Some shots from the ending:

Hedwig-Hansel as Gnosis-Corgan. It’s complicated.
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That’s songwriter Stephen Trask on the left.
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Yitzhak unleashed! I will look out for her next time I watch Shortbus.
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An Emily Hubley moment:
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edit August 2011:
I finally got Katy to watch this, after five years of trying.
I don’t think she hated it, either.

edit March 2017:
Well, she didn’t like it enough to watch again with Maria.

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.

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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!).

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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.

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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.
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Hepburn & Tracy. IMDB calls this Hepburn’s last performance before she moved into “middle-aged spinster roles.”
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Tracy, 13 years after Fury and still a bad-ass.
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Tom Ewell (The Seven Year Itch, American Guerrilla in the Philippines) is Warren the wounded husband
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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.
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Jean Hagen as the other woman. She played the comically terrible silent film actress in Singin’ in the Rain.
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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:
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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”.

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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.
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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.
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Shun Oguri (Azumi, Miike’s Crows Episode 0) is Akira, the boy’s father, killed before the movie even starts but shown in flashback.
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Yoshino Kimura (Glory to the Filmmaker, Dream Cruise), mother of the young boy turned Red Clan prostitute and killed off at the end.
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Koichi Sato (Ring Spiral, Kinji Fukasaku’s Gate of Youth), cruel leader of the red clan, rips it up with a chain gun.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Quentin Tarantino (Destiny Turns On The Radio, Little Nicky) plays the funny-talking white guy in the framing scenes.
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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…
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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.
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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…
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…when I’m not watching it.
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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:
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L-R: Lorre, Wynn, Lewis, Carradine, Balin, Sloane, Harris
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this was his final film:
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the mushy flashback scene:
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funny ending, dismantling the set:
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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.