Title: Beetlejuice Release Date: March 30, 1988 Director: Tim Burton Production Company: The Geffen Company Summary/Review:
Beetlejuice was on cable TV a lot in my youth, and despite seeing it multiple times, I never really liked it. I’m not quite sure why it rubbed me the wrong way, but as a Harry Belafonte fan it did annoy me that so many people acted like his calypso music was original to his movie. I thought my younger child might enjoy seeing a young Winona Ryder after watching Stranger Things, and that I would warm to the movie since my surly teen days are long behind me.
But it didn’t. I still don’t find it funny. It’s almost funny which can be worse than not being funny at all. The basic plot is kind of a take on gentrification. Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) Maitland are a young couple restoring a large Victorian house in Connecticut. When they die in a car crash, they find themselves trapped in the house as ghosts. When an awful yuppie couple from New York, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Charles (Jeffrey Jones) Deetz, Barbara and Adam try to use their ghostly powers to scare them away. They do bond with the Deetz’s goth daughter Lydia (Ryder), but ultimately call on the creepy “bio-exorcist” Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to help them drive out the Deetzes. Hijinks ensue.
There are aspects of this movie I like, starting with just the general weirdness of everything that is distinctively Tim Burton. The stop motion animation effects are well-done and a lot of fun. And Ryder is terrific in one her earliest roles. But overall, Beetlejuice just doesn’t do it for me.
Title: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Release Date: April 15, 2022 Director: Jane Schoenbrun Production Company: Love In Winter LLC | Dweck Productions | Flies Collective Summary/Review:
Casey (Anna Cobb) is a teenager with a widowed father who appears to spend a lot of time alone. At the beginning of the movie Casey records a video of herself taking “The World’s Fair Challenge,” a viral online horror roleplaying game that really just seems like playing “Bloody Mary” with added technology. The bulk of the movie consists of videos Casey and other teenagers showing the symptoms and changes that occur from participating in the challenge.
The movie never makes clear whether the game is really taking a psychological and physical toll on its participants, or if they’re just acting for the sake of the game. One person who believes that bad things are really happening is JLB (Michael J. Rogers), a middle-aged man who apparently lives alone in a large house and spends a lot of his time watching World’s Fair Challenge videos. He contacts Casey over Skype to show his concern. Again, it’s uncertain whether he’s really a concerned adult or just a creepy old dude.
There are a lot of reviews on Letterboxd from people who say this movie captures the feeling of being a teenager who spends a lot of time alone using the internet. Since the World Wide Web made it’s public debut the same week I started college, I never had this experience, but can believe it’s true. Regardless, this is a weird and unsettling psychological drama.
Over the past few years I’ve made a concerted effort to watch lots of movies considered to be among the best of all time. Now, for the first time, I’ve made my own list of favorite movies of all time. Every other Wednesday throughout 2022, I will be revealing ten movies in my list of 250 Favorite Movies of All Time.
Title: Fargo Director: Joel Coen Cast:Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Harve Presnell, and Peter Stormare Year: 1996 When did I first watch this movie?: 1998 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A crime caper comedy that goes horribly wrong with Frances McDormand putting in a terrific performances as Marge Gunderson, one of the most decent human beings to ever appear as a character in a film.
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Title: Stop Making Sense Director: Jonathan Demme Cast: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison Year: 1984 When did I first watch this movie?: 2011 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A concert film the puts the emphasis on the film (we don’t even see the audience until the very end) shows Talking Heads and their collaborators pulling out all the stops for a mind-blowing musical performance.
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Title: The Third Man Director: Carol Reed Cast:Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard Year: 1949 When did I first watch this movie?: December 2019 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A post-World War II thriller that is steeped in cynicism and lifted up by outstanding cinematography.
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Title: Modern Times Director: Charlie Chaplin Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin Year: 1936 When did I first watch this movie?: March 2020 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: Charlie Chaplin’s anti-capitalist comedy masterpiece is also the last appearance of The Little Tramp, who talks – er, sings – for the first time at the climax of the film.
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Title: Finding Nemo Director: Andrew Stanton Cast: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe, and Geoffrey Rush Year: 2003 When did I first watch this movie?: 2004 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: Part of Pixar’s amazing run of masterpieces, Finding Nemo features great voice work, stunning visuals, and a hilarious and heartwarming story.
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Title: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Director: Morgan Neville Cast: Fred Rogers, François Clemmons, Yo-Yo Ma, Joe Negri, David Newell,
Tom Junod, and Joanne Rogers Year: 2018 When did I first watch this movie?: June 2018, in the theaters Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A celebration of one of the kindest humans in popular culture will bring a tear to your eye.
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Title: The Farewell Director: Lulu Wang Cast: Awkwafina, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin, and Zhao Shuzhen Year: 2019 When did I first watch this movie?: January 2021 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A highly relatable family comedy of inter-generational and intercultural differences.
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Title: The Triplets of Belleville Director: Sylvain Chomet Cast: Lina Boudreault, Mari-Lou Gauthier, Michèle Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, Michel Robin, and Monica Viegas Year: 2003 When did I first watch this movie?: December 2007 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A film told mostly through pantomime and music tells an imaginative story about bicycling and jazz music.
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Title: Cinema Paradiso Director: Giuseppe Tornatore Cast: Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin, Leopoldo Trieste, Marco Leonardi, Agnese Nano and Salvatore Cascio Year: 1988 When did I first watch this movie?: 1990 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A nostalgic film about the bygone days of movie palace in small-town Italy is a love letter to cinephiles everywhere.
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Title: 13th Director: Ava DuVernay Cast: Angela Davis, Bryan Stevenson, Michelle Alexander, Jelani Cobb, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Year: 2016 When did I first watch this movie?: April 2019 Why is this one of my all time favorites?: A ground-breaking documentary that exposes how mass incarceration has perpetuated the effects of slavery and segregation for Black Americans.
Title: They Live Release Date: November 4, 1988 Director: John Carpenter Production Company:Alive Films | Larry Franco Productions Summary/Review:
A decade after Halloween, John Carpenter made this even movie that feels even more low-budget. But I guess he wasn’t going to get a lot of money to make this odd satire of Reagan’s America (that somehow feels even more relevant in 2022).
The movie starts off at a comfortable slow pace with no real science fiction or horror elements. Drifter Nada (Roddy Piper doing a half-decent Kurt Russell impersonation) arrives in Los Angeles and finds work at a construction site and a place to stay at a shanty town adjacent to a church. Nada begins to suspect that the people in the church aren’t really running a church but before he can learn any more, the church and the homeless encampment are destroyed by the police. And honestly this scene is more scary than anything else in the movie because it so real.
Before fleeing the church, Nada takes a box of sunglasses and discovers that they help him see the world as it really is. Subliminal messages are everywhere telling people to consume, conform, and not question authority. Furthermore, there are skull-faced aliens living amongst humanity, and getting people to collaborate with them by giving them wealth and power. Nada instantly becomes a revolutionary.
Now, this movie has a leftist bent that coincides with my own political leanings, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that everything bad in the world is due to aliens. After all, conservatives have a lot of conspiracy theories blaming socialists, Jewish people, Muslims, LGBTQ people, you name for all that they see wrong in the world. Meanwhile some Democrats choose to believe that everything the Trump/MAGA types do is personally coordinated by Vladimir Putin. The truth is that there are a lot of assholes in humanity and a lot of assholishness within every human.
The thing that this movie really gets right is that through ignorance, indifference, or manipulation the assholes can get otherwise good people to fight each other. This is exemplified by the back alley fist fight between Nada and his only friend in L.A. Frank (Keith David) when he tries to get Frank to wear the glasses. The fight purportedly last six minutes, although it feels longer and gets at the futility of human nature.
Unfortunately, the final act of the movie isn’t as strong as everything that set it up. Perhaps because it’s more reliant on special effects the cheapness really shows. But the pacing also picks up and rushes too swiftly toward a resolution that doesn’t make much sense. I feel like the first hour would’ve made a great pilot for an ongoing TV show. Nevertheless, the legacy of this movie cannot be denied. The “OBEY” logos were adopted into Shepard Fairey’s street art, right down to the font, and the oft-quoted line “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum,” has it’s origin here.
Author: Ross Welford Title: Time Traveling with a Hamster Narrator: Bruce Mann Publication Info: Listening Library (2016) Summary/Review:
“My dad died twice. Once when he was thirty-nine, and again four years later when he was twelve. (He’s going to die a third time as well, which seems a bit rough on him, but I can’t help that.)”
Al Chaudhury is a nerdy 12-year-old growing up in the North of England who is off Indian and Welsh heritage. He lives with his mom, her boyfriend Steve with whom he doesn’t connect well, his goth half-sister Carly with whom he does not get along, and his genius Grandpa Byron. On his twelfth birthday, Al is given a letter written by his father Pye before his death four years earlier.
Al is tasked with finding his father’s time machine and traveling back to 1984 when the young Pye suffered an accident that would contribute to his early death decades later. Pye was unable to do it himself because the rules of time travel prevent the same person from appearing twice at the same time. In this very sweet story, Al makes several attempts to figure out the time machine and how to fix the past, while forming a bond with his father as a boy his own age. And yes, he travels with Alan Shearer, a pet hamster that was also a birthday gift.
I love time travel stories and really enjoyed this messy, heartfelt adventure even if it makes me feel old that traveling to 1984 is treated as the distant past. Grandpa Byron is a great character and reminds me of my own grandfather who tried to get me to read a book about learning memorization skills. And this is a light spoiler but I love that this is the only time travel story other than Back to the Future where changes in the past lead to a more positive future for the protagonist.
Title: Halloween Release Date: October 25, 1978 Director: John Carpenter Production Company: Compass International Pictures | Falcon International Productions Summary/Review:
I remember watching Halloween with my family on Halloween night on broadcast TV (which included extra scenes not in the theatrical release). If I remember correctly, it was 1983, meaning I was a few weeks short of turning ten years old, but regardless I was probably too young to be watching Halloween although it seemed like all my classmates had already seen it. Anyhow, it’s been a long time since I’ve been truly frightened by a horror movie and I oddly kind of miss that feeling.
Revisiting Halloween means sorting out the original movie from it’s legacy, both the endless sequels (I don’t believe that the current release Halloween Ends will actually be the end of the franchise) and the slasher film copycats that dominated the next decade of horror. As a young horror buff, I wasn’t drawn to following Michael Myers story as much as Friday the 13th (in retrospect an inferior franchise) and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
But on this re-watch there were three things that made Halloween really stand out as a classic of the horror genre:
The cinematography is excellent, starting from the tracking shot the opens the film and the POV shots that would be endlessly imitated.
John Carpenter’s score is terrific and is responsible for much of the menace in the first half of the film when there’s not actually any killing.
Jamie Lee Curtis is an excellent actor. Even though she’s still drawing a paycheck from Halloween sequels I don’t think I’m alone in not considering her “scream queen” era defining her career just because she’s been so good in so many different kinds of movie. And it starts here with Laurie Strode.
I also appreciate the effort the movie crew put into making Pasadena, California in April look like October in Illinois on a budget. Also, I remember liking Annie (Nancy Kyes) as a kid, and I still like her now. A lot like Rose McGowan’s Tatum in Scream, she’s the funny best friend who really needs to survive longer in the movie. If you haven’t watched Halloween in a long time like me, this week is a good time to do it!
Title: Train to Busan Release Date: July 20, 2016 Director: Yeon Sang-ho Production Company: Next Entertainment World | RedPeter Film Summary/Review:
Divorced workaholic investment banker Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) doesn’t have much time for other people, including his young daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an), but feels guilty enough to fulfill her wish to visit her mother for her birthday. They board the Korean Train Express (KTX) in Seoul for what should be a one hour journey to Busan. But their departure coincides with a massive zombie outbreak and unfortunately an infected person boards the train.
The infection spreads quickly among the passengers and crew. These zombies are fast than your typical movie zombies. But they are docile when they can’t actually see live humans and dumbfounded by darkness, such as when the train passes through tunnels. The uninfected passengers must work to gather themselves together in the same car and defend themselves against the zombies until they reach Busan which is purportedly secured by the military.
One of the things I like about the movie is that it feels like the disaster movies of the 1970s with the characters fitting into archetypal roles. There’s the high school baseball team with one girlfriend/cheerleader tagging along, the elderly sisters, the homeless man, the selfish business man, and the pregnant woman and her husband. These last two, Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi) and Yoon Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok), become key characters in the survival story and in Seok-woo’s transformation to becoming someone who is more caring for others.
The movie has a lot of scares and a relentless pace that makes it very exciting to watch. But it also has a lot of heart. The characters may start as archetypes but they definitely are fleshed out quickly as real people with real stories. The movie has a lot to say about humanity, negative and positive, even if there aren’t a lot of humans left by the end of the film. Perhaps the scariest part of this movie is that even in a zombie apocalypse the Korean rail system is better than the U.S. on a good day.
Title: Hocus Pocus Release Date: July 16, 1993 Director: Kenny Ortega Production Company: Walt Disney Pictures Summary/Review:
I was 19-years-old when Hocus Pocus was released to theaters in 1993, so I quickly judged it as “not for me.” But over the decades, the Millennial generation have made it loudly be known that this is a Halloween classic, so I figured I’d give it a try. The movie is very 1990s, sometimes painfully 1990s. And very Disney. And very sitcom-ish. And very 1990s Disney sitcom, although I should note once again it was released in theaters. And yet, despite the cringe moments, I found myself warming to the quirky charm of Hocus Pocus and its absolutely bonkers plot points.
Max (Omri Katz) is a teenager who just moved from California to Salem, Massachusetts and is having trouble fitting in. That the movie depicts the people of Massachusetts as obsessed with Halloween and prone to making fun of Max for being from Los Angeles are some of the most accurate parts of the movie (I’m also impressed that so much location shooting was done in the real Salem!).
On Halloween, Max reluctantly takes his little sister Dani (Thora Birch) trick-or-treating. Stopping at the house of Max’s crush Allison (Vinessa Shaw) the three decided to break into the shuddered historic house museum of the Sanderson sisters, three women executed for practicing witchcraft in 1693. Trying to impress Allison, Max accidentally casts the spell that brings back the Sanderson sisters – Winnifred (Bette Midler), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Mary (Kathy Najimy). With the help of Thackery Binx (Sean Murray), a colonial boy cursed by Winnifred to live in immortality as a talking cat (voiced by Jason Marsden), Max, Dani, and Allison must stop the Sandersons and save Salem.
This movie is a lot weirder than I thought. Midler is obviously having fun in her over-the-top performance as Winnifred. For my money, though, the MVP is Parker is almost always doing something bizarre around the edges of the shot (I’d forgotten how goofy Parker could be in her career before Sex and the City, although I haven’t seen any of her more recent work). Birch is also excellent in the sarcastic, cute kid role. And the great Doug Jones has a small part as the zombie Headless Billy.
This movie is a lot hornier than you’d expect for a Disney film. A key plot point is that Max is “still” a virgin at 15-years-old and everyone gives him a hard time for it! Also, a bus driver quips that he would be willing to impregnate all the Sanderson sisters. Not for nothing, there are also some scares in the movie, including a child being killed on screen within the first five minutes and a cat getting flattened by a bus. Still though, this is light comic fair for the most part, and I’m not surprised that a generation of kids could enjoy watching this every October on tv.
Title: The Phantom of the Opera Release Date: September 6, 1925 Director:Rupert Julian Production Company: Jewel Productions Summary/Review:
I have never seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera but through cultural osmosis I’m aware that the story is a great romance. In this 1925 film adaptation, there is a feint at a beauty and the beast type of romance, but settles on being a pure horror film. There’s really no doubt that Erik (Lon Chaney), the disfigured man who lives in the cellars below the Paris Opera, is supposed to be seen as a monster. While Erik has great facial makeup, designed by Chaney himself, what’s really creepy about him is his behavior. He mopes and he manipulates, he abducts the singer Christine (Mary Philbin) and when he doesn’t get his way he straight up kills people. Erik is essentially The Incel of the Opera.
I didn’t find this movie all to scary, but there are a lot of impressive shots and I enjoyed Chaney’s performance. I was also impressed by the set of the Paris Opera House. I know that they didn’t do much location shooting before the 1960s, but it really looks like they were in a large theater. Turns out that the set for the Opera House was one of the largest and most substantial sets built for a Hollywood movie up to that point (it used steel girders set in concrete). The set was built inside a building called Soundstage 28 on the Universal Studios lot where dozens of classic films were shot until the building was demolished in 2014! The Phantom set has been preserved and put in storage.
Some other details I liked about this movie:
the ballerinas do a pirouette every time they’re frightened
the owners of the Opera House selling it to new investors in the middle of a performance
Erik’s “Red Death” costume
Raoul (Norman Kerry) and Ledoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) holding one arm in the air as they search for Erik, like total dorks
the mob of angry Parisians is lead into the cellars by a cat!
Panorama of the Mountains 