Category: Found-Again

Found-Again Friday (on Saturday): Octopussy

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Sorry for the delay: the snow and the recent loss of a pet have been sapping my will to blog.

Why Found-Again? Free association from seeing someone throwing knives on TV, as a matter of fact.

Octopussy was the second James Bond movie I ever saw (the first being Live and Let Die, which still has my favorite opening sequence of any Bond movie ever) and is regarded by a surprising number of people as one of the worst. Helpful empirical tip: nothing that starts with a clown murder can be completely bad. That… is just science.

The Premise: Following a trail that begins with a Fabergé egg, James Bond foils a nuclear plot by the evil Kamal Khan (the late Louis Jourdan) with the help of nefarious smuggler/entrepreneur/cult leader Octopussy, whose dealings with Khan are going sour and who has a pet poisonous octopus. Who are these people who hate this movie??

I will concede that it’s a bit formulaic, and I know Mr. Moore isn’t everyone’s favorite glass of shaken-not-stirred. As a freshly minted young fan, though, I found this an excellent Bond 101: exotic locale, tuxedos, beating the bad guy at a game of chance, scheming Soviets, chase scenes, bizarre weapons…and the women!  I’ve always wondered whether Magda using her sari to escape Bond on the balcony would get old for me, and recent viewing has proved it probably never will.

The Verdict: Those of you who remember the scenes of Octopussy fighting bad guys with a sword can hardly doubt my verdict. It’s one of the few times I’ve watched a Bond movie and not wanted to be Bond: who needs MI6 when you have an octopus cult?

Might go well with: Sushi, Indian food, and a look at some Fabergé.

 

Next time: You know. Sword stuff.

 

 

Found-Again Friday (Well, Valentine’s Day): Singin’ In The Rain

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Why Found-Again? This one, like a few before it, is cheating: I watch this every year on Valentine’s Day.

I can’t really remember when this became a tradition for me: I decided to watch it one year when I thought I’d have nothing else going on and wanted a movie that would have some romantic aspects, but not too many. Singin’ In The Rain still delivers all that and more, and so it’s become my go-to no matter what kind of Valentine’s Day I’m having that year.

The Premise (to most people): Handsome leading man Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) gets a rude awakening when talkies replace silent films, but prevails with the help of the ingenue he loves (Debbie Reynolds) and his best friend.

The Premise (to me and people I’ve persuaded to watch the movie): The snarky, sensible, and crazy talented Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) rolls with the punches—in some cases literally—as the film industry changes. Also, his friend Don has problems both romantic and professional.

I stand by my interpretation 100%. Gene Kelly is good-looking and an excellent dancer, but Donald O’Connor is the star of the movie, and all too few people seem to know it. Don’t believe me?

(Warning: contains musical number, if you’re against that sort of thing.)

The actual “Singin’ In The Rain” song might be more iconic, but this is friggin’ amazing.

The Verdict: Are you kidding me? Go watch this right now. Here’s some more:

 

Might go well with: Given that my traditional Valentine’s Day food involves stuffing cinnamon candy hearts into my mouth until I look like a vampire, I’m just going to say champagne.

Next time: One of my favorite parts of Highlander for TCBOM!. Our long(-winded) nightmare is almost over! And no, I don’t mean me.

Found-Again Friday: The X-Files

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Why Found-Again? I still vividly recall watching the first episode of The X-Files while at college. To the left of me was the guy I had a crush on; to the right was the guy who had a crush on me. And in the middle was me, stunned that they had at last made what in my house tended to be referred to as “spook shows” for a major audience. (Instinctively I knew late-night fare like Monsters and Nightmare on Elm Street: the Series didn’t count, though even now I can’t explain why.) For somebody who’d entertained a childhood dream of becoming a paranormal investigator, this was a Big Deal.

The sight of a young David Duchovny in wire-rimmed glasses was a less big deal, but it is the point at which I forgot I was watching the show with other people. Sorry, fellas.

I started watching The X-Files on Netflix again before I heard that Fox might be trying to bring back the show, but this seems like a good time to see how it holds up.

The Premise: Straight-arrow FBI-agent-with-an-MD Dana Scully is assigned to work with Fox “Spooky” Mulder, who specializes in weird unsolved cases known as “X-files.” She’s supposed to bring him back to mundanity, but the actual existence of aliens/vampires/government conspiracies/mutants keeps getting in the way (as does what seems like an endless stream of autopsies. What did Mulder do before he had a doctor on his team?).

I’m probably in the minority of people who loved The X-Files, in that I do not care about short grey aliens even a tiny bit, and for me the conspiracy stuff was starting to get old even before somebody shoots Deep Throat late in season 1. When it was on TV, I tended to skip around a lot, checking in for a monster of the week but leaving the extraterrestrial stuff alone. Netflix streaming has reminded me that the Scully/Mulder bond is a lot of what’s worth watching here—I’m shocked to find myself literally out-loud “Awwww”ing some of the exchanges when the X-files are (temporarily) closed down but they still can’t stay away from each other.

And, of course, all the classics are still there: the vampires, the scary clones, Eugene Tooms, Flukeman.

The Verdict: Many of these are much better than I remembered. And it’s still got some of the best theme music ever.

And just for the heck of it, my favorite goofy ‘Files YouTube video:

Might go well with: I find myself wanting to watch this side by side with Eureka. As for food recommendations, some of the episodes preclude food altogether. Yuck.

 

 

 

 

Found-Again Friday: Musical Interlude 1

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I’ve been wanting to shake up the kinds of things I look at on Fridays (Highlander, of course, being a smorgasboard of infinite variety every Monday), but I hesitated to branch out into music. More than TV or movies, I still listen to a lot of the same things I’ve always listened to—I just add more as things are brought to my attention. The Gordon Lightfoot song  I loved when I was ten* is on a mix in my car right now: that’s not very Found-Again, is it?

Still, the idea appeals, so here are some things you could expect to find blaring in my headphones in the early ’90s. (No verdict section required for this one—if I picked ’em, I still like ’em.)

Here’s something a bit nerdy:

I mean it as a very high compliment when I say that nobody yelps and growls like Murray Attaway, whose solo album was stock listening for me for ages:

One of my teenage regrets is that I never got to see these guys live, even though they were from Norfolk:

And 1993 was the year I got a little bit into zydeco.

*Between the folk music and the Goldblum crush, I was exactly as popular as you think I was during my tween years.

Enjoy!

Next time: This part just drags ON and ON Ramirez trains Connor in Monday’s TCBOM! post.

Found-Again Friday: Simon & Simon Season 1

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I hesitated about this one, because this show’s theme song is one of the most pernicious earworms ever crafted by humans (according to the credits, “humans” in this case would be The Thrasher Brothers; it’s been a while since I wanted to write a College Bowl question quite this badly). If you turned this into a ringtone, you would either rule the hearing world or be killed by an angry mob. Don’t say I didn’t warn you:

Why Found-Again? This, like all the other shows from Matt Houston to Riptide, was on at my house a lot when I was young. Mom had a thing for Gerald McRaney. I…did not.

The Premise: Bickering brothers Rick and A.J. Simon (McRaney and Jameson Parker, respectively) run a little detective agency in San Diego that seems to function as a remora attached to the bigger firm across the street. Rick is the shady one; A.J. is the uptight one who for some reason has a red lining in his blazer. As with its cousin Magnum, P.I., the show’s setting itself is often practically a character.

As I revisit the detective/crime shows of my youth and otherwise, it’s interesting to see how much or how little one knows about the characters’ lives: one of my favorite things about classic Law & Order was teasing out the little details about Lenny Briscoe or McCoy/Kincaid as they were dropped in the middle of the real business of the episode. Simon & Simon takes it to the other extreme and lays on a thick layer of back story: the Simons tease each other about childhood incessantly, their mother makes regular appearances, etc. To return to the Magnum comparison, it’s almost as if someone thought internal monologues would be so much  better if only you had someone to talk to.

The Verdict: Mixed. They won’t be playing it for the damned souls in hell or anything, but you’d have to be pretty bored to seek this out. (If you are, however, full episodes seem to be available on YouTube.)

Might go well with: Tacos. But then again, what doesn’t?

 

 

Found-Again Friday: Danger Mouse

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This British cartoon about a super-spy rodent didn’t come to my TV until the mid-1980s, by which time I’d already seen my first two James Bond movies (both of them Roger Moores, in case you wondered why I have his autobiography; I was marked at a young age). I’ve often wondered what the show is like for people who saw those things in a more age-appropriate order, since Danger Mouse may be one of the first things I ever recognized as parody.

Why Found-Again? Because even the most puerile grownup—I grant that I may crack a top 500 list in this regard—can only stomach so much punnery at a time, and once the DVDs are in, I refuse to turn them off in the entertainment equivalent of eating the whole bag of chips.

The Premise: The world’s greatest secret agent is a little white mouse with an eyepatch who lives in a mailbox. His assistant is a nervous hamster with glasses and a suit. Together they take on foes natural and un-, including evil toad (but I repeat myself) Baron Silas Greenback and a pre-vegetarianism Count Duckula, saving the world one odd adventure at a time.

For something like this, it might work better if I just list my top 3 episodes, in no particular order:

  • “Who Stole the Bagpipes?”—Dangermouse and his not-very-musical assistant Penfold investigate bagpipe theft…and as the bagpipes in question are wheezy, plaid grazing creatures, it gets a little odd.
  • “The Duel”—Dangermouse enters a contest with supervillain Baron Greenback; if the mouse wins, Greenback promises to give up villainy. Yeah, that’ll happen.
  • “One of Our Stately Homes Is Missing”—in which we learn what DM did before he met Penfold, and about his very unusual piloting ability.

And then there’s the theme song:

 

The Verdict: Interestingly, the DVDs have made it a little harder for me to rewatch these by restoring them to their original British glory; when I was a kid, some of the transition between episodes was obviated, and Stiletto the hench-crow had a Cockney accent, not Italian. So it’s not quite as I remember it. It is still gloriously silly, though, which is good, because so am I.

Might go well with:  Tea, anything you ate as a giddy eight-year-old.

Next time: In all likelihood, a shorter-than-usual Highlander post.

 

Found-Again At-Last Friday: Flashdance

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You may have gathered from past ruminations on murder shows and evil cartoon cobras that I was not particularly censored in my viewing as a child, and you’d be right. (That doesn’t mean I ran wild: in the days of network TV, just having a child-sized bedtime prevented you from seeing a lot of things—and when Mom figured out those things included The Twilight Zone, I got a dispensation for that, too.)

In fact, the only thing I remember anyone specifically not wanting me to watch was 1983’s Flashdance, and given that one of my parents would later painstakingly explain the “dickless” joke from Ghostbusters on the way back from the theater, it may have been less about censorship and more about being unwilling to take on the annotation.

Happily, Netflix has offered Flashdance on streaming, so I spent part of New Year’s Eve remedying a years-old gap in my education.

The Premise: Spunky, insecure Alex (Jennifer Beals in the role that made her famous) welds by day, dances at the world’s coolest strip club by night, and dreams of being a professional dancer. Also, she has an adorable dog.

Flashdance is one of those movies people know from the pop-cultural collective unconscious even if they’ve never seen it: the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, the bucket of water splashing down, the dance moves, the amazing soundtrack. What I hadn’t realized was how pretty the movie would be, though it’s no surprise with Adrian Lyne as director. Even the steel mills have a faint halo, buildings are lovingly filmed, and the scene where Alex panics in the dance academy has her moving through practicing dancers who threaten to engulf her like the clockworks of some gorgeous, terrible machine. Even the strip-club scenes (a club where none of the dancers ever completely denudes, and where elaborate costumes and themed dance routines are allowed to flourish) resemble early music videos.

None of that completely disguises the fact that Flashdance is a basic triumph-of-the-underdog movie with a bit of bildungsroman and fairy tale thrown in, but it does help the movie rise above that. To my surprise, this isn’t leaving my streaming list anytime soon.

The Verdict: An emphatic yes. I wish I’d made an effort to see this a lot sooner.

Might go well with: Rocky, Amélie, but probably not lobster.

 

Next time: How do you solve a problem like Maria Connor MacLeod?

 

 

Found-Again Friday(ish): Holiday Edition—You Can Go Home Again, But Maybe Don’t

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So far I have driven nearly flooded roads, permanently cut a relative from my life, and slipped and fallen on an icy safety ramp: Christmas, and parts of my tailbone, are a bust.

My old favorite bookstore is still here, though, so I am celebrating Pendergastmas instead.

Ordinarily, this seems like it would be more dangerous than mere Christmas...
Ordinarily, this seems like it would be more dangerous than mere Christmas…

Found-Again Friday: The Animated Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

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When I was a very small child, four things terrified me:

  • Heights;
  • That Looney Tunes cartoon where Tweety gets into the Jekyll-and-Hyde potion;
  • My great-aunt Ruth’s lamp, which looked a bit like this one (or indeed, just about any result you get from Googling “Deco panther lamp”; who knew those things were so ubiquitous?);
  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which was so obviously calculated to scare the bejesus out of children that it turned up on TV every October despite not actually being a Halloween story.

Why Found-Again? I have no idea why I picked up the DVD as an adult, but it may have been some combination of a low price and the desire to finally see the show while not peeking out from beneath a blanket in sheer dread.I’m a grownup now, right? (Discounting the Highlander posts, anyway.)

(In fairness, I wore less eyeliner as a toddler.)
Historical reenactment of my first seven viewings.

The Premise: Doughty mongoose Rikki is adopted by a very British family living in India and defends them from the scariest damn snakes this side of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the assistance of a pair of birds and a timid muskrat.

Over the years, I’d never realized that Chuck Jones animated Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and it was surprising to see how cute Rikki is, the occasional red eyes of mongoose bloodlust notwithstanding. The snakes, especially the main cobra villains Nag and Nagaina, are suitably sinister-looking, but aaaagghh those voices; when we first hear Nag speak, I may not have hidden under the blanket this time, but I did make a noise usually reserved for stepping on hairballs with my bare feet.

When the snakes aren’t talking, Orson Welles’ narration keeps things going, lending so much gravitas to the story that sometimes animation effects like Rikki’s super-swishing tail seem out of place. (The scene of Rikki destroying snake eggs by trampling them to death—shown only as shadows— also keeps things somber.) The cartoon ends in a chase scene that had me glued to the screen even after all this time, rooting for what has to be one of the bite-iest heroes in all of fiction.

The Verdict: Everything about this was better than I remembered except the musical numbers; stick to sidekicking, Mr. Bird.

Might Go Well With: Chicken tikka masala, strong tea; definitely not eggs.

 

Next time: We find out who my least favorite minor character in Highlander is, among other things.

Found-Again Friday (on Saturday): Mister Frost

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One of the reasons my college friends and I could play an adaptation of the Kevin Bacon Game called “Four Degrees of Jeff Goldblum” was Goldblum’s European/British period in the early ‘90s: he starred with Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson in The Tall Guy, joined Bob Hoskins and Natasha Richardson in The Favour, the Watch, and the Very Big Fish, and was a serial murderer in 1990 psychological thriller Mister Frost.

When I started looking for the movie again, I expected it to be hard to find; I didn’t expect that Amazon wouldn’t even have it available in US format on DVD.* Fortunately, YouTube has hooked us up once again.

Why Found-Again? Until I sat down to rewatch it this week, that basic outline—and the line “Oh, yeah, the body; I was just burying it when you drove up”—were the only things I remembered about this movie other than a longing for something, anything to happen.

The Premise: Serial murderer/man with no first name Mr. Frost, who has spent two years in silence after being apprehended, is sent to a mental hospital, where he chooses as a confidante Dr. Day (the ever-magnificent Kathy Baker).

Did I mention he might be the devil? The movie sure does, most often through the character of Det. Detweiler (Alan Bates).

I can’t for the life of me (hah!) understand my impression that nothing happened in Mister Frost: there are philosophical discussions of evil, certainly, but there’s also a lot of investigation, internal tensions at the mental hospital, a gentle patient Frost pushes over the edge into clergy-murder, and a detective who is maybe mauled by a ghost. (You’d think at the very least the occasional shirtless Goldblum would have kept my attention as a college student, but I didn’t remember that, either.)

The Verdict: This movie was an awful lot better than I remembered, and exactly what I was hoping for when I started this project of revisiting things. Watching it, you realize that at some level it wouldn’t matter whether Goldblum’s character is the actual, just-what-it-says-on-the-Milton devil; as the lives of the characters spin out of control, he is exactly what we expect of Old Scratch.

I’m not going to go buy a European-region DVD player so I can have Mister Frost with me always, but I can at last recommend it.

Might DOES go well with: Since I had little memory of the plot, I sat down with unintentional irony to watch this with a microwave EVOL meal. Tasty!

 

* Note to self: Figure out why the Dutch are the only people still committing this film to DVD.

 

Next time: Highlander!