All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950) -
You've got to love a classic like this. Based around the goings-on within a group of people whose lives revolve around a passion for stage acting, it's just as powerful as watching a very good play. The players act accordingly and all deliver memorable performances - not just Bette Davis, but also George Sanders and Anne Baxter primarily, especially at the film's climax. It's a classic for a reason, and it still holds up well even now.
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Man, what you can get done when you can't sleep...
Two Hands (Jordan, 1999) -
Wow. I was surprisingly underwhelmed by this.
Two Hands tries to be a smart and edgy '90s crime thriller - revolving around Heath Ledger's young ne'er-do-well who gets roped into a Sydney crime ring and who makes a mistake that lands him in hot water with the bosses. However, the film really does fail on just about every front. Apart from the cringe-inducing Australian accents (which is really a personal thing I can't stand), there's plenty wrong with it. There's the decidedly average plot, poor attempts at humour and emotion, and one very misguided attempt at giving the film a supernatural edge (in the form of a talking corpse whose presence in the film is completely redundant - the prime example of just how redundant is his explaining Ledger's Yin-Yang tattoo by saying, "Something that's good can still have a little bit of bad in it, and something that's bad still has a little bit of good." No sh*t.). On the plus side, Ledger turns in a half-decent performance (despite not being given that much to work with) and Rose Byrne (who plays the story's nominal love interest) is rather easy on the eyes. Other than that, I have nothing to recommend about this film.
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (Mallon, 1996) -
+
For those who don't know the movie nor the show it's based on, here's the gist of both - Mad scientist Dr. Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) has imprisoned Mike (Michael J. Nelson) on board a satellite in outer space and is forcing him to watch the worst movies ever made in order to find a film that can drive the whole world insane and make it easier for Forrester to take over. However, Mike is kept company by a trio of sentient robots - Gypsy, Servo and Crow. To stave off the insanity brought on by watching horrible movies, Mike, Crow and Servo resort to constantly making wisecracks about the poor quality of the film.
The first time I tabbed this film about three months ago, I actually had given it a bona fide
, I'd enjoyed it so much. This marks my fourth viewing of the film since then and and, as you may have guessed from the rating, it's gone down in my estimation a little. If you read up on the history of the film, you'd learn about the extent to which the film was compromised by studio interference, and this is responsible for a couple of the film's flaws (i.e. the film's surprisingly short 73-minute runtime or cutting down on riffs for the sake of the B-movie's storyline). However, some parts of the film can just be considered flawed ideas to begin with - as with the show there are parts where Mike and the robots take breaks from watching the B-movie and end up doing something else on board the Satellite of Love for a brief period before returning to the B-movie. These scenes (better known among fans as "host segments") quite honestly lack the same amount of humour as the B-movie part (with one possible exception being the scene where Mike crashes the Satellite into the Hubble telescope).
However, the actual B-movie part is still very funny (and it makes me wonder if there are people on here who have seen
This Island Earth, the movie that Mike and the bots are forced to watch in
MST3K: The Movie) and while I've seen a few episodes of the show since then and the jokes fly faster and looser in the show, the movie is still hilarious on its own. Even though it's not quite as awful as some of the other films that have featured on the show, Mike and the bots still find plenty to mock about
This Island Earth - the lantern-jawed leading man, the aliens with oversized foreheads and the same slick white hairdo, the slacks-wearing bug monster...the list goes on. There's too much in there to list completely in a review (and even some I'm still spotting after several viewings) I'm considering putting
MST3K: The Movie on my revised Top 100 and I probably will. As a damned funny comedy, as a source of inspiration for seeking out the actual show and getting even more laughs, and there's even one more personal reason I have for loving it (which can wait for another time). Excellent.
The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980) -
This is a hell of a film to watch when you've been awake and mostly bored all night and start watching at about six in the morning. I wonder if being as tired as I was would've affected the film at all, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't be any more impressive than it already was. Although I don't really feel like it's going to become my favourite Lynch film, I still thought it was pretty good. Lynch's direction is restrained and not quite as indulgent as it is in his other works - a move that helps the film because making
The Elephant Man too stylised would've been a bit of a mistake. I thought everything about the film was pretty good (with the possible exception of Merrick's speech patterns - even though he's supposed to have difficulty talking like an ordinary person, that doesn't mean it should be entirely incomprehensible as I felt it was at times). The only other real flaw I felt was that it dragged a bit in places and it could've been cut quite easily. Oh, well. The ending was also rather good, if a bit of a shock.
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) is merely alright. His character is a fiend but the writers didn't seem to have the heart or the balls to just go ahead and make him a bad guy. Whateva.
I learned as well that it was Mary Steenburgens first movie role (apparently jack directed this one too?) wow.
