I watched Mulan on Disney+.
To be honest, I found this affecting enough, and I liked it quite a bit – I even love Ben Affleck – but the screenwriter really took the lazy road in act three. It's just all so predictable.
Also, this film has nothing at all to do with Orson Welles. I really did not realize that before I watched it.
I've been watching João Pedro Rodrigues's films on the Criterion Channel, since they're about to leave. The first film of his I saw was The Ornithologist, and it's so intriguing and surreal and wonderful. O Fantasma is really a masterpiece, though. I look forward to watching both Odete and To Die like a Man. I expect very queer things.
Fun fact, when Rooney and Garland produce a show in act two, at the end of it the curtain comes down and it says Next Week: East Lynne. This was a common thing producers put at the end of a bad show; East Lynne could always be counted on, and audiences loved the show. This is a kind of theatre joke in Strike Up the Band that most people would understand. Anyway, it reminded me that I had never seen East Lynne, so I finally decided to watch it.
I watched Strike Up the Band on DVD.
I am still working through this Japanese Noir series on the Criterion Channel.
I watched this on Amazon Prime and it was the last film that I hadn't seen from the 1984 Oscar cycle. (This was the year Amadeus won Best Picture. The year of Beverly Hills Cop and War-Time Romance and Sesión Continua and El Norte and Footloose.)
Contrary to synopses of this that you might read on the Internet, Deux (Two of Us) is not a sweet movie about love that's been tested. It's nowhere near some kind of sugary, sentimental film. Filippo Meneghetti's film is a thriller. It feels dangerous throughout, and I spent most of the movie very scared for the two main characters. The opening of Deux is mysterious and troubling, with a little girl's screams covered by the cawing of birds. And the rest of the movie continues from this tempestuous opening. This is a very good movie with an excellent central performance. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it, but it's very good.
Deux was France's submission to the Academy Awards' International Feature this year. The nominations came out on Monday, though, and Meneghetti's film was not included among the nominees.
This movie was directed by Glen Keane, who made the wonderful short film Dear Basketball in 2017. Over the Moon is a very different movie, and it jumps between styles in a way that is interesting. But this is a kid's movie. It is not really for adults at all. You can watch it on Netflix.
I was surprised that I loved this so much. I didn't really care much for Zhao's last film, The Rider, even though almost everyone else seemed to love it. I just am not very interested in her use of non-actors.
And, I have to say, I really didn't like the non-actor aspect of Nomadland either. It's not that I don't think they're interesting people – they are definitely that – it's just that non-actors don't open up very well to the camera, and so they don't let the viewer have access to them in a way that an actor usually would. I find this a frustrating movie-watching experience. If I'm honest, I would just prefer that everyone in the film was an actor. For me, the sequences that worked best in Nomadland were all of the scenes with actors.
But honestly this bothered me a lot less in this movie than it did in The Rider, and Nomadland is a wonderful film. I recommend it to everyone.
Worse yet, One Night in Miami... insists on treating Malcolm X and Sam Cooke with the writer's own pop psychology. Malcolm's only doing what he's doing because he's trying to prove something to Black folks, it is posited. And Sam Cooke is only what he's doing because he's too invested white people's approval. This seems... lacking in nuance, let's say. But the film doesn't leave space for things to get richer. Characters are given space to air their opinions, but we never really get anywhere. All four of the characters, as it turns out, are right (except for Jim Brown, who appears not to have many opinions). It's just such a frustrating bit of writing. And I am not sure I understand, either, what the point of it all is. One Night in Miami... feels designed to confirm the viewer in our own ideas rather than to challenge them at all. It doesn't ask us to change; strangely enough, this film asks its characters to change. And this seems to me like an odd request.
The costumes are good, and I expect Leslie Odom Jr., who plays Sam Cooke, to get an Oscar nomination, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I've been told that there is only one copy of Frank Lloyd's East Lynne and that it is housed at UCLA. I sort of despaired of ever seeing this movie, particularly since I don't live in Los Angeles anymore, but I found a bootleg DVD online and thought I'd see what that held for me. The actual movie is something like 104 minutes long, but the DVD doesn't include the last real of the film, and I was only able to watch about 92 minutes of East Lynne. But I feel pretty sure I got the gist.
East Lynne is yet another Oscar-bait, woman-sacrifices-her-child picture, though I will say that I think Lloyd's film is different in some ways from the usual tropes these movies employ. In the first place, literally everything that happens in this film is the fault of a man and absolutely never the fault of the main character, Isabelle. And the film makes no bones about this. The men in this movie are terrible, terrible people who throw this woman away and treat her like shit.
I'm gonna write a little synopsis because there aren't any accurate ones on the internet. Isabelle marries this suburban, neo-Puritan dude and leaves the gay life of London to go stay at this giant manse in the country called East Lynne. She's super excited about it and loves her husband. But as soon as she gets to East Lynne she finds that the place is run by her husband's dour sister in law, who actually hadn't even come to London for the wedding. She badmouths Isabelle immediately, and it's clear she's going to muck things up somehow. The film skips all of the microaggressions we can be sure this old bat perpetrated, and we advance quickly to three years later with a title card. Isabelle has changed visibly. She no longer wears any pretty dresses, she's stifled in this house, and she also has a little boy. Her husband is mean to her; the sister is mean to her. It sucks. Then one of her former suitors comes to visit.
Then the Franco-Prussian War begins. Apparently it's 1870 (which I hadn't actually realized) and Paris is under siege. Miss thing is like I just really miss my son, perhaps my asshole ex-husband has come around and is not being such an asshole anymore. (We see in a few scenes back at East Lynne that he has most definitely not stopped being an asshole, though he has remarried.) But Isabelle's current boyfriend, who was swindling the British government, is now a full on jerk. She says I'm getting out of Paris and I'm going back to London to see my baby. This is crazy. Paris is under siege. A building falls on both her and her man. The man is killed and she somehow has some illness where she's going to go blind unless she has complete rest and, like, sits in a dark quiet room or something. But Lady Isabelle will not listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she refuses to trust the science. She says, Listen, if I'm going to go blind I need to see my babychild one last time. So she goes back to East Lynne in the dark of night.
And then the film cuts out.
Unfortunately, this is a ridiculous melodrama. It's so divorced from any reality and takes itself so seriously, that I just couldn't come around to enjoying it, even with Ann Harding in the lead role.
I actually don't know what happens at the end, and I think the
film is so different from the original novel that there are no clues
even to be found there. Every synopsis online gets things so wrong that I don't think they can be trusted here either. Does she shake the crib and he dies in her arms
or something like that? That seems about the speed of this movie. Perhaps one day I will find my way to UCLA to see the final reel. Hopefully I can watch just the end by itself, though, without having to rewatch the rest of this mostly tepid melodrama.
I watched this classic on the Criterion Channel as part of their series of Cary Grant's comedy turns.
Andrey Konchalovskiy's Dear Comrades! (Дорогие Товарищи!) is really good. This film is beautifully acted and a good companion piece to this year's films about police violence in the 1960s.
Dear Comrades! is the Russian selection for the International Film Oscar, and it made the 15-film shortlist announced last month. You can watch it on Hulu.
Calm with Horses was being called The Shadow of Violence for like two weeks, and although you can watch it on Netflix under the title Calm with Horses, the title that flashes on the screen is, indeed, The Shadow of Violence. Neither of these titles is really very good, but, then that begs the question of what title this film ought to screen under at all. There really isn't anything distinguishing this violent story of a heavy who works for a drugrunner from any other story of a heavy with a heart of gold who works for a crime racket.
This film does have Cosmo Jarvis and Barry Keoghan, but it isn't enough.
We watched this as a part of my unseen movie club, and I don't know how my friend Greg got ahold of it, but I think we were all a little embarrassed by it. Greg protested that the director, Jean-Claude Brisseau, was something of a phenom when Sound and Fury came out and that Sound and Fury itself was a Cannes darling back in 1988. I think all of us were skeptical, and then, I'm not kidding, the day after we watched this, MUBI had another Brisseau movie as their film of the day.
Greg later told me, "Well, he did call it Sound and Fury, after all."
"Signifying nothing?" I said.
"Exactly," replied Greg.
