News You Can Bruise for 2019 November 2

(1) Sat Nov 02 2019 13:45 October Film Roundup: I saw a ton of movies this month and there was something fun or interesting in almost all of them! Here's the scoop:

• Puppy Love (1985): A.k.a. "Dou qi xiao shen xian" Sumana and I watched this on a date back in September and I forgot about it, even though it's really fun! It came back to me because Gregory's Girl (see below) is similar in a lot of ways. It's basically a sequence of skits. The skits are funny and cute, with lots of female eristic energy a la Celine and Julie Go Boating. There seemed to be a strong "you had to be there" element: others in the theater were laughing really hard at what appeared to us as random Hong Kong 1980s stuff.

  This movie's pretty obscure, to the point where the best English-language description is on the Metrograph web site announcing the showing we saw. I recommend this film but not sure how you'd go about seeing it.

  BTW films I see at Metrograph are at high risk of being forgotten because I don't see a lot of films there and they don't have a convenient "everything we showed" list I can go through at the end of the month. I remember them eventually though!

• Gregory's Girl (1980): This is the same kind of funny, cute, skit-based high-school romcom as Puppy Love, with one big asterisk: there's a skit early on where a teacher talks about his female students in a really gross way. Fortunately this doesn't become a theme, but it changed the tone of the whole movie.

  I'm not even talking about the boys being gross. Teenage boys are frequently horny and gross, you can get comedy out of that, and although I'm glad this isn't the main goal of Gregory's Girl—it certainly isn't the high point of its comedy—I think they did an okay job with it.

  Because it's so great that so many of the characters in Bill Forsyth movies are good-hearted, the appearance of a creep is more of a bummer than it would be in another movie. Burt Reynolds' character in Breaking In has one moment of creepiness which is earned in a character sense but brings the mood down a bit. Judging from IMDB reviews, my attitude about this doesn't bode well for the 1999 sequel to Gregory's Girl, in which a grown-up Gregory inherits the mantle of the creepy teacher from the original movie! Boo.

  Anyway, the last act of Gregory's Girl is ambiguous in a way I don't associate with romcoms, but I think what happened is that another girl has a crush on Gregory and so gets her friends to basically heist Gregory out of his date with Dorothy. And because he's so easygoing and trusting he doesn't even realize he's been heisted. That's really clever. That's the kind of thing I come to a Forsyth movie to see.

• Gaslight (1944): The ultimate trope namer. I feel like you could have explained gaslighting to, say, Shakespeare, and he would have recognized it, but it took the era of the Big Lie to bring it into consciousness and another 25 years for it to become a term of art. BTW I also feel this way about the card game "Dominion". It could only have been invented in the 21st century, but you could explain it to someone from the 1920s and they'd totally get it (although they'd be annoyed by the sheer number of cards).

  Anyway, the movie. The first half is masterful in setting up the suspense but the back half is... a police procedural? This dude isn't even manipulating the gaslight to mess with his wife; it happens by accident. On the plus side: Angela Lansbury's film debut!

  (TV Tropes claims that Petruchio gaslights Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, and it is a similar form of manipulation, but I don't think he's trying to get her to doubt her own sanity.)

• Beetlejuice (1988): Without a constraint like historical fact (Ed Wood) or a time-consuming filming process (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Tim Burton movies are at risk of heading off into a ball pit of cool but disconnected ideas. This film jumps into the ball pit almost immediately and we get some fun set pieces that make me think this film would have been better as a series of shorts.

  The third act, in particular, has a lot of scars on the screenplay where they cut all the exposition. Of course they still had time for Beetlejuice to set up this goth shotgun wedding with Gregory's Girl-age Lydia—just no time to convince the audience that it would solve any plot problem. It's clear Beetlejuice is exactly the sort of person who would do this, so at least it makes logical sense, but it's less clear why they followed up this movie with a children's cartoon—the main thing I remember about Beetlejuice from my childhood—where Beetlejuice and an aged-down Lydia are best pals. I guess that comes from the same place as the Robocop cartoon.

  Uh, to say a nice thing about this movie: the main villains are redeemed, and one of them is even redeemed before the ending. I've also heard good things about the Indian remake, Beteljuice.

• The Informant! (2009): Up until the end of the opening credits I was assuming this would be like The Conversation, possibly because of Matt Damon's dorky moustache, but I wasn't disappointed to see a much different film set in the 1990s, in an office culture that I got the barest glimpse of tagging along with my father to clients and working my first summer programming jobs. I liked the twists and enjoyed watching Scott Bakula's long-suffering FBI agent. I laughed really hard at "You don't know how to read a lie detector!"

  Sumana had seen this movie already and when I told her I was watching it, provided this Bakula-ready joke: "Archer Daniels Midland is the spot where Captain Archer and Crewman Daniels agreed to meet." Yes, a Crewman Daniels reference every month, that's the Film Roundup promise!

  I see why they had to add the exclamation mark to the end of this movie's name. (The book was just called The Informant.) The exclamation mark shows that the film has a strong comedic element; otherwise it looks like a Robert Ludlum adaptation. This got me to thinking: if you have a film with a question mark in its title, but you also add an exclamation mark, does it cancel out the (totally imaginary) question mark curse?!

  I found about 30 feature films on IMDB that have adjacent question and exclamation marks in their title, but the only ones I recognize are The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?. So it looks like a reliable signal of a very bad movie.

• My Dinner With Andre (1981) This film hasn't aged well (the subject matter is... very Age of Aquarius) but I was amazed by how natural the dialogue feels. Gave me the vicarious thrill of listening to a smart crackpot present his theories on a topic I don't care about. Maybe his crackpot theories are correct! Who knows? Wallace Shawn was of course the big draw for me, and he doesn't have much to say until the last half-hour, but I was entertained. A production assistance credit for Troma (one of their first credits) was a nice surprise.
• Silver Streak (1976): The disappointing essence of stagflation-era comedy. After a rocky start (primarily caused by movies like this one in heavy rotation on Comedy Central) I've come to appreciate the cinema of the 1970s, but the comedies rarely make me laugh. No matter what they try, I'll never see Gene Wilder as a romantic lead or even a great comic actor. I think I found out about this from a "list of overlooked comedies" and now I'm questioning the judgement of the entire list. Plus, blackface. IMDB trivia: "Richard Pryor was uncomfortable with the scene." No kidding! Oh yeah, Richard Pryor's in this, eventually.
• Hausu (1977): This has a lot of stuff I don't like in horror movies (like... horror...) but it's so over the top and ridiculous I can't stay upset. My favorite scene was at the beginning where the backstory is laid out in a different filmic style. Every Disney animated feature does that now, but it doesn't happen a lot in 1977. And Hausu does it in an unusual way: one character is narrating the backstory, laying down the backbeat for the film-within-a-film we're seeing, but instead of listening to this narration, the other characters are also watching the film-within-a-film and commenting on it, MST3K-style? I guess this is to say that right from the start, Hausu is really weird, moving really fast and demanding a lot of the viewer. Once the blood effects start kicking in I've kinda had my fun.
• The Coca-Cola Kid (1985): I'm gonna put it out there: this, not Mad Max, deserves to be considered the true prequel to The Road Warrior. It was pretty fun, showcasing both the glorious high-tech of the 1980s and steampunk turn-of-the-century low tech. I can't confirm this 100% but this feels like a "low-budget non-American director gets big movie-industry money for the first time" film, a genre I'm becoming interested in after seeing Housekeeping last month.
• Little Caesar (1931): From the golden age of "every screenplay is based on a novel, and we're going to show you a picture of the novel on the title card". Also from the golden age of opening with a Bible quote, perhaps to appease the Hays office. I watched this because I really like Edward G. Robinson in non-gangster roles but I hadn't really seen the gangster roles he's best known for. It's a "great" performance—sixty years later, Robinson's accent still meant "gangster" at my middle school—but I think this movie is now basically obsolete. You got The Godfather series and both versions of Scarface telling this story with better character motivation than "gonna do some crimes, see?"
• Key Largo (1948): "Let's rip off the last scene from Key Largo, Mitchell!" That was going through my head the whole time, so suffice to say I knew how this movie ends. Has aged better than Little Caesar, with some nice noir moments regarding corruption and human weakness. Johnny Rocco has a super-petty speech about how ungrateful are the politicians he buys, which is exactly what I wanted when I went looking for "Edward G. Robinson gangster stuff".
• Re-Animator (1985): Kind of a repeat of my Reservoir Dogs dilemma: I'm not into horror films, but I am a big fan of Jeffrey Combs, who works almost exclusively in horror. I gotta at least watch the movie that started the typecasting, right? For an 80s horror flick you could do a lot worse. Combs met all my expectations: sinister with great comic delivery. The practical effects are goofy, but more "realistic" and less inventive than in Hausu. In further "random unexpected production assistant credits" news, Re-Animator has one for Rick Berman, of all people. Has anyone asked him about this?
• Gaslight (1944): A boring, train-ride-heavy first half sets up a reign of claustrophobic gothic terror in the second. A real thrill to watch. Plus, Angela Lansbury's film debut! Sumana hasn't seen the film but recommends "Just in Spring", a Yuletide fic dealing with the aftermath.