FisterRoboto

It took me FOREVER to figure out why I felt like I knew this song. And then they play part of the melody a few other times, and it just started making me angrier and angrier.

It's....uhhhhh...definitely a thing, all right.

I thought he sold some of the lines pretty well. I really, really liked Banderas in this movie. I mean, first, I was just really surprised he could sing that well. And I appreciated almost everything the movie was doing with his character. I can't remember how far apart you and I are age-wise, but I was 15 when this movie came out, and I remember this song being EVERYWHERE. Madonna's popularity was definitely waning, but she was still a big enough star that this movie and the song were a big deal. That feels super accurate. I haven't seen the stage version, but the movie feels VERY dated in the way that it treats Evita. We're supposed to believe she's this super influential and capable woman, but every five seconds, it has to remind us that she's only where she is because she's banging Jonathan Pryce. ALSO, the award for most WTF line goes to the former Admiral who is escorting Evita at one point when she laments that people are still calling her "a whore." And he says something to the effect of, "They still call me Admiral even though I gave up the sea long ago." I feel like that's this whole movie in a nutshell. It clearly wants to both be in reverence of Evita as a hugely influential political figure while also still being pretty slut-shamey all the way through. My other big issue with the movie (besides the fact that except for Che, all the principal roles in this movie are played by white actors) is the same thing I have with many other biopics. It feels like flipping through the Cliff Notes of someone's life. The pacing is just super fast, and I don't feel that it really gives any character a chance to feel grounded. A scene happens, an indeterminate amount of time passes, and then we're in the next scene. And some movies can make that kind of structure work, but in this case, it just ends up feeling very rushed and never really sells me on the characters or their arcs.

I'm about halfway this movie, and I can't wait to talk about Antonio Banderas.

I mean...yeah. Shrek was two full years after "All Star" was released. But I do like that they say it was "on its way to #1." It peaked at #4 on the Hot 100. Maybe they mean the Adult Top 40 (although almost everyone means the Hot 100 when they talk about singles charting). And also, they're absolutely crazy if they don't think there's a whole generation that only knows that song from the movie because they grew up watching it while Smashmouth was almost irrelevant by the time the film was even released.

I fucking love this movie, and no one can convince me that it's not brilliant. I was sad when Jason said he hated it but felt immediately redeemed when Paul said he owned it on Laserdisc. A few random thoughts from just listening to the first half hour or so: 1. Why did so many movies have these starting title cards in the 80s and 90s? Part of me thinks it was studio intervention basically saying, "Well, people aren't going to get it unless you explain what's going on first." But I have literally no proof to back that up. I will say, though, that I find it equally frustrating that so many sci-fi/fantasy/comic book movies now need to start with a 10-minute cutscene with a VO telling us backstory that could just as easily be part of the actual story. 2. Forget Origin Stories about these movies. Let's get Origin Stories on Zouks' and St. Clair's friendship. I knew they had been friends for quite some time. I assumed it was because they were both UCB people, but I was overjoyed to find out they went to college together. And equally overjoyed to find out about St. Clair's obsession with the Shrek 2 soundtrack. I need to know so much more about their friendship over the past couple decades. 3. Let's talk disk space. I know 320 GB doesn't seem like much nowadays, but let's keep a few things in mind. The short story this was based on was released in 1981. The first GB hard drive was released one year earlier. It cost $81,000, weighed 450 lbs, and was the size of a refrigerator. At the time, home computers' hard drives were roughly ~5MB (roughly 0.5% of 1 GB). This movie was made in 1995. The average size of a hard disk drive (HDD) was around 400-500 MB the year before, but higher-end computers were starting to have ~1 GB HDDs. Those HDDs were SUPER expensive, too. For comparison, today you can get a 1 TB HDD for about $50. For comparison's sake, in 1995, a 500 MB HDD would have run you about $380. Enter the Zip Disk. Originally released in 1994, Zip Disks were removable media that held a whopping 500 MB. The drive would run you about $200. But the disks were relatively inexpensive I couldn't find a cost at the time of release, but by the late 90s, you could get a pack of 6 original 100 MB disks for under $15 or a pack of 250 MB disks for under $20. When I entered college in 1999, I bought a new computer. It was pretty decent for the time, and it had a 750 MB HDD. The following year, Dell and Gateway started putting 1 GB HDDs in most of their new computers. Now, that might all seem like a lot of needless information, but I hope it puts into perspective how much 320 GB would have seemed in 1995. It's am almost unfathomable number for the time period. It's like if someone today said they were going to carry around about a petabyte (1000 TBs) in their head.

Feel better, man! I feel for ya. I had some sort of cold-type thing right at New Years, and then I got the fucking flu last week (on the bright side, I learned that fuckin' Geostorm was exactly the kind of flu movie I needed in my life). So I haven't had a chance to re-watch this yet either. But I fucking love this movie so much. I totally agree with everything Quasar Sniffer said. The thing I love most about this movie is that it just wears its heart on its sleeve so damn much. It doesn't try to be cool or cynical; it lets its joy just wash over the screen. It's hard to talk about this movie now without talking about La-La Land, but all the things that made LLL successful have their origin in this movie (and, to a lesser extent, the other two films in Demy's romantic trilogy). Even down to the ending, which Chazelle also kind of used in his first film, Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench. Also, I only watched "Jurassic Bark" one time because it bummed me out so hard I didn't ever need to see it again (I've had to say goodbye to enough dogs without having to think about them having to say goodbye to me, thanks), so I didn't even make the connection between that episode and "I Will Wait For You" until a friend pointed it out after I watched it the first time. That song is SO FUCKING GOOD, though. I think I listened to that song on repeat for, like, a month straight after I saw this movie. I rarely listen to music with lyrics I can't understand, but it just cuts right through me for some reason. And when they play that theme as Guy is getting on the train, I remember being like, "Oh, this is going to end badly" and getting kind of upset. AND THEN IT'S SO MUCH WORSE THAN I EXPECTED when the end comes. Like, it's not earth-shatteringly sad or anything, but it's such a weird bittersweet ending, and I love that the movie has the guts to end on something like that.

I've been meaning to come back and list a few of the worst offenders of the "weepy versions of pop songs over trailers" phenomenon. So here are a few: And the worst fucking offender: I think I hit the max number of videos it will let me embed, but there are a few others I can think of: "Happy Together" in The Great Gatsby "Wild World" in Mad Max (granted...good movie, but still part of this fucking horrible trend) "Every Breath You Take" in The Woods "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" in Dracula Untold "Crazy in Love" in Fifty Shades of Gray "Black Hole Sun" in A Walk Among the Tombstones "I've Got No Strings" in Avengers: Age of Ultron "California Dreamin'" in San Andreas "Sweet Child O' Mine in The Last House on the Left And it's not limited to movies. TV's been doing it, too, just not as much (most likely for budgetary reasons). The big one that comes to mind is "Wild World" being used in the promos for The Returned. The most recent movie one, though, which really bums me out because I'm looking forward to this movie so much because Ava is a gift from the gods, is "Sweet Dreams" in the trailers for A Wrinkle in Time.

The freakout at the basement door was probably the most well-earned Cage freakout ever. I completely died laughing. Literally the only problem I had with the movie was

DON'T TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE YOU'RE NOT PART OF IT, TOM

That song wasn't used in the trailer, though, was it? I thought it was just in the movie.

Mom and Dad

Maybe we need our own HDTGM RPG where you could play as a party of, like, Cameron Poe, Tom Scoggins, Barb Wire, Letty Ortiz, and Kevin Lomax.

Yessssss! I fucking LOVE this movie. For the overachievers out there, it's generally considered the middle move of an informal Demy trilogy. I don't particularly like the first movie (Lola), but The Young Girls of Rochefort is pretty good, too (even if it has the nerve to dub over Gene Kelly).

We actually roll Pathfinder, but I usually say D&D because most people don't know wtf Pathfinder is unless they're also RPG nerds. I should have known this group would

Ummmm I'm a lawful good human monk, thank you

Heyyyyy I might even be able to join because my D&D group (which usually prevents me from partaking) isn't meeting that week

Totally agree. I love her so much. When she was on with Rachel Bloom for the Streets of Fire ep, I tweeted asking if she could be the permanent fill-in for June. And since that tweet got all of three likes and was basically two years before she made another appearance on the show, I'm probably responsible for this run. So...y'all are welcome. (Also, since I brought up Rachel Bloom, she was on last week's Off-Book, and it was probably one of the funniest episodes they've done so far, and you should all listen to that ep if the show isn't in your normal rotation)

It got a lot of buzz at Sundance, but all I needed to know was that it was an A24 movie with Toni Collette. That's all it takes to sell me.

I saw this tonight, and I would 100% be down for a "Thank God This Got Made" episode because Jason would lose his fucking mind over this movie. I'm not huge on the over-the-top Cage, but it works in this movie.....as much as anything about a movie where parents murder their children works.

And those thoughts are REALLY fucking stupid. The one I remember most is when she first sits down at lunch by Edward and they start talking. She asks him if he's going to eat, and he's like, "I'm not hungry." And then her internal monologue is something like, "I told him I wasn't either. What I couldn't tell him, though, was that my stomach was already full...of butterflies!"

That's really cool. But they'll bring back Rita Moreno to play Anita, right? I'm totally fine with an Anita that's, like, 60 years older than everyone else in the production.

I really thought I had included that in my post, but I guess I deleted it by accident because I am an old man who is bad at phones. (The part about KStew being awesome in Peronsal Shopper. Not the part about your mom because I don't know her)

Yeahhhhhh, I like Spielberg a lot, but this is a horrifically bad idea.