Awkward Press

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

This past June 24th marked the twenty fifth anniversary of the greatest soundtrack ever recorded specifically for a movie. Man oh man, is Purple Rain ever an amazing soundtrack! “When Doves Cry”? That song is awesome. “Let’s Go Crazy”? Even awesomer, especially when Prince gets all Hendrixy at the end of the song. “Take Me With U”? Holy shit, that song is so awesome they don’t even have a word to describe it (you could probably describe it by calling it “Really, really, really awesome,” but that’s four words). “The Beautiful Ones”? “Baby, I’m a Star”? “I Would Die 4 U”? Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yes, there is no doubt about it; Purple Rain is one totally awesome record. Case closed.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the movie for which the Purple Rain soundtrack was recorded (did I mention how awesome that soundtrack is?), which celebrated its own twenty fifth anniversary this past Monday. Purple Rain: the Movie stars Prince as “The Kid”, a wunderkind musician who lives in his parents’ basement and creates music deemed too weird for First Avenue, the Minneapolis club where Morris Day and the Time draw huge crowds by playing music almost exactly like that of The Kid and his band, the Revolution. Except it’s not as good. The Kid meets aspiring singer Apollonia, falls in love with her, and lets her know this by tricking her into jumping naked into a lake. In Minneapolis. In the winter. Shooting her in the back would have been an equally romantic valentine, but then I guess we wouldn’t have gotten to see her boobs. Despite The Kid’s sadism, Apollonia is unable to resist the pubic hairs glued to his chest (or his purple pirate costume… or his Batgirl Cycle…), so she buys him a guitar. When Morris Day gets wind of the budding ingénue, he swoops in to turn her into his personal protégé. The Kid reacts to this news by punching Apollonia in the face.

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According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Jeffrey:

Pre-Internet, the only way to learn about cool things if you grew up in a small town in Michigan as I did was to read about them in these magical collections of information called “books” and “magazines.” When I was in high school, there were 2 books that changed my life. The first was the fourth edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide. Trouser Press was an indispensable guide to thousands of “alternative rock” records back in the days when the term alternative rock actually meant something. The second was Danny Peary’s fantastic (and sadly out of print) 3 volume Cult Movies series. Ever since I received the first book as a Christmas present, I’ve made it my ongoing life’s mission to someday see all 200 titles that Peary discusses.

The best thing I can say about Zardoz is that I am now able to scratch another film off that list. To say that Zardoz is a terrible film is like calling Hitler “eccentric.” Zardoz creates its own new category of terrible. It is breathtakingly, incomprehensibly, mind-blowingly bad in a way that must be seen to be believed, but must never, ever be seen by anyone. Mike and I took one for the team, and no matter how tantalizing it may sound after reading our reviews, I beg you: DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE. It is so terrible that its title should really stand as a universally-recognized synonym for atrociously bad. If I go to a coffee shop and tell them the ½ and ½ tastes Zardoz, they should immediately lock the place up and send every customer to the hospital. If I am at a café in France and I tell the waiter “Cet croque-monsieur est Zardoz!” he should walk straight back to the kitchen and stab the chef in the throat with an ice pick.

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According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

Although its reputation seems to have diminished considerably over the years, when The Blair Witch Project premiered a decade ago today, it was considered to be a revolutionary piece of cinema. First of all, there’s the radical way it was produced. Filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick set amateur actors Heather Donohue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams loose in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, for eight days with a camera and sound equipment. The actors were responsible for filming their own scenes and adlibbing their dialogue. Sanchez and Myrick left them little notes indicating the plot developments. All of this cost somewhere in the neighborhood of five grand, but raked in an astounding $248,639,099 at the box office, partly due to a brilliant advertising campaign suggesting that the events in the movie were real (here come the spoilers).

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According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs. Our candidate for Week One: the notorious 1987 flop Ishtar, directed by Elaine May and starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty.

Jeffrey:

Ishtar is that worst kind of movie: the movie you expect to be unwatchable, but turns out to be merely mediocre. Upon its release in 1987, it quickly replaced Heaven’s Gate as the go-to synonym of choice for overblown box office disaster. It reportedly brought in only $12.7 million with a budget of $55 million, making it the most expensive comedy ever made at the time.

Watching the film, it’s difficult to tell where the money went. Although there are a few set pieces involving helicopters, most of the film takes place in interiors (is that a thing movie people say?) or in the desert … and how much can a permit to shoot in the desert cost? Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman raked in 5.5 million apiece for their performances, which was, apparently, a staggering amount at the time. It still seems pretty staggering, especially considering the fact that they are both woefully miscast.

Make no mistake about it, Ishtar is a bad film. Revisionists will tell you that it’s actually a dryly hilarious satire that was unfairly maligned due to its legendary budget woes and bitter critics. These revisionists are wrong. Is it dry? Yes. Is it hilarious? Not by a long shot. It is, however, not un-hilarious enough to qualify as a fun disaster. Most of the jokes — and there are lots and lots of jokes — drop out of the characters’ mouths and fall to the floor like leaden word balloons filled with a laughless soup (my coffee mug reads “World’s Greatest Simile Writer”).

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I love Roger Ebert. I know, I know, he liked Benji: The Hunted or whatever. He’s still funnier and smarter than 99% of the critics out there. I know, because I took a poll of all of them and he was only beat by the margin of error.

Yesterday he posted a great piece about taste inspired by feedback to his Transformers 2 review. (Article discovered thanks to Videogum.) This part, especially, gets to me:

What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable. If someone I respect tells me I must take a closer look at the films of Abbas Kiarostami, I will take that seriously. If someone says the kung-fu movies of the 1970s, which I used for our old Dog of the Week segments, deserve serious consideration, I will listen.

That’s absolutely right, Roger Ebert. May everyone who is reading this post listen to Ebe’s solid advice. If someone you respect tells you he or she likes something that you do not like, you should take some time to understand why your opinions differ instead of automatically assuming your opinion is correct. Your friend will feel appreciated and you just might learn something!*

*Unless the thing you like is Friends with Money, which has been scientifically proven to be unwatchable.

The moon. What is it? Is it a planet? A vegetable? A giant ball of space lint? These are the questions that have haunted man for decades, if not centuries. Thankfully, Moon has landed in a handful of theaters around the country to answer these questions, and more.

In answer to the first question: it is not a planet. It is a lifeless rock. They don’t even have trees. Who knew?

Here’s another interesting thing about the moon that I learned from this movie: once you’re on it, it’s not very easy to get home, even in the future. This is what the movie is about, how hard it is to get home from the moon. We can all relate to this problem. Imagine you’re at the bar and you’re ten miles away from your house and you don’t want to drive home because you’re pretty drunk but it’s really your only option. Now imagine that you don’t have a car and there are 250,000 miles (I looked it up!) of brain-exploding space between you and home. And you’ve been at the bar for three years. By yourself and without any alcohol. Now you know how scary Moon is, which is very scary indeed.

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