3w54v

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

Watched it on mute on a tiny TV up in the corner of the room. You can really tell what's going on in this movie with or without the sound.

It's probably not fair to judge a movie about people singing based on my experience watching it on mute on a tiny TV while I focused on other stuff. But I think their voices were awful. Terrible singers. I'm obviously guessing but I think I'm right.

This review may contain spoilers.

If these are the lengths Lady Raven is willing to go to for a man who -let's be honest- probably wasn't a listener, well I think that says a lot about her as a person. Consider me a fan.

If memory serves, this movie positions Dan Quayle as a secret evil genius. That can't be right. Unfortunately there's no way to check, as the film was lost at sea during the Golden Age of Pirates (2002-2009)

Short documentary about prisoners making quilts for autistic kids and kids in foster care. Made me teary-eyed. I'm not made of stone.

Watched it on a plane which is unfair but there's no chance I was gonna watch this with earth beneath my feet so what can you do, really. Reminded me a little of Stephen Malkmus's description of Steely Dan where he called them something to the effect of ice cold music for Episcopalian sociopaths. I think a person with parents that don't kiss would love this. Really not sure what part of it I was supposed to find sexy. It cannot be the sex. There's just no way in hell.

Anyway, I did laugh when it flashed back to 2006 and suddenly everybody had a pastel polo shirt and the nastiest haircut you've ever seen.

Watched it on a plane and was eventually won over. As I watched, I couldn't help but be reminded of a recent major news story. I speak, of course, of the Baltimore Orioles firing their manager Brandon Hyde in May after an abysmal 15-28 start.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

This was playing on our hotel TV. Usually those things only show you Family Guy or Forensic Files. I sense a change in the air. Something has shifted.

Finally got around to watching this curio during a break in unpacking into our new place. The cocaine era managed to touch every living thing like a blanket of ash, even our Methodist newspaper comics artists.

This two and a half hour length fifty minute film is the tale of Snoopy's brother Spike falling in love with a girl who drives a red truck. It's a classic story: boy falls for girl, girl does not fall in love with boy because he's a dog with a wasting disease and she's a human, girl yearns to become a jazzercise instructor in the big city, boy is thrown from a roller rink and hunted by coyote poachers under cover of night. You've seen these beats play out time and time again. The movie has an epistolary structure that seems to exist largely to remind the audience that our protagonist is related to one of the most famous cartoon characters of the 20th century. I see why they made this decision but I think it's a vulgar one. You're already making a movie about Spike, why chicken out at the last second? Audiences know Spike. And audiences that don't know Spike don't deserve aid. They've already proven themselves unworthy. Cut them loose. I don't care if they live or die.

Looking through the reviews and I saw a few people say this "looks like a porn parody." Sorry but I'm not seeing it. This feels like the genuine article to me.

*Roger Corman snapping his fingers at an Italian kid on his set* "You there, Giuseppe! You're directing Psycho now. You've got thirty hours. Don't fuck it up and maybe you'll get to direct a few pornos and two movies that all American dads will say are the best movies of all time for forty years and a movie about a, like, an old child that will suck."

Rewatched for a podcast. I'll link to it when it's up. No two ways about it, this is a flawed film. But it's my flawed film. Not in the sense that I had any hand in its production but in the sense that we're on the same team.

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

Exists at a beautiful intersection between Dirty Harry and Austin Powers. If it was made today it would have jokes about safe spaces and pronouns. But that's the joy of it. It wasn't made today. It was made in 1993 when Glenn Shadix was alive.

This review may contain spoilers.

Fans of not being surprised won't want to miss my review of a Daffy Duck and Porky Pig movie. It turns out I loved it.

Please go see this in theaters immediately for the sake of everything cool in my industry. A traditionally animated gag-dense movie where nobody says the word "hashtag" and that pays tribute to the best cartoon characters of all time is nothing to take for granted. Zaslav will cry if you go see this. Maybe he'll even... do something that I once got locked out of my Twitter for suggesting he do. Who knows? Only one way to find out!

There are obviously political, real world reasons why I want people to see this. If you really want the stakes laid out go see it in theaters so you can watch the twenty minutes of trailers to see the barren media landscape this exists within, like a palm tree growing in the middle of the Hell from the end of The Beyond. I can't describe the relief I felt several seconds in when I realized "Oh I'm in great hands here." The team behind this obviously knows their shit when it comes to Looney Tunes. After seventy five years of the same Duck Season, Rabbit Season beats collecting dust I can't tell you how nice it is to see Baby Bottleneck getting used as a touchstone onscreen when Porky and Daffy go to work at a factory. I've long said that the actual warmest relationship in Looney Tunes is the one between Porky and Daffy. What a beautiful idea to build an entire movie out of that, even if some of the harsher angles of the characters needed to be sanded down. I get that. I'm not a lunatic. I don't expect a movie that hopes to make more than forty dollars to show Daffy attempting to operate on an awake Porky or to show Petunia shrewishly berating him to the point that he attempts suicide. Frankly I commend the entire team on their discretion in excising these elements while still keeping them -for lack of a better word- loony. I've always liked Eric Bauza's take on the characters' voices. He seems like a sweet man in real life (he's an affable presence on podcasts) but his vocal work has just a little bit of a nasty edge that you need to make these characters work. I like when Porky feels like he's got a Falling Down in him. I don't need to see it but I feel safer knowing it's there. Like a Republican and a gun in the home.

Much like the original shorts, I think this works best when you can tell the team behind it was trying to make themselves laugh. The Farmer Jim stuff especially feels alive. I sort of can't believe they were able to make the entire emotional cornerstone of the movie so surreally funny.

To make this personal, I saw this with my wife in a mostly empty theater a few seats away from a kid who could not physically stop moving and his exhausted mom. The kid reacted to the entire movie like he was on a roller coaster. He especially loved every frame that featured Daffy Duck. Makes sense. Daffy Duck is the patron saint of kids who can't stop moving no matter how many parent teacher conferences you throw at them. Hard not to scan myself and my poor mother onto those two. Stick with Daffy, kid. School is temporary but Daffy Duck is forever. He'll never let you down.

"If you don't like rock n' roll, think what you'll be missing"

A very special film. When I was in my early twenties I would say it was one of my favorites to anybody who would listen. Upon rewatch all I can think is "why did I stop doing that?"

One of our cats (Foxy) sat perfectly still watching the screen for most of this. She's never done that before. I didn't even know she had taste in film. Sort of troubling to consider how much she must've hated the hundreds of hours of giallo and old theatrical cartoons and Unsolved Mysteries we've subjected her to. I'll have to throw on more Kaurismäki for her. She's family after all.

Fritz the Cat is a sword without a hilt. You can wield him and know great power, but that power comes with a terrible cost. Another artist will take Fritz from you and utilize him in a way you detest. This is known as the Fritz Curse. Happened to Crumb. Happened to Bakshi. It's only a matter of time before it happens to Robert Taylor, even though he is dead.

This does a fairly able job of aping Bakshi (live action mixed with animation, funk soundtrack, naturalistic dialogue, racial iconography deployed with the sensitivity of a Blink 182 hidden track) but it misses a key element: I do not believe that people stuck in an elevator with Robert Taylor were uncomfortable. He simply is not a horny lunatic. None of these scenes feel like they're missing frames because he stole them from his own movie to jerk off with. That's the Bakshi difference. Not to say that this is bland or family friendly or anything like that. Speaking of which, I wonder if the scene where a naked Hitler is psychoanalyzed about having only one testicle ever came up when Robert Taylor was directing Goof Troop.

It's got about a 10:1 ratio of groaners to great jokes. Not bad at all for a movie you obviously couldn't pay rent with the budget of.

Watched on Saturday March 8, 2025.

I'm going easy on this because I watched it as a kid and it left no impression on me. I guess I was slightly pissed at my parents that we couldn't afford a McDonalds in our home, but I came around to communism eventually. ("What if there was a McDonalds in everybody's home and we all worked there?") That said, the satire dials are all off on this. This thing is like 3% satirical about the obscenely wealthy. Just enough to let you know that the filmmakers aren't militant monarchists while having no impact whatsoever on the story. Not gonna cut it. It should've either been 100% (scathing and borderline unwatchable Buñel style social satire where Richie's father sells him to poachers for a nickel) or 0% (triumphant Alan Silvestri score plays as Richie has his guards kill the other children for gawking at him, film is only available in 2025 as part of an Indicator box set.)

"Welcome to heaven. Everybody gets one wish. Anything at all. Nothing is off the table. What's yours?"

"I would like to be made privy to the reaction of my three poker buddies to letters I left each of them in my will implying that perhaps something untoward occurred between their wives and I."

"And just to be clear. You can wish for anything. You can wish to fly or shoot God with His own gun or a swimming pool full of babes. Why, you could even-"

"This is what I want."

"Okay. It's just that-"

"Do it."

Watched on Wednesday February 26, 2025.

Showed it to my friend who was staying in my couch because I made a ing reference to it and he had never heard of it. We ended up watching all of it.

To be honest I have a lot of thoughts about this movie. Too many. Maybe one day they'll invent a website where I can write them down...

I liked that his English hitman persona looked sort of like Wes Anderson.

Not as good as Mean Girls which is true of a lot of movies and generally an unfair comparison but this one is really asking for it.

Watched on Saturday February 15, 2025.

Obscure Bjork's face in shadow all you want, man. As soon as she starts talking it's like "that's Bjork"

I'm just one man but I don't think we should be giving the Ready Or Not guys the keys to anything. They don't have anything to say other than a very vague and eye--free "fans, right?" What do you mean by that? Like, what specifically? Please share with the class! I'd be happy to hate some fans with you but you need a follow up thought to your first thought or it starts to feel more and more like a posture than it does a synapse that fired in your brain organically.

You can really tell Wes Craven is dead. The meta commentary is no longer novel. What once was a master of the genre in the third act of his career turning his lens inward and laughing is now two guys in $300 hoodies checking off beats on a checklist to get ahead of "the trolls." I dunno, man. At least the trolls care.

In much the same way that every morning I am one day closer to death, I am now one step closer to having seen every Kevin Smith movie.

"In purgatory there is no sound. And yet it has -and has always had- rock n' roll"

Watched at Vidiots with a Q&A from John Michael Higgins afterwards. He did something I've never seen where he started by saying something to the effect of "Questions or comments are both fine. I like comments. I don't have to answer those." Best behaved audience Q&A I've ever been to. Not a single comment. Sort of a next level move.

Alan Ladd's warm treatment of cats is a reference to Elliot Gould and his cat in The Long Goodbye, a film that came out an entire thirty years after this one. Another Hollywood miracle!

Chock full of spooks, scares, and ghastly frights. Perhaps none more spine-chilling than the sight of Vincent Price in a flannel shirt.

Who the FUCK is Floyd Buckley? His Popeye is an abomination. An apple-headed rummy sitting on a bench outside of a liquor store in Greenpoint asking you to feel what he's got in his pocket. The kind of man who was old when he was 13. I could not, with fifty thousand words, explain how much I hate his Popeye voice. That's not Popeye. It's a man who lost everything in a factory fire. Half expected him to skip the spinach and just shoot heroin and sit down.

If you don't have Billy Costello in the booth you might as well run a six minute title card announcing that Popeye was killed by dogs while a funeral march arrangement of "Be Kind To Your Web-Footed Friends" plays.

Seeing a lot of people yass kweening Popeye in this one for setting firm boundaries. I get it but I'm on Olive Oyl's side, here. Zoom out a little and I think you'll agree. She puts up with a lot. She's entitled to a little cheating on Popeye from time to time.

Wimpy did it. The son of a bitch actually did it. His "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" gambit worked. Like taking a hike and walking up on a grizzly catching a salmon right out of midair.

A little structurally weaker than the last few Popeyes I watched but that's okay because this short features Wimpy seated next to a lever that allows him to control who lives and dies. Structure is only useful insofar as it can aid us in reaching moments like that.

Couldn't tell if I was watching a Popeye short or looking out my damn window. I tell ya. Things are not good in Los Angeles, folks.

I love how Popeye runs. It's like he's half of a horse.

Olive Oyl, Bluto, Wimpy, and Popeye represent the four human body-types: skinny, brawny, fat, and Popeye.

Bluto has French slaves in this one.

The image of Wimpy chained up by his neck is an indelible one.

The description for this says "Olive Oyl runs some kind of boarding school." Literally the first shot is a sign that reads "Olive Oyl's Health Farm For Children." You don't have to like it but to act like it was unclear is disingenuous.

Anyway, I think -best case scenario- that one kid is supposed to be a gorilla.

Popeye and Bluto are both active threats to Olive Oyl but later on when Olive Oyl gets hurt Popeye seems somewhere south of halfway aware that she's been hurt. That's why he's the hero.

I liked the lizard dinosaurs. Sorry but if you expected biological fidelity from 1960's The Lost World that's on you. What I didn't like was the mondo, Cannibal Holocaust style fight to the unsimulated death between a real alligator and komodo dragon. And that's on me.

Really loved George C. Scott's relationship with the ghost. Zero parts scared and five parts "Jesus, what now?"

At one point I got a knock on the door and I had to pause this to go answer it. They had the wrong address and had already moved on to our neighbor which was sort of a relief because I wasn't looking forward to explaining the image frozen on my screen.

I had an acting teacher once tell me I reminded her of Clark Gable after I itted that I was self conscious about how I look. She was clearly just being nice but it stuck with me. Probably the single victory of my time at acting school, a time in my life when every other authority figure told me that I look and act like a freak and audiences "will not easily trust" me. Come on.

Anyway, that's not really a review of this movie. What do you want? It's It Happened One Night, it's great. You can tell this is one of the primary influences on Bugs Bunny. Has there ever been higher praise?

"That Faulkner. Boy, he could write a joke about an implied blowjob that really made you think"

For years I've believed that Enigma's Return To Innocence played over the credits of this movie. It turns out I had it confused with Man of The House (1995). I believe the error was not on my part but rather on the part of the two films. The world music vibe and lyrical content -beseeching us to return to the type of innocence of, perhaps, the Amazon rainforest- match much better with this film. I am ready to forgive, but first an apology must be made.

Just so you can see them all in one place if you were looking. These are in vaguely chronological order but don't hold me to that. Unsure how to link directly to my reviews but they shouldn't be hard to find. I'm usually the top review for these because I'm God/most people are normal.

I tried to limit it to golden age But there are some 80s and 90s ts in here that I felt deserved it for whatever reason. Don’t like that Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s in here? Keep scrolling, pal, I’m reloading...

• The 'Teddy' Bears
• How a Mosquito Operates
• Gertie the Dinosaur
• The Ouija Board
• The Dresden Doll
• Birthday
• The Farmer and his Cat
• The Four Musicians of Bremen
• Fresh Fish
• Felix Fifty-Fifty

...plus 378 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My man does not up an opportunity to talk about musicians in front of a camera. I left off the one where he goes undercover into Burma because that's not really a music documentary.

• Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-90)
• Bad Brains: A Band in DC
• Reality 86'd
• We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
• No Age New York
• American Hardcore
• A Band Called Death
• Babylon's Burning
• Punk's Not Dead
• It's Not Repetition, It's Discipline

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.