ytbufflo Reviews

Unfrosted (2024)

Seinfeld's Decades-Old Pastry Served with Stale Humor and No Plot

[1/10 · 26 May 2024]

If you make the mistake of wearing the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia going into this ridiculously-wealthy-older-comedian-guilts-all-his-friends-into-crappy-cameo-roles-in-an-ego-driven-zeal-to-be-relevant-while-his-reputation-sinks-like-the-Titanic fiasco, I assure you your lenses will not only crack, they'll be run over and flattened as if by an angry New York cab driver trying to escape MAGA freaks at a Trump rally in Times Square.

Seinfeld is arguably one of the most loved of the nineties comedians, and his show certainly deserves its place in the lexicon of greatest sitcoms in modern American television. That said, what worked about it was that he played a kind of plausible urban everyman that much of middle America could relate to, even if it was a well crafted myth.

Now that he has been obscenely wealthy and privileged for longer than most of his potential audience has been alive, his comedy is a stale rehash of a time long past that no-one today can plausibly relate to.

With student apartment rents in Manhattan at record highs, ($300 a month for a studio walk-up in the derelict East Village where I lived in the 80's is now considered "affordable" at $3,000 in the 24s), the world Jerry lives in is so rarefied and out of touch, he seems like the annoying great grampa lecturing the grandkids on the good ol' days.

Other than being a Master class in WHAT NOT TO DO in a comedy, this sinking ship is not worth bringing your life raft to. If I could give it zero stars I would, but then I wouldn't be giving credit to the game stars that worked hard to keep this afloat. Your call, but I say nah...

Bite Me (I) (2019)

If Jack Kerouac went on the road to shoot a vampire movie - this would be it!

[10/10 · 25 June 2019]

I had a blast! Such a fun project, with great cast and so much fun to meet the director-lead actress-producer and her wonderful husband at the Santa Fe premiere!

Learned so much about the hard work and thinking outside of the box that these talented folks are doing to create a truly independent film business model, and the updates from the road are priceless!!!!!!!

Support your local joyful vampire and buy or rent this hilarious movie!!!!!!

The Interview (II) (2014)

A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie!

[1/10 · 10 January 2015]

I am going out on a limb to even give this one star. It was momentarily promising in that James and Seth have a natural on screen chemistry, but it rapidly unraveled into a schizophrenic mish-mash of the worst, most self-indulgent, cartoonish all star cast cameos and a joke free storyline that would make anyone in their right mind blush to even have submitted, much less brought to final script approval stage. If I had to sum it up, it would be like being on bad acid while being chained in solitary confinement as every yelling scene from every Three Stooges movie played for almost two hours before your eyes. (Oh my god the yelling - it never stopped!) This should never have been financed, and it makes me almost believe the rumor that the whole Sony hacking story is just a cynical PR ploy by desperate executives to try and recoup some of their losses ($44M + $50M Marketing) on what they surely must now realize was one of the worst investment mistakes in recent memory. If you want to go just to hate on this, then by all means pay out. But I personally want to bleach my memories of this permanently from my brain, in case these two stars might one day redeem themselves and actually do something I want to see. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad experience!

Angels Over Broadway (1940)

Rita Hayworth - The Original Marilyn

[9/10 · 6 January 2012]

It is so easy to write off beauty as the reason an actress achieves great rank in Hollywood, and it is what also plagued Marilyn Monroe - the desperate need to be taken seriously for your talent rather than your looks once you have become famous for beauty alone.

I myself had never given Rita Hayworth props for anything other than her luminous visual persona. So it was with great delight that I came across this exceptional film, with its screwball comedy timing and humor, and its amazing ensemble casting - from a sleazy but compelling performance by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. To the ironic portrayal of the has-been drunk played to iconic perfection by Thomas Mitchell.

But the two real gems are John Qualen as a suicidal bookkeeper who is the target of a 2 bit mob scam, and Rita Hayworth - in a portrayal as exceptional to me as Rosalind Russell in The Front Page, or Marilyn Monroe in 7 Year Itch - plays a star-struck wanna-be who is barely making it in shady circumstances, yet manages to convey tremendous innocence and idealism in spite of her deeply compromised situation.

The most striking thing to me of all is how uncanny it is to watch what one would consider to be a classic Monroe performance coming from an actress seven years prior to Marilyn having been given her first on screen part. Suddenly I felt like I understood how Marilyn had crafted her persona - hours of sitting in darkened theaters watching Rita Hayworth concoct her brilliant magic of innocence and seduction like it was real and not a carefully crafted act.

In my humble opinion, I don't believe Marilyn would have been nearly as iconic had she not had Rita Hayworth's example to follow, and this portrayal in Angels Over Broadway is the link that, to me, irrefutably proves my point! What an amazing, under-appreciated work of group talent and screen writing art! Rita is poignantly brilliant and her performance ranks for me with Robert Williams in Platinum Blonde for great, naturalistic acting that lasts through time.

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

A+ Cinematography, D- Screenplay

[5/10 · 2 December 2006]

This movie begins the way all great Westerns should - with the tiny, lonesome stagecoach dwarfed by the breathtaking landscape. It continues in the time honored way by having the stagecoach held up by a band of outlaws, led by Glenn Ford as the wily Ben Wade. Then it introduces the protagonist, Dan Evans (played Van Heflin), and the whole timing and purpose of the story begins to lose momentum.

All the establishing shots are simply brilliant, but the actors are by turns wooden, clueless, or clichéd, and only the town drunk seems to have any motivation or personality. My impression upon first viewing was that it was meant to be just another churned out formula piece, but that the cinematographer (Charles Lawton Jr.) chose to be extraordinary and visionary in spite of his humble circumstances.

The shot where one of the Gang guys is scoping out the tiny town of Contention and the camera rises about five stories above the action and follows him as he circles around into the main street is beyond anything the poor, miserable screenwriter could possibly ever have envisioned, and therefore made his pathetic lack of decent dialog seem even more disjointed and disorienting.

I felt that Glenn Ford just didn't have the chops to handle the hidden menace of his character, and that his sloppy grin and sideways glance never once conveyed a sense of real danger. The tense scene in the hotel room was interesting at times, but mostly for how cleverly it was shot, and the actress playing the bar girl, Felicia Farr, did a very good job of playing a sort of enigmatic victim of circumstance, a quality sorely lacking in any of the characters around her.

Otherwise, a B-movie sort of drama, with an indulgent 50's television quality to the direction, so not much else to recommend it. But if awesome camera genius is your cup of tea, you will be greatly rewarded, and might even want to watch it again and again, just to study all the great visual choices that were made without repetition or clichés. I didn't hate this movie, simply found that its style far surpassed its substance, to the point where it took away from my ability to simply enjoy it as a mediocre Western.

It might have worked better in my mind with John Ford as director and John Wayne as the bad guy, but that was not meant to be. Only recommended for the beautiful sets and cinematography. Otherwise go watch Shane for true depth, drama and realistic poignancy.

Platinum Blonde (1931)

A Genius - Robert Williams - the great loss

[8/10 · 8 September 2004]

Platinum Blonde launched so many careers - the most infamous being Frank Capra and Jean Harlow. It is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination. The sound is bad, Harlow is terribly miscast, and poor Loretta Young struggles valiantly to bring depth to a part that is the filmic equivalent of wallpaper. As many have said before me, she and Harlow would have done well to reverse roles.

But the greatest on screen portrayal of fresh, modern, naturalistic acting (a style that later would be attributed to James Dean) is from the wonderful, refreshingly brilliant young Robert Williams in 1931!!!!! I would never mark this film as a masterpiece, yet I would encourage all struggling male actors to study this man's work as a prime example of how to dominate a scene without any artifice or aggression. Every time he enters a room, the whole film lights up, and every time he leaves, all the other actors seem to lose their purpose and energy.

I have never seen such simple perfection, and I am saddened to no end to learn of his untimely death at thirty-four, just as he was starting to get roles worthy of his genius. I could not get enough of this man's work, and regret having so little of it to view. An absolute must see for Robert Williams alone!