December 2024

The characters in this movie about con men are hard to like, all of them, especially the main character's stupid, narcissistic wife. Certainly that means the director and the screenwriter did their jobs well! But even so, I was almost ready to give up on the film two-thirds of the way through. However, I'm glad I persevered. The payoff, in which yet another con is revealed, made the whole thing worth it.

This animated French movie is just awful. The plot is nonsense: the villain is only defeated because, for absolutely no reason, he choose to not just command but cause the protagonist to pass into the future in suspended animation, and be restored at a time when the villain is weaker and less able to defend himself. All of that takes up a third of the movie. The bad guy's soldiers (robots with a Nazi-inspired color scheme) plod monotonously through landscape. The animation is merely acceptable: at one point the protagonist slips off a log and the movements are so stiff they might as well be a cheap flipbook.

God, this movie is absolute fabulous.

I was initially interested because it had Robert Redford and Paul Newman co-starring; having just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the first time, I was eager for more from that pair. I didn't feel so strongly about Butch Cassidy that I wanted to follow its director to this film, but then my decision was clinched when I saw on Wikipedia that The Sting's plot took inspiration from David Maurer's book The Big Con, which I read just a few months ago.

My initial interest in watching this came from the costars: I figured I couldn't go wrong with Robert Redford and Paul Newman together. But I also watched it because the university movie theater in my new town (Madison, WI) is going to be playing a bunch of classic movies over the next few months, including Sam Peckinpah Westerns. In their online blurb for Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, the movie theater people explicitly contrasted that movie's blood and grit with Butch Cassidy's freeze-frame, doomed-but-heroic ending. They further suggested that anyone who hadn't seen Butch Cassidy should watch it to get an idea of what "ordinary" Westerns were like in 1969, to more properly appreciate the contrast presented by a revisionist Western like The Wild Bunch that came out the same year.

My test for the quality of a comedy is simple. Does it make me laugh out loud? If so, how many times?

Revenge of the Nerds drew at least two genuine laughs. The first was when Lewis emerges in the smoking jacket: the gag caught me so off guard that I had to grope for the keyboard, laughing hard, to pause the movie until I was ready to resume. My other big laugh was at the ridiculousness of the beer-fueled tricycle race; this was partially because the antics of Takashi (Brian Tochi) reminded me so much of internet prankster Filthy Frank. Honorable mention goes to the reveal of the nerds' elaborate musical number near the end of the film.

A loving meditation on the differences between knowledge gained through solitary scholarliness, and understanding gained through worldliness and devotion to artistry. The titular Narcissus is an austere monk; Goldmund, his former pupil and fellow monk who leaves the monastery to travel the world and follow his passions. I am much more of a Goldmund than a Narcissus; though I have done a number of things in my life that must surely be coded as scholarly, my motivation to undertake those things has stemmed from personal interest and passion in various subjects. I recommend this book to anyone who considers himself an artist.

I watched this on a whim; it was better than I expected, and contained more intrigue than I expected as well. A complete surprise, and a welcome one. You can't get more 90s than Keanu Reeves whooping and hollering as he learns not to suck at surfing.