Media I’ve consumed lately
9 to 5: Very silly and enjoyable. Dolly Parton is the best of the main trio. Love Dabney Coleman as the douche boss who later gets owned by his employees. A sneaky LA movie (Jane Fonda lives in Monrovia and you can see the Verdugos behind her apartment).
What’s Up, Doc?: Barbra Streisand is so sweet in this movie. Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, and the art grant administrator are all very funny. Makes me want to watch more of Bogdanovich’s movies, even though this seems like an outlier in his filmography. But I don’t think I’ve seen any of his films besides this one, so who am I to say? Love movies like this where the gender politics are completely insane in retrospect, and yet you can still feel a satisfied bliss when the two leads get together at the end.
Broadcast News: Not bad, but less than the sum of its parts. Sometimes you watch a movie and you don’t feel like someone is particularly charming, and you wonder whether this feeling is a result of you doing a bad job of separating the actor from their character. Do I feel like Albert Brooks is super-annoying in this movie because his character was so expertly written to be this way, or do I just find him annoying because he’s trying for another key of performance, missing, and leaving me with this? Either way, I found this pretty unsatisfying.
Evil Dead (2013): Not groundbreaking, but the violence was pretty well-executed, the plot was eerie, the demon was good, and it left me pumped for the upcoming sequel. Sometimes you watch a movie with the goal of scratching a particular itch and you’re willing to ignore or discard the extra not-so-great packaging it’s wrapped in; Evil Dead is definitely one of those movies.