Black & White World

You can tell by the lines I'm reciting, I've seen that movie too.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

A Song Is Born (1948)

Comments coming soon.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

The Lodger (1944)

This movie has a lot to recommend it:  the moody, atmospheric photography and lighting is just stunning; the look of the film is really above reproach.  The use of fog and shadows set the tone very nicely.  The direction and the performances were great.  Laird Cregar in particular was fascinating to watch.

But here’s what I didn’t get—is it supposed to be completely obvious who Jack the Ripper is from the moment he first appears on screen?  Or is it supposed to be a mystery?  If it’s supposed to be obvious, I can’t figure out why we would spend so much time watching the other characters try to piece it together—it just makes them look stupid for not seeing it.  If it’s supposed to be a mystery, well… it’s not.  At first, it was so obvious I thought it must be a red herring, so that distracted me for a little bit.  But, no—not a red herring.  It’s almost laughable how obvious it is—he couldn’t be more transparent if he were wearing a big “JACK THE RIPPER” t-shirt.  Covered in blood and entrails.

But speaking of laughable moments, here’s my favorite:  near the beginning of the movie, the newsies are getting out a special edition with news on the Ripper case—the big update is that he’s actually been spotted this time.  One of the newsies is wearing a huge sandwich board which reads:  “RIPPER HAS BEEN SEEN!” And this guy tears open his pack of newspapers, reads the headline and hollers out, “Cor lummy, they’ve seen him!” Yes sir, I know—I just read that on your chest.  Couldn’t they have the guy with the “RIPPER EVADES POLICE” sandwich board do that line?  Or swap the sandwich boards?  It’s such a small thing, but if it’s that small, that makes it so much easier to avoid, doesn’t it?  It made me laugh.  I’m not trying to be nit-picky about it—I wouldn’t say that ruined my enjoyment of the movie or anything.  It just seemed that it was completely avoidable if anyone had been paying attention.

The movie does have a very suspenseful chase scene near the end, through an old Victorian-era theatre.  I’ve always thought old theatres were full of great places to hide.  It’s also got a fantastic climax.  It’s worth seeing for sure, I was just bothered by how non-mysterious the mystery was.

The Awful Truth (1937)

I’ve read that Cary Grant really didn’t like working on this picture, and tried on a number of occasions to get out of his contract.  Most of the time when he and Irene Dunne showed up to shoot, there was no script and director Leo McCarey had them improvise scenes.  Or, when McCarey was stuck, he’d just go off and play the piano for a while.  I guess I can understand why Grant was nervous.  Hell, even the finished product has no plot to speak of, and in the last ten minutes it threatens to collapse like a house of cards.

Looking back on his career, oh let’s say a decade or so later, Grant must have been relieved that RKO wouldn’t let him out of his contract, since The Awful Truth effectively turned his career around and molded him into the light comic, well-dressed, fast-talking, urbane, witty, smooth operator he would become legendary as.  There were some hints of his capabilities earlier in his career, but always fleeting.  The Awful Truth was a box office smash that catapulted Grant into stardom.

There’s no real plot to the movie at all—a young wealthy couple, Jerry and Lucy Warriner, divorce on a spur of the moment decision (neither appears to be very honest with the other); they have a custody battle over their dog Mr. Smith (Asta, the cinema’s greatest canine star ever); they interfere with one another’s romances and get involved in hysterical levels of one-upsmanship.  It’s almost like a farcical chess game.  The greatest sequence is an ill-fated double date between Jerry and his new flame Dixie Belle Lee, and Lucy and her new beau Dan Leeson (the always great and underrated Ralph Bellamy).  It’s an hilarious mix of verbal sparring and visual gags.

The final ten minutes of this movie really start to drag—like a lot of screwball comedies, The Awful Truth doesn’t seem to know when to put the brakes on.  But it’s saved in the final scene with adjoining bedrooms and a clever device with a cuckoo clock.  Great fun and well worth seeing.  If you’ve seen it before, it’s well worth another look, too.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Dan in Real Life (2007)

Fairly by rote rom-com with Steve Carell as Dan Burns, a widower with three kids, who falls in love at first sight with Marie (Juliette Binoche).  One problem:  she’s already seeing someone.  Okay, two problems:  the someone that she’s seeing is Dan’s brother.  Usually romantic comedies help the viewer out by making it clear that “the other man” isn’t right for our heroine, making him out to be a bad guy.  They didn’t do this in Dan in Real Life, however they did cast the odious Dane Cook as the brother, which certainly made it easier.  Steve Carell vs. Dane Cook?  Not really a contest.  There’s a few spoilers below—which really aren’t spoilers if you have seen more than three Hollywood romantic comedies.

By about the halfway mark I realized that this movie had no way to resolve to a happy ending.  Either Carell would end up with Binoche, which would alienate his entire family, or he would do the honorable thing and step aside for his brother, but still end up alone—which is not how romantic comedies are supposed to end.  The script solved this by going with the first option, but being completely unrealistic about the consequences.  Because there weren’t any.

Steve Carell was great; the material was maybe a little beneath him but he went a long way towards making the movie palatable for me.  I think he has the most expressive eyes of any actor working today, and the same sadness that he brings to his comic portrayals like Michael Scott on The Office, that sadness translates just as well in a dramatic context.  He had good chemistry with Binoche, who was also quite good.  I dislike Cook, as I believe I have made clear, but he was always on screen with someone who was more interesting to watch, so I was not overtly bothered by his presence.  Overall:  average.  The soundtrack, performed by Norwegian-born Sondre Lerche, was far and away the best part of the movie.

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Get Smart (2008)

I walked into Get Smart armed with low expectations and free movie passes, and as such walked out feeling satisfied.  I doubt I would have wanted to pay $11.50 to see it on the big screen, probably would have waited for the DVD to roll around on Netflix.  But for a freebie, for a remake of a classic TV show (an extremely tired genre right now), it was pretty enjoyable.  It coasted by on the considerable charm of its leads.

Probably the biggest objection I have with the script is that Maxwell Smart is such a competent agent.  The fun of the TV show was that Max was a bumbler, and 99 was always covering for his blunders and saving the day—unsung, of course.  I don’t know if this was changed to make him more heroic, or to make it less sexist since 99 never got the credit—whatever the reason, I think it hurts the character.  Likewise, the inclusion of Maxwell Smart’s past life as an overweight man might have worked fine as a simple explanation of why he never passed the agent’s exam before, but didn’t need to be brought up over and over and over again.  After the second mention, it became mean-spirited.

Steve Carell can do practically no wrong in my eyes (I haven’t seen Evan Almighty, though).  Even when he falls back on familiar territory, he’s enjoyable to watch.  Anne Hathaway was good and had some nice Barbara Feldon-ish touches as 99, but she is too young for this part.  Period.  Regardless of how they try to explain it away in the script.  Arkin was a lot of fun too as The Chief.  Surprisingly, I even thought The Rock was pretty good (he’ll never get me to call him Dwayne Johnson).  Some of the shout-outs to the old TV show were fun, some were predictable.  Some were predictable and fun, like the credits sequence with the doors—always my favorite part of the TV show.  If I’d spent $12 on it I would have felt ripped off, but for a freebie I can hardly complain.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

I’m surprised to discover I’ve never really reviewed The Best Years of Our Lives on this site before, except just a few sentences, a short paragraph, in what was apparently my most recent viewing way back in November 2004.  I always like to check on what I’ve written in the past so that I don’t end up repeating myself, but there’s not much to repeat in this case.

For a film that was so very representative of its time, it’s really quite surprising how well The Best Years of Our Lives holds up after sixty years.  At the time, it was very topical and fresh—an entire nation, quite literally, learning how to live again in peace time after five years at war.  Today, it’s an historical document, a time capsule of post-war America.

If I have a criticism of the movie at all, it’s that, despite its length, there are so many more avenues I wish they had explored.  There’s just one scene between Fredric March’s character and his young son—his son is 16, maybe 17.  That would put him at 12 or 13 when Dad went off to war, and a LOT changes in those years; Al clearly has no idea who his son is anymore.  His son has been learning at school that the Japanese people have rich traditions rooted in honor; Al only knows them as “savages” that he fought against in a brutal war.  It’s something I wish I could have seen more of.  On the other hand, I can’t think of anything I would cut in order to make room for that.

When I was younger, and It’s a Wonderful Life was my favorite movie, I used to be really annoyed that Best Years of Our Lives won the 1946 Best Picture.  I’ve realized, though, that the Academy really made the right choice here.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Verso sera (Towards Evening - 1991)

You ever have one of those experiences where you’re watching a movie, and you’re kind of hanging in there because you’re pretty sure the good part is coming?  It’s not that the movie is boring, necessarily, but it just feels like it’s leading somewhere and the payoff is going to be worth it.  And then it never really gets there, or when it does there’s no payoff?

Towards Evening is that kind of movie, unfortunately.  It was a year in the life of these characters, and though the narration at the beginning indicated that this would be the “happiest, and saddest, year” of this character’s life, I didn’t see much of the happiness or the sadness.  It was mostly a movie about the generation gap, which doesn’t seem like anything urgent enough to make a movie about, frankly.

Marcello Mastroianni (ah, now we see the reason I rented it in the first place) was good, but I much preferred his scenes with the little girl, Lara Pranzoni, and after about the midway point they didn’t have much together.  When the movie was over it didn’t feel like anyone had learned much or had done much growing, including me.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Protagonist (2007)

Compelling and well-paced documentary from Jessica Yu, profiling four disparate men and the defining moments in their lives—a bank robber, a terrorist, a martial arts enthusiast and an evangelical ex-ex-homosexual.  That’s not a typo—he’s gay, he went through a phase where he believed he was cured, and then came out of that phase and embraced who he is.

Each subject is the protagonist of his own story, and Yu threads the stories together according to ancient Greek dramatic structure, through phases like Provocation, Opportunity, Turning Point, Catharsis, Reversal, and Reflection.  Puppetry and scenes from Euripides in Ancient Greek serve as transitions from one phase into the next, and while I really enjoyed the inventiveness of the puppetry, the Ancient Greek slowed me down a little.  I really appreciated the idea of it—maybe more than anything else I didn’t care for the translation that was laid out in subtitles.  The wording was so literal as to make it difficult to follow even in English, for example these opening lines:  “Tell it still.  There is pleasure in hardships heard about.” I mean, I get what it means, but it’s as if it needs an extra translation.

I was reminded a little bit of Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap and Out of Control a few times, just in the randomness of the four stories and how parallels could be drawn between them.  I thought it was odd that the story of the martial arts enthusiast was less life-and-death than the other three stories, and in fact kept thinking that his story was going to take a tragic turn any moment, but it didn’t.  On the other hand, the subject (Mark Salzman) is such an enthusiastic and engaging storyteller, full of humor and energetic outbursts, and I wouldn’t dream of losing his story.  And his more mainstream run-of-the-mill story is a bit more relatable than that of the terrorist or the bank robber, for example, and helps tie in the viewer with all the other stories.  Really a fascinating piece.  Recommended.

1776 (1972)

“This is a revolution, damn it, we’re going to have to offend somebody!”

As surely as Christmas Eve is a time to sit down and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, my Independence Day holiday would not be complete without sitting down to watch our forefathers sing, dance and rebel in 1776. 

As the years go by, I find I have less to say about it.  So, this might be a cheat, but if you’re looking for a review, have a look at last year’s.  Or the year before’s.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Advise & Consent (1962)

Director Otto Preminger had a well-deserved reputation for constantly pushing the boundaries of Hollywood censorship—The Moon is Blue, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man With the Golden Arm were all banned and/or not approved by the MPAA; Exodus credited blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (released simultaneously with Spartacus which also credited Trumbo, which effectively ended the blacklist).  Occasionally, the controversy overshadowed the film itself (The Moon is Blue is reportedly pretty tame, which I recall became a plotline in an episode of M*A*S*H; Exodus is said to be overlong and dull; Anatomy of a Murder might have been very cutting edge for its time but comes off as misogynistic and simplistic today.

Advise & Consent doesn’t fall victim to that Preminger curse, however.  While the plot does tend to get muddled around the midway point, there are enough unexpected twists along the way to keep the viewer engaged and guessing.  The subplot about blackmailing a senator about his homosexual past is maybe even more controversial for its time because the closeted senator is a sympathetic character, a good guy—any suggestion of gay characters prior to this were almost always evil sadistic villains.

Performances are uniformly excellent, not a weak link to be found.  Charles Laughton’s final role is a memorable one, the irascible South Carolina minority leader and Senate Pro-Tempore.  Both Franchot Tone and Lew Ayres are memorable in their respective roles as President and Vice President (at the outset I said, “America is being run by 1930’s B movie stars!").  Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, Paul Ford, Henry Fonda, George Grizzard, Peter Lawford and Gene Tierney all battle for screen time as well, each as good as the other.  Look for Betty White and Inga Swenson (later famous for playing Kraus on TV’s Benson) in small but memorable roles as well.  Political insider movies like these seem to hold up pretty well over the years, maybe because the inner workings of Washington DC haven’t changed much over the years.