lee_eisenberg

Michael Shanks's directorial debut portrays a couple who start growing abnormally close to each other. "Together" definitely can qualify as an entry in the body horror genre; some of the scenes reminded me of "The Substance" or David Cronenberg's movies. Dave Franco and Alison Brie both put on excellent performances, with the tension building up as the movie progresses (and even finding time for a jump scare here and there) while never giving anything away.

It's not any sort of great movie, but I enjoyed it. I guess that I'll have to read Aristophanes's theory.

Obviously, "DuckTales" was sort of a corny show, with oligarch Scrooge McDuck spending his days doing and saying things reminiscent of Thurston Howell III and Monty Burns.* With the show's popularity, it was inevitable that Disney was going to turn it into a movie. The result was the innocuous "DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp", basically an Indiana Jones-type story. It'll entertain the tykes, while we adults will come up with weird interpretations (i.e., I posited that the hotel in the mountains was the Overlook from "The Shining").

As for the cast, we of course have Alan Young voicing Scrooge; he's generally known to TV audiences as Wilbur on "Mister Ed" (personally, I always thought Carol was the real reason to watch it). In supporting roles are Christopher Lloyd, Russi Taylor, Chuck McCann, Richard Libertini and Rip Taylor. Quite a cast there.

All in all, some harmless fun.

*My 2012 Halloween costume was a combination of plutocrats depicted on comedy shows (Messrs. Howell, McDuck and Burns), defined as the 1%.

Cocaine was the famous drug of the '80s. It was assumed that every Hollywood celebrity and every Wall Street stock broker was using it. Drawing less attention was crack, a cheap form of cocaine that devastated entire communities. Vince DiPersio's and Bill Guttentag's "Crack USA: County Under Siege" focuses on some youths in West Palm Beach, Florida, who got hooked on the stuff. Some truly nasty stories.

The point is that a drug epidemic doesn't just affect the "other"; it ends up affecting everyone. I might add that we now have the opioid epidemic (notice how when it primarily affects white people it gets treated as a medical issue, but when it primarily affects black people they get labeled "addicts"?). There is simply no such thing as a drug-free society.

The documentary is available on YouTube.