Last week, I introduced you all to the best so-bad-it’s-good movie you’ve never seen. The above video is a compilation of my favorite parts, and here is my full review I promised:
Continue reading My Streets: The Best Parts & Full Review
Category: Greg’s Reviews
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: An Almost Perfect Movie
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
Directed by Stephen Herek
Written by Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon
90 min.
Very mild spoilers.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is almost perfect. It’s very original, the characters are cleverly constructed, there are some cool visuals, the ride is a lot of fun, and there’s even a few touching moments. But it’s missing a certain fundamental piece of storytelling, the absence of which prevents it from being transcendent. Instead, it’s merely a bonafide classic (which is still pretty damned good).
Continue reading Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure: An Almost Perfect Movie
Forrest Gump: A Gritty Indie Film Masquerading as a Hollywood Epic
Forrest Gump (1994)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Eric Roth
From a novel by Winston Groom
142 min.
I know it’s weird, but there are actual people who don’t like Forrest Gump. (Dr. Seuss described this phenomena as having a heart three sizes too small.) Sentimentality is a powerful thing—it makes people cry and tricks intellectuals into thinking art isn’t good. It also tricks moms into thinking that a movie with LSD use, a guy blowing his load early, sexual bartering, and child molestation is appropriate for an 8 year old—or, maybe I just have a really cool mom.
I was flipping through the channels the other day (I don’t use ‘the guide’) and I landed on Forrest Gump, which is the epitome of a ‘whenever it’s on TV I have to finish it’ movie. I landed on one of Jenny’s hippie scenes, the one where a dude pulls up in a Volkswagen Beetle and asks if anyone wants to go to San Francisco, and Jenny says “I’ll go,” and he says “Far out!”, like a very happy hippie. At that moment, I had a realization: Forrest Gump is a pretty weird movie to be on ABC Family (which is the channel it was on). When I was a little kid, Forrest Gump was just a big, fun movie that made me laugh and then cry at the end. When I was eight, I didn’t understand that when Forrest is sitting on Jenny’s bed in her dorm and she takes off her shirt, he ejaculates early. Forrest Gump is a gritty, indie film masquerading as a Hollywood epic.
Continue reading Forrest Gump: A Gritty Indie Film Masquerading as a Hollywood Epic
An Interview with James Merendino, Writer/Director of SLC Punk (But First, A Review Of The Film)
SLC Punk (1998)
Written & Directed by James Merendino
97 min.
I could never identify the groups in my high school. We certainly had some jocks, potheads, and even a few hanger-on goths. But punks, I don’t know. We had a kid with a mohawk; he was a fucking asshole. And we had a bunch of kids who loved punk music—a lot of them had safety pins in their clothes and dyed hair, but they seemed to really like some band called AFI, which I always thought was the American Film Institute. By the time I was in high school, punk music had completely soaked into the mainstream and everybody had heard of Pennywise and Bad Religion. It was in vogue to go see Henry Rollins do his spoken word shows in Ann Arbor, and if you were really cool, you already liked Bad Brains and Minor Threat.
I didn’t care about any of that stuff and I was tired of every local band sounding like Green Day. I was like the James Duval character in SLC Punk—the social diplomat. I could be friends with anybody. I was too busy getting into movies and figuring out my own depression to bother committing to some specific clique. Plus, the fashion of punk seemed so childish to me. It’s music; I don’t wear it, I listen to it. But that being said, we didn’t have nazis or rednecks either. Well, everywhere has rednecks, but our punks didn’t beat them with bats. Our punks were nice kids (except for that mohawked loser) and they got good grades and loved their parents. They went to Michigan State University and were proud to do so.
Continue reading An Interview with James Merendino, Writer/Director of SLC Punk (But First, A Review Of The Film)
The Blue Goop That Comes Out Of A Bag Of Dead Pig Babies: Nights on Netflix, Part II
June 29th, 2013 12:06 AM. My girlfriend and I nestled in for a night on Netflix. This is what happened.
It started with a really ‘clever’ and ‘quirky’ movie called Spork. That didn’t last long. Then we tried Kink, a Canadian TV show about an assortment of really arrogant and obnoxious S&M purveyors. The bumpers took up more time than the fucking interviews. Next. Then we tried that Sushi documentary that every keeps talking about but it was boring as fuck. Then we entered what I call ‘the blur’. This is where you turn off so many movies that are all so similar that they run together. I can’t remember what any of them are called.
After a while, Netflix kind of beats you down and you end up sticking with the least shitty thing. Generally, you want to pick something that’s just bad enough to be fun to make fun of, making it bearable. Most movies are far below that, but finally, I found one. Here’s what I wrote right after it ended:
Continue reading The Blue Goop That Comes Out Of A Bag Of Dead Pig Babies: Nights on Netflix, Part II