Scary Movie 3. David Zucker. 2003. ⚁

Oh wow. This Scary Movie isn’t by the Wayans guy, but David Zucker? The guy who did all those 80s comedies that the first Scary Movies er referenced? That’s … so… meta?

Oh, wow^2. That’s a … scary career. He didn’t do anything of note between the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movies and this?

[fifteen minutes pass]

This is so old-fashioned. Sure, the two Wayans movies were gross (so much puke), but they were snappy and funny. The joke density here is low, and so many of the jokes are things that should have been edited out. Typical example:

“I got a dream.” “What.” “To have a dream.”

That’s not even the beginning of a joke… it’s just… what gets left over when riffing.

Anna Faris is fun, but the rest are just there. This movie feels old and tired and kinda racist. And the paedophile Catholic priest jokes seem really horrific instead of funny.

[fifteen minutes pass]

So I guess they’re doing the Ring movies? Half the scenes are away from that premise, so it’s hard to tell. It’s not that there’s a lot of different skits, either, but they spend ten minutes on a lame rap battle thing?

[fifteen minutes pass]

Suddenly it’s kinda funny? How did that happen!?! Did I get more drunkener? I DID!

Anyway, it’s funny now.

[the end]

Well… OK. There’s the germ of a funny movie in here. There’s about twenty? minutes of this that’s worth watching. I mean, that’s funny. It’s such a train wreck that I don’t quite know how it ended up like this… it’s so unfunny at the start, and then gets amusing and then finally funny.

Hm… OK, now I’m watching the making-of documentary, and they explain that nothing from the original script ended up on the screen, and they rewrote things constantly, and what they wrote they filmed a couple days later. I guess that explains the disassociated nature of it all, and how so many of the jokes are underdeveloped. There’s so many scenes that have, like, a funny idea going? And then it’s… not as funny as it should have been?

And it looks like they filmed a lot that was cut out. Presumably those were even less funny than what survived — for instance, it looks like they did a whole Matrix thing? And almost not of that made it onto the screen.

And now I’m watching some of the cut scenes — alternate endings and everything. This one leans heavily into a Signs Shyamalan thing ending:

They spent a lot on this stuff that was never shown — and it’s really, really unfunny, so dropping it made sense.

I guess it’s just a sloppily made movie. And that kinda makes it even sadder.

I guess, for once, I agree with everybody.

I guess.

The Lady Eve. Preston Sturges. 1941. ⚅

Oh right! This is a Preston Sturges movie! I made an effort to buy his movies a while ago, and then forgot all about it.

I watched Sullivan’s Travels the other year and was absolutely bowled over by it, so I wanted to watch all his other films, too.

[half an hour passes]

This is such a delight. Barbara Stanwyck is amazing and Henry Fonda somehow seems… sexy? in his nerdishness, which is very unusual. William Demarest as Fonda’s minder is a perfect hard-nosed guy.

I’m not sure the plot makes that much sense — why is the grifter daddy so shortsighted and working against the daughter? It seems like he’d be able to fleece Fonda a whole lot more by not making waves.

But it makes for really fun scenes, which is the point, I guess.

[the end]

It’s not a perfect movie (it’s a bit flabby in the middle), but it’s fantastic. I laughed out loud several times at the antics in the last fifth of the movie, but it was thoroughly amusing throughout.

I find it fascinating how much the movie was on the side of Stanwyck (as the grifter) and not on the side of Honda (as the patsy): He’s a nerd, and not a very likeable one. She’s smart and funny, and the movie leans so hard into this that it’s not always clear why Stanwyck really wants to get into his pants this much. I mean, besides the money, which really doesn’t seem like a motivating factor after a while.

It’s such an original set-up: Any other director would have made the Honda character more active, but Sturges leaves all the action up to Stanwyck.

Ad Astra. James Gray. 2019. ⚁

For a moment, I was worried that this was going to be one of those interminable real space movies instead of sci-fi. *phew* It’s sci-fi!

Brad Pitt is getting a scraggly face, and it suits him. Especially in 4K, where you can see all the laugh lines and tiny wrinkles.

[twenty minutes pass]

Well, OK, the cinematography is very… modern… That is, every scene is colour-graded to an inch. It’s not that it doesn’t look good — it does — but it’s a bit boring visually. It’s so… controlled.

The actors are really working at making everything all modern and sombre, too. Nobody speaks in their natural register, but pitch their voices as low as they will go.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, now it’s just stupid. A highway robbery on the Moon? This is not a past-scarcity movie or where major sci-fi technological breakthroughs have been made (I think), so just getting all those resources up to the Moon, and then staging a moon buggy ambush, just to… er… rob them? When any tear in their suits mean that they’re dead? It’s almost unbelievable moronic. I mean, by the filmmakers. And of course almost everybody dies, because that is what would happen in a situation like that. I guess that’s realistic?

[five minutes pass]

This is in-credibly boring. So of course:

If all the reviewers like a sci-fi movie, you pretty much know that it’s going to be pure tedium: All character development (i.e., daddy issues, because that’s the only character development allowed) and no fun.

[ten minutes pass]

This may be the most moronic movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and I watched Scary Movie 2 yesterday. He opened up the door to vacuum and the primate exploded? I thought they’d stopped doing that a couple of decades ago. (Because that’s not a thing.) And, yes, the primate had… crushed the space helmet of a guy? What?

Why is there zero G on the ship, anyway? On all the shots, it looked like it was under acceleration?

This is a sci-fi movie for people who’ve never seen, or wanted to see, a sci-fi movie, I guess.

[the end]

It’s really a ⚀ movie: It’s unimaginably boring and it’s stupid as nothing you’ve seen, and it’s pretentious and portentous.

But it’s got some nice shots.