News You Can Bruise for 2015 March

Mon Mar 02 2015 22:51 January Film roundup:

• The Music Man (1962, 2003): We marathoned both versions of The Music Man, making me the Music Man Marathon Man. I'm attached to the 1962 original, Sumana to the 2003 remake (which you can see on Youtube). We laughed, we learned, we sang along. It's such a good musical, with the greatest resolution to a con job I've ever seen.

  The 2003 version does a couple things better—notably the mayor— but most of the actors in the 2003 version are too young for the part and look even younger than they are. Matthew Broderick doesn't have the gravitas to play Professor Hill. More like Graduate Student Hill, amirite? There's a line where he tells Marian she's "twenty-six years late" to her Lovers' Lane assignation. Kristin Chenoweth is 35 in this movie and she looks about 28. Some shots had to be redone with a stunt double because Broderick's umbilical cord was visible.

  Overall, the 1962 version is still the best. I mean, Cary Grant refused to play Harold Hill because he wanted to see Robert Preston do it like he did on Broadway. That's a hell of an endorsement. And one thing we hadn't noticed before was that Preston isn't afraid to massively camp it up when he's putting the con on River City. I guess what I'm saying is it takes judgement, brains and maturity to play—I say that any fool can fast-talk his way through the Harold Hill part, and I call that sloth.

• The Parallax View (1974): This movie was super tense and really freaked Sumana out. I liked the way it would seem like a character was becoming important to the story and then, jump cut, they're dead now. The central concept of the movie is brilliant. The set pieces are pretty good and the final one is incredible. Recommended overall.

  Video game watch: there's a scene where a scientist is playing Pong with a chimpanzee.

• The Pirates (2014): I was initially very excited about this story of medieval Korean pirates chasing after a renegade whale. And there's a lot of goofy action but all the fun was spoiled for me because the whale dies! Yes, the tragic destiny of this movie's majestic whale is to be graphically killed and become a CGI whalefall. Boooo. Not recommended.

  Unaccountably other people don't consider this a deal-breaker. The movie was made, Sumana recommends it, and Sarah scoffed when I mentioned the possibility that a whale's gory death was a reason to dislike the movie. I am alone! I was afraid this would happen so I went online ahead of time looking for a Whale Death Warning, but even with hindsight the best I can find it this vague statement in an Amazon review: "Also, having the movie scenes with the Mother whale and the baby were to raw and disgusting for under aged people to watch.." I'm not even sure whether this is talking about the death scene or the (completely unobjectionable) nursing scene. That's why I'm starting a new website, doesthewhaledie.com, as a public service to whales and whale allies who want to be spared these graphic portrayals. Here's the initial site mockup I used to secure VC funding:

  Movie	Does the whale die?
  Star Trek IV	No! 🐳
  The Pirates	Yes
  The Little Mermaid (initial establishing shot)	Probably not
  That National Geographic special from the 80s	OH GOD

• Kid-Thing (2012): A modern illustration of my aphorism that the French New Wave directors made films that would be much better as genre films. You can read this film as an unpleasant indie dysfunctional-family dramedy that's mean and only kinda funny, the sort of film that considers Napoleon Dynamite a phony big-budget sell-out. Or you can read it as a really effective horror movie that relies solely on the fact that kids are assholes. Either way, it was refreshing in a Celine and Julie way to see a ten-year-old girl get the sort of screwed-up Huckleberry Finn part that usually goes to boys.

  Annie squishes a grub in this movie, and there's a dead cow, so if you feel about grubs or cows the way I feel about whales, don't see this movie. Not recommended in general, except maybe for certain real-life ten-year-olds. I couldn't find an MPAA rating, but if your kid is ready, you'll know.

  Video game watch: at one point we see Annie playing Devil World on the family TV using a N64 controller. This may appear to be a ridiculous inaccuracy, since Devil World was a Famicom game and it never even came out in America, but it's actually one of the subtlest, truest portrayals of video games I've ever seen in a movie. The "N64 controller" has AV cables coming out of it, indicating that it's an all-in-one system loaded with pirate ROMs. Specifically, it's the Power Player Super Joy III, which comes with Devil World and displays the flashing "FUN TIME" we see earlier in the scene. So the filmmakers got it absolutely right. Annie's playing Devil World on a crappy pirate Famiclone because that's the only game system her family can afford.

• Pennies from Heaven (1981): One of the most cynical movies I've ever seen, not just that its attitude is cynical but that it thinks the audience will swallow gritty 70s cinema if we also get fabulous show-stopping musical numbers where Christopher Walken does a tap-dancing pool table striptease. (Highlight of the film.) Fred Astaire, who's unwillingly in this movie via archive footage, said (courtesy IMDB trivia):

  I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realize that the thirties were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the eighties - it was just froth; it makes you cry it's so distasteful.

  I wasn't there in the 30s, but I think someone who says "it was a very innocent age" is really making a statement about their own mental state. Anyway, this sort of gets at the problem, but it doesn't explain how Paper Moon can be a 70s-cinema movie set in the Depression that's very cynical but also funny and a great movie. Doesn't explain Sullivan's Travels.

  The secret ingredient is, again, that vague concept called "heart". Paper Moon and Sullivan's Travels have heart; Pennies from Heaven just hates musicals. But it also has to prove its technical chops to demonstrate that its hate does not spring from jealousy. And the film's technical chops are amazing, absolute first class. So the film is really good at being the thing it hates. It's like a talented lit-fic author writing a novel deconstructing the science fiction genre and then denying the book they've written is, in fact, an exemplar of a school of science fiction that flourished in the 1970s. So how about some heart with your cynicism? That's Dr. Billy Wilder's 100% reliable nostrum.