I enjoyed watching Hardware on Hulu, a 1990 post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk movie directed by Richard Stanley. The story is essentially that a scavenger in a dystopian city picks up metal parts for his sculptor girlfriend to create art with, and a metal head that he finds is a military grade piece that, when fused with the robot body, becomes a sentient killing machine. It’s a little reminiscent of The Terminator, but also feels inspired by Japanese cyberpunk films that have a messy low-budget look to them.
The story was a little thin, and I lost interest when it became more of a killer robot story, as I skipped ahead sometimes, but I really liked the atmosphere and grittiness, and the orange color schemes to illustrate the grim future. It had some great music in it, like Public Image, Limited, and I could definitely tell the director came from music videos, I could see him doing videos for industrial and post-punk bands, given his obvious interest in cyberpunk genres.
So this was a pretty cool movie to watch, and it looked great with fantastic special effects for just under a million dollars in 1990.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Thoughts on Panel Discussion of Village Voice Film Critics
Last month, I enjoyed attending a panel discussion at the Moving Image museum about the history of the film section of the recently ended Village Voice, where several film critics and editors talked for an hour about their experiences writing for the paper, really reminiscing on the close-knit, counterculture vibe of the paper over the decades.
The panelists were Michael Atkinson, Bilge Ebiri, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Jonas Mekas, Nick Pinkerton, Amy Taubin, and Stephanie Zacharek. It was really fascinating, and I loved seeing how the critics shared the same love for odd or underseen films as I do, and were actively working to promote those films and not just the prestige stuff that the New York Times was covering. It did make me a little nostalgic for when I briefly worked at the Voice as a summer intern, as well as how I used to read the paper a lot and saved clippings of arts reviews for my scrapbooks. My experience with the Voice is pretty much the same as any newbie in NYC who used it as a guide to find the underground arts scenes in the city. It was just great to see these film journalists gathered together and sharing stories about the legacy of the Voice and the indie film theater scene in NYC.
The panelists were Michael Atkinson, Bilge Ebiri, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Jonas Mekas, Nick Pinkerton, Amy Taubin, and Stephanie Zacharek. It was really fascinating, and I loved seeing how the critics shared the same love for odd or underseen films as I do, and were actively working to promote those films and not just the prestige stuff that the New York Times was covering. It did make me a little nostalgic for when I briefly worked at the Voice as a summer intern, as well as how I used to read the paper a lot and saved clippings of arts reviews for my scrapbooks. My experience with the Voice is pretty much the same as any newbie in NYC who used it as a guide to find the underground arts scenes in the city. It was just great to see these film journalists gathered together and sharing stories about the legacy of the Voice and the indie film theater scene in NYC.
Thoughts on Body Bags
I went to the Museum of the Moving Image last month to see as part of their John Carpenter weekend the 1993 anthology film Body Bags, which was made for Showtime as a pilot for a possible series in the style of Tales from the Crypt. It was pretty fun to watch. Carpenter directed the first two segments, and Tobe Hooper did the last one. It had a cast of stars and famous horror movie directors, with actors like Stacy Keach, Robert Carradine, Mark Hamill, Twiggy, Sheena Easton, David Naughton, Deborah Harry, David Warner, and directors like Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Roger Corman, and Carpenter himself as the horror host introducing the segments as “The Coroner.”
My favorite segment was the first one, where a young woman is working her new job on the night shift alone at a gas station, on the same night that a serial killer is on the loose, and a series of varying men are introduced, letting the audience try to figure out which one is the killer. I definitely got the killer wrong, and was surprised. The story has influence from Halloween, including Carpenter recreating one of his iconic shots of the killer rising from the ground behind the heroine, and there was a lot of really great suspense and creative camera angles. So this definitely felt more like a standalone movie and not so much a story segment.
The second segment was more horror comedy to me, where Stacy Keach is insecure about his thinning hair, and despite that his sexy girlfriend (Sheena Easton) isn’t bothered by it, he is obsessed with trying to fix it. He goes to a doctor he saw on TV, and ends up with a long mane of romance novel cover hair. But his hair keeps growing, his face breaks out in gnarly pustules, and his hair has tiny little snakes in it as hair follicles. This story I wasn’t as into, because it was a little too silly for me, but Keach was great at totally playing it seriously, and he has fantastically rich voice which, as Rifftrax said, can basically take any hokey line and give it actorly gravitas.
The last segment starred Mark Hamill as a baseball player who loses his right eye in a car accident, and his eye transplant gives him strange visions and personality changes. I could already figure out the end based on seeing similar stories, but it was a lot of fun seeing Hamill camp it up as a conflicted hero who can’t control his emotions and is just freaking out over his cursed eye.
This movie was a lot of fun to watch, and is available on YouTube.
My favorite segment was the first one, where a young woman is working her new job on the night shift alone at a gas station, on the same night that a serial killer is on the loose, and a series of varying men are introduced, letting the audience try to figure out which one is the killer. I definitely got the killer wrong, and was surprised. The story has influence from Halloween, including Carpenter recreating one of his iconic shots of the killer rising from the ground behind the heroine, and there was a lot of really great suspense and creative camera angles. So this definitely felt more like a standalone movie and not so much a story segment.
The second segment was more horror comedy to me, where Stacy Keach is insecure about his thinning hair, and despite that his sexy girlfriend (Sheena Easton) isn’t bothered by it, he is obsessed with trying to fix it. He goes to a doctor he saw on TV, and ends up with a long mane of romance novel cover hair. But his hair keeps growing, his face breaks out in gnarly pustules, and his hair has tiny little snakes in it as hair follicles. This story I wasn’t as into, because it was a little too silly for me, but Keach was great at totally playing it seriously, and he has fantastically rich voice which, as Rifftrax said, can basically take any hokey line and give it actorly gravitas.
The last segment starred Mark Hamill as a baseball player who loses his right eye in a car accident, and his eye transplant gives him strange visions and personality changes. I could already figure out the end based on seeing similar stories, but it was a lot of fun seeing Hamill camp it up as a conflicted hero who can’t control his emotions and is just freaking out over his cursed eye.
This movie was a lot of fun to watch, and is available on YouTube.
Thoughts on TV Party at Anthology Film Archives
Earlier this year, I saw at Anthology Film Archives a selection of public access TV from circa 1980 called TV Party, hosted by the late downtown scenester Glenn O’Brien. It was interesting to watch in a documentary way of the NYC underground scene of the downtown world of art, post-punk, No Wave, experimental film, etc. I liked it as a time capsule, but also found it extremely tedious to watch talentless hipsters muck around in front of the camera in unedited shots with technical difficulties (a lot of sound issues with the audio); the cameraman focusing on an unaware woman’s breasts several times; party guests poking fun at a guy passed out from drugs at a party and seeing it as a joke instead of a problem; the host grabbing a woman in a tight headlock and wrestling her to the ground, and despite her laughing, it looked messed-up to me.
There were some highlights: Jean-Michel Basquiat as a background player, looking like a baby-faced kid; a guy singing a song about fast food and working “Chain of Fools” into it; awkwardness of a bad post-punk band with a Casio keyboard beat; and a shy British guy from the Flying Lizards clearly weirded out by the NYC hipsters and their bullshit.
It was good to watch to see it as a representation of what the scene was like then, but seeing so many hipster assholes also took away the coolness for me, like demystifying it for me. So I had a half and half reaction to it in all.
There were some highlights: Jean-Michel Basquiat as a background player, looking like a baby-faced kid; a guy singing a song about fast food and working “Chain of Fools” into it; awkwardness of a bad post-punk band with a Casio keyboard beat; and a shy British guy from the Flying Lizards clearly weirded out by the NYC hipsters and their bullshit.
It was good to watch to see it as a representation of what the scene was like then, but seeing so many hipster assholes also took away the coolness for me, like demystifying it for me. So I had a half and half reaction to it in all.
Thoughts on Vagabond
I went to see Agnes Varda’s classic film Vagabond (1985) at the Moving Image museum. I hadn’t seen it in nearly twenty years, and found it to be poignant and rough to watch. It’s about a young teen female drifter who is found dead from cold in a ditch, and an unseen fictional interviewer collects on-camera recollections from people she met along her journey, with a series of vignettes about her life hitchhiking, doing odd jobs for money and small random meals, smoking grass with a short-lived beau, befriending a businesswoman during a car ride, sleeping in a tent in the woods, etc. The girl, named Mona, can be quite charming, like when she gets drunk on brandy with a rich old lady, or makes lame puns like “bread for some bread.” She is a pretty intelligent and streetwise character, who pretty much just goes where the road takes her.
The film largely takes place in the French countryside, and it is compelling to watch Mona go along her way and collecting experiences, being transient. I likely romanticized this film in my late teens, but didn’t pay close attention to the negative sides of her vagabond life as a solo teen girl, like when she gets raped in the woods (the camera pans away and cuts to another scene), gets wasted with a group of homeless vagrants in a dirty flophouse, or acts like a drunk, desperate mess in a bus station.
It was good to revisit this film and have an adult perspective on it, of both having admiration and sympathy for Mona, and wanting her to settle somewhere or to have more safety in her life while still being a free spirited person.
The film largely takes place in the French countryside, and it is compelling to watch Mona go along her way and collecting experiences, being transient. I likely romanticized this film in my late teens, but didn’t pay close attention to the negative sides of her vagabond life as a solo teen girl, like when she gets raped in the woods (the camera pans away and cuts to another scene), gets wasted with a group of homeless vagrants in a dirty flophouse, or acts like a drunk, desperate mess in a bus station.
It was good to revisit this film and have an adult perspective on it, of both having admiration and sympathy for Mona, and wanting her to settle somewhere or to have more safety in her life while still being a free spirited person.
Thoughts of The Changeling
I went to the Metrograph and saw The Changeling, a 1980 horror film starring George C. Scott as a grief-stricken man staying in a house with a haunted ghost history. It was a fairly effective haunted house story, with a really interesting backstory of a cover-up by a wealthy family, and Scott often had a low-key quality to his performance, not overacting the reactions, but either looking perturbed by random oddness (piano playing by itself, hearing ghostly voices at night), or, in unintentional humor, having a annoyed attitude to whatever new weird thing happened, like he wasn’t even surprised anymore.
I also like watching old films to see uses of now retro-technology, like reel-to-reel tape recorders to record a seance or using a microfiche machine to look up articles from 1909. I just like seeing how people used technology that is now considered archaic or obsolete.
I also like watching old films to see uses of now retro-technology, like reel-to-reel tape recorders to record a seance or using a microfiche machine to look up articles from 1909. I just like seeing how people used technology that is now considered archaic or obsolete.
Thoughts on Hereditary
I saw Hereditary. I thought it was okay, not as scary as it was hyped. It was very effective in the first half with scenes of family grieving over loss, and being silent in sorrow, feeling guilty over conflicting emotions over the dead, or howling in pain. I really felt for them more there. I was especially impressed by the performance of Alex Wolff as the family’s average teen son who is stricken by a chilling turn of events. He did a fantastic job in playing a traumatized teenager and digging deep into emotions. I had only known of him prior from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle as the teen who turns into The Rock in a video game, so this was a pleasant surprise to see him in a heavily dramatic role.
But the second half became more supernatural, with seances and apparitions, and the effect was more hokey than terrifying, and I stopped caring as much and felt outside of the story, not invested anymore. I think the film was mismarketed as this chilling horror film, whereas it’s more a supernatural thriller about grief. I wanted to like it more than I did, and I definitely preferred the first half before they went for more cliched movie scares.
But the second half became more supernatural, with seances and apparitions, and the effect was more hokey than terrifying, and I stopped caring as much and felt outside of the story, not invested anymore. I think the film was mismarketed as this chilling horror film, whereas it’s more a supernatural thriller about grief. I wanted to like it more than I did, and I definitely preferred the first half before they went for more cliched movie scares.
Thoughts on Highlander
I watched Highlander for the first time recently. I really liked it a lot. Though I felt like the female love interest in the present day scenes was unnecessary, she could have just been an ally and not a future girlfriend. And I also got tired of Christopher Lambert’s weird “heh heh” laugh, he laughs like that in Mortal Kombat too. I found his voice to be grating and off-putting. I got that the accent was unusual because he had lived for 400 years all over the world, and wouldn’t have a specific accent, but it didn’t make it any less irritating to listen to.
But Clancy Brown was great as the Kurgan, and he was pretty much my favorite character of the movie. I liked his heavy metal look, and he seemed to have so much fun playing the villain.
I was surprised that Sean Connery wasn’t in as much of the movie as I thought. He enters the film forty minutes in, and is dead about twenty minutes later or so. I did not buy him as an Egyptian at all, and Lambert sounded like either he did a lot of ADR or someone else had dubbed his lines, because he didn’t speak English at the time.
The sword-fighting scenes were pretty good, I liked the training sequences with Connery, with his supportive encouragement, and the final battle with the Kurgan, though the stunt double work was very obvious with the use of silhouettes and dimly lit night scenes.
But Clancy Brown was great as the Kurgan, and he was pretty much my favorite character of the movie. I liked his heavy metal look, and he seemed to have so much fun playing the villain.
I was surprised that Sean Connery wasn’t in as much of the movie as I thought. He enters the film forty minutes in, and is dead about twenty minutes later or so. I did not buy him as an Egyptian at all, and Lambert sounded like either he did a lot of ADR or someone else had dubbed his lines, because he didn’t speak English at the time.
The sword-fighting scenes were pretty good, I liked the training sequences with Connery, with his supportive encouragement, and the final battle with the Kurgan, though the stunt double work was very obvious with the use of silhouettes and dimly lit night scenes.
Thoughts on Body Count
On Hulu, I watched Body Count, an 90’s home invasion movie starring Justin Theroux, Alyssa Milano, and Ice-T. I remembered seeing it on shelves at Blockbuster years ago, and was interested, but my family never rented low-budget stuff, just Hollywood stuff. It was pretty good, an effective thriller that also had Tiny Lister in it in a tough guy with a soft side kind of role. He still killed people, but had some good comic lines about being a loser at gambling and only winning bets in his mind.
The basic plot is that Theroux and Milano are a couple going to see his super-rich family for the weekend, and his family gives a hard time about not having a career direction and being passive-aggressive jerks towards him. Then while the couple are in the basement, Ice-T and his guys bust into the house, kill everyone, and start stealing artwork. So the couple are trying to avoid detection and survive this invasion, and it gets pretty tense and suspenseful to watch, with Ice-T giving the best performance of the film. He just injected so much energy and charisma in the film, and dominated his scenes.
I was surprised to see Theroux in the lead role, since he was a virtual unknown in 1997, and didn’t get more widely known until being in indie films of the 2000s, as well as being the villain in the second Charlie’s Angels movie. He did well in it, though he has an odd voice, it’s a little affected to sound tough or “dark.” Milano was fine, she’s a decent actress and was in her period of starring in low-budget movies until Charmed brought her back to the mainstream.
Hulu though messes up with partially giving away a major plot point. The first line of the summary describes Theroux’s character as a hired professional. That could mean anything, but I took it to mean hit man. And so I waited throughout the movie for that to come into play, and his criminal life (he’s portrayed as the innocent hero for much of the film) is revealed in the last twenty minutes. The summary doesn’t totally spoil the film, but it does give away that he has a secret that he’s been hiding, so it blew the story a little.
The basic plot is that Theroux and Milano are a couple going to see his super-rich family for the weekend, and his family gives a hard time about not having a career direction and being passive-aggressive jerks towards him. Then while the couple are in the basement, Ice-T and his guys bust into the house, kill everyone, and start stealing artwork. So the couple are trying to avoid detection and survive this invasion, and it gets pretty tense and suspenseful to watch, with Ice-T giving the best performance of the film. He just injected so much energy and charisma in the film, and dominated his scenes.
I was surprised to see Theroux in the lead role, since he was a virtual unknown in 1997, and didn’t get more widely known until being in indie films of the 2000s, as well as being the villain in the second Charlie’s Angels movie. He did well in it, though he has an odd voice, it’s a little affected to sound tough or “dark.” Milano was fine, she’s a decent actress and was in her period of starring in low-budget movies until Charmed brought her back to the mainstream.
Hulu though messes up with partially giving away a major plot point. The first line of the summary describes Theroux’s character as a hired professional. That could mean anything, but I took it to mean hit man. And so I waited throughout the movie for that to come into play, and his criminal life (he’s portrayed as the innocent hero for much of the film) is revealed in the last twenty minutes. The summary doesn’t totally spoil the film, but it does give away that he has a secret that he’s been hiding, so it blew the story a little.
Thoughts on Excessive Force
I enjoyed watching a low-budget action movie from 1993 called Excessive Force, where Thomas Ian Griffith (best known as the villain from The Karate Kid Part III) plays a Chicago cop out to take down a local crime boss that keeps evading convictions, Gotti-style. I am such a sucker for gritty old B action movies, wailing electric guitar soundtracks, and guys in trench coats doing martial arts in warehouses and back alleys at night, so I dug this a lot.
Griffith had a lot of charisma and a streetwise vibe to him, and he wrote the film, which was pretty solid. He also had great chemistry with some heavyweight actors like Lance Henriksen and James Earl Jones, having such a natural ease with them that is difficult to come by.
For a low-budget movie, this film had a great cast, including Burt Young as the ruthless crime boss DeMarco and Tony Todd as a fellow cop. The weak link in the cast was Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child, Embrace of the Vampire), who is just cast as a love interest and has an underwritten role that isn’t as dynamic as the male roles were. She just seemed pretty blah and boring, both as a fault of the poor writing and her flat acting.
Lance Henriksen was one of the best things about this film. He just has this crazy intensity that makes him feel so chilling, and he’s got this great gravelly voice that he can use to intimidating effect. He just brings this higher level to any film he’s in, and he’s been in a lot of low-budget films that are lucky to have his presence in it. I’ve been into him since I was a teen watching Millennium, and he’s one of the most unique and interesting actors I’ve ever seen in films.
I tend to really like movies set in Chicago, and this film really utilized the city to its strengths, with scenes shot at courthouses and government buildings for day scenes, and a lot of night scenes at bars or under trains or in side streets.
The film also focuses a lot on corruption between cops and the mob, linking how dirty cops profit from and excuse mob activity, and there likely is a lot of truth to that. I really liked how the film would explore different sides of that, like dirty cops who excuse what they do as family traditions in the force, to shady cops who don’t want to betray their fellow officers even while in league with the mob, and clean cops who don’t know who to trust anymore. It definitely had some depth that I wasn’t expecting, so I appreciated that.
I had heard of this movie ages ago from its trailer, narrated by the legendary Don LaFontaine, and showing pretty much all the best parts of the movie. This really made me want to check it out, and I’m happy I did.
Griffith had a lot of charisma and a streetwise vibe to him, and he wrote the film, which was pretty solid. He also had great chemistry with some heavyweight actors like Lance Henriksen and James Earl Jones, having such a natural ease with them that is difficult to come by.
For a low-budget movie, this film had a great cast, including Burt Young as the ruthless crime boss DeMarco and Tony Todd as a fellow cop. The weak link in the cast was Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child, Embrace of the Vampire), who is just cast as a love interest and has an underwritten role that isn’t as dynamic as the male roles were. She just seemed pretty blah and boring, both as a fault of the poor writing and her flat acting.
Lance Henriksen was one of the best things about this film. He just has this crazy intensity that makes him feel so chilling, and he’s got this great gravelly voice that he can use to intimidating effect. He just brings this higher level to any film he’s in, and he’s been in a lot of low-budget films that are lucky to have his presence in it. I’ve been into him since I was a teen watching Millennium, and he’s one of the most unique and interesting actors I’ve ever seen in films.
I tend to really like movies set in Chicago, and this film really utilized the city to its strengths, with scenes shot at courthouses and government buildings for day scenes, and a lot of night scenes at bars or under trains or in side streets.
The film also focuses a lot on corruption between cops and the mob, linking how dirty cops profit from and excuse mob activity, and there likely is a lot of truth to that. I really liked how the film would explore different sides of that, like dirty cops who excuse what they do as family traditions in the force, to shady cops who don’t want to betray their fellow officers even while in league with the mob, and clean cops who don’t know who to trust anymore. It definitely had some depth that I wasn’t expecting, so I appreciated that.
I had heard of this movie ages ago from its trailer, narrated by the legendary Don LaFontaine, and showing pretty much all the best parts of the movie. This really made me want to check it out, and I’m happy I did.
Thoughts on Ballet Now
I watched Ballet Now, a Hulu documentary about the making of a dance performance in L.A. directed and curated by Tiler Peck, principal dancer of the New York City Ballet. It was decent, though short at just 75 minutes long. It was mostly about Peck curating and directing a dance show for the first time at 28 years old while also dancing in it, and trying to keep it together while taking on this challenge.
I liked watching it to see the rehearsals and the grind of dancers working through pieces, being tired, and trying hard to perfect difficult phrases. I especially liked seeing Michelle Dorrance, an eclectic tap dancer/choreographer who I’ve seen in performance once or twice, and saw in person during my time working at Martha Graham, when she came to create a piece for the company. I didn’t talk to her because I likely wasn’t allowed to (unspoken rule of not talking to special guests unless told otherwise) but I thought she was sweet and funny and had this childlike enthusiasm that was charming to me. I was also happy to see Virgil Gadson from So You Think You Can Dance in Dorrance’s piece, he’s a fantastic hip-hop dancer with a cute personality, and happy to see him continue in success with major dance artists.
I’m not a fan of Tiler Peck despite choosing to watch this documentary in which she is the focus. She’s a talented dancer, and I’ve seen her onstage, but I’ve never been into her personality in interviews. She often comes off as very sheltered, and someone who was coddled for her talent all her life. She grew up in her mother’s dance studio, had a remarkable talent for picking up routines and following along with older dancers, and was successful enough to join the New York City Ballet at just 15, and became principal at 21. I was also stunned that as a kid, her grandma would drive her three hours back and forth from Bakersfield to Los Angeles to study dance more formally, and did that 4-5 days a week in her childhood before coming to New York to be a classical ballet student. I know that many dancers make sacrifices for their art, and work very hard, but that just seemed over the top to me. But it paid off, so what do I know.
I did like that the documentary did show her at less flattering moments, like times when she is annoyed or has to get tough. Like when her grandma comments on her eating, going “You must be hungry, you almost never finish a sandwich,” and she snaps back, “I’ve done six ballets today,” with this dagger look in her eyes, like “lay off, I’m eating.” There also another good moment where her patience wears thin when the stagehands tell her it will take a long time for a nonstick solution applied to the stage for Dorrance’s piece to dry, and Peck goes, “Well, maybe instead of talking about it we can just do it.” It was a good moment of her taking charge and being firm to get things done.
I would have liked to have seen a dance performance with Isabella Boylston of the American Ballet Theatre, which was hinted at but not included in the documentary. I am a fan of her from interviews, and think she comes off as a kind and sweet person who is very open about her issues with performance anxiety.
Another highlight was Bill Irwin, who performed as a clown with obvious classical dance technique with Peck, and I just found him to be so funny and charming and interesting, and could just watch him as an artist with more footage.
I did notice that the film tightly stayed on Peck’s professional life, as in real life she was divorcing from her ballet dancer husband Robert Fairchild. Their romance was big in the dance world, as they had been on and off sweethearts since they were students, and had this gorgeous wedding covered by the New York Times a few years ago, but divorced last year. So it was no surprise that any of that personal stuff was left out.
So it was a nice documentary to watch about the rigors of ballet and the rehearsal process. I haven’t taken a dance class in over a year, and I haven’t worked in the dance world since I was at Martha Graham (aside from volunteering as an archivist for the New York City Ballet for a six-month stint afterwards), so I’m not involved in dance as much as I used to. But it was still nice to revisit one of my old passions and feel connected to it on some way.
I liked watching it to see the rehearsals and the grind of dancers working through pieces, being tired, and trying hard to perfect difficult phrases. I especially liked seeing Michelle Dorrance, an eclectic tap dancer/choreographer who I’ve seen in performance once or twice, and saw in person during my time working at Martha Graham, when she came to create a piece for the company. I didn’t talk to her because I likely wasn’t allowed to (unspoken rule of not talking to special guests unless told otherwise) but I thought she was sweet and funny and had this childlike enthusiasm that was charming to me. I was also happy to see Virgil Gadson from So You Think You Can Dance in Dorrance’s piece, he’s a fantastic hip-hop dancer with a cute personality, and happy to see him continue in success with major dance artists.
I’m not a fan of Tiler Peck despite choosing to watch this documentary in which she is the focus. She’s a talented dancer, and I’ve seen her onstage, but I’ve never been into her personality in interviews. She often comes off as very sheltered, and someone who was coddled for her talent all her life. She grew up in her mother’s dance studio, had a remarkable talent for picking up routines and following along with older dancers, and was successful enough to join the New York City Ballet at just 15, and became principal at 21. I was also stunned that as a kid, her grandma would drive her three hours back and forth from Bakersfield to Los Angeles to study dance more formally, and did that 4-5 days a week in her childhood before coming to New York to be a classical ballet student. I know that many dancers make sacrifices for their art, and work very hard, but that just seemed over the top to me. But it paid off, so what do I know.
I did like that the documentary did show her at less flattering moments, like times when she is annoyed or has to get tough. Like when her grandma comments on her eating, going “You must be hungry, you almost never finish a sandwich,” and she snaps back, “I’ve done six ballets today,” with this dagger look in her eyes, like “lay off, I’m eating.” There also another good moment where her patience wears thin when the stagehands tell her it will take a long time for a nonstick solution applied to the stage for Dorrance’s piece to dry, and Peck goes, “Well, maybe instead of talking about it we can just do it.” It was a good moment of her taking charge and being firm to get things done.
I would have liked to have seen a dance performance with Isabella Boylston of the American Ballet Theatre, which was hinted at but not included in the documentary. I am a fan of her from interviews, and think she comes off as a kind and sweet person who is very open about her issues with performance anxiety.
Another highlight was Bill Irwin, who performed as a clown with obvious classical dance technique with Peck, and I just found him to be so funny and charming and interesting, and could just watch him as an artist with more footage.
I did notice that the film tightly stayed on Peck’s professional life, as in real life she was divorcing from her ballet dancer husband Robert Fairchild. Their romance was big in the dance world, as they had been on and off sweethearts since they were students, and had this gorgeous wedding covered by the New York Times a few years ago, but divorced last year. So it was no surprise that any of that personal stuff was left out.
So it was a nice documentary to watch about the rigors of ballet and the rehearsal process. I haven’t taken a dance class in over a year, and I haven’t worked in the dance world since I was at Martha Graham (aside from volunteering as an archivist for the New York City Ballet for a six-month stint afterwards), so I’m not involved in dance as much as I used to. But it was still nice to revisit one of my old passions and feel connected to it on some way.
Thoughts on The Bookshop
Over the summer, my mom and I went to the Stony Brook Film Festival in Long Island and saw The Bookshop, a new film by Isabel Coixet starring Emily Mortimer as a 1950s British widow who decides to open up a bookshop in a seaside village, and gets all this unnecessary pushback for it by the locals for being an independent widow. It’s a small, bittersweet gem, and Mortimer was lovely in playing a sweet woman who just wanted to share her love of books with everyone and to bring more culture to the small town. I especially liked Bill Nighy as a reserved man who ordered her books from afar and fell in love with Ray Bradbury novels. I’m a fan of Coixet from her film My Life Without Me, so it was great to see a new film from her.
There was a short film preceding the film that I liked a lot called Seven, a tense drama in which a Norwegian woman has to decide the punishment for a man who killed her father. The film’s backdrop is about oil rig workers working in the Arctic in Norway and clashing with locals over drilling in their homes, and the film had a lot of intensity for being so short, I was really into it a lot.
There was a short film preceding the film that I liked a lot called Seven, a tense drama in which a Norwegian woman has to decide the punishment for a man who killed her father. The film’s backdrop is about oil rig workers working in the Arctic in Norway and clashing with locals over drilling in their homes, and the film had a lot of intensity for being so short, I was really into it a lot.
Thoughts on Bloodlight and Bami
At the Museum of the Moving Image, I watched a documentary about Grace Jones called Bloodlight and Bami, chronicling her life in 2005 of visiting her family in Jamaica, performing her shows around the world with an Afrofuturism style, negotiating over her records with her collaborators, and just generally being awesome. I loved how blunt and funny she was (especially mocking a tacky overly pink set she was made to perform in on a French TV show) as well as how sweet and warm she was when bare-faced and chilling with her family. I just loved seeing the contrasts between her as just Grace with her family, vs. applying makeup and stage costumes as “Grace Jones” onstage.
The documentary feels very caught on the fly, without captions to state years or locations, so a lot of her life just seems like a blur of traveling all over as she switches between speaking English, French, and Jamaican patois. It didn’t reflect as much on her whole career, it just would show her in concert performing hits like “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Warm Leatherette,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” and others.
I used to have one of her albums, Nightclubbing, and dug how her music is a great mix of rock, R&B, funk, and other influences, she’s an incredible artist to watch onscreen.
The documentary feels very caught on the fly, without captions to state years or locations, so a lot of her life just seems like a blur of traveling all over as she switches between speaking English, French, and Jamaican patois. It didn’t reflect as much on her whole career, it just would show her in concert performing hits like “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Warm Leatherette,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” and others.
I used to have one of her albums, Nightclubbing, and dug how her music is a great mix of rock, R&B, funk, and other influences, she’s an incredible artist to watch onscreen.
Thoughts on Brad Dourif
Recently, for some reason, I felt like watching Brad Dourif in movies/TV. He’s just one of those actors who has a strange but magnetic quality to him, and I felt interested in watching his acting. So I watched a Tales from the Crypt episode, and Curse of Chucky.
The Tales from the Crypt episode was from 1993, titled “People Who Live in Brass Hearses,” and featured him and Bill Paxton as brothers. Paxton plays an ex-con who wants revenge on his old boss that turned him in, and plans a heist at the ice cream warehouse where he had worked. He makes his brother be a part of it, and his brother seems to have a developmental disability and a hair-trigger temper, plus a poor memory for following directions, so it seemed like a really bad idea to have him as an accomplice on a heist. Paxton was great at playing a gleefully sleazy character, while Dourif excelled at playing a character who was both childlike and deeply disturbed. As predicted, the heist doesn’t go off as planned, and it was a lot of ridiculous fun to watch.
I put on Curse of Chucky afterwards because I had heard good things about it, and it was a really solid horror film, and great in staying in continuity with the original Child’s Play and taking off from where the awful Seed of Chucky left off. I really appreciate how Dourif never half-asses his performance as Chucky, and always gives a fully passionate voice work no matter the quality of the film. The character may be a misogynistic serial killer in a doll body (the doll says “bitch” way more times than I’d like to hear), but Dourif makes the series engaging, my favorites of the series being Child’s Play, Bride of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, and the last 15-20 minutes of Cult of Chucky. In addition, his daughter Fiona excelled a lot as the heroine in the last two films, really bringing a grounded reality and likability to her character, and it does amuse me in scenes between father and daughter when they are playing killer and potential victim, just giving so much energy between the two of them.
In addition to these roles, I also really liked Dourif a lot in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Alien: Resurrection, though I know he’s done way more below-the-radar genre stuff that I haven’t seen but would probably like.
The Tales from the Crypt episode was from 1993, titled “People Who Live in Brass Hearses,” and featured him and Bill Paxton as brothers. Paxton plays an ex-con who wants revenge on his old boss that turned him in, and plans a heist at the ice cream warehouse where he had worked. He makes his brother be a part of it, and his brother seems to have a developmental disability and a hair-trigger temper, plus a poor memory for following directions, so it seemed like a really bad idea to have him as an accomplice on a heist. Paxton was great at playing a gleefully sleazy character, while Dourif excelled at playing a character who was both childlike and deeply disturbed. As predicted, the heist doesn’t go off as planned, and it was a lot of ridiculous fun to watch.
I put on Curse of Chucky afterwards because I had heard good things about it, and it was a really solid horror film, and great in staying in continuity with the original Child’s Play and taking off from where the awful Seed of Chucky left off. I really appreciate how Dourif never half-asses his performance as Chucky, and always gives a fully passionate voice work no matter the quality of the film. The character may be a misogynistic serial killer in a doll body (the doll says “bitch” way more times than I’d like to hear), but Dourif makes the series engaging, my favorites of the series being Child’s Play, Bride of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, and the last 15-20 minutes of Cult of Chucky. In addition, his daughter Fiona excelled a lot as the heroine in the last two films, really bringing a grounded reality and likability to her character, and it does amuse me in scenes between father and daughter when they are playing killer and potential victim, just giving so much energy between the two of them.
In addition to these roles, I also really liked Dourif a lot in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Alien: Resurrection, though I know he’s done way more below-the-radar genre stuff that I haven’t seen but would probably like.
Thoughts on Return of the Living Dead 3
I was reminded of this movie this week on the genre film podcast Radiodrome, and forgot how much I adored this film. It’s so punk rock, and is this badass zombie story that is also one of the most heartfelt love stories I’ve ever seen onscreen. Melinda Clarke, then Mindy Clarke, was so great in playing this young woman named Julie that gets resurrected from the dead by her boyfriend and feels really weird and strange about being cold and hungry a lot, and trying to fight to return to being normal, denying her hunger for flesh and inflicting pain on herself to feel human, before coming to a self-acceptance. She brought so much passion to this role, and though she is likely more famous for being on Days of Our Lives and The O.C., this is my favorite role of hers. Plus, she looked absolutely gnarly and stunning all pierced up S&M style in the finale.
Dread Central summed it up much better than I could: “When Julie finally makes that transformation into the zombie seen on the poster, it’s a fascinating sequence because it starts out as an attempt to hold back her own hunger as she has done throughout the feature, but as that montage progresses it evolves into final acceptance of what she has become. She’s not just sticking wires into her finger tips anymore, she’s creating claws. She has a spike in one hand and a rock hanging from the other, solely for the purpose of cracking open a skull. That bold new look isn’t just for show. Everything about it has a purpose.” https://www.dreadcentral.com/e
Dread Central summed it up much better than I could: “When Julie finally makes that transformation into the zombie seen on the poster, it’s a fascinating sequence because it starts out as an attempt to hold back her own hunger as she has done throughout the feature, but as that montage progresses it evolves into final acceptance of what she has become. She’s not just sticking wires into her finger tips anymore, she’s creating claws. She has a spike in one hand and a rock hanging from the other, solely for the purpose of cracking open a skull. That bold new look isn’t just for show. Everything about it has a purpose.” https://www.dreadcentral.com/e
Thoughts on Favorite Cult Films
I was nominated by a friend on Facebook to post my favorite movies for ten days. I’ve done this before, so I’ll try to focus more on the kind of cult weirdo shit I like since I already talked about Hollywood and indie films I was into.
The Prophecy (1995) is a lesser-known film series starring Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel, who wants to start a war with heaven over a battle of good vs. evil from two millennia ago. In the first film, he menaces on Earth, torturing a priest-turned-cop (Elias Koteas), trying to kill a fellow angel (Eric Stoltz), intimidating children and a schoolteacher (Virginia Madsen), and forcing a recent suicide (Adam Goldberg) to come back to life to be his servant. It’s a stunning fantasy horror film that I was captivated by, and especially by the killer performance of Viggo Mortensen as Satan, who only appears in the last twenty minutes but steals the movie from everyone else. The sequel wasn’t as great, but decent to watch, and I didn’t bother with the other movies. So this is one of my favorite cult movies ever.
Day 2 of 10 of cult movies I like
I remembered when Johnny Mnemonic came out in 1995, it was seen as a huge joke, like it was already a punchline as a bad movie. I saw it years later as an adult, and I really liked it a lot, loving how it was this cyberpunk movie with a really unusual cast lineup and potential to be better.
The basic plot is that Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is this courier in the future who carries downloaded computer data in his head to deliver to people, and he ends up taking on twice his capacity and is in danger of dying if he doesn’t get it out within two days. He is being hunted by gangsters for the data and meets up with underground resistance folks who are subsisting on black market tech.
It’s a plot that heavily gets into the fears of technology being addictive as a literal sickness, especially when implanted into the body, and the movie has this messy look for a Hollywood film that I really liked a lot. It is darkly funny at times, and the cast was pretty awesome: Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Beat Takeshi, Udo Kier, Henry Rollins, and Dolph Lundgren. I also really like dated cyberpunk movies where the technology is very 90’s despite it being set far in the future, being kind of anachronistic. It’s a really fun movie to watch, and nowhere near as terrible as its reputation would make you think.
Day 3 of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen the original Maniac Cop, which starred Bruce Campbell as a good cop trying to catch a rogue killer cop, but I loved the sequel. Robert Davi took his place as the righteous detective, and I loved the gritty mix of noir and low-budget but high quality action. There are some really great stunts in this film, including a famous scene where Claudia Christian is dragged by a runaway car, and this atmospheric dark city mood that is very 80’s NYC. This was just one of the best cop movies I’ve ever seen.
Day 4 of 10 of cult movies I like
I’ve seen Earth Girls Are Easy a couple of times, and it’s just a really fun, goofy, satirical movie. It makes fun of sex, it makes fun of Valley Girl stereotypes, and it’s just very bright and cartoonish. Julie Brown co-wrote the film, and she is a fantastic comedy talent with a really prolific and varied career and a sharp self-awareness. I love the campy songs, the 80’s pop, Geena Davis’ wide-eyed girlish innocence, and the male aliens just wanting to hook up with hot Earth women. It’s just this movie that makes me really happy to watch.
Day 5 of 10 of cult movies I like
The Brotherhood of the Wolf was one of the strangest movies I’d ever seen. I saw it in college in 2002, hanging out in a student lounge area watching it with some random kids, and was really taken aback by how weird it felt. It’s a French movie (that I watched dubbed in English, so that added to the weirdness) about a wolf-like beast terrorizing villages in 1700s rural France, and a hero is selected to hunt down the beast. He barely speaks and acts more like a barbarian, just murdering anyone that gets in his way. His sidekick is a Native American man who knows Asian martial arts, played by Mark Dascasos. There’s a disabled hunter (Vincent Cassel) who seems incestuously in love with his sister, and Monica Bellucci as a courtesan, with a hilarious scene fade transition of her bare breasts to a pair of snowy mountains. I haven’t seen it since then, so I don’t remember how the rest of the film goes. But I had both really liked and thought it was one of the most bonkers movies I had ever seen.
Day 6 of 10 of cult movies I like
I really dug Ginger Snaps a lot, a Canadian teen horror film about a girl who becomes a werewolf, with jokes about it being a metaphor for puberty as “the curse.” The film is centered on a few strengths: Katharine Isabelle’s captivating performance as the raw and seductive Ginger who struggles to stay human as her animalistic side begins to take over; the deep relationship between Ginger and her reserved sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) as best friends, and Brigitte’s fight to find an antidote to save her sister from completely becoming a monster; and the way the film balances dark comedy with straight horror, especially with the fantastic special effects of Ginger as a beast. I don’t remember how I heard of this film, but I had really liked it a lot. There are two sequels, but they haven’t been as highly acclaimed as the original, so I may not try hard to find them.
Day 7 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I don’t remember how I came across Freaked, but I thought it was one of the most unique films I had ever seen. It was co-written, co-directed by and starred Alex Winter as a pompous movie star who ends up getting turned into a mutant freak along with a gang of other changed captives by a mad scientist (Randy Quaid) for his own sideshow profit.
It was a weird movie that had this early 90’s underground punk energy to it, especially with the music of the Butthole Surfers on the soundtrack. It also featured Keanu Reeves in an unrecognizable role as a dog-man hybrid with a Latino accent disguising his typical Keanu voice (he’s hardly credited in the film), Bobcat Goldwaith as a guy with a sock puppet for a head, and Mr. T as a bearded lady. I watched it again recently on YouTube, and it still holds up really well as a bizarre and fun movie.
Day 8 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I wasn’t a fan of anime growing up. I really didn’t like anime meant for kids because I found it too loud and busy, and the animation had a lot of repeated tropes, like giant eyes welling up with tears or people screaming with cartoonish sound effects. I did watch some Sailor Moon and some 80’s Nickelodeon stuff like an anime retelling of fairy tales and the Noozles, but it wasn’t really my bag. When I got older and watched anime on the Sci-fi Channel, I also didn’t like it because, while it was darker and meant for adults, it often had storylines of young women and girls being raped by giant demon monsters, and I couldn’t watch it.
So in 2001, an anime that was partially inspired by the classic sci-fi silent film Metropolis came out (combined with being an adaptation of a manga by Osamu Tezaka), and I was really interested because I adored the silent film so much. My mom and I went together to the Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, and while I was excited, I was also nervous because I didn’t want this film to have any of the rape or sexual abuse that I saw in other sci-fi anime. Thankfully, it did not. It was a gorgeous film that truly struck me at how great anime could be, and I was happy to finally find a happy medium in the genre that fit my interests. I especially loved a climatic scene set to the tune of Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and really felt connected to the whole noirish city landscape.
I haven’t seen the film since then, but it did give me a new appreciation of anime, and I’ve enjoyed films like Spirited Away, When Marnie Was There, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Princess Mononoke for being thoughtful and mature stories with character depth.
Day 9 out of 10 of cult movies I like
The Fisher King just hit me hard as a movie. I don’t even know if this qualifies as a cult movie, but it’s certainly strange and fantastical. I don’t know why it affected me so much, but the film was emotionally heavy, was sad but full of hope, and just had these damaged characters just trying to get through life.
Robin Williams, who I much preferred as a dramatic actor than his spitfire comedy, was so sweet and kind in his portrayal of Parry, a homeless man with schizophrenia who was once a professor at Rutgers, but fell into mental illness after his wife was killed in a mass shooting.
Jeff Bridges’ radio DJ host inadvertently blames himself for the shooting because he had delivered a “screw the rich”-style rant to a caller that would commit the massacre. Bridges, who I was vaguely aware of before but never had really seen act, was tremendous in how he conveyed both the pain and regret of his actions and the anger in his life falling apart afterwards and trying to save Parry to do some good in the world.
The film has this burgeoning love story between Williams and Amanda Plummer’s character that is just so sweet and awkward between two hopeless dorks who, as Mercedes Ruehl’s character says, “were made for each other.” It’s so touching and so lovely, and is a shining light in a otherwise bleak world.
The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, brought magical realism into 1991 NYC and made it feel believable within its world, of coldness and grit combined with fantasy elements like impromptu musical numbers in Grand Central Station and a search for the Holy Grail in a castle in upper Manhattan. The film was just stunning to me, and was one of the most devastating yet beautiful films I’ve ever seen.
Day 10 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen eXistenZ in a very long time, so I don’t recall the whole plot, but I do know that it is about people entering a virtual reality video game and getting caught up in the story as it blurs between fantasy and reality. It was a really intriguing film to watch, was directed by David Cronenberg, and had a fantastic cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh (who I loved as a teen and am happy to see have a career resurgence), Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar (famous Canadian indie director/actor), Callum Keith Rennie, and Christopher Eccleston. I really need to watch this again, I just found the film so fascinating.
The Prophecy (1995) is a lesser-known film series starring Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel, who wants to start a war with heaven over a battle of good vs. evil from two millennia ago. In the first film, he menaces on Earth, torturing a priest-turned-cop (Elias Koteas), trying to kill a fellow angel (Eric Stoltz), intimidating children and a schoolteacher (Virginia Madsen), and forcing a recent suicide (Adam Goldberg) to come back to life to be his servant. It’s a stunning fantasy horror film that I was captivated by, and especially by the killer performance of Viggo Mortensen as Satan, who only appears in the last twenty minutes but steals the movie from everyone else. The sequel wasn’t as great, but decent to watch, and I didn’t bother with the other movies. So this is one of my favorite cult movies ever.
Day 2 of 10 of cult movies I like
I remembered when Johnny Mnemonic came out in 1995, it was seen as a huge joke, like it was already a punchline as a bad movie. I saw it years later as an adult, and I really liked it a lot, loving how it was this cyberpunk movie with a really unusual cast lineup and potential to be better.
The basic plot is that Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is this courier in the future who carries downloaded computer data in his head to deliver to people, and he ends up taking on twice his capacity and is in danger of dying if he doesn’t get it out within two days. He is being hunted by gangsters for the data and meets up with underground resistance folks who are subsisting on black market tech.
It’s a plot that heavily gets into the fears of technology being addictive as a literal sickness, especially when implanted into the body, and the movie has this messy look for a Hollywood film that I really liked a lot. It is darkly funny at times, and the cast was pretty awesome: Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Beat Takeshi, Udo Kier, Henry Rollins, and Dolph Lundgren. I also really like dated cyberpunk movies where the technology is very 90’s despite it being set far in the future, being kind of anachronistic. It’s a really fun movie to watch, and nowhere near as terrible as its reputation would make you think.
Day 3 of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen the original Maniac Cop, which starred Bruce Campbell as a good cop trying to catch a rogue killer cop, but I loved the sequel. Robert Davi took his place as the righteous detective, and I loved the gritty mix of noir and low-budget but high quality action. There are some really great stunts in this film, including a famous scene where Claudia Christian is dragged by a runaway car, and this atmospheric dark city mood that is very 80’s NYC. This was just one of the best cop movies I’ve ever seen.
Day 4 of 10 of cult movies I like
I’ve seen Earth Girls Are Easy a couple of times, and it’s just a really fun, goofy, satirical movie. It makes fun of sex, it makes fun of Valley Girl stereotypes, and it’s just very bright and cartoonish. Julie Brown co-wrote the film, and she is a fantastic comedy talent with a really prolific and varied career and a sharp self-awareness. I love the campy songs, the 80’s pop, Geena Davis’ wide-eyed girlish innocence, and the male aliens just wanting to hook up with hot Earth women. It’s just this movie that makes me really happy to watch.
Day 5 of 10 of cult movies I like
The Brotherhood of the Wolf was one of the strangest movies I’d ever seen. I saw it in college in 2002, hanging out in a student lounge area watching it with some random kids, and was really taken aback by how weird it felt. It’s a French movie (that I watched dubbed in English, so that added to the weirdness) about a wolf-like beast terrorizing villages in 1700s rural France, and a hero is selected to hunt down the beast. He barely speaks and acts more like a barbarian, just murdering anyone that gets in his way. His sidekick is a Native American man who knows Asian martial arts, played by Mark Dascasos. There’s a disabled hunter (Vincent Cassel) who seems incestuously in love with his sister, and Monica Bellucci as a courtesan, with a hilarious scene fade transition of her bare breasts to a pair of snowy mountains. I haven’t seen it since then, so I don’t remember how the rest of the film goes. But I had both really liked and thought it was one of the most bonkers movies I had ever seen.
Day 6 of 10 of cult movies I like
I really dug Ginger Snaps a lot, a Canadian teen horror film about a girl who becomes a werewolf, with jokes about it being a metaphor for puberty as “the curse.” The film is centered on a few strengths: Katharine Isabelle’s captivating performance as the raw and seductive Ginger who struggles to stay human as her animalistic side begins to take over; the deep relationship between Ginger and her reserved sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) as best friends, and Brigitte’s fight to find an antidote to save her sister from completely becoming a monster; and the way the film balances dark comedy with straight horror, especially with the fantastic special effects of Ginger as a beast. I don’t remember how I heard of this film, but I had really liked it a lot. There are two sequels, but they haven’t been as highly acclaimed as the original, so I may not try hard to find them.
Day 7 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I don’t remember how I came across Freaked, but I thought it was one of the most unique films I had ever seen. It was co-written, co-directed by and starred Alex Winter as a pompous movie star who ends up getting turned into a mutant freak along with a gang of other changed captives by a mad scientist (Randy Quaid) for his own sideshow profit.
It was a weird movie that had this early 90’s underground punk energy to it, especially with the music of the Butthole Surfers on the soundtrack. It also featured Keanu Reeves in an unrecognizable role as a dog-man hybrid with a Latino accent disguising his typical Keanu voice (he’s hardly credited in the film), Bobcat Goldwaith as a guy with a sock puppet for a head, and Mr. T as a bearded lady. I watched it again recently on YouTube, and it still holds up really well as a bizarre and fun movie.
Day 8 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I wasn’t a fan of anime growing up. I really didn’t like anime meant for kids because I found it too loud and busy, and the animation had a lot of repeated tropes, like giant eyes welling up with tears or people screaming with cartoonish sound effects. I did watch some Sailor Moon and some 80’s Nickelodeon stuff like an anime retelling of fairy tales and the Noozles, but it wasn’t really my bag. When I got older and watched anime on the Sci-fi Channel, I also didn’t like it because, while it was darker and meant for adults, it often had storylines of young women and girls being raped by giant demon monsters, and I couldn’t watch it.
So in 2001, an anime that was partially inspired by the classic sci-fi silent film Metropolis came out (combined with being an adaptation of a manga by Osamu Tezaka), and I was really interested because I adored the silent film so much. My mom and I went together to the Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, and while I was excited, I was also nervous because I didn’t want this film to have any of the rape or sexual abuse that I saw in other sci-fi anime. Thankfully, it did not. It was a gorgeous film that truly struck me at how great anime could be, and I was happy to finally find a happy medium in the genre that fit my interests. I especially loved a climatic scene set to the tune of Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and really felt connected to the whole noirish city landscape.
I haven’t seen the film since then, but it did give me a new appreciation of anime, and I’ve enjoyed films like Spirited Away, When Marnie Was There, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Princess Mononoke for being thoughtful and mature stories with character depth.
Day 9 out of 10 of cult movies I like
The Fisher King just hit me hard as a movie. I don’t even know if this qualifies as a cult movie, but it’s certainly strange and fantastical. I don’t know why it affected me so much, but the film was emotionally heavy, was sad but full of hope, and just had these damaged characters just trying to get through life.
Robin Williams, who I much preferred as a dramatic actor than his spitfire comedy, was so sweet and kind in his portrayal of Parry, a homeless man with schizophrenia who was once a professor at Rutgers, but fell into mental illness after his wife was killed in a mass shooting.
Jeff Bridges’ radio DJ host inadvertently blames himself for the shooting because he had delivered a “screw the rich”-style rant to a caller that would commit the massacre. Bridges, who I was vaguely aware of before but never had really seen act, was tremendous in how he conveyed both the pain and regret of his actions and the anger in his life falling apart afterwards and trying to save Parry to do some good in the world.
The film has this burgeoning love story between Williams and Amanda Plummer’s character that is just so sweet and awkward between two hopeless dorks who, as Mercedes Ruehl’s character says, “were made for each other.” It’s so touching and so lovely, and is a shining light in a otherwise bleak world.
The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, brought magical realism into 1991 NYC and made it feel believable within its world, of coldness and grit combined with fantasy elements like impromptu musical numbers in Grand Central Station and a search for the Holy Grail in a castle in upper Manhattan. The film was just stunning to me, and was one of the most devastating yet beautiful films I’ve ever seen.
Day 10 out of 10 of cult movies I like
I haven’t seen eXistenZ in a very long time, so I don’t recall the whole plot, but I do know that it is about people entering a virtual reality video game and getting caught up in the story as it blurs between fantasy and reality. It was a really intriguing film to watch, was directed by David Cronenberg, and had a fantastic cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh (who I loved as a teen and am happy to see have a career resurgence), Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar (famous Canadian indie director/actor), Callum Keith Rennie, and Christopher Eccleston. I really need to watch this again, I just found the film so fascinating.
Thoughts on Maximum Force
I was in the mood to watch some low budget action movies on YouTube, so I got into watching this 1992 movie from PM Entertainment called Maximum Force. Three badass lone cops are put together to nail a drug lord that they all have a personal history with. It’s two men and a woman, and the film already acknowledged the obvious sexual tension right after their initial meeting, with both guys hitting on her and her refusing to date cops. It’s very obvious that she will end up with the hotter guy rather than the scruffy comic relief.
The villain looks like a budget Rutger Hauer and is white but has the Japanese-sounding name of Tanabe. Some scenes with him as the evil businessman at his board meetings made me think of the McBain movie scenes on The Simpsons with the corrupt Mendoza leading his sinister business meetings.
The film has a lot of great mood and atmosphere, and this Youtube comment sums it up perfectly: “This film has fantastic use of lighting and cinematography. PM Entertainment really brought an expressionistic noir feeling to some of their martial arts and action cinema. A superb watch, purely for the visuals.”
The film has some pretty great action sequences and stunt work, especially a scene where goons are taken out by exploding toy cars and each go flying airborne in slow motion after every explosion.
The villain looks like a budget Rutger Hauer and is white but has the Japanese-sounding name of Tanabe. Some scenes with him as the evil businessman at his board meetings made me think of the McBain movie scenes on The Simpsons with the corrupt Mendoza leading his sinister business meetings.
The film has a lot of great mood and atmosphere, and this Youtube comment sums it up perfectly: “This film has fantastic use of lighting and cinematography. PM Entertainment really brought an expressionistic noir feeling to some of their martial arts and action cinema. A superb watch, purely for the visuals.”
The film has some pretty great action sequences and stunt work, especially a scene where goons are taken out by exploding toy cars and each go flying airborne in slow motion after every explosion.
Thoughts on Cancelled Too Soon
I listen to the podcast Canceled Too Soon, which is about TV shows that were cancelled after one season or less. It’s a wide variety of shows, and I decided to watch a few of the shows that they covered, watching the episodes on YouTube, and re-listening to the episodes to hear the commentary.
The first was Terror Vision. First, that got me into watching the 1986 cult horror comedy movie, which I enjoyed in a campy, goofy way, about an alien entering a family’s home through their satellite TV and eating them. But afterwards, I watched this obscure 1980s horror anthology of the same name that had nothing to do with the movie. The series was from circa 1988, shot on video (or shot on “shitteo”), had terrible, wooden actors with no other credits to their names, and had flat, predictable storylines that got wrapped up in 10-15 minutes, like a monster in a kid’s closet, a vampire dentist, a clothing store that turns young women into mannequins, a stalker in a house, etc. It was fine to watch more in a “what the hell is this?” way as a weird forgotten relic of the 80’s. The producers had serious credit with being involved with Liquid Sky and Jim Jarmusch movies, and one actor went on to a real film career in stuff like Total Recall, but everyone else just felt so random and awkward. I do like 80’s horror anthologies like Tales from the Dark Side, Monsters, 80’s Twilight Zone, and others, so this was my thing to watch, even if it was really bad.
The next was Nightmare Cafe, a short-lived series from 1992 from Wes Craven that started out with promise, but was more hokey than horror. Two newly-dead people are resurrected to find a mysterious cafe run by Robert Englund, and the cafe acts as a rest stop for people to change their lives for the better by going back and fixing the past. There’s a TV where they can both see the past and present times, and the ghosts can teleport when they need to help somebody or understand a past event. The first episode started out with good mystery to understand the backstories of the ghosts, and how they go back in the past to change things that they were cowards about before so even if they still die again, they die as heroes and not losers.
The problems with the show were that the storylines were more sappy and less “nightmare,” like the ghosts meeting old family and friends who don’t know they’re dead, and helping them with their problems, like having an abusive boyfriend or son in a coma. Or two film noir stories that felt heavily dated and out of place in 1992. I was expecting more of a horror show, and it was more sentimental. Or, as the hosts said, not stories out of Touched by an Angel. And Englund, despite how charismatic he is (and he rocks a long dark coat well) is totally wasted as a supporting character who narrates the plot sometimes, talks to the audience Rod Serling-style, seems like an agent of Satan but it’s never really said where he comes from, and pops up throughout the episodes playing minor characters in various getups and accents. He deserved better on a show called “Nightmare Cafe.”
The last that I watched was a T.V. movie pilot also from 1992 called Steel Justice, in which the spirit of a cop’s dead nine-year old son possesses a toy robot dinosaur, and the dinosaur grows fifty feet and breathes fire to help his dad fight crime. The show takes this plot very seriously, with a gritty futuristic cop drama, set in a Blade Runner-like city, the cop having nightmares about his son’s death by a crime boss, and an ancient immortal man coming to guide the cop with this transformation, and it’s just half-baked and dumb. It’s hard to take the story seriously with a giant robo dinosaur breathing fire on guys selling illegal weapons and mowing down people and crashing through buildings, and trying to buy this Highlander-like story with the immortal guy. The show basically threw so much money into this TV movie pilot with explosions and gritty city set designs and tons of extras, all for a show that didn’t get picked up because it had a ludicrous plotline.
I’ll likely watch more shows, but these were just some of the few I saw. I also watched an episode of Bone Chillers, a kids’ show from 1996 about a haunted high school with monsters, that featured Linda Cardinelli as a goth teen. It was OK, a little too goofy for me, but cute for kids.
The first was Terror Vision. First, that got me into watching the 1986 cult horror comedy movie, which I enjoyed in a campy, goofy way, about an alien entering a family’s home through their satellite TV and eating them. But afterwards, I watched this obscure 1980s horror anthology of the same name that had nothing to do with the movie. The series was from circa 1988, shot on video (or shot on “shitteo”), had terrible, wooden actors with no other credits to their names, and had flat, predictable storylines that got wrapped up in 10-15 minutes, like a monster in a kid’s closet, a vampire dentist, a clothing store that turns young women into mannequins, a stalker in a house, etc. It was fine to watch more in a “what the hell is this?” way as a weird forgotten relic of the 80’s. The producers had serious credit with being involved with Liquid Sky and Jim Jarmusch movies, and one actor went on to a real film career in stuff like Total Recall, but everyone else just felt so random and awkward. I do like 80’s horror anthologies like Tales from the Dark Side, Monsters, 80’s Twilight Zone, and others, so this was my thing to watch, even if it was really bad.
The next was Nightmare Cafe, a short-lived series from 1992 from Wes Craven that started out with promise, but was more hokey than horror. Two newly-dead people are resurrected to find a mysterious cafe run by Robert Englund, and the cafe acts as a rest stop for people to change their lives for the better by going back and fixing the past. There’s a TV where they can both see the past and present times, and the ghosts can teleport when they need to help somebody or understand a past event. The first episode started out with good mystery to understand the backstories of the ghosts, and how they go back in the past to change things that they were cowards about before so even if they still die again, they die as heroes and not losers.
The problems with the show were that the storylines were more sappy and less “nightmare,” like the ghosts meeting old family and friends who don’t know they’re dead, and helping them with their problems, like having an abusive boyfriend or son in a coma. Or two film noir stories that felt heavily dated and out of place in 1992. I was expecting more of a horror show, and it was more sentimental. Or, as the hosts said, not stories out of Touched by an Angel. And Englund, despite how charismatic he is (and he rocks a long dark coat well) is totally wasted as a supporting character who narrates the plot sometimes, talks to the audience Rod Serling-style, seems like an agent of Satan but it’s never really said where he comes from, and pops up throughout the episodes playing minor characters in various getups and accents. He deserved better on a show called “Nightmare Cafe.”
The last that I watched was a T.V. movie pilot also from 1992 called Steel Justice, in which the spirit of a cop’s dead nine-year old son possesses a toy robot dinosaur, and the dinosaur grows fifty feet and breathes fire to help his dad fight crime. The show takes this plot very seriously, with a gritty futuristic cop drama, set in a Blade Runner-like city, the cop having nightmares about his son’s death by a crime boss, and an ancient immortal man coming to guide the cop with this transformation, and it’s just half-baked and dumb. It’s hard to take the story seriously with a giant robo dinosaur breathing fire on guys selling illegal weapons and mowing down people and crashing through buildings, and trying to buy this Highlander-like story with the immortal guy. The show basically threw so much money into this TV movie pilot with explosions and gritty city set designs and tons of extras, all for a show that didn’t get picked up because it had a ludicrous plotline.
I’ll likely watch more shows, but these were just some of the few I saw. I also watched an episode of Bone Chillers, a kids’ show from 1996 about a haunted high school with monsters, that featured Linda Cardinelli as a goth teen. It was OK, a little too goofy for me, but cute for kids.
Thoughts on Rockula
I heard of this 1990 vampire musical comedy called Rockula through Todd in the Shadows’ video on Thomas Dolby. He described the movie as “bugshit” about a “loser nerd vampire” who forms a rock band to court a girl who is a reincarnated spirit of his lost love and is trying to prevent her from being killed due to a prophecy that has happened 14 times over the course of 400 years. Dolby played the villain, a snidely music producer/owner of a coffin company, and is a decent actor in a campy, fun kind of way. Dean Cameron of Ski School was the dork vampire, and his love interest, as a pop star, had a real Sheena Easton vibe going on. I did honestly like how fun and Halloween-y this movie was in an 80’s way, complete with a lot of musical numbers with some glorious cheese, like the vampire calling himself “Rapula” and rapping in a very “white rapper” way.
The highlights of this movie to me, besides Dolby, was Toni Basil, as the vampire’s mother. Basil just dove heavily into the campy vibe of the film, and I loved her playfulness and sensuality. She was in her late forties at the time, and had a killer look to her as a dancer, particularly in a dance number where she’s trying to ward off the girl, who she sees as a potential threat to take her son away from her. I really dug her choreography mix of ballet, jazz, and locking with the witchy costumes. That was just one of my favorite moments of the film, and highlighted what a particularly unique and interesting talent that Toni Basil is.
The highlights of this movie to me, besides Dolby, was Toni Basil, as the vampire’s mother. Basil just dove heavily into the campy vibe of the film, and I loved her playfulness and sensuality. She was in her late forties at the time, and had a killer look to her as a dancer, particularly in a dance number where she’s trying to ward off the girl, who she sees as a potential threat to take her son away from her. I really dug her choreography mix of ballet, jazz, and locking with the witchy costumes. That was just one of my favorite moments of the film, and highlighted what a particularly unique and interesting talent that Toni Basil is.
Thoughts on The Phantom
I watched The Phantom for the first time earlier this year. I expected it to be bad, but it was actually pretty decent. A fun B-level action adventure movie that clearly was going for a self-aware 1930s serial vibe. Billy Zane was great, he had a lot of charisma, humor, and definitely got the old-fashioned superhero vibe of just being a classic good guy. Though I heard that Bruce Campbell was originally considered for the role, and would like to see what that would have looked like.
There were some problems I could see with the film. The purple suit was way too bright-looking against the jungle island setting, and it looked ridiculous onscreen. There was also a poor transition where Catherine Zeta-Jones’ character, who was one of the villain’s henchpeople, just turns to the good side seemingly out of nowhere. I guess it was when she started to have compassion for Kristy Swanson (who I didn’t recognize at all in the film)’s character while she was held hostage, and turned against her crew, but it wasn’t well-established. But Zeta-Jones was one of the highlights of the film to me for her smooth sensuality, and I so wanted to see a side story about her and her band of lady pirates.
I got that Treat Williams’ villain was supposed to be hammy and over the top, but I just found his voice incredibly irritating, and couldn’t see him as a real threat despite his on-screen kills. I also initially got him mixed up with Timothy Dalton’s character from The Rocketeer, thinking he was supposed to be a Hollywood movie star secretly in league with the Nazis. Instead, he’s a major business owner who is in league with a lot of shady people and profits from piracy.
Despite that the scenes were very derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark due to having the same screenwriter (Jeffrey Boam), I still thought the action set sequences were fantastic, with more of a real sense of danger, having stunt people hanging off of airplanes or off of bridges. They were fun to watch, and did have an old-fashioned thrill to them that fit the period style.
So the movie was a pleasant surprise to watch a nice B-level superhero movie, and I really enjoyed it.
There were some problems I could see with the film. The purple suit was way too bright-looking against the jungle island setting, and it looked ridiculous onscreen. There was also a poor transition where Catherine Zeta-Jones’ character, who was one of the villain’s henchpeople, just turns to the good side seemingly out of nowhere. I guess it was when she started to have compassion for Kristy Swanson (who I didn’t recognize at all in the film)’s character while she was held hostage, and turned against her crew, but it wasn’t well-established. But Zeta-Jones was one of the highlights of the film to me for her smooth sensuality, and I so wanted to see a side story about her and her band of lady pirates.
I got that Treat Williams’ villain was supposed to be hammy and over the top, but I just found his voice incredibly irritating, and couldn’t see him as a real threat despite his on-screen kills. I also initially got him mixed up with Timothy Dalton’s character from The Rocketeer, thinking he was supposed to be a Hollywood movie star secretly in league with the Nazis. Instead, he’s a major business owner who is in league with a lot of shady people and profits from piracy.
Despite that the scenes were very derivative of Raiders of the Lost Ark due to having the same screenwriter (Jeffrey Boam), I still thought the action set sequences were fantastic, with more of a real sense of danger, having stunt people hanging off of airplanes or off of bridges. They were fun to watch, and did have an old-fashioned thrill to them that fit the period style.
So the movie was a pleasant surprise to watch a nice B-level superhero movie, and I really enjoyed it.
Thoughts on Spirits of the Dead
At the Quad cinema I saw Spirits of the Dead, a 1968 anthology film of Edgar Allan Poe stories directed in segments by Roger Vadim, Federico Fellini, and Louis Malle. It was interesting to watch, I loved how colorful and gothic the stories were. The Vadim one had Jane Fonda looking like a cross between a Middle Ages princess and a 1960s fashion model whose cruelty to villagers is cured when she falls in love with a wild horse. This was my favorite because of Fonda’s mixed performance of being cruel at first, and then learning compassion through the influence of her cousin (Peter Fonda) and having a connection with the horse. And I really liked her outfits and how anachronistic they were with the time period.
The Malle one had Alain Delon as a sadist fighting with his doppelgänger and being psychologically tortured, that ended up being the least interesting segment for me because I didn’t care what happened to the characters, and there was an interminably long poker scene in it that dragged on for some time.
The last segment was by Fellini, where Terence Stamp played a debauched actor who gets wrapped up in this twisted world that feels like a mix of the movie world of 8 1/2 with the surrealism of Juliet of the Spirits. I liked the darkness of it, but was tired by that point and kept nodding in and out, so I didn’t follow the whole story, but luckily was awake for its finale.
So while I didn’t think this movie was great, it was a fun experiment to watch 1960s auteurs try their hands at Poe stories.
The Malle one had Alain Delon as a sadist fighting with his doppelgänger and being psychologically tortured, that ended up being the least interesting segment for me because I didn’t care what happened to the characters, and there was an interminably long poker scene in it that dragged on for some time.
The last segment was by Fellini, where Terence Stamp played a debauched actor who gets wrapped up in this twisted world that feels like a mix of the movie world of 8 1/2 with the surrealism of Juliet of the Spirits. I liked the darkness of it, but was tired by that point and kept nodding in and out, so I didn’t follow the whole story, but luckily was awake for its finale.
So while I didn’t think this movie was great, it was a fun experiment to watch 1960s auteurs try their hands at Poe stories.
Thoughts on Claire's Camera
I saw a decent artsy movie at the Moving Image museum called Claire’s Camera. It was just slightly over an hour long, directed by Hong Sang-soo, who had a new film at this year’s New York Film Festival. This film came out last year, and stars Isabelle Huppert and Kim Min-hee as two women who serendipitously meet in Cannes during the film festival, and connect warmly while dealing with personal life upheavals. It was shot beautifully, with a lot of wide shots of beachside scenes and cafe discussions, and the film was in Korean, French, and English. I liked its intimate discussions with characters displaying both a mix of being honest while putting up fronts. I don’t have a lot of deep thoughts on it, I just liked it as a discussion-heavy character study set within one day far from home.
Thoughts on Living in Oblivion
I saw Living in Oblivion at the Moving Image museum. It’s a 1995 indie comedy about a film director (Steve Buscemi) trying to make his first feature, and everything going wrong. Spoiled takes, flubbed lines, technical problems, primadonna actors, etc. I had seen some of it before, and in its entirety, it’s a hilarious movie, with Buscemi looking pop-eyed and ready to crack at any second while trying to keep his cool and assuage other people’s egos to get his movie made.
The film within a film doesn’t make any sense, with the scenes not seeming to belong in the same movie, with a mother/daughter family drama scene about abuse; a romantic lovers’ scene about pining from afar; and a surreal dream sequence. It just adds to the absurdity that the plot of this whole movie isn’t ever fully explained, and doesn’t make sense in full context.
Catherine Keener was just fantastic in this film. I loved how her character was a struggling actress with raw talent who felt like she was only recognized for a shower scene in a Richard Gere movie, and feels a mix of insecurity while still having a natural confidence in her film within a film scenes. Keener was just great at bringing a mix of sensitivity and lived experience to the role. Besides her, I also liked the actress who plays Buscemi’s mom, a woman with possible Alzheimer’s who wandered off from her assisted living home and randomly gets in the way of the film set, to the worry and frustration of her director son, only to end up being an unexpected saving grace.
Also, weirdly enough, I found Buscemi attractive in this movie. The guy has a squirrely-looking face and a dirtbag-sounding voice, but I still found him attractive anyway, go figure.
The film within a film doesn’t make any sense, with the scenes not seeming to belong in the same movie, with a mother/daughter family drama scene about abuse; a romantic lovers’ scene about pining from afar; and a surreal dream sequence. It just adds to the absurdity that the plot of this whole movie isn’t ever fully explained, and doesn’t make sense in full context.
Catherine Keener was just fantastic in this film. I loved how her character was a struggling actress with raw talent who felt like she was only recognized for a shower scene in a Richard Gere movie, and feels a mix of insecurity while still having a natural confidence in her film within a film scenes. Keener was just great at bringing a mix of sensitivity and lived experience to the role. Besides her, I also liked the actress who plays Buscemi’s mom, a woman with possible Alzheimer’s who wandered off from her assisted living home and randomly gets in the way of the film set, to the worry and frustration of her director son, only to end up being an unexpected saving grace.
Also, weirdly enough, I found Buscemi attractive in this movie. The guy has a squirrely-looking face and a dirtbag-sounding voice, but I still found him attractive anyway, go figure.
Thoughts on The Stendal Syndrome
I watched The Stendhal Syndrome, a 1996 Dario Argento film in which Asia Argento plays a young cop trying to catch a rapist/serial killer in Italy while dealing with her own crippling hallucinations whenever she looks at artwork. It was a pretty good psycho thriller, but tough to watch for its graphic depictions of rape and murder of women. I did like how trippy and unnerving the film was, and despite that it came out in the ‘90s, it felt more ‘80s to me with its film quality and old-fashioned loud musical score.
Argento, at twenty years old, seemed way too young to be playing a police investigator, but had an intensity in her eyes that worked for the film’s vibe, especially as she becomes more psychologically tortured by both the killer and the artwork. Thomas Kretschmann, as the rapist-killer, was fantastic in playing such a disturbed and monstrous character with a lot of charisma.
I saw this at The Metrograph, and enjoyed visiting there again to see this weird thriller.
Argento, at twenty years old, seemed way too young to be playing a police investigator, but had an intensity in her eyes that worked for the film’s vibe, especially as she becomes more psychologically tortured by both the killer and the artwork. Thomas Kretschmann, as the rapist-killer, was fantastic in playing such a disturbed and monstrous character with a lot of charisma.
I saw this at The Metrograph, and enjoyed visiting there again to see this weird thriller.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
My 2016 Trip to Paris
I traveled to Paris, France for a vacation in October 2016, and
kept a travel diary, and wanted to collect my entries together in one post, and
to reminisce on how much I enjoyed my visit there.
Day
Two (after initially arriving and getting settled in)
Today I explored Montparnasse, St. Germain, and the Opera
Quartier. I started with breakfast in a Montparnasse cafe, of a cafe au lait
and croissant. I visited the Montparnasse cemetery, where I appreciated how the
cemetery was dedicated to Jewish Parisian residents, with stones on graves,
Stars of David and Hebrew writing on gravestones, tributes to Holocaust victims
and survivors, heroes of the French resistance, etc. I thought it was a
beautiful cemetery, and still haven't been to Pere Lachaise yet, the biggest
one of all. I also have not seen the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe yet, I
just haven't gotten to them yet.
I walked around Montparnasse a lot, and after the cemetery, I
stopped in a Catholic Church called the La Chapelle des Tous les Saints, it was
nice and small and quiet. I sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg, it was very pretty
and sunny there. I walked a lot around St. Germain, and browsed in an Alexander
McQueen store, admiring his fashions and chatting with a friendly saleswoman
about his designs and Paris Fashion Week. I went to a used record/DVD store and
bought CD soundtracks of Love Jones, La Femme Nikita, Faraway,
So Close!, and Leon. I went to the Forum des Images at Les
Halles, thinking it was a film museum, but it was an arthouse movie theater in
a shopping center, and I didn't want to bother watching an un-subtitled French
film and wasting time.
I didn't like the rich and high fashion parts of Paris, as I
felt overwhelmed by it, and preferred the smaller, homey neighborhoods in Belleville
and the Marais. I prefer neighborhoods that are like Brooklyn and Queens, not
like Park Avenue or SoHo. I felt homesick, missing New York and feeling
frustrated when I wasn't being understood in French or having trouble
understanding other's French, and speaking English after messing up in French,
and trying to find something familiar (and not a McDonald's, I saw some of
those around and can have that anytime at home). I just really felt melancholy
and unhappy in the fancy parts of Paris, the parts that are seen as the most
beautiful.
I really adored the Catholic Church La Eglise de la Madeleine,
it was gorgeous, and I felt at peace there. I bought two postcards and a short
book at their gift shop, and had a lovely conversation with the British shop
seller. I visited the gift shop of the Palais Garnier, and bought two postcards
with ballerinas on them.
I had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, of salad with
vermicelli rice noodles and a beer.
Day 3
I have been able to get around well speaking basic French when
ordering food/drink or asking questions, but here is a stupid mistake I made:
in a bakery, I was trying to ask what a certain pastry was, and trying to say
"What is this?" What came out was "Qui est la?" Which means,
"Who is there?"
The woman at the counter looked confused and asked me
"Quoi?" ("What?") I tried to fix it, but it came out as
"Qui est ca?" which means "Who is that?"
She just told me what the pastry was, and I bought one, but
walking out, I realized I should have said "Qu'est-que ce?" which
means "What is this?" I just noted that for next time so I don't
sound ridiculous.
Observations about Paris:
There are a ton of motorcycles in the city, not just motorbikes.
They can be pretty loud, but are really nice-looking bikes.
Parisians are not rude, contrary to the stereotype, and are
polite if I ask them a question (more so if I start off speaking French and
switching to English if I don't know enough French and they can understand
English in some capacity). Conversely, Parisians have been polite to me if they
ask me a question that I cannot understand and are nice if I respond in French
that I don't understand and only speak a little French.
I hear English-language pop music playing in some places, like
when I went to an Irish bar that catered to English speakers, playing music
from the UK and America (like Genesis and U2 and stuff like that).
This is the lower tourist season, so I don't hear many
English-language tourists. Sometimes I hear an American or British accent, but
not often. In my hostel, the other tourists are women in their 20s: two
Argentinians (either sisters or close friends) and a Brazilian woman
who lives in Geneva. I like how the Argentinian Spanish had this European lilt
to it, and myself and the Brazilian woman chatted last night about
our struggles with French and our sightseeing.
Day 4
I had a better day today sightseeing. I went to the Latin
Quartier, to Place d'Italie (which was not as Italian as I thought it would
be), and had a cafe au lait and a banana and Nutella crepe. Then I went to the
neighborhood of Bercy to the Cinematheque Francaise, a museum devoted to French
film history. It reminded me of the Moving Image Museum in Queens, with early
20th century film equipment, archives on early film techniques, retrospectives
of George Melies and the Gaumont film company, and clips of silent films and
1960s French films (the clip playing on a loop had Brigitte Bardot in it),
drawings and costumes from the German sci-fi silent classic Metropolis, an
exhibit on notable Japanese filmmakers like Kurosawa, Ozu, Miyazaki, and other
Japanese films; and a library and research room. I adored it, and if I
understood French better, I would have browsed more of the books in the
library. I bought postcards featuring Jeanne Moreau, Federico Fellini, and
Giuletta Masina.
After that, I went to the Marais, and went to the Maison
Europeene de la Photographie, to see an exhibit on Herb Ritts. It was nice,
though small, and I had seen much of his famous fashion and celebrity
photography before. I liked seeing how much of a notable style he had to his
work that is hard to describe, but had a very modern and b&w cool look of
the 80's and early 90's that was incredibly flattering to his subjects. A video
played on a loop of his music video and commercial work edited together like
one video, and it made his work look more signature, like the Madonna video for
"Cherish" blending into Janet Jackson's "Love Will Never Do
Without You" into Chris Issak's "Wicked Game" into a Calvin
Klein commercial and swirling all together. I was a fan of him as a teen, and
fantasized about being famous enough to be photographed by him, but he died
from HIV-related complications in 2002. He was a visionary artist, and I
enjoyed seeing this show, which I heard if via a subway ad in passing.
I mostly hung out in the Marais today, because I really loved
how it had a Jewish and Arabic presence with falafel and schnitzel shops, mixed
in with small art galleries and smaller high-end fashion, and then the streets
around the Bastille were all winding with a lot of hip cafes and boutiques, and
I could easily get lost in the narrow and twisting streets (which I did get
lost sometimes walking in Paris, but not in a bad way, more just seeing the
personal characters of neighborhoods and walking off of my original path). I
really prefer smaller neighborhoods with their own cultures, and felt more at
ease than when I was on St. Germain and feeling overwhelmed by the upper class
world. I had a pita sandwich there, sat in a church for a little bit, walked
around more, hung out in a Starbucks to charge my phone and have a green tea,
then went back to Belleville, and had a salad for dinner.
On the subway back, I had nice interactions with Parisians. A
woman went to hold the same pole as me, then got a static shock and laughed
about it with me. Then I later let a woman and her toddler daughter have my
seat, and I could understand them a little, the girl was saying in French, “I
want to eat," after seeing someone else with food, and the mom saying
stuff like "OK, we will eat soon." I liked having short, friendly
chats with people in French, and feeling like I passed as a French speaker as
long as I didn't have to say a lot, and could pick up on tones and gestures
more so. Most of my interactions with locals have been with making purchases or
ordering food/drink, so I haven't had much of an connection with people, so
these shared moments in the train were nice and made me feel better about
connecting through speaking French and not struggling or hesitating as much,
just being more at ease when it is about everyday people.
Day 5
I visited Versailles today, and it was lovely. I couldn't afford
to see the palace or the gardens, so I took photos from outside the gate, and
walked around the town, which is ridiculously pretty. Like it doesn't even look
like a real town, more like a pop-up book for tourists to be in a fairytale
version of Europe. I enjoyed taking a nearly-hour long train ride to
Versailles, passing various French towns and seeing country and suburban life
and cute houses. I took photos of the town and a cathedral, which I included
here, and enjoyed taking a day trip from the city.
I had dinner in Montmartre, and since I didn't eat all day, I
ate two crepes (a ham and cheese one and a chocolate one) and a small cafe au
lait. The place was a cute little cafe, with very friendly staff (when I paid
up, one guy asked me to stay longer to hang out with them and listen to live
music, but I politely declined), and the radio music was a mix of French and
English-language pop music, so I heard Mariah Carey's "Without You"
and that song that goes "take me to church" by a recent band. Then I
walked around Montmartre, seeing the local bustling nightlife, before catching
a metro back to my hostel.
Tomorrow is my last day, and I don't have much plans. I likely
will see Pere Lachaise, either the Catacombs or a museum of letters and
manuscripts by notable authors and artists, take a visit to finally see the
Eiffel Tower, and just meander. I really loved seeing Paris, and feel like I
saw a lot, even if not everything. I am ready to go home, and miss New York, my
loved ones, and my little Sam.
Day 6
I had a good last day in Paris. I visited Pere Lachaise, and
enjoyed walking all around and seeing the graves of Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf,
Oscar Wilde, and others. The cemeteries there aren't depressing, they are more
like celebrations of life with really beautiful headstones (for the rich and
famous, anyway). I was surprised to see a grave for a victim of the 2015 terrorist
attack, a young woman killed amongst others at the Bataclan. There were tour
groups and various other visitors, so it was busier than when I visited the
other major Paris cemeteries. It just felt like a very respectful place to be
in.
I found a little Creole restaurant in the neighborhood, and had
a cafe, as I wasn't in the mood for a meal or having a rich Creole dish. The
place was small, but warm with a lovely brown color, and the radio played rock
bands like The Rolling Stones and The White Stripes. The manager was this
handsome white man who was tall and thin, and reminded me both of Anthony
Bourdain (but quiet) and Jim Jarmusch. The other manager was a plump black
woman with shoulder-length dreads. I complimented them, saying in French
"It's nice to have a Creole restaurant in Paris." :)
Afterwards, I went to the Catacombs, and that was something that
was thrilling, nerve-wracking, and amazing. The underbelly of the city was made
into a cemetery for 18th century Parisians in the 1800s, as well as a place for
casualties of war. I waited on line for an hour, and it was worth it. I was
most scared by the winding staircase going down. It is 130 steps of steep
stairs with a low ceiling, and it winds so much and goes so deep down ( like 20
meters below), I felt like I was going down into a neverending staircase into
hell, and kept taking breaths to calm myself in a small space.
The Catacombs don't have a tour guide, but rather well-lit
passages with arrow directions on the walk, and forbidden entry ways locked up,
and I would read signs in French (that I halfway understood) about the 19th
century quarries, the water aqueduct built in the 1600s, and then, the many
halls full of skulls and bones of ancient Parisians. It was a little unnerving
to see so much of the human remains, and arranged like walls on either side of
the passageways. My phone battery was dead, so I couldn't take photos, but I
didn't want to anyway, it just felt disrespectful to do that, as these were
once people.
In all, I really loved visiting the Catacombs, as I hadn't seen
anything else like it before, but it was creepy and I was a little on edge
while walking through halls of death. At least the cemeteries don't have the
remains on display, and have beautiful artwork on their graves to celebrate
life.
I went to see the Eiffel Tower, and it was gorgeous. It looked
like a radio antennae from afar, but when I was close to it, I was amazed by
its architecture. Just huge and steep and beautiful. I didn't go in it, I just
walked around it, but I was just craning my neck up like
"Damn."
I walked alongside the Seine, and by then, my feet were killing
me. I got blisters from walking so much, my shoes are roughed up, and I had a
large chicken and cheese crepe for dinner, my one real meal of the day (besides
a complimentary croissant with the hostel breakfast), and had a nice
conversation with the crepe stand salesman, a Pakistani man who let me practice
my French with him, and we talked about Paris and New York.
I loved visiting Paris, and seeing so much of the city and
practicing my French (for better or for worse) and getting to be on another
continent for the first time. I likely will not return, due to costs, so I
really wanted to take advantage of this week and see and do as much as I could.
I will likely print out my photos so I can put them in an album at home. This
truly was a memorable trip.
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