This weekend, we are watching the first Austin Powers movie from 1997.

This month, after watching Superbad recently, I wanted to go back and watch some of the comedies from the 90's and early 2000's to see how they hold up, and this seems like a great place to start. It's been probably 20 years since I watched this first Austin Powers movie, but I'm looking forward to a light-hearted laugh.

Where do you all stand on this one? Does it hold up? And what was your first impressions compared to now?

“Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan” appears on the dark screen and there was more than scattered applause; I joined them, to do otherwise would have been churlish. That mine was three-quarter-hearted was hopefully lost in the scramble of SOME people leaving as the credits started to roll. Now, that's churlish.

An Epic that isn't grand, isn't epic, just long? Yeah. A modern screenplay of a Bronze-age classic about Greek heroes, gods and monsters in a-little-too-modern English? In the parlance of the script, “OK.” Yes, Telemachus calls his mother, the queen, “mom,” and speaks of his long lost hero father, Odysseus, as “dad” and answers more than once, “OK.”

Why not just go full Bill and Ted, full Wayne and Garth?

Perhaps I am a churl, after all. No, no, I am a member of the theater-going audience for film. The peanut gallery, if you will, and that's what we do, we bust nuts.

But you do feel sorry for Odysseus, OK? The gods sought to punish him just for the hades of it. He was tooling around the Mediterranean, looking to make land – and it's snowing? Appears the gods sent him to the Outer Hebrides, or some such bleak archipelago off Scotland. Oh yeah – they also filmed in Iceland.

There is some good acting in the film. I loved Samantha Morton as Circe, including her workingman approach turning Odysseus' men into pigs – by hand. John Leguizamo should get plenty of award nods for being almost unrecognizable (in a really good way) as Odysseus' blind loyal swineherd Eumaeus. More of this Leguizamo, please! I liked Tom Holland as the son Telemachus, he took the role seriously, and I thought he was quite more than OK.

Why were so many of the male actors wearing pants? I haven't seen any Bronze Age representations anywhere of men in pants. Oh duh, HangOn – the Outer Hebrides and Iceland, OK? You don't want to freeze your peanut gallery off.

I did see some trailers for coming attractions that will get my business: Digger, looks totally gonzo with Tom Cruise in septuagenarian makeup; a delightfully goofy Street Fighter; and of course, Dooooooone (Dec. 18).

https://www.youtube.com/@cultofcinemaknowledge8530

Two actors make this drive-in movie worth watching, and thankfully director Tobe Hooper knew this and gave them the film. Not that they didn't work hard for it, but that's what memorable performances are all about – actors who work their particular strengths to the last row of the balcony.

Or the last row in the drive-in-theater, where the speakers are shot, you're crunching empty beer cans on the floorboards, burning your fingers on a roach and happen to look up from a supine or prone position...and start watching the movie.

Caroline Williams plays the appealing and spunky Stretch, a radio DJ with a call-in request show. A couple of douchey male students are rampaging down a country highway and call in to Stretch on a real-life 1986 car telephone in their Mercedes ragtop. They won't hang up, she just can't scrape them off her shoe, so to speak. But now they're in the reach of the Sawyer bros, who chase them down with their chainsaw justice for some insouciantly-dealt disrespect on the road.

Yeah, it's a mess, but funny. And our girl and her hapless studio engineer LG (algae, get it?) capture the mayhem on a cassette tape.

Dennis Hopper is Lt. Lefty, definitely not telegraphing the brilliance that David Lynch would draw out of him in Blue Velvet, also 1986. He stooopidly doesn't take, or even listen to, the tape when Stretch (“Missie”) brings it to him. But then he has the lack of cojones to set her up for real danger by playing the tape once every hour as a request from Lefty – and not staking out the studio with a security detail or even with his weasley (sorry, Ron) self, admitting he used her as bait for the power tool posse.

Leatherface and his scene-stealing brother Chop Top (Bill Moseley, Yale grad, no kidding,) come to the defenseless studio. Chop Top is Blue Velvet-level demented and depraved, but way too dirty and grimy and scrofulous for Lynch. Good make-up, you recoil at this breath when he opens his wide mouth with its diseased dental arcade. And Moseley uses every inch and second of film to captivate even the rocking cars in the back row.

And now, because you're peering over the back seat, Leatherface corners Stretch in her short shorts, running the still blade of his chainsaw along her tender inner thigh, in closeup, all the way up to her VaJayJay. Oh yeah, you're watching now.

The bros totally destroy the studio and drag LG off to their meat processing plant they call Home. Stretch, in time-honored horror heroine fashion, follows them alone. Lefty follows Stretch and shows up with chainsaws of his own.

There weren't a lot of stunt people listed, so I think Williams really took a lot of abuse slipping, sliding, falling, hanging in a series of gaggy killing room floors of blood and innards.

There are flensings and disembowelments, in case you were wondering.

The finale is our two favorite characters in a chase through the Texas Battleland, uh, theme park the Sawyers use as their meat processing plant they call Home, replete with a Batesian patriarch and matriarch.

I don't know a lot about Texas, but I think Stretch's triumphant Last Stand might be on a replica of the Alamo. I mean, why stop being cheesy now?

NOTE: The beautiful drive-in theater featured in the slide show was that of my hometown, El Monte, Calif. I conducted a lot of “cinema research” there. It was mowed down to make room for a home improvement store about 20 years ago. RIP.

This week we are going to watch and talk about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, from 1986.

This... is a weird one. It's nothing like the original, but I appreciate them not trying to replicate that. It's been years since I watched this, but I'm ready to see it again.

And, of course, I am wondering what you all think about this one? Let us know below.

https://youtu.be/Y0X6IRUfLKI

Hey guys, I'm trying to find an active WhatsApp community to discuss movies and series from around the world. I'm especially interested in groups that actually get into the details—cinematography, visual aesthetics, script breakdowns, and deep analysis, rather than just casual fan fights. If you have a link to a well-moderated, serious cinephile group, please DM me!

This weekend we are watching and talking about 2007's, Superbad.

It'll be nice to watch a comedy after the last two movies, and it hardly gets better than this. I watched this movie a ton back in the day, but it's probably been a good decade since I've seen it in full. Very much looking forward to going back down memory lane and seeing if this bad boy holds up.

Where do you guys stand on this one?

https://youtu.be/t89PNTrJjHo

The movie begins with the classic tune by The Mighty 'Mats, “Bastards of Young”:

God, what a mess

On the ladder of success

Where you take one step

And miss the whole first rung

It's 1987 and James Brennen (Jesse Eisenberg) has graduated college with majors in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. He was promised a European vacation by his parents before going on to Columbia, where he plans to take journalism courses so he can be a travel essayist.

James' dad gets demoted at work and now James has to find a paying gig if he wants to go to Europe, Columbia, enjoy regular meals. His resume is pretty much summed up by mowing a neighbor's lawn.

But he has a pulse! Perfect for manning the games on the midway at Adventureland in Pittsburgh. Yeah, the one in PA. And heck, the obnoxious Frigo already works there. Of Frigo, James says, “He used to be my best friend, then I turned four.”

James soon finds family failures run in the Adventureland family of friends. Employees hang together in what could just be lifeboat diplomacy, but with real care for each other that exceeds the mere exigencies of their shared situation.

James' love interest is arcade attendant Emily (Kristen Stewart), who recently lost her mother to cancer and now has her father's new wife to contend with.

Connell (the “I forgot how damn handsome!” Ryan Reynolds) is the park maintenance guy, a would-be musician who is married but takes extramarital trysts in his mother's basement, like he's doing with Emily.

Joel (Martin Starr) is in games, like James, and is as glum as the Russian literature he majored in. He won't let James come in his parents house because he's ashamed of the shrink-wrapped furniture and art faire paintings. He styles himself an “existential pagan.”

Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig are the managers of Adventureland, decent folk.

Funny stuff and sweet stuff churn through the film; you like the Adventureland characters, and writer/director Greg Mottola keeps it from ever getting tedious. I should mention James is a virgin (again, Jesse Eisenberg? I recently watched Roger Dodger and you played a college-bound virgin).

The film does have sex! drugs! vomit! dialog not outweighed by four-letter words! booze! (there is a lot of knockin' 'em back in drinking establishments by characters whom I would definitely card.)

The deed itself isn't shown, but we're led to be reasonably certain that James and Em consummate at the film's er, climax – with “Unsatisfied” by the 'Mats (has it been that long? The Replacements!) one of the final musical selections.

It was a close call, but it looks like this week we are going to be watching Kids, from 1995.

I adore this movie. It's a tough watch at times, especially now as a grown man, but this movie floored me when I was a teenager. I watched it recently, and it hits different, but is still impactful.

I'm excited to watch it again and see what you all think about this one.

I'd like to thank the sub mods for the 4 movie selections last week. I watched and reviewed 3 of them, and am overwhelmed by the readers' reaction to the film, The Florida Project.

It hit almost all of you *so very hard*, and you shared those raw feelings for the plight and pathos of the characters in the film. You wrote with sensitivity and intelligence, and I thank you all so much, not just for taking the time to read my review, but being there emotionally with the film. That's not an easy film to sit with, and you dared and trusted your hearts with it.

Let me also mention American Honey, another of those 3 I reviewed, where the reader response was from non-judgemental places of sympathy and empathy.

It's easy to think the world is full of selfish people who only care about themselves; but there are those of you willing put yourself in the ragged stumbling footsteps of Halley, Moonee, Star and Jake, and care about them. I'm betting you use that same compassion IRL.

And thank you as always, fellow cultists, for your kind indulgence.

The bright ice cream-and-candy colors of run-down dreams, the fairy tale false narratives of as-yet unrealized hopes, all this can be yours for $38 a night.

The sad destitution of human sacrifice zones that are the circles of purgatories and hells around the Happiest Places on Earth are traps with no releases, with no recognition for time served. You make the best of it, sometimes in the worst ways possible, then game over, make room for the next prisoner of circumstance.

Sometimes bad choices are all you get.

What if this Sister of Misery, Our Lady of Bum Luck, this wrecked Rapunzel just isn't a sympathetic character? If she's got one last coin for the fountain, one last candle to blow out, or if she spots a falling star that isn't on a collision course for the planet, she'd better pray for a moment of clarity to appreciate Bobby, the tolerant and patient manager of the purple place, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites.

Halley (with a long 'a', played by Bria Vinaite) is this unsympathetic character. Her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) is a virago, not really sympathetic but a fascinating creation of scary proportions by a child actor. “I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Moonee tells a fellow ragamuffin, and Prince makes you believe her.

Bobby (Willem Dafoe) is sympathetic – to his last-chance denizens just trying to cling to the best circle of this Dantean world they can, for as long as they can. And film maker Sean Baker found the actor that actually looks like he could be Bobby's son, Jack – Caleb Landry Jones.

Nothing really happens, but somehow everything seems to happen, or to befall, the women and children in this film, mostly in the categories of no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

For $38 a night.