Thursday, June 30, 2011

My Blue Valentine (1990)*

Steve Martin is a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program. He has black hair instead of white—I think this is just his character, not part of his disguise—and he pushes a shopping cart in a supermarket (possibly also on the movie poster). Maybe he meets Rick Moranis? I don't remember anything else about this goddamned movie.

Whatever happened to Rick Moranis, anyway?

* Important note: This movie is called My Blue Heaven. Blue Valentine is a very different movie.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A politician gets shot in the head through the rear windshield of a town car—and I watched this as a pretty little kid* and for years afterwards was always just ever so slightly worried about getting shot in the head through the rear windshields of cars. (Great, now I'm scared of it again.) Anyway, these doctors need to get shrunk down and drive a submarine through this guy's veins, where they're nearly crushed by the heart—I may be remembering Innerspace here—and up to the brain, at which point it turns out that someone on the sub is a saboteur, and then my parents were like, "OK, time to go," and they turned off the TV, and I never found out what happened. I assume the submarine got big again and the politician's head blew up.

I think this is the brain...but where are the file cabinets?

* By which I mean that I was pretty little, not that I was pretty and little—although I was pretty gorgeous.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Flatliners (1990)

Kiefer Sutherland (I think...pretty safe guess, anyway) is part of an all-nighter-pulling team of scientists who discover that they can maybe bring people back from the dead, and a few of them—maybe all?—try it, after which I think they start having terrifying visions, like they brought something back. Then it turns out they just have to go around apologizing to people they wronged as kids. Oh, maybe one of them can't do that because the person he wronged committed suicide? Not sure what happens then. Nothing too cheerful, I'm thinking.

Also starring—Oliver Platt, as "Igor."

Monday, June 20, 2011

Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)

Julia Roberts is on the run from an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband who wants to kill her: not sure whether it's because she knows about some crime he committed or just because he's a violent, jealous maniac—I think the latter. In the end there's a suspenseful scene at an amusement park and presumably the guy dies, probably by falling off a ferris wheel or something. I remember this movie being about as cheerful and fun as you'd expect a movie about a woman-beating stalker/murderer to be.

This screenshot might be from a different movie—not totally sure.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Hugh Grant and others (maybe Helena Bonham Carter?) are friends and have various romantic entanglements. To be fair, that's less remembering than it is guessing. I sort of want to say that the wedding-funeral math doesn't add up the way you'd expect it to, and I think one of the main characters may be gay (which at the time of the film's release was relatively unusual?). I am really straining to remember anything else about this movie. I know I saw it in the theater, and I believe I felt that it had an impact in the United States that was disproportionate to its quality. Either that or I thought it was funny—but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go back and check.

Reminds me of that movie Homer went to see
when they pulled the crayon out of his brain
and he got too smart to like bad movies.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Baby (1938)*

Not to be confused with Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (I actually did confuse the two when I was a kid and was painfully disappointed: no dinosaurs at all?!), this movie does still involve a wild animal, albeit not extinct. Cary Grant and, I don't know, probably Katherine Hepburn have a tiger they have to drive around for some reason, and they wind up in a jail cell at one point with a bunch of other people—and possibly also the tiger. I feel like I have this movie filed, for some reason, in the same folder of my brain that has Mighty Joe Young (1949) in it. In other news, my brain is organized into file folders, and this is entirely neurologically sound [see Muppet Babies: "Scooter's Uncommon Cold"].

Adorable photograph (taken moments before Hepburn's tragic death).

* Important note: this movie is actually called Bringing Up Baby, and the tiger is a leopard.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Swordfish (2001)

Wolverine is a hacker and John Travolta is a master criminal who tests his hacking skills by seeing whether he can crack some kind of code while getting a blowjob with a gun to his head. Maybe Wolvie's an undercover cop? I think Travolta's getaway plan for some kind of big bank robbery involves a school bus being picked up by a helicopter with a huge magnet, and somehow that's supposed to be a brilliant, unstoppable maneuver. Halle Berry might be in this.*

Also part of the process if you apply for a job at Google.

* Ohhhh, right. Topless, reading a book.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Mermaids (1990)

Cher is a single mother, possibly a widow, whose daughters are Winona Horowitz and Christina Ricci (in her first role!). Sometimes they have fun, like when they cook together and sing songs from the early '60s or when Cher dates Bob Hoskins, but other times things are rough, like when Winona loses her virginity and her sister nearly drowns because sex is immoral. In the end everything turns out OK, though, and they cook and sing together during the credits. [NOTE: Is there something sort of messed up, somehow, about a bunch of pretty women singing that "Never make a pretty woman your wife" song, or am I imagining that?]

Why does this look more depressing than fun? Looks like
an oasis of laughter in a desert of despair.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Point Break (1991)

Val Kilmer robs a bank in a Reagan mask, and Keanu Reeves is maybe a cop trying to catch him? And they become buddies? Or maybe they're already buddies and Keanu wants out? But they definitely surf, I know that!—and, in the end, Val Kilmer rides his surfboard off into a huge wave that I guess they for some reason know is a certain-death situation,* and Kilmer says, all meaningfully, "Vaya con Dios"—and that's the end of the movie, and my friend and I (this was in high school) looked at each other and were both like, "What the fuck?" We didn't speak Spanish.

Jesus. I feel like this movie is for guys with sunglasses I wouldn't like.

* Funnily enough, "And, in the end, Val Kilmer rides his surfboard off into a huge wave that I guess they for some reason know is a certain-death situation" are actually the original lyrics to the Beatles' "The End." (They changed it to that "love you take, love you make" business because this version didn't scan quite right and because they were like, "Paul, who's 'Val Kilmer'?" and he made this very hammy Paul face and was like, "Beats me!")