Maybe I can understand why it's not everyone's cup of tea ~ it's insane. Pure fuckin crazy. But god, it was one of the greatest cinematic surprises of my life & I drank it UP.
All tagged it's good actually
But while a label may not always be necessary, they are SO VALUABLE. Besides Quinni (Heartbreak High), Billy Cranston is the only character I've seen actually acknowledge his own autism & it feel real, & authentic, & relatable (unlike *hacking cough* The Good Doctor et al).
To be sure, there’s a lot about the script for Delirious that I love. The soap opera characters and situations in particular are clever subversions of the genre, and anyone watching this movie on some level at least understands how soaps work. The movie takes your understanding and runs with it to some surprising and often surreal places. The movie operates on soap opera logic, but also works with dream logic, and it’s easy to see why Gable is more often than not way in over his head.
The vampires of this film skew younger than usual, the clan having been built up by Lothos with unlucky high school students who remain ready to party and have fun. As they are reborn into their new world of darkness, they maintain some of their personalities and memories of who they were before, still wanting to flirt and play basketball and DJ their senior dance and drop in on their friends for a bite. These vampires are more relatable than they are terrifying.
To prepare his cast before making the film The Three Burials of Melquidas Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones had them read The Stranger by Albert Camus since the theme of alienation is central to both that book and the film they were about to shoot. Before he commenced filming the movie Heat, director Michael Mann gave the cast copies of the book No Beast So Fierce by former convicted felon turned author Edward Bunker about a recently paroled convict and his attempt to go straight. In my senior year of college, before we began rehearsals of the one-act play I wrote “Show Me Your Tong Po,” I invited the cast over to my house to watch Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor for similar reasons as those directors.
Each of these characters in Starting Out in the Evening has their own needs and desires, but they unselfishly interact with each other, learning from each other the importance of sharing life. For people who like a meaty intellectual story, there is much here to enjoy. No less than Roger Ebert said that Langella's performance was Oscar worthy. That the Oscars ignored it only confirms that movies of the mind and emotional depth play second fiddle to movies of entertaining merriment.
Jawbreaker ultimately distinguishes itself through its specific treatment of high school politics, especially through its wicked screenplay, slick visuals, and lurid narrative. Even the name of the school, Reagan High, evokes a political atmosphere in which, as I mentioned, Foucault’s structures of power apply themselves to angsty, late ‘90s adolescence.
The first one in the group to sign with an agent is the one who had never even heard of Jane Austen or even read The Great Gatsby, and a few in the group are a little jealous of her. When Hannah comes to the meetings with her writing to critique, the group begs off commenting, saying that the stuff is being published and doesn't need critiquing. Sensing the envy from the group, Hannah tries to keep secret the six-figure movie deal she gets for her book. Of course the aspiring authors find out about it, and turmoil besets the group.
Up until this point, Gershon was probably best known for her recurring role on Melrose Place. The argument could be made that, in contrast to Berkley’s, the movie helped Gershon’s career, probably because Gershon’s sumptuous, femme fatale turn as Cristal Conners possibly could have worked if it were featured in literally any other movie with these themes.
The film didn’t kill Tucker in his mid-20s, though, and it didn’t kill his career. He kept working in Hollywood, made it onto some big projects, and now there’s an independent filmmaking award named after him. A fellow could do a lot worse than that in an industry that eats its own.
And like every "right and wrong side of the tracks" story, such as The Outsiders, Far and Away, or Rebel with a Cause, there has to be a bad boy to make Deborah Foreman's female protagonist Julie's world catch on fire. And for the valley girl Julie, it was a punk, unwilling to don an Izod shirt or Members Only jacket.
IT'S GOOD, ACTUALLY / Beyond the Blowjob: Re-examining The Brown Bunny / Eliott Klug
When someone puts so much of themself into a film, it’s easy to assume that film embodies the ideology and values of its creator. This is, to a degree, true. Like Clint Eastwood before him, the beauty of a conservative creative like Gallo is his immense skill in interrogating the flaws inherent to his beliefs.
IT'S GOOD ACTUALLY / Fired Up! / Sean Woodard
For all its irreverence, Fired Up! is a pretty fun flick. But the most important reason I love it is because it’s part of the indelible bond I have with my friend Dillon. No matter where we are in life, we can always turn it on, enjoy each other’s company, forget about the world, and laugh for a little while.
Why do I love this movie? By all accounts it's dumb as fuck. But look: I'm a sucker for hair metal. Motley Crue is one of my favorite bands of all time. I'm always on the hunt for a “Too Fast For Love” shirt: I long to have Vince Neil’s ‘80s leathered crotch plastered across my chest.
They aren’t communicating. The whole movie only takes place because Carol and Mike both decide to plan surprise holiday getaways for each other. When they can’t decide where to go, they settle on forcing their children to come home for the holidays.
I have no interest in explaining to you why Tron: Legacy is good. If you don’t want to absorb yourself in this world of candy-coated neon and “bio-digital jazz” (man), then very little I can say here will convince you otherwise. The truth is, I don’t care whether Tron: Legacy is good, but let me tell you why it matters to me.
Speaking of the cast, if anything the film's age has made it harder to tell who will live or die for a new viewer, as some cast members have gone on to bigger and better things and will thus be assumed "safe" only to be killed off relatively early.
In Simmons’ hands, Luther is a surprisingly intimidating presence, delivering a Grim Reaper’s glare at anyone who’s dared get in the way of his sinister plot -- with a grisly death almost always certain to follow.
What is in this container, you might ask? An egg; an egg out of which hatches a newborn baby. The nuns at the church witness a person hatch from an egg, then sort of smile and shrug and move on as normal.
He couldn’t take any chances or the Hollywood Gods would have him for brunch over egg-whites-only eggs benedict, so Villeneuve spent the other half of his Gambia-government-budget-sized budget on the most killer CGI this side of Marriage Story. Villeneuve covered all his intergalactic bases.