What movie did you watch?

Movies
596

I saw this too.

This started playing in my head before I was ten minutes into it:

Warren Zevon - Excitable Boy.

You can imagine how satisfying it was for me when he grabs the steering wheel, and Helen goes “He’s just excited”. Well put, Helen. Well put indeed.

I like Caleb Landry Jones a lot (and the rest of the cast for that matter) but I have issues with the movie. I think it’s stylistically overblown, there were parts that felt like bad TV to me, and I don’t think it says anything profound about Martin Bryant or what he did.

It didn’t justify itself to me as either a psychological portrait or a story with something to say, and that bothers me in a movie about a mass murderer.

597

Finally got around to seeing My Dinner With Andre. It was fine, but Christ, in real life I would have walked out of the dinner after about 5 minutes. Andre (or rather “Andre”) is absolutely insufferable.

598

I’m still holding out for the video game version.

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599

That Simpsons joke was really misleading. Made young me expect the conversation in the movie to be interesting, instead of a load of inane New-Agey nonsense. Trenchant insight, yeah right.

I still don’t know how seriously we were meant to take that stuff.

600

Yeah I also watched this tonight, and I am not sure what could have made it a better movie. Everything felt just ok, casting, fights, locations. The premise just didn’t have enough story elements to carry an entire movie, and have it be good.

602

So we watched this tonight.

It was fucking magical.

603

This the thing with Ozzy Man, from Ozzy Man reviews, in it?

604

Whoa, is it?

Omg you’re right.

605

I’m so going to watch this.

606

Peace in our time.

607

So, one of the things I missed about pre-COVID movies was a program the Alamo Drafthouse was doing called AGFA Secret Screenings - they wouldn’t tell you what the movie was, only that it was a genre film and they thought you should watch it. In exchange, tickets were free. This is why I’ve seen Brain Damage, Uninvited, and an Italian Alien knockoff called Contamination. They’ve not revived that post-COVID, alas.

But it turns out our AMC is doing blind screenings themselves. For them, it’s a pre-release showing a week or two ahead where all they tell you is the rating. And tickets are $7 instead of like $20. (There is a separate version specifically for horror movies, so there you know that much and for the rest you know that’s not in the mix.)

My mom and I took a shot at it tonight and the movie turned out to be My Old Ass, a Canadian comedy about a teenage lesbian at the cusp of her moving away from the small town farm she’s lived on, who meets her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) via a shroom trip she tries with friends in the woods. Fuckin’ loved it. Funny, thoughtful, real. I don’t think anyone but Plaza is a big name star but they’re doing good work and they’ll probably get there.

608

Yeah, that was fun :)

I felt like the plot took too long to develop, but once it got going, it was good.

Even if Alice is whacked out of her gourd, this is still a movie about a creepy Brit who lies and manipulates in order to have sex with a woman he knows has brain damage, or is deeply psychotic. And he obviously reaps what he sows on that account.

609

That sounds like a test screening and not quite what the Alamo Drafthouse was doing, which was actual programming and sounds like a lot of fun! The difference is that for the upcoming Aubrey Plaza movie, it’s likely some of the audience members were quietly spirited away afterwards for some quick n’ dirty focus-grouping. You know, in case they need to change the ending or send it back for reshoots or something.

Although since it’s only a week out, it’s probably a preview screening to get a sense for how they’ll fare with Cinemascore and whatnot? I never quite understood the value of these kinds of test screenings so close to a release, but LA is positively lousy with them. Maybe the idea is to build up word-of-mouth?

610

Well it worked for me!

611

Oh I definitely preferred the Alamo version. But it’s still kind of neat to go see a movie without knowing literally anything about it.

There was no spiriting away. They asked you comment on Instagram in a brief title card but I don’t even have an Instagram account and I have no interest in doing so. So yeah, probably word of mouth.

612

I did something I told myself I wasn’t gonna do, and I saw a movie about juggalos, called Off Ramp. I watched the trailer out of morbid curiosity, and I was surprised by how not-terrible it looked, so I went for it.

It splits the writing credit between director Nathan Tape and a guy called Tim Cairo, who also worked on Lowlife, and I feel like the shared DNA shows.

It’s full of great lines. Quite frankly Off Ramp is so much better than a movie about juggalos has any right to be. It’s really fricken well shot, written and acted.

Structurally it’s a bit like Dumb and Dumber, in that you have a couple of guys going on a road trip, but instead of being all whacky and learning disabled, they’re just juggalo losers, and they get into a whole bunch of trouble on that account, traveling through Mississippi.

I don’t consider myself the easiest laugh, but it got me good along the way.

It comes off the rails tonally towards the end, which is such a huge bummer because it was doing so well up to that point. But it’s still an impressive no-budget movie. I’m pretty sure Nathan Tape is gonna do something really awesome in the future, and I fricken love Tim Cairo’s writing.

Ashley Smith and Scott Turner Schofield are really good in it as well. Nobody’s bad in it, it’s good craft all the way through.

I never wanna reveal anything about movies I like, but it features a squirt gun full of LSD, a guy who does shots of his little sisters blood to perform necromancy, and a gas station attendant whose momma had sex with a party clown, which inevitably leads to an interesting interaction with a juggalo.

613

I’m not a juggalo, and I think ICP’s music is atrocious, but I became a juggalo stan when I saw Violent J don a furry suit for his daughter and emphatically apologize and call himself an asshole for ever making fun of furries or gays.

614

The documentary about them is really good as well and worth watching.

615

TIL I’m going to be watching a movie about juggaloes.

616

Follow up: I watched A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks this morning.

To compare and contrast with the original, here’s what I felt the original did better:

  • Better casting, since the guy who played Ove was really grumpy and I bought it. Otto was really grumpy too, but come on, it’s Tom Hanks. He’s a teddy bear. No disrespect to his acting, but his essence is too nice.
  • Volvo vs Saab seemed like a more believable rivalry than Chevy vs Ford.
  • The original had little jokes, like him trying to get one set of flowers from a 2 for $ price coupon, cancelling the phone, cancelling the gas service, all were cut from the Tom Hanks version

Things that I felt the Tom Hanks version did better:

  • My main criticism for the original is that I didn’t get the story of the crotchety old man getting to know his neighbours story I thought I was going to get. Instead, most of the run time is used to show his childhood, his adolescence, his romance with his wife. It’s mostly a series of flashbacks and the “present day” feels more like bookends to the story even though it’s interspersed. Well, the new version fixes this! It’s the same runtime, and yet, there’s way fewer flashbacks. There’s no flashbacks to his dad growing up, his learning to work, all of that is cut. The only flashbacks we get are him meeting his wife for the first time, their first date, his proposal, and that’s about it. Much more of the movie takes place in the present with Tom Hanks!

So yeah, even though I enjoyed the original, I felt the editing and lack of flashbacks made the remake a much better paced movie and I felt like I spent more time with the part of the story I really enjoyed instead of in flashbacks. Bravo!