Tag: movies

Movie review: The Life Of Chuck

based on a Stephen King novella

The description of the movie  The Life of Chuck on IMDb: “A life-affirming, genre-bending story based on Stephen King’s novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz.” The movie starts with Act Three, and the characters in the film wonder, Who IS this guy, Chuck?

One gets a sense of Chuck as portrayed by four actors: Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak, and Cody Flanagan. It also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carl Lumbly, Mark Hamill, and Mia Sara as his grandparents, and Karen Gillan as perhaps his last dance partner, who also gave fine performances. 

All that said, I don’t know how to review it without wrecking it utterly. One fan reviewer: “I want to leave my critique relatively vague as I believe the hook of the film works best going in without knowing much.” I did like it a lot. 

Here’s a meh (5/10) fan review on IMDb that actually gets to the crux:  “If you like movies that make you think about life, that make you contemplate existence, you will very much enjoy this. I personally don’t normally go for movies like that… but I would say The Life of Chuck is about as good as they come.”

Untidy

Diane Cameron, whom I know, wrote on Facebook: “Now, if you are the kind of person who needs to know what a work of art means, or what a poem means, or have a satisfying tidy feeling after a movie, skip ‘Chuck’. It will make you crazy. But if you like questions more than answers, and fabulous actors and some great dancing, and maybe to chew on a movie for a few days, then ‘Chuck’ is your next movie.” I’ll buy that. 

Another reviewer wrote, “I left the film feeling a mix of joy and melancholy and appreciated the artistry that brought me there.” This is also true.

 On Rotten Tomatoes, it received an 82% positive rating from critics and an 88% positive rating from fans. Mick LaSalle wrote, “The movie is maudlin and pessimistic and features a mildly sardonic voiceover narration by Nick Offerman that only serves to distance us from the action.” Well, no, on every count.

Ruth Maramis, by contrast, noted: “This poignant existential drama doesn’t just spoon-feed you everything but leaves room for interpretation as we connect its profound themes to our own experiences. Great seeing Hiddleston flaunt his killer dance moves.” Yeah, that.

See it if you’re not looking for tidiness. My wife and I saw The Life Of Chuck at the Spectrum 8 in Albany on the evening of June 27; the theater was 3/4 full. 

Sunday Stealing is F.A.B. again

Ringo, Linda, Carlos, Alison, and Mick

Welcome to Sunday Stealing.

Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Since it’s the 4th of July weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. We stole this from a blogger named Idzie, who called this the F.A.B. (film, audio, book) meme, so we’re F.A.B. again.

Movies

F. Film: What movie or TV show are you watching?

On Monday, my wife and I visited the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the comedy Caddyshack. Neither of us had ever seen it before, but we heard that it was very popular in 1980 when it came out. We were mostly unimpressed. Chevy Chase’s character was somewhat interesting, and Rodney Dangerfield was funny for a while, but Bill Murray seemed to be in another movie. I had to start looking at why so many find the film beloved.

The Wikipedia post was helpful: “The film was met with underwhelming reviews in its original release, with criticism towards the disorganized plot, though Dangerfield’s, Chase’s, and Murray’s comic performances were well received. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, ‘Caddyshack feels more like a movie that was written rather loosely, so that when shooting began, there was freedom—too much freedom—for it to wander off in all directions in search of comic inspiration.'” If you’ve ever talked with a person who’s stoned, you’re not, and they think everything is hysterical? That may be this movie.

Harold Ramis, a first-time film director, noted that “In the DVD documentary, TV Guide had originally given the film two stars (out of four) when it began showing on cable television in the early 1980s, but over time, the rating had gone up to three stars.” Maybe it’s better with repeated viewing.

Music

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

This being July, some of the birthdays are those of Ringo Starr, Linda Ronstadt, Carlos Santana, Alison Krauss, Mick Jagger, and Jim Stewart. So I’ll play Linda, Santana, and the Rolling Stones. Who’s Jim Stewart? He co-founded the legendary STAX Records with his sister Estelle Axton. I also play a lot of compilations of Beatles covers, and I have many of them.

Photograph – Ringo Starr

Telling Me Lies -The Trio (Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris)

Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen – Santana

Maybe – Alison Krauss

I Am Waiting – The Rolling Stones

Green Onions – Booker T. and the MG’s

You Can’t Do That – Harry Nilsson

Text

B. Book: What are you reading?

My friend Fred Hembeck wrote so kindly about former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who died recently at age 73, regarding Fred’s participation in the Fantastic Four Roast and Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe, I thought I’d read the book The Marvel Universe According to Hembeck.

Please come back next week.

Movie review: SINNERS

Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan

Admittedly, I was wary about seeing the movie SINNERS.  I can be a bit squeamish when it comes to a film described as vampire horror.  My friend Steve Bissette had recommended it when he saw it in April, but that type of film is more in his wheelhouse.

Then my daughter, likewise squeamish, viewed it in Cape Town, South Africa, in June, just before returning to the States. She said I had to see it because it was about the black experience in America, and it was about music.

So I went to the Madison Theatre near my home on the hottest day of the year, Primary Day – they have $5 films on Tuesdays! – while my wife, the most squeamish of the three of us, saw another flick at the same venue.

How do I describe this film? The IMDb notes: “Trying to leave their troubled lives behind [in Chicago], twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown [in 1930s Mississippi] to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.”

That doesn’t tell you much. Bissette wrote: “A rip-roaring fusion of masterful visual storytelling and toe-tapping music, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s first original blockbuster reveals the full scope of his singular imagination.

“Wildly primal, big and bold, fueled by pain and rage, by community and family, throbbing with love and sex and joy, infused with magic. A sumptuously textured, unmissable howl of a passion project.”
It’s about time
Someone named Corey Creekmur commented on Bissette’s Facebook page: “It’s such a rich sequence. It seems to be drawing upon African models of time, occult notions of time (such as the way vampires move outside of human time and share memories), and rich notions of musical and cultural continuity across eras. (It seems evocative of Sun Ra and George Clinton’s mystical, time and space traveling visions.) It’s dazzling in any case.”

Oh, it’s Afrofuturism, at least in part, which does not become clear to me until near the end.

It was well-acted by all involved. The scenes with the twins, Smoke and Stack, looked realistic. Special kudos to Miles Caton, who is all of 20, for playing the pivotal role of Sammie. And the music is excellent; I have, of all things, Rocky Road to Dublin, stuck in my head.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews were 97% positive among critics and 96% positive among audiences. Some suggested that at 137 minutes, it was about 15 minutes too long. But I think the time built up the tension and better established the characters.

An audience reviewer on a site thought the vampires were silly, rather than scary-looking. I thought that was the point. The vampire’s life was alluring at some level.

Bissette is right about this: “if (and oh, you should) you catch SINNERS in the theater, be advised NOT to leave when the first of the final credits appears…

“The real ending to the film is mid-way through the final credits” (at least three of the dozen and a half folks in my theater left too early and missed Buddy Guy!), “and after the credits crawl conclude, a sublime post-credits sequence that sent me out of my seat positively elated follows” (I was in an otherwise empty theater.)

Hello! My Name Is Blotto: The Movie!

Bowtie, Broadway, Cheese, Sergeant, Lee Harvey, Blanche, Chevrolet, et al.

I had a deep-seated NEED to see the documentary Hello! My Name Is Blotto: The Movie! Here’s the trailer.

At this point, I need to explain what Blotto was. Initially, several of the members were part of the Star Spangled Washboard Band in the 1970s, starting off in Lake George, NY. They achieved a modicum of fame, even appearing on The Mike Douglas Show, which was a big deal. (John and Yoko co-hosted the show in 1972.)

Then, the SSWB disbanded and, through some alchemy, became Blotto, with the members all having the same last name, a la the Ramones. They created a song, “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard.” The Albany-based group received airplay from WNEW in NYC and other stations in the Northeast and beyond.  They had achieved a modicum of fame.

A new entity called Music Television was created in 1981. The folks at MTV wanted to know if Blotto had a video. A few months earlier, a couple of college kids working on their final project offered to make a short film of Lifeguard, which aired as the 36th video to play on MTV on August 1 of that year. And Lifeguard had a new life.

They toured incessantly, releasing some singles and the album Combo Akimbo, which had a great cover designed by the late, great John Caldwell. That album included I Quit.

FantaCo, the comic book store I worked at for much of the 1980s, carried their music partly because we were all part of the city’s arts scene. I got to know some of the guys. (We ended up at a restaurant in Troy after Raoul Vezina’s funeral in November 1983.)

But the music industry didn’t know how to categorize them. Blotto was not a comedy group, though there were comedic elements. Metal Head, for instance, annoyed some, er, metal heads, even though it featured Buck Dharma of Blue Öyster Cult.  Incidentally, there’s a funny story about a biker’s helmet.

Now what?

Eventually, they played less often and got “grown-up” jobs, such as Paul Rapp (drummer F. Lee Harvey) attending law school and becoming an intellectual property attorney.

Sarge (Greg Haymes) became a writer covering the music scene, primarily for the Albany Times Union and the Nippertown website. I would see him all over the area until his untimely death from cancer. I attended his funeral at the Egg, the first time I’d seen Broadway (Bill Polchinski, a social worker) in years.

Oh, the movie! I forgot. It was great! Lee Harvey, Broadway, and Bowtie (Paul Jossman, who got into computers) were the core conversants, along with Blanche (actor/director Helena Binder). There were old interviews with Sarge and Cheese (Keith Stephenson, who died in 1999).

The film featured familiar faces such as Jim Furlong (Last Vestige Records, and member of the music group the A.D.’s –Livin’ Downtown), Vinnie Birbiglia of the club J.B. Scott’s, and MTV VJ Martha Quinn.

I wish I could have gone to the world premiere at the Cohoes Music Hall, but I was out of town for a wedding. So when it was announced that it would be shown at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, I was there for the Monday 3 p.m. show, the second of a two-week run. There will be others.

Blotto put Albany on the national music map and supported other local bands in the 1980s.

Movie review: 1946

What if the word “homosexual” was never meant to be in the Bible?

On Sunday night, May 4, I attended a showing of the 2022 film 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted A Culture. It was shown at the nearby Madison Theatre, sponsored by the Spirit Committee of the Pride Center of the Capital Region. The movie “investigates how the word ‘homosexual’ was mistakenly added to the Bible in 1946 through expert interviews, archival research, and personal stories. This documentary challenges long-held assumptions and opens the door for honest healing dialogue about scripture, sexuality, and belonging.”

The movie is part biography/autobiography. Director Rocky Roggio is “an independent filmmaker and production designer.” Rocky is also a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and “moved out of her home after coming out to her conservative, religious parents. Rocky’s father, Sal Roggio, is a non-affirming pastor who preaches that the LGBTQIA+ lifestyle is sinful.” Rocky and Sal are in conversation throughout the film.

What a find!

The film is also part investigative journalism. Ed Oxford, a Graduate of Talbot Seminary, is a gay Christian and “a researcher in how the Bible has been weaponized against LGBTQ people.” He is greatly aided by his hero, Kathy Baldock, author, LGBTQ advocate, international speaker, and educator, and Executive Director of CanyonWalker Connections. She is “a leading expert on LGBTQ issues in the United States, especially dealing with historical and current discrimination faced from the socially conservative Christian church and political sector.” Ed and Kathy have fascinating story arcs before their big find in the archives of Yale University.

Their sleuthing led them to David S. “In 1959, a young, gay seminary student named David wrote a letter to the head of the Revised Standard Version biblical translation team challenging the RSV’s use of the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. David wrote: ‘I write… because of my deep concern for those who are wronged and slandered by the incorrect usage of this word./” Here’s an interview between Kathy Baldock and David S., after an intro by Ed Oxford that explains the find; a bit of the footage is in the movie.

Reviews

The ten reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes were positive. Jennie Kermode wrote:  “This isn’t a film which sets itself up in opposition to Christianity – quite the opposite. Several of its participants speak of how amazed they were when they first came across the concept of gay Christians and realised that they didn’t have to choose, whether the concern was their own sexuality or their support for LGBTQ+ friends. One expresses horror at the way that a homophobic stance has driven good people away from the Church. There is a strong implication that another began questioning the Bible after finding it impossible to reconcile with the idea of a loving God.”

After the movie, there were brief discussions with people around us about how the film made us feel. At some level, it was positive. But as the film itself notes, something that was a mistranslation of the Greek a few decades ago has been baked into current conservative theology. Finding the corrections may not alter the demonization of queer people in some Christian churches, which makes it more important to stand for inclusiveness in “progressive” churches.    

I understand that there will be another showing in Albany in a few months. If you do such things, you may rent or buy the movie on Amazon.

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