Mon Sep 04 2023 11:04 August Film Roundup:
- 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964): The traditional film seen a while ago that I forgot to round up until Sumana reminded me. A low-budget sex comedy with a brilliant premise (illicit timesharing of an expensive psychiatrist), some Mamie Van Doren jiggle, and maybe three funny jokes. The sort of film you'd see on an R-rated MST3K.
The "three funny jokes" thing makes me think there's a lot of these old movies that could be edited down to the length of a TikTok video. It'd be the film school equivalent of those one-page summaries of business books so you don't have to read the book. "But Leonard," you might say, "that only works because those business books only have about one page of real content in the first place. It has to be padded into book form because that's how such insights are sold in modern society." To you I say: I have some bad news about movies.
- Winny (2023): A decent biopic of a piece of software which IMO lionizes developers too much. Maybe that's a side effect of the dramatization because the issues are complex, but if any nation's film industry can make "This approach to law enforcement would criminalize basic research!" exciting, it would be Japan's. Rise to the challenge, I say.
- Free Guy (2021): I saw this movie and it was pretty fun but I really don't have much to say about it because I already said it all in "Dana no Chousen".
Early in the story, Guy obtains an extra pair of magic sunglasses, but nothing comes of it and it never gets used. Most scholars see this as evidence of editorial fatigue on the part of the redactor as they excised a scene from the film—itself a copy of a parable from the Carpenter Scrolls—in which Buddy gets his own pair of sunglasses.
- Barbie (2023): Very clever and fun. Everything from the actors' body language to the random and inexplicable plot twists indicate that the director is playing with the Barbie franchise the way a child plays with an individual Barbie doll. The normal Hollywood movie beats happen, but the film's so chaotic that an act break acts as a kind of refresher, like the quiet catch-your-breath scene following a chase in an action movie. I do not usually laugh out loud (or LOL, as the handy abbreviation puts it) while watching movies, but Barbie got me several times.
- The Band's Visit (2007): Although I scoff at the traditional Hollywood three-act structure (and just did) I do prefer movies with a through-line. I rarely enjoy the type of film that presents a series of disconnected, nearly stochastic skits, but this one was really fun. I think the unity of time on display gives it a sort of through-line, and the decision to focus on just a couple of the many quirky characters stops it from getting scattershot the way Muppet movies are these days. This was made into a stage musical, but I think the amount of music here is just right: the bulky instruments are basically just big inconvenient pieces of luggage until the final scene.
- Kittu Puttu (1977): DNF, as they say. This was on a DVD Sumana brought back from India and we could not find English subtitles for it anywhere, so Sumana tried translating the dialogue for a while, but it wasn't very rewarding so we gave up. Supposedly there's a split-screen dual role later on, which could provide some gags, or at least cheesy low-budget fun.
- Starman (1984): John Carpenter tries to deliver a heartwarming rom-com, and only reveals the horror movie at the heart of every rom-com. It's like a pre-deconstruction of the Hallmark Channel genre, where the new lover and the creepy stalker and the dead husband are all the same guy.
I'm always here for a Carl Sagan pastiche and SF that uses the Voyager record as a plot element. And I suspect Jeff Bridges' performance here (for which he got a Best Actor nomination) was an inspiration for Brent Spiner's portrayal of Data. Would I recommend this movie? I dunno, but I always like whenever Carpenter tries something different.
- Impromptu (1991): I reluctantly agreed to watch this Masterpiece Theatre-ass movie because Sumana remembered seeing it on Masterpiece Theatre in 1993 and enjoyed it. Thirty years later, I have enjoyed it too! It's really funny! Hugh Grant is funny and frail; Judy Davis is funny and brassy. I must say that this film has one of the clearest examples I've seen of the old adage that the difference between a happy ending and a sad ending is when you stop telling the story.
- Badhaai Do (2022): A misleadingly humorous poster led us to expect a more comedic rom-com than we got, but this was all right, I thought. Rajkummar Rao continues his trend of being one of this household's favorite actors, partly because of his insistence on only taking non-generic roles.
- The Celluloid Closet (1996): Sumana saw that this was leaving Tubi and I suggested that we watch it for one reason only: so I could confirm my hypothesis that Algie the Miner (1912) is included in the movie but not the book the movie is based on. Well, it is, and looking at that old post it looks like I'd already confirmed this hypothesis. But, a good overview of (among other things) the changing techniques used to circumvent the Hays Code and the effects those circumlocutions had on people for whom they were the only source of representation seen in movies. Sumana pointed that most of the Hays censorship involved approval of scripts, so once the script was approved, there was all sorts of nonverbal stuff you could do when filming the script to get your point across.
Gore Vidal and Susan Sarandon are a hoot, and Tom Hanks is refreshingly frank about the source of his success: "I have never been one to strike fear into anyone's hearts when I enter the room." Tell that to Sony CEO Howard Stringer, Tom.
Finally, it's a Television Spotlight on Guns & Gulaabs (2023), a crime comedy that recreates the nostalgic (for Sumana) atmosphere of India of the 90s. Which is not that different from rural California in the 80s, so I got a bit of the bittersweet air as well. Gulshan Devaiah is so sinister as the bemulleted jean-jacket assassin in this, that it was a pleasant surprise when we saw him later in the month, pursuing Rajkummar Rao once again as the goofy gay lawyer in Badhaii Do.
The series was a lot of fun and led up to a cool heist, but I don't know about calling it a comedy. Breaking Bad (clearly a big influence) has a lot of similar humor to it, but nobody tags that show as "comedy." A lot of what I think was meant to read as comedy here was actually people making stupid choices, which I don't find all that funny. You can try and make it funny to lampshade a weak plot point, but that's not what was happening here.
