Captain Marvel. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. 2019.

Wait! This isn’t 4K!? The guy in the video store gave me the wrong disc!

Dude.

Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to suffer through the 2K version…

This is a pretty fun movie. It all hinges on the main characters being somebody you want to watch, because it’s you know a super-hero movie so the plot is the usual running around after a MacGuffin. But Brie Larson is super-charming and plays it pitch perfectly: She’s serious about her heroing, but everything else is done with a cheeky grin.

Perhaps the best super-hero performance ever.

Nick Fury’s face sure looks weird. Is that even Samuel Jackson? Is he CGI? His face looks like silly putty. It’s offputting, but… you kinda get used to it? Until you see a screenshot and it’s like EEEEEEK.

Dude. It looks like they modelled his face down to his skeleton and then rendered a flensed CGI based on that.

I mean, like they do with dinosaurs.

Anyway!

For all it’s got going for it, it’s got pacing problems and … like … basic problems with the logic of some of these conversations: What Earth words the aliens understand depend of whether it makes a good joke or not. It’s fine, it’s fine, but it could have used some polish.

It’s definitely among the better Mar-Vell movies.

Mike’s Murder. James Bridges. 1984.

I’ve had the soundtrack album (by Joe Jackson (not one of the Jackson siblings)) since I was a teenager:

It’s pretty odd as soundtrack albums go: It’s got three vocal songs on the first side, and then instrumentals on the reverse. I kinda sorta assumed that perhaps only the instrumentals were in the actual movie, but then Jackson had embellished them into vocal versions for the album?

I guess I’ll find out tonight!

Hm… Jackson is credited with “additional music” in the opening credits… not a good sign…

This movie is by a director I know nothing about, but he’s done stuff like Urban Cowboy and The China Syndrome… which are, I guess, well-received big-budget movies? This seems distinctly low-budget.

Hm, not, $6.3M in 1984 isn’t that bad. But it totally, utterly bombed at the box office.

Still, he went on to direct Perfect, the vehicle for Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta (which also failed commercially and critically), and then did Bright Lights, Big City with Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of that crowd, which, again, wasn’t a success.

This isn’t a good movie. All the tension depends on us caring about these characters a lot, but we’re given no reason to do so. If the actors had been charming, that might have helped, but they’re pretty useless; Debra Winger is by far the best of them. The cinematography is relentlessly blah, so there’s not even that.

The structure is also way … strange. It’s basically about a guy running from the mob, but we mainly follow the guy’s girlfriend. And everything takes so long. She goes to visit his former boss/boyf and they’re in that garden, talking, for what seems like eons.

They do use some of the vocal Jackson songs, though: As background music playing on the stereo in some scenes. Makes sense.

Sleeper. Woody Allen. 1973.

Hey! Woody slapstick. One of his earlier, funnier movies.

I was indeed amused by the slapstick (it’s very Lucille Ball) and the one-liners, but I do think that he could have used something other than improv versions of Yakety Sax as the soundtrack.

That stuff gets on your tits after a while.

There’s some hilarious scenes in here, like when Diane Keaton does Marlon Brando. All the Keaton/Allen scenes have great comedy timing; as a pair they are impeccable.

I guess you could make the case that it’s a bit scattered, but I think it works a lot better than it should.