Splendor in the Grass

Introducing!?

Oh yeah, he looks younger than usual here… for some reason I was thinking he was older.

But… they’ve cut this movie down to 16:9 from 1.85:1? WHYYYYY

Sex Ed ’61 Style

(But she’s talking about Lego, of course.)

Oh, the 24-year old Beatty is in high school. OK, now his behaviour makes more sense.

This looks like a very inefficient way to shower. I think they need more showers.

Oops!

Fancy.

You see, Beatty is really horny. I mean, really, really. But his father doesn’t want to let get married right away…

Now, that’s a plot.

So sarcastic.

Oh, is this gonna be one of those movies where the fun older sister is killed so that Warren Beatty can learn a lesson?

I guess it is!

OK, not dead yet…

Wow, finally we have AI to answer these questions that were totally unavailable on imdb before AI…

Heh heh. All the critics agree that the major weakness in this movie is that the script is inane. So of course that’s the one Oscar it won.

Because the script is so absurd. It goes for So Much Drama all the time, but nothing much happens?

But also because the performances are so over the top — going for Dramatic Teenager and landing at w t f.

She cut her hair — the surest sign of mental instability there is!

This movie is getting worse by the minute, and it didn’t really start of well, either.

Noo! No bathing!

Dramatic lighting.

Successful casting.

Yes… hehe…

This is a really bad movie — every plot development is cringe-worthy, the performances are over the top, and the direction just isn’t there.

Splendor in the Grass. Elia Kazan. 1961. ⚁

Vibes

The reason I bought this bluray is because the cover looks like this:

How could I not buy it!!! But I assume that it’s probably the worst film in the universe, although… it’s got Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Julian Sands, Steve Buscemi, Park Overall and Peter Falk. How bad can it be!

Max 80s.

Why didn’t Lauper get the Oscars for this? She was robbed!

Hey! Isn’t that… er… that guy!? I think it is! From Buffy! This movie has all the people!

And there’s that guy!

I love these NY-ey shots.

Columbo!

This is such an odd movie. (But aren’t all movies odd?) But I mean, it feels (in some ways) like a straight to VHS release — it’s silly, it’s leisurely paced — but they really went to South America to film? And it just looks really good.

Oh, it wasn’t a straight to VHS movie! $18M was a pretty solid budget back then. But it seriously bombed.

(The gag is that he’s afraid of germs so he brought water from the US. Love the umbrellas on the water tank.)

He’s the bad guy.

Heh heh.

SPECIAL EFFECT IS OUR PASSION

Yeah, OK — the first two thirds of this movie was just really, you know, amiable? There were lots of jokes, and most of them missed, but then you’d get some more… and Lauper is fun to watch, and Peter Falk hammed it up to match, and Goldblum was Goldbluming away, as he does. It almost felt like some kind of lost treasure? In just how likeable, silly and easygoing it was?

But then we got to the dreaded third act, and Julian Sands shows up, and is, like, all Serious Actor, and it all goes down like a lead balloon.

I mean, it’s probably not Sands’ fault, precisely — presumably the script was bad — but…

It’s like Peter Falk was holding it all together, and then when they killed his character off, it’s *thud*.

OK, now things are looking up again…

True colours

Aykroyd was such a dick:

The movie was described as “Romancing the Ghostbusters in the Temple of Doom. It was originally meant to star Lauper and Dan Aykroyd.

[…]

Aykroyd met with Lauper and decided he did not want to do the film. Columbia Pictures stood by Lauper and Jeff Goldblum replaced Aykroyd.

Ebert was such a dick:

Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars and wrote: “Movies like Vibes appear and disappear like fireflies in the dog days of summer. Nobody seems to have made them, nobody sees them, nobody remembers them.

Wow, that’s quite a critic/audience spread.

Anyway, I did like this movie. The last third was a total drag, though.

Vibes. Ken Kwapis. 1988. ⚃

Wild River

Oh! Lee Remick! There’s a name I haven’t seen in a minute…

This starts with a voice-over infodump about floods along the Tennessee river, and we’re apparently going to follow people working for the TVA who are buying land from recalcitrant people along the river? Or something? It doesn’t quite make the “elevator pitch” criteria (unless it’s a long and boring elevator ride), but it seems … er … It seems like a weird way to start the movie, laying out the concept like that.

Is there gonna be romance?

Hm… is the aspect ratio correct here? People seem a bit squashed? Vertically?

And that image up there is 853×364… (/ 853.0 364) => 2.34! I guess they just have some kind of squashed-looking faces?

Oh, that sounds wonderful!

Oh, Lee Remick… I was thinking of Lee Van Cleef!

Not the same kind of thing at all! But most amazing of all:

There’s somebody else in this movie with exactly the same name! Doooing!

Yeah! Take that, city slicker!

This is really entertaining. And quite unlike any of Kazan’s preceding movies. I think he’s hitting the beats he didn’t quite hit with Baby Doll? That was supposed to be funny, but instead was… confusing.

This movie has so many good lines.

*insert Beavis sounds here*

Subtle framing.

Clift’s performance is a bit confusing — he often seems diffident, but at the same time he’s being kinda heroic (here he’s talking to the local KKK boys (I think) who don’t want equal pay for the Black people)… It’s… it’s… almost like he’s trying to do a more serious version of Cary Grant? But not quite getting all the way there?