The Waterworks - E.L. Doctorow

The Waterworks. A mystery set in 1871 New York City with a possible supernatural element told from the perspective of a newspaperman. Told in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, it's a creepy mystery for sure. Sign me up! 

Trying to read more Kenyon College authors. It's where I went and is known for it's literary output. E.L. Doctorow is probably the most famous alum, so figured I'd start there. Mostly just read a bunch of Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Waterson also went there) and a contemporary professor that is an asshole. 

Hell of an opening paragraph got me pretty interested: 

“People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this - they imagined him as some sort of poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.” 

The gist is the narrator, McIlvaine, who works as a newspaper editor, seeks his missing freelance reporter Martin Pemberton who has vanished after telling him he has seen his recently deceased father alive, wandering the streets of New York. McIlvaine and Detective Donne, one of the few good cops in an age of corruption, uncover a mystery involving the deaths of several wealthy New York men, the elder Pemberton among them. All of this leads to trouble, as you might expect.

Three things I really loved about the book. First, his narrator is a newspaper editor named McIlvaine. I'm crazy about detective novels where it's a regular Joe who gets pulled into the action. This is especially true if the guy is a newspaperman like I used to be. With this being back in the 19th century, we get a lot of how the industry worked back then, which is cool and interesting, to me at least. Second, get a nice portrait of the New York City of old. Like other Doctorow novels, this is a document of the city. The novel's greatest strength is these vivid, rich description of the cultural landscape of the Boss Tweed-controlled city that is on the verge of falling apart. 

Lastly, I was pretty interested by the villain of the novel. Something of a Moriarty type, Dr. Sartorius is a great character that is whispered about throughout much of the novel. Once we finally see him near the end, he lives up to the hype as a Mengele-like physician that plays god while disregarding morality and convention. Unlike Mengele, however, he might be onto something with his work. 

Only thing I wasn't crazy about was Doctorow's writing style. Dude loves ellipses as there are about 1,000 of them, no shit. Guess it gives the impression of thought or oral storytelling. Also, the narrator is old and tells of some crazy shit. Sort of signifies his difficulty in telling the tale. I found that aspect a little gimmicky. 

You People - Kenya Barris - 2023

★★★ - Not bad at all. You can't really miss with this group of talent. Kenya Barris and Jonah Hill's writing is on point. Hill's character is great too. David Duchovny, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eddie Murphy, Nia Long. Then the cameos are something as well. I won't spoil those.

Gist is Hill, culturally Jewish, meets Lauren London, a black woman. They hit it off and their relationship progresses to the meet the parents to get the hand stage. All the parents are embarrassingly terrible in totally different ways. One of those will their love survive the cultural/generational differences along with their parents' expectations. It might sound lame, but it is done really well.

Several scenes stand out for their exceptional writing. The one where Hill's character is at the synagog is stellar. So funny it's insane. A doctor asks Hill about his dick. Says he'll look at it for free in the bathroom. He declines. We then find out he is an orthodontist. That's one thing I really appreciated about the writing. How the jokes are patient. Like we find out that London's family are Muslim. Eventually we find that they are actually Nation of Islam and Hill tries to explain why he loves Louis Farrakhan.

Murphy is actually a really funny straight man, which was surprising. Hill could have played hero ball he was so on fire, but he didn't need to. Duchovny had a few hilarious moments, like when Hill leaves him with London to check his mom, Louis-Dreyfus (who is insane and such a familiar-type of “cool” mom), and finds him playing the piano and singing John Legend. “Dad, what the fuck?” Mike Epps, an Indianapolis native, is an absolutely incredible heat-check. He totally stole the show.

However, I thought the end was stupid, made worse by the sappy score. Also, I'm not buying London and Hill as a couple. Anyone who is partners with Nipsey Hussle and Lil Wayne isn't going to seem right with the likes of Jonah Hill.

Lifeboat - Alfred Hitchcock - 1944

★★★★★ - Not the usual Hitchcock fair. I still absolutely loved it. Overall, it has a parable or allegory feel. Hitchcock obviously hates himself some Nazis. The only good ones are dead ones. This is a lesson that plays out throughout the film and is still applicable today.

Made during WWII. Written by John Steinbeck. The film follows a group of Merchant Marines on a lifeboat after their ship is sunk by a Nazi U-boat. One of the survivors pulled out of the water, however, ends up being a Nazi that they struggle to keep in check. This guy is a gaslighting mother fucker you want to see get his almost immediately.

The best stretch of the film comes early when the group has to deal with a survivor suffering from gangrene. They realize that they are going to have to amputate his injured leg. He's a real trooper, but it's obvious that this is really going to suck. They use the little bit of rum they have to get him drunk and knock him out so they can perform the procedure. The nurse among them, who has never done anything like this, has to rely on the German who claims to have been a surgeon in civilian life. No one likes this but it has to be done. The scene goes on forever, building up over minutes. It's excruciating.

Some real trigger warning in this film, though there isn't any cannibalism. Just a dead baby, some suicide, and beating a guy to death.

The film stars a bunch of familiar faces. Among them Mary Anderson (whom I recognize from Gone with the Wind), Heather Angel, Tallulah Bankhead, who is awesome, William Bendix (whom is basically the same guy he played in The Blue Dahlia), Hume Cronyn (always great, he was married to Jessica Tandy and was introduced to me as one of the old guys in Cocoon), John Hodiak (mostly know him from Somewhere in the Night), Henry Hull (who steals the show), Canada Lee (the black guy on the ship, his character isn't too offensive for the time), and Walter Slezak as the Nazi. This film also has one of my favorite Hitchcock cameos. With so few people in the movie, he shows up in an advertisement in the only newspaper they have on the boat. Pretty slick.

Gonna wrap it up with a little bit on Tallulah Bankhead's awesomeness. Known for her sexual exploits, she is the one who gave the world “dahling”. She was only in around a dozen movies but looms large. Born into a political family, her grandfather and uncle were U.S. Senators and her dad (William B. Bankhead) was Speaker of the House from 1937-1940. While they were considered liberal in their day, Tallulah was way left of the fam. She hung out with Zelda Fitzgerald and was Tennessee Williams inspiration for Blanche DuBois for A Streetcar Named Desire. She employed gay men to care for her when she was in the throws of addiction, calling them her “caddies”. She was a fan of Alfred Kinnsey and found his research to confirm her already advanced views on sexuality. She did interviews in the 1930s where she talked about wanting to get fucked and had many affairs with both men and women. Some of the women included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, and Billie Holiday. She referred to herself as “ambisextrous”. She was also an extremely heavy drinker and drug user that smoked 120 cigarettes a day (hence the husky voice). Her last words were “codeine... bourbon.” My kind of chick.

The Lady Vanishes - Alfred Hitchcock - 1938

★★★★★ - I loved this movie. Hitchcock's second to last film before coming to the states.

Gist is a beautiful English tourist, Margaret Lockwood (a total babe [this was during Hitch's brunette phase]), travels by train across Europe with a motley cast of characters. Just before boarding the train, she takes a bump on the head and an elderly woman agrees to watch after her. In and out of consciousness, she awakens to find her companion has disappeared. The other passengers deny having ever seen her and gaslight her, saying she can't trust her own memory because of the blow to her head. She eventually employs the help of a musician, Michael Redgrave (who looks exactly like Paul Dano), whom she has had beef with going back to the hotel where the movie opens.

All the train stuff was filmed in a studio that used only one car for the entire shoot. Totally remarkable filmmaking.

The vanishing lady is something of a McGuffin that only sort of matters. The film gets a little bogged down with why she is being kidnapped and what have you.

Has a decent amount of humor to it. There is a great fight scene between Redgrave and Lockwood and this Italian magician who is in on the kidnapping. It takes place in the luggage area with all his magic props and a cardboard cutout of him looking on. The fight is realistic and terrible with a lot of slow choking and wild punching. The best comes after the magician has escaped being locked up through a trap door. Frustrated by the whole thing, Lockwood punches the cutout in the face.

Might be my all-time favorite train movie. Hitchcock is mostly associated with Strangers on a Train in this regard, but that really isn't a train movie. This takes place almost entirely on board.

Vengeance – B.J. Novak – 2022

★★★★-A dark Blumhouse comedy written, directed, and starring B. J. Novak, sign me up. An impressive directorial debut. He's come a long way from his intern days. In addition to Novak, it stars Dove Cameron whom I don't recognize, Boyd Holbrook (the blonde guy in Narcos) as the bro, Ashton Kutcher, and Issa Rae (from The Lovebirds and Insecure).

Gist is Ben Manalowitz, a journalist and podcaster from New York City, gets a call in the middle of the night from the brother of a girl he was casually hooking up with. She has died from a opioid overdose which the family finds suspicious. Convinced his sister was in love with this Ben fellow, the brother more or less demands he come down to Bumfuck, Texas to attend the funeral. While there, he begins to investigate circumstances of her death, discovering a compelling story along the way... This has me written all over it.

Underneath all this stuff going on, the film has some interesting things to say about modern society, storytelling, biases, journalistic ethics, addiction, the rural poor, and casual internet sex. Deep down it is a story about a storyteller who is creating a story about how stories are created. Don't see that too often, but that is obviously my brand. It is a clever take on a kind of morality play. Also, I'll never drive past a Whataburger without thinking of this film. Supplanting Infinite Jeston that front. 

Amsterdam - David O. Russell - 2022

★★★ - Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, and an amazing supporting cast. David O. Russell directing a period movie about Nazi supporters trying to overthrow democracy in America in 1933.  What’s not to love? 

Turns out a decent amount. Totally a hot mess with a hard-to-follow plotline that jumps around through time and makes little sense. However, I still really liked it. This is definitely a minority opinion.

The cast is just too good. In addition to those listed you've got Ed Begley Jr., Rami Malek, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Michael Shannon, Anya Taylor-Joy (the young woman from The Witch and Split), Taylor Swift (forchristssake) who isn't bad, and more. Plus, I am a total sucker for a period piece from the first half of the 20th Century.

We Need to Talk About Cosby - W. Kamau Bell - 2022

Cosby is a sick man. A rapist first. Entertainer second. Used his power and influence to sexually assault women for half a century. 

I first heard about all this like 20 years ago. It was bad enough at the time that I was completely done with him. But he kept on doing his thing, his persona getting more irritating and sanctimonious as the years went by. The call-out stuff was especially bullshit and sickening. 

I also vividly remember him hanging out with a dude with the last name Cosby who was a late pick in the 2008 NFL Draft. That kid's vibe was basically “what the fuck is happening here?” I talked with an African American lawyer friend of mine about Cosby at this time. He made me see the whole thing in a somewhat different light. He is a man of the law and public opinion is not a good barometer of guilt, he explained. Media tends to use these facts in a way that supports a narrative. These facts can be good or bad. The bad are misleading and don't stand up in court. An example of a bad fact would be if say a teacher was accused of being a pedophile and the fact that the teacher is seen with children is held against that person. Only if he goes to court and has evidence presented against him would he change his opinion of Cosby. “Always presume innocence,” he said. When Cosby eventually did stand trial, my friend completely changed his tune. “Fuck that guy,” he said. 

So I felt pretty comfortable about hating Cosby before watching the doc. He had his day in court and was convicted, but got off on a technicality. After watching the doc, the way he fooled everyone and made it seem impossible that he was capable of something like that was what really disturbed me.

What is nuts is that he is talking about going on tour. I am sure there are a lot of people that will still pay to see him. I assume he is pretty close to broke, which is some consolation.

Anyway, the documentary series definitely wasn’t easy to watch. It took me a month to regroup after each episode. Every one got worse, too. This documentary series is damning and made me sick to my stomach.

The Menu - Mark Mylod - 2022

★★★★ - Finally getting to this. Pretty solid. Not my favorite food movie, but it was very good. On a personal note, I’ve had more than a few taco Tuesdays like this myself.

The less you know going in, the better. Basically, people go to an upscale, haute restaurant that they don't appreciate like they should. Ralph Fiennes, the chef, makes them regret it. Does not feature cannibalism, by the by. 

I feel like all the patrons were people I went to private school with. Trust fund types that don't find pleasure in anything.

Cast includes Hong Chau from The Whale (she is having a real moment right now), Nicholas Hoult (Beast from the new X-Men movies/the “I live. I die. I live again.” guy from Mad Max: Fury Road) who plays a real piece of shit, John Leguizamo, Judith Light (Angela from Who's the Boss), Janet McTeer (the lawyer in Ozark), and Anya Taylor-Joy from The Witch (she is still killing it), among others.

Was definitely on-brand for me. I've had three people tell me that this was an “AB type of movie.” One guy was like, “I totally have a movie for you. Guess what it is.” Of course, I guessed it on the first try. 

The Wolf of Snow Hollow - Jim Cummings - 2020

★★★★ - Jim Cummings wrote, directed, and starred in this fantastic flick. Plays a great stressed-out police officer with problems. He is like the one person in town convinced that the horrific murders in the small mountain Utah town were not done by a werewolf, which don’t exist, right? 

Smart, interesting, fresh take on werewolf movies. Deals with some real shit too. Alcoholism, relapse, mental breakdowns. Packs in a lot for a horror movie with comedic elements.

As the bodies pile up, he is under more pressure and becomes increasingly paranoid and unhinged. Trying to stay sober, keep everyone safe (including his daughter and fellow officers), care for his aging father (played by Robert Forster in his final role) who’s the town’s sheriff that refuses to retire, and keep townspeople from completely losing their shit is too much for him.

This film definitely kept me guessing. Highly recommend.

Dunkirk - Christopher Nolan - 2017

★★★★★ - Christopher Nolan is an absolute genius. He is in my top five filmmakers of all time. I love all of his films. This might be his best.

Tells of the Dunkirk evacuation through the perspectives of the land, sea, and air. Chronology is all over the place before coming together at the end. Has what he calls a “snowballing effect” where everything connects but is made clear in the third act. This is something he does in most of his movies to great effect.

Stellar cast includes Aneurin Barnard, Kenneth Branagh, James D'Arcy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Tom Hardy, Barry Keoghan, Jack Lowden, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Harry Styles in his film debut, and Fionn Whitehead. Mostly character actors that you know, but not by name.

The film is the highest-grossing World War II film of all-time, which is nuts, earning $527 million worldwide. Dunkirk received praise for its screenplay, direction, musical score, sound effects and cinematography; some critics called it Nolan's best work, and one of the greatest war films. The film received various accolades, Received eight nominations for the 90th Academy Awards including for Best Picture and Best Director (Nolan's first directing nomination) and won three for editing.

What is crazy is Nolan conceived the film in the 1990s before ever making a feature film when he and his future wife Emma Thomas sailed across the English Channel along the path the small boats took in the evacuation. However, Nolan didn't set out to make it until he had acquired sufficient experience directing large-scale action films, wanting to do it right.

Features an economy of dialogue instead creating suspense from cinematography and music. Historically accurate, apparently, if you care about such things. However, the characters were fictional.

My overall takeaway was the film is truly breathtaking. Wish I would have seen it in IMAX. It might be my favorite WWII movie. I was glued to the screen the entire time.

Marnie - Alfred Hitchcock - 1964

★★★ - I’ve always been led to believe this was a great movie. It was not a great movie. Hardly any of it makes sense. Doesn’t really feel like a Hitchcock movie. Lotta melodrama.

I felt like Tippi Hedren mostly phoned it in. Sean Connery was pretty good. The actress that plays Tippi’s mother is maybe the worst performance in all of Hitchcock. Her accent is literally incredible.

The gist is Tippi’s character be scammin’. Connery, his character seems to be into that sexually or something. Never really figured out what his motivation was, honestly.

Like when Connery catches her, he has her tell him her story. She tells a tale about her mom being dead and desperate for cash. Let’s her go on forever and then tells her how he knows that was all bullshit. Then he decides to take care of her. Alright.

Ought to be sending her to jail. She ripped off a bunch of friends of his and stuff. When he marries her, those friends are at the wedding. She’s like, “welp, I’m going to jail.” But instead, Connery says that they want after he tells them what he has to say. No idea what the hell he’s gonna say to smooth that shit over.

Something I’ve noticed after 25 or so flicks. Men in Hitchcock movies are always forcing brandy on women in the morning.

Also, Hitchcock did love the violence-leading-into-sex move. When Connery inevitably gets rapey, the Bernard Herman score is at its most frantic and horrible. The whole time you ask, why is he doing this.

What an insane living situation this is. Sean Connery and his fake wife, his dad, and his widowed sister-in-law that is in love with him all under the same roof. Tippy has a nightmare, her normal, reoccurring one where she’s screaming. “Don’t hurt my mama.” The sister-in-law comes and shakes the shit out of her while Sean Connery is just looking at her. The sister-in-law leaves their room and sees the book Sean Connery is reading, “Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal Female.” If any of this is happening to me, I am reassessing as life has become way too complicated.

Everybody is sort of familiar with it with many claiming it as one of Hitchcock’s greats. But when you get into this run of films, things get pretty weird in his universe. Definitely question his genius at this level.

Overall, to me, it felt like someone imitating Hitchcock. Same with the Bernard Herrmann score. The whole movie just felt kind of off.

Harold and Maude - Hal Ashby - 1971

★★★★★ - My partner’s pick for this movie club we are in. 

I adore this movie. Love it more with each watching. 

Flawless performances from Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, and Vivian Pickles. Hal Ashby's directing and Colin Higgins' script are perfection as well. Don’t even get me started on the Cat Stevens soundtrack. 

Beautifully kooky movie with some really dark undertones. This scene kills me. 

Foreign Correspondent - Alfred Hitchcock - 1940

★★★★ - Love a journalist thrust in into a spy-thriller or noir flick. Main guy, Joel McCrea, has a Tom Brady look. Plays a great dumb guy who finds himself unwittingly in an international assassination plot. Shares some DNA with North by Northwest in that way.

The paper he works for in New York sends him to Europe in 1939 just before the war broke out. The publisher tells him he doesn’t want him to cover the impending conflict, but really wants him to, I guess. This is the backdrop of the story. Everybody waiting for war, but thinking it’s not going to happen but knowing it will.

The publisher is sending the protagonist because he punched a cop. This is his “punishment” instead of being fired. He’s out of control and loves his job. If this were what being a newsman was like in 2023, I’d for damn sure still be on the job.

Bunch of people I recognize but no one really by name. This guy George Sanders looks just like Jason Segal. Recognize him as the raging asshole convinced Laurence Olivier was up to something in Rebecca. He was also Mister Freeze in the Batman show from the 60s.

Female lead, Laraine Day, was not much else. This was her biggest role. Didn’t really make it. Was a Mormon, too, similar to Scientology. I can’t enjoy someone’s work if I know they are a Mormon. Other groups that ruin it are Jehovah’s Witnesses, fundamentalist, Christians, conservative, rapist, wife, beaters, and racist. If you turn out to be a Trump supporter, I cannot even look at you. There is active rage there.

Pretty great film but has some flaws. Overshadowed by Rebecca, which also came out in 1940 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. These are his first movies after arriving in Hollywood. This film is mostly forgotten, but shouldn’t be. Plus a heck of a plane smash at the end.

You're Only as Good as Your Next One: 100 Great Films, 100 Good Films, and 100 for Which I Should Be Shot - Mike Medavoy

My December reads were essays and a book on film, You’re Only as Good as Your Next One by Mike Medavoy. Medavoy is a long-time Hollywood studio executive who began his career in the 1960s and is still in the biz to this day. His resume includes Oscar-winners, the universally loved, and the downright hated. This fun, long read tells of his time in the industry from his start to the early 2000s. 

After getting his start at United Artists, he helped found multiple studios that went bellyup, usually a few years after firing him. Might recognize these: Orion, TriStar, and Phoenix Pictures (which is still around). He goes through the pictures he green-lit at each of these and goes into some detail about why they worked or didn't. He also walks the reader through how the business changed while goiing through his work, using these films as examples of something larger that was going on in Hollywood or the world. It's all pretty eye-opening.  

Some of the films he brought to the screen include: Amadeus, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, Dances with Wolves, Hook, Legends of the Fall, Network, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Philadelphia, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepless in Seattle, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Thin Red Line. 

He doesn't shy away from his duds either. He details why they didn't work and ultimately bombed in usually hilarious fashion. Take1984's The Cotton Club, my personal favorite annecdote from the book. This film got started when legendary producer Robert Evans more or less got fired from Paramount for cocaine trafficing. He called up Medavoy saying that he had a movie he wanted to get made and he could sell it with three words: gangsters, music, and pussy. 

With a pitch like that, of course this movie got made. Almost immediately, predictably, everything went to shit. Evans originally was going to direct but had no idea what he was doing. Orion (i.e. Medavoy) and Evans eventually brought in Francis Ford Coppola who was deeply in debt and despirate for money. He accepted though he and Evans had hated each other since The Godfather. The film ultimately took five years to make and went way over budget before losing money at the box office. Both Coppola and Evans blamed each other for the shitshow. Medavoy clearly sides with Coppola as Evans appears to be completely unhinged during this period.

With all the budget woes, Evans went to shadier and shadier backers as more respectable types started to cut ties. Eventually, Evans was taking money from Arab arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and a guy named Roy Radin that Evans met through his former drug dealer, Karen Greenberger, who was dating Radin. Radin was murdered about a year before the film was released. This became known as "The Cotton Club Murder." 

It gets weirder. In 1989 a contract killer and three others were sentenced for shooting Radin in the head and blowing up his body with dynamite to make identification by authorities more challenging. Among them was Greenberger who was angry about being cut out of a producer's role. Evans was considered a person of interest when two of the killers said that Evans and Greenberger hired them to take the guy out. At the trial, Evans pled the Fifth and refused to testify, though Greenberger later testified that Evans had no involvement in the crime. You can read more about in "The Cotton Club: A Scandal in Two Acts." 

Anyway, those are the kinds of stories I loved the most, though that one was especially scandalous. In the book you'll get more of Evans behaving badly as well as famously poorly behaved John Milius and Jon Peters. Milius is mostly known for his work as a screenwriter for such films as Apocalypse Now, and for being the inspiration for the character Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. Peters, on the otherhand, is known for being the inspiration for the film Shampoo and for the insane stories Kevin Smith tells about him in An Evening with Kevin Smith. His fuckery has since been put to screen in one of my faves from the last few years, Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Peters is portrayed by Bradley Cooper in the 2021 film and is completely unhinged. This period was during Peters's long domestic partnership with Barbra Streisand. He has since been married to Pamela Anderson, this in 2020, though Anderson said she was "never legally married" to the guy because the paperwork wasn't filed. 

It's the stuff like this that I find super interesting. Hollywood, however, doesn't give us that juicy goss. Instead, we get bullshit stories that are only half true. Rarely is much of Hollywood star mythmaking accurate. Get discovered off the street or what have you. Lot of nepo babies out there. 

Book ends Medavoy's early days with Pheonix. He mostly details his work on The Thin Red Line in 1998. This epic war film written and directed by Terrence Malick after a 20-year absense despite his reputation as a genius was a very big deal at the time. The movie rags I read at the time, Premiere and Flicks, and the message boards were losing their minds over it. It ended up being fine but somewhat disappointing. So it was nice to get some of the inside scoup on what all went down.

The final movie he details is The 6th Day which he talks about like it was Andrei Tarkovsky or something. I saw this in the theater with a couple dudes from my high school basketball team. It was an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle where he plays a family man in the future who gets accidentally illegally cloned as part of a vast conspiracy. A billionaire's goons come for him, but come on, it's Arnold. We thought it was unintentially hilarious. 

He then ends the book discussing the causes of the steady decline in theater attendance when he was writing the book, which has only gotten worse, esqecially with the pandemic and all. He says it mostly comes down to the economy, technology, and the bullshit Hollywood was putting out which they saw as more marketable as opposed to riskier films that might offer better rewards in the long run. According to Medavoy, the cost of marketing and producing now requires outside partners for high cost films which lowers the upside. Thus making all the choices of which pictures to make more difficult. The decision to rely on remakes and sequels at higher costs either makes people feel that they have seen a movie and can either wait and see it on the after-market or miss it all together. Obviously, this has only got worse. 

Incident at Loch Ness - Zak Penn - 2004

★★ - Spoilers below! Usually like these inside baseball movies. Wasn’t crazy about this one. 

This is basically two mockumentaries in one movie. The documentary film crew is following Werner Herzog, talking about his films. While they are filming, he is making another film about the Loch Ness monster. Things get weird with the writer/producer Zac Penn trying to stage some bullshit, hiring a softcore porn actress as their sonar expert, and just some actor as the cryptozoologist. Werner stays levelheaded though his integrity is being compromised.

The cryptozoologist guy is way too over-the-top. Takes you out of the movie. Also, people Zack is constantly saying “stop filming me” and “get that camera out of my face.”

We do get some of those great Werner monologues though:

“It's one of those films that didn't want to be made. To me, it seemed to be like a stillborn child that just didn't want to come to life.”

“Finding the monster was never my intention. And so filming it was strangely unfulfilling and it left me questioning not only this experience, but many things I've done before. It made me wonder what I've been after. All this drama and pain to capture a few moments of light on a strip of celluloid. The truth did not seem ecstatic. It seemed vulgar and pointless.”

Overall, liked the supplemental material on the DVD more than the actual movie. Lots of fun cameos with people like Jeff Goldblum, Crispin Glover, and other Hollywood folk hanging out with Werner at the beginning of the movie. I’m sure they had fun making it.