Like the first Beach Party, this movie is fun when it’s about partying and surfing, less so when it leans on its story, which grows very thin by the end of the film.
Author: Dan Stalcup
I kept wanting this to go full Linklater and just show us the kids partying and surfing with no pretext, because those are the best bits.
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The Care Bears Movie (1985)
“There’s something so crass about a movie constructed entirely around selling toys”
Even with the framing story, this feels like some inessential shorts of familiar characters in stock sitcom plots stitched together.
From the podcast recording: “I wanted to be fond of it, because there are lots of things on the surface level I want to root for, and maybe kind of like, but none of it actually pulls through. “
What’s amazing about this movie is that every time you hit 2-3 minutes where you think you know where it is, it throws a curveball at you.
Here’s a quick rundown of the three films in this anthology:
Water and ham
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The Elephant Man (1980)
Still a biopic with too many biopic-y moments. But it’s David Lynch so there’s plenty of weirdness, dual-sided themes, and moral grayness. (Though it is the most conventional Lynch I’ve seen.) Looks amazing, sounds brilliant (Lynch was the sound engineer, too!).
The makeup/prosthesis is masterpiece-level, and John Hurt is phenomenal underneath it, too. Observing a person gradually emerge from something that looks so viscerally grotesque is the film’s greatest strength.
On the one hand, I might have over-binged on Woody Allen movies in the past three months. Some of his themes and rhythms of writing are starting to seem repetitive and shallow to the point I rolled my eyes a few times.
On the other hand, this a pretty marvelous art house drama. “Bergman-esque” is the term they use for this kind of morally complex retrospective style, I think. There’s also something almost spiritual about the central gimmick: a woman overhearing another woman’s confession in a nearby shrink’s office, but what she hears feels so personal that it almost reads as a reflexive hallucination. (The young psych patient’s name is “Hope” for crying out loud.)
Gena Rowlands is amazingly controlled throughout a movie that asks her to do a LOT. And Allen is, against all odds, a better director than a writer at this point, I think. The camera holds an intense gaze that amplifies the film’s themes.
It’s quite groggy in its pacing and energy, but the emotional threads teased out are remarkably sharp, especially Allen’s increasingly cynical view of marriage always dying a slow, wheezing death.