137/2303. Asteroid City (2023)
It feels almost like all other Wes Anderson films were setting the stage for this, the most Wes Anderson film yet. I probably don't need to tell you that this was my favorite movie of 2023. Like Birdman, the meta-commentary on plays, acting, art, and entertainment is more text than subtext, yet it still manages to be evasive enough for multiple interpretations. "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep."

138/2304. Altered States (1980)
Because I don't enjoy body horror or drug movies, I have been avoiding this movie since I first became aware of its existence (thanks to a Mad magazine parody), and I was right to. It's a hot mess. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's words are here, but the director and actors sidestep Chayefsky's cynicism for an irritatingly earnest.... horror romance? Not very not good.

Coca-Cola is the mildest mind-altering drug in this picture.

139/2305. Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023)
Rob Reiner's documentary interview with Albert Brooks is pretty entertaining because Albert Brooks is very entertaining. It could have been three times as long and been just as good.

140/2306. Best Defense (1984)
Speaking of not very good.... Looking back on Eddie Murphy's lifetime body of work, very few of his movies are really any good. He has admitted he did this one just for the money, and it shows. Dudley Moore isn't any better in this very mediocre spy "comedy."

141/2307. The Cheaters (1945)
This very slim plot involving scammers bilking a girl out of her inheritance at Christmas barely sustains the 90 minute runtime. It did not hold my full attention, but it also didn't drive me away. Make of that what you will.

142/2308. An Actor's Revenge (1963)
This experimental Japanese movie is staged to look shallow, like a stage play, which is directly relevant to the story, but the story itself is something like a dull cross-dressing version of Hamlet. I like my movies a little weird, but the slow pace put me to sleep. I did not want to wake up for more.

More to come.

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I'm on a movie-watching tear so far this April! Here's the first batch of films seen.

46. (1105.) Dreamgirls (2006)
I didn't like it. I'd rather not spend three hours of my time with a bunch of people finding old and unexciting ways to ruin their own lives. (And if I want to hear a Supremes pastiche, I'll just listen to The Supremes.) Eddie Murphy is the highlight, and he kills himself. I didn't blame him.

47. (1106.) Journal of a Crime (1934)
A housewife is unable to come to terms with someone else paying the price for the crime she committed. The best part is her confession to the scapegoat that ends up making her feel worse. Good crime melodrama!

48. (1107.) Easy to Love (1934)
Screwball comedy about a wife who cheats on her cheating husband and the ensuing hijinks. Cute. Like Journal of a Crime, the brevity of this film (just over an hour) keeps it from dragging.

49. (1108.) Five Deadly Venoms (1978)
The last apprentice of a kung-fu Master has to track down his five previous students — each trained in a different deadly animal-inspired style — and stop them from destroying the Master's legacy. Where has this movie been all my life?! Really, really fun.

50. (1109.) Woman of the Year (1942)
The first Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy pairing. Hepburn comes off great (no surprise if you read the title), leaving the audience wondering what she sees in Tracy's chauvinistic sports reporter. They do have good screen chemistry, though.

More to come.

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Like I said, I watched a lot of movies starting with the word "The" in July. This is the first batch.

106. (413.) The Name of the Game is Kill (1968)
Jack Lord plays an unusually forceful meddling drifter in this B- C-movie. The film teases a shock ending that would have been more shocking if it hadn't been so damn obvious from the start. I spent most of the movie trying to guess what the shock could be, only to find out that it was exactly what I expected. I was shocked only that it was so unshocking.

112. (419.) The Falcon in San Francisco (1945)
The first of three "Falcon" movies I watched this month. More suspense than mystery: think Mike Hammer meets The Saint. I guess this is what passed for popcorn movies in 1945.

113. (420.) The Kid (2000)
I had no idea Bruce Willis made this Disney movie until I watched it. Bruce phones it in with a wig on, but there is still plenty to like, mostly thanks to female lead Emily Mortimer. If Disney were to make this movie now, Bruce's role would be filled by Eddie Murphy, and the schmaltz level would be turned up to a totally unwatchable 11.

114. (421.) The Devil-Doll (1936)
Lionel Barrymore crossdresses and shrinks humans down to doll-size to extract revenge on the evil bankers who sent him to prison. Great special effects and lots of fun (if a little longwinded).

115. (422.) The Seven Year Itch (1955)
I thought I had seen this before, but it turned out I'd only seen a about 15-minutes combined of 4 key scenes. Honestly, what I had seen was enough to guess the rest of the movie. I get that Marilyn Monroe was a star (she has plenty of charisma onscreen), but I do think she was an objectively terrible actress.

116. (423.) The Fortune Cookie (1966)
I loved watching the football scenes at the start of the movie, and I loved watching Walter Matthau play a lovably despicable lawyer. (Jack Lemon I'm still not so nuts about.) A cynical film in all the right ways — it could be noir if it had a different ending.

117. (424.) The Big Heat (1953)
Speaking of film noir, loved this film of the determined lawman out for revenge against a mob stupid enough to have killed his wife. Glenn Ford movie #1.

118. (425.) The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)
Glenn Ford movie #2. From honest cop to cowardly gunslinger, I have to give Ford credit for range. The first two acts of this 3-act western really crawled, but Ford was a good actor with a good supporting cast. Together, the make the final act suspenseful. Entertainment-wise, it falls somewhere between The Searchers (great) and Love Me Tender (not so great), both also westerns and both also released in 1956.

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Continuing movies seen in February:

25. (332.) Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I'm not going to lie: I chose to watch this movie because it is homaged by a Knight Rider episode. I never quite got a handle on the character Spencer Tracy was playing, but I enjoyed the film anyway.

26. (333.) Hop (2011)
Yee-ouch. Imagine if the executives at Universal became determined to make a multi-million dollar Easter movie they could merchandise to kids, and they just didn't care if they didn't have a script worth shooting. Yeah. Sorry, Russell Brand, but if you want to go over big in America, you'll have to do better than this dreck.

27. (334.) Another Earth (2011)
I watched the first half of this "sci-fi" movie back in, what, October? I finished it in February, and it is emphatically not a sci-fi movie, but a figurative allegory for an unanswerable metaphysical question. Think of Donnie Darko without the evil bunny or Patrick Swayze, and you'll begin to realize just how much having a Patrick Swayze in your movie can add to the slow but necessary bits of exposition.

28. (335.) My Life as a Dog (1985)
Christmas Story meets Wes Anderson. Films tend to mythologize the coming-of-age stories of young boys as simultaneously tragic and magical. I really don't have a good handle on my own formative years, but I don't remember an over-abundance of either tragedy or magic. There is just no way that shit like this happens in real life.

29. (336.) Welcome to Mooseport (2004)
I did not know this as I was watching it, but this was the last movie made by Gene Hackman, who has officially retired from acting. (Oh, Gene, you're still young at heart. Come back to us!) It's a simple, unencumbered comedy that I found very enjoyable despite my dislike for Ray Romano.

30. (337.) Imagine That (2009)
I didn't know this movie existed before I watched it. If I told you that it is exactly the kind of uninspired by-the-numbers movie that Eddie Murphy makes these days, I think you'll know what I'm talking about. At least it was better than A Thousand Words (watched last month).

31. (338.) The Deer Hunter (1978)
This has been on my "watch this if you get a chance" list since I first learned of its existence in high school. For years I wondered how a movie with De Niro, STreep, and Walken, a movie that won 5 Academy Awards, could consistently fail to cross my path. Now I know that there were 3 reasons it is so elusive: A) It is 3+ hours long, far too long for broadcast television. B) There are ample graphic scenes of games of Russian roulette that are, frankly, strongly unpalatable. C) This is probably as dark a movie Hollywood could ever make, about America's loss of innocence in the Vietnam era as illustrated by the lives that were damaged by the experience. It's really a very good film, probably forever assigned to that mental category labeled "good films I never need to see again" alongside the like of Natural Born Killers and Birth of a Nation.

32. (339.) Hesher (2010)
Remember up above where I said "films tend to mythologize the coming-of-age stories of young boys as simultaneously tragic and magical"? Ditto here, too. Gordon-Levitt never fails to impress, this time as a heavy-metal Jesus.

That's not all! One more February movie post to come.

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Since we're over halfway through the month, I might as well post the films I watched in the first half of November so that I don't get backed up posting them all at the beginning of December (as happened for October/November).

262. Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006)
Film in a nutshell: a giant squid protects an ancient artifact. Seriously, the whole thing was created as an excuse to fill some empty time slot on SyFy's schedule.

263. Dance Flick (2009)
The Wayans never really stopped making In Living Color. The family just took their parody spoofs into movie theaters and weaved a loose narrative around them.

264. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)
I remember wanting to see this when it came out. Sure, it was sappy and predictable, but I was still entertained.

265. M (1931)
Now this film is art! The cinematography is amazing, especially given the film's age.

266. Super Shark (2011)
Poor John Schneider. Last time I saw him, he was playing a man crusading against evil corporations releasing super killer sharks. Here he plays the head of an evil corporation that releases super killer sharks. At least he's not typecast.

I don't want to oversell it, but the highlight of the film takes place shortly before a very, very slow walking tank was employed to attack a very, very slow crawling shark on a beach. A scientist, a colonel, and a boat captain watch a giant shark jump out of the ocean and eat a jet plane:

Scientist: "It flies!"
Colonel: "That's bad!"
Captain: "I need a drink!"

267. Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)
Greg Evigan steals scenes from The Core while a bunch of actresses I've never seen before reenact scenes from Jurassic Park with a touch of chest-bursting Alien thrown in for good measure. You know, just like the Jules Verne novel.

268. Princess of Mars (2009)
In another knockoff of a big budget film, Traci Lords plays the titular character. (Giggle.)

269. Goon (2011)
This film was released to Video on Demand before it hit theaters in the US, usually a sign of a terrible film. But damn, this was genuinely entertaining and funny. It tries really hard to be a 21st-century Slap Shot and doesn't fall too short.

270. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
I loved this truly great character piece. There is not typically a lot of suspense in John Huston films because justice is always ultimately served. However, the way this film briefly toys with defining the protagonist as a nice twist.

271. Dear John (2010)
The "happy" ending seemed completely out of place, something that a quick internet search confirmed as a last minute studio response to negative preview audience reactions. Where do they find these preview audiences? This movie went on to make a bunch of money, so what do I know.

272. Poseidon (2006)
Everything about remake of The Poseidon Adventure is absurd, but I was always more partial to its sequel, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, anyway.

273. The Last Man on Earth (1964)
The "vampires" in this movie sure act suspiciously like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. I'm sure that's no coincidence. (I should also point out that this film has our hero kill his newly befriended miniature poodle just to demonstrate how difficult and lonely it is to be the Last Man on Earth. This is the second movie I've seen this year that "Kicks the Dog" by killing a miniature poodle. To be fair, at least this time it was a vampire miniature poodle.)

274. Tower Heist (2011)
Eddie Murphy is always at his best playing a supporting character, but how did Alan Alda, Matthew Broderick, and Judd Hirsch also all end up in this silly caper flick?

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The middle of three lists of movies for October.

241. Exporting Raymond (2010)
I must be the exception that proves the rule that Everybody Loves Raymond, but I did very much enjoy this documentary of the attempt to adapt the American sitcom for a Russian audience. Thanks for that recommendation, Randy.

242. Mean Girls (2004)
This was the movie that launched Tina Fey into the popular consciousness. It's not a bad teen comedy, but it's not an outstanding teen comedy, either. (Teen comedies, romantic comedies, and Frank Capra movies: if you've seen one, you've seen all of them.)

243. Blind Alibi (1938)
A sculptor interested in recovering some sensitive documents hidden in some art decides to pose as a blind man and buy a seeing-eye dog so that the museum will give him 24-hour, unfettered access to the museum collection. Yeah, it could happen.

244. Black Swan (2010)
Every shot in this film was a close-up of something, making the whole thing feel hideously claustrophobic. I thought this approach was odd in a movie set in the world of ballet, an art I typically associate with plenty of open space. I'm filing this in the category of "good movies I never want to see again."

245. Bewitched (2005)
The first of 3 television-to-movie adaptations that I watched this month (not counting the documentary mentioned above), and the least artistically successful of the three. This film spends so much time paying homage to the source material, it never really establishes its own identity as a separate story. It just sort of... is.

246. The Tuxedo (2002)
I caught this movie almost accidentally one night while trying to meet a deadline at work. Given its rather bland action scenes and broad humor, I would have expected it to be made for children except for the frequent sex jokes. Maybe it was meant immature adults. That's a pretty large audience, I guess.

247. The Great McGinty (1940)
A very enjoyable send-up of big city city politics. Highly recommended.

248. This is Cinerama (1952)
Cinerama was a precursor to Imax. This documentary promoting the concept leads with its strength, a roller coaster ride (specifically the Atom Smasher from Playland at Rockaway Beach, NY, which was dismantled in 1985) then limps through another hour-and-a-half of opera singers, landscapes, and tourist footage of Cypress Gardens (that closed on September 23, 2009, to be replaced by Legoland Florida on October 15, 2011). The film is generally booor-ring, but obviously I find the amusement park connections interesting.

249. Contraband (2012)
Mark Wahlberg stars as exactly the kind of character you expect to find Mark Wahlberg cast in a film that was somewhat better than I was expecting. There are no "good guys" in this film pitting bad guys against bad guys. I don't know if this is an endorsement, but I'm sure my father would like it.

250. I Spy (2002)
Ever seen Shanghai Noon? Replace Jackie Chan with Eddie Murphy, bring the movie into the 21st century, and you've seen this movie. I think it's weird that this movie is more like another movie than the television series it was based on, but I guess this is more loyal to the source material than Starsky & Hutch. Maybe Wilson should just stay away from tv-to-movie properties.

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Now that I finally have Mom conditioned to watch movies and not television shows, I seem to be making significant headway in my quest to 150 as many movies as I can watch in 2012. To keep from posting huge lists twice a month, I'm going to start regularly posting what I've seen in the past week. Since I've already got a backlog, let's get started. I watched the following movies the first week of April:

76. Meet Dave (2008)
After blogging about it in 2008, I finally had to watch this "family comedy" -- the only kind of movie Eddie Murphy makes anymore. I got the impression that the actors were really trying but had nothing to work with either via script or director Brian Robbin's instructions. (Robbins only directs television shows for kids and Eddie Murphy films, and it shows.) At one point, Eddie Murphy smiles into the camera as he shits money. That's fun for kids of all ages! To be perfectly clear: don't watch this film.

77. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
Believe it or not, I'd never seen this before. Two words summarize why it is a classic: unintentionally hilarious.

78. Bridesmaids (2011)
I had started this film alone but quickly decided that it was a film that Mom would enjoy, so I started it over. Kristen Wiig knows funny.

79. Meteor (1979)
This movie predicts future events, showing a flying object slamming into the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Does that mean that one day Sean Connery will really be a divorced rocket scientist trying to save Earth from an idiotic NASA beurocracy?

80. How the West Was Won (1962)
Slowly, I'm working my way through all those mid-1960s epics that have a running time of three hours and mid-movie intermissions. This film was originally presented in Cinerama, which apparently was a gimmick placing three screens side-by-side. Because of the camera design required to capture such a wide aspect ratio, there's no shot approaching a close-up in the entire story, which may explain why the studio cast only stars in even the minor roles. Seriously, Lee Van Cleef shows up for 30 seconds as a member of a gang of pirates. I'm not convinced that this type of epic story with an all-star cast and Imax-style visuals has any place in modern Hollywood, and that's part of the film's appeal, I think.

81. Columbiana (2011)
A brainless revenge flick that wasn't worth the time it took to watch it. I'd rather watch nothing but 3-hour epics than any number of boring 90-minute wastes of celluloid like this.

82. Thor (2011)
This was the Marvel movie I was looking forward to in 2011, and I'm pleased to say that it lived up to my expectations. Far better than Captain America, Green Lantern, and Green Hornet combined.

83. The Smurfs (2011)
Trey can attest that I spent most of this movie complaining about Scottish Smurf. However, I really enjoyed Azrael the cat and Hank Azaria's Gargamel. Dont' get me wrong: I don't want to see it again, but I'm not in hate with it.

There was one more film this week (Trey knows what it is), and I'll get to it soon.

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From here on out, I'm going to make an effort to make my posts more cohesive. Looking back, it appears to me that my blog posts ramble all over the place. For example, take a look at something I've blogged about many times over the years, something like movies. Sure, most of what you'll see is my predictably negative feedback about how much I hated whatever super-hero movie I just watched. Only occasionally I meander off and talk about Golden Globes or Eddie Murphy's head. And I never talk about how much I like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane or Beautiful Girls. Well, until now.

Maybe when I start typing, I should write down a topic sentence. That way when I wander too far from the plot, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day, I can remind myself where I was going. Although people seem to like Terminator 2, despite the fact that its story takes a 90° turn about halfway through and appears to destroy its own premise. If Sarah Connor destroys the research that leads to terminators, she can't have been harassed by terminators from her future and a whole lot of people will have wasted a few hours in a dark theater.

I find that long-winded obfuscation of the actual point is a flaw in most of Cameron's scripts. I like True Lies, but it also takes a right turn about halfway through. More accurately, I suppose what I object to is the subplot in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and his crack team stalk his wife when the main plot is about a terroristic threat to the United States. If spend our time worrying about who loves us, then we've let the terrorists win.

Couple my distaste for Cameron's screenwriting with the public's overboard response, and it should be easy to understand why I still haven't seen Avatar. Call it a personality quirk, call it a character fault, call it curmudgeonly pigheadedness. If the silent majority decides to like something, I'll decide to hate it. And once I decide that I'm going to do something, it's a done deal.

Wait. What was I saying?

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Eddie Murphy's giant head has been touring America promoting the star's latest flop movie, Meet Dave. It's a pretty good looking sculpture of the star of The Adventures of Pluto Nash and The Haunted Mansion, as it lacks any pores or blemishes, unlike the real Murphy. Lemuel Gulliver pointed out that from his diminutive point of view, the Brobdingnagians had terrible skin with seemingly gigantic pores, and the microscopic vermin that lived on them were plainly visible to him. No doubt Eddie Murphy, one of the highest grossing stars in the world thanks to such films as Metro and Holy Man, would never suffer the indignity of appearing as something other than perfect.

Unfortunately, this reproduction lacks the animation of an audio-animatronic Jason Taylor or a marionette of the Royal de Luxe. You'd think an actor animated enough to play every role possible in each movie in which he appears would be a perfect opportunity to create a larger-than-life animated prop. But then Hollywood never does anything all-the-way when half-assed will do just as well. In fact, this statue of Life and I Spy star Eddie Murphy has more in common with the statue of the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota, than anything else: they're both big, colorful, and created just to sell me something.

(All kidding aside, the sculpture was created by a fellow named Jim McPherson at Gentle Giant Studios. He's posted more pictures similar to the one above here. Fantastic.)

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