Tag Archives: Macaulay Culkin

HOME ALONE, the Christmas spirit & celebrating my Mom’s birthday! 🎉🎂

Posted on by Bradley Crain

This weekend our family has been celebrating my Mom’s birthday together at our family cabin. One thing about hanging out with Mom in November is you know you’re going to be watching Christmas movies. It may be on the Hallmark channel or it may be one of her countless DVD’s or Blu rays of Christmas classics, but you’re going to be getting in the Christmas spirit. Last night we watched HOME ALONE.

The story is well known. A family is going on a Christmas vacation in Paris. In all the craziness created by a fluke power outage, 8 year old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is accidentally left home alone while the rest of the family gets on a plane to France. Meanwhile, a pair of house robbers (Joe Pesci & Daniel Stern) plan on hitting homes in the neighborhood on Christmas Eve. Kevin not only survives with his parents gone, he thrives, and he makes the robbers wish they’d never stumbled into his neighborhood. With that said, he does learn some valuable lessons along the way, and he realizes that he does love and miss his family. 

What can you say about Macaulay Culkin in HOME ALONE?!! He owns the movie. It’s one of the great child performances in the movies.  Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are funny as the robbers, with young Kevin putting them through hell. I still cringe in pain at times as the two step on ornaments, get burned and are physically assaulted, all thanks to Kevin’s assorted collection of tricks & booby traps. There’s also a plot line with Kevin’s scary neighbor that leads to a touching conclusion. And finally, as we celebrate Mom’s birthday, I can’t help but be touched by the reunion at the end between Kevin and his mom (Catherine O’Hara). No matter how much they can get on each other’s nerves, the truth is that they both love each other with all of their hearts. It’s a special feeling when you have a mom who loves you. That’s one thing Kevin and I have in common. And we love them back. 

HOME ALONE is highly recommended!

October True Crime: Party Monster (dir by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhAsZh3NOA&pp=ygUVUGFydHkgTW9uc3RlciB0cmFpbGVy

Michael Alig!  He was the flamboyant, self-declared “King of the Club Kids.”  He was a club promoter in New York City in the late 80s and the 90s.  He had money.  He had fame.  He had a huge following.  He used to appear regularly on the daytime talk shows.  He was a regular feature in the gossip columns.  He also had a raging drug addiction and an ego that most people couldn’t stand.  He tried to position himself as the successor to Andy Warhol, overlooking the fact that Warhol himself actually had a bit of talent.  And, in 1996, he became a murderer.

He and his roommate killed his drug dealer, a fellow club kid who was known as Angel.  They hit him over the head and suffocated him before then dismembering him.  Everyone knew that Alig was responsible for Angel’s disappearance, largely because he wouldn’t shut up about killing him.  Alig even threw a party where the macabre and bloody decorations left little doubt that Alig had murder on his mind.  Eventually, a group of children found Angel’s remains and Alig and his roommate were arrested.  Due to a plea deal, Alig was sent to prison for manslaughter.  He served 14 years before being paroled.  Alig died of a heroin overdose in 2020.

Released in 2003 (while Alig was still in prison), Party Monster is a biopic of Michael Alig and also a look at New York club culture in the 90s.  The film got a bit of attention when it came out because it starred Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green as, respectively, Michael Alig and James St. John, who was Alig’s mentor-turned-friend-turned-enemy.  Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t very good and both Culkin and Green are lousy in their roles.  Both of them come across like middle American high school kids trying to score cheap laughs by acting as self-consciously flamboyant as possible.  At the time the film was made, Culkin did bear a passing a resemblance to Michael Alig but the same could have been said of Michael Pitt and, at the very least, we know that Pitt is capable of playing a character who is capable of murder.  Culkin, on the other hand, seems to be trying so hard to make us forget that he’s Macaulay Culkin that he instead continually reminds us that we’re watching the star of Home Alone snort cocaine and urinate in wine glasses.  (Ewwwww!)  That said, Culkin and Green aren’t the only two giving bad performances here.  I started giggling as soon as Dylan McDermott showed up wearing an eyepatch.  Only Wilson Cruz as Angel and Chloe Sevigny as one of Alig’s associates feel in any way convincing in their roles.

For a film about a group of people who claimed “fabulousness” as their defining aesthetic, Party Monster is a visually dull film.  Many scenes are overlit, to the extent that the performers look wan and washed out.  That may be a good look for the drug-addled Alig who killed Angel but, in this film, Alig looks and seems burned out from the minute he shows up in New York City.  The end result is a rather boring film that doesn’t offer up any insight into the Club Kids or the murders.

Mac Attack: The Good Son (1993, directed by Joseph Ruben)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“Hey, Mark, don’t fuck with me,” 12 year-old Henry (Macaulay Culkin) says to his cousin Mark (Elijah Wood) in The Good Son‘s signature scene.  But fuck with him Mark does because Mark knows that evil exists and that Henry’s evil.  Henry killed his brother and he tries to kill his sister, Connie (Quinn Culkin), by throwing her onto thin ice.  When Mark, whose mother has recently died, decides that Henry’s mother, Susan (Wendy Crewson), is going to be his new mom, Henry gets jealous and tells Mark that he would rather kill Susan than allow her to have another son.  Eventually, Mark and Henry both end up dangling from a cliff with Susan holding onto them.  Susan has to decide who to save, her evil son or the distant relation that she barely knows.  She makes her choice and the camera lingers on the corpse of the less fortunate child on the rocks below.  For most mothers, it probably wouldn’t even be a difficult decision.  Of course you would save your own child!  But Susan has to think about it.  Maybe she can see the future and knows that Elijah Wood has the Lord of the Rings to look forward to while Macaulay is destined for something much different.

The Good Son caused a lot of controversy when it came out in 1993, not because it was about a murderous child but because that murderous child was played by the then-biggest star in America.  How would people who loved watching Macaulay seriously injure two burglars react to watching Macaulay kill people?  The movie actually did well at the box office but it also revealed that the Macaulay Culkin was a limited actor.  Elijah Wood was a good actor but Mark still comes across like a little creep.  Trying to steal his cousin’s mother?  What did he think was going to happen?

Finally, The Good Son was written by Ian McEwan, of all people.  In McEwan’s defense, he only wrote the first draft and that was long before Macaulay Culkin was miscast as Henry.  Apparnetly, Macaulay’s father and manager, Kit Culkin, demanded that his son be cast as a psycho murderer before he would allow Maccaulay to appear in Home Alone 2.  I guess Kit thought making his son look evil would be a good career movie.  If only someone had been willing to say, “Hey, Kit Culkin, don’t fuck with the movie.”

Music Video of the Day: All Alone on Christmas by Darlene Love (1992, dir by ????)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) is one of my favorite Christmas song but, unfortunately, there’s not an official music video for Love’s version.

However, there is a music video for Love’s 1992 Christmas song, All Alone on Christmas.  As you can tell from watching the video, this song was actually a part of the Home Alone 2 soundtrack.  The video is full of footage from the movie but it does not include the scenes with Donald Trump.  However, it does feature Macaulay Culkin “producing” the song.  I understand that the grown-up Culkin now performs song about pizza which …. well, I mean, I like pizza so hopefully it’s not as stupid as it sounds.

In the video, Darlene Love is backed up by members of the E Street Band, who all look happy to be freed (if only momentarily) from the tyranny of Bruce Springsteen.

Enjoy!

Horror Film Review: Jacob’s Ladder (dir by Adrian Lyne)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder asks the question, “Who is Jacob Singer?”

Is Jacob (played by Tim Robbins), a soldier serving in Vietnam who has just been severely wounded in an enemy attack and who is now barely clinging to life in a helicopter?

Is Jacob a withdrawn postal worker who lives in 1970s New York with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Pena), and who is haunted by horrifying visions of faceless, vibrating figures and viscous demons?  This Jacob is haunted by ill-defined past incidents.  Whenever he gets depressed, Jezzie is quick to demand that he snap out of it and that he stop thinking about anything other than the present day.  This Jacob can only watch as all of his old friends either sink into paranoia or die.  He hears rumors that they all may have been part of some sort of experiment involving LSD.  He’s sure that he served in the army but when he attempts to hire an attorney, he’s informed that the army has no record of him ever having served in combat and that they say he was discharged for psychological reasons.

Or is Jacob the husband of Sarah (Patricia Kalember) and the father of Gabe (Macaulay Culkin — yes, that Culkin)?  This is the Jacob who occasionally wakes up in bed with his wife and tells her that he’s been having the weirdest dream, one where he was living with “that crazy woman” from the post office, Jezebel?

Which one of these three realities is the truth for Jacob?  At times, Jacob himself doesn’t even seem to be sure.  Perhaps the one thing that you can be sure about in this movie is that whenever Jacob closes his eyes, he’s going to reopen them and discover that he’s in a different time and place.  Jacob spends almost the entire film trying to work out what’s happening in the present, what’s happening in the past, and what’s just happening in his head.

And, to be honest, it all gets a bit pretentious at times.  The film’s script has a lot on its mind.  In fact, it might have a little bit too much going on.  No sooner have you soaked in what the film has to say about denial and acceptance than you’re suddenly getting a crash course in MK-ULTRA and other mind-control conspiracy theories.  Whenever Jacob isn’t seeing demons and faceless apparitions, he’s being kidnapped by government agents.  There’s so much going on that this film can get a bit exhausting.

Fortunately, the film itself is such a triumph of style that it doesn’t matter that the script is a bit of a mess.  Director Adrian Lyne does a great job bringing Jacob’s nightmarish world to life.  Jacob seems to live in a world where the skies are permanently overcast and the streets are always wet after a recent storm.  When Jacob makes the mistake of walking down a subway tunnel, Lyne frames it as if Jacob is literally following a tunnel into Hell.  When a subway train rushes by Jacob, we catch disturbing glimpses of featureless faces facing the windows.  When Jacob sees a demon at a party, Lynne films the moment so that, just like Jacob, it takes us a few minutes to realize what we’re seeing.  And when Jacob is kidnapped and taken to a Hellish hospital, the scene is nightmarish in its intensity.

Tim Robbins gives a great performance as the emotionally withdrawn and haunted Jacob.  (In fact, he’s so good that it makes it all the more sad that he really hasn’t had a decent role since he won an Oscar for 2003’s Mystic River.)  He’s matched by Elizabeth Pena, who constantly keeps you wondering if Jezzie truly cares about Jacob or if she’s just another part of the conspiracy that seems to have taken over his life.

Jacob’s Ladder is an intensely effective, if somewhat messy, horror film.  Apparently, like almost every other horror film released in the 20th century, it’s currently being remade, with the remake due to released on February 9th.  Just in time for Valentine’s Day!