Ang Peregrino Recommends 3: Reel Geezers
On YouTube: ReelGeezers
URL: http://www.youtube.com/reelgeezers
They are really all that and more.
The two octogenarians are simply known on YouTube as “Marcia and Lorenzo”. And if you think they’re amateurs, they’re actually Hollywood-bred and trained. And they know their stuff (it shows in their tongue-in-cheek humor and quality film criticism).
Marcia is Marcia Nasatir, 81, a longtime agent, pioneering woman production executive and producer of such films as the The Big Chill and the Vietnam War film Hamburger Hill.
Lorenzo is Lorenzo Semple, 86. He was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters in the 1970s. He helped write movies for among others: Warren Beatty (for the conspiracy classic The Parallax View), Robert Redford (Three Days of the Condor), Steve McQueen (for one of my favorite all time films Papillon) and Paul Newman (The Drowning Pool). He has won numerous awards for his screenplays, even bagging the Edgar Allan Poe and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
They’re not a husband and wife team. They’ve been friends for a long time, although the way they talk (and disagree about a lot of things), you’d wonder if they’re really friends. The power (and novelty) of their mini-reviews (their videos usually run for 6 minutes) lies in their obvious knowledge of movies, the differences in their philosophies, their no-holds-barred criticism, and their lively repartee.
To my surprise, they reviewed Superbad, and while Marcia didn’t like it (saying “It’s vulgar…and very hostile to women.”), Lorenzo says, “It’s a good movie because it’s a totally honest imagination of what sex is like to a teenager.”
Lorenzo found Lions for Lambs to be a the worst movie he’s seen for what it pretended to be: an illustrated lecture on the Iraq-Afghan War. And that is why their tandem works so well. They’re not beholden to Hollywood brouhaha. While saying that Lions for Lambs had “monster starpower”, he even forgot the name of Tom Cruise in the cast, and just laughed it off. It was like he was saying, “You’re not important, I’ve met better actors than you.”
You get nuggets of wisdom here and there. Talking about the setting for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild , Lorenzo puts it very succinctly, “Alaska is a very good place to lose yourself, but a very bad place to find yourself.”
Cool.
The good thing about them is that they’re very realistic (or maybe jaded) about the role of movies in society. Lorenzo, in an interview with the LA Times has this to say about movies:
“No one’s vote has ever been changed by a movie,” he says. “That’s why all the Iraq war movies failed. People who were against the war already knew it and people who supported the war didn’t want to see them. Movies are immediate. No screenwriter has ever been discovered after their death the way painters or novelists have been. If you don’t like a movie right away, it’s no good.”
Marcia has this to say, “I’ve always believed that movie stars, like to believe that they’re making movies that have impact on society. They’d like to believe that they’re making a difference. As if nobody (else) knows what is going on in the world.”
So if you’re up for honest-to-goodness, no-holds-barred movie reviews with a sprinkling of humor and nuggets of wisdom here and there, head over to YouTube and look for the Reel Geezers.
This is their review of Superbad:
And this is just a trip down Hollywood memory lane:
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