the average person with bad taste can be into some extremely banal garbage but when you get close enough to someone with otherwise good taste that they start a recommendation by going off on a preamble about how they don't necessarily recommend it you know you're seconds away from hearing about some real torturously wretched dogshit
friend from work will have you watch a two hour movie where you can feel every second as it passes by, but enemployed movie mutual will put you on the kind of shit that feels like crawling on cobblestone until emaciated
people are reading this as the latter friend recommending dry, pretentious cinema. that's not the case. not that kind of situation. you're getting no enrichment out of this. I need you to understand they're making you watch Gooby because "it's kinda good"
Not to insert myself here but as someone who owns Ghost Rider 1 and 2 on DVD I do actually need everyone to watch it right now because in the second one a kid asks Nick Cage as Ghost Rider how he pees and Nick Cage says “it’s like a flamethrower” and then they hard cut to a CGI skeleton in full black moto leather pissing a jet of fire and then it does a shoulder check at the camera and nods like “hell yeah brother”
Fully derailing this post because I found a gif
Drive-in Saturday Night (1968)
Whole books have been written about this since the end of americas involvement in Vietnam. That's why there are so many action heroes whose wives or children are dead. If you have a family you have to be part of a community, but if you're freed of those responsibilities you can be an eternal child who can kill endlessly with no consequences. Once you recognize it, you see it in everything. Cool grizzled divorced antihero who plays by his own rules and lives outside the law doesn't have to put the seat down or remember anyone's birthday grrr rough 'n tough creampuffs
Art by Dan Goozee for Moonraker (1979)
One of the very many things I love about The Adventures of Bucakroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is that, insofar as it is a parody of comic book movies and comic fandom, it has aged like fine wine. Despite its 1984 release date, it is a better satire of Marvel films than almost anything I've seen that postdates those films. Buckaroo Banzai perfectly replicates the feeling of having sat down at one of these huge franchise action films with no knowledge of prior films in the series. You don't know who anyone is, where they come from, or why you ought to care about them, but the film clearly expects you to know who these guys are. The thing is that in Buckaroo Banzai, this is all intentional. There is no background of films or comics. The film will do a slow pan to introduce some guy called Nebraska Steve and everyone in the film reacts as if we're all supposed to know who Nebraska Steve is, despite the fact that he's never appeared in any media whatsoever until literally this second.
And this appeals to both halves of my brain.
The nerdier half immediately gets to work, over the course of dozens of rewatches, at the task of reconstructing the background lore from the hints the film gives. Who is Peggy? Is the twin story plausible, or is it a cover for something (yes)? What's the deal with Pecos, and why isn't she in the film? How come Rawhide shows up in the end credits?
All the while, the less nerdy half of my brain is sitting there saying 'that's the joke, right? That doing this sort of thing is stupid?'
But I'm A Cheerleader (1999)
