Onward

I was completely charmed by Onward from the very beginning. It's a very sweet story of brothers, magic, and cuteness. I expected this movie to make me cry and it did not disappoint. I cried about three times. I also laughed a ton. I think this is really fun.

The Living End (1992)

I had never seen Gregg Araki's The Living End before, but I watched it last night because the Criterion Channel's Pride month celebration has a whole collection of films by Araki in it. The Living End is sexy and fun and irreverent. It's not really a gay Thelma and Louise, as I guess people called it when it originally came out, and the two men certainly do not go on a killing spree as some plot summaries say they do, but they do go on the run on what would appear to be an endless road trip.

Araki is exploring the disaffection of life in the early 1990s for people with HIV. The characters' frustration with the promise of USAmerican success is thrown into relief because they are promised so little of it and not promised a future. In this way, The Living End becomes a fascinating meditation on modern existence.

The men are also violently attacked on all sides, by murderous homophobes, murderous lesbians, murderous heterosexual wives of bisexual husbands. But the violence in the film is campy. This might not work for everyone. It worked for me. It felt actually scary at the same time as Araki mocked it and made it absurd.

Oh! There are a bunch of film posters and other references hidden in plain sight throughout the movie, but my favorite is a physical copy of the soundtrack to Making Love, which can be seen leaning against a window before the couple first has breakfast in Paul's house.

There are two or three more Araki movies in this collection on the Criterion Channel. I'm gonna check out the rest of them soon.

Long Day's Journey into Night (2018)

Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey into Night (地球最後的夜晚) is visually very cool. The 59-minute long take that ends the movie is astounding, and even the first 75 minutes of the film are gorgeously shot, with intriguing use of mirrors and focus, so that one isn't always sure in which direction one is seeing. It's just that all of this isn't very interesting. I liked the protagonist, but everything in the film feels soporific and unnecessarily slow. It's hard to get excited about the character's journey here. He makes a lot of decisions that felt to me like they made no sense at all, and so I really couldn't get that interested in what was going on. There's a very strange scene in a mineshaft with a small boy at the beginning of the final hour that I enjoyed a lot, but other than that I was rather bored.

The Two of Us (1967)

Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant, which was released in the U.S. as The Two of Us in 1968, is a charming, heartwarming comedy about anti-Semitism and French country folks. It's a great little movie, with many lovely insights. I've been meaning to watch this for a long time. Of course, it's on the Criterion Channel now. This channel is the best.

Arizona (1940)

Wesley Ruggles' Arizona is a typical Hollywood colonialist Western epic that thinks "taming Indian territory" is something to celebrate. Jean Arthur is the central figure in this plot, and she is intent on settling in Arizona and intent on Arizona itself becoming settled. Arthur is a kind of figure for Arizona itself as she settles down with a man and exchanges her jeans for dresses and gets married. Ok, so much for themes.

In the plot, Arthur plays a young capitalist wants to get the biggest ranch in Arizona. For a while she is swindled and outwitted by another capitalist (Warren William), but she meets William Holden – who was dreamily cute in 1940 – and settles down with him, after getting the biggest ranch in Arizona. There is lots of shooting (mostly off-screen or in longshot because of the PCA) and there are cattle drives and explosions and big crowd scenes. Ruggles handles all of this well, but the tone of the film is entirely off. Victor Young's score constantly tells us we're watching a comedy. So even when Arthur kidnaps her rival and brings him to her house and holds him at gunpoint – a moment when one might suppose we were supposed to be taking her seriously – we're given lighthearted comic music to tell us not to worry at all. This is all in good fun.

Numerous people are murdered by the film's villain, and in one of the film's final lines we are told that Arthur's character is steel from her topknot to her toes or some such drivel, but there's never really any danger here at all, and Ruggles reminds us that throughout the film so much that I never believed there were any stakes in this little colonialist fantasy at all. As for Arthur, who is perhaps the great comic actress, she's totally miscast as a serious action heroine here, and this makes the whole thing even more comic. She squeaks her way through the script's dangerous sequences, and only really lights up when she's playing romance or at the film's very end when she's called upon to be a strong wife/potential widow.

In any case, Arizona didn't work for me at all.

Ruben Brandt, Collector (2018)

Listen when I tell you that Ruben Brandt a Gyűjtő (Ruben Brandt, Collector) is not to be missed. This animated film is done in a surrealist style while also referencing more works of art than I could count as well as many, many films. One of the main characters drinks whiskey out of a glass with an Alfred Hitchcock ice cube. This is an animated heist movie that is way more fun than you'd imagine. I really, really liked it.

The Watermelon Woman

What a film! This is a hilarious romantic comedy that is also smart and invested in history and filmmaking. The Watermelon Woman is also sexy as hell, with perhaps the quote hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid unquote. I honestly am not sure this is an exaggeration. This film is great.

Also, there is a whole collection of films directed by Cheryl Dunye currently playing on the Criterion Channel, including numerous hilarious and poignant short films. She's excellent, and if you don't know her work, you must check her out.

Born Free (1966)

Truly charming if the actors are a bit stiff. Born Free is a funny, even occasionally silly story about a pair of white British colonists in Kenya who adopt three lion cubs and then have trouble letting them go. A Yearling for the 1960s.

Grand Prix (1966)

I really liked Yves Montand in Grand Prix. He's so great. James Garner, Toshiro Mifune, Eva Marie Saint, and Antonio Sabàto are great too. This is also brilliantly edited and shot – in Cinerama, which allows for all kinds of strange combination shots, like two thirds of the screen a race and one third of the screen an entirely other scene. It's just wonderfully put together.

And, after all, it's a car-racing movie, and so one has a kind of intense reaction to winning and rooting for one's favorite that one has in any sports movie.

Garner does his usual stoic man's-man thing here, and it works well enough, although I think much of his charm is lost on my by 1966. Still, he is humanized well by Jessica Walter and by Mifune.

Overall Grand Prix is a fun movie dressed up as an epic. But Frankenheimer makes a great film, and I still liked it better than Ford v. Ferrari. The racing footage is comparable but Grand Prix's downtime was so much more interesting.

Mahogany (1975)

This movie is iconic. Diana Ross looks incredible in every single scene in the film. She's dressed fabulously, and she is every inch the dynamic movie story. Ross is absolutely a joy to watch. Mohogany is campy, obviously, but goddamn is it perfect! There's even a scene in which she drunkenly yells I'm a winner, baby at Billy Dee Williams, a phrase RuPaul quotes constantly on her show. Understandably. We should all be quoting this film. And Miss Ross did the fashions herself? Come through. Legend.

Sicilian Ghost Story

I really, really liked Sicilian Ghost Story. It's a romantic, spiritual meditation on something really terrible that happened in Sicily in the 1990s. The performances of the two leads are just perfect, and the film is beautifully written and beautifully shot. This is great.

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

To Be or Not to Be is brilliant. This Ernst Lubitsch gem switches from broadly hilarious to deadly serious with superb deftness. Lubitsch has made a perfect film. It's just so funny while also being very, very serious and – in the last act and according to the rule of threes – deeply moving.

The Wandering Soap Opera (2017)

La Telenovela Errante was funny and weird and slightly surreal. It's an absurdist satire in the style of a novela, but it's a satire of... well... I don't quite know because I'm not Chilean. It felt like I missed a lot of these references.

The entire thing is made even stranger by the fact that Raúl Ruiz wasn't able to finish the film before he died, and so the film we see is something compiled after his death and finally released in the U.S. only in 2019.

La Telenevola Errante is a densely referential film, and it's at least partially about the Dirty War, about torture, about the desaparecidos. Most of this, though, I missed. Still, I laughed a lot even if this wasn't made for me.

Beverly Hills Cop

Beverly Hills Cop is pretty much perfect. It's an excellent script with a brilliant central performance by Eddie Murphy, and it's really, really funny.

Bugsy Malone (1976)

Bugsy Malone is decidely weird. I was super into the whole child-actors-playing-mobsters thing. It's really fun. What I think I don't understand is the lipsynching. The kids don't actually sing their own numbers but instead are dubbed by adult singers. It's a gimmick, and one sort of gets used to it, I suppose, but I am not sure why it was happening. Jodie Foster is amazing. She's so much better than everyone else in this movie, but honestly the whole thing is super cute.

Also, a kid wants to be a tap-dancer and tells us this in act one, and so I predicted we'd get to see him tap the house down in act three, but no dice. For some reason he has a number about wanting to be a dancer early in this film but then never actually does it. This is perhaps Bugsy Malone's main flaw.

Blue Thunder (1983)

In many ways Blue Thunder was very, very weird. The technology in it is absurd. In fact, it's completely incredible (by which I mean not believable), and the film itself is strangely sexist – not that sexism is strange, but this film is sexist in ways that I thought were really weird.

Also, this film's politics as related to policing are not very well considered. The villains are (as far as I can tell) fomenting racialized violence in Los Angeles as a way to get funding for militarized helicopter patrols for the police... or something like that.

And our hero defeats them, although it is decidedly unclear whose idea this is or whom this militarized police force would benefit.

In other words, this film was still completely relevant 37 years later.

Either way this has some fun editing – there are good car chases – and the effects are pretty cool.

The Magic Flute (1975)

Trollflöjten is a simultaneously weird and breathtaking Magic Flute. It feels totally un-Bergman, but there are also some gorgeous moments, particularly the quiet scenes off-stage between acts one and two. The costumes are also very cool, and the art direction is lovely.

Making Love

Arthur Hiller, who directed Love Story, directed Making Love. Now, I have known about this movie for many, many years as an early gay movie (1982!), but I'd never seen it because I assumed it was going to be a) mostly a soap opera and b) kinda homophobic. It wasn't really either of those things.

Instead it's a beautifully realized, nuanced film about three very different people. It's a romantic drama in the truest, most serious sense, and it isn't really even melodramatic. It's almost sensible. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And it has a great supporting performance by Dame Wendy Hiller. Actually, all the actors are very good, and Harry Hamlin has a great part as the stud Bart who doesn't want a relationship. Most importantly, this is not a homophobic film, and it isn't sex-negative either.

Before I say anything else, I think it is also important to say that Michael Ontkean, who plays the film's lead, is dreamy as all hell. Kate Jackson is gorgeous. And Harry Hamlin is very, very sexy in this.

I think the most extraordinary section of Making Love is this insane sequence when the wife finds a matchbook from the gay bar with an address written inside it and decides to go to the address, announce herself as the husband of this man, and then ask the man a bunch of questions about her husband. The man, of course, knows nothing about this guy. He slept with him once. There is literally a tub of vaseline in the shot, just sitting on this guy's end table while he talks to her. But she asks him a whole bunch of questions including: Are you happy? He just looks at her and says, "Yeah. I get mad when I'm stuck in traffic; I don't like to pay my bills; I eat well; I live my life. I'm as happy as the next person." It's just a stunning sequence. Making Love is a film that actually wants to emphasize the idea of gay happiness, that being gay does not equate to being miserable. Happiness is actually possible for the gay men in Making Love. It's a really surprising film in so many ways.

The Three Musketeers (1974)

Now I know The Three Musketeers was originally written for the Beatles, and so its madcap humor is supposed to work in a particular way, but the trouble is I just didn't think any of this was really very funny.

The costumes are very, very cool. Honestly. But the rest of this thing just didn't really work. Its humor was sort of lost on me, and I really thought that both Michael York and Raquel Welch were boring. My lord Welch is beautiful, but she is truly terrible in this movie.

I've been curious to see this film (and its sequel The Four Musketeers) since I read in Faye Dunaway's autobiography that the actors thought they were only making one film. (You can read about this, but the actors sued, and now there is a clause in every SAG contract that the actor is only making a single film.)

Reading reviews of this movie, I feel like maybe I missed something – like maybe the jokes were just going over my head...? Perhaps they were. I will probably watch the sequel too. Maybe I'll start to understand Richard Lester's humor when Faye is onscreen more.

Safe (1995)

Well... Safe is fucked up and weird. It's so weird to watch this movie about HIV in the moment of COVID-19. I totally respected this, and there's so much good stuff, but Safe was hard to love.

Oscar (1967)

Oscar is one of the funniest films I've seen in years. It's a farcical gem directed by Édouard Molinaro  (who directed the hilarious La Cage aux Folles, which was – as you probably know – remade as The Birdcage) that would work just as well as a stage play – it has a unit set – but which Molinaro has made wonderfully cinematic. The farce feels like a kind of French Joe Orton, with similar morals (although less queer). This movie had me in hysterics. The lead actor, the brilliant Louis de Funès, just does bit after bit, and it is hilarious. I cannot recommend it enough if you need something just stupidly funny.

The Decameron

Il Decameron is delightful. Totally fun and very much captures the spirit of playfulness and cleverness that is such a hallmark of Boccaccio's great novel. (I adore this novel, for the record. It's enormously long and I couldn't put it down!) Pasolini's film is sexy and fun, and even though I saw it more than a week ago, I haven't stopped thinking about it. I watched it on the Criterion Channel ... and I had meant also to watch Pasolini's Canterbury Tales, but I ran out of time and now it's no longer playing on the channel. Guess I'll catch the Chaucer one some other time.

Tomboy (2011)

Tomboy is an astoundingly good little movie. A trans kid who is maybe nine or ten tells the kids in his new neighborhood that his name is Mickäel instead of Laure. Sciamma has gotten absolutely gorgeous performances out of her child stars, Zoé Héran and Malonn Lévana, and we get to watch their relationship with their parents, which is deeply touching, and watch little Mickäel figure out how he wants to move about in the world. I loved this.

Gilda

This is iconic. Obviously Rita Hayworth is the best thing about Gilda. She's incredible, unexpected, unpredictable, sexy as all hell, compelling, gorgeous, and nearly every other adjective you can throw at her. It's extraordinary that she went from singing and tapping with Fred Astaire in 1941 and '42 to playing this role in a Columbia noir with Glenn Ford. Extraordinary. But the picture itself is also exquisitely written. I had no idea what was going to happen for most of the movie, and most of the Gilda is terrifyingly menacing. It's shot beautifully in a noir style, and I loved it from start to finish.

The Slender Thread (1965)

Wow wow wow. I actually find it sort of hard to believe that somebody (Sydney Pollack, in fact) made this movie in 1965 with two of Hollywood's biggest stars. It's a movie about a woman who wants to commit suicide and the man she calls at the suicide helpline. This is a fast-paced, seat-of-your-pants script that is brilliantly written, generously humane, and deeply poignant. It's truly excellent.

I watched this movie on Criterion – the fourth movie I've seen on the "Scored by Quincy Jones" channel. Jones's score is, of course, great.

The Italian Job (1969)

The Italian Job is so funny and so much fun. I loved it. The fashion is great. The Quincy Jones score is excellent. The car chase is incredible. The whole thing is just an absolute blast. It is insane that this wasn't a huge hit in the U.S., but then this poster has nothing to do with the film, which has no machine guns at all that I can remember.

The Karate Kid Part II (1986)

Listen, The Karate Kid Part II is extremely predictable at every turn, but, for all that, this is a fairly enjoyable orientalist fantasy. Pat Morita is excellent as always, and Yuji Okumoto makes for a very, very good looking villain. It is also pretty funny to see all of these Japanese-American Angeleno actors playing Japanese characters who allegedly barely speak English.

P.S. I didn't realize just how young Ralph Macchio looks in these movies. He is a baby child!