Midnight Mover is the Accept song that wasn’t Balls to the Wall. I actually prefer Midnight Mover to Balls to the Wall as both a song and video but Midnight Mover was never featured on Beavis and Butt-Head and is lesser known as a result.
The song is about a drug dealer, one who moves his product at midnight. The video is mostly interesting as an early example of the “bullet time” technology that would later be made famous by The Matrix. Accept did it first!
Enjoy!
To be honest, the trailer for A Jazzman’s Blues looks a bit better than the average Tyler Perry film but…. well, it’s still a Tyler Perry film. Perry seems like a genuinely nice man and he’s given valuable opportunities to a lot of actors and technicians. But, as both a writer and a director, he has a tendency towards being more than a little heavy-handed. He’s one of those filmmakers who, because of his personal qualities, you always hope will eventually make a great film but it’s debatable whether he’s even made a good one yet.
We’ll see how he did with A Jazzman’s Blues when it drops on Netflix in September.
Earlier today, the trailer for Noah Baumbach’s upcoming White Noise dropped. This film, which is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel, is expected to receive a major awards season push from Netflix. It’s a film that not only reunited Baumbach with Marriage Story‘s Adam Driver but which also co-stars Greta Gerwig, who has yet to receive an acting nomination despite directing two films that have been nominated for Best Picture. It’ll be curious to see how Baumbach does with White Noise. DeLillo is one of our most acclaimed novelists but other filmmakers have often struggled to capture the essence of his prose on film.
Here’s the trailer. Judge it for yourself.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tomorrow, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 1992’s The Cutting Edge!
It’s figure skating, hockey, and love! D.B. Sweeney is a former hockey star. Moira Kelly is a figure skater with a reputation for being a diva. Terry O’Quinn and Roy Dotrice are the distinguished character actors who are brought in to class the joint up. Can Sweeney and Kelly win the gold and fall in love at the same time!?
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
This movie is a personal favorite of mine and I can’t wait to play host tomorrow night!
by James B. Settles
This is from 1943.
Just to clear up some confusion that apparently shows up online, the Blair Underwood who directed this video for Megadeth is not the same Blair Underwood who co-starred on L.A. Law. Considering that Blair Underwood the actor reportedly based his L.A. Law character on a young Barack Obama and Dystopia was undoubtedly Dave Mustaine’s commentary on America under Obama, the collaboration would have been an unlikely one.
It was for Dystopia that Megadeth won their first Grammy. Unfortunately, during the Grammy ceremony, the house band played Metallica’s Master of Puppets when Dave Mustaine and the band went up to accept the award. Mustaine, who was famously kicked out of Metallica before then forming Megadeth, said that he didn’t take it personally. That doesn’t really sound like the Dave Mustaine that most people know but let’s take his word for it.
Enjoy!
This is the time of year when the haze around the Oscar race starts to clear up. On paper, Empire of Light certainly looks like it should be contender. It’s British. It’s a period piece. It’s a love story. It stars Olivia Colman. It was directed by Sam Mendes. And judging from the trailer, which was just released today, the film looks like a visual treat.
Will the actual film live up to the hype? We’ll see. As a filmmaker, Sam Mendes can be inconsistent but he’s certainly improved quite a bit since he somehow won an Oscar for the abysmal American Beauty. I am looking forward to seeing and judging Empire of Light for myself.
(Curtesy of NASA)
Pluto will always be a planet to me.
The most interesting thing about this performance clip music video is that it was directed by Julien Temple. Temple was and still is best known for documenting the brief but memorable career of The Sex Pistols. He went on to direct two Sex Pistol films, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury.
Temple has directed music videos for just everyone who was anybody on the British rock scene: Sex Pistols (naturally), Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Sade, and many others. He also directed the music video for Planet Texas, in which Kenny Rogers is abducted by aliens. The music industry brings together even the most unlikely of collaborators.
Enjoy!
Last night, I watched the 1987 film, Banzai Runner!
Why Was I Watching It?
Last night, it was my turn to host the #MondayActionMovie live tweet! The loyal members of MAM trusted me to find an exciting, action-filled movie with which they could start their week. I failed.
What Was It About?
Listen, it’s not totally my fault. I checked with the IMDb. I checked Wikipedia. I read the film’s description on YouTube. They all said that the film starred Dean Stockwell as a cop who goes undercover to bring down a group of wealthy street racers.
And technically, that is what the film’s about but only at the very end. Before we get around to any of that fun stuff, the film is basically just Highway Patrolman Billy Baxter (Dean Stockwell) driving around the desert and trying to keep his dumbass nephew, Beck (John Shepard), from getting into trouble. How big of a dumbass is Beck? He’s so dumb that he lights up a joint while he’s driving and while his uncle — the policeman — is sitting right next to him. Needless to say, Billy gets upset about that. (The scene is amusing if — and only if — you know that Dean Stockwell was one of Hollywood’s most prominent hippies.)
Eventually, Billy and Beck do go undercover to take out Syszek (Billy Drago), a wealthy drug dealer who likes to street race but who also does to much cocaine. In a coincidence that comes out of nowhere, it turns out that Syszek is responsible for the death of Billy’s brother and Beck’s father. Neither Billy nor Beck really seem to be too upset about it, though.
What Didn’t Work?
(Usually I like to start with what did work but I’m making an exception here.)
It’s an 84 minute film (not counting the end credits). It takes 60 minutes for Billy to go undercover. It takes another 5 minutes or so for Billy to actually meet Syszek. The only reason that anyone is going be watching this film is because they want to see Dean Stockwell and Billy Drago race against each other but that part of the film doesn’t even kick in until the movie is nearly over! Instead, we get an hour of Billy aimlessly doing his job and Beck complaining about his uncle being too strict. It’s very slow and dull.
Dean Stockwell was a good actor who gave some wonderfully eccentric performances in his adult years but he’s miscast as Billy. John Shepherd played Tommy in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and I’ve always preferred Shepherd’s interpretation of the character over Thom Matthews’s performance in Jason Lives. Shepherd had an appealing vulnerability in A New Beginning but none of that is present in Banzai Runners. It doesn’t help that the script portrays Beck as being a combination of every bad boyfriend I had from the sixth grade through my senior year of high school.
What Worked?
I’m a Southern girl and I’m also enough of a country girl that I do have a weakness for fast cars and the people who drive them. So, I could appreciate the film on that level. The car chases were fun, I just wish that there had been more of them. All of those scenes of Billy worrying about paying his mortgage (and yes, that was a huge subplot during the first hour of the film) should have been edited out and replaced with scenes from The Wraith. Or maybe just the Shangri-Las singing Leader of the Pack.
“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments
There’s a scene where the rich daughter of one of the racers announce that she’ll remove a piece of clothing for every mile that Beck goes over 55. On the one hand, it’s a scene that feels like it was lifted from a Crown International cheerleader film. On the other hand …. well, like I said, I had a weakness for bad boys who drove fast cars. So, even in this rather bland film, I still found someone to whom I could relate. Yay!
Lessons Learned
Never assume that a movie is exciting just because of its name.
Through the Shattered Lens 