News You Can Bruise for 2023 December 31

Happy new year! While doing some end-of-year housekeeping I discovered a pretty large number of movies I'd seen this year but not reviewed in Film Roundup. The downside is that I generally forgot these movies because they're not very good. Anyway, here we are! Let's start 2024 with a (probably) clean slate:

• Danger Flight (1939): I can barely remember this movie but I know we watched it and I anti-recommend it highly enough that the details don't matter much. It was trying to bring a wartime level of airborne action-movie excitement to a world that was not yet at war. So the plane is a mail plane, and the threats are bad weather and hoodlums.

  Maybe this was even a serial pasted together into a feature? I don't remember and won't look it up, but it had that feeling.

• Goverment Girl (1943): This one wasn't great either but it gives an interesting glimpse into the extreme housing shortages of wartime Washington.

  There's a car chase sequence in this film that was actually filmed on the streets of D.C., and while watching it I was struck by how rarely I've seen such a thing in Code-era movie. It's not technically impossible; Buster Keaton was filming car chases in the 1920s. But I feel like from the invention of talkies until 196x, car chases were done in the studio with rear projection and are thus not very exciting. In fact, I think the only reason they filmed this one on location is that it's a motorcycle, not a car, so rear projection wouldn't work.

• Visit to a Small Planet (1960): "Maybe a science fiction theme will make dorky Jerry Lewis comedy more bearable," I thought. Oh, what an innocent fool was I! It's bad. I remember some alien/beatnik interactions that were kinda funny. Oh, and the moment in the nearby screenshot had a great Jerry Lewis delivery.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947): This film does not have the courage of its convictions. After a few fun fantasy sequences a la the original source material, Walter Mitty is quickly thrown into a world of real thrills and excitement and excuses for Danny Kaye patter songs. At that point it turns into a fish-out-of-water scenario, like North by Northwest or something. When Walter Mitty is about a fish who wishes he was out of water and never will be. James Thurber hated this movie, but presumably not enough to tear up his big check from Samuel Goldwyn. I merely found it a bit dull, and got no check from Goldwyn whatsoever.

OK, now for the movies I saw this month:

• Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): Excellent continuation and conclusion to the trilogy. The naturalistic, conversational style continues. Before Sunset perfectly captures the long lingering when you really need to go, but you're with the one you want to be with. Good stuff.
• Luv (1967): The Elaine May/Jack Lemmon/Peter Falk collaboration we needed to heal our nation. Pretty sure nothing bad happened after 1967, but there's still time. From the period when Broadway plays were routinely turned into movies, this has very heavy "play" marks on it and it's not exactly a great comedy, but we were in the mood for dark madcap humor and this delivered.

  The neurotic late-60s Neil Simon-ness of the characters in this movie brought to mind the elevator scene from Sweet Charity (1969). That scene is a lot funnier than anything in Luv, but it was nice to be reminded of it.

• The Philadelphia Story (1940): Can you be more specific? I thought I was going to see Rocky. I'm going to go against the moviegoer grain here and say this was just okay. So much sitcom-style misunderstanding! Admittedly this movie predates sitcoms, but at this point I'm tired of it. Just communicate, people! I'm pretty sure I fell asleep for about 10 minutes and missed nothing.

  Yeah, good thing Film Roundup isn't one of the inputs into the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator, or this review would spoil its 100% rating and I'd have the hardcore Storyheads coming after me.

• Scrooged (1988): I finally understand why people my age claim Die Hard (1988) as a Christmas movie; because otherwise they'd have to watch Scrooged every year. A decent concept with great practical effects becomes disappointingly random due to countless script rewrites, self-indulgence, and Bill Murray's insistence on improvising important bits. Sure, that speech at the end is an impressive feat, but we have large language models now, so the burden of rattling off vague sentiments can now be lifted from humanity's shoulders. Elaine May had an uncredited writing pass on this movie; they should had just filmed whatever she wrote.
• The Boy and the Heron (2023): This may be the most controversial sentiment I've shared on Film Roundup, but this movie is not good. It's the kind of thing you make when you're so famous and important that you bypass an agonizing but essential part of the creative process: having someone else look at your draft and tell you that there's really good stuff in here but it's too big and sloppy, and you need to figure out what story you want to tell and focus on that.

  The good movie inside this one is something self-critical with evil Totoroid parakeets, something about the juggernaut Miyazaki has created, the immortal images in his films and the limits of art's ability to change the world. But that new idea doesn't show up for a long time and it's in there with so much more typical stuff, that I wasn't feeling it at all.

  There's the very slight chance that this is awesome in Japanese and a bum translation screwed everything up, but reviews of this movie sound like people trying to convince themselves that a bad movie is good.

• Our Hospitality (1923): This (now public domain!) film apparently invented the idea of clogging up a hilarious short with a bunch of dramatic plot elements to pad it out to feature length. Yes, Buster Keaton's innovations have always been a double-edged sword. The stunts are great as always, and the parts where Buster's running in and out of the house like a deadly game of freezetag are quite funny, so overall I do recommend this one. I mean, the "padding" takes it to 73 minutes, it's not that bad.
• Cup of Cheer (2020): This film is a mess. But we enjoyed finally seeing a Christmas romance parody that swings for the hard R rating, especially given its Zucker and Zucker-like insistence on playing everything straight. But it's a mess. It feels like much of the screenplay was improvised and typed up without polishing. Really funny moments sit side-by-side with obvious clunkers and entire subplots that aren't funny and don't add anything.

  If you read IMDB reviews you'll see the movie's natural audience have been turned off by all the swearing and filthy dialogue, and you'd think this would drag down its rating beyond what it should be, but a 5.5 is exactly what Cup of Cheer deserves.

• Oppenheimer (2023): I was engaged for three hours despite already knowing the story, so objectively speaking I have to count this movie as a success. Creatively, the most interesting part for me was the junction between the second and third acts, right after the Trinity test. Oppenheimer sees his world-historical importance slipping out of his fingers, never to return, until he's just a schmoe like the rest of us. The key scene IMO was the one where the A-bombs are loaded into trucks and the trucks drive out of Los Alamos and the camera doesn't follow them.

This month, Television Spotlight focuses on Taskmaster, a show that combines the collegiality of British panel shows with the sadism of Japanese game shows. We're slowly going through the show, we're on series 9 or something, occasionally re-meeting someone we recognize from the small and incestuous world of British comedy. You were in Footlights, eh? Interesting, interesting.

We've also started going through the international spinoffs, notably Kongen Befaler, the Norwegian edition. Kongen Befaler contestants are all notably more handy than their British counterparts, possibly because Norway has universal compulsory military service. Update: This is not true, I misread an ambiguous document. Only about 10% of Norwegians actually undergo military training. However, according to Norwegian Wikipedia, Calle Hellevang-Larsen, one of the handier participants, is "a trained marine telegrapher from the Norwegian Navy."