Pun sort of intended. While the expedition partner and I share many of the same musical experiences, our movie literacy is pretty divergent. I grew up so far out in the boondocks, it was a real production to go anywhere to see a first-run movie before I was about eleven years old. The first first-run movie I remember seeing, in fact, was 'Star Wars' in 1977.
The other half lived nearer to movie theaters, growing up in the burbs, so he saw more movies. Not necessarily better ones, mind you, but more.
Off and on, we both get the bug to expose each other to movies we remember, whether good or bad, from years ago. The first time I tried this was not a raging success -- 'Dark Star' isn't the movie you want to offer as a waterline of your taste, y'know? I mean, it's a hoot. It's John Carpenter's first movie, after all, and it has hippies and aliens and suspense. Only problem is, if you don't smoke hash, the movie comes off as what it was -- a low budget science fiction camp epic about four personality impaired nerds stuck on a space ship for twenty years. With an alien who looks like a Hippity Hop or a giant version of one of the fungi we've seen in the yard the past couple of years, pressing up out of old tree stumps like a creepy dildo.
Anyway, the next serious recommendation was a little more satisfying -- 'The President's Analyst,' a James Coburn (rest in peace) vehicle that was a real howler in light of the current governmental paranoia and invasions of individual citizens' privacy. For some bizarre reason, I don't think people in the late sixties would have thought The Phone Company should be tapping their phones and listening in on even the aggregates of their conversations, or else this movie never would have been made. It certainly wouldn't have been as good a joke as it was in this movie, at least, if people genuinely had believed their conversations and behaviors were being pawed over by members of their government. Cult movie or not, it skimmed a zeitgeist that wasn't just paranoid UN-haters. Back then, everybody hated 'the government' and 'The Phone Company,' not just canaries in the coal mine.
Tonight, we watched 'Westworld,' which I'd recalled sucking a bit when I saw it, back in the late seventies. Sometimes, we mellow, and as we age we can find nuance in movies that we didn't find originally, or at least enough camp value to make them laughable.
'Westworld' still sucks.
When you spend the last fifteen minutes of a movie asking each other why Richard Benjamin's character doesn't do ... well, anything much but run around, the suck quotient rises so high you start yelling "grab a weapon, wouldja? Jeez! How many times does that bastard have to show up on your ass before you realize the last one didn't work?" ... it sucks.
So I've added 'A Boy And His Dog,' 'Omega Man,' 'Damnation Alley' (with the caveat that the movie kind of sucked) and 'THX 1138' to the list. If I must sit through bad early to mid seventies SF, it might as well at least be based on well-written original stories, however badly executed.
As much as I hate "Chuck-Chuck-Bo-Buck-Banana-Fana-Fo ... uh ... you'll have to get out," (bonus points to anybody who can pinpoint where I stole this routine) Heston, I'll credit that Omega Man was actually a pretty decent campy science fiction movie. Of course, so was 'Soylent Green,' if only for the interminable jokes about Soylent Green being people. It was even concept-checked by Steven Colbert's voiced character, Phil Ken Sebben, on 'Harvey Birdman,' only instead of Soylent Green it was the cafeteria's baba ghanoush. One of the reasons I actually cried real tears when Phil Hartman died -- that SNL sketch he did based on that scene was pure genius, one of the funniest things I ever saw on that show once the original cast all left to make progressively less successful movies, become some variety or other of assholes or die of drug overdoses. Or else be Bill Murray.
Footnote -- 'Westworld' can be dumped, steaming and sparking, squarely at the feet of global warming denier Michael Crichton, whose last worthwhile effort was, in my opinion, 'The Andromeda Strain.'
Though I never actually saw the movie all the way through, I also threw 'Rancho Deluxe' into the mix. It isn't science fiction, it's just Lebowski-type gooniness. Oh, yeah -- we'll probably rent 'The Big Lebowski' at some point in the near future, too. I'm sure we'll both kick ourselves for not having seen it years ago.
I hate seeing movies in the theater. You can't pause them to get up and piss, and for the most part, you can't have a glass of wine (or three, if the movie sucks, CF: Westworld) while you do so. I think I developed bizarre anxiety attacks when seeing movies while I was in a period of serious emotional turmoil, and I've never quite got over it. Sitting in a theater demands a really captivating movie, for me, or I start worrying about shit I can't do anything about and stop watching the movie.
Yeah, I'm a freak. I'm guessing the prior posts where I made arguments in favor of bands like Foreigner and Zebra (granted only for single songs by either of them) probably already convinced you, if you know who they are. I never really minded being a freak, for that matter -- what the hell kind of boring conformist makes a judgment like that, anyhow?
Exactly.
Hasta!
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