News You Can Bruise for 2022 March 6

Sun Mar 06 2022 20:07 February Film Roundup:

• Werewolf of Washington (1973): The summary of this film promised a level of political satire which was not met. An early illustration that quoting the catchphrases and quirks of a hated political figure is not intrinsically satirical or funny. (A lesson that, alas, still eludes us.) The screenwriter/director is well-informed enough to base the main character pretty closely on William Safire, but doesn't really know what the President does, or knows but wasn't able to work it into the screenplay. In this film, POTUS is basically the mayor of Washington, D.C.

  Considered as a lowbrow comedy rather than a satire, this is... still pretty bad. But I laughed and laughed at the scene in the White House bowling alley, where the President spouts platitudes as Dean Stockwell's character gets his wolfman fingers stuck in a bowling ball.

• The Laughing Policeman (1973): A pretty good police procedural starring San Francisco public transit. Bolsters my hypothesis that in the early 1970s, it was easier to shoot a "big American city" movie in San Francisco than New York. There are a lot of location shots in this film that would have been really difficult to get in New York. Walter Matthau is nice and jowly, and Bruce Dern makes a plot point out of the fact that the 1970s cop mustache is the same as the 1970s gay mustache.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): This is a film where not much happens, and also a film where everyone these days goes in knowing the ending, but damn if it's not engaging for almost all of its nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime. For a lot of films made between 1975 and 1985 I can be entertained just watching the set dressing, and the set dressing here is top-notch.

  I was really skeptical of the decision to give Francois Truffaut a major acting part, but it works. "This character needs a translator" is a dynamic you don't see in films very often, and they play it naturally while also getting some good gags out of it.

• Evolution (2001): Like Spaced Invaders passim, this is one of those bad sci-fi films I've always kind of wanted to watch even though I knew it was bad. The difference is I could have easily seen Evolution when it came out, since I wasn't in high school, but... I just didn't get around to it, I guess. Anyway, I had the right idea. In a sign of my own growth as a critic, if I had seen this in 2001 I would have been very upset by the inaccuracies surrounding the mechanics of evolution, but for me in 2022 that's far from the worst problem with the movie.

  It's not bad at the start, when the stakes are no higher than the egos of a couple of professors, but it rapidly escalates into a world-saving thing and I don't care. But then Dan Aykroyd reads the phone book for a while; that's fun.

  According to IMDB trivia, it was Julianne Moore's idea to give her character a character trait. Good thinking! PS: Shout-out to the Hallucigenia reference.

• Moon 44 (1990): This is a bad film that is interesting theoretically but not in practice. Roland Emmerich, a German living in West Germany, made a Hollywood-style film in English to try to sell it to Americans. Sort of like if Billy Wilder had directed Bringing Up Baby before fleeing Austria. And it's really believable! Moon 44 looks just like the American movies it's ripping off (Blade Runner, Aliens, and of course the big S. W.). It even does a good job of catching the 1990 Hollywood zeitgeist a la Total Recall. When Moon 44 flopped, Emmerich eliminated the middlecountry and just started directing American movies, including Independence Day, a film that feels like the much better second draft of this boring movie.

  I did not finish this and can't recommend it at all. I think I made it about 45 minutes in? I started longing for Mike and the 'bots (Joel wouldn't have bothered with this film), and not long afterwards I bailed out. The visual effects look great, very crunchy and Turnbull-ish, but only so long as you're looking at screenshots and not watching the film itself.