A Little Night Music (1977)

I frequently complain about today's Hollywood musicals and frequently say how much better they were a long time ago. But... I am not sure the 1970s was the time when they were better. Harold Prince's 1977 version of Sondheim's A Little Night Music is rather flat. In the first place, it stars Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg, neither of whom can sing, and in the second place the whole thing is filmed without miuch energy. I suppose this makes sense for the deflated egos of a majority of the characters but even the upbeat songs feel slow as captured by Prince's languid camera and the milky lighting that is such a hallmark of the 1970s. The costumes are gorgeous, but the film really could have been livened up by more interesting production design. Len Cariou feels as though he is on his game, and he and Laurence Guittard and Lesley-Anne Down – all three of whom are in good voice – seem to know that they're in a comedy, but... well maybe it's Prince that is trying to make something other than a comedy. The comic scenes just don't really work here. 

Or perhaps it's Taylor's fault. She plays the whole film in much the same way – it's a rather sad and desperate performance. It's even very moving when she gets to "Send in the Clowns", despite her inability to sing the song. But she doesn't lean in to the character's schemes or her silliness, and if she calls for clowns she never lets us laugh at her. She asks only for pity.

I want to say something about the theatrical frame that Prince gives to the whole thing. We begin in a nineteenth-century Austrian theatre, and the story is introduced to us onstage before we move in and find ourselves in the real world. We end onstage as well, and the actors take bows as the credits roll. This is a fine device, and Ingmar Bergman himself (A Little Night Music is based on a film of his) had used it just two years earlier for his film of The Magic Flute. But Prince does nothing at all with this theatrical frame. We never return to it in the course of the movie. The characters never talk directly to us; the falseness of it all never breaks through. In Bergman's Flute, for example, we spend a short intermission with the actors, who smoke silently or play checkers or flirt. It's a stunning little section in that film. In A Little Night Music we get nothing like this, and there is no point at all to the frame except perhaps to remind us that the entire thing might have been better onstage.

I read on Wikipedia that reviews of this film were mostly negative and that critics made a lot of hay about Elizabeth Taylor's apparently wildly fluctuating weight from scene to scene. I saw none of this. She looked great throughout the film. These critics perhaps proved one of the central theses of A Little Night Music: that men are pigs, and that an older man easily thinks himself entitled to a younger woman while simultaneously imagining that an older woman is entitled to nothing. How dare they.

Chicago 1969 Double Feature

I have to say that I really didn't know much about this trial before watching The Trial of the Chicago 7. But it is stunning to watch a conspiracy of criminals sit in judgment and purport to represent law and order in the United States with impunity. It's stunning to watch because it's so obviously part of the very fabric of this country. Villainous, terrible people literally running the government and bringing the entirety of their considerable violence and might against unarmed people in order to silence them and get them to bend their knees to force. Justice? I don't see much of it. The government does what it wants, and then it tells everyone what it did was right. 

The film itself... is fine. It's a little bit too self satisfied for my taste. It has a kind of smugness that I found a bit distasteful. Its emotional tone, too, is a little bit too Steven Spielberg for me. I'm not sure why Sacha Baron Cohen is receiving the accolades he's receiving. He's fine but not great. I liked Jeremy Strong a lot. And Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a better movie than The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I'm glad I watched them together. They belong together. Judas and the Black Messiah is also a movie about terrorist, murdering, arsonist policemen and FBI agents who assassinated Fred Hampton and called it justice. Watching these kinds of stories is so difficult and even unsatisfying. It's unbelievable to me that people still trust the police to mete out justice in this nation. This film documents a violent racist campaign by our federal government to destroy a revolutionary hero who was attempting to make people's lives better. The acting in this film is great. Daniel Kaluuya, especially, is fantastic. It is completely and totally category fraud to try to sell Kaluuya in the supporting actor category, though, and this might backfire. There's no reason he couldn't be a solid contender in the Best Actor group. It's one of the best performances of the year.

I watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix. Judas and the Black Messiah is on HBOmax.

Operation Petticoat (1959)

Operation Petticoat is pretty delightful. It's a silly, totally absurd comedy about a submarine that gets sunk before it leaves Pearl Harbor but whose captain insists on repairing it anyway and sailing it into battle. It's the kind of farcical take on World War II that Spielberg was aiming to make when he made his worst film, 1941.

I watched Operation Petticoat on the Criterion Channel, where they were playing a series of Cary Grant's broad comedy films. Grant is hilarious in this. Tony Curtis is funny, too, and is as femme as ever.

Tenet

Listen, I know Nolan is soulless. I don't think this movie has any more soul than any of his other movies, but Nolan's awkward attempts at interiority seem to matter less in Tenet, and I liked it all the more. 

To be honest, I loved this. I haven't had this much fun at a movie in ages. It's a total and complete blast. It doesn't make a lick of sense, and I'm not going to bother to worry about the way the science of time travel works for one bit. This is a delightful and fun thriller, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. John David Washington is great. Robert Pattinson is great. Elizabeth Debicki is great. Aaron Taylor Johnson is great. Dimple Kapadia is great. The whole cast is excellent.

A Colt Is My Passport (1960)

A Colt Is My Passport (拳銃 コルト は俺のパスポート) is not a film noir. It's more like a Western set in 1960s Japan than anything else. It is, however, a very enjoyable crime film with a central theme of fraternal loyalty that is quite compelling. The editing is excellent, and the acting is great.

As usual, I watched this as part of the Japanese Noir series on the Criterion channel. This is such a great series.

Charm City Kings (2020)

Charm City Kings (which was originally called Twelve) started off with promise, and the location and the world building are great. But... as it turns out Ángel Manuel Soto was just making a usual paint-by-numbers Sundance movie. This has plenty of good stuff in it, but the screenplay is awful, and once we hit act two every single scene is not only predictable but also preposterous.

You can see from the poster, that the distributor was trying to sell the supporting performance by Meek Mill. And he is fine for some of the movie, but the screenplay is just so dumb that even his performance seems silly by the end.

I watched Charm City Kings on HBO Max, but I suggest you skip it.

Bull

Bull is very good, and Rob Morgan is excellent as always. It's an intriguing portrait of a particular aspect of Texan life with which I was not at all acquainted. I thought it was really interesting; the characters are excellent; and the storytelling feels dangerous and unpredictable even if it really isn't.

I Was at Home, But...

I Was at Home, But... (Ich War Zuhause, Aber…) is so boring. I know it's about grief and, like, ok. But everyone in it behaves like they're zombies, and I swear to you a full fourth of this movie is dedicated to children acting Hamlet in the most boring, terrible way possible. Franz Rogowski, who is a genius actor, has a very small part in this that is hard to explain. Like, I am not sure why he would take such a part. But, in fact, most of I Was at Home, But... is hard to explain. No thanks.

The Climb

The Climb is really funny. It's totally outrageous but strangely believable. And while it is not quite as wise, I think, as it wants to be, it's just so totally enjoyable. It made me miss my best friend a lot, even though he is nowhere near being a fuck-up like the guys in this movie.

I watched this film on blu-ray, so I'm not sure how else you watch it.

Babyteeth

Babyteeth is excellent. It's funny and quirky and touching, while also being messy and very smart and occasionally dangerous. I really loved it.

This is one of my favorite 2020 films. You can watch in on Hulu.

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

I understand why Tarantino and other people might like Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者). It's a movie filled with style. Much of it takes place on what looks like a Vincente Minelli Hollywood movie set from the 1950s, and yet the genre is a kind of yakuza western. 

But this movie is style over substance. I honestly didn't know who was who half the time or what was going on. I liked the main character a lot. He's very cool. But this thing wore out my patience. 

Tokyo Drifter did, however, help me see how Suzuki got from the tight films noirs he was making in the 1950s to the surreal nationalist stuff he was making in the 1980s. Tokyo Drifter totally makes sense as something midway between the two.

This is another Nikkatsu crime caper, and it's in the Criterion Channel series Japanese Noir, though it is definitely not a noir.

Advantageous (2015)

Advantageous has a smart little idea. A woman who has been deemed too old to do her job can replace her body entirely, but it means jeopardizing her relationship with her child. It's a poignant, message-heavy story. Jennifer Phang, however, places this narrative within an entire dystopian world of child sexual exploitation, terrorist attacks, abusive fathers, artificial intelligence, houselessness, surveillance, and memory loss. There is also an additional context of the betrayal of a best friend, a cheating husband, a daughter who refuses to speak with her father, and a religious mother who is also estranged from her daughter. 

To put it another way, the container is too big for the story. 

And what results is boring. 

There are so many nascent ideas in the film, and so little is happening in the narrative itself, that the viewer begins following these other ideas in order to make the film have meaning. But literally all of these ideas are red herrings in Advantageous, and the movie turns out to be what you thought it was about all along. 

Furthermore, it hasn't a thing to do with the poster – which makes this film look like a science fiction thriller – and, in fact, it doesn't need to take place within its dystopian universe at all. All of that is just a distraction from this film's lessons for you. 

Maybe this worked as a short film.

If you want to catch Advantageous you can find it on Netflix. But I wouldn't recommend that.

Hope Gap (2019)

Hope Gap feels like it has the potential to be something better than it wound up being. As it is, it's sort of tiresome. Annette Bening's character is rather an awful person, and she was hard for me to love. But the screenplay has some lovely language in it, and it's fairly elegant. The problem is that spending time with these folks isn't very much fun, if I'm honest. Still, Josh O'Connor has sold me as a truly brilliant actor. He's wonderful in this.

Heroes Never Die (2019)

Les Héros Ne Meurent Jamais opens in a stunning way. A man is accosted in the street and the person yells and says You are dead. You died on such and such of a date. The man who is accosted is disturbed by this. The date he is supposed to have died is his birthday. He and a few friends go on an odyssey to find his old life, traveling to Bosnia outside Srebrenica. From here Aude Léa Rapin's film becomes about mourning and the Bosnian war and the desire to do kind things for others. I liked this a lot. It's quirky and profound. There's an entire metacinematic element that I don't understand, but it works just fine.

This movie was released in the US as Heroes Don't Die not Heroes Never Die, which I think is rather odd. There's no real reason to mistranslate the title. In fact, it's much better when translated accurately.

I watched Les Héros Ne Meurent Jamais on MUBI. It premiered on MUBI on January 21, 2021. The Academy of Motion Pictures is counting January 2021 as 2020, and so I am too. So Heroes Don't Die is a 2020 movie.

Intimidation (1960)

Intimidation (ある脅迫) is another tight noir from Kurahara Koreyoshi and the Nikkatsu studio. Intimidation's characters are less likable than I Am Waiting's, and that perhaps works against it. But Kurahara's tight storytelling is excellent here. We move from the street to the bedroom or from sober to drunk in the blink of an eye, and this telescoping of time works so well. Then when it wants to draw out its long, central heist sequence, the time of it becomes excruciating. This way of playing with time works great. And the entire thing clocks in at something like 65 minutes.

I am watching a bunch of Nikkatsu crime films as part of a series called Japanese noir on the Criterion Channel. So far most have them have been great.

Martin Eden

I loved this film. Luca Marinelli is brilliant in it, and the film itself is just beautifully done. Martin Eden is the story of a poor worker who gets an education in order to gain access to bourgeois society, but his education teaches him that bourgeois society is a bunch of murderers. Martin responds to this with despair. Still, the film isn't a downer. It's so lush and carefully crafted, and the performances are so excellent and honest that watching this movie feels celebratory just as an activity.

Made in Italy

Made in Italy isn't a Hallmark Channel movie because Lindsay Duncan is in it, but it's not not a Hallmark Channel movie. Micheál Richardson, who is the son of Liam Neeson and the late Natasha Richardson, is very handsome, but he's sort of terrible in this, and the script is just abysmal. It's Hallmark scene after Hallmark scene. I can see why this got made, and I can even see why Liam Neeson wanted to make it with his son, but wow. It's awful.

I Am Waiting (1957)

 I Am Waiting (俺は待ってるぜ) is another Nikkatsu noir picture. This one stars Ishihara Yūjirō in an early-career turn as a boxer who befriends a cocktail singer played by Kitahara Mie. He's great. She's gorgeous, but more importantly she's also very, very good. I liked this one a lot.

Who's Singin' over There? (1980)

This movie is brilliant. It's been a long time since I saw something I loved this unequivocally. Who's Singin' over There? (Ко То Тамо Пева) is perfectly balanced. It's a broad, hilarious, folksy farce with sequences of gorgeous sublimity and beautiful music, and then all of a sudden it's tragically poignant. The direction, by Slobodan Šijan is just exquisite. I adored this Yugoslavian film.

Father of My Children

Really wonderful filmmaking. I love all of Mia Hansen-Løve's films. This first one is exquisite.

The Seventh Victim (1943)

In this very strange horror film from 1943, a young woman discovers a... satanic cult? This is bananas, and it's actually very scary, even though there's nothing at all satanic on screen. I enjoyed this. It's shot beautifully. And goddammit is it weird.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

In Make Way for Tomorrow, a septuagenarian couple loses their house and – without any warning at all – asks their fortysomething kids to take them in. But the old folks refuse to lie low and stay out of their kids' hair, complaining and otherwise making nuisances of themselves. The film obviously sympathizes with these two old people, but I was not having a moment of it. They intrude on their kids' lives, cause a ton of trouble, and then have the gall to blame their kids and make them feel awful for not financially supporting them. The whole thing is so morally backward. And the film actually believes that these kids are terrible people and that the old folks are lovable and pitiable. Not for me. These two old people were assholes.

I think this is so noticeable to me because I do not feel the same way about Ozu's Tokyo Story, which is based on Make Way for Tomorrow. The old folks in Ozu's film are lovable, and their kids really are the jerks. The kids are not jerks in Make Way for Tomorrow. I also remember liking Randolph Edmonds' 1934 play Old Man Pete, which has a similar conceit: an old couple from Virginia moves to Harlem to visit their children and stay with them. 

It's the two characters in Make Way for Tomorrow. They just don't seem to understand that they're in the way, and they have no ability at all to read the room. They're awful people.

Butt Boy (2019)

This movie is called Butt Boy, and if that makes you think of a kind of hilarious superhero or supervillain, then you've got the title right. The premise of this film is that there is a serial killer who... puts things up his asshole, including small children and dogs, who are never seen again. His incredible asshole just somehow is able to fit them in there without the Butt Boy himself getting any larger. You just have to go with it, I guess. 

This is stylishly made and occasionally funny. It's the kind of jokey, gross-out, horror movie that plays really well at a certain kind of film festival. But I guess I find the entire premise kind of homophobic. Butt Boy is about the terror of the asshole, being afraid of what is beyond the sphincter, a disgust at the interior of the body, specifically the colon, and a fear of becoming addicted to shoving things up one's ass. The entire thing, in fact, is framed in the terms of addiction. Anyway, this wasn't for me. 

Also, I wanted more affect from the star (who is also the director), Tyler Cornack. He behaves like he's in a stupor for the entirety of the film.

I watched Butt Boy on Prime, and you can too if this sounds like something you might enjoy.

Two from Stephen Cone

Stephen Cone's The Wise Kids (2012) is, indeed, wise. This is a nuanced, careful, and generous exploration of three religious high schoolers during the summer before they go off to college. One is dealing with being gay, one with losing her faith in Christianity, and the other with the fact that she has none of these problems. Cone himself plays the church's music director, who has his own issues. As much as I have no time for Christianity, this film is a very kind, very smart exploration of this world without the usual sensational gay conversion therapy plot. The film's central actress, Molly Kunz, is especially lovely.

Oddly enough, Cone's second feature, which I also recently watched, covers much of the same ground (albeit with several more hard-bodied shirtless actors and an absence of cargo shorts). Henry Gamble's Birthday (2016) is in many ways a retread of The Wise Kids, which is, I think a much better film. It's set in a much wealthier megachurch scenario, and the family is much, much richer. This second movie is fine, and it's occasionally pretty sexy, but the territory it wants to cover doesn't feel very new at all. This movie made a bit of a splash when it came out, and it was apparently rather polarizing with gay audience, and I don't know. I was happy to see Jack Ball in something, but Henry Gamble's Birthday really paled in comparison to The Wise Kids. 

Another thing that I guess is worth saying here is that now that I'm almost forty years old I'm much more interested in the adults in these films. I think I liked Wise Kids better than Henry Gamble is that the former film is so much more interested in what is going on with its adults. The grown-ups in Henry Gamble are mostly messes.

I watched both of these films on the Criterion Channel, where they were paired with Cone's (excellent) film Princess Cyd in a little collection there. They were about to leave the Channel on January 31st so I got in under the wire, although I think you can probably find them on Amazon Prime.