News You Can Bruise for 2023 July

• Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005): Sumana reminded me that we saw this a long time ago and I didn't Round it Up, so it gets pride of place in this month's edition. This film has a great premise—I'd say almost timeless. The only restriction is whether the censorship regime allows it. You might be able to get away with it in 1925, and you could definitely do it in 1975—it's not that much different from Fun with Dick and Jane (1977). But this story would have made a better film in 1975 than in 2005. It could work in 2005 but only if it had a much smaller budget, just enough to pay its pretty leads.

  Basically my issue is that the bigger this film gets, the more it becomes like a generic action flick and less like a darkly comedic rom-com. The fight scene where the Smiths are destroying their yuppie house while trying to kill each other is about the level of slapstick violence I was hoping for.

• Rope (1948): A filming gimmick lets Hitchcock distract the audience from how gay this movie is, but modern audiences won't be fooled. Making us watch a big chunk of the movie with a coffin blocking the action? Nice try, Hitch, we're not terribly disturbed by that either. Now, if this film starred the Five Nights at Freddy's gang? Jumpscares galore!

  I have to say, Jimmy Stewart's character is kind of wishy-washy. He seems totally serious about his Nietzschean philosophy until he's faced with a single, obvious real-world implication, and then he immediately crumbles and starts sounding like the Hays Code. Either he should have just been making over-the-top cocktail-party chatter (in which case his character arc makes sense, and the movie becomes a commentary on Alfred Hitchcock's sense of humor), he should approve of the murder once he learns about it, or he should berate the two murderers for killing another ubermensch instead of one of the lesser specimens of humanity.

• Our Nixon (2013): Soundless home video of the Nixon White House (seized by the Feds during the Watergate investigation) is matched with the videoless recordings of Nixon's secret home taping system, creating that audiovisual brew we call a "movie". I don't know how well the two match up a lot of the time, but there are some stunning just-backstage shots, and I'm always a sucker for "contemporary documentary made from footage that got stuck in a government vault for 40 years"—see Apollo 11 (2019) for more Nixon-era excitement.
• The Preacher's Wife (1996): A fun remake with good songs. I sensed a little bit of The Angel Levine in the way Denzel Washington's angel character is wistful for his pre-death life, and a bit of Wings of Desire in his love for the sensual pleasures of street food. I was struck by how little theodicy you have to do in these lighthearted spiritual movies. Near the beginning, Courtney B. Vance's preacher has a moment of Job-like aggravation at the horrors of the world, and from then we're emotionally on board with an all-powerful God giving light supernatural help as long as He can maintain plausible deniability.

  It doesn't really fit with the rest of the movie, but I liked Dudley's angelic handbook that includes information on how to use Windows 95. I can't remember if the handbook was present in the original, but it feels like a palimpsest, offering a glance into either the original movie or an earlier draft of the screenplay.

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023): The whole time I was thinking "this pacing's a little weird", and then the pacing got very weird and it turns out this is only half a movie. This has happened to me before but it was the Lord of the Rings movies and I knew what I was getting into.

  As entertaining as the visual spectacle was, I have to question whether a multiverse based on a character defined as a rebel and an outcast would cohere around the cliche of the fortress run by a Bond villain with tons of obedient henchmen. I hear people make good money (well, bad money) making very long Youtube videos where they complain about this stuff, but you know that's not my style.

  It was cool to see some Jeff Koons sculptures get destroyed, a la Constellation Games. Sometimes the family stuff would get boring, and I'd just remind myself that this is a movie for kids. Enjoy it, kids! The nostalgia clock starts now!

• The Great Train Robbery (1978): This film provides value for money by turning the preparations for the heist into a series of mini-heists. You could do a fractal heist story in which every step of the heist preparation requires another, smaller heist, recursively. In fact, that's a good way to enjoy those dull dramas where nothing much happens: you're actually seeing a complex series of nanoheists.

  I wouldn't want to live there, but I love the look of the 1970s-studio-film version of Victorian London. (See also The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.) All that facial hair and crushed velvet. You see it in the indoors scenes in westerns of the period, as well.

• Hobson's Choice (1954): When we were watching Ted Lasso Sumana really hated the character of Rupert. He's an unsympathetic character, you're supposed to dislike him, but Sumana has a visceral and vocal dislike for that kind of sexist, manipulative blowhard. We brainstormed an ending for Ted Lasso in which Rupert dies in the most humiliating, un-masculine way possible: shitting himself to death while straining to open a jar of Marmite. At his funeral, Bex delivers the touching eulogy: "He loosened it for all of us."

  Unfortunately(?) that's not how Ted Lasso ended. But Hobson's Choice does fulfill the desire to see that kind of character exposed as a buffoon and humiliated, and it throws in another crowd-pleaser, assuming Sumana is in the crowd: a woman who doesn't care about oppressive societal conventions and either manipulates or ignores them. A fun film overall.

And now, a Television Spotlight brought to you by the letter M:

• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Sometimes a show is cancelled prematurely and has to hustle to tell its story in its final season. Sometimes it gets that other season after all and the true final season is awkward and extraneous, like Babylon 5, or Arrested Development. Sometimes it says "screw it" and spends the final season goofing off, like Star Trek: Enterprise. Mrs. Maisel does a really good job telling two seasons worth of story in one season; making heavy use of flash-forwards, quickly shunting off characters who became too expensive due to their actors starring in a Best Picture winner, and using impressive but cheap-to-film set pieces like a low-budget stage show and a Friar's Club roast. Characters get their arcs completed and Midge completes her transformation into Joan Rivers. It works.
• The Muppets Mayhem: Very much on the kid side of Muppetainment, but with a few deep cut references thrown in for the adults. (Meet the Feebles, of all things, and is that a reference to the instant-classic SNL skit at the end?)