by ·Comments Off on Megalopolis (2024, Francis Ford Coppola)

Once again an online review affected the viewing experience, and I spent much of this movie giggling at its “Cheesecake Factory aesthetic.” I had a good time watching this with my bottle of Coppola wine, and since it is (more or less) the American Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, I’m going to use the same approach and just post the notes I took while watching it:

Julia out partying, someone who isn’t her dad picks her up, Claudio is hanging round her, ah her dad is Mayor Cicero, she can see Adam’s time stoppage
LOL at the dialogue
Laurence tells us an empire begins to die when its people no longer believe in it, uh oh
Rich banker Crassius’s son is Claudio, those girls are his sisters the Claudettes, he’s hot for ’em
Mayor’s daughter Julia is a big part of this

Vesta wears invisible dress Cesar invented
Doddering super-rich uncle Voight is marrying Wow, is Cesar’s uncle
Shia is good in this, schemes to show vid of Cesar in bed with girl singing about her purity pledge, she might be good singer but you gotta be a good lipsyncer to be in a movie

No characters in this movie, just narrators – the dialogue is all terrible but the lighting is very good, so we’ll call it even.
During Driver’s scandal he loses his time control
He gets new girl preg, he’s married to Sunny
Only Shia and Adam are thriving here

Mayor will confess to hiding Cesar’s wife’s body if Cesar leaves the preg daughter
Tattoo guy sends a 12-yr-old to assassinate Cesar for Claud
Wow and Shia plot to take over the bank from Voight
So the movie is about rival family members of the world’s richest banker both trying to become populist revolutionaries
Movie bad.

by ·Comments Off on Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.

Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.

In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the

brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business — though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).

by ·Comments Off on Chef (2014, Jon Favreau)

Simple, straightforward, obvious movie full of affable people, a pleasant diversion with some delicious-looking food but probably not even as great/interesting as something like Waitress.

Favreau’s smallest film in over a decade, but probably didn’t feel small since he was writer/director/producer/star/cook. Although it might’ve been ghostwritten by Twitter. His movie star friends come along – Avengers Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. play his restaurant hostess and ex-wife’s ex-husband. Sofia Vergara (vengeful brothel mistress of Machete Kills) is the still-friendly ex-wife, Dustin Hoffman the chef’s boss, Oliver Platt the restaurant critic who sends Favreau on a road-trip journey of self-discovery, starting from scratch and remembering what he loved about cooking (alongside longtime assistant John Leguizamo) and reconnecting with his favorite regional dishes and his 10-year-old son and ex-wife and finally making up with the critic (but not with Dustin Hoffman) and opening his own place and getting remarried.