by ·Comments Off on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951, Albert Lewin)

Pandora (Ava Gardner) is immediately set up as destructive and impulsive, getting the man who loves her (Nigel Patrick of The League of Gentlemen) to wreck his prize racecar in exchange for engagement. Her other suitors don’t take this well – Marius Goring (young lovestruck composer of The Red Shoes) kills himself, and a vain, famous matador gets jealous. All this depresses poor Sheila Sim (star of A Canterbury Tale), who always thought she’d marry the racer.

But none of it matters, because Flying Dutchman James Mason (two years after The Reckless Moment) joins the party, doomed to sail the seas until he finds a faithful woman, and surprised to see that Pandora is the image of his own wife, murdered centuries ago. So they are obviously destined to be together (and soon die together, as the prologue already revealed). Before that, the matador is (justly) killed, Sheila’s uncle reads us the Dutchman’s diary to fill in backstory, and John Laurie (sideburned village elder in Edge of the World) is occasionally spotted in a supporting role.

Mostly the movie is known as a gorgeously-shot (by Jack Cardiff) technicolor spectacular, which looks just great on blu-ray. And there’s a remarkable chess set by Man Ray, who also did the paintings in the Dutchman’s cabin.

by ·Comments Off on Wartime Comedy Double-Feature

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, Leo McCarey)

Another nazi comedy, this one McCarey’s follow-up to Love Affair. Ginger Rogers has finally landed a rich baron (Walter Slezak, title star of Dreyer’s Michael, also in Lifeboat), follows him to various countries, each of which falls to Hitler soon after. This gets the attention of reporter Cary Grant, and French secret agent Albert Dekker (ultimate baddie of Kiss Me Deadly). Ginger proves her loyalty to the viewer by rescuing her Jewish maid (Natasha Lytess, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) before agreeing to spy for Dekker, while Cary takes a nazi radio propagandist job, like if Mother Night was a comedy. The spy game doesn’t work too well, so Ginger pushes the baron overboard on an ocean liner and sails away with Cary.

The More The Merrier (1943 George Stevens)

A different kind of wartime picture than Once Upon a Honeymoon. This one focuses on the high women-to-men ratio in the D.C. area, and a housing shortage that forced people to take roommates. The story is short on logic, but the cast is super cute – and I don’t mean Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, I’m talking about Charles “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” Coburn, great scammer of The Lady Eve. It’s the usual setup, where sweetie Jean is engages to a boring dude (Richard Gaines, Edward G. Robinson’s boss in Double Indemnity) but oughtta be with Joel instead, so Coburn invents complicated ways to make that happen, but all while the three are roommates.

Nominated for most major oscars, but up against Casablanca. Coburn still won an award. Remade as Walk, Don’t Run with Cary Grant. The last comedy Stevens would make before heading to war. IMDB: “Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit’s footage was used both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification program after the war.”

by ·Comments Off on Bestiaire (2012, Denis Côté)

Katy thought this was a boring movie where nothing happens until I told her to treat it not as a movie but as a series of motion photographs. Camera is mostly still, and half the frame is usually a wall – a favorite trick is to shoot only wall and let animals slowly wander into view. Shot at a Quebec zoo, with the occasional custodian and a parade of customers at the very end (plus a taxidermist, some sketch artists, but mostly animals and walls). Côté’s statement in the press notes declares that it can’t be a documentary since it has no subject, but he doesn’t offer what it might be instead. “Something indefinable.”

Côté:

But where is the salvation between the puppies on YouTube and a boa constrictor’s reproductive cycle narrated in eight chapters? How should one look at an animal (and find a cinematic language specific to this act)? Is it possible to shoot animals other than through the lens of entertainment or for a non-educational purpose? Neither actor nor story catalyzer, cannot an animal be contemplated and filmed simply for what it is? … The immense field of contemplative cinema offers elements of an answer.

by ·Comments Off on Hobson’s Choice (1954, David Lean)

Charles Laughton is Hobson, self-important shoe salesman, who talks of getting his youngest daughters married, but not the severe elder daughter since she’s far too old. So she elopes with the underpaid cobbler from dad’s basement and opens their own shop, while dad falls further into drunken ruin, until the final reconciliation.

It’s a fine story, but also an excuse for Laughton to pull out every doughy facial expression in the book and Lean to have a bit of fun. My favorite scene combines the two, as a near-fatally drunk Hobson stupidly chases the moon’s reflection across street puddles and window glass.

The DVD extras told me that the movie was named after an expression – a “Hobson’s choice” is when you’re superficially given a choice that has already been decided for you, like when Laughton is offered the chance to become partners with his wayward daughter and traitor ex-employee, but his business and personal affairs have fallen so far without them, he has to accept. One of Laughton’s last films, the year before directing Night of the Hunter. Especially good was John Mills (Pip in Lean’s Great Expectations) as the shoemaker/unwitting husband. His wife/business manager is Brenda de Banzie of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much remake, and not-Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps remake.

by ·Comments Off on Behind the Candelabra (2013, Steven Soderbergh)

Matt Damon is Scott, who gets introduced to Liberace (Lee to his friends) by laid-back mustache dude Scott Bakula in the late 1970’s, beginning an affair/family/employee situation that lasts until Lee (Michael Douglas) finally kicks out Scott in favor of a new, younger, less-drug-addicted, less-contentious boy. It comes full circle from when Scott replaced gloomy pretty-boy Cheyenne Jackson (Danny, the new cast member on 30 Rock) at Lee’s house. Liberace dies of AIDS, but Scott is cut out of the will, Lee’s verbal promises not carrying any legal weight, so Scott writes a tell-all memoir.

Performances are great, storytelling is effective, costumes and period details are spot-on, but it can’t break out of the “bio-pic based on tell-all memoir” genre. A squinty Rob Lowe is the highlight as a plastic surgeon who makes Douglas look younger and Damon look weirder with shiny cheeks. Dan Aykroyd plays Lee’s manager and Debbie Reynolds (Tammy and the Bachelor, Susan Slept Here) his mother. Adapted from Scott’s book by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King).

A. Cook: “I don’t know if any other American filmmaker is more inventive right now with choosing where to place the camera, how to frame the image, how to use focus, etc.” I get what he’s saying – in this and Haywire and Contagion I notice unusual editing and shot choices – but the movies’ standard Hollywood storytelling and starpower get in the way. If I was dedicated enough, I might rewatch Haywire paying attention only to its framing and technical qualities, but maybe instead Soderbergh needs more interesting scripts to go with his artistic filmmaking intentions – The Informant being a good example.

by ·Comments Off on The Great Gatsby (2013, Baz Lurhmann)

The only version of the Gatsby story I know, so I can only positively compare this to Moulin Rouge rather than bitch about how he ruined the novel. Got all my hatred at the editing out of the way early, spent the rest of the movie enjoying the script, the acting, the visual excess in a story that seems to demand excess.

Leo Gatsby struck it super-rich, wants to reconnect with old flame Carey Mulligan who’s now married to Brolin-looking Joel Edgerton (star of The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello), enlists the reliably young-and-foolish-looking Tobey Maguire to help. Along the way they piss off dirty Jason Clarke (Death Race) by running down his wife Isla Fisher in Gatsby’s car, so the gun-toting Clarke obligingly shoots Gatsby, providing the tragic ending that all great literature demands.

Gatsbies: There’s a 2000 version with Paul Rudd and Martin Donovan, a 1970’s with Bruce Dern and Karen Black, a 1958 with Robert Ryan, 1955 with Gena Rowlands, 1949 with Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters and 1926 with William Powell and Georgia Hale.

by ·Comments Off on Big Deal on Madonna St. (1958, Mario Monicelli)

Rewatched Rififi recently after reading that this is supposed to be a parody. Instead of a team of experts successfully pulling a heist then getting killed off by rivals in the aftermath, we’ve got a team of incompetents who botch the planning and the heist itself, escaping with their lives and nothing more.

Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto, a croaking Eugene Pallette type) is arrested ineptly breaking into cars, forms the heist master plan but gets edged out of the group. Peppe the boxer (ladies’ man Vittorio Gassman) takes over, teams with aged Cappanelle, tough-looking mama’s boy Mario, new dad Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni, a couple years before La Dolce Vita) and suave mustache man Michele who keeps his virginal sister Carmelina (Claudia Cardinale in her first year in the movies) locked in their apartment. The plan involves Peppe dating a girl who lives above the shop they plan to rob, gaining access to the building through her.

L-R: Mario, Michele, Cappanelle, Peppe and Tiberio:

By the time of the heist, Cosimo is dead (run down by a bus trying to purse-snatch), Tiberio’s arm is broken, Mario is fooling around with Carmelina, and Peppe’s girl has quit her job. They break in anyway, fail to get the safe, just steal some food from the kitchen, knock down a wall, then slink away. Reads like there’s a ton of comic business, but for an Italian comedy it’s actually pretty subdued.

Mario meets Claudia Cardinale:

Based partly on an Italo Calvino story – what?

by ·Comments Off on Neighbouring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonca Filho)

A Do The Right Thing setup, introducing the neighbors along a suburban Brazilian street, including young lovers, a stressed-out mom, a petty thief with rich parents. Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos of Elite Squad 2) appears, setting up a street security force with the backing of the neighors, including an elder Donald Sutherland type (Francisco) who used to run this town. It’s all infused with a sense of slow dread seemingly leading nowhere major but enjoyable on its own, until Clodualdo’s final revelation at Francisco’s house, confronting the colonial sugar-mill owner with his past crimes before the movie ends abruptly in fireworks.

The movie draws its menace from the fences and bars, the security force and barking dogs, tension between neighbors and classes, dreams of hordes of street kids hopping the fences and murdering us all. It also sets you up to identify with Clodoaldo and his group, giving as Cinema Scope points out “the simultaneous sense .. of being inside and outside the community.”

Cinefest played it in the wrong ratio so everyone looked thinner, with some digital glitches – all forgiveable, since they played it at all.

A. Cutler:

The street on which the main action unfolds is his actual street; the apartment of one of the protagonists, the stir-crazy housewife Bia (played by Maeve Jinkings), is his apartment; the dog whose persistent barking drives Bia bonkers is his neighbor’s dog. Many of the film’s incidents, often charged with implicit racial or class tensions, came directly from things he had lived, and its mixing of genres—drama, comedy, action, horror—came from the mind of someone who regards daily life as material for cinema.

Green Vinyl (2004)
Also watched an earlier short by this director, set in the same neighborhood. A montage of still photos, a la La Jetee or Dog’s Dialogue. Mom gives Daughter a box of 45’s, says she must promise to never play the green one. Daughter ONLY plays the green one, keeps doing so even though it kills her mother, one limb at a time, like Monty Python’s black knight (and similarly unconcerned, always with a loving smile). “Freely adapted from a Russian fairy tale” was the only explanation I could find.

by ·Comments Off on The Lords of Salem (2012, Rob Zombie)

“Bleed us a king”

Whoa. The witchiest, most satanic movie of our time. House of the Devil cries back home to its mother while Lords of Salem goes out and burns down the neighborhood. Zombie knows how to build atmosphere, but his movies have also had portions of gleeful camp and self-awareness until this one, risking playing it straight up to a final burst of 1970’s psychedelia.

Sheri Moon Zombie is a Salem radio DJ alongside her sometime-boyfriend, beardy Jeff Phillips, and Rob Zombie regular and Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree. But she starts to have headaches and experience weird visions and dreams after receiving a record by the titular Lords.

Meanwhile in way-back-story, Sheri’s ancestor Reverend Hawthorne (Andrew Prine, deputy of The Town That Dreaded Sundown) tortured and burned a bunch of suspected witches to death. In typical movie fashion, the modern witches (led by Sheri’s landlady and her “sisters”) now want revenge through the Reverend’s descendant, using her to summon some great evil. But atypically, they succeed. Local historian Bruce Davison (deadly dreamer of The Lathe of Heaven, mighty morphin’ senator in X-Men) learns more and more about the history and current events then is suddenly killed by Sheri’s landlady (Judy Geeson of To Sir With Love) and her two “sisters”, Dee Wallace (House of the Devil, The Frighteners) and palmreader Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror). The Lords “concert” begins, everyone in attendance ends up dead with Sheri missing, and the Devil only knows what happens next.

Funny that Bruce Davison’s role was suposed to be played by Bruce Dern since I thought Meg Foster rather looked like Dern – until she got naked, which she did often. Saw Sid Haig’s name in the credits and kicked myself for not having recognized him, but IMDB says he was cut. It also says there were no digital effects, but I guess that doesn’t account for the melting-Jesus animation in one of the freakout scenes. Good use of a couple VU & Nico songs, speaking of those.

–
Oct 2023: Yep, it’s a good one.