{"id":176521,"date":"2022-09-11T13:11:31","date_gmt":"2022-09-11T17:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=176521"},"modified":"2022-09-12T08:42:10","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T12:42:10","slug":"august-2022-viewing-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=176521","title":{"rendered":"August 2022 Viewing Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took me a while to get this up. Shit’s BUSY. Here’s what I watched and saw in August. <\/p>\n

What Josiah Saw<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Vincent Grashaw)
\nPretty grim watch. I reviewed for Ebert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Married at First Sight<\/strong><\/em>, Seasons 10 and 11 and 5
\nEarly August was wild. I watched one season of this back in 2020 when my concentration was so shot I could only deal with binge-watching (I was weirdly relieved when I learned I was not alone in this very specific situation). My sister Siobhan also got really into it and through conversing about it with her recently I decided to check out some other seasons. And so …. I did. I get so invested. <\/p>\n

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Emily the Criminal<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. John Patton Ford)
\nGod, this was great. Exhilarating. I reviewed for Ebert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Elvis<\/em><\/strong> (2022; d. Baz Luhrmann)
\nAgain. <\/p>\n

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Follow That Dream<\/strong><\/em> (1962; d. Gordon Douglas)
\nI love this movie. My pal Larry called it “Elvis’ Occupy Wall Street movie” and I co-sign. This is a really wonderful Elvis movie and it is currently not streaming.<\/p>\n

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Kid Galahad<\/strong><\/em> (1962; d. Phil Karlson)
\nI will never not be fascinated by how this movie career coalesced – and calcified – in such a specific way. Never to be repeated again. They cannot be analyzed with the same rubric you use for other movies. They require their own criteria. He’s adorable here, gleaming and beautiful, with lots of shots like this one. <\/p>\n

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I Just Killed My Dad<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Skye Borgman)
\nWhat a terrible story. I can’t even believe it. I watched with a sense of AWE that shit could go this wrong. It makes you question things, big things, like … “why do such things happen? How can God allow such things?” You know. The big questions. Terrible story. <\/p>\n

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Spin Me Round<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Jeff Baena)
\nI reviewed for Ebert<\/a>. More Aubrey Plaza! Plus Molly Shannon and Alison Brie. <\/p>\n

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Girls! Girls! Girls!<\/strong><\/em> (1962; d. Norman Taurog)
\nThis movie is so weird<\/i> and so entertaining. But if you think about it for more than five seconds you’re like …. wait. What? See above my comments about Kid Galahad<\/i>. The way this all turned out and shook down is just so fascinating and BIZARRE. Plus; he looks so fucking great in this.<\/p>\n

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Funny Pages<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Owen Kline)
\nI get excited when a movie today allows itself to be grim, unexpected, and uningratiating. Funny Pages<\/i> is grim as hell. There’s something missing, maybe, but in general this really works. I reviewed for Ebert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell? <\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Erica Gornall)
\nI honestly learned more about her in this than I ever wanted to, and I am – admittedly – pretty heavily (and mortifyingly) up to date on the Epstein story. But this doc features interviews with people who knew Ghislaine when – many of whom have never spoken up before. Some are interviewed while maintaining anonymity. That’s how threatened they feel. But some are more than happy to come out and express how weird this broad was, even way back in the day. Christina Oxenberg is the STAR of this documentary. (The Oxenbergs don’t mess around. Catherine and her daughter India have become the stars of the NXIUM story. Very impressed). Oxenberg’s comments are so insightful and she speaks as someone who was friends with Ghislaine and spent a lot of time with Ghislaine and Epstein. She is merciless<\/i>ly articulate. <\/p>\n

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It Happened at the World’s Fair<\/strong><\/em> (1963; d. Norman Taurog)
\nThere’s a lot to say about this one. Little Kurt Russell kicking Elvis’ shin. The relationship Elvis forms with the little girl, who’s somehow lost her grandfather in the crowd. She is a very natural child, just like Kurt Russell is a natural child – she doesn’t seem like a precocious little child-actor. She’s funny and keeps up with Elvis and he seems to have had fun. One of my favorite acting moments in Elvis’ whole career is in It Happened at the World’s Fair<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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Fun in Acapulco<\/strong><\/em> (1963; d. Richard Thorpe)
\nThis is the one where Elvis suffers from PTSD due to a tragic trapeze accident. Thankfully, he has not one, not two, but three women chasing after him to help him come to terms. One of whom is Ursula Andress.<\/p>\n

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\nViva Las Vegas<\/strong><\/em> (1964; d. George Sidney)
\nThis movie is pure entertainment, start to finish.<\/p>\n

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Double Wedding<\/strong><\/em> (1937; d. Richard Thorpe)
\nHow had I not seen this? It stars William Powell – as a bohemian wannabe movie director – and Myrna Loy – as a snooty woman trying to stop her sister from getting mixed up in the bohemian crowd. But that’s just the premise. This is a screwball, and the final sequence – the “double wedding” sequence – which isn’t sorted out until the very last moment, Shakespeare-style – is absolute lunacy. I fell over laughing a couple of times. The visual gags, the callbacks, and how Myrna Loy – so imperious at the start – literally falls apart (see below). She can no longer maintain her dignity. I also just want to point something out: Check out the name of the director and then slowly scroll up this list, checking out the directors. You won’t have to look for long. Life is interesting.<\/p>\n

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\nKissin Cousins<\/strong><\/em> (1964; d. Gene Nelson)
\nWhy ya gotta do Elvis like this: 1. make fun of hillbillies and 2. make him play an identical twin. Okay not a brother, but still an identical twin. Elvis lost his twin brother. I mean, I know nobody cared about this shit, and maybe it wasn’t common knowledge then? I’d have to look into it. There’s something really chilling going on in this movie beyond putting Elvis in it: it’s PRO nuclear-armament, and the triumph in the end is the United States governments’, who have convinced these mountain people that it will be okay to build a missile silo on the top of their mountain. That’s literally a WIN in this movie. It starts out like Ruby Ridge, with isolated people under siege by their own military, with Elvis as go-between, and finally … the mountain people cave, but only because Elvis brokers a deal where these mountain people will no longer be harassed to pay taxes. This is some wild shit – and goes towards proving what my friend Charlie wrote about in his book Opening Wednesday at a Drive-In Near You<\/i>: that critically-ignored B-movies, or genre movies, often “say more” about the world we live in than the more serious (self-serious) message movies do. Of course … those B-movies often employ irony, whereas Kissin Cousins<\/i> decidedly does NOT. This movie is propaganda for the Cold War – at the same time that every single Army person in this movie is shown to be idiotic, horny, incompetent. This is just two years after Elvis’ Occupy Wall Street movie. The ’60s were a trip. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on.<\/p>\n

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\nThe Cathedral<\/strong><\/em> (2022; d. Ricky D\u2019Ambrose)
\nThis is such a unique film. The story isn’t unique, but the way it is told really held my interest. I reviewed for Ebert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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It took me a while to get this up. Shit’s BUSY. Here’s what I watched and saw in August. What Josiah Saw (2022; d. Vincent Grashaw) Pretty grim watch. I reviewed for Ebert. Married at First Sight, Seasons 10 and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2627,4,31],"tags":[2097,2666,2544,2493,2546,2095,332,2560,377,2543,2559,200,275],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176521"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177128,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176521\/revisions\/177128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}