Moe Lane

I picked Ant-Man more or less as a reminder that you should probably start taking this opportunity to make sure that you’re checked out on the MCU. I sincerely doubt that Marvel’s going to pause in the middle of Avengers: Endgame just to let you to catch up.  And, honestly: can you really expect them to?  This is the last stage of an eleven-year ride, and the time for recaps have passed.

Plus, this is one of the fun ones.  You want to start with one of the fun ones.

I gotta watch The Thing again.  …During the day, when my kids aren’t here.  I’m pretty sure that it would freak them utterly out.

Yes, the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series was pretty bad.  But these two made-for-TV movies?  These were the true quill when it came to TV horror. …I’m reasonably sure.  It’s been a while since I saw them.  And, like many another TV gem, they’re surprisingly hard to get in digital format.

Still.

I’m surprised that I’ve never done So I Married An Axe Murderer, because it is a movie that changed my life.  No, really.  It was the way Mike Myers dressed in it.  I know that this sounds fairly lame, but I realized that the clothing aesthetic might actually… work… for me?  And it did!  I looked better after I altered my wardrobe accordingly.

Also, it’s a howlingly good dark comedy (I’ve carefully not watched it recently, because I prefer my memory of it that way).   So, since it’s the 25th anniversary of the movie being made…

Twenty bucks for all five of the previous movies: Mission: Impossible 5-Movie Collection.  Either there’s something wrong with this DVD, or the suits decided that it was smart to put all of ’em in one case so that people could binge ’em before watching the latest film.  I mean, that’s what I’m going to do; it’s probably too late to see it in theaters around here, but I figured that I could catch up in time for the DVD release.  And I was in the Best Buy today, recycling some electronics, and I walked past the DVDs, wondering if there was a collection.  There was.  And it’s ridiculously priced, for a series that everybody says is consistently good.  I ain’t gonna argue with them, though.  Sometimes, I guess Hollywood just has a rush of oxygen to the brain.

….Speaking of which.

When they first announced The Death of Stalin (plot synopsis: just what it says on the tin) as a dark comedy I was, I think legitimately, wary.  Turns out it was very good.  No romanticizing of the Stalin regime here: everybody important in the film is awful, none of them are particularly heroic, and you root for Khrushchev in the end because he’s the least bad option and Steve Buscemi (the guy who plays him) is an all right fellow.  Oh, and the actual Marxists out there in the review world hated, hated, hated this flick.  Some of the angrier reviews are worth tracking down. (more…)

…Really? I missed The Lost Boys? Weird. Also: hey, it came out 31 years ago! Congratulations, we’re all old. And it’s surprisingly not too bad, actually. I mean, I have an excellent credit rating now, and everything.

Why? Largely because of this:

An underappreciated thing about the Conan the Barbarian movie is how low-key informed it is by 1970s California beach culture. It's basically about a Muscle Beach bodybuilder & his hapa surfer buddy doing drugs, having casual sex & battling a cult that exploits rich hippies. pic.twitter.com/PWcbVzhPdx

— Zack Stentz (@MuseZack) May 12, 2018

(more…)

“What We Do In The Shadows” is a mockumentary about vampires that was made by Taika Waititi. I’ve wanted to see it ever since I watched Waititi make a no-fooling good Thor movie, and hey! It’s free with Amazon Prime! So I figured I’d let people know.

That’s pretty much it. I like it when it’s easy to cross something off of the list like this. It’s refreshingly straightforward.

Moe Lane

For an interesting reason. Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is itself an excellent animated film — but I am not fascinated by it.  I am fascinated by the world that it’s set in.  It’s clearly set in a Trieste (yes, I KNOW where Miyazaki drew his visual inspiration from: now hush) that’s still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which means that this world never had a World War I, let alone a World War II.  That last link suggests a time period of the 1950s, which is confusing, because Kiki’s transistor radio (which looks like the first one mass-produced in 1954) odd: it’s picking up American radio broadcasts. If there are no American troops in Europe — which seems likely, given that it took the Cold War to put them there — then what’s letting Kiki pick up their transmissions*?

What is going on in that world? — Even putting aside all the stuff with witches and so forth. That’s interesting, sure, but I want to know why there hasn’t been more jet propulsion work done.

(more…)