piranesi

It just hit me that there was probably a moment a few weeks ago when you could have gone to that weird place that takes bets on any situation and laid a bet that "This year both the Razzies and the Oscars will have to rescind their top acting award." and they would have given you like 500 billion to 1 odds and you'd be sooooo close right now.

I have one of the highest tolerances for bad movies of anyone alive and I would not watch this movie again even if they agreed to credit the 80 minutes back onto my life expectancy afterward.

Has anyone here gone 4K? When I started buying movies again I kind of promised myself that Blu Ray was the last/best I would ever need and I don't really feel like buying a separate player and double dipping even on the classics. But it looks like on the boutique front it's profitable enough that 4K re-issues of already released and relatively "big" titles are going to take up a bigger piece of the pie.

It makes a lot of people who published "Bruce Willis is ruining his legacy" takes the last couple of years look shitty.

Blue Monkey (There are no monkeys in this) The Mafu Cage (looks insane) Neurosis (Jess Franco) Street People (Italian crime movie with Roger Moore) Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (cheesy slasher) Doc (nihilistic 1970s western) Illustrious Corpses (Italian crime) Just Before Dawn (cheesy slasher-in-the-woods) Revenge of the Shogun Women 3-D (title says it all) Scavenger Hunt (absurdly bad 80s comedy) The Bedroom Window Link (There are monkeys in this) Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Now do we know for certain that Tommy Lee Jones didn’t “get out” his ass into Will Smith’s body?

This tweet is right up there with like “The Nabisco Corporation does not condone today’s attempt to overthrow the United States government. Who’s up for some triscuits?” As evidence that we have gone off the rails, reality wise.

So this is just further confirmation that everything is insane and we’ve deviated from the normal timeline into toontown logic and it’s not going back to normal ever, right?

Throw in a couple of misspellings and this is a Gregg Turkington tweet.

Is it weird that the thing I'm now most looking forward to this year is for Shaun Diston and Carl Tart to be on Comedy Bang Bang as Will SMith and Chris Rock?

I didn't watch but the Rock/Smith thing is kind interesting because I've started to see the Oscars as this strange liminal space where we take a bunch of super rich people (in other words people who we kind of secretly think need to be taken down a peg) and we're supposed to love them and cry for them and be so happy for them and sympathize with them but they're also still super rich and probably a lot of them assholes and they just gobble up resources and attention in their walled Elysium so we hire one guy to go up there on our behalf and say the meanest shit he can get away with about them because it's the one time we get to see someone do that to them to their face. And this is all in the same show. I think we either need to grow up and stop pretending we like them enough to be offended for them or stop watching them on awards shows at all if we hate them enough to want Ricky Gervais or Chris Rock to go up and roast them. Maybe it was different when the academy still pretended to care about any of the technical awards or the past and "film buffs" would watch for that stuff, but now it's all about the drama of this year's chosen unicorn pretty person crying or whatever. It's an idea that has been focus-grouped right to the brink of being too absurd to exist. Like, the razzies should end. But the Oscars shouldn't be far behind. They're only maybe 20% less irrelevant to anyone's experience of movies anymore.

I demand that the fourth Chinatown movie be called The Two Jessicas.

The last time I walked into a media section of a B&N the first thing I saw was a vinyl record by Kiefer Sutherland for $35.

SO true... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol_short_story)

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/3/24/22994898/mlb-streaming-deals-apple-tv-peacock-nbc-comcast-rsn-marquee-sports-network-nbc-sports-chicago So...fucking...tired....

Another example: Shout Factories sale prices are usually ridiculed online for not being much of a discount, and it's true, but at their sale I just picked up: Cheech and Chong's Next Movie Car Wash Into the Night Mr. Mom Midnight Run Night Hawks all actually great and re-watchable movies for the same price I would pay at VS here for Miami Connection and Cloak and Dagger. I can't even imagine how much a VS version of and of these would cost. $60 on sale? Sure they'd probably all be UHD and Blu ray with a nice slipcover and the promise that I could resell them on Ebay in year for $200 but I don't really care about any of that. I just want to be able to watch Mr. Mom without figuring out which streaming service it might be on (I checked and it's only on Starz???? I'm not subscribing to Starz to watch Mr. Mom) but I'm also not paying more than $12-15 for a copy of it. I get the argument that VS chooses more obscure titles with a tiny audience and track down al the lost footage and clean it up on the extras and pay for interview and stuff, so their prices have to be higher. But there has to be a ceiling for, like, Miami Connection. I'm still hoping some of these might get a blu-ray only, no slipcover release down the road where the sale price is closer to $20. I don't even know if I would go as high as $24 even for Thriller though as you can still find the Synapse DVD for around $15 at times and, again, I just want to watch the fucking movie a couple of times.

I love Vinegar Syndrome to death, but at $40-50 for a single title even when they're half off, I don't think I'm in for any of these. As an alternate Kino has an amazing sale on right now and I just grabbed 10 pretty amazing movies for the price of two of these sale price titles at VS. I know VS puts a lot of work into these and needs to make as much per unit as they can to keep it going, but if Kino can sell a genuinely good-but-fogrotten 80s gem like The Bedroom Window or a super obscure movie like Revenge of the Shogun Women with three separate versions (2 in 3D one in 2D) on the disc for $10, I don't see how I'm ever going to pay $40 for Miami Connection. It's to the point where I'd rather see Kino get something like Cloak and Dagger. It wouldn't have as many extras or the cool cover art, but it would cost about 1/4 as much to just buy it and watch it. I went through this as a record collector watching prices get to the point where I haven't bough an album in almost a year because even everyday things are $20-30 each used now and with "collecting" old audio equipment where now even a piece of Realistic kit that needs work is $600. The Boutique blu market seemed downright reasonable in comparison to those but the jump from $17 (on sale) per title to $20 to $24 to now $30-40 happened really fast here.

Any movie that can somewhat accurately be described as having a Deus ex Monkena will always be loved by those with a heart.

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I want Big E to be my dad. Dude doesn't even show a flare of not being nonchalant and patient after someone breaks is neck, imagine how chill he would be if you just, like, broke a dish at dinner. Yeah. Be my big Daddy, Big E. That sounds like a normal thing to say to a man, right?

If movies today were a bit more like the 80s we should have had a series of hijinks comedies out of them by now where they play three slackers who get into trouble but end up ruining some rich person's evil plan by accident Three Stooges or Bob & Doug McKenzie style.

Big E needs to get outa this business. He's one of the most charismatic people on earth and should be able to make bank as a t.v. personality who just hosts stuff. In fact, the world needs Big E. as host of Good Morning America more than it needs the entire wrestling business.

I am fully expecting opening day to come and go with no baseball and for everyone at MLB to be kind of sadly surprised at how little anyone seems to notice because 13 new series dropped and Jake Paul farted on Keemstar and a bear got into an Aldi's to eat some bread and Aldi bear runs for president before we find out he's a Putin sympathizer and he goes on Rogan and eats Jordan Peterson and then we all love him again. And then when they do start up again, how few people even notice, and ho the few that want to watch won't be able to because by then their local RSN will be charging membership fees for games or locked out of the cable package or whatever. If nothing else this will be a good test case for the divide between the pessimists who say "nothing ever changes" and the pessimists who say "things have really changed this time." But don't worry, your local Onceler will be okay. He'll just buy your hockey team.

We might call this the Ringo Starr doctrine.

He was also a Laff In alum. Sad to see a big man pass. But 84 is pretty solid and if you look him up it seems like Johnny Brown was really really happy most of the time he was on this dumb planet. In fact, I would encourage anyone to look him up every few weeks just to remind themselves what being happy can look like. Here he is playing Match Game with some wide lapels.