Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week

[skimpole]

I'm reviving a long-time TCM forum thread, the least and most favorite movie of the week. This week I saw five movies. Blonde was certainly the worst. Some critics have found nuance in Ana de Armas's performance as Marilyn Monroe, but the movie consists of such unrelenting victimization and of Monroe appearing so utterly miserable, viewers are likely to find her pathetic. The movie consists of fairly bad ideas (the ones involving Monroe's miscarriages are uniformly risible, but let's not forget the crude daddy fixation, or the sex scene with JFK where he climaxes watching rockets on TV. Or muffing the scene where Monroe shows Arthur Miller she can actually act). It certainly does not show her intelligence, her talent or even that she didn't talk like her movie characters. Krull is a movie Peter Yates made between Breaking Away and The Dresser. As a fantasy movie it's an attempt to combine Excalibur and Star Wars. One problem people will have with it is that while the medieval aspect is fairly competent, the sci-fi effects look cheesy. So not only is it not in the class of Excalibur or The Princess Bride, it's also not as imaginative as The Dark Crystal or as fun as Willow. It's a tolerable movie. Perhaps most interesting is this is one of two films which both star Freddie Jones and Francesca Annis, the other one being Dune.

Death of a Cyclist is a pioneering Spanish social realist movie about a couple responsible for a hit and run accident. Among its virtues, Carlos Casaravilla is good in a supporting role as a nasty art critic who blackmails them. Lucia Bose is stunningly beautiful, and one wishes she had a bigger role. But since she could only speak Italian it's not surprising she didn't do more. One might think the original ending, in which Bose eliminates her conscience ridden lover and gets away with it, would have been better than the one the censor imposed. Athena, is about a riot that breaks out a Parisian housing estate over a case of police brutality. While not one single take, must of the movie consists of virtuouso long takes as the riot goes on. So it's certainly an interesting movie to watch. But it lacks political depth and it's a bit mealy-mouthed. So I suppose Eo is the movie of the week. Now you might think there was no compelling reason to remake Au Hasard Balthazar. But despite an early scene where it appears a circus assistant will be playing the Anna Wiazemsky role, it turns out Jerzy Skolimowski has something different in mind as Eo the donkey goes on his adventures. At one point we get to see Isabella Huppert as a widowed countess in Italy. And then there are two striking deaths that will stay in the memory.

[TikiSoo]

Yay! I always liked this thread skimpole!

[laffite]

"Death of a Cyclist is a pioneering Spanish social realist movie about a couple responsible for a hit and run accident. Among its virtues, Carlos Casaravilla is good in a supporting role as a nasty art critic who blackmails them. Lucia Bose is stunningly beautiful, and one wishes she had a bigger role. But since she could only speak Italian it's not surprising she didn't do more. One might think the original ending, in which Bose eliminates her conscience ridden lover and gets away with it, would have been better than the one the censor imposed."

They didn't get the ending they wanted but sure made a nice recovery. The political punch gives way to what one may see as an expedient finale but it was sure entertaining.

[Thompson]

Laffite, how do you quote a previous post when posting after it?

[jamesjazzguitar]

Laffite, how do you quote a previous post when posting after it?

Not sure what you're asking but there is a "quote" icon to the left of one's avatar.

[Thompson]

Laffite, how do you quote a previous post when posting after it?

Not sure what you're asking but there is a "quote" icon to the left of one's avatar.

Okay, thanks James

[Thompson]

Duh. I thought those were two unlocked padlocks instead of quotation marks.

[laffite]

Duh. I thought those were two unlocked padlocks instead of quotation marks.

[skimpole]

Last week I saw seven movies. History, or how not to show it, turns out to be a major theme. The United States v. Billie Holiday comes from Lee Daniels, whose most famous movie, Precious, answers the question "What if the Dardenne Brothers were soulless hacks?" This movie, which got an acting nomination in cinema's worst year since 1929, has two big historical problems. First, Daniels somehow got the idea from a book by a compromised journalist (Johann Hari) that because some people disliked "Strange Fruit," (because it's a grim song and many music patrons would prefer something lighter) was actually the government's opposition to it. Daniels then posits a conspiracy to use Holiday's drug addiction against her largely for political reasons. Even though in 1947 and 1948, when the movie starts, Truman's own commission was calling for anti-lynching legislation, which he endorsed himself in 1948. For some reason Daniels casts the key (vindictive and racist) FBI official on narcotics with an actor at least twenty years younger than him who doesn't look anything like him. Even worse, Daniels fills up much of the movie with the idea that the (Afro-American)FBI agent who helped catch her felt guilty and then had an affair with her, something completely imaginary. So whatever advantages Andra Day has over Diana Ross in looking and sounding more like Holiday are more than countered by these mythologies. And that's even if one liked or tolerated Daniels generally lurid and sordid way of proceeding, which I don't.

RRR is getting surprising critical buzz, from both the National Board of Review and the New York Critics Film Circle, which is a bit surprising since it's an Indian film and three hours long. This story about two Indian rebels in the twenties against the Raj, one of them working undercover as a police officer, and their friendship and their working at cross purposes, certainly shows the most impressive use of CGI in some time as much of the movie shows vibrant choreography, stuntwork and pyrotechnics in a number of over the top scenes. Also, there are two effective dance scenes! But if this is certainly a more watchable movie than USvBH, it's also a more sinister one. If this shows the influence of Mel Gibson (there is a grueling scene where one of the rebels is whipped), like him it shows the potential for a new fascist cinema. I've never seen The Patriot, but although Britain was both more brutal in the American war of independence than they like to remember as well in colonial India when the media wasn't matching, both Gibson and RRR demagogically simplify matters by turning them into Nazis. Moreover, the relentlessly vindictive punishment of the English, as well as the superhuman nature of the two protagonists is both unnerving, an insult to the very different independence movement which existed at the time, and an unpleasant sign indeed from the current government of the pogromist Modi.

You wouldn't think that many people who want to remake Disraeli, but in 1941 Britain did. Certainly it's a better idea for John Gielgud to play the man than George Arliss. And the movie even shows him winning his pocket borough because the widow of the aristocrat who held it gives it to him before she marries him. But much of the movie is based on trying to show Disraeli's involvement in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 was somehow analogous to the current war Britain was in, which is all kinds of silly. Much better is Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, which may be Richard Linklater's best movie yet, certainly the best of his three animated movies. The conceit is that in 1969 boy who happens to share Linklater's age (nine) is asked to serve in a special mission because the Apollo module is too small for real astronauts. The movie is less about the mission but actually what is was like to grow up in the Houston suburb near NASA where Linklater also grew up. And this is actually fascinating, precisely because there is so little distinctive about the Houston suburb, it is likely to resemble the childhood of many white Americans. The family itself is non-Hispanic Catholic (the boy is the youngest of six siblings, the oldest of whom can't be more than eight years older than him), and Jack Black does an excellent job voicing the grown-up boy's memories.

Dominick And Eugene is the sort of OK movie that some critics wonder why it didn't do better. And then you see this movie about twin brothers, one of whom has a learning disability so the other has to take care of him and then you see it's not really that interesting. (The worst point is the healthy brother has to leave his twin to take up a medical residency--his medical education has actually been subsidized by his twin's garbage removal job--when the twin's dog is run over by a car.) Certainly Jamie Lee Curtis is rather bland as the girlfriend. The Hand of God is interestingly shot, about an Italian family in the eighties, concentrating on the teenage son's interest in sex, only to be abruptly complicated halfway through the movie when his parents die of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Interestingly, the emotional temperature cools down a little and the characters become less flamboyant and more approachable. What can one say of Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio? Is it as good as the Disney classic? No. Is it as good as Jan Svankmajer's brilliant and upsetting Alice [i.e. of Wonderland]? No. But it is inventive and charming, and since Pinocchio in the original novel is somewhat insufferable, del Toro's protagonist has a lot of room to maneuver in his path to virtue. Admittedly, the anti-fascist subplot isn't better than in Pan's Labyrinth, though it's reasonably competent audience self-congratulation. One might wonder about the actual conclusion.

[skimpole]

Last week I saw six movies. The 1943 The Phantom of the Opera has the good idea of having Claude Rains play the title character, and the not so good idea of having three lesser actors take up most of the movie. It's not that Susanna Foster is a bad singer. It's just that she's not much of anything. The closing line would have worked better if the two good guys who woo her along with Rains had been played by Abbott and Costello. Five Days One Summer was a critical and financial failure when Fred Zimmerman directed what turned out to be his final film. As it happens, the financial failure is more explicable than the critical one, since it involves Sean Connery playing an unsympathetic role (he's vacationing in pre-Hitler Alps) as a man in a relationship with his niece. I find it striking, since Connery would actually gain superstardom later that decade playing more conventionally heroic figures in genre movies. I personally think that the movie is intelligent and tasteful, that it shows the qualities of steadiness that Zimmerman used in his other films, and I, at least, found the ending genuinely surprising. I doubt Truffaut would have wanted Confidentially Yours to be his last film. It's actually less impressive than most of the movies he made after 1970. As a tribute to Hitchcock, the mystery involved does not have the master's depths. Nor is the mystery itself particularly clever. What it does have is a good performance by Fanny Ardant as the secretary who seeks to vindicate her boss Jean-Louis Trintignant from a murder charge. She's actually in love with him, notwithstanding his unsympathetic portrayal.

A Dandy in Aspic and That Lady in Ermine are both last movies of directors, in this case Anthony Mann and Ernst Lubitsch, who died while making the film and it had to be completed by others (respectively by Dandy star Laurence Harvey and Otto Preminger). Neither film is successful. In the first film the primary culprit is a confusing script. Harvey plays a Soviet agent who has succeeded in becoming a British agent, only for his British superiors to order him to find the cunning Soviet agent who is in fact himself. One assumes Harvey was asked to play the fox in this scenario so that audiences would be less likely to sympathize with him, and therefore the filmmakers wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism. As such Harvey does a good job, as does Tom Courtenay as the unlikable British agent breathing down his neck. But once the movie goes to divided Berlin, where Mann died, the characters act in a hopelessly confusing manner. In the second film, it's hard to doubt that Otto Preminger was not the person to try to recapture the Lubitsch touch. I wouldn't have chosen Betty Grable and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., as my leads, but then one of Lubitsch's striking qualities was to get admirable performances from otherwise less than brilliant actors, so it's clearly Preminger's fault. I finally watched National Velvet after waiting for more than a decade for it to appear on TCM Canada. As a movie, it captures perfectly the desire of prepubescent girls for horses. Not being a prepubescent girl myself, I can hardly say I'm the target audience. And, since the 12 year old Elizabeth Taylor could hardly run and win the actual race, the climactic Grand National can't help but be a bit disappointing 78 years later. But Mickey Rooney is better than usual as the jockey, Donald Crisp and Anne Rovere are good as the heroine's parents, and this is certainly the movie which puts the young Elizabeth Taylor's charms to best use.

[laffite]

"The 1943 The Phantom of the Opera has the good idea of having Claude Rains play the title character, and the not so good idea of having three lesser actors take up most of the movie. It's not that Susanna Foster is a bad singer. It's just that she's not much of anything. The closing line would have worked better if the two good guys who woo her along with Rains had been played by Abbott and Costello."

Amusing.

[CinemaInternational]

A Dandy in Aspic and That Lady in Ermine are both last movies of directors, in this case Anthony Mann and Ernst Lubitsch, who died while making the film and it had to be completed by others (respectively by Dandy star Laurence Harvey and Otto Preminger). Neither film is successful. In the first film the primary culprit is a confusing script. Harvey plays a Soviet agent who has succeeded in becoming a British agent, only for his British superiors to order him to find the cunning Soviet agent who is in fact himself. One assumes Harvey was asked to play the fox in this scenario so that audiences would be less likely to sympathize with him, and therefore the filmmakers wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism. As such Harvey does a good job, as does Tom Courtenay as the unlikable British agent breathing down his neck. But once the movie goes to divided Berlin, where Mann died, the characters act in a hopelessly confusing manner.

I saw it too this past week, and it is too muddled, with far too many threads left hanging (it is never fully answered if Mia Farrow is an undercover agent sent to tail him, although it seems pretty likely). Harvey's good performance does help quite a bit though.

[skimpole]

Last week I saw four movies. Tar is the best of these, an intelligent movie about a brilliant, demanding, selfish director played by Cate Blanchett who slowly but certainly gets her comeuppance. Even though it's possible that she's going mad. Todd Field directs intelligent in the Blanchett's brutalist apartment and contemporary Berlin. What do we see when we look up at the sky is a Georgian movie in which a young couple, about to meet on their first date, are cursed with having their appearances changed. The interesting thing is this takes place in modern Georgia, in a city with its own fascinating architecture (not the capital, Tiblisi.) The movie moves at a leisurely place, perhaps too leisurely. The Tragedy of Macbeth certainly has an interesting misc-en-scene. It includes angular shadows in beautiful black and white, and certainly shows the strangeness of 1040 Scotland. One wonders if Frances McDormand quite goes mad well enough, and one wonders whether Denzel Washington quite gets the right handle on the character (though he's good in his final scene). CODA is less a worthy best picture movie than a combination of several conventional plots, the talented would be artists struggling to get the confidence to succeed, the loving but someone trying family. Except for the fact that this family is deaf, played by actual deaf actors, and has a somewhat vigorous sex life, much of the movie proceeds in a fairly predictable manner.

[TikiSoo]

Again, thanks for this thread. I like that you italicize the titles, but it's also easier to read if you start a new paragraph for each movie. I got a little confused (but blame my addled brain)

RRR is getting surprising critical buzz, from both the National Board of Review and the New York Critics Film Circle, which is a bit surprising since it's an Indian film and three hours long.

I am a big fan of Indian film and started watching this with MrTiki, hoping to get him interested in them, at least try the duration. India has a history of bloody, violent testosterone laden movies almost to counter balance the sparkly feminine Bollywood styles movies. Appreciate your observations, glad you liked it.

I finally watched National Velvet after waiting for more than a decade for it to appear on TCM Canada. As a movie, it captures perfectly the desire of prepubescent girls for horses.

While Elizabeth Taylor is adorable as spunky Velvet, to me the story is really about life decisions, opportunity & choices made. Ann Revere as Mrs Brown is the one who conveys this when she says "Everything has it's right time" which really seems to be the heart of the story. A horsey girl myself, no scene in classic Hollywood touches my heart as this:

(you have no idea how dangerous this is-I'd never try it)

[skimpole]

Last week I saw four movies. It Happened on fifth Avenue is a sweet little Christmas movie about Victor Moore taking over a millionaire's mansion while that millionaire is away for the winter. Maybe too sweet. A Distant Trumpet was Raoul Walsh's last movie. It is by no means a bad movie, but it might have been a much better one if the lead actor had been more thoughtful than Troy Donahue. It is shot fairly well, Suzanne Pleshette is charming as the love interest, and the plot has some subtleties. The movie was based on a relatively recent novel, but the (not entirely successful) attempt to treat American Indians with more nuance had occurred in earlier Walsh movies.

Madadayo was Akira Kurosawa's last movie. As the movie is about a retired teacher who has an elaborate ceremony every year where his former students loudly ask whether he is willing to die and he says "not yet." That scene which gives the movie its title is fairly effective. The problem with this movie is that it combines elements of Kurosawa's earlier Ikiru with Umberto D (in this case involving a lost cat, instead of trying to get rid of a dog in the previous movie), all to lesser effect. The Liberation of L.B. Jones is supposedly based on a true story from its Tennessee setting, so one can't really complain too much that the conduct of the Southern Whites is unrealistic and oversimplified. And Roscoe Lee Brown does give the title character some dignity. But it's a pity that William Wyler's final film is not more effective. It exists in a strange state, where movies like this were once too brave to be made, to be too satisfying of liberal prejudices, without there being a time in which they were made and respected.