The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018) – Surprisingly for a title like that, this is not a spoof. Sam Elliott plays a man who, in his youth, was part of a special program in WWII that, yup, killed Hitler (it didn’t help, there were doubles); now, as a lonely old man in the 1980s, he’s called upon by his government to help again.
Writers often read books or watch movies and wish we had written them. But it’s a surreal experience to watch a movie that plays out exactly as if I had written it, focusing on the mundane details of life and glossing over the “action” bits a little too quickly. (I’m well aware of my habits and weak spots as a storyteller.)
Ong Bak (2003) – I could tell you about the plot, with a village Buddha statue being deprived of its head and the young idealist of the village traveling to Bangkok to retrieve it, but the plot is only a device to hang creative Muay Thai fight scenes on — like, Jackie Chan-level of creative.
You may not pick up on all the nuances of local culture, but you will come away from this movie knowing that Muay Thai uses elbows and knees like nobody’s business. The more you know…
Out of Liberty (2019) – A dramatization of the months that Joseph Smith and his companions were confined in the ironically named Liberty Jail in Missouri in 1838-1839, focusing largely on the jailer (Jasen Wade) who has to both keep the men confined prior to their trial and ward off the locals who want to take more “frontier-style” justice.
Sincere, yes, but there are a couple of performances so jaw-droppingly bad that they sour the whole production. As the Southeast Asian proverb goes, “A single rat turd can spoil a bushel of rice.” (It was a hoot to see Corbin Allred playing the role of Porter Rockwell, though.)
Abandoned movies:
House of Clocks (1989) – In case you had forgotten just how bad a bad Lucio Fulci movie can be…
I gotta tell ya, boyo, that I was pretty underwhelmed with “The Man Who Killer Hitler.” I thought it was going to be something else, as did you, but I was willing to ride with it, even when it wasn’t. And I am a huge Sam Elliott fan. But DAMN. Talk about mostly turgid…
I think that movies–and literature–that focus on the “mundane details of life” have their places. But…you know, you gotta be in the right place and right mindset for those. (To wit, “The Ballad of Lefty Brown,” which some folks call great and brilliant and not-fast-paced and yup, I call mind-numbingly SLOW.)
I’ve come to enjoy the slow burns more and more. (Whatcha think of Tarkovsky’s STALKER?)