Sarah and Son

Ruth Chatterton is a damn genius. Sarah and Son is an emotional film and a bit of a far-fetched Cinderella story, but Chatterton's performance makes it all worth it. Also, it's worth noting that Sarah and Son was directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women who worked as directors in Hollywood in this period.

A Ship Comes In

Sweet, patriotic, anti-Communist nonsense.

When Ladies Meet

All my pre-code viewing has turned up something really remarkable! A women's film that is smart and fun and truly delightful. I adored this movie from start to finish, and it treats its characters frankly and humanely.

The film boasts positively brilliant performances – by Ann Harding, Myrna Loy, and Alice Brady in the first place, but also by the always great Frank Morgan and with a superb supporting turn by Martin Burton.

When Ladies Meet is frank about sex. It's honest about relationships. It possesses fascinating insights about marriage. It was, of course, based on a play written by a woman, and I don't think this could have been otherwise. Male Hollywood screenwriters from this period simply were not writing things like this. And under the PCA I can't imagine this movie existing at all. It was, apparently, remade in 1941. I haven't seen that film yet, but I can't see how something censored – as it would have to be under the PCA – could work as well as this one.

Berkeley Square

Well I wasn't expecting this! Berkeley Square (which is always pronounced Barkley Square) is a time-travel movie (!) and an exceedingly odd one at that. I was sort of impressed with this film's ambitions, even if I find Leslie Howard rather boring and found the plot itself rather bizarre. What a strange film.

The Big Pond

The Big Pond is a very slight picture, one designed to capitalize on Maurice Chevalier's success in The Love Parade, no doubt. This is hard to dislike - it's too slight for that - but it's nothing to write home about.

Skip! This! Movie!

I am sure Aronofsky thinks that Mother! is some sort of meaningful, fascinating allegory. But it isn't. Jennifer Lawrence's range is, as usual, limited, to say the least. She unsurprisingly scowls through the picture, and thus is, I suppose, the perfect star for the outrageous cynicism, awkwardness, and displeasure that characterize Mother! itself.

And if the plot itself is incoherent – which it is – this incoherence is made uncomfortable, unbearable, unwatchable by the fact that one has no character with whom one can identify and no one for whom one might wish to root. Aronofsky actively dislikes his own main character, and quite possibly dislikes his antagonist even more. This is a sadistic, painful movie that is actually invested in punishing its audience and violating its protagonist.

The structure of Mother! (what is that exclamation point about?) is such that we are angry and have hit a breaking point a full sixty minutes before our protagonist hits her own breaking point. This leaves us an entire hour in which we as an audience are frustrated enough to scream, but our heroine is not. We actively wait for her to lose her shit and let everyone have it – or for her to do anything at all! (Exclamation point.) But we wait the entire movie for this to happen. It will take the full two hours.

Michelle Pfeiffer is good in this, though, in her Hebraic Eve drag. I will say that. And I am certain this is because she is really the only actor who is having any fun here. Bardem plays a sadistic asshole but doesn't seem to relish this part at all, opting instead for a baseline of sincerity with small bursts of uncontrollable rage (an odd thing for an actor who has played fiendish, pleasurable villains.) Pfeiffer, on the other hand, opts for taking pleasure in sadism, annoying our protagonist and trying to get a rise out of her in whatever way she can. It's a pleasure to watch, and one of the only pleasures Mother! can actually boast.

La Pfeiffer

Domnhall Gleeson, on the other hand, is wasted in this movie. He is great, as always, but woefully underused.

And as for Kristen Wiig, there's a problem here. She represents, in fact, a real casting error. Wiig is hilarious. And we can't take her seriously in a part – we are trained to laugh at the things she says. So when she shows up in act three and is supposed to be terrifying? All I could do was giggle.

It might not be her fault completely. To be fair to Wiig, I had already started laughing at this movie by the time we got to act two. It's too silly not to laugh at it. This is an absurdist exercise in sadism and allegory. Be smart and skip it. This is the same guy (with an utter contempt for humanity) who directed Noah, and we all skipped that one (or wish we did). Do yourself a favor and skip this one too.

Addendum: If you want to read my sincere critique of the politics of Mother!, please follow the link to my Noah discussion. As it turns out, Mother! is just Noah in a new CGI outfit. What my friend Rick and I discuss about Noah is that Aronofsky really believes that a) human beings deserve to be punished for their total depravity, that b) there is a god, and that c) that (apparently male) god is actually a terrible force of mostly petty evil. Now, I have nothing per se against a film without hope or a film with a cynical view of human beings. But Aronofsky's two most recent films posit that human beings ought to be destroyed, that human culture is without redeeming qualities, and that the god ought just to scrap the whole experiment.

I find this frustrating for numerous reasons. In the first place, there is not actually a god. In the second place, what does Aronofsky want us to do with his allegory? Ask mom how we can help? In his film, the one character (Jovan Adepo) who actually tries to help JLaw, is treated like just as much of an interloper as Aronofsky's ciphers for Cain and Abel. As far as I can see, Aronofsky has no empathy whatever for any member of humanity, so aside from finding his film boring, I find his politics bankrupt.

Kong!

Kong: Skull Island is a veritable Boschian garden of delights from start to finish. The entire structure of the film is that the characters fight one giant monster after another, and although the movie is about 105 minute long, it almost never slows down at all.

There are other good things, too. Nearly every moment of exposition is delivered by John C. Reilly doing a kind of clown–crazy man thing, so that even the information that we need to know we get delivered to us in a funny way (despite the fact that really insanely disgusting monsters are threatening to eat and kill our little band of heroes).

And the CGI is pretty excellent. There are giant musk oxen, giant spiders, a giant octopus, a giant gorilla (incidentally every character who refers to Kong's species refers to him as a monkey), and then there are these evil fucking reptiles with heads like the skinless skulls of giant, dead lizards. All of this looked very real to me, and the CGI team also gives us countless explosions, waves, and helicopter crashes, as well. All of it works well, and the sound effects editing is also excellent.

But it's Kong's plot that works the best. It never bothers with sentimentality – substituting the protagonists' feelings of wonder and awe for sentiment and renewed courage and other well-worn action-movie tropes. Kong simply doesn't have time for that sort of thing. Or rather it doesn't take time for those sorts of things the way a lesser movie would. In Kong there's always another monster attacking that we need to figure out how to neutralize.

Kong killing monsters? Thank you, and more, please.

There are a group of themes, and these mostly articulate the dangers of misguided revenge fantasies and close-minded masculine military bravado. Kong is set during the Vietnam War (with a small section in World War II), and this not only puts Kong in the time period just after many of the great monster movies (Mothra, Rodan, Godzilla, The Crawling Eye), but it also links the film's fighting of monsters to larger themes of the fighting of many-headed "monsters" like, say, ISIL or terrorism in general or Al Qaeda or even the so-called war on drugs. The film is invested in communicating to its audience not only the futility of fighting Kong with grenades or helicopters or machine guns but also the insanity of fighting with Kong in the first place. The massive ape, as it turns out, is defending the island from disgusting, vicious, and remorseless subterranean terrors. So the military was aiming its firepower in the wrong direction all along.

Mr. Kebbell, when not covered by a mo-cap suit

As for acting, everyone does just fine. Thomas Mann (honestly, I can't believe that's his name, but this is the kid from Me, Earl and the Dying Girl) is lovable as the soldier attached to Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larsen, and John C. Reilly is very funny as the soldier from the 1940s still stuck on the island. Best in show is Toby Kebbell, the British actor who is mostly known for mo-cap roles. He was in Warcraft and also in the new Planet of the Apes movies, where he plays Koba, the son of Caesar (Andy Serkis). Kebbell is great in the second Apes film, and he's great here – he does double duty as the loneliest of the soldiers and Kong himself (a mo-cap prince, if you will, to Serkis's king).

In any case, I recommend this. It's much better than the third Apes movie, doesn't take itself at all seriously, and never slows down for a minute. The third act, in which Kong fights beast after beast, is an absolute pleasure. The fact that Kong: Skull Island was directed by the same guy who directed The Kings of Summer is a bit shocking to me (this is only his second feature!), but it makes as much sense as anything else does in this world.

(Also, I obviously love monster movies. I don't think was clear to me before, but it is now.)

The Candidate (1972)

The Candidate, as it turns out, is a satire. This should be obvious from the film's poster, but it was a surprise to me as I watched this movie, because the first two-thirds of the movie are played fairly straight.

The last third of this movie is actually laugh-out-loud funny, but the first two acts? I found the whole thing just puzzling. It's played like a serious drama, where we're watching an honest man get swallowed up by the political machine.

Now that it's over, I can see that the whole thing was supposed to be funny – at least three scenes are played in men's rooms, and there's this totally weird bit where the candidate gets accosted by a man who just wants to talk about his dog – but the filmmaking just isn't letting us know we can laugh a this until we get to the end of the picture. I think perhaps it is also hampered by Redford's portrayal, which doesn't leave any room for laughter, but even more, I think with Redford as the star, the film needs to focus on him, whereas what it should be focusing on (for laughs) is the electoral circus that it is supposed to be skewering.

Or maybe it's me. Maybe making fun of federal politics in the U.S. just isn't funny to me anymore.

Bleed for This

Ben Younger's Bleed for This is an odd film. The acting is fine, but the filmmaker doesn't know how to do the things he needs to do to make his movie successful. Younger looks down on his characters, as you can clearly see from this poster above; he thinks they're amusing or curious. Worse yet, every single thing in this movie feels generic. As with the Stephen Frears' biopic of Florence Foster Jenkins, also from 2016, this film tells the story of Vinny Paz, but it never gets under the skin.

Free Old Hollywood Cinema Online

I got in a mood for really old cinema last week, and I've been watching a lot of movies from the years 1927 to 1935. Many of these films are available on YouTube or somewhere else, and there are some great old films with excellent performances among this group. All of the ones I watched were nominated for Oscars, and sometimes I was baffled by the nominations (as indeed I often am now), but there were some very good movies, nonetheless.

Condemned! is a 1929 melodrama about a French thief, played by Ronald Colman, who is shipped off to a prison colony in an Africa jungle. He gets put to work as the warden's butler, however, and he and the warden's wife fall in love. So, naturally, he plans an escape. Ronald Colman is a great deal of fun in this, and he was nominated for Best Actor. This category, let me just say, from 1927 to 1935 at least was a bunch of nonsense. Not always, of course, but frequently. Some of the actors getting nominated for performances are doing fun work, but they're not really having to do much acting. Many of them aren't even carrying their films. What it looks like to me is that the studios wanted to push particular actors as important, as talented, as sexy, and so they put their weight behind particular performances.

In any case, Condemned! has its good elements. There is a pretty great swamp chase sequence and I really liked the stuff on the boat in the first five minutes of the movie. But the second act is all love and nonsense, and it doesn't focus nearly enough on the wife's terror and anguish to be actually affecting. The point of this movie, however, was to sell Colman as a leading man, and this works marvelously.

* * *

The Affairs of Cellini is, if possible, an even sillier Best Actor nomination. Not that this film isn't delightful. It is! It is a farce set in the Cinquecento in Florence. In this fun film, Fredric March plays Benevenuto Cellini, the great Florentine goldsmith, as a kind of hot-tempered Casanova who is killing men who fight with him and seducing women whenever he can. The other main characters are the Duke and Duchess of Florence (Frank Morgan and Constance Bennett), who are both hilarious and delightful. The Duke and Duchess are each attempting to have affairs with different people (the Duchess with Cellini, of course), and so they try to trick and confuse one another by playing various pranks and making ridiculous decisions. It might seem crazy for a studio to spend all the money one needs for a 16th century set, costumes, and props just to do a film version of what is obviously a stage farce, but the whole thing worked splendidly.

What is sort of crazy is that when it was over, I thought: they nominated Fredric March for Best Actor for this!? But then I checked and they hadn't nominated March; they nominated Frank Morgan! Even crazier. Morgan was an excellent actor, but almost always worked as a supporting comedian. In 1933 and 1934, however, Morgan was playing leading men, and so perhaps the studio was interested in pushing him as a romantic lead at this point in his career. This is a nomination that honestly makes no sense without studio politics, but I am glad it happened, because The Affairs of Cellini is really fun stuff. Constance Bennett is perfect in this, and I've always thought of Fredric March as a very serious actor, but he is excellent in this farce and funny as hell.

 * * *

Combining my astonishment at both Fredric March and undeserved Best Actor nominations, March's first Best Actor nomination is for a film version of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's The Royal Family re-titled as The Royal Family of Broadway. I saw this play many many years ago with Kate Mulgrew and the great Marian Seldes. It was a delight. There were live dogs onstage and the comedy was absurd and delightful. The part played by Fredric March is definitely a supporting part (this was before Best Supporting Actor existed as a category). March is fun, and he once again acquits himself well as a comedian in a great part, but his nomination really does surprise me.

It is even more surprising since The Royal Family of Broadway is not very funny. Ina Claire, who play's the film's lead, is far too serious in her part, and so the film feels far more sober than it is supposed to be, perhaps even tragic. This was probably what the filmmakers (George Cukor and Cyril Gardner) wanted, but it was not what I wanted from this old gem of a farce.

Fredric March is wondering why everyone else in the movie is so serious.

* * *

Alfred Werker's The House of Rothschild is a very interesting document from 1934. It stars George Arliss, whom I've really begun to love, and the film is about the rise of the Rothschild family of bankers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. What is most fascinating about the movie is that it is clearly a bit of pro-Jewish propaganda designed to combat 1930s anti-Semitism. This is explicitly its subject matter. It is also about the way that the Rothschilds helped England by funding its wars in Europe. In other words, the film is a kind of The London Merchant 200 years later.

I will confess to enjoying this film rather thoroughly. The final sequence of the movie is in color, which was a wonderful surprise, and as I say George Arliss is an actor whom I have begun to love. I had thought this movie was impossible to find for many years, so watching it recently was a real treat for me.

The Bad Batch

The Bad Batch could have been a good 35-minute film. Instead it was a boring 118-minute film. This is a film-school wank of a movie that loves Tarantino but doesn't have the dialogue, wit, or irony that Tarantino has. (Could the poster be any more of a Tarantino tribute?) Ana Lily Amirpour uses all of the most recently typical cannibalism tropes, so this film is about capitalism and vegetarianism. Fine. The first twenty minutes of the world-building are great, but then the film starts to think it's really smart. Oh well. There is lots of funny stuff in The Bad Batch, but that good comedy is stuck inside a long, sententious movie about exploitation and true love or something. I was bored.

Once More with Too Many Feelings

For the record, I loved the first of these movies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and I really really liked the second one, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. (I wrote an entire post about how the film thinks about justifying violence; the movie is very interesting.) This means, of course, that I am the target audience of Matt Reeves' third movie, War for the Planet of the Apes, since I already love the characters, already care about the fate of the apes, and am hoping the humans can leave them alone to live in peace. (Rupert Wyatt directed Rise; Reeves directed Dawn and War.)

Reviews of this third movie were good, so I was excited. But War falls mostly flat. It is a slow, ponderous type of thing that follows the conventions of 19th century melodrama to a tee. This means that all of the emotions in it are overdone, everything is milked for the absolute last drop of feeling that can be squeezed out of it. This is supposed to be an action movie, and it does have some good action sequences in it, but Reeves is not focused on action as much as he is focused on the feelings of everyone involved in the action. So even when we are in an action sequence, we get shots of sad chimps, looking wistfully at the camera and dreaming of better days or a world without action. All of this kind of thing slows us down, and it takes Reeves forever to do what he's trying to do.

The small, tearful, white child up on Caesar's horse stands in for all of this movie's many many feelings.

The other problem with War is that it is too intent on meaning. It takes itself extremely seriously (à la nineteenth-century melodrama). The other movies were serious too, don't get me wrong, but now that we are in a third movie, Reeves has decided that what the films are about is racism and not animals. To be sure, both topics are about the ways that we exclude people from the category of the human, but the first two movies told us a story and let us make sense of what the movies had to say. Not War. War makes explicit allegories about nationalism and Steve Bannon and the alt-right. Worse than that, the film simply tells us all what we already know about racist white supremacist without using the allegory of apes to see if there's anything new we might learn about the logic of neo-Nazism.

Still, the allegories aren't really the problem. What the allegories do is contribute even further to the slowing down of the entire pace of War. The real problem is the slow pacing of Reeves' staging and his sentimental treatment of every moment of feeling so that what could be a simple moment turns into a four-minute sequence. What could have been a good, tight, 117-minute movie became instead a 140-minute Spielberg melodrama with chimps.

State Fair

I hadn't actually realized the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair was based on an original film. Anyway, this is it. And Henry King's film is charming from start to finish. And this movie also had some pretty great shots for 1933: the roller coaster rides were a highlight.

The Beguiled and Baby Driver

I was into Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled. It's a mood piece, like all of Coppola's films, and, well, it is about the same mood as all of Coppola's films. Still, it's a fun, mostly sexy piece, and I was into it. I found it troubling and interesting. 

But I find that Coppola's movies make assumptions about audience identification or comprehension that aren't always quite there yet and so The Beguiled makes unjustified moves, assuming we are following, and we eventually end up playing catch up.

The other sort of odd thing about The Beguiled is that it isn't really sure whose side it's on. This is strange. Are we supposed to identify with this soldier against the women (the film seems to think so during a long sequence in the third act in which he is allowed to articulate his grievances), or are supposed to be on their side, to take pleasure in their actions? This just isn't clear, and if Coppola knows what side she wants us to be on, she hasn't made a film that helps us do that. Again, I think Coppola's filmmaking makes assumptions about audience identification that haven't actually been achieved.

This didn't bother me too much, though. I just love me some Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell and Kirsten Dunst. And this film uses all of them very well. (I continue to be baffled by the popularity of Elle Fanning, I must say, but to each her own.)

The best thing about The Beguiled is the costumes. They're absolutely genius. I really hope that  Stacey Battat gets her first Oscar nomination for this.

* * *

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is better than what I am about to say, but once it occurred to me that Baby Driver is La La Land for people who hated La La Land, I couldn't forget the association. To be sure, Baby Driver has guns and explosions and the best car chases I've ever seen in my life, but it is just a little more gimmicky than I could handle.

This is a fun twenty-first-century musical, and it is definitely Wright's most accomplished, finely directed film to date. But... well so much of it just seemed so overly phony. This is not helped by Kevin Spacey's absurdly over-the-top performance and the film's ridiculous romantic plot, which even has an entire La La Land fantasy sequence near its end.

Do not mistake me, though. This is a good movie. And I enjoyed it a lot. That the film does not have enough Jon Bernthal in it is, I think, indicative of why I didn't completely love this picture. Baby Driver is more interested in sentiment and fantasy than it is in crime, violence, or really scaring its audience. Instead, everything in the film takes place in a kind of Disneyland version of criminal activity, in which it is inevitable that love will save the day.

Visions from 1964: Part Five

Bernhard Wicki's The Visit did not work for me. It stars Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn, as well as a wonderful Valentina Cortese, but I didn't like it, and the entire conceit fell flat for me. A woman returns to her hometown and shames them because they shamed her when she was young? This kind of revenge is not interesting to me... I think because it is emotional revenge rather than a logical, murderous revenge. Killing someone, I guess I can get. Shaming him or her: no thanks. Also, I don't think I had ever read Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play (on which this film is based) and I have to say that if the play ends the way this film ends, I don't like the play either.

The Visit had fabulous costumes (that was why it got an Oscar nomination), but its camerawork was very strange, and its sentiments left me cold.

* * *

I honestly don't think I have anything to say about Edward Dmytryk's Where Love Has Gone. This was apparently based on a true story, but it is a soap opera through and through – something Jacqueline Susann might have written. It stars Susan Hayward (who I adore) and Bette Davis (who is beyond all adoration), but... this is dumb. It wishes it were a murder mystery, but it actually never builds any tension in that direction. In other words, I never cared who committed the murder in the first place. This is a melodrama through and through, a kind of poor man's Mildred Pierce, but it never really picks a side and so the final suspenseful moments have no effect.

Where Love Has Gone was nominated for Best Original Song and, if I'm honest, I don't really dislike the tune, sung by Jack Jones. It's a big, bright, brassy sort of thing with lots of violins, rather like something Frank Sinatra would normally make into a hit.

As for the movie though, don't bother.

* * *

The Chalk Garden is another boring potboiler that was probably originally a stage play.

Ok, I went and looked it up and of course it was a play – by Enid Bagnold. the film is directed by Ronald Neame, and he tries his best to make this something other than a stagey movie, but I'm afraid there's no saving it. It's a kind of David and Lisa or Miracle Worker sort of thing, where a teacher gets ahold of a precocious young woman and somehow convinces her to be less crazy and stop causing everybody to fret so much.

Edith Evans was nominated for an Oscar for this picture, and she earned her nomination. She plays a cranky old grandmother who believes she's caring for the young woman in her house but who is actually causing rather a lot of trouble because she's being so darned indulgent and not reading this child the riot act. 

It's not a bad little thing, and it's sort of your typical mid-century USAmerican realist drama, but I've never cared for mid-century USAmerican realist drama, and I haven't gotten any kinder to it in 2017.

* * *

Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater follows a woman played by Anne Bancroft who has many children. Her husband is cheating on her (cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater), and she figures this out over the course of the film. Maggie Smith appears (in 1964!) in a tiny role as the first of her husband's lovers whom we meet. Peter Finch plays the husband, and this movie is interesting, even if it is quite strange.

The thing is, The Pumpkin Eater is a brooding, slow movie, and it is more than a little odd. I appreciated it more than I liked it. But it is about depression, and watching a movie about depression is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

Still, it gets kudos in my book for trying to get into the mind of the depressive in 1964 and not simply treating depression as something that needs to be somehow dealt with or cured. And I really love Jack Clayton's work as a director. I think his 1959 Room at the Top is near perfect, and this is gorgeously, assuredly made even if I didn't enjoy watching it, particularly. Clayton was really ahead of his time.

This concludes my 1964 viewing! Now to catch up on some 2017 movies.