Category Archives: Movies

February 5, 2020 · 2:15 pm

The Set of 400: #151 – My Favorite Wagon Wheel Coffee Table

Today! Because he was very jealous, and I had these days of the week underpants –

When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

Directed by Rob Reiner (x3)

Starring Billy Crystal (x2), Meg Ryan, Bruno Kirby (x2), Carrie Fisher (x4), Steven Ford, Lisa Jane Persky, Michelle Nicastro, Kevin Rooney, Tracy Reiner (x2), Estelle Reiner

I like to think that my personal preference on this list is mine and mine alone, that maybe there were influences over the years steering me toward certain things, away from others, or just jamming something I might not have otherwise seen in front of my face for endless years until it lodged in my brain as something I really enjoyed. As you might have noticed, various of my family members had this effect on me growing up – with their Ghosts and She Wore a Yellow Ribbons and Rocky Horror Picture Shows. However, today, we come to my wife’s favorite movie, somehow, at number 151. Remarkable!

Congratulations, boots!

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February 4, 2020 · 2:10 pm

The Set of 400: #152 – My Favorite Vending Machine Card Game

Today! Because if you want to get out of here, get rid of that monkey!

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Directed by Lee Unkrich (x2)

Starring Tom Hanks (x4), Tim Allen (x3), Joan Cusack (x3), John Ratzenberger (x4), Wallace Shawn (x3), Ned Beatty (x4), Michael Keaton (x6), Estelle Harris (x2), Don Rickles (x2), Laurie Metcalf (x3), John Morris (x2), Jodi Benson (x2), Blake Clark, Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal, Jeff Garlin, Bonnie Hunt, Whoopi Goldberg (x5), R. Lee Ermey (x2), Richard Kind (x3)

One of the most disconcertingly emotional movies ever made, Toy Story 3 manages to be alternatingly hilarious and heart-breaking, and forces you examine issues of loss and abandonment in ways that aren’t typical in mainstream entertainment. Hell, I would say it’s not something even esoteric filmmaking would attempt to inflict on an audience too often. If it weren’t for Buzz’s Spanish mode and hard-bitten, crime noir-ish gags from the telephone, I would say this might be the most insidiously horrifying children’s film ever created.

Oh Jesus Christ, that porch

Seriously, how do you navigate little ones through this movie? Is it possible to just separate the nightmare of Lotso’s life from all the Woody and Buzz adventures? I get that the ending is geared toward making adults cry – none of that can be anything kids will really understand – but what about the psychologically torturous aspects of this story? I would only imagine there are a million unanswerable questions raised through the middle section of this movie, straight through to Lotso’s end – which is no walk in the park either. And maybe that’s truly the genius of this film, and this whole series. We can examine the people and things we’ve lost – the parts of our lives that were left behind somewhere, by choice or just forgotten – without it killing us. Toy Story 3 sure as hell tries to rip you apart along the way, but in the end it’s okay. Like our heroes, we made it. Even if we narrowly escaped the landfill incinerator in the process.

Oh my God, that incinerator

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February 3, 2020 · 2:14 pm

The Set of 400: #153 – My Favorite Robot Dragon

Today! Because that’s a Smith & Wesson and you’ve had your six –

Dr. No (1962)

Directed by Terence Young (x2)

Starring Sean Connery (x4), Ursula Andress (x2), Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Bernard Lee, Anthony Dawson, Eunice Gayson, John Kitzmiller, Zena Marshall, Lois Maxwell (x2), Peter Burton

For years growing up, we had a VHS copy of the first filmed James Bond adventure, and I was not impressed. It was so hokey and stagey, and that Bond! Wooden! Uncharismatic! That villain! All snide remarks but with no threat behind them whatsoever! This was a load of junk! I’m not even sure where we got it, or why they’d release it on video, because the less seen the lousy made-for-TV Casino Royale from 1954 starring Barry Nelson and Peter Lorre, the better!

Dullsville!

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January 31, 2020 · 2:03 pm

The Set of 400: #154 – My Favorite Singing Telegram

Today! Because communism was just a red herring –

Clue (1985)

Directed by Jonathan Lynn

Starring Tim Curry (x3), Lesley Ann Warren, Eileen Brennan (x3), Christopher Lloyd (x5), Madeline Kahn (x4), Michael McKean (x4), Martin Mull, Colleen Camp (x3), Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jeffrey Kramer (x2), Howard Hesseman

In the very limited realm of Movies Based on Board Games, Clue is far and away the king. It’s not a genre that should’ve necessarily been encouraged to expand, and thankfully it hasn’t managed to in the three plus decades hence. On the other hand, why not? While most board games don’t present enough characters or plot to facilitate a real story to emerge, I’m sure they could come up with something halfway decent for, say, Candyland. Who do you see playing Plumpy in that one? Someone get a treatment together!

Yikes – I didn’t make this graphic – this was actually in development at some point. Gah.

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January 30, 2020 · 2:12 pm

The Set of 400: #155 – My Favorite Animated E.L.E.

Today! Because I’m very happy to have this opportunity to introduce to you – the soundtrack –

Fantasia (1940)

Directed by James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson (x2), Hamilton Luske (x2), Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen

Starring Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Walt Disney

Perhaps the most iconic Disney film to also bore kids to death, Fantasia at the wrong age can be a snooze-inducing two-hour punishment with only a very brief, comic Mickey Mouse to break up the droning symphony. Remembering it as I do from a young age, it is a hard sell in the modern day to induce kids to watch this lengthy silent film no matter how many dancing hippos and mythological creatures populate the screen. Sure, in 1940 it probably fared better, as there were only two feature length cartoons in existence at that point – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio. But nowadays – with hundreds and hundreds of animated films to choose from – does anyone bother to force Fantasia down their kids’ throats? Continue reading →

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January 29, 2020 · 2:15 pm

The Set of 400: #156 – My Favorite Dreams of Orson Welles

Today! Because we’ll shoot the scene when you find a cat that can act –

La nuit americaine (Day For Night) (1973)

Directed by Francois Truffaut

Starring Jacqueline Bisset (x2), Jean-Pierre Leaud, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Francois Truffaut, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean Champion, Nike Arrighi, Nathalie Baye

Ah, movies about movies! And there are few better than Francois Truffaut’s serio-comic masterpiece Day For Night – a movie that happened to come along at just the right point in my life to stick around apparently forever after. I enjoyed it when I first saw it, sometime early in college, but then as now I wasn’t a huge fan of foreign films. Like, I can appreciate them, but subtitles just have a natural tendency to keep you at arm’s length, so it’s hard to gather up a more advanced fondness, I find. However, in short order, there were two big things that helped Day For Night in reaching this pantheon all these years later. One – again, movies about movies – that’s my wheelhouse. And two, right around the time I first saw this movie I started writing a play – a play within a play, actually – and a pretty autobiographical one at that – and found myself borrowing a lot of ideas from this movie. That thing – forever lost to the ages, dear readers! – eventually was titled Play For Night, and was staged in one of the more nonsensical summers of my life – 2002 – replete with heavy drama among a cast that by the end largely didn’t get along (entirely my fault), a number of people moving out of their apartments (others) and parents’ house (me), and my getting hammered with my dad at a Red Barons doubleheader as he tried to dissuade me from an avalanche of shitty decision making I’d already set in motion, as detailed back in #170 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “But how was the play?” I can hear you asking. Never mind all this ancient teenage (20ish?) interpersonal drama! Play For Night…didn’t work. The less said the better, really.

(I actually wrote an insane follow-up play – a play within a play within a play, actually – about the staging of that play, more as a joke than anything, but it actually fares considerably better, in that it’s waaaaay shorter. Jacques the Monkey, that one was called. No, none of these are available to read.) Continue reading →

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January 28, 2020 · 2:10 pm

The Set of 400: #157 – My Favorite Enlarged Photograph

Today! Because it’s very clear to me/I’ve got to give in/High Anxiety – you win!

High Anxiety (1977)

Directed by Mel Brooks (x3)

Starring Mel Brooks (x3), Madeline Kahn (x3), Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman (x3), Ron Carey (x2), Howard Morris, Dick Van Patten (x4), Jack Riley (x2), Rudy De Luca (x2), Barry Levinson (x2), Robert Ridgely (x4), Charlie Callas, Lee Delano

If Mel Brooks could be said to have a forgotten movie, well, it’s The Twelve Chairs. But if it could be conjectured that he has another forgotten film, more surprising due to the legion of classic Brooks players involved, it’s almost certainly High Anxiety. Perhaps because it’s the only of his films from the era to be set in the era itself, it doesn’t have the more timeless qualities of a Young Frankenstein or even a Spaceballs. The jokes aren’t necessarily dated to the ’70s either – they are just sorta dated in that Catskills Mel Brooks way many of his jokes feel now. However, the other main thing working against this movie might be its focus of parodying Hitchcock movies – a terrific idea that really comes off well in the film, but does forever land it squarely in the purview of cinema nerds who also might enjoy Borscht Belt comedy. It’s a group I fear dwindles by the day, to the point that I worry no one will watch this movie twenty or thirty years from now, except Brooks completionists and Hitchcock-o-philes.

It’s not the greatest pic of Hitch, but Brooks and Bancroft are thrilled by his presence!

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January 27, 2020 · 2:15 pm

The Set of 400: #158 – My Favorite Especially Good Expectorator

Today! Because we’re not safe until he’s dead/he’ll come stalking us at night –

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Directed by Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

Starring Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Angela Lansbury, Jerry Orbach (x2), David Ogden Stiers (x2), Richard White, Rex Everhart, Jesse Corti, Jo Anne Worley, Kimmy Robertson

Had the Academy not expanded the number of potential Best Picture nominees in a given year to ten, it’s likely we’d still be referring to Beauty and the Beast as the only animated movie ever put up for the top award, back in 1991. Sure, maybe this doesn’t seem like anything now, as there have now been wholly three animated films in the big contest, as of this writing – along with Up in 2010 and Toy Story 3 in 2011 – never mind that they added a Best Animated Feature category since BatB days, but it getting in alongside #174 Silence of the Lambs and #357 JFK and Bugsy was a huge deal at the time. However, despite the large number of ’91 films on this list (this is #11!), it was a weak enough year that The Prince of Tides was the fifth Best Picture nominee, so…

Ugh, Prince of Tides

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January 24, 2020 · 2:21 pm

The Set of 400: #159 – My Favorite Super-Duper Chocolate Eruption

Today! Because if you don’t bring those kids back I’m going to commit Hare Krishna!

The Goonies (1985)

Directed by Richard Donner (x4)

Starring Sean Astin (x2), Corey Feldman, Jeff Cohen, Jonathan Ke Quan, Josh Brolin, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, Anne Ramsey (x3), Joe Pantoliano (x4), Robert Davi (x2), John Matuszak, Mary Ellen Trainor (x5), Lupe Ontiveros, Keith Walker, Steve Antin

The ’80s were the heyday of kids on adventures in the movies, or at least it seemed that way when I was a kid, in the ’80s. Maybe every decade plays this way when you’re young – maybe that’s how they’ve designed it to feel! – but back then it seemed like we couldn’t hunt down kid-centric action peril flicks from much further back than the Carter administration, and so it all felt like a new concept. And the first time I ever remember going to a drive-in movie – at the glorious Circle Drive-In in Dickson City, still in operation as of this writing! – was to see the Ethan Hawke classic Explorers paired with Richard Donner’s rip-roaring, hilarious treasure hunt The Goonies.

Didn’t make the list, but I’ve got pretty fond, vague memories of Explorers, too

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January 23, 2020 · 2:12 pm

The Set of 400: #160 – My Favorite Wyoming as a Country

Today! Because I’m a fuck-up and I’m an outcast. If you get near me you’re gonna get it –

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Directed by Sidney Lumet (x2)

Starring Al Pacino (x2), John Cazale, Charles Durning (x2), Chris Sarandon (x3), James Broderick, Lance Henriksen (x2), Penelope Allen, Carol Kane (x4), Sully Boyar, Susan Peretz, Marcia Jean Kurtz, John Marriott, Dominic Chianese, Judith Malina

The bank robbery movie against which all others are forever judged, Dog Day Afternoon very basically serves as a template for how to sustain tension in a locked-in heist film where everything immediately goes wrong and negotiations drag on for hours. However, what Dog Day does different from nearly all similar films before or following is that it manages to continue throwing twists and bizarre surprises into the plot straight through to its sudden, stunning finish. Most bank hold-up films go for explosions and constant action to keep the audience engaged – here, it’s the wonderfully nuanced performances of Pacino, Cazale, Sarandon, and Durning, all masterfully guided by Lumet at his best.

It’s also a wonderfully sweaty, sloppily dressed film

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January 22, 2020 · 2:09 pm

The Set of 400: #161 – My Favorite Tight-Fisted Hand at the Grindstone

Today! Because I’m too old and beyond hope! Go and redeem some younger, more promising creature –

A Christmas Carol (1951)

Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst

Starring Alastair Sim, Mervyn Johns, Hermione Baddeley, Michael Hordern, George Cole, Rona Anderson, Kathleen Harrison, Francis De Wolff, Brian Worth, Peter Bull, Patrick Macnee

The greatest Christmas Carol ever filmed, 1951’s Alastair Sim take feels like a much longer film than its 86 minute run time. Hell, the Jim Carrey motion capture thing from ’09 is 96 minutes (and you feel every second of that thing). But while a short film feeling longer is typically not a good thing, the ’51 Carol benefits grandly, as it actually took the time to expand on elements teased in the novel and never explored in any prior film version. This also might not necessarily be seen as a positive aspect of a typical film adaptation – just straight adding things to a plot – and especially one with a story widely regarded as one of the best ever told, but the additional material feels so organic, so Dickensian, that unless you are really a Christmas Carol scholar – films or novel – you may not notice.

If you can overlook the Ghost of Christmas Past’s gloriously excessive wig

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January 21, 2020 · 2:15 pm

The Set of 400: #162 – My Favorite Soul Bowl

Today! Because now she’s thinking of dead kittens!

All of Me (1984)

Directed by Carl Reiner (x3)

Starring Steve Martin (x6), Lily Tomlin (x2), Victoria Tennant, Madolyn Smith, Richard Libertini (x2), Selma Diamond (x2), Eric Christmas (x2), Michael Ensign, Basil Hoffman (x2), Dana Elcar, Jason Bernard (x2), Gailard Sartain, Neva Patterson, Harvey Vernon

The rage of body switching style comedies of the ’80s and ’90s hit its peak with All of Me, the third, final, and best of the Carl Reiner/Steve Martin collaborations on this list. These movies had the built in appeal of seeing wildly different persons trying to inhabit each other’s bodies, and seeing how the actors involved would pull this off. Whether it’s list favorites #358 Switch or #366 Freaky Friday, or more generic fare like 18 Again and Like Father, Like Son, or the rapid-aging sub-genre of this idea like Big or 13 Going on 30, this is a tried and true formula that will seemingly never tire in audience imaginations. Congratulations! The twist with All of Me is that dying millionaire Edwina (Lily Tomlin) gets magically stuffed into lawyer Roger’s (Steve Martin) body, where they both have to inhabit it while trying to sort of the nefarious details of her heir’s schemes. Continue reading →

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January 20, 2020 · 2:08 pm

The Set of 400: #163 – My Favorite Sandy Beer Cocktail

Today! Because we were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold –

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro (x2), Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire (x4), Ellen Barkin (x3), Christopher Meloni, Michael Jeter, Gary Busey (x3), Gregory Itzin, Flea (x2), Lyle Lovett (x3), Cameron Diaz (x4), Craig Bierko, Mark Harmon, Katherine Helmond (x2), Laraine Newman (x2), Verne Troyer, Debbie Reynolds (x2), Penn Jillette, Harry Dean Stanton (x3), Jenette Goldstein (x2)

A prime example of a film that came along at just the right moment in my life to have a lasting impact, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a psychedelic nightmare road trip travelogue comedy, long thought unfilmmable. Hunter Thompson’s true-ish story of heading to Nevada to cover The Mint 400 motorcycle race spirals quickly and wildly out of control, featuring massive hallucinations, property damage, excessive drug use, and Debbie Reynolds. It’s funny, in that quirky Terry Gilliam kind of way, and it’s visually stunning, in a head-trip kaleidoscope pretty much unparalleled in mainstream cinema.

However, this movie, lacking any real narrative drive or logical reason for existing, certainly wouldn’t work for everyone. It’s a large budget art film produced mainly because of Gilliam’s name (pre-Don Quixote mess) and Johnny Depp’s enduring love for Thompson. This was released during my early college years, and I loved this goddamn movie. Hell, I loved the book – did everyone have a Hunter Thompson phase in college? His sentences, man! Even when they didn’t coalesce into a plottable tale (and they rarely did), they were still cutting and incisive and impactful, more philosophy than prose – and this is what made ever translating this to the screen so unlikely. And yet, it sorta works, in a conventional way, here and there. Sorta.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks – how much for the ape?”

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January 17, 2020 · 2:11 pm

The Set of 400: #164 – My Favorite Blind Butler

Today! Because conversation like television set on honeymoon – unnecessary –

Murder by Death (1976)

Directed by Robert Moore (x2)

Starring David Niven, Maggie Smith (x2), Peter Sellers (x4), Peter Falk (x4), Elsa Lanchester, James Coco (x3), Alec Guinness, Eileen Brennan (x2), Estelle Winwood, James Cromwell (x2), Nancy Walker, Truman Capote, Richard Narita

Neil Simon’s epic comedy mashup of legendary 20th century mystery novel sleuths is half brilliant, half standard Neil Simon-esque jokes, with a like 20% horribly racist overlay. It was the ’70s, and I know that’s no great excuse, and you had master of accents and buffoonery Peter Sellers as Charlie Chan-lite Sidney Wang, but that’s also no great excuse. Wang has some funny lines – not just funny accent bits – but it’s not for today’s audience, I’ll readily admit that.

However, Niven and Smith as Dick and Dora Charleston, Peter Falk’s Sam Diamond, James Coco’s Monsieur Perrier, and Elsa Lanchester’s Jessica Marbles take off wonderfully on Nick and Nora, Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple. The plot revolves around a secluded mansion where the detectives have been gathered to solve a murder by their host Lionel Twain, the ultimately murdered man, played fairly tongue-in-cheek by Truman Capote. It’s absurdist zaniness, with the house functioning very much as a character itself, moving rooms at will and facilitating numerous attempts on the detectives’ lives. It’s basically a wilder take on Clue, just ten years earlier and with only one ending. Continue reading →

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January 16, 2020 · 2:20 pm

The Set of 400: #165 – My Favorite Claw-Licking Cat

Today! Because I used to think you were one of a kind –

X2 (2003)

Directed by Bryan Singer (x3)

Starring Hugh Jackman (x3), Patrick Stewart (x3), Halle Berry (x2), Ian McKellen (x5), Famke Janssen (x2), James Marsden (x2), Brian Cox (x5), Bruce Davison (x2), Anna Paquin (x2), Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn (x3), Aaron Stanford, Shawn Ashmore (x2), Kelly Hu, Katie Stuart, Kea Wong

The last X-Men movie on this list, I swear, X2 apparently might just go by X-Men 2 now! Is this something everyone was aware of? Like how the first Star Wars movie is often called A New Hope, as though that’s its name? Or that Tom Cruise movie went from being Edge of Tomorrow to the pithier, stupidier Live Die Repeat? If you couldn’t figure it out before the release, you shouldn’t just keep hammering away at possibilities forever, folks! I was an extra in a solidly mediocre Vince Vaughn/Kevin James comedy ultimately titled The Dilemma, but when it was filming they were still calling it alternately Cheaters and What They Didn’t Know. That’s the time to sort it out! And yeah, that’s shameless promotion for my movie extra career! Send gigs my way!

I don’t have a current headshot, per se, but this pretty much covers it

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