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.

Movies I've Seen Recently That Have Been Sort of Crap

WarGames. Lame. I love Ally Sheedy, but this movie was lame.  I wish I could save the world with a game of tic-tac-toe.

Havana.  Must we always see Cuba with a backdrop of 1958?  The reason for this is that Cuba after 1959 doesn't include any white people.  I'm tired of looking at this period in Cuba's history.  Let's see something else.  I still love Lena Olin, though.

Is Paris Burning?  This was supposed to be a star-studded extravaganza.  No.  The audio is horrible, but that's beside the point because this movie (clocking in at 172 minutes) is fucking boring.

Down with Love.  Down with this movie.  It was cute for the first 40 minutes and then it went south in a real hurry.  I really disliked Renée Zellweger in this film.  Her acting is just bad.  Ewan McGregor, however, can trick me into believing he's an astronaut any day of the week.

First Love.  Boo to Deana Durbin (who looks exactly like Renée Zellweger would look if she ate every once in a while), and boo to this partial retelling of the Cinderella story and partial ripoff of Victor Schertzinger's One Night of Love.

Hero.  Pretty... and pretty sentimental.  I love Zhang Yimou, but this movie was boring.  Hopefully his next film, House of Flying Daggers, is better.

It's a Wonderful Life.  Whatever.  This movie was good for a little while.  But it's sooo sentimental and schmaltzy.  I know everyone will say I have a heart of stone, but giving up your dreams to make other people happy is not "a wonderful life."  It may be noble, and he may feel some sort of righteousness, but he's still not living his dream and he's still not happy.  Jimmy Stewart was great, though.  I have to admit.

The Bostonians.  I usually like Merchant/Ivory.  At least I think I do.  The main problem with this movie is the always boring Christopher Reeve in the lead role.  Thank god he doesn't do movies anymore.  The lead girl and he have no chemistry and the lead girl is annoying in her own right.  I can't remember her name because I'm trying to forget it.

Fun Story

Watched The Ladykillers this morning (the original).  No thank you.  I hate movies from the 1950s that are like this.  Now, I am opposed to old people to begin with, and the old lady in this thing is annoying as all Hell, but a lot of 50s movies have this Capra-esque legacy that says that good salt-of-the-earth people who are genuine and have good motives always deserve to win out, even if they are dumber than shit.  Notice this in Capra movies like Lost Horizon and Pennies from Heaven.  This is bad Capra.  I genuinely like movies like It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The Capra legacy of which I speak are movies that try to recapture this spirit of good triumphing over evil (which usually means stupidity triumphing over intelligence) in movies like Forrest Gump (blecch) and The Majestic (double blecch).  In the '50s, the bad guys always lost and they were always captured or foiled by idiots.  This drives me crazy.  I sound a little bit Fascist here, but it's not that I want intelligence to always triumph over stupidity or banality, but at least sometimes it could happen.  In the 1950s movies just didn't do that.  If you were a good guy you won... no matter how stupid you were.  Is it sick of me to root for the criminals and to wish that they would just snuff the old lady and get it over with?