For Love of Ivy (1968)

One doesn't normally think of Sidney Poitier as a romantic comedy performer, but For Love of Ivy is so much fun, and Poitier is delightful. I loved this film. It's smart and charming and poignant and very funny.

The Last Tycoon (1976)

The Last Tycoon has a great cast and it's beautifully designed. It also has a terrible script and some truly atrocious acting.

I don't know what was supposed to be going on in this, but it is terrible.

P.S. I don't think Robert De Niro has ever been more handsome than he is in this.

The Swimmer

For me, The Swimmer doesn't work. I really wish I had read the John Cheever story before watching this movie, but it was leaving Criterion in 3 days and I was on a time crunch. But here's the thing: The Swimmer is a Frank Perry movie, and the Perrys make horror movies. All of their movies are horror movies, even though none of them is actually in the genre: they're just made like horror movies. Mommie Dearest is actually a superb example. There's no reason for the film to be made in the way it is, but instead the camera lingers in weird ways, focuses on strange things, watches Joan Crawford walk eerily up the stairs. 

In any case, the trouble with the Perrys' version of The Swimmer is that we know something is off from the very beginning of this movie, even though it would have worked much, much better if we didn't perceive something as being wrong until much later when the main character himself starts to realize something is wrong.

This is John Cheever's Willy Loman, but we shouldn't start seeing ghosts in scene one.

Lancaster is expertly cast here, though. He's the perfect actor for middle-class unraveling as he has proven in many other films.

Brubaker (1980)

Tough stuff. Brubaker is a hard-bitten and rather depressing prison-reform movie. What's so hard about it is that the real obstacle for prison reform in Brubaker is corrupt politicians.

In this way Brubaker is much, much more realistic than most prison movies, and consequently much more disheartening.

This is, however, a very well made movie, and Robert Redford and his supporting cast is great – especially David Keith.

Flee (2021)

I'm not in the habit of ranking documentaries on my best-of-the-year list, but Flee is one of the best movies of 2021, so I'm doing it anyway.

Not as a Stranger (1955)

Meh. Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger (based on a bestselling novel) is not that great. 

In the first place, the main character is mostly a terrible human being. It's an excellent lesson in how being convinced that you're right is dangerous. 

In the second place, Robert Mitchum, who is looking very, very handsome in Not as a Stranger, is giving a wooden, weird performance that doesn't let the audience in at all. 

The rest of the cast is mostly good – especially Broderick Crawford and Charles Bickford. And I'm always happy to see Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin.

However, I just do not care about Olivia De Havilland, and I don't care how many Oscars they give her or how many pieces I have to read about how great Melanie in Gone with the Wind is. None of that can make me like her milquetoast personality.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

I never did see the documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye on which this film is based, and I'm sure my thoughts would be richer if I had, but here we are.

I quite liked this movie. Jessica Chastain is fully and completely committed to doing Tammy Faye Bakker at every moment, and this performance feels nuanced and sensitive and loving even when Tammy Faye herself feels like she's a cartoon. It's a great performance, and the accolades Chastain is receiving are deserved. (Also, the makeup is great!)

One of the issues I have with the film itself is that it doesn't really let us in on what is going on with Jim Bakker and his swindling deals. The Eyes of Tammy Faye sort of takes Tammy Faye's perspective, and since she didn't concern herself with Jim's dealings, his sexual assaults, and his (was this real?) homosexual affairs, we learn absolutely nothing about any of them. This feels weird; I felt sort of robbed of the explanation for the Bakkers' downfall, and because this was left out we really didn't get to see Tammy Faye's responses to any of this. It just feels like a big chunk of the story is missing. A character played by Sam Jaeger appears in act two, and I swear I still don't know who he was supposed to be other than a rich man. (I just googled it. He was playing Roe Messner, whom Tammy Faye married right after divorcing Jim Bakker. The film makes it seem like she's just hanging out by herself in a tiny apartment.)

The other result of leaving out Jim Bakker's shady deals is that the real villain of the film turns out to be none other than Jerry Falwell, who is a complete asshole in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I have nothing bad to say about that. It's clear in this movie that Falwell and Pat Robertson are calculating, wealth-amassing figures exploiting their tax-exempt status and attempting to influence U.S. American politics; what they are not is spiritual leaders. (It is insane to me that these men who run businesses that are exempt from U.S. American taxes can simultaneously claim to be somehow oppressed. Literally the government lets you work without paying taxes and you're oppressed???)

Anyway, I had fun, and I was too young to remember much of what goes on in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, so I learned things.

Body and Soul (1925)

Body and Soul was Paul Robeson's film debut, and it's an intriguing film, especially because Robeson plays this awful swindler-rapist-murderer pastor, who really destroys the family at the center of the movie. Robeson is wonderfully dynamic, of course, and the film has some exciting action in it. I also loved the ending (one Oscar Micheaux was apparently forced to make by the censors), in which the main character fantasizes about what might have happened if she'd made better decisions.

El Baile de los 41 (2020)

Dance of the 41 is a very confused movie. It's a film about the closet, but the risks taken by these closeted men – and the main character in particular – are terrifying, and I was supremely anxious the entire film. The trouble with David Pablos's movie, though, is that he doesn't really have anything to say about the homophobia that is his movie's subject. The closet is left uninterrogated here, and this movie makes us feel as though we want the protagonist to do a better job of being closeted. (Some of this might have to do with the fact that we know absolutely nothing about turn-of-the-20th-century México when this film is set. What exactly are the men doing that is illegal? Is it transvestism? Sodomy? Prostitution? This film does not tell us.)

This film sees the central love story between the two men as sad or sweet or something, and that's nice and all, but Dance of the 41 also takes the side of the culture, seeing their behavior as basically bad for society and damaging to those around them. No one makes any passionate speeches on behalf of these men; indeed, no one even articulates the logic of freedom in this movie. It's rough going.

All of this discomfort is made much better by the truly beautiful costuming and the very lovely production design. And of course Alfonso Herrera and Emiliano Zurita are very handsome. But I'm not sure any of that is enough to make Dance of the 41 worth watching. (If you do want to watch, though, it's on Netflix.)

The Horse's Mouth (1958)

I had no patience for Ronald Neame's The Horse's Mouth. This was a peak Alec Guinness moment in British cinema, I guess, and he apparently could sell anything to audiences. Well, not to me. He's doing this weird gravelly voice in this movie and his character is the most irritating, annoying person. I found this rather insufferable.

Meet John Doe (1941)

Meet John Doe still contains much of the corniness of Frank Capra's usual fare, but it's actually much much darker than we usually expect from Capra. Meet John Doe is a rather terrifying portrait of anticommunism/fascism and big political money in the United States and the truly evil depths these fuckers will sink to in order to maintain a stranglehold on US American politics.

Also surprisingly, the ending of Meet John Doe is fairly grim. We do not end with a great deal of hope for the potential of the little guy and the honest worker to join together to defeat the cynical politician, and yet the potential is there! The film shows us that it is possible to join together and help each other and redistribute wealth, and if it also shows us that those possibilities are frail and need nurturing and commitment, it still shows us a great many people who are willing to work at them.

I didn't love Meet John Doe: Cooper's ingenuous yokel figure never feels quite honest to me. But the character actor Regis Toomey shows up in act two and gives us a breathtakingly performed monologue. Toomey is brilliant in this movie.

Child of Deaf Adults

CODA is a sweet little movie. 

I am not sure why I'm calling it a "little" movie other than maybe it's a movie about high school kid and so in many ways it operates on the level of a high school kid's feelings and decisions and desires. In any case, it's very well acted (Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin are standouts as the main character's parents), and charmingly sentimental.

Whether I think Siân Heder's film is little or not, the Screen Actor's Guild nominated the cast for best ensemble over some pretty powerhouse ensembles including The Power of the Dog's cast, and the Golden Globes nominated it for best picture, so it seems to me that on February 8 CODA is getting an adapted screenplay nomination and a best picture nomination, in addition to the near certainty of Kotsur getting a best supporting actor nomination. And if I think about how sometimes a trailing supporting actress can often get a nomination in a movie that receives unexpected Academy love, Matlin may end up with a surprise nomination too. This would definitely be a surprise, but it really could happen, depending on how the love for this "little" movie surges in the next two weeks.

Operation Hyacinth (2021)

Piotr Domalewski's film Hiacynt has just skyrocketed to become one of my favorite movies of the year. Operation Hyacinth is dangerous, and sexy, and smart, and really nerve-wracking. Hiacynt is a genre movie – a crime film in which the detective uncovers ever more dangerous information. In this case we are in 1980s Poland, and our detective is attempting to figure out who is murdering gay men, although the police seem to think there's nothing to investigate. 

One of the things I really liked about Hiacynt is its refusal to treat homosexuality sentimentally. There was a range of queer people in the movie, and the film's focus wasn't on a couple who just wanted to get married or something like that. Instead Hiacynt's best comparison is Basil Dearden's Victim (1961), in which we watch the practical ways that the lives of queer people are destroyed by the (so-called) justice system. Victim is an important point of reference here because it, too, focuses on crimes against gay people and the work of a protagonist who cares about this when the government does not,.

I loved this movie. It was fascinating to get a bit of a window into what gay culture must have been like in this police state. Tomasz Ziętek is excellent as the film's lead, but the film itself is also just so well made. The cinematography, editing, score... all are top notch. It's very, very good.

And you can watch it now on Netflix.

Just Look Up

Don't Look Up had some really funny moments. I laughed out loud a couple of times. (Rob Morgan's wig made me laugh every time I saw it). But Don't Look Up is also long and relentless. I had to take a couple of breaks while it was on just because it hits you with the same kind of tone over and over and over. It was just a lot to have to process without pausing.

Don't Look Up wants to be a kind of modern-day Network, I guess, but I think what I needed was more from the Leonardo DiCaprio character. I think my favorite moment with that character was the moment where he's on the phone with Rob Morgan's character and he says "you probably haven't heard of me because I haven't published in a while". I also really liked the moment early on where he's on the phone with his wife talking about his two sons. We get a sense of who he is in these moments – a sense we get just once more while he's in bed with Cate Blanchett's character – but none of this is ever about mortality, about the actual fact of the world's ending and how he is processing that for himself.

The film is about the media circus and it is a media circus, and it never really stops to be about real humans or hippopotamuses or hummingbirds, even though those would appear to be important to Adam McKay. I liked DiCaprio in this, and I liked Blanchett, and Timmy. Jennifer Lawrence glowers through the movie, as she always does when she's supposed to be "acting". I'll never understand why a person who is so dynamic and has so many different expressions in interviews chooses to make only three or four dour faces when she's playing a character. It's insane to me. She's so bad.

The movie isn't bad, I don't think. I just didn't really like it. I found its tone strange, and it never felt like it switched over into being something heartfelt or powerful to me. I loved the little story about waking up with a deer that Robert Radochia tells at the end (his performance is excellent), but then the script has Timothée Chalamet say a very sincere prayer to the Christian god that had me howling with laughter. I think maybe I wasn't supposed to be laughing at that, but it was honestly so absurd that I couldn't help but look at it satirically.

I'm a homosexual, so I loved the Ariana Grande song, obviously. It's hilarious.

The Wanting Mare

This film was very hard to connect with. I never really knew what was happening or why characters did what they did. I also don't understand the world-building. Or rather, I like the idea of it, we just knew so little about the world that the circumstances of the world – which were designed to inform the characters' decisions – explained nothing.

For me, this film made another enormous mistake in its dramaturgy. It jumps ahead 35 years, and when it does it expects me to care about a new trio of characters making similarly inexplicable decisions. I really loved the two characters in act one (Nicholas Ashe Bateman, the director, plays one of them), but the film is done talking about those characters after 25 minutes.

This movie looks cool, and I wanted to like it. I tried hard to like it, even. But it just didn't happen.

The Best Shakespeare Adaptation I've Seen in Years

Denzel Washington is incredible in this.

It's been literal years since I've seen a film of a Shakespeare play in which actors spoke the lines like human beings. If The Tragedy of Macbeth is notable for anything it's that Washington and the other actors behave and speak like real people and not like people speaking Shake-a-spear. 

The design, however, is a little baffling. The actors are human beings, but the production design is theatrical in the extreme. Joel Coen (working alone) shoots the film in black and white, and stages The Tragedy in a highly theatrical mode.

I didn't mind any of this. I was here for the whole thing. I thought Corey Hawkins and Kathryn Hunter were standouts in their supporting roles. (Alex Hassell, too.) And the cut of Shakespeare's text is very, very good, with (as is appropriate) a focus on Macbeth himself rather than a focus on the weird sisters or Lady M (as so many directors these days want to do).

And Denzel Washington. He's just extraordinary. It's an astounding performance.

I've heard rumors that Washington is going to give us more arthouse fare in the years to come. Anything he gives us like this is a blessing. This is an actor at the top of his game, and he loves to make big Hollywood nonsense, so if he started making arthouse fare? It's hard to imagine being so blessed.

Also: we're in a black-and-white moment, right? Passing and Belfast and C'mon, C'mon and The Tragedy of Macbeth? That seems like a lot of important movies in black and white for one year.

Lucy and Desi

I am not sure why Aaron Sorkin's movie wound up being called Being the Ricardos. I think I Love Desi would have been a better title, or Lucy and Desi, which was apparently its title for a while. Not that any of that really matters. I really didn't connect with this film at all. The entire thing just felt completely phony to me. 

And I have nothing bad to say about Nicole Kidman or the casting of any of the other actors, really. I blame Aaron Sorkin. This thing is soulless.

I liked the sequences where Kidman played Ball playing Lucy in black-and-white in the show, but I don't think I liked anything else. Everything else just felt like it went through twelve committees.

And the politics of Being the Ricardos are awful. This movie is very clear that it hates anti-communists but it also manages to hate communists? There's even a moment when we all... cheer for J. Edgar Hoover. It's a dramatic moment, perhaps the most dramatic moment in the film, and I know why it is there, but the physics of it repulsed me.

I didn't understand this movie. It thinks it's very clever, but its charms don't work.

Poupelle of Chimney Town

Yesterday after work I went to a matinee of Poupelle of Chimney Town (映画 えんとつ町のプペル) so that I could see it in Japanese instead of dubbed in English. I never do this during the day, and it was kinda fun.

Hirota Yusuke's film is not very original, and its computer animation shows through frequently in its style, but it's designed well, I really fell in love with the characters, and I liked the music a lot. 

Poupelle is not the little boy in the movie (his name is Lubicchi – almost everyone has an Italianesque name) but a kind of trash-monster who is formed magically from a jeweled heart that inexplicably descends into Chimney Town. (Let's not worry too much about why.)

Anyway the trash monster and Lubicchi become friends. The story is quite cute, if typical. I'm a sucker for father-son narratives, and this one is definitely that. It has some other really imaginative characters, too, including a gruff boss who's afraid of monsters, a revolutionary welder, and a talkative miner named Scoop. I had a good time.

One little curiosity about 2021's animated films is that the name Bruno has appeared way more times than I expected. From Luca's constant chant of "Silencio, Bruno!" to Encanto's "No se habla de Bruno" to little Lubicchi's dad actually being named Bruno. The name appears numerous times in Poupelle because Poupelle gets a job in Bruno's old shop, and we see his name in a sign over the window a dozen times.

Do I Like Lin-Manuel Miranda Now?

I don't know how to say this, and I still think he is annoying as a human being, but Lin-Manuel Miranda is having a very good year at the movies. Encanto and Tick, Tick... Boom! are both excellent. I loved them both. Encanto is fun and hilarious and colorful. I laughed a lot, and it has some absolutely great fucking songs. "We Don't Talk about Bruno" is a total jam, and when Sebastián Yatra started singing "Dos Oruguitas", Encanto's eleven-o'clock number, I was stunned to realize it was in Spanish and that there was simply going to be no translation. Someone convinced Jared Bush and Byron Howard to have this key song only in Spanish. It's beautiful, and I burst into tears as soon as I realized what was happening. It's a great moment honestly. What a cute movie.

Tick, Tick... Boom! is another beast altogether. This is a film adaptation of the musical Jonathan Larson wrote before he wrote Rent. One of the things I loved about this is that it wasn't a film about him writing Rent. If it had been, I think that there would simply have been nothing to root for. We know that Rent is going to be one of the biggest musicals of the 1990s and is going to be a huge success, so there would be no stakes. But Tick, Tick... Boom!'s subject matter is different.

Instead, this is a movie about being a troubled artist who can't figure his shit out. He's selfish and stubborn and doesn't really know how to live his life, even though he is obviously very, very talented. The movie turns its attention to this aspect of Larson, and it makes the whole thing so much more interesting. I also really liked the songs, I really liked the filmmaking, Andrew Garfield is really excellent, and the entire approach to this musical just worked for me.

I want to say that I found Tick, Tick... Boom! very theatrical. But I thought Miranda dealt with the theatricality in really interesting ways. He reminds us all the time that this is a show – we watch the show being performed onstage at the same time as we watch the movie version of that same show. This seemed to me a really intelligent approach. And he knows when to remove this device, also. There's a wonderful moment in the third act when Larson is thinking about his sick friend and he goes to the park and sings a song by himself, and Miranda never cuts back to the theatre. We stay in this moment with Larson, and the film doesn't undercut its emotional thrust with the kind of editing tricks that were so pervasive in the the film of Miranda's In the Heights.

 Also the cameos! I was particularly obsessed with the appearance of Chita Rivera looking fabulous!

No. 7 Cherry Lane

I really liked Yonfan's No. 7 Cherry Lane (繼園臺七號). This is an arthouse animation film from last season that I missed, but it's beautiful. I am really into animated films these days. I am not sure what has come over me. In any case No. 7 Cherry Lane is a memory film. It's an intriguing May-December love story with gorgeous animation.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel.

Drive My Car

Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) is a good movie. It's a slow burn, but it has some truly beautiful sequences in it, and I loved every moment that we spent in the theatre. Rehearsals were fascinating, and the finished theatre product (with which the movie ends) was heartbreaking and gorgeous. This is a film about grief and loss and wanting to hold onto what we have instead of appreciating what we have. But it's just not a great film. It never takes off and begins to soar, really. 

And, I have to say, the Murakami-ness of it all annoyed me. I think maybe I am one of the only people I know who doesn't love Murakami. But I don't understand why he introduces so many elements into one story. Often they appear (as with the driver's mother's dissociative identity disorder – is that what it was? – at the end of Drive My Car) just for one sequence and they never come back again. I find this annoying, like he's giving me 15 extra pieces for a jigsaw puzzle that just never fit, even when the puzzle is done. 

Don't get me wrong, the acting is great (Hidetoshi Nishijima and Yoo-rim Park are especially wonderful), the filmmaking is beautiful, the music is lovely. But this is a long and talky film that, for me, never quite lifted off.

Titane

A coolly violent and gorgeously made portrait of sociopathy, Titane also boasts an astounding, remarkable performance by Vincent Lindon. I found the ending slightly unsatisfying, although that's mostly because I felt like the film had already given away what it showed us at the end. This whole movie is unsettling and weird. I absolutely did not love it – it's no Raw – but there's just so much to appreciate here!

The Lost Daughter

Easily one of my favorite films of the year, The Lost Daughter is wise, mysterious, and troubling. It's brilliantly acted, beautifully directed, and very well scripted. I loved it.

Red Rocket

It's baffling. Sean Baker makes films about the working poor – Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket are about people living on the margins of the economy. But his films are filled with contempt for their subjects.

Red Rocket is the best of these movies. I honestly enjoyed this film for most of its running time. Baker conceals his lack of empathy for the characters for most of the movie – we feel as though some of them might succeed (at least on their own terms), I hoped for them to succeed. But Baker doesn't believe they can succeed. He throws new plot developments at them that destroy their hopes and make them look foolish. I was really with this movie, and then (just like with The Florida Project) Red Rocket's end demonstrates that Baker thinks the people in the stories he tells are just some sort of comic fun.

But let me shut up about Sean Baker, because the real story here is that Simon Rex is fucking fantastic in this movie. He honestly and truly deserves an Academy Award nomination. It's a flat-out brilliant performance.

The Wild Boys (2017)

Well Les Garçons Sauvages (The Wild Boys) is fucking bananas. Bertrand Mandico's highly theatrical and gender-bending film is dense as hell, totally campy, very weird, and filled with references to other things that reward pondering.

I watched this back in August 2021 with the unseen movie club. (It was not even my selection, although it seems like it should have been.)

Blow Out (1981)

I really liked Brian De Palma's Blow Out from 1981. I find myself really into De Palma's neo-noir style, and this one is very pleasurable with one truly insane performance from John Lithgow (what is up with his collaborations with De Palma in this period?).

Travolta is great at this kind of thing, and it's a surprise that his career didn't move more in this direction.

Blow Out's mystery, its thriller elements, and its sound and editing are all excellent, although I think the script suffers a bit at the end, and I didn't quite buy the completely jaded finale and worldview that Travolta/De Palma offer us.

I watched this movie back in September 2021 before it left the Criterion channel. I'm not sure why I haven't written about it until now, but I got briefly out of the habit of writing about the movies I was watching for a few months, and this film was one of the casualties.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Creepy as hell and actually downright troubling, Shadow of a Doubt is a solid Hitchcock thriller from 1943 based on an original story by Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

This film is leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I wanted to watch it before I missed the opportunity.

West Side Story Redux

The cast is great, the music is orchestrated and conducted beautifully, the cinematography, production design, and costumes are gorgeous. Mike Faist (as Riff) is excellent. I loved Ariana DeBose (Anita) and Josh Andrés Rivera (Chino), and I have no complaints about any of the rest of the cast. They're all great. I liked it. I'm just not sure why this exists. Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is a very, very, very good production of something we didn't need a new production of.

Tony Kushner's new screenplay puts all of the events of West Side Story into context. The new film historicizes the plot of West Side Story. Good! But Spielberg, Kushner, and co. refuse to change it. We spend all our time with the Jets, and we're supposed to feel an immense amount of compassion and sadness for these racist, violent boys playing at being men. And I do feel compassion for these white supremacists. Of course I do. That's how the show is engineered. So West Side Story 2021 is what it was back in the day. This is a nicer, fancier, gorgeous version of something that is the same thing that we've seen before.

Down Argentine Way

The 1940 musical Down Argentine Way is really only notable for its great Carmen Miranda numbers and for the appearance of the Nicholas Brothers, both of whom are featured in diegetic numbers as the characters visit Argentine night life. There are also non-diegetic numbers in this musical, but I can't say I had any interest in them. The title song "Down Argentine Way" was nominated for an Oscar for reasons I could not explain if I tried.

Charlotte Greenwood is a strange performer. In Down Argentine Way she plays the comic sidekick/Ado Annie part. I can't say I laughed at many of her jokes, but she has some interesting dance moves and a serviceable voice.

The entire enterprise of Down Argentine Way is that trying on of other bodies, especially those deemed ethnic by Hollywood or "America" at large. Grable sings about Argentina and Ameche speaks Spanish-inflected English (if not Argentinian Spanish-inflected English).

In any case, the whole thing is pleasant enough, Don Ameche is handsome and has a great smile (as always), and the Nicholas Brothers and Miranda are excellent.