Happy Thursday, everyone! The sports year is over as the World Series ended last night so we have to wait until February for the return (OK, fine, there are plenty of other sports but my Bears are rebuilding, my hockey team is awfully sexist and racist and the Bulls look OK). But anyhoo, enough of my griping. This week we have some more effective schlock, a 1992 movie that should have gotten a lots more awards recognition and a boxed set of books that rewards my weird level of OCD.
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Defending Your Life is going to be a revisit for me, in this case I think my first look since it came out in 1991. Since then I've aged, I've been married and divorced and married again and I'm very curious to see how this movie about a man who dies and ends up in an after-life waiting room where he has to, well, defend his life or go back to do better will pay with me. I fully appreciate that my fascination with this sort of narrative can be weird; I am an atheist who doesn't expect any sort of reevaluation after death, but this kind of narrative makes me understand just a little the appeal for those who do believe in this. And this movie is funny. Brooks, as always, is just plain selling on his neuroses, but it's Meryl Streep as his fellow dead person who keeps stealing this movie. She is amazing as a woman who was apparently so...great in life that she's sailing through her defense but she never seems a jerk about it. I'm fully convinced that her performance in this caught someone's eye and is why she plays the drug-addled, goofy version of the very real Susan Orlean in Adaptation a little over a decade later.
Defending Your Life is available for rent on the usual places and streaming on Cinemax.
Weirdly, Adaptation is not part of any streaming package. But it's only like 3 bucks and well worth your time.
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I feel like Deep Cover is a weird movie that has somehow slipped between the cracks. Like, how does a movie where Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum, where one of them may be a deep cover police officer that has gotten in just way too deep, kind of disappear? This is a minor classic directed by Bill Duke...and hoo boy, if you only know Bill Duke as a character actor, let me dig in a bit here.
I always think of Bill Duke first in Predator, one of the finest action movies ever made. He's not the biggest part in the movie, but he has such a presence to him, including a point where he's shaving with a dry razor that breaks when he hears something out in the jungle. But Duke is also an excellent and long-standing TV and movies director, all the way back to Cagney and Lacey. Deep Cover might be his masterpiece, a movie that understands the weirdness of the subject and has a sympathy for it.
Deep Cover is streaming on HBO Max and Cinemax and available for rental on all the usual places.
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Richard Matheson might be one of my favorite speculative fiction authors. He wrote for The Twilight Zone (the classic one being him adapting himself for "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), he wrote for The Outer Limits, his work has been adapted all over the place in various ways. (Seriously, his novel I Am Legend has been adapted three times and the main character played by Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith, which is some kind of good actor trifecta.)
But wow, this one...this one always comes back to me. The story of Scott Stuart, a man who goes through a mysterious cloud while sailing who then starts just...shrinking. And shrinking.
And shrinking.
This is one of those really interesting '50s movies that has a weird science fiction hook but also has something really interesting to say. What happens if you're a standard '50s normal white guy and you start getting smaller? Like, smaller than your wife? Smaller than a child? Smaller than a cat? What does that do to your Greatest Generation mind?
It's a weirdly sad movie with great effects that hold up much more than you might expect from 1958. Rear projection, of course, but hey he's fighting cats and spiders! People have talked about remakes over the years but unless someone finally cracks it like the incredible 2020 remake of The Invisible Man, please don't.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is at the usual places for rental as is streaming on Peacock.
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And now...my find of the week.
Why yes, I'm the guy who wants the same box set of the Narnia books I had as a child.
The one with these weird covers.
With Aslan's head floating in the sky.
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY WITH THE BOOKS IN THE CORRECT ORDER.
Backing up here, for a long time the Narnia books were ordered and numbered in the order of their publication, which meant that The Magicians Nephew ended up 6 out of the 7. At some point, the publishers decided to screw with that for no reason and re-ordered them for the internal chronology of the series, making Magician the first book in the series. It makes some sort of sense but it also doesn't, because the end of Magician leads directly into The Last Battle, both thematically and for plot reasons.
So yes, I'm the kind of crank who has opinions on how the Narnia books should be ordered.
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This week's recent recommendation? David Cronenberg has a son, Brandon. Brandon Cronenberg made a movie. Andrea Riseborough stars in it. What, do I need to draw you a road map? (It's named Possessor and it's on Hulu and it's fantastic, one of the best movies of 2020.)
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