2025 Modular Film Festival

So this year I have decided to try the "Modular Film Festival" which is a series of prompts for movies to watch, one per day of September. The 2025 list was shared as a letterboxd user list. I was thinking about posting this as weekly updates, but September doesn't neatly divide by seven, so I'll mix it up a bit. Eight films in the first installment.

1. A movie that nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie
   RKO-281 (1999)

   For me, that other film about making Citizen Kane : RKO 281 (1999).

   Mank is a minor character in this one. The focus is mostly on Welles and some on Hearst, and a lot on the pressure exerted to suppress the film.

   50 takes of a line out of 60

2. A French New Wave Movie
   La Jetée (1962)

   A little bit of a stretch since it's a short, but it's in 1001 Movies You Must Watch so I don't feel bad about the length. Jetée, like Savage Eye (1959, but I watched last week), breaks rules about how films are made. This is a slide show with audio and a single motion clip, yet it is pretty effective. The story subject helps make it work. (Terry Gilliam remade this as Twelve Monkeys; "remade" used loosely.)

3. A movie that seems fake on Tubi
   The Machine Girl (2008)

   I watched a Bionic Man/Woman film last month, so the title lured me in. Japanese schoolgirl films are something I don't watch normally.

   This enhanced young woman on a revenge mission makes the new "Toxic Avenger" seem sedate and plausible. Two minutes to first geyser of blood. Curiously there are no blood waterfalls when people get holes through torsos. That's probably all you need to know.

4. God forbid women have hobbies
   But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

   Hobbies. That's a hard one. Jobs? Hopes and dreams? Sure. Cheerleading sounds like a hobby, so time to watch this one.

   As yesterday, not my usual tastes: I tend to leave teen lesbian stories out of my film watching.

   Unlike yesterday, this was a lot a of fun, and very carefully styled. Would look for more like this. The sexuality was rather mild, as noted in This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)

5. A movie at least 100 years old
   Safety Last (1923)

   I've been meaning to watch this for a while, I've viewed and enjoyed a bunch of other silents in the past few years. I found most of the first hour a bit tedious, humor derived from awkwardly covering up lies just isn't that funny. The building climb, with clock scene, in the last twenty minutes is the good part. (Buster Keaton's antics are better for my money.)

6. A Wallace Shawn movie
   Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989)

   Having seen both "My Dinner with Andre" (1981) and "Princess Bride" (1987) too recently to repeat, I picked a Paul Bartel film I had not watched.

   Shawn here has the role Bartel usually saves for himself: husband to Mary Woronov. Fun absurdist comedy about class, akin to "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972).

   Four castration themed pick-up lines out of four.

7. A movie Roger Ebert gave one star or less
   The Green Hornet (2011)

   I remember reading reviews of this when it was new, and remembering liking the trailer. It's really dumb, seemingly existing to answer the question "What if Batman were very stupid?" Unfortunately that drags down pretty much the whole film (while leaving enough contextless scenes for a trailer).

   Except for Christoph Waltz. I liked him, he does a good job generally with funny bad guy.

8. A movie shot in Luxembourg
   Hysteria (2011)

   This is a period rom-com hung on a largely fabricated story about inventing the vibrator by a doctor specializing in the malady "hysteria." Much "humor" is based on the medical ideas of period. Much drama comes from the well-off not caring about the poor.

   Luxembourg fills in for Victorian London. City scenes and sets were fine, perhaps heavy handed with the advertising, but the costumes did not all seem era appropriate.

Thoughts on a Pair of Eighties Films

I was in high school student in the 1980s. I was a good student and I went on the school trips to various cities for both educational visits and for college tours. There would be maybe one or two chaperones per ten kids and we'd stay in hotel rooms with four kids in a room.

During one of these trips, one of my roommates figured out that the hotel TV got the Playboy Channel. No one objected, but I was secretly concerned about the viewing showing up on the bill. Anyway, so we watched what that channel had to show that night. And what it had to show, when we tuned in, was Joysticks (1983) (at imdb) (at wikipedia).

I remember thinking it was a terrible film.

Fast forward a few decades, and I'm watching or rewatching a lot of 1970s and 1980s films. During this I come across Hardbodies (1984) (at imdb) (at wikipedia) and I watch it about a month ago.

It is, uh, not good. It's an improbable T&A fest at recognizable beach areas of Los Angeles. A newly homeless kid finds an opportunity to teach some newly single guys his dad's age about how to score with the modern youths. Until he decides they're not cool. But here is some interesting (and again improbable) home automation in one bedroom set. I found that bit amusing.

Teal Roberts, playing Kristi, demonstrates how this unusual bed headboard has controls for the blinds, the lights, the wave action waterbed, the disco ball, etc. Strangely the radio buttons don't control a radio or other music.

But in my usual style, after I watched it, I read about it. (Imagine one of those good / bad idea memes: "Learn about the film before watching it? Nah. After, Yes.") Wikipedia has this little note about Hardbodies:

An initial plan to sell the film for broadcast on the Playboy Channel fell through when, according to [producer Jeff] Begun, the network found it "too soft." Instead, Columbia picked it up for theatrical distribution.

Now I'm thinking about Joysticks again. I can't find it again, but I did once read a review of this film that called it "an attempt at a T&A spectacular that doesn't have enough T&A" or words to that effect. How does Joysticks get on Playboy Channel when Hardbodies was "too soft"?

So I re-watched Joysticks. There's a lot of nudity by 2020s standards, but maybe not a lot by "raunchy eighties comedy" standards, and much of the skin is front loaded, leaving a cringe comedy kids vs adults conflict you've seen it a thousand times to fill out the movie. The writer and/or director has clearly watched Animal House (1978) and made a checklist of things they want to include, not the least of which is a fat slob sort-of hero character climbing a ladder to get to an upper floor bedroom window. But to make it different, this time it's the bedroom window for the chief villian of the film, where his wife is totally zonked out on sleeping pills. (Her sexuality and her husband's disinterest are played for laughs. Cringe laughs.)

The video game aspects of Joysticks are okay. There's a bunch of clips of games clearly just a few seconds into game play. But we do meet the fat slob character as he's trying to break a million in Pac-Man, with game play. Later there's some "Super Pac-Man" (which you don't see often), a backroom game of "strip video" with "Streaking", and "Satan's Hollow" which the film makers managed to get pre-release for showcasing.

Overall, Hardbodies seems more of a Playboy offering than Joysticks, and I think my high school assessment of it as crap holds up okay. So why? My only guess is that Playboy Channel was just willing to put raunchy theatrical films on during evening prime time, but didn't want that stuff actually endorsed as "Playboy" branded.

A final note. No one ever mentioned anything about a Playboy Channel item on the bill. I don't know if we got away with it because of a glitch, because no one looked closely at the bill, or because whoever looked at it didn't want to touch that issue. I don't think I have watched Playboy Channel since then, the quality of the entertainment was not that appealing.

The best bit of Zombeavers

Seventy seconds to one hundred fifteen seconds into "Zombeavers" (2014). Probably the funniest part of the movie.

[ Joseph is driving a small truck, Luke is in the passenger seat ]

Luke: My friend told me I can't shit in his house anymore.

Joseph: Ah, isn't that the worst?

Luke: Can you believe that?

Joseph: Yeah, they get all mad 'cause you blew out their bathroom. It's a place to shit. That's what the room is built for. You're supposed to go in there and take a shit, and then when you do it, they act like they're surprised, like you took a dump on their table or something.

Luke: Yeah.

Luke: I did take a dump on his table.

Luke: Hey, man, you see that deer up there?

Joseph (looking at his phone): Yeah, I see it.

Luke: I don't think you do.

[ vehicle hits deer completely covering the front the car in blood ]

Joseph: Okay, I admit that. I didn't see the deer.

Joseph: But I see him now.

For the rest of film, watch the trailer several times in a row. (But be sure to imagine one of the actresses topless.)

Zombeavers (2014)_ at imdb

SF Film Festival 2024

The San Francisco Film festival gets smaller every year. It's now down to five days, plus a few more "encore" days. I watched four of the films in this year's line up, one documentary and three fictional.

Porcelain War
Janet Planet
Dìdi
Thelma

Porcelain War is a is a much more hopeful film about the war in Ukraine than the recent Oscar winning 20 Days in Mariupol, and possibly the most beautiful film you can imagine being made inside a country at war about the people trying to keep on with their lives there. After the film, both co-directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, plus cinematographer Andrey Stefanov (and little dog Frodo[*]), were there to talk about how the production was done. Bellomo had previously met these people and was planning a film about their art before war broke out. Then they changed the subject matter. Because of the deep involvement in the war by two artists, and the working relationship with a third artist, this is a lovely film about art in wartime with some slightly awkward cuts to artists waging war.

Four out of four bombs dropped by a whimsically painted DJI drone.

[*] No questions were directed to Frodo and he did not speak on his own.

Janet Planet is a film about an 11-year-old girl one summer in 1991. Her mom is divorced and has a series of relationships that constitute the major chapters of the film. It's from A24 and a first time movie director and follows in the footsteps of A24 giving a chance to first time directors to tell stories of girls (eg, Greta Gerwig's _Lady Bird_). This would fail a gender reversed Bechdel Test, if that sort of thing bothers you. What bothered me about the film was just how slow it is. At one point, near a major plot event, we see some blintzs get put in a microwave and cooked for 30 seconds. The camera just stays there immobile watching the food cook. I can see the message there: 1991, home alone in the woods, no friends, no video games, no cellphone, no cable TV: life is slow and you watch your food cook. It's not an thing kids today (and there were a lot of under 30s in the audience) really know. But it is a little tedious. Afterwards, over the next few days, I did find myself thinking a lot about the film, but boy was it slow to watch.

Two out of four frozen blintzes.

Dìdi makes an interesting contrast to Janet Planet. This is about a boy one spring and summer in 2008, at the end of 8th grade up to the first few days in high school, in Freemont, California. His dad works in Taiwan, and he lives with mother, his paternal grandmother (Nai Nai), and his older sister, about to head off to dental school. The boy goes by different names with different people, "Dìdi" ("younger brother") to his family, "Wang Wang" to some of his friends, "Chris" to others. He is trying hard to fit in and become more popular, definitely falling into the tag along friend in his social groups, and having some rough times getting along with his family. And so the movie follows his failings and growth at that time when socialization was in person, on Myspace, on Facebook, on Youtube, and on text messages by flip phone.

Three out of four hasty Google searches.

Thelma is a delightful film that manages to deftly juggle the concerns of seniors (Thelma is 93 and played by a 94 year old actress) and a loving hommage to Mission: Impossible. It starts with Thelma discussing Tom Cruise doing all his own stunts while they watch a clip from MI Fallout, which is meta-relevant in that June Squibb (long a supporting actress, now in her first starring role) did "many" of her stunts for Thelma. "Stunts" in the Hollywood union rules sense of stunts, at least, and not really challenging for the able-bodied. The story concerns a common scam that targets seniors, and Thelma's quest to recover her lost money after falling for it.

Three out of four hearing aids.

Links for other movies mentioned:
20 Days in Mariupol
Lady Bird
Mission: Impossible - Fallout