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Wed Sep 04 2024 23:15 August Film Roundup:
- Christmas in July (1940): One for the "we can't agree on a title" files. A fun screwball comedy with twists you can see coming 1.2 miles away. At this point I can say that Preston Sturges movies just give me a good feeling. Not because they're warm and fuzzy—they tend to be the opposite—but because they posit that the human capability to fuck things up is limited, that we do good despite ourselves.
- Shack Out on 101 (1955): Like Raiders of San Joaquin, a film I chose because its title made me nostalgic for my childhood. It's got a fun Cannery Row vibe going on, and I didn't even mind the escalation into an action-ish noir movie, but my credulity was strained when basically every character in the film turned out to be a spy. It was like watching the final ending of Clue.
- The Swimmer (1968): I had heard of this movie, but suffered from a major misapprehension about the plot. I thought this guy literally swims from pool to pool, traversing underwater tunnels like in a Mario game. I'm not saying I didn't also recognize it as a highbrow metaphor for the human condition, but when Burt Lancaster got out of the pool and started walking to the next one I was drastically disappointed.
I dunno, it's still OK. I feel like I don't encounter many movies like this, movies that are nominally mimetic but operate on a mythic or archetypal level. Most likely these movies are still around but I actively avoid them. Like, Evil Does Not Exist (2023) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) seem like they're going for a similar feel but I have no desire to see either one of those movies.
- The Facts of Life (1960): Maybe Lucille Ball will make Bob Hope seem funny, I thought. And... she kinda does? It helps that this isn't a fake-divorce film, like you'd have to make to tell this kind of story in the 1950s. It depicts real suburban desperation and genuine, Billy Wilder-approved infidelity. I never thought I'd see the day, but here's a movie where Bob Hope has some actual chemistry with his lead actress.
Overall I didn't think this was great, but the ending was sweet. I guess what I'm saying is you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all, and... no, wait... sixty years ago we had Ball and Hope, and now... where was I going with this?
- The Bank Shot (1974): Another movie adaptation from my Donald Westlake kick, and the best I can say for this is it really shows how the adaptation of a good source material can fall short. The Hot Rock (1972) takes a lot of liberties with the book, but they're all in the service of making the story move fast enough to hit an unusual number of plot beats in a normal-length film. The Bank Shot feels like they wanted to do a different movie with the same central gimmick. (It's a great gimmick.) The scenes where they execute the gimmick are great; the others are lousy and it doesn't help that oom-pah circus music is playing during every action scene to tell you it's funny.
The characters are unrecognizable as well (just as well that most of them are renamed from the book). The point of the book is that Dortmunder's genius at planning and staffing heists is exactly balanced out by his terrible luck. In this movie he's a super-criminal abetted by, and going up against, buffoons. They moved the setting from Long Island to LA just because it was easier to film. Not enjoyable.
What was enjoyable was discovering, while writing this entry, that Donald Westlake wrote the screenplay for Cops and Robbers (1973)—a darkly comic heist with a great gimmick that's also a good movie.
- Salt and Pepper (1968): This movie's bad, but it does give a sense of what it would be like if they'd started making Austin Powers movies in 1968. In that respect it's sort of like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? from 1957—contemporaneous proof that the people who lived in a ridiculous part of the past were in on the joke. However, most of the actual jokes in this movie are not good, and the action scenes are like Austin Powers fight scenes but played straight. The best gag is near the beginning when Sammy Davis Jr. does the longest-delayed double take I think I've seen in a movie.
- Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975): Crime and grime, baby. When your response to being kidnapped is to just go with the flow, you know it's the 70s. Less watchable than The Bank Shot but has more indie cred. Looking up this movie after watching it, I saw that star Alan Arkin directed Little Murders, another "who cares, I'm already dead inside" movie. He also played the title character in Simon (1980). The guy had some issues, is what I'm insinuating.
- The Questor Tapes (1974): As soon as I saw "teleplay by Gene Roddenberry" on this pilot-cum-made-for-TV-movie, I knew it was only a matter of time before Majel Barrett showed up. (It was about 45 seconds.) But what I didn't expect was seeing a whole dry run for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Others have mentioned that Robert Foxworth's Questor is a prototype of Data, down to really specific 1st-season-of-TNG stuff like the "fully functional" gag. What I haven't seen others mention is that The Questor Tapes also prototypes the Data/Geordi relationship, with Jerry as Questor's friend/maintenance guy.
And man, this movie has Gene Roddenberry humanism sermonizing like nobody's business. "An insane creator? Good thing humans don't have an insane creator! How horrible that would be!" (Not a direct quote.) I would not watch this if it had been picked up as a series, but as a time capsule showing an early draft of one of my favorite things, I loved it.
PS: Ol' Gene reuses the Vulcan nerve pinch in this one. It's a low-violence way to put your enemies out of action—perfect for network TV!
- One Cut of the Dead (2017): I enjoyed this, but not as much as I was expecting. The recent Japanese mini-trend of long-take movies like this, River, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, etc. is very heartening. It's a genre of film that requires a lot of skill but very little money. However, this one was a bit disappointing because the description of the movie you see on IMDB and whatnot is actually a description of the movie-within-a-movie (True Fear) you see in act 1. There are definitely twists in act 3 that recontextualize True Fear, but... there are no actual zombies in this film. Sorry. It's just a triumph-of-the-human-spirit kind of thing.
If there was some way to skip act 2 altogether I'd be more sanguine about recommending this film. It kind of drags, but you can't just cut it, because it's setting up all the character development for act 3.