I am all over the map again this month. Tried to keep it short; let me know if it’s too short.
RadishFlix on YouTube
2024 on the IMDB
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
Speaking of “cult”, the fourth (and weakest, IMO) movie in the franchise; we follow Caesar, the talking chimpanzee born at the end of the previous film, as he organizes his city’s apes in rebellion against the humans in a thinly-disguised take on the Civil Rights Movement. The cars and clothes of 1991 look a lot like 1971, apes’ evolution was too advanced to be plausible, and the battle scenes went on a little long, but there are some clever twists.
The real star is the campus of the University of California, Irvine, a “futurist” concrete wasteland where the exterior scenes were filmed.
The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962)
YouTube, original English
Sometimes you just need to see people get hit in the face with a pie. Some of the gags seemed to be recycled from Have Rocket — Will Travel, but who cares?
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
The fifth and last of the series, and it ends well. Mr Radish thought the battle scenes were too contrived.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
I think I saw this once on an airplane, but I’d forgotten how it ended. It’s another live-action cartoon, with with lots of comedy cameos, brilliant colors, and improbable situations. Relaxing evening on the couch.
Plan A (2021)
arte, Deutsch
arte aired this Bavaria-Israeli joint production based on a true story about Holocaust survivors seeking revenge last September. I didn’t have time to watch it before the mass murders of October 7; after that it was hard to get into the mood. I still wasn’t in the mood, but I needed the DVR space and I didn’t want to delete it unwatched…
Auschwitz survivor Max was kept alive as a slave, but his wife and son were shot into a mass grave after the family was betrayed by a neighbor who wanted their house. Upon returning home, he falls in with a group of British Jewish soldiers (natives of the British territory of Palestine, AKA Israel) tasked with bringing justice to those who actively took part in the genocide. He helps them out, then falls in with a group planning to poison the water supplies of several major cities. The Brits convince him to help them disrupt the plan.
There are two endings, the first is an hallucination. I hate that. This was a serious film, and y’all just Wayne’s World-ed it.
As a tangent, a main plot point is the work that had to be done to restore the public water system of Nuremberg after the main facility was destroyed by Allied bombings (FAFO). It was a massive reconstruction project, all done with human power. Something else to keep me up at night, worrying about the water system.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
arte, Deutsch
I was going to write “everything I said the last time I watched it (2022)”, but I didn’t write anything. And now I must suffer.
Absoluter Klassiker with Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and Claude Rains. I first saw it on an airplane, en route to Montreal, and laughed so hard I frightened the women in my row from Saskatchewan. It’s all the clichés–tights, veils, giant chunks of meat, chase music–but this does not make it less enjoyable. It’s live-action Bugs Bunny! (Poseidon says Flynn was commando under those tights. Decide for yourself.)
The costumes were all anachronistic, but glorious. There may not have been a rhinestone left in all of California.
Scarlet Street (1945)
arte Mediathek, original English
The last of arte’s Film Noir mini-fest, and the one I enjoyed the most. Outsider art is a main plot point. I really like Edgar G. Robinson.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
arte, Deutsch
Of course I was comparing Kirk Douglas’ Doc Holliday to Val Kilmer’s throughout the whole film. Douglas does a better job of portraying Holliday more accurately as an abusive asshole. But the focus of this classic Western, the second of seven films Douglas made with Burt Lancaster, is male friendship. It was probably better in English, and it’s a very male film, but it had really good music.
Hey, look!: Youngest brother Morgan Earp was played by Star Trek’s Bones.
Mr. Jones (2019)
arte Mediathek, original/Deutsch
F’n arte, man. “Original English” was half in Russian, with only French subtitles available, so I had to switch back and forth to German, which also only had French subtitles available. I may have missed some subtleties in the dialog, but it’s about the Holodomor, and Walter Duranty and the New York Times getting paid by Stalin to lie about it to trick the US government into recognizing the Soviet Union for purposes of trade relations, so it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on.
The titular character is Gareth Jones, a Welsh advisor to Lloyd George who snuck into Ukraine from Moscow to learn the truth. The film shows his trip, his struggle to get it reported, and the aftermath. (There is also an entertaining scene where Jones tells George that Hitler’s gearing up for war, and the whole meeting room laughs at him.) Interspersed are scenes of George Orwell writing Animal Farm after meeting with Jones and reading his report.
Very well-made, and a story that absolutely needs to be told to wide audiences in this century, but–and I know wrote this about the The Promise just a few months ago–you can feel good about having watched it, but if you are a decent human being you cannot feel good while watching it. There is a scene where a screaming baby clutching his dead mother is picked up out of the snow on the side of the road, taken into the next town, and left with a family eating a soup made of tree bark. Contrast to the scenes of the drug- and sex-orgies at Duranty’s luxury accommodations in Moscow.
The scary part is how *current* this movie feels.
(The Times still maintains they did nothing wrong by accepting a Pulitzer prize for printing lies paid for by a genocidal tyrant. FWIW.)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Netflix, original English
Palate cleanser, from the My Parents Steadfastly Refused To Let Me Watch Anything All My Peers Were Watching Collection. (I probably could have rented it as an adult when the second sequel was released, but I had a lot of other stuff going on that year.) Anyway, it’s a bit of a time capsule these days, but I enjoyed it. Great soundtrack. Laughed when I was supposed to. Loved the chase scene at the beginning.
Curious: There’s a female lead, but no romance. No obligatory sex scene that doesn’t advance the story. The past is a different planet.
Strange Brew (1983)
YouTube, original Canadian
Probably an illegal upload, the ending credits are cut off, but good enough, eh. The first time I saw this movie, in 2007 or thereabouts (hi, Dean, take off, eh), I thought it was stupid, eh. It’s still stupid, but now that I’m all internationally conversant with Fassbinder and stuff, I appreciate it, eh. It’s funny, it’s well-made, and doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not, eh. The McKenzie Brothers try to scam free beer from the Elsinore Brewery, and get sucked into a contemporary retelling of Hamlet, complete with ghost (Ophelia survives, eh, thanks to Bob McKenzie’s love of beer), and a creepy “testing mind-control drugs on insane-asylum inmates” subplot, eh.
Also they got that hose-head Max von Sydow to play the villain (bringing all the weight and meaning of The Exorcist into this movie, eh), and the hockey-player love interest looks familiar because he’s Gold Leader, eh.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
arte, Deutsch/Spanish
Another one of those “absolute classics” that bored me to bits, although at least this time it was the John Huston’s fault half the dialog wasn’t in the advertised language. I did enjoy looking at Tim Holt.
The Gumball Rally (1976)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
B-comedy about an illegal secret car race across the US–the previous record was 34.11 hours. Lots of jokes about Carter’s national speed limit, some nice crashes, some good slapstick. A lawman from NY follows them across the country, trying to arrest them in different states; I have questions about the legality, but it provides a lot of humor. Mr Radish enjoyed seeing all the cars–two elderly gentlemen run in an old Mercedes–and I…honestly, it was stupid, but enjoyably so. Strange Brew-level.
All of the actors looked vaguely familiar from their one episode of 70s and 80s TV shows; Raul Julia played an Italian Lothario, and of course Gary Busey was recognizable from his teeth. The guy in the green Castrol jacket? He’s the guy from the meme.
Of course, now we have to rummage up Cannonball Run.
The Usual Suspects (1995)
arte Mediathek, original English
Another one of those “absolute classics” that bored me to bits, and there wasn’t even anyone to enjoy looking at. I found myself thinking, “I should have listened to that archived broadcast of the the Brewers losing 15-3 instead.” FWIW.
Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
Cable (Warner Film), original English
[Opening credits roll]
Me: “Ooh, Jason Patric.”
Mr Radish: “Do you know who that is, or do you just like to say ‘ooh’ and shout names every time we watch a movie?”
Me: “He was in The Lost Boys.”
Mr Radish: *grantles*
[Opening credits continue]
Me: “OOH! Michael Hutchence!”
Mr Radish: *grantles again*
Me: “You don’t know Michael Hutchence?!?”
Mr Radish: *grantling intensifies*
Hehehehe.
The premise was interesting–a scientist (John Hurt) who has accidentally created a monstrous weapon gets sent by it back in time to 1817 in a K.I.T.T-esque sports car (how he got from California to Switzerland, which is a completely different latitude, was not discussed) and meets one Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia), picking up the story just after the Monster murders his brother and lets the housemaid take the fall. He also meets Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Bridget Fonda, unconvincingly), Lord Byron (Patric), and Percy Shelley (Hutchence, sadly only one scene), and I would have liked to spend more time in a story universe where Godwin Shelley’s book is non-fiction.
Unfortunately, after the unplausible but apparently obligatory sex scene between Mary and middle-aged future scientist, the film devolved into a rubber-prosthetics/fake blood-spray B-horror film, and instead of being thoughtfully scared we laughed ourselves silly. Sigh.
In the end, the scientist wanders the frozen wasteland alone (not a spoiler, you should have read the book in a college lit course yonks ago.)
Next time, more Jason Patric.
