News You Can Bruise for 2016 May 1

Man, this took forever to put together. I can't believe how many movies I saw in April, given that we spent a week in France, where everyone knows they don't have movies. Enjoy:

• Dracula (1931): Introduced by Guy Maddin! The projectionist accidentally (?) started showing us the original, and then had to start over with the version with the Phillip Glass soundtrack, and you really can tell the difference. It made a slow-paced movie seem action-packed. I haven't read the book and didn't really know anything about the plot apart from "vampire bites a buncha people", and I thought Renfield was great. I liked his abrupt turn from snob to craven Torgo-esque servant. If anything, it was a little disappointing how the best plot element in the movie happened right at the beginning.

  I also liked how Van Helsing doesn't pussyfoot around like a lot of movie scientists. He's like "these bite marks indicate it's a vampire, therefore vampires are real, deal with it." Also enjoyable whenever Mina would glare really hard at her Zeppo-esque fiance trying to work vampire magic on him.

  The ending was super disappointing! Dracula gets staked offscreen and you don't get to see what could be a great Bela Lugosi death scene.

  Since Jeanne Thornton is a big Guy Maddin fan I decided it would be cool if I could get him to autograph my Dracula ticket to her, so after the show I looked around for him, but he had disappeared... like a vampire! Or like a guy with something to do other than watch the movie he introduced.

  (If the tone of this review seems different from usual it's because I basically copy-and-pasted it from an email thread with Jeanne.)

• Buck and the Preacher (1972): Seen as part of a Sidney Poitier retrospective at the museum. Overall these films gave me an appreciation for Poitier's skill in psychologically intense action roles. The only movie I'd seen him in previously was Sneakers (1992), where he scowls a lot but doesn't do much action. In The Heat of the Night (1967) is on my list but we haven't seen it yet.

  Anyway, around 1989 I remember a movie about black cowboys came out (I don't remember the name and can't find it) and it was... not controversial, but it was remarked upon as unusual. But having discovered old movies after starting Film Roundup, I've learned that that movie would have been right at home in Hollywood fifteen years earlier. The 1970s saw tons of action movies and thrillers that have been stuffed into the "blaxploitation" box, plus a good number of westerns and comedies by and for African-Americans.

  Something happened in the 1980s, maybe due to the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster, and now we mainly remember Blazing Saddles (1974), a movie directed by a white guy that plays the "black cowboy" idea for laughs. Blazing Saddles is a really funny movie, but it came out in the context of movies like this which took the same topic seriously. So it's like we're yukking it up at Spaceballs, but all we remember is Buck Rogers and we've all forgotten about Star Wars.

  You don't need a "reason" to put black characters in a period genre piece, but this movie has a very good reason and it gives the plot, which is basically cribbed from Wagon Master, some real heft. It helps that the ending isn't a big disappointment like Wagon Master's was. A really solid movie overall.

  I could have used a little more of Harry Belafonte's con-man preacher. There's a great scene where he's sweet-talking himself into Sunday dinner and you can see the pioneer ladies thinking "He's obviously a con man, but it's not like we have a real preacher..." But probably the best scene is one where Buck and the Preacher rob a telegraph office, but they can't get at the money, and rather than let it become a Dog Day Afternoon situation they just cross the street and rob the bank as well!

• Francofonia (2015): Kinda disappointing film from the director of the gorgeous Russian Ark (2002) (one of the first films reviewed on NYCB). There's a plotline that's really good, and it's the one that you see in the promotional material for the film, making you think it's the whole film, but there are two or three other plotlines sprinkled in and none of them are very good. I did like seeing Napoleon mugging in front of the Louvre's collection of paintings of him. And that one plotline is really good. Maybe a "Phantom Edit"-type vigilante operation is called for.

  On the plus side, when we went to Paris this made me feel better about skipping the Louvre. There were specific works of art I wanted to see in Paris, but they were all in the Pompidou Centre.

• The Defiant Ones (1958): An intense, personal thriller. Poitier and Tony Curtis are great, and the supporting cast includes Theodore Bikel as the Southern sheriff, plus Lon Chaney Jr. doing the same twitchy-eyed thing he does in The Indestructible Man (1957). One of those films you can recommend just by saying who's in it and asserting that they didn't screw it up.
• Paris Blues (1961): Conveniently, we saw this movie the day we left for our Paris vacation. There's a scene with Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll on the bridge by Notre Dame, and twenty-four hours later we were walking that same bridge. Really great.

  The movie itself is pretty light fare, but it's an enjoyable rom-dram that doesn't settle for easy answers, and it's got hot jazz and great shots of nighttime Paris. I got a strong Commander Riker vibe watching Paul Newman pretend (?) to play the trombone.

• Tomorrowland (2015): I'd been wanting to see this movie for its retro-tech cheese factor, but then it was shown on the flight back from Paris at an inconvenient but not quite ignorable angle, and I got enough of it to see that it all plays out as you'd expect, but not enough to say that I've really 'seen' the movie. So let it sit eternally on this dread threshold, neither seen nor unseen, neither Rounded Up nor un-, until the end of days!
• Blow Out (1981): This started out great but rapidly went downhill, where The Parallax View (1974) starts out okay but ramps up the tension throughout. I feel like Brian de Palma is wagging a Hitchcockian finger at me for my supposed voyeuristic love of exploitation movies, whether they're trash like the fictional movie-within-a-movie in Blow Out, or Hollywood fare like Blow Out itself, or something highbrow like Blue Velvet. But I don't seek these movies out, buddy, I just watch what they show at the museum, so the joke's on you.

  Anyway, I would have liked this movie a lot more if there had been less crazy John Lithgow and more John Travolta out in the woods with a shotgun mic. My recommendation is to watch The Parallax View and The Conversation (1974) instead of seeing this. Sure, it takes more time to watch two really good movies instead of one mediocre movie, but you can't rush quality.

• Shuffle Along (2016): Our second Broadway excursion. Post-Hamilton we've decided to pay more attention when our theater-loving friends say something's great and we should get in on the ground floor. And... problems with this technique are now becoming apparent.

  Shuffle Along is a good time. It's an all-black musical about the creation and staging of another all-black musical. It deals with serious topics in a funny way, it's got great old-timey costumes and tap dancing. If I saw a musical every week I too might be thinking "yes, this is a cut above, a true classic", and recommending it to all. But since I don't, it was well within the range of "normal musical" to me. The love story was meh. The history bits suffered from major show-don't-tell issues (occasionally also a problem with Hamilton).

  We saw a preview, so maybe everything has been improved 100%, but what hasn't changed is that tickets start at eighty bucks a pop. I'm not prepared to pay that much for entertainment on a regular basis. And this strategy has worked really well for me. In all my years in New York the only live performance I've regretted missing was Bryan Cranston in All The Way, and they're turning that into a movie, so no harm done.

• Zootopia (2016): Seen on a double-date. There was a lot of fun stuff in this. The worldbuilding was great, and the design of Zootopia the city makes me feel like the movie is taking place on a space station or a ringworld or something. As with Inside Out (2015), there was also the hint of something deeper but I don't think the "deeper" thing was put together coherently enough to deserve credit. And even at the superficial level Inside Out was a lot deeper than this movie, if that makes sense.

  For me, the best cop stories are stories about systemic problems that the cops can't fix or are making worse. Zootopia is that kind of story, but this could easily have been an accident that happened in the course of building a more superficial story about the same topics. According to IMDB trivia a lot of the movie was reworked after the first test screenings in 2014, so that could have caused it, or maybe the creators of the movie didn't want to "overthink" things. (Bah!)

  The Discworld Watch novels also deal with the topic of the responsibilities of a police force in a multispecies society. In fact I think it gets a little tiresome seeing the Watch novels deal with this issue over and over again, but Terry Pratchett clearly gets it. And I don't think Zootopia does because it creates problems of systemic racism and addresses them as though they are problems of personal prejudice (which it nails with cringey gags).

  Is a shrew crime boss terrorizing your city? Maybe his grip would be less secure if he didn't know 100% that there are no shrews on the police force! That sort of thing. It's hard to fault Zootopia for being "unrealistic" in this regard, since very similar things happen in real life. And I'm spending a lot of time on this because Zootopia does seem aware that something deeper is going on, and interested in addressing it, but it feels like the edges got sanded off.

  Having written all this I can't square it with the fact that my favorite cop movie is Hot Fuzz (2007), a cinematic tribute to all the cop movies I hate. Could it be that I contain... multitudes?

  Speaking of the shrew crime boss... The Godfather came out in 1972, long before I was born. When I was a kid you'd sometimes get a Saturday morning cartoon doing the Godfather bit, and it felt a little old-fashioned, like seeing Clark Gable in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Now it's 2016. This movie came out forty years ago and we're still doing extended riffs on it. Not a 'parody' per se, but a long reenactment with no twists or jokes. I love some Maurice LaMarche but it feels like this bit came out of a "Man, have you heard LaMarche do Brando? It's incredible, we gotta put him in the movie!" type discussion. They shoulda had him do the frozen peas commercial instead.

  IMDB trivia: "This is the tenth film from Walt Disney Animation Studios to feature a character who is revealed to be the villain of the movie as a surprise[.]" Not much of a surprise anymore, is it?

• That's it for movies. But there's one more thing to take care of. This month, let's focus the Television Spotlight on Columbo (1971-2003), a mystery show where there's no mystery. You know who the killer is—it's the celebrity guest star, the first act is them committing the murder—and you know what's going to happen—Peter Falk's Columbo is going to come in, get the killer to underestimate him, and then bust them.

  It's tempting to say something like "you'd think this wouldn't work," but why wouldn't it work? It works fine. You know exactly what's going to happen in a Bertie Wooster story, but it's still hilarious. What doesn't "work" is lazy mystery shows that assume they can fool us because we don't know how to watch television. As with many TV shows, Columbo's plots are a metaphor for the process of the show's production: the triumph of patient competence over flashy genius.

  I came into Columbo a few years ago because Sumana's parents were big fans. I'd heard of it, sure, but thought it was just another 70s cop show like Kojak. But you put them side by side and there's no contest. Columbo might be the earliest fully modern television show. It's the Tristam Shandy of TV.

  That said, individual episodes can flop. Each episode is basically a long face-off, so it succeeds or fails on the chemistry between Falk and the guest star. And the 70s episodes are a lot better than the 90s episodes. But overall, a hell of an achievement. As your guide to sorting out the good from the bad, I recommend the Columbo podcast Just One More Thing.

Well, see you next—ow! I banged my shin on Tomorrowland (2015), which for some reason is sitting right in the middle of this high-traffic dread threshold! Oh, right, the curse. Well, only one way to undo my hasty decision—express an opinion about the movie! It was a nice surprise to see Hugh Laurie as the scenery-chewing villain. Bye!