Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw six movies. Alex in Wonderland is Paul Mazursky's attempt to remake 8 1/2, the sort of movie that hurt Fellini's reputation more than it helped Mazursky's. The attempts at surrealism don't work and come off badly, but Donald Sutherland and Ellen Burstyn do a good job as the couple based on the Mazurskys (their marriage was noticeably long and apparently harmonious.) Payment Deferred's most attractive feature is a good performance by Charles Laughton as an increasingly desperate bank clerk who thinks murder might be a good solution to his problems. Dorothy Peterson is also good as his alternately trying and loving wife, though the movie itself all too clearly shows its stage origins.
I remember the ad campaign for Sphinx when it came out early in 1981, and it had an oscar-winning director Franklin J. Schaffner. It also has what should be a strong cast, with John Gielgud and Frank Langella playing Arabs, as well as John Rhys-Davies. But after a beginning in which we see a tomb raider ripped apart by horses, this is an amazingly bland and uninteresting movie. There is just no reason to care about Lesley-Anne Down, let alone wonder whether she will fall in love with Langella. When Knighthood was in Flower was shown as part of Marion Davies spotlight and tells a tale that, oddly enough, Disney would remake three decades later, about the sister of Henry VIII who was forced to marry the king of France, but eventually ended up with her less regal true love. As such, the movie is OK.
Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery boasts strong performances with Daniel Craig in the lead, followed by Edward Norton, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae. The movie starts out amusingly and there's an intriguing twist about halfway through the movie. It certainly benefits from the fact that Elon Musk was the first person to lose $200 billion. But like its predecessor, it hasn't fully thought out things. Trying to avoid spoilers, but for a start, the good guys' basic plan should fall apart the moment everyone arrives on Norton's private Greek island. And second, the last dramatic gesture is likely to have one of the few characters the audience likes lose every penny and face a life sentence in prison. To rephrase the late Meatloaf, I would do anything to bring Musk or Trump down, but I certainly wouldn't do that.
Lost Illusions is the movie of the week. While not showing the auteurist strengths of other 19th century film adaptations as Barry Lyndon,Mysteries of Lisbon or Doomed Love, it does show a certain flair as it makes it way through its two and a half hour running time. Benjamin Voisin is engagingly feckless as the lead. Xavier Dolan and Vincent Lacoste do a good job essentially serving as the angels and demons on his shoulder. Gerard Depardieu has a good brief role as a disreputable publisher, while Salome Dewaels and Cecile de France are fine as the love interests.
I remember the ad campaign for Sphinx when it came out early in 1981, and it had an oscar-winning director Franklin J. Schaffner. It also has what should be a strong cast, with John Gielgud and Frank Langella playing Arabs, as well as John Rhys-Davies. But after a beginning in which we see a tomb raider ripped apart by horses, this is an amazingly bland and uninteresting movie. There is just no reason to care about Lesley-Anne Down, let alone wonder whether she will fall in love with Langella. When Knighthood was in Flower was shown as part of Marion Davies spotlight and tells a tale that, oddly enough, Disney would remake three decades later, about the sister of Henry VIII who was forced to marry the king of France, but eventually ended up with her less regal true love. As such, the movie is OK.
Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery boasts strong performances with Daniel Craig in the lead, followed by Edward Norton, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae. The movie starts out amusingly and there's an intriguing twist about halfway through the movie. It certainly benefits from the fact that Elon Musk was the first person to lose $200 billion. But like its predecessor, it hasn't fully thought out things. Trying to avoid spoilers, but for a start, the good guys' basic plan should fall apart the moment everyone arrives on Norton's private Greek island. And second, the last dramatic gesture is likely to have one of the few characters the audience likes lose every penny and face a life sentence in prison. To rephrase the late Meatloaf, I would do anything to bring Musk or Trump down, but I certainly wouldn't do that.
Lost Illusions is the movie of the week. While not showing the auteurist strengths of other 19th century film adaptations as Barry Lyndon,Mysteries of Lisbon or Doomed Love, it does show a certain flair as it makes it way through its two and a half hour running time. Benjamin Voisin is engagingly feckless as the lead. Xavier Dolan and Vincent Lacoste do a good job essentially serving as the angels and demons on his shoulder. Gerard Depardieu has a good brief role as a disreputable publisher, while Salome Dewaels and Cecile de France are fine as the love interests.
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Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
skimpole wrote: ↑January 8th, 2023, 3:25 am Last week I saw six movies. Alex in Wonderland is Paul Mazursky's attempt to remake 8 1/2, the sort of movie that hurt Fellini's reputation more than it helped Mazursky's. The attempts at surrealism don't work and come off badly, but Donald Sutherland and Ellen Burstyn do a good job as the couple based on the Mazurskys (their marriage was noticeably long and apparently harmonious.) Payment Deferred's most attractive feature is a good performance by Charles Laughton as an increasingly desperate bank clerk who thinks murder might be a good solution to his problems. Dorothy Peterson is also good as his alternately trying and loving wife, though the movie itself all too clearly shows its stage origins.
I remember the ad campaign for Sphinx when it came out early in 1981, and it had an oscar-winning director Franklin J. Schaffner. It also has what should be a strong cast, with John Gielgud and Frank Langella playing Arabs, as well as John Rhys-Davies. But after a beginning in which we see a tomb raider ripped apart by horses, this is an amazingly bland and uninteresting movie. There is just no reason to care about Lesley-Anne Down, let alone wonder whether she will fall in love with Langella. When Knighthood was in Flower was shown as part of Marion Davies spotlight and tells a tale that, oddly enough, Disney would remake three decades later, about the sister of Henry VIII who was forced to marry the king of France, but eventually ended up with her less regal true love. As such, the movie is OK.
Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery boasts strong performances with Daniel Craig in the lead, followed by Edward Norton, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae. The movie starts out amusingly and there's an intriguing twist about halfway through the movie. It certainly benefits from the fact that Elon Musk was the first person to lose $200 billion. But like its predecessor, it hasn't fully thought out things. Trying to avoid spoilers, but for a start, the good guys' basic plan should fall apart the moment everyone arrives on Norton's private Greek island. And second, the last dramatic gesture is likely to have one of the few characters the audience likes lose every penny and face a life sentence in prison. To rephrase the late Meatloaf, I would do anything to bring Musk or Trump down, but I certainly wouldn't do that.
Lost Illusions is the movie of the week. While not showing the auteurist strengths of other 19th century film adaptations as Barry Lyndon,Mysteries of Lisbon or Doomed Love, it does show a certain flair as it makes it way through its two and a half hour running time. Benjamin Voisin is engagingly feckless as the lead. Xavier Dolan and Vincent Lacoste do a good job essentially serving as the angels and demons on his shoulder. Gerard Depardieu has a good brief role as a disreputable publisher, while Salome Dewaels and Cecile de France are fine as the love interests.
Alex in Wonderland is just a bit too diffuse, but you are right, its leads cannot be faulted as they turn in fine performances. Payment Deffered is OK, but Laughton was better in other films. Sphinx lacks character drive, but I will give it this much: it is impeccably photographed and definitely not the worst Orion release of 1981 ( that goes to the dire Under the Rainbow, where Eve Arden is felt up by a short man she mistook for a child, but Rollover, another film with classy credits [Alan Pacula, Jane Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Hume Cronyn] is literally so muddled that its plot is indecipherable)
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Cinemainternational wrote : Alex in Wonderland is just a bit too diffuse, but you are right, its leads cannot be faulted as they turn in fine performances. Payment Deffered is OK, but Laughton was better in other films. Sphinx lacks character drive, but I will give it this much: it is impeccably photographed and definitely not the worst Orion release of 1981 ( that goes to the dire Under the Rainbow, where Eve Arden is felt up by a short man she mistook for a child, but Rollover, another film with classy credits [Alan Pacula, Jane Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Hume Cronyn] is literally so muddled that its plot is indecipherable)
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Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was probably the best, though it turns out this documentary is most interesting about Nan Goldin's career as an avant-garde photographer in the eighties, and how her bisexual milieu was ravaged by AIDS. How Goldin has spent much of the last decade campaigning against the Sackler family and its role in the opioid crisis is not particularly striking, with less new information. Hollywood Revue was actually nominated for best picture at the Second Academy Awards, which had a rather uninspiring best picture lineup (the most promising feature, Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot, is the one that's lost.) What can we say about this feature which has a couple of color features, but which is now overshadowed by the following year's King of Jazz? Well it has Jack Benny, but his jokes aren't very funny. (There's a running gag about recognizing the actresses, only to be slapped by them. Probably his best line is at the beginning when he tries to introduce his cohost Conrad Nagel, but forgets his name.) We do hear "Singin' in the Rain" for the first time on film. Bessie Love and Marion Davies have good dance numbers, and the Natova Dance Company has a better one.
Everything Everywhere All at Once certainly starts off engagingly, and has a good cast. Michelle Yeoh is best as the lead who gives a strong performance as an overwhelmed Chinese-American laundromat owner who one inopportune days finds herself the focus of the disintegration of the multiverse. Much of this is amusing and clever, including an alternate universe where fingers are like hot dogs and another where she finds herself turned into a rock. But the last third of the movie not only loses focus, but also becomes a rather treacly invocation of family values.
Everything Everywhere All at Once certainly starts off engagingly, and has a good cast. Michelle Yeoh is best as the lead who gives a strong performance as an overwhelmed Chinese-American laundromat owner who one inopportune days finds herself the focus of the disintegration of the multiverse. Much of this is amusing and clever, including an alternate universe where fingers are like hot dogs and another where she finds herself turned into a rock. But the last third of the movie not only loses focus, but also becomes a rather treacly invocation of family values.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. Monsieur Beaucaire and The Frisco Kid were the best. They were light comedies that, while not particularly memorable or even excecptionally funny put their respective stars (Bob Hope and Gene Wilder) to good use. Interesting, the former movie forgets that the kings involved in the plot were actually uncle and nephew, which sort of undercuts the plot. Wilder's rabbi character is allowed by director Robert Aldrich to have a surprisingly large amount of dignity, though his best line at the end wouldn't be printable here. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was a massive Emmy award winner in its day. But Dave Kehr was right to call it "well-intentioned tripe" which got more credit for dealing with issues like Klan vigilantism, injustices towards sharecroppers and civil rights dilemmas for the first time on network television than for any skill or artistry on the subject.
The Batman is the fourth revision of the character since the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Arguably the fifth, actually, if you count Joker. What can we say of this new version? Well, it's better than the Ben Affleck version, so one suspects it was overrated for that reason. Also, Colin Farrell's Penguin is certainly an improvement over Danny De Vito's. On the other hand the main attempt to make Gotham more realistic is to have it rain all the time. And for some reason, Gotham now has a landscape that resembles New Orleans. Also, large swathes of Se7en have been plagiarized for the plot. The tweaking of the Batman's origins is not particularly interesting. The last quarter of this ridiculously long film does come up with an interesting idea, in that this version's Riddler has been turned into a crazy vigilante, but his vigilantism turns into mass murdering fascism. This is more interesting than the gargantuan and unimaginative corruption plot, but it's basically ignored before it undercuts the whole movie.
The Batman is the fourth revision of the character since the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Arguably the fifth, actually, if you count Joker. What can we say of this new version? Well, it's better than the Ben Affleck version, so one suspects it was overrated for that reason. Also, Colin Farrell's Penguin is certainly an improvement over Danny De Vito's. On the other hand the main attempt to make Gotham more realistic is to have it rain all the time. And for some reason, Gotham now has a landscape that resembles New Orleans. Also, large swathes of Se7en have been plagiarized for the plot. The tweaking of the Batman's origins is not particularly interesting. The last quarter of this ridiculously long film does come up with an interesting idea, in that this version's Riddler has been turned into a crazy vigilante, but his vigilantism turns into mass murdering fascism. This is more interesting than the gargantuan and unimaginative corruption plot, but it's basically ignored before it undercuts the whole movie.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw five movies. Let's start with the two I didn't particularly care for. No Blade of Grass starts with Britain, and all of the rest of the world being threatened by a virus that destroys key plants, like the world's cereals. Although Nigel Davenport's plan is for his family to take a biologist who will try and find a cure, this basic purpose is soon forgotten as Britain soon disintegrates into chaos and Davenport and his group realize that it's kill or be killed. So the movie, in the 50+ years since it was made, suffers from the sense that the apocalyptic view has been embraced too quickly as seen in half a century of parodies. I have never read Portnoy's Complaint and only knew that the movie was a notorious bomb. And having seen it, I see no reason to disagree with this view. The introductory scenes are excruciating with their scatology and their Jewish mother stereotypes. Then a relationship develops between Richard Benjamin and Karen Black and there are signs that it might develop into something competent as we see signs that they think about things other than sex. And then it falls apart again.
The original The Italian Job is little more than an amiable crowd-pleaser. And the "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" line is somewhat less impressive when we see it's just in the preparatory stages. And the Mafia is more a southern Italian institution, and Turin, where the job takes place, is in the far North of the country. But having said that the car chase with three tiny little cars is nice, and while you might think a van driving in the Alps would be more careful, the actual cliffhanger is genuinely memorable. I did not think Avatar: the way of Water would have been as enjoyable as I thought it would. And to be sure, James Cameron is still the emotional adolescent he's been since The Terminator, such that only Newt's desperate plight in Aliens works. And one finds the last hour is repeating parts of Titanic, with characters being cuffed to the sinking ship, freed and then cuffed again, and with various Na'vi facing drowning, but in warmer water and with more lung capacity. But Cameron is still the master of action sequences and much of exploration of Pandorian ocean life is strikingly beautiful. Turning Red, I think works better than Everything Everywhere all at Once. Admittedly the last ten minutes is disappointingly similar in presenting the love of family. But the story of a Chinese-Canadian girl whose mother has made her an overachiever facing the metaphor of puberty by periodically turning into a giant Red Panda is actually amusing and inventive in the first two-thirds.
The original The Italian Job is little more than an amiable crowd-pleaser. And the "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" line is somewhat less impressive when we see it's just in the preparatory stages. And the Mafia is more a southern Italian institution, and Turin, where the job takes place, is in the far North of the country. But having said that the car chase with three tiny little cars is nice, and while you might think a van driving in the Alps would be more careful, the actual cliffhanger is genuinely memorable. I did not think Avatar: the way of Water would have been as enjoyable as I thought it would. And to be sure, James Cameron is still the emotional adolescent he's been since The Terminator, such that only Newt's desperate plight in Aliens works. And one finds the last hour is repeating parts of Titanic, with characters being cuffed to the sinking ship, freed and then cuffed again, and with various Na'vi facing drowning, but in warmer water and with more lung capacity. But Cameron is still the master of action sequences and much of exploration of Pandorian ocean life is strikingly beautiful. Turning Red, I think works better than Everything Everywhere all at Once. Admittedly the last ten minutes is disappointingly similar in presenting the love of family. But the story of a Chinese-Canadian girl whose mother has made her an overachiever facing the metaphor of puberty by periodically turning into a giant Red Panda is actually amusing and inventive in the first two-thirds.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Over the last two weeks I saw five movies. One on One is a rather bland movie where Robby Benson eventually succeeds as a baseball player and as a college student, without really showing much ability as either. I think we're supposed to be sympathetic to him because G.D. Spradlin is his coach. Annette O'Toole plays a perfunctory love interest. Hangover Square is about a musician who can be triggered into a homicidal frenzy by discordant sounds. Laird Creager is OK as the musician, Linda Darnell as the conniving minx who unwisely tries to leach him for her own advantage. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno is the best movie of the fortnight. It's certainly the best movie with an explicit sex scene in the first ten minutes, which probably didn't help director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous movie had won the Palme D'Or. But if one is willing to go past those ten minutes one will see a thoughtful film without nudity though a lot of bathing suits in which a young student slowly falls in love with the woman in the aforementioned sex scene. There is a sequel to the movie.
The next two movies are best picture nominees. Top Gun: Maverick was a sequel nobody except the studio's bank accounts needed. One might think that getting a best picture nomination was too much of a reward for just being financially successful. Although the original was an everpresent aspect of 1986 popular culture, thanks to a soundtrack with three (fairly annoying) top ten hits, when I actually saw the movie more than two decades later, the only thing that really stayed in my mind was Meg Ryan's supporting performance. One might note a certain self-critical note in that Tom Cruise's character, after all these years, is only a poorly regarded captain, while a dying Val Kilmer has made admiral. But this is just the scene setting before we reach the plot, about Cruise training pilots to run a risky assault on a conveniently unnamed but very dangerous country. I'm not much of a fan of aerial dogfights, but what is presented is acceptable, I suppose.
Women Talking is much more disappointing. The story of a Mennonite colony wracked by a horrific sex scandal where the women have to decide what to do with the abuse they face falls apart very quickly. Very simply, Sarah Polley cannot imagine what it would be like to be a woman and a Christian in such circumstances and so instead of having such people discuss what to do, she has people like the potential audience discussing what they would do. So the exercise is ultimately unreal. And when the characters talk about forgiveness, their religion's pacifism, or how to structure gender relations in the wake of the sexual abuse they've suffered, they don't think like actual Mennonites, but how Mennonites are viewed by someone with no sympathy with them. Kyle Smith for The Wall Street Journal was the one critic who pointed out how hollow this is, that it doesn't remotely deal with the objections to the [SPOILERS] ultimately chosen path of leaving the colony completely. In deciding to leave, nobody discusses that the malevolent Mennonite patriarchy has kept the women almost completely illiterate. They are so badly informed they barely have any idea where they are (the novel the movie was based on was inspired by a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie characters live in either Canada or the United States.) They don't have any money, and if they leave with vehicles, livestock and their children, the men in the colony will simply get the police to stop them and take all of it back. I can understand why Polley wanted an oscar-nominated Best Picture to end on a happy note. But dictatorship never ends that easily.
The next two movies are best picture nominees. Top Gun: Maverick was a sequel nobody except the studio's bank accounts needed. One might think that getting a best picture nomination was too much of a reward for just being financially successful. Although the original was an everpresent aspect of 1986 popular culture, thanks to a soundtrack with three (fairly annoying) top ten hits, when I actually saw the movie more than two decades later, the only thing that really stayed in my mind was Meg Ryan's supporting performance. One might note a certain self-critical note in that Tom Cruise's character, after all these years, is only a poorly regarded captain, while a dying Val Kilmer has made admiral. But this is just the scene setting before we reach the plot, about Cruise training pilots to run a risky assault on a conveniently unnamed but very dangerous country. I'm not much of a fan of aerial dogfights, but what is presented is acceptable, I suppose.
Women Talking is much more disappointing. The story of a Mennonite colony wracked by a horrific sex scandal where the women have to decide what to do with the abuse they face falls apart very quickly. Very simply, Sarah Polley cannot imagine what it would be like to be a woman and a Christian in such circumstances and so instead of having such people discuss what to do, she has people like the potential audience discussing what they would do. So the exercise is ultimately unreal. And when the characters talk about forgiveness, their religion's pacifism, or how to structure gender relations in the wake of the sexual abuse they've suffered, they don't think like actual Mennonites, but how Mennonites are viewed by someone with no sympathy with them. Kyle Smith for The Wall Street Journal was the one critic who pointed out how hollow this is, that it doesn't remotely deal with the objections to the [SPOILERS] ultimately chosen path of leaving the colony completely. In deciding to leave, nobody discusses that the malevolent Mennonite patriarchy has kept the women almost completely illiterate. They are so badly informed they barely have any idea where they are (the novel the movie was based on was inspired by a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but the movie characters live in either Canada or the United States.) They don't have any money, and if they leave with vehicles, livestock and their children, the men in the colony will simply get the police to stop them and take all of it back. I can understand why Polley wanted an oscar-nominated Best Picture to end on a happy note. But dictatorship never ends that easily.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw five movies. Red Sonja the comic book character was striking in the contrast between her considerable beauty and sexuality, and her absolute determination to put aside all that and everything else in her pursuit of vengeance. In Red Sonja the movie we have Brigitte Nielsen who is conventionally attractive, but otherwise is completely uninteresting. The movie seems to be, oddly enough, most inspired by Krull with its convenient cosmic McGuffin. Oddly enough, I didn't realize that Arnold Schwarzenegger was not playing Conan as he had in two previous movies, but a completely different character. Summer and Smoke is that not rare thing, a movie based on a Tennessee Williams play about repressed sexuality. It got four oscar nominations in 1962, and one might almost think it was a competent drama. As it happens, Laurence Harvey is better as the doctor with a taste for womanizing than Geraldine Page who got the oscar nomination as the brittle spinster.
I was only a child when Elvis Presley died. And I was more likely to hear of his drug problems, or of the more comic aspects of Elvis impersonators or whether he might possibly be alive, rather than appreciate his talent. So the one valuable thing about Elvis is that it does show why so many people valued, and indeed still value, him. But aside from that, Baz Luhrmann's movie is annoyingly shallow. Elvis is not really that impressive by the low standards of biopics. There's not much point in granting its protagonist no interiority. Luhrmann's style of pointless effervescence is still as annoying here as in his earlier movies ("a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article" in Richard Brody's phrase). And one might think that of all the aspects one would look at, his relationship with his manager "Colonel" "Tom Parker" is the least interesting one. Particularly with Tom Hanks giving an odd performance: Parker may originally be from Holland, but it's odd having Hanks try to adapt a Dutch accent while pretending to be a Southerner.
The best thing about Drive, He said is that this story of a basketball player with troubles with his team, with his roommate and with the married woman he is having an affair with is that it is better than One on One made several years later. As an exercise in film-making it does suggest why Jack Nicholson devoted relatively little attention to continuing being a director (he made two more movies, both starring himself), and it lacks the concentration of the following year's The King of Marvin Gardens, starring Nicholson and directed by his friend Bob Rafelson. So Cold Water is the movie of the week, an Oliver Assayas movie about his own teenage years in the seventies. It's noticeable that the two troubled youths are not simply presented as cool or as victims, showing a certain subtlety there. Also, the soundtrack is better than I suspect most teenagers had in 1973.
I was only a child when Elvis Presley died. And I was more likely to hear of his drug problems, or of the more comic aspects of Elvis impersonators or whether he might possibly be alive, rather than appreciate his talent. So the one valuable thing about Elvis is that it does show why so many people valued, and indeed still value, him. But aside from that, Baz Luhrmann's movie is annoyingly shallow. Elvis is not really that impressive by the low standards of biopics. There's not much point in granting its protagonist no interiority. Luhrmann's style of pointless effervescence is still as annoying here as in his earlier movies ("a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article" in Richard Brody's phrase). And one might think that of all the aspects one would look at, his relationship with his manager "Colonel" "Tom Parker" is the least interesting one. Particularly with Tom Hanks giving an odd performance: Parker may originally be from Holland, but it's odd having Hanks try to adapt a Dutch accent while pretending to be a Southerner.
The best thing about Drive, He said is that this story of a basketball player with troubles with his team, with his roommate and with the married woman he is having an affair with is that it is better than One on One made several years later. As an exercise in film-making it does suggest why Jack Nicholson devoted relatively little attention to continuing being a director (he made two more movies, both starring himself), and it lacks the concentration of the following year's The King of Marvin Gardens, starring Nicholson and directed by his friend Bob Rafelson. So Cold Water is the movie of the week, an Oliver Assayas movie about his own teenage years in the seventies. It's noticeable that the two troubled youths are not simply presented as cool or as victims, showing a certain subtlety there. Also, the soundtrack is better than I suspect most teenagers had in 1973.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. What can we say about Red Sun? Well, since the spaghetti western started out by plagiarizing Yojimbo, it's only gentlemanly that the genre offers Toshiro Mifune a starring role. And the relationship between Charles Bronson and Ursula Andress is atypically bitter, while Alain Delon makes a rational assumption only for that assumption to be convincingly vitiated. Having said that, Mifune isn't really given much to do as a Japanese samurai out to regain a sword that Delon and his men stole in passing, and the movie isn't particularly brilliant. Still, it could be worse. The Four Seasons is a mildly amusing comedy where Alan Alda and his friends vacation together for the aforementioned four seasons, only with stresses to develop when Len Cariou divorces his wife and marries someone 16 years younger. Aside from a general lack of genius and insight, I suppose my main problem with it is that Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno have little to do, with the latter in the shadow of her hypochondriac husband who causes the crisis that ends the movie.
The best thing about The Eternal Daughter is that it's better than Joanna Hogg's previous film The Souvenir. Not a lot better is sort of a gothic mystery that takes place at a hotel without any of the fun one might expect from such a scenario. As it happens, instead of having Tilda Swinton's daughter in the starring role it has Swinton herself as both daughter and elderly mother who check into the strangely uninhabited hotel. As it turns out, the reality of the situation is not as frightful, or as interesting as one might imagine, though one might guess it from the title. So clearly the movie of the week is One Fine Morning. In the first Mia Hansen-Love movie I actually like, Lea Seydoux gives one of the best performances from 2022 I've seen so far as she deals with her father suffering a particularly nasty variation of Alzheimer's Disease while beginning a relationship with a friend who's married to someone else. The story itself is thoughtful, reasonable, and mature. Interestingly, Seydoux plays the sort of person who might actually watch a Mia Hansen-Love movie (she's a translator).
The best thing about The Eternal Daughter is that it's better than Joanna Hogg's previous film The Souvenir. Not a lot better is sort of a gothic mystery that takes place at a hotel without any of the fun one might expect from such a scenario. As it happens, instead of having Tilda Swinton's daughter in the starring role it has Swinton herself as both daughter and elderly mother who check into the strangely uninhabited hotel. As it turns out, the reality of the situation is not as frightful, or as interesting as one might imagine, though one might guess it from the title. So clearly the movie of the week is One Fine Morning. In the first Mia Hansen-Love movie I actually like, Lea Seydoux gives one of the best performances from 2022 I've seen so far as she deals with her father suffering a particularly nasty variation of Alzheimer's Disease while beginning a relationship with a friend who's married to someone else. The story itself is thoughtful, reasonable, and mature. Interestingly, Seydoux plays the sort of person who might actually watch a Mia Hansen-Love movie (she's a translator).
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies, none of them all that impressive, I'm afraid. The Watermelon Woman actually made the Sight and Sound top 250 movies of all time, although its only historical distinction is that it was apparently the first feature made by an African-American lesbian. As such the movie has two threads. First, there is the documentary the protagonist is making about a forgotten African-American actress in the first decades of sound film who, to conveniently match the demeaning roles she plays on film, is credited only as the title character. In the second thread, the protagonist deals with her own life as an African-American lesbian, working in a video store, trying to make a movie, and having an affair with a white woman costumer. As a movie, it's OK, though hardly the best movie of 1996. One problem is that the movie is only about 90 minutes long, and there's four minutes of credits for the imaginary documentary, and then another six for the actual movie.
The Doorway to Hell isn't a bad gangster movie actually. It's just it suffers from the obvious problem that we're supposed to care more about Lew Ayres as the gangster protagonist who decides to cash his winnings and live a life of luxury, instead of James Cagney, who plays his deputy. The Northman is the third movie of Robert Eggers. It takes elements of the Hamlet story and transfers them to the time of the Vikings. One can appreciate its emphasis on Viking mythology and vengeance, and one can also agree that the movie's violence is not that different from the insane feuding one finds in Viking sagas. Nor is one to deny a certain cinematographic skill, as in Eggers' previous two movies. Yet the overall result left me cold. One element is that there is a brutal berserker raid in what is now Russia and unlucky villagers are herded into a building that is set on fire. My reaction was that the director had obviously seen Come and See, or at least Mel Gibson's The Patriot. For all the emphasis on authenticity, a comparison to Marketa Lazarova, Andrei Rublev, or Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (which I recently rewatched) shows the hollowness of Eggers' somewhat easy use of violence.
I just want to remind myself that I now consider Twin Peaks: the Return a movie, because the Sight and Sound Poll considered it one.
The Doorway to Hell isn't a bad gangster movie actually. It's just it suffers from the obvious problem that we're supposed to care more about Lew Ayres as the gangster protagonist who decides to cash his winnings and live a life of luxury, instead of James Cagney, who plays his deputy. The Northman is the third movie of Robert Eggers. It takes elements of the Hamlet story and transfers them to the time of the Vikings. One can appreciate its emphasis on Viking mythology and vengeance, and one can also agree that the movie's violence is not that different from the insane feuding one finds in Viking sagas. Nor is one to deny a certain cinematographic skill, as in Eggers' previous two movies. Yet the overall result left me cold. One element is that there is a brutal berserker raid in what is now Russia and unlucky villagers are herded into a building that is set on fire. My reaction was that the director had obviously seen Come and See, or at least Mel Gibson's The Patriot. For all the emphasis on authenticity, a comparison to Marketa Lazarova, Andrei Rublev, or Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (which I recently rewatched) shows the hollowness of Eggers' somewhat easy use of violence.
I just want to remind myself that I now consider Twin Peaks: the Return a movie, because the Sight and Sound Poll considered it one.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. To Leslie has a simple trick. Its lead character is so unrelentingly pathetic, miserable and self-destructive when the movie starts, and you are so distraught to find the movie has another hour to go, that you are relieved when she starts improving herself. Even though this transformation is neither very original nor all that convincing. The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer actually won an oscar, which is why TCM showed it this month. It won best original screenplay, where it beat Body and Soul and Monsieur Verdoux. Any movie that has both Cary Grant and Myrna Loy can't be all bad, even though the eventual plot is obvious once the premise is announced. It does make the movie slightly more tolerable that Shirley Temple is entirely at fault in this movie.
Return to Seoul is an interesting movie. It's about a French woman originally adapted from Korea who visits that country when she can't visit Japan. Apparently out of idle curiosity but actually out of a longstanding need, she becomes curious about her birth parents. And because South Korean institutions are incredibly efficient she soon encounters some of her relatives, with results she is not that happy with. One interesting scene involves her talking with her father, and since she barely speaks Korean, and he doesn't know French, they have to talk through a translator, with all sorts of interesting aspects for movie critics. Ji-Min Park is good playing the protagonist, who is not afraid of appearing flighty and unsympathetic. My main problem with Nope is that a crucial twenty minutes in the middle couldn't be seen because there was a problem with the DVD. But as it stands, I probably wouldn't have liked it as much as I did Us. And while it's not necessarily a bad thing that the overlying metaphor isn't as clear as Jordan Peele's two movies, it is perhaps not the best that Keke Palmer is more interesting than the supposed strong-willed protagonist Daniel Kaluuya.
Return to Seoul is an interesting movie. It's about a French woman originally adapted from Korea who visits that country when she can't visit Japan. Apparently out of idle curiosity but actually out of a longstanding need, she becomes curious about her birth parents. And because South Korean institutions are incredibly efficient she soon encounters some of her relatives, with results she is not that happy with. One interesting scene involves her talking with her father, and since she barely speaks Korean, and he doesn't know French, they have to talk through a translator, with all sorts of interesting aspects for movie critics. Ji-Min Park is good playing the protagonist, who is not afraid of appearing flighty and unsympathetic. My main problem with Nope is that a crucial twenty minutes in the middle couldn't be seen because there was a problem with the DVD. But as it stands, I probably wouldn't have liked it as much as I did Us. And while it's not necessarily a bad thing that the overlying metaphor isn't as clear as Jordan Peele's two movies, it is perhaps not the best that Keke Palmer is more interesting than the supposed strong-willed protagonist Daniel Kaluuya.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies. The Spanish Main is not a bad pirate movie. It's just if I had to watch a pirate movie from the golden age of Hollywood, I'd rather see one that starred Errol Flynn, Bob Hope, Gene Kelly or Burt Lancaster rather than Paul Henreid. Also, pirate movies probably don't best play to Frank Borzage's strengths. The Gorgeous Hussy starts off with a disclaimer than most of this movie is mostly fictional. Clearly someone realized this movie was utter tosh and felt that a disclaimer was in order. Because it's hard to think of a movie so wildly inaccurate, though Braveheart comes to mind. It's like the film in Vile Bodies where the story of the founders of Methodism is turned into a Western. The idea is that Peggy Eaton's true love was not her husband (Jackson's Secretary of war) or her first husband but Virginia politician John Randolph played by Melvyn Douglas of all people is idiotic if you know that Randolph was perhaps the least heterosexual politician in the first half century of American history. It's like making a movie about the great love nobly forsaken by James Buchanan or J. Edgar Hoover. And then the movie has Randolph assassinated! (The real Randolph died of tuberculosis.)
So The Fabelmans is the movie of the week. It certainly offers a more complex picture of family than, say, the last two best picture movies. Certainly better than four of the seven of Best Picture nominees, one sense of reserve I have comes from the emphasis on Michelle Williams' role. It's not so much that there's anything wrong per se with her portrait as the Fabelman/Spielberg mother as artistic but also selfish and a bit unstable. It's just that one is reminded of her truly heartbreaking scene in Manchester by the Sea by comparison. It also shows that the Academy are morons because they nominated Judd Hirsch's brief cameo while Paul Dano's more subtle work was ignored. As indeed was Gabriel LaBelle's lead performance as the Spielberg surrogate who better shows the complexities of the movie (voyeur, admirer and destroyer of the family, sentimentalist, and manipulator).
So The Fabelmans is the movie of the week. It certainly offers a more complex picture of family than, say, the last two best picture movies. Certainly better than four of the seven of Best Picture nominees, one sense of reserve I have comes from the emphasis on Michelle Williams' role. It's not so much that there's anything wrong per se with her portrait as the Fabelman/Spielberg mother as artistic but also selfish and a bit unstable. It's just that one is reminded of her truly heartbreaking scene in Manchester by the Sea by comparison. It also shows that the Academy are morons because they nominated Judd Hirsch's brief cameo while Paul Dano's more subtle work was ignored. As indeed was Gabriel LaBelle's lead performance as the Spielberg surrogate who better shows the complexities of the movie (voyeur, admirer and destroyer of the family, sentimentalist, and manipulator).
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
I saw four movies over the last two weeks. Watching Period of Adjustment, I wondered Jane Fonda, in her bright ingenue phase, had a strong southern accent as a nurse who marries one of her patients almost on a whim and quickly regrets it. And then it turned out that the movie was based on yet another Tennessee Williams play, this one a supposed comedy. Given the homoerotic themes that Hollywood repressed in its many films adaptations, watching this movie about husbands learning to appreciate their wives better is not particularly convincing. And although George Roy Hill would do better in the future, it's still basically a filmed play. The Sky's the Limit has Fred Astaire have Joan Leslie as a partner. As second rank Astaire goes, it's amusing, and better than Belle of New York, but not as good as You were Never Lovelier. It's no surprise that Leslie didn't match Rita Hayworth's career. The three dance numbers are OK, but we have to wait more than half an hour to see the first one!
Turning to the other two movies, they came out, not last year, but the year before. Murina is an OK movie, taking place by the Croatian seacoast and stars Gracija Filipovic as the not unattractive teenage protagonist who often goes sea diving. Her father is a very irritable man and much of the movie deals with a business meeting with an old associate of his, who seems to have had some kind of relationship with Filipovic's mother. So all sort of film noir elements, though at a somewhat cooler temperature, not unlike the Adriatic where much of the movie takes place. The last shot is particularly striking, and a bit reminiscent of Red Desert. The Tale of the King Crab is perhaps even better, telling two stories. The first half involves the Italian peasant protagonist who trespasses against the local aristocrat. Once he is punished for this, he goes up to Tierra del Fuego, looking for treasure. If you liked Zama, you'll find this worthy of interest as well.
Turning to the other two movies, they came out, not last year, but the year before. Murina is an OK movie, taking place by the Croatian seacoast and stars Gracija Filipovic as the not unattractive teenage protagonist who often goes sea diving. Her father is a very irritable man and much of the movie deals with a business meeting with an old associate of his, who seems to have had some kind of relationship with Filipovic's mother. So all sort of film noir elements, though at a somewhat cooler temperature, not unlike the Adriatic where much of the movie takes place. The last shot is particularly striking, and a bit reminiscent of Red Desert. The Tale of the King Crab is perhaps even better, telling two stories. The first half involves the Italian peasant protagonist who trespasses against the local aristocrat. Once he is punished for this, he goes up to Tierra del Fuego, looking for treasure. If you liked Zama, you'll find this worthy of interest as well.
- dianedebuda
- Posts: 97
- Joined: October 23rd, 2022, 9:49 am
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
No wonder I was mostly bored by the movie. TW is just not my cup of tea.
- Intrepid37
- Posts: 870
- Joined: March 5th, 2023, 5:05 pm
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Favorite of this week - Summer of '42
I just really relate to this movie. Loving a beautiful (and charming) but older and unattainable woman over a summer beach vacation at the age of 15. An innocent existence in 1942.
Least favorite - not sure.
I just really relate to this movie. Loving a beautiful (and charming) but older and unattainable woman over a summer beach vacation at the age of 15. An innocent existence in 1942.
Least favorite - not sure.