Spitball Army

5.5
[blu-ray, Netflix]

Pretty good for a student film, if that is what this is. Best approached with extreme empathy for the mindset of a young girl beginning to develop her reasoning skills by trial & error.

6.5
[blu-ray, Netflix]

This is one crazy, dark, fucked-up dystopian trip – kind of like Mad Max in Texas with golf carts. And with cannibals, and with a cult led by Keanu Reeves calling himself The Dream (his concubines wear t-shirts proclaiming “The Dream Is Inside Me,” so, yeah, the film has a sense of humor, too). There’s not much of a script, but the production design is solid, including Jim Carrey nearly unrecognizable as a shopping-cart homeless guy in a land where there doesn’t seem to be a home for anyone. You will likely need subtitles (I did) to know what Jason Momoa is saying half the time.

6.6
[DVD]

Totally non-PC by today’s overzealous standards, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from cracking up at title cards with quips such as “A rival tribe of savages who went broke playing strip poker.”

7.8
[DVD]

Non-stop hilarious gags. That dinner table ballet was tops, but I laughed for the duration. Add some crazy intertitles (“She was a member of the dancers’ union and couldn’t stop until the whistle blew.”), a lug nut wedding ring, and a dog that climbs both up AND down a ladder, and you have a Keaton gem.

4.6
[blu-ray, Netflix]

If the context that I watched this in was as an evaluator of a philosophy/art school dissertation, I would be tempted to give it one of the highest marks available. But as a filmic entertainment, it is merely semi-audacious. Certain scenes hit the mark, such as when Cate Blanchett assumes the role of a mother saying grace at the family dinner table but the words coming out of her mouth are from Claes Oldenburg’s “I am for an Art” (“I am for the art out of a doggy’s mouth, falling five stories from the roof. I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.”), followed by her husband ripping the roasted bird apart with shears while Blanchett empties the contents of a gravy boat on top of it. Or Blanchett as elementary school art teacher, mouthing a melange of film theory dictums from Godard, Von Trier and Werner Herzog to her students, who are innocently scribbling in their notebooks (“The camera must be hand-held! Genre movies are not acceptable! The director must not be credited!”). MANIFESTO is its own unique brand of Meta, but it’s too busy trying to be clever to generate any genuine feeling in the heart, much less true stimulation in the brain.

3.7
[blu-ray, Netflix]

Aside from a handful of sincere deep laughs at hearing nuns cuss, this was unfunny. I’m beginning to think that a film featuring Aubrey Plaza is most likely a film to avoid.

6.6
[on-demand, TCM]

Mesmerizing. Essential viewing for all interested in engineering, construction work, logic, shopping at Ikea, climbing stairs,…in other words, everyone!

https://boxd.it/lyp8L

7.7
[blu-ray, library]

Watched with the Nora Ephron commentary: lots of breaks, especially when Meryl Streep is on screen (and that’s a good thing). Re-watched primarily for Streep’s performance, which overpowers every other actor’s on screen (also a good thing, because that’s what I came to see).

https://boxd.it/lxA3b

4.2
[DVD, library]

So much shouting, much of it in rapid Cockney accents, and occasional spirited singing of British music hall songs without the nuance of Noel Coward. Katherine Hepburn is a woman disguised as a man pretending to be a woman, several decades before Julie Andrews did the same in VICTOR VICTORIA.

https://boxd.it/lw6O5

4.8
[DVD, library]

Mix a precocious young mouse who refuses to believe in Santa Claus with a hungry scoundrel cat dressed as St. Nick, and you have the basic outline of this trifle that retains the nostalgic tinsel-y Christmas glow of my parents’ childhood.

https://boxd.it/lw6zf