News You Can Bruise for 2024 May 4

Quite a few films this month despite work and two out-of-town trips: to Ohio to see the solar eclipse (spectacular!) and upstate to Storm King to see modernist sculpture too big to fit in a gallery (big!). I can recommend Arlene Schechet's Girl Group sculptures mentioned in this recent NYT article. The exhibit hadn't opened yet, but you can't exactly hide art at Storm King.

Anyway, gasp as Films are Rounded Up before your eyes:

• Much Ado About Nothing (1993): Staging a Shakespeare play as a movie? I don't think that's ever been done before. A fun production that really plays up the hedonism. Lots of 90s butt-focused nudity, is what I'm saying. Denzel Washington is as likeable as ever. Pre-Speed Keanu Reeves is well cast as one of those Shakespeare villains who keeps monologuing about his own villainry.
• The Fastest Gun Alive (1956): I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't pay 100% attention to the black-and-white Westerns I review. They're so stereotypical that I can put them on in the background, play a game on the Steam Deck, and just tune in for the interesting bits.

  Well, an interesting bit happened pretty quickly in The Fastest Gun Alive—a classic puppy-kick scene, but well executed—and I started paying full attention and never stopped. This is really good! It plays like a noir drama, with its exploration of human weakness, but it's not a noir with Western trappings: it's specifically focused on the interaction between masculinity and firearms, which is as Western as it gets.

  It took me a while to figure all of this out, because The Fastest Gun Alive is also the kind of movie that's padded with an unnecessary tap-dance number. So for a while I was baffled by this movie that seemed to be veering back and forth between Double Indemnity and Oklahoma!. (IMDB trivia: "Glenn Ford at first demanded that Russ Tamblyn's choreography not be included in the film. But at the premiere, the audience noticed that the choreography, performed by Russ Tamblyn, was written into the credits. They asked why there was no choreography in the movie and the studio eventually put it back." Easier than re-filming the credits, I guess!)

  Glenn Ford does a very good sort of Martin Freeman everyman in the lead, but the quality of the underlying story probably comes from the chemistry between noir director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Frank D. Gilroy.

• I'm All Right, Jack (1959): Another surprisingly good movie made from less than inspiring parts: in this case, the slightly bawdy postwar British comedy. What starts out with a goofy series of pre-Monty Python "job hunt" sketches becomes a relatively biting satire of labo[u]r, management, and the bargaining table where they meet. I find Peter Sellers a bit hit-and-miss, but he's great as the shop steward.

  Like Dentist on the Job, I only found out after watching this that it's a sequel and we're supposed to remember the characters from the previous movie instead of just reading the stereotypes (which totally worked). I assumed that "as you know, Bob, you served in the war with these unbearable secondary characters" was a common enough plot device not to need a whole other movie backing it up. And although those secondary characters can get pretty unbearable, they each get a scene in I'm All Right, Jack that humanizes them and makes them more sympathetic—something American comedies generally don't bother with.

• What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966): According to Wikipedia, "The title of the film came to [Blake] Edwards when he was asked the question by his son Geoffrey." I don't know why he didn't go on to make a movie about the Coast Guard, but instead we got this. It's all right. I like how the Italian villagers are completely done with the war despite seemingly being unaffected by its ravages.

  This film is kind of America's version of The Corporal and the Others (1965), in that we've all agreed the Nazis were the real bad guys in WWII and what side everyone else was on (the Hungarians, the Italians) isn't really relevant. Once the Germans show up this does lose a bit of the farce and become a more typical war movie. Or maybe the farce moves up a level of abstraction: one fun thing about the last act of this movie is the ridiculous extreme to which it takes the old "knock out the enemy and wear their uniform" gag.

• Hundreds of Beavers (2022): This movie is just insane. It's like Guy Maddin made a feature-length live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, and I mean that completely literally. There's one breathtaking moment where it plays with a classic Buster Keaton gag (you know the one) and immediately follows it up with a postmodern twist on the exact same gag. Brilliant.

  Nonstop sight gags for two hours straight does get a little exhausting, but I noticed a couple of tricks that the film uses to structure your attention. The unifying concept of the middle of the film is the trapline (Wikipedia: "a route along which a trapper sets traps for their quarry"). One common trick I use in SF worldbuilding is to introduce a simplified version of an idea and gradually make it more and more complex. Hundreds of Beavers does the opposite: it shows a trapline that is way too complicated for either the protagonist or the audience to understand; then destroys it, replaces it with a much simpler trapline, and then starts gradually making it more complex, illustrating each complication with helpful video game-style graphics.

  The different types of trap on the trapline also provide structure to the gags in the middle of the film. As the trapper moves around and around the route, you sort of check in with each gag, so it's not just a formless mess of laughs... the way the first 30 minutes of this movie is. Maybe the first bit should be treated like an animated short shown before the movie proper, with a break in between for a reel change.

  Weird, funny, surprising, and different from almost any other movie (by which I mean, exactly like the funny parts of Guy Maddin's movies). A big recommendation from me.