Category: Uncategorized

Twixt (2011)

twixt

Francis Ford Coppola made some of the greatest films of the 1970s. The Godfather (parts I and II), The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now rank as some of the best films ever made. He seems to have struggled in the decades since, his output has been spotty at best. Over the last twenty years or so he’s made very few films and all of them have been independently financed. Still, he is a director worth paying attention to. I watched Twixt back in 2013, wrote this review, and haven’t thought about it since.

Reading that review now, even though I more or less panned the film, makes me want to watch it again. The story sounds pretty cool, and it is sometimes fun to revisit a film you didn’t like years ago to see if the changes in your own life affect the way you see the film now.

Laura (1944)

laura

I am of an age when I came to know Vincent Price as the creepy voice who narrated Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I knew who he was before that – I knew he was a guy who starred in a bunch of old horror movies – but I had never seen any of those movies. As an adult, I’ve watched tons of those old horror movies. He, along with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, were staples in the Hammer Studios horror stable and I love them all.

Of course, Vincent Price wasn’t just a hammy horror actor, he made lots of other films. But it always surprises me when he does. He plays it completely straight in Laura, one of the great film noirs. He’s good in it, too, but it is hard not to watch the film and not expect him to start killing people.

Anyway, you can read my review here.

Babette’s Feast (1987)

babettes feast

In my review of this film over at Cinema Sentries I talk about how we (used) to have a monthly film night in which we invited some friends over and watched a non-English language film. Not long after writing that review my family and I moved to another state and those foreign film nights dried up. I really miss them. We tried briefly to have a regular movie night (our new set of friends in this place most likely wouldn’t take to films, not in English, sigh) but it didn’t go so well. Then COVID hit and we pretty much never have anyone over anymore.

I think I’d like to try again sometime. Maybe we should have a Midnight Cafe movie night 🙂

Until then, you can read my review here. Babette’s Feast really is a lovely film.

American Gigolo (1980)

american gigolo

I have this idea that The Midnight Cafe could turn itself back into a blog circa 2004. Back then people ran blogs like they post on Facebook or Twitter now. They could be an odd mix of personal stories, pictures, and short blurbs about pop culture and the art they were responding to. I like trying to do something like that here. Over on Twitter I, and lots of other folks, will often post about what were are currently watching or reading, or listening to. We don’t give full reviews, just note what we are doing with maybe a short (this is Twitter after all) couple of sentences about what we liked or didn’t like about it.

My trouble is that when I start to write a post here (where there are no character limits) I tend to get wordy. I don’t really know how to write a review without doing research on the film, or giving my personal background with it which results in too many words. But I’m gonna try.

American Gigolo is a drama by writer/director Paul Schraeder. It stars Richard Gere as a prostitute who caters to rich, elderly women. Things get complicated when he gets involved with a senator’s wife (Lauren Hutton) and is wanted for the brutal murder of a woman he recently was hired by.

It made Gere a huge star and one of the biggest sex symbols of the 1980s. He’s good in it. The film looks great, it is shot like a neo-noir. The soundtrack is great and it turned Blondie’s “Call Me” into a hit. It is probably my least favorite Schraeder film (from the ones I’ve seen). There is something missing from it. Hutton is good in it but her relationship with Gere falls flat for me. It isn’t given enough time for me to believe the film’s message which is something along the lines of “love will save you.”

Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast “You Must Remember This” did an episode on this film as part of her Erotic 80s series and it is well worth a listen.

Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol

doctor who hapinness patrol

Doctor Who
The Happiness Patrol
Season 25
Story 149
Originally Aired: November 2-16, 1988

Sylvester McCoy does not get a lot of love for her tenure as The Doctor. On the whole, his stories are not as good as some of the other actors, and he tends to get knocked for being The Doctor that got the series canceled. But I quite like his performance in the stories I’ve seen and I don’t really think you can blame him for the cancellation. The series was in serious need of retooling by the time he got on board, and the BBC was not willing to do what was needed (mainly give it a decent budget).

Which is why I’ve now watched three of his stories in a row.

“The Happiness Patrol” is a good example of the best of Doctor Who and some of its worse excesses. The Doctor and Ace (Sophie Aldred) land on a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha which is run by Helen A (Sheila Hancock) who is obsessed with happiness. So much so that she has outlawed unhappiness and has unleashed the Happiness Patrol (made up of a group of women with big hair, big makeup, and short skirts) to find anyone even the slightest bit sad and kill them. Naturally, The Doctor and Ace stage an unhappiness revolution.

That’s a cool idea for a story and one they would revisit in 2017 with “Smile”. Helen A is a great character. She is someone who probably started out with the best intentions – she simply didn’t want her people to be unhappy – and then she allowed things to go very extreme.

And in Classic Doctor Who fashion almost everything goes extreme. Helen A’s henchman is Kandyman, a killer robot made entirely out of candy. The Doctor thwarts Kandyman a couple of times by throwing a liquid at its feet, melting the candy, and making it stick to the floor. Helen A has a crazed wolf-dog hybrid. It is all wonderfully batty, completely silly, and a bit excessive.

The original inhabitants of the planet now dwell underneath the city in a series of pipes. There is a man who wanders about playing the blues on the harmonica, at least until he spies the Happiness Patrol at which point he plays a happy tune. There is an undercover agent who pretends to be just a little bit sad by which he coaxes other people to admit their own sadness and then sicks the Patrol upon them. There is a census taker from another planet who notices that a whole lot of people have gone missing since his last census.

That’s a whole lot of stuff for one story to be doing, and with only three episodes and a run time of 75 minutes, there isn’t enough time for the story to do everything it wants.

There are folks out there, smarter than me, who dig deep into these things. Those folks note that Helen A feels a whole lot like Margaret Thatcher and the entire story seems to be commenting on her reign as Prime Minister at the time. I don’t know about that, but I do know that this story is a whole lot of fun.

Beck: Volume 7 & 8

beck tv

I’m never entirely sure how I should title these posts where I’m just linking to reviews I did for Cinema Sentries. I suppose I should research the best possible SEO way to capture Google searches or something. But I never was good at that sort of thing. Beck is a Swedish detective series that I apparently thought was pretty good. I watched it and wrote the review back in 2013 so my memory is sketchy at best. I’ve since read one of the books in the series and felt basically the same about it – ’tis good but not great.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

wild strawberries criterion

I often think that Ingmar Bergman is the reason most Americans don’t like foreign films. Bergman often made emotionally heavy, deeply symbolic, and frankly not all that easy to watch movies. He is the epitome of the intellectual, art-house type of filmmaker that I think a lot of Americans think of when they think of foreign language films. The fact that there are all kinds of films – silly comedies, dumb action films, etc. – being made in countries that aren’t American doesn’t matter. Foreign films = inexplicable movies that only smarty-pants film critics like.

Or something. I generalize. But it is true that when I talk to my friends who don’t like foreign films they seem to think that all foreign films are European art-house films of the kind that Bergman specialized in.

Which, is perhaps, a weird way of saying I actually love Bergman. I find most of his films to be utterly fascinating. Wild Strawberries is one of his best. Criterion released a Blu-ray of it a few years back, and I’ve got a review.

Detective De Luca

detective de luca

I love a good crime drama. There is something very satisfying about watching someone try to solve a murder or some other heinous crime. The conventions of the genre are somehow comforting as you more or less know what is going to happen (a crime will be committed, questions will be asked, and the criminal will be caught). The best stories find ways to subvert those conventions and do something interesting.

I also love that crime dramas work well all over the world. Just about every culture that makes movies and TV shows makes crime dramas. MHZ used to put out a lot of DVDs of crime dramas and mysteries from all across Europe and other countries. They might still do that, I’ve just lost touch with them. I know they do have a streaming service and I’ve been meaning to give it a try.

Detective de Luca is a cool little series of detective movies from Italy. I reviewed it several years ago and now you can read my thoughts here.

Band of Outsiders (1964)

band of outsiders criterion

Jean Luc Godard was one of the pioneers of the French New Wave. His films have been hailed as some of the greatest movies of all time, but he also has a reputation for being difficult, for making challenging, even obtuse films. So, I’m always surprised when I watch one of his movies and find them to be utterly delightful. Band of Outsiders is one of my favorites of his films (at least from what I’ve seen) and Criterion released an excellent Blu-ray of it awhile back. I wrote a review and you can read it here.