Galaxy Quest: 1999, dir. Dean Perisot. Seen on DVD (Oct. 22).
After tiring of gruesome horror movies, this was just what we needed. Galaxy Quest is funny and cute and pretty smart too, smarter than I would have guessed.
Yeah, I know everyone else has seen this movie already, including my boyfriend, who promised I would like it. He mentioned something about Sigourney Weaver wearing a costume that gets more and more shredded as the movie continues, and that Tim Allen was pompous but that this fit his character perfectly and was actually enjoyable. That was about all I knew except that Star Trek jokes were somehow involved.
Category: films seen in 2004
The … Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993)
The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom: 1993, dir. Michael Ritchie. Seen on DVD (Oct. 21).
With a title like that, how can you go wrong? I thought this was going to be hilarious. However, although Cheerleader-Murdering Mom is amusing at times, overall it was a little flat.
Control Room (2004)
Control Room: 2004, dir. Jehane Noujaim. Seen at Paramount (Oct. 10).
I said I was getting tired of political documentaries, but we had Paramount movie passes to burn and I had no desire to see Winged Migration. I thought it would be Good For Me to see this profile of Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, and its coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003.
I did not expect to find the movie as compelling as it was. No voiceover, which was a nice change of pace. No blatant propaganda pushed in my face. No grandstanding. No, well, no Michael Moore or even Errol Morris.
The Front (1976)
The Front: 1976, dir. Martin Ritt. Seen on DVD (Oct. 7).
I have been wanting to see this movie since I read about it in high school or college, and I finally rented the DVD. My boyfriend wasn’t planning to watch it with me—he thought it was a Woody Allen movie—until I told him it was about blacklisted writers in the 1950s and he realized this was a movie he’d heard about before and wanted to see. The writer (Walter Bernstein), director (Martin Ritt), and some of the actors in The Front were all blacklisted in the 1950s.
Woody Allen’s character, an apolitical restaurant cashier saddled with gambling debts, offers to be the front for a blacklisted screenwriter friend of his, so the guy can keep writing TV scripts. Next thing you know, he’s working as the front for four writers, impressing a female TV producer whom he starts dating, and becoming known as a well-known TV writer. Eventually he’s investigated as a potential Communist sympathizer, and he has to decide whether to play along or risk becoming blacklisted himself.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 1974, dir. Tobe Hooper. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 18).
I had wanted to see this movie ever since last year, when I went to an Alamo event where Joe Bob Briggs showed clips from the movies he highlighted in his book Profoundly Disturbing. Plus, it was shot near Austin, and seeing local landscapes and actors always adds an element of interest to a movie.
In retrospect, I wonder why I thought it would be fun to see a bunch of films that are considered disturbing, but at least I decided to skip the worst ones. (For example, I have absolutely no desire to see Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. And I am still recuperating from seeing only the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs.)
I was so excited that I would get to see this movie in a theater that I forgot about the part where, well, I would get to watch a lot of blood and gore and hear a lot of screaming and tense up with suspense over who was going to die next and when and how.
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Shaun of the Dead: 2004, dir. Edgar Wright. Seen at Alamo Village (Oct. 24).
Oh, my. Shaun of the Dead was delightful, better than I expected. It is strange to say that a movie with zombies was delightful, but then this movie is just that kind of strange.
Shaun of the Dead is the rare film that has extremely funny moments in it but also delivers an overall solid and entertaining storyline. It doesn’t let comedy get in the way of the action—there are intense, serious scenes as well as hilarious ones. I would say that Shaun of the Dead is a romantic comedy, but my boyfriend is not generally fond of romantic comedies and he liked it a lot.
Dear Pillow (2004)
Dear Pillow: 2004, dir. Bryan Poyser. Seen at Alamo Village (Sept. 19).
It’s more difficult for me to write about very good movies than about stinkers. It takes longer, at any rate. I saw this movie nearly a month ago and I truly enjoyed it, and have thought about it a lot, but am just getting around to typing my thoughts about it now.
I think if Dear Pillow had played another week at Alamo, or if I’d seen it earlier in its run, I would have written the review earlier to encourage people to see it. But I didn’t see it until its last week in theaters, which was still two weeks longer than it had originally been scheduled to play at Alamo anyway.
Dear Pillow is about a 17-year-old boy who wants to write porn, such as the kind he reads in a Penthouse-letters-style magazine called Dear Pillow. His neighbor, who writes for this magazine and who used to direct porn movies, acts as his mentor. Meanwhile, Wes (the kid) is living with his dad, with whom he has some complicated issues, and lusting after the apartment landlady, on whom he is eavesdropping.
Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator: 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 11).
I decided I had better see Re-Animator because it’s one of the better known horror cult films, because I hadn’t ever seen any Stuart Gordon films, because I don’t see enough horror movies, and because this is one of my little brother’s all-time favorite films and he would just die if he found out I missed the opportunity to see it in a theater. Not to mention it was Dollar Night at Alamo Downtown (part of a tribute to the film’s art director, Robert A. Burns, who recently died).
I don’t always agree with my little brother (he adored Napoleon Dynamite) but I definitely enjoyed this movie. “Enjoyed” is kind of a weird word to use about a movie that contains graphic images of brain surgery, the use of a bone saw to kill a reanimated corpse, a very sad and gory little cat, a decapitation with shovel that eventually resulted in a reanimated severed head, sexual assault involving the aforementioned severed head, reanimated decomposing corpses with gore streaming from their mouths, and other nasty stuff. But I had a good time and even laughed a lot at some of the more outrageous gore.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Night of the Living Dead: 1968, dir. George A. Romero. Seen on DVD (Oct. 9).
It seems that October is, appropriately, Undead Movie Month for me. Mostly the movie Shawn of the Dead is to blame. My boyfriend and I want to see the movie, but we decided that we should see a couple of the Romero films beforehand so we could appreciate all the jokes. He suggested it and he is not even a film geek. Perhaps I am a bad influence.
Also, Alamo Downtown is showing a lot of horror movies this month. No other theater chain in town seems to be acknowledging Halloween very well, but at Alamo they’ve got all kinds of goodies planned. I’m really pleased about this.
I thought about lumping all my thoughts on these undead/horror movies into one big review but first of all, it would be way too long and second of all, when in the hell would I finish that? And should I include all the horror movies I see this month, or just the ones with undead/re-animated corpses/evil dead? So I’m splitting up my thoughts on these movies by movie, but will probably have a lot to say about my general feelings on the genre.
House of Games (1987)
House of Games: 1987, dir. David Mamet. Seen on DVD (Oct. 6).
My boyfriend rented this one, and watched it alone, but advised me to see it because I like heist films and caper films and con films. I thought it looked interesting but I really had to talk myself into watching it. It is difficult to get in the right mood to deal with Mamet’s particular style of dialogue.
It was worth the effort, though. I liked House of Games a lot, more than my boyfriend did. It was a little cold and distant, in the way some noir films are, but without the morality of noir (arguably dictated less by the genre than by the Production Code of the 1940s).