Tara and Andrew Versus The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide

So for this episode we've decided to take a brief break from the normal routine-- with the string of movies we've been picking lately, can you blame us? And when we say "we", we of course mean "mostly Andrew". Get it together, dude. Get. It. Together. 

Instead of talking about a movie that we selected randomly from the Scarecrow Movie Video Guide, in this episode we're talking about a bunch of movies that we deliberately chose to watch over the course of the 4 weeks that the Seattle International Film Festival takes place. Here are the trailers for the movies that we saw, in alphabetical order:

American Animals

A Prayer Before Dawn

Crime + Punishment

(couldn't find a trailer, but here's the link to the website-- we both liked this one a lot!)

Dead Pigs

The Devil's Doorway

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil

First Reformed

The Guilty

Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse

Lots of Kids, a Monkey, and a Castle

Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts

Moomins and the Winter Wonderland

The Most Unknown

Pick of the Litter

Pig

Prospect

Revenge

Ruin Me (don't let all of those award emblems fool you-- this movie was baaaaaaaaaaaad)

Three Identical Strangers

Under the Tree

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

whew. As an added bonus, as promised in the podcast, here's a link to the really great/horrible episode of Locked Up Abroad that we briefly discuss:

Joe Dirt is a 2001 movie about a guy, played by David Spade, who the movie just loooooooooves to shit on, literally and figuratively. He's abandoned by his family, constantly made fun of by Kid Rock and other various creeps, and is exploited by a shock-jock radio host (Dennis Miller, playing what seems to be an only slightly exaggerated version of himself). It's full of ideas and jokes that for the most part either miss the mark or which haven't held up well now, some seventeen years later. Somehow, between all of the poop jokes and casual homophobia, David Spade manages to eke out a likable performance and land three or four legitimately funny jokes that salvage this from being an utter trainwreck of a movie. We never thought we would be saying this, but Kid Rock isn't terrible in this movie. Put that on the poster! Sure, that means that someone will have to go back in time and talk to the people in charge of advertising this movie, but stranger things have happened-- Kid Rock not being terrible in this movie, for example. It's a strange world that we live in!

Well, someone certainly thinks highly of their obsession, don't they? Granted, "A Pretty Good Obsession" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but c'mon, show a little humility, will you? The answer, of course, is no. Magnificent Obsession is a movie based on a book written by a minister back in the late 1920's that was pretty popular but, by most accounts, not actually very good. That didn't stop Hollywood from making it into a movie twice, though (why would it?). 

The plot of the movie centers around Bob Merrick, played by Rock Hudson, who is some rich dickhead who races motorboats around poorly at implausible speeds. He causes the death of the head doctor of the town's hospital after he gets into a boating accident and hogs up the hospital's resuscitator while the aforementioned doctor is dying of a heart attack, and quickly follows that up by accidentally blinding the doctor's widow in his efforts to prove that he's not a total piece of garbage. And look, that's not how either of us would try to make amends, but you have to bear in mind that the 1950's were a very different time. We've begun to make some real good, meaningful societal changes over the last few years, but we've still got a long ways to go before we can recognize blinding the widow of the man you inadvertently killed as a valid means of reparations. Someday, though. Someday. 

Anyone who has watched a ton of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, as we have, will be familiar with Gamera's stupid turtle face. For those not in the know, he's a gigantic flying, fire-breathing turtle monster who fights other giant monsters, and who allegedly is a friend to all children, although that seems like that might be more kids projecting than anything else. There's been twelve or so movies in the Gamera series, and Space Monster Gamera is close to being the movie equivalent of a sitcom clip show, repackaging fight scenes from previous entries and tying them together with a story about a trio of space women and a ten year old organist fighting an evil space woman and her alien overlord boss who wants to enslave the earth. It's a tale as old as time itself!

Is there anything more compelling than the idea of a writer for the hit mid-to-late 80's cat-eating focused sitcom ALF struggling with a heroin addiction? The answer to that question is, of course, yes, almost certainly there is. BUT, but but but, it's still a really crazy thing to think about, right? The answer to that question is, of course, a non-committal shrug of your shoulders. Permanent Midnight is the movie adaptation of an autobiography written by Jerry Stahl that covers the years he spent writing for television shows while strung out on all sorts of different drugs. In spite of this, it somehow manages to be underwhelming and doesn't even really manage to clear the low bar of serving as an anti-drug PSA. Great job, Hollywoo!

Other things in this episode:

• Andrew briefly talks about how one of the writers for the Muppet Babies cartoon was a Scientologist and tried to loosely work some of its teachings into an episode. It's hard to find much on the internet about this anymore, but here's a message board post that has a couple of brief excerpts from the interview with the writer. Praise Xenu!
• We talk about the new indie-horror movie The Endless. We both liked it a lot, and you should go see it. Here's a trailer:

Hey, how do you feel about movies about corporate espionage? Anywhere from ambivalent to interested, right? Hold on to that thought. Now, how do you feel about hentai? Don't worry, that's more of a rhetorical question, no one needs to know how you feel about hent-- you what? oooooooooookaaaaayyyy...

Anyway, for the rest of you, what would you say to a movie that combines those two things? Sounds like a pretty bad and/or insane combination, right? That is, for some reason, exactly what Demonlover sets out to depict. Two corporations are fighting for the rights to help produce / distribute the first 3-D CGI hentai, because that's the exact sort of hot commodity that the public is clamoring for, champing at the bit, if you will. Except not really-- the underlying premise of Demonlover is totally preposterous, and to be fair, having a preposterous premise for a movie isn't necessarily a bad thing. Swiss Army Man is pretty fucking preposterous, but it's easy to suspend disbelief because of how smart it is in its execution.

Demonlover is no Swiss Army Man. `nuff said.

The answer probably won't surprise you.

Pink Flamingos is John Water's 1972 epic about the battle between Divine and a couple, the Marbles, for the title of the Filthiest Person/People Alive. And boy oh boy, do they do their damnedest to earn that title. Generally speaking, we're not prudes or easily offended, and yet when Tara picked this movie our gut reactions both externally (Tara) and internally (Andrew) were "oh shit". Appropriate! There is one particular scene from the movie whose reputation preceded it, and word of that scene alone had served as enough of a deterrent for the both of us. If you've seen Pink Flamingos or know anything about it, you know what we're talking about. If you haven't... well, you're going to hear about it when you listen to the episode! You're going to hear a lot about it! And as it turns out, as traumatic as that scene is to watch, there are a few other scenes in the movie that are equally as difficult to watch, if not more so. Pink Flamingos is a movie that shows up in several "[x] Movies You Need to See Before You Die" lists, and we pity the fools who walk into it blind after watching Citizen Kane or Casablanca or Dunston Checks In.

(as a side note, we struggled a little bit with which pronouns we should use when talking about Divine, and settled on using feminine pronouns while discussing the character in the movie, and male pronouns while discussing the actor-- apologies in advance if we fucked up!)

Destry Rides Again is a 1939 western-comedy starring Marlene Dietrich and what was then a still up-and-coming James Stewart. It's named after a movie from 1932 which was itself based on a book written by Max Brand, a Seattle-born author, and was the basis for a nearly scene-for-scene remake that was made in 1954 for some godforsaken reason. This movie bares shocking little resemblance to the book that it's named after, and the filmmakers try to skirt around this by claiming that James Stewart's character is the son of the original Destry, but honestly, who cares?

Both of us were cautiously optimistic, having had a good experience with the previous James Stewart-starring western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Our optimism generally tends to be cautious in our everyday lives, but it's proven to be a necessity for the purposes of this podcast-- the more enthusiastic we are about a movie going in, the more disappointed we've usually ended up feeling. Is Destry Rides Again an exception, or does it further prove the rule? Who can say? You can, if you listen to this episode! What an exciting adventure you have in front of you!

In this episode we watch Jafar Panahi's 2000 film, The Circle, which is about the stories of several different women living on their own in Iran. It's pretty bleak, although it never reaches the same depths of grimness that we encountered when we watched Lilya 4-Ever way back in our second episode, thank fuck. As we discuss in the episode, Panahi leaves nearly every story unresolved, but the movie doesn't suffer for it. It's a very interesting movie, and Panahi's career and the things that he's had to do to get his movies made at all are equally interesting, and at the risk of revealing our opinions on the movie before you listen to the episode, it made us want to seek out the other movies he's made, which doesn't happen often for us.

Also, perceptive listeners may note that both of us sound hoarse and sick still-- sorry about that! Most of the coughs and death rattles have been edited out for your listening pleasure. You're welcome!

NEXT TIME: we watch... get this... a movie of some sort! Pretty wild, right?

(or: "If the Octopus Doesn't Get Ya, The Spider Will")