Archive for November 2019
Chinatown (1974)
Yeah, I know I said I was going to watch more 80s movies, but this movie has been sitting around a long time waiting for me to watch it. When I took Creative Writing at Stuyvesant High School with Frank McCourt, the author Angela’s Ashes, he made us go out and buy the book Screenplay by Syd Field. And then he never made us actually read any of it, so mostly I didn’t, but I do remember that the screenplay to Chinatown was included in the book, because it was supposed to be an example of the best possible screenplay one could hope to write, or something like that. It should be noted that although Chinatown was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor. Best Actress, Best Director, etc., the only award it actually won was for Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
So does Chinatown live up to all the hype? I’m afraid to say, I found it very tedious. There was a super-complicated plot about Los Angeles’ water supply that I don’t think anyone besides Roman Polanski (the director) and Robert Towne (the author of screenplay, later modified by Polanski himself) actually understood. There are plot twists that are really rather ridiculous, but because of good acting and good directing they don’t seem quite that ridiculous upon initial viewing.
Maybe this is a movie for the 1970s. It was meant to be watched on a big screen in a time when there were no other options for watching a movie besides going to a theater. Without distractions from a smartphone or the internet, people had time to sit back and appreciate how nice everything in the movie looked and how good of a job they did recreating 1937. Today we no longer have patience for these kinds of movies, and besides, everything looks really great these days thanks to advances in the craft of creating movies and television, so what stood out as exceptional in 1974 isn’t so special 45 years later.
The movie doesn’t even have anything to do with Chinatown! Chinatown is just a metaphor for a place where the cops are crooked and the rich and powerful literally get away with murder.
Certain events in the movie can also be interpreted as Roman Polanski justifying his own future sexually deviant behavior, like drugging a 13-year-old girl and then having sex with her. The same logic could be applied to Jeffrey Epstein.
There were no black people in this movie. Everyone important in the movie is white. There are some Chinese people in the movie, and they all have bit parts as servants who barely speak English and the important white people treat them as non-entities. There is some gratuitous anti-Semitism thrown in. I guess, as a Holocaust survivor, that’s a point that Polanski earned the right to make.
“The Real Class War”
Commenter Lowe plugged this article in a comment. It’s pretty good as an attempt to create grand theory of what’s going on and why college-educated people are voting Democratic, but without HBD it doesn’t tell the whole story. Also important and not discussed is the decline of Christianity and its replacement with a religion of climate change and SJWism.
The Goonies (1985)
This movie is horrible. I can’t understand what any of the kids are saying. So stupid. The only reason to watch it is because it’s a well known kids’ movie from the 1980s, and it also heavily influenced Stranger Things, but Stranger Things is so much better and more watchable.
But I did get a kick out of how they made fun of the Mexican housekeeper’s inability to speak English, and the Asian kid was a walking stereotype with a cringy Japanese-ish accent. This would be called “racist” today. Also, the weirdly deformed and retarded brother of the bad guys, you also wouldn’t see that in a modern movie either; it would be considered insensitive to people with disabilities.
Buttigieg soars into first place in polls
https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us11262019_uaov53.pdf/
Actually second place overall, but in first place with white voters.
May I point out to you that Iowa and New Hampshire are both very white, and since early caucuses and primaries in those states, no candidate who has won both IA and NH has gone on to lose the nomination.
Looks like I was right to be more bullish on Buttigieg than just about all of the commenters. As the only white male top-tier who will be under the age of 78 when taking office, he’s in a very strong position.
* * *
Latest Emerson poll of NH also shows a Buttigieg surge while Warren drops.
The poll also shows that in NH, Buttigieg performs best in a one-to-one matchup against Trump.
* * *
Tom writes in a comment: “Only a gay sex tape leak can stop him now.”
What 80s movies should I review next?
Taking suggestions.
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) is the last of the John Hughes high school movies from the 1980s. It’s the least well-known of the bunch, and for good reasons in my opinion. Not to say that it’s a bad movie, but it’s not a great movie. A lot of articles talking about John Hughes movies will include this one and drop Weird Science, but Weird Science is memorable and a quintessential 80s movie.
I vaguely remember seeing this movie before. I was infatuated with Leah Thompson back in the 1980s. I even liked her in Howard the Duck. One article I read described her role in Some Kind of Wonderful as a “sexy virginal archetype” and I can go with that.
Like most John Hughes 80s movies, you can experience the joy of a nearly all-white cast, plus other political incorrectness that you don’t get in modern-day movies. This is the third consecutive John Hughes movie I’ve watched where the word “faggot” is thrown around as an insult.
There are two blacks seen in the movie, but they are not honor students, they are delinquents who hang out with a white skinhead (obviously, John Hughes had no idea about skinheads), and their purpose in the movie is to be ugly and intimidating, and part of the delinquent-kids posse who back up the Eric Stoltz character and stop the rich kids from beating him up.
Some Kind of Wonderful also features a female character who has a tomboyish, almost butch, look about her. She is insulted by other kids, called a “lesbian,” which was an insult in 1987 and not a compliment like it is today. In a movie today, she might come out as “trans” or something like that, but everyone in a John Hughes movie is heterosexual.
The movie never tells you where exactly take place, my impression was that it takes place in New England because the prole characters seem to have a prole New England accent, but then I read on Wikipedia that it was supposed to be in Los Angeles.
The movie is about a love triangle. The lead character, played by Eric Stoltz (way too old to be a high school senior) lusts after Leah Thompson (who wouldn’t lust after her even though she was also way too old to be a high school student?) but unknown to the clueless Eric Stoltz character, his tomboyish best friend played by Mary Stuart Masterson (slightly too old to be a high school senior) has her own case of oneitis is for him.
When I watched the movie the first time, I had trouble empathizing with the Eric Stoltz character who works after school at a service station and has no desire to go to college. What sort of loser wouldn’t want to go to college? Even in the 1908s, it didn’t make any sense. On top of that, he has such a pathetic case of oneitis that even people who know nothing about PUA-theory would cringe. He also engages in some stalker type of behavior, which wasn’t considered to be creepy in 1980s movies the way it is today.
The moral of the movie is that prole whites are good people, and rich whites are bad people with no redeeming qualities. Leah Thompson, who starts out as a vacuous rich-people groupie, is redeemed because she embraces her family’s proleness and rejects her rich friends, including the rich boyfriend who was a total jerk and cheated on her.
* * *
One thing the movie does well is that it perfectly captures the typical prole father’s views about college. The father doesn’t want his son to have a crappy prole job like he does. But he also doesn’t want his son to major in something he considers useless, like art. He wants his son to get a degree in business, because to a prole that sounds like a way to make money.
Time to #cancel Mormonism?
The New York Times article about cancelling Gaugin (who married two 14-year-olds and a 13-year-old) made me think that there’s another person that needs to be #canceled, and that’s Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, just as much of a pedophile as Epstein, who had multiple under-aged teenage wives, two who were only 14. How can we allow this religion to continue to exist? Mitt Romney is such a hypocrite accusing Trump of immorality when he follows the teachings of a pedophile child molester.
After we cancel Mormonism, we can move on to canceling Islam. Mohamed had sex with a 9-year-old. Also, some of Mohamed’s other wives were given a choice between slavery and marrying him, which sounds kind of rapey to me.
NBC to ruin the memory of St. Elmo’s Fire?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/st-elmos-fire-modern-remake-works-at-nbc-1231695
The original movie was about seven heterosexual white people.
How much do you want to bet that the NBC TV series will have minorities and homosexuals added to the mix?
* * *
It’s actually quite a shame they would have to ruin this adaptation with SJW dreck. Because one of the problems with the movie is that they sort of squeeze what could be a 12-episode soap opera into a 1-hour and 50-minute movie. This made the movie hard to follow, and required at least a second viewing to fully appreciate everything that was going on.
So expanding the original story could potentially be quite interesting. But instead we are going to get a revised story updated to be politically correct with racial and sexual orientation diversity.
Skyline (2010)
This movie sucks really bad and you should’t watch it.
Why did I watch it? Totally by accident. It came up on Netflix as a movie similar to other movies I was interested in it, and I started watching it, and the first 20 minutes weren’t horrible. But then it went downhill.
Aliens from outer space (presumably that’s what they are and where they are from) are killing people for no reason that we ever find out. There are lots of CGI special effects. All of the characters act stupid and none of them are remotely like-able except for the building’s Puerto-Rican superintendent. Except for the superintendent, I was rooting for everyone else to die.
Lesson: check RottenTomatoes before watching some random movie off of Netflix.
Weird Science (1985)
BEFORE WATCHING THE MOVIE
(Oingo Boingo music video featuring some scenes from the movie interspersed with a lot of weird stuff that isn’t from the movie. And in another 80s movie, Rodney Dangerfield goes Back to School and throws a party where Oingo Boingo plays Dead Man’s Party, but that has nothing to do with Weird Science.)
I haven’t watched Weird Science since the 1980s. It’s a well known movie with a catchy theme song that’s still played on 80s music stations, but it’s assumed to be the stinker among John Hughes’ much better high school movies, which include the three Molly Ringwald movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful. Is there anything here worth watching?
AFTER WATCHING THE MOVIE
Wow, this movie truly lives up to its name. It’s weird. A combination of fantasy and farce. Girls with 80s hair. “Mutant bikers” who appear to have come out of a Mad Max movie. 24-year-old Kelly LeBrock as a sort of magical genie of the 1980s looking totally uncomfortable and lacking any on-screen chemistry with her 16-year-old co-stars Anthony Michael Hall and some kid from New York City who was never seen again in any other movie, yet at the same time she appears to enjoy herself immensely. (The age difference here is the opposite of The Breakfast Club where 16-year-old Molly Ringwald was paired up with 24-year-old Judd Nelson. No one batted an eye about that pair-up.)
And oh yes, the word “faggot” is thrown around a few times, and there’s an incongruous scene at a bar where most of the patrons are older black men; today the scene is considered to be “racist,” but no one in the 1980s realized the scene was racist. (Regarding the scene’s incongruity, every scene in this movie is incongruous.)
Do I recommend a re-watch? Yes, I do. I’m still not sure if this movie is genius or if it sucks.
Lion of the Blogosphere 