Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, 1993. This is the one where April buys a weird lamp at a thrift store and then she gets teleported to  feudal Japan, and the guys have to go after her and they get caught up in some civil war between Grumpy Man and Mitsui, Warrior Princess, a war that can only be remedied if Mitsui, Warrior Princess, marries Grumpy Man’s son Kenshin, who – inconveniently – was teleported into 1990s NYC along with his father’s honor guard because time travel only works if you match the number of people going and coming exactly.   I have conflicted feelings about this one:  it’s…silly, but Secret of the Ooze was downright preposterous,  especially with Tokka and Razar who would only work in a kids movie.  On the other hand, kid-me was a fan of Mitsui.

1776, 1972. A rewatch for me, an introduction for the ladyfriend. Excellent, excellent, excellent. I’d forgotten how great a movie it is, between the impassioned debates, casting, acting, and music.  It’s only aged better the older I get, as I now recognize so much dialogue from the letters of the Founders themselves. 

SuperVixens, 1975.  A….crime….suspense…..trash movie about a man being chased by Charles Napier. Let’s leave it at that.  (Just read Russ Meyer’s wikipedia article, you’ll get idea.)

The Patriot, 2000. My lord, I’d forgotten how utterly hatable Jason Isaacs is in this movie. In his first five minutes on film, he’s ordered an innocent man’s house and fields set fire to,  ordered a teenager to be hung as a spy, and shot a child.   This is a Revolutionary War murder drama in which a farmer who is determined to shield his children from the War sees one threatened with hanging and another one shot, at which point he chooses violence. Glorious, bloody violence.   Also, Rene Auberjonis (aka Odo from ST DS9) is a supporting actor in this!  

In Bruges, 2008. A hitman accidentally kills a child while on an assignment, and is told to hang out in Belgium until the heat dies down.  He is accompanied by Mad Eye Mooney, which is funny because their mutual boss is Ralph Fiennes, aka Voldemort.  The beginning of the film is a low-key suspense film with some comedic elements, as Moody enjoys the culture of Bruges but the hitman finds it only tolerable after he meets a local and starts dating her.  It turns out that Voldemort sent the hitman to Bruges so he’d have a nice week before someone else knocked him off to avoid any problems with law enforcement and the dead kid.

Rock and Roll High School,  1979. An enthusiast of the Ramones meets them at a concert and invites them to take over her high school.  Basically a Ramones musical with the plot being of secondary – perhaps tertiary – importance.  I continued my parlor trick of finding Star Trek and Sopranoes links in almost every movie we watch because Del Pay has been in no less than three episodes of 1990s-era Star Trek episodes.

Microcosmos, 1996. French insect documentary with video work that is absolutely AMAZING for the mid-1990s. This is Planet Earth level detail. (This movie was prompted by my cinema buddy’s apartment being literally colonized by bees.)

Twelve Angry Men, 1997. The first time I ever watched TAM was the remake in high school, for creative writing or speech class (same teacher, same classroom). Watching this thirty years later was a…wholly different inexperience, in part because I knew the story and largely because I knew so many actors.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1954. A musical comedy about some backwoods boy lookin’ for lady-types.  Fun!

In the Army Now, 1994. Two slackers (Pauly Shore & Andy Dick) who work in an electronics store are fired for general incompetence, and decide to join the Army Reserves as weekend warriors specializing in water purification.  Are they concerned? No, because the last war was like, what, WW2? (Boy, you guys need libertarian friends who will give you lectures on all of DC’s foreign policy misadventures.)     Things happen, and soon the “waterboys” soon find themselves not only in a war, but behind enemy lines in a place where only they can do something.  I watched this more than a few times as a teenager.   There are also aspects I didn’t appreciate as a kid, like the absurdity of Libyan camp guards shooting machine guns during an air raid.

Payday, 1973. Watched this solely because it was filmed in and around my hometown, so my buddy and I were constantly pausing and rewinding to study background details and figure out where shots were being taken. There is a plot about a country-music singer whose life of excess is destroying him and those around him. 

Renaissance Man, 1994. Danyn DeVito plays an unemployed ad man who is assigned to work at a military base and teach a small group of boots who are judged being on the verge of flunking out.   There’s no curriculum,   so after a few halting attempts at finding some way to teach “comprehension”, DeVito stumbles into teaching ….Hamlet!   The students include a very young Mark Wahlberg, as well as a minor character from The Sopranoes. (He’s one of Jackie Jr’s friends who gets shot.)   While a lot of the film is weak, sense-wise, there’s a lot of humor and heartwarm-y stuff. My favorite part was the Sopranoes character, who is fond of Al Pacino impersonations,  reading Henry V as Pacino in Scarface. (He does not do this in the big finale, where for some reason his DI demands he quote some Shakespeare, so he  performs  the “Band of Brothers” speech.)    One impressive feat the film does is slowly humanizing a group of largely obnoxious students –  Private Motormouth in general – so that the viewer can actually like them by the end.  Ditto for DeVito’s character, who starts off very much like Emilio Estevez in Mighty Ducks but finds his passion.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, 2019.  Jay and Silent Bob have to go to Hollywood to stop Kevin Smith from making another Jay and Silent Bob movie. “What kinda broken down [creeps] still WATCH this stuff, anyway?!”

Along the way, Jay discovers he’s a dad, and viewers are forced to deal with annoying teenagers. While my attitude during the movie was more toleration than wholescale enjoyment, there were nice parts: like cameos from Matt Damon & Ben Affleck. (Damon’s was the funniest, since he kept doing Bourne references.) There are a lot of inside references, like Kevin Smith’s daughter (playing Jay’s daughter) saying she hates Kevin Smith because he forces his daughter to act in all his movies. The ending is amusing, though.

“How old are these guys, anyway?”
“I think they were alive during the ninenties.”
“No way! That’s before they built THE INTERNET!”

“Silent Bob says, failure is success training.”
“…then why aren’t you the most successful man in the world?”

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, 2001. Watching Reboot made me realize that either (1) I’ve only watched unconnected clips from the original Jay and Silent Bob movie or (2) it’s been so long since I watched the movie I remember nothing about it. In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jay and Silent Bob learn that a movie is being based on them, so they run off to Hollywood to stop it.

Enroute, Jay falls for a young woman and unwittingly joints a diamond-stealing gang as their love-smitten patsy. There are cameos from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and….a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, not to mention Will Ferrell. (Dante and Randall also appear a few times! On the downside, Jay repeatedly refers to an orangutan as a chimp and still worse, a monkey.

WF: Why are you shooting at me?!
Bad Girl Band: Two reasons! One, we’re walking, talkin’, bad-girl cliches! Two, you’re a man!

Out to Sea, 1997. Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon are a couple of old codgers who Walter enlists as “dance hosts” on a cruise ship. Walter’s not in it for a cruise, though, he wants to gamble & try to lure in some old biddie with a lot of money. He winds up falling in love with a youngish woman who (unbeknowst to him) is also a gold-digging con artist. Meanwhile, Lemmon struggles with being a widower in love. Entertaining, and it has Brent Spiner singing.

The Drop. 2014. James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy, madonne! Gandolfini plays the former owner of a bar who was pushed out by some Chechens who use the bar for some gangland things. His nephew Bob (Tom Hardy) tends the bar. One night they’re robbed by a couple of nogoodniks, annnnnd the Chechens want their money back. I’ve always only ever seen Hardy in roles where he’s very self-assured — Shinzon, Bane, Bronson, etc — so seeing him as a mild-mannered barkeep was fascinating. Continue to be impressed by his acting chops.

The Intern, 2015.  Robert DeNiro is a retired widower with a hole in his life, so when he sees a flyer for a “Senior Intern” program at a local business, he’s intrigued.   He’s soon the personal assistant of Anne Hathaway,  the founder of the company who is working herself to death. There’s humor here, largely in the old-school DeNiro teaching Millennials a thing or two – like the importance of dressing for the office, say, and not like they’re staggering into walmart at 1 am in their pajamas and plastic shoes with a case of the pizza roll munchies. DeNiro and Hathaway’s relationship is interesting to watch grow, though, especially after DeNiro realizes Hathaway’s husband – who does not look like he could catch Hathaway – is cheating on her.   Seriously, her husband is Pajama Boy with an ill-kept beard. Wonderful acting from both Hathaway and DeNiro, I thought, especially when DeNiro reveals that his old factory is the site of Hathaway’s new e-boutique firm.

The Master, 2012.   I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman was meant to be L. Ron Hubbard enticing a Navy veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix into his cult, but the movie was lots of quiet, intense conversations and I was actively watching the clock waiting for it to end. 

The Apartment, 1960. A young Jack Lemmon, a young Shirley Maclaine, and Fred MacMurray feature in a film about a young executive who has been pushed into letting upper executives use his apartment for their affairs, but things go awry when he realizes the girl he’s smitten by is involved in one of the affairs. Fun romantic comedy.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio, 2009. A French parody of James Bond films that is absolutely hilarious. Where else can you find Robin Hood and a Nazi in a Mexican wrestling mask fighting? Lots of cinema references to other films like Vertigo.

A Serious Man, 2009. A Jewish black comedy about a man whose wife wants to leave him, even while other crises are descending, so he sees three different rabbis (one played by a Michael Knowles doppelganger) and things get progressively weirder.   It’s….slightly reminiscent of the Book of Job. Probably the most interesting film I’ll see this year.

“Why does Hashem make us feel these questions if there’s no answers?!”

.

What About Bob?, 1991. A comedy in which Bill Murray plays a distrubed man who stalks his new psychologist (Richard Dreyfuss) on vacation. Watched this in high school and though it was hysterical; enjoyed it well enough this time around, though I now prefer Dreyfuss in more serious roles.