8 responses to “Weekly Dead People — 12/23”

1. 

   granville

   12/23/2025

   Always thought Gil Gerrard was like a Canadian version of Don Johnson, so it surprised me to learn he was from Arkansas.

   They used to air Buck Rogers re-runs on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, it’s probably where my love of schmaltzy sci-fi comes from. I torrented the series some years ago and the first few episodes are fun, a few others have some interesting quirks but good God the rest of it is fucking unwatchable. How do you take a theme like “space vampires” and make it boring? idk, but they do.

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/24/2025

      Never watched more than an episode or two of that version of Buck Rogers. The show didn’t do much for me, but Gerard had a nice touch of Adam West in the performance.

      Reply
2. 

   granville

   12/23/2025

   Also, saw “The Exiles” about (and kind of by?) Christine Choy earlier this year. The concept sounded better than the final film. She meets up with a few Chinese dissidents who have been exiled from the country (in at least one case involuntarily). The idea is that most of these people thought they’d be abroad for awhile, and then the Chinese communist party would collapse, and then they’d return. By this point nobody kids themselves about that, and here they are, still going through the motions of writing letters, etc., and wondering what it was all for. Some of them have been abroad longer than they lived in China.

   From what I understand Choy started making a film about Tiananmen exiles decades ago but ran out of money, so some of her students elected to “follow up” on the unmade film with her as a narrator/host meeting these old friends/comrades. But it’s only like 3 people, and not even the most well-known or interesting of them. Choy is interesting throughout, though.

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/24/2025

      My Choy experience is only Who Killed Vincent Chin?, and it’s been 30 years since I saw it. I don’t remember it vividly, maybe ought to see it again, but it helped make the shittiness of the justice system clear to me.

      So she wanted to make more movies, but couldn’t get funding. That’s the way it goes. We need more state-funded art, to get past the eternal monied gatekeepers.

      Putting The Exiles on the long, long list…

      Reply
      1. 

         granville

         12/24/2025

         I’ve never seen Who Killed Vincent Chin and honestly wasn’t that familiar with her before seeing The Exiles. Reading her Wikipedia page it seems there’s a long list of films she’s made and almost none of them have blue links.

         I realized at some point that I no longer had to watch or read profiles of prolific ’70s New Hollywood directors, because the story is always the same: some kind of overreach in personally financing a film that didn’t do well, and then a decade+ of doing even worse films for other people to try to bail themselves out of debt.

         I am still interested to see Coppola’s Megalopolis, which from the reviews and attempts to stir up mobs against it seems like another one of those movies people trash for reasons other than the movie – how it was made, how much it cost, etc. For a guy to lose his shit from financing an unsuccessful movie, spend like 20 years as a hired gun, somehow become fabulously wealthy selling wine and then leverage it to once again finance a movie that is causing him to lose his shit again is a fascinating story arc.

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         1. 

            Doug Holland

            12/25/2025

            The problem with “New Hollywood” as a genre was always Hollywood. It’s the catch-22 of movies as art — they’re expensive to make and distribute, and for anything mainstream money is the motivator. The system makes it unlikely for actual art to be created, and even more unlikely for it to be seen.

            Megalopolis is on my list, definitely. A big-time hot-shot Hollywood guy spending his own money to make a passion project, right? Even if it sucks, it’s gonna gotta be interesting. And I assume Coppola is rich enough to not be injured as the film bombs.

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            1. 

               Claude Reigns

               12/25/2025

               Megalopolis is not objectively good, in fact it might be objectively bad, but I loved it, because I love Coppola. There’s no one from that era who I find more inspiring than him, however stupid so many of his decisions are.

               Of his late period work, I think Twixt is a real masterpiece, just don’t expect the grand epics he made in the 70s/early 80s.

               I hope he lives to be 120 and makes even more films.

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               1. 

                  Doug Holland

                  12/25/2025

                  Twixt must’ve bombed like Hiroshima — I not only never saw it, I never even heard of it, despite it’s being written and directed by Franky Ford Coppola and having several big stars.

                  He’s made some stinkers, but FFC has a fine ratio of good over sucks ass, so I’m adding this not only to my list, but to my short list of movies I might actually get to in the next few weeks or months.

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