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From: boyajian@akov68.DEC
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: re: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Silly
Message-ID: <1465@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Apr-85 07:50:28 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1465
Posted: Wed Apr  3 07:50:28 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Apr-85 03:10:59 EST
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> From: nsc!chuq	(Chuq von Rospach)

> Phantom of the Paradise

>    This is a good movie, and I'm suprised that it has fallen by the
>    wayside while much worse movies (such as Rocky Horror Picture Show)
>    pick up a following. If you can find this movie, see it. quickly.

If you hadn't added this paragraph, I would have agreed wholeheartedly. No,
this isn't a rabid, knee-jerk defense of RHPS. As it so happens, I saw both
of these movies for the first time as a double-bill (and I've seen each
separately since). As much as I liked POTP, I thought it paled in comparison
to RHPS. Of course, I will always remember POTP for its great line (by Beef):
"I know the difference between drug real and real real!"

> Buckaroo Bonzai across the eight dimension

Again, I have to disagree. Sure, I was disappointed with it too --- somewhat.
But that was only because I'd read the book beforehand (which is top-notch).
BANZAI isn't a *great* movie, but I found it highly entertaining, and worth
the price of buying the tape. I've seen it four times now (two in theater,
two on tape), and I've seen something new in it every time. This is the kind
of film that I could see any number of times.

> The hunger

>    found the hunger a movie without direction, very dark, confused, and
>    not quite sure where it really wanted to go or what it wanted to say.

A good deal of the problem with THE HUNGER is that a good deal of background
information in the book was left out of the movie, so that to someone who
hasn't read the book, the characters seem to have no history, and motives
are vague, if at all discernable. on the other hand, I thought that Tony Scott
brought a nice dark, decadent elegance to the production. And the scene in
which Catherine Deneuve infects Susan Sarandon with vampirism is probably
matched in its eroticism only by the "Air-rotica" sequence in ALL THAT JAZZ.

> Kentucky Fried Movie

On the other hand, I found myself gravely disappointed with this film. It
had its moments, but as you said about BUCKAROO BANZAI, good moments alone
do not a good film make. I found most of the humor in FRIED to be too puerile,
more like a collection of adolescent dirty jokes. "A Fistful of Yen" was
probably the best part, especially if one has seen ENTER THE DRAGON, and I
was impressed by how they managed to compress DRAGON down into a 20-minute
parody and get all the important parts in. On the other hand, before it was
half-way through, I felt it dragged on overlong. It's very difficult to stage
a virtual scene for scene parody and get away with it for that long (YOUNG
FRANKENSTEIN managed to do it, but then it had other things going for it than
the parody of FRANKENSTEIN).


--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, Maynard, MA)

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