Boże Ciało (2019)

Jan Komasa's Corpus Christi was fairly conventional. I kept predicting the moves it made throughout. Its ending is surprising and it has a prison rape in it in the first, like, 30 seconds of the movie (I mean, why not at this point?), but I liked Corpus Christi well enough, and the acting is great. The lead performance, by Bartosz Bielenia, is absolutely great, and I was also taken with Aleksandra Konieczna as a bitter old lady in this small Polish town.

Bright Victory (1951)

Bright Victory is a sentimental tale about which I don't have much to say. There is one really great moment halfway through the film in which the main character (whom we're supposed to like) says some racist language in front of his black friend. See, he hates black people, but he's blind and so he doesn't realize that his best friend is black. This is all quite contrived, of course, but this scene is really shocking, and I was upset by it despite my skepticism about this movie in general and its disability metaphors.

Listen, Bright Victory is no The Best Years of Our Lives. And the idea of being literally color-blind strikes me as schmaltzy, even for 1951.

Two queer connections that are worth making: the film's title is clearly a reference to Dark Victory, the Bette Davis starrer from 1939, which also starred Ronald Reagan (feh). In Dark Victory, Bette Davis's character goes blind at the end of the film. This was a "woman's" film, of course, and the twist of Bright Victory is that our hero, Arthur Kennedy, deals with blindness in a "masculine" way by working through his disability and becoming a useful member of the U.S. American labor force. His victory is therefore bright rather than dark. Whatever. The other queer item of note in this movie is that Rock Hudson has a small part at the beginning of Bright Victory, and he's great. He wasn't a star yet in 1951?

The Great Victor Herbert (1939)

I didn't like The Great Victor Herbert at all. It's a jukebox musical using the music of Victor Herbert with the character of Victor Herbert functioning as a kind of ringmaster or yenta for the two main characters, played by Allan Jones and Mary Martin (both in gorgeous voice). But The Great Victor Herbert is really a riff on the Star Is Born plot, and these plot machinations, where the husband is an egomaniacal jerk and the wife is longsuffering, sacrificial, and faithful are so boring. In fact, I was really bored by this whole business. The music great, obviously, but this plot is tired.

Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves is trying to do the kind of neo-noir thing that Chinatown did so very well and that was imitated (also in 1975) by Farewell, My Lovely. The latter is probably slightly better than Night Moves (mostly because of a superb performance by Sylvia Miles), but Night Moves tries hard and it has a good script. Jennifer Warren, who hasn't really made many movies since this one (and is kind of a poor man's Jane Fonda) is really quite good in Night Moves, and so is Gene Hackman, of course. Still, this movie never really gets going in any real way. It feels sort of stalled the whole time, as though it's waiting for something exciting to happen but nothing materializes.

O Pagador de Promessas (1962)

Anselmo Duarte's fable O Pagador de Promessas – which was released in the U.S. (in 1964) as The Given Word – is a semi-comic morality tale about a simple man who tries to keep a promise to a god but who is attacked on all sides by newsmedia, police violence, prostitution, religious intolerance, and capitalist greed.

This film is a moral kind of story with a heart of gold that critiques "modern" life by favoring the "simple" values of honesty, devotion, loyalty, and truth. My scare quotes should indicate that I'm not sure this film believes in modern life as such or in the simple values it would seem to be extolling.

Duarte's film, see, can't help aligning itself with modernity because the film itself is invested in "simple values" as an exercise in nostalgia. What I mean by this is that O Pagador de Promessas is a vehicle through which its director can mourn a set of values or a way of life that Duarte himself believes already to be past – or at least passé. The director is a part of modern life and conservatively or nostalgically orients himself toward these simple values, but the entire premise of the film is from the point of view of modernity.

Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is all around pretty wonderful. It's sexy and funny and the script is exquisite. It didn't hit me emotionally in all of the ways I wanted it to, but I admired this film a great deal, and Adèle Haenel is absolutely brilliant in it.

This was the last film I saw before the movie theatres shut down for the coronavirus. There were just three people in the theatre, including me. Glad I got to see it when I had the chance.

Alexandria... Why? (1979)

Alexandrie Pourquoi? (إسكندرية..ليه؟) is very interesting, but it did feel a bit disjointed to me. There were rather a few more plots than I really knew what to do with, and some of them got away from me as a viewer. Extra points, though, for portraying a gay British–Egyptian romance in 1979. This is why I watched Youssef Chahine's film – he is a famous Arab filmmaker who often portrayed gay characters – and it didn't disappoint in that regard.

T-Men (1947)

T-Men is a surprisingly great film from Anthony Mann. I've only seen his westerns (fine) and his terrible epics (El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire), but this one is a sleek film noir that follows some upstanding law enforcement agents (improbably enough) from the Treasury department. T-Men is gorgeously shot, totally suspenseful and engrossing, and beautifully performed by Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder. There are all of these very strange sequences in Los Angeles steam rooms, and the photographer, John Alton, makes the most of his stark whites and stark blacks. This movie is filled with haunting silhouettes and shady corners. I was really into this.

Mondo Cane (1962)

Mondo Cane is "the original shockumentary" – as all of the synopses call it nowadays. This movie is so very 1960s, though. It's quite silly, really, while also showing us a great deal of savagery.

Mondo Cane's style is a sort of faux-anthropological view of various activities in human societies worldwide. To my mind, this kind of thing ends up being sort of racist, even when it doesn't want to be, and the violence in it, particularly as directed toward animals, is a repeated theme in the film and is, frankly, disgusting.

I didn't hate this, though. It's well made and amusing when it's not horrifying. It has that kind of Italian humor that we can see in movies like I Mostri and I Nuovi Mostri. Mondo Cane, too, would go on to have a series of sequels.

As for the song that was nominated for an Oscar in 1964... what song?

A Little Romance (1979)

I loved A Little Romance. It's a totally romantic and charming rom-com about two young teenagers in love. Diane Lane is adorable and her boyfriend, Thelonious Bernard, who only made two movies in his entire career, is just the cutest. I found the whole thing lovely. Broderick Crawford also has a delightful couple of scenes as himself – an actor making a movie in Paris; they call him "Brod" the whole time, and it's fun. George Roy Hill, who directed, has also made the main character into a movie fan who loves (why shouldn't he?) George Roy Hill movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. So nostalgic clips of these caper movies are peppered throughout for thematic purposes but also just for fun.

The only weird part of  A Little Romance is, ironically, Laurence Olivier, who is top billed and who gives an extremely strange, hammy performance that really does not jell with the rest of the picture. It really ought to have been Paul Newman or Robert Redford here, and I'm not sure why it wasn't. But, hey, it doesn't much matter. Olivier's character is not central here (top billed or no), and the rest of the movie is so cute that I'm happy to forgive.

La Mujer sin Cabeza (2008)

The Headless Woman is slow and troubling and ultimately haunting. I really, really liked it.

The Hole (1998)

Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole (洞) is very strange and very well made. It is an intriguing tribute to Grace Chang songs. It's also an apocalyptic vision of loneliness and contemporary Taiwan, and it has a fantastic performance by Yang Kuei-mei. I saw this with my unseen movie club right before Covid-19 shut everything down and the whole thing felt uncanny. We all really liked it. And I can't stop thinking about the fact that the main character (Yang's character) is hoarding sanitary napkins, meanwhile in California people were hoarding toilet paper like madmen.

Breakthrough (2019)

Breakthrough is a god movie. Kid falls through the ice. Mom prays for him. Crisis of faith (or whatever). Kid pulls (breaks?) through. This is one of those DeVon Franklin-produced films that are designed for Christian audiences and that promote (vaguely) Christian ideas. I watched it because Diane Warren's original song ("I'm Standing with You") was nominated for an Academy award.

To be honest, in addition to Diane Warren's song, I thought all of the music from this movie was great. And, as it turns out, Breakthrough is actually pretty well made. It has some really good lines in it. I even think the movie has a strain of agnostic skepticism running through it that I found interesting. But Breakthrough is first and foremost a movie that is super-invested in the god and the power of the god. Or, maybe I should say: the power of people who believe in the god to get things done or make the god do things or speak to the god and ask him to do things. The god actually doesn't appear in the film. What we see instead is people of faith closing their eyes and praying or saying magic words and also people speaking about the power of the god. I found most of that stuff just really laughable. I have no ability to take this kind of thing seriously.

At the end of the movie, Topher Grace (he and Josh Lucas are both really great in this, and I loved Lisa Durupt too) has all of the medical personnel and rescue workers who saved this boy stand up, and I thought, Right – these are the people who actually saved this boy's life. And then he also had everyone who prayed for the kid stand. Ok. Fine. But I'm just not into this idea. Those people are not responsible for the boy's rescue in the same way as the actual people who worked hard to save this boy.

The trouble, for me, is that Breakthrough isn't actually interested in the parts of this story that I think are interesting. The main character, for example, begins to feel that it is not the god but she who is keeping the boy alive, that she has some kind of spiritual or magical power (either) over the god or over life and death. This is a fascinating moment in Breakthrough, but it's one that the film doesn't really want to explore. Instead, there is a single scene where she realizes that she's being a little nuts and then she, like, prays about it for a bit and we're done.

The Big Country (1958)

The Big Country – which William Wyler directed one year before Ben-Hur – looks like a giant, epic western. It's actually more of a melodrama. It does this very well, though, and Burl Ives, who won an Oscar, is really fantastic in this film. His first scene is clearly Oscar-worthy, but actually every scene he's in is amazing.

The most interesting thing about The Big Country, though, is the nominal non-violence it appears to preach. But, much like 1957's Friendly Persuasion (starring Gregory Peck's contemporary pretty-boy Gary Cooper), the non-violent man at the film's center proves his masculinity through violence after all. I am not sure why filmmakers were doing this non-violent thing during this period, but one does wish they actually believed in the product they were selling.

Charlton Heston: hot. (Listen. To each his own. He's sexy in this movie. I don't care what you say.)

Carroll Baker: the worst.

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

What an absolute delight of a film The Devil and Miss Jones is! Jean Arthur is brilliant, as usual – just perfect comic timing. Spring Byington is a joy to watch. Robert Cummings is a charming and very funny leading man. And Charles Coburn is hilarious. These are Hollywood's best comedians in a sparkling, socially relevant comedy. I loved this movie. For folks who haven't laughed since 1929!