Happy Thursday, everyone! Bit of a short one this week just because of work and this weird chest cough I have. But let's dig in!
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Last Saturday was the annual F This Movie Fest, the annual Twitter film festival run by the delightful folks at F This Movie. This year we did films of 1983 so I picked up a couple that aren't available through free services
The first one was WarGames, the John Badham thriller about what can happen when you take humans out of the decision loop for war. It's alternately funny and terrifying and I'm going to quote myself when I wrote this up for The Solute a few years ago:
I honestly kind of hate that this movie has some relevance again. Yeah, I’m starting kind of heavy here but this movie has a very personal feel for me. I was ten years old when WarGames came out in 1983, a year I remember spending a good deal of a bit scared that someone was going to screw up and the whole world was about to go up in a nuclear fireball, This same year we also had the terrifying miniseries The Day After, Reagan and Andropov were rattling sabers at each other and we all had this feeling that for whatever reason, some idiot might accidentally start the whole thing. So, you can see the parallels.And in all of that, WarGames arrives. A movie that feels like the standard “kid gets involved in secret shenanigans and has to work his way out” plot that has resulted in a ton of movies since then. But what makes WarGames a bit more relevant than its fellow shenanigans movies (The Manhattan Project comes to mind) is that there’s a little more going on here. This movie has something to say about nuclear war and deterrence and the use of computers and humans doing what might be considered insane things in the most logical way possible. It might not always hit the targets but this movie takes some pretty big swings that are worth admiring.
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Next up was Krull, and man if you have not seen this movie in a while...it's a deeply goofy but weirdly entertaining movie. What really cracked me up though is how absolutely barebones this blu-ray is. No subtitles, no special features, nothing besides a main menu that says "Play Movie". It was pretty hilarious. I've seen Warner Archives discs with more features than this thing. And then Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane show up with deeply regrettable facial hair.
And yes, fans of British TV and musical theater, that's Alun Armstrong as well. This movie's cast is weirdly deep. Sadly, the script is not anywhere near that deep. (But to it's credit, this blu-ray looks absolutely great, far better than the trailer would make you think.)
As a bonus, here's Alun Armstrong, who was the original Thenardier in the London production of Les Miserables, performing "Master of the House."
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That's it for this week, folks! Join me next Thursday when we'll be back to The Invisible Man, this time talking about 1940's The Invisible Man Returns.
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