Mini Reviews for June 20 - July 3, 2022

Sorry for missing last week! Things got busy!

Movies

Spiderhead (2022)
Pretty dumb by the end, and specifically the action climax (set to Hall & Oates) is no good whatsoever. But before that, it's a mostly fun little sci-fi thriller in the vein of Ex Machina, i.e. "futuristic tests in an enclosed environment with a charismatic mad-scientist type." Chris Hemsworth (the mad scientist-type) is extremely entertaining, actually—of all the Marvel people who primarily exist as Marvel people (as opposed to, say, Scarlett Johansson, who has a robust career elsewhere), Hemsworth has always struck me as the most movie-star-ish, and performances like this make it clear how much of a shame it is that his career has not really made space for him to be characters who aren't Thor. Grade: B-

 

RRR (రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం) (2022)
I am not qualified in the slightest to comment on the politics of this movie, which are complicated, but hey, I had a good time with Top Gun: Maverick, whose politics are not complicated at all (they're bad!), so who am I to say anything? Anyway, as a piece of action movie craft, this completely rules. For a full 100 minutes, you get a non-stop, rip-roaring, fist-pumping onslaught of some of the most banana-pants wild action choreography I've ever seen, even within the already fairly banana-pants-wild world of Asian action cinema. Everything's just flying across the screen, usually in slow-motion, in these incredible comic-book-ish tableaux. The film slows down a little in the subsequent hour-plus, but only a little. I was a little disappointed how the Komaram Bheem character kind of fades into the background as we're given a somewhat awkwardly structured info-dump about Alluri Sitarama Raju's backstory, but only a little. For the most part, this just rocks and rolls like no other three-hour movie I've seen. Also, some British colonizers get killed in some really nasty ways, and whatever the politics of the rest of the film, I gotta give this movie props for that. Also also, as awesome as the action sequences are, the best scene of the movie is the amazing dance-off early in the film. The British not just being literally killed in battle but also figuratively killed on the dance floor. Fantastic. Grade: A-

The Long Day Closes (1992)
Terence Davies movies always have this floating, ethereal quality that makes them more dreamlike than narrative, but this is the first of his that I've seen that decouples narrative almost entirely and instead leans into the free-associative possibilities of Davies' style to depict a just-barely-prepubescent childhood in postwar Liverpool. This is, more than any film I can think of outside of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film that understands how our human minds process the passage of time less as a story and more as a collection of images, sounds, and emotions that capture the atmosphere of given periods of our lives without necessarily tying those in to a rigorous timeline of "when" and "how." Just absolutely stunning filmmaking on display here, too, which is pretty much a given with any Davies film but especially so here, where it far eclipses that of any of his other movies I've seen. Kinda wild how most of the rest of his later films are so much more heavily narratively driven, given that it kinda feels like he unlocked his secret weapon with the dream style here. Grade: A

Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒) (1992)
I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, I do like it, but I was gearing up for another slow-cinema opus in the vein of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and instead, it's just a low-key drama about some young adults having ennui and doing crimes, which is good but kind of a letdown. I should probably rewatch with my expectations appropriately recalibrated, but even so, I can't imagine preferring this to, for example, the movies where Wong Kar-wai does something similar. That said, the vibes are pretty immaculate for what this is. Grade: B

 

 

The Cosmic Eye (1986)
An animated movie that looks like the cover of Don Cherry's Organic Music Society put into motion, which is fitting because the music in this movie sounds a lot like the kind of music Don Cherry and the rest of that whole spiritual jazz wave in the 1970s were making. Which of course means that the music absolutely owns. The animation is also very, very cool, completely ambivalent to hiding the drawing streaks and strokes that a lot of more traditional animation tries to smooth away, and the result is something that is constantly shimmering with organic motion. The basic, hippie-ish "why can't we all get along?" text of the film (the whole movie basically consists of aliens looking down on earth and wondering why there is so much conflict and violence when human beings share so much in common) is pretty shallow in that new-age-y way that sometimes comes out of well-meaning social-justice sentiments without a lot of concrete basis in material specifics, but it's at least a broadly nice sentiment. I'm mostly just here for the very cool music and animation, though. Grade: B

The Last Detail (1973)
The kind of movie that spends its first 90-ish minutes building up this really sweet, warm male camaraderie just so it can show the system (imperialist, patriarchal, judicial—take your pick) crush it in its final 15 minutes. A real bummer of a movie, but my kind of bummer movie. Also, maybe my favorite Jack Nicholson performance? The real star here is Randy Quaid, though, who is adorable beyond measure. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi) (1972)
I've had this on my watchlist for years entirely on the basis of its being referenced in a St. Vincent song ("Chloe in the Afternoon," i.e. its original title in America). So when I popped this in and the opening title card informs me it's the last in a series, I was like, "Uh oh." Luckily, it seems like the entries in Éric Rohmer's "Six Morality Tales" are fairly standalone, and if there was any of this that I was supposed to connect to previous entries, it went completely over my head as I blissfully enjoyed this pretty straightforward little fable about a man being tempted into infidelity. I know this already has an English remake (starring Chris Rock??), but tbh, Eyes Wide Shut already feels like it's picking up the baton and taking it to the finish line. Grade: B

 

The More the Merrier (1943)
A movie about a very relatable situation in which you have sublet your apartment to a guy who is trying to set you up with the guy he sublet his sublet to, just so he can destroy a political opponent. 100% a delight. Also, surprisingly steamy for a studio movie of its era. Grade: A

100 Years...100 Movies 88-90: Bringing Up Baby, The Sixth Sense, Swing Time

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Blah blah blah.

88. Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up, my family would periodically have movie nights. My dad would go to the local Blockbuster or, in the way olden days, the local Hollywood Video (remember those?) and come home with some classic movie that we'd all watch together, arm-in-arm on the living room couch. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting, only with a lot more Star Wars. And you know what? My dad was really good at picking movies we'd all enjoy. Except for this one time. That fateful evening, he came home with this old screwball comedy that he'd never seen, "but it's supposed to be really good," he told us. "It's a classic." Well, we all sat down in front of the TV, my brother popped the popcorn, Dad put the tape in the VCR, and we watched the movie. And we hated it. All of us, including Dad. It's literally the only time I can remember a unanimous thumbs-down from the family on a movie-night movie. The name of that movie? Bringing Up Baby. Full disclosure: I haven't watched the movie since then (which was, by the way, probably twelve or thirteen years ago), although I have an unusually vivid memory of the film (such was the intensity of my dislike, perhaps?), so I feel at least semi-confident to say that I probably still wouldn't enjoy it today, although my hatred would probably be tempered to a "meh." The big sticking point for me is that I just don't find Katherine Hepburn's character funny. Like, at all. And that's a pretty big deal breaker for the movie, considering she delivers most of the jokes (give or take a few irate straight-man-turned-funny lines from Cary Grant's character). I'm not sure if I can explain why exactly I don't find her funny other than to say that her anarchic comedy becomes positively grating to me as the movie wears on. Irritation is a weird, inexplicable feeling, though; for instance, I love Spongebob Squarepants, Bugs Bunny, Groucho Marx, and Tina Belcher, all of whom are similarly nonsensical agents of chaos in their respective worlds. Why don't I find them irritating, too? I can't tell you. But whatever strange alchemy of factors it is that pushes a performance to the right side of the line between hilarious and aggravating, Hepburn just doesn't have it here. And that goes for the rest of the movie, too, unfortunately. Sorry, folks.

89. The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)
Honestly, I'm not sure of the reasoning that led to AFI's putting The Sixth Sense on this list. In the context of the rest of the list, the selection of this movie seems to go against the general character of films that made the cut, which, as I've discussed previously, usually tend toward Big Important Themes, epic scale, huge cultural import, sweeping romance, and/or showy, majestic cinematography. The Sixth Sense has none of these [1]. But oh well. No sense in belaboring the point since it did end up making the list, and anyway, it's a movie I like very much. For starters, it's a horror movie [2] that relies on clever use of atmosphere and practical effects, something I can always get behind. It's a darned entertaining, efficient bit of filmmaking, too, and also an appealingly personal one. So much of the discussion surrounding this movie has to do with the film-ending twist (and it's a doozy of a twist, too!) that the fact that the movie is, at heart, a poignant character study of two profoundly broken individuals often gets lost in the shuffle. Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment both give fantastic, haunting (heh) performances that flesh out the already psychologically sophisticated characters the screenplay provides, and the chemistry between the two (both on an acting and a writing level) is just as important to the movie's success as Shyamalan's excellent composition and command of tone. One of the great things about The Sixth Sense, in fact, is that it's still great without the twist. Future films of Shyamalan's would fail in part because the whole movie was in service of some endgame antics. With The Sixth Sense, you have the opposite, with the end in service of the rest of the movie. It's a character-based movie masquerading as a high-concept one, and a warmly redemptive one at that. For all of horror's nihilism, that redemption is a welcome anomaly.

90. *Swing Time (1936, George Stevens)
I'm not sure there's such a thing as a hangout musical in the same way that there are hangout sitcoms (e.g. Friends), hangout comedies (large chunks of any Apatow film), and hangout dramas (The Deer Hunter), but Swing Time is the closest I've seen any musical come to capturing the easygoing, elliptical vibe of that subgenre. There's almost no plot to speak of (well, characters fall in love, but in musicals, that's pretty much akin to breathing), and consequently, a large part of Swing Time's MO is just to let the characters sort of exist in front of the camera, bursting into song and dance numbers whenever they feel like it. It's surprisingly laid back for a musical, both in terms of adherence to the musical formula[4] (the first song doesn't appear until well past the 20-minute mark) and actual craft. And you know, that makes for a largely enjoyable viewing experience. The dialogue is light and fun, Fred Astaire is as dapper and charismatic as you could ever want a lead to be, and the songs are catchy, well-choreographed, and generally charming (particularly "The Way You Look Tonight,"[5] which is the charmingest of the charming and one of the best ever of cinema's musical creations, melodically). It's a movie that aims to delight by the sheer force of its fleet amiability, and it's largely successful in doing so. .... And then there's that blackface sequence. Okay, sorry, I just couldn't not mention it. Astaire doing a song-and-dance routine with his face smeared with dark shoe polish is one of those shocking old-movie moments that jolts you into realizing the uncomfortable truth that oh yeah, this movie is from the '30s, and things were like that in the '30s. Honestly, my first impulse (other than "WTF, Swing Time, seriously blackface???") is to give the movie a pass because of the film's otherwise amiable demeanor and that the sequence seems to be a mostly good-natured use of that sort of performance (i.e. not a whole lot of appeals to racial stereotypes other than the fact that, yeah, Astaire is painted black). But that first impulse is a bunch of crap. Given the ugly, destructive context of the whole minstrelsy medium, there's not really such a thing as a "good-natured" use of blackface performance[6], and no matter how nice the rest of the movie seems, the fact is that the blackface comes in the middle of a movie in which there is only one black character, a porter who has like two lines—that doesn't help the racial politics here one bit. And did I mention that the song Astaire dances to here is called "Bojangles of Harlem"? Yeesh. All of this is a shame, firstly because of the racism of course, but secondly because it blemishes what is probably the best-choreographed sequences in the entire film; Astaire dancing with his shadows in one of the most beguiling images from the movie, too, again made less palatable by the racism. Anyway, sorry for the rant. It's an unfortunate spot on an otherwise endearing trifle of a film.

My friends, we are now just a scant ten movies away from the end of this project. Just in time, too, since the school semester is just around the corner. Per usual, feel free to share your own thoughts on the movies here. Until next time!

If you feel so inclined, you can read the previous entry in the series, #s 85-87, here.
Update: You can read the next entry, #s 91-93, here.

1] As far as Big Themes go, for sure The Sixth Sense is a rumination on death and grief, but its treatment of those themes isn't the sort of capitalized portentousness that characterizes, say, Apocalypse Now.

3] Another bit of AFI counter-programming on The Sixth Sense's part. It's a horror movie, for Pete's sake—granted, an extremely classical, even Hitchcockian[3] horror movie, but a horror movie nonetheless. And if there's one thing that AFI doesn't put on its 100 Years...100 Movies list, it's a horror movie. How many times do you think I can use the word "horror" in this footnote? Horror horror horror horror horror. Ten. Ten times.

3] So, it looks like Alfred Hitchcock has directed the only other horror movie on the list (Psycho). There may be a link here...

4] Well, I guess I should say the musical formula that would be standardized by the '50s. Swing Time is probably the earliest musical I've ever seen, and, being mostly ignorant about the larger mechanics of the genre, I have to admit that it's possible that the conventions I'm familiar with didn't emerge until much later.

5] Am I an idiot for not knowing that this song came from this movie? I had always assumed it was some old pop standard or something.

6] Besides, good-natured racism is nonetheless still racism.

100 Years...100 Movies 43-45: Midnight Cowboy, The Philadelphia Story, Shane

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

We've reached a section of the list where there are quite a few movies I haven't seen yet. This is exciting for me, as it means I'll be getting to experience lots of classics for the first time, but it might be tedious for you readers who want me to hurry up and finish this project already. Expect delays as I wait for Netflix DVDs to trickle in.

43. *Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger)
I ended up liking Midnight Cowboy a whole lot more than I thought I would. Maybe because of its legacy as the only X-rated movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture, I had filed Midnight Cowboy in my mind somewhere alongside Natural Born Killers and Fritz the Cat as one of those films whose primary artistic and historic significance was that it broke those taboos. I'm not a big fan of taboo-breaking just for the sake of it, and movies that are interested in doing so generally have a pretty short shelf life. I'm happy to announce that Midnight Cowboy is not one of those movies. Sure, there's maybe some shocks for a 1960s audience (though nothing that would have earned the film anything above an R rating even a few years after its release[1]), but the film has a tender core to it that makes the would-be shocks actually artistically relevant. John Voight's titular cowboy is a sweet but damaged individual, damage that extends to the seedy world around him and makes his relative innocence (and pre-film loss of it) all the more poignant. I was also surprised at how visually engaging the movie is, with the cinematography and editing taking numerous cues from avant-garde and world cinema. The mid-film dream sequence is particularly stunning, mixing fractured editing with both color and black-and-white film in a way that makes for a strikingly efficient method of delivering exposition. Mix the visual inventiveness with that immortal "I'm walkin' here!" improvisation from Dustin Hoffman (who is, by the way, excellent throughout), and you've got yourself a good movie.

44. *The Philadelphia Story (1940, George Cukor)
There's a stretch of The Philadelphia Story where the film actually feels like one of the greatest movies of all time and probably one of the top five best romantic comedies ever. That stretch is the thirty-ish minute sequence that begins with the party on the night before Katharine Hepburn's character's wedding and lasts up to about fifteen minutes before the movie ends. During that sequence, The Philadelphia Story is excruciatingly funny, complex, and thrilling, and the plot is impressively choreographed throughout the relatively confined locations of the party. This sequence confirms what It's a Wonderful Life only hints at, which is that James Stewart (who deservedly won an Oscar for his role in this movie) plays an amazing drunk. Come to think of it, the party and post-party scenes probably work as well as they do because every character is drunk, loosening up the otherwise quite stagey dialogue elsewhere in the film. I can't stress enough just how mesmerizing and hilarious every single cast member is here once their characters get a few drinks in them. When they're sober, though (and, unfortunately, they are sober most of the rest of the movie), The Philadelphia Story doesn't work nearly as well. I dropped the word "stagey" a few sentences back, and I meant that literally; this movie is based on a play, and for much of its runtime, it shows. The shots are lethargic and even static, with characters entering and exiting the frame as they would a live stage. The dialogue, too, simply reeks of the sort of starched intricacy that stage dramas can pull off because it fills out the otherwise stripped-down nature of the medium. Cinema, however, (and particular Hollywood cinema) is rarely stripped down, and consequently, the dialogue often feels overwritten. Also, the character work is troublingly dodgy, as the script doesn't do nearly enough to interrogate the male characters' misogyny (a possibly minor problem if you're one to forgive a movie's dated politics) or, worse, develop Cary Grant's character as a compelling love interest (a huge problem once the film's finale rolls around). All of this makes the non-night-before-the-wedding scenes kind of a drag, although I can't knock Jimmy Stewart in the slightest (he's stupendous throughout). Those night-before-the-wedding scenes, though: golden.

45. Shane (1953, George Stevens)
"Shane, come back! Shaaaane!" Poor little Brandon deWilde is definitely the weak link in the cast. But he tries his best as Joey, and there's no denying that he sells the crap out of that final line delivery. His plaintive cried for his hero to return is one of the saddest, most sincere moments from any movie on this list, and as iconic scenes in Westerns go, this one ranks up there with any put to film by John Ford or Sergio Leone. What makes that ending even more effective is that it's not just a one-sided lament; though he's put a straight face on it, Shane himself is genuinely grieved to leave as well. His is a more existential sadness than the raw abandonment that Joey experiences, as he realizes that the insuppressible violence that defines his character is incompatible with the compassionate, domestic life he tries to adopt for much of the film's duration. He understands that he is doomed to be lonely and unhappy, separated from meaningful human contact by the heroic role he is compelled to adopt. Shane is one of the earliest self-reflective Westerns I can think of (followed a few years later by the granddaddy of all self-reflective Westerns, The Searchers), and that conflict of the irreconcilability of gunslinger violence with happiness is central to its questioning of genre tropes. There's a typical Western romance to Shane's lone gunman heroism, but there's also the decidedly unromantic subtext that Shane yearns to break free of the role the movie forces upon him. But of course, characters can't do that unless their movies allow them to. Tragically, Shane doesn't.

I'll try to post again soon, but as I said earlier, I gotta wait for those darn discs. In the meantime, feel free (as always) to let me know what you think of these or any movies. Until next time!

You can read the previous post, #s 40-42, here.
Update: Read ahead to the next post, #s 46-48, here.

1] 1969 falls within that magical period of maybe five years in which the X rating actually meant what it was supposed to mean, before the R rating got a ridiculously high ceiling to hedge out the increasingly explicit higher rating. Thanks, pornography. Thanks, MPAA.