The movies I saw in Jan. (NOT a 10-best list and the last one)
Feb 01 '07 (Updated Nov 07 '08)
The Bottom Line "Proof," "Streamers," "Pushover," & "Crank" vanished without receiving their due; I thought that there was more of value in "Igby_Goes_Down" and the "All_the King's_Men" remake than was reported
Historical Preamble: Tired of waiting for the long-promised expansion of general categories in movies (and books) to match the ones in music, I invaded the nearly empty "10 best melodramas" category after deciding that I wanted to list all the movies I saw in 2005. The rajahs of Brisbane still have not delivered general categories to movies (or to books) and have decided that preserving the sanctity of the existing swamp of "topics" is more important than drawing visitors to epinions for (mini) reviews of movies that cannot be added by the movie CLs: movies that are neither in theaters or on VHS or DVD (nor has the epinions management they done anything to clean up the large-scale mislistings in regard to "in theater" or to get corrections of listings made even more than a year after the much-vaunted "year of the catalog").
I surprised myself by keeping my 2005 resolution to list what I saw through all of 2005 and 2006. It has become a habit to jot down something about all the movies I see (including some regular-review-length ones that cannot be posted). I didn't think I'd make it through 2006 to provide myself with descriptive statistics, but I continued through January 2007. Both because doing these lists are a lot of work and because of the response that has come down (on the map, come up) from Brisbane, this is probably the last one. I appreciate the general support I have received and have contempt for those who complained to the hierarchy rather than communicating to me (through ratings and/or comments on-site or via e-mail). And I am fairly certain that none of the complaints came from anyone looking for a list of the "10-best melodramas" who failed to notice in the titles of each of my entries "NOT a ten-best list."
Since Epinons doesn't want them, my reviews of movies that are not in the database and can't be added will be posted at http://som1950.gather.com/. Please do NOT bother the CLs about this matter. The decision is not their fault, but comes from Epinions management--and is all too consistent with general rewarding of hall-monitor mentality glee at stomping on any creative use of available slots, the kind of acting out of resentments from vigilante judges of which the movies category has been blessedly free.
BTW, my own practice rate something "OT" if there is a slot in which a posting could be put (the graveyard of "Writer's Corner" is not a meaningful option in my view).
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As usual, the movies are listed in chronological order, with dashes between jottings running more than a paragraph.
Friends and Lovers (1931, directed by Victor Schertzinger, 2.2 stars) melodrama starring Adolph Menjou with and against Gary Cooper and Erich von Stroheim, orbiting around Lila Damita (soon to wed Errol Flynn offscreen).
Footlight Parade (1933, directed by Lloyd Bacon with delirious production numbers directed by Busby Berkeley, 3.3 stars) and standard backstage problems with a frenetic producer played by James Cagney and a genial crooner played by Dick Powell.
Our Daily Bread (1934, directed by King Vidor, 2 stars) fantasy/melodrama about communism and water: digging the waterway is dramatically filmed, but the characters are not even as rounded as cardboard. In what is basically a silent-screen vamp role, Barbara Pepper heats things up for a while, but even without the Production Code being enforced, there is no doubt that Marriage Will Hold and virtue win.
Arizona (1940, directed by Wesley Ruggles, 3 stars) may have seemed less humdrum western in 1940 than it does now. It has a lot of very obvious back projection, a standard-issue plucky Jean Arthur, Warren William as a standard-issue 19th-century dastardly villain, and a surprisingly straightforwardly heroic William Holden. I liked seeing the locations around Tucson (where I twice lived) but was driven up the wall by repetitions of the ten-note opening of "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" every time Arthur comes into view..
The Big Street (1942, directed by Irving Reis, 3.1 stars) A Damon Runyon melodramatic romance with Henry Fonda as "the best bus boy there is" enamored of a tough gold-digger played by Lucille Ball (and the unlikely pairing of Agnes Moorhead and Eugene Pallette) provide some entertainment, particularly when Fonda seeks to wheel Ball in a wheelchair through the Holland Tunnel and the officials cannot find any regulation to stop them. Schmaltzy as the ending is, it's hard to resist.
Made during WWII, clearly aiming to encourage Brits to be nice to (European) Allied visitors, English without Tears (1944, directed by Harold French from a screenplay by Terrence Rattigan, 2.8 stars) has too little Margaret Rutherford and Lilli Palmer, way too much Penelope Ward, too much of her ESL students and Michael Wilding (before he became Elizabeth Taylor's second husband and father to her children). It is a pretty silly romantic comedy, but of interest as a period piece with a propaganda mission.
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The Impatient Years, a 1944 melodramatic romance with elements screwball comedy( directed by Irving Cummings, 3.2 stars) reunited Jean Arthur with Charles Coburn from "The More the Merrier" (for which Coburn got an Oscar and Arthur her only Oscar nomination). Joel McCrea was offered the role of the Army Air Force sergeant who wed Arthur the day before being deployed, having met her three days earlier. Lee Bowman took the part (and IMO was better cast than McCrea would have been).
On leave in Sonora (in California's Central Valley), 18 months later, he meets his son and father-in-law, and the boarder (who has been de facto father and disrupts the established schedule of the wife he barely knows (and who barely knows him). They decide to divorce. In court, Coburn tells the judge (Edgar Buchanan) that many men are going to come back changed to wives who have been on their own, often raising children on their own. Coburn suggests that the judge order the couple to return to the scenes (in San Francisco) of their whirlwind romance to try to see how they got together. If that fails, then grant them the divorce, he suggests.
Anyone who has seen 1940s (or 30s) comedies about antagonistic male-female relationships (and particularly married ones) knows what the outcome will be. There is a certain amount of screwball comedy along the way, particularly in the adjacent but not connecting hotel rooms guarded by Charles Grapevine. The main interests are historical--first anticipating the postwar marital problems (and showing they are superficial and could be worked out) and in movie history as being Arthur's last movie at Columbia (she only appeared in two more, both classics, Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair" and George Stevens's "Shane").
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The Mating Season (1951, directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Charles Brackett et al., 3.6 stars) struck me as a sort of "Lady for a Day" in reverse. Rather than being decked out as a society swell to fool her new and swanky son-in-law, Ellen McNulty (Thelma Ritter in an Oscar-nominated performance) is mistaken by her beautiful but domestically unskilled daughter-in-law (Gene Tierney) as the cook sent over to work on a dinner party. To the consternation of her son (Johnn Lund), Ellen moves in as a cook and works as hard at making the marriage work as the other mother-in-law (Miriam Hopkins) seeks to sabotage it. The unpleasant characters get their just desserts, while those who see them for what they are are heading for happily-ever-after at the end. Anyone who enjoys Ritter will enjoy "The Mating Season". (BTW, Brackett also wrote the screenplay for the great screwball comedy "Midnight" (1939), the best of the movies Leisen directed, and the Olivia de Haviland soap opera "To Each His Own" which also costarred Lund and for which de Haviland won an Oscar.)
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Park Row (1952, 3 stars) , he fifth movie made by writer/director Sam Fuller (1911-1997), and, alas, not available even on VHS, let alone DVD, "Park Row" is at once very sentimental and quite misogynist. "War" is not a metaphor in the description "newspaper war" as Fuller portrays publishing in the New York City of the 1880s. Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans) envisions better ways of doing things, including sponsoring the invention of linotype, inventing newspaper stands, and launching a campaign to raise funds to put up the Statue of Liberty (accepted by Congress without any appropriation of tax dollars for erecting it in New York Harbor).
Across the street from his marginal facility for The Globe is the established Star, published by a ruthless woman misnamed "Charity" but with a fitting last name (Hackett). What seems like a Joan Crawford or Gale Sondergard role was played passionately by newcomer Mary Welch. (Sondergard was blacklisted. Welch made no other movies and died while giving birth in 1958.)
An old sidekick of Horace Greeley named Josiah Davenport (Herbert Heyes) encourages Mitchell's innovations and encourages Ms. Hackett to get out of a man's business. After all such antagonism between a man and a woman can only mean they are in love, right?
Although the movie is difficult to get into and is filled with stock characters and hackneyed attitudes, the look of the old-time machinery and Fuller's talent for filming mayhem make an interesting spectacle. "Citizen Kane," it ain't, but Fuller did a lot without much budget or cast talent. Ordinary material and often cliched dialogue were filmed from some striking angles with very fluid (often tracking) camerawork (credited to Jack Russell, who would later film "Psycho" for Alfred Hitchcock).
Fuller also put a statue of Ben Franklin to interesting use.
The movie celebrates freedom of the press, that was endangered in the McCarthy era and is all but extinct in America now (or translated into the freedom to trample privacy of individuals rather than to examine what the US government is doing in our name and the shredding of the Constitution by Alberto Gonzales et al.).
"Park Row" is notably upbeat compared to some other Fuller movies such as "Shock Corridor" and "The Steel Helmet." (The latter is my favorite Korean War movie, BTW.)
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Also known as "The Killer Wore a Badge," the 1954 cop-turned bad bewitched by a blonde, Pushover (directed by Richard Quine, 3.5 stars) introduced Kim Novak as Lona, a tough cookie in public, who was shy and vulnerable and passive in private. Police detective Paul Sheridan (Fred MacMurrray, seemingly right out of "Double Indemnity", unsatisfied with his life but too lethargic to do anything about it) is sent to "help" her with a car that won't start (it won't start because it has been tampered with). Sparks may not fly under the hood, but back in his apartment, while waiting to hear from the all-night garage fixing the car (putting its distributor cap back on) a fire starts to burn.
Burbank police lieutenant (E. G. Marshall with more hair than in anything I've seen him) assigns Paul and Phillip Carey (Rick McAllister) to stake out Lona's apartment. As she waits, she smokes many cigarettes, as do her stalkers. Phil becomes quite taken with a nurse in the adjacent apartment, Ann Stewart (played with dark hair by Dorothy Malone), Eventually, he helps her ward off some unwanted advances in the elevator lobby. (When she suggests she should learn some of the techniques, he sourly suggests taking greater care about male company so that such techniques are not necessary).
Meanwhile, Paul has followed Lona, who drove to his apartment and berated him for pretending to be her friend... and proposes that they share the $210,000 that the gangster who is keeping her has stolen from a bank (in a daylight robbery than included shooting down a guard). Paul simulates outrage and remarks on having felt guilty about using her before seeing how she was trying to use him, and then (turning on a dime) takes charge of the plot to get rid of her boyfriend and get the money for themselves.
In a 1954 Hollywood movie, any such plot was doomed, but there is suspense and noir photography to grease the slide to failure. And as Bernard Hermann would do for Novak('s) character in "Vertigo," Arthur Morton provided her (character) plaintive theme music in "Pushover." Lona is not as money-driven as MacMurray's partner in crime, Barbara Stanwyck, was in "Double Indemnity," but so fixated on the need to get the money that he thinks he needs to get her (and/or) so drives since childhood to make good in financial terms, Paul only hears Lona's "It doesn't matter," too late for either of them.
I saw it in a large Noir City audience that audibly appreciated Novak's lines and her delivery of them, an atmosphere that will be lost when finally this movie comes to DVD. The streets will still look rain-slicked, MacMurray will still look devious and ready for a fall, Novak will still project a passive innocence just beneath what she knows to discourage being hit on, and the matter-of-fact illegal search of her apartment will still be shown.
Stakeouts have stretches of boredom, and some of that is shared with the viewer, but for those seeking a noir experience, "Pushover" is a satisfying port of call. Also, Dorothy Malone showed she could turn on the wholesome girl-next-door charm.
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"The High and the Mighty, 1955, adapted from his best-selling novel by Ernest K. Gann, directed by William A. Wellman, produced by John Wayne's production company , 2.4 stars) was long unavailable. Part of my disappointment in seeing this long-unavailable movie, no doubt, is that I was expecting an action movie rather than a multi-character soap opera, but the exposition is startlingly ham-handed coming from an old hand like Wellman. Everyone by John Wayne overacts mostly hackneyed, stereotypical parts, and the movie runs way too long (147 minutes).
Once More With Feeling (1960, directed by Stanley Donen, 2.3 stars) is a silly movie in which Yul Brynner plays a very short-tempered symphony conductor. Kay Kendall plays his harpist wife who still the waters he disturbs, but is fed up. Her soothing powers are unbelievable (unlike Brynner's tantrums, self-love, and deviousness). And the marriage/divorce complications are more than preposterous. Kendall, who had become Mrs. Rex Harrison, died of leukemia in 1959, aged 33. She won a Golden Globe for the 1957 (bad!) movie "Les Girls."
Dementia 13 (1963, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, produced by Roger Corman, 2.6 stars) low-budget horror film has some visual flair, but weak acting and a silly script
Ice Station Zebra (1968, directed by John Sturges, 3.6 stars) Cold War action/submarine movie with too little Jim Brown (as in "The Dirty Dozen" he falls in battle). I thought the underwater part was far superior to the search and confrontations on the ice.
I'm pretty sure that the listless comedy I Love You Alice B. Toklas seemed silly to 1968 viewers, both "squares" and "potheads." There are some sight gags on psychedelically painted cars and the bizarre couture of the freeloaders (and the family of eleven Mexican clients claiming whiplash, all wearing neck braces) and the surprise that a casket stuffed into the back of the psychedelic car straight-laced lawyer Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) has while his car is in the garage doesn't fall out. 2 stars or less (coscripted by Paul Mazursky, from whom I expected better, directed by Hy Averback).
QBVII (1974, 3.4 stars) courtroom drama, from a best-selling novel by Leon Uris, with Ben Gazzara bringing down Anthony Hopkins as a Nazi death camp physician who has become not merely respected but knighted.
Streamers (1983, directed by Robert Altman, 4.6 stars) Vietnam era military drama with Mitchell Lichtenstein starting more than he can finish with the street-tough, resentment-filled Michael Wright. Matthew Modine and one of the two whacked-out veteran sergeants are collateral damage of the fraught intersection of race and sexuality in the shadow of Vietnam.
Un, deux, trois, soleil (literally means "1,2,3, sun." 1993, directed by Bertrand Blier, 3.8 stars) contains a tour de force performance by Anouk Grinberg (who was 30) playing Victorine from the age of 12 to age 25, finding and losing love in the Marseilles slums with then-newcomer "specialist in love" Olivier Martinez. A bit surrealistic and requiring the viewer to catch up with lurches forward in time, the movie does not share American views about the sexual innocence of the young and the (im)propriety of showing intergenerational nudity.
Bedrooms and Hallways (1998, directed by Rose Troche, 3.2 stars) comedy about fluidity of sexual behavior . It is notable for being shot in Falcon's Lair, built for Rudolph Valentino, later owned by Doris Duke. Like "The Fluffer," there is a melodramatic final act set in Mexico. The romance is closer to that in "Latter Days."
The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me (2000, directed by Tim Kirman, 2 stars at most) filmed David Drake one-man show. The title kept me from seeing the play when it came through on tour. Although creatively filmed, the material seems unremarkable to me.
Hatuna Meuheret (Late Marriage, 2001 in Georgian and Hebrew, written and directed by Dover Koshashvi, 3.6 stars) The protagonist, Zaza, is an Israeli graduate student (played by Lior Ashkenazi. who later starred as a Mossad agent in "Walk on Water "). His parents and extended family emigrated from Georgia to Israel and press their beliefs that a man should be married to a younger and virgin woman before reaching his advanced age, 31. No, it's not that he's gay. Rather, he has a relationship with a divorced woman, Judith (Ronit Elkabetz) who has a 6-year-old daughter. Stubborn as Zaza is, his elders in the family are more stubborn. Both Zaza's father and uncle were pried away from women they loved back in Georgia (though each was at the time married already). Family interventions to break up illicit romances are as much a part of their culture as arranged marriages are). En masse, the male and female elder descend on Judith's apartment while Zaza is there. The scene is such over-the-top melodrama that it seems like black comedy (a sword is much brandished and the presence of a young child inhibits the threats and derogations of her mother not at all). Zaza seems affectless and passive in comparison to the emotional pyrotechnics of the other characters and Judith does not appreciate his passive aggressive tactics in dealing with them. The ending is very tense and leaves calculating the story's bottom line to the viewer. Scenes go on a long time with no camera movement. The sex scene (with full frontal nudity) and the scene of Zaza with one prospective bride are outstanding in showing character. The visual quality (whether the transfer or the original) is less than great and the DVD's only extras are some trailers.
Igby Goes Down (2002, written and directed by Burr Steers, 4 stars) is, I think, a comedy about Igby (Kieran Cullan in a superb turn as a 21st-century Holden Caulfield), a somewhat nerdy 17-year-old who has been expelled from all the best Protestant private schools on the US East Coast. His father (Bill Pullman) made a fortune but went crazy (seemingly in the shower while Igby was in the room). His "golden boy" brother Oliver (Ryan Phillipe in a performance that is deeper than it first seems to be) has a very superior attitude and the patronage of a super-rich D. H. (a leering Jeff Goldblum) as well as the approval of their pill-popping mother (Susan Sarandon) who has cancer and is not going to endure it. The interlinkanges include sexual partners played by Claire Danes and Amanda Peet. Igby is very sarcastic. It's hard to believe that anyone could come up with some of the lines in the movies (not just Igby's), but they are so splendid, I can't care very much about that. The film looks almost as good as it sounds (widescreen compositions and a very apt choice of music as well as witty lines). I'm sure some viewers have/will hate it, but those who liked "The Squid and the Whale," "Metropolitan" and "Rushmore" are likely to love it. Steers has only directed some television since then (including an episode of "Weeds"). I wish someone would fund him to make more movies!
The Boy Who Played on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2004, directed by Phil Grabsky, 3.4 stars) is a documentary, in Dari, shot with the niches in which the world's tallest statues had stood for 1600 years, until the Taliban destroyed them in 2001 (along with killing many of the Shi'ites in the vicinity) in the background, a squabbling refugee family in the foreground, focusing on one boy, Mir, an eight-year-old going to school (and playing soccer after school).
Sin City (2005, directed by Richard Rodriguez, 2.2 stars) cartoon(ish) yawner of a thriller (with lots of violence).
Rent (2005, directed by Chris Columbus, 2 stars) rock musical without any songs I could remember more than a minute after they were performed. It is not that I can't relate to a group impacted by AIDS. I can't relate to artists without talent, even as consumers of culture (never mind creators of it). Moreover, I don't have to have had friends consumed by tuberculosis to appreciate "La Boheme" (though that is far from being my favorite Puccini opera, it is a perennially popular one) or "Camille" or "Moulin Rouge." The characters in "Rent" are types—and not very interesting types and I don't see that the world owes them free space in Manhattan.
Proof (2005, adapted by David Auburn from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, directed by John Madden, 3.6 stars) doesn't quite work. Although Gwyneth Paltrow played the lead role (Catherine) on (the London) stage, she is just too sane to be believable as someone who may be cracking up. She can do petulant and can manage not to look radiantly beautiful, and can do vulnerable, but not wacko (as also demonstrated in her attempt to portray Sylvia Plath). She is very good in scenes with her genius father (played by Anthony Hopkins, who recovered from a crackup of his own, but is dead in the movie's present time and in an ambivalent relationship with a student of her father's (played by Jake Gylenhall, who had quite a year onscreen in 2005!), who appreciates genius and is well aware he does not have it, and with her sinisterly conventional sister Claire (Hope Davis). I like both how the play has been opened up and how it hasn't, but think Madden (who directed Paltrow in her Oscar-winning turn in "Shakespeare in Love") is a tad too tasteful to plunge into the muck of going crazy. The questions of authorship and collaboration are of special interest to me, but I would not go so far as to term the movie a "thriller."
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005, starring and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, 3.2 stars) is too long and quite strange. I kept wondering why the Border Patrolman played by Barry Pepper didn't get sunburned on the trek through the desert sun. Although less violent and more motivated, it reminded me of the trek under a more merciless sun in Monte Hellman's western (1967) "The Shooting."
Crank (2006, written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, both former cinematographers, 4 stars) is a live-action cartoon in which the protagonist, Chev (Jason Stratham, "Transporter"), a hit man, has been poisoned and can keep going only as long as he keeps adrenaline pumping into his system (and stimulates adrenaline release in viewers, echoes of D.O.A., and of the need to maintain velocity in "Speed"). I like the similarly implausible "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" better, but both have some wild humor along with wild deeds. It's totally a "guy movie" and a high-octane, resolutely escapist action "popcorn movie." One of the many strains on suspending disbelief is that the protagonist had quite his vocation for his exceedingly bimboish girlfriend, Eve (played by Amy Smart). The DVD featurette is pretty high-octane, too. It reveals that the cinematographers wrote the script in four days. It is also possible to play the movie without the expletives, though between the violence and the very public sex scene, many parents may consider the movie still from "family" fare.
United 93 (2006, written and directed by Paul Greengrass). With no stars (at least none recognizable to me), this docudrama provides a re-enactment of the 9/11 flight that did not reach its target (seemingly the US Capitol). It crashed after passengers who knew what had happened at the World Trade Center (because the takeoff of the flight from Boston was delayed) stormed the cockpit. The point of view seems to me to be that of the terrorists. It is with them the movie begins, and the early part shows their anxieties. No character is really developed, but the Islamist pilot is the most developed character in the movie. The camera is constantly on the move (along with cuts to FAA and NORAD trackers of the flights deviating from their courses and disappearing from the radar screens (on impact with buildings)). Many of the air traffic controllers and their boss, Ben Sliney) (re)play themselves. Those playing the flight attendants are actresses, but quite convincing. 4 stars?
Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple (2006, directed by Stanley Nelson, 4 stars) is a docudrama mostly about the death, giving short shrift to the functioning in San Francisco and the recruitment of members following Jim Jones into the jungle and on into the abyss. The recollections of survivors powerfully blend with re-enactment and the last radio transmissions from the paranoid charlatan minister.
All the King's Men (Writer [The Falcon and the Snowman, Searching for Bobby Fischer, The Interpreter]-turned-director Steven Zallian's 2006 re-make of the adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that Robert Rossen made into the best movie of 1949 (one that picked up Oscars for Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge) has darkly color cinematography by Pawel Adelman (Ray, The Pianist), a very intrusive, heavy-thudding musical score by James Horner (Glory), and underrated performances by Sean Penn (as the populist governor Willie Stark with big building programs involving significant graft, less a proto-fascist than Crawford's Stark), Jude Law as Jack Burden, the fascinated observer detached from his natal class (a role expanded from the one John Ireland played in 1949), Kate Winslett as Jack's childhood sweetheart (an easily forgettable Joann Dru in the 1949 version), Patricia Clarkson as the assistant (the role McCambridge played without the sexual edge, and blocked by the censorship of the day of saying things like "The world is full of sl_ts on skates"), Jackie Earle Haley as the turned-inside sharp-shooting bodyguard, and Anthony Hopkins as a pillar of integrity whom Jack was move out of the way or sully (another American politico convincingly played by Anthony Hopkins). James Gandolofini, a more obvious Willie Stark physical type did not escape notice as the toady called "Tiny." The character of Jack is less interesting than that of Willie, and I think that Zallian made a mistake in moving the spotlight from Willie to Jack, with way too many flashbacks to the rich young friends on the beach. There are obvious ways that the movie could have been better (firing Horner for starters) but on its own terms as a study of how men of pride in their integrity get enmeshed in the slime of practical politics—including populist movements—the movie repays attention to it. Set in the 1930s (the era of the real Huey Long) and flowing better with a darker proto-Fascist Willie Stark, the 1949 stands up as the better movie. Leaving the comparison aside, the 2006 version is an interesting take with many fine performance. The only one that seems off to me is Mark Ruffalo's as her troubled brother. 3.5 stars
© 2007 Stephen O. Murray
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