The first time I really remember being outraged at The Academy was 1991.  That was the year that Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture.  I was talking to a friend about The Departed the other day.  That movie seemed too convoluted, too soupy, for my taste.  They gave Scorcese his Best Picture award, but it wasn’t the right Scorcese movie.  Goodfellas was right Scorcese movie.

Of course everybody knows this.  I watched the movie again this week, and it is clear and focused in a way that The Departed utterly fails to achieve.  The only question I had during the movie was the post-Lufthansa robbery killing spree.  How did that make sense?  Wouldn’t somebody notice that everyone else was getting knocked off?  Why have a criminal organization if it’s going to eat itself like that?  I thought that the mafia served to bring stability to crime.  To give a sense of rules and responsibilities to the lawless.  That way you can plan much more complicated capers, and place some element of trust in your partners.  Though the movie seemed very true the character, I wondered if they had perhaps over-dramatized this portion.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia.   Turns out the truth was even crazier.  This is the list from Wikipedia:

The following were all murdered after the heist: ^{[2] [3]}

• Parnell Steven Edwards, African-American blues musician and credit card theft expert whose music career was managed by Dino Barzotinni
• Louis Cafora and wife Joanna, Downtown Brooklyn parking lot owner
• Joe Manri, night-shift Air France cargo supervisor
• Robert McMahon, Air France night shift supervisor
• Paolo LiCastri, illegal immigrant Sicilian-born Pizza Connection drug trafficker and Gambino crime family associate and “Man of Honor” mobster from Sicily
• Theresa Ferrara, the daughter of short-lived one time Milwaukee mob boss Joseph Ferrara and beauty salon owner and manager.
• Tom Monteleone, Fort Lauderdale, Florida restaurateur and mobster,
• Richard Eaton, Fort Lauderdale, Florida associate of Tom Monteleone, Burke front man and con-artist
• Angelo Sepe, Lucchese crime family nephew of Ralph and Thomas Spero, cellmate of Tommy DeSimone and contract killer
• Joanna Lombardo, veteranarian girlfriend of Sepe
• Martin Krugman, hairdresser and wig store proprietor, loan shark and bookmaker

• Thomas DeSimone was later murdered due to having carried out the unrelated murder of William Devino, and Brooklyn parking lot owner Angelo John Sepe was killed after murdering two Lucchese crime family drug traffickers “Joanne Lombardo” and the son of Jimmy Burke, military school graduate, Frank James Burke who was murdered by his drug dealer over heroin.

I also learned a lot about Italian cooking from this movie.

To participate in Final Girl’s film club, I had Netflix send me Lifeforce, a 1985 Tobe Hooper move about Naked Space Vampires.

Reach into my brain and pull out the perfect woman, and she might look like Mathilda May, the naked chick who walks around sucking blue light out of people in Lifeforce. But why would she have two perfect naked guys with her? Those guys didn’t come out of my head, I’m certain of that. Also, if she came out of Steven Railsback’s brain, why isn’t she over-emoting massively? Instead, the perfect woman is ice-cold and creepy. But she does have perfect breasts.

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it here, again. Naked Space Vampire Movie is an automatic win. But Lifeforce is encumbered by dry British-ness, set against a weirdly screaming Steve Railsback, who is oddly distant when he’s not madly emoting. The plot, even with the restored footage that US distributors edited out, is muddy. You’d think space vampires would be straight-forward, but these things seem to have varying rules. Also, the initial contact story gets re-told three times, in different ways. The result is confusing, and action is disconnected. After a long, dry, procedural hunt, culminating in the strangest Patrick Stewart quivering ever, we suddenly shift to Zombie Apocalypse mode. Also, there’s a lot of flashing blue light streaks. The ending is vague. I’d say ambiguous, but that word means two clear options that oppose each other. In this case, the ending doesn’t really mean anything clearly.