Grudge Match (2013)

This is what Hollywood calls a high concept: a movie that could be pitched and sold easily, where the poster comes first, the movie later.
Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, two movie stars famous for their boxing movies Rocky and Raging Bull, play long-retired boxers who hate each other, and they’re destined to fight one last rematch. 

NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL #310  [archive] JULY 12, 2024

Boxing is heavily regulated, and the stars are wrinkly old men, so there’s no way this would be allowed, but it’s an amusing concept. The film starts pretty good, sputters a lot with formulaic subplots, and rallies with the ridiculousness of the fight scenes, plus an impossible plot twist toward the end.Overall, it’s OK for an ordinary movie, but they could’ve sliced half an hour and it would’ve been better. Verdict: YES. ♦ ♦ ♦ G-Sale (2003)
Streaming free at YouTube

Here’s a movie that’s not made by a corporation, not focus-grouped by test audiences, not fine-tuned to appeal to the widest possible audience.G-Sale is a homemade mockumentary about garage sales, where we meet sellers and buyers and see some of the reasonably-priced second-hand goods. Being a bit anti-corporate myself, this is the kind of film I enjoy finding. DIY and indies forever, man. And it features Ted D’Arms, a Seattle-area stage actor of some local renown, who’s quite good in it, and now dead, so it’s a pleasant going-away.The movie, though, bears little resemblance to any of the many garage sales I’ve been to, and it’s an hour before we’re actually in the movie’s only garage sale. The tally was nine laughs in an hour and a half, most coming toward the end.My apologies to the moviemakers, but it’s proof that what Christopher Guest does — making fictional weirdos seem off-the-cuff interesting, believable, yet funny — ain’t easy.Verdict: MAYBE.♦ ♦ ♦ Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

A child destined for greatness is kidnapped by bad guy space aliens, grows up to be Chris Pratt, steals a mythical orb, and goes on the run across outer space, performing heroics accompanied by the greatest his of the 1960s and 1970s … and there’s not a fresh moment anywhere.Guardians of the Galaxy is a collection of tropes borrowed from a hundred better sci-fi flicks, pasted into a pastiche so predictable that after the first ten minutes, you’ll know every plot development that awaits. Yes, Pratt will fall for adventurous good girl Zoe Saldana, not for any romantic reason but because the algorithm says it’s time for a smooch.On and on this rolls along, with great rock’n’roll played over boring action and special effects costing many millions of dollars.There’ve been worse big budget sci-fi flicks — Battlefield Earth comes to mind — but I can’t think of any with less imagination.Verdict: BIG NO.♦ ♦ ♦Guerillere Talks (1978)
Streaming free at Internet Archive
This is very avant-garde, a short film made up of several shorter films, all showing women doing whatever they’re doing, but nothing sexy nor particularly feminist. The first few minutes, for example, show a woman playing pinball in an arcade. But nothing happens.
Next we’re watching a different woman hammer nails into the wall, and unlike the first woman, she has something to say, reading a letter while the camera wanders around the room. Another woman talks earnestly about what she wants to say for the film, but it takes her a long while to find the words, the words aren’t much, and eventually the film cuts her off in mid-sentence, while the camera is inexplicably showing her torso instead of her face.On to the next seemingly unedited vignette.Avant-garde films are marvelous, of course, but after seeing a few you start wishing avant-garde filmmakers would make something with scenes and dialogue and a story and camerawork that isn’t random…Verdict: MAYBE.♦ ♦ ♦Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004)
a/k/a Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army
Streaming free at Vimeo

Only senior citizens read this blog, so y’all know who Patricia Hearst is, but let’s recap anyway. She’s the fabulously wealthy granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane), and in 1974 she was kidnapped and radicalized by a violent, kinda bumbling group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.There was, of course, no ‘Symbia’; they took their name from the word ‘symbiosis’, wherein dissimilar organisms live and thrive together. There was also no ‘army’, only about a dozen people with more guns than smarts.Hearst was young, pretty, white, and almost unthinkably rich, so her kidnapping had all the essential ingredients for a media whirlwind. Over the next year and a half, she went from victim to calling herself ‘Tania’, toting a gun, and spouting the SLA’s revolutionary rhetoric.So that’s the basics, and thirty years after these events, this documentary tries to understand what happened. Patty wasn’t willing to talk about it, but two other SLA members share their insights.The movie doesn’t make sense of the SLA, or the Hearst kidnapping, but that’s not the movie’s fault and might be its strength — there is no sense to be made. The film simply shows you the madness, compellingly.Patty Hearst was first a victim, then a terrorist, and now she’s gone back to being rich. The SLA was a bunch of damned fools, who killed at least two innocent people in this movie, maybe more. When cops or soldiers or businessmen kill innocent people it’s “collateral damage,” but when radicals do it they’re imprisoned or, more likely, shot dead.
There’s no denying that the SLA did stupid things and did those things stupidly, and that everything they touched or did turned to chaos, but I can’t hate them for it. At least they did something, you know? Gotta respect that. Verdict: YES. ♦ ♦ ♦ Guess What We Learned in School Today? (1970)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

“Sex is an insidious commie plot,” says police Lieutenant Manley, and he’s furious that the local schools are adding sex education classes. On duty, he enjoys entrapping women for solicitation.This is a lighthearted, lightheaded political comedy, very broad and never really funny. The sexy bits are more weird than sexy, and the liberal propagandizing is not discreet. It’s all very 1960s, with weird music and general weirdness that’s weird.Directed, quite badly, by John G. Avildsen (Rocky, The Karate Kid).Verdict: MAYBE.♦ ♦ ♦ Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

Joey, the daughter of Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn), comes home from vacation with a man she’s fallen in love with and wants to marry.And golly, has there ever been a better man to welcome into the family? He’s John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), a globetrotting super-doctor busily saving the lives of children in the third world, and he’s soft-spoken, self-effacing, intelligent, and dashingly handsome. Just one problem: he’s black.This was a brave gamble for a studio film in 1967, and it’s widely hailed as a classic even today. It’s as odd flick, though. The Draytons aren’t merely white, they’re liberal millionaires, but Doc Prentice is such a perfect man that even a Republican would welcome him to the family.
There are some eye-rolling scenes as the movie tries to reflect its time, like having a white delivery boy and black maid do a be-bop dance to music on a transistor radio.And somehow, despite the drama about the young lovers, and the rancid discrimination they’ll face everywhere except in this movie, all it takes for a happy ending is a long speech by Spencer Tracy.What’s oddest is, despite the movie’s preachiness and dramatic faults a plenty, it’s enjoyable to watch, and you’ll tear up at the end.Nobody seems real, but the issues are. It’s fun watching the anti-racist liberals confront their racism, and there are a few great lines, like Doc Prentice ending an argument with his father by saying, “You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”Written by William Rose (The Flim-Flam Man, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming) and directed by Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, On the Beach).
Katharine Houghton is good as the young woman in love with Doc Prentice, and she’s Katharine Hepburn’s niece.Verdict: YES. ♦ ♦ ♦ • Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentaries • Joan Cusack has a tchotchke shop of her own • The making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre7/12/2024   • • • Coming attractions • • •     Guilty as Sin (1993)
Guilty by Suspicion (1991)
Guilty Bystander (1950)
The Guitar (2008)
Gulliver’s Travels (1939)
… plus schlock, shorts, and surprises