theCLog

The Goonies

By Brooke Edge

A few weeks ago, I was yelled – rather, shrieked – at when two of my fellow film studies students found out I didn’t care for Meet Me In St. Louis. I knew that would be the response. It always is. So usually when the topic turns to MMISL, I just nod along and stay quiet, not feeling like entering into an argument over whether Tootie is precociously adorable or annoying and creepy (I vote the latter). I’m not sure what inspired me to speak up this time, but man, did I get an earful on how wrong I was.

So it started me thinking about other movies that typically get me a similarly shrill response. The following are a few flicks that aren’t necessarily critically revered (though some are), but moreover seem to mark me as an ignorant outsider whenever I speak up and say what I think. Well, now I’m going public, owning up to what I hate. Deal with it. (more…)

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While working on another movie-related blog post, I found myself just wasting time taking online quizzes and reading fairly useless compendiums of others’ opinions. Here are two I figured I’d share:

The New York Times’ Film Studies Quiz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/26/education/edlife/20090726_Edlife_Quiz.html?ref=edlife) — This is one Internet quiz that’s actually pretty tough, and co-authored by a professor at my program. I’d like to explain away my god-awful score on the quiz by saying I never took a course with him, but that doesn’t really excuse someone who’s getting a Master’s in this stuff. Surprisingly, I did best on the Westerns section. If only there had been an homage to MGM musicals …

John Carpenter's The Thing, included in Empire's list of great horror movies.

Empire’s Salute to Horror Through the Ages (http://www.empireonline.com/features/horror-through-the-decades/default.asp) – A fellow MA student posted this to their Facebook page. Obviously, it’s just one person’s (or one magazine’s), like, opinion, man, about the standout themes and films from the past 50 years of horror, and it’s a shame the magazine didn’t give movies pre-1950 their due, but this still provided a few minutes of good distraction and food for thought.

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Hostel

My love-hate relationship with horror flicks — the more ridiculous and over-the-top the better — stretches back to my earliest experiences with movies, more specifically my earliest experiences with movie rental stores. I’d wander away from the classic film and musical section from which most of my family’s rentals originated, and peek around the corner at the horror aisle. The peeking and hiding would continue for a few minutes, until I worked up the nerve to actually step within the two rows and surround myself with the worst images imaginable to my 8-year-old eye — knife-wielding prom queens, bloody masked villains, and of course the ubiquitous doomed camp counselors. I’d take my time considering which VHS case to pick up and look at both sides of, gingerly lift one off the shelf, turn it over to see the two or three additional photographic promises of the gore within the tape, and quickly shove it back on the shelf and run to find my mom. Twelve hours later, I’d inevitably wake up with nightmares. (more…)

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By Brooke Edge

I just completed an intensive summer course on “Martin Scorsese’s New York” at NYU. It was four hours of Scorsese, four nights a week, for three weeks. If I never see Robert DeNiro again, it’ll be too soon. In the roster of movies we watched was the usual Italian-American fare (Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Raging Bull), the historical looks back at the city (The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York), and the titular homage to the city (the interminable New York, New York). One film in the bunch took me by surprise, though — After Hours.

I’d never heard of After Hours, perhaps because when it was released in 1985, I was far more concerned with my family’s recent addition of the Disney Channel to our cable lineup than with Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre. Maybe everyone else out there (beyond the folks I’ve talked with who are just as clueless as me) already knows about After Hours. If I’m not too much of an anomaly, though, this has become my latest Netflix recommendation (it’s even available for instant gratification streaming).

So if you want something short, funny, weird, and frustrating, and you can deal with the absurdity of the surreal (and get over the dated obstacle of no one carrying an ATM card or having a cell phone), I suggest checking it out. If the idea of watching 97 minutes of a guy trying to get out of the clutches of crazed insomniac artsy types sounds unbearable, skip it. This movie will make you want to tear your hair out.

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By Brooke Edge

I know I used to be one, but I hate teenage girls.

Anyone checking celebrity gossip sites or flipping through supermarket tabloids is well aware that Robert Pattinson (“RPattz,” evidently) caused some minor rioting among teenage girls on the streets of New York City last week while filming scenes for his new romantic comedy Remember Me.

Luckily for me, this swarm of baby estrogen was directly in my path to school (as was the Washington Square Park set for Step Up 3-D the previous week, but that didn’t draw quite as many fan girls). When I walked by, RPattz was on break and nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean that his devotees took a minute off from striking moody/alluring poses. The general dress code they’d agreed upon that morning seemed to be something like a choice between black short shorts or black skinny jeans, with a mandatory black top and three-inch studded heels. I presume this has something to do with looking vaguely goth and vampire-y, since any actor in a Twilight movie must love that look in their personal life. Lots of makeup was also obligatory, plus a textbook bitchy look to throw at every other girl in the pack who dared to come between them and their husband-to-be, RPattz … as soon as he noticed them.

Oh, and I don’t mean to sound old, but here’s where my age comes in — what is the big deal about this guy? I’m sorry, but I just do not see it.

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By Brooke Edge

I don’t fly too often, so I’m still pretty easily impressed by entertainment options available on planes. The folks at Jet Blue positively made my Christmas vacation with their individual screens for each seat keeping me connected with cable TV – MTV conveniently scheduled a True Life marathon for my flight home to Florida, so I was successfully distracted from my fear of flying for two hours by the trials and tribulations of attention-whore teenagers with body image issues, substance abuse issues, love triangle issues, etc. I thought I’d discovered some revolutionary new feature of in-flight entertainment, but when I got off the plane raving about this Jet Blue phenomenon, it turned out everyone else had known about it for years. Oh well. Not the first time I’ve been late to the pop culture party.

In the past two weeks, British Air won me over with not only having individual seat screens (which have tickled me on international trips for a few years now), but having practically a kajillion TV shows and movies On Demand, ranging from serious films I’ve been meaning to see (like The White Countess) to the option of just watching a bunch of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Flight of the Conchords for fun. Turns out my inner critic and film scholar also goes on vacation while flying, as the movies I ended up picking were Marley & Me (which falls into the “cute puppy flick that I don’t want to pay to rent” category) and Watchmen (which I just never got around to seeing in the cinema, and probably was a bad choice for a 4×4-inch screen). I stayed awake for Marley; succumbed to the Tylenol PM and free wine and conked out for the superheroes.

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By Brooke Edge

Thanks to the wonderment of sharing movie trailers (and other YouTube fun) via Facebook, I was alerted to the presence of a film called The Bike King and the Ten Commandments. This masterpiece is either coming to a theater near you, or is available via mail order DVD – its Web site was a little unclear on this matter. But I think the trailer will be enough for most people to decide Bike King is a strong contender for one of the Top 10 Worst Movies Ever Made. (more…)

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By Brooke Edge

Why do I keep getting excited when I see that 1976’s The Bad News Bears is on television, momentarily getting ready to cancel the day’s plans and call my mom so we can both settle in on our respective couches and chuckle over the ridiculously politically incorrect slurs coming out of tiny, towheaded 10-year-old boys’ mouths?

I should have realized by now that for the past few years, TBS has replaced the classic, where Walter Matthau is drunkenly inappropriate, with the crappy 2005 ersatz Bears, in which Billy Bob Thornton is awful.

So, rather than sitting around and moping, here are some inspirational words — courtesy of Coach Morris Buttermaker — to get you through the day:

“Listen, Lupus, you didn’t come into this life just to sit around on a dugout bench, did ya? Now get your ass out there and do the best you can.”

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By Brooke Edge

A few nights ago, at dinner with a group of girlfriends, one of them started raving about the preview she’d seen for the new Sam Mendes movie, Away We Go. She proceeded to act out various scenes from the preview as she explained the premise: Couple decides at approximately seven months pregnant to do a cross-country search for the ideal place to live. I found the trailer up on YouTube the next day, and gave it a look. And then another look. And another. Soon it was a five-view-a-day habit. It might necessitate an intervention … (more…)

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By Brooke Edge

Thanks to a generous friend, I scored a last-minute ticket to the Tribeca Film Fest yesterday, in time to catch a screening of City Island, this year’s First-Place Audience Award winner. (more…)

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