Tag: movies
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Movie Adventures: Accidental Colman Domingo Double Feature!
I knew about the first one (since I watched the movie specifically because he’s nominated for best actor), but didn’t realize the second until he showed up onscreen.
Rustin
He’s great, and the movie has some outstanding performances, but it’s so generic that it draws away from the power of the events shown. Still good, but I wish it was a little more adventurous.
Drive-Away Dolls
Exactly what the trailer promised. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in a raunchy lesbian-centric pulp mystery road trip comedy. It doesn’t make sense, and lots of sections don’t work, but the leads are great. I laughed a bunch. Colman Domingo is really only in this for a few scenes, but I’m still counting it as a CDDF.
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Retro Movie Adventures: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
Ah, the Fifties: when aliens so advanced that they can travel thousands of miles between seconds can be defeated by guys driving trucks with weapons they built in two months. When people could be followed by a flying saucer on Monday, and not mention it to their army general father until the next day over dinner. When spacesuits that scientists claim they are unable to to damage can be pierced with bullets. When a vital part of communicating with aliens was have dead batteries in your tape recorder so the alien voices would slow down. When most of the world moved at 24 frames per second, but spacecraft moved at 12. When a woman would expect credit for her work, but proudly demand to be called “Mrs. Doctor Russel A. Marvin.”
I’m so glad we’ve left all this behind and moved into the unassailable logic of movies like Argylle and The Beekeeper.
Also: The lead scientist is named Dr. Marvin, and I kept waiting for Dr. Marvin Monroe to show up.
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Movie Pass Adventures: Madame Web
A misfire, but much less of one than I expected it to be.
It’s set before Peter Parker’s birth, so it’s full of “let’s talk about Spider-Man without talking about Spider-Man” moments. My favorite was when a character said “when you accept responsibility, you will gain great power.” I also enjoyed when someone said the bad guy was “like some kind of spider… person.”
Some really rough dialogue, slippery motivation, disappearing characters, dropped plots, and misguided fan service.
Still, I officially declare this movie Better Than Morbius. maybe let it play in the background while you’re doing housework.
Also: The IMAX poster is way cooler than the standard ads. Look at this thing:
Bonus Movie: The Last Repair Shop
Are short documentaries about people who fix musical instruments for LAUSD students supposed to make me cry? And then cry again while talking about it? Because this one did. A pretty straightforward talking heads (and playing heads, I guess) short film. The score was surprisingly distracting for a movie about giving kids the chance to expand their lives with music- until the end, when it suddenly clicked for me and I retroactively appreciated all of it.
It’s on YouTube. Watch it!
If you count short films, I am now up to 20 movies this year. That’s a movie every 2.35 days, or just under 3 movies a week.
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Letterboxd
Hey, all none of you who ever read my blog: Now I’m putting stuff you won’t see on Letterboxd as well! Let us be friends there as we are here, imaginary person!
In conclusion, please enjoy this image of a boy with an albino squirrel on his head.
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Eleven More
Here’s another batch of posters from my treasure hunt. There are more I didn’t photograph yet.
The Phantom Tollbooth (1970). A lot of the kid posters are labeled “MGM Children’s Matinees,” which were films re-released between 1970 and 1972 to be played as matinees before current films.
This trailer even has the “Children’s Matinees” tag! 
Dr. Crippen (1963)
The full movie is on YouTube. 
Get Carter (1971)
Village of the Damned (1960) & Children of the Damned (1964)
World In My Pocket (1961) & Looking For Love (1964)
I couldn’t find any usable video from World In My Pocket (though there’s a dubbed version on a sketchy Russian movie site). All I have is the Wikipedia article. So I’ll compensate with two clips about Looking For Love.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957) and Rhino!
…and the full movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaZkM9fjzxg
The Alphabet Murders (1965)
Featuring Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot.
Full movie:
The Scarlet Coat (1955)
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Today’s treasure
I’m a digital media teacher. Today, I met with a bunch of fellow elective teachers for an all-day planning meeting. We normally meet at the district offices, but today we were invited to the Warner Bros. lot. In the middle of the meeting we were taken to Stage 24. It used to be where they filmed Friends, but today it was mostly empty.
MOSTLY empty; it now held this:
The stage had boxes and stacks of promotional posters from Warner movies from the past sixty years. “We’re going to get rid of all this. Take as much as you like!”
You know how you sometimes get a dessert that’s so delicious you keep eating well after you are full? That was me with these posters. I spent HOURS digging through them. I took a bunch for my classroom, and more for me. I left behind a ton of things that looked amazing but were not appropriate for school. Most of the materials were either half sheet posters or publicity packs, but there were some full size posters as well.
Here are a few of the things I found. I added trailers if I found them.
Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975), starring Ron Ely, AKA “TV Tarzan.”
Deadly China Doll (1973)
The Impossible Years (1968)
(A scene, not a trailer) 
A man called Dagger (1967)
THEME BY STEVE ALLEN! 
Two posters for The Bad Seed (1956)
“A PICTURE OF EMOTIONAL EXTREMES and SNSITIVE DEPTH!” 
Chamber of Horrors (1966)
“The first movie with its own FEAR FLASHER and HORROR HORN!” 
The Body (1970) – music by ROger Waters!
“A deeply intimate feature-length film exploring the physical experience of being human.” 
The Time Machine (1960) promotional materials.
Octopussy (1980) – Not the worst James Bond movie, but certainly close.
Time After Time (1979). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “My name is H.G. Wells. I have come here in a time machine of my own creation!”
Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972). A Brian De Palma movie!
Rock & Rule (1983)
Debbie Harry! Cheap Trick! Lou Reed! Iggy Pop! Cartoon Animals! 
Mayerling (1968). No real trailer available, but here’s a “fan” edit.
Not exactly a fan: “This movie is laughably bad. I really only watched it so I could look at Omar Sharif and honestly they did him dirty with that hairstyle.” 
The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) promotional pictures. I’d say this is the greatest film about a man who turns into a fish and joins the navy ever made.
The transformation scene. 
Hot Potato (1976) and Enter the Dragon (1973).
Amazing that Bruce Lee got THIRD billing in the original trailer. 
The Gumball Rally (1976)
Raul Julia’s finest film. 
O Lucky Man! (1973) promotional pictures.
Slander (1957)
I think I’m getting this one framed. I have a car full of posters like those, but I definitely left these two behind:
Hercules (1983)
Curse of the Pink Panther (1983)
“Sure, Peter Sellers has been dead for three year, but that doesn’t have to stop us!” -
So, here’s a weird thing…
I was trying to remember how I did a fake sketch effect in Photoshop, and I remembered that somewhere along the way I had written up a tutorial and put it on this site. So I did what any disorganized person would do: searched for “fake sketch ga2so” on Google. I found the link, but I also found a link to a reddit post that led to an essay on YouTube about David Manning.
You probably have a couple of questions, like “Who is David Manning?” and “What does that have to do with you?”
Well, about twenty years ago, Sony made up a fake reviewer named David Manning and used his quotes in their ad campaigns. I thought it was hilarious, so I fired up Paint Shop Pro and a bootleg copy of Dreamweaver and made David Manning- The Last Honst Critic. Then last year Brickwall Pictures decided to do a video detailing the history of David Manning. He ended up spending almost a third of the video trying to figure out why someone would go through all the trouble of making the site.
I’ll tell you why: I was a goofball with a very slightly popular personal web site at a time when people who wanted to share a goofy idea on the internet couldn’t just post it on a giant social network, and I thought it was funny. I have a vague memory of trying to get the buttons on the site to resemble Apple’s house look of the time taking more time than writing all of the terrible copy on the page.
Didn’t quite get it. So I posted a comment on the video explaining who I was, why I made the page, and what I was doing now. I even mentioned that my recent Criterion Collection boxes were sort of a spiritual successor to David Manning. I also thanked him for making me feel like it was worth it to leave a dumb joke up for 20 years. I thought I’d either get some sort of “that explains it” response, or (more likely) no response at all. What I didn’t expect was that he’d delete not just my comment, but any comment anyone made referring to my page. Really odd. Maybe he’s planning a secret followup video and doesn’t want to give away the ending. Maybe he visited my Youtube channel and decided he didn’t like my goofy bike videos. Whatever. It’s his channel. He can do what he likes with it.
Me, I’m going to go watch David Manning’s “Best Film of 2022”: Morbius.
And I’ll be drinking Jared Leto’s Hard Kombucha the whole time. UPDATE: He wasn’t deleting comments. It was Youtube’s spam filter going a little hard.
