minutes are going to stick with me: the lady outside of the bunker with the burns, the gun betrayal, the getting-on-with-life montage set to Tommy James and the Shondells, the quick shot of dissolving in acid, all the tiny little moments when we are convinced just for a couple seconds that maybe there's some good in Howard, the wild board game scene when Howard can't say the word "woman," and so many more. Maybe I just love "could have been a theater production on the stage" movies too much, and that's the real reason that the instantaneous expansion of the universe into a global-alien-invasion movie irks me so.

Here's one more theory for you: I just have a tough time talking about sequels. I noted during Bride of Frankenstein that there were very few sequels on the Film Club list, but I forgot about the movie that was a "surprise sequel" at the time of its release. I like watching sequels, especially for movies that I originally liked. But I struggle with the writing about them, or discussing them, or something like that. I don't know if this is actually true, I'm just speculating, but think about it. If this was a standalone, I'd be talking about a good movie. It's not a standalone, so now I have to talk about some other movie, one that I actually liked a little less, and one that negatively affects this movie due to simple association. It's just cooler to write about brand new worlds here in blog form. I don't need to revisit old ones. That's less interesting.

Let us forget about the aliens. Let us forget about any potential future team-ups with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ben Feldman and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (I had to look that last one up, I have no plans on watching The Cloverfield Paradox any time soon). Let us instead simple remember John Goodman standing at a jukebox, twerking in the sterile fluorescent lighting of the bunker. That's a better movie than survivors fighting aliens in Houston.

How pissed would you be if, like, you watched Whiplash (example fits since that film's creator worked on this film's script) and after that drum solo, the camera panned outside the auditorium and you saw Peter Parker and you realize that, oh shit, this was actually part of the Spider-Man franchise this entire time! Wow! I would fucking hate that! That's exactly what 10 Cloverfield Lane does. It takes a great film and then force-feeds it into the giant maw of extended-universe film franchising. Boo! No! Let good art stand on its own!

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

Alright, let's go. Any additional thoughts? Drop a comment below.

(NEXT TIME: We talk all about Eve with All About Eve.)

The Silver Tongued Devil and I, Frank

When Bob Dylan switched from folk music and went electric, his fans were apparently absolutely outraged. He had sold out, changed genres, etc. I'm not saying there isn't a difference between Dylan's folk stuff and his rock stuff, all I'm saying is if I went and bought a Greatest Hits CD for Bob Dylan, it would have both on there, along with his other genre-bending later stuff, they wouldn't make two separate CDs. If I turned on the local "classic rock" station, I'm sure I would hear both "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," and without some explained context, I don't think that I would know they were different genres of music. They're just Dylan. Similarly, if I took a time machine back to the '70s and told a Pink Floyd fan that their songs were being played with, nay, considered the synonymous genre as, Eagles songs, I imagine the Pink Floyd fan would suffer Brain Damage. But pressure and time have a way of compressing things, and to a general audience, anything with a guitar from pre-the-year-2000 now qualifies as "Classic Rock."

I guess I bring this up as a word-count way to say that, upon listening to Silver Tongued Devil and I, I didn't feel like there is this gigantic canyon between Kristofferson and, say, early rockers Springsteen or Warren Zevon, or folkers Johnny Cash or John Prine. Like, I can tell this is country, I guess cause of the accents? 

Country is by far my biggest blind spot. I would say my parents were virulently anti-country, to the point I think me comparing Kristofferson and Springsteen would probably have made seventeen-year-old Donna F****** reconsider having kids someday if they were gonna say something like that. I might as well tell her I like ABBA. I just have had so little country exposure in my lifetime, that then I really am surprised by how much I like something like this album.  The title track was riveting and I was hooked right away. But maybe if I had a ton of country music knowledge I would think it was super basic?? We'll never know!!

I just think he's a compelling songwriter and showman, and you can just picture being in a dive bar with this being the band and it being great. Like "Epitaph" feels like someone at an open mic who just quietly gets everyone in the bars attention. "Good Christian Soldier" reminds you of a time where country music could be for poor people who were pissed at the government getting them killed, and not the self-parodying jingoistic John Wayne slop wanted by those who wish el espectáculo de medio tiempo del Super Bowl en inglés. 

I will also say that a lot of stuff on this just feels really soulful. Maybe it's early enough in the tree before it splintered, where R&B and rock and country all went in vast different directions.

The downside of this album I will say is it all passed through my mind like a sieve. I enjoyed listening, but if you asked me to hum a distinct ditty 20 minutes later, I would fail you. Nothing stuck in my ear or my soul the way Springsteen or Prine does. Could this be from everything passing through my mind like a sieve at this stage of my life? We'll never know!!

With Nashville in Film Club and now this, I am getting a crash course on '70s music that my parents despised. I don't think I'll ever be country fan number one, but the healing has begun. I would not make you turn this album off if you put it on in my car. That's progress, baby.