Movies I Have Seen Lately

[The Baron]

Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.

[JD DeLuzio]

Is this some kind of weird endurance test? Or are you doing random and bizarre things to connect to another reality?

(Yeah, guess what Oscar-winner we just watched).

[Richard Willis]

Everything Everywhere All at Once?

JD DeLuzio said:

Is this some kind of weird endurance test? Or are you doing random and bizarre things to connect to another reality?

(Yeah, guess what Oscar-winner we just watched).

[JD DeLuzio]

I hesitate to review it. We really liked it, but almost everything is a spoiler.

How about: imagine Crisis on Infinite Earths as a prestige film, except instead of DC superheroes, it concerns the  members of a family, and Jamie Lee Curtis plays the Anti-Monitor's Shadow Demons. And instead of the Anti-Monitor.... You get the idea. But not really.

It's amazing how ideas once familiar only to nerds have become so mainstream that you can make a comedy about them and win multiple Oscars.

Richard Willis said:

Everything Everywhere All at Once?

JD DeLuzio said:

Is this some kind of weird endurance test? Or are you doing random and bizarre things to connect to another reality?

(Yeah, guess what Oscar-winner we just watched).

[Jeff of Earth-J]

JD DeLuzio said:

Is this some kind of weird endurance test?

Don't ask me, ask Tim and Rob. they put me up to it.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

I think we should start over, but Tracy wants to buy a different many-movie pack.

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

I'm with Tracy; get a different movie pack.

Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod) said:

I'm with Tracy, too -- get a different movie pack and do that one!

Even you said:

JD DeLuzio said:

That is some fine programming-- and I've seen surprisingly few of those.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

THE VAN (1977): "A nice young man gets more than he bargained for when he acquires his fantasy vehicle... a van."

Actually, I think the "nice young man" got exactly what he bargained for. This movie is so much like The Pom Pom Girls that it could be a sequel. The Van follows two different different couples, and one of the supporting actors from The Pom Pom Girls plays a supporting role in this. The first 15 minutes are a direct rip-off of Car Wash, then it moves directly into van culture. I was only in junior high school when this movie came out, but I wanted a car horn exactly like those featured in this movie when I learned to drive. I even scoped them out at K-Mart; they could play 100 tunes. By the time I got my license, however, I completely forgot about it and didn't think about it again until just now.

I'll tell you something many of these movies have in common: a single band provides the soundtrack. Unfortunately, most of these "house bands" have only three or four songs, so they're featured over and over. In the case of The Van, it's Sammy Johns, whose style is best described as "soft country rock." Apparently he had a hit song in 1975 ("Chevy Van") which is played at least three times in the movie. The bully of the film, Dugan Hicks (Stephen Oliver) reprises his role in Malibu Beach (1978), and before you ask, yes, it's part of the set (four movies from now). Danny DeVito plays a supporting character in what must be one of his first movie roles.

[JD DeLuzio]

He did indeed score a hit with "Chevy Van," a song which I thought about for the first time since, quite possibly, the 1970s, yesterday. WTF? Are we connected by  more than just a common first name?

The wiki article, which I just checked, even mentions that the "original 1973 version was featured in the 1977 film The Van" (it was apparently covered many times in a more country vein). Although first recorded in '73, it was not a hit until 1975, as you note.

Bonus 70s van magazine:

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"Although first recorded in '73, it was not a hit until 1975, as you note."

As Wikipedia notes. I had never heard the song until last night. Incidentally, the song is about a Chevy van, and the one featured in the movie is clearly a Dodge. 

"Are we connected by more than just a common first name?"

Possibly (I did not know your first name is Jeff)...

"WTF?"

...but here's what I think happened. When I first announced my intention to buy the drive-in cult movie set, you looked at the movie list online and quite possibly noted "The Van" (either consciously or subconsciously). In either case, you have been reading my posts which have opened a compartment in your mind which you haven't accessed in a while, the one that stores the memory of "Chevy Van." The fact that you just happened to be thinking of it yesterday is mere coincidence. At least that's the way my subconscious mind works. 

Or we have a some kind of psychic link. Your choice.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"The bully of the film, Dugan Hicks (Stephen Oliver) reprises his role in Malibu Beach (1978)"

The main character spends the entire movie flirting with Dugan's girlfriend (she's the blonde in the middle on the poster), until he finally scores. Just before the climactic drag race, the kid tells Dugan that he slept with her and calls him a "turd." That's such a juvenile insult, but Dugan obsesses over it. Forget the fact that the kid slept with his girlfriend, he spends the entire drag race muttering, "Nobody calls Dugan a turd. Nobody!" I now have this elaborate backstory in my head about some kid on the playground calling him a turd in the first grade and the experience scarred him for life. I looking forward to his next appearance in Malibu Beach.

[Richard Willis]

The thing that jumped out at me about the poster was the word "Fun-truckin'," which probably gave some theater owners pause. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

THE BEACH GIRLS (1982): "A coming-of-age story about a bookish young woman who changes during her summer vacation from a bespectacled bookworm to a femme fatale."

Good girl Sarah has the use of her uncle's beach house for the summer. She invites her parting friends, Ducky and Ginger, and they pick up a hitchhiker named Scott along the way. Ducky and Ginger pressure Sarah into throwing a party, and they invite a beachful of total strangers. The neighbors call the uncle, and Ducky and Ginger seduce him. There's also a subplot about some drug runners and a Coast Guard Captain who thinks he's Humphry Bogart from The Caine Mutiny. I never saw this one, but I do actually remember it from when it was playing (which is more than I can say for most of them so far). The "house band" is Arsenal, and they are able to play in a variety of styles (beach and disco, mainly). As bad as it is (and it quite often slips into slapstick), the production values on this movie are quite high (relatively speaking).

Most of the movies in this set so far have been rated R, and I have invented a game I play against myself. (Tracy isn't aware, and wouldn't participate if she was.) It involves whose boobs we'll see, whose we won't see, whose we'll see first, whose we'll see last, and when. (There are a lot of boobs in these movies, and I had to think of something to do with them.) For example, for The Beach Girls, it was fairly obvious that Sarah was going to be the last to show hers, and it was going to at the very end. (For the record, Ginger was first, in the very first scene.) The next movie is rated PG, but the next five after that are rated R.

Pictured are Ducky (white bikini), Sarah (hat) and Uncle Carl.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Addenda:

THE POM POM GIRLS: One of the two main male characters is played by Robert Carradine, the least well-known (and least talented) member of the Carradine family. The only other role I've seen him play was an episode of Kung Fu with his father and brother. 

THE VAN: The main character drives around with a perpetual grin on his face (even before he gets the van), as if he's perpetually having the time of his life.

THE BEACH GIRLS: The girls who plays Ducky was Playboy's November 1980 "Playmate of the Month"; I recognized her immediately. (I did not share this information with Tracy.) Now she's a grandmother. 

[Richard Willis]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

THE POM POM GIRLS: One of the two main male characters is played by Robert Carradine, the least well-known (and least talented) member of the Carradine family. The only other role I've seen him play was an episode of Kung Fu with his father and brother. 

If you don't hate westerns, you should see The Long Riders (1980), which stars the Carradine family as the Younger Brothers, the Keach brothers as the James boys and the Quaid brothers as their fellow gang members the Miller brothers. It's enjoyable if you can ignore the "Lost Cause" BS.

THE BEACH GIRLS: The girls who plays Ducky was Playboy's November 1980 "Playmate of the Month"; I recognized her immediately. (I did not share this information with Tracy.) Now she's a grandmother. 

I'm glad to hear of an actress who hasn't died prematurely. When I look up somebody's bio on IMDB it's depressing how many died too young.