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Mon May 06 2019 07:54 April Film Roundup:
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Tomorrow Never Dies (1997): Not a big Bond fan—I've now seen three movies and read one of the novels—but another member of my household enjoys the action set pieces, and these action set pieces were pretty good. I liked how Michelle Yeoh randomly went in and out of scenes before showing up permanently, implying a whole other movie going on in the background. Yeah, it was fun.
According to IMDB trivia this title changed from Tomorrow Never Lies because of a typo. The producers adjusted their monocles and said 'I say, this plucky typo has the right idea!'. I think that's emblematic of how little care the Bond franchise takes with its titles. If they don't care, why should I?
- Thelma and Louise (1991): I usually enjoy movies where the problems start small and escalate out of control, so this was a good time. Really good pacing: the breaks in the action let you breathe but they're also setting up the next escalation. As in Mad Max: Fury Road, the episodic 'road trip' format maps well onto a chase.
I watched this with a friend who was really confident they knew what happens at the end but who was surprised! So I got a nice surprise-by-proxy.
- The French Connection (1971): This movie really puts the 'procedural' in 'police procedural'. Lots of waiting, and running around on crowded sidewalks. I'm not complaining; this is some classic crime-and-grime. Plus, there's a chase scene between car and subway train! But the thing I want to tell you about is the song near the beginning of the film.
This blog post has the movie clip plus a live version of the song that's easier to follow. It's called "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon", it was written by Jimmy Webb (of "MacArthur Park" fame) and originally sung in 1969 by Thelma Houston in a version that starts out pretty nice but turns way-too-clever in a way that's distracting. Maybe that's why it wasn't a big hit. But the Three Degrees rehabilitate it, speed it up and put a lot of energy and joy into it.
I think this song appears in The French Connection solely to set up a dramatic contrast between space-age optimism and the moral rot of the "real world". But this song is the best thing about the movie! It's almost fifty years later and we've been making gritty cop movies nonstop, some of them are pretty good, but we haven't done much that goes on the same shelf as "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon".