paultab

....so I don’t know if I’ve missed the taping of the mini-episode, but I submit: If the screenwriter already had Monty Python on the brain, it’s not a far leap to think he named Urbana Sprawl for her “huge tracts of land.” I’m as disgusted by this as you are.

I actually signed on today hoping to be the first to comment on it. It's too close to it for me to think Michel Gondry wasn't inspired by it somehow, but I can't find evidence of him copping to that.

There is artistry in interpretation. She owned every one of those songs.

I just saw this movie on Amazon Prime and I had to share it with all of you. I'm not going to post the trailer here -- it reveals too much, even though there are a few extra twists and a great payoff that aren't there -- but suffice to say that this movie is like if Tommy Wiseau aimed for Hitchcock and missed by a long shot. A couple in suburban Las Vegas, struggling to conceive for the first time, has a creepy kid move in across the street from them, and the wife starts inexplicably experiencing night terrors. The narrative plays like Jacob's Ladder Scenario: The Home Game, and the twists come frequently. There are passages where you will wonder if you are watching the Room, except everything in this movie has a reason for being there. It's nuts. This movie is insane.

Can we please talk about the fact that several grown adults all see and recognize and call out this activity as "the peepee dance"

I just want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, on an '80s kid perspective. Was it bad and stupid? Absolutely. What it also was, though, was a bunch of people doing exactly the jobs they had been hired for, and doing them well. Bronson Pinchot: jogging along pews, pinballing around rooms full of people and committing 1000% to every bit. John Larroquette: pretty much just being Dan from Night Court, but in league with a psychic. Bess Armstrong: constantly in her moment. All of it didn't come together all that well, but people were trying. That said, I want to talk about the take-off on the early Poltergeist scene where Larroquette and "Pankin's Wife" (played by Mad Men's Christine Estabrook) are having remote wars, her with the remote, he with Bobby McGee's rabbit-ear limbs. If she was betting on all the games based on McGee's projections, just like he was, wouldn't she want to watch the game, and not the ABC TGIF lineup?

I want to, real quick, call attention to my favorite moment in this movie (it got the biggest laugh from me), and maybe the only time the writers are taking a stab at grounding the movie in the real world. When Sho' Nuff and his gang are trashing Daddy Green's Pizza, there is a moment towards the end where Sho'Nuff destroys the video jukebox, and Daddy Green goes "That isn't mine! I DON'T OWN THAT!" This gets into some real random specifics about the synergy between restaurants and vending machine companies and I love it.

The only other instance I can think of is "Starman," when Jenny Hayden is drinking and watching old films of Scott, but I don't remember off-hand whether she was speaking her part. If the confluence of drinking, watching old home movies of dead people, and speaking one's own lines in the conversation is a trope, there should be a supercut somewhere to show us how fictional technology has evolved this process.

Did anybody clock the influence this movie had on Steven Spielberg's Minority Report -- specifically, the scene where Tom Cruise, alone in his apartment, is drinking and watching (holographic) videos of his dead son and speaking his own lines in the recorded conversation?

FWIW, I'm watching Ninja Terminator on YouTube after buying the DVD. Maybe it's the luck of the bootleg draw, but the version I got was pan-and-scan (1.66:1 instead of 2:35:1) with a shaky camera. Very different experience, as the YouTube version shows a much steadier camera at play than the DVD version gives it credit for. I'd recommend the YouTube version, but for those with sensitive hearing, be prepared to shave the top of your high frequencies and compensate with low end, because this mix is trebly as a clef.

I know they addressed the issue of conversational speech during the course of the movie -- you can ask a series of questions and get a series of answers, and it's OK to reorder them so we feel like we're listening in on a conversation -- but there is one exchange that bothers me. It's the one where Keanu trails off while talking about something his father said -- and then Sandra prods him to go on and say it -- and then he says it. THAT can't be accomplished any other way than by having Keanu's letter end in an ellipsis, then Sandra to write a letter that just says, "What did he say?," then for Keanu to pick up where he left off. In any normal penpal relationship, ending your letter in an ellipsis is psychotic behavior, but through a TIME RIFT?

Enya's breakthrough in the states was "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)" off of Watermark in 1988, which cracked the top 40 in the US in 1989. Exile, off that same album, was featured in an incredible scene in LA Story in 1991. Sleepwalkers came out in 1992.

I should correct myself: Los Angeles stands in for New York City. They don't dutch it up to look like NYC, but they also don't change any of the New York of it all from the script (this was originally supposed to be shot here, but it was decided that it would be too expensive, which is headscratching but not if you consider that Liongate's head producer's long game was to shelve it in favor of his own projects -- the costuming and behaviors all scream New York noir.

Stars: Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Brooke Shields Director: Ryuhei Kitumara http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0457565 Bonkers-level: Exponentially higher with each act. Los Angeles stars as New York City, as Bradley Cooper, a photographer hell-bent on capturing the dangerous side of the Big Apple, finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks when he follows the wrong kind of butcher into the wrong kind of train. I just finished this movie, which I randomly found on Netflix, and am beside myself. This thing needs to be seen and talked about, if only so somebody can confirm what I just saw. Here's the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805570/videoplayer/vi2259812633