The_Triple_Lindy

Just a quick open question to the board, because I wondered about this while I watched: So, this guy ... ... sex symbol, yes or no? The movie exists in a world where nuns will leave The Calling for him, and single, alone women are not completely freaked out when he approaches them in a diner declaring intimate details about their identities and lives. Not to mention, Dan Fielding on Night Court is a total womanizer who meets and sleeps with a different woman every episode. I feel unqualified to opine on this because 1) I find nearly everything about fashion and sexuality in the 80s totally repugnant and 2) I know we're dealing with pre-Bechdel movie-making sensibilities here, and so EVERY man in EVERY movie is attractive to ALL women. How 'bout it? Who out there longs for Larroquette's long-waisted love?

A couple of notes about what is, in my opinion, almost a flawless film: 1. In the first scene after the credits, when Bobby is trying to identify the thief in the room full of busts, he goes up to Manoogian and says "she's not pregnant" and Manoogian grins ... ... the implication being, I guess, that he's having an affair and had a pregnancy scare? 2. At the end, "Murray" comes around and says that he's going "back behind the bright light" and that he won't be around that much anymore. But what does this mean about Bobby's powers? Does Bobby have powers other than those based upon his association with Murray? How long from the moment he was struck by lightning did Bobby become attached to Murray? Because they call Murray his "spirit guide" but that makes it seem that some of his powers are just Murray acting in the spirit world ... what powers would remain with Bobby after Murray leaves? 3. "NIT: Nun in Training" seems like the perfect title for a Nundercover sequel.

I'll take this a step further and say that Preston doesn't need to exist in this movie, at all. His part is 100% expository. Just about every line he has is explaining why Bobby is acting nuts and twitching around -- all other lines were "Hey this is amazing" and he takes a picture. When they said that the problem with the film was that they couldn't rewrite it because of the writer's strike, that made total sense -- this movie's script was clearly a rough draft, and Preston was probably just a character that existed on the page so that the writer could keep himself straight. I doubt his character would have made it through in a re-write.

I just finished. I found myself mesmerized almost the entire time, but every once in a while I would snap out of it and realize I had no idea what was happening. This must be what it feels like when dogs watch movies. He's what dynamite is to a game of Paper-Rock-Scissors.

That's just the magic of musicals ... anybody or any group can burst into the perfect musical arrangement necessary to humiliate any opponent, "Top That" style. It's like the musical hadouken. "Hadousical." Private schools can set whatever qualifications they want for their teachers. Most private schools want to set pretty high bars for their teachers because they're all about prestige and reputation, but some private schools exist just to control the curriculum and tailor it for a specific crowd. Religious schools are like that a lot.

Considering that Lex Luther is a Wile E. Coyote-level supergenius, it's odd that his best plan for escaping such a rinky-dink chain gang is to have his idiot nephew trap them in a car and drive them non-fatally off the cliff. I'm surprised it never occurred to him how easily two cops could been overpowered by a half dozen guys with pick-axes. Or how about just throw a rock? That would seem to be enough. This comes back to what I said earlier about Lex Luthor being 1950s "Batman" villain-level incompetent. Either we're supposed to take him seriously when he says he's a genius and therefore take him seriously, in general, or we're supposed to see, based on available evidence, that he's a fool when he says this and thus never take him seriously again.

Was Margot on her way to prom after this?

Oh man, good point. If she was going so fast that she achieved lift-off, the wind buffeting would've been nightmarish ... anyone who has ever ridden a motorcycle or stuck their head out of a moving car window knows that you can't even breath, let alone keep your eyes open. Not to mention getting hit by the bugs and random airborne detritus. She'd be getting the crap knocked out of her.

Their "space slap-fight" wire-work was particularly impressive.

I found Perry White to have one of the most intriguing arcs in the entire film. First time we see him, he's being told that his life's work is shit by a Rupert Murdoch-type who wants to destroy The Daily Planet by turning it into a tabloid. And Perry resents the fact that this guy was able to buy it up out of nowhere because it hasn't been profitable for years and it's publicly traded so he can just buy up all the stock (which incidentally is not how that works) and then slap his name on it and make his daughter a publisher. So, at the 24 minute mark, he announces that he's "not going to take it lying down" and "if anyone needs me, I'll be downtown" (as if someone could just call "downtown" on the phone and ask to speak to Perry). Lois Lane makes the crack about how he's dressed like his dad used to when he went to the bank to ask for a loan (which was how many times, exactly, Lois?). We don't see Perry White again until the very end of the movie, after everything else has resolved, when he rolls into the lobby to take down the Warfield sign and announce that he got the bank to load him the money to buy the remaining shares (not how that works) which somehow made him majority owner, which implies that Warfield came in and started throwing his weight around even though he wasn't the majority owner. Anyway, what has Perry White been doing all that time? Days have passed. A specific plot point was that Clark Kent had ghosted and no one at the Planet had seen him so Lois gets worried and breaks into his place, yet nobody missed the boss not being there? How long was Perry at the bank? Did he chain himself to the front door of the bank? Did he stage a hunger strike? Did he have to perform dirty deeds for the bankers? There's no way a love of the Fourth Estate alone convinced a bank to give an elderly man millions in order to resurrect an unprofitable newspaper -- what did Perry do during all that time to convince them to loan the money? And more importantly, what was his long-term plan, going into debt in order to buy a failing newspaper? He would have had to borrow millions, which would take decades to pay back, and if the Planet was struggling in 1987, it has to be deader-than-dead today when even, in my own town print, media is practically non-existent. Knowing the path that print journalism has taken since this movie came out makes this the story of Perry White's impending financial ruin, incurred in a Hail Mary attempt to save a vestige of dying industry as it slips toward irrelevance at the dawn of the age of "fake news." This, combined with the nuclear weapons story line, may make this one of the most poignantly prescient American movies ever filmed in a British industrial park.

A couple of quick thoughts: 1. I know that this is a super-low budget Cannon Group flick, but couldn't they make Superman go a little faster? He is the slowest on-screen version of himself in this movie. 2. I must respectfully disagree with Ms. Lyonne: I thought that Lex Luther, in this movie, seems to have been reduced to Adam-West-Batman-villain levels of ridiculousness. His costumes are baffling. His dialogue is ludicrous ... he's either addressing his own "awesome brain" or just talking out loud about what he's doing. And I quote: 3. How the hell does Lex Luthor get out of the museum? When he smashes the glass with the World's Best Bolt Cutters, the alarm starts blaring and people scatter. He snips the Puberman hair out of the display, and then ... just leaves? Has a shoot-out with museum security and flies away in that blimp from the second movie? The scene cuts away here and it's never brought up again (I assume that his thrilling get-away was part of the 45 minutes that was chopped from the 2hr+ version).

I was going to say something similar ... that it makes no sense for all the countries of the world to not just disarm if that's what they really wanted. And for the scene with the launches to come right after that, it's almost looked like the nuclear powers all said, "Oh shit, Superman's coming for our nukes! Quick -- launch 'em before he gets here." Which of course wouldn't make any sense if they didn't want they in the first place. But then you see that Supes already had a big net full of missiles ready to go, so yeah ... I guess they're just alley-ooping them up to him. By the way, it would have taken those missiles about 10 minutes to actually get to the sun ... even if he threw them at the speed of light. No, you should keep making that point, because I had the exact same thought. Please continue.

Q reminds me of a very specific type of white boy who, after ingratiating himself into the community of color, forgets what it looks like when he says the N-word as much as he does. His "dead n***** storage" exchange in Pulp Fiction comes off as way over the top, even in a movie that uses the word 100 times, because in that moment it's being very casually said by a very calm white dude who's just stirring his coffee. I never read it as racism ... more an inappropriate co-opting of black culture. I imagine, if Q was a little bit younger, he'd have ended up less fast-talking 80s cool and more like Seth Green's character in Can't Hardly Wait Also (unpopular opinion warning) I don't hate Vanessa Hudgens. I never saw any of the High School Musicals so I'm not tainted. Spring Breakers was ok. I didn't mind Sucker Punch. I won't defend its quality, but I thought it looked cool as hell. And I liked her in Powerless, mediocre as it was.

I knew nothing about this flick when it was in theaters this summer and I knew nothing about it as I sat down to watch it tonight and I. Fucking. Dig. This. Movie. At some point while watching, I said out loud, "Jamie Foxx is going to die spectacularly," because he's the antagonist in an Edgar Wright film and they all go out big. I thought that considering some of the over-the-top fatalities in Hot Fuzz and SotD, that both Batz and Buddy's death were rather toned down but still pretty glorious all the same. I caught this right away and in fact backed up to watch the sequence again because it was so cool. The camera work and pacing is so perfectly and smoothly matched to the music ... it's just fun to watch. But I do agree with Fister -- there's nothing else really like that moment in the movie. I caught the beat-matched gunfire too! I LOVED that, such a cool touch and consistent throughout the whole film -- every time a gun was fired, it was on-beat. I also like the subtle choreography in the laundromat, as Baby and Debora move around each other while tethered by the earbuds they're sharing.

That movie is called Mary Poppins: Also, Kelsey Grammar is an Expendable? He's a good pick to fight, because all you need is to put him on a stage and wait for him to kick his own ass.

Franco was decent on SNL last weekend. Anybody catch it? For some reason, the "Za" sketch was my favorite: http://www.nbc.com/s...a/3633409?snl=1

PLZ I can haz Oscar?

I know that when it comes to the Grammys, the nominees and winners are determined, in large part, by the amount of campaigning done by the artists that are up for consideration. A band I play/tour with was preliminarily nominated in the World Music category, and I learned a lot about what a sham the whole process is. The way it works is that a dozen or more artists or groups are told they are up for consideration (there's a mindblowing amount of networking involved just to get a foot in the door), and then they have to promote themselves and appeal to the panel that decides the official final ballot. And all artists have to schill themselves and hype their art to get it noticed, so that's nothing new per se, but when you're dealing with a business full of millionaires with millionaire agents, the "promotion" basically amounts to sending gifts and swag to the judges and whoever sends the nicest "cookie bouquet" (as we called it) ends up getting officially nominated. Unless an album is good enough to get noticed amidst all that, the bigger names tend to win out. There's probably a similar dynamic in the movie biz. It's not just the names, but it's the massive resources that those bigger names have at their disposal. It's all just beautiful, rich people applauding themselves over their expensive pretending. EDIT: Lest this all sound like insufferable humble-bragging, I personally have never been nominated for anything, even preliminarily. The lovely folks whose music I learn and play were.

I'm just saying ... has anyone ever seen Paul Scheer and Cameron H in the same room together?

Oh wow ... I never saw this when it was in theaters last summer (I don't know ... "life" or whatever) despite always loving Edgar Wright, so this will correct a grievous omission in my summer movie-going. Gotta say, though ... I had no idea it was a musical.

It took me a while to realize this was Cloris ... it's probably the hair ... has kind of a "Sia" effect. But my favorite cameo in anything is always Madeline Kahn, and this movie is no exception: She was always such a knockout ... and she's doing her Blazing Saddles voice, to boot.

All this begs the questions, how drunk was O/F-OW during his turn as Lew Lord? Or how much did he quibble about the syntax of his single line?

I've been humming "Moving Right Along" all day. I want to learn it on banjo. This has been fun ... I realized that I didn't remember anything about this movie besides the Big Bird cameo, meeting Sweetums at the car dealer, and Arthur Pendleton's part as the villain henchman ... he stood out to me because another favorite childhood movie of mine was Short Circuit, where Pendleton played Gutenberg's boss at the military base. Also, I think I would've liked The Jazz Singer 1000% better if, at some point, Neil Diamond had just signed a "standard rich-and-famous" contract. Great pick, Jammer! Oh by the way ... the Muppets did 9/11

I realized two things while listening to this: 1. Oh THAT'S where I know Gabbi Hoffman from! 2. This is the movie that I think of when I think of John Candy. My parents loved this moved and totally signed off of us watching it as kids. I don't know why ... the cuteness of the kids obscured the total rapeyness of this flick. For me, it goes Uncle Buck, Spaceballs, Heavy Metal (he's the voice of Dan of Earth), Vacation, and Home Alone. PT&A doesn't really ping for me.