News You Can Bruise for 2018 November 3

Sat Nov 03 2018 17:44 October Film Roundup:

• The Brain (1988): I saw this as part of a MST3K Live event, which was really fun. Joel and Jonah brought an audience member on stage to riff with them! The film itself is great material for MST3K: long chase scenes, a goofy practical effect, a plot that's 100% cliche but could have been cool with the right execution, and not the right execution. Recommended if they're coming to your town.
• Lilo and Stitch (2002): A fun movie from Disney's "weird" period following the megahits of the early 90s. Sumana can't stand when fictional characters are jerks (also real people), so she did not have as good a time as I did, but I liked the technique of putting two jerks in the movie and making them care about each other.

  Random question: do you think Bubbles is really a social worker, or is he a Man In Black who was rushed over to the likely crash site? His presence seems like a huge coincidence, but it could be something left over from an earlier draft of the screenplay. I could go either way. Probably overthinking it.

• White Christmas (1954): A little-known fact is that Irving Berlin wrote a sequel to "White Christmas", called "I'm Dreaming of a Bunch of Very Similar Musicals About Rural New England Inns That All Feature My Song 'White Christmas', Ensuring A Constant Stream of Royalties". It's not well known because whenever he tried to use it in a musical, it always made more sense to slot in "White Christmas" instead.

  Anyway, Danny Kaye's in this one, and he's great. Good banter, fun dance numbers, mediocre songs. Unlike Holiday Inn there's no romantic blackface scene, but there is a whole song about how one misses the old-timey minstrel show. Just... keep it to yourself how much you miss that shit. Isn't there a song about yams we could be hearing instead?

• In Jackson Heights (2017): Saw the first half at the museum; I'll finish it up later. It was nice to see an in-depth look at a local neighborhood, but it was also nice to not see a three-hour movie all at once. It was really weird to see the camera pan over the exterior wall of the Trade Fair like it's the bazaar in Marrakesh or something. It's just pictures of produce!