Run Lola Run

Running with a mop on your head is not recommended.

Run Lola Run is the story of the titular woman trying to prevent her boyfriend from getting killed by mobsters.  For no clearly explained reason, Lola gets to relive the day until she succeeds.  It’s like Groundhog Day, but with less Bill Murray and more red wigs.  Lola runs in one direction, jumping over obstacles and avoiding baddies while a clock ticks down.  If she fails, she has to start over at the beginning of the movie, but she only has three tries and oh just read the manual for Super Mario Bros. 

The movie gets off to a great, energetic start.  Music pumps.  Credits that I can’t read because they’re in German scroll by as a cartoon character runs and runs.  Then, the movie starts and an actual person runs and runs through a drab city while some unenthusiastic German techno throbs in the background.  It has all the excitement of a high school track meet, or more accurately, three largely identical track meets in a row. 

Little things change between attempts (oh, the goomba is headed left this time!), but since everyone is a bad person, it’s hard to care.  The whole thing only takes 80 minutes or so, but since the movie just replays virtually the same footage three times, it managed to bore me to tears.  By the third go round, I was thinking of taking up knitting just so I’d have a needle to shove in my eye.  Luckily, I remembered the fast-forward button before inflicting ocular trauma on myself or, God forbid, knitting a scarf. 

Even when I made it to the end, Lola has no impact on the actual resolution of the story, even though the whole mess is her fault to begin with.  She just ran and ran for no purpose it all.  She might as well have been on a treadmill eating Häagen-Dazs.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

Hombre

Apache Paul Newman does not give a crap about this white man’s review.

Hombre is the story of a Paul Newman raised by Apaches, then adopted by the movie Stagecoach.  Right down to the Hierarchy of Races (White>Mexican>Apache) established in the first ten minutes of the movie, this is the same movie.  An eclectic group of travelers get on a stagecoach and ride off to an uncertain future.  To be fair, the non-titular stagecoach is stolen part way through the movie, so it’s more like No Stagecoach from that point on, but that’s just picking nits.  And we all know I only pick nits when they’ve achieved full ripeness for baking my famous nitpie. 

The movie is called Hombre because nobody knows Paul Newman’s name.  No wait, that’s not true.  It’s John Russell.  Everybody knows his name, except this one, unimportant, guy.  Heck, he has three names, though they never tell us the other ones.  Maybe Hombre is one of them?  I don’t know.  This is supposed to feed into the mystery of a man raised by Apaches, but as far as I can tell, all being raised by Apaches does is make you an asshole.

After Newman cuts his hair, he speaks in nothing but monosyllabic phrases that can be Google translated as “Screw off.”  He studiously avoids doing anything, ever, because he, like, doesn’t care man.  So he’s less like an Apache warrior and more like a high school senior.  He’s an excellent shot with a gun, always knows what to do, and can survive in a desert with nothing but the glint in his deep blue eyes. 

Naturally, he uses these superpowers to make a nice woman destitute, get an innocent man who tried to help him killed, let a woman be kidnapped, and leave six people to die in the desert.  He presumably does this because white people were so mean to his Apache friends.  So really the movie is all about the most aggressively passive-aggressive case of White Guilt ever.  So that’s different from Stagecoach.  Everything else is the same, so just watch Stagecoach instead.  Or The Mummy.  I hear that’s good.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: No

The Big Lebowski

Dude.

The Big Lebowski  is a stoner movie, which means you either need to be a sixteen year old or a stoned 35 year old to enjoy it.  At my advanced age, it’s not cool to hang out with sixteen year old boys, and my stoner neighbor got arrested recently, so I’m forced to fall back on my own counsel.  My counsel says that this movie sucks.  Everybody in the movie is an idiot, and do a bunch of idiotic things while non-sequitors circle them like stoned vultures.  Rather than being funny, the movie settles for being weird and off-putting.

The main character has a name, but prefers to go by the name “the Dude.”  Every character in the movie talks about how inspiring it is that he’s so relaxed (stoned), but he spends the entire movie freaking out about one thing after another.  I’m more chill than he is, and I just slapped a hobo because I ran out of toothpaste.  His crazy friend is more fun, and also gets to live out a fantasy of mine by telling Steve Buscemi to shut up every time he opens the misshapen teeth-lined maw he calls a mouth.

There’s a lot of time spent in a bowling alley, so we see a ridiculous amount of footage of the camera rolling down the alley, rolling through the ball return, and hanging out inside the ball itself.  My best guess is someone made a student film showing off how clever he was with bowling ball metaphors and some movie dude did another line of cocaine and said, “This is awesome!  Make it 117 minutes long!”  Struggling to pad the run time, he made the characters repeat every line of dialogue 17 times like a stuttering West Wing parody.  There are only a dozen unique lines of dialog in the movie, probably even less if you remove all the times they say “dude.”

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

Scanners

A harrowing battle scene. Suck it, Braveheart.

The basic premise of Scanners involves people with super brain powers engaging in psychic dueling, which is not particularly cinematic.  The best the filmmakers could do is show two people squinting really constipatedly until someone’s head explodes.  Try this: Go to a bathroom where someone has just finished a particularly nasty bit of business.  Look at yourself in the mirror and try to divide 1,486 by 29 in your head.  See that series of expressions on your face?  That’s almost every scene in the movie.

The exact psychic powers that all these mutants, called Scanners, have are poorly defined.  Sometimes they can barely distract a ferret and the next minute they can make a phone booth explode.  That’s a pretty impressive power given how the only thing flammable in there is the yellow pages.  Then again, this was the 80’s, so everything is probably coated in hairspray.  The abilities of the Scanners waxes and wanes with the needs of the plot.  It’s basically X-men but with no unique abilities or budget.  There might have been more to the story than that, but I kind of fell asleep for some of it.  I dreamt of unicorns!

The climax is a duel between the bad and good Scanners that is mostly a lot of sweating and grunting, leading to my wife coming in sleepily and asking me to turn down the gay porn again.  Eventually, body parts start exploding and catching fire until somebody wins by doing something that is never previously established as possible.  Look, sci-fi has enough problems not being terrible.  At least establish some rules so I understand what’s at stake, or at least what’s happening, during the climatic fight.  Otherwise I’m just watching sweaty dudes making eyes at one another and that makes me uncomfortable.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: Only in my dreams.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

They could rob my bank any day.

I’m not really sure what the point of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is.  The movie covers the very tail end of the outlaws’ career as they flee America for Bolivia.  We’re not given any reason to care about the characters or events of the movie, any more than I care about the dump I took just because I spent two hours with it.  The movie relies on Robert Redford’s Redfordiness and Paul Newman’s Newmaniness to give the main characters personality.  While their charms are not inconsiderable, I’m trying to watch a movie here, not be bedded by them.

Most of the action revolves around the outlaws being chased by a posse that we never get to see up close.  There’s like half an hour of Redford and Newman riding a horse, stopping, breathlessly saying, “I think we lost ‘em,” then widening their eyes as they see silhouettes on the horizon, and saying, “Oh my stars, they are still coming, the game is afoot!”  When they finally have to fight after fleeing the country, Redford kills like thirty Bolivians.  This is after spending the whole movie hemming and hawing over fighting the mere six Americans that were chasing them before.  I guess that clears up the exchange rate on posses at the turn of the century, but it feels incongruent.

The movie’s not unpleasant, a quote that probably won’t make the movie poster (“Not Unpleasant” – Musty Movies), but it’s not really memorable either.  The beginning is pretty good, but then the movie muddles along until the over the top ending.  One watching tip though: Mute the movie whenever a musical montage of riding a bike or a slideshow of Our Trip to New York starts.  There hasn’t been a soundtrack this inappropriate since I hired a barbershop quarter to sing “God Save the Queen” at my 4^th of July barbeque.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No

M

He’s concerned it’ll set before he gets it in the wash.

M is really boring.  The movie was released in 1930’s Germany, and it’s pretty common for movies made before the discovery of ADD to have scenes that run so long an innocent viewer might assume the camera operator snuck out for a quick schnitzel break leaving the actors to yell at each other in German for a few extra minutes while the subtitles give up and start rolling quotes from Mein Kampf.  So little happens that if it was written down, it’d be more of a pamphletization, not a novelization.

Other than the 70% of the movie where nothing happens, M’s a great movie!  It manages to convincingly portray a man trying to elude a town full of Germans angry at him. He’s a serial killer of children, so he probably deserves whatever’s coming his way.  Still, watching 1930’s Germans hunting a man through the streets, marking him so he can be clearly identified…I’m probably reading too much into it.  Then again, the killer is played by Peter Lorre, a Jewish man who had to flee Germany after this movie was made for fear of his life.  I guess I’m reading exactly the right amount into it. The whole thing has a creepy Holocaust training video vibe to it.

Nobody other than the killer, has much of a personality aside from “Angry German”, making it difficult to care as they s-l-o-w-l-y hunt for the criminal.  I suppose it didn’t take a lot to make Germans angry in the 30’s.  There are numerous scenes where angry citizens take up arms, and criminal syndicates have more success than the police at tracking down the killer.  I think that’s supposed to be a pointed social commentary, but if I was to make a “Top Problems with Germany in the 1930’s” list, “Too Inefficient at Hunting Down Jews” wouldn’t exactly bubble to the top.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

Love Story

Dude, you might want to get the hideous back growth removed.

Love Story was the most popular movie of 1970, making it Exhibit X in what is quickly becoming the main thesis of this blog, “People in the 70’s had terrible taste.” Romantic movies typically start with a Meet Cute. This one starts with a Meet Ugly, since the girl is such a horrible person that the banter seems more like it should end with her getting punched, not a date. I would have paid real cash money to watch her die slowly of a terminal illness and oh hey look wish fulfillment. Her death’s not really a spoiler since her sweet, sweet demise is announced at the beginning of the movie and it was made 40 years ago.

The guy isn’t much better, since all he does is whine about how much it sucks to be rich, then how much it sucks to be poor, then how much it sucks that his wife is dying. I think I’m supposed to feel bad for him since his actually pretty nice parents are too rich, but his rebellion makes him seem like a petulant twerp. Both of the main characters don’t have a sympathetic bone in their body. They’re also about the only people in the movie, so you’re stuck with them for the duration. Aside from “young” Tommy Lee Jones anyway. Dude was born forty years old.

At least all this nonsense is completely forgettable. Love Story is just a montage of scenes from other movies. Montage of falling in love, montage of being poor, montage of fighting/making up, montage of being rich, montage of dying, montage of people who made the movie. These aren’t kick-ass 80’s montages either. It’s all people slowly walking around in coats while a piano plinks away in the background. The whole thing is as generic as the title. The only memorable thing is how ugly the girl is. Even for the 70’s she’s homely.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: Yes

Stagecoach

More like "Clowncoach"

If you’ve ever been watching a Western and thought, “Man, I wish instead of all the shooting and chasing and excitement there was more talking about feelings and scenes of childbirth,” Stagecoach is the Western for you.  That’s not to say that the genre stand-bys are completely absent.  There’s plenty of hats, saloons, and casual racism (for those of you keeping track at home, White People > Mexicans > “Savages.”)  There’s also a surprisingly large amount of historical context.  I suspect the filmmakers wanted to make a History Channel documentary, but it was 1939 and no one had invented dramatic voiceovers yet.

Around half the movie is just shots of a stagecoach traveling through a desert, so you can’t accuse the movie of false advertising.  Inside the stagecoach are too many people for its actual size.  Like an episode of The Real World: Dodge City, they are carefully picked to stir up conflict with each other.  One has a drinking problem, one pretends to be shocked by all the debauchery around her, and one is probably going to come out of the closet later on.  Unlike The Real World, only one seems likely to have drunken sex with her coachmates.  For this, she’s shunned by the more puritanical members of the coach, who believe you should only seduce married women through your genteel Southern charms.

Not Young John Wayne though.  I didn’t recognize him at first since he actually showed roughly two and a half emotions over the course of the movie.  He’s more than happy to defend the honor of the good-time gal and proposes marriage to her the first time they’re alone.  Sure, it seems rushed, but he’s been in prison for years and she’s just happy someone wants her despite her road-tested vagina.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward:  Barely.  There was this bit with a “savage” singing and I just couldn’t take it.

Dark Star

Later on, the bean-bag alien uses a lava lamp to solve a puzzle hidden in a blacklight poster.

I made a couple of mistakes when watching Dark Star. My first mistake was deciding to watch a 1974 sci-fi movie about some guys with shaggy hair sitting in a spaceship for 20 years with no outside contact. The second came from the relentless optimism that darkens every day I live. There were two options in the DVD menu. One made the movie last a little over an hour, and one for 80 minutes. I thought to myself, “Surely, you sexy devil, you can handle a mere 80 minutes of film.” No. I couldn’t. I had to fast forward through an extra fifteen minutes. So I wasted an extra two minutes, or one Hot Pocket, of my life.

The story related above is significantly more interesting than the movie itself. There’s dudes in space, nothing happens until the last five minutes, then the movie ends. The Must-See Movie book insists that this is a comedy, which is funnier than anything in the movie itself. It’s a bleak, depressing movie. Not because of the loneliness of space or anything like that, but because someone in the 70’s thought this movie was a good idea. I can’t believe the 70’s happened. I just can’t. The decade is like genies, a good Jennifer Lopez movie, or landing on the moon. It’s never happened.

In this long, drawn out eighty minutes of crap, the special effects deserve special mention. This is the least convincing recreation of space since I suffocated myself with a plastic bag and passed out. An excruciatingly long sequence in the middle of the movie involves an alien that looks like a bean bag with rubber feet. I’m not saying that to give you a rough approximation of what the alien’s appearance. It literally looks like someone strapped a bean bag to a pair of rubber feet. I can see the seams on the bean bag. If the Must-see Movie book is right and this movie influenced a generation of sci-fi film-makers, I no longer have to guess why most sci-fi movies suck so hard. Mystery solved, Scooby!

Rating:  Musty

Did I fast-forward: Yes

Three Days of the Condor

Redford is clearly the best spy, at least based on collar height.

Halfway into Three Days of the Condor, I felt like I was watching a pretty good movie.  I couldn’t believe that a watchable movie had been made in the 70’s.  Then came a love scene that couldn’t be any more improbable if it involved a bear and a shark doing it on the back of a unicorn.  A scant eight hours after finding his girlfriend dead, Robert Redford’s laying pipe to Faye Dunaway.  After kidnapping her at gunpoint.  Right before she was about to go see her boyfriend.  I can’t imagine this ever happening in real life, but then again, I don’t look like Robert Redford.

It’s probably unrelated, but after that moment, a pretty competent spy movie goes off the rails and crashes into the Sensical Plot Development Assisted Living Community, leaving no survivors.  As Robert Redford tries to track down who killed everyone he works with and find out why, we’re introduced to a variety of names, places, motives, and 70’s hairstyles that make no sense.  It’s all hastily cobbled together at the end to leave an unsatisfying conclusion.  It’s not actually complex, just poorly explained.  When someone gets shot suddenly, you can barely muster the enthusiasm to give a half-hearted, “No!  Not….that guy!  Whoever he was.”

I haven’t liked any Robert Redford movie I’ve seen, and I’m prepared to blame him for that.  I was once compared to a young Robert Redford by a senile, partially blind woman, and I now take it for the insult she clearly meant it to be.  Damn you old senile lady!

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No.