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Brainstorm (1983), Douglas Trumbull. September 30, 5:30pm. View count: Two.
American Splendor (2003), Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini. October 1, 8:00ish pm. View count: One.
Brainstorm is not a good movie. And yet we've voluntarily watched it twice. We watched it for the first time the day after chmmr and I met (six years ago nearly exactly), having picked it out at the video store as a likely-looking bad movie. Unfortunately it's mostly just bad, as we have again found out. This is romance, people. BRAINSTORM.
It's got Christopher Walken, in pants pulled up too high, being a jerk in a hilarious helmet (not, sadly, a good acting helmet). It's got the lady who played Nurse Ratched, completely slumming in this movie, and easily playing its best part. Sadly, the screenwriters didn't much care about whether you got what was going on, whether characters behaved consistently, or, uh, whether anything happened for a reason. The first half of the movie, almost, is spent on people being excited about marketing this goofy braincasting device, that can essentially record experiences, invented by Walken and Ratched. Christopher Walken has some nebulous relationship with some lady, and people are concerned about it. He has an asshole son, too, and a house which, along with Nurse Ratched and the excellent company logo, were the only things I'd remembered about this movie from the first time around. The second half is all metaphysical whatnot, and Christopher Walken and (ex-?)wife haxxoring the lab's megahertz and adding water to Water-Activated Foam. As chmmr observed, "It doesn't actually make sense with the sparkles." It sure had sparkles, though.
American Splendor was sort of amusing; it seemed to focus on how the act of recording, or fictionalising, makes things (life, and narratives therein) interesting. It never got really far with that, but its layers of fiction were fun, and Urbaniak did a great R. Crumb (as I recall from the documentary back in... 1994??). And the 'borderline autistic' coworker was pretty terrific. The lady playing the wife is definitely the one to play Unpleasant in the movie of her life, although hopefully with a better wig.
I'm not entirely sure if it really came through with what it wanted to do, but it had some pleasing aspects. I could really have done without the afterfxey 2d animation, though; getting some intern to do some wiggle holds (meaning, to trace some frames) would have done wonders.
I think it's possible to read the movie as showing that Pekar is barely functional in any way, and that everyone around him, including the artists who illustrate him, treat him as a naive-art source of nuttiness. This is sort of depressing, but he doesn't really seem to notice it.
American Splendor (2003), Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini. October 1, 8:00ish pm. View count: One.
Brainstorm is not a good movie. And yet we've voluntarily watched it twice. We watched it for the first time the day after chmmr and I met (six years ago nearly exactly), having picked it out at the video store as a likely-looking bad movie. Unfortunately it's mostly just bad, as we have again found out. This is romance, people. BRAINSTORM.
It's got Christopher Walken, in pants pulled up too high, being a jerk in a hilarious helmet (not, sadly, a good acting helmet). It's got the lady who played Nurse Ratched, completely slumming in this movie, and easily playing its best part. Sadly, the screenwriters didn't much care about whether you got what was going on, whether characters behaved consistently, or, uh, whether anything happened for a reason. The first half of the movie, almost, is spent on people being excited about marketing this goofy braincasting device, that can essentially record experiences, invented by Walken and Ratched. Christopher Walken has some nebulous relationship with some lady, and people are concerned about it. He has an asshole son, too, and a house which, along with Nurse Ratched and the excellent company logo, were the only things I'd remembered about this movie from the first time around. The second half is all metaphysical whatnot, and Christopher Walken and (ex-?)wife haxxoring the lab's megahertz and adding water to Water-Activated Foam. As chmmr observed, "It doesn't actually make sense with the sparkles." It sure had sparkles, though.
American Splendor was sort of amusing; it seemed to focus on how the act of recording, or fictionalising, makes things (life, and narratives therein) interesting. It never got really far with that, but its layers of fiction were fun, and Urbaniak did a great R. Crumb (as I recall from the documentary back in... 1994??). And the 'borderline autistic' coworker was pretty terrific. The lady playing the wife is definitely the one to play Unpleasant in the movie of her life, although hopefully with a better wig.
I'm not entirely sure if it really came through with what it wanted to do, but it had some pleasing aspects. I could really have done without the afterfxey 2d animation, though; getting some intern to do some wiggle holds (meaning, to trace some frames) would have done wonders.
I think it's possible to read the movie as showing that Pekar is barely functional in any way, and that everyone around him, including the artists who illustrate him, treat him as a naive-art source of nuttiness. This is sort of depressing, but he doesn't really seem to notice it.
