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Sat Sep 05 2015 16:52 August Film Roundup:
- Stagecoach (1939): I always come into these hyper-classics expecting to be disappointed, but Stagecoach totally delivered. It's a movie full of memorable character actors and easy-to-get jokes. Its plot structure is very unusual for a western. I found it a cut above much "deeper" westerns like Red River. Recommended.
- The Sun Shines Bright (1953): John Ford's second attempt at Judge Priest, the film I walked out of in July. I saw this one with Camille, so I was committed. Still has Stepin Fetchit doing his bit but generally achieves 1950s-liberal levels of anti-racism. I upgrade this version to "watchable." There's a scene where a lynch mob pours into town, and you see reaction shots from all the black characters, and it's filmed like the scene in a western where the bad guy walks down main street and the shopkeepers hurriedly close up shop. Also a very effective moment of cringe comedy at the beginning, like the striptease in Cotton Comes to Harlem. Plenty of good stuff interspersed between the never-explained scandals and the tepid romance between [Female Lead] and [We Can't Give An Old Guy Top Billing! Get Me a Zeppo Marx type!]
Between this and Stagecoach I wasn't expecting how pro-sex-worker John Ford is. ("So was Jesus."—Camille) This is the one that really hammers the point home, though. So cheesy and heartfelt and effective. Not believable, but effective. People marching with a banner saying "He Saved Us From Ourselves"—the ultimate liberal fantasy!
- Brainstorm (1983): I was really impressed by Brainstorm's portrayal of a Research Triangle tech company and the weirdos who work there. It doesn't hurt that Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher play the weirdos. Some really clever twists, by which I mean ideas you might see in print SF in 1983, instead of film being twenty years behind like usual. It becomes kind of goofy at the end, but it's a Douglas Trumbull movie, you're gonna get some goofiness. A pleasant surprise.
- Victor/Victoria (1982): I cut this movie a lot of slack while I was watching it because I seriously thought it was made in, like, 1965. It's a mashup of a bunch of mid-1960s movie plots, and I'm still at a loss to explain how young Julie Andrews looks in this movie. Maybe a mosquito bit her just as The Sound of Music wrapped, the mosquito was preserved in amber, and a clone of the beloved actress was created from the blood in the mosquito's stomach. I assure you, it's quite possible. German scientists brought to the United States by Operation Paperclip had been researching... but you're not here for the science lesson.
I don't know about the politics of this movie, I guess it's pretty good for 1982. Overall it's kind of a mess in my mind. It's worth watching just to see Robert Preston (who has aged a normal amount) be a huge ham. There were a lot of funny moments but also a lot of duds, like the... bumbling private detective? What, did Blake Edwards direct this? Oh, he did? Well, he should know better.
PS: In an act of sheer cowardice, a "nobody's perfect"-style line was cut from the romantic lead's part, leaving him nearly as Zeppo-ish as the dude in The Sun Shines Bright.
- It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963): I'd never seen the prequels (It's a World (1956), It's a Mad World (1958), It's a Mad Mad World (1959), etc.) but it's pretty easy to follow. Also easy to see why this is where the franchise ran out of steam. Not recommended, especially since The Great Race (1965) fixes every problem with this movie:
- Shorter
- Less sexist
- Better characters
- Better jokes
- Better slapstick
- More Peter Falk
So watch The Great Race instead. It's one of my favorite movies and maybe the best thing about It's a (Mad )* World is that it ensured The Great Race would be greenlit.
- Baahubali: The Beginning (2015): Saw it again with the in-laws. My verdict is the same as before. One funny thing I forgot: there's a guy who's got all his lackeys together to carry out a coup, and as he explains why pulling a coup is the right thing to do, ethically speaking, all his lackeys intone in unison: "The right decision." It's funny the same way "The greater good." is funny in Hot Fuzz. I asked my brother-in-law if that was a translation error and he said no, that's pretty much what they say in the Telugu original.
In our collection of Amar Chitra Katha we found a comic called "Bahubali", and although it shares some similarities to the movie it's not the same story. The comic is notable for having a conflict between two brothers which could lead to war, but is instead resolved by contests of brotherly roughhousing: backyard wrestling, splashing water at each other, and so on.
- The Master (2012): I guess it was inevitable that some big-shot Hollywood auteur would take it into his head to make a prequel to Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), answering all the questions no one cared to ask, like: why is Torgo's posture so poor? How did he and the Master meet? And why does the Master keep all his wives under hypnosis? Creating such an elaborate backstory to something so silly is, well, silly, but it's also something I would do, so I'll give it a pass.
The performances in this are great, but it's ultimately another in Paul Thomas Anderson's explorations of horrible men being horrible, so... I'd stick with There Will Be Blood. At least there's blood in that one.
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