Oddball Cinema

This Oddball Adventure isn’t a true story, but it was inspired by various reports from UFO Sweden, one of the world’s most active UFO-seeking organizations. The members are portrayed as misfits for whom Robert's Rules of Order and strong coffee are as important as finding signs of extraterrestrial visitors. When a teenage girl brings them evidence that her father’s disappearance many years earlier may have been UFO-related, the group begins an investigation. Individuals alternately celebrate or bicker when the effort goes well or poorly, but once the search comes into full focus, the action gets fast, furious, weird, and amazing.

■ Title — Watch the Skies
■ A.K.A. — UFO Sweden
■ Director — Victor Danell
■ Cast — Inez Dahl Torhaug, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey
■ Rating — PG-13
■ ©2022 | 1h 55m | Action, Adventure, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Despite a ridiculous plot with too many characters and incidents to count, this is a true story that’s well worth the viewer’s time to stick with it to the end. After an industrial accident demolishes a British factory, scrap-metal dealers collect an armored steel case from the rubble. When they bring it back to the warehouse and break it open, they find a strange lump of heavy metal inside. A test reveals that it’s pure uranium, and they figure they can sell it on the black market for a tidy sum. There is nothing tidy about the ensuing caper, which at times looks like it was originally written for a Pink Panther movie. Accents, slang, and dialogue muttered so as to avoid being overheard mean that most Americans will need subtitles to follow the story.

■ Title — The Hot Potato
■ Director — Tim Lewiston
■ Cast — Ray Winstone, Colm Meaney, Jack Huston
■ Unrated, suitable for teens and adults
■ ©2012 | 1h 35m | Comedy, Drama

■ Watch it free with ads on Fandango:
https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/The-Hot-Potato/1207700
■ Watch it free with ads on Fawesome:
https://fawesome.tv/movies/10254176/the-hot-potato
■ Watch it free with ads on Tubi:
https://tubitv.com/movies/519525/the-hot-potato
■ Available free without ads to Amazon Prime subscribers:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.3eaf0c2e-5dcf-4e4c-911f-22efd99c7653

■ As with most of our online features, you can watch this one whenever you like. Members who watch at the scheduled time may enjoy exchanging comments with other members on this page. If you post a comment before the show, please avoid spoilers. Comments posted after the show may contain any content, but Oddball Cinema encourages members to always avoid spoilers unless there’s some particularly important details you need to mention.

■ Many of the movies on our online events from as far back as March 2020 are still available for viewing. However, titles sometimes move from one streaming service to another. If you find that the links on an old event no longer work, you can search for the current providers of any title here: https://justwatch.com

Gold Diggers of 1937 begins with an obvious gold-digging scenario: a troupe of chorus girls leaves town penniless after their show is cancelled, and when they find themselves on a train with a group of well-dressed businessmen, they flirt their way to some free dinners. But the real gold-digging begins when a couple of impresarios try to stage another show. Lacking the funds to produce it, they scheme to get their feeble boss to buy some life insurance and then arrange his swift demise. The showgirls and the businessmen both intrude on their plans, with true love guiding one of the more interesting and complex plots in Busby Berkeley productions.

■ Title — Gold Diggers of 1937
■ Director — Lloyd Bacon
■ Choreographer — Busby Berkeley
■ Cast — Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Glenda Farrell
■ Unrated, suitable for general audiences
■ ©1936 ■ 1h 41m ■ Comedy, Musical, Romance ■ black & white

A Busby Berkeley musical encore will follow the feature: “By a Waterfall” from Footlight Parade (1933).

Welcome to Butterface Fields, a small midwestern town where people tend to congregate at Floyd’s, the only bar in the area. Recently unemployed Andy is the focus of everyone’s attention as the movie begins: as he’s done in the past, he’s trying to come up with an idea for a moneymaking scheme. Suddenly he has a Eureka! moment: pornography is cheap to make and sells well, so why not get the townspeople (played by a surprising cast of famous actors) to collaborate on an “adult” movie? There are, of course, many reasons not to do this, but some of the town’s loveable misfits sign onto the project anyway. While the story is slow and confused at first, much like the wannabe filmmakers, once they get rolling it’s a wacky and rather heartwarming cocktail of determination spiked with ineptitude. The ensuing action, albeit presented with strategically-placed obstructions in the foreground, prompts Oddball Cinema to advise viewer discretion.

■ Title — The Amateurs
■ A.K.A. — The Moguls
■ Director — Michael Traeger
■ Cast — Jeff Bridges, Ted Danson, Joe Pantoliano
■ Rating — R
■ ©2005 | 1h 36m | Comedy

■ Watch it free with ads on Fandango:
https://athome.fandango.com/content/browse/details/The-Moguls/3740067
■ Watch it free with ads on Tubi:
https://tubitv.com/movies/100009708/the-moguls

■ As with most of our online features, you can watch this one whenever you like. Members who watch at the scheduled time may enjoy exchanging comments with other members on this page. If you post a comment before the show, please avoid spoilers. Comments posted after the show may contain any content, but Oddball Cinema encourages members to always avoid spoilers unless there’s some particularly important details you need to mention.

■ Many of the movies on our online events from as far back as March 2020 are still available for viewing. However, titles sometimes move from one streaming service to another. If you find that the links on an old event no longer work, you can search for the current providers of any title here: https://justwatch.com