riding the echo down

he plays such a dumb character in this movie. (ariel needs legs voice) i can't not fuck him

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 3/5

the plot: remember the cop characters from "it seemed like a good idea at the time"? no? that's ok, it doesn't matter, there's no continuity here other than some reheated gags. john candy's dumb pizza-loving cop kopek and his superior officer, lawrence dane's sergeant broom, end up responsible for investigating a sexy woman's kidnapping. except there's a second kidnapping note for her, then a third. she's supposed to be making an opera debut even though she can't sing and would rather do burlesque at her boyfriend's club, but her rich guardian (played by peter cook phoning it in) is having her kidnapped for an insurance scam and she tries to kidnap herself so she doesn't have to debut. so who's responsible for the third and real kidnapping? broom and kopek do not find out. not on purpose, anyway.

like its predecessor, this is not a good movie. that said, there's a charm to it that the first movie doesn't have at all and it's mainly due to dane and candy. richard monette as a drag queen trying to help strippers with their choreography is an absolute scene-stealer and an instant highlight of the movie. i expect he and dane already knew each other since monette was part of the stratford shakespeare festival in 1965, around the same time dane was getting his start there as larry zahab, before monette went on to become its artistic director in 1994. wish i knew what their interactions were like.... this one is also complicated since it's got some period-typical anti-asian racism and other racisms as well, technically? except they're all typical examples of jokesters trying to have it both ways since every time the point seems to be that the white people are dumb/incompetent compared to the non-whites. arguably more tolerable than something like "sixteen candles" which full disclosure i never finished because of that one character. i don't know what dane would have thought, especially with his experience of being pigeonholed into roles as ethnic stereotypes when he was first starting out versus being treated as white here. the joke where dane's character thinks he needs a spanish translator for someone speaking italian is pretty funny to me tho.

he is also Very Physical With Other Men in this. sure, some of it seems like it's supposed to be along the lines of "ha ha the homophobe is made to look gay and the idea of being gay is hilarious", but i will take it. i will take his unquestioning acceptance of monette's female impersonation and his nervous attraction to the same. a fascinating follow-up to the arguably best and definitely most controversial scene from the previous movie where broom and kopek are dropping anti-gay slurs like there's no tomorrow.

this is pretty easy to find online since it's now marketed as a john candy movie which, yeah, technically. it was one of the very first movies he did, which is still notable even if he wasn't given many chances to shine. (he had a little more energy in his first movie as kopek, versus the writers now seeming more interested in emphasizing his weight and candy seems a little checked out as a result.) the recent john candy documentary included a couple clips from these two movies but didn't discuss either at all, which seemed a little strange to me. (the documentary also completely omitted any mention of the clown murders, which is a shame because it's one of the first roles where he was given something a little meatier.) the documentary didn't really get into his beginnings as a film actor even though it was focused a lot on his feelings as an actor, so i was a little disappointed in that but otherwise it's a fine feature and you should consider watching it. should you consider watching find the lady? i mean, i guess? for dane, sure. he's in it enough that a dane cut isn't warranted, and it's not unfunny imo. mickey rooney as one of the criminals gives a mildly amusing performance in the dane-less scenes. watching it under some kind of influence might get you the best results tbh.

highlight: there was a bit where he was combing his hair while looking in the rearview mirror. very sexy of him

( acab but also. yknow )

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 0/5

he doesn't show up until an hour into the movie (-1); he only has the one scene (-1); the movie's script is weak and the direction is a hot mess (-2); it has charlie sheen (-100000).

the plot: a potentially interesting biopic about the brothers responsible for "behind the green door" and key players in the onset of the brief era known as porno chic. the movie kind of gets into the legality & ethics of it all but cares more about the interpersonal drama between the brothers and doesn't do justice to either topic. maybe if you go into this with rock-bottom expectations you'll find it enjoyable despite charlie sheen?

despite having an almost two-hour runtime it feels like the movie was trying to cram in too much and didn't have a clear vision beyond "check out these two assholes". like, why even bother to incorporate dane's turn as a mafioso if they're not coming back to the mafia poaching the movie due to lax intellectual property/copyright protections for erotica? what was the point? don't get me wrong, great look for him, fun performance, but why was it necessary? there's a lot of scenes that seem like they're supposed to be connected to something else but ultimately aren't. disappointing.

( scene starts with him holding up a nudie mag so enjoy but also beware )

this time i swear next review will be the littlest hobo episode. he was very cute and charming and one of the main characters to boot. a great palate cleanser after the trainwreck of this movie.

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 0/5

he was listed right after hal holbrook on imdb, and holbrook's is the last "featured" name on the poster, so i thought he might still have a handful of scenes. he had One scene and it was less than three minutes long not even 20 minutes into the movie. i watched the whole thing because i was so sure he was gonna come back given the film's apparent emphasis on the main character's political wheeling and dealing. nope. maybe his character was more prominent in the book?

the plot: i actually watched this while it was on the criterion channel and i still don't understand why it was on there. it was basically just a hallmark movie with slightly better production values and acting. nothing conceptually original or aesthetically inspired to redeem it like scanners. boringly broad social stereotypes (the uptight yuppie falls in love with the hippie radical! he has man pain because she dies following her dreams and he compromises his own dreams so he's seeing or hallucinating her ghost out of white guilt! or maybe she didn't actually die, dun dun dun, waking the dead more like wake me up i'm dead asleep) and the pacing is strange. there's moments with reasonably striking cinematography but they're few and far in-between; i can see how this would've been a better movie in the right hands, but as it is i really don't think this was worth watching all the way through.

the best part was dane sharing the screen with holbrook again. like a rituals au where mitzi survived and he went into politics with harry, lol. even the dynamic between them was similar and dane's character said "fag" just like mitzi in rituals. full circle! here's the scene so you can see for yourself, and the obligatory screenshots are below.

( at least they gave him a suit that isn't comically oversized like the one they made him wear in his tropical heat episode )

it's been way too long since i felt like i had the time and brainpower to sit down and do one of these. feels great to do it again even if this one is on the short side. think next time i'm gonna review his episode of the littlest hobo because it was unexpectedly VERY erotic. he gets chained up!! look forward to it :3

i'm not a music reviewer by any means. in the past others have encouraged me to write about music i enjoy, since i do like reading reviews whether i agree with them or not - i remember spending hours on progarchives and places like this one guy's website where his rating system didn't use stars or numbers but something that iirc was derived from math or something? i can't find it again unfortunately* - and i'm also very interested in the history/production of a given album and following connections to find cool music by relatively obscure artists (bobb trimble, anyone?), but it's difficult for me to actually write my own reviews because, well... i know i'm not getting the same auditory information as most other people. but here's an unorganized attempt (pitchfork this certainly ain't) so let's see how it goes - aiming high by starting with steely dan even if it means retreading well-trodden ground lol.

apparently steely dan's discography has been experiencing a re-evaluation lately and i had no idea - only found out when i was browsing reviews of donald fagen's solo albums the other day and fell into a rabbit hole. (this brand-new book focusing on the characters in the band's songs sounds interesting and i'll have to see if i can get it from a library first or something - the illustrations are a cool idea, but the author's "don't do drugs, kids" comment at the end of the interview is annoying enough to make me not want to buy the book sight unseen lol.) i grew up mostly hearing about the band as a punchline the same way a lot of other '70s stuff was made into the butt of jokes during the 1990s/early 2000s and never actually listened to them until last year, entirely by chance. i asked my parents recently about their memories of the band and they both said that they remembered some songs being radio hits but didn't have strong opinions either way. they didn't have any of the albums in their record/cd collection when i was a kid even though they did have a fair amount of jazz music. at any rate i'm glad i finally introduced myself to steely dan - i've tended to prefer music with tightly-crafted lyrics that invite closer reading and/or are dense with references&meaning, and steely dan's work fits right in. distinctive voices also tend to feature a lot in my favorites and while i wouldn't put fagen on the same level as orbison/nilsson/mercury/darnielle/etc, he's still recognizable enough for me to hear 'I.G.Y.' on a recommended-for-you playlist and be like, huh, this sounds like steely dan and then look up the singer's name for an oh-shit moment lol.

my favorite of steely dan's albums at this point is the 1980 "gaucho" which, in addition to having a rather notoriously tortured production history, is apparently also their most divisive. some people feel it's too polished and/or too simple compared to earlier work... can't speak to the "polished" sound but if it is relatively simple then that's to its benefit imo - makes it easier to follow what individual instruments are doing so appreciation comes faster. wall-of-sound can be fun but it typically takes me several listens to figure out what i'm even hearing. (thinking about how long it took me to appreciate masato nagai's "wild drive"....)

thematically it feels like a spiritual companion to pulp's "this is hardcore" and that's probably why i'm drawn to it more than the other albums - i've been a big pulp fan for a long time and still go back and forth on whether i like "this is hardcore" or "we love life" best, but i've not found anything else that really reminds me of the latter. "gaucho" and "this is hardcore" have similar themes of dissolution and longing, with less defiance than in the earlier albums from either band. the songwriters for both tend to simultaneously make fun of and empathize with their seedy male subjects - but they're not necessarily asking the listener to sympathize. their lyrics are more aimed at reminding us that we're all capable of being terrible to each other in one way or another, and that beneath the fucked-up actions there's still a person there who's hurting. sometimes, anyway. other times it seems like they're just having fun writing about creeps, and i can dig that too! both titles are also almost concept albums, tightly wrapped around a unity of sound and theme that each band's earlier (or later!) albums don't quite have, which is another thing that makes the overall listening experience that much more rewarding imo.

steely dan continued to revisit these themes, of course - 'things i miss the most' from "everything must go" is a real fucking earworm with their signature sensitive-yet-sardonic lyrics - but "gaucho" as a whole is so laser-focused that it comes across like a collection of short stories by raymond carver with more of a sideways sense of humor. and i'm seeing now that there's some who class carver as "dirty realism" and that midnight cowboy is considered a great example of the subgenre, which tracks since i adore both the herlihy book and the schlesinger film.... i don't know if steely dan would fit the literary definition here but there's a definite throughline with regards to subject matter that i find interesting.

anyway, back to the music: this is a short album, easy to listen to all the way through in sequence as intended, though i can also understand why people might not enjoy that experience much. to continue the short story comparison, it's a bit like flannery o'connor - great in individual doses, but if you sit and read a full collection of her in one go then you might find it a bit repetitive after a while. (not my personal opinion! one i've seen other people express, though, including people whose opinions on writing i tend to respect even when we disagree.) so imo if you only listen to one from this album, make it 'hey nineteen'. i'll talk a bit about each track below, including why that one is my favorite.

( you gotta shake it )

earlier this month my partner and i managed a cross-country move - driving three days with three cats.... really do not recommend doing this unless you have to lol. but we all made it to our new apartment in one piece. my first week at my new job was really hectic but i'm enjoying it so far. from the sound of it this next week will be more normal now that a big site event is over with - they wanted me to start at the beginning of the month but that timing just wouldn't work for me.

i haven't been able to engage in my hobbies much with all the packing/driving/unpacking/new job orientation stuff but yesterday i finally got my pc unpacked and set up with a fancy new monitor to replace the one i had to leave behind. everything seems to be in good shape so far! and while i was in the middle of a move i got an email response from the PR person for the organization that runs what used to be known as the genie awards - they're willing to give me reproduction permission for award ceremony footage where the LAC description makes it sound like dane gave a presentation. this is exciting for me since i've yet to see video footage of him just being himself. i do also have permission from the CBC to get a copy of a brief sit-down interview he did with a local tv station in the 1980s but i haven't put in a request for that yet with the moving and everything. now i have my new mailing address and things seem to be arriving here with no problems so i'll act on that soon.

i'm stll catching up on a lot, including dreamwidth, but the more things we manage to unpack the more time i have to just chill and do my thing. i'm enjoying new hampshire so far, partly because i really missed being around mountains and also because it is not going to be nearly as hot here as it was in the midwest. even with climate change it's not as bad. the cats like it here too. we're using a projector instead of a TV now and one of them keeps wanting to climb on the platform, so we'll have to figure out a way to stop him....

the other night we watched "magic" - the 1978 film with anthony hopkins - and it was an interesting experience. i had more fun watching "the italian connection" from 1972 with my father when he was here to help us move in, even though the structure of that one was a little confusing to me at first. the hopkins movie had some great performances but a weak script imo - mostly hamstrung by the fact that the female character didn't really have any kind of interiority. an example of the male gaze in the original sense of the theory, where she's just there for the men to act their desires upon. a bit disappointing with the pedigree of the screenwriter but it was still fun to see hopkins so young when i only know him from his more recent work, and again the performances from hopkins and the supporting cast were quite strong. (i was very excited to recognize david ogden stiers in a brief appearance lol, and burgess meredith was a pleasure to watch.) i also dug the aesthetic, of course. "the italian connection" was an engaging character study and it had a couple truly nuts chase sequences - i can totally understand how it's a cult favorite. it was kinda funny tho since the female characters in that are also pretty limited development-wise (one's dialogue was mostly about how she's a "whore") but they're still given more to do than ann-margret in "magic". all in all a movie i could see myself rewatching.

baked some beer bread earlier with a local ale even though it's hot today and it turned out nicely so i'm gonna kick back with something cold and play some eso until the place cools down haha. hoping that soon i'll have the mental energy to write prose again!

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 3/5

dane only has a handful of scenes, but the story and quality of the acting overall means that the rest is still fun to watch imo. the movie itself has gotten mixed reviews - stephen king loved it, apparently, while other critics felt it didn't have much substance. i think that criticism is fair; it does feel like a story where the strength would be in the interior narration, which we lose without having a voiceover or anything like that in the movie. there's a note in the credit that claims no animals were injured, but i'm not a fan of the use of what looks like footage from lab experiments of rats being made to attack each other. that's still animal cruelty, even if it wasn't instigated for this movie specifically.... could be worse tho, i could be watching the beginning of nothing personal again lmao.

the plot: the one-sentence summary would be something like, a classic wall street yuppie stays home to finish a business deal while his family goes on vacation but discovers he's not alone - a giant rat has decided his house is its territory. when it comes to the office setting, this is a very different beast (heh) than films like, say, scanners or american psycho. whatever the corporation is doing, it's nothing blatantly nefarious or parasitic. (i had to look it up - they're investment bankers? so closer to parasitic than not but at least we're shown them actually doing things rather than dicking around like bateman lol.) i've seen people argue that the film is a type of commentary on the "emptiness" of corporate success and i can see where they're coming from, but in my opinion the movie doesn't really lean into that. maybe the book it's based on is more explicit with this theme? the movie feels more like a classic man versus nature narrative, with the setting serving as a means of visual contrast - the clean buttoned-up office appearances vs the disheveled "uncivilized" look main character bart is rocking by the end.

lawrence dane plays eliot riverton, his boss, who seems to be very sympathetic and tolerant of bart's difficulties - up to a point. the last interaction they have, he tells bart to go home before any of the other employees see him like that. he doesn't inquire after what's been happening, but bart also doesn't choose to seek support. in a way it's a very macho movie - he tries to get help from other men who fail and eventually has to take matters into his own hands, alone, and make his home safe for his heterosexual nuclear family. eliot does what he can to support his employee, but.... despite the big company dinner party, there's no real familiarity there between them. so, again, i can see where the social commentary argument comes from, but it seems largely incidental to the actual plot of the movie.

that said, i did enjoy watching this! i've seen it thrice now in different environments and it's held up each time. peter weller of robocop fame gives us a solid performance as the main character and the supporting cast is great as well. it was fun to see louis del grande in the same movie as dane again, lol, and i look forward to seeing him once more in the dane episode of, well, seeing things. the female actresses aren't given a lot to do with their characters imo. jennifer dale as the secretary gets more screen time than the wife, which isn't saying much given the depth of their roles or lack thereof. their acting helps them sell what they're told to hawk. the practical effects with the giant rat are fun and there's a lot of close-ups of cute little rat feet. the overall tone of the movie feels a bit tongue-in-cheek/self-aware at times but not to its detriment. (eliot keeps expressing disapproval of a minor character smoking, which is morbidly amusing to me since afaik dane kept smoking most/all of his life.)

i had to upload the dane cut to the internet archive here, since i guess warner brothers doesn't want people sharing the dinner party scene on youtube? lol whatever. but that means it's not easy for me to include autocaptions or anything like that, since i chose to keep subtitles off when i was editing the original video. the movie isn't hard to find with subtitles/captions though; i checked out a library dvd the first time i watched this, and it's easy to find online whether torrenting or streaming.

yoinked a custom mood theme off ye olde livejournal (source post here). i used to have a really cute one of kawamura takashi from prince of tennis on my lj but it seems to have been nuked. thanks photobucket. at least this one is fun too.

watched a japanese horror film last night with the english title of "bloody muscle body builder in hell" on shudder. entertaining little thing - only an hour long - and very clearly a love letter to the evil dead film(s). seemed as though there were also some oblique references to reanimator but i could be wrong.... then again, decapitating someone with a shovel is pretty specific, isn't it? ditto a foot attached to another limb vis-a-vis bride of reanimator? or am i just Uncultured? at any rate i had fun, even if the movie did a couple things on my "thanks i hate this" list wrt things that keep me awake at night.

i really don't like jerky head movements, especially if they're at an unnatural speed, and i also don't like sudden loud noises/music cues at a specific pitch. the latter is related to my inability to tolerate a very specific kind of throat sound, lol, because for whatever reason my hearing aids just. cannot process it in a way that sounds organic to me. nope. cannot do it. (yes, i've watched the original grudge movie, yes every single fucking time that sound happened i just turned off my h/as until i was told it was over. No Thanks.) i'm also pretty susceptible to visual jump scares, even if i can guess they're coming, and when the movie ends with one.... wonderful. super nice. won't keep me awake at all.

other than that the movie was really enjoyable! the practical effects were so fun, as were the stop-motion/painted animation bits, and i loved how i could feel the passion in it all. would i watch it again? PROBABLY NOT LOL. but i'll definitely recommend it to others!

i also rewatched tommy recently, i don't remember why now - something about a conversation with pendulumscale and wanting to show it to them just so they'd have that context - and i did NOT realize that fucking father grandier is in it! i didn't recognize him when i watched the devils even though i'd seen tommy first (same director!) but it was kinda surreal this time around knowing the actor. he doesn't do a bad job in tommy at all, though i do think he gives a better performance in the devils. but when i was watching tommy with whim i realized that i didn't remember the latter half of the film at all. it just isn't as compelling once it gets into the cult narrative, which is a bit ironic imo considering that ken russell apparently agreed to direct because he liked the cult element. it just falls apart narratively imo, and that might be partly due to how it handles disability. it was really weird the first time around, and let me tell you it's even weirder the second time around because i was more sober and could tell they weren't even trying to use british sign language. yas qween use crips as props more! groundbreaking!!1 everything before tommy gets his sight/hearing back is great visually so idk wtf happened after that. (yeah there's the revival church scene in the first half but that felt a little less yikes to me personally because of the context, with his mother trying to ~cure~ him and it being framed as misguided, vs the context of the scene where tommy's preaching to the disabled people because...??? idk why that was necessary to include lmao)

i do remember whim making a couple comments to the effect of "if i were high right now this scene would probably be amazing" and y'know what? they weren't wrong. but even high i was like :| at some of it lol. maybe i just don't find exploitation narratives interesting when they move into religious territory, or when they use disabled people as visual props? like, i love iscariot in hellsing, they're my favorite part of the whole thing, but my interest is in the characters rather than the exploitation aspect. hm. Food For Thought, i suppose.

was gonna start taking screencaps for my next dane review (a good idea at the time/find the lady, per that poll i ran a while back) but got sidetracked uploading the custom mood theme. that took longer than i thought it would! while in adhd hell yesterday when trying to work from home i found some mixed/positive reviews for those movies so that was interesting, since until now i'd only seen bad ones. thank you [redacted local library] for providing premium access to newspapers.com. do be sure to check out your local library's database offerings in case they have free access for a database you'd find interesting/useful! the website kept 404ing when i tried to follow results for two specific papers, which was very frustrating because one of the results sounded like it included him discussing why he switched from zahab to dane, but oh well. i sent in support requests so we'll see what comes of that.

i did see that shudder has castle freak, but whim wasn't interested in a more serious movie and jeffrey combs/barbara crampton being in it wasn't enough of a sell, alas. hoping to watch it tomorrow with a good friend who's a combs stan - their enthusiasm is infectious. speaking of reanimator&c - check out this super cool post by tempural about an artwork i commissioned from them. i love hill/west and jumped at the chance to get a valentine's day commission from them because i love their art and knew they'd have fun with the premise of my request. i wanna write more hill/west this year! fuck the people on tungle who get mad if your gay reanimator ship isn't danbert. it isn't my fault david gale is mega sexy!

anyway, time to log into eso and dick around in advance of the elsweyr event starting next week. my absolute favorite expansion... next post of mine on here should be a review of find the lady. pray for my adhd. thanks.