by ·Comments Off on The Ten (2007, David Wain)

Not in order: 1. Guy (Adam Brody) gets stuck in ground after bad parachute dive, achieves short-lived fame / 2. Woman on Mexican vacation (Gretchen Mol) has passionate affair with Jesus Christ (Justin Theroux) / 3. Guy (assistant chef in wet hot) skips church to stay home naked, invites over lots of other guys / 4. White mom confesses to black kids that their real dad wasn’t white, hires impersonator (Oliver Platt) / 5. Doctor (Ken Marino) leaves scissors inside patient “as a goof” / 6. Woman (Winona Ryder) leaves new husband for ventriloquist dummy / 7. Animated rhino (Jon Benjamin) lies until no one trusts him, then town is wiped out after not believing his warnings / 8. Prisoner (Marino again) being raped by cellmate wishes to be raped by a new cellmate (Rob Corddry) / 9. Neighbors (Liev Schreiber & Joe Lo Truglio) have rivalry over who owns more cat-scan machines / 10. Couple from framing device (Paul Rudd & Famke Janssen) meet years later and get back together

What humor there is gets stifled by the endless unfunny parts, a pained grin on my face, wanting to enjoy the movie but being horrified instead by its lameness. Parts 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 and the entire overlong Paul Rudd framing device pretty much suck, and that’s most of the movie. The others would be funny web sketches that I’d watch on YouTube (but probably turn ’em off before they were over) but they’re not movie-worthy… the thing doesn’t feel like a movie, like W.H.A.S. did, just a rough draft of a failed sketch show.

Jessica Alba and Janeane Garofalo and Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black knew better than to get deeply involved – they all have bit roles. Either replacing Showalter with Marino as co-writer was a bad idea, or the whole thing was doomed from the start. The trailer was funnier. Just glad I saw it for free.

by ·Comments Off on Goya’s Ghosts (2007, Milos Forman)

A pretty well-composed movie, not bad overall. The artistic look, good framing, lavish sets & costumes all put indie-hack fare like “last king of scotland” to shame, so it’s a fine movie to watch, if nothing great is playing. No doubt that this one isn’t “great”… it’s too even, regular, plain… nothing daring, original or transcendent, just a big pretty movie. Director Forman only pops up every 4-7 years to make another biopic (amadeus, larry flynt, andy kaufman). IMDB says he’s working on another one already.

First, to get it out of the way, the bad. It’s one of those movies where you can play “spot the reshoots”, as newly-dubbed lines show up when characters’ backs are turned and they weren’t supposed to be speaking, or during another actor’s reaction shot, then they’ll cut back to the speaker (in long shot, preferably) and his lips don’t match up. It’s not like I’ve read that this was a troubled production that required reshoots… they’re right up there on the screen. That, and our theater smelled like Windex.

Then the good. I told Katy I hadn’t seen Javier Bardem since Before Night Falls (2000) but I forgot his small part in Collateral (and I missed Live Flesh at the Almodovar retrospective). Fun to watch him croak out his lines with that serious look on his face, but even more exciting is Michael Lonsdale (THOMAS from Out 1) as Bardem’s superior. That shouldn’t be so thrilling, since he’s in Munich and Ronin and other stuff, but maybe that should tell me something about “goya’s ghosts”, that the most engrossing moments were when I was imagining scenes from “out 1” instead.

Funny thing about Randy Quaid (played the king). He’s in nothing but the dumbest movies for twenty-five years, then he gets cast in Brokeback and now suddenly he’s “and featuring academy-award nominee randy quaid” in studio prestige pictures. the Oscar nom was from 1974, not from Brokeback. Heh, from Pioneer Press: “Swedish Stellan Skarsgard plays Spanish painter Goya and where a key theme is that the Spanish people hate their new king because he’s from France. Which is weird, because he’s played by Randy Quaid, whose accent evokes not Baroque Spain or France, but Houston, circa today.”

Yeah, uneven accents and just a not very great movie full of tragedy with sad ending, but there’s even more Natalie Portman torture/imprisonment than in “V For Vendetta”, so if that’s your thing, here’s your movie.

by ·Comments Off on My Best Friend (2006, Patrice Leconte)

One of those breezy, happy, lightweight French movies that attracts elderly people to the Tara. I didn’t think I’d be watching stuff like this, but “The Valet” was good and I needed a comedy, so…

Probably liked it better than The Valet, too. Movie about friendship, or more accurately about people who have no friends and why that is. Climax is a maybe-overlong segment of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with the French Regis.

Rich guy from Valet plays antiques dealer, and lead Valet’s valet friend plays a talkative trivia-obsessed taxi driver who is friendly with everyone and friends with no one. There’s a significant, expensive vase, a daughter who doesn’t love her dad (awww), some jaded girlfriends and coworkers, a cruel bet, and two concerned parents. PG-13, 90 minutes long, better than it sounds, and already due for an American remake.

Okay, just read a Reverse Shot article calling this movie out for being completely uninventive, almost entirely unfunny, and having not a single realistic character or situation, catering to oldies who can’t handle today’s profane American comedies, giving them this “Gallic piffle” that seems highbrow because of the subtitles. Probably true, but I was in the mood for it at the time.

by ·Comments Off on The Gay Divorcee (1934, Mark Sandrich)

A light and funny musical about trying to ruin a woman’s reputation, sort of the opposite of the end scene of Buster Keaton’s College.

Supposed to be “the first film that featured Astaire and Rogers in equal billing”. I kinda recognized Rogers from Monkey Business, and Astaire from those cartoon caricatures where he has a giant head and big hands. Hmm, now I’ve seen his first (Flying Down to Rio) and second movies, and none of the other 40+ he made through the years. Who else?

Alice Bracy as the almost-annoying Aunt Hortense was also in My Man Godfrey and Young Mr. Lincoln before dying of cancer in ’39.
Edward Evertt Horton, Fred’s posh-looking straight-man sidekick (the lawyer who arranges the divorce at a resort), appeared in other Astaire movies incl. Top Hat and Holiday
Erik Rhodes is Mr. Tonetti, the amorous fake-beau who pretends to cheat while his wife cheats on him for real, was in the Broadway version of this, and later appeared in Top Hat.
Eric Blore, the waiter, was also in Top Hat, jeez.
Betty Grable, the most famous pin-up girl of WWII and star of The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, had a featured dance, but I didn’t recognize her.

Won best song at the Oscars for “The Continental” but lost out best picture to It Happened One Night and best art direction to The Merry Widow (also with edward e. horton). I’m not sure it should have been in strong contention for best art direction in the first place… not exactly a huge production with lights and mirrors, sort of small-scale simple dancing and singing. We liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Big Night (1996, Stanley Tucci & Campbell Scott)

The producers (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott) chose an interesting script (written by Stanley Tucci and his cousin) then hand-picked directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, who cast Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, Minnie Driver and Campbell Scott.

So a vanity project, and an obvious one (for everyone other than Ian Holm, who is too shouty and shifty and will hopefully not use this on his actor’s reel).

Italian brothers Tucci and Shalhoub (who is actually Lebanese via Wisconsin) have a restaurant that is failing because the food is too authentic for the locals and the atmosphere is dead. They have time for one final feast, their “big night” if you will, with special guest of honor Louis Prima (so movie is maybe set in the late 40’s), invited by their across-the-street rival Ian Holm who is suddenly all buddy-buddy with them. But Holm lied (to get the restaurant to fold, so the brothers will come work for him) and the bank will be foreclosing soon. Before that though, we must have a raging party with the best food anyone has ever tasted, and the brothers must fight then make up in the end, their futures still unwritten.

Such a typical 90’s indie movie. Really nothing to complain about, we enjoyed it pretty well, but it’s also no more groundbreaking or artistically exciting than Shalhoub’s directorial debut (written/starring his sister-in-law) eight years later Made-Up.

Isabella is here, but with too small a part to liven up the movie… it’s really all about the men.
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Cinematographer Ken Kelsch (an Abel Ferrara regular) here tries to emphasize the fact that Ian Holm has a mustache, without actually showing the mustache. A risky artistic move that pays off. Holm does, it is later revealed, have a mustache.
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The anticlimactic ending (all serious indie movies have anticlimactic endings):
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by ·Comments Off on Alternative 3 (1977, Christopher Miles)

Hosted by an actual BBC personality, this was a special episode of a (made-up?) show called Science Report that aired on April Fool’s Day. Plays it very straight, a well-made fake documentary. Can’t scare people with it anymore because of the dated 70’s look, but it would be fun to re-stage today, especially with global warming so big in the news.

The premise is that scientists discover global warming has passed the tipping point and the planet is doomed. The space race is a ploy, and subsequent moon landings after the first few were faked on a studio lot. Really the shuttles are delivering parts for a new ship that will be launched from orbit to send some hot scientists and a representative group of people from different specialties to live on Mars, where they have recently discovered life, to begin a new society. All of this has been hidden from the Earth public to avoid panic. The BBC has carefully uncovered hints of the truth over the last six months but hasn’t learned everything. The movie ends with questions, and a challenge to the people involved in this secret project to explain themselves on-air.

This movie is as old as I am. Cool spacey music by Brian Eno. Some of the same crew later worked on Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, including producer John Rosenberg, who died of cancer in ’91.

by ·Comments Off on Guys and Dolls (1955, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Worst part: at no point did the whole cast sing “guys and dolls… we’re just a bunch of crazy guys and dolls!” The Simpsons has misled me again. It had better not happen again… I wanna hear Lee Marvin sing “gonna paint that wagon / gonna paint it fine / gonna use oil-based paint / ’cause the wood is pine”.

Movie was really good… colorful and fun, full of cops and robbers and action without getting too serious, and swapping off the super-corny dancing segments with some slightly (slightly!) more dignified ones.

Frank Sinatra is a sorta wussy and slimy guy who sets up craps games, Marlon Brando (whyyy cast him in a musical, exactly?) is the tough super-gambler, Jean Simmons (Spartacus, Black Narcissus) is the cute missionary Brando falls for while taking her to Cuba to win a bet, Vivain Blaine (of nothing special) is Sinatra’s off-again actress girlfriend who can’t stand him but wants him to marry her, and Robert Keith (sheriff in The Wild One) is the cop trying to catch everyone involved.

After a buncha fun musical numbers, movie ends with a double wedding, so what else matters, really? Katy liked it too. Good night, everyone.

by ·Comments Off on Le Plaisir (1951, Max Ophuls)

“Still, it’s very sad.”
“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.”

Three filmed short stories by Guy de Maupassant, reminding me of Quartet. It wasn’t great and made me not want to seek out any of the author’s books… there it also reminds me of Quartet. Not narrated by the author like Quartet was, since the author is dead, but rather by a sort of author character who shows up as an active participant (the artist’s friend) in part 3.

So, Lola Montes and La Ronde, and even Letter From An Unknown Woman would have been wonderful, but I chose to show Katy Le Plaisir instead and now she thinks I enjoy stodgy period pieces. Sure it had some sparks of life in it, but even the documentary extras on the DVD wanted to talk up the difficulty in finding locations and in making the film rather than giving a reason why people seem to like it. Stanley Kubrick once called it his favorite film, so surely there’s something there.

Movie starts out weird, kicking it into high gear with a creepy-looking masked man dancing gaily at a fancy ball, then quickly passing out. It is discovered that he’s an old man trying badly to recapture his youth and hit on young girls, to his wife’s patient dismay.

Centerpiece segment seems like it wanted to be the entire movie, but wasn’t quite long enough so they tacked on the other two bits… it must be over an hour long, about a whorehouse that the camera can never bring itself to go inside. Fortunately, the whores all come outside, closing up shop to take a trip to the country for an unexpectedly moving wedding, before returning home to the glee of the townsfolk.

Last bit, a model and artist fall for each other, but when things get rough and he might leave her, she tries to kill herself… they end up together forever, she in a wheelchair.

Haven’t seen a Max Ophuls movie yet that takes place in modern day… guy liked to create ornate depictions of times past. Some fantastic shots made the whole thing worth watching, incl. the artist meeting the model in the start of segment 3, and her suicide later, which switches fluidly from an objective to a subjective camera, climbs the stairs with her shadow cast before us then crashes through the window and down.

I am so bad at recognizing people, because Simone Simon played the model and I didn’t know it. Jean Gabin was unmissable as the friend/host in the country in the middle segment at least. Claude Dauphin (President of Earth in Barbarella) was the doctor in the first segment.

by ·Comments Off on Shockproof (1949, Douglas Sirk)

“Stop being melodramatic” – Harry Wesson to Jenny Marsh… in a Douglas Sirk movie!

Did I even have to be told that Samuel Fuller wrote this, when the lead character is named Griff?

Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight, Cornell Wilde’s wife of 14 years, career fell apart after their divorce soon after this movie came out) is a bad girl just out of jail. She went there covering for her boyfriend Harry Wesson (John Baragrey, appealingly slimy, pretty much a TV actor except for this movie). Gets out and meets parole officer Griff Marat (Cornell Wilde, kinda big star in the 40’s). Trouble ensues.

To keep an eye on the girl, Griff naively hires her to live/work at his house and care for his blind mother. She still visits Wesson on the side and schemes to fake falling in love with Griff to corrupt him and ease her situation. But of course they really fall in love, and she shoots Wesson in a struggle. She’s back in trouble, and Griff will be in trouble if he’s found out for marrying a parolee, so they escape to an oil town to start a new life (leaving behind blind mom and super-irritating younger brother). “But the strain of poverty and fear of apprehension begin to corrode” and they turn themselves in. In a suspiciously happy twist ending, a recovering Harry Wesson lets them both off the hook and they live happily etc.

Tight little 80-minute noir drama. I don’t know much about Sirk, but the Fuller element is there in traces. Fuller’s own debut, I Shot Jesse James, came out the same year.

IMDB reviewer points out: “The title, by the way, seems basically meaningless but to have been chosen for its purely abstract, noirish resonance.”