The Island at the Top of the World (1974)

The Island at the Top of the World is good, adventurous Disney fun in the vein of Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The plot of this, incidentally, is an absurdity, but who cares.

I watched this on Disney+.

The Quiet One (1948)

Despite being nominated for Best Documentary Feature, The Quiet One is not a documentary; it's a docudrama that's been performed by actors. (The poster above is attempting to make it very clear (to Oscar voters?) that Donald Thompson is an actor.) At the very least this pushes the boundaries of what can be called documentary. The Quiet One is purportedly a true story, and it is reported here in a documentary style very like Navajo from 1952. This is interesting for its discussions of mental illness among young people. It's unfortunate that the film quality is no longer so great.

You can watch this on YouTube, but the quality is rough.

Nocturna (2007)

Nocturna is a beautifully animated magical adventure. I enjoyed this a great deal. It's wonderfully imaginative and lovely to look at.

It's currently playing as part of an art-house animation series on the Criterion Channel.

Swing Time (1936)

Barf. Swing Time is one of the least interesting Fred Astaire movies I've seen. (It was apparently Ginger Rogers' favorite of their films together. I gotta disagree, Ginger.) The fact that the songs come from out of the blue (i.e. are non-diegetic) is interesting, but the book is so long; there's so much unnecessary plot. There are four excellent Jerome Kern songs – all four are superb – but this thing is almost 100 minutes long and there are literally four songs plus two dance numbers. This is a musical? 

Also there is a blackface number in Swing Time that I found completely tedious – it also, big surprise, did not need to be in blackface.

The Men (1950)

The Men is a solid mid-century postwar disability drama that has a great performance from Marlon Brando and an excellent supporting turn from Arthur Jurado.

It is, as you might imagine from the title, obsessed with the idea that disabled men are (still) men. Much of this Fred Zinnemann feature rings oddly now, I guess, but there are still some intriguing ideas, and, as I say, some interesting acting. Although probably the most interesting thing is watching an acting style like Teresa Wright's – truly old school Broadway stuff – next to performers like Brando, Jurado, Everett Sloane, and Jack Webb, who just didn't have that same kind of approach to acting.

I watched The Men on the Criterion Channel - just before it leaves at the end of the month.

The Kid Detective

The Kid Detective is very good. Very funny but also poignant and smart.

And I cannot stop thinking about the last scene, when the kid detective burst into tears.

Under Fire (1983)

Under Fire is really strong. It leans on sentiment a little bit, but way less than it could have. There are some really powerful scenes in this, and it surprised me frequently, though I was not always able to follow the plot carefully – the facts of the uprising were not quite so clear to me as I think they should have been. I thought this was very good.

Give Me the Satus Quo or Give Me Death!

The Twentieth Century: the Epic of Mackenzie King as Recounted in Ten Chapters is a brilliant comedy about early 20th-century Canadian politics. It's a wonderful satire inspired by Guy Maddin and Derek Jarman, but the genius is all Matthew Rankin. It's a hilarious, fabulously confident film. (Incidentally, all of the reviews that compare this to Monty Python are out of their minds.)

I watched this with my movie club. It was a Dave Rodriguez pick, and the entire group loved it.

Kitty (1945)

Kitty is a riff on the Pygmalion story, but it's so brilliantly done, with such a cracklingly witty script, that I fell for it and fell hard. Paulette Goddard is fabulous in this, and Ray Milland is, of course, delightful. The supporting cast is excellent too, especially Constance Collier and Cecil Kellaway. There are some absolutely hilarious moments in this script, and the gowns and the hair and makeup are superb. Kitty was nominated for production design, but this was two years before the costume design category was created. This is a sumptuously made movie and it's gorgeously designed - Mitchell Leisen was, in fact, a designer before he was a director. But the direction is also brilliant. Leisen has this relaxed, casual way in his films that seems to defy the morality of the day with a beautiful ease. Kitty is really a spectacular - and spectacularly underrated – film, but I'm certainly glad we are all beginning to reassess Leisen's wonderful career.

I watched this as part of a series of Leisen films on the Criterion Channel. I've only seen a few, but I'm a new admirer.

Trading Places (1983)

Trading Places is a very funny comedy that I enjoyed a ton. It's a cross between the stupid 1930s comedy $1000 a Minute and Calderón's classic La Vida Es Sueño, and it works. The cast is excellent. I fucking love Eddie Murphy and there's just no getting around it. He is so goddamn funny, and this shows off his talents perfectly. There is an unnecessary blackface scene, and Murphy says faggot too many times, and there is also a male/male rape joke involving a villain in a gorilla suit, but listen, this is a funny movie, unlike some garbage like Splash or something – a movie that has plenty of its own problems, mind you. I thought this was great.

Look for tons of excellent actors in very small parts, including James Eckhouse as a cop and Giancarlo Esposito as one of the guys in jail with Eddie Murphy. 

I watched Trading Places on DVD, but I am sure it must be available via VOD.

Electra (1962)

This adaptation of Euripides' play Electra (Ηλέκτρα) – the least enjoyable of the three ancient Athenian plays that cover this plot (the others are Sophocles' Electra and Æschylus' Libation Bearers) – is slow and ponderous and contains almost no plot whatsoever. For some reason, too, the film avoids staging some of the violence in the story but then adds a bunch that doesn't appear in the original play. 

The score is the worst thing about this, though. It's a series of drones and drums, and it makes the mood of the entire film strange. 

The worst part of all is that no one in this movie behaves anything like a real person. It's all good and well to answer that by saying, Well it is an Athenian tragedy from the 5th century BCE. Indeed, you would be right. But it's not like this was performed in any way approaching how it would have been performed in the 5th century, so why then must it be performed this way, with all of the slow, ponderous droning and hysteria? No thanks.

Cacoyannis's Electra was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture, and, strangely enough, it's available on YouTube.

Minstrel Man (1944)

Minstrel Man is a diegetic movie musical designed as a vehicle for and celebration of Benny Fields. He sings his hit "Melancholy Baby" in this twice. In fact, he sings nearly every song twice, and he sings the Oscar-nominated "Remember Me to Carolina" a total of four times in this 65-minute movie. 

This is a nostalgic piece of film history that was very popular, and it anticipated the popularity of The Jolson Story two years later. 

Blackface minstrelsy is so fucking weird. In the first place, this movie was popular in 1944, during the war, and that's already mind blowing, but I really just don't understand why this singer needed to be in blackface in the first place. These songs are fine, and they could be sung easily enough without the burnt cork. 

As for the movie itself, it has only a whiff of a plot and is fairly dumb.

I watched Minstrel Man via the Cave of Forgotten Films.

The Last Unicorn

The Last Unicorn is pretty wonderful – aside from the America songs. It's magical and filled with lovely imagery, and it ends in such a gorgeous bittersweet way, so unlike the typical Disney fare.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel. Apparently everyone my age had already seen this film, but somehow I missed it when I was a kid despite my love of unicorns.

The Last Angry Man (1959)

The Last Angry Man is a sort of late 1950s early 1960s prestige drama, the kind that Arthur Miller would write – about principles and such. Not that I'm knocking it, but it's a drama that is tired of the world we live in, and it hopes people can be better than the modern world is making them. The Last Angry Man, however, is elevated by a brilliant performance by the great Paul Muni, and supporting turns from Billy Dee Williams and Claudia McNeil. And look for Cicely Tyson in a cameo!

I watched this as part of a series of Paul Muni films playing on the Criterion Channel.

I, Olga Hepnarova

Já Olga Hepnarová is gorgeously shot and I quite enjoyed it. It's a very odd movie, and it definitely has a few continuity problems, but the central performance is amazing, and the character is so intense and strange, that this becomes quite compelling.

Two with Sonja Henie & Tyrone Power

Thin Ice is a totally absurd Sonja Henie picture with Tyrone Power as her love interest. He's some Swiss prince or somesuch nonsense. This whole thing is stupidly absurd and delightful, and I enjoyed myself. Both this film and Second Fiddle (two years later) were directed by Sidney Lanfield.

Second Fiddle is a truly charming little Irving Berlin musical. This is fundamentally a much better musical than Thin Ice. All of the songs are diegetic, and of course Tyrone Power does not sing – although he writes a song and croaks out a few lovesick bars while writing it. I have to say that I don't think Sonja Henie is that interesting, but she's pleasant enough, and this film has Edna May Oliver doing tons of great comic shtick, and of course Tyrone Power. He's quite funny in this, and just as handsome as ever. This is a nice little riff on the formula established with Thin Ice, and Second Fiddle has great Irving Berlin tunes.

Under the Sand (2000)

Well, Under the Sand is brilliant. It's creepy and cool for a while, and then there's this amazing shot where Charlotte Rampling fucks her new boyfriend in her dead husband's bed while he watches and she enjoys him watching that just sent me over the edge. 

Ozon is a genius. Watching this made me wonder why I haven't seen more films by this director whom I love so much.

Green Grass of Wyoming (1948)

Green Grass of Wyoming... is dumb. It's so strange to watch yet another movie about animals that is somehow about heteronormativity, and the animals, like, are in love and are parents and shit. What the hell is going on? 

This one also features two or three songs by Burl Ives that about two hundred teenagers seem to be loving. I've never met such teenagers in my life. Some of the photography in this movie is cool, and the horses are pretty, but this doesn't have much going for it once they track down the white stallion. Act three involves three races that are all the same, and we are supposed to care just as deeply about each one. I am not sure why this sequence needed to be repeated twice.

This is apparently the third book in a series called My Friend Flicka, about which I know nothing. The cast in this film, however, has been completely changed from the first two films.

Perri

Perri is a cute enough story about a squirrel – why they've gone and named her Perri is anyone's guess. Walt Disney takes documentary nature photography and gives it narration and makes a melodrama out of forest interactions – with songs that aren't too bad. This is diverting enough, but its heteronormativity is so annoying. Oh well. I guess that's the 1950s for you.

In the Heights

In the Heights has some fun content, and it is so nice to watch a musical in which everyone is a good singer – this is so rare for a movie musical. 

But... this is not directed well. Everything is an ensemble number, and it is as if there is no plot at all. Usnavi is supposed to realize, over the course of the film, that Washington Heights is a community and one where he belongs. This is obvious from the first sequence in the film, and the film itself seems to insist on precisely this fact in number after number. And all of them are ensemble numbers. Even Nina's beautiful number from act one becomes a busy ensemble number in Chu's film. And Nina and Benny's love song late in act two becomes a very busy dance number with special effects. It's just all so busy. 

But, listen, I love Jimmy Smits. I love Daphne Rubin-Vega. I love Marc Anthony. And I loved Gregory Diaz IV.

Luca (2021)

I loved Luca a little more than it deserved, probably, but the boys are so sweet together, and the film's allegory for sexuality works very well, I think. I loved all the Italian in it, too, and the animation is really pretty and cartoony.

The Black Swan (1942)

The Black Swan is a delight! I love a good swashbuckling adventure film, and this one is one of the best. It's funny to me that most of these pirate movies Hollywood are actually films about nationalism. The English, the Spanish, the Americans. Of course, this is a WWII film, and so the question really is about betrayal and who you can trust, and alliances. In any case, this is a lot of fun, and Tyrone Power is just great – aside from being impossibly handsome.

Les Girls (1957)

I loved Kay Kendall in this, and I don't recall ever having seen her in anything before, but this movie as a whole is rather lackluster. I wanted more musical numbers and more Gene Kelly.

Carancho

Carancho was exciting (and outrageous) for a while, and about midway through I thought Oh I really like this movie. This is good. 

But Carancho wore thin with me during act three, and by the end, the movie collapsed in on itself. I suppose the ending of the film is meant as a kind of commentary about life and death and control over circumstances, but it felt like a kind of overly neat shrug to me, as if not much of it mattered.

I watched this because it stars Ricardo Darín, who I love, and because it was leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of June.

Duffer

Duffer is a fucked up movie about a young man and his fucked up relationship with an older man. The older man, Louis-Jack, is psychotic, and he consistently harms and toys with the young man (who is called Duffer). We get all of this in narration, although we also see a great deal of it. But there is no diegetic sound in the movie itself; the entirety of the film's sound information is in voiceover. This is disorienting and strange, especially because sounds loop around or repeat incessantly. 

Duffer tells us what he's doing, what he does with his friend, a prostitute he calls Your Gracie, and what he does with Louis-Jack. Things are weird – in a British, 1960s theatre sort of way, I guess – but then Louis-Jack decides he wants to get Duffer pregnant and things take quite a gruesome turn.

This movie was never released in the U.S., and it's difficult to tell when it was released in the UK – 1971? 1972? Who's to say?

Gook (2017)

Gook is a well made US American tragedy. This has some great performances, and the script has lots to recommend it – especially as an original take on the Rodney King riots in 1992. I liked it a lot.

That's Life!

It is pretty hard to think about the frailty of the human condition, as That's Life!'s poster promises we'll be able to do, when the film's protagonist is as rich as Croesus. 

We're in a giant estate in Malibu, for fuck's sake, but we're supposed to sympathize with a man who is bored or anxious or, like, vaguely dissatisfied or irritated. 

Worse yet, the screenplay undermines the stakes of this man's crisis by letting us know before we even meet this asshole that his wife is worried about whether or not she might have throat cancer. So the whole time this movie wants us to sympathize with this rich white dude and whatever midlife crisis he's experiencing, we already know that someone else in the family is having a life and death situation that just makes his crisis feel silly. 

And this isn't to say that anxiety or nervous breakdowns or whatever aren't real, but it's hard to identify with or pity someone this rich.

Anna (1987)

Anna is very strange and very 1980s. An actress is having a nervous breakdown, and the film... well I guess I just don't really understand this film's point of view. It's sort of an odd little story. Sally Kirkland is great, honestly, but most of the time I wasn't sure what in the hell was happening.

Romance on the High Seas (1948)

Romance on the High Seas was Doris Day's first film, and she is billed fourth. Someone made a mistake; she would become a huge star – much bigger than everyone else who is billed higher than her here. She is incredible in this, and frankly the whole thing is quite fun. Day and Oscar Levant, especially, are hilarious.

Tavernier Triple Feature

I watched three Bertrand Tavernier films at the end of June. Tavernier died recently (in March) and the Criterion Channel put a bunch of his films up for us. 

A Sunday in the Country (Un Dimanche à la Compagne) (1984) is understated and lovely.

Daddy Nostalgie (1990) is smart and slow and sad. It's Dirk Bogarde's last performance, and I love that man so much, so this is a pleasure in many ways. It's also a very interesting character study. Jane Birkin's character is constantly getting angry for no reason, or rather, there's something in her character that prompts her to quick rages. It's a very, very interesting film.

And then there is La Vie et Rien d'Autre (Life and Nothing But) (1989), which is plainly Bertrand Tavernier's masterpiece. This is an incredible, moving antiwar film set in the year following WWI. Tavernier's focus on the dead, on the absolute and total loss of life is extraordinary, humane, and almost unbearable. I loved this film. Philippe Noiret and Sabine Azéma are wonderful.

38: Auch Das War Wien (1986)

The tone of this WWII movie feels really off. Like, it's supposed to be quite suspenseful, and the plot tells us it is, but the director doesn't manage communicating that with us, so things happen that are very dangerous, but they just never feel dangerous. 38: Vienna Before the Fall is interesting as a portrait of theatre people in Austria right before the German invasion, but that's about it.

This movie was very difficult to find. I had to purchase a bootleg.

Return of the Magnificent Seven

Return of the Seven is a passable sequel, and I love Yul Brynner so much that this was worth the watch. Also, I just felt like watching a Western gunslinger movie. Return of the Seven also boasts the very, very handsome Robert Fuller, as well as a gorgeous revisioning of the original Magnificent Seven score by Elmer Bernstein. The plot of Return of the Seven, however, is... half-baked, and the entire film feels like the second and third acts of a film and not really a full film. I guess they were assuming I've seen The Magnificent Seven, and, like, I have, but that was 20 years ago (Literally. In 2001.) But even for sixties audiences it would have been six full years! I don't know. This sequel assumed a great many feelings about characters that I just didn't carry with me. This was more of a sketch of a film than a film.

Kirikou et les Hommes et les Femmes (2012)

Kirikou and the Men and Women is completely charming – and possibly just as charming as Kirikou and the Sorceress. (I haven't seen Kirikou and the Wild Animals, which appeared between the original film and this one.) The best part of this is the explicit references to Soundiata Keita. In one of the vignettes in this Kirikou story, a griot appears, and she tells the story of Soundiata to the villagers and to Karaba. And Kirikou (of course) finishes the tale and invents a new ending. I forgot how much I love Kirikou, actually. I need to get hold of the second film.

This was not released in the United States, for reasons I don't understand. This is definitely a kids' film, though, so it would need to be dubbed.