Hi everybody. Welcome back. This week was almost a lot shorter than it is, due to work from the other website. Mainly catching up on The Jinx and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But by the end of the week, I got shit done. And it’s nice and varied for ya ass. So sit back and let the good times roll.
Blue Collar (March 15th, 2015)
Director: Paul Schrader
Starring: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto
I woulda been interested in this movie if you just told me that Paul Schrader, the man who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, was the director/writer of this movie. But when you have a crime dramedy with Harvey Keitel and, most interestingly, Richard Pryor, you have my attention. The movie focuses on Pryor, Keitel, and Kotto. They are working class men in an automobile factory. Pryor and Keitel are family men who are very much in desperate need for money to provide for their families. Kotto is just the friend they know who’s done time. So they decide to rob their Union office, since the union is corrupt as fuck and isn’t helping them at all. From there, they enter a world they didn’t want to. What I like most about the movie is that you understand these guys. They aren’t heroes, idolized versions of the working man. They make mistakes and do stupid shit. But there hearts are in the right place, they just don’t have the means to provide. So they do what they can and suffer for it. What’s also nice is the subtlety to the movie. It isn’t a big, obnoxious movie that holds your hand. We see everything from these three guys’ eyes, and things aren’t always clear. The performances are solid all around, Keitel being the standout. Pryor does his best and this is the best work he’s done. The end scenes are his best work, but the he shows some rough edges for the most part. It’s kinda obvious why he didn’t get used very well in Hollywood. Keitel though manages to play this simple, naive guy very straight and lived in. We all know a guy like him. It’s very different from his other roles. Schrader shows some roughness with his directorial debut, but that doesn’t detract too much. And his writing is superb, par for the course back then. The very last scene comes off a little too on the nose and isn’t a great fit. Feels shoehorned in. But the cumulative effect of the movie, about how the working class is pitted against each other and held down by those in power is great. Good little 70’s gem.
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: William Finley, Paul Williams, Jessica Harper, and George Memmoli
Thank the lord the Brian De Palma made a musical, because this is such a unique and singular experience of bug fuckery and insanity that everyone needs to see it. I seriously don’t know how exactly to sell this movie. I can roughly describe it. It is De Palmas mad scientist hybrid of Phantom of The Opera, Faust, and Dorian Gray all set in the glam rock 70s music scene starring Paul Williams with Paul Williams music. And even from De Palma, this is a big and overblown experience. Not a subtle bone in it’s body, this is ridiculous to such an extreme as to be endearing. It knows exactly what it’s doing and it does it well. Really, all I can say is to see it. I know most people will dislike it because it is different than what they want. But it’s weird enough for me.
Director: Rob Marshall
Starring: Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, Catherine Zeta Jones, and John C. Reilly
Well lookie here. A movie I’m not giving an 8 rating. What a shock, since apparently I’m an easy mark for movies. So suck a dick. So yeah, the movie really didn’t do it for me. And what made it a miss in the end for me was the structure of the movie. Not necessarily that it was a musical. It’s the structure of making the musical numbers separate from the movie in a way. Instead of happening within the story like most musicals, it goes to a stage to do musical bits. And it kills a lot of momentum the movie has. The story is actually interesting and I wanted to like this more. But cutting to musical numbers that just repeat information we already got or highlight a characters emotional frame of mind we can get from their reactions is a real drag, slowing this movie down to a crawl. I’ll say the musical numbers got better integrated in the trial scene, but it was almost too little too late. The cast is fine if unspectacular. Gere is just playing his Primal Fear role pre character arc. Zeta Jones plays the diva losing her fame well enough. I don’t like Zellweger and she doesn’t win me over here. I don’t think she really fits the role. That’s just me. The movie is technically well put together and the music itself is good. But as a whole, despite a story I coulda dug, this movie lost me. And the story itself is kinda fucked up in the sense that it wants us to sympathize with a woman that is essentially Robert Durst. And the ending is all kinds of fucked up, with these horrible pieces of shit winning and getting what they want and being celebrated for it. It’s so wrong headed a story that so tonally doesn’t realize how fucked up it is, I should love it for the insanity of the plot. But I don’t, so fuck it. An apparently rare lower than 8 rating from me.
Mystic River (March 21st, 2015)
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, and Marcia Gay Harden
I had already seen this movie and loved it unabashedly when I did. But it had been quite a long time since and figured it was a good time as any to rewatch. And the movie is still a fucking powerhouse, an emotional gut punch about the power of regret and past mistakes haunting us. It’s really weird to see this movie after there being so many Clint movies since that all have the same visual look to them, but they all come off like weaker imitations of the look this one has. He captures the drab and depressing atmosphere of working class Boston. The performances here are just superb. Tim Robbins has never been better, really just perfectly portraying the broken man with the haunting past that may slowly be losing his mind. Kevin Bacon has a thankless role of the straight edge cop who pushed his wife away because of his emotionally withholding ways, but he elevates it enough to not be eye rollingly cliched. But the real MVP is Penn, a man I’ve no love for for the most part. Only this role and Carlito’s Way are the performances of his that I like. And this is the best by far, emotionally crushing and very threatening. He’s never come off as one of the guys before, his smug sense of self worth keeping that a seemingly impossible task to portray. But here he does it, making this blue collar guy with a darkness to him so real. The themes that run through this thing really speak to me. The idea of one mistake, an innocent mistake as a child just reverberating through a lifetime and effecting those around you is great. And guilt for that mistake and the various ways those deal with it, or don’t. This really is a masterpiece. I will say though, the very end is a bit confusing, almost like it was shoehorned in or not as clear due to stuff from the book that clears it up not being there. But aside from the kinda ambiguous ending that still works for me, this is a masterpiece. And if he didn’t have Unforgiven in his belt, this would be the tops in his directorial belt. Although there is a part of me that wonders what Ben Affleck could have done with this. But that’s just a hypothetical. I’m glad we got this.
Top Movies
1. Mystic River
2. Blue Collar
3. Phantom Of The Paradise
4. Chicago
- Tom Lorenzo
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