April 2021 Movie Round Up
An old article from my monthly movie round up series that fell off the wagon. Here are a few more thoughts on some gems I enjoyed all the way back in April 2021.
Favourite — LA Confidential (1997) (dir. Curtis Hanson)
LA Confidential is the type of movie I was immediately captured by upon watching it. I quickly wanted to see again. It starts off as a campy LA noir type film, underscored by character/narrator Danny DeVito.
The movie follows three vastly different police officers. Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, Russell Crowe as Bud White, and Guy Pearce as Edmund Exley. Vincennes is a celebrity cop, White is a meathead rule breaker who beats up domestic abusers, and Exley is an ambitious, green, by-the-book type officer following in his father’s footsteps.
There story itself has a lot of moving parts, following the long line of Los Angeles corruption movies. The story itself works fantastically, not focusing too much on exposition, but moving along with the frenetic pace of the wild characters.
It does the perfect job of showing, not telling, everything you need to know about every character, with great bits of high and low acting from all of it’s main characters.
The tertiary characters of DeVito, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, and especially Kim Basinger, give the movie a breadth and depth to the buzzing conflict of the movie.
Scorsese Shorts (dir. Martin Scorsese)
I’m shamelessly unashamed about my love of Martin Scorsese, the influence he’s had on my love of movies, and his Italian-American upbringing in New York City.
He has a pile of shorts he made before his ascent to stardom in the early 1970s. They are vastly different, sometimes weird, and contain elements that he clearly built upon as he carved out his own stylistic tendencies. They can all be found on Youtube, with varying to degrees of quality.
Perhaps my two favourites:
- American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince. Prince was a former heroin addict and ex-road manager of Neil Diamond. The movie is essentially recounting stories from his life.
- The Big Shave, a short commentary on the Vietnam War.
They’re bizarre to be sure, but worth a glance, and both available to watch on Youtube.
Favourite Horror — The Empty Man (2020)
A unique horror movie buried in the debacle of movie going that was 2020, The Empty Man lived up to the high expectations I had going in.
The first 20 minutes are a mini horror movie unto itself, set in the mountains of Bhutan. With the rest of the movie taking place over two more hours, its easy to be intimidated by the unorthodox runtime. I had no issue whatsoever soaking in the story that involved far more mystery than I expected. Littered with homage to horror movies of the past, its most intense scene elevated The Empty Man from great to special for me.
James Badge Dale is one of my favourite B-List actors, and he plays his role extremely straight without feeling too over the top.
Blank Check Favourites
Biggest Surprise — Ishtar
The Blank Check pod decided to do Elaine May’s movies, in April! A director who I knew almost nothing about, her stardom in the 60s and 70s was overridden by one of the biggest box office bombs of all time; her 1987 comedy Ishtar, starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. If you haven’t heard of the movie, I guarantee you’ve seen it made fun of in various other pop culture spaces. It is essentially a trope unto itself. Waterworld, a famous Kevin Costner bust eight years later, was called Fishtar.
Ishtar is about two friends living in NYC trying to make it as musicians. The comedy comes from the simple fact that they suck. They suck and they are too dumb to realize it. They get an offer for a gig in Ishtar, Iraq. They take a flight, and they’re idiocy causes mishap after mishap. It puzzles what is so offensively bad about this movie. It’s had a Showgirls renaissance of sorts, as it became the de facto movie to make fun of, thereby leading many pile-onners to actually not watch it.
