Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Underrated then? Definitely. Underrated now? I don’t know. I think its reputation has been rescued after a tepid response in 1994. Still, it’s bottom-half Coens for me but that’s mainly because competition for those top slots is so fierce. Definitely one of those movies that offers more to discover each time. As a slow-witted Midwesterner myself it only occurred to me with this viewing that Norville should have figured out that women from Muncie don’t have Mid-Atlantic accents.
It's probably been 20+ years since I last watched this and I was worried that time and imitators might have dulled this movie's edge. Nope. It's a brilliantly paced descent into chaos and a pretty remarkable acting exercise, too. "I kicked that fucking map into the creek yesterday," is one of those lines that takes all the air out of the room. Watched with the kid as part of her growing interest in horror movies. Of course it didn't scare her (but she liked it a lot).
The strange story of a nice Jewish girl in the early 1960s who meets a working class time traveler from the 1980s whose amazing hair and MTV-influenced dance moves bewitch the Catskills resort where she's vacationing with her father, a famous New York homicide detective, and mother, who will later become an easily offended Connecticut socialite with a fondness for martinis. By the end, everyone is so enamored of him that they don't even notice when he puts on a 45 and the synth-laden sounds of late '80s adult contemporary pop come piping out of the speakers.