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Sat Feb 03 2024 12:30 January Film Roundup:
- Future '38 (2016): A very divisive film according to user reviews, but Sumana and I both loved the screwball comedy banter, the old-timey sci-fi slang, and the fact that it seems to have been filmed over by the Trader Joe's in Long Island City. It's kind of the perfect Film Roundup movie, because it combines the aesthetics of old comedies and low-budget SF.
- Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! (1966): Another Midcentury Modern sex comedy with no sex. Bob Hope is actually properly cast in this one, as a middle-aged father who's tempted... to bring leftover fried chicken to a hungry starlet. He should just cheat on his wife with his housekeeper Phyllis Diller, like a normal 1960s real estate broker.
Even dull movies like this usually have a couple interesting bits, and I think Diller is the interesting bit here—I'd never seen her act before and she's got a lot of what I think of as "Kate McKinnon energy."
Oh yeah, here's another thing: a while ago I mentioned that there's a span of decades where Hollywood movies don't seem to have car chases. Well, they definitely do by 1966. This is one of those comedies that ends with a wacky car chase that I find boring (see also: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). You do get to see Bob Hope hijack a cop car, which I thought I'd only be able to see in the alternate universe of The Man in the High Castle.
Something must have happened in the early 60s to make car chases safer or cheaper to film. Maybe a technological advancement, maybe a streamlined permitting system, maybe the formation of the Stuntmen's Association in 1961. Maybe it was simply a lost technique rediscovered so they could film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). I don't know. Someone's got to have a master's thesis on this, I'm just going by what I see in the movies.
- The Corporal and the Others (1965): a.k.a.. "A tizedes meg a többiek". As the author of Situation Normal, the story spoke to me: people trying to opt out of a war take refuge in a seemingly abandoned place that quickly becomes a hotspot; farce ensures. Not as much of The Good Soldier Schweik as I perhaps stereotypically expected from an Eastern European war comedy, but it was a good time overall.
I imagine Hungary in 1965 was a tetchy place to make a WWII movie, and the balancing act here is quite noticeable: the Nazis are portrayed as monstrous buffoons and the regular Hungarian army isn't that much better, while the advancing Soviets (Hungary's nominal enemy) are mainly represented by one hapless draftee. I think this works in the movie's favor as a comedy, driving home the fact that nobody is going to help these desertees, they've got to help each other. This enthusiastic IMDB user review gives some historical context.
- Bad Day in Black Rock (1955): This film promises unity of time and doesn't quite deliver, although I guess the "bad day" could be the one that Spencer Tracy has arrived to investigate. This was a decent drama that had much less "classic Western" than I expected based on the description. But it had way more "Asteroid City" than I expected based on the description, which was a pleasant surprise.
- With Six You Get Eggroll (1968): For some reason I thought this rom-com came out in 1978 and I kept thinking "this is really outdated, it could have been made ten years earlier." The joke's on me! This was all right; I liked the role-reversal, with the parents escaping to the drive-in to get away from their judgmental children. George Carlin's first film role is as the waiter! Some good banter between the leads, and unlike modern rom-coms it doesn't end when they get married. Unfortunately, the comedy does end (in both senses) with a big car chase that's not very funny.
- Mr. Majestyk (1974): Like watching First Blood, if Rambo was my grandpa Dalton. This guy just wants to get his crop in, and he's going to fuck up the whole crime syndicate to do it. The Elmore Leonard screenplay elevates it above the usual 1970s action fare, I think.
Includes a great, messy scene where a bunch of watermelons are shot up, like The Untouchables meets Double Dare. Also includes a good, exciting car chase scene. Maybe they just shouldn't be in comedies?
- Decision At Sundown (1957): A strangely bloodless title. "I'm gonna need a decision by sundown, Tex." This movie's one big seige/hostage situation and maybe if I'd been in more of a Dog Day Afternoon mood I would have liked it more. But probably not, judging from the amazingly dull final line. ("I'll tell you one thing, none of us will ever forget the day that Bart Allison spent in Sundown.") It's the kind of bad line that now sounds like it came out of an LLM. In fact, while writing this review I asked Rob Dubbin's LLM to come up with a better final line, and it just didn't give me any output, silently admitting defeat. Richard Deacon provides some welcome comic relief.
- The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963): A good concept, I always like a good cinematic police/criminal team-up, but only intermittently fun to watch. I hesitate to mention this since this isn't a Hollywood picture and I don't know where it fits my theory, but... this 1963 comedy ends with a big car chase that's not very funny.
- The Long Good Friday (1980): Loved it. A better, non-comedy version of The Wrong Arm of the Law. The classic tale of a criminal whose life is spiraling out of control and doesn't see that he's facing threats that are way above his level. Before seeing this movie, I didn't know Bob Hoskins was British, because I'd only seen him play characters with perfect American accents; here, he perfectly straddles the line between genial and thuggish, which is where you want your movie crime bosses. A young Helen Mirren has a couple of intense scenes.
- Simon (1980): A Woody Allen movie with no Woody Allen; Alan Arkin plays the part instead. Unfortunately, Woody passed on this one for a reason: the film is a mess. But it's a mess full of the aesthetic I love: Modernist buildings, creepy think tanks, scientists who dress like Carl Sagan, the Space Shuttle back when it was an untested and mysterious spacecraft. All that good stuff. The rest of the film? Well, there are some jokes, and Wallace Shawn's in it.
The Indian scientist in this film is credited as simply "Jayant." There is an Indian actor who acted under the name Jayant, but he died in 1975. This is Nikil Jayant, an actual scientist who ended up playing an evil scientist in a movie about evil scientists. He was at Bell Labs at the time, and I have to assume Marshall Brickman met him there while researching the film.
Apart from Simon (1980), Dr. Jayant is known for his work on data compression. Here's an IEEE paper from him from around the time of Simon, a paper that apparently came with a vinyl record so you could hear the examples! This guy's a triple threat!
- The Lawnmower Man (1992): Speaking of sci-fi messes. What I didn't know until just before I saw this film is that it's not a normal Hollywood production; it's a low-budget movie made by a VR booster to get the public psyched up about VR. As a creative work, it's a B-movie that unexpectedly made it big. As a piece of cinema, it's kind of an industry propaganda film, like Hats Off To Soup or Telephones: When You Need To Talk To Someone But They're In Another Town. Go in with this knowledge, and the movie makes sense. It's not as boostery as Hats Off To Soup, because the director also cares about telling a story, but that's why the VR segments are the way they are.
Do I recommend this film? Not really, no. The goofy CGI isn't funny out of context, and the contextual matter is too slow and predictable to be interesting on its own. However, there is some nice-looking old tech, and if you can get over the "cheese" factor and the "total nonsense" factor, there are still some chills to be found in the scenes where human beings are transformed into human-shaped collections of POV-Ray balls. Also, young Dean Norris was a nice surprise.