Damon Packard's movie diary

Damon Packard is the Los Angeles-based filmmaker behind such underground classics as “Reflections of Evil,” “The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary,” “Foxfur,” and “Fatal Pulse.” His AI-generated work has appeared as interstitials for the 18th annual American Cinematheque Horrorthon and can be enjoyed on his YouTube channel. After a long day making movies or otherwise making ends meet, he likes to unwind with late-night excursions to the multiplexes and art house cinemas of greater Los Angeles. For previous installments of the "Diary," see here.

May 23, "Muppets from Space" (1999, d. Tim Hill ), Nuart Theatre

Damon Packard

Nice and empty 10:30 p.m. show of "Muppets from Space" (1999) tonight at the Nuart. Can't remember if I ever saw this.

It was cute, but nothing compares to the first three Muppet movies. Would've far preferred if they screened the second or third film rather than the millennial-era nostalgia. A time I find nothing to be nostalgic about.

May 23, "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning" (d. Christopher McQuarrie), AMC Burbank 16

Damon Packard

Heading into a nice and semi-empty 1:30 a.m. show (yes, you read that right — 1:30 a.m.!) of this "Mission Impossible" junk right now in Burbank. Actually you'd be amazed how many people are here. And this thing is three hours.

Update, three hours later: Good grief, that was awful. Felt like a teaser trailer padded out to three hours, yet still not even enough interesting material for a teaser trailer.

Well, not even enough for a zero-second trailer, since there was nothing interesting about any of it. Some ridiculous, convoluted, overlong plot about an "entity" and various key chips in between obligatory bomb-defusing scenes and close-ups of Cruise looking intense.

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Marco Ravagli/Getty Images

The group dialogue/over-exposition scenes are so ridiculous. They do that a lot in big blockbusters. They must have some contract clause that requires or allows each actor a certain number of lines or something so they all take turns. It's like a Zucker/Abrahams parody, but then reality itself is a Zucker/Abrahams parody now.

Mission Tedium.

May 19, "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997, d. Roger Spottiswoode), CineFile Video Movie Rental

Keith Hamshere/Getty Images

Secret midnight screening of "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997) at CineFile last night.

We felt an urge to revisit some Bonds lately.

This was one I remember hating when I first saw it in '97, but time has been kinder even to the late '90s (when things were really getting bad, only to get even worse later).

Title designer Maurice Binder directs a bikini-clad model in the title sequence of the James Bond film "The Living Daylights," 1986. Photo by Keith Hamshere/Getty Images

While not as good as "Octopussy" and "Living Daylights" — the final vestiges of the era of director John Glen, composer John Barry, and title designer Maurice Binder — Roger Spottiswoode's outing prides itself on not giving you any time to breathe in between every whiz-bang, over-the-top action scene of gasoline pyro and zirc hits.

Zirc hits, in case you didn't know, are .68 caliber paintballs filled with zirconium powder and fired from an air gun to create the "sparking" effect of a bullet hitting metal or another hard surface.

For non-sparking impact effects — a bullet hitting the dirt, for example — paintballs filled with colored dust (dust hits) are used.

This paintball method is much easier than pre-wiring explosions (squibs) on the impact surface, so it became more and more popular, to the point of being overused in many action movies (especially by the '90s).

Even though cheap-looking CGI is ruining everything, productions still use practical zirc hits for gun battles.

Another thing you notice in "Tomorrow Never Dies" is the use of gasoline-charged "fireball"-type explosions — safer and more controllable than the more dangerous, and sometimes more realistic, forms of pyro used in the '70s, when they were breaking all the rules and didn't have as many restrictions or regulations in place.

Explosions at an arms bazaar on the Russian border in the opening sequence of "Tomorrow Never Dies." Keith Hamshere/Getty Images

Take the famous stunt in which a helicopter tilts almost 45 degrees so that its rotors trap Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) in an alley. If they wanted to do that in the '70s, some crazy, gung-ho pilot probably would have offered to risk doing it for real back then.

Good to see Joe Don Baker (who died May 7) reprise his "Goldeneye" role as CIA agent Jack Wade ("Yo, Jimbo!"). He also played arms dealer Brad Whitaker (the first American Bond villain) in the 1987 Timothy Dalton-era installment "The Living Daylights."

Music-wise, David Arnold does a pretty decent job capturing the feel of John Barry's scores, but still the Barry magic is gone.

Fun film, but for me the beginning of a decline from "shaken, not stirred" to "shake in a turbo blender until you're dizzy" to the "fizzed, flattened, and rebranded" era of today.

"Tomorrow Never Dies" director Roger Spottiswoode ("Terror Train") is not only still alive but was still working until a few years ago.

Roger Spottiswoode on the "Tomorrow Never Dies" set in France. Gilles Bouquillon/Getty Images

I always thought of him as a kind of "hired hand" industry guy; then again, "Under Fire" (1983 movie starring Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as foreign correspondents in Nicaragua) still stands as a terrific film. And Spottiswoode seems like terrific guy, part of that generation when directors were not only humble, intelligent, and gracious but good communicators.

May 17, "Bronsploitation" (d. Mike Malloy)

I feel bad it's taken me a few days to share this preview clip of writer/director Mike Malloy's very cool-looking upcoming documentary "Bronsploitation," about three men who have built careers in showbiz based on their resemblances to Charles Bronson.

Malloy and Eric Zaldivar (who also worked on "Bronsploitation") are two of the coolest cats out there doing interesting work. If they were around in the '70s, they'd probably be making solid highbrow exploitation films (something only Quentin Tarantino seems to have success with these days) instead of nostalgic documentaries about the era. I hope we can collaborate some day on some original work.

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Palladium Pictures

May 16, "Friendship" (d. Andrew DeYoung), AMC Burbank 16

Well, looks like It's an 11 p.m. of "Friendship" in Burbank tonight.

Update (hours later): Ooof! Awful. Sheer tedium. Didn't care for it at all. Just awkward strangeness with no purpose. P.T. Anderson it ain't. The woman who played his wife, though, was beautiful.

May 15, "Final Destination: Bloodlines" (d. Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein), AMC Century City 15

Damon Packard

I guess it's an 11 p.m. of this "Final Destination" garbage tonight, in theater ... 13. (Gulp.) Only because I woke too late after a nap and there's no other choice.

Update: I don't know who the audience is for these movies.

People just like seeing other people mutilated and killed, but if so much as a single animal gets fake-harmed or killed, they go completely insane. Why? Because humans hate other humans. Animals give the unbiased, unconditional love to humans that humans can't give to each other.

Well ... cute, domesticated animals do. See what happens if you find yourself alone in a remote forest and are surrounded by hungry tigers, bears, or coyotes.

May 15 (earlier)

Cinerama/Getty Images

RIP Joe Don Baker, my kind of folk.

May 13, "Fatal Pulse" (2018, d. Damon Packard), CineFile Video

Tonight is a screening of my yuppie fear thriller "Fatal Pulse" at CineFile Video.

This one never got many public screenings, though it did have a nice Egyptian premiere in 2018 before falling back into the oblivion zone. I'm sure all of two people will be there.

Then again, the CineFile Micro-Cinema has gotten some big press lately with the upcoming unauthorized "Batman Forever" Schumacher Cut screening on May 29 [ed. note: Canceled May 25 after cease-and-desist notice from Warner Bros.], which the cine-hipsters are losing their minds over.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the "Batman Forever" premiere in New York City, June 13, 1995. Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

We screened it privately over a year ago, and I enjoyed it, though did run a tad long. An improvement over the original release, as one can see a degree of Schumacher's ambition in creating this vast, crazy, cartoony comic-strip world of massive set pieces. All mostly set to Elliot Goldenthal's "Interview with the Vampire" score, as his new score was not ready at the time of the edit.

Anyhow, expect insane cine-hipster riots that night when they all show up to find out the place only has 20 seats. Much like the "New Jack City" riot in "Fatal Pulse" (based on real events in Westwood in 1991, when crowds couldn't get into that film).

Prepare for total chaos.

Update: A full house (surprisingly).