Mon Dec 04 2023 08:36 November Film Roundup:
It's been one of those months where the Roundup is scrambling to catch up with the Films, so let's make this quick before I watch another movie!
- Miss Congeniality (2000): 2000? Seriously? I would have guessed earlier. I forgot to mention this one, which I watched with my uncle Leonard last month. I never thought of this before but Sandra Bullock is one of those actors who seems to choose roles with an eye towards living cool Hollywood fantasies. She's an astronaut, a hacker, she gets to drive a bus real fast... In this movie, she gets to fire a gun and undergo the Mousy Girl Makeover, all while complaining about beauty standards.
Have you, Film Roundup reader, watched a movie before? You will be able to see who the villain is pretty quickly. Tragically, not a skill they teach at Quantico. An enjoyable flick.
- You've Got Mail (1998): We've seen enough Nora Ephron screenplays now that her go-to tactics are becoming visible. In my review of 1993's Sleepless in Seattle I projected that movies' technologically mediated rom-com world into the future, where mobile apps flash thousands of faces at you until they find the one that triggers the "love at first sight" rom-com spark. You've Got Mail can be seen as the groundbreaking experiment that disproves this model of the rom-com spark.
With the introduction of dial-up online services into the rom-com-verse, You've Got Mail presents two characters who fell in love online but dislike each other IRL. They encounter each other several times without triggering the spark or showing any awareness of it. This, Ephron concludes, is because the spark requires a connection to be made between personalities, not persons. The masks we wear in public make our true selves invisible to each other, and it's only in AOL chat rooms that we can truly be known.
Oh, something about the movie itself? It was fun, but a better ending would have had Kathleen falling out with Joe, then founding amazon.com to destroy his stippled brick-and-mortar empire.
- That Thing You Do! (1996): Like the previous movie, this is part of our traditional celebration of Hanksgiving, and we watch it every November 2023. I remember seeing the end of this movie on a VCR stand in high school, which spoiled the ending, but maybe that's a good thing. My viewing partner (Lady S— of G— Manor) was afraid the whole time that this was a movie where the evil record industry guy screws over the up-and-coming band. I tried to reassure her, but to no effect. Anyway, a fun way to bathe in someone else's nostalgia, if you go in knowing there's no real villain.
In the closing credits they play some of the hundreds of songs called "That Thing You Do" that were submitted for consideration as the fictional band's hit song. Possibly the largest number of songs ever written with the same title. At the time, I remember hearing that They Might Be Giants was one of the auditioners, and thinking that this represented a rather forlorn hope due to TMBG's rather distinctive style.
I assumed that sometime between 1996 and now, this song had made it onto some compilation album that I'd missed, but looking it up just now I see that that is not the case! Maybe because they signed over the rights when they submitted the song or something. It lingered unheard until 2021, when the TMBG "That Thing You Do" was leaked onto YouTube. I've heard it now and... they tried, but Tom Hanks (who surely made this decision personally) was right to go with Adam Schlesinger's version.
- Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): A fun movie, an early entry in the "multiple rom-coms going at once" subgenre that I saw later in Love In Space. The scenes in the big restaurant kitchen blew me away, especially that first long shot, which felt like a scene from a thriller. There was even some classic DOS laptop gaming action and Microsoft Paint 3.1. I must deduct a fraction of a point for not originating the "Sir, this is a Wendy's" joke. Harsh, I know, but those are the rules. Of course, it cancels out, since all movies ever made suffer the same penalty.
- A Global Affair (1964): Did you know that Bob Hope was a data scientist responsible for drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? Or at least, his character in this movie was, and we all know there's no real daylight between Bob Hope and the character he plays in his movies. In this one he's pushed into caring for an abandoned baby who's... the Messiah? The Antichrist? I dunno, the postwar internationalism of this movie forms a real Rorschach test when placed in a modern political context.
The marketing for this gender swap of The Lady Is Willing (not to mention the name of the movie) presents Bob as lecherous and vaguely Jack Nicholson-ish as delegations of ladies make eyes at him. But the actual movie, like all 1960s sex movies, shows him as nothing but put-upon and upset by the attentions of these international dames. They're seriously interfering with his golf game and his regression analysis!
In general I'm detecting an awkward changing of the guard in the 1960s, as Danny Kaye and Bob Hope hang on to roles that should have gone to Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon. At least Cary Grant had the good sense not to be in Man's Favorite Sport?. Hope is sixty years old in this movie, and he looks great for sixty, but by this time definitely seems more the "confirmed" kind of bachelor than the "swinging" kind.
PS: This movie's full of random UN factoids, some of which still apply. I didn't know that the UN headquarters is an extraterritorial exclave and not part of the United States or any other country. I'm pretty sure it's just that and Antarctica.
- Polite Society (2023): Loved this movie in a very particular way: this is the closest I've seen to a movie that captures the cinema-junkie fun of the Cornetto Trilogy movies. It starts out a slice-of-life movie full of references to genre movies, and then weird things start happening and it turns out to be a real live genre movie. Lots of fun. Sumana and I were also reminded of Sorry to Bother You (2018) in the specific way this one escalates.
- The Talk of the Town (1942): The kind of title you only use when you're desperate. They came up with twelve possible titles for this movie, and most of them were generic and dull, with The Talk of the Town being the dullest of all. The worst part is that The Talk of the Town was registered to Universal at the time, and Columbia had to trade away Sin Town (a better title!) to use it. So presumably this movie was originally going to be called The Talk of the Town.
This raises so many questions, some of which might be answered in my review of the bizarrely-named Upstream (1927), which lifts the curtain on a lost world of preregistered movie titles. But one question we may never see the answer to is: did Universal say "Send us whatever title you want, but it has to have 'Town' in the name. We're doing a picture about a town, by gum, and we can't lose that! Sin Town? Sure, we'll throw some sin in there."?
The movie itself certainly isn't dull, although it is somewhat dilg. Yes, my favorite pastime as the drama unfurled was making jokes about a character's unusual name. "Wow, Cary Grant is a real DILG." "He likes his borscht with a lot of dilg." "His favorite Babylon 5 alien species is the Dilgar." Sorry, I just had to get my dilgs in. Dilg is a very uncommon name but not unheard of: for example, Peter Dilg of Long Island "has one of the largest private collections in the country of windup phonographs and gramophones."
Anyway, the movie's fine. The best parts are Grant and Ronald Colman going at it like Socrates and Thrasymachus.
- Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949): We really enjoyed this Lucille Ball YIMBY comedy. I wasn't really expecting to, because my preexisting opinion about Lucille Ball was that she was a really good producer but her comedy hasn't aged well. After watching this movie, I think she's fine, and what hasn't aged well is the sitcom format.
See, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond, Ball's character is a clumsy ditz who gets in over her head, sort of like her character in I Love Lucy. If this was a sitcom, "clumsy ditz" would be the extent of her character development. Since this is a movie, we get to see her discover that being a clumsy ditz doesn't preclude you being really good at other things, like customer service and managing real estate developments. It's a more satisfying ending. Also, there's some great slapstick in this film which I don't think would have been allowed on television at the time.
- Godzilla Minus One (2023): This is very good, one of the best Godzilla movies, not least because of its refusal to zoom out from its focus on a few people who are having very bad days. Godzilla only shows up four times! This decision frustrated me while I was watching the movie, since I liked the grand (if incompetent) sweep of 2016's Shin Godzilla. But in retrospect it keeps the stakes at human scale in a movie about a very big thing (Godzilla).
This focus on the individual does mean the movie tips into cornball melodrama at a couple points, but maybe it's just a matter of degree. Maybe some people don't like seeing any level of human emotion in the hapless people who flee from Godzilla by running away in the same direction he's walking in, without really considering the possibilities of alleyways or crossstreets. (Not saying those are guaranteed safe, but give it a try, folks!) Maybe those people are at a 1, and people who really loved all the corny personal drama in this movie are at a 10, and I'm, let's say, at an 8.
Overall, I have to say I left the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.
Sun Dec 31 2023 14:48 December Film Roundup:
Happy new year! While doing some end-of-year housekeeping I discovered a pretty large number of movies I'd seen this year but not reviewed in Film Roundup. The downside is that I generally forgot these movies because they're not very good. Anyway, here we are! Let's start 2024 with a (probably) clean slate:
- Danger Flight (1939): I can barely remember this movie but I know we watched it and I anti-recommend it highly enough that the details don't matter much. It was trying to bring a wartime level of airborne action-movie excitement to a world that was not yet at war. So the plane is a mail plane, and the threats are bad weather and hoodlums.
Maybe this was even a serial pasted together into a feature? I don't remember and won't look it up, but it had that feeling.
- Goverment Girl (1943): This one wasn't great either but it gives an interesting glimpse into the extreme housing shortages of wartime Washington.
There's a car chase sequence in this film that was actually filmed on the streets of D.C., and while watching it I was struck by how rarely I've seen such a thing in Code-era movie. It's not technically impossible; Buster Keaton was filming car chases in the 1920s. But I feel like from the invention of talkies until 196x, car chases were done in the studio with rear projection and are thus not very exciting. In fact, I think the only reason they filmed this one on location is that it's a motorcycle, not a car, so rear projection wouldn't work.
Visit to a Small Planet (1960): "Maybe a science fiction theme will make dorky Jerry Lewis comedy more bearable," I thought. Oh, what an innocent fool was I! It's bad. I remember some alien/beatnik interactions that were kinda funny. Oh, and the moment in the nearby screenshot had a great Jerry Lewis delivery.
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947): This film does not have the courage of its convictions. After a few fun fantasy sequences a la the original source material, Walter Mitty is quickly thrown into a world of real thrills and excitement and excuses for Danny Kaye patter songs. At that point it turns into a fish-out-of-water scenario, like North by Northwest or something. When Walter Mitty is about a fish who wishes he was out of water and never will be. James Thurber hated this movie, but presumably not enough to tear up his big check from Samuel Goldwyn. I merely found it a bit dull, and got no check from Goldwyn whatsoever.
OK, now for the movies I saw this month:
- Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): Excellent continuation and conclusion to the trilogy. The naturalistic, conversational style continues. Before Sunset perfectly captures the long lingering when you really need to go, but you're with the one you want to be with. Good stuff.
- Luv (1967): The Elaine May/Jack Lemmon/Peter Falk collaboration we needed to heal our nation. Pretty sure nothing bad happened after 1967, but there's still time. From the period when Broadway plays were routinely turned into movies, this has very heavy "play" marks on it and it's not exactly a great comedy, but we were in the mood for dark madcap humor and this delivered.
The neurotic late-60s Neil Simon-ness of the characters in this movie brought to mind the elevator scene from Sweet Charity (1969). That scene is a lot funnier than anything in Luv, but it was nice to be reminded of it.
- The Philadelphia Story (1940): Can you be more specific? I thought I was going to see Rocky. I'm going to go against the moviegoer grain here and say this was just okay. So much sitcom-style misunderstanding! Admittedly this movie predates sitcoms, but at this point I'm tired of it. Just communicate, people! I'm pretty sure I fell asleep for about 10 minutes and missed nothing.
Yeah, good thing Film Roundup isn't one of the inputs into the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator, or this review would spoil its 100% rating and I'd have the hardcore Storyheads coming after me.
- Scrooged (1988): I finally understand why people my age claim Die Hard (1988) as a Christmas movie; because otherwise they'd have to watch Scrooged every year. A decent concept with great practical effects becomes disappointingly random due to countless script rewrites, self-indulgence, and Bill Murray's insistence on improvising important bits. Sure, that speech at the end is an impressive feat, but we have large language models now, so the burden of rattling off vague sentiments can now be lifted from humanity's shoulders. Elaine May had an uncredited writing pass on this movie; they should had just filmed whatever she wrote.
- The Boy and the Heron (2023): This may be the most controversial sentiment I've shared on Film Roundup, but this movie is not good. It's the kind of thing you make when you're so famous and important that you bypass an agonizing but essential part of the creative process: having someone else look at your draft and tell you that there's really good stuff in here but it's too big and sloppy, and you need to figure out what story you want to tell and focus on that.
The good movie inside this one is something self-critical with evil Totoroid parakeets, something about the juggernaut Miyazaki has created, the immortal images in his films and the limits of art's ability to change the world. But that new idea doesn't show up for a long time and it's in there with so much more typical stuff, that I wasn't feeling it at all.
There's the very slight chance that this is awesome in Japanese and a bum translation screwed everything up, but reviews of this movie sound like people trying to convince themselves that a bad movie is good.
- Our Hospitality (1923): This (now public domain!) film apparently invented the idea of clogging up a hilarious short with a bunch of dramatic plot elements to pad it out to feature length. Yes, Buster Keaton's innovations have always been a double-edged sword. The stunts are great as always, and the parts where Buster's running in and out of the house like a deadly game of freezetag are quite funny, so overall I do recommend this one. I mean, the "padding" takes it to 73 minutes, it's not that bad.
- Cup of Cheer (2020): This film is a mess. But we enjoyed finally seeing a Christmas romance parody that swings for the hard R rating, especially given its Zucker and Zucker-like insistence on playing everything straight. But it's a mess. It feels like much of the screenplay was improvised and typed up without polishing. Really funny moments sit side-by-side with obvious clunkers and entire subplots that aren't funny and don't add anything.
If you read IMDB reviews you'll see the movie's natural audience have been turned off by all the swearing and filthy dialogue, and you'd think this would drag down its rating beyond what it should be, but a 5.5 is exactly what Cup of Cheer deserves.
- Oppenheimer (2023): I was engaged for three hours despite already knowing the story, so objectively speaking I have to count this movie as a success. Creatively, the most interesting part for me was the junction between the second and third acts, right after the Trinity test. Oppenheimer sees his world-historical importance slipping out of his fingers, never to return, until he's just a schmoe like the rest of us. The key scene IMO was the one where the A-bombs are loaded into trucks and the trucks drive out of Los Alamos and the camera doesn't follow them.
This month, Television Spotlight focuses on Taskmaster, a show that combines the collegiality of British panel shows with the sadism of Japanese game shows. We're slowly going through the show, we're on series 9 or something, occasionally re-meeting someone we recognize from the small and incestuous world of British comedy. You were in Footlights, eh? Interesting, interesting.
We've also started going through the international spinoffs, notably Kongen Befaler, the Norwegian edition. Kongen Befaler contestants are all notably more handy than their British counterparts, possibly because Norway has universal compulsory military service. Update: This is not true, I misread an ambiguous document. Only about 10% of Norwegians actually undergo military training. However, according to Norwegian Wikipedia, Calle Hellevang-Larsen, one of the handier participants, is "a trained marine telegrapher from the Norwegian Navy."
