The new Nightmare Alley does in fact fix the problems of the original 1947 film. I had faith that Guillermo Del Toro would opt for a darker ending, and that he would make the character's decline make a great deal more sense. This new version of William Lindsay Gresham's novel is also much more violent (thankfully), and the production design, score, costuming, makeup, and hairstyling are all gorgeous.
But Del Toro has introduced some new problems into the mix, as well. [You should stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.] In the first place – and I hate to say this because I absolutelyloveBradleyCooper – I don't think Cooper works in this movie. He could work, but he's playing the part weirdly, way too close to his chest, like he is hiding everything in the world. This part needs a clearer, honest portrayal that takes in absolutely everyone, a seducer's portrayal. This just isn't that: Cooper feels hidden and terrified for most of the film, wide-eyed and surprised rather than open-faced and genuine. It's hard to imagine him tricking anyone at all. He certainly never takes us in, and I feel like he probably should do this at times. Is he a nice guy? Cooper never lets us believe that he is.
Rooney Mara and Toni Colette also both seem to be playing their parts using the most shallow choices as possible. Both of their parts are slightly smaller because of the way the new screenplay works, but Mara opts for a totally guileless portrayal rather than someone with some teeth, and Colette's version of her character is barely a hustler at all – just a kind of sad horny lady.
Cate Blanchett comes out unscathed, though. Her part was the worst of the three in the original, and not only has it been beefed up here, her character is more interesting, dangerous, and sexy than anything we saw in 1947. Blanchett plays the part like a complete diva, and she wears gorgeous gowns, has gorgeous hair, and poses in front of walls inlaid with wood while endlessly smoking cigarettes and smiling with the reddest lips possible. She's a hustler, and we know it, and it's nothing but fun. Her final scene has been expanded here, and it's a delight – best thing in the movie.
Props, too, go to David Strathairn, who is consistent and wonderful. His character here is very different from anyone we've seen him play recently, and he's filled him with life and made distinct, intriguing choices.
All in all, I guess I didn't find this film so markedly different from the 1947 movie. It feels technically better, but it also has such a polished shine to it, and the acting is so stilted, that this 2021 version always just sort of feels soulless.
Patrick Imbert's The Summit of the Gods is one of the best animated films of the year. It has a gorgeous score by Amine Bouhafa, and it is wise and exciting and deeply philosophical. I really, really liked it.
1. What did you do in 2021 that you'd never done before?
Smiling at Jessica Del Vecchio
It doesn't feel like much of a year of firsts, honestly. In many ways this was a retread of 2020. I worked a lot. I made a lot of new types of food – especially Chinese and Mexican food – and didn't work out as much as I should have. But I did change my Instagram handle from aaroncthomas to chilicologne. I was at a vegan bar with my friends Steve and Joz in San Diego and Joz ordered popcorn that came dusted (spritzed?) with chili cologne, and Steve and I thought this would be a hilarious drag king name.
2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year? My new year's resolution was to brunch more. And I did! Especially with Michael Fatica and Jason Tate when they were in town but also with many others. There's plenty of quality outdoor brunching in Florida.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? My friends Caleb and Diana's daughter Cora was born in May, and my delightful co-worker and friend Kevin and his wife Katie had their son Finn in April.
4. Did anyone close to you die? We lost my friend and colleague Mark Brotherton earlier this year. Mark chaired the search committee that hired me at UCF, and he was an all-around great guy, a wonderful director, a good friend, and a loving mentor and teacher. He was one of my favorite people at UCF, and I miss him a lot.
5. What countries did you visit? My passport is actually expired. I will renew it in 2022.
6. What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021? I have so much! I am not sure about this. I am very grateful. You know what I need? A more organized kitchen.
7. What dates from 2021 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? This October 14-17 I went on a very important societal retreat with my friends Yasser, Katie, and Jonathan. We stayed at the beach, ate seafood, and I had a drug-induced paranoid episode. It was life-affirming and very important – except for the paranoia.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? I'm now the co-director of the BA program at the FSU School of Theatre. My committee and I are working hard to give the BAs their own sense of identity and a kind of brand that really differs from the BFA programs at FSU. This is not easy, but we made a big step this Fall by hosting a Fall Fringe Fair for BA students. It was a big success, and I think we're on our way. (P.S. The correct response to learning someone is directing a program or is now a department chair is not
Congratulations!; it's Oh that sounds like a lot of work. How can I help?)
My article "Infelicities" was published in JDTC this summer, and some very cool people areliking it a lot. I'm so happy that people are finding it helpful, and I'm very proud of it.
9. What was your biggest failure? My poor book manuscript on male/male sexual violence (which is actually quite good!) is still in limbo. It will come out eventually, I am sure, but academic publishing is now on pandemic time, and I don't know how to help things move along. This would be very disheartening if I weren't working on my next book. As it is, it is very frustrating, but I'm focusing on the next thing I need to do.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Just some mild neck injuries. I've got a good chiropractor, though, and he is putting me back together.
11. What was the best thing you bought?
A curry leaf tree! I am now growing Genovese basil, curry leaf, and kaffir lime in my backyard. It's very exciting.
12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My colleague Lilian Garcia-Roig got a Guggenheim. She's awesome and very talented, and so this is very deserved.
I continue to be very proud of my students, especially the ones who keep in touch. I love hearing from them, and I am deeply invested in them. It is not very common for students to keep in touch, actually, so it is great when they do.
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Republicans in Congress and at the Supreme Court, and in governors' offices around the country. I'm not exactly happy with Democrats either, so I don't mean this as partisan politics; it's really not. But these Republicans are actually fighting actively against democracy. They know that a majority of the country doesn't agree with them about many, many things – especially personal freedoms – and yet they arrange it so that they control the country's laws instead of a majority of the people controlling the country. I am a person who is consistently in the minority (politically and personally) in this nation, and I feel like it's our job to work to convince people of our positions, but the Republican leadership in this country, who also represent a minority, have seized power in order to tell the rest of us what to do. It's cynical and disheartening and truly terrible. Our government isn't working. It's not working the way it should be working to help the most people, and it's not even working the way that it was designed to work. Honestly, I don't know how these people sleep at night.
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Attending the ASTR 2021 conference in San Diego. It was the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic that I had been to a conference and I was so happy to see everyone, even though it didn't always feel super safe. It was also nice to be somewhere other than Tallahassee. I had done no air travel at all since March 2020
16. What song will always remind you of 2021?
Doja Cat and SZA's "Kiss Me More". I even wrote a little essay about it.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? Happier. b) thinner or fatter? Fatter. c) richer or poorer? Richer.
18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Working out.
19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Departmental service.
20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I was East of Los Angeles visiting my sisters Deborah and Sheila and their families. We had Christmas Eve at Sheila's and Christmas Day at Debs'. The theme this year – we always have a theme – was less complicated than usual: hugs. We went for comfort food. I made a pumpkin-peanut soup, a potato-leek gratin, roasted sea bass in tomatoes and shallots, and we also had collards, macaroni and cheese, and a quinoa-grapefruit salad. With Christmas cookies for a simple dessert.
21. Did you fall in love in 2021?
I didn't. But there's this boy I flirt with a lot at my favorite bar. It's not love (yet...?), but he's a charmer.
22. How many one-night stands?
Ok, I'm not exactly sure, and I think that's a very good thing, but there were definitely a couple of memorable ones! I'm in a new, very exciting phase of my life in terms of one-night stands.
23. What was your favorite TV program?
I didn't watch TV in 2021, as much as everyone tried to convince me how great TV is. I did, of course, watch RuPaul's Drag Race season 13 and Drag Race All Stars season 6.
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No.
25. What was the best book you read? I keep track of this on GoodReads. Come join me over there! I read a lot of books related to ancient and medieval theatre this year. I was really inspired by Particle and Wave, a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I finally read Rinne Groff's play The Ruby Sunrise and absolutely loved it!
I did not read a lot of fiction this year – and I mostly disliked everything fictional I read, so no recommendations there, but I just finished Danny Licht's little book about being in the kitchen, Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again, and completely loved it.
26. What was your greatest musical discovery? I don't know about you all, but I'm listening to Joey Herr's Only for the Night.
27. What was the best piece of theatre you saw? The Metropolitan Opera's production of Fire Shut Up in My Bones. It was so incredible. The music is great, and the production itself was deeply moving. I saw it by myself and had no one to discuss it with, but it was really amazing.
28. What did you want and get?
A new kitchen faucet! A curry leaf tree. Lots of hugs.
29. What did you want and not get?
A larger pool of eligible bachelors from which I might choose. Tallahassee is small, y'all. I'm reminded of this every time I am in Orlando or Los Angeles or San Diego and can swipe right on exponentially more options.
30. What was your favorite film of this year? Dune. Actually, I can't believe I've only seen it once.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 40. It was low key. Jason and Meredith hosted with cocktails and a simple dinner. Greg came over. It was great. These are my very good friends in Tallahassee, and I'm grateful to have them.
32. What new recipes did you make this year?
Birria de res. I'm excited to move into more Mexican cuisine next year, actually. Other fun things I made: carmelized scallion sauce, XO sauce. I spent most of the year alone, so not too many giant complicated dishes.
33. What were your cocktail obsessions?
I started drinking a lot of sidecars. At Bar 1903, my usual hangout, they serve one for happy hour, and I love them. Earlier in the year I was obsessed with Aperol. The two Aperol standards at my house are both easy: a Paper Plane (equal parts Aperol, bourbon, amaro nonino, and lemon juice) and a Naked and Famous (equal parts Aperol, lime juice, mezcal, and yellow Chartreuse).
34. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A puppy. Haha. I'm kidding. I'm very satisfied with my life, so I'm not sure how to answer this question too well. More beach time would be better, of course. I'll just say that: more beach time. Nights at the beach are my favorite thing. I can just sit by the water and listen to the waves and feel the wind. It's the best.
Oh wait I thought of something: some retirements in my department. A few of those (six?) would improve my life exponentially.
35. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021?
I discovered tee-shirts that are cut well and started wearing them. I use two brands: Fresh Clean Tees and True Classic Tees. But I am no longer a medium, or at least I can no longer wear one and still look presentable.
36. What kept you sane?
Mostly the same as last year: Meredith and Jason.
My friend Greg hosts a movie club where we watch a movie every week that none of us has seen before. More of my friends joined this year, and their tastes are all over the place. I watch stuff I never would watch on my own. It's delightful.
Texts from friends checking in on me.
The Criterion Channel. 37. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Richard Madden. I love him so much.
38. What political issue stirred you the most?
The fucking budget. I actually get enraged when I think of the extraordinarily wasteful amount of money spent on the military industrial complex every fucking year – supported by both democrats and republicans – that could be spent on actually helping people instead of on imperialism and making technology executives richer. Obviously I am also angry about Texas (and other states') outrageous attempts to control poor women, and obviously I am aghast that we continue to incarcerate people in ICE facilities, military prisons, and state and federal "correctional facilities" for indefinite amounts of time. Our priorities in this country are fucked. We spend so much money on murder.
39. Whom did you miss?
More than anyone: Dayne.
But also Jason Tate, Matt Silva, Aaron Farr, Michael Stablein, Katie Cassidy, Chris Martin, Julia Listengarten, my best friends in California, and my best friends in the Upper Valley.
40. Who was the best new person you met?
Donovan Sherman
Katie Merrill
41. Tell us a valuable life-lesson you learned in 2021: Lying flat is justice. In many ways, my "technologies of the self" approach to turning myself into someone of whom I am proud and someone I like has already been captured by the system of the academy. The academy tells us that to be valued we need to turn ourselves into a kind of person: productive, always on top of the newest ideas, innovative. I have definitely internalized these values, and I work hard at all times to improve myself. But am I really working for myself and those around me? Or am I simply becoming a better little laborer for my employer? These are questions I began asking myself in 2021. I am not sure what the answers are yet, so this isn't quite a life-lesson, but it's what I'm pondering.
42. Share an important quotation from 2021: This is from Particle and Wave. Daniel tells a story about his grandmother's pound cake:
"She made legendary… it was this tall, it had the perfect crust, like you would go (slicing sound) put the knife in, it’s perfect, you know, dense, whatever. And as she got older, you know, not to be morbid, but all my uncles, everybody was like, we got to get that recipe! Because she would always make it and all of the kids would come and get a piece and you know, you visit, and you take your piece home and everybody, all the families would eat the cake. At one point I asked her, and she was like: ‘No you can’t have that recipe.’ And then, you know, we kept asking and asking and finally she conceded to my father to give me the recipe. I was 24 years old when this happened. She said, “I want you to call me when you made it.” So I went in, I got all the ingredients and I, you know, I did it step by step. And I put it in the oven, it kind of like exploded in the oven and burned. And I called her, and I was like, Grandma Daisy?! And she was already laughing, she was already—I said, “This happened, this happened…” And she said, Well I guess I got to be the one makes it. Right? She was like, Y’all will never get my recipe, you’ll never get it! Each of us has a miraculous series of utterances… what a wonder that you would seek out to be present to experience. It’s like … rather than doing this extractive model where it’s like, you’re doing that thing—I want it! I’ma go get it—which even we were guilty of with our own grandmother, you know like: who’s gonna have the recipe after she dies? I mean come on! We gonna miss you, but we still want the cake! Versus actually saying, you know what a miracle to be present. It’s a miracle to be present."
This is diverting and fun – almost all of the actors are comedians – and I enjoyed myself. Scott Glenn is so great. He is truly an underrated performer. And I love see Kevin Costner in movies in the early 1980s. He's so cute and fun; in Silverado he's downright playful. He's absolutely delightful to watch.
Kevin Kline is, quite oddly enough, not playing for laughs, even though this is obviously a comedy, and I'm not sure what that's about. But his seriousness doesn't get in the way of the pleasures of Silverado, which are really all about friendship and shooting the bad guys off of horses when they aren't expecting it.
A classic that's actually in need of a remake, Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947) stars the charismatic Tyrone Power (against type!) and the excellent Joan Blondell, but the rest of the cast can't manage the power of its stars. Worse yet, Goulding's film accelerates its antihero's downfall so that it makes almost no sense that he manages to fail so badly so quickly. All of a sudden, the man's helpless and out of his mind.
And then... it actually pulls its final punches.
In any case, I was with this for a long while. It's great to see Power in something other than a swashbuckling movie (although I love him in those too), and this is very different territory from the usual noir. It's too bad that the movie's last 40 minutes or so didn't hold up to its first 70.
I admit to being skeptical of the new Guillermo Del Toro film. It just looks so glossy – but I feel pretty certain that Del Toro will give us a better ending than the one for which Goulding opted.
George MacKay is great in Wolf. There are these moments when he stalks down the hallway and he completely looks like he should be a wolf. But Nathalie Biancheri's film never manages to give us the real weirdness of the Yorgos Lanthimos films on which Wolf has obviously modeled itself. This is a movie that wants to be about what it means to be human – a good human, a good man, etc. – but it's a film that instead opts for what appears to be an allegory for transgender. And I'm just not sure what Wolf has to say about transgender – or that it should be taking up space making up allegories for how people experience gender.
This just didn't work. It's opening sequences feel like Lanthimos territory, and in their way these early moments in the movie prompt laughter just as the scenes in The Lobster do. But then the film refuses to go off the deep end the way a Lanthimos movie would. It settles instead for the world we already know. Wolf leaves us with liberal platitudes with which we are comfortable and familiar instead of any real unsettling questions.
Railway Sleepers (หมอนรถไฟ) is an observational documentary, in which the camera watches overnight railway cars in Thailand. It's a film without narrative, but it's filled with intriguing characters, of whom we only get a glimpse. The whole things is done in rather tight shots, so we see only part of the train car at any given time. There are no big train shots or shots of full cars. Where is everyone going? The film is pieced together from footage taken over eight years on, apparently, every train line in Thailand.
Sompot Chidgasornpongse's film has the kind of mysterious, haunting quality of a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who produced), and although it was about two hours of apparently nothing, really, I found the whole thing eminently watchable and could probably have watched another hour.
Jesus Christ what a long, meandering mess. Adam Driver and Al Pacino are doing their best, I think, but the script is ridiculous, and Jared Leto is... honestly I have no idea what he's doing. It's clear that the character he's playing (Paolo Gucci) is a very silly nut of a man, but the whole thing feels like a weird bit, and the lines he says are so out of place – he's the only character who speaks like this – that he feels like he's just in another movie altogether. The worst part is that this movie just doesn't care about the Guccis themselves. It doesn't even really care about Maurizio (Driver's character); the film just likes him more than the others, which isn't much at all. House of Gucci doesn't really make fun of the Guccis, but it thinks this insane story of betrayal and murder is more interesting than them as people.
And then there's Lady Gaga, who is much much worse than she was in A Star Is Born. I've always thought that in that movie Cooper and his team edited around her in very smart ways, but here she's front and center, and although the movie thankfully sort of forgets about her for a stretch of act three, she's clearly the centerpiece of the film, the reason for it to exist, even. And she just can't really act. Sure, she can move around and say lines and wear clothes fabulously, but there's really nothing there that she's doing or giving away. She is, like Jared Leto, just doing a kind of long bit. It's crazy because the part is honestly perfect for her. But she just doesn't give the character any kind of life. Patrizia doesn't quite feel like a cartoon – although she is very silly and I laughed out loud several times – but she also never feels like she's a human at all. Just a kind of image of a person. It's a very bad performance in a movie that never works.
(Tom Ford makes an appearance in this movie, as a character, and he has the role of saving the Gucci brand. Ford has apparently said in interviews that he didn't like this movie either.)
Roger Bellott's film has been on my list to see since it came out in Bolivia in 2019. It was released in 2021 in the US and it's an intriguing adaptation of his play.
Tu Me Manques is a very theatrical movie, although it is never stagey. It feels much, much better than most theatrical adaptations, and I think that's because the theatre piece from which it is adapted is already quite abstract. I loved all of the theatre parts of this movie, and when we finally get to opening night in the story, I found the parts of the play we got to see absolutely breathtaking. The opening of the show literally took my breath away. Seriously.
The main theatrical conceit in the film is that the central character in the drama – whom we find out has died in the first few minutes – is played by three different actors. We rotate between these three performers constantly, with the film always giving us a full scene but while switching between the actors playing the scene. It's an odd but pleasurable conceit, especially since the three actors are rather different physically. I liked this idea a lot.
But the plot... ugh. The plot is about a man who has lost his lover to suicide because his lover would rather commit suicide than come out to his family. Now, I am predisposed to find this topic affecting, and I might have done so if this was a film about new relationships being established, about mourning, about dealing with loss, about any of the other emotions that might attend this story. But this is a public service announcement about how Bolivians need to be more accepting of homosexuality. There is a long sequence discussing what the Bible really thinks about homosexual sex, an excruciatingly long coming out sequence that is completely unsatisfying, and numerous fights about how one partner "just doesn't understand" how the other partner's family is. In short, the film's content is just not interesting. Coming out? Family acceptance? These men are adults living in New York City. To be fair, I'm not saying these aren't issues that are dealt with by many real people. I know that they are, and I sympathize with (and have counseled) many going through these same struggles. I'm just saying I don't want to watch a movie about them. I feel like I've already learned the lessons for straight people that this film has to teach.
The theatre piece in the film, though, seems to be real, and I would like to get my hands on it and read it. It looks incredible.
You can watch Tu Me Manques (I Miss You) on HBOmax, and although it was playing without subtitles for a while, they now work perfectly.
Passingis pretty good. It has no score, though, and that causes a lot of problems for the filmmaking. Rebecca Hall's movie wants to be a kind of thriller, I think. I realized near the end of act three that we were in a kind of serious psychological study slash thriller with Tessa Thompson's Irene character as someone whose motives and ideas we aren't supposed to be able quite to figure out. And I think I would have liked a film that really tried to do this, but Passing doesn't have the music it needs to help it with this, and so what we have instead is a series of scenes that move the whole thing forward but don't ever give the film the drive it needs. Something haunting, something insistent, something a little frantic, even something vaguely horrific like the score for Pablo Larraín's Spencer would have given Passing a much better pace. If it had had this, I think Passing would have worked. As it is, it rather doesn't.
I also don't really think Tessa Thompson is a very good actress. She's beautiful, obviously, but I never feel like she lets me know what's going on with her – or maybe not much is. Contrasted with the fantastic, almost hysterical performance that Ruth Negga gives, Thompson barely even registers. Ruth Negga is brilliant in Passing. She absolutely tears into the part of Clare and lets us see absolutely everything she's going through. It's wonderful, gorgeous work.
One thing I loved about Passing was the way the film took care to illuminate the queer aspects of Nella Larson's novel. In this film, Irene has a powerful and strange attraction to Clare that even she doesn't quite understand, and I loved that Hall's film did this.
Belfastis a better movie than Passing, but in many ways it has its problems, too. Kenneth Branagh's film is about a small boy as the Troubles start in Northern Ireland and he reappraises his relationship with his father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather, who is dying. The film – like Passing – is given to us in black and white, but it has a kind of gimmick related to color. When little Buddy watches anything on stage or on screen, it's in color. (Well, not all of what they watch is in color. High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are, as they were originally, in monochrome.)
But Belfast has another, more important, gimmick – one that is even more theatrical than switching to color photography. In this film, we only are allowed to see things that little Buddy overhears or is in the room for. So, even though the movie is really about Buddy's mother and father and their relationship, we never see anything that Buddy himself isn't present for in some sort of way. The film takes great pains to indicate this by placing Buddy in the shot during scenes that don't really concern him or otherwise including him in the scene. This makes everything in Belfast seem performed, as if everyone is doing everything they're doing for little Buddy. It's an odd little quirk in the movie, and I didn't think it totally worked. After awhile it makes everything feel just a little too heightened, as if the film won't let me watch it without seeing through Buddy's eyes. He's not exactly trustworthy after all; he's a small boy.
But the fucking acting in Belfast is incredible. Honestly, I think all four of the main actors in the movie deserve Oscar nominations. Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan are Buddy's mom and dad, and they're both just incredible. I had no idea Jamie Dornan could do this level of work. His performance is devastating. I loved him. Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds are also always good, but here their work feels special and intricate. Their performances are nuanced and beautiful and idiosyncratic even if the roles aren't very large. The film is just beautifully, beautifully acted, and it's worth seeing simply for that.
John Frankenheimer's The Fixer is a tough, tough film about injustice and anti-Semitism. It is also quite clearly a film about prison systems, state violence, and torture. Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde are excellent. This is a hard movie to watch, though. We spend most of our time in solitary confinement with Bates's character, and the prison is a terrible, horrible place.
It is crazy, I have to say, that this movie is almost impossible to find. It's not streaming anywhere and it's not on blu-ray. How is this Frankenheimer film so neglected?
I quite liked Eternals. I think there are a couple reasons for that.
1. The fighting is way more interesting than punching, and the energy sources with which the eternals fight are visually very cool.
2. The monsters – especially the main monster – are very cool. They look cool and they do cool things.
3. The movie is epically long, but that didn't really annoy me until the dénouement, when we had to wrap up what happened to Sprite (who cares) and every other one of the eternals. That made for a thousand irritating little cliffhanger scenes so typical of Marvel films.
4. This movie had good jokes. Kumail Nanjani, Don Lee, Harish Patel, and Brian Tyree Henry are all very funny in this.
There is plenty of clunky exposition, of course, and there is soooo much that still is not explained in this world, but the world-building is kind of cool, and I think I like how humans are not really the center of things in many ways. Thinking about the universe the way helps us remember how small humans are. This is good.
Angelina Jolie. It was so good to see her and get to spend so much time with her. I legitimately missed her.
I. Love. Richard Madden. He can do no wrong. He's not even great in this or anything, but goddammit I love him.
Haaz Sleiman!? This movie gave me the beautiful gay actor in a key supporting part – and he played a gay man. My heart soared every moment he was onscreen.
Look Eternals has plenty of problems. I thought it was mostly a big old unwieldy mess, but I had a good time. The fight scenes, especially, were really awesome, the visual effects were very cool, and the eternals' superpowers were interesting and used in ways that were constantly intriguing.
Neil Simon is funny, and there's kind of no way around that. I had never seen the original Odd Couple film, although I have seen the play onstage several times. I did not expect to laugh much at this old style of humor with which I have become very impatient. (I especially find Jack Lemmon's characterizations at this point in his career very annoying.) But The Odd Couple is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and it's funnyprimarily because Walter Matthau's facial expressions get to do most of the work. In other words, the medium allows this old story – and the jokes I know by heart – to be funny all over again because I have a different kind of access to the comedians than I would if I saw them onstage. I laughed a lot at this.
Admittedly, when it ended I was like wait, that's the end? I had forgotten that this little thing that has been selling tickets across the country for more than 60 years basically has no stakes at all. The entire thing is insanely contrived and absurd. But I must admit that it is legitimately funny.
I didn't have much to say about Nina Wu (灼人秘密) after I saw it – back in late September. I watched it with my unseen movie club, and it's a film about the film industry in Taiwan (but also, really, the film industry everywhere). Midi Z's movie is a kind of psychological thriller where we don't always know what's really happening, whether or not something is a dream or not, etc. But the film's end really does bring everything all together, and it makes things quite clear.
The performances in this film are also just excellent.
The thing for me is that I didn't really enjoy watching this very much. It's a hard film to deal with, and it doesn't offer a lot of room to breathe or space for joy. (This is, I suppose, a weird thing to complain about, but I guess what I'm saying is Nina Wu felt a little too relentless. One excellent thing in the film, to my mind, is the way it uses queerness as a kind of space of freedom or possibility. I was into that.
Nina Wu was released in Taiwan in 2019 and the U.S. in 2020.
Sexy while also being informative, Dome Karukoski's Tom of Finland is a much, much better film than the documentary about Touko Laaksonen's life and work, Daddy and the Muscle Academy, which I watched a couple months ago. Karukoski's film makes clear just how repressive the Finnish government was against homosexual sex in the mid-century, and what is so interesting about this is that it goes a long way to explaining Tom of Finland's fascination with the gear (the drag) of the police, of the military, even of the Nazis. One thing we sort of see in the film is the writer processing the violence he's experienced and his real fear of these people by transforming them into erotic figures. It's a fascinating angle on Tom of Finland's work, and one the film really sold well.
I also had somehow missed that Laaksonen had a longtime partner, Veli “Nipa” Mäkinen, with whom he shared a home for most of his adult life. This film shares that story, too, and I fell in love with the actor who played him, Lauri Tilkanen.
Cryptozoo is a bananas animated fantasy with great animation and an insane plot involving a fucked-up zoo for cryptids that purports to keep them safe but also imprisons them. It's a deep film about serious issues of freedom and security that is delivered with a hilariously deadpan attitude and an unhinged plot. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Diamantino is so hilariously absurd and campy. I had a great time. This is a spoof of Cristiano Ronaldo while also skewering far right politics and envisioning some kind of strange queer kinship. Totally delightful and very funny. Carloto Cotta is amazing in this.
I really liked Spencer. The vaguely horror-film style of Pablo Larraín is not always to my taste – I found Jackie really off-putting – but Spencer is scored by Johnny Greenwood instead of Mica Levi, and though that kept things in a decidedly terrifying minor key, it wasn't the descent into madness that Jackie was.
But anyway this movie is great. It's tense and intriguing, and it documents a kind of insanity within the British Royal family (not actual insanity, just insane behaviors). In many ways, Spencer is a film about Diana that is also a film about Prince Harry today, and indeed Kristen Stewart herself, which I think makes the whole thing much richer. The way everyone pokes and prods and has something to say, the way they're watched and scrutinized. It's a terrifying, weird life – a very nice one to be sure, and I am not usually one to feel sorry for very wealthy people, but one can see how difficult it would be to be an actual human person in this insane world.
This is definitely worth a watch. And Kristen Stewart is finally going to get a Best Actress nomination, so that's cool.
And then there's David Lowery's The Green Knight, which is an adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and might, for all I can tell, actually be titled this. (The title is something of a mystery to me. It is, appropriately either Sir Gawain... ...and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or ...The Green Knight, but I'm splitting hairs, I guess.)
Here's the thing. Why is this movie so boring? It looks fucking cool. It is designed beautifully. It has Dev Patel looking gorgeous and having lots of feelings. But it's mysterious without being intriguing. It doesn't ask you to puzzle through what's happening at all; instead it behaves as though you really already ought to know what the fuck is happening.
And maybe The Green Knight would have been interesting if I had read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight beforehand. I really ought to have. The film is a revisioning of the poem, and I guess it needs knowledge of that in order for it to mean anything.
To be fair, I was with this for a while, but then near the very end, the movie takes a turn and launches off into a quick montage of the future (without, I might add, telling us what it's doing), and during this montage I just kept thinking why am I watching this???? Who cares! Honestly, though, I was just so bored. I didn't know enough of about any of the characters to be interested in them.
There's kind of an odd moment in Jolson Sings Again, in which Al Jolson remarks that people don't really want to hear his kind of music anymore because they're listening to the kind of crooning Bing Crosby does. Now, I had never thought of Bing Crosby and Al Jolson as even occupying the same universe. I think perhaps I imagined Al Jolson as a kind of relic of vaudeville and thought of Crosby as a fifties movie crooner – this is decidedly incorrect. But this became even more obvious to me while watching Elliott Nugent's She Loves Me Not last night.
In the first place, Crosby is billed over the title and way above Miriam Hopkins already in 1934! That seems insane to me. Hopkins is a perfect star, and is delightful and hilarious in this little farce.
Crosby, on the other hand, has not yet figured out his sound, or at least has not settled into the kind of sound he would adopt later. He is doing a little trill thing in his songs that sounds really silly. If memory serves, he left off doing this after awhile. But more to my point about Jolson, Crosby actually sounds like he's singing songs written for Jolson in this. The songs were written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon ("Straight from the Shoulder" and "I'm Humming–I'm Whistlin'–I'm Singin'"), Arthur Schwartz & Edward Heyman ("After All, You're All I'm After"), and Ralph Rainger & Leo Robin (for their Oscar-nominated tune "Love in Bloom".) It's the Schwartz & Heyman tune that sounds especially Jolsonesque to me. Anyway, this is not a scientific examination of Jolson and Crosby, and I'm not a musicologist, but I've never heard this in Crosby's voice before, and all of a sudden in She Loves Me Not I did.
This is a cute little movie with a couple of fine songs; it's funniest when it's doing its madcap farce routines starring the brilliant Miriam Hopkins.
If you like Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, perhaps you feel, like me, that you also need to apologize for liking it. It's so overtly stylized, so fussy and fastidious, so carefully made, so fucking cute that it feels like liking it is saying that I like all of Anderson's mannerisms, or that I pretend to be getting all of his (obviously myriad) inside jokes and odd sense of humor.
I definitely don't get all of the little jokes in The French Dispatch, but I did think this movie was funny in several excellent places – the Owen Wilson and Tilda Swinton sections, especially, I found hilarious, and the movie begins with them, so it sets a certain tone.
The conceit is charming: the opening tells us that the movie will be a kind of visual representation of a literary magazine: some editorial comment, one travelogue, three stories, and a final section of back matter. The movie was made in Angoulême but is set in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, already a hilarious name. The film, however, is anything but boring. There is a story of an incarcerated painter and his prison-guard muse – starring Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, and Adrien Brody – and one of a student protest in the 1960s, with Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand, and finally one with a chef (hilariously named Nescaffier), a police chief, and his kidnapped son, starring Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, and Mathieu Amalric. The travelogue section stars Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac (these names!) in a farcical opening passage.
The French Dispatch does not offer non-stop hilarity like The Grand Budapest Hotel. After the first two stories, this becomes a much more somber film. Both the Frances McDormand section and the Jeffrey Wright section, though they have their silly bits, to be sure, are about regret and getting old. They're about memory and forgetting and loss and frustration. I liked the Wright section especially.
This is also a film about writing. It's dedicated to the short story writers and foreign correspondents who worked for magazines like The French Dispatch, and the closing of the magazine (which is announced in the film's first few minutes) stands in for the disappearance of these kinds of publications today. The movie is dedicated to a long list of these writers, and it's obvious that Jeffrey Wright is playing a kind of version of one of them – James Baldwin. But what the Wright section really hit home for me was a kind of loneliness, the difficulty of putting things into words for others, of judging what's important and what isn't, of experiencing what you experience and then somehow channeling that into language so that other people can have a different experience. The McDormand section and the Wright section both have an underlying melancholy about being a writer, trying to stay objective or separate from the story, and needing to do the work more than you need to live your own life – a kind of slow sadness of working to tell other people's stories.
What's sort of wonderful in a Wes Anderson picture is that everyone in it is so famous, so that this question of whose story is important, who has stories that might be worth sharing, is easily answerable. It's apparent on the very surface of the film that there are rich stories within so many of them. When Larry Pine or Lois Smith or Bob Balaban or Henry Winkler... or Saoirse Ronan or Willem Dafoe or Elisabeth Moss or Christoph Waltz or Edward Norton or Cécile de France appear in tiny parts, it is very apparent that there are stories hidden in each of these characters. They only need reporting.
In any case, The French Dispatch is complex and rich, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. It is fussy and mannered and overtly (almost embarrassingly) theatrical. But it has lots to say.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz made No Way Out the same year (1950) that he made All About Eve. This movie (why it's called No Way Out is absolutely anyone's guess) is your standard anti-racist Hollywood fare from 1950. It's a good enough drama, with a sensational race riot in the film's center. Aside from the high drama of the riot (which is filmed very, very well, without showing even a little bit of violence), the rest of No Way Out is quite predictable stuff. The whole thing is tied together gorgeously by Sidney Poitier in one of his earliest screen appearances. (This is 5 years before Blackboard Jungle but must have been filmed just before Raisin in the Sun appeared on Broadway). Linda Darnell is great in this too, and Ruby Dee plays a small (uncredited) role! The real star here, though, is Richard Widmark, who gives a superb performance as a vile racist asshole. The performance is never sympathetic, and Widmark doesn't worry a bit about whether or not the audience will hate him. It's bold and rich work for a script that doesn't quite deserve it.
Well, I finally watched John Ford's 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and... I had more problems with it than I usually have with Ford's movies. Liberty Valance is billed as the first time Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are together in a film, and they play their usual archetypes. Wayne is a short-tempered, confident gunslinger who has no time for law and order but somehow at the same time, like, just really loves "America". Stewart plays a law-and-order-loving attorney who comes west for no reason I can really understand. He apparently followed Horace Greeley's advice to go west young man and all that. The violent man and the peacenik inevitably come into conflict.
I've noted this before, but there's a trend in films at this time in which a man who is opposed to violence comes to the west and teaches everyone that there are better ways than violence to deal with problems (The Violent Men, Friendly Persuasion). But of course, this same person must also be violent in order to get anything done. Violence is only good when used by the right people, and when it's used by the right people, it's the best thing in the world. This ideological approach is the perfect narrative sleight of hand for USAmerican democracy – violence is bad and no one should commit it except the state. The state upholds its own monopoly on violence and justifies its own use of force while pretending that it disapproves of violence on a large scale. One is reminded of George W. Bush's famous phrase "When we talk about war, we're really talking about peace".
This was my chief political problem with Liberty Valance, but this movie is also just really dumb. It wants to be taken very seriously for a while, and it begins in a very somber mood – with a weepy and aged Vera Miles – but then once we go back in time to hear the story of Liberty Valance, almost every single scene is a cartoon. Edmond O'Brien, who is doing good work, plays the town newspaperman and town drunk, but the script is written so that the whole thing is just silly. No opportunity for a joke is skipped. It's constant! And I actually don't really understand why. The main part of the film feels phony from start to finish. One or two examples will suffice, I think. At one point, Ransom Stoddard, Stewart's character, starts a school in order to teach some folks how to read and write. Once we see the school, no one is learning how to read and write. Instead, Stoddard is teaching them about the U.S. constitution. Everyone behaves earnestly, pretending that some scene like this could actually happen, with adult people pushing other adult people to remember the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and encouraging each other earnestly, while miming eager listening. It's an insane scene. It is made even more bizarre when Denver Pyle, who was 42 in 1962, enters dragging his wayward teenage son played by O.Z. Whitehead, who was 51! There is a later scene in which this character is licking a lollipop, and another in which John Wayne lifts Whitehead off of a bar and says get out of here. You're too young to vote. Excuse me, that is literally an old man.
This very weird approach to age was especially colorable in Liberty Valance, but it can also be seen in almost all Jimmy Stewart films from this period. Well into his fifties Stewart was constantly playing young men in their twenties. It always looks so weird to me. He is never believable as a twentysomething. This is not only true of John Ford movies, but a whole host of Stewart's films in the '50s and '60s. It has always bothered me.
I will say that I did like the very strange ending to the film, in which Stewart's relationship with Vera Miles is shown to be not quite as satisfying as it seemed in the cartoon part of the movie, and in which we glimpse that she may really have loved John Wayne's character all along. Stewart is playing a character his own age there, and his approach is filled with regret and indecision. It's much more interesting than his faux-youthful performance in the larger film.
But I guess I just don't really know what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is
supposed to be about. The last long act of the film is about a nomination scene in
which a whole bunch of men yell in a totally phony-looking election
scene because – as in so many of Ford's films – this is really a movie
about USAmerican politics. And Ford's white supremacist and imperialist
opinions about USAmerican politics are of no interest to me.
Sergei Bondarchuk's 7-hour epic is a stunning, incredible achievement, and I loved it.
Bondarchuk's film emphasizes poetry over story. Flashback, nuance, dreams, and the sheer phenomenological experience of wonder take priority over historical facts. And this is all to the good. Rather than feeling as though we can always make sense of something, we instead feel overwhelmed by Tolstoy's world – and deeply a part of it.
I felt like the timing in De Palma's Obsession was really off. But... well, this is just a weird movie all around. Cliff Robertson is the star, and though he's very attractive, he gives a very strange, wooden, almost amateurish performance.
John Lithgow is also in this – he is the villain in De Palma's Blow Out too, and is creepy as ever here – doing a questionable southern accent. Geneviève Bujold is great, as always – I will never understand why she wasn't a bigger star. And Bernard Hermann's final (or almost final) score is... insistent and very Bernard Hermann. Obsession's most important intertext is Hitchcock's Vertigo, which Hermann also scored.
This was my selection this week for my unseen movie club, and we all
thought it was a very silly, unintentionally campy movie. De Palma makes
some very strange choices, although they're not all his fault. The script is by Paul Schrader. (Both Schrader and Hermann will work on Taxi Driver this same year.)
I recognize that for many, the long-term storylines of the five Daniel Craig Bond films have been one of the series' assets, but this long-term structure doesn't really work for me. I know these actors have been in Bond films before, but I'm looking at Léa Seydoux and Christoph Waltz and Jeffrey Wright (and Eva Green's picture), and if I'm honest, I can't remember who any of them is. James, Moneypenny, Q: these people are people I know. The rest of these characters? No clue. Of course, they're archetypes too, just as much as Moneypenny and Q are. The woman Bond loves, the friend he trusts, the woman he gave up, the supervillain. I think the weird thing for me is that Cary Joji Fukunaga's film just behaves as though I have feelings about all of these characters, and I don't have a single feeling about any one of them.
No Time to Die is a long business. And there are way too many feelings in it for my taste (I had the same problem with Casino Royale if I recall correctly). I like my Bond movies high tech and shallow with a cool villain who wants to destroy the world in an intriguing way. (The destruction of the world in this film is plotted in an intriguing way, to be fair.) But mostly this film just sort of plods along. There is a very exciting sequence with Ana de Armas in Santiago de Cuba. I enjoyed that a lot. And the first sequence in the Mediterranean was also very fun. Pio Amato (from A Ciambra and Mediterranea – both brilliant films) even makes an extended appearance! It's still a Bond film, and some of it is very cool.
But this film's villain is Rami Malek, and he is boring. He's a sad, lonely man who just wants to be loved. He's not really nefarious and evil, just sort of pathetic. It isn't even fun to hope Bond beats him; he's already such a loser.
Faces is tough. It feels cool and fresh – certainly it is unlike most of the other movies from the 1968 season. The acting is excellent; the script is great. But... I can't say I enjoyed myself very much. Cassavetes' work here is hard to love. The camera follows these characters around closely; it gets into their faces. And everyone is miserable. I think I just wish there were a little more time to breathe. This felt frenetic and sad.
I love that this movie opens with a frame in which Elsa Lanchester, who will eventually appear as the eponymous bride, plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It's delightful. Also, this movie is better than the original. It has some lovely moments – especially the long sequence with the blind man in the hut who teaches the monster to speak. The end, too, is quite moving. As for the "bride" herself, the poster pretends as if she is going to be somehow scary. She is not.
It's weird. I loved this novel so much, but it seems like director Robert Ellis Miller and screenwriter Thomas C. Ryan thought the novel was about something much different than I thought it was. In the first place – and most strangely – they cast Sondra Locke in the role of Mick, which really transforms the part from someone who doesn't fit in and can't make sense of her world into something else... a girl who's gonna be alright. The whole thing felt sort of weird. This is a novel about longing and dissatisfaction and frustration. But the screenplay eliminates two of the central characters early on, and spends its time focused on (what the movie figures as) a poor, white straight girl. Sigh. It's a giant missed opportunity, and I suppose it might one day be made into a good movie or tv series.
Alan Arkin, to be fair, is great. Even more, Laurinda Barrett is excellent, and so is Cicely Tyson, but of course the film's focus is on Sondra Locke, who is terribly miscast. It throws off the whole picture.
Watching The Great Caruso is a sad business now, knowing that its wonderful star, Mario Lanza, died – just like Enrico Caruso – long ahead of his time. This movie was the highest grossing film of 1951, but it's hard to see why: it's a standard, even sub-standard, biopic, with no really deep emotional moments and not much of a narrative at all. Caruso doesn't struggle with alcoholism... or anything, really. So what we get instead are great performances of famous arias by the wonderful USAmerican tenor Mario Lanza. The storytelling is a little wonky. We don't really know what causes Caruso's death in the movie, and the film doesn't lead up to it at all or explain anything that's happening as Caruso becomes ill. All of a sudden, he's just sick.
But I'm not complaining, really. This is a Hollywood jukebox musical designed around great tenor arias, and they are performed beautifully. There's no reason to gripe, but I can't say it's that interesting, really.
I'm not sure what I was expecting of the original Planet of the Apes, but I sure as hell wasn't expecting this philosophical meditation on humane behavior. This is a kind of Marivaux experiment in which the author reverses the world. On this planet, the apes are in charge, and humans are treated as animals. This allows for all sorts of philosophical meditations on what it means to be humane, how we treat non-humans, and – most importantly – how we let religious conviction stand in the way of scientific truth and real research.
But Franklin Schaffner's film is not very much fun. It's very, very talky, and there just isn't as much action as I had hoped for. Jerry Goldsmith's score is incredible, though. It feels very ahead of its time.
I don't really understand the politics of The Enemy Below. It's a film about a U.S. Navy captain battling it out with a Nazi submarine captain. Their battle is one of strategy and cleverness, and the two men fight until they are both destroyed, although technically the U.S. Americans win.
And then the two men, like, toast one another and share a cigarette. This doesn't seem related to a kind of shared humanity, though. It seems, instead, as though they share something else – white masculinity, perhaps? I'm opposed to war, and it appears as though the two men at the center of The Enemy Below are also opposed to war. Instead, they both really understand what they're doing as a kind of job. It's their job to kill one another, to try to destroy each other. The film doesn't wave the American flag – it actually doesn't appear in the movie, and neither does the German flag – so this isn't a movie about American exceptionalism or military power. It's rather a jaded view of things.
But, then... the score is rousing and filled with brass and actually feels quite old fashioned. This feels like a late 1950s military movie trapped inside a mid-1940s military movie. Thankfully, Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens are both very cool. Mitchum is given none of the film's dumb lines about hope and the future. Those are all given to Russell Collins, who plays the ship's doctor. He dutifully says them, but they ring hollow as Mitchum gives him a withering stare and says only maybe.
In any case, thisis a weird movie. It's shot in beautiful Cinescope, but in many ways it needn't be. We're stuck on these two ships and the camera never really pans out for wide shots except for when Mitchum's ship is bombing the hell out of Jürgens. These are The Enemy Below's best moments, and the special effects needed to make them happen are worth the watch, even if its politics are weird.
The Shoes of the Fisherman is a beautifully shot and beautifully scored terrible movie. This film has an excellent cast and it's based on what was, in the mid-1960s, a famous novel, but Michael Anderson's film adaptation is a plodding, self-important, strange mess. It doesn't know where to focus – continually and bafflingly pulling us back to a plot between a newsman and his doctor wife and their marital problems – and even when it's focused on the important plot, the decisions of the new pontiff, it takes too long to do everything and is far too precious with the narrative's events.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a Sherman Brothers movie-musical, also from 1968, that is insane and widely beloved. The title refers to the name of a car that a crackpot inventor (played by Dick Van Dyke) has rigged up, and the two children who star in the film think the sounds car makes sound light "chitty chitty bang bang", so they make up a song with these words as a title and refrain. It's an asinine song that I have been singing for days since I saw the movie.
The plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is also completely bizarre, and the songs really don't go together at all. There's one about a candy whistle our crackpot has invented, and there's a diegetic song set in a circus performer's show in which our inventor is forced into performing but in which he performs astoundingly well. And then there is the flying car, which takes our characters off to a land in which all the children are imprisoned. This is entertaining stuff, and if the film makes no sense at all, it's very fun, and Dick Van Dyke is wonderful. Sally Ann Howes is no fair substitute for Julie Andrews, but her voice is gorgeous, and she performs admirably.
I watched both The Shoes of the Fisherman and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on DVD. It's just a fluke that they were both from 1968.
Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was, apparently, supposed to have a sequel or two – The Adventure Continues, perhaps. Well, there's a clear reason why this adventure did not continue. Remo Williams is dumb. Now, dumb is of course, fine, but this film spends the majority of its time on the elite assassin Remo Williams training for doing the things he's going to do instead of doing them. I swear to you that this training takes up some 75 minutes of the 120-minute film, maybe even more. It's so boring. This is the kind of thing most filmmakers would make into a montage sequence. There's just no reason to watch this adult man train to be a fighter for this long – especially since the martial art he's allegedly learning is totally fictional.
There is another very large problem. The person training Remo is a wise old Korean sensei named Chiun who is played by Joel Grey. It's 1985. Joel Grey as Asian martial artist? Really? Worse yet, this film was nominated for an Academy Award in one category: Makeup. The yellowface makeup in this movie was deemed so extraordinary that it deserved an Oscar nomination.
Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was directed by Guy Hamilton, who directed a few excellent James Bond films in the '60s and '70s (Goldfinger and Live and Let Die), and one can see how this film is of a piece with that stuff, but this one falls flat. I usually like 1980s sci-fi stuff, although this turned out to be more of an adventure film than science fiction, but Remo Williams was junk.
I was not into The Pirate. I like the movie's South American–Caribbean setting, of course, and I love pirate movies, but this is no pirate movie. The main character here is a young girl named Manuela (a name everyone in the film annoyingly pronounces as man-you-ELL-a) who has created a set of romantic fantasies about a pirate. This is Judy Garland, who apparently missed much of the filming because of illness. The stuff Garland appears in is pretty great, but the real star – although not top-billed – is Gene Kelly. The trouble is that Kelly's numbers are just... not that good. Cole Porter's score is dumb, and most of the songs are not good.
I did turn a corner with the film near the halfway mark when Vincente Minelli moved into his full fantasy sequence mode. Kelly does a great pirate dance in a fantasy number wearing tiny black shorts and an open shirt. He looks incredible, and the sequence is very fun. Because it's one of those Minelli's fantasy numbers for which he will become so well known, the whole thing just works so much better than the dumb plot that the musical is so tied to. It's almost as if musicals really aren't integrated.
The movie's final number and reprise, "Be a Clown", are also great. In the first version Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers do some great spins and leaps and turns. The Nicholas Brothers are not really restrained, and Kelly really keeps up with them! It's a fun, acrobatic number. The second version is Kelly and Garland as hobo clowns doing a series of bits and yukking it up as the finale. It's a delightful number and the dancing and comedy are great.
On the whole, though, this is rather a flawed mess, and one wishes "Be a Clown" fit nicely in some other show.
The Garden is a psychedelic dream-trip of a film that uses the mythology of the life of Jesus Christ to talk about homophobia and to mourn for the loss of life caused by the HIV/AIDS crisis and the criminally lethargic response from the US and UK governments to the health crisis. I'm not into Christian imagery, so much of this felt heavy handed to me, but this has some very good moments, and every time the central couple appeared onscreen, I felt great. To be honest, though, they're not in it very much...
One image that will really stick with me from The Garden, though, is a small boy on a table spinning a globe, appearing to teach a group of very old male students, none of whom is listening. The old men–students are all banging these wooden rods on the table in unison, making stupid noises. It's a great image of role-reversal: old male hysteria masquerading as reasonable adult behavior. This is, of course, exactly what does happen in the world, although our newsmedia and governments pretend that their hysteria is normal and that other people are the crazies.
I watched The Garden as part of a series of queer films on the Criterion Channel.
Since Thursday night's movie was from 1936, I figured I'd continue the trend and watch Jack Conway's Libeled Lady with Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. It's delightful: a perfect romantic comedy that is very funny and also very sweet. The script is pretty typical stuff story-wise, but the dialogue sparkles and the delivery is aces. William Powell and Jean Harlow, especially, are absolutely hilarious. Powell had me cracking up from the moment he appeared in the film.
I watched Libeled Lady on the Criterion Channel, where it's part of a series of 14 films starring Jean Harlow (including Suzy).
Of the 574 (or 571, depending on how you count) films nominated for Best Picture since the first Oscar ceremony, I have seen all but five. Libeled Lady was one of these five. It's one of the only two movies that was nominated for Best Picture but no other awards (the other is Grand Hotel). Oddly enough, the two other films that I am able to see are also from 1936 – Romeo and Juliet and Three Smart Girls. I seem to be on a 1936 kick, so perhaps I'll finally get these watched. (The final two are 1928's The Patriot and 1934's The White Parade; they're either lost or damaged.)
With the apostrophe in the title or without, Lloyd's of London is a film about the daring, dangerous, exciting world of nineteenth-century insurance.
This is an epic, sprawling movie by Henry King, and although its plot goes in a million places, King really does nothing to communicate to the audience just how exciting this is supposed to be, so much of the film's excitement falls flat. There are some excellent spy scenes, a two-day boat ride from France to England during the Napoleonic Wars, some delightful adulterous comings and goings, and the film even begins with a fun bit in which two kids spy on a bunch of fraudulent would-be pirates.
But I'm not kidding when I say this film is about insurance, and Lloyd's of London is more interested in communicating to its audiences the virtues of the insurance trade in England – apparently keeping the British navy afloat (I'm skeptical) while making sure that trading vessels were able to come to England to provide food for people who would have starved otherwise (oh?). All of this, apparently, was made possible not by the ships themselves but by wealthy insurers at Lloyd's, risking all they have for the good of England... and only occasionally becoming obscenely wealthy. Lloyd's invents a childhood friendship between Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier's character in That Hamilton Woman) and this insurance man at Lloyd's of London, a deep bond that is pure fantasy but that the film uses to illustrate how deeply intertwined the British navy is with British financiers and British merchants (although the film would like us to believe that none of these people was a colonialist).
Lloyd's of London is notable also for starring a 22-year-old Tyrone Power in his first starring role. (He is the star, even if, as you can see from the poster, he is billed fourth). This movie proved to Twentieth Century Fox that Power could carry a picture, and that he was good enough to be the amazing star he would turn out to be. The top-billed talent here is Freddie Bartholomew, who plays Power's character as a child. The movie opens with him, and he is as charming and delightful as he is in all of his movies.
I watched this sprawling epic on YouTube, where you can clearly see that the film's title is Lloyd's of London and not Lloyds of London.
This documentary – which is about Marshal Josip Broz Tito, his love of film, and film production in Yugoslavia – didn't really work for me. It felt disjointed, and I wasn't really sure what the film was about most of the time. I wanted it to be about the Yugoslav film industry and the state-sponsored production of propaganda films and other films. There is rather a long sequence where the film discusses the production of Battle of Neretva, and I perked up during this section. I love that film, and I had wondered for years how something so epic and grand was financed. But then Cinema Komunisto (god, I hate that title) becomes a film about the fall of Yugoslavia itself and the loss of the dream of the unified nation that is now Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. It's almost as if there is too much to mourn, and so Mila Turajlić chooses to mourn all of it. She isn't wrong, of course, but it makes for an unfocused movie.
