As each year passes we lose a few more established actors. Once in awhile this news bubbles up to us and we make a show in remembrance of them. Plus maybe it can drive a few clicks our way if someone stumbles upon us looking for the actors we’re talking about. This time we look back at Rip Torn who’s best known for being the rough, curmudgeonly, old guy who back and mumbles profanity at the protagonist. Even when it’s rated G, there’s the implicit swearing.
It may not be a special number but we happen to like the triple digits. So we just had to pick a theme of some sorts. We couldn’t come up with anything particularly uniting so we decided to hone in on movies set in our home state.
This week we kick the show off with the grand pappy of mockumentaries. The one that started them all and inspired up to dozens of copy cats. Tim and Weltall jointly review This Is Spinal Tap(1984). A documentary style comedy filmed around a fictional English rock band in the vein of Sabbath who’s going on an American tour as their popularity begins to wane.
There’s nothing quite like public domain characters for making movies from. How about a wacky take on Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde? What if the great great grandson of Dr Jekyll inherited his notes, attempted to fix it with estrogen and then turned into an evil woman? That’s the plot of Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde(1995).
Video game movies are kind of like corn blight. They’re things that devastate whole crops of but only ever seem to effect monocultures. We’re not even sure if that thing lands or not. Our joint review is for Doom[2005]. It’s one of the early crop of game adaptations which continued to add evidence that no one in Hollywood has ever touched a controller.
Deep in the heart of every video rental store of the nineties there were a few VHS tapes that were ubiquitous. These were the movies that were not ordered by the owners. They simply appeared on the shelves complete with worn stickers and suggested rental prices that were incorrect. One such film is Ice Cream Man(1995).
What happens when a crazed Australian teams up with the director of Superman(1978)? You get a wacky cowboy adventure flick that’ a remake of the a TV show from the fifties. We are talking about Maverick(1994).
There’s nothing quite like watching an actor pretend to lose their mind on screen. Especially when they’re the kind of person who already comes across as unhinged. That’s why we jointly reviewed The Beaver[2011].
Wouldn’t it be crazy if everything was a simulation and we were all just programs in it? Not really as it wouldn’t change your day to day goings on. Thankfully that’s not the question asked by the nineties in Virtuosity(1995). Because there wasn’t a lot of room for movies in that era asking if we lived in reality or not and most of that space in pop culture was reserved for the Matrix with a small corner carved out for The Thirteenth Floor.
We jointly review Mortal Engines[2018]. It’s a “young adult” novel so of course it’s post apocalyptic. Cities in Europe chase down and consume each other for reasons that don’t make any sense. London has basically picked the land clean of smaller towns and now wants to attack Asia. Hugo Weaving is planning on doing this by reviving the weapon that ended the world.
