(no subject)
we watched a couple movies last night (after probably about an hour of dithering and deliberation in Blockbuster and another hour in Stop-n-Shop), both of which I hadn't seen before. this can be a bit of a gamble if you're watching them high, because while it's highly entertaining, the odds of retaining the plot coherently are pretty low. a glance through their respective Wikipedia listings shows that I remembered most of the salient points, enough to ramble on my livejournal anyway.
Canadian Bacon
I think this is the only non-documentary movie Micheal Moore ever did. it's still political, but it's very funny. it feels like an exceptionally long SCTV sketch, so much that me and Glenn started figuring out which SCTV member would play who
John Candy would stay where he is, obviously
Andrea Martin would be Honey (Rhea Purlman)
Joe Flaherty would be the President (Alan Alda) and that old crazy guy
Eugene Levy would be General Panzer (Rip Torn), also the Russian diplomat
Dave Thomas would be Smiley
Rick Moranis would be that really really creepy guy (the one who looks like the backwoods castoff of Steve Buscemi and Gordan Gano)
Catherine O'Hara would be ... in various small roles, there aren't many women in this
I love Alan Alda, but you really don't buy him as President here. he's like a slightly older Hawkeye was suddenly thrust into the Oval Office. I do always like to see him, though, he just seems so nice and like he's having a really good time. the biggest problem I had here was discerning whether or not he was sarcastic.
also, you can really tell when this was made, because the President would be a totally different character after 2000
ew, Steven Wright is in this. ergh. my boss is obsessed with him and I can't figure out why. besides the fact that he has the voice of a dead person, all his jokes are somehow agressively lame. like he's straining to make his jokes as uninteresting as possible. see? and I'm tired of Rick telling me I just don't get him - "I spilled spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone"? I get that - because like almost all his stuff, it's basically a narcotizing deadpan read of a Laffy Taffy joke. it's just not that funny. Rick is like that with all the dumb shit he likes - sport fishing, Ayn Rand, Captain and Tenielle ... he's so lame and convinced he's awesome
there's a lot of rote Canada jokes in this ("eh", "aboot", politeness), and some very funny ones (the part with Dan Aykroyd making them add French translations to their anti-Canada graffiti is very reminiscint of the scene in Life of Brian with the "Romans go home!" graffiti). it was weird everytime John Candy made an "ew, Canadians" joke, though.
"This old possum bought the farm. E-I. E-I. O." goddammit Rip Torn is hilarious in this (and lol, one of his suggestions to distract the American public is to fake alien invasion. if he also got the line about the New york blackout, it'd have been an unintentional shoutout bonanza to Men in Black)
Canada-bashing is a common thing in comedy I think because it lets you make jokes about racism without any chance ever of being called racist. france is maybe number two, followed by Scandanavian countries
Children of the Corn
I had seen a handful of sequels, in tactlessly's basement when I was in elementary school, along with bits of Child's Play and other oddly child-friendly horror movies of the day, but never the original. and now that I have, the whole situation becomes that much more perplexing - of course the sequels were bad, but shouldn't the original that spawned so many have some kind of redeeming qualities? if Linda Hamilton and Twerpy Guy were the best I could do for stars, I just wouldn't bother. I don't know who the guy was, but I can't stand Linda Hamilton, especially when people go on about how hot she's supposed to be. she looks severely stupid, vaguely simian, and over the last 15 years more and more indistinguishable from a sinewy rope statute of herself. the only other person I recognize is the unspeakably ugly redhead kid who was unspeakably ugly in "The Burbs" as well. the rest is an amorphous sea of lisping unscary kindergarteners that I hope got hit by a train on the last day of filming, or at least went on to careers as far as possible from the movie screen. the plot is so stupid as to waste even my time in describing it. all I'll add is that Isaac is probably Radar, and hella creepy, and that you can only say "get out of the house, dummy!" so many times before you throw the TV out the window
we also watched Public Access at like 3 am, which means we watched a very old man struggle through random notes from Jewish History and crippling dementia. Public Access is fucking crazy
- random ass question aimed at ... Ryan, I guess - what do the midgits in Star Wars robots actually do? Jawas and Ewoks and things run around, but you have crew moving the robot and someone elese making the beeps, so are the midgits just living ballast? that's weird.
Canadian Bacon
I think this is the only non-documentary movie Micheal Moore ever did. it's still political, but it's very funny. it feels like an exceptionally long SCTV sketch, so much that me and Glenn started figuring out which SCTV member would play who
John Candy would stay where he is, obviously
Andrea Martin would be Honey (Rhea Purlman)
Joe Flaherty would be the President (Alan Alda) and that old crazy guy
Eugene Levy would be General Panzer (Rip Torn), also the Russian diplomat
Dave Thomas would be Smiley
Rick Moranis would be that really really creepy guy (the one who looks like the backwoods castoff of Steve Buscemi and Gordan Gano)
Catherine O'Hara would be ... in various small roles, there aren't many women in this
I love Alan Alda, but you really don't buy him as President here. he's like a slightly older Hawkeye was suddenly thrust into the Oval Office. I do always like to see him, though, he just seems so nice and like he's having a really good time. the biggest problem I had here was discerning whether or not he was sarcastic.
also, you can really tell when this was made, because the President would be a totally different character after 2000
ew, Steven Wright is in this. ergh. my boss is obsessed with him and I can't figure out why. besides the fact that he has the voice of a dead person, all his jokes are somehow agressively lame. like he's straining to make his jokes as uninteresting as possible. see? and I'm tired of Rick telling me I just don't get him - "I spilled spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone"? I get that - because like almost all his stuff, it's basically a narcotizing deadpan read of a Laffy Taffy joke. it's just not that funny. Rick is like that with all the dumb shit he likes - sport fishing, Ayn Rand, Captain and Tenielle ... he's so lame and convinced he's awesome
there's a lot of rote Canada jokes in this ("eh", "aboot", politeness), and some very funny ones (the part with Dan Aykroyd making them add French translations to their anti-Canada graffiti is very reminiscint of the scene in Life of Brian with the "Romans go home!" graffiti). it was weird everytime John Candy made an "ew, Canadians" joke, though.
"This old possum bought the farm. E-I. E-I. O." goddammit Rip Torn is hilarious in this (and lol, one of his suggestions to distract the American public is to fake alien invasion. if he also got the line about the New york blackout, it'd have been an unintentional shoutout bonanza to Men in Black)
Canada-bashing is a common thing in comedy I think because it lets you make jokes about racism without any chance ever of being called racist. france is maybe number two, followed by Scandanavian countries
Children of the Corn
I had seen a handful of sequels, in tactlessly's basement when I was in elementary school, along with bits of Child's Play and other oddly child-friendly horror movies of the day, but never the original. and now that I have, the whole situation becomes that much more perplexing - of course the sequels were bad, but shouldn't the original that spawned so many have some kind of redeeming qualities? if Linda Hamilton and Twerpy Guy were the best I could do for stars, I just wouldn't bother. I don't know who the guy was, but I can't stand Linda Hamilton, especially when people go on about how hot she's supposed to be. she looks severely stupid, vaguely simian, and over the last 15 years more and more indistinguishable from a sinewy rope statute of herself. the only other person I recognize is the unspeakably ugly redhead kid who was unspeakably ugly in "The Burbs" as well. the rest is an amorphous sea of lisping unscary kindergarteners that I hope got hit by a train on the last day of filming, or at least went on to careers as far as possible from the movie screen. the plot is so stupid as to waste even my time in describing it. all I'll add is that Isaac is probably Radar, and hella creepy, and that you can only say "get out of the house, dummy!" so many times before you throw the TV out the window
we also watched Public Access at like 3 am, which means we watched a very old man struggle through random notes from Jewish History and crippling dementia. Public Access is fucking crazy
- random ass question aimed at ... Ryan, I guess - what do the midgits in Star Wars robots actually do? Jawas and Ewoks and things run around, but you have crew moving the robot and someone elese making the beeps, so are the midgits just living ballast? that's weird.