Watchcast Schedule for November 2024: The Turkey Month Returns!

Greetings, Nextlanders! Hope you enjoyed our October chock full of horror anthologies, because now it's time to shift into a different kind of horror: the horror of bad movies! That's right, we've got another turkey month on the horizon, but this time we're leaving the Z-grade ninja movies on the sidelines, and moving into bigger budget fare. In fact, we're tackling some of the biggest budget movies to ever fail! And I don't just mean financially (as one of these movies did eventually become profitable), but creatively, too. Every one of these movies more or less became a punchline for their time, each a shining example of budgetary excess leading to infamy. And before we get into our trio of films for the month, just want to say up top that this will be a shorter month. We've got the Thanksgiving holiday coming up at the end of the month, so we'll be taking a 1-2 week break before resuming our Watchcasting. Once we know what the December schedule is gonna look like, we'll let you all know as well.

And with that out of the way, let's get to the lineup!

Monday, November 4th: Cutthroat Island (1995)

Kicking off our November is one of the most dramatically and comedically inert pirate movies ever made. Director/Producer Renny Harlin sank a great deal of capital into this ill-conceived tribute to the swashbuckling cinema of old, and pinned quite a bit of hope on this thing turning America's Sweetheart™ Geena Davis (his then wife) into a bona fide action star. That did not quite work out, though Davis fared better in Harlin's follow-up, The Long Kiss Goodnight. Here though, Davis seems genuinely lost trying to find her way from port to starboard, her male lead (Matthew Modine) is equally lacking in swashbuckling qualities, and in most scenes both are upstaged by a pet monkey. It's an incredible mess, made all the more baffling by the sheer volume of money Carolco dumped into this thing. We'll talk at length about the sordid history of its production, and try to make heads or tails of why anyone thought this script was exciting in the slightest.

Where to Watch 

Monday, November 11th: Waterworld (1995)

Boy, 1995 really was a banner year for unjustifiably expensive blockbusters, wasn't it? I feel like whenever I do end up talking to people about Waterworld--which admittedly isn't that often--it's mostly in the context of the biggest box office bombs of all time. The problem is, it's technically not a bomb! It made some money! It also still cost a ghastly amount of money to make, all that money just to churn out a movie that is better remembered as a source of future parody than anything else. Some people have tried to defend this movie to me, and look, it's not without its occasional goofy charms. Dennis Hopper is having about as much fun as anyone can possibly have being this salt-drenched and angry all the time, and you kinda have to hand it to all the stunt performers and set designers. Less so Kevin Costner, who is like a gravity well of charisma.

There's a fancy special edition of this out there (because of course there is), and that comes with a 40-ish minute longer version called the Ulysses Cut, which is mostly based on the European TV version of the movie. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WATCH THIS. I'm only making the guys watch the theatrical cut, on account of that's the most widely available version. I will watch the longer version for you, and report back on what, if anything, is of value there.

Where to Watch

Monday, November 18th: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Happy birthday to me! What better way to celebrate my 43rd year on this earth than to watch a movie I have assiduously avoided since I saw it in theaters. That's right, we're finally tackling the movie that Roger Ebert called "the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm" (?!?), the movie that KILLED SQUARESOFT, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Look, we all know computer animated movies of this era don't always hold up the best, but even outside of the technological leaps that have come in the two decades since, The Spirits Within has a whole set of completely separate problems that make it one of the more confounding productions of its era. It is a movie in which great care is put into the fidelity and expressiveness of its visuals, seemingly almost entirely at the expense of a memorable plot and any kind of voice direction. And its failure had significant ramifications for Square, the kind that eventually led to an Enix getting affixed to the end of its name. It's a fascinating story; far more so than the story they actually wrote for this movie.

Where to Watch

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And that's the schedule for this month. As I said before, we'll let you know exactly when things will pick up again in December once we have that scheduled. As always, thanks for listening and watching along with us. We'll see you at the movies!

--A