Good Night, & Good Luck., Stage Fright, Homecoming, Macbeth, & Kung Fu Hustle

Good Night, & Good Luck. has a period in the title. David Strathairn was very good, and it's an interesting story, but it just feels so superficial of an approach to the material. Doesn't make it a bad movie at all, just means that it works only as a history and a sort of evocation for the era. Plus, of course, a love letter to a time when journalists did their job and were very important. Clooney clearly loves this movie, and Murrow, and does as good a job as can be expected from a movie that was made, at least somewhat, to piss off Faux News and Bill O'Reilly. Who do deserve it, definitely.

Stage Fright contains one of Hitchcock's least favorite things, the false flashback. I'd read about it so many times, and yet when it appeared, I never once remembered that. Hitchcock was clearly a master filmmaker, and he was able to make even a typical plot of his interesting. Definitely worth seeing, even if just for Marlene Dietrich's very good performance. And the flashback, but mainly Marlene.

Homecoming was Joe Dante's entry into the Masters of Horror anthology series on Showtime. And damn if it didn't just make me more pissed off than ever that we couldn't just have zombies come back from the dead to vote out Bush. Damnit. Funny, angrifying, and infuriating. Actually, I just wanted to use angrifying. Probably most enjoyable for those of us who think that some funny business has been going on with this administration, but it's actually a well done hour long zombie film. Yeah, low budget as hell, but very enjoyable anyway. But, of course, I couldn't help thinking that the dead were supposed to vote Republican.

Macbeth is almost entirely a reaction by Polanski to the Manson family murders. The violence, the insanity, and the entire tragedy just seems to fit. Could have been a better movie, mainly by, I don't know, having a stronger Lady Macbeth, and, say, not having large amounts of fat women naked in it. But at least there was a decapitation, which makes any movie better. Not nearly as good of an adaptation as Throne of Blood, even if it had the actual lines in it. Weird that Hefner produces this actual good, if extremely nihilistic, movie, while Bob Guccione just produced the crap that was Caligula. Apparently Playboy is a lot classier than Penthouse.

Kung Fu Hustle was fun, but ultimately, it's just like every other Stephen Chow film, flashes of brilliance, along with lots of humor that just falls flat. However, he again finds a very attractive leading lady to have be a mute or have a strange physical condition, or be a prostitute. Just let them be normal, because few of those things are funny. Well, being a prostitute can be funny, like the idea that Pretty Woman was a good movie, but Chow just pushes some things too far. The huge amounts of CGI would have been distracting had I not just approached the movie as a live-action cartoon. Which, unlike Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, actually works as a movie. And what was with the guy who always had his pants riding low? Needed? I think not. I have this bad feeling about the gay kung fu master, if I didn't also have a competing feeling that it was done somewhat tongue in cheek. Somewhat, as Hong Kong is years behind even the US in accepting homosexuality. Which is sad. Not that there aren't great films with homosexuality (one only need to see Happy Together to realize that), but most mainstream films use gays as a punchline rather than as real people. And I, of course, loved the many film references.