Cape Fear is the greatest movie of all time

Cape Fear. My 4th of July watch this year. I guess it is sort of a 4th movie. There are fireworks and a parade. One of three movies I remember my grandpa telling my dad not to let me watch as a child which I overheard and immediately sought out (the other two were The Fly [1986] and The Silence of the Lambs) and was definitely way too young to watch. This one made it on the list for the horrific rape and face biting scene that is indeed still fucking terrible to watch. One of those things I probably should have waited a couple of years.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Smart and stylish, Cape Fear is a gleefully mainstream shocker from Martin Scorsese, with a terrifying Robert De Niro peformance.

Gist of the flick is that ex-con, Max Cady played by Robert De Niro, goes on a vengeance tour against his former attorney, Sam Bowden played by Nick Nolte, who didn't disclose that the woman that Cady raped was promiscuous which would have gotten him off, apparently. Was thinking it must have been a different time but now rape is more or less acceptable again if you are a republican with any sort of power. Anyway, Cady loses his fucking mind and basically becomes the Terminator, he is pretty much video game character unstoppable, with the ultimate plan of raping Bowden and his family to death. Yeah, it's purty fucked up.

The cast is amazing. It is a Martin Scorsese movie after all. We have the lovely and talented Jessica Lange as Nick Nolte's wife (Leigh), Juliette Lewis as daughter Danielle in one of her more relatable roles, Illeana Douglas who is young and pretty and in a bunch of stuff but is mostly remembered for this role as being the girl who gets her face bitten off, and MST3K favorite Joe Don Baker of Mitchell fame. A remake of 1962 original which has a 100% fresh rating on RTs, the flick has cameos from the original cast members with Robert Mitchum (who was Cady in the old one) playing a cop, Gregory Peck who was in the Sam Bowden role now playing Cady's lawyer, and Martin Balsam--whom I remember as Arbogast in Psycho and Juror No. 1 in 12 Angry Men but don't recall seeing in the original (though I saw it 28 years ago)--plays a judge.

Remember it as a longer, more developed movie but it's basically just De Niro yucking it up. The Simpsons fans out there, and likely people who have a passing knowledge of the series, will recognize all the times they have sort of spoofed the film with Sideshow Bob basically taking on the role of Cady and Bart as the dude he obsesses over. Also get the great scene where the police strip search Cady and we see all of his creepy as fuck tattoos that have to do with vengeance, justice, revenge, so forth. De Niro is impressively jacked here, especially considering he is almost 50 when this was made.

The film is pretty hard to watch but is a super solid movie. It is brutal and disturbing. Not only is it incredibly violent, but Cady is nasty. Like after he has displayed that he is a true sociopath, he poses as a teacher before coming clean to who he really is and seduces Juliette Lewis's character who is a child. Luckily they don't fuck, which would have been waaayyyy too much, obviously. But De Niro does stick his thumb in her mouth which she sucks on... I almost puked.

L.A. Confidential is the greatest movie of all time

L.A. Confidential. Love a period neo-noir flick. This one is one of the best. Up there with Chinatown and The Big Lebowski. Watch this shit once a year(ish). That Kim Basinger is quite a looker. She is a classical beauty, this film well establishes. The soundtrack is killer. LA in the 1950s looks like the shit, even with the crime. Everything about this movie is fucking sick. A perfect goddamned movie.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Taut pacing, brilliantly dense writing and Oscar-worthy acting combine to produce a smart, popcorn-friendly thrill ride.

Oh, cops. They all, like 90% of them, fucking suck. This movie, and like 400 others I've seen, and the news media and my personal experience (luckily I've got white male magic going for me) and anecdotal experience have led me to this position. This movie sure as shit hammers it home. In the end, they are all corrupt. Even the incorruptible. Isn't that right ole buddy boy? It is.

This movie is also one of the best examples of historical fiction that I can think of. Ellroy sort of went off the rails with The Black Dahlia from 2006 but then one was spot on. Atmospheric. Cool. Would have won a shit ton of Academy Awards but was up against Titanic in 1997 and that won nearly everything. Near. Far. And so forth. Though Basinger won Best Actress and somebody won a writing award.

Following three very different police offers in the unpopular straight shooter Ed Exley played by Guy Pearce, cool guy Jack Vincennes played by rapist Kevin Spacey, and thug Bud White played by Russell Crowe who reluctantly sort of join up to investigate a murder within the historically corrupt-ass LAPD. This made all of these guys stars though Spacey was well knownish for The Usual Suspects. Crowe easily wins the movie. He became an A-lister after this performance. But don't sleep on Pearce or Spacey. They are both great as well. Also get solid performances out of James Cromwell who is the Daryl Gates prototype and the spitting image of my grandpa and Danny DeVito who is the spitting image of my female companion's dad.

Bunch of Hollywood in the 1950s stuff in here which is cool. Basinger's character, Lynn Bracken, is a Veronica Lake, the star of Sullivan's Travels, which keeps coming up, lookalike call-girl. The plot revolves around this prostitution ring of girls that look like celebs. This leads Exley to mistake the real Lana Turner for one made to look like her because of the company she keeps, a real-life thug named Johnny Stompanato. Some interesting Hollywood crime shit going on here. This asshole Stompanato was a bad dude. He beat Turner, escalating to the point where her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed the gangster to death in 1958. Yeah, piece of shit. The type of guy that Bud White hates and at one ridiculous point in the film, White grabs Stompanato by the balls, literally, which was one of the dumbest, most unbelievable things in the film. He basically makes Stompanato his bitch. No way this dude gets away with that shit. Cop or not. 

Sunset Boulevard is the greatest film of all time

Sunset Boulevard. Loved it when I first saw it. Soured on it in college. Back to loving it. As has been established, I love self-referential cinema. Back to thinking that this is one of the best. I mean, not quite Singing' in the Rain, but it is unfair to compare it to that wonderful, upbeat film. It also predates that flick by a couple of years making it the first, that I could see, movie that looks back at the old silent era. Old Hollywood looking at an older Hollywood. Not the first meta Hollywood flick, Sherlock, Jr. staring Buster Keaton who makes a cameo in this movie was made in 1924 and 1941's Sullivan's Travels which starred Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake are both movies about the film industry, this is the first of a subgenre that depicts has-beens that time forgot.

About a down-on-his-luck (and dumb as fuck) screenwriter played by William Holden who gets romantically involved with a forgotten starlet, Norma Desmond played by the silent film star Gloria Swanson, in her 50s who believes she is on the verge of a comeback due to a script that she threw together and dude is molding into something coherent. In the first scene we see the screenwriter, our protagonist, floating facedown in the bloody swimming pool. This is, indeed, a fucked up and dark movie.

Still makes the film look like a hilarious comedy, which it is

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Arguably the greatest movie about Hollywood, Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is a tremendously entertaining combination of noir, black comedy, and character study.

Probably a somewhat unpopular opinion here. I fucking hate the main character, Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, and sort of think he had bad shit coming to him karmically. Maybe not murder, but bad shit. He thinks he is playing Norma, ha, but is playing fucking checkers. Thinks he is stringing her along as a meal ticket of sorts. She buys him shit but doesn't pay him and won't let him leave. Yeah, really getting one over on her. So his motivations are fucked, obviously, and he is in a prison of his own making that is so fucking obvious but he barely sees it or doesn't care until the end, when he suddenly does. His leaving prompts Norma to pull out her gun and start waving it around, threatening to shoot herself. He is like, don't care. Obviously should have as we see in the first scene that he is dead from getting shot. Like someone who isn't a fucking idiot, he should have got the fuck out of there when she broke out the gun, instead he is like, "na, I'mma push her over the edge," which he does by talking shit and calling her crazy and what not. Making a bitch shoot him.

Get some solid cameos with director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper both playing themselves, said to be somewhat recognizable by Gillis and presumably playing themselves, Buster Keaton (the one who says "pass", Buster was a silent film star who was supposedly famously not allowed to open his mouth in a talkie where everyone else sang, heard this on a podcast but can't remember the film), Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner are all seen in the "living waxworks" scene playing bridge with Norma, and Erich von Stroheim, a "groundbreaking" silent era director, who is fucking great, seems to sort of play a version of himself as a forgot, avant garde director who now works as Norma's butler after the two divorced.

Hebba hebba

Gloria Swanson totally wins the movie. First, don't buy the myth that this is in any way autobiographical for her. While she wasn't the star she was during the silent era, Swanson's transition to sound was fine(ish), continuing to get work and even getting nominated for a Oscar for The Trespasser in 1929, though there were a handful of flops in there. When her career began slowing down in the late 1930s, she started a patent company in New York that was she created to help get Jewish inventors out of Nazi occupied Europe. This kept her busy through the war years. Then in 1948 she began hosting one of the first live television programs, The Gloria Swanson Hour. So yeah, she was doing alright when this part came along though she wasn't exactly the first choice. Director Billy Wilder offered the role to silent stars Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, and Mary Pickford (who was one of the inspirations for the composite character). Also Mae West was Wilder's original choice but was never asked to star in the film. Rumor has it that she was all, "of course a younger man would want to date me! I wouldn't be believable!" which is something I imagine all of these ladies saying and it being pretty true. Swanson, for her part, looks great for 50, though the craziness is pretty off-putting. Also, as a young woman, hubba hubba. And she is still, I think, more attractive in this film than the younger chick that William Holden as Joe Gillis wants to shtoop, Betty Schaefer played Nancy Olson who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and is still alive, that's engaged to his buddy. SB marked her first film in a nine period after Father Takes a Wife, she was that wife, bombed. For the role, Swanson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, her third nomination.

Didn't remember how funny she is, Swanson. Like the way intensely stares at him as he reads her script which he hates. When he goes through the motions like he is really trying to make her script better, taking stuff out and what not, she is like, "why did you take that out?" He says something like, "you can't be in every scene." She leers at him and barks, "put it back," in a way that is like "of course I'll be in every scene." Some more humor comes when the two walk through the giant, creepy-ass house and we hear a sinister music playing in the background. Norma then says "yeah, wind gets in the organ pipe, happens all the time." Love that shit. Also, she is so physical and deliberate with all her movements, sometimes to great comedic effect. Those silent film skills. Really like her. But she is fucking insane. Guys, if a woman has all of your things removed from your apartment, is keeping you from leaving, and claims to be your employer but doesn't pay you, don't fuck her.

Singin' in the Rain is the greatest movie of all time

Singin' in the Rain. "I'm laughin' at clouds, so dark up above, the sun's in my heart, and I'm ready for love." Holy shit, this movie. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer Arthur Freed takes all of the best show tunes he wrote with Nacio Herb Brown from MGM best musicals and builds a plot around them. Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds choreograph and sing the shit out of them. MGM, the studio, then scales them to infinity. It's genius. If you don't fucking love the shit out of this movie, there is something really wrong with you. If I'm having a shitty time, this is the movie I put on to break me out of it. "I'm happy again!" This film is light, vividly colorful, a feast in every way a film can be. It is perfect. I will fight anyone who says otherwise. I really believe, like for real real, maybe, I don't know, that this is the best film ever made.

Rotten Tomatoes Consensus: Clever, incisive, and funny, Singin' in the Rain is a masterpiece of the classical Hollywood musical.

Love a self-referential flick, as has long been established. I've been especially into these older Hollywood movies that focus on an even older Hollywood. This flick, Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, so forth. In this one we get a 1950s history of the transition from silent pictures to sound. We even see how it was done in those early days, which is cool. Here we have an actress, Lina Lamont, played by Jean Hagen who is best remembered for her role in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, who was a star in the silents but sounds like shit and has to have her voice dubbed. Megastar and Lamont's fake, studio boyfriend, Don Lockwood, played by the Gene Kelly who wins the movie, falls in love with the girl dubbing her lines and providing her singing voice, Kathy Selden played by the lovely Debbie Reynolds. The only real conflict in the movie is that Lamont is a bitch who steals all the credit away from Selden which keeps her from becoming a star. But that shit doesn't work out because this is lighthearted picture.

But here's some weird and interesting shit, Hagen, the actress playing Lamont, when she has her voice budded in the acting parts, Reynolds does sing, of course, is actually using her own voice. So she is using her own voice, but we are lead to believe that the voice we hear is Selden's. Definitely a mind fuck.

So much iconic shit in this movie. First, there is Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain". OMG. Then there is the "Moses Supposes" scene, one of two original songs in the film, where Donald O'Connor as Cosmo Brown, Lockwood's vaudeville partner and sort of his boss as the head of Monumental Pictures' music department, work with a speech coach in preparation for the transition to sound when they just ham it the fuck up and sing and dance all over the goddamned place while this coach guy stands there like an idiot. Love it. The three of them, Kelly, O'Connor, and Reynolds, in character, of course, performing the shit out of "Good Morning," one of my faves from the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie Babes In Arms, worth a watch as well.

But the best has to be O'Connor doing the original, though very similar to Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from another MGM flick, song "Make 'Em Laugh." The song is awesome and O'Connor's dancing is incredible. His athleticism is amazing. He dances up walls, running up them and flipping back to the ground, and does impressive physical comedy with a mannequin. These are all long shots. No cuts. We see all the moves and the actors have to be spent after their number. This one ends with O'Connor throwing himself through a wall after what can only be truly maximum effort. This movie and this number are the shit.

Rebecca (1940) is the greatest film of all time

Rebecca. Hitchcock's first American film. David O. Selznick produced. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine stared. Gothic thriller. 100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. No way this isn't great. And it is. Academy Award for Best Picture. It is the greatest movie of all time, after all.

Rotten Tomatoes Consensus: Hitchcock's first American film (and his only Best Picture winner), Rebecca is a masterpiece of haunting atmosphere, Gothic thrills, and gripping suspense.

What I thought I knew about the plot walking into this movie was from spoofs like an old episode of Mama's Family, "I Do, I Don't", where Thelma, Mama, dates an old rich dude and has spooky dreams where he tried to turn her into his dead wife, Rebecca. Because of this, I was thinking it was more of a prototype for Vertigo. However, no. As it turns out, Olivier's character, rich dude Maxim de Winter, fucking hated his wife and sort of kills her and definitely disposes of her body like he killed her. It's pretty fucked but his performance is so over-the-top that it is kinda funny. Like when Fontaine's character the Second Mrs de Winter is convinced by de Winter's in-fucking-sane housekeeper and homey of Rebecca, Mrs. Danvers who was masterfully played by Judith Anderson who does unhinged hella well, to dress up as this dead relative from a painting on the wall at this costume ball they are hosting. She should have known something was up when all of his friends who see her are like, "what in the actual fuck?" and so forth. But she is like, "eh, I'll roll with it," and de Winter sees her and loses his fucking mind. She thinks, "oh, shit, I remind him too much of what he lost," and Danvers is like, "yeah... you should kill yourself," which she almost does.

"Psst. I don't give a fuck."

But then de Winter surprises her with the old, "actually, I sort of almost killed her when she told me she was pregnant with this asshole I hate's baby and I sank her boat to make it look like suicide," bit. She takes that surprisingly well, we'll go with, and helps him cover up the crime until his dead wife's dude, Jack Favell, comes out of the woodwork to blackmail de Winter, saying that he will tell the po-lice that she wasn't suicidal and that he was dicking her real good and shit, I guess. But all is avoided when they do an autopsy on the dead wife and see that she was dying of cancer and she just wanted to ruine de Winter because she was cray.

Ah, all is good. The end. JK. When they go back, Danvers has completely lost her fucking mind and burns down the mansion, Manderley, screaming like a mad woman and ultimately dying in the blaze.

Little tidbit about Fontaine. She was the younger sister of Olivia de Havilland of Gone with the Wind (she was Melanie Hamilton) fame. Good stock, those girls. Fontaine lived to be 96 and de Havilland just turned 103! She was an adult in Gone with the Wind! That is crazy pants.

This movie was for real great. Of the bitch be crazy genre, this one is pretty near the top. Maybe around the 10th Hitchcock movie I've seen, while probably not my favorite or what would be the apex of his career, this is a top five, conservatively, from a critical perspective. Hell of a Hollywood debut. Got him nominated for Best Director and the film won Best Picture, the only Hitchcock movie to win that award, which is shocking.

Destry Rides Again is the greatest movie of all time

Destry Rides Again. Great flick. Audited a class at IU on the year 1939 in cinema, in the professor's informed opinion, the great year in film. This was my favorite of the films that we discussed. Western that is super fun and funny with iconic performers yucking it the fuck up. Also has two incredible scenes and has Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy, belting out some inspired tunes in her role as the saloon singer. The film is the obvious inspiration for Blazing Saddles with Frenchy as basically the same character as Lili von Shtüpp in that much more well known flick.

I fucking love Marlene Dietrich in this movie and she easily wins the movie. She was a fucking rocking chick. There is a podcast I listen to that goes into Dietrich during the WWII years that I highly recommend called You Must Remember This, which is just phenomenal. From Germany, she defected in the 1930s after the Nazi's came to power. She was a huge star by that point and after a few years of American films under her belt, Nazi Party approached her with an offer of becoming the top German film star of the Third Reich if she came back to Germany but she refused and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937, eventually working to raise money with Austria-Hungary born Jewish filmmaker Billy Wilder (among others) to help Jews escape from Germany and did a couple of USO tours during the war. In her late 30s when this film was made, Dietrich bragged about all the younger Hollywood dudes she banged going into her 70s. Among the men she boned were Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Errol Flynn, Joe Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne, among many others. Also Jimmy Stewart who seems like sort of a dick. He knocked her up whilst filming this movie. She told him and he said something like, "well, golly, what are you going to do?" She said something about "we" can do this or that and he replied, "well, what are you going to do?" Dickhead. And she was bisexual and sort of a leader in the gay Hollywood scene and frequented the legendary drag balls of Berlin in the 1920s. She called her underground, closeted lesbian clan her "sewing circle." She knew how to live, this one.

In Destry, Dietrich beats the literal pants off a guy and then when his wife shows up, played by the actress Una Merkel, the two get into a tussle that is just fucking incredible. After minutes of cat-fighting, Destry, Stewart, the new deputy cleaning up the town, dumps soapy water on the pair which enrages her more and turns her wrath toward Destry. He tries to wait on her to tire herself out after minutes of throwing shit at him, but she just keeps on going, chasing everyone out of the saloon.

Movie has one of the best setups I can recall. The outlaw saloon owner Kent, played by one Brian Donlevy, kills the sheriff and then has the mayor in his pocket appoint the town drunk, Washington Dimsdale who is played by a guy named Charles Winninger, as the new sheriff. Everyone laughs their fucking asses off when he says he is going to quit drinking and clean up the town but he does what he says he'll do, wasted as he seems to be at that moment in time, bringing in Stewart's character, the son of legendary law man Destry.

Can't say enough about this flick. All around great with a fantastic and epic ending with all the women in the town taking up garden tools and kitchen utensils, marching down to the saloon, and kicking ass all over the place. It is phenomenal.

Mystery Team is the greatest movie of all time

Me and my colleagues are positively abreast with...currency and we'd like to buy some cocaine

Mystery Team. Gotdamn I love this movie. Female companion has What We Do in the Shadows which she would watch every day if she could. MT is that movie for me. It's my falling asleep movie. It's about a group of kids, young adults really, who have a clubhouse type of mystery service that solve shit like who stole Mrs. whatsherface's pie and where is some lost cat. They get in way over their heads when a little girl hires them to figure who murdered their parents and shit gets cray. I love everything about this. Features totally absurd humor. Still LOL every time I watch it. Great little murder mystery.

Kimmy!

Solid cast that were unknowns at the time. The most famous of them in 2009 was Bobby Moynihan from SNL who was in the flick for like a minute and a half. The rest of them were known, at that time, for their comedy troupe Derrick Comedy for their skits on CollegeHumor. Donald Glover (the "master" of disguise of the detectives and the one least in touch with reality) and Aubrey Plaza would become pretty huge not long after with their respective roles in Community and Parks and Recreation but the only one anyone recognized when this came out was Ellie Kemper from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for the skit "Blowjob Girl" which she hates and is unfortunate.

While Glover totally wins the movie with his earnest and ridiculous portrayal of a kid who can't let go of his childhood, DC Pierson, who plays Duncan, the self-proclaimed "boy genius", is the one that really steals the show. Like how he is chosen to reach into a fowl ass toilet at a gentlemen's club whilst wearing a tuxedo (they really focused on the "gentlemen" part and thought it was something completely different) to retrieve a ring owned by the dead mom that ended up in a stripper which she peed out after one of the murder suspects finger banged her in the champagne room. "This looks like a job for the boy genius," actor Dominic Dierkes, who plays the skinny-ass "strong man" Charlie, says. They flee the strip joint and when they reconvene Duncan reeks. They ask him what the fuck and he tells them the smell is the dog urine he sterilized himself with. "You washed your hand with dog pee?" "No, of course not, I drank it." When they go to tell Plaza's character that they find the ring, Duncan, who tells Plaza the source of this smell, then pukes all over her, Glover, and himself.

"We thought to treat ourselves to a day of sport with other gentlemen."

Duncan has the best line of the movie as well. When basically telling Glover's character that he is insane and a loser, he screams "fuck". The other two look at him incredulously and he says Yeah, that's right. I've been saying 'fuck'. Going in the backyard and trying it out." Also, cracks me up when they are being held hostage by this crazy coked up drug dealer who is holding them at knife point and is super pissed that Glover's character has disappeared. After the dumb, "strong" one says that they didn't know the guy that they showed up with and were dressed like and that they thought he was with the drug dealer, hilarious, Duncan, suggesting ways to pass the time as, lucky for them, he brought Travel Scrabble. Or, as he likes to call it, "Trabble. Or Scravel." Duncan then says he is going to start with "Trabble." Charlie then tells him he can't spell that as it is not a real word which Duncan claims is the name of the game so of course it is a word. With the hostage taker getting pissed, Duncan then says, "You know what? Let's just play Travel Monopoly. Or, as I like to call it, Travopoly." That guy then loses his mind.

Every time I watch this I pick up on something new. This is genuinely a must watch if you like absurd, arrested development, both literal and the show, humor. Smart movie about stupid people. The best type of humor.

Pet Sematary (2019) is the worst movie of all time

Pet Sematary. Baaaaad. Such a disappoint. Stephen King got me into reading. There for a while it wasn't cool to like King but I never went through that phase. Might have hidden his books under something more highbrow but I still read them. With the exception of William Shakespeare and maybe Paul Auster, I've read more of his works than anyone else. This is partly because he is so prolific. But I legit have enjoyed almost all of the books of his I've read. This book was a little dark but had its moments and was easy to blow through. This movie, on the other hand, was tough. Not because it was disturbing. Because it was shit. Though it was occasionally unintentionally hilarious.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Pet Sematary takes its source material in a few different directions, but this remake feels like an exhuming almost as often as it does a revival.

Much like my own cat, Richard Parker, Church is a monster

Saw this on opening night. This was a while ago. Obviously. Packed theater. I'm hating this movie. Get to the end. That's my MO after awhile. Almost there at this point. The girl, Ellie, is back from dead. Jud is dead. Mom, Rachel Creed, is getting stabbed to death by the girl in the upstairs of the house. She heroically tosses her baby, Gage, down out the window to the husband, Louise, outside by the car. He catches the baby. Meanwhile, wife is fighting for her life with their undead daughter. So, you know, time is of the essence and what have you. Gotta take the baby somewhere safe, I guess, so off to the car they go. Now you would think that he would lock the door and be off but no. Here he starts telling the baby that he is locking the door and not to unlock the door for anyone except him. He then proceeds to name all of the people he shouldn't open the door for. He is like, "don't unlock the door for your sister, Ellie, mommy, Jud Crandall, your grandma, gramps, aunt Zelda, Victor Pascal, the cat Church," and so forth. I couldn't stop laughing. I haven't laughed like that in years. We are talking like hysterical, belly laughing for over a minute. I mean, I could not stop. I was the only person in the packed theater that had this reaction. People were getting pissed. The guy next to me, whom I didn't know, didn't get it and said something like "that was a good kid, staying where he was told." I guess he was, man. He was obviously not self-actualized.

That is more or less all you need to know about this movie I'll give you a little bit more. The wendigo stuff was cool. But not as cool as the book though it never really is. They flesh that stuff out a little bit which everyone was hype about and indeed was interesting. The movie looks cool. Everything is all dark and New Englandy lighting wise in a way that doesn't really happen in the Midwest. It's a hard to explain aura. You have to have spent some time in Maine in the fall to experience it. Good to see Amy Seimetz, the mom, Rachel Creed, in like real main stream flicks. She was also in Alien: Covenant. Before then she was in a bunch of cool, independent horror, stuff like You're Next and Ti West movies. She was really great and probably won the movie. Though one could make a case for Jason Clarke, the dad, Louise Creed, who is solid as well. Was sort of excited to see John Lithgow in as Jud Crandall as he is usually pretty good. But this role didn't do anything for me.

The movie, on the whole, is just dumb. The changes from the book/the first movie were pretty shitty. Made the movie darker which is was pretty unnecessary and pointless (though the twist fucking got me). Much like the original 1989 movie staring Dale Midkiff as Louise, Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) as Jud, and the lovely Denise Crosby, one of my first onscreen crushes as a child, who played Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation, meow, I shan't ever be watching this one again. Trash.

Arsenic and Old Lace is the worst movie of all time

Arsenic and Old Lace. This movie is insane. As a buddy said of this movie, "Hollywood trying to mainstream wild ideas." Referring to all the forced euthanasia in the movie--i.e. straight up murder as these two old broads take old lonely dudes into their home, which is sort of a 1940s Airbnb situation. So these sociopaths, they are depicted as sweet but I fucking know, raised three brothers, their nephews I think. None of them are what you would call well adjusted.

First, there is Cary Grant. Protagonist. One of my favorites of all time. Several of my top 10 feature him as the leading man. He was an LSD enthusiast for Christ's sake. This movie, however, considered a classic, I fucking hated. Grant's performance is frantic and all over the place and Don Knott's esque. He is a bachelor who writes books for pathetic guys. Turns out he is newly married, as of that day (the whole movie takes place Halloween night though they get no trick or treaters) and wants to keep it secret. None of this really matters except that he should be boning this chick but instead is mostly seen frantically on the phone after discovering that his aunts are murdering people. He also breaks the fourth wall roughly five or six irritating times.

His brother that he is protecting, trying to get him into this sanitarium, Bellevue, maybe, as he legit thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt. He buries the bodies and what not. His other bro, meanwhile, is a complete psycho. He is a hit-man or something and shows up at the house after being away since childhood with Peter Lorre's creepy ass and his own murder victim.

This shit is cray and way too lighthearted about torture, murdering old people, and being a complete psycho. Filmed in 1941 during WWII, it was released in 1944, I guess this what you'd call escapist humor though I found that aspect of it to be more disturbing. Least favorite Frank Capra movie of those I've seen. Deleting off my Plex server as I'm never watching this shit again.

Piranha 3D is the greatest movie of all time

Piranha 3D. Trash. But fun AF. My female companion was pretty sure we'd watched this but no. That was either the original 1978 Joe Dante Piranha movie, which I loved as a child, or 1979's Killer Fish which was part of MST3K "The Return" on Netflix last year. Try to keep up. But I'll definitely watch this movie again.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Playing exactly to expectations for a movie about killer fish run amok, Piranha 3-D dishes out gore, guffaws and gratuitous nudity with equal glee.

Lots to like here. Ridiculously over-the-top. Shitty CGI that they roll with. Solid B-list cast. Gore. Gratuitous nudity, the best kind. This movie does indeed have it all. Sort of weird watch all the shots that were done for 3D in standard 2D but other than that, I can't complain as the movie is what I've known it would be since it came out back in the day. Didn't see it in the theater which is surprising.

Most of the kills are meh because the CGI looks so bad. Lot of faces and eyes getting eaten off. There is a chick parasailing on the back of a boat with her giant breasts out. Thought she was going to pop up with piranhas hanging off her nips but the movie isn't that silly though one of the "Wild Wild Girls" does get eaten and her implants float up to the surface. One of the victims that popped out was a redhead that gets pulled under on her inner tube. I recognized this chick as a contortionist I follow on Instagram, one Bendy Bonnie, aka Bonnie Morgan. I've long been fascinated by stretchy people, probably because I'm so not even though I work on it every day (yoga every fucking day and I can't just reach down and touch my toes [though I can after a minute or two]). First on my radar from this show I fucking loved that got cancelled called Hap and Leonard. She was a bendy former lover. In this movie she bends herself in half. She is pretty and seems cool and it was weird seeing a minor celebrity you follow online just pop up in a movie like this.

Moving on. Basically the same setup as The Meg. There is a cavern under the body of water where another body of water lies, one filled with prehistoric creatures that have a taste for humans, apparently. First casualty is Richard Dreyfuss who is supposed to be his character in Jaws, Matt Hooper. Self-referential and what not. Also get some meta commentary from Jerry O'Connell who plays Derrick who is the man behind the camera of a Girls Gone Wild type of thing. The real guy that the character is based on, one Joe Francis, great guy I'm sure, was hella pissed as O'Connell was super upfront about basing the character on this douchebag. In his official statement after Francis threatened to get lawyers and shit involved, O'Connell said "I get to play Joe Francis! Oh, wait. For legal reasons I'm supposed to say, 'I play someone loosely based on Joe Francis.'" For this alone he pretty much wins the movie. Obviously have little respect for this guy as they portray him as being fucking terrible and his character gets it rough with the piranhas biting his dick off and his last words being "wet t-shirt contest."

Have one of my all time beauties here in Elizabeth Shue, still looking fine. Have a bunch of naked ladies but they all look meh compared to Shue though she seems to sort of phone it in. Adventures in Babysitting Shue this is not. But the movie is extremely entertaining and a fun watch. Also get some cameos from Christopher Lloyd and Eli Roth who were each on set for probably 15-20 minutes. Ving Rhames, Paul Scheer from like every podcast I listen to who was just in Hell Baby, and Adam Scott from Parks and Rec and Party Down are in the movie as well and are all serviceable. Again, a really fun ride for what it is.