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The Week In Movies: February 26 – March 04, 2023

the big trail poster

I watched eight movies this past week only one of which I’d seen before. Most of them were pretty good. Also, I did really well writing about a lot of these movies as I watched them. I’m proud of myself.

El Dorado (1966): I mentioned this one last week as it worked well as a double feature with Rio Bravo (1959). It follows a very similar plot structure as that movie with John Wayne playing a gunfighter for hire who teams with a drunk, a young buck with something to prove, and an old codger who stand against a villainous crew. It moves quicker than Rio Bravo and is funnier, but I’d give the earlier film a slight advantage.

Welcome to the Sticks (2008): A very silly, very funny comedy from France. I wrote about it here.

The Cariboo Trail (1950): A not particularly great western with Randolph Scott. I wrote a review which you can read here.

The Naked Spur (1953): A fantastic western with James Stewart, Janet Leigh, and Robert Ryan. I wrote about it here.

Sleepless (2001): Dario Argento’s late-career work has been fairly spotty, but this is a good one. I wrote about it in my Friday Night Horror column.

Looker (1981): I loved Michael Crichton’s books when I was a teenager. His method of blending slightly futuristic science with a very human story was right up my alley. As a director, his stories have remained interesting, but stylistically they tend to be pretty dull. Looker is my favorite of his films that I’ve seen so far.

I wrote a spoiler-y review of it on my Letterboxd.

Dark Phoenix (2019): I’d been putting off watching this film because the reviews have been generally terrible and I love the original comic. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, but yeah, it is not good. It has been so long ago that I read the comic that I don’t have much to say about how faithful it is, except that it clearly added quite a bit of stuff. Which I get because the comic isn’t exactly cinematic.

I didn’t actually mind the story while watching it. Thinking back on it now there is a lot of stuff in it that doesn’t make much sense, but in the moment I followed along alright. But the direction, especially the many fight scenes, is just bad. It was directed by Simon Kinberg who has a long career as a writer/producer but had never directed a movie before. And it shows. The action is muddled and flat and really hard to follow.

The Big Trail (1930): Nine years before John Ford made him a movie star John Wayne got his first starring role in this Raoul Walsh western episode. I will be writing a full review soon but for now I’ll just say that while the story mostly didn’t work for me, Walsh’s use of the wide screen format and his depth of field is simply astonishing.

Foreign Film February: Welcome to the Sticks (2008)

welcome to the sticks

I’ve been a bit slack in my foreign language movie-watching over the last week, but I wanted to end the month with something fun. Welcome to the Sticks was written, directed and stars Danny Boon, but he’s not the lead.

That role goes to Kad Merad who plays a postal worker who is desperate to get transferred somewhere on the southern coast of France. Instead, he is transferred to a small town in the far north of the country.

The north of France is to the French like the deep south is to many Americans. He fears that it will be incredibly cold, that the people will speak with terrible accents and everyone will be rude and backward and rather stupid.

It turns out that the climate is pleasant and the people are quite nice. The trouble is he left his wife and young son back in the south. When he visits them on the weekend she is so ready for him to be miserable up there he doesn’t know how to tell her he likes it. This causes a lot of sitcom or romantic comedy-style shenanigans.

There is also some business over Danny Boon’s characters’ love life and a lot of other very silly stuff. It is very breezy and very goofy and it makes me laugh. A lot. I’ve seen it before, we own it on DVD actually. I’ll no doubt see it again.

It probably won’t work for everyone and there is a lot that gets lost in translation. A lot of the gags have to do with the difference in language. In the north, they speak a dialect of French and there are a lot of jokes about the Southerner not understanding anyone or misunderstanding certain words.

I speak a little French but not enough to watch a French film without subtitles. Jokes about how two completely different words sound a lot alike are difficult to translate so I expect a lot of the humor here doesn’t work that well for non-French speakers. I was helped out by the fact that my wife is a French speaker and she helped get the jokes across. Also, her laugh is infectious.

But there are also loads of other jokes that don’t need translating. I’m surprised an American studio hasn’t adapted it for the USA. It would work well with someone from the coast of some New England state moving to Alabama.

Yeeshkull Is Closing

If you haven’t heard the great Pink Floyd site Yeeshkull is closing its doors very soon. So you might want to run over there and grab what you can while you can.

I know I had an account with them at some point, but have long since lost my username and password. They aren’t accepting new registrations nor do they give out old passwords which means I cannot grab anything from them. But if you still have an account now is the time to use it.

Johan Falk Trilogy

johan falk trilogy

My wife is a big fan of British crime stories and period dramas. I like them too but she likes to put them on while she’s crafting or sewing doll clothes (have I mentioned she’s a doll collector? and that she makes super cool costumes for them?). Which means she watches a lot of them.

We cut the cord years ago but try to limit our streaming choices down to one service per person in our family. Recently she was subscribed to BritBox, which like it sounds, contains lots of British programming. But she’s ready to switch to something else. I’ve been trying to talk her into giving MHZ a try of late. They have a lot of interesting shows from European countries that are not England.

I used to get a lot of DVDs from them and generally enjoyed what they sent. I’ve posted several of those reviews here lately and this is another one. Johan Falk was actually a pretty long-running Swedish series, but for whatever reason, MHZ packaged three of the films as a trilogy. It is pretty good. You can read my full review here.

The Amazing Adventure (1936)

the amazing adventure

I am very much a fan of Cary Grant. I’ve seen most of his most popular films so sometimes I like to dig a little deeper and find something somewhat obscure (as obscure as a film starring one of the world’s most famous actors that is). As a bit of trivia, The Amazing Adventure is the only film the British actor ever made for a British studio. Over there it was titled The Amazing Quest of Mr. Ernest Bliss and had a run time of about 120 minutes. It was reissued in the United States as The Amazing Adventure and was cut down to just one minute over an hour’s length. The copyright was never renewed and so it entered the public domain, causing there to be untold editions of the film released on home video. Most of these are copies of copies of copies and look pretty terrible and as far as I can tell the original British cut has been lost.

The film is a slight thing, it feels like a knock-off version of the film My Man Godfrey which came out around the same time, though this one plays it mostly straight. Cary Grant feels like an amoeba version of the persona he’d play for most of his career. The charm is there, as is the lightness of his touch, but it isn’t quite in full bloom yet.

He plays Earnest Bliss, a rich playboy who has grown bored with his life. When he sees a doctor to see if there is anything wrong with him, he’s told that his money is the problem. What he needs is a little hard work, and perhaps to go hungry once in a while and that will put him right with the world. They make a bet that Bliss can’t spend one year of his life without using any of his money for personal gain, which come to think of it sounds an awful lot like the plot of Brewster’s Millions too.

He finds a cheap room to rent and spends a few weeks looking for a job. He strikes out as a salesman but then comes upon an idea to make the business a roaring success. It works and inexplicably he quits that job and becomes a driver for hire. This allows him to be seen by all his old rich pals, all of whom seem completely nonplussed that he’s down and out. There is a love interest, of course, and naturally, Bliss learns that money isn’t what makes a man happy. It is hard work and love that do that. Then the film ends with him back in his high-rise apartment throwing an expensive party.

It isn’t nearly as funny as it ought to be, and the drama never really sticks. I’d be interested to see what is in those extra 20 minutes that were cut out, but I can’t imagine they would turn this thing into a classic. Its short run time is actually a benefit to the film as I didn’t get bored, which I would have had it run a little longer.

Definitely worth watching if you are a Cary Grant fan.

Aftershock (2012)

aftershock movie poster

If you think Eli Roth is a terrible director (and he is), wait until you see him as an actor. For some reason, he is the lead in this really, really bad horror film set in the aftermath of an earthquake in Chile. No, wait, for half of the film’s run time it is set just before the earthquake where we watch a bunch of inane people do inane things while partying, or trying to get to a party. Then an earthquake happens and all sorts of horror begins, but it is so poorly done that the biggest shock of all is that it never seems to end.

In the nearly ten years since I watched Aftershock I had managed to remove this terrible film from my memory, but reading my review has brought it all back.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

eyes without a face

I think I’ve mentioned before that my wife is a Francophile. That means we watch a lot of French movies together. I watch a lot of French movies without her too. I watch a lot of movies. Some of them are French. Some of them are with my wife. I think we watched this one together. It is a classic. It is also a freaky horror movie.

You can read my review here.

My Week In Movies: February 12-18, 2023

osterman weekend

Last week I did a My Weekend in Movies post. This week I thought I’d expand it to the entire week. I’ll skip the movies I watched last Sunday since they are covered in the last post. And some movies I will have already talked about it, but maybe this will be a way to briefly discuss the other movies I watched. Because I know you all just can’t wait to hear about what I’m watching.

One On Top of the Other (1969): Italian horror maestro makes a sleazy noir. Results are mixed. I talked about this one in my Foreign Film February post.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947): An early adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. Here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd:

I’m a pretty big Raymond Chandler fan so I’m always excited to see an adaptation of his work that I haven’t seen before.

This sticks pretty close to the source material though they simplify Chandler’s complicated story quite a bit. The direction is adequate in that you can always tell what is going on and it looks nice, but there is nothing all that stylish or interesting about it.

It is clear that it was influenced by Howard Hawk’s take on The Big Sleep and John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon (which of course was written for the screen by Chandler). It feels like a low-rent version of those films, but it is passable in that regard.

The real problem is George Montgomery whose take on Phillip Marlow is bad. He’s too friendly for Chandler’s wisecracks to really snap as they should, and he’s not charming enough for the romance to work. He feels like he’s in a high school stage production rather than a Hollywood movie. The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better though Nancy Guild does ok as Merle and Florence Bates is decent at the old villain. But the guys acting like Peter Lorre are just pale imitations.

Crimes of the Future (2022): David Cronenberg started out as a low-budget horror director who used a lot of body horror to make a point. Then he moved on to bigger budget dramas that have earned various awards. Crimes of the Future (the second film he’s made with the same name though neither has much to do with the other) is a return to body horror with lots of weirdness. Viggo Mortenson stars as a man whose body keeps developing new organs. Léa Seydoux is his partner who makes performance art out of the surgery she performs on him to remove those extra organs. It gets weirder from there. I’m not sure I loved it, but I do love that guys like Cronenberg are still stretching their boundaries in films like this.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974): I’ve been on something of a Sam Peckinpah kick lately, and I had never seen this one before. It begins with a pregnant woman who is brought before her Mexican gangster of a father who demands she tells him who the father of her child is. After some light torture, she says it was Alfredo Garcia. The father says the title of the film and then he sends some of his men to do just that.

They scour the country looking for him and run into Bennie (Warren Oates) a piano player at a dive bar who says he might know where Garcia is. Turns out Garcia is already dead, but Bennie needs to collect his head in order to prove the man is dead and collect his reward. The film takes a lot of turns and it never goes where I thought it was going. It becomes a treatise on capitalism and how the rich always get what they want, and the poor turn themselves inside out trying to get rich. It is funny, strange, sad, and brutal.

Capricorn One (1977): A classic 1970s conspiracy film that spoils the conspiracy from the get-go and winds up being kind of dull. Three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and OJ Simpson) are pulled from their space shuttle just moments before it launches on the first manned flight to Mars. They are told that there was a problem with their life support system, but that if the launch doesn’t go off as planned Congress will scrub future missions. So the shuttle launches without them and they are to shoot some video of them pretending to land on Mars and fool everybody into thinking they were really there. They play along for a while but James Brolin starts to have his doubts and wants to tell the truth.

A journalist (Ellliott Gould) suspects foul play and begins asking the kind of questions that will get him into trouble. It all turns into a big chase where the government goons want to kill the astronauts and Elliott Gould seeks out the truth. Most of it didn’t work for me. Had they kept the secret a secret to the audience and made the film about Elliott Gould trying to uncover the truth I think this could have been a classic. But as it is, it just wasn’t very thrilling.

Titane (2021): This weeks Friday Night Horror movie was disturbing, freaky, and quite fascinating.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967): My wife loves big Broadway musicals. I can take them or leave them, more or less. I have to be in the mood. I was in the mood on Saturday and we sat down to watch this one. It is a bit dated, especially in terms of its sexual politics, but the music is good and the dancing is great, and the sets are fantastic. A young Robert Morse plays the lead and I’ve only ever seen him as a much older man in Mad Men. So it was really fun seeing him sing and dance.

The Osterman Weekend (1983): Another Peckinpah. This one is a mess. It’s about a group of old friends who get together every year for a fun weekend. Except for this time, one of them finds out that the rest of them are Russian spies. He’s charged by a secret US agent to try and turn one of them into a double agent. Or something. The plot is all over the place and there are all sorts of twists that just muddle everything even more. They say the studio took it over from Peckinpah and edited it into oblivion. And it shows.

Autumn Sonata (1978)

autumn sonata criterion bluray

I have not yet watched an Ingmar Bergman film for this year’s Foreign Film February. I really should remedy that. I bought a big boxed set of his films from the Criterion Collection a couple of years ago and haven’t begun to really scratch the surface of it. Bergman films tend to be very weighty, which sometimes makes them difficult to watch. They are often rewarding, but the effort it takes to watch them often makes me put them off. Foreign Film February is always a good excuse to make me make that effort, but I haven’t yet.

Goals!

I did watch this one several years ago and reviewed it here. It is definitely a rewarding watch.