News You Can Bruise for 2016 July 4 (entry 0)

Mon Jul 04 2016 09:34 June Film Roundup: This month's movies are all over the place. I also wrote a huge essay about a movie I saw on July 1, so there might be a supplemental post as well.

• Rise of the Legend (2014): Fun, generic popcorn martial arts movie with a generic name. Best thing about this one was a small heist subplot—it's a full-fledged heist but it's just one part of a larger plan—and a character named "North Evil".
• Putney Swope (1969): Anarchic Groucho Marx-style comedy meets the 1960s counterculture in a film that's got a good number of laugh-out-loud moments and a pretty impressive Molotov cocktail effect (possibly achieved with a real cocktail, I dunno) but is ultimately a huge mess. It was an extremely offensive movie in 1969, and it's still pretty offensive, but mostly for different reasons, which is its own kind of accomplishment.

  The worst part for me was the pretty common low-budget movie conceit where someone is a terrible boss and bad at running a business, but is rewarded with huge success because... it's a satire? The director is extrapolating their experience in the film industry to the business world as a whole? I've never figured it out.

  I'm glad I saw this, but it's not great. If you want a bitingly satirical Mad Men-era film about advertising that's based on an understanding of the business, check out the 1960 short Your Name Here. If you just want more commercial parodies, watch the first few minutes of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957).

• Time Table (1956): The first scene of this movie is best-of noir material, and there's a twist at the start of act two that's handled really well, but really the first ten minutes is all you need. It's public domain, so see for yourself. The great theme of a plan that's perfect but brittle, undone by the slightest error, isn't done justice.
• Monkey Business (1952): Definitely inferior to the Marx Brothers Monkey Business, this lesser Howard Hawks feature focuses on Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers acting like teenagers. Cary Grant gets a haircut which, in retrospect, yes, is the haircut that teenage boys had in 1952 but adult men did not. It took me a while to catch on because of all those movies from the same period in which 25-year-old actors with that haircut are playing high school students.

  Not a great watch, but it was really refreshing to see a romantic comedy where the couple starts off married and in love, and stays that way for the entire movie.

• Synechdoche, New York (2008): Distressing and effective. reminds me of a Buster Keaton film in the creative ways it keeps twisting and escalating its premise rather than letting the one joke ride. Recommended.
• Heaven Can Wait (1943): This film puts on the big screen the unspoken American worldview that mixes Christianity and Epicureanism, and shows how it creates an arbitrage opportunity between heaven and hell. The story's okay, but all the characters are cartoony stereotypes. Specifically it reminded me of a Tex Avery cartoon, the way the film was scored, the orchestra constantly quoting from old-timey songs.

  Sometimes the techniques used by Code-era directors to sneak filth past the censors come off as humorous and sophisticated (Will Success Spoil Rock Hudson? again), but in this movie it just seems sleazy. Despite valiant efforts, only a couple of scenes really connected with me on an emotional level.

• Approaching the Elephant (2014): A pretty amazing documentary about a free school, with a lot to say about fundamental questions of political science. I found it really interesting because I think a free school would have been a much better environment for me when I was a kid than public school. Not really an option for me, though. Also, Lucy, the girl who's one of the focal points of the documentary, is the same age as and acts a lot like my niece Maggie. This film is really effective at showing that unstructured spaces attract a wide variety of people who don't "fit in", including bullies.