So, um. Movies? lololololololetc
Back to the Future (1985): I've lost count of how many times I've seen this movie, but it never gets old. Somehow, Biff makes me laugh more each time I see it. Butthead!
Shivers (1975): This is an example of movie where the plot and ideas mesh perfectly and really elevate something that probably should have been pretty crummy. It's David Cronenberg's first real feature film, which is why I wanted to see it (big Cronenberg fan here), but it has all the makings of a cheap horror flick at first: Undeniably low-budget (uses all the requisite tricks to hide it as much as possible, but it's not difficult to tell), bad acting and dialogue that ranges from average to almost George Lucas-esque, "Wait, are we sure people actually speak like this?" levels of bad. (To be fair, though, there are a couple of instances of truly brilliant, legitimately creepy dialogue in the movie.) The plot by itself is no great shakes either: An insane scientist creates parasites originally intended for use in transplants, but the parasites grow too unwieldy to handle and are unleashed upon a clean-cut apartment building, where they infest all the inhabitants within.
What really makes this work is how Cronenberg actually does something interesting with this basic concept. The parasites take over their human hosts, but as a side-effect, they also turn people into "sex zombies" -- they have intense compulsions toward violence and promiscuous sexual activity, because one of the ways the parasites can spread from person to person is through sexual intercourse. (More than once the parasites are directly compared to STDs, and it probably should be noted that Shivers came out about five or six years before the first reported case of HIV/AIDS.) The behavior of the hosts is contrasted with sterile, clean-cut suburban nature of the apartment complex, which is on an island near Montreal and functions like a permanent vacation residence for yuppies.
Shivers is not at all subtle about its satire, but subtlety is not really what it is aiming for, anyway. In fact, it is this very lack of subtlety that allows Cronenberg to wring out every drop of potential from this idea and craft an interesting portrait of society's sexual paranoia. The movie's depiction of life in the complex is over-the-top in its blandness, and the effect the parasites have on their human hosts is likewise over-the-top in how the people are morphed into complete sexual maniacs. The whole movie comes off to me like an ingenious parody of how much of society and popular culture views sexuality -- that people are either chaste or sexual deviants. Being infected with the parasite is akin to stepping outside the borders of what is viewed as "acceptable" sexual behavior: To those who remain within the border, those on the outside appear to be irresponsible sex addicts who can't keep it in their pants and attack anything that moves to get one more bit of pleasure. This plot is like the nightmare scenario for normal, middle-class people -- sexual corruption spreading like wildfire across the nation.
Shivers of course turned out to be amazingly controversial in Canada because of some of its more extreme images. (These images are actually fairly tame now, but the implications of some scenes are still pretty shocking even today.) Ironically enough (or maybe "predictably enough" would be a better phrase), the reaction against the movie is of exactly the type it parodies. Unfortunately, it also made it a hell of a lot tougher for Cronenberg to get funding for subsequent movies for a long time. Now, I don't think Shivers is quite high art (too many flaws, and Cronenberg was still a raw filmmaker at this time), but even though there will always be people who see it and similar movies simply for shock, violence and titillation, Shivers has an interesting message that really should start debates about sexuality in media.
Anyway, tl;dr Shivers is a solid horror flick with some interesting ideas that has stayed with me since I watched it about four or five days ago.
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938): Probably the It's a Wonderful Life of gangster movies, about two childhood friends -- one, Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), who grows up to be a gangster, and the other, Jerry Connolly (Pat O'Brien), who grows up to be a priest, and their fight over influencing the next generation. Connolly wants kids to go down the right path, and Sullivan is, well, a gangster, and his way of living holds a lot of sway with the lower class youths of the town. It gets dangerously close to being cheesy at times but never goes quite over the line with it, and the ending is quite well known. This movie also features Humphrey Bogart as a two-bit gangster a few years before he hit it big with The Maltese Falcon.
The Wrestler (2008): Randy "The Ram" Robinson's (Mickey Rourke) story is unfortunately one that is all too common in the wrestling world -- out of simple love and dedication to wrestling, and the fact that it is really the only world Randy knows, he's still plugging away at cheap events years after he probably should have quit. (Randy's body is covered with scars, he needs reading glasses and wears a hearing aid in his left year. To keep himself looking good, he has his hair bleached regularly and visits tanning salons.)
After the opening montage (which features a "Mega Powers Explode!" poster featuring The Ram against his biggest rival, the Ayatollah, which got a good chuckle out of me), the movie makes it immediately and devastatingly clear just how alone Randy is in the world: He's friendly with his buddies in the locker room, but they rarely meet up when they're not doing shows; his only semi-intimate relationship is with a stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), who is afraid to get too close with him because she has complicated things of her own to deal with in life (even though she is really as lonely as Randy is); and Randy's daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) wants absolutely nothing to do with him, for good reasons, even though the movie takes an overall sympathetic view of Randy. The guy is so lonely that when he is finally able to pay the rent on his trailer, and realizes he has nothing to do, he invites a neighborhood kid over to play a NES wrestling game featuring 8-bit versions of himself and the Ayatollah. And even the kid has a more active social calendar than Randy.
What makes the movie particularly sad is that, were he wired in a slightly different way, Randy might be able to adjust to the world. For a while he's able to take a situation that would be humiliating for most people and spin it to where he actually has a good time with it. He makes some headway with his daughter and gets just a bit closer to Cassidy (real name Pam). But the pull of the ring is just too much, and Randy is the type of guy who can fit in only in this specific world. Everything outside is just too much for him to deal with. He's a guy who is ultimately good and tries damn hard but just lacks that certain something needed to function. So he kills himself day in and day out in violent wrestling matches so that he can still secure work. I really like how the worlds of wrestling and stripping are paralleled (alike in their showmanship and for their brief periods of glory), and Randy and Cassidy are alike in many ways except one -- Cassidy knows when she needs to step aside and say, "I'm through" and actually mean it. She can function in the world, hard as it is; Randy can't.
So many other good things about the movie that I'd like to mention, but I'm running low on time, so I'll just say this: Wrestling fans and non-wrestling fans alike can get something from The Wrestler. Don't be scared away because of the subject matter. It's a legitimately great movie.
On the queue for this week: Frankenstein (1931) and whatever is on my DVR that I want to see.
Total Movies: 154 (Gaslight, The Last King of Scotland, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Darjeeling Limited, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Diary of the Dead, Bullets Over Broadway, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, The Professional: Golgo 13, Lars and the Real Girl, Lolita, Quills, Hamlet, Iris, Manhattan Murder Mystery, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The Savages, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Stranger, Love and Death, Harold and Maude, Spartacus, Scarlet Street, Sabrina, Zelig, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Stardust Memories, Barry Lyndon, Be Kind Rewind, Radio Days, Deconstructing Harry, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Creating Rem Lazar, Undefeatable, Ninja Terminator, Ninja Dragon, Rumble Fish, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, In Bruges, The Bank Dick, Marathon Man, Clannad, Air, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, MirrorMask, Slither, It's a Gift, Splendor in the Grass, Waitress, North by Northwest, Monkey Business, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, The Brave One, 3:10 to Yuma, Bringing Out the Dead, Gurren Lagann: Gurren-hen, There Will Be Blood, Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Spellbound, Frenzy, Anatomy of a Murder, Clue, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Changeling, Shadows and Fog, Into the Wild, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1987), Synecdoche, New York, Carlito's Way, Shoot 'Em Up, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Up, Yor: Hunter from the Future, Tropic Thunder, True Romance, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, A Woman Under the Influence, Casablanca, Frost/Nixon, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Le Samouraï, Inland Empire, The Reader, Doubt, Arachnophobia, Manhunter, Wild At Heart, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Omega Man, Hitman, Leaving Las Vegas, Cape Fear, Say Anything ..., Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, Chasing Amy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Point Break, 500 Days of Summer, Man Bites Dog, Burn After Reading, Glory, Training Day, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, White Heat, All About Eve, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Big Heat, Death at a Funeral, Valkyrie, Shane, Stalag 17, Secondhand Lions, Bride of Frankenstein, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Witness for the Prosecution, In a Lonely Place, Dracula, Escaflowne, Dark Passage, X/1999, Watchmen, High Anxiety, Point Blank, Murder, My Sweet, The Thing from Another World, Revolutionary Road, Commando, Coraline, Rachel Getting Married, V for Vendetta, Let the Right One In, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Beast with Five Fingers, This Gun for Hire, Jackie Brown, Beverly Hills Cop, The Boys from Brazil, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Back to the Future, Shivers, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Wrestler)
