4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we take a moment to remember the great director and stuntman, Hal Needham. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Hal Needham Films
Smokey and the Bandit (1977, dir by Hal Needham, DP: Bobby Byrne)
Hooper (1978, dir by Hal Needham, DP: Bobby Byrne)
The Cannonball Run (1981, dir by Hal Needham, DP: Michael Butler)
Rad (1986, dir by Hal Needham, DP: Richard Leiterman)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly watch parties. On Twitter, I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday and I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday. On Mastodon, I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 1986’s Highlander!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, find Highlander on Prime or Tubi, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there happily tweeting. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Since it’s Spring Break for many people in the United States, I figured this would be a good time share some of my favorite Spring Break scenes.
This one comes from Umberto Lenzi’s 1988 film, Welcome to Spring Break. In this scene, a student has decided to have a little bit of fun by pretending to be dead on the beach. Since there’s an actual murderer on the loose, his friends are less than impressed with his sense of humor.
It’s a short scene but it features one of the greatest line readings ever.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
104 years ago, on this date, Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Italy. His controversial films and his mysterious death continue to inspire debate to this very day. Both the man and his works were full of intriguing contradictions. Pasolini was an atheist who made one of the best Biblical films ever made. He was a communist who made films that celebrated individual freedom and who had little use for the upper class liberals who made up much of the European counterculture of the 1960s. In the end, he was an artist unafraid to challenge all assumptions, whether they were found on the right or the left. His final film, Salo, was the most controversial of his career. It was also projected to be the first part of a trilogy, though those plans were ended by Pasolini’s murder.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Pier Paolo Pasolini Films
Accatone (1961, dir by Pier Paolo Pasolini, DP: Tonino Delli Colli)
The Gospel According To St. Matthew (1964, dir by Pier Paolo Pasolini, DP: Tonino Delli Colli)
Medea (1969, dir by Pier Paolo Pasolini, DP: Ennio Guarnieri)
Salo (1975, dir by Pier Paolo Pasolini, DP: Tonino Delli Colli)
Caleb Whitley (Daniel Stine) is an energetic and handsome pastor who is also a coach at the local high school. His father was a pastor and Caleb inherited the church that his old man founded. Caleb’s loyal mother, Hattie (Annette Saunders), is there to protect Caleb in all that he does because she believes that he is meant for something special. Caleb’s wife, Jenn (Clark Sarullo), appears to be the perfect pastor’s wife. She’s blonde, she’s composed, and she always seem to have control over the situation.
And that’s good because Caleb …. well, Caleb often falls to temptation.
Caleb is the type of pastor who makes a big deal about running shirtless every morning so that the single women of the neighborhood can appreciate him. Caleb says he’s just trying to take care of his body but we all know what he’s doing. Caleb also has a history of cheating on Jenn and his mistresses have a tendency to turn up dead once they become inconvenient. Is the Pastor truly preying? Or is something else happening?
That’s what fashion designer Nicole (Amanda Nicholas) is determined to find out. After her cousin, Amanda (Analisa Wall) is found dead, Nicole immediately suspects the pastor. She shares her concerns with Detective Chandler (Wade Hunt Williams) but does she have any proof? Not yet….
I should say a few words about Detective Chandler. There are a lot of memorable characters to be found in The Pastor Who Preys but Detective Chandler is one of the most entertaining, just because he seems to be so genuinely perplexed by everything that he hears. Most detectives tend to be cynical but Detective Chandler seems to be genuinely shocked at the idea that the pastor could be a serial adulterer. When the detective later talks to Jenn about the rumors of her husband’s infidelity, he has no problem revealing the name of the person who said that Caleb’s a cheater. It seems like most detectives would know better than to reveal the name to a potential suspect. Chandler is so incompetent at his job that he becomes oddly likable. I mean, he’s just trying so hard! His facial expressions during the film’s finale really should be put in a museum.
This is a Lifetime church melodrama. I have to admit that almost everything I know about protestant churches, I learned from watching Lifetime. I’ve learned that the pastors are always charismatic but they shouldn’t be trusted. The church men always want to get home to watch the game. The church women always spend their meetings gossiping about who is cheating on whom. There’s always a divorcee who wears leopard-print dresses and who has her eye on the pastor. In this film, that role is filled by Lacey (Erika Monet Butters) and she’s definitely the best character in the film.
The Pastor Who Preys is an enjoyable melodrama in the time-honored Lifetime tradition. It offers up several credible suspects and I have to admit that my first guess as to who was guilty turned out to be wrong. Caleb is one smooth operator. I expect he’ll return when they get around to The Pastor Who Stalked Me.
Today, we celebrate the birthday of actor and musician, Ronn Moss!
In honor of this day, here is a classic scene fromHard Ticket to Hawaii! In this scene that I love, Ronn Moss not only blows up a skateboard assassin but the assassin’s sex doll as well. No one messes with Ronn Moss, his driver, or the Molokai cops!
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today’s the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 85th birthday to the British director, Adrian Lyne! Lyne was one of the many British director to start his career by making commercials. (Alan Parker and Tony and Ridley Scott also followed a same career path.) He brought the same technique that inspired people to buy products to his films and the enf result was some of the most stylish films of the 80s, 90s, and the aughts. Lyne hasn’t directed many films but his lasting influence cannot be denied.
It’s times for….
4 Shots From 4 Adrian Lyne Films
Flashdance (1983, dir by Adrian Lyne, DP: Donald Peterman)
Fatal Attraction (1987, dir by Adrian Lyne, DP: Howard Atherton)
Jacob’s Ladder (1990, dir by Adrian Lyne, DP: Jeffrey L. Kimball)
Indecent Proposal (1993, dir by Adrian Lyne, DP: Howard Atherton)
The most interesting thing about In The Blink Of An Eye is who directed it.
Andrew Stanton got his start at PIXAR, directing films like A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and my personal favorite, WALL-E. (He also directed Toy Story 5, which will be coming out later this year.) Stanton’s PIXAR films were some of the best to come out of that legendary studio. Especially when it came to WALL-E, he showed not only his skill as a visual storyteller but also his ability to craft compelling narratives that sold their message without necessarily feeling preachy. (If you didn’t cry while watching WALL-E, you don’t have a heart.) Stanton’s first live action film was John Carter, a legendary flop that was more betrayed by its producers than its director. After the failure of John Carter, Stanton redeemed himself by directing episodes of shows like Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and For All Mankind.
In The Blink Of An Eye is Stanton’s second live action film. It’s an earnest film. One can tell that both Stanton and the film’s screenwriter, Colby Day, felt they had something important to say. (Day’s screenplay appeared on the 2016 Black List, which is the annual list of the “best” unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Unfortunately, as anyone who has sat through Cedar Rapids can tell you, merely getting on the Black List is not a guarantee that a script will be transformed into a good or even watchable movie.) Like WALL-E, it’s a film with a message. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as watchable or compelling as Stanton’s animated work.
It’s a film that tells three interconnected stories, each one taking place at a different time in human history. In 45,000 BC, a family of cave people struggle to survive and to start a civilization on the beach of a largely untouched Earth. In the 21st century, anthropologist Claire (Rashida Jones) falls in love with Greg (Daveed Diggs) and eventually, they have a son who inherits their shared interest in science and their appreciation for Paleolithic culture. (Don’t let Claire hear you suggest that Neanderthals were dumb.) Meanwhile, in the far future, Coakley (Kate McKinnon) lives on a spaceship where her only companion is an AI named Rosco (voiced by Rhona Rees). When Coakley’s mission appears to be in jeopardy, Rosco suggests that the only solution might be Coakley shutting Rosco down. The stories share a connection, one that most audiences will guess before the film gets around to revealing it.
As I said, In The Blink Of An Eye is an earnest and well-intentioned film. (Colby Day also wrote the screenplay for the underrated Spaceman, a film that dealt with similar themes.) And yet, it really doesn’t work. The pacing is off. This is a 90 minute film that feels considerably longer. The stories themselves are not particularly compelling. The cave people are well-acted and I appreciated the fact that they spoke they’re own language as opposed to crude English but they were also way too clean. For a group of people who lived without soap, toothpaste, razors, and deodorant, they were way too physically pleasant to be credible. Rashida Jones and Daveed Diggs are sweet when they’re falling in love but then they become rather insufferable once they start a family. As for the future scenes, Kate McKinnon has never been a particularly consistent actress and that trend continues here. She gets outacted by the voice of Rosco. (Having the AI be more likable than the actual human worked well in 2001 but it’s far less effective here.)
As I said, it was well-intentioned but, in the end, it just left me wanting to watch WALL-E again.
In 2024’s Saturday Night, there’s a scene where the president of NBC (played by Willem DaFoe) tells a young and arrogant Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) that, if he plays his cards right, he might someday replace Johnny Carson as America’s most popular talk show host. When Chase brags about this to one of the writers of Saturday Night Live, the writer — who is portrayed as being a weary industry veteran — tells Chase that he will never replace Johnny Carson. In exacting detail, he predicts that Chase will start strong. He’ll be one of the early stars of Saturday Night Live but then he’ll let the adulation go to his head and his arrogance will alienate everyone who once believed in him and, in the end, Chevy Chase will end up a faded, nearly forgotten star.
The film obviously meant for this scene to be a crowd-pleaser. Personally, I found it to be gratuitously cruel. While watching Saturday Night, we all know what the future holds for Chevy Chase but having a fictional character show up for just one scene so that he can say it to Chase’s face feels excessive. It’s not only a bit too on-the-nose but it’s also not necessary. However, the scene does speak to a larger truth. It’s socially acceptable to hate Chevy Chase.
The stories of Chase’s bad behavior are legendary. People have heard the stories about him being difficult to work with on the set of Community. They’ve heard about him suggesting a skit in which Terry Sweeney, the first openly gay member of the Saturday Night Live cast, would announce that he had AIDS. Everyone can visualize the famous brawl that occurred between Bill Murry and Chase when the latter first returned to host SNL and I think nearly everyone agrees that they’d rather have Bill Murray crash their wedding than Chevy. Chase is famous for being rude and for snapping at people in interviews. It’s not only socially acceptable to hate Chevy Chase but it’s kind of expected, especially if you’re an extremely online comedy nerd.
Myself, I have to admit that I wonder why Chase’s personality is the business of anyone other than the people who have work with him. Does the fact that he’s not lovable in real life somehow make Christmas Vacation less entertaining to watch in December and if so, why? One might be tempted to wonder if some grace can be given to an 82 year-old man who is obviously in frail health and whose ideas about comedy were developed in a time very different from today.
That many people would answer that question with a resounding “no,” is evidence of just how bad of a reputation Chevy Chase has. Marina Zenovich, the director of I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not, described Chevy Chase as being the “rudest” person that she has ever interviewed and you can see more than a little of that while watching the documentary. He replies to one question with, “You b*tch.” (I gave up cursing for Lent and I’m not going back on my word just to quote Chevy Chase.) Another question leads to him telling the interviewer that she’s stupid. When asked about Terry Sweeney, Chase’s first reaction is to laugh and his second reaction is to say that he had heard Sweeney was dead. (Sweeney is alive and, like many of the people who have worked with Chase in the past, declined to be interviewed for the documentary. We can probably learn more from so many of them not wanting to talk about working Chase than we could from any of their interviews.)
And yet, there are scenes where you can see evidence of the aging and very human person hiding underneath all of the rudeness and the bluster. When Zenovich mentions that a lot of people dislike Chase, the pain in his eyes will take you by surprise. When he meets a fan in a diner, he seems to be genuinely touched. Chase’s love for his family comes through, as does their love for him. His daughter talks about a time when Chase nearly died and the viewer is reminded that, regardless of all the stories, he’s still a father and a husband. There’s a moment where Chase seems to forget the name of his first wife. Is he being a jerk or is he an 80-something man with memory issues? It’s far too easy to make assumptions, both good and bad, about famous people who we don’t actually know.
The first fourth of the documentary discusses the early days of Chase’s career while the second fourth deals with his declining stardom and his reputation for being difficult. Performers like Dan Aykroyd, Beverly D’Angelo, and Goldie Hawn all appear to defend him while others are a bit less charitable. And yet, the most important part of the documentary comes towards the end, when Chase attends a showing a Christmas Vacation and takes questions from people in the audience. Even then, Chase is a profane smart-aleck and the audience loves it.
And, for at least a little while, Chevy Chase seems to love it too.
Through the Shattered Lens 