Tag Archive
I’m Still Here
Andy Kaufman was* hilarious. But only in retrospect. If you went to a comedy club and had to sit through one of his on-stage readings of The Great Gatsby, it’s a very reasonable response to heckle him and eventually leave. Such meta-commentary on the notion of entertainment and the expectation of a comedian performing for […]
Skatetown, U.S.A.
Categorizing a movie as a time capsule reduces it to a simple evocation of a specific time and nothing else. William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is drenched in 1985, a Wang Chung score, rampant androgyny, ridiculous car chases, cheerful amorality, and a cynical fetishism that seems modeled on Miami Vice, which debuted […]
Lookin’ to Get Out vs. Lookin’ to Get Out: Revisionist History Vol. 1
David Fincher’s Alien 3 is the best example of a very flawed film that was improved in a longer version, while still retaining all of those very same flaws. The theatrical cut, running just under two hours, has very little character development. And, therefore, apart from Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, doesn’t make you care about […]
Wild At Heart
There was some riff-raff about the fact that MGM’s new disc was the R rated cut, and not the unrated version that was released in Europe. The main difference is apparently in the smoke that appears when Dafoe blows his own head off, which was added to avoid an X. I watched the Region 2 […]
Willard
The biggest mistake made in 2003’s Willard was not in remaking a mediocre movie that’s mostly remembered for the sequel’s use of a Michael Jackson love song for a rat, but because they went with a PG-13. The tone is R rated, the violence seems overly toned down (and indeed was), the language is awkwardly […]
The Butterfly Effect
Sometimes director’s cut DVDs are a waste of time and a simple marketing scheme. I watched the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect and then watched the conclusion of the theatrical cut, and am mystified how anyone can even consider the latter’s ending to be valid. The director’s cut’s conclusion seems thematically correct, as it […]