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Peter_Mork
Reviews
Film: The Living Record of Our Memory (2021)
Don't panic, but everything is crumbling into dust
Well worth a watch, though they had to do that scare tactic of opening up a film can full of brown dust or black goo or white mold every two minutes. Chances are those films were boring anyway - most are. Archivists don't always make value judgements like that. I watched a "rediscovered" silent film, The Life Story of David Lloyd George awhile ago - it should have stayed lost.
The more pressing question is what are we doing to preserve our precious film actors? Remember Emily Watson? Cute star of films from the 90s like Breaking the Waves and Trixie? Now rather gaunt and careworn. Why aren't we putting her in a climate-controlled, dark storage facility? Before she crumbles into dust! That would be money well spent.
Beavis and Butt-Head: Escape Room/The Special One (2022)
A welcome return of our old friends
Beavis and Butt-head are best experienced in short bursts. The new feature, "Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe", is frustratingly loaded with annoying non-Beavises and non-Butt-heads, and plot deviations that have nothing to do with the single-minded obsessions we cherish these two lovable innocents for. Rating: one Huh.
I'm glad to see they are back in the vignette brève configuration that best suits their unique, subtle exploration of the human foibles we can all understand. In "Escape Room", an unforeseen circumstance throws them into a situation that will require all of their considerable wile to handle. Luckily, a handle does present itself, and they are able as ever to resolve any difficulty by shifting their expectations away from problem-solving to making the best of things. If only we all could do likewise. Two huhs.
"The Special One" is quite an unexpected surprise. Butt-head does not appear this time; instead it allows Beavis to meet his soulmate - will he score? The answer upends our expectations - perhaps what is Cool and what Sucks are after all situational. Ten heh-heh-hehs.
The Numbers Station (2013)
I don't do star ratings - sorry.
A few suggestions for armchair critics. If you liked a movie, don't call it a "gem", or worse "a hidden gem". If it was hidden you wouldn't have seen it.
If you didn't like it, don't say "That's 97 minutes of my life I'll never get back". That was clever 50 years ago when someone (Rex Reed, maybe?) thought of it. Now it's an old man shaking his fist at the sky.
Finally, please proofread your review before you hit "submit". I know, it's the internet and nobody does that.
"The Numbers Station": By now most of the intended audience for this sort of thing - paranoid Americans - know about these mystery radio stations that broadcast coded strings of spoken numbers to field agents. Even if it seems like someone came up with the title before hatching an outine, there ought to be an interesting story in the concept. This isn't exactly it, but it has its redeeming points.
I used to listen to numbers stations on my brother's shortwave radio in the 70s. Even then it was obvious there wasn't someone sitting in a room, reading numbers into a microphone - the voices were pre-recorded tapes that played single numbers in the order you wanted. When I saw they were going to introduce a real-live female numbers reader, presumably to be threatened by ominous outside forces, I was ready to throw up my hands. But the conceit does sort of pay off in an "Assault on Precinct 13" sort of way, when the reader and her manager are forced to hunker down as a ton of firepower is directed at their little fortress by an enemy who apparently wants to get in to do bad things - it's never really clear who they are, but World Domination seems to be a likely goal.
John Cusack looks pretty depressed here. "I was in The Grifters, now I'm a sad-sack spy on probation, manning a forlorn numbers bunker in, dear God, rural England." The Numbers Lady, who is more resourceful than you think at first, is adequately played by (person I never heard of). There's one role that stands out, a nasty villain named Max, played by Richard Brake. He's only in it for a few minutes in the middle of the movie, but this guy was born to do this sort of thing. He has a James Woods complexion and a leer that could melt your heart. Like Kurtwood Smith in Robocop, he's bad because it's just more fun.
The Vast of Night (2019)
A character study with tape decks
This can't really be called a science fiction movie - oh, there are alien spaceships, but they don't really matter. This is more like a strange, atmospheric inquiry by two young people who can't figure out what's going on but are determined to flush out the truth.
It takes place on a single night, and is centered around three long set pieces. The first has teenage swithcboard operator Fay hearing some unusual sounds coming through one of her connections, and alerting her DJ friend Everett, who patches into the noise and puts it on the air, to see if anyone can identify it. The second is a long phone call from a man (never seen) who says yes, indeed he has heard it before and relates a story of a job he once did as a soldier, the purpose of which was never explained to him.
Finally, Fay and Everett visit a woman who narrates a tale from years ago, where her son vanished one night - she insists he was taken by "the people in the sky". Her story at time confirms what Fay and Everett have learned, but also veers into paranoid rambling. What to believe?
If you watch this expecting explanations to emerge from these long dialogue scenes, this isn't the movie for you. But there are some odd choices, starting with the title (shouldn't that be The Vastness of Night?) and the framing of the whole thing as an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish show called "Paradox Theater". And what are we to make of all the old reel to reel tape recorders which are not only used as plot points, but are sometimes discussed in detail? You could write a whole thesis on this stuff. Is it all a put-on? A delve into a 50s culture that may seem as alien to us as "sky people"? Discuss.