Sleeper: It looks like Woody had some genuine fun doing a few futuristic sets and props and extrapolations for this 1973 “science fiction” version of his usual Woody comedy, but the jokes aren’t as funny as in Bananas. Except for the joke about where Woody is showing pictures of people from the 21st century and he says “this is Norman Mailer. He was a great writer. He donated his ego to Harvard for scientific study.” Nobody else around here has ever talked about this movie except for TonyV, who said it was shit. I think it’s pretty average.

Last Days: Gus Van Sant’s boring 2005 super-low-budget evocation of the final days of Kurt Cobain, here named “Blake” and played by Michael Pitt. I remembered a few shots from this film, and that Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth has a small acting role in it, and it’s probably not that far off from the “truth” of some poor famous drug addict drifting away to his boring demise, but I never liked the film and I like it even less now, because one scene that I thought was powerful (a scene where the camera slowly pulls away from Not-Cobain’s window while he hacks away at some grunge song he’s trying to write) didn’t even work this time, leaving me with pretty much nothing. This film doesn’t give the impression that it was very hard to make or that the person who made it, Van Sant, had a particularly great reason for doing so, or expended much talent in making it. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any Gus Van Sant film I like much. Is Drugstore Cowboy good?

Secret Honor: This is in the Criterion collection, which has given me the possibly false impression that it’s the only film Robert Altman made between 3 Women and The Player (a span of 15 years) that anyone really gives a shit about anymore, and even then, it’s not that widely talked about. I didn’t like it when I was 23 (my mom had a VHS copy in the basement) and I like it even less now that I’m 43. It’s Philip Baker Hall playing Richard Nixon alone in his study, drinking and cussing out imaginary enemies for 90 minutes. Meaning that there’s no reason to return to it–if you’ve seen any other critical depiction of Richard Nixon anywhere else (Anthony Hopkins, Frank Langella, Dan Aykroyd on SNL, any book about Nixon, etc.) then you’ve already seen this film, because there’s nothing in it that I know of that isn’t available in other, better things. I guess “humanizing” Nixon wasn’t all that common in 1984 either, but even then, give me Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning over this one-note bore any day.

Go: One of the bigger Pulp Fiction knockoffs from the late 90s, this one tried to hire a bunch of young hot-shit actors and a hip electronica soundtrack (and a number of scenes set in rave parties) to lure in the kids and form a Tarantino-like cult. I don’t think one ever really formed, but tell me if I’m wrong (it’s been 27 years, after all.) The characters in the movie are indeed mostly young and almost entirely unlikeable, just like I remembered, and in one case–the redhaired British guy who dominates the second act with his dumbass antics and screwups, played by an actor name Desmond Askew who I’ve never seen in anything else–completely loathsome, I can’t easily remember a case of a single character more thoroughly fucking up any good will I had for a single movie. I will probably never revisit this film ever again.

Love & Death: Another 70s Woody Allen film, this time a sort of riff on War & Peace, an excuse for Woody to do a period costume comedy. There’s a scene where Diane Keaton lectures Woody about when it’s okay to kill somebody that stuck in my head, but not much else; I did however recall thinking this was one of Woody’s five or six best movies, and that didn’t come through much at all this time; it’s a totally average film. This now cements Bananas as being the only pre-Annie Hall Woody film that I really like anymore, and the only one I’m likely to revisit ever again. This is a shame, I was really hoping to like revisiting this one, but it’s no better than Sleeper, Take The Money And Run or Everything You Always Wanted To Know etc. etc.

Time Bandits: The beginning of Terry Gilliam making Terry Gilliam Movies. Tick off the list: there’s lavish sets and glorious costumes and great-looking production design, there’s that children’s-classic-fantasy-storybook feel and plot and stunning visuals through and through, there’s dwarves, horses busting through a wall, hints of adult humor (but not too much), Monty Python members showing up, and of course, it’s all leading up to a lame-ass afterthought of an existential moral (you know, some half-assed shrug couched in a generic battle between good and evil) which gives you the sense that the glorious visual ideas came first and the point of the whole thing came a distant second, and one walks away thinking Terry Gilliam is really overrated except for the two movies by him that I still care for, Brazil and 12 Monkeys. I never got into this movie before and now it’s pretty well cemented that I never will; all I’ve ever really been able to remember from it after two previous viewings was Sean Connery showing up as Agamemnon and the bit at the end where Ralph Richardson shows up (it’s him that delivers the bland existential moral). The Robin Hood bit is really lame, but I will state (for the purpose of saying something nice) that the set-piece involving the cages hanging in jet-black darkness is a pretty nice one, so there’s that.

Platoon: Well, now we’re talking. I can’t envision a future when this doesn’t hold up, and it surely has. I once commented that it was a little too easy to sympathize with Elias (Willem Dafoe) over Barnes (Tom Berenger) and that Barnes has a serious scene where he discusses killing and death and all that that’s supposed to prevent him from being a cartoon character, but if he doesn’t, it’s just because Tom Berenger did a really good job. This is further cemented by how well Berenger handles the scene where Barnes flat-out murders Elias, which for some reason hadn’t stuck in my memory from any previous viewing. The My Lai scene is a better evocation of My Lai than any other Vietnam War movie scene that is obviously meant to evoke My Lai, I should also mention. It should be noted after winning Best Picture for this film, Oliver Stone would get, for better and worse (depending on the film), more and more bold and even hysterical, but his Vietnam combat movie actually seems fairly restrained by his standards.

1941: Steven Spielberg directs a zillion-dollar John Landis comedy, and Landis hadn’t even been given any big budgets yet. Yeah, really. That’s like if Bruce Springsteen had covered John Mellencamp in 1978 or something like that when Mellencamp was still getting awful reviews, instead of waiting until 1984 to do “Glory Days” in response to “Hurts So Good.” But that’s really what it is–an outlandish truckload of money spent on lavish World War II-era sets and costumes, overblown set pieces (the dance-hall scenes halfway through–holy shit!), a huge all-star cast (most of whom don’t stand out at all–the biggest star present was John Belushi and I feel pretty certain that most people have forgotten he was even in it!), an epic running time (146 minutes if you’re watching the director’s cut, which I did), and all for what?....content even shallower than most Landis films. But it really is Landis-like in terms of both content and feel–crude sexual humor, obvious parodies, childish slapstick, comedic fist-fights, lots of stuff being destroyed, like in Blues Brothers, which, again, hadn’t even come out yet. There’s one scene that I like, which involves Slim Pickens being held hostage in a Japanese submarine by Toshiro Mifune, no matter how broad it is. But if this isn’t Spielberg’s worst film (no way would I rather watch Hook) and I can’t quite hate it, it’s really only worth watching for those who like garish spectacle for garish spectacle’s sake. Which explains why most people have forgotten it.

Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: Should’ve bought a copy of this on DVD a long time ago. Still very funny through and through, with no joke more relevant nowadays than the best one, where John Cleese starts griping about how the “Judean Popular People’s Front” isn’t the same as the similarly-named revolutionary movement he’s part of. Second best gag is the Caesar figure with the lisp and everyone laughing at him (“we want Wodewick!”) Third best is when Graham Chapman as Brian gets into it with that nude bearded guy played by Michael Palin (who must have played 30 people in this movie) in the hole, who gets mad at him for stealing his hole. Ahhh, you all know this movie is great, I don’t need to discuss it anymore.

Breaking The Waves: If I’m not mistaken, this is when Lars von Trier started to get enough international attention and glowing critical reviews to become a serious filmmaking force, and I certainly remember all the hype about his “Dogme 95” movement being a thing around this time too. And then is when he became the big provocateur–right? Because for all the pain he puts his mentally retarded heroine (Emily Watson) through in this film, it honestly seems like von Trier is really being an “asshole” here. Which ties into my next point–one of the best things I can say for von Trier is that his big emotional scenes–like whenever Emily Watson has to scream in anguish–completely demolish similar piercing scenes in Oscar-bait trash like American Beauty or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and it takes a really skilled filmmaker to do that–maybe because of his grainy visuals and hand-held camera aesthetic helping out, who knows. Furthermore, he has a great sense for creating a lived-in quality via his film’s setting–it really seems like he knows that bleak coastal English town inside out along with everyone in it. And even better than that–not only did Emily Watson give a great breakout performance in this film, but she does so well that I forget any chance that von Trier is being manipulative by making her mentally retarded and childlike. There’s only one truly heavy-handed scene, and that’s when some sympathetic female character castigates the grim country vicars at the end of the film for condemning the Watson character to hell for being a prostitute (and those country vicars, for most of the film, had never quite crossed the line into being cartoon characters.) So yeah, I like this a lot better than any of the other von Trier films I saw, but I don’t consider it a masterpiece and won’t be purchasing it or anything, and why? For a more conventional reason: it’s probably 30-45 minutes too fucking long and I’m getting really fucking sick of 160 minute films.

Talk Radio: Oliver Stone directed this too, but it’s based on Eric Bogosian’s play (and Alan Berg’s life) and I think what we have on screen is every bit as much Bogosian’s as Stone’s, if not more, which marks it as a rare non-auteur Stone film. It’s still pretty in-your-face, with Bogosian’s shock-jock sarcasm-king character predicting not just Howard Stern but every Internet edgelord ever, even if this film’s 1988 release date meant that his character would have to come across as an adult through and through, unlike all the douchebags we see in the news every day. Which he does, so the film is both dated and relevant at the same time. The problem with it is that about 20-30 minutes could have easily been chopped out of it, a bunch of scenes lamely involving the Bogosian character’s back story and a bunch of troubles he’s having with his ex-wife. Fuck that shit!!! All this movie needed were all the scenes of Bogosian fighting with people on the air. On that level, it’s still really good.

Soylent Green: This movie sucks my death, bros. I never remembered much of it anyway aside from some depressing, dust-filled shots of the overpopulated future New York City of 2022 with 40 million people milling around in the streets, and of course, the final line, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOPLE!!!!” But it barely does anything with its science fiction concept beyond that; really, the movie’s soul resides almost entirely in that final line. What it really is, is a crappy second-rate detective story couched in a bleak future world, and the details of that story are likely remembered by very few today. There’s a nifty shot of some riot police being pressed through glass windows back onto the broken glass by mobs of people that made me cringe with pain, but a subsequent scene of a villain shooting a woman in the head and her screaming like she stubbed her toe is really bad. Charlton Heston looks really bored, too. I’d rather watch the old SNL sketch with Chris Farley and Phil Hartman (playing Heston) where he goes “They didn’t change the recipe like they said they would. IT’S STILLLLLLL PEEEEEEEEOOOPPPLLEEEE!!!!“