The September 2016 30-Day Movie Challenge

The Saloon
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DAY 6: FAVOURITE ACTOR

Wow, this was tough. Tougher than I thought it would be. I think that what I gleaned most from today’s pick was that I don’t really have a favourite actor (or actress, about which more tomorrow). There are so many variables, not least of which is the length and diversity of each actor’s career. Clint Eastwood’s career is long, but is it all that diverse? Doesn’t he just play “Clint Eastwood” over and over (I’m generalising of course, but you know what I mean)? On the other hand, even though his range is narrower than, say, Al Pacino, Clint is outstanding at what he does, maybe better than anyone else ever. Hm.

Anyway, today I’ve decided to plump for Benicio Del Toro, an actor I’ve felt has made interesting character choices in every role in which I’ve seen him. Whether he’s mumbling incoherently (The Usual Suspects), sporting an hilarious fright wig (Guardians of the Galaxy) or both (Sin City), he’s always eminently watchable, hard to take one’s eyes off of what he’s doing. Even when he was a pre-school toddler (Licence to Kill) he had that magnetic quality about him.

So, what to watch? Well, a big reason for picking Benicio was that doing so presented a good excuse to watch either Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998) or Traffic (Soderbergh, 2000), two of my all-time favourites, but at the last minute I’ve decided instead that picking Benicio also presents me with a terrific excuse to watch arguably my favourite film of the last four or five years: Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015). Then, when I lose the bloody dice throw, I’ll stick Traffic on later anyway. Benicio by stealth! Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might yet represent my nomination for Day 29: Movie Which Best Decribes Me, but that’s another story.

Up against Benicio (Sicario) in the dice throw today is Tom Hanks (represented by Paul Greengrass’ 2013 dramatisation Captain Phillips) courtesy of my wife, and Mark Hamill (represented almost inevitably by George Lucas’ 1977 leviathan Star Wars) courtesy of my son. Not a bad trio whatever happens. I’m kind-of rooting for my boy today; he hasn’t won one yet.

EDIT And my boy won the throw at last. That’s no moon…

(I’m still watching Sicario later anyway. Or Traffic)

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DAY 7: FAVOURITE ACTRESS

This was even more difficult than yesterday (though for the same reasons). In the end, having thought about the likes of Julianne Moore or Cate Blanchett or similar, I went with:

Hattie Jacques.

Most famous of course for her contributions to fourteen of the twenty-nine proper Carry On… pictures made in her lifetime (not including compilation pic That’s Carry On! from 1977) and also in Britain for her television role as Eric Sykes’ sister Hattie in Sykes (1972-1979), she possessed impeccable comic timing (as did the entire Carry On… regular ensemble, in fairness), and played all of those “large lady” roles perfectly, be they of the “battleaxe” variety (Carry On Abroad) or of the far more vulnerable kind (Carry On At Your Convenience). She was able to bring pathos and depth to all of these roles, as well; no mean feat within such broad, seaside-postcard comedy. She was also a nigh-on twenty-year veteran of stage and radio, and a ten-year television veteran too before she even appeared in the first Carry On… pic, Carry On Sergeant, and she appeared in a number of other pics besides those in the Carry On… franchise, such as School For Scoundrels (Hamer/Frankel, 1960) and Crooks and Coronets (O’Connolly, 1969).

So, today’s pick for me was always going to be a Carry On… - that’s why I love her, after all - but which one? After seriously considering Carry On Cabby (Thomas, 1963), Carry On Loving (Thomas, 1970) and Carry On at Your Convenience (Thomas, 1971), all three in which Ms. Jacques has a co-starring role as the wife of characters played by Sid James, I’ve ultimately gone with Carry On Doctor (Thomas, 1967) in which Ms. Jacques plays Matron, a role she returned to for two more Carry On… pictures and which pretty-much defines her in the eyes of many.

Up against Hattie Jacques and Carry On Doctor in the dice throw today are Kate Winslet (from my wife), represented by Titanic (Cameron, 1997) and Carrie Fisher (from my boy), represented by Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983). Dear God Almighty: If You’re really there, PLEASE don’t make me watch Titanic today. PLEASE. Amen.

EDIT It would appear God is in His House and all is right with the world. I won today. Ooh, matron!

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Oh dear …

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Terrific little doc that. I think I might’ve seen it before but if so it wasn’t for years and my recollection is very vague, so I enjoyed that. Not a fan yourself, scherp? Don’t like Hattie specifically, or the Carry On… pics, or bawdy British postcard humour of the 50s/60s/70s in general?

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I like the Carry On movies, but watch only one every theree, four months or so, it’s a type of comedy that’s better taken in small doses. And yes, Hattie is mong my favorites. I started watching the series for Sid James, the man with the wrinkled face.

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Definitely one of the better carry on movies. Don’t think Hattie Jacques was very easy to live with in real life though judging from her treatment of John le Mesurier!

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The Dutch title of your guilty secret pleasure movie, Walter Boos’s Urlaubsgrüße aus dem Unterhöschen (1973), just made my day: In Tirol hangen de slipjes aan de Alpen.

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Yes, that is a hilarious title, it’s probably one of the reason the film became one of the most successful German Urlaubs-filme ever in Holland (They were by the way called Tiroler sex komedies in Dutch). In general those movies were very successful - they were among the first movies offering the full monty - but this one was a sensational hit.

Another sex comedy, not from Germany but from Sweden, that was a sensational hit in Holland, was Kyrkoherden, which simply means vicar, that also got a very funny title in Dutch:

De Pastoor kan geen bloot meer zien

In case you read Dutch, I wrote an article a couple of years ago about nudity and the way it was experienced by us in teh early Seventies; a slightly altered version can be found here:

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DAY 8: GUILTY SECRET PLEASURE

Today’s pick should be a movie which you’d maybe be a little reluctant in admitting to liking, or at least a movie which might cause you to pause for a beat before you confess to being a fan. My immediate go-to in this category was going to be The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (Hillenburg/Osborne, 2004) since, quite often when I’m explaining my non-elitist, anti-snobbery outlook to movies, I’ll mention how Dekalog (Kieślowski, 1989) sits happily alongside SpongeBob on my shelves. But then, I realised that I’ve made that comparison lots; I’ve never missed a beat when declaring my love for the little guy whoooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea (absorbent and yellow and porous is he!). So I can’t exactly use him.

So, what do I feel the most guilty about? Right up until this morning, my choice was going to be Freddy Got Fingered (Green, 2001), the Tom Green comedy vehicle which garnered an 11% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a zero-out-of-four from the late great Roger Ebert, who said of it: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels[…]. The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.” Now, this is a movie which I’m not quite ashamed to say I find hilarious, but I don’t volunteer that information too freely, too often. So it qualifies, for sure.

But then I saw in the news this morning that today is the 50th anniversary of Star Trek (1966-1969) first airing on television. See, I’ve never been a Trekkie, I’d never seen an entire episode of Star Trek or any of its more modern variants, and the only “original cast” movie I’d ever seen was Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (Nimoy, 1984), and I’d only seen that because we were forced to watch it at school one day by some nutjob science teacher who wanted to draw all sorts of parallels between it and the resurrection of Christ (Yay Catholic education!). So it’s fair to say I’ve never given a good f*ck for Star Trek. It can “boldly go” and bumfun itself, for all of me. Still, I recently decided to give the new, rebooted movies a try (the first two JJ Abrams films, that is. I haven’t seen the newest one yet). I don’t know why; uniformly terrific reviews plus, since it’s all a reboot, a chance to come in with a clean slate, maybe. And (whispers) I quite liked them! But here’s the shameful bit: Although I admitted to the wife that I’d checked out a Star Trek film, I didn’t admit that I’d actually checked out two, or that I’d enjoyed either of them. And when she caught me idly inspecting a box-set of the movies in our local supermarket, she said, “What are you looking at that for??” and I snapped “Nothing, nothing!” and hurriedly put it back.

Gentlemen: The stars have aligned, the day is the perfect day, and I am ashamed to admit to a guilty secret pleasure: I enjoyed Star Trek (Abrams, 2009), and that’s the film I’m nominating today. If I win the dice throw, I will sit and enjoy it here in front of my gobsmacked, disbelieving family. So there.

Up against Star Trek today goes Dumbo (Sharpsteen, 1941) courtesy of my wife and District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009) from my son. Quite why he feels that might be a guilty pleasure escapes me but that’s twelve year-olds for you. Perhaps Neill Blomkamp is really naff and unfashionable across the school playgrounds of the UK? Who knows.

EDIT Aaaaaand all that careful consideration was for nowt in the end anyway. I lost the throw, and here on Star Trek’s 50th birthday, I’m “enjoying” Dumbo. Shazbut.

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Good writing, thank you! Of course I miss the finer points of language reading Dutch, but I get the basic meaning. The same for you reading German I guess.

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DAY 9: FAVOURITE REBOOT/REMAKE

It’s the turn today of those movies which were taking a second (or third, or fourth, whatever) pass at adapting an original piece of material, or were attempting to reignite a dormant franchise; and God knows, there are enough of those. For me, it was a simple toss up ‘twixt two: The Coen Brothers’ stab at Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit (2010), and the movie I’ve ultimately decided to nominate: The Thing (Carpenter, 1982), the second pass at adapting John W. Campbell’s 1938 short story Who Goes There? after The Thing From Another World (Nyby, 1951) (the third if you count Eugenio Martin’s Pánico en el Transiberiano from 1972), and a movie which for me could’ve easily slotted right into Favourite Action day, Childhood Favourite day, Favourite Actor day, I Could Quote Every Line day, Favourite Sequel day (which I reckon counts since the release of the 2011 prequel), Favourite Sci-Fi day OR Scariest Movie day. John Carpenter’s finest hour? I think so, by some distance. And I love John Carpenter.

Up against Kurt and co. in the dice throw today go Piranha 3D (Aja, 2010) from my wife and The Amazing Spider-Man (Webb, 2012) from my son. I don’t mind either of those, but I REALLY want to win this one.

EDIT The wife won the throw, but we can’t watch Piranha 'til later (it’s still a bit sexually explicit for my boy, I feel), so I’m sticking The Thing on anyway shortly. Win/win!

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I was lucky to see The Thing on the big screen in May. Still an impressive film. I had forgotten how beautiful the opening sequence is, the helicopter chasing the dog through the vast whiteness of the icescape.

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A whole project devoted to John Carpenter, I love it! Why don’t we get stuff like that where I live? We never get anything like that in South-East Essex. Mind you, we’ve got the Bay City Rollers appearing at the Basildon Towngate Theatre in November. So there’s that. :grimacing:

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Yesterday could’ve been – or possibly was – a nice movie-day: for titoli George Miller’s Mental Maximilian series, Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, co-directed by George Ogilvie), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and finally Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). For ION_BRITTON Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great Le Salaire de la peur (1953) followed by William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), which I have to watch as soon as possible. My pick for yesterday would have been Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), a quasi-remake of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) via Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974). scherpschutter would’ve watched Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit (2010), after Henry Hathaway’s 1969 film the second adaptation of Portis’s eponymous novel. And today: a criterion difficult to define – so bad, it’s good. I’m curious about it …

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I’ve had that sat on my PC for awhile now, someone on another forum recommended it to me, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m assured it’s a cracking film; in fact I considered it for Haven’t Seen it Yet, Think I’m Going to LOVE it Day and for Really Should Have Seen This By Now Day, too.

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Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about… grave robbers from outer space?

DAY 10: SO BAD, IT’S GOOD

We all love a good “bad” movie, don’t we? A slice of glorious f*ckwittery, what I guess the kids today would call an “Epic Fail”? These days, films like this are something of a burgeoning industry thanks to Asylum Films, SyFy and the like. But whilst modern tongue in cheek pics like Sharknado (Ferrante, 2013) or Birdemic: Shock and Terror (Nguyen, 2010) are fine up to a point, and some travesties from the 70’s and 80’s such as The Star Wars Holiday Special (Binder, 1978) are fantastic, my true love in this area lies with those movies from the fifties and sixties which tried and failed, such as Monster a Go-Go (Rebane, 1965), half-filmed in 1961 before the director ran out of funds and then completed four years later by a completely different director (Herschell Gordon Lewis) who had to use different actors for almost every character, or The Creeping Terror (Savage, 1964), shot without a proper monster (the fx guy stole it the day before filming because no one had paid him, so they knocked up a supercheap substitute on the day of filming), and without proper sound equipment to save costs leaving the movie narrated for the most part, or the mighty Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo (Steckler, 1966), a movie intended as a straight noir picture - and which plays as one for the entire first half of the film - but, when writer Ron Haydock wrote his characters into a corner and Steckler was running out of time and funds, they changed the whole film out of the blue into a Batman parody. Brilliant! THESE are the sort of films I find so bad that they’re actually good, and of course one such movie stands head and shoulders above all of these: The infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space (Wood jr., 1959), a movie I’ve seen so many times and love so very much, it almost doesn’t count for me any more as “bad” in any sense. I could spend the next ninety minutes rattling on about how awesome Plan 9 is, but I’d rather get the dice throw for today over with and (hopefully) just get on with watching the film!

Up against Edward D. Wood, jr. and his happy band go Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010) courtesy of my wife and the frankly awesome Robot Monster (Tucker, 1953) from my son. Come on, anyone but my wife!!

EDIT YES!!! I WIN! And remember… My friend, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen? Perhaps on your way home someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us at this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television. And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us in the future! :grin:

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Well exactly. That’s why everyone should’ve, could’ve and could yet join in! A fair few fellows on a football forum are playing along; only two (as far as I know) are doing every day, but plenty are joining in as/when they can. It beats the sh*t on telly, anyway. It staggers me that nobody else on a cineasts site such as this is playing along; there’d better be a better response to SpagvemberFest in seven weeks’ time, or I’m visiting every one of you personally with the rubber gloves and NO lubricant!

:slight_smile:

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No lubricant? Bl**ding hell, my pick for tomorrow: Blake Edwards’s The Party (1968). Film poster by the late, great Jack Davis:

Party.jpg685×1024 419 KB

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THE PARTY

Sellers in top form:

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@last.caress baby, there are far easier ways to score points than snoring all the way through a gpod chick flick, hon :wink: xxx

IMG_20160712_171419.jpg4160×2336 2.44 MB

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