Quasar Sniffer

If you're in the Chicago area and you legitimately love this movie, you are in luck: a 70mm screening! https://www.musicboxtheatre.com/films/streets-of-fire I'm... well, not jealous, but excited for the people who are excited for this.

My favorite is Pride and Prejudice, but I also I really like Mansfield Park. Maybe it's just because it's more of an outlier in Austen's bibliography; the protagonist is much more quiet and reserved and concerned with her own morality. Since I read so much Austen in such a short period of time, that book seemed unique and unlike the others, so it attracted me.

I GOTS OPINIONS! When I went back to school to get a teaching degree (didn't happen; long boring story), my favorite English class was actually a Focused study on the works of Jane Austen. After a week or so, it was me and a bunch of female English majors who loved to read and watch BBC dramas and it was THE BEST. Of course we watched this film, along with discussing the various strengths and weaknesses of the BBC Pride & Prejudice and the 2005 Joe Wright film. I love the 2005 film for a variety of reasons; I find it to be constantly moving and alive, full of emotion and color. It takes that stereotype of a staid, Austen/BBC sitting room drama and explodes it with passion. It is less faithful to the book and has its flaws, but I love it. I also... have a Keira Knightley thing THAT I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR. I had never read any Austen before that class but it turned out to be a lot of fun since almost everyone was game for discussing Old Literature in a mature yet fun fashion. Nice. Also, fuck Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That was one of the worse reading experiences of my life.

On the subject of telling disgusting abusers to GTFO, Gal Gadot demands Brett Ratner GTFO of her franchise: https://pagesix.com/2017/11/11/gal-gadot-will-only-be-wonder-woman-again-if-brett-ratner-is-out/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=P6Twitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow It's hard to imagine a heroine more easy to root for or a Prime Choice Hollywood Douchebag to be on the chopping block for gross misconduct.

I'm assuming it's a play on the variety of viruses known as Bacteriophages. From Wikipedia So the term being derived from "to devour" makes sense, as vampires literally devour blood to survive. I think the name "hemophage" is probably the smartest and most logical part of this fucking movie.

If this movie endeavored to make sense, maybe people trying to kill hemophages would use some sort of gas weapons so as not to draw blood? Sort of like the Golden Age DC-era Sandman, Wesley Dodds? I know that's a stretch, and maybe other non-projectile weaponry like some sort of taser would be more "future-y," but hey, I love the Wesley Dodds costume and I am a Francesco Francavilla fanboy so when an excuse to post art like the image above presents itself, I WILL TAKE IT!

I have a theory that this movie is part of a Shared Universe with a 14-year-old-boy's wet dream after drinking a gallon of Mountain Dew Code Red. It makes about as much sense as a dream, traveling from scene to scene in defiance of all logic and laws of physics. It's a visual mish-mash of washed out CGI and out-of-focus nonsense, complete with floating heads and fetishistic costumes. And, of course, there's the presence of Milla Jovovich, who, as the content of the Second Opinions reviews makes clear, is the focus of many-a creepy teenage boy's obsessions. This is what happens to such a teenager's subconscious after 100 viewings of 2002's Resident Evil, 36 hours of gaming without sleep, and the subsequent crash into a coma-like state after a soda-induced sugar high.

I couldn't agree more. The "casting couch" modus operandi has been in place in Hollywood since the Silent Era and it's time for such a disgusting practice to end, once and for all. The only way to accomplish that is for people to speak out and for people to listen.

I think "tedious" is the exact write word. The movie is as blank and uninteresting as the washed-out faces of its characters. Hell, even the fight choreography is like if a network TV executive saw Kill Bill and said, "do these fights exactly... but as if they were choreographed by Mike Pence."

I don't remember specifics because it's been so long, but I do remember really enjoying the Rifftrax version of the original. Rifftrax is good times, so I hope you enjoy it as well!

I am watching it now and, holy shit, it is INFURIATINGLY BAD. I am physically angry at how fucking stupidly terrible this movie is.

Ack, now I'm doubting myself. I think of something like Top Secret, which is amaAaAaAazing, and it's definitely a pastiche of everything from WWII spy movies to Beach Boys songs. That's part of the point... but maybe that's why it works in that film? It gets actual jokes from having a "French Resistance" in a post-WWII... Germany. That's funny, and the film knows it. Plus, I think the most successful parody films take their characters seriously and we root for them, whether that's Val Kilmer and co. in Top Secret or Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks films. In Reefer Madness, characters can die, get sentenced to death, or sell their souls to the Devil and it doesn't really matter. The jokes have no payoff because the narrative has no weight, therefore the setups have no weight therefore the punchlines have no impact. Does ANY of that make sense?

One thing that I found frustratingly lazy about this movie is how much of an anachronistic pastiche it is. The original Reefer Madness was a 1936 propaganda film, and the initial scenes of the musical stay true to that. But later in the film, you have homages to 1950s pop culture like beatniks and in a some of the musical numbers and dances. It's like they just decided to reference a bunch of "old, stuffy shit" and threw it in there. It felt like less of a satire of the dangerous lies America told itself about drugs in the 1930 as what Philip J. Fry might think the 1930s were like. I know this is a movie with zombies and the god Moloch and everything, so asking for historical accuracy is downright silly on my part, but it got to the point where I was thinking, "what are we even making fun of?" I'm not asking for historical accuracy, just... more focused jokes. Something for the very talented cast to actually play to. The movie goes so big so soon, it has no where to travel to and its momentum is lost, which is part of why it feels so long. It's referencing one specific propaganda film, so I would have liked to have seen more focus from a film with such a singular reference point.

I would say it would help, just so you can experience just how imbued with madness it really is. It is no myth, The Room is reality.

This actually pissed me off. With the talent both in front of and behind the camera, this film could have been a classic in the serial killer/police investigation genre. But instead, it's apparently a pile of shit. I admittedly haven't seen it, but paying to see another terribly movie about a psychopath who murders women is not high on my to-do list.

Top Gun has been my bread and butter since I was a wee lad (my Dad being a 5'6" dark-haired handsome Navy pilot didn't hurt. FREUDIAN!) I hereby challenge you to a game of shirtless volleyball!

Thank YOU! I really appreciate that everyone was willing to jump in to this movie, an unknown quantity to even me, and that they enjoyed it. You people are the coolest!

Ok, NOW we're suggesting you go around eating baked goods at a bakery or a grocery store to check the ingredients before purchase? Now THIS, dear sirs and madams, is a bridge too far! Impropriety!

....ok, I realize it is perfectly reasonable to smell baked goods in a bakery because those sugary treats and doughy delicacies no doubt smell scrumptious, it's just that I got an image in my head of someone picking up and smelling an entire batch of cookies with deliberate intensity and determination, trying to discern the ingredients contained therein.

Better question: Why are you going around smelling baked goods before you have purchased them? Are you one of those people I have nightmares about doing gross things to the food I buy at the grocery store?

And about smoking and dancing in these movies: From Wikipedia

If I can weigh in on the Gene Kelly characterization discussion, I think a lot of his style and his career trajectory was in response to the public perception of male dancers, that they were this cadre of effete, un-masculine homosexuals, the kind you see prancing about in the studio backlot sequence at the end of Blazing Saddles. So much of his dancing was to show the audience, to force them to see, that dance could be daring, athletic, powerful, sexy, and yes, even masculine, as well as artful, emotional, and elegant. That was probably what led to him being a demanding collaborator (and downright cruel to Debbie Reynolds at times, which he later admitted), since he wanted to imbue all of his dance sequences with all of these elements, which he could do because he's motherfucking GENE KELLY, just not everybody is. It also led to him creating those elaborate sequence of just dance in his films that have nothing to do with the story. When things are flying on all cylinders, I find myself almost enraptured by him at times, and he's certainly allowed to make something like Invitation to the Dance if he wants to, but that's a biiiiiiit much for me. Even something like the long "Broadway Melody Ballet" from Singin' in the Rain takes me out of the movie with its separateness from the rest of the film, especially me not being a dancer, though I admire it for how wonderful it is as a piece.

EvRobert, on 23 October 2017 - 10:58 AM, said: I was thinking along these same lines (though not so coherently ), both about how this movie does fit nicely in the 1930s screwball comedy mode, and where this movie might fall in the lineage of musicals, both the theatrical and film variety. The fact that this has music by Irving Berlin makes it a signpost for the development of the form and American music in general, since you could make an argument that he was the most influential figure in American music in the first half of the 20th Century (I might not make that arguement because I frequently find myself proven wrong when I make such pronouncements, but I would not begrudge anyone who holds that opinion). I mean, he fucking wrote "White Christmas," which is still the highest-selling single of all-time. So these movies hold an interesting place in musical and entertainment history; between the Gilbert and Sullivan and the Threepenny Opera era and the post-Oklahoma! era. And speaking of works like Threepenny Opera, this is a musical that was made in the same era as the film Cabaret was depicting. I find it fascinating how historical perspective can change, and how different the 1930s was to so many people. The characters in Cabaret might have been rebelling against the very polished entertainment that Fred and Ginger were pumping out; populist, pleasing, inoffensive (unless you were Italian or gay), and, on the whole, charming. Granted, Berlin was a very different place than America, and very different in 1935 than it was ten years before or later (no shit), but part of why I love old movies (and period pieces) is that they give us a chance to see how the past viewed themselves and how that past viewed their past.