Brandon’s movie memory

Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! If someone pauses to take a breath, they quickly cut to someone else so the talking won’t stop!

For some reason I listened to the commentary for a while. Paul and Penn are very proud of their interviewee picks and of their independent filmmaker status. Big Hollywood never would’ve dreamed of filming The Aristocrats!

I guess it was good to see some of my favorite people hang out and talk about The Joke and each other and performing and everything. Jon Stewart, Drew Carey, Richard Lewis, Sarah Silverman, Bill Maher and Rip Taylor were all in there. I didn’t realize how much of a big deal they were gonna make about Gilbert Gottfried doing The Joke a couple weeks after 9/11/01. It’s the dramatic climax of a movie that had no drama or story up to that point, and while it’s true that humor was in a sorry state for those few weeks and it’s true that Gilbert is hilarious, they overblow the whole thing.

Anyway I didn’t mean to write so much because this was hardly even a movie, but here are some fun screenshots I took where you can see the cameraman in something reflective:

What a wonderful coincidence that I watch You’re Never Too Young, and then find out the next day that the film it remade is on Turner Classic.

Robert Osbourne introduced as a screwball comedy, but the only thing screwball here is the premise. Movie is played as a straight, semi-romantic comedy. Same story as the Lewis flick but minus the jewel thief and with a sex reversal (and predictably there’s no equivalent to the Dean Martin character). So Ginger Rogers is the scalp-massager lured to an apartment under a false premise which gets her to leave town and have to pose as a kid to afford a ticket. She hides out in Ray Milland’s room, same thunderstorm and morning discovery scene, then has to keep up the ruse so Ray won’t get in trouble and kicked out of the military. Again, a happy ending with Ray getting his wish to be sent on active duty (makes more sense in the nationalistic war-ragin’ 40’s than in the 1955 remake) and happening to meet a finally-acting-her-own-age Ginger on the train platform (where she gives him a Katy-disapproved line about how all some girls want is a letter from their husbands-abroad every couple weeks).

Cute movie, with some major Creepiness Issues (Ginger cuddling up to Ray, wanting him while pretending to be a little girl and calling him “uncle”). Not the madcap funhouse of the remake, though… no Dean songs (they’re not missed) or speedboat chases, choral performances or marching band shenanigans. Turning the all-girls school into a military academy surprisingly doesn’t change much. Some scenes are very similar, like the long-distance call at the phone switchboard (though Jerry ups the humor with his nutty dancing and a voice-dubbing stunt). I’m sure there’s some auteurist reason why I should prefer the original to the remake, but sorry, I sorta don’t.

This came out a full decade before Ginger Rogers had a lot more fun playing a little girl in Monkey Business (another movie comparison which does this film no favors), and TWO decades before Ray Milland acquired his X-RAY EYES. Back in the 40’s he was cast not for the x-ray eyes but because he is an effective leading man, and an exact cross between Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. Wilder sez: “I wrote the part of the major for Cary Grant. I always wanted him in one of my pictures, but it never worked out.”

15-year-old little Lucy would grow up to play the love interest in the remake. Ray’s meddling fiancee (and Lucy’s big sister) was Rita Johnson (The Big Clock, Here Comes Mr. Jordan). The strict colonel (Lucy’s father) was Edward Fielding, who managed to portray military men, doctors, ministers and shopkeepers in over 70 films in the 1940’s despite a fatal heart attack halfway through the decade. Ginger Rogers’ mom, in her only screen appearance, played Ginger Rogers’ mom. Guy who gets a scalp massage at the beginning was Robert Benchley, the Jaws author’s grandfather. The young high-school age kids were actually 22, 21 and 16 (x2). That’s more accurate casting than the remake managed to get. The one familiar-looking boy had played Rudy in Shop Around The Corner, the kid the shop owner takes out for Christmas dinner in the final scene.

And what do I know about Billy Wilder? Not very much! Just enough to see plot parallels between this and Some Like It Hot. Saw none of the cynicism for which he’s known, but Wilder explains: “I was very careful. I set out to make a commercial picture I wouldn’t be ashamed of, so my first picture as a director wouldn’t be my last.”

Internet says the screenwriter invented the bad pickup line “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”.

Trying to clear my head of CJ7, I grabbed the first Stephen Chow movie I could find at the store, and hit paydirt. Not as artistically ambitious as most of the movies I like, but as entertainment it is supreme, better than Michael Bay’s filmography to date and probably a thousandth as expensive. Plus these are only two of the six films Wong is credited with directing in 1992 alone. Take that, Mr. Bay.

I’d check the IMDB every ten minutes during part one trying to keep characters straight and to locate superstar Brigitte Lin… finally figured out that she shows up at the very end (the final shot!) of pt. 1 to set up her starring role in pt. 2. But then she’s not even that big a deal in 2 - it’s another jumble of too many characters (sometimes crossdressing to make it even more confusing for me). Just a ton of penis jokes, more than I think I’ve ever heard in one place before. Supposedly very clever wordplay in the dialogue, but I don’t guess that translated very well in the subs. I found it funny anyway. Not the greatest most showoffy action scenes, but they’re alright. Just so much going on, impossible to get bored while watching this. Trying to lay out all the plots and alliances here would take longer than re-watching the movies, but in short…

Stephen Chow is Wei Shu Bo, works at a brothel or someplace, rescues the lead dude (Chan) of an anti-government organization, joins their group and is sent to the emperor’s palace to do some shit, but befriends the emp (Ning) and his sister (Princess Kim). In each movie he tries to protect them from a traitorous super-powerful white-haired dude, first Obai then Fung (who works for King Ng of Ping-Si whose son Prince Ng is to marry Kim, who is in love with Stephen Chow, who is also having sex with Brigitte Lin and the Swan twins, but I get ahead of myself). Actually Chow is powerless but lucky throughout part one (the empress or queen, the one who later transforms into Brigitte Lin, kills Obai but Chow takes credit), working as apprentice to eunuch Hai, then when Chow has sex with Lin in pt. 2 he gets most of her powers. Chow has a friend Dor Long who shows up a lot, and there’s a girl named Ah Or or maybe Sister Bond who I never figured out who she was and nobody else seems to know either. Oh and Lin’s teacher the one-armed nun is a big deal in the first half of pt. 2.

Stephen Chow had been in 30 movies by now so I assume he was pretty well known. He started his writer/director career a couple years after this.

Lin starred in Police Story, Zu Warriors and Peking Opera Blues, Swordsman II & III, New Dragon Gate Inn, Bride With White Hair, then she pretty much stopped acting after doing two Wong Kar-Wai films and getting married in ‘94.

I didn’t get screenshots of the first movie, but the queen was Sharla Cheung (costarred with Stephen Chow in a bunch of things), the eunuch was Stephen Chow fave Man Tat Ng (also in Happy Together), and Obai (hilariously credited as O’Brien on IMDB) was Elvis Tsui of the Sex & Zen movies and a hundred others.

The emperor’s sister, Chingmy Yau (below), costarred with Jet Li in some other Jing Wong films in the 90’s as well as the HK version of Street Fighter. The emperor, Siu-Lun Wan, hasn’t been in much else. The mysterious Sister Bond, Sandra Ng Kwan Yue, has been in a hundred movies with titles I recognized from the other filmographies I looked at.

King Ng is Paul Chun (appeared with Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan movies back in the 70’s), his son the prince (who gets castrated by the princess if I haven’t mentioned) is Ken Tong (of a bunch of movies with knockoff titles of more famous movies, incl. a semi-sequel to Royal Tramp starring Tony Leung).

Lan Law, the one-handed nun, has been acting since the 50’s, appeared in Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.

The puppetmaster Fung, Shi-Kwan Yen, was in a lot of stuff in the 70’s, some high-profile films in the 90’s, and hasn’t done much since Iron Monkey in ‘93.

Oh wait, forgot to mention the best part. At the end of part one, it freeze-frames on Brigitte Lin, and the credits come up, declaring “PEPSI / SEVEN-UP”. A soda advertisement in the credits!

Happy 10th anniversary to the funniest comedy of the 90’s!

In honor of this anniversary, I intended to post pictures of Jeff Bridges’ smiling eyes, but the DVD crashes my VLC player on both computers, so I will abandon this post before I am tempted to start quoting lines.

I’d heard this was one of those forgotten comic masterpieces, have to say I was underwhelmed. Humor and references seem state-of-the-art to 1957 - I got Groucho’s “you bet your life” cameo but probably missed a lot more.

an alarmed Tony Randall:

In high cinemascope color, a cross between Tashlin’s cartoony style, an advertisement (since our protagonist is an ad-man) and a regular 60’s comedy (Tash was ahead of his time). Tony Randall (from Let’s Make Love) is our ad-man, who makes a deal with superstar Rita Marlowe (Jayne “The Girl Can’t Help It” Mansfield). She’ll do a bunch of ads for his makeup company client, saving him his job (and eventually earning him an unwanted promotion to president) if he’ll publically pretend to be her new boyfriend to make her ex, Bobo Branigansky, want her back. The ex, also a TV star, sort of a Hercules/Tarzan type, is played by Mickey Hargitay, a bodybuilder who would play Tarzan for real three years later. Betsy Drake (not a big star, best known for being Cary Grant’s wife throughout the 50’s) plays Tony’s pissed-off fiancee who threatens to leave him over the whole Rita thing, and 16-yr-old Lili Gentle (one of her only movie roles) is Tony’s excitable niece, a bit Rita fan.

a very red Lili Gentle:

It’s all about knowing where we belong, being happy with our lot in life, finding true love, and making fun of television. Tony and the president of the ad company (John Williams of Dial M For Murder) end up a farmer and a gardener, and Tony’s boss (Henry Jones of 3:10 To Yuma and Vertigo), a born ad-man, ends up an ad-man. Joan Blondell (star of 1930’s musicals, Nightmare Alley) has an interesting part as Rita’s washed-up assistant who yearns for the life she could’ve had with the love of her youth, a milkman, and gets Rita thinking about her own young love, George Schmidlap (Groucho, below).

Katy somewhat liked it, but I have a feeling she’s about done with Frank Tashlin comedies, so I’ll save Artists and Models for another time and go back to the always reliable Billy Wilder (although she didn’t like Ace in the Hole either, hmmm).

check out Rita and her matching poodle:

I think Gregg Araki has nothing to do with Arakimentari, the photographer doc I kept almost-renting a couple years ago. Rather he’s the director of hottt indie films Mysterious Skin and The Doom Generation.

A talked-about hit of Sundance 2007, this predictably turned out to be a breezily likeable little comedy which relies on the idea that watching someone act extremely stoned will stay funny for 90 minutes. It pretty much does. Mostly I liked the bummer ending and the rest was pretty okay, a time waster. Rented it as a palate-cleanser after Redacted, which was rumored to be crappy and which I feared would put me in a bad, bad mood like Road to Guantanamo and The War Tapes did… but I kinda loved it so there was no need.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:

Watching someone who is very stoned is, of course, hilarious. Anna Faris (who I do not remember from Brokeback Mountain) is very good, but could leave her mouth hanging wide open less often. There are also hilarious cameos by actors I mostly don’t know. In reverse order of how well I know them, they were:
- Danny Trejo, who doesn’t have much to do here
- Brian Posehn, who plays a big pothead on the Sarah Silverman Program
- John Cho, Harold himself
- Danny Masterson (Hyde in That 70’s Show), awesome as Jane’s roommate
- Adam Brody (skydiver in The Ten) as the dealer
- John Krasinski (The Office U.S.), who I’ve never seen before but I’ve heard his name a lot, in a good role as Jane’s duped love-interest
- Jane Lynch (Christopher Guest movies) as an unimpressed casting director
- late 70’s star and Hitchcock actor Roscoe Lee Browne as the narrator

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:

Actually I had a better time wandering the IMDB looking up names than watching this movie. Get this, Anna Faris is gonna star in Kids In America this year. Her co-stars are a different guy from That 70’s Show, a different guy from The Ten, a guy who is playing Hitchcock in a fakey bio-pic, and someone from the previous Gregg Araki film.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:

Some shots from the ending:

Hedwig-Hansel as Gnosis-Corgan. It’s complicated.

That’s songwriter Stephen Trask on the left.

Yitzhak unleashed! I will look out for her next time I watch Shortbus.

An Emily Hubley moment:

No wonder Oklahoma oilman Ralph Bellamy looked familiar - he was Hildy’s falsely-arrested fiancee in His Girl Friday. Hmmm, also third billed in Pretty Woman fifty years later. And no wonder Irene Dunne did not look familiar - I’ve never seen her before. This is now the earliest Cary Grant movie I’ve seen, and he was already unmistakably Cary-Grant-ish in it.

Based on a play (which was previously filmed twice) and partly improvised on-set, a screwball comedy, which is just to say that the storyline is less important than getting the most comic potential out of each moment. I thought it held together pretty well, except for a bit towards the end where it suddenly swerves to have Dunne destroy Grant’s affair with a rich young woman, as if realizing that too much time had been spent destroying Dunne’s own affairs while he was getting off the hook.

Grant and Dunne get divorced but still see each other at nightclubs and on court-ordered dog visitation days. Very suspicious of each other, but still mutually attracted, each tries to break up the other’s real or imagined romances. I can’t tell if the movie is smartly concealing the truth from the audience (is Dunne really having an affair with her music teacher? where was Grant when he claimed to be in Florida?) to keep things tensely ambiguous, or if we’re just supposed to assume that they’re cheating on each other and the movie can’t address it directly because of the hollywood production code. Katy says her grandmother would not have approved of the ending, where the two wait until the clock strikes midnight (signaling that their divorce is final) to get back together (adultery!).

Senses of Cinema:

Who else would make the final scene of such a loud screwball comedy as The Awful Truth end as quietly as it does? Compare the film with Bringing Up Baby (1938) or Twentieth Century (1934) – Hawks’ strategy is to go faster, louder, zanier. McCarey, by contrast, slows down The Awful Truth at its climax, startlingly so. The ending, suddenly, is not screwball. This is something deeper, more realistically romantic, than “sophisticated comedy.”

A. Vanneman:

Remarkably, Dunne holds her own, thanks to an excellent script and her own acting. … Classy, yes, very, but not condescending, and very light on her feet. She’s always one step ahead of Jerry, a tantalizing gadfly that never lets him relax into his godlike perfection.

Ralph Bellamy gives us a very nice ride as Dan Leeson, the interloping cowpoke boyfriend from Tulsa. Yes, he’s corn-fed and lives with his ma, but he sure knows how to fill out a top coat, doesn’t he? It’s a very nice touch to make Dan so open and good-natured, laughing with naïve delight at the slightest witticism. “Hey, that’s funny! You know, you’re funny!” How can you get mad at someone who laughs at your jokes? If you didn’t want him to laugh, why did you tell a joke in the first place?

In addition to fine performances from the leads, The Awful Truth shines for its beautiful mingling of verbal, character-driven humor and superbly paced slapstick. The tale of the hats, the fatal mix-up involving Jerry’s and Armand’s derbies, is probably the most elegant hat-play on film, Stan and Ollie gone uptown. McCarey almost seems to be working on a dare — taking the lowest piece of vaudeville shtick, putting it on Park Avenue, and making it work. 10 Nothing is forced; each step in the farce is quite reasonable and sensible on its own — little bits of paper floating randomly together to form a picture of disaster.

Leo McCarey won best director at the oscars, but The Life of Emile Zola and The Good Earth beat it for picture, actress, supporting actor and screenplay. Very good movie. Katy liked it too.

Co-written by Maude. Maude!

Husband and wife lawyers defend opposite sides in a legal case of husband vs. wife. Both relationships get pretty rocky during the case. Good movie, and funny, but not a wacky romantic comedy like the DVD box would have you believe.

Judy Holliday is Doris, who shot her husband. She was great in this, later starred in Born Yesterday and It Should Happen To You before her career died thanks to meddling by the junior senator from wisconsin.

Hepburn & Tracy. IMDB calls this Hepburn’s last performance before she moved into “middle-aged spinster roles.”

Tracy, 13 years after Fury and still a bad-ass.

Tom Ewell (The Seven Year Itch, American Guerrilla in the Philippines) is Warren the wounded husband

Hepburn with David Wayne as Kip, their obnoxious musician neighbor. He’s sort of an annoying Donald O’Connor. What a sorry choice to play Peter Lorre’s character in the remake of M two years later. Also appeared in Hell and High Water, which I’ve seen twice but I still don’t remember him in it.

Jean Hagen as the other woman. She played the comically terrible silent film actress in Singin’ in the Rain.

I guess I don’t know what makes a Howard Hawks movie a Howard Hawks movie. No anti-auteurism implied, but I have an awfully hard time detecting the directorial stamp in pre-1960’s studio films like those by Hawks and Lang. This is an awesome movie, one of the best comedies ever made, but at first glance the camera work and editing don’t seem to be helping. We put Rosalind and Cary in frame and they recite the screenplay as fast as they can manage and voila, instant classic. It can’t be that simple though, and every Hawks movie seems to be superb so there’s something Hawksian here, even if it’s only in his ability to attract the best scripts and collaborators. Let’s go to the experts. Actually let’s just go to Senses of Cinema:

“Hawks was able to impress upon these genre films his own personal worldview. It is essentially comic, rather than tragic, existential rather than religious, and irreverent rather than earnestly sentimental.”

“Nicknames point to the primacy of the group over the individual; the value of male bonding through rivalry or through rite of passage; the elevation of male communities validated by codes of ethics and professionalism; the potential for women to gain access to male groups in unconventional ways; and the articulation of mystique-laden alternative forms of social and sexual arrangements outside of Hollywood’s idealisation of the nuclear family. These are the traits of Hawks’ work which are almost universally noted by film critics.”

“Hawks’ own characteristic plain vanilla style (eye-level camera privileging dense formations of actors in the frame)…”

So not a mise-en-scene thing so much as an expression of a certain world-view. I get it.

This was the third or fourth time I’ve watched “His Girl Friday” since 2001, and I watched it not as a work that I know well, but as something new and exciting but vaguely familiar. When something happens I go “oh yeah, that’s what happened” but I have little prior recall of plot, character or dialogue. I am seriously thinking of renaming this site “The Amnesiac Filmgoer”. So rather than recount what happened in the movie and put up screenshots, I’m going to go ahead and forget it again so it’ll be just as new and exciting the next time I watch it.

Okay, any show that opens with George Wendt dissolving his father in a bath of acid is gonna be good. Never quite lives up to its promise (or its predecessor, “Deer Woman”), but it gets 80-90% there, and that ain’t bad at all.

His coolest horror role since House:

Young couple moves in next door to utter lunatic Wendt. Besides being a bit socially awkward, he’s also creating himself a lovely family of well-dressed skeletons in an upstairs room and imagining whole conversations (even fights) with them. Young couple is an investigative reporter and an ER doctor whose daughter is part of Wendt’s family. Turns out they have tracked him down in order to torture him to death, a perfectly horrible ending (and I mean that as a compliment). Some of the couple’s own fights, which we assume are about deciding to have a new baby, are actually about deciding to go through with the murder plot, a detail which makes the somewhat-slack middle of the episode come to life upon reflection. And the more lighthearted & comedic moments come from Wendt’s delusions and the care with which he assembles and dresses his skeleton family, so it’s probably a darker piece than “Deer Woman”.

The “gunman” (Hideaki Ito, star of Cross Fire from the Gamera director), a stranger who blows into town, plays one of the two ruling gangs against the other and emerges as the sole adult survivor.

Ruka Uchida, love child of the red and white clans, the other survivor and only non-participant of the bloodshed. According to closing titles he will grow up to be sequel-happy Italian hero Django.

Shun Oguri (Azumi, Miike’s Crows Episode 0) is Akira, the boy’s father, killed before the movie even starts but shown in flashback.

Yoshino Kimura (Glory to the Filmmaker, Dream Cruise), mother of the young boy turned Red Clan prostitute and killed off at the end.

Koichi Sato (Ring Spiral, Kinji Fukasaku’s Gate of Youth), cruel leader of the red clan, rips it up with a chain gun.

Yusuke Iseya (Memories of Matsuko, Distance, After Life, upcoming Blindness), stylin’ leader of the white clan, kinda the less evil of the two evil lords.

Kaori Momoi (Izo, Kagemusha), Akira’s mother and a legendary badass in hiding who comes out and helps our hero for the final fight. Falls somewhat in love with a white-headbanded guy whose name I couldn’t figure out.

Teruyuki Kagawa (of Memories of Matsuko, Serpent’s Path and the next K. Kurosawa film), the town sheriff torn between loyalties to both sides, becomes schizophrenic. Probably Miike’s most interesting new character in the story.

Quentin Tarantino (Destiny Turns On The Radio, Little Nicky) plays the funny-talking white guy in the framing scenes.

Watched late at night with Jimmy. Full of eager anticipation, turned quickly to apprehension when we’re unable to understand half the dialogue (plays at festivals with English subtitles, which we lacked). Then movie seemed to get longer and louder and more tedious, and I got sleepier and less interested…

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it has visual appeal, and a few stand-up-and-clap moments of bravura. Didn’t leave me cold exactly, just… wasn’t thrilling and I started to regret suggesting it.

But ya know what? Looking through the screen shots I started to like it a lot more. It’s a really awesome movie when… you know…

…when I’m not watching it.

A new movie that did not start at the end, and had opening credits! What’s the world coming to?

This year’s little miss sunshine indie-rock dream-team cast: Ellen Page from Hard Candy, boyfriend Michael Cera from Arrested Dev./Superbad, parents Allison Janney (West Wing?) and JK Simmons (Spiderman’s boss), and adoptive parents Jason Bateman (Arrested Dev.) and Jennifer Garner (Elektra). Ellen gets knocked up and gives the baby for adoption but restless Bateman breaks up his marriage so Garner gets baby by herself and Ellen starts hanging with Cera again, the end.

Waaay overbaked dialogue written by a showoff blogger and a cutey sitcommy setup made it the darling oscar-nom hit of the year. Movie is either a hateful, opportunistic, love-desperate mockery of teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, marriage and parenthood… or, as Katy says, it’s great for being a funny and clever movie (which it is) which portrays real behavior and choices not commonly seen at the movies.

I’ll decide later.

Worst JL movie I’ve seen so far. I can’t believe this was the (directorial) follow-up to “Nutty Professor”.

Lewis is of course the title patsy. A famous singer/entertainer dies, and his handlers don’t know what to do with themselves. They want to continue their partnership, keep doing what they were doing, but how can they without a star to support? Enter clumsy bellboy Lewis. His character is sweet but SUCH a loser that it’s impossible to suspend enough disbelief to believe that the handlers would unanimously adopt him instead of taking maybe an hour to look around, or more likely holding a casting call.

Hardly ever funny, the romantic bit seems forced, movie’s sole reason to exist seems to be so Lewis could work with some high-class supporting actors, so here they are:

Everett Sloane (Disorderly Orderly, The Enforcer, Citizen Kane)
Phil Harris (Anything Goes, The Jungle Book)
Keenan Wynn (Piranha, Laserblast, Point Blank, Parts: The Clonus Horror)
Peter Lorre (M, Maltese Falcon, Mad Love)
John Carradine (The Howling, Frankenstein Island, Red Zone Cuba)

Ina Balin (The Projectionist 1971) is the girl, the heart of the picture, and Scatman Crothers gets one good scene.

Jerry is called the “king of comedy” once, and Ed Sullivan refers to having Martin & Lewis on the show before.

a patsy:

L-R: Lorre, Wynn, Lewis, Carradine, Balin, Sloane, Harris

this was his final film:

the mushy flashback scene:

funny ending, dismantling the set:

UPDATE: Senses of Cinema calls it “a discourse on comedy” and points to the scene where Jerry almost but never quite breaks all the priceless vases as an example of defying comedic expectations. See attached comment for a more thought-out opinion than mine.

Somewhat-funny comedy with some good moments, but mostly made me wonder when it would be over. Did not leave in a good mood, and things only got worse from there.

Tim Meadows was the funniest part. Harold Ramis funny too. Dewey Cox’s love interest is in the American “Office”. Everyone’s favorite scene was Dewey’s meditation with The Beatles: Jason Schwartzmann, Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Justin Long (of “live free die hard”). John C. Reilly good, but not awards-good.

Katy liked the songs.