Last week I saw five movies. The Thief Who Came to Dinner was probably the least of this, chosen by TCM as part of its seventies actor tribute where it is Warren Oates as the insurance investigator who is the focus of the spotlight, as opposed to Ryan O'Neal playing the title character. One could think of better Warren Oates movies from the seventies to showcase his talents. And the movie itself suffers from the fact that O'Neal is too smug and smarmy a character, and is also not that bright. (You would think someone who knows his next site is under video surveillance would choose a better disguise than just being a priest). It's interesting to compare the movie to the other heist movie of the seventies $ (Dollars) which puts some effort into showing Warren Beatty's skills, and where Goldie Hawn is a more charismatic accomplice than Jacqueline Bisset in Thief.
The other movies are more interesting. Don't Worry Darling, with its Stepford Wives vibe doesn't have the most original plot. And the last third feels like something we have seen before. And yet Florence Pugh does have more energy in the strange early sixties California desert company town than one might expect, and there's certainly more sexual energy from her and Harry Styles than one ordinarily sees in Stepford Manor, and Olivia Wilde does have a certain directorial style. Shockproof combines a Sam Fuller script with early Douglas Sirk direction in the story about a parole officer who falls in love with one of his charges, who in turn can't quite quit the louse who has been using her for his own nefarious ends. Having an actual husband and wife play the leads helps the movie along and adds to the interest. But then the movie starts to turn into They Live By Night, and before it can end like Gun Crazy there's a studio imposed happy ending.
Last Summer is also worth watching. Barbara Hershey does show considerable promise as the attraction of the two male leads as they play on the beach one summer. As it happens, she would have to wait until the eighties to get major movie roles. Certainly this movie about slowly developing sexual tension among the trio, along with another girl they meet, works better than Summer of '42 and the eventual conclusion is both effective and counters the pornographic hopes many viewers may have expected. (Though a crucial early scene, which reveals much of Hershey's character involving her treatment of a seagull, is not quite adequately pulled off). Young and Innocent suffers in comparison to The Thirty-Nine Steps but this story of a good Samaritan finding a body, only to be falsely accused of the crime, doesn't work badly and is worth a rewatch, particularly in a suspenseful scene involving a children's party, and the conclusion involving blackface.
Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies. You might wonder if there was any real need to remake Ikiru. Certainly Woody Allen's attempts to remake Smiles of a Summer Night, 8 1/2, Wild Strawberries and Juliet of the Spirits were hardly his most essential films. As such Living is tasteful, but hardly necessary, and its ending has a softer impact than the original. The Devil is a Sissy starts out as an OK youth movie as Freddie Bartholemew gets to know Jackie Cooper and Mickey Rooney while living with his father in New York. Then it becomes an anti-juvenile delinquency movie with somewhat indifferent results. A Little Princess, the Alfonso Cuaron version, benefits from good art direction and cinematography--both nominated for oscars, and even interesting costume design (the girl students wear horrible, but striking green dresses as their uniforms). If the movie isn't quite as successful as its fans and Cuaron's admirers would wish, it's because its message (all girls are princesses) is a bit shallow.
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CinemaInternational
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Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
I recall seeing The Thief Who Came to Dinner about a dozen years ago when I had a mad teenage crush on Jacqueline Bisset. It was labeled as a crime comedy that hearkened back to the 30s, but it wasn't very comic, it wasn't 30s style, and it had a pretty nasty edge to some of the latter scenes. The only sparks came from the supporting turns of Jill Clayburgh and Austin Pendleton.skimpole wrote: ↑July 30th, 2023, 2:35 am Last week I saw five movies. The Thief Who Came to Dinner was probably the least of this, chosen by TCM as part of its seventies actor tribute where it is Warren Oates as the insurance investigator who is the focus of the spotlight, as opposed to Ryan O'Neal playing the title character. One could think of better Warren Oates movies from the seventies to showcase his talents. And the movie itself suffers from the fact that O'Neal is too smug and smarmy a character, and is also not that bright. (You would think someone who knows his next site is under video surveillance would choose a better disguise than just being a priest). It's interesting to compare the movie to the other heist movie of the seventies $ (Dollars) which puts some effort into showing Warren Beatty's skills, and where Goldie Hawn is a more charismatic accomplice than Jacqueline Bisset in Thief.
The other movies are more interesting. Don't Worry Darling, with its Stepford Wives vibe doesn't have the most original plot. And the last third feels like something we have seen before. And yet Florence Pugh does have more energy in the strange early sixties California desert company town than one might expect, and there's certainly more sexual energy from her and Harry Styles than one ordinarily sees in Stepford Manor, and Olivia Wilde does have a certain directorial style. Shockproof combines a Sam Fuller script with early Douglas Sirk direction in the story about a parole officer who falls in love with one of his charges, who in turn can't quite quit the louse who has been using her for his own nefarious ends. Having an actual husband and wife play the leads helps the movie along and adds to the interest. But then the movie starts to turn into They Live By Night, and before it can end like Gun Crazy there's a studio imposed happy ending.
Last Summer is also worth watching. Barbara Hershey does show considerable promise as the attraction of the two male leads as they play on the beach one summer. As it happens, she would have to wait until the eighties to get major movie roles. Certainly this movie about slowly developing sexual tension among the trio, along with another girl they meet, works better than Summer of '42 and the eventual conclusion is both effective and counters the pornographic hopes many viewers may have expected. (Though a crucial early scene, which reveals much of Hershey's character involving her treatment of a seagull, is not quite adequately pulled off). Young and Innocent suffers in comparison to The Thirty-Nine Steps but this story of a good Samaritan finding a body, only to be falsely accused of the crime, doesn't work badly and is worth a rewatch, particularly in a suspenseful scene involving a children's party, and the conclusion involving blackface.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies. The Catered Affair was clearly the least of these, an unsuccessful attempt to combine Marty with Father of the Bride, or more accurately remake Marty as a very gloomy version of Father of the Bride. One can concede that actually making this sort of movie would work if the director had a real idea of mid-fifties American working class life. But Richard Brooks is better known for being a "serious" director than as a good one. Except for one scene where the working class bride's family finds that the much richer groom's family has almost doubled their number of guests, this is an understandably forgotten downer. The apparent idea behind Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was "let's remake The African Queen, with two actors who are almost, but not quite, of the caliber of Bogart and Hepburn. And also, let's ultimately ditch the romantic aspect." The result isn't bad, but it's not particularly good. I can't imagine why the Academy nominated Kerr for this role, instead of for An Affair to Remember, since she spends most of the movie hiding from the Japanese. So the movie of the week is Hit the Road an Iranian road movie in which the family is supposedly arranging an elopement but actually to allow the older son to escape the country. I must say I found this movie more successful than the movie the director's father made a year later and which I mentioned earlier this year. Viewers might wonder why the sons are so far apart in age (six and someone who is no younger than his early twenties), but Rayan Sarlark is very impressive as the rambunctious and rude younger brother.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Over the last two weeks I saw six movies (four this week, two the week before). Let's start with the two starring Paul Newman. Somebody Up There Likes Me made him a star, but he's playing his stupidest character. Not only is it distracting to see how much of this will be taken into Rocky, but how it's clearly inferior to director Robert Wise's earlier The Set-Up. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson starts a period in Robert Altman's career where, after the mostly successful run from MASH to Nashville, Altman went into a period of critical disrespect that arguably didn't recover until The Player. It might be interesting to ask why, since Newman as William Cody, Burt Lancaster as his manager, Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley are all perfectly adequate in their parts, and the somewhat improvised ensemble acting isn't the different from other admired Altman movies. A comparison may explain the problem. McCabe & Mrs. Miller actually subverted the traditional Western in many ways, partly by having it in the Pacific Northwest, more importantly by having one of the hottest Hollywood stars play a forward looking entrepreneur who appears to be little more than a glorified, at times pathetic, pimp. And then the movie plays with that appearance in several unpredictable ways. By contrast, Hollywood has had a bad conscience about Indians for decades, so pointing out the shabbiness of the Wild West show, and not having particular insight about Indians, somewhat undercuts the movie.
Chaplin also appears in Anna and the Wolves, one of Carlos Saura allegories about Francoist Spain. While Chaplin isn't bad in the movie, it's worth of it to make clear why this movie, and others made by Saura, are much less successful than Cria Cuervos, which was also shown on TCM. One reason is that in Wolves, Chaplin's governess character meets three brothers on an estate who clearly represent Patriarchy, the Military, and the Catholic Church. As such, they are ultimately not interesting in themselves, and their final act against Chaplin is more allegorical than artistic. By contrast, Ana Torrent in Cria is amazingly authentic as a child in reacting to her corrupt hypocritical father. Torrent, of course, was a child at the time, but what she achieves here is remarkable. Finian's Rainbow was Fred Astaire's last musical, and, while his numbers are OK, they're not as good as his previous one, Silk Stockings. The movie itself is overly long, and the combination of Irish blarney and forties satire on race relations is not very effective. If you are very patient, and very admiring of Petula Clark, you can see some scenes which suggests Francis Ford Coppola is capable of better things.
The Novelist's Film is another movie by Hong Sang-Soo which suggests I haven't really got the point of Hong Sang-Soo movies. One might appreciate this movie about a series of conversations where a female novelists encounters an actress and they chat, more or less idly, about the actress appearing in an adaptation of one of the novelist's works. More interesting, and certainly more engaging is The Innocents, which is not the adaptation of The Turn of the Screw starring Deborah Kerr but is a more recent Swedish film where several pre-teen children in an increasingly multiracial apartment complex find they have special mental powers. The cinematography is notable in its coldness and its austerity, and one might object to how "tasteful" the increasingly grim events are shown. But I would suggest that the movie does show the authentic desire for hidden, unstoppable power, and therefore the greater shock when one child uses it.
Chaplin also appears in Anna and the Wolves, one of Carlos Saura allegories about Francoist Spain. While Chaplin isn't bad in the movie, it's worth of it to make clear why this movie, and others made by Saura, are much less successful than Cria Cuervos, which was also shown on TCM. One reason is that in Wolves, Chaplin's governess character meets three brothers on an estate who clearly represent Patriarchy, the Military, and the Catholic Church. As such, they are ultimately not interesting in themselves, and their final act against Chaplin is more allegorical than artistic. By contrast, Ana Torrent in Cria is amazingly authentic as a child in reacting to her corrupt hypocritical father. Torrent, of course, was a child at the time, but what she achieves here is remarkable. Finian's Rainbow was Fred Astaire's last musical, and, while his numbers are OK, they're not as good as his previous one, Silk Stockings. The movie itself is overly long, and the combination of Irish blarney and forties satire on race relations is not very effective. If you are very patient, and very admiring of Petula Clark, you can see some scenes which suggests Francis Ford Coppola is capable of better things.
The Novelist's Film is another movie by Hong Sang-Soo which suggests I haven't really got the point of Hong Sang-Soo movies. One might appreciate this movie about a series of conversations where a female novelists encounters an actress and they chat, more or less idly, about the actress appearing in an adaptation of one of the novelist's works. More interesting, and certainly more engaging is The Innocents, which is not the adaptation of The Turn of the Screw starring Deborah Kerr but is a more recent Swedish film where several pre-teen children in an increasingly multiracial apartment complex find they have special mental powers. The cinematography is notable in its coldness and its austerity, and one might object to how "tasteful" the increasingly grim events are shown. But I would suggest that the movie does show the authentic desire for hidden, unstoppable power, and therefore the greater shock when one child uses it.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. Passages was clearly the best of these. Franz Rogowski is indeed very good as a vain, talented director who apparently on impulse leaves his husband (Ben Wishaw) at the end of shooting party to go off with a woman (Adele Exarchopoulos) and then comes back to Whishaw the next morning and says "I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it?" Certainly much better than the first major movie to try this sort of triangle, Sunday Bloody Sunday. Rogowski is the key corner, playing a character who is charismatic, magnetic, but also manipulative and repellent as he switches back and forth between the other two. I thought his performance in Transit was one of the great performances of the previous decade, and this movie shows this was not just a one time thing.
I wouldn't quite say Brass Target was the BOMB that I vaguely remember Leonard Maltin calling it. But this story of immediate postwar intrigue involving a quarter billion dollars of stolen Nazi gold has only more and more problems when you think of it. For a start, given that the theft involves the murder of 59 American soldiers, the actual case quickly loses it energy among the Americans investigating it. (It's even more irritating because, as a Soviet general rightfully points out early in the movie, the money wasn't America's to lose, but belonged to the occupation authority as a whole.) Who murders Patrick McGoohan's character and why? It's the sort of movie which says villains Robert Vaughn and Edward Herrmann are homosexuals in the absence of any other characterization. Why is there so much interest in killing General George Patton when he is about to leave Germany anyway? Although Sophia Loren is giving star billing, she's actually a deus ex machina to point John Cassavetes in the right direction (but after Patton is already dead!) because otherwise he would have no idea who the real killer is. And after showing the care and intelligence the talented assassin took to kill Patton, it then has Cassavetes repeat the shot under remarkably more difficult circumstances to get rid of him in the final reel.
Hitler's Madman is actually the second Hollywood movie to deal with the assassination on Reinhard Heydrich, and also the second one to be made by a director of talent. (Douglas Sirk, after Hangmen Also Die by Fritz Lang). This is the inferior version, and while some can Sirk's pictorial talents in this early film, I doubt he was very pleased with seeing the massacred villagers of Lidice get the sentimental war time propaganda treatment. The movie is inaccurate in a number of respects (Heydrich suffered his fatal attack in Prague, not in Lidice) and someone had the very bad idea of having Himmler played by a bland and plump actor, wholly missing the "creepy scoutmaster meets world historical evil" vibe. I decided to watch Frisco Jenny on reading about its plot: a district attorney tries a "morally compromised" woman for murder, not realizing that she's his own mother. As you might expect, it takes a number of very contrived circumstances to get to this point. But on the other hand director William Wellman is for once making his own pre-code film and not making a film that can be too easily compared to its own detriment with a much better film. And is certainly startled by how far Wellman and star Ruth Chatterton go with the idea.
I wouldn't quite say Brass Target was the BOMB that I vaguely remember Leonard Maltin calling it. But this story of immediate postwar intrigue involving a quarter billion dollars of stolen Nazi gold has only more and more problems when you think of it. For a start, given that the theft involves the murder of 59 American soldiers, the actual case quickly loses it energy among the Americans investigating it. (It's even more irritating because, as a Soviet general rightfully points out early in the movie, the money wasn't America's to lose, but belonged to the occupation authority as a whole.) Who murders Patrick McGoohan's character and why? It's the sort of movie which says villains Robert Vaughn and Edward Herrmann are homosexuals in the absence of any other characterization. Why is there so much interest in killing General George Patton when he is about to leave Germany anyway? Although Sophia Loren is giving star billing, she's actually a deus ex machina to point John Cassavetes in the right direction (but after Patton is already dead!) because otherwise he would have no idea who the real killer is. And after showing the care and intelligence the talented assassin took to kill Patton, it then has Cassavetes repeat the shot under remarkably more difficult circumstances to get rid of him in the final reel.
Hitler's Madman is actually the second Hollywood movie to deal with the assassination on Reinhard Heydrich, and also the second one to be made by a director of talent. (Douglas Sirk, after Hangmen Also Die by Fritz Lang). This is the inferior version, and while some can Sirk's pictorial talents in this early film, I doubt he was very pleased with seeing the massacred villagers of Lidice get the sentimental war time propaganda treatment. The movie is inaccurate in a number of respects (Heydrich suffered his fatal attack in Prague, not in Lidice) and someone had the very bad idea of having Himmler played by a bland and plump actor, wholly missing the "creepy scoutmaster meets world historical evil" vibe. I decided to watch Frisco Jenny on reading about its plot: a district attorney tries a "morally compromised" woman for murder, not realizing that she's his own mother. As you might expect, it takes a number of very contrived circumstances to get to this point. But on the other hand director William Wellman is for once making his own pre-code film and not making a film that can be too easily compared to its own detriment with a much better film. And is certainly startled by how far Wellman and star Ruth Chatterton go with the idea.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. Comanche Autumn is one of John Ford's last movies. It's part of the longer than one might expect Hollywood history of its bad consciences about American Indians. In this story Comanches move from their reservation in the American southeast to some place closer to their ancestral lands in Wyoming. It's competent, perhaps the best movie of the week, with Richard Widmark, Carrol Baker and Edward G. Robinson serving as the white viewer's conscience, while James Stewart has an extended cameo in a not entirely successful comedic sequence which does show some of his strengths. The movie got an oscar nomination for cinematography. The cinematography is certainly not bad, even if I wouldn't have chosen it, and even if much of the 1200 mile trek is shot in the considerably smaller Monument Valley.
Hide in Plain Sight is not a bad movie, though one could argue that its essential message is a bit bogus. James Caan plays a divorced father whose wife gets most of the custody of the children. She remarries, then her new husband enters witness protection, which means Caan can no longer see his children at all. The 1980 advertising emphasizes the government "kidnapping" Caan's children, which is an oversimplification, and we don't get to see much from the mother's perspective. Rabbit Run also stars Caan. It is the film one of the most famous of postwar novels. But the movie was not respected. Caan at the time was not a star, and Updike apparently thought it could be reshot and improved several years after the movie appeared. I'm not sure if it's necessarily worse than more respected seventies movies about unhappy middle class husbands.
Finally there is The Whale, last year's best Actor winner. We start with Brendan Fraser in grotesque form, 600 pounds and frequently on death's door well before the movie ends. As the movie proceeds we learn about the traumas that led to this clearly self-destructive behavior and the relationships involved are somewhat less grotesque. Fraser's performance is better than this questionable scenario suggests, though one still suspects that he won the award out of guilt over how Hollywood treated him.
Hide in Plain Sight is not a bad movie, though one could argue that its essential message is a bit bogus. James Caan plays a divorced father whose wife gets most of the custody of the children. She remarries, then her new husband enters witness protection, which means Caan can no longer see his children at all. The 1980 advertising emphasizes the government "kidnapping" Caan's children, which is an oversimplification, and we don't get to see much from the mother's perspective. Rabbit Run also stars Caan. It is the film one of the most famous of postwar novels. But the movie was not respected. Caan at the time was not a star, and Updike apparently thought it could be reshot and improved several years after the movie appeared. I'm not sure if it's necessarily worse than more respected seventies movies about unhappy middle class husbands.
Finally there is The Whale, last year's best Actor winner. We start with Brendan Fraser in grotesque form, 600 pounds and frequently on death's door well before the movie ends. As the movie proceeds we learn about the traumas that led to this clearly self-destructive behavior and the relationships involved are somewhat less grotesque. Fraser's performance is better than this questionable scenario suggests, though one still suspects that he won the award out of guilt over how Hollywood treated him.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw three movies. The 1976 A Star is Born has the advantage of the five movie versions of having both leads played by talented musicians. Otherwise it has the distinction of having the least interesting director. And despite "Evergreen" being both an oscar winner for best song and a #1 single, I've completely forgotten it. At least "Swallow" from the most recent version was more memorable. I suppose the most interesting scene is the one where Streisand finds a female journalist in bed with her husband and who still expects to interview Streisand. The seventies could be a crazy place, I guess. Night Ambush was a Powell/Pressburger movie I hadn't seen before. This movie about the true story of the kidnapping of a German general from wartime Crete is certainly not of the caliber as the duo's other films. The fact that Powell didn't like the movie in retrospect doesn't help, though I suppose one can see some of his traits in this workmanlike thriller. Lux AEterna is a very short feature (about fifty minutes) in which actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beatrice Dalle play fictional versions of themselves and then go about on the making of their movie about burning witches. As it happens the strobe lights break down and drive poor Gainsbourg batty in her burning at the stake scene. Another dispensable movie from Gaspar Noe.
So clearly the best movie of the week was The Lady Vanishes rewatched in full for the first time in thirty years.
So clearly the best movie of the week was The Lady Vanishes rewatched in full for the first time in thirty years.
Re: Least and Most Favorite Movie of the week
Last week I saw four movies. Cry-Baby is not the most shocking of John Waters' works or, to be frank, his most substantial. It is, however, amusing enough, enjoyable enough, does have early Johnny Depp, and does have Patty Hearst tricked into uttering an obscenity. Certainly more memorable than the original Hairspray. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Barbie. After seeing two movies by Greta Gerwig which asked us to admire her for admiring her amanuenses, she actually finds an objective correlative in imaginative set design, considerable humour, not to mention an actress who was clearly born to play the title role. It also has a clear political argument which it makes with more intelligence and cinematic brio than in similar high-profile movies, and also includes a great last line.
Mrs. Soffel contains ambiguity, nuance, reasonably complex characters and an attractive, competent misc-en-scene. The problem most viewers have it with is whether they should care. Diane Keaton plays a warden's wife who moves from Christian charity for condemned prisoners Mel Gibson and Matthew Modine to some kind of Stockholm syndrome, which however develops before they drag her along after she helps them escape. Apparently based on a true story, though it doesn't seem to be a very interesting one: it's neither a grand passion, a cynical seduction or a betrayed husband. Moonage Daydream is an odd documentary: basically we see images of Bowie as his career takes off after Ziggy Stardust, along with a lot of other images, and we hear him talk as his career develops. It's not a conventional documentary which sets out a clear narrative of what's happening. Now admiring this movie does mean accepting the idea was Bowie was a great artist. I'm more than sympathetic with this idea, though more caustic people will note we don't hear him speculate in the mid-seventies about becoming a fascist dictator. And also the last thirty years of his career are kind of squished. And yet the movie's kaleidoscope of images does reveal much of Bowie's postmodernist moment.
Mrs. Soffel contains ambiguity, nuance, reasonably complex characters and an attractive, competent misc-en-scene. The problem most viewers have it with is whether they should care. Diane Keaton plays a warden's wife who moves from Christian charity for condemned prisoners Mel Gibson and Matthew Modine to some kind of Stockholm syndrome, which however develops before they drag her along after she helps them escape. Apparently based on a true story, though it doesn't seem to be a very interesting one: it's neither a grand passion, a cynical seduction or a betrayed husband. Moonage Daydream is an odd documentary: basically we see images of Bowie as his career takes off after Ziggy Stardust, along with a lot of other images, and we hear him talk as his career develops. It's not a conventional documentary which sets out a clear narrative of what's happening. Now admiring this movie does mean accepting the idea was Bowie was a great artist. I'm more than sympathetic with this idea, though more caustic people will note we don't hear him speculate in the mid-seventies about becoming a fascist dictator. And also the last thirty years of his career are kind of squished. And yet the movie's kaleidoscope of images does reveal much of Bowie's postmodernist moment.
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Allhallowsday
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