The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

Gene Tierney is a delight in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and even Rex Harrison's usual masculine bravado is sort of charming. Charming, incidentally, is the correct word for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a strange, pleasurable fantasy of a film that is impeccably directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as he moves deftly between romance, comedy, and drama. This is really lovely, and its photography is gorgeous.

My Foolish Heart (1949)

No thank you. My Foolish Heart is a real mess. It starts off by giving us a portrait of a young woman as a spoiled bitch – this is the kind of part Susan Hayward would excel at playing forever – but then we are supposed, somehow, to see her as an innocent kid falling in love and all that jazz. Didn't work for a second. You set up a thing like that and it's difficult to break. 

Even worse, this part could've been played by any actress from the period and we would've gotten a similar performance. It's just not that great a part. It's a version of Olivia De Havilland's part in To Each His Own (a movie I also disliked, for the record). 

Incidentally, was 1949 the worst year for Best Actress nominees ever? No wonder De Havilland won her second Oscar for The Heiress. It's easily the best performance among these 5 nominees. 

Worse yet, Dana Andrews, who is top billed in My Foolish Heart, phones his performance in! A mess from start to finish. I never even got around to liking any of the characters! Except Robert Keith. He's at least having fun in all of his scenes.

La Jeune Fille sans Mains (2016)

I've never seen an animated feature drawn like The Girl without Hands. It's just gorgeous – meditative and strange and quirky and grotesque. I loved it. Definitely worth watching.

Lingua Franca (2020)

Lingua Franca is good – not great – but Isabel Sandoval is excellent and so is Eamon Farren. Where the movie falters is in its thematics. The title, for example, refers to language, but the film isn't really about the way that the characters love one another or communicate with one another. It certainly isn't about a lingua franca of some kind. I also felt like the movie directed its attention in just a few too many places. This could have been a film about both central characters or it could just have been a film about Isabel Sandoval's character. It tries to split the difference - to give us some of Farren's character's story without delving too deeply. This doesn't quite work. The one other thing I found annoying about this was the way the film continued to come back to Donald Trump in clunky ways. Of course Lingua Franca, which is the story of an undocumented woman working as a caregiver in New York, is about the hateful xenophobic policies Republicans and Donald Trump have perpetuated. It would be fairly difficult to watch a story like this and be confused about that. No need to underline the point awkwardly for us. So... the filmmaking has some problems, but I liked this movie. It's romantic and sad and occasionally very smart. It tells a story about trans women in the U.S. that is seriously underexplored, and the actress–director telling the story does so in mostly understated ways with an beautiful performance.

Lingua Franca is available to watch on Netflix now.

Poltergeist II: the Other Side (1986)

Poltergeist II is relentlessly stupid. It also basically undermines the plot of the first film – in which the family is haunted by an Indian graveyard. In this film, Native American spirits are here to help! The real enemy is (apparently) a demonic cult leader and his dead followers. The cult leader is played by... and this is the only true reason to watch this film... Julian Beck of The Living Theatre. He is totally fucking creepy as this demon-possessed motherfucker. Otherwise – except for one sequence where a giant alien-demon comes out of Craig T. Nelson's mouth – this movie is really fuckin dumb.

Tri (1965)

Tri (Three) is a three-part film set in Yugoslavia, with each part set at a different period during WWII. Bata Zivojinović is the main character in each of the sequences, and he's really excellent. Aleksandar Petrović's film is unflinching and occasionally difficult but always riveting drama. It is in fact brilliantly directed, with act one being a powerful, tragic character study, act two an adventure film, and act three a kind of quiet, meditative drama. Each of the stories feels profound. I loved this.

Two Petrović movies were nominated for the oscar for Best Foreign Language film - Tri and the film he would make next, I Even Met Happy Gypsies, which is also excellent.

Tri is rather hard to get hold of, however. I downloaded my copy from the great website The Cave of Forgotten Films which has been shut down by opponents of freedom.

The Getaway (1972)

The Getaway is typical, enjoyable Peckinpah. McQueen and McGraw are exactly what you'd expect – the kind of action stars who are great at action but whose acting is so good that you forget that their real purpose is to shoot people or plot heists. The script for The Getaway is great, and it's a kind of unconventional heist film in that the heist takes place early on and the rest of the film is the getaway – styled, in other words, along the line of The Thomas Crown Affair. It's a totally serviceable genre picture.

The Limits of Control

The Limits of Control is fine. It looks cool. But I am not sure it's all that interesting.

The Big Broadcast of 1936 (except that it came out in 1935)

Not to be confused with The Broadway Melody of 1936, which was also released in 1935, The Big Broadcast of 1936 is really asinine but surprisingly turns out to be quite funny. There are a lot of great bits in it, and the Nicholas Brothers, who are very young in 1935 and don't make the poster, are in it a lot. The film is decidedly harmed by the presence of Amos 'n Andy doing a completely unfunny blackface bit (it is so weird to me that white audiences thought nothing of watching African American performers sing numbers right before watching white performers in blackface do other numbers). But Ethel Merman sings "The Animal in Me", Norman Taurog directs the whole thing quite ably, and Gracie Allen is a delight.

Australian New Wave III

Am I obsessed with the Australian New Wave? I might be.  

Sunday Too Far Away is another – less well known in the United States – Australian New Wave film, and this one is excellent. I absolutely loved it. It's so smart and so affecting. 

This is not a film about a strike – despite apparently every synopsis of the film online – although, there is a strike late in the film. Instead Sunday Too Far Away is about labor and laborers as such. We follow a group of laborers led stunningly by Jack Thompson. This is a superb film from start to finish, brilliantly directed by Ken Hannam. The tone is really balanced perfectly between adventure, mourning, Marxist observation, humor, and sublimity. I have nothing but good things to say. 

It deserves to be considered alongside the great films about labor and unionizing from this same period in other parts of the world. I am thinking of films like Actas de Marusia (also 1975), I Compagni (1964), Blood on the Land (1965), La Venganza (1958), Ådalen 31 (1969), and The Molly Maguires (1970).

And Jack Thompson truly is brilliant. I am glad Hollywood got Mel Gibson and Sam Neill and Judy Davis out of the Australian New Wave, but we really deserved to get Thompson too. He's just so damn good in this.

The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019)

Giuseppe Capotondi's The Burnt Orange Heresy is not good. It starts off interestingly enough – drug-addicted art critic who is spending more than he's making (Claes Bang), young woman who clearly isn't telling the truth about who she is (Elizabeth Debicki), daffy old painter (Donald Sutherland, unscrupulous art collector (Mick Jagger) – so there should have been intrigue and perhaps some wisdom and a few thrills. The Burnt Orange Heresy would like to be The Talented Mr. Ripley, with schemes on schemes on schemes and real identities revealed or better yet hidden forever. But this movie was actually just rather boring. The script feels slightly off, stilted, with several real clunkers – especially as delivered by Donald Sutherland. Debicki is interesting enough, and I residually love her from her great performance in the equally stilted crime film Widows, and I like Claes Bang, too. But this movie just kind of sucked. It's not very thrilling or exciting, and Capotondi's gaze is sort of flat. He's interested in "telling the story", and one isn't really sure how to feel about any of what we're watching, as though the director doesn't have an opinion on the film's proceedings at all. There are some surprising moments in the third act, but they came too little too late for me, and then the actual end of the film is almost insistently, intensely boring.

Australian New Wave II

Nope nope nope. I liked Mad Max for its Australian New Wave-ness and for nothing else. I fail to understand George Miller's work. It doesn't seem the least bit cool to me, even though it's attempting to project coolness and masculinity throughout. And the villains – as in all of his films – are dangerous and violent, of course, but also laughable and stupid. The main guy in this one (his name is Toecutter) has one eyebrow shaved off and is constantly doing little kindergarten gymnastics as if he never graduated from tumbling. I think the thing that is especially distasteful about this film is its reliance on disability imagery as grotesquerie for its ideas of horror. I am going to keep watching more Australian New Wave, because I'm interested in the movement now, but George Miller is not my style. (I didn't care for Mad Max: Fury Road either.)

Broken Arrow (1950)

Meh. Broken Arrow is, like, fine, but it's full colonialist fantasy. Good white man learns that Chiricahua Apaches are humans. Congratulations.

The movie itself is well shot, but the script is drivel even if it is well intentioned. And James Stewart doesn't work for me as a cowboy. I just don't like him in westerns. I can only see him as a city boy.

I guess this is the second Delmer Daves western in a month or so that I have thought was just not that great. Sorry about it Delmer Daves, but I'm just not here for it.

The Competition (1980)

The Competition is a bad movie. Amy Irving is good, but something is off with Richard Dreyfuss in this film, and it isn't just the terrible hat he wears in every scene; his makeup (or plastic surgery?) seem off. His cheeks are weirdly filled. It's very strange. 

Anyway, the worst part of this movie is not him. It's Lee Remick, who gives a kind of grande dame diva performance for an audience of no one at all. It's really odd and makes no sense. 

The script is bad, too, I don't mind saying. 

The only redeeming element here (aside from Irving, who is good but surprisingly boring) is Joseph Cali, who plays a smaller part and is captivating in every scene.

This was the first film made by Joel Oliansky, who wrote and directed The Competition. He never made a second film. 

In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (1974)

In Gefahr und Größter Not Bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death) is a protest drama from West Germany in the mid-1970s. It's interesting as a kind of time capsule of politics from the period. And the filmmaking is intriguing. But this style of thing just isn't for me. Why am I not into documentaries? I do not understand this about myself.

Asignatura Aprobada (1987)

I am not really sure why none of the plot synopses of Asignatura Aprobada (Course Completed) on the internet is correct. This is not a film about a man who has several affairs. In fact he doesn't even have one! Asignatura Aprobada is a film about a man who is reckoning with being alone and the decisions he's made that have brought him to his solitude. He is an asshole – something he freely admits to his son and friends – and he chased away his girlfriend, whom he loved deeply.

Asignatura Aprobada is about growing old and time and regret and not knowing what to do next. It's about not being able to stop yourself from saying the wrong thing and being too self centered to make the other people in your life more important. It's a great film. I also love Garci's filmmaking. He refuses to give us any exposition, starting off immediately with layers upon layers, usually with a game that we can't trust. It's a technique of theatricality that Almodóvar will also favor. In fact, there is much of Almodóvar in Asignatura Aprobada – although Garci's work is very, very heterosexual – and their films would probably benefit from being analyzed side by side.

Adventures of Don Juan (1948)

Adventures of Don Juan is the best Errol Flynn movie I've seen. One of the reasons for this is Viveca Lindfors, who holds her own with Flynn in a way that Olivia De Havilland never did. Lindfors is fabulous.

The swashbuckling is also so extra in Adventures of Don Juan. There is way more swordfighting than I've ever even seen in any movie, really. It's just chock-full of these sequences. It's great. 

I think, though, that the real appeal here is the costumes. They're breathtaking. Truly extraordinary. Flynn never wears pants the entire movie... just different colored tights and then gorgeously embroidered and decorated jerkins on top. And the dresses they put Lindfors in truly are jaw-dropping. Each one more gorgeous than the last. And there must be at least a dozen. And that's not all. Her hair is always covered in pearls or rubies. It's just the most fabulous thing. Marjorie Best and her team really outdid themselves.

Australian New Wave I

My Brilliant Career (1979) is perfect. It's charming and beautifully made. It's a love letter to the Australian landscape, which is gorgeously shot here, including some really extraordinary camera work by Don McAlpine. And then there's the luminous Judy Davis and the very handsome Sam Neill. The supporting cast is also terrific. And of course this is all due to Gillian Armstrong's script and direction, which are literally just perfect. This is a fuckin' gem. More Australian New Wave, please. I think the only Australian new wave that I've seen are 'Breaker' Morant and The Year of Living Dangerously. I will be remedying that error tout de suite.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan's Travels is fun, but I didn't love it as much as everyone else seems to love it. I think I Married a Witch, another Veronica Lake film from the same period, is much funnier. Obviously this is charming, but the turn the film takes in the third act, in which the main character goes to a privately run prison, is difficult to stomach. The film is trying to give us a portrait of injustice, and it certainly does that, but it doesn't seem very interested in justice. I don't know. It just didn't sit right with me. I need to see some more Sturges.