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Mon Feb 03 2025 12:05 January Film Roundup:
- Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024): A fun movie, but I wish they'd come up with a brand new villain. Instead they brought back Feathers McGraw, who's enjoyable, but I think this trend of creative people mining their past triumphs is getting a little worrisome. If we must mine the past for Wallace & Gromit villains, why not bring back the stop-motion monstrosities from the Peter Gabriel "Sledgehammer" music video? Just throwing out ideas here.
- Thirty-Day Princess (1934): With a title like that you'd expect this to be a Lifetime original from 2015, but with a screenplay credit for Preston Sturges you'd expect it to be better than that, and it is. A Prince and the Pauper-type screwball farce with a pretty long automat scene. Cary Grant hasn't got The Voice down yet. It's all right.
- The Last Married Couple in America (1980): George Segal and Natalie Wood are always fun but this was more successful as a time capsule than as a comedy. Also, I have to point out the shadow hypothesis that this movie never dares to mention: Jeff and Mari may actually be causing their friends' marriages to break up, draining their compatibility energy to keep their own relationship afloat. I think this is a really strong possibility, given that at the end of the movie they're able to destroy another couple's marriage just by spending five minutes alone in a room with them. The power of their love vampirism can't be overstated.
- Inspector Ike (2020): A "loving parody", as they say, of 70s detective shows, which is also a decent Columbo-style mystery. I really enjoyed this because... well, it's a goofy version of Columbo. Nuff said. Can't wait for Poker Face season 2? Check this out. I do wish Aparna Nancherla had a bigger part, but it feels like a "I'll do one day of filming as a favor" kind of part.
- One, Two, Three (1961): Rewatch with James. Still a hilarious movie, an all-time great at making me laugh. Almost 20 years after we first saw this film, Scarlett's "Well, bye!" is still a common reference in our household.
- It Happened Tomorrow (1944): The strange sequel to It Happened One Night. A fun light fantasy story, with the fantasy element being slightly more fantastic than It's A Wonderful Life. I thought the most fun part of this movie was its illustration of how an artifact from the future swiftly ceases to be interesting or valuable once your timeline catches up with the time of its production. It's not from the future anymore!
- Batman Returns (1992): I wasn't expecting this, but this is way better than the 1989 Batman, and it's completely down to Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a movie all about the villains, with Batman himself being almost absent. Batman (1989) was also all about the villain, but with an annoying amount of time dedicated to Batman himself.
The Batman Returns screenplay doesn't really need Batman at all, though the marketing surely does. This could easily be the story of Catwoman and Penguin attempting to team up and then destroying one another. When he is on screen, Michael Douglas has the same blasé attitude towards the part which he'd display (I have to admit) to greater effect in Birdman (2014).
I didn't know Christopher Walken was in this, but he Walkens his way through this movie and it's a treat. One of the most Tim Burton-compatible actors. Speaking of Burton, I've seen enough of his movies now that certain aesthetic choices are repeating. I guess I'd classify him as a wackier version of David Lynch? He really puts his id on the screen, but not in a way that's terribly hard to figure out. Spirals and stripes; the guy loves spirals and stripes.
And I just realized this while writing this Film Roundup: the scene in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl where they're tracking the gnomes through the sewers is a clear reference to the part of Batman Returns where Batman is tracking the penguins through the city streets. The UI is the same and really, the penguins in this movie should've used the sewers. Good call, Feathers McGraw.