by ·Comments Off on What a Way to Go! (1964, J. Lee Thompson)

One of the greatest forgotten comedies with the best casts ever. Shirley Maclaine is super as a long-suffering woman who wanted a simple life with true love, but all the men she married came into money and became obsessed with success, driving them to their deaths and leaving her with increasingly massive inheritance. My favorite, self-referential part: in telling her story, Maclaine imagines each of her marriages as a different style of movie.

Undercranked silent with Van Dyke:

Maclaine (just after her oscar nomination for Irma la Douce) spurns self-important department store heir Dean Martin in her hometown, instead marrying Dick Van Dyke (of Bye Bye Birdie). After some idyllic months in their crumbling shack, he finds he has a knack for salesmanship and devotes the rest of his short life to business.

Arty Foreign Film with Newman:

Next comes bohemian painter Paul Newman (character name: Larry Flint) who makes a fortune selling artworks painted by machines (and by a monkey). Then to switch things up, Robert Mitchum, who’s fabulously wealthy when he meets her and dies as soon as he attempts to retire to a simpler existence. Finally Gene Kelly, a hack café comic who becomes a star the first time she convinces him to perform without his costume and makeup.

Spendy Hollywood production with Mitchum:

All this is being told to psychiatrist Robert Cummings (Jean Arthur’s love interest in The Devil and Miss Jones) in framing story after she’s caught trying to give away her fortune to the IRS. Maclaine then finds a financially ruined Dean Martin, working as a janitor in the building, who has come to appreciate the simple life after being driven out of business by Dick Van Dyke, and it’s true love.

Musical, of course, with Kelly:

Won a well-deserved oscar for costumes (although it kinda cheated with the parade of self-consciously glamorous dresses in the Hollywood meta-film), and another for art direction, presumably for the house that Gene “Pinky” Kelly has painted entirely pink. Writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green did The Band Wagon, Singin’ in the Rain and On The Town, and Thompson had just made The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear. Thanks to Joanna for the recommendation.

by ·Comments Off on Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)

I’ve always gotten this confused with Charade (starring Audrey Hepburn with Cary Grant) and Holiday (starring a different Hepburn with Cary Grant). This one has no Cary Grant at all, just boring ol’ Gregory Peck. But Audrey is charming, and Greg is better than I’ve ever seen him, and this movie lives up to its lovely reputation.

Audrey is a princess hating her European press tour, so she sneaks off after receiving a sedative and is found, presumed drunk, on the street by noble newspaperman Greg. He shows her around Rome the next day, pretending not to know her identity, while he and cameraman Irving (Eddie Albert, the husband in Green Acres) sneak photos and pre-sell their exclusive story. But after getting to know her better, Greg respects her privacy and withholds the story, giving her the photos as souvenirs.

I’ve seen few Gregory Peck movies (Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, Spellbound) and none in the last 15 years, so maybe he’s not so bad and I’ve had him confused with Gary Cooper or James Mason. Hepburn won best actress in this, her debut film, and it was nominated for damn near everything else but From Here to Eternity won the rest. We saw the 2002 restoration with then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo’s names in the opening titles. Coincidentally, a Trumbo bio starring Bryan Cranston as the Roman Holiday writer was playing next door.

by ·Comments Off on Tehran Taxi (2015, Jafar Panahi)

Simply called Taxi (or Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) in the USA since lately we are allergic to descriptive or interesting titles (now playing: Joy, Room, Spotlight, Brooklyn, Trumbo). Panahi plays himself, driving a cab and secretly making a film with hidden dash cameras. It’s a smiling, upbeat comedy for the most part, with a bit of surveillance-state darkness at the end. He’s fond of injecting reality into his fictions, but he doesn’t blend them as completely as his countryman Kiarostami. We never believe for a minute that the dash-cams are capturing reality – each ride and conversation is too funny, poignant or perfect to have been accidental.

Panahi picks up a bootleg DVD salesman, who says all cinephiles (including Pahani’s own family) go through him for uncensored foreign films which are officially forbidden, his niece whose school project is to film something which follows all official rules, which she’s finding difficult, a guy and his young wife who were just in a motorcycle accident and she’s freaking that he might die without writing a will, in which case she’ll inherit nothing under the law. I’m seeing a pattern of protest in all this. Also a crime-and-punishment conversation, a lawyer… and two women who want to ritually release their fish, not sure what that’s about besides it reminding me of fish and ritual in What Time Is It There, which I watched the same month.

A. Cook:

This is a great film, one that, with minimal means, creates a sophisticated formal system that Panahi flourishes in and in such a way that for me surpasses Closed Curtain (though doesn’t touch This is Not a Film). It gets bonus points for being such a lively and lovely picture — one that’s excited to pay attention to every character who enters its frame. The dashboard camera setup makes for a simple and exquisite approach, the swivelling device capturing most of the film’s images. Just as lovely, however, are the formal digressions brought on by Panahi’s niece, who pulls out a camera of her own that the film then intermittently cuts to, reiterating the artistic and technological democracy that This is Not a Film first articulated: anything is cinema and anyone can make it using whatever they wish.

Won the top prize in Berlin, where it played with 45 Years, The Pearl Button and Knight of Cups. Hey Kino, let me know if you need a subtitles proofreader. Happy to help. If you’re not embarrassed by the Taxi subs, you ought to be.

by ·Comments Off on Television watched late 2015

“TV is a nickname, nicknames are for friends, and television is no friend of mine.”

–
Toy Story of Terror (2013, Angus MacLane)

After watching horror movies in the car trunk, the gang stays at a sinister hotel where manager Stephen Tobolowsky’s pet lizard steals toys from children’s rooms so Stephen can sell them on eBay. Also, Jessie struggles with her fear of boxes (cuz she spent years boxed-up). As usual, all looks hopeless until a last-minute rescue is mounted. Carl Weathers continues his post-Arrested Development self-conscious-comedy phase as Combat Carl, also appearances by Legos, a Transformers-Voltron hybrid and Ken Marino. MacLane has been a Pixar animator since Geri’s Game and A Bug’s Life, is codirecting the Finding Nemo sequel. Katy wasn’t too sure about watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with me for SHOCKtober, but she eventually agreed to this one (it wasn’t scary).

–
Parks & Recreation season 7 (2015)

Victory lap for one of the greatest sitcoms. This season is set in the near-future, with cameos by everyone from previous seasons. Until Amy has another show, we’re watching Aziz’s new one. One of the Parks & Rec creators works on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which Trevor said is good.

–
Inside Amy Schumer season 2 (2014)

I watched season 1, Trainwreck, and season 2 in a sort of continuum and I can’t keep straight which is which anymore. But obviously I love this. Appearances by Michael Ian Black, Ali Reza (Delocated), Jim Norton (Lucky Louie), Zach Braff, Greta Lee (Soojin from Girls), Josh Charles (Sports Night), Patrick Warburton, Rachel Dratch (30 Rock), Parker Posey, Scott Adsit, Janeane Garofalo, Jon Glaser, Mike Birbiglia, Colin Quinn, Todd Barry, Reggie Watts, Adrock, and Paul Giamatti as God. Most episodes directed by Ryan McFaul (NTSF, Broad City… and The Electric Company?)

–
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015, David Wain)

Not the pure, unfiltered genius that people seemed to be expecting, since I heard from all sources that it was a letdown. I’m not a quick-draw TV viewer, took us a couple months to get through eight half-hour episodes, and in the end it was certainly better than I assumed it’d be, and one of the few comedy series (miniseries, really) I’d consider watching a few more times.

Unbelievable string of actors on this, including everyone from the original movie plus Jason Schwartzman as a scandal-discovering counselor, Mad Men lead Jon Hamm as a spy, Mad Men lead John Slattery as guest director of the theater program, Kristen Wiig and Sports Night star Josh Charles at the rival camp across the lake, Chris Pine as a reclusive rock star, Randall Park as Molly Shannon’s post-lunch love interest, Michael Cera as a lawyer, Lake Bell, Paul Scheer, Rob Huebel, Jordan Peele, Weird Al Yankovic, probably a bunch I’m missing.

–
Rick and Morty season 1 (2014)

I loved the hell out of this. Justin Roiland (Sarah Silverman Program) voices both Rick and Morty, Dr. Spaceman is Morty’s dad, Kelsey Grammer’s daughter is Morty’s sister and Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) his mom – appearances by Dan Harmon, David Cross, Tom Kenny, Futurama’s Maurice LaMarche, Dana Carvey, John Oliver, Rich Fulcher, and Alfred Molina as The Devil. Weirdly specific and extended references to movies both popular (Titanic, Jurassic Park, Inception-meets-Nightmare On Elm Street) and not-at-all-popular (Needful Things). Standard family-sitcom drama with lots of interdimensional travel thrown in, kind of the best of both worlds from Simpsons and Futurama. I was enjoying the random travel scenarios, then in the second half of the season it starts tying together previous episodes, exposing huge Rick-vs.-Morty tension, and becoming weirdly self-referential with Rick’s catchphrase and breaking the fourth wall. And I only started watching this because I heard season two is even better, if that’s possible.

Pete Michels (Family Guy) codirected all the episodes, writing by a couple Community writers (in addition to Harmon), plus web comedians Wade and Eric.

–
Superjail! season 1 (2008)

This Adult Swim show fills the Metalocalypse-shaped hole in my life with its ten-minute episodes of ultraviolence and nonsequiturs. Although I should really watch the next two seasons of Metalocalypse, too. Every episode is absolutely overstuffed with animated mayhem, looks expensive to make. David Wain plays the Willy Wonkaesque Warden with assistants Jared (Teddy Cohn) and Alice (Christy Karacas, director/creator of this show and of Robotomy, which sounds fun). Another creator did animation for Fox animated features, the third wrote for a Speed Racer reboot series.

by ·Comments Off on Mistress America (2015, Noah Baumbach)

Katy’s pick for post-Thanksgiving viewing was much more successful than my vote for Looney Tunes. In any year that I hadn’t watched Damsels In Distress, this would obviously be the funniest and most charming Greta Gerwig movie. It’s still funnier and more charming than Frances Ha (which was pretty damned charming).

Lola “sister of Jemima” Kirke (the trailer-park neighbor who robs Rosamund in Gone Girl) is an aspiring writer who can’t get into her campus literary society and can’t get a boy in her class (Matthew Shear of Baumbach’s While We’re Young) to go out with her. Lola meets vibrant Gerwig (their parents were gonna get married, then they don’t) and starts mining Gerwig’s life for story ideas on the sly. Great second half as the three of them and the boy’s jealous girlfriend (Jasmine Jones) crash the Connecticut* house of Gerwig’s rich ex (Michael Chernus, of this year’s People Places Things) and his wife (Heather Lind of Demolition and Boardwalk Empire) to beg funding for the restaurant Gerwig wants to open.

Great dialogue in the movie overall, and Baumbach is good at coordinating all these characters into a sustained screwball sequence. He loves Gerwig’s energy and idealism, but he can’t keep from knocking her characters down a few pegs at the end of his movies, so she is punished for having no business sense and letting other people steal her ideas, but at least she seems to stay friends with Lola.

* wikipedia: “The philosopher Stanley Cavell has noted that many classic screwball comedies turn on an interlude in the state of Connecticut (Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth).”

V. Rizov:

Driver’s amateur documentarian in While We’re Young may be a jerk, but pretty much everyone around him (save poor Ben Stiller) concedes the end results are worth it. Inversely, in Mistress America, Tracy is climactically shamed for the diagnostic cruelty of her fictionalized portrait of Brooke, but she remains secure in the value of the work. Both films articulate multiple tangled perspectives on the rightness or wrongness of unkind fictionalization, and both effectively end by throwing their hands up and walking away from the question without resolution. This is self-critique, but it shies away from concluding that the ends don’t justify the means: the films themselves negate that conclusion.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Performance (1929, Pal Fejos)

Conrad Veidt, Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist, again plays an intense guy with too much eye makeup, this time as stage magician Erik The Great. He can hardly wait until the young girl he stuffs into boxes and pretends to saw in half turns 18 so he can marry her, but the girl Julie (Mary Philbin, star of Phantom of the Opera, Merry-Go-Round, The Man Who Laughs) doesn’t seem anxious to marry the elder magician.

Dangerous Conrad:

Julie:

Assistant Buffo:

Film Quarterly: “In the course of his act, Eric demonstrates his hypnotic control of his assistant, Julie, and also his power over the audience, in a series of short cuts on his eyes and the faces of the audience, and then swirling images of the city, with Eric’s face looming in superimposition over it all.”

Erik hires a dude named Mark after catching him break into his apartment, as his assistant Buffo’s assistant – so now Erik, Buffo and Mark are all in love with Julie. Buffo (Leslie Fenton of The Public Enemy, later a director) gets caught mouthing off that Julie doesn’t love Erik, and Mark gets caught sitting on a bench with her (bench-sitting was 1927’s version of sex), and Erik dramatically overacts overreacts, announcing at a fancy dinner that Mark and Julie will marry, as the camera glides over a crowded dinner table in a way I didn’t know could be done back then. Then Erik frames Mark by having him murder Buffo on stage in a box full of swords.

Mark and Julie on the whoring bench, Conrad’s massive shadow over them:

Mark and Julie at trial:

Nothing’s as thrilling as a big courtroom ending, and so Erik and Julie demonstrate how the murder-box was supposed to work in front of a judge. It’s highly unusual, but I’ll allow it. But out of nowhere, Erik confesses and kills himself with a knife, leaving Mark and Julie – a thief and an unemployed magician’s assistant – in each other’s arms. I’m being flippant, but it was a good movie, if not Lonesome-caliber. Also released as a part-talkie, but Criterion’s got the silent version. Cinematographer Hal Mohr shot The Jazz Singer the same year, later A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

by ·Comments Off on A Looney Tunes Thanksgiving

After a Thanksgiving feast I brought out a bunch of Looney Tunes in shiny HD. “Who doesn’t love Looney Tunes,” I thought. Turns out it’s everyone but me. That’s who doesn’t love Looney Tunes.

Book Revue (1964, Robert Clampett)

Bunch of book puns, most of which flew over our heads, then Daffy Duck shows up as “Danny Boy”. He saves Red Riding Hood from the wolf. Everyone is impressed with Frank Sinatra. It’s quite confusing. Love the use of random newspaper articles as backgrounds.

Devil May Hare (1954, Robert McKimson)

Introduction of the Tazmanian Devil character, whom Bugs torments then finally defeats by hooking him up with a lady devil.

Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (1953, Chuck Jones)

Great one, full of disintegration-ray jokes. Daffy is Duck Dodgers, Porky his trusty assistant, and they fight Marvin for control over Planet X.

Feed the Kitty (1952, Chuck Jones)

One of my faves. Wasn’t appreciated by my menagerie.
Dog enamored with cute kitten, takes him home, thinks his owner has baked the kitten into a batch of cookies, cries, is reunited with kitten.

Rabbit Hood (1949, Chuck Jones)

Bugs is caught stealing the king’s carrots by the sheriff of Nottingham, messes with him relentlessly, occasionally interrupted by a dim-witted Little John. There’s no actual Robin Hood until the very end when Errol Flynn appears via a clip from The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Rabbit of Seville (1950, Chuck Jones)

On a theater stage by accident, Bugs torments Elmer while pretending to enact the Barber of Seville. Quite excellent, but only a prelude to the even greater What’s Opera, Doc.

And a couple I’ve written up before:

One Froggy Evening (1955, Chuck Jones)

Influenced by a Cary Grant movie called Once Upon a Time, according to wikipedia.

What’s Opera, Doc (1956, Chuck Jones)

Voted the greatest cartoon of all time, a more stylized opera rendition than Seville, Elmer with his spear and magic hellllmet.

by ·Comments Off on A Bug’s Life (1998, John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton)

Haven’t watched this since theaters. Blu-ray version 17 years later reinforces first impression that it’s pretty good. Man, Pixar has come a long way with 3D textures. Misfit inventor ant is exiled for causing havoc and getting the ants in trouble with the bully grasshoppers, finds help in the form of failed circus act, returns and fails to save the day but succeeds in convincing his fellow ants to stand up to oppression.

by ·Comments Off on Avengers 2: Age of Ultron (2015, Joss Whedon)

Nick Pinkerton, quoted by Nathan Silver last week:

Re-watching [A Nos Amours] gives the frustrating awareness of how comparatively petty many of the experiences I have — and have had — with movies are, how a diet of mediocrity accustoms me to betraying a natural expectation that art can expand its frame into the world I’m living in; the sad truth is that most films evaporate the moment we emerge from the theater, vanquished by the more engaging muddle of life.

Movies vanquished by the muddle of life this month include Love, The Wolfpack, Actress, and Avengers 2: Age of Ultron.