Vegas Vacation. Stephen Kessler. 1997.

So this is part of the National Lampoon “vacation” series? I’m not quite sure how I come to have this DVD, but I think it may have been part of a box set…

I think I’ve probably seen these movies before? But I have no recollection of this one.

I thought it started off pretty well, with quite a few good jokes. But then it just went… boring…

It’s not so much that the jokes are lame (and they are), but that there’s so few of them. There’s even minutes where there’s nothing that can be identified as an attempt at a joke. And when there’s a gag it usually doesn’t land. And you can see how you’d just tweak some of these gags slightly and they’d work.

But it’s otherwise well made, I guess? There’s nothing annoying in the viewing experience.

It’s just not very funny.

I did like the “Guess what number” casino.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. Sidney Lumet. 2007.

How odd. I’ve seen the first three minutes of this before, according to Emacs. But… I bailed?

So this is Sydney Lumet, they guy who did a gazillion worthy movies in the 70s. Like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Equus… I haven’t seen a movie of his since Deathtrap in 1982, so I don’t know whether this movie (his final) is an anomaly for him or not.

Going by my extremely limited knowledge of him, if I were nasty I’d say that he’d seen Pulp Fiction and too much New Era Of Quality TV and then decided to make something m. o. d. e. r. n.

It has it all: Small-time crooks; hyperviolence; a messed-up timeline; oh-so-ironic outcomes; etc.

In short: It’s pretty awful.

It features two actors I know a lot of people like: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. I don’t particularly like either of them. At least Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney is in here to class things up.

I’m guessing this was a successful strategy, because:

The critical consensus reads: “A tense and effective thriller, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead marks a triumphant return to form for director Sidney Lumet.

People love this kind of thing! I mean, The Sopranos was wildly successful and it as all about listening to some moron nattering on about whatever, and that was endlessly fascinating because bad boys are so interesting. Showing a criminal not being a monster 100% of the is just so deep!

The cinematography’s pretty awful. It looks like a digital video shoot, and those didn’t start getting good until a few years after this was shot.

It’s an ugly, boring movie.

The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock. 1963.

What! It’s in colour! I’ve seen this before, of course, and in my mind’s eye it’s in black and white!

I realise now that I don’t remember anything about this movie. I just vaguely remember Tippi Hedren being attacked by some… crows? Sitting on some telephone wires? Oh. I’m not the only one…

ANYWAY.

What’s so striking about this movie is that there’s really no hint at the start of the movie of what even the genre is, or even where the plot is going in a general sense. It’s so weird!

Until the first gull attack, it’s amusing and puzzling, but from there on it’s absolutely riveting. The creeping horror intensifying slowly, slowly…

One bit that just doesn’t work is all the womenfolk reacting in sheer passive horror at the proceedings while The Man goes around shuttering all the windows. And Hitchcock has a real problem with the main horror concept here: There’s no way these birds can harm anybody without somebody willingly walking into a room full of the birbs and then shutting the door behind them, so, of course, that’s what happens.

Still, there’s so much powerful imagery in here.

And, of course, Hitchcock was abusing Tippi Hedren throughout the making of this movie, because she refused to have sex with him. Some of the bird attack scenes were horrifying for her, too.