by ·Comments Off on The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan)

Great opening titles, introducing all the characters as a music montage cut with the body of their dead friend being dressed, closing on shot of his stitched-up wrists. It’s a hangout film after that, former classmate/friends who now all have good jobs and drug habits. Some light resentments and conflicts, some secrets and such, one delightful ending.

JoBeth Williams had just starred in Poltergeist, her outsider husband is an object of fun. Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly (Body Snatchers), also an outsider, had been Dead Alex’s girlfriend so they all feel responsible towards her. Mary Kay Place (between New York, New York and Pecker) is a lawyer with bad hair who wants to get pregnant but has no man, so is sizing up her friends (and gets the movie’s best insult-comic line). Kevin Kline is the nice-guy husband of Glenn Close (between Garp and The Natural) who’d had an affair with Dead Alex. William Hurt, messed up on pills, had already starred in Altered States and Body Heat. Mustachioed Tom Berenger is a TV celebrity (actually on his way to Major League immortality after an oscar-nominated stop in Platoon). And reporter Jeff Goldblum would reunite with Kline and their dead friend Kevin Costner in Silverado. Lost the same writing oscar as Fanny & Alexander, Kasdan went on to make the terrifically bad Dreamcatcher. Wiki says the last ten minutes were meant to be a 1960s flashback with Costner-as-Alex, and it was cut… and I see the blu-ray has ten minutes of deleted scenes… but they’re completely different scenes, no fair. At least Criterion had the good sense to commission an essay by Lena Dunham.

by ·Comments Off on Five Came Back (2017, Laurent Bouzereau)

Feature film directors (and Meryl Streep) tell the tales of American feature film directors in the 1930’s and 40’s who were sent to war to make documentaries for the homefront… with one of the best motion-graphics-meets-stock-footage opening title sequences. If you’re interested in filmmakers and/or war, the whole thing’s just fascinating.

William Wyler, fresh off the inspirational Mrs. Miniver, rages against racism while Frank Capra is producing Private Snafu cartoons. Working (mostly) under Capra, John Ford and George Stevens are sent to film D-Day. John Huston makes the gritty San Pietro, using mostly reenacted fight footage but real dead bodies. And Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland proves himself a poor director. Stevens went on to film the liberation of concentration camps, while Wyler snuck a trip home and found the holocaust had killed his family and all their neighbors. In the end, Huston’s final work about emotionally wounded soldiers was censored for decades, Ford returned to make They Were Expendable, and Capra/Wyler/Stevens founded their own Liberty Studio, which immediately went broke on the flop It’s a Wonderful Life.

I’d love to watch a bunch of the original documentaries themselves, all available on netflix: Battle of Midway, Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro, Let There Be Light, The Negro Soldier, The Battle of Russia, Nazi Concentration Camps and Memphis Belle. But that’s six hours of WWII docs, and it’s Cannes Month now, and six movies I want to see opened in theaters this week, and a new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 just came out, and it’s baseball season…