Watching Movies Mar 8

A sub/dom romance told from the sub's point of view that keeps Skarsgard's dom character at arm's length and shows that devotion and obedience is not equal to love. While I appreciated exploring this unconventional relationship, I would have liked to have learned even more about the subculture and the other characters in it, and more about the barbershop quartet.

My favorite comedy of the decade. 

Armando Iannucci series about an interplanetary space cruise led by Hugh Laurie that dives right into the middle of things with little setup or explanation and takes a while for the mostly forced cringe humor to really click. I wasn't overly-enamoured with it, but they seem to have spent a fortune on sets and extras. It looks amazing for a British TV series.

I never saw the movie (or any of the Saturday Night Live stuff where this apparently started) but the series was highly rated so I gave it a shot. It's an amusing action movie spoof with an overemphasis on crude jokes and not enough wit to carry it off (the basic difference between British and American humor). Will Forte is good, Laurence Fishburne isn't funny, and Kristen Wiig makes it all bearable. 

Apparently if you soak your film stock in testosterone, it turns everything brown, and this is the brownest movie ever made. Walter Hill's macho remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo is set in a Texas border town during prohibition. There's a lot of name dropping so it's hard to follow who is who and whom they keep referring to, but it boils down to Bruce Willis playing both sides of two rival gangs. It helps if you already know Yojimbo, which also takes a bit of figuring out. The overly dusty western town and Hill's typical truck commercial photography makes it western noir fantasy world that's almost a Lynchian dream. It's the kind of dad movie you stumble on at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep and in that context it's perfect. I guess you could say that about most Walter Hill films. 

Poor Albert! This post-series TV movie has Albert Ingalls dying from a blood disease just as he's about to enter college. The heavy subject doesn't leave a lot of room for humor, which is mostly handled by a corny school kid crush. The wholesomeness is palpable. I didn't realize how involved Michael Landon was in all of this. He wrote, produced, and directed multiple episodes of Little House, Bonanza, and Highway to Heaven. The guy was amazing.

This is a B-western with a tiny budget that's directed like a TV show, but none of that matters if you have a great script by a blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. It's an angry tale of tyranny and oppression by a writer who was experiencing it, and the storytelling is sharp if a little histrionic. Sterling Hayden is great as a Swedish immigrant with a bad accent, but the story spends a lot of time with its villain, terrifically played by Ned Young (who wrote The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind). 

One of the better Laurel and Hardy shorts, where the comedic duo opens an electrical supply store and gets into a tussle with a neighboring business. Co-starring Mae Busch, who looks exactly like Teri Garr. Funny stuff!

​My first Max Linder comedy is an Airplane-styled spoof of The Three Musketeers (after the Douglas Fairbanks version from the year before) with a lot of great gags packed into a brief hour. I'll be watching more of his films.