The best movie with a focus on southwest LGBTQIA+ rodeo I have ever seen. Very sweet, and very comfortable and open with gender and sexuality. And it has Teen Witch as an alcoholic mother, so you know it’s good. A big plus: no one gets beat up for being who they are.
Part II of my Let’s Watch America-centered movies in Wales Tour.
Let’s play Guess What Happens!
There is exactly ONE direct reference to the original film.
This time I counted the commercials (not trailers, commercials) before the movie. There were FIFTEEN, including three for the armed forces, one for a cleaning product, and one misguided commercial for KFC. Is Kentucky Fried Chicken popular in Wales? I’ve seen a bunch of them- more than I’ve seen McDonalds.
I’ve liked most of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies (I didn’t care for the “sex with someone who is effectively a child, played for laughs” of Poor Things) so I had a lot of hope for this. Unfortunately it was disconnected, arch, and stiff, with a lot of it feeling like weirdness purely for weirdness’ sake.
I saw both of these at The New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s movie theater that only shows movies on 35mm (or in rare cases 16mm) film, and it’s always a double feature. They also show old trailers, and it was wild to see something that actually made The Black Hole look like a serious, scary sci-fi film. The audience was full of neurodivergent socially awkward weirdos who talk too loudly about things they love, so I fit right in.
Somehow, I’d never seen this. I really enjoyed it. It’s a crazy mix of dated ideas (“we’ve known each other nearly two days, so of course we’re in love!”) and ahead-of-its-time concepts. The special effects hold up incredibly well for a movie that’s almost 70 years old. I bet Gene Roddenberry loved this movie. It was like an early Star Trek episode in all the right ways, all the way up to the “our greatest enemy is ourselves” ending. And dig that crazy score!
After Forbidden Planet ended, someone in the row in front of me told a friend: “Forbidden Planet is great, but The Time Machine is better! It’s a classic!“
He was wrong.
The Time Machine has its charms, but it’s a much weaker story (the final message seems to be “our blond-haired master race can save the world with genocide”), and more than once the special effects are either terrible mattes or “here is some stock footage that approximates the description in the voice-over.” Also: coming up with futuristic names is always a challenge, and there’s no way to know how language will shift over time, but Weena is an especially unfortunate choice.
I always make a graphic for the featured image of these posts. If I see two movies in a day I make a single combined graphic. But this one is different! I made two separate graphics, then mashed them together for the front page.
Why has it taken me 25 years to see this movie?
I teach digital media to middle school kids. One of the things they love is filming chase scenes, and I always end up telling them the same things: It’s too long. It’s too repetitive. You need a clear, sensible story to carry the action or the audience will get bored.
This movie is basically one long chase scene repeated multiple times with a story that shifts every time it repeats, but good golly it works. I may have to show this to my classes (in an edited-for-language form) and say “here’s why this long chase is engaging and yours are less so.”
Call it a crazy hunch, but I think Francis Galluppi (who directed this) is a fan of the early work of the Coen Brothers. It’s clear from the very beginning that things are not going to go well for pretty much anyone.
Two movies in a day!
You know how old low-budget R-rated sex comedies like to show boobs really early so you’ll spend the rest of the movie anticipating more? Babes does the same thing with raunchy language. Sure, it’s never puritanical, but it sure felt like the bulk of the naughty talk happens in the first fifteen minutes. The Required Meaningful Moments fall a little flat, but the funny stuff is strong enough to support the weak bits.
I was going to try and write a bunch of monkey puns, but it’s late and I should be asleep so you get two or three flat sentences that will do the required job without being offensive, but also without much to make them interesting. Which it turns out is a pretty good way to describe this film; no monkey business in this monkey business.
Do you like sweaty people? Thumping music? Different points in time marked by Zendaya’s haircuts? Balls (type: tennis)? Then I’ve got a movie for you!
Also: I’m not a fan of exposition dump scenes, but I really needed someone to tell my non-sports brain the rules of tennis.
I expected a movie about a stunt guy directed by a stunt guy to be full of stunts, but there’s a lot more to enjoy here. The mystery plot isn’t much more than what you would have seen on the TV show that this is loosely based on, but that’s not important. What’s important: Gosling & Blunt have great chemistry, the depiction of the movie industry feels wildly cartoonish yet somehow believable, and most importantly the stunts are a blast. The end credits are what every stunt man movie needs: an eighties-Burt-Reynolds-movie style flashback of behind the scenes shots showing the real stunts behind the movie stunts. There’s also a mid-credits scene that’s exactly what you expect. I saw it in IMAX for maximum explodey goodness. Thumbs up!