What the… 4:3!? Oh yeah, this only seems to be available now in that aspect ratio, but it was filmed in 1.85:1. So I guess I’m never going to see the edges to the left and right of this movie: It bombed and was a critical failure, if I remember correctly. I saw it at the time (probably on VHS) and I kinda liked it, so I’m rewatching it now.

Hey! It’s Grace Zabrieskie!

Ah yeah, I guess he died just before this…

Yay.

Hey! It’s William Burroughs!

Hey! It’s John Hurt!

Hey! It’s Keanu!

I love New York.

Hey! It’s Crispin Glover! With an amazing comb over!

Hey! It’s Carol Kane! I was thinking “is that a very young Amy Sedaris? Nooo” but then I got it.

I choose to believe that this looked better in the cinema than in this DVD version.

The darker scenes are just very… like this.

Noo!

Hey! It’s Udo Kier!

This movie still has really awful IMDB scores.

And it’s not just that a bunch of people have given it a 1, but the weight is really on 5-1. People actually really dislike this movie!

I can understand that… It feels very 60s. And improvised. Even though it’s based on a novel? And it doesn’t really make much sense? But I kinda like it.

Hey! It’s that guy!

I want to see this in 1.85:1. There would be like 40% more cowgirls in shots like this.

I didn’t like the ending. No, that’s putting it too weakly — I loathed the ending. It’s such a cliché — I know this was made 30 years ago, but even back then, it was a loathsome trope.

But I quite liked the movie otherwise.

Right:

The film was a critical and commercial failure. The picture opened in wide release on May 20, 1994, and grossed a mere $1.7M against an estimated $8.5M budget.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an 17% approval rating based on 30 reviews, with an average score of 3.5/10. On Metacritic the film has a score of 28% based on reviews from 16 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable” reviews.

Eep. 3.5/10. That’s harsh.

Film historian and critic Leonard Maltin said: “The novel was hopelessly dated, and there is not enough peyote in the entire American Southwest to render this movie comprehensible or endurable…K.D. Lang’s score is the picture’s sole worthy component.”

It’s true — the score is pretty fab. Was it released on an album? I should get that.

Oh wow. This movie is one of those OH IT”S SO BAD movies that they put on “worst of” lists.

But it’s not.

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. Gus Van Sant. 1993. ⚃

Yes, it’s another Hazel Flagg movie of the day. But the reason I’m watching this particular one is because there was a comment on the previous one saying that this is a particularly good Hepburn/Tracy movie.

What a remarkable movie! I usually type these blog posts while the movie is running (you know, while getting a new cocktail and stuff), but I was so riveted by this one that I’m typing this after the movie is over. (I did the screenshots while it was running, of course, but that’s just a button I press here on the couch).

That opening… just wow. So original.

So the plot here is that Hepburn is a defence lawyer and Tracy is the prosecution, and they’re doing the same trial, and you’d expect that drama would ensue. And it does, but for like three quarters of the movie, there’s such a light touch… the Hepburn/Tracy thing is irresistible.

That’s some bandage!

It’s filmed in an unusual way, too. Cukor plants a camera and just holds it there for quite a time — this scene, for instance, lasted for (I’d say) three minutes, without any cuts or any camera moves.

And we got the same treatment for this scene, but here the two would peek their heads in from the sides to deliver some repartee.

Oh, the repartee here — I couldn’t stop smiling while watching this. And I laughed out loud several times.

Wow, that’s some motto.

quelle heure est-il

They’re just so much fun on the screen together.

Snap!

I loved the court stenographer — he was talking in a kind of joisey dialect? Fantastic.

I loved this movie — OK, it got a bit heavy in the last bit, but then it fixed things up nicely.

Adam’s Rib. George Cukor. 1949. ⚅

Once upon a time when they started doing the “insert a title into a scene”, it looked neat because they could insert a CGI object into a real scene. But nowadays? Is any of this real? Is it just all CGI and composited objects? It just makes things look even more fake than things do by default.

Oh yeah! I’m watching a super-hero movie again! Even though I had decided to stop, because they’re all mostly kinda mid. But this one (which bombed at the box office, I think) had some people going “well, it’s fun?” So I’m watching it.

Ouch. Well, I mean, it could have been worse, but they lost a substantial amount — with a $100M budget, they’d have to gross $200M to break even.

I guess this is the final pre-Gunn DC super-hero movie? So it “doesn’t count” in the “new timeline”. *rolls “eyes”*

This movie doesn’t have the typical look of a modern super-hero movie. I mean, it’s all colour-graded as fuck, but not to the usual gray/teal scale.

Oh oh! They’ve colour graded it to “Mexico”. So it’s gray/yellow instead.

Oh, and purple.

Sarandon is having so much fun playing an eeeeevil corporate eeeeevil CEO.

The CGI looks pretty good when it’s dark, or when it’s all CGI, but when they’re compositing CGI over real elements like here, it looks like compost.

Well, this feels pretty prescient now, eh?

I thought “well, final fight! that didn’t feel like two hours at all!” and I hit the “show elapsed time” button and it said “01:20”. How on Earth is there still almost an hour left…

I mean, I’m enjoying myself watching this — it is, as foretold, a fun super-hero movie, but I was kinda ready for it to be over now.

Very mecha.

If you were to ask me to list the top three super-hero movies… this probably wouldn’t be on it, but perhaps not that far off, really? Yes, it’s too long, like all super-hero movies, but it is indeed fun. I don’t really see any reason why this wouldn’t rake in the $$$s in the box office. It’s certainly better than, say, the first Wonder Woman movie, which did the big bucks.

At the time this was released, the explanation why it kinda bombed was that there was super-hero fatigue. But it’s now only two years later, and you can’t open a web browser without being confronted with people being all atwitter at the James Gunn Superman movie, or the Pedro Pascal Fantastic Four movie. Did everybody get all un-fatigued all of a sudden?

This movie has a very low rating on imdb — 5.9 — so I wondered whether it was being brigaded by racists because there’s a lot of Latino people in this. But… it doesn’t really seem to be? When that happens, you get a ton of people voting “1”, which you can just immediately dismiss, because few movies are that bad. But this has most people voting “6”, which is “meh”, which seems more honest.

So I guess people just thought this was a pretty meh movie? I mean, I do, but it’s just odd.

I don’t have any explanation for why it bombed here, but I think the narrative at the time can’t have been totally correct. I kinda feel that it should have done better than it did — did Discovery Channel dept. Warner Bros just torpedo it because it started under the previous regime? Stranger things have happened. If you look at the Superman publicity onslaught, when they want to get behind a movie, they do, and they didn’t for this one.

Blue Beetle. Angel Manuel Soto. 2023. ⚃