Wyatt Earp (1994)

I gotta be honest. I had a lot of trouble telling all of these mustachioed men in Wyatt Earp apart. They truly all looked the same to me. And so I know that there was some clan that Wyatt Earp needed to kill, but I couldn't have picked a single one of those men out of a lineup. 

As for this 190-minute epic film, I really don't understand why USAmericans were so into three-hour movies with Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson or Tom Hanks in the 1990s. This fucking drags. 

And there is another problem too. Costner is a stoic dickhead throughout for whom it is almost impossible to feel any kind of sympathy. The film tries to dig into some ethical problems or something, but it fails at this. Instead we get a bloody revenge film pretending to be something resembling law and order. No law and order about it. This is just a vigilante film about a dude I didn't like very much. 

I will say I quite liked Dennis Quaid in this. But I don't have much else to say that is good. Oh, actually no I do. The photography is pretty great at times.

This was the final film I needed to see from the 1995 Oscars. I watched this, if you can believe it, on DVD. It was split into two discs, even. Extra old school.

Twice in a Lifetime (1985)

Honestly, and I mean this sincerely, who cares? 

Twice in a Lifetime is a Bud Yorkin movie about a fifty-year-old guy who is bored with his very boring wife and finds someone much more fun and attractive who is actually interested in him and wants to leave the house and stop watching television. But here's the thing, everyone in this movie is a sad-sack. I think maybe this would be interesting if this weren't scripted like a kind of Hallmark thing with tidy endings and silly platitudes, but it is scripted like that.

The worst part about Twice in a Lifetime is that Amy Madigan, who plays the main couple's oldest daughter, is furious about her parents breaking up and can't seem to be even remotely reasonable about it. Instead she shrieks at her mother, shrieks at her father, shrieks at her little kid and just generally makes things much, much worse. It's really painful. And most of the movie I was saying oh, grow up, kid. She plays a twenty-seven-year-old who behaves like a teenager. It's embarrassing. What's odd about this is that I am not sure how the movie feels about this foolish woman. Her point of view is sort of treated as if it's reasonable. It isn't remotely reasonable.

Anyway, this was a bit of a slog. It's just not very enjoyable to watch. And of course that's fine in a movie, but this one doesn't have a point of view about any of it. It's just a story of a marriage that broke up and the two people in it got a new lease on life. Good for them, I say, but not much fun for the viewer.

In Too Deep (1999)

My reasons for watching In Too Deep were purely work related. I did not actually know that LL Cool J's character rapes a man in this movie, but he sure the hell does. In a book I'm working on, I have a chapter on '90s films with male-male rape in them, so I clearly needed to watch this. It was not terrible, but it felt completely unrelated to the real world. And, after all, I don't think this belongs in the chapter. The guy LL Cool J rapes is not really a large part of the film at all. It's a very weird sequence with a pool cue. And it's followed by one in which he orally rapes a woman with a gun. But the entirety of this material is designed to show the audience that LL Cool J really must be stopped. He's more than a violent man, he's really unhinged. (I am not sure, incidentally, that these events in the film accomplish the filmmakers' goals, but oh well. It's not exactly a great movie.)

Tobruk (1967)

Tobruk has some great effects. George Peppard, Guy Stockwell, and Nigel Green are great, but Rock Hudson is extra wooden in this one. Still, there are some truly awesome fire fights. And Tobruk has dialogue in French, German, Italian, and Arabic – all of which is done without subtitles. Anyway, this film is exciting enough, but the plot is frequently confusing, and the movie is light on character development. Oh, this movie is also pro-Israel propaganda... not in an awful way but certainly in a way that is insistent.

Pigs and Battleships (1961)

Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦) is a dizzyingly funny crime film that is also a satire, not only of U.S.–Japan relations, but also of the yakuza in general. 

Despite Pigs and Battleships' presence on the Criterion Channel's Japanese Noir playlist, this is not a noir film.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

Absolute perfection. I cannot believe that The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero were released seven months apart. Eddie Bracken is hilarious, and the script is flat-out brilliant. William Demarest is an unsung comic genius.

I watched Hail the Conquering Hero on the Criterion Channel as part of the Preston Sturges series. It's leaving the channel on May 31, but you can always rent this gem somewhere else. And you should.

Ammonite

I like Francis Lee, and I like both of these actresses, but I found Ammonite pretty boring.

Fire Will Come

O Que Arde (Fire Will Come) is a mostly intriguing study of light, smoke, fire, and fog. What plot there is doesn't really work, and I'm not sure the movie is trying to do much other than look at fog and fire. Not that I blame Oliver Laxe; what he shoots is certainly visually interesting.

I watched Fire Will Come on the Criterion Channel.

The Blue Dahlia (1946)

The Blue Dahlia is a tight, exciting crime movie. It's not a film noir, but the script is superb, and Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are just so excellent.

That Hamilton Woman! (Exclamation Only for the Poster)

That Hamilton Woman is kind of great – whether Winston Churchill wrote some of it or not. This is a WWII movie disguised as a movie about a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Vivien Leigh is wonderful, and the gowns and the production design and the visual effects are excellent. It's a true Alexander Korda picture: big budget, fancy costumes, enormous naval battles. Delightful stuff. All of this is couched in a rather tiresome old plot about jilted wives and cheating husbands and other infidelities, but it's good fun all the same.

Sister (L'Enfant d'en Haut)

Sister was superb. It's a story about a very poor boy who steals things from a wealthy ski resort in order to support him and his sister. It's tense like a potboiler, and I found myself waiting for something really dangerous to happen. As my friend Christina said, though, the violence here is all slow and in the background. It's a devastating movie in many ways. I loved this.

Also, I think the title in English might be better than the title in the original French. That doesn't happen a lot, but whoever came up with Sister did a great job.

The Band Wagon (1953)

The Band Wagon is a neglected gem. The gowns, Mary. The choreography by Michael Kidd! Cyd Charisse! The first number Astaire and Charisse do together is legitimately transcendent. And then the gowns in act three. It's great drag, even if the songs aren't quite memorable.

The Hot Rock (1972)

I watched The Hot Rock tonight because George Segal just died and this movie was on the Criterion Channel. Honestly this crime caper–comedy is a delight from start to finish. Redford and Segal are great together, and the whole thing is hilarious. RIP George Segal.

Banning (1967)

I really like Robert Wagner. In all sorts of things. Banning is, oddly enough, a golf movie, although it begins by being a kind of con-artist/seduction kind of thing. I quite enjoyed the con-artist/seduction part. The golf part is not that interesting. 

The big golf showdown involves a kind of auction game where someone bids on a team winning a large golf tournament. This is called a Calcutta, and I've never heard of anything like it before. This kind of thing was apparently widely understood by Banning's audience, because the film itself takes no time to explain the rules. I had to pause the movie in the middle and read up on golf Calcuttas.

Wagner is handsome and clever, and Guy Stockwell and James Farentino are, too. Jill St. John is totally delightful, but Anjanette Comer is legitimately terrible in this. I've never heard of her before, so perhaps she's terrible in everything? Who's to say. 

This is an odd, sexy little film with a sleek script that I haven't seen available in many places. It was on my radar because the main song in the film was a) composed by Quincy Jones and b) nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1968. I watched it through the Cave of Forgotten Films.

Mother Wore Tights (1947)

Mother Wore Tights is cute. It's pretty standard fare, though, and the conflict – of which there is very little – involves one of the characters learning not to be such an asshole snob and accept that her parents are awesome even though they're vaudevillians. Still, Betty Grable is fun, and the whole thing works quite well.

Godzilla vs. Kong – Allegedly

Call it Godzilla vs. Kong if you want, but then put them in the movie more! 

I was bored by this movie, and the reason for that is that there are like two plots and neither of them really has anything at all to do with monsters fighting. There's this corporate corruption subplot that is supposed to be funny and is filled with jokes (apparently) but Brian Tyree Henry is not funny at all in this, and he runs around with Millie Bobby Brown (also not funny in this) and Julian Dennison, and one can see where there are supposed to be jokes, but this entire plot is not funny, and there are no monsters. This takes up a lot of the movie. 

There is also a whole thing where a small child can talk to Kong using sign language. Kong never really says anything, though. His communicative abilities are restricted to I'm sad and Home and I don't trust your conniving ass. The CGI is cool, and Kong has neat fur. And, listen, I love Godzilla. But he's just barely in this damn movie.

The Blue Angel (1930)

The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) is an excellent Weimar-era tragedy starring the great Emil Jannings. It feels very much like a play still (it is one – by Carl Zuckmayer), but its emotional force comes through.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel as part of a series on collaborations between Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg.

Blancanieves (2012)

Blancanieves, one of the three Snow White movies to arrive in 2012 (this one was released in the U.S. in 2013), starts out interesting but winds up being rather a disappointment. This is a silent film set in the 1910s and 1920s, but it isn't really ever clear why this needs to be a silent film just because it is set in the silent era of cinema. There is absolutely never a payoff in Blancanieves for it being a silent film. No theatrical flourish in which we suddenly have sound, for example, the way that we get in 2011's The Artist.

The highlight of Blancanieves – as with Snow White and the Huntsman and Mirror Mirror – is the evil stepmother who, in this film, is played with divalicious, hilarious relish by Maribel Verdú. She's fabulous in this, and every single thing she does is over the top and wonderful. (The Spanish poster, as you can see, is not at all confused about who the star of this film is.)

Snow White is also a bullfighter in this film, and that allows for plenty of fun, too, but again there is no real emotional payoff. She doesn't have a relationship with any of the bulls, and neither do we.

The one place where I truly thought the movie was going to break new ground is with Snow White's love interest. In Blancanieves, the film indicates that Snow White's love interest is actually one of the dwarves (the very handsome Sergio Dorado). And so it looks as if Blancanieves will tell us that he is her one true love and it will be him who wakes her up with a kiss. But... then the film refuses to let that happen, and it ends, instead, with a whimper. Snow White becomes part of a freak show and no one ever wakes her up at all. It's a very disappointing finish to a movie that had rather a lot going for it. 

Mother India (1957)

Oooo the drama. Mother India (मदर इण्डिया) is an epic (three-hour) musical melodrama from Mehboob Khan, but it is mostly enjoyable, and there are elements that are absolutely brilliant. The most important aspects are the film's struggle between honor and justice. This is the central question of the film, and it is embodied by Radha and her son Birju, who represent honor and justice, respectively. This is a hard and emotional battle, and although honor wins in the end, the film really isn't sure whether it's right to choose honor. It's a very interesting movie.

Destination Moon (1950)

For one of the first movies to depict space travel, Destination Moon is awfully boring. This is a bit of weird nationalist–capitalist propaganda. It's not without interest, though. It contains an intriguing animated sequence with Woody Woodpecker explaining the science behind space travel, and its images of the moon and of the space ship are interesting. The movie itself just doesn't have much content to it.

The Buccaneer (1958)

I was in the mood for some swashbuckling, and thought maybe I would watch The Buccaneer (the 1958 remake of the original Cecil B. DeMille film from twenty years earlier). This movie is a hot mess. In the first place, this movie is (bizarrely) directed by Anthony Quinn, the only film he ever directed. But the reason he did this was because his father-in-law DeMille was too sick to work on this movie.

This is a remake of the 1938 Buccaneer with Fredric March, but it's also clearly of a piece with DeMille's general interests – I recently watched Reap the Wild Wind from 1942, and it's also about pirates and going straight and comparisons between civilization and banditry.

But The Buccaneer might actually be dumber and worse than Reap the Wild Wind (though it certainly repeats most of its plot points). It stars Yul Brynner (who's great) and Charlton Heston (who is ridiculous) and Charles Boyer (who is perfect). Almost everything else is laughable. The screenplay is absurd. Just when you think the movie is done it introduces an entire stupid fourth act. The production design is awful. Every single scene looks like it was filmed on a cheaply made set. The costumes are perhaps the film's only redeeming quality. They're legitimately gorgeous.

Yul Brynner is delightfully shirtless on this movie's poster, but unfortunately appears with a shirt in all of the movie's scenes.

There is a most curious moment in the terrible fourth act that is relevant, perhaps, to theatre history. Jean Lafitte and his fiancée are dancing, and the blonde milquetoast fiancée is congratulated by Andrew Jackson on her dancing and he mentions his wife. What he says is something to the effect of: If my wife were here I'd have her teach you "Possum Up a Gum Tree". Everyone laughs and applauds. It's a really weird moment, mostly because no one today knows that song at all, but it was obviously a reference that many people were supposed to get (in 1958?). "Possum Up a Gum Tree" is a famous song that Charles Mathews used to sing in blackface in his show A Trip to America in the 1820s as a mockery of Black Americans (and Americans in general). Later, the African American actor Ira Aldridge would sing "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in his own act, incorporated into performances of Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock. But The Buccaneer is set in the War of 1812, so the reference here is anachronistic. It's a very strange and gratuitous blackface reference in a film about the history of Louisiana.

Lucky Grandma (2019)

Lucky Grandma (幸運的奶奶) is funny and charming, and Tsai Chen is great. It's very well directed, and it's Sasie Sealy's first feature! I enjoyed myself a lot, and laughed a lot, as well. This is good fun, and doesn't get mired in sentimentality the way one might expect a film about an irascible grandmother to get.

Quo Vadis, Aida?

I loved Quo Vadis, Aida?. The central performance, by Jasna Đuričić is incredible, and the film itself is stunning, even merciless. But this story of the tragedy of the Srebrenica massacre isn't relentless at all. It leaves space for the viewer to breathe and process while also never minimizing the brutality of what happened. It's an excellent film.

The phrase, Quo Vadis?, incidentally, is a reference to Saint Peter, who deserts his people in Rome, but the Christ appears to him as he flees and he asks the Christ where are you going? The Christ replies Back to Rome, to be crucified again. Upon hearing this, Peter's courage returns to him and he goes back to Rome to be martyred. It's quite a literary reference to live up to. But this movie manages it. Quo Vadis, Aida? is really stunning, and it doesn't sell the suffering it portrays short. And the ending of the movie? It's chilling.

Quo Vadis, Aida? was nominated for Best International Film at the Academy Awards for 2020+, and it was released for distribution in the U.S. in 2021. You can watch Quo Vadis, Aida? on Amazon or anywhere else you buy video on demand.

The Good Shepherd

With a better script Greyhound could have been a pretty exciting movie. Even with its terrible script – which focuses on religion for a risible amount of time – it's frequently exciting and often a bit of a nailbiter. But, as usual, Tom Hanks is kind of boring. And the script – which Hanks himself penned (really?!) – treats the main character as some kind of saint whose weird behavior is not quirky but instead some kind of mysteriously magical power. (This is, presumably, in the source material, a memoir by the main character that is titled (rather ambitiously) The Good Shepherd.) There is also a shallow frame with a love interest, and director Aaron Schneider weirdly insists, throughout, on referring to dead people as "souls". As in, "We lost 200 souls last night." It's weird. 

The fights are cool. The rest of it is silly.

Pieces of a Woman

Everyone says so, and everyone is right. The first thirty minutes of this film are really, really great. The remaining 95 minutes are a predictable melodrama. The camerawork is great, and of course Mundruczó has great style. Pieces of a Woman is well made; it's just that there's not much to it.

You know... the thing about dead babies in films – this is not quite as true onstage, but I think it is true of films – is that they're replaceable. It's easy to jump forward 2 years or 1 year or whatever, and magically, poof, there can be a baby. Or even a full-grown six-year old or whatever. It's just so easy. So the stakes just don't seem very high to me in a movie when someone loses a baby. The filmmaker can get you another one without any trouble; don't worry.

It is surprising that Mundruczó decided to direct something like this after directing the intense White God. I don't really understand that, but, well, as I will say it again: the first thirty minutes are really stellar.

Turbo Kid (2015)

Turbo Kid is for the SXSW crowd. This is a kind of nostalgic dystopian film in the vein of Mad Max. Actually, this film loves Mad Max. I would say that Turbo Kid's main selling point is that it does its gross-out blood effects in the old-school way. No CGI. All geysers of blood and dismembered corpses spouting viscera at the camera. I didn't hate it or anything, but it's really gross, and its particular brand of nostalgia just isn't aimed at me.

The Man Who Sold His Skin

The Man Who Sold His Skin (الرجل الذي باع ظهره) is very good. I really like films about art, for the record. This movie is not up to the level of Museum Hours or The Square, but it's definitely intriguing, and Yahya Mahayni is great. I really enjoyed this. I think the reason it doesn't quite get to the level of brilliance is that the director, Kaouther Ben Hania, isn't willing to let her film be a tragedy. There's a moment near the end of the film where it really feels like she's going to let the bottom drop out, but a Hollywood sensibility brings us back around and the movie unfortunately can't stick its ending. Still, there's a lot of good stuff here, and as I said Yahya Mahayni is excellent.

The artist on which the entire premise of The Man Who Sold His Skin is based – Wim Delvoye – makes a cameo appearance in the film (his art does too), and so perhaps his involvement necessitated that we look at this artist in a more heroic light than we normally might.

Anyway, this is my first 2021 film, and it was good!

The Mark (1961)

The Mark is a pretty extraordinary film about the way that society punishes formerly incarcerated individuals, especially so-called sex offenders. The Mark is made very well, and it's a stunningly humane portrayal. I really appreciated this and also really enjoyed it. It's a remarkable movie. Rod Steiger is brilliant in this.