Happy Thursday, everyone! It's snowy as heck here in Chicago, MLB is still in a lockout and the Landover NFL team has chosen a new team name that is both lame and is part of the NFL's weird fetish for the US military. Rants over, let's talk about my finds of the week!
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Brian DePalma is kind of a difficult director for me. Many people have said over the years that he's aped the works of Alfred Hitchcock and I'd be as annoyed as anyone else at that if well, it's not completely untrue. DePalma has his own style, but it's so clearly influence by Hitchcock. But is that a bad thing? Certainly not, if you are going to specialize in thrillers you can do far worse as an influence.
What I do have a serious problem with DePalma is that he can be weird about woman in his movies. Body Double, I firmly believe, is a sexist movie. Carrie can be very good at times but I think misses a decent amount of the points that Tabitha King brought to Stephen's novel. And geez, Femme Fatale. There's a move that wastes Rebecca Romjin on male gaze nonsense.
But Blow Out is one where DePalma gets it right. Nancy Allen plays, for once in a DePalma movie, a well-rounded and interesting character in a fantastic thriller plot about a possible assassination captured on audio tape that may or may not exist. (It's directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, about a photographer who may have accidentally captured a murder on film.) With Allen, John Travolta and John Lithgow, this is a really taut thriller that is very worth your time.
Blow Out is available for purchase and rental at the usual places.
And hey, check out Blow-Up! It's stylish and creepy and fun. It's in the Criterion Collection and currently is also available for sale and rent at the usual places.
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Jeff Greenfield is a halfway decent political commentator, even if he's still stuck in the "both sides have good points" that hasn't been true since about 1970. But he's also at times a very funny and acerbic fiction writer and this is a novel I've always quite loved. Two days after a Presidential general election, the Republican whose won...dies. (In a stupid accident based on a badly designed campaign stop.). Now, ask yourself...who is going to be President?
No, seriously, who is going to be President? This is after the general election but months before the electors meet to actually elect the President. Is it the winning Vice President? Can the RNC simply meet to nominate the VP winner to the Presidential slot? Does the second-place Democrat candidate have any place in this? It's a weird, weird, blind spot in the Constitution and Greenfield has some wicked fun playing with the idea.
Because naturally, everything goes nuts. This came out in 1995, when the Internet was barely a thing, but Greenfield even then knew it was enough of a thing that it would come into play along with the big ones of the time, like talk radio shows and cable news and letter columns. I can only imagine this scenario in a world of Twitter and Facebook and TikTok; Greenfield is very good at both the humor and the horror of the situation. (Also, this is a reminder I need to check out his books on alternate histories of the USA, a subject I find fascinating.)
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Time for schlock!
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Really, if that title doesn't get you a little intrigued for how this could be fantastic junk, I don't know what I can tell you. Jeremy Rennet and Gemma Arterton are having a ton of fun as the titular siblings, now grown up and dedicating themselves to, well, witch hunting. It's so...wonderfully dumb in all the right ways. Crossbows and witches and shotguns and for some reason a diabetes subplot, I love this sort of silliness. (Really, if you ever saw the grim slog that was Van Helsing, this is what that movie should have aspired to be.)
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is streaming on Hulu, Paramount+ and the various Epix platforms as well as being available for rent and sale.
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My recommendation of the week is, kind of unsurprisingly, Peacemaker on HBOMax. I caught up over the weekend and goodness, this is a show that knows what it is and is reveling in it's actiony disgustingness, both in the violence and in how Peacemaker is a pretty awful person who might actually be trying to be better. It's funny, it's gross, the music choices from James Gunn are kind of amazing (there's an actual discussion of Hanoi Rocks that had me cackling) and it's a very, very fun cast.
And seriously, these credits. These are credits I will never skip.
(Fun story about the song here; it's from a Finnish glam-metal group named Wig Wam, and they literally were dropped from their representation a few days before Peacemaker premiered due to COVID making it impossible for anyone to tour. Now they have a song that's charting in the US, new representation and the possibility of playing over here for the first time. They have a fun, "we're doing music that was passe a decade before we even formed" sound.)
Hansel & Gretel was SO FUN.
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