moviegroovies

[moviegroovies]

ok. craziest thing about ghostbusters: frozen empire..... they give phoebe a ghost girlfriend. and in their last scene together they have a whole "see you on the other side, ray" / "nice working with you, dr. venkman" thing

which, retroactively...

they were like. okay real gay people in ghostbusters (not clickbait); what's the gayest thing you can say in a ghostbusters movie? well...

#ghostbusters #ghostbusters: frozen empire #text post #peteray #the actual line is 'see you in the fabric of the universe' #the high romance of peteray coding

[moviegroovies]

TOP MOVIES 2023

10. Dicks: The Musical (2023)

9. Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011)

8. Citizen Kane (1941)

7. Sorry To Bother You (2018)

6. There Will Be Blood (2007)

5. Deathtrap (1982)

4. Prospect (2018)

3. Pitch Black (2000)

2. School Daze (1988)

The Hitcher (1986)

#text post #i almost cheated and put sherlock holmes (2009) in the ninth spot WITH game of shadows but keeping it honest #game of shadows was the one i really liked #honorable mention this year goes to hair (1979) train to busan (2016) hedwig and the angry inch (2001) brother to brother (2004) #phantom thread (2017) and the cabinet of dr. caligari (1920) #i hit my goal but i didn't watch as many movies this year as last #i did watch at least one movie made every year between 1979 and 1993; 1995 and 2009; 2011 to present #promise you guys i'm going to use this damn blog in 2024!

[moviegroovies]

just watched the hitcher, so now i’m giggling and blushing and kicking my feet like i’m in love

#text post #the hitcher #it quite literally was that good

[moviegroovies]

new kind of guy dropped ( <- trans dude who feels very gender about sorority boys (2003))

#sorority boys #text post #statistically speaking this is at least a 20 year old kind of guy but it's a new experience for me. to be this guy #(<- wrote an essay on gender in some like it hot) #ok it was entirely anticipated. i might be back with an essay about that gender

[moviegroovies]

TOP MOVIES 2022

10. The Lion in Winter (1968)

9. Bedazzled (1967)

8. Casablanca (1942)

7. Saw (2004)

6. Seven Samurai (1954)

5. Sunshine (2005)

4. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

3. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

2. Ravenous (1999)

1. Nope (2022)

#text post #okay these rankings are kind of arbitrary. #honorable mention tho to: rocketman (2019) yentl (1983) godspell (1973) #the hateful eight (2015) hancock (2008) cursed (2005) mayhem (2017) #the dreamers (2003) blackkklansman (2018) the warriors (1979) and magnificent seven (2016)

[moviegroovies]

of all the movies i believed might warrant a moviegroovies revival, i think i speak for all of us when i say that this one was... not at the top of the list. nevertheless: unexpected, unwanted, and unsung: dream a little dream (1989).

mmmmm... i liked it. more than i expected to, anyway. to be honest, this was one i probably wouldn’t have picked up on my own, even for the “two coreys” phenomenon and its tangential connection back to the lost boys (my beloved)--as i’ve indicated before, while i’ll do anything for love (of the lost boys), i won’t do that (watch corey feldman movies)--but my dad got some kind of meredith salenger itch this week, and this was the result. all in all, it was pretty solid? kind of dragged for me, but there were no scenes i’d point to in particular and say “cut this.” plus, they did some interesting things with the bodyswap concept... and, if we’re being honest, i found myself pretty impressed by feldman’s performance.

(said nobody ever. i know, i know.)

what i liked: the body swap is a fairly standard stock plot (although, as i type this, i can’t call to mind NEARLY as many examples as i thought i could. i’ve extolled the virtues of vince vaugn in freaky on this blog before, haven’t i?), but dream a little dream had a fairly unique take on it; most of the movie is corey feldman acting as jason robbards’ character coleman, but we never see robbards as bobby. the justification for the plot is given a lot more screentime than the handwavey explanation which typically accompanies such a story (although i’m not necessarily sure that this is a good thing--sometimes the plot does NOT demand explanation; groundhog day & etc.), too--we devote a substantial amount of the exposition to coleman’s obsession with dreams and the idea that, as we don’t really know what dreams “are,” therein lies the path to eternal life, eternal youth...

sometimes it really is better just to say a wizard did it and have done, i think.

what really stood out to me, though, was whose movie it really was. don’t let the smokescreen of the two coreys fool you--dream a little dream is coleman’s movie, through and through. coleman, not the delinquent teenagers, is the one with a problem to be solved. it’s coleman, and apparently coleman alone, who has to learn a lesson, and while “this was what being young was like--and it wasn’t easy” is a pretty standard one for this genre, it feels... different, as presented. i searched a while for the big why, until it hit me: dream a little dream is a teen comedy about an old man.

bobby, on his own, has plenty of problems, and the introduction, cutting between title cards and a seinfeldian conversation between coreys feldman and haim, serves as something of a red herring in that respect. we gear up for a movie about teenage ne’er-do-wells coming of age, finding themselves, and presumably getting the girl. the thing is, though--that’s not the movie we get. quickly after we’re presented with our presumed protagonists, we’re introduced to another figure: a grumpy old man searching, to the detriment of his relationship with his friends and wife, even, for more. he has a good life, and he’s still deeply in love with gena, but he’s restless and ill-content. it’s already a departure from the role of older figures in such movies (because if our teenage protagonists represent youth and chaos, then older characters, especially much older characters like coleman and gena, are stability, stagnation--they’ve already figured it all out, and are liable to be trapped in their ways)... and then his obsession pays off, with a little help from fate, and he ends up occupying the body of bobby keller, with gena taking up a more backseat role possessing his female counterpart, lainie diamond.

like i said, the reverse is never true. bobby still exists in a spiritual form during coleman’s escapade, making the occasional cameo in coleman’s dreams (and one has to wonder about the influence of a nightmare on elm street on this movie’s final form; at one point, bobby even quips “you were expecting, maybe... freddy krueger?”, the dreams are shot in a similar, fuzzy way to nancy’s, and in the last act not falling asleep becomes an apparently life-or-death matter for gena), but he’s not walking around in coleman’s body, which i do believe the movie is stronger for. bobby might have a takeaway lesson from all of this, but it’s coleman we follow, navigating his way through high school and first love and the mortifying ordeal of trying to pull his wife’s consciousness up through a teenage girl’s mind. and i like that the delineation between lainie and gena and even bobby and coleman isn’t always clear; they’re sharing the bodies. as coleman points out at one point, “we’re them.” there isn’t quite a point where one stops and the other starts--coleman takes on more of bobby’s mannerisms and speech patterns the longer he plays his part, and lainie, when she’s around coleman, acts more and more in accordance to gena’s personal quirks. it’s surprisingly heartfelt, in a way. the end product is sometimes messy, because it’s juggling the body-swapping a-plot with a romantic triangle subplot involving an angry boy with a gun and a minor gang war between rival delinquent groups at the school (although, i will say that the culmination of THAT, the confrontation where coleman urges joel to shoot HIM, was pretty satisfying), but it’s mature in a way you don’t see in a lot of its contemporaries. ultimately, we’re watching an old man face the consequences of his monomania and realize what really matters to him is love. the rest is set dressing.

and as for the rest, hm. corey haim’s role didn’t pan out nearly as much as i expected it to. he sticks around for most of the movie to make faces at coleman when he does out of character shit in bobby’s body, but doesn’t even make it into the final scene when coleman and bobby (in their respective bodies again) come to a final understanding. it was already a pretty long movie, but i can’t help feeling like more could have been done with their friendship, especially with dinger making it onto the cover of the movie (unlike robbards) and into all of the promotional material. toward the end, coleman-as-bobby genuinely thanks dinger for looking out for him during the ordeal, only for dinger to ask if he’s “going fag” for his trouble. (as an aside: was this a thing people said? i’d never really heard it before i watched the warriors last week, but here it popped up again. whatever.) dinger’s character also continuously brought weird, sexualized racial comments to the table (first referring to apache women, then hawai’ian), which served no purpose but white supremacy’s. this, along with the ease with which lainie’s mother makes the decision to have her second husband drug her teenage daughter with a sleeping pill mixed into a glass of wine, can be explained (but not excused) as products of their time, but, y’know, come on. even in 1989, these scenes were written, greenlit, and parroted by people who should have known better.

hey, killer soundtrack, though. all in all, i could watch it again.

#dream a little dream #bobby keller #coleman ettinger #this didn't fit nicely into the above but you know what really killed me about this movie? how gender corey feldman looked #iykyk

[moviegroovies]

watched rocketman again tonight (because i cannot escape musical biopics despite my very best intentions). it’s a good movie but the BEST part is the facial expressions taron egerton puts in at the start of the tiny dancer number. gay jealousy gay resentment gay rage <3

#rocketman #text post

[moviegroovies]

urgh. well? it’s been a while since i’ve posted anything fully coherent on this blog (not that you can tell, ha, ha) despite my employment at a movie store and the fact that i’ve watched at least 87 movies in the past few months that i could easily have debriefed into the void. in the spirit of updating more regularly, here’s what i think i’ll try: mini-reviews of all the movies i’ve seen in the last week! in order: 

the tao of steve: donal logue felt a little bit like discount jack black in this one, but i know him from gotham, so who am i to judge?

breakfast on pluto: wait, wasn’t the LAST thing i posted on here about cillian murphy being my boy girlfriend? well, kitten was my girl girlfriend. could have done without the glam rock group of white irishmen who dressed up as indigenous americans (this character in the book was apparently a lawyer, too, so that was just invented wholecloth for the film? for some reason), but everything besides that made me cry. i loved kitten. liam neeson was almost tolerable for once. ruth negga was there!! 

this is elvis: okay my brother saw elvis (2022) a couple weeks ago and is on a kick, i was only half-present for this one. this sure was. elvis. (i will say this version of the story paid far less heed to the influence he took from Black musicians than baz luhrmann’s take--which is an unnecessarily nice way of saying they had literally ONE scene of young elvis watching a Black man playing a guitar and conveniently ignored the rest; conversely, they did at least state out loud that priscilla was 14 (!!) when they met, which was something elvis ‘22 glossed over. all-in-all, i’m essentially elvis’d out.... at least until we convince my brother to sit down for bubba ho-tep.)

thor: love and thunder: disappointing. no loki. valkyrie was shafted. other people have disected it better than i’m currently equipped to so let’s say 3/10 and skip right ahead

meet joe black: this one i watched last night so it’s freshest in my mind; i have some thoughts. basically... it was okay. conceptually i was intruiged by the death-as-a-character thing; that was far and away the standout element. (idk if you’ve noticed--perhaps if you’re very, very new around here, but i love a good bit of the supernatural interacting with the mundane.) hopkins was good, but his role struck me as a bit... inconsistent? honestly, i just wasn’t sure what they were trying to SAY with him; he’s introduced as a wealthy, workaholic businessman (honestly my first thought--which continued well into the film, especially when it was revealed he made his fortune in the news, was succession), but death--THE death!--chooses him as a guide for his exemplary life. now, pre-character journey, death struck me as kind of childlike, insofar as he was ignorant to how things work, and carelessly selfish, so maybe something could have been explored with the idea that a rich man really leads such an upstanding life that he could possibly deserve his delirious wealth being a similarly naive fantasy, but that way of thinking really went unchallenged right to the end of the movie; bill was a complicated, but ultimately good man. he earned his wealth, unlike his conniving weasel of a former assistant, drew. (who was, incidentally, my favorite character after brad pitt’s death. he served, he gave cunt, he died was exposed for tax fraud. etc.) there was never a scrooge moment. 

i’m too communist for this movie, but i digress.

so, whatever, i guess that was what it was--one of the foregone conclusions on which the film’s premise is built. the bigger problem, then, was that exact aforementioned premise: it never comes through! the whole story is supposed to be bill, chosen to guide death/joe black in human affairs, but if you watch the movie, very little actual guiding gets done! joe follows bill around into a couple of humerous situations, but bill never deliberately TEACHES him anything worthwhile; in fact, the only thing that the “choice” of bill as the guide really serves is the romantic plot between joe and susan, and that. well, i don’t use the words “romantic plot tumor” very often, but... romantic plot tumor. their scenes put the whole movie on hold for me--or, really, they felt like a very DIFFERENT movie than the subplot with drew and bill’s business. there was some other weirdness; allison knowing she was her father’s unfavorite and never getting any resolution there (i don’t think they went in with the message “parents should have a favorite child/it’s okay for a parent to love one kid more,” but...?), brad pitt’s jamacian accent and the euthanasia subplot...

all said, though, it was kind of worth it to see brad pitt be a weird little freak. 

death and taxes. peace on earth.

#text post #the tao of steve #breakfast on pluto #this is elvis #thor: love and thunder #meet joe black

[moviegroovies]

saw sunshine recently. 

in related news, cillian murphy in sunshine is my boy girlfriend

#sunshine #text post #robert capa

[moviegroovies]

#memes #images #john mulaney #so sorry about this the light of creation died from my eyes for a minute #i will be back with more posts but i cannot be certain how long it's going to take for me to get back to id4 #somewhere between next weekend and next july

[moviegroovies]

and obviously that last post was just this one taken to its full and logical conclusion 

#text post #link

[moviegroovies]

look into your heart. you know it to be true.

#star trek #ghostbusters #re-animator #frankenstein #rocky horror picture show #mr. spock #egon spengler #herbert west #victor frankenstein #dr. frank n furter #if anyone has other suggestions feel absolutely free to add them but this is where i'm at tonight #honestly this was originally a scale from spock to herbert with egon in the middle the fact that herb #ended up being the MIDDLE GROUND?!? #something happened here

[moviegroovies]

#independence day #meme #image #can we talk about the mail #basically this is a warning... my next five posts or so are all going to carry this energy

[moviegroovies]

not to be confused with the lost world and id4, or, the “women are punished for not listening to men, ft. jeff goldblum” cinematic universe

jurassic park and id4, or, as i like to call it, the jeff goldblum having an m/m/f threesome in which two of the participants are a married couple cinematic universe

#text post #independence day #jurassic park: the lost world #much less fun wapfnltmfjgcu my beloathed :pensive:

[moviegroovies]

jurassic park and id4, or, as i like to call it, the jeff goldblum having an m/m/f threesome in which two of the participants are a married couple cinematic universe

#jurassic park #independence day #text post #ian malcom #david levinson #the jghammftiwtotpaamccu for short <3

[moviegroovies]

watched the birdcage. 

oh g-d... now i wanna be a middle aged fag :’(

#the birdcage #text post

[moviegroovies]

confession time: for someone who (semi) actively runs a movie blog, i really haven’t seen a lot of classic movies.

(i know this comes as a shock for those of y’all who have been subjected to nothing but my half-baked thoughtpieces on bad 80′s horror for the past couple of years, but bear with me.) 

to be honest, even this review doesn’t REALLY represent me making an active choice to remedy that so much as it does me pulling a long con where i endear myself to marilyn monroe by watching her movies to get myself excited to watch the miniseries blonde (2001), for abnormally pretty, young jensen ackles purposes*, but let’s not dwell on all that. the practical result is the same; i watched some like it hot (1959). now, i hope y’all are ready for a few some like it Thoughts™:

first, idk how much attention y’all have been paying to the loose bits of personal lore i occasionally scatter within my reviews, but one thing about myself that i feel i’ve been pretty open about is the fact that i’m trans. this being so, and knowing not a whole lot about the movie beyond the very basic premise “1959 extended man in a dress gag,” i can’t say i went in with the highest of expectations. imagine my surprise, then, when the gender aspect of this movie was... actually pretty good? i mean, full disclosure, it’s not exactly gender studies, but it’s passable! it’s tolerable! there were even a few moments where i felt inclined to say the words “oh, GENDER?” out loud!

perhaps most impressively, i’d say the Cis Creator Cringe Factor of some like it hot was actually impressively LOWER than a lot of modern moves with genderswapping premises tend to be. like, i know that one definite explanation for that would be the fact that trans experiences are more widespread today, so modern filmmakers don’t feel comfortable playing with ideas like this without at least giving lipservice to them, while the era that bore some like it hot didn’t face the same “pressure,” but, okay. listen. compared to another movie i watched recently--freaky (2020), in which a teenage girl swaps bodies with serial killer vince vaugn, featuring one incredibly anvilicious scene where, upon being informed by a gay boy that she’s in the men’s bathroom, the girl’s best friend retorts, “she [vince vaugn]’s got a dick in her hand, and you’re wearing chanel no. 5. i think we’re past labels.”--some like it hot, a movie older than my father, was wayyyy easier to watch**. actually, you know what? yeah. listen to me. cis content creators? movie producers? i’m talking to you. DON’T EVEN BRING GENDER (or gender “identities”... which is an incredibly gross term, anyway) UP IF YOU’RE NOT PLANNING TO DO SOMETHING WITH IT. sincerely, this particular bad taste corner of the trans community :).

...anyway.

some like it hot, by contrast, did it right. YES, the premise of the movie was two presumably cis men in disguise as women. i’ll put that in the open. however, there was a certain... i don’t know if “respect” is the right word, but there was an avoidance, at least, of the usual predatory tropes. in fact, the worst behavior by far from either main character comes when joe manages to take off his female disguise, donning another, male persona and using things that sugar (marilyn’s character) confided in “josephine” to create a nonthreatening, desirable “millionaire” in order to trick her into sex. okay, like i said, it’s not gender studies, but, the humor in some like it hot comes from generally the right place. joe and jerry don their female disguises in a matter that in quite literally life and death for them (and it’s more than the creators ever thought of, i’m sure, but there IS an interesting analysis to be had of them needing to pass to live), which to a degree removes the usual pitfalls of male to female crossdressing as a gag; they’re neither doing it for lecherous reasons, nor to parody the female experience. this being a comedy, there is a degree of humor found in the situation, but it’s directed at jerry and joe, the characters, more than their disguises. the general assumption is that they both pass without question, as long as they’re wearing their ladies’ clothes; jerry once comments that he’s “not even pretty,” but it’s never an issue to contend with. 

wrt the crossdressing, the worst moment for me, personally, was a scene on the train when jerry prepared to take off the disguise in order to sleep with sugar, and even this ends up comedically averted at jerry’s expense.

and speaking of jerry.

jerry is actually the most compelling part of the movie for me, especially viewing it through the lens of gender. while joe, who gets the girl and manages to spend large chunks of the latter part of the film in his second, male disguise, never thinks too much about what they’re doing beyond the survival aspect of it, jerry is the one who, erm, “gets into character.” joe’s female name is simply josephine; before they get on the train with the woman musicians, it’s assumed that jerry will be going by “geraldine.” however, when they give their introductions, the duo becomes josephine... and daphne. 

as the movie progresses, this distinction grows more pronounced; when joe has to remind a smitten jerry on the train that he’s a girl, referring to their disguises, jerry miserably repeats the affirmation: “i’m a girl. i’m a girl. i want to die. i’m a girl.” later on, however, as joe’s relationship with sugar develops, “daphne” becomes acquainted with local horndog millionaire osgood, who he at first dislikes, but comes around to after being forced on a date as part of joe’s plan to trick sugar. after seeing jerry excited by the prospect of marrying osgood, a bewildered joe has to remind jerry why it’s an impossibility, and in the same miserable tone as before, jerry/daphne muddles through a new affirmation, one that definitely didn’t ring false to my trans ears: “i’m a boy. i’m a boy. i want to die. i’m a boy.” 

hm. actually, now i’m thinking about a trans male reading of joe. he was the one at first resistant to taking the job (with the all-female band), when they only needed money, and not a place to hide from an upset mob boss, but also the one who seems to know more about the role when it comes time to get into character. while jerrydaphne gets increasingly comfortable with femininity as time passes, joe never performs it in anything but a perfunctory, necessary way, and sloughs the costume EVEN WHEN the danger of being found out has not yet passed, because pretending for such a long period of time is just untenable. something about passing for female being a safe haven and a burden for both closeted (re-closeted, in this case) trans men and out trans women?

anyway. by the end, though both osgood and sugar do find out the truth about the disguises, sugar seems to instantly forgive joe for his treacherousness (again, referring more to his actions as the shell millionaire than his escapade in drag), while osgood appears unbothered by daphne’s truth, leading to an ambiguous ending for the futures of the characters, and any realizations that might come later.

no, it’s not the “real transgender experience.” it (thankfully) never claims to be. BUT, being trans myself, there were some moments that made me feel linked to our protagonists, and relatively few, if any, that made me feel alienated. all in all, that’s a lot more than i hoped for going in, so that’s what i’m happy with.

watch some like it hot, y’all. it’s a good movie in a timeless way, and, as modern movies appealing to short-lived trends that will feel outdated next week (if not by the very time of their release) will show you, that’s more than it needed to be. 

*since my original draft of this post, i DID watch blonde, and i don’t know if that’s technically fair game for this blog (not exactly a movie) or what, but 6/10. fairly well done piece of art but just BEATINGLY tragic, so proceed with caution. jensen ackles literally is THAT PRETTY though, so the jackles cut i give a strong 11/10. i am a homosexual.   **i would like to clarify that this isn’t me telling you not to watch freaky. yes, some of the dialogue is tragically riverdaleian, but there’s also a scene where vince vaugn makes out with a teenage boy. so,

#some like it hot #text post #freaky (2020) #link #jerry/daphne #joe #transgender