I decided to pull out my DVD and rewatch this one because I was impressed that at least a couple of people put it on their Top Comedy lists.  I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to put it on mine.  It's more of a film that makes you smile, rather than laugh, and the title is less of a premonition and more of an sarcastic act of defiance against an industry which had written Peter Bogdanovich off at this point in his career.

Out of all of the New Hollywood directors, Bogdanovich was the most studied stylist.  Others, like Coppola and Altman and Woody, had their share of nostalgic indulgences into varying degrees of Old Hollywood classicisms, but Bogdanovich made this a central aesthetic.  Probably the acme of his melding of the genre tropes of the 30s-40s cinema with his own flavor of sentimental charm was Paper Moon.  Unfortunately, Bogdanovich followed this up with a string of increasingly saccharine, meticulously artificial, romantically inflated emulations of sepia-age infantilism.  Daisy Miller was a bit stiff and pompous, but At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon were crushing castles of tinsel.  Bogdanovich had crapped out.

In response, he took a brief retirement, and finally returned with Saint Jack, the kind of cynical and scarred realism that no one would have thought Bogdanovich could accomplish.  It still has a sense of old-world romanticism, in defiant spite of the times, but without the genre artifice filters, and Ben Gazzara as his world-weary stand-in, trying to hold on to the Casablanca pretense as the new-world pressures close in around him.  This and Laughed are films of personal revenge, Bogdanovich's most mature films made entirely on his terms.

Although both Saint Jack and They All Laughed represent Bogdanovich at his purest filmmaking, straightforward work free from the classical frills, the latter is the closest to autobiography.  Gazzara again is here representing Bogdanovich's ego as old man wisdom, warm and patient and clever, while splitting off another Bogdanovich stand-in in the form of young bumbling naivete, John Ritter, tailessly chasing Bogdanovich's then-muse Dorothy Stratton.  The film is probably the most uncompromising and unapologetic a film that Bogdanovich could have made, at a time when no one was paying him any attention anymore, and determined to make his most personal expression on film, in the back-drop of his hometown NYC.  But even if Bogdanovich eschewed commercial considerations, he's not really capable of making an uncommercial film.  His essential sentimentality and charm is soaked throughout the picture.  And it's evident in the film's quiet confidence that he was having the time of his life.

Now the film is tainted with the unavoidable association with Dorothy Stratton's death at the hand of her husband's murder-suicide, a scandal (told in Star 80) that overshadows all of the good feeling in the film.  And there's plenty of those who will question Stratton's acting abilities (she's fine, but for my money, I think that the likewise model/non-actress Patti Hansen outclasses everyone), but that's just petty.  If I have to fault the film for anything, it would be the country music that was so in vogue among these 1980 urban cowpokes.

Last edited by Jinnistan (8/17/2022 1:33 pm)

Rock wrote:

I see Hansen has been married to Keith Richards for almost 40 years.

Aaaawwww.... but also lol

Keef has the Kramer Kavorka.  (And he's also surprisingly monogamous, unlike Jagger.)

Not salsa, not flamenco, my brother.

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

Not salsa, not flamenco, my brother.

How much better would Fast/Furious films be if Vin and Rock just spontaneously busted out into synchronized suspender-stretching dance numbers?

Rock wrote:

Hollywood Chinese (the doc)

This is very good. While there's only so much depth a ninety minute doc could realistically go into, I like how it tries to interrogate each of its threads, offering contradicting takes through the well chosen interviewees. I think there's a tendency for looks at such potentially loaded subjects to glibly lean in one direction or the other, but this is admirably devoted to sussing out these nuances.

Running With The Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee

John McAfee is the kind of personality who can make even the fictionalized over-the-top cartoon of Nic Cage in Unbearable Weight look like a Sunday School teacher in comparison.  The shorthand is that he's a one-time computer software billionaire who ran off to Belize with a ton of guns and drugs and plenty of cash to pay off the local authorities for when he finds himself in trouble for any rape or murder that might entail.  Unfortunately one such murder landed him on the Interpol watchlist, and he went on the lam, winding up in rural Tennessee (getting busted for driving under the influence of GHB) and, somewhat naturally given the circumstances, running for the President of the United States in 2016 in the Libertarian Party primary.  He was eventually found hanged to death in a Barcelona prison in 2021 shortly after the Spanish authorities approved his extradition back to the US for tax evasion and cryptocurrency fraud.

So there's definitely quite a film to be made here, and this is actually the second documentary in recent years (after 2016's Gringo).  McAfee wasn't shy about using the guns and drugs on camera (and quoting Hunter S. Thompson in the most cliched way), so there's lots of outlandish and incriminating material available.  This doc has the liability of being based around two Vice reporters who are just about the dumbest bricks this side of a fortified mailbox.  Which is obviously exactly why McAfee allowed them access, due to their easily manipulatably feeble wits and the fact that they were stupid enough to not see the set-up from a mile away.  Now, that's not a knock on the film's entertainment, per se, because it is hilarious.  There's lots of talk about McAfee's alleged brilliance, given the mythmaking around computer software billionaires, but fundamentally he's a bullshit artist and, judging from this, not a particulalry brilliant one, but rather blessed at having the fortune of a parade of dupes on which to prey.  (His faked heart-attack is also hilarious, because it's unfathomable that it could have been successful outside of a corrupt third-world country.)

By the time McAfee is tripping on bath salts, armed to the gills and tearing the bottom of his boat apart looking for government spies, the Vice cameraman decides that it's possible that this may be a legitimately dangerous individual.  So after this (around 2018), we get a brief rundown of what we know about McAfee's adventures, landing him in that Barcelona prison (which I'm guessing was gun or drug related).  McAfee had publicly stated two years prior to his death, after Jefferey Epstein was found in a jail cell in an apparent suicide, that if anyone ever found McAfee himself hanging in a jail cell, that it certainly would not be a suicide.  So when McAfee was found dead in a jail cell, there were lots of theories involving Epstein, Qanon, the Clintons, etc etc, and for whatever reason ignoring the more obvious scenario which is that he likely paid off the Spanish police to fake his death.  (Or maybe they just killed him anyway because he really is an obnoxious asshole.)

So the story itself is pretty fascinating, stranger than fiction, and if you can tolerate the idiots telling it and appreciate the macro-idiocy of it all, then it's a pleasant 90 minute ride.

7.5/10

China Sky
The Evil That Men Do
Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects
Double Indemnity
 

I watched this more for Melanie Laurent, basically giving a one-woman performance, than the director Alexandre Aja (who some people have some cult affection for the likes of High Tension and Crawl).  It boils down to a sci-fi trying to emulate a lot of the same tension and emotions as Gravity, and, while Laurent is easily on par (or possibly superior) to Sandra Bullock, Aja is no Cuaron, to say the least.  He does his best at establishing some claustrophobic tension in a confined space (a cryogenic pod, being the sole setting), but essentially he's still an expensive hack, and the film's many developments and twists grow proportionately unrewarding and manipulative.  But still, I can watch Melanie Laurent sweat in close-up for two hours, so sue me.

6.5/10
 

Satan Was a Lady (1975)
Satan Was a Lady (2001)

crumbsroom wrote:

I was beginning to wonder if there were two Satan Was a Lady's

Sadly yes. And the porno is actually the more entertaining one.