My January movie-watching
Feb 01 '05 (Updated May 24 '08)
The Bottom Line Get out and see "House of Flying Daggers" and "Bad Education" in theaters!
A combination of inspiration from thevoid99's monthly lists and discomfiture at the difficulty of remembering the movies I saw in 2004 and did not write about produced a New Year's resolution to start a list. Writing down the titles led to ratings, and ratings led to jotting a few things down (which led to writing epinion reviews and express reviews of some movies I had not planned to review). It is rare for one of my New Year's resolutions to last this long, but here is the list of movies I saw in January in chronological order of the movies' release years:
I watched Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927, 3.5 stars) out of ongoing curiosity about what "the Lubitsch touch" is, plus curiosity to see Norma Shearer in a silent movie (I later realized I'd seen her as the ingenue by whom Lon Chaney is hopelessly smitten in "He Who Gets Slaped"), Ramon Novarro in anything (never having seen the silent "Ben-Hur," and only having seen him in "Dishonored" with Dietrich), and Jean Hersholt before he became a humanitarian award. Hersholt played a humanist tutor to the sadly isolated prince (Novarro). Eager to be a regular guy in college, the prince has a romance with a barmaid (Shearer). The beginning and end of the movie have impressive, ironic montages, and there is an eye-popping scene of a hillside covered with artificial flowers blowing in the wind during one lovers' tryst (also, the unmarried and unmarriageable pair share a roof and are together unchaperoned in ways that would be forbidden in Hollywood movies after 1934.)
You'll Never Get Rich (1941, 4 stars), like most musicals, centers on putting on musical shows (or numbers). This one shows that Rita Hayworth had legs. Along with You Were Never Lovelier, it shows the Hayworth could keep up with Fred Astaire on the dance floor and that he could be silly enough to win the aloof beauty she played. Although the plot involving a choreographer (Astaire) drafted and getting into trouble as a private in the camp under the command of the fiancé of a dancer (Hayworth) who was being romanced by the theater owner (Robert Benchley) is not remotely realistic, there is some witty dialogue along with some sappy characters and situations.
Producer Val Lewton's Cat People (1942, directed by Jacques Tourneur, 3.8 stars) only runs 73 minutes, but is surprisingly slow at getting going. I find it harder to believe that someone would give a kitten as a present on a first date than that Simone Simon could turn into a panther. As the sensible, red-blooded all-American male (the one who gives the kitten), Kent Smith had no presence and certainly no chemistry with Simon. Still, the concept and execution on a shoestring budget are impressive. Sound is used very effectively to set audience nerves on edge. Nicholas Musuraca skillfully shot shadows. The panther in the cage in the park turns in a far better performance than Smith. So does Tom Conway as a housecall-making psychiatrist.
Passage to Marseille(1944, 3 stars) shows what a miracle "Casablanca" was. Although it reunited director Michael Curtiz with a cast including Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, it has none of the magic of "Casablanca." Michèle Morgan, while lovely and brave, was not in the same league of emoting as Ingrid Bergman. The propaganda was less heavy-handed in "Casablanca." Although there is more action in "Passage" than in "Casablanca" and "Passage" profited from the resourceful cinematography of James Wong Howe, the most significant difference between what clicked and what clunked "Passage"'s awkward screenplay (credited to Casey Robinson (Now, Voyager) and Jack Moffitt) from a novel (Men without Country by Nordhoff and Hall), and the pounding musical score of Max Steiner (in contrast to the witty screenplay by Howard Koch, Julius and Philip Epstein and the less obtrusive musical score by Max Steiner for "Casablanca," augmented by that song ("As Time Goes By" by Herman Hupfield, played by Doolie Wilson). "Passage" includes Free French bombing runs, a prison escape, a sea rescue, a shoot-out with a Nazi plane, and a lot of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks), and many hokey touches, especially a recurrent letter drop that would certainly have been noticed by the Nazis and turned into a deathtrap.
The Archers' (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger) I Know Where I'm Going (1945) was a vehicle for the great Wendy Hiller, whose previous two movies had been adaptations of Shaw plays (Major Barbara and Pygmalion). I find it hard to believe that she would marry for money, and her dream on the train (of wedding a corporation) makes it clear she will not. Love is certain to win out. The black and white photography of the Hebrides were skillfully blended with studio shooting, and there is a whirlpool that is still an impressive special effect 60 years on. I'd rate the movie 4-star, and the DVD 5-star (and urge fresh viewers not to watch the documentary about the movie before watching the movie).
The Dark Corner (1946 directed by Henry Hathaway, 4 stars) is an enjoyable noir with Lucille Ball as a wry secretary saving her boss (a not-very-good private investigator played by Mark Stevens) from being framed. Clifton Webb plays a variant on his jealous psychopath role from "Laura." William Bendix chews even more scenery than Webb.
Too much of Born To Kill (1947, directed by Robert Wise, 3.2 stars) takes place by day for it to be a noir. It is, instead, a very strange murder-drenched soap opera most notable for a very unusual protective role played by Elisha Cook, a seedy but savvy detective played by Walter Slezak, a lush trying to do the right thing played by Katherine Howard, and a three-way nocturnal confrontation in foggy dunes (implausible as it is for Howard to go there). There's some klunky dialogue and Claire Trevor was not Bette Davis (though I'm not sure even la Davis could have sold some of what Trevor was given to try to sell). The main problem, however, is Lawrence Tierney as a supposed homme fatal. Tierney is convincing enough as a pyschopathic killer, but his erotic irresistability is quite unconvincing. (Soon after this, Wise would make the masterful noir/boxing movie "The Set Up.")
Berlin Express (1948, 3.8 stars), directed by Jacques Tourneur just after his noir masterpiece "Out of the Past," is a propaganda film for maintaining the wartime alliance that had already broken apart with a noble unifier played by Paul Lukas and an ordinary American quick to undertake heroism played by Robert Ryan.
Magnificent Obsession (1954, 3.3 stars) has the signature Douglas Sirk saturated colors that was the signature of his soap operas for Universal, along with a preposterous plot. Rock Hudson looks good in the suits in which he is clad (even on the beach!) and Jane Wyman suffers with dignity. Agnes Moorhead keeps her bright red hair up and has not a single sarcastic or otherwise cutting line to speak. Any social criticism is more muted than in the other Sirk movies I've seen.
The Violent Men (directed by Rudolph Maté, 1955, 3 stars) is one of many westerns with a ruthless tyrant (here Edward G. Robinson) losing his grip. In this version, his wife (Barbara Stanwyck) and his brother (Brian Keith) are cuckolding him and planning to own the whole valley. Then there is the Civil War (Confederate cavalry) veteran who doesn't want trouble, but handles it when it is forced upon him (Glenn Ford, who was in better 1950s westerns, including "3:10 to Yuma", "Jubal", and "The Cowboys"). The man who stands up to monopoly capitalist ranching is a smaller rancher rather than a farmer (as in "Shane" or "Once Upon a Time in the West," etc.) The characters and plots are noirish. There are interesting tactics from Ford (but hoary ones from Stanwyck); the movie is relatively scenic, and, for the 1950, rather violent.
Robert Wise's homefront melodrama Until They Sail (1957, 3.3 stars) with Joan Fontaine, Jean Simmons, Piper Laurie, and Sandra Dee as sisters (!) in Christchurch, New Zealand (!!).
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The Greek travelogue footage shot by Milton Krasner for Boy on a Dolphin (directed by Jean Negulesco, 1957, 3.1 stars) is very scenic, though much of it is only vaguely related to the story, which is set on and off the island of Hydra, where Greek sponge diver Sophia Loren finds a boat sunken in ancient times with the title statue on board. Clifton Webb plays a rich collector who wants it for himself and Alan Ladd as a Yale archaeologist who wants it displayed as a part of Greece's cultural patrimony. Ladd is supposed to be he-man, but is considerably more pompous and stilted than the amoral Webb.
The young (wet) Loren rising from the sea popped many eyes and launched her as a star while she was learning English (Negulesco was impressed at her progress and had her redub her lines at the end of the shooting.) She sings and dances, flares up and romances, and can pass as Greek more easily than Robert Wagner's Greek-American sponge diver. in "Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef"
The lack of tourists in the Parthenon is especially noticeable to me (like the ease of James Stewart finding parking so easily on Nob Hill in "Vertigo"). The music by Hugo Friedhofer is often overwrought, but not nearly as effective as Bernard Hermann's for "Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef" (or for "Vertigo"), but was Oscar-nominated. The underwater scenes also cannot compare with those in "Beneath the Twelve-Mile Reef."
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Akira Kurosawa's variation on Hamlet updated to toying with revenge against a Halliburton- or Bechtel- like corrupt Japanese building corporation The Bad Sleep Well (1960, 3.5 stars) is too long and too talky, but has some brilliant scenes.
Heavy-duty grity action director Don Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes (1962, 3.8 stars) is too much a standard rebellious Steve McQueen movie, though it has interesting performances by James Coburn, Fess Parker, Bobby Darin, Bob Newhart (in his film debut), and Nick Adams. Sounds like a lot of comic relief? Well, there's lots of action as half a dozen men are left to defend a sector and busted former sergeant McQueen convinces others that the only defense is an all-out offensive. Like Aldrich's "Attack!" (another gritty movie about an unsupported detachment), "Hell Is for Heroes" does a lot with little — that is little except in cast intensity.
Captain Newman, M.D. (1963, 4 stars) juxtaposes a mildly amusing Tony Curtis as an operator service comedy with the dramas of three WWII cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a happy ending, but not for all the characters (two of the main ones being dead by then). And I do see a resemblance between Bobby Darin and Kevin Spacey. Oustanding performances by Darin, Gregory Peck, Eddie Albert, and then-newcomer Robert Duvall. Angie Dickinson and Tony Curtis also do all that could be expected of the parts in which they were cast. And then there are the sheep!
Stanley Donen's Arabesque (1965, 1.51 stars) has some striking visuals but a plot that is not only opaque but devoid of interest (not to mention plausibility). (See Sloucho's evisceration.)
John Huston's simultaneously rushed and boring adaptation of the first 22 books of Genesis, The Bible (1966, 2.5 stars) also has striking cinematography, plus a remarkably listless performance from George C. Scott as the character with the most time on screen, Abraham. The book's definitely better, at least the part adapted is.
The fairly well opened-up movie version of Robert Anderson's I Never Sang for My Father was excruciating in 1970. Superlatively acted by Melvyn Douglas and Dorothy Stickney as the parents, Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons as the children, I'm fairly certain that there is something on display in the movie to make everyone who is a father or a son or a daughter or a mother uncomfortable. One of my grandfathers was far more like the combination ogre and passive aggressive father Douglas played, but having recently been through the death of an aged mother and being in a funeral home with my father who had taken care of her for a long time made the movie even harder to bear (though I eventually adopted the perspective of "How much worse their dysfunctions are" smugness to make it through til the end, which is only 92 minutes from the start). The movie has not dated at all, and contains what is arguably Gene Hackman's greatest performance as the frustrated son trying to be filial. (A pain-giving 5-star movie.)
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The French Connection (directed by Williamm Friedkin, 1971, 3. 4 stars) is a dated, hard-to-follow narcotic policing movie that was shocking in 1970 with a hard-nosed cop that Gene Hackman won an Oscar for portraying. didn't remember that Roy Scheider was in it, though he received an Oscar nomination. Now I am comfortable that the reason I didn't remember him is that he does nothing memorable or extraordinary. Ben Johnson definitely deserved his statuette more than Scheider! The main competition in my view was from Jeff Bridges in the same movie.
I do think Hackman is good, but he's been better, and Dennis Franz is better on a weekly basis as a short-fused cop (for which he has harvested awards of his own...)
Gerald Greenberg's editing still looks good, though there are some jumps in the narrative that seem ill-advised or worse (notably after the most celebrated scene in the movie, the sniper at the top of the stairs from an elevated "subway" train), and the failure to show the development of the case before the shipment from Marseilles.
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Robert Altman's Quintet (1979, 0 stars) is still the mind-numbing combinaiton of opaque and tedious that I walked out on the first time around. I think it is the only Altman movie without any interesting characters. There is an international cast of actors (including Paul Newman, Bibi Anderscon, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey) declaiming stilted dialogue in a post-apocalyptic 1970s world. The only plus is the arresting set (from the 1976 World's Fair in Montreal, iced over).
John Woo's last Hong Kong policier Hardboiled (Lashou shentan, 1992, 3.5 stars) has too much cartoon shooting and exploding. ( I much prefer the moments in the eye of the hurricane of bullets and fireballs, with Chow Yunfat and Tony Leung or Chow and Teresa Mo). I can even put up with the cooing over the babies, but the bulletproof cops eventually become merely ridiculous.
Producer/director/"writer" Pen Densham's (1996) Moll Flanders (2.3 stars) largely wastes some extraordinary actors (Robin Wright, Morgan Freeman, Brenda Fricker). Only Stockard Channing makes a strong impression (as a vicious bordello-keeper). The movie has nothing of what I remember as the spirit or tone of Daniel Defoe's rollicking 1722 novel, and little of the plot or characterization. The dialogue would ring false in any century; the ending and the beloved, separated daughter are just too gaggingly cute.
Seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997, 3.7 stars) with its great ensemble cast (many of whose careers have bloomed since then) I found Mark Wahlberg's performance more remarkable than when I first saw the movie, those of Burt Reynolds, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Julianne Moore less so (none of the four much helped by the Oscar-nominated Anderson script, in contrast to Don Cheadle's quirkily written part that he ran with). I'd forgotten how coked up the porn "talent" got as time went on, the amount of violence, and how Don Cheadle succeeds in starting a business after being turned down for a bank loan. The movie captures some of the particularly 1970s forms of questing for , yearning about , and expecting success, but seems more diffuse than it needs to have been. Even before seeing it the first time, I knew that the business of pornography is very unerotic by the end of the first day, if not sooner.
Mrs. Dalloway (directed by Marleen Gorris, 1997, 4.6 stars) is an outstanding adaptation of the pioneering stream-of-consciousness Virginia Woolf novel.
I was disappointed by André Téchiné Alice et Martin (1998, 2.5 stars), though, as Alice, Juliette Binoche is (as usual) marvelous and very beautiful with minimal or no makeup. "Les voleurs" should have warned me that "Wild Reeds" was a fluke. I thought that Téchiné specialized in confused youngsters, but it is the older non-couple of Alice and Benjamin (Mathieu Amalric) and the crusty mothers (Carmen Maura and Marthe Villalonga?) who are more interesting than the troubled youngster Marin (Alexis Loret) here. Indeed, even the slow-mo shots of waves are more interesting than his character! And the couple wandering through the Alhambra is a highlight (not least because there is no dialogue, of which there is way too much elswhere in the movie). High marks for cinematographer Caroline Champetier. But hang high the three screenwriters! (Yes, one of those "credited" was Téchiné. )
Zhang Yimou's middle (Capraesque) period Happy Time (2001, 3.4 stars) throws some viewers on a turn from broad comedy about young and not-so-young mating to taking charge of a sweet-natured blind Cinderella in a princeless but far-from-egalitarian "People's Republic." The widespread delusions of grandeur are well-captured in the transformation of "hut" into "hotel."
Othello, (directed by Geoffrey Sax, 2002, 3.4 stars): Lifting the story to contemporary London works fine for the resentful Iago, but the noble Moor does not fit as easily in the present.
Intimacy (2001, 3.2 stars) is very unpornographic: unarousing, unpretty, and inexplicit. If I didn't know that Patrice Chéreau was/is a set decorator, I'd have never guessed it from the messy, ugly, mostly green set designs, photographed mercilessly by Eric Gautier.
Phone Booth (2002, directed by Joel Schumacher, 3.25 stars) is in some ways, including running time and forced moralism, like 1940s B-movies, but in color with much off-color language, and black police officers (captained by Forrest Whittaker). Colin Farrell is quite good as the trapped man, but his character's sleaziness does not strike me as making him a target for demented wrath in Hollywood (or Manhattan, where it is set). And the script fails to reveal much about the sniper appointing himself the Wrath of God (speaking in Kiefer Sutherland's voice). The real-time (short time) unrolling works well, though.
Control Room (2004, directed by Jehane Noujaim, 3.3 stars) seems fairly miscellaneous until Donald Rumsfeld has the Baghdad al-Jareez office and two other locations with journalists failing to toe the Bush regime line are targeted with "surgical strikes." The US Army information officer (Lt. Josh Rushing) comes across as engaging, there are images of the war blocked by US networks, and some of the complexity of the situation of al_Jareez reporters comes across.
Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education (2004, 4.7 stars) has a wicked sucker punch and shows off an outstanding cast headed by the triple-threat Gael García Bernal and the susceptible movie director played with often dour longing by Fele Martínez.
Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers (2004, 4.8 stars), which has won several "best foreign film" awards but is underappreciated on epinions and was lost in the ever-Byzantine nomination politics of the Academy Awards. It is one of the most visually gorgeous movies ever made, though I could have done with less CGI of flying daggers and more nudity (like any of Kaneshiro Takeshi).
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