99/2108. The In Crowd (1988)
Start with Hairspray, subtract the cynicism and commentary on racism, add a sexual predator father, and you get this! It's not without charm, especially scene-chewing VJ Joe Pantoliano and the "biker versus nerd" dance-off.

100/2109. Repo Man (1984)
When I was in high school, there were several boxes for movies on the "Cult Classics" row at Blockbuster that I looked at and looked at but could never bring myself to rent. Repo Man falls into that category and demonstrates how bad my decision-making process was in 1991. This is a punk-rock film that delights in subverting expectations.

Cars, beers, and Coca-Cola are the few brands in this movie pointedly populated with generic products.

101/2110. The Fearmakers (1958)
Dana Andrews comes back from Korea to discover that gangsters have taken over his PR firm to advance a Communist plot: lobbying Congress! The film wisely focuses on the tighter picture of Andrews trying to avenge his former co-worker and plays as a pretty entertaining noirish crime story.

102/2111. The Watermelon Woman (1996)
I enjoyed the half of this film that is a fictionalized biography representing how poorly Hollywood treated colored people in its early days (as if anything has changed), but the other half, a companion plot about the young, gay, black would-be documentarian's messy personal life felt like something I had to sit through to get to the good stuff. I suspect most viewers have the opposite opinion, and I do not deny that both halves contribute to a superior whole.

More to come (sooner than later).

Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: coke movies walter