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Tue Oct 01 2019 21:13 September Film Roundup:
- Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982): In movie terms, this is the Crewman Daniels-esque car that Johnny Cash builds in "One Piece at a Time". The Steve Martin/Carl Reiner brand of comedy is able to drive the weirdo car a pretty good way, but I was left a bit disappointed. Like a Mel Brooks film, this is really sentimental about The Movies in a way that probably touches the hearts of those people who go in to work every day to make The Movies. But most of us have different jobs, and the technical achievement here rarely serves the comedy or the plot (in fact the plot serves it, big time). The one genre of joke I think they really nailed is the "noir narrator" joke. Just off the top of my head I can remember two great gags that came out of fooling with the narration.
As an interesting cross-reference, the mailing list manager Enemies of Carlotta is a reference to this film.
- Steven Universe The Movie (2019): I'm reserving judgement until I see the next season of the TV show because this movie sets up one of my favorite SF conceits -- aliens living alongside humans on Earth, c.f. Constellation Games -- and doesn't do much with it. Wasted opportunity? Not if they go on to spend a large number of ten-minute cartoons exploring the topic! Otherwise... this was a fun kid's movie. I'm not a kid anymore and I know this isn't designed for me, I'm just watching over your metaphorical shoulder.
- Shadow of the Thin Man (1941): At this point we're just watching for the comic relief scenes. Dashiel Hammett doesn't have so much as a "based on an original story by" credit anymore and the mystery bits are pretty dull. Nick and Nora were fun in New York, fun in San Francisco, but in this movie they live in an unnamed split-the-difference city that feels like pure backlot. William Powell's still funny. though.
The only thing that would convince me to watch the rest of this series is 1) Sumana might want to, 2) eventually a young Dean Stockwell starts playing the kid!
- The Phantom Carriage (1921): A century before The Good Place, there was... this. There's some cool technical wizardry (In its day, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was hailed as "A new The Phantom Carriage"), and it's always nice to watch a silent film with live accompaniment, but overall I wasn't sold on the melodrama and the moralizing. The museum handout intepreted the whole supernatural element as a metaphor for the main character's alcoholism, and although readings like that generally annoy me, I think it makes a lot of sense here.
Having to drive Death's carriage for a year seems horrible, what with being endlessly confronted with human frailty and misery, but is it really worse than spending that same year in the Bad Place? One of many worldbuilding questions not considered by this movie, perhaps confirming the "metaphor for alcoholism" theory.
- Comfort and Joy (1984): This was my introduction to Bill Forsyth, who's already one of my favorite directors. I'd never heard of him before this month. Now I've seen three of his films (see below) and am eager to see the rest. His work is really consistent, but he doesn't have a ton of credits and hasn't directed since 1999, which made me suspect an Elaine May "movie jail" situation. Best I can see looking around the web is he just got tired of making movies.
Getting down to specifics: Comfort and Joy is a light comedy about mob violence where nobody gets hurt. It's all property damage. I'll say two negative things about it: the ending is really slight and although any resemblance is purely coincidental, etc. etc., there was real ice cream mob violence in Glasgow around this time and it's hard not to see this movie making light of it—a criticism that would have less bite if the movie was more satirical and less fluffy. Apart from that, a really good time.
As in many movies, there's a dream sequence in Comfort and Joy that is shot as though it were actually happening, ending with a smash cut to the sleeper waking up. Unlike most movies that do this, here we've also got a second dream sequence featuring the same characters, in which one of the characters is loudly suspicious that this is a dream, is finally convinced it's not, smash cut—they were right, it was a dream. Pure comedy... I'm gonna say comedy thallium.
- Breaking In (1989): I saw this one with Sumana and it blew us away! Great gags, great performances, a good heart, minor characters get their chance to be funny, awesome Portland locations. Sumana proposed this film as a model for Breaking Bad, and it's very plausible. Unlike a lot of stories of mismatched partners, it's clear here what each party gets out of the relationship, and at the end they both think they've come out ahead. Overall I'd compare this to Big Business—a hilarious but forgotten 80s comedy that's miles ahead of most of the stuff people remember. It's even got some subtle Edgar Wright-style jokes—(Delphine:Carrie::Ernie:Mike):::Shaun:Yvonne. Yes, I had to use parentheses and the rarely seen triple-colon to explain that analogy.
- Housekeeping (1987): This movie was not a laugh-a-minute crime comedy, so I didn't love it as much as Comfort and Joy and Breaking In, but it was solid. I was taken aback by the audacity of flooding the set, something I don't think I've ever seen. Though I imagine most movie ships are sets that can be flooded. Anyway, good mischief—comic and otherwise—in a less comedic universe than the other two Forsyth movies I've seen.