Category: Uncategorized

Westerns in March Stars: in My Crown (1950)

stars in my crown poster

Jacques Tourneur directed one of the great Film Noirs Out of the Past (1947), and one of the eeriest horror movies of all time, Cat People (1942). I’ve seen a few of his other films and they are all good, so I was excited to see what he could do with a western. Stars in My Crown isn’t bad, but it’s not all that great either. It is a slice-of-life film that’s a bit too sentimental and feels like it borrows a little too heavily from To Kill a Mockingbird. Though that can’t be true as it came out years before that book was written. In fact, Harper Lee has noted that she was partially inspired to write her famous novel after watching this film. But she did it much, much better.

Joel McCrea stars as Josiah Doziah Gray who shows up in the little town of Walesburg just after the Civil War, walks into a saloon, announces he’s the new preacher, and starts his first sermon. When the saloon customers laugh at him, he pulls out his pistol and makes them listen.

Soon enough he becomes well-loved in the community. The film watches him as he gets married, has a child, and enjoys inviting the local atheist to church.

The town doctor dies just as his son (James Mitchell) comes back to town, having just graduated from medical school. He has none of his father’s bedside manner and feels people ought to just do what he says because he’s got the schooling to know what he’s talking about.

When typhoid breakout the preacher inadvertently passes it on to the schoolchildren and gets yelled at by the Doctor for not taking precautions (I’ll leave you to ponder how very familiar that sounds).

Later a free slave (Juano Hernandez) is harassed by some miners who are also Klansmen. This is where the film feels like a half-baked Mockingbird but it is much more sentimental than that story.

McCrea is enjoyable, in fact, everyone is good. The story is fine and the direction alright. It’s like an episode of Little House on the Prarie or some such thing. Fine enough to watch, but nothing particularly special.

Final Destination (2000)

final destination poster

A group of American high school kids boards a plane headed for Paris for a few weeks. One of them, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) falls asleep before the plane takes off and has a vision of the plane exploding mid-air. He awakens with a fright and freaks the heck out. One of his classmates, Carter (Kerry Smith) aggressively tells Alex to chill out and a fight ensues. In the aftermath Alex, Carter, and a few others including Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), and their teacher Mrs. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are all kicked off the plane.

Sure enough, moments later the plane takes off and then explodes killing everyone on board. Since Alex told everyone the plane was going to explode before it did, the FBI thinks he must have been involved. Everyone at his high school just thinks he’s a freak. Only Clear Rivers believes him.

Soon enough some of the others who survived the explosion begin to die under mysterious circumstances. A visit to the morgue and a chat with Tony Todd reveal that when you cheat death, death comes at you. Surmising that the kids are now dying in the order they would have died on the plane (by using the seating plan and extrapolating where the explosion occurred) Alex figures out who will be next and tries to save them.

He’s not very good at it.

I knew this movie was gonna be dumb, but I had no idea what dumb depths it would dumb down to. I don’t usually nitpick movies over little details. I don’t mind small plot holes. But I was shaking my head over this one within the first few minutes.

The whole point of these movies (and there are a lot of them) is to create larger and more complex methods for the kids to be killed – call them Rube Goldbert deathtraps. I’ve not seen any of the sequels, but apparently, they get really ridiculous. Here they are pretty fun, but not particularly impressive. The last one goes over the top in a way I won’t spoil, but that I found really enjoyable to watch.

I don’t know why I’ve never seen this film until now. I was totally on board with the post Scream cycle of self-aware horror films and this came out at a time when I watched just about every movie that came to my local cineplex, but I must have missed this one. I’m glad I was able to catch up with it now, and I’ll probably eventually get to the sequels, but I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to do so.

Last Weekends Pickups

photo of some books and dvds

We hit up a couple of second-hand shops last weekend and I got some good stuff.

The Retaliators was actually something that arrived randomly in my mailbox. Normally the review material I get for Cinema Sentries comes by request, but every now and again PR people will just send me random stuff in hopes I’ll cover it. I did write a review of this one and you can read it here.

Batman is probably my favorite comic book character (although I might also say that of the X-men). I’ve read more of his comics than any other line. Knightfall introduces Bane as an enemy and he immediately makes things interesting by opening Arkham Asylum up, releasing most of Batman’s Rogues Gallery onto the city. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through the book right now and so far I’m loving it.

Sometime in the late 1990s the American Film Institute released its top 100 list of the best American movies ever made. They did a big television show about it with lots of cool talking heads discussing why those movies were chosen.

I was in college at the time and just becoming a true cinephile so that show was like catnip to me. It introduced me to all sorts of films I’d never heard of. I printed out the list and began seeking out as many of those films as I could find and watching them.

Yankee Doodle Dandy came in at number 100 and it is one of the few films from that list that I still haven’t seen. I found it on sale for $1 and figured it would make a good blind buy.

Sports Night was the first TV series created and run by Aaron Sorkin. It isn’t as good as The West Wing but it has a lot of that show’s DNA in it. There is lots of great, sparkling dialogue and the actors are just wonderful. I’m not a sports guy but I still like this.

I think I’ve mentioned my love of Maigret, the great detective created by Georges Simenon before. Every time I go to a used bookstore I always look for more books from him. This time I found two.

What have you picked up lately?

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.