Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982)

The Return of Martin Guerre is pretty wonderful. First, it's beautifully acted by Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, and it's gorgeously designed. The costumes and the production design are both exquisite. Let me just say again, Nathalie Baye is fabulous in this. It's a nuanced, gentle, surprising performance.

The plot is well known, since it is a sort of famous fable of a sixteenth-century man who comes back after a very long time away. And this retelling of the story must surely be the most accomplished there is. It's just excellent.

I watched this on DVD, but I think it is available to stream on TUBI.

Pirates de Roman Polanski (1986)

This movie is quite funny at times, but it sure does wear out its welcome. At a full two hours this is a pirate comedy that just doesn't have enough steam to justify itself. And the plot, though nihilistic and duly critical of everyone's greed, just doesn't resolve enough to make Pirates feel like it was worth one's while. I enjoyed myself for the first hour or so, and then I wondered why it kept dawdling. Anthony Powell's costumes are gorgeous, of course, but this movie has problems.

I gotta say, it's sort of funny to watch a movie like this that was such s huge flop but that cost $30,000,000. Not funny, I mean, but just a curiosity. What a weird film. It is actually an enormous, expensive movie, but no one has seen it.

I watched Pirates de Roman Polanski on YouTube.

Blaxploitation but Make It Revolutionary

The Spook Who Sat by the Door is one of the coolest movies I've seen in a while. It's a 1973 film about a revolutionary who is trained by the CIA and then uses his training to bring down the United States. It's made in the style of a blaxploitation movie, but it's based on a novel, and it's incendiary and pleasurable to watch. I loved this.

Jacob's Ladder

The script for Jacob's Ladder is kind of great, and of course Adrian Lyne's filmmaking is scary and strange and enjoyable. It's unfortunate that this movie stars the inexpressive Tim Robbins, whose breakdown just never materializes onscreen. He's so deer-in-the-headlights at all times, that one seems to see no change at all.

Pig (2021)

I really enjoyed Pig. The direction isn't always as sure footed as I would have liked – Pig's tone is wryly ironic for most of its running time, and then when it wants to be serious it can't quite manage. Still, the script is excellent – it's wonderfully weird and compelling – and I enjoyed this very much.

Son of the White Mare (1981)

Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia) is a trippy, psychedelic, beautiful 1980s animation fantasy based on Hungarian folktales. The opening is jaw-droppingly extraordinary, and if the rest of it isn't quite as exciting as the incredible first ten minutes, it's still pretty amazing.

I watched Son of the White Mare as part of the awesome Art-House Animation series right now on the Criterion Channel.

Carefree

I didn't like Swing Time, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' 1936 pairing (their sixth) and, although I guess I liked Carefree from 1938 a bit more, it has all the same problems. In the first place, it's obsessed with plot, with so much writing that it can't seem to squeeze in musical numbers – there are only four in this film and one of them is in slow motion. I don't understand this, although I suppose Ginger Rogers really must have seen herself as an actress, and she imbues this character with lots of feeling – the character she's created is actually quite sensitive and deep.

But this sort of goes directly against what I understand the point of a movie like this to be. I would like dance numbers and I would like singing. Instead Carefree gives us plot twists. It does have comedy, don't get me wrong. And some of it is actually funny. Hattie McDaniel gets two excellent laughs, and Luella Gear and Jack Carson have some good bits. I'm wondering, now that I think about it, if this change in the way the movie musical is working is related at all to the new and more serious ("integrated") book musicals that were happening at the Princess Theatre. It seems to me like Carefree and Swing Time are trying something – and it might make sense to look at them as part of similar attempts at the Princess.

And although this movie is directed by Mark Sandrich and not George Stevens, Carefree contains the same kind of weird fade-outs that Swing Time has. We stay in a scene just a bit too long and we fade out on this bit of plot in order to further complicate something that isn't the least bit complicated.

Carefree's weirdness is compounded by the basic smarminess of Astaire's character in this film. When we first meet him he's a sexist doctor. And then as the film progresses he hypnotizes the woman who loves him and then betrays his very good friend. When Astaire and Rogers walked down the aisle at the end (because of course they did), I wasn't sure this is what I wanted to happen at all.

I watched this on HBOmax, and I'm going to see another one – Shall We Dance – before it leaves at the end of this month. Maybe I'll like that one.

Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

It's always great to see Paul Muni, and I am totally invested in WWII movies that were made during the war. But this movie just isn't that interesting. It's about a Norwegian dude who is living a peaceable life but is driven to rebellion when the Nazis arrive in Norway and start killing people. Some of the battle scenes are good, but I think I was expecting something a bit more emotionally engaging considering Paul Muni was the lead.

Dumbstruck (2010)

Oof. Dumbstruck is so awkward and sad. The filmmaking is also pretty terrible, which doesn't help the enterprise. Most cringeworthy, perhaps, is the thirteen-year-old white Ohio kid who has a black ventriloquist dummy called Reggie. It's painfully awkward, and even weirder, it goes strangely unremarked in this movie. No one seems to think this might be blackface. 

Even worse, perhaps, Comedian Willie Brown, the Black puppeteer on the poster – and on the cover of the DVD – does not even appear in the film; it looks like he was intended to be one of the film's subjects but was edited out of it. 

The most interesting figure, perhaps, is the intersex puppeteer Wilma Swartz, who has been completely abandoned by her family for living her life as a woman but has been embraced by her ventriloquist family.

The Mitchells vs the Machines

I wanted to like The Mitchells vs the Machines. I did. And the animation is sometimes really fun. It's quirky, and it incorporates drawings in a different style on top of its regular style of animation. But this has the most hokey family-is-everything narrative that it begins with and just never releases. This film really believes that family is everything. I just can't handle this kind of ideological approach to family. 

I liked all the robots. They all made me laugh. And I liked the small boy in this movie – his name is Aaron. But the whole "family' bit is just not for me.

You can watch The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix.

Adam's Rib (1949)

Adam's Rib is mostly charming and mostly politically intriguing. Katharine Hepburn is very, very good. But the movie falls apart by the end. It ties itself up in just a few too many knots and it doesn't know how to pull itself loose reasonably. 

I also feel like it attempted to undermine its own political positions – it didn't manage this successfully, but it sure felt like it made an effort.

I watched this on HBOmax.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

I enjoyed An American Werewolf in London so much. It's quirky and amusing and campy, but it's also very violent and rather merciless in its gaze. The direction is pretty great, and it's a pleasure to be looking at a naked David Naughton as much as this movie wants me to.

Weirdly enough I just watched John Landis's 1983 movie Trading Places and really liked that too. This is a director to whom I have definitely paid no attention, but he really knew what he was doing.

The Longest Yard (1974)

Burt Reynolds was at the top of his game in the mid-1970s. He made so many good movies. The Longest Yard is a really brutal film about prison violence. It is, however, a raucous comedy in the style of film Reynolds excelled at making. I absolutely enjoyed the hell out of this. Burt wears an incredible pair of pants in his first scene, and look out for Bernadette Peters in a small role as a horny secretary. The other true, brilliant highlight of The Longest Yard is the cheerleading squad during the big game, which consists of a total of nine beautiful prison queens who all take their wigs off at the end of the game. It's fabulous.

El Ángel (2018)

El Ángel is the true story of a pretty teenage sociopath in Argentina. It's really slickly made, and very fun to watch. I had a great time. I also found the film shallow, to be honest, but I didn't really mind that so much. It's a fun, queer ride. So much so that at some point late in the film he kills some people and I had to remind myself that he is a sociopath. I also wanted a little more weird sexuality. There are lots of explanations for this killer's behavior that cite deviant sexual attraction, but there honestly isn't too much of that in El Ángel.

Something Useful (2017)

İşe Yarar Bir Şey (Something Useful) is poetic, and it has some very good scenes, but I was impatient with it, and it is very talky, and I found it frustrating. I really liked every scene with Yiğit Özşener. He was really excellent, and of course Başak Köklükaya is stunning and wonderful. This was good, but it was overwritten, to my taste.

I saw Something Useful with my movie club, though, and almost everyone else was quite taken with this.