My answers to the latest movie quiz from the Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule blog. This one has dueling horror and baseball themes. I love horror, but I'm not a sports guy, so I may embarrass myself on the baseball questions.
1) Ricky Vaughan or Nuke LaLoosh? (question courtesy of our main Maine monster, Patrick Robbins)
Nuke LaLoosh is a funnier name, and I like Bull Durham more than Major League, so I'm going for Nuke.
2) Best moment in the Friday the 13th film series.
I haven't seen a Friday the 13th movie since I was in high school, but I had a great time watching the series between my sixth and tenth grade years. I'm tempted to say Crispin Glover's dancing in 4, the opening scene of 2, and the head rolling into the Dumpster in 8, but I think I have to go back to the beginning and pick the canoe sequence in the first film.
3) Henry Hull or Oliver Reed?
Oliver Reed. I haven't seen either of their werewolf performances, but I'm a big fan of Reed in general.
4) What is the last movie you saw in a theater?
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
5) Best movie casting for a real-life baseball player, or best casting of a real-life baseball player in a movie.
Uhhhh, Reggie Jackson in The Naked Gun?
6) D.B. Sweeney or Ray Liotta?
I haven't seen Eight Men Out, so putting their Shoeless Joe performances aside, I tend to be a bigger fan of Liotta.
7) Given that the fear factor in 2020 is already alarmingly high, is there a film or a genre which you would hesitate to revisit right now?
I tend to find the experience of watching movies that, directly or indirectly, address my own intense experiences and difficulties oddly comforting, but because of a loved one dealing with cancer, I have no desire to revisit Mike Nichols' Wit.
8) The Natural (1984)-- yes or no?
I've only seen it once and it left me pretty cold, but I do remember enjoying Richard Farnsworth's performance.
9) Peter Cushing or Colin Clive?
I like Clive, but I'm a bigger Peter Cushing fan.
10) What’s the lamest water-cooler hit you can think of? Of course, define “lamest” however you will, but for “water-cooler hit” Dr. Savaard is thinking about something zeitgeist-y, something everyone was talking about the weekend it opened and beyond, something everyone seemingly had to see—The Other Side of Midnight residing at #1 in 1977 for two weeks is not what the professor has in mind.
I just don't understand what people see in Inception. I don't like the dialogue's near-constant exposition, I don't think the actors have much chemistry, I find its visual style oppressive and drab, and for a movie about dreams, it lacks imagination and eccentricity.
11) Greatest single performance in horror movie history.
Impossible to answer, but a few that came to mind were Max Schreck in Nosferatu, the entire cast of The Old Dark House, Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead, John Amplas in Martin, and Zohra Lampert in Let's Scare Jessica to Death.
12) Ingrid Pitt or the Collinson Twins?
Even with the advantage of two Collinsons to just one Pitt, I have to go with Ingrid.
13) Name one lesser-known horror film that you think everyone should see. State your reason.
The Unknown is a very creepy, very strange Tod Browning film arriving at the peak of his silent film powers in 1927, with a couple of amazing performances from Lon Chaney and a young Joan Crawford. I'm going to cheat and recommend one more: Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural from 1973.
14) Do the same for an underseen or underappreciated baseball movie.
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar from 2008 is an underappreciated movie about baseball and the immigrant experience in America.
15) William Bendix or Leslie Nielsen?
I like both, but I have so many more childhood memories tied to Nielsen films and TV shows, so I have to go with Leslie.
16) Would you go back to a theater this weekend if one reopened near you?
No. I want to see a movie on the big screen again, but I want to keep my loved ones alive a lot more.
17) Your favorite horror movie TV show/host, either running currently or one from the past.
Again, I can't pick one. A three-way tie between Elvira, Joe Bob Briggs, and Zacherley.
18) The Sentinel (1977)—yes or no?
I have extremely vague memories of seeing part of this on television in the early '80s, so maybe?
19) Second-favorite Ron Shelton movie.
White Men Can't Jump
20) Disclaimer warnings attached to broadcasts of films like Gone With the Wind and Blazing Saddles-- yes or no?
As long as the films themselves aren't being sanitized or censored, I have no problem with disclaimers, especially when presented with historical context.
21) In the World Series of baseball movies, who are your NL and AL champs?
With the help of Google, I came up with Field of Dreams (NL, NY Giants' Moonlight Graham) vs The Naked Gun (AL, Mariners vs. Angels). Field of Dreams was mostly a default pick. Nearly every movie about pro baseball I've seen is set in the American League, though most of my favorite baseball movies are about little league, minor league, or college teams.
22) What was the last horror film you saw?
Hack-O-Lantern
23) Geena Davis or Tatum O’Neal?
I like them both, though Geena Davis has been in more of my favorite movies. If we're talking baseball movies, though, I have to give the nod to O'Neal because I love, love, love The Bad News Bears.
24) AMC is now renting theaters for $100 - $350, promising a more “private,” catered party-movie experience. What do you like or dislike about this idea?
If it keeps movie theaters in business, I'm reluctantly in favor, but I don't like the idea of employees being at risk or of the movie theater experience only being available to people with hundreds of dollars to spend on a single screening.
25) Name the scariest performance in a baseball movie.
The full cast of Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch. There's nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can't play baseball, but maybe there should be.
26) Second-favorite Jack Arnold movie.
The Incredible Shrinking Man
27) What would be the top five films of 2020 you’ve seen so far?
In no particular order:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho & Juliano Dornelles)
Tommaso (Abel Ferrara)/She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz) (tie)
The combination of being stuck in my house and not going to a theater since early March has had the strange benefit of increasing my at-home movie watching from two or three a week to six to 10 a week. 1) Thanks to Shudder and a few other streaming sites, I've been catching up on recent horror films (mainstream, indie, and global). I've mostly been a silent era to early 1990s horror guy, and I'm trying to see if my snotty dismissal of most recent horror has been justified or the outdated ramblings of a crank. Turns out, it's a lot of both. I'm also watching plenty of '70s and '80s cult horror and the Joe Bob Briggs double features. 2) I rewatched every Coen Brothers movie in chronological order, to mostly pleasant results (Hudsucker Proxy dropped greatly in my estimation, The Ladykillers was not nearly as bad as I remembered and was sometimes even enjoyable, Intolerable Cruelty remained a curiously impersonal mixed bag, I like O Brother Where Art Thou more than I used to but I still don't love it, Barton Fink is fantastically suited to pandemic viewing and might be their greatest achievement, I'm a big fan of all the rest). It also reminded me that the Coens aren't as mean-spirited or as condescending as their detractors accuse them of being. They mostly love their characters and the actors who play them, and there's a real anti-materialism theme running through all their work. 3) Alternating my horror film dive with the selection on the Criterion Channel has allowed me jump into several '40s, '50s, and '60s Hollywood westerns, films noir, and crime thrillers and fill in some gaps in the filmography of one of my favorite French directors, Maurice Pialat. I was also introduced to two great early '80s indies by directors who died too young and weren't able to make followups: Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground and Horace B. Jenkins' Cane River.
