Big Picture

23/01/2024

A few quick hits on the American Movie Award noms:

1. Disney received its token nominations, including Best Score for John Williams (who remains a global treasure) and Best Animated Feature for ELEMENTAL. I still liked that film better when it was called INSIDE OUT.

2. For all the audience and critical hype, the voters were not impressed with BARBIE. America Ferrara absolutely deserves that nomination, as she was the second-best thing in the film, next to Rhea Perlman. The fix may be in to get Greta Gerwig an American Movie Award. Why else would you put BARBIE in the Adapted Screenplay category? Is there a book somewhere that BARBIE was based on, or are we making sure it doesn't have to go up against THE HOLDOVERS?

3. Movies people actually saw are again relegated to the technicals. There's MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (wait, nobody saw that, based on box office) for Visual Effects and and Sound. Disney sneaks out a third nomination, possibly deserved, for GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3. Fanboys want GODZILLA MINUS ONE to win.

4. Most of the KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON nominations are predictable, as are most of the OPPENHEIMER nominations. Any "serious" film from Christopher Nolan, and any non-documentary from Martin Scorsese, will get a nomination by default. Keep an eye on Lily Gladstone as awards season rolls along.

5. You probably want to see THE HOLDOVERS, OPPENHEIMER, MAESTRO and POOR THINGS before the American Movie Awards air, just to have a sense of what's going on. Add NYAD for its acting nominations.

18/11/2023

FRIDAY NIGHT FRIGHTS
STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL

"Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir!"

On this very day and date, 45 years ago, a nation weary of disco, high gas prices and President Carter's creeping malaise turned their hopeful eyes toward CBS, yearning for new stories from a galaxy far, far away.

Instead they got STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL, two hours of ill-conceived variety television at turns brilliant, questionable, forgettable and absurd. I have broken this down in the past more than once, including its overlap with the similarly awful RINGO special from 1978, and there is little more to be said about its origins and failings. There is also a new documentary, A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE, screening somewhere near you where the surviving participants relive their attempt to cram George Lucas' vision into the constraints of television business expectations.

Instead of rehashing all of that again, I'm going to try and put some context around STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL, and what it meant to at least one fan.

I was an eager-eyed 9 year old on that Friday night, sitting in my favorite chair right in front of the RCA 21" color console TV, considered one of the better options of the era. I had read the advertisements and the press previews. There would be a new STAR WARS story! All the original cast would be there! We would meet a new villain who would have an important role in the next STAR WARS movie. Harvey Korman! (If you were a young child in the late 1970s, you almost certainly knew Korman from The Carol Burnett Show, The Muppet Show, or HUCKLEBERRY FINN.)

For myself, and likely a generation of young STAR WARS fans, nothing on television could have lived up to our expectations. We were yet to grasp the nature of the hype machine, though this STAR WARS misadventure likely played an outsized role in cultivating Gen X cynicism) and we were not regular consumers of variety television. What we thought we were getting was a new STAR WARS adventure. Most of what aired committed the worst possible crime any entertainment can commit against a child: It was boring.

People talking in Wookiee with no subtitles? Boring. Green-screen acrobats fresh from a Buggles video shoot? Boring. Diahann Carrol? Boring, at least I hit high school and understood what she was supposed to be doing. I still hope she fired her agent after that.

The schoolyard critical review benefitted from the show running on a Friday, which left an entire weekend of more interesting experiences to soften its disappointing impact. The recess conversations on Monday morning were halting.

"Did you see it?" "Yeah. I don't want to talk about it."

"The cartoon was good. I like Boba Fett." "Yeah."

This was good news for the kid who didn't get to see it because his parents hauled him off to some family event. If nobody wanted to talk about it, he wasn't left out.

It was bad news for that one kid who really liked it, but nobody wanted to talk to that kid anyway. (That kid grew up to be an insurance salesman who owns three houses and two boats, but you still wouldn't want to have a conversation with him.)

STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL was my first real taste of crushing disappointment, and the realization that the thing I loved most could wind up in the hands of unreliable people, or people who I thought were reliable until they foisted Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks on me. It is the moment where STAR WARS starts to go off the rails, sowing seeds of skepticism that would magnify through every awkward moment of the prequel trilogy and the near-total destruction of the franchise at the hands of Disney.

This was the moment when my generation discovered that STAR WARS could do wrong, and that the earnest attempts of talented people could come up so far below expectations that you wondered why you bothered with expectations in the first place. I won't go as far as to say it was a generation-defining event, as we had plenty to chew on over the next three years, but for those of us who lived through it on that November night, a bit of cynicism crept into our psyches.

That may explain why it remains a cult classic among Gen Xers. We watch and rewatch its unchanging mess to rekindle the hope we once had, and to reacquaint ourselves with the way reality can stomp into our lives and rip apart our stuffed Banthas, like a Stormtrooper trying to satisfy an officer who snaps his fingers too much.

To celebrate the 45th anniversary, grab some milk and cookies, put on your pajamas, and settle in front of the YouTubes with this version, which includes all of the commercials that aired during the broadcast on WMAR in Baltimore. For maximum effect, watch it with an impressionable child who loves STAR WARS. There are life lessons here worth learning, and if you don't take it too seriously, the whole thing is a hoot.

from 3 different sources I pieced together a good quality version of the infamous Star Wars holiday special

03/11/2023

FRIDAY NIGHT FRIGHTS
RINGO

In honor of the release of "Now and Then,' let's take a well-deserved break from horror and gore and spend Friday night with a couple of Beatles.

How many bad 1978 TV variety specials feature Art Carney and Carrie Fisher singing? One more than you probably know.

As I did last year, I am giving November over to a different kind of horror: TV variety specials. So many of these are awful due to the slipshod way they were made. They existed to fill a programming hour at a time when most people were away from home, or to pad out the end of the broadcast season before summer repeats began.

None other than Ringo Starr is the victim of this outing, which aired on NBC on April 26, 1978. Written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft, who a few years later wrote the brilliant BACHELOR PARTY and POLICE ACADEMY, this is the kind of hasty promotional content that darkened prime time television until MTV came along and gave music promoters a better outlet.

The plot is a riff on Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. Ringo, recording a new album in L.A., is overwhelmed, as we learn in a grating sketch that features John Ritter as Ringo's sleazy manager. If only he could get away.

He can, it turns out, because L.A. is also home to one Ognir Rrats, a maps-to-the-stars selling loser who looks just like Ringo. They switch places. Calamity ensues because Ognir can't play the drums and Ringo gets turned in to the police for suspected car theft by Ognir's overbearing father. Art Carney tackles that role (and, apparently, the craft services buffet) with an overbearing performance in which he may or may not be attempting a south London working-class accent. It's difficult to tell in part because he shouts every line, and in part because the accent comes and goes, sometimes from sentence to sentence.

Carrie Fisher is also here, because who doesn't want to get high with a Beatle? If you thought the song "You're Sixteen" was creepy, just wait until you see 38-year-old Ringo sing it to Carrie, dressed up like a 1950s teenager, as she stares at him adoringly.

The special's second-creepiest moment is a tribute to "Yellow Submarine" featuring 20 or so shirtless men jazz dancing to an orchestral reworking of the song while Ringo sings the title over and over again. I'm sure this has an appeal lost on my heterosexual male eyes.

Ringo also sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," or at least part of it, before they stick in royalty-free sound bites of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, in front of a wall of smoke lit with lasers, which was really something back in 1978. There's a three-song performance at the end featuring forgettable tracks from his Bad Boy album, and if you look closely, you'll see Dr. John playing the keyboards.

Parts of this are pure disaster. Angie Dickinson took a couple of hours off shooting Police Woman to arrest Ringo. There's an interlude on the set of the Mike Douglas show, which likely began with someone saying, "We can get the set for two hours, and Mike says he'll stick around."

Then there are the parts that hold it together. George Harrison dropped by for an afternoon ("Get a one-camera setup on him, then get him in the booth to narrate!"). Vincent Price is up for his role as a psychiatrist specializing in hypnosis. Fisher plays along in her role, and Ringo, for all his unhappiness with the show, is the charming, goofy self that everyone loves.

Ringo and George manage to infuse a bit of Monty Python silliness into the special, and there are a couple of really good jokes from Israel and Proft. It's enough to salvage the hour from being a complete dumpster fire. It's more a smoldering dumpster with the occasional pop of flame. Absolutely worth 47 minutes of your time, and best enjoyed with a case of Watney's Red Barrel or half a bottle of Beefeater.

A 44-minute film telling the story of Ringo and his poor look-a-like Ognir Rrats, narrated by George Harrison. Songs include: 1. "I Am The Greatest", 2. "Act...

27/10/2023

FRIDAY NIGHT FRIGHTS
V/H/S 2

Beautiful, aren't they? But not as beautiful as yours will be.

I don't like horror anthologies. I don't like found-footage movies. I don't like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. So it is somewhat surprising that this week's recommendation, and my must-watch Halloween pick, is a found-footage anthology made by the creators of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

V/H/S 2 must be seen by anyone with a tolerance for gore, because it features some of the best horror storytelling of this millennium. Those who hate anthologies for the proper reasons - they are uneven, with low-quality, inconsequential wraparound stories - will not find anything to change their minds in the first 26 minutes. Go ahead and skip to 26:28 if you want to get to the good stuff, or use the first part of the film to get your drunk on. Then strap in for a hell of a ride.

There are three short films that make up the bulk of the film's runtime. A RIDE IN THE PARK, made by BLAIR WITCH creators Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale, uses a helmet-mounted GoPro to tell the story of a guy out on a bike ride who turns into a zombie. SAFE HAVEN, directed by Timo Tjahjanto of MAY THE DEVIL TAKE YOU and Gareth Evans of APOSTLE, follows a film crew as it investigates the compound of a religious cult, unaware that the cult leader has chosen their arrival to coincide with the summoning of a demon. SLUMBER PARTY ALIEN ABDUCTION, directed by Jason Eisener, who later adapted this into the feature-length KIDS VS. ALIENS, sees a Friday night sleepover interrupted by alien attackers, with much of the story told via a camera mounted on a Yorkshire Terrier's collar.

The wraparound, which continues the universe established in V/H/S, something about people collecting tapes of horrific incidents that will drive them mad or help them achieve enlightenment or whatever, is the film's weakest element, despite fan service in the first few minutes and a bit of clever scripting that could only happen in an anthology wraparound. PHASE I CLINICAL TRIALS, directed by Adam Wingard (GODZILLA VS. KONG, YOU'RE NEXT), is a show reel of found-footage jump-scare setups. If you like that, you'll like this, but it is nowhere near as clever, shocking or entertaining as the rest of the film.

This is a guaranteed crowd pleaser for horror fans, worthy of inclusion if you're hosting a horror movie marathon. This is the only appropriate use of most anthologies. People can drop in and out as they wish. You can refresh your drink or hit the bathroom when the linking story appears. All you need is the attention span for the short films, all of which are beyond worthy of your time, and you will have a blast with this.

Of the three best films, A RIDE IN THE PARK stands out for its creativity. It adds some refreshing ideas to the well-trodden rules of zombie cinema and has a strong vein of dark humor.

SAFE HAVEN is the best overall, and worth watching independent of the rest of the film. A slow-burn setup gives way to gore-soaked mayhem with moments you have never experienced in any other film. It feels a bit like a later Resident Evil game in places, but it is also terrifying to its final frame.

This was originally a VOD release, and all of it was shot on digital. TUBI's presentation looks as good as any other film of this nature. A RIDE IN THE PARK is notable for its bright, sunny outdoor setting, while SAFE HAVEN keeps the lighting levels high throughout. Only PHASE I CLINICAL TRIALS suffers from some compromised visuals, in part by design. Don't let it set low expectations for the rest of the film.

Skip the first V/H/S and go straight to this sequel, which is superior to the original in every aspect and one of the most memorable horror films of this century. If you were disappointed in V/H/S or one of the other entries in this series, do not skip V/H/S 2. You are missing out.

Excessive gore, nudity, strong sexual situations and scenes that will scare the hell out of you demand that this be kept from anyone under the age of 18. This is MA-rated material by any standard. You may want to make sure your bowels are empty before SAFE HAVEN kicks in, so you don't wind up having to pause and clean the sofa.

If you plan to show this in a pairing or as part of a horror marathon, put it on last. Any feature will seem slow after the frantic action SAFE HAVEN and SLUMBER PARTY ALIEN ABDUCTION. Great setups for this include CREEPSHOW, the only truly excellent horror anthology, CREEPSHOW 2, if your tastes run toward that underappreciated sequel, or .REC for a night of found-footage horror.

Searching for a missing student, private investigators discover a pile of videotapes that may reveal the frightening truth in this horror anthology.