This week I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about the 1931 Ernst Lubitch film The Smiling Lieutenant. Here's the link if you're interested!
Movies
It spends a good portion of its first half pretending to be a much more serious movie than it is (the movie it pretends to be: a slow-burn thriller about two strangers accidentally booked at the same Airbnb), but after a particular point, it drops the mask so quickly that the abruptness in and of itself is hugely entertaining. It does this a couple more times, and by the end, Barbarian is thoroughly goofy, albeit of the grimy, ugly sort that characterizes the work of, say, Wes Craven. This isn't anywhere near as clever as a Craven movie, but that veneer of seriousness barely containing a mean-spirited glee at others' misfortunes definitely feels like it's in the same wheelhouse. I found this thoroughly entertaining, though by the end, as it's become clear that the film is kind of a one-trick pony in terms of how it doles out its reveals, there are diminishing returns to what it's attempting on a thematic level (some muddled ideas about gender and motherhood and morality). But it's a masterclass in executing that one trick, and I had a great time hootin' and hollerin' at the screen with my wife as we watched this. Grade: B+
Really, shockingly good. I don't hate Martin McDonagh, but it's been a while since he's done anything I particularly cared for, and this far surpasses the distant, pleasant memories I have of In Bruges. Moreover, this is the first McDonagh screenplay (I've never seen one of his stage plays) that doesn't feel like it's bending over backward trying to prove something with its cleverness; the screenplay here simply is clever in this understated yet confident way that bowled me over. If I'm not mistaken, there's some Irish political history metaphor going on with the plot that I am unequipped to unpack, but that's okay, because it's also just a very human story of pain and loss as two former friends drift apart. Whatever the allegory that's happening here, McDonagh does the very graceful and very difficult task of also making it not feel like an allegory, and the entire thing works just as well (perhaps better) if you assume that Colin Ferrell and Brendan Gleeson's characters are real, psychologically complex human beings instead of simply being analogs for the sides of the Irish Civil War or whatever is supposed to be going on there. Career-best work from Ferrell, too. He takes his "affable goofball with hidden complexity" thing and imbues it with a deep well of sadness and vulnerability that ends up pervading the entire film. I can imagine having a good, cathartic cry over this movie if it caught me in the right mood, and I mean that as a compliment. Grade: A-
The first half of this movie, which is split pretty evenly between the social-realist(ish) beginning involving the struggle of a mother and her son to make it in a new city and the wildly inventive fantasy of the boy's flight from the city to a magic island, is terrific, utilizing a dream logic undergirded by a strong emotional core in a way reminiscent of the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The back half of the movie unfortunately falls apart as it fails to maintain the emotional clarity through the dream logic, and the climax hinges on an emotional epiphany that is almost completely unearned. Narratively, it's the weakest of the Cartoon Saloon features, and it's not even close. Visually, however, this is as stunning as any of the studio's other work, maintaining the rich texturedness of Wolfwalkers as well as the luminous use of color present throughout the studio's work. In the face of that, it's hard to feel grumpy about the film. Grade: B
My least-favorite, I think, of the "...of Chucky" stage of this franchise, but Mancini continues to have a tight grasp of fundamental horror mechanics as well as the specific idioms that make his Chucky movies special—at this point, watching these characters and tropes return is something akin to watching a soap, and it's great fun just to see, for example, Jennifer Tilly show up again in some new, ridiculous role. Some great practical gore effects here, too. The psychiatric hospital setting isn't nearly as evocative or well-deployed as the old mansion in Curse, and the film relies just a little too much on movie-crazy-people-isms in fleshing out the secondary cast, and as a whole, the movie lacks the verve or the mad-scientist coherence that animates the best in the series. But I guess in the short span of time I've been watching the series, I've become a lifer with these movies, because I still had a good time and can't wait to hop into the TV series. A cult indeed. Grade: B
If I wasn't already familiar with the source material, it would be unbelievable that a movie this smutty and this mean came out of the stuffy '80s costume drama world. The closest thing I can think of to this is The Favourite, which of course arrived from a much different milieu in cinema. But here's this movie, a brutally spiteful satire of 18th-century ruling class with only a few of the edges sanded off from the French novel on which it is based (I'm unfamiliar with Christopher Hampton's 1985 play that is the more direct source for this movie). This is probably the best I've ever seen Glenn Close and John Malkovich, two actors I'm not overly fond of, and the way they slowly reveal the utter despair that they cloak in the abject evil of their actions is kind of masterful. The film's pacing gets a little dicey by the end as the plot turns from being outrageous to being just bleak, and as with basically every other version of the story, I'm not sure how to feel about its treatment of sexual assault. But on the whole, this is pretty good. I want to live in the alternative universe in which all Masterpiece Theatre-ish productions are this cruel and sick. Grade: B+
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