Tag: parody

  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: UHF (1989)

    A shot from UHF. Weird Al Yankovic, parodying the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, stares at an Oscar statuette.
    Weird Al Yankovic and David Bowe in UHF.

    Movies out in the summer of1989: Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future Part II, Look Who’s Talking, Dead Poets Society, Leathal Weapon 2, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Little Mermaid, Born on the Fourth of July… and this goofy little movie. It never had a chance.

    I had to adjust my usual Alamo Drafthouse viewing experience expectations for this. For one thing, anyone going to see UHF in a theater in 2025- and this includes me- is likely to be a weirdo who laughs loud and hard at corny jokes they already know. For another, I somehow decided I’d be okay sitting front row center, so the whole movie looked like this:

    A highly keystoned image of a movie screen showing a cat in a costume.
    Actual shot from my seat.

    UHF is about competing TV networks, so the source poster was a no-brainer. I could have left in all the original taglines. Unfortunately, the poster is not very well-known, but trust me: this is really accurate.

    A poster for UHF mimicking the poster for Network.
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  • Movie Pass Adventures: Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie

    Cheech & Chong smiling and looking at the camera.
    Early Cheech & Chong, shirtless and making bodybuilder poses & silly faces.

    The story of how a Chinese Canadian soul musician and a Mexican American with a love of pot(tery) became comedy superstars. Very watchable. A little too forced at times, but that’s about right for these guys.

    I went with a different last movie for the parody poster.

    A poster for Cheech and Chong's Last Movie mimicking the poster for The Last Picture Show.

  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Lost Highway (1997)

    Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway
    Robert Blake as Mystery Man in Lost Highway

    Somehow, David Lynch’s Lost Highway is both more and less realistic than Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Body doubles, body switches, a Mystery Man who appears in multiple places at once, and a linear story told in non-linear time, but it’s still not as weird as a guy dressing up a woman to look like the woman who thought she was possessed by her ancestor and killed herself but then two or three other layers of unlikely weirdness happen.

    Also: it was fun to see Robert Loggia beat up a guy on the closed road I use to ride my bike to Griffith Observatory.

    Today’s poster was such an clear choice that I almost avoided it for being too obvious. Fun fact: The original poster featured an early example of computer graphics. Vertigo was actually the first movie to use computer graphics; Saul Bass used them in the title sequence and on the original version of this poster. They probably took days to render. I made my low resolution substitute in about five minutes with an online programming language for kids called Scratch. The part that took the longest was all the hand drawn lettering. There are Saul Bass homage fonts out there, but I wanted all the letters to be unique.

    A poster for Lost Highway in the style of the poster for Vertigo.
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