Links of the Day: March 6, 2023

The Top 10 Most Profane Martin Scorsese Movies, Ranked by Number of F-Bombs: Collider

Why it mattered: Lucinda Williams’ ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’: Happy Mag

A Complete Guide To All Of The Grateful Dead’s Lineup Changes: Grunge Mag

Rodney Crowell Announces Jeff Tweedy–Produced New Album: Pitchfork

Neil Young Continues Original Bootleg Series With The Ducks’ ‘High Flyin’’ And Neil Young & The Santa Monica Flyers’ ‘Somewhere Under The Rainbow’ : That Eric Alper

There Were Sidemen. And Then There Was David Lindley: Rolling Stone

Spiral: Season 2 DVD Review: A Superb, Layered French Crime Drama

spiral season 2 dvd

Over the last few years my movie watching has gone way up and my television viewing has gone down. I find it easier to sit through a 2 hours movie than to make it through several seasons (and many hours) of a television program.

It doesn’t help that there are just so many shows out there. It seems like every other week I’m hearing about some new show that everyone is talking about and is a must-see. Who has the time to watch it all?

I have a bad habit of watching a few episodes of something, then getting distracted by a bunch of movies or another series and I forget to finish a season, never mind an entire series.

Spiral is a fantastic French crime series that I’ve watched 2 or 3 seasons of, but never finished. I’m at the point now where I’d have to start at the beginning, and like I say, who has the time?

Anyway, I wrote a review of Season 2 many years ago and you can now read it at Cinema Sentries.

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.

Westerns In March: The Naked Spur (1953)

the naked spur poster

Westerns in the 1950s began to change. The days of heroes dressed in white and villains clad in black were not entirely gone, but they were slowly being replaced by westerns with more nuance. Films brimming with anxiety, that were concerned with the consequences of violence and the psychology of those who lived on the edges of society (and you don’t get farther onto the edge than the old west) began filling up the movie screens.

Perhaps no other director better exemplifies the psychological western than Anthony Mann. He made numerous westerns in his career, half a dozen of them starred James Stewart. These films are filled with men seeking revenge or otherwise revealing the old west as a dark, dirty place full of violence and greed.

The Naked Spur is possibly their darkest collaboration, and one of their best. Stewart plays Howard Kemp who has been tracking Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), a wanted killer, across the country.

In the Rocky Mountains Kemp enlists the help of an old prospector, Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) to help track Ben down. They locate him and his companion Lina (Janet Leigh) at the top of a ridge. Their shots draw the help of an ex-solider, Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker).

Once they’ve captured Ben, Kemp tries to send the others on their way, but Ben stops them noting that there is a large reward coming to those who bring him in. He does this not out of some sense of altruism, but knowing that if he can set the three against each other he has a shot at getting away.

For the rest of the film, Kemp continually finds ways to set his captors against each other. Each man has their own dark secrets. Stewart, playing against type, is a man who lost his farm to a girl. He gave her the deed when he went away to war and she sold it out from underneath him. He’s now desperate to buy it back but needs all the reward money to do so. He might just be willing to do the others harm in order to collect it.

Shot on location the scenery is gorgeous which makes it a nice contrast to all the dark, evil deeds brewing in the men’s hearts. But while there are some nice vistas Mann keeps things pretty tight, focusing on the faces of his characters as they all try to figure out to get the best of one another.

It ends with some of the nastiest scenes ever seen in a classic western. I won’t spoil it, but it is a one-two punch that really must be seen.

Westerns In March: The Cariboo Trail (1950)

cariboo trail poster

I’ve mentioned a few times in these pages how much I love Randolph Scott. Truth be told I don’t think he was that great of an actor, but he was one of those guys who figured out the type of character he could play well and he stuck to that. While he acted in many types of films, he mostly stuck to westerns and was almost always the hero.

He was also the sort of actor who seems like he would star in any movie the studios asked him to. He made over 100 films, both good and bad, well made and quickly shot b-films. I’ve been trying to watch as many of his movies as I can, and that means sometimes I get one that is not so good.

In The Cariboo Trail, he stars as Jim Redford who, along with his friend Mike Evans (Billy Williams) heads to Canada along the Cariboo Trail. They are looking for gold. For Jim the gold is a means to an end, it will finance his dreams of becoming a rancher, but for Mike the gold is the goal.

The two almost immediately find trouble. There is a short bridge over a small river. The builders of the bridge try to make them pay an expensive toll to cross, but our heroes are having none of that. They run their cattle over the bridge, wrecking it in the process, and making an enemy out of the man who owns the bridge. He owns a lot of the nearby town too.

Mike gets injured after a cattle stampede which was likely started by the men at the bridge. This makes him angry and bitter and he ultimately teams up with the enemy. Jim travels farther north and finds an untouched patch of land that will be just perfect for a cattle ranch.

He also finds Grizzly (Gabby Haynes in his final role) and an old prospector. The two team together to try to find some gold. There’s also a love interest. Actually, there are two, for every woman who comes in contact with Jim seems to fall immediately in love with him. But he has no interest in women, or anything other than finding gold and getting his ranch.

The film was clearly made on the cheap and most of its ideas don’t feel fully developed. My guess is either the writers didn’t have time to finish the story or the budget didn’t have enough money to film them. Either way the film feels a little disjointed.

Scotts is always enjoyable and Gabby Haynes is a lot of fun. This is mostly skippable unless you are a fan of Randolph Scott and even then I’d probably hold off on it until you’ve seen his classics.

Westerns In March

Westerns were massively popular from the 1940s up until about 1960. As their popularity waned in the United States European studios began making them on the cheap. These so-called Spaghetti Westerns amped up the sex and violence and often eschewed the traditional conventions of the genre. By the end of the 1970s, the genre was entirely out of favor pretty much everywhere.

Much like the Hollywood musical, a good western pops up every few years, generates some buzz that maybe the genre is back, and then it disappears again.

I grew up in the 1980s, came of age in the 1990s. Westerns had mostly passed me by. I do remember Young Guns and The Three Amigos, Tombstone, and The Unforgiven. I liked those movies, but the western was still something foreign to me. It wasn’t something I would seek out. At least not for many years anyhow.

Oh, I’d watch some of the classics, films like True Grit and Rio Bravo, but mostly I stuck to other genres. But over the last few years I’ve started to really enjoy westerns and have begun digging deeper into its large well.

So I thought I’d make the theme for my March movie-watching westerns. I started to make a Letterboxd list of westerns I wanted to watch this month, but it was taking me too long to get it together so instead, I’ll just wing it. Most streaming services have a Westerns category and I’m sure to find others in various ways.

I couldn’t think of a catchy title for this theme so it’s just gonna be Westerns in March. But I look forward to watching lots of cowboys and gunfights, horses and the wise open plains. I hope you will too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sleepless (2001)

sleepless movie poster

This is the third film from Dario Argento that I’ve featured in The Friday Night Movie posts. Clearly, I like the director. I’ve been trying to catch up on his filmography past the period of what would generally be called his prime. He’s definitely made some bad movies, most of them being made in the 1990s and beyond, and there was a time when I would have said he’d not made a good movie since Opera in 1987 (in fact I more or less said that in my review of Dark Sunglasses). But I think my opinion is changing.

Nobody is going to call his late career movies better than his output in the 1970s into the 1980s, but some of his later movies aren’t bad. Sleepless falls easily into that category. He’s very much aping some of those early films with a black-gloved killer, lots of stylish camerawork, red herrings galore, plenty of blood-soaked violence and he even got Goblin to do the music.

Unfortunately, it feels a little too much like an old master copying his greatest pieces long after he’s lost the particular genius that made them so special.

The great Max Von Sydow plays an aging, retired detective who gets sucked back into an old case, one he thought was solved years ago. But when more people start being murdered in the same manner he begins to realize he pinned the wrong man all those years ago.

He teams up with a man whose mother was killed by the murderer when he was just a boy. There are a lot of twists and turns and expectations that the killer is this person or that only to have everything upturned right at the end.

Argento’s signature style is there, but it feels a little muted. There isn’t any particular image that really stood out to me. Though there is a nice bit showing the insides of an answering machine that was pretty cool. The director never shied away from extreme violence, but here he leans more toward blood and gore than stylishness.

It isn’t top-tier Argento, but it is a long way from his worst and that’s always good to see at this stage in his career.

The Movie Journal: February 2023

titane

I watched 40 movies in February. Seven of which I had seen previously. 19 of them were made before I was born. As it was Foreign Film February 13 of them were not made in the United States and were not in English.

Stats for the year to date include:

Number of movies watched: 90
Number of previously not watched by me: 74
Top Five Actors: Henry Silva (4 films), Giulio Baraghini (4 films), Vittorio Caprioli (3 films), Val Avery (3 films), and James Coburn (3 films).
Top Five Directors: Fernando Di Leo (5 films), Howard Hawks (3 films), Quentin Tarantino (3 films), Martin Scorsese (3 films), Sam Peckinpah (3 films).

My favorite films watched this month (that were new to me) were: She Dies Tomorrow, Possessor, I Was A Male War Bride, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Titane, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Pig, Nostalghia, and The Bicycle Thieves.

Here’s the full list:

Welcome to the Sticks (2008)
El Dorado (1966)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Brimstone (2016)
Black Rain (1989)
She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
The Night (2020)
Possessor (2020)
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (1936)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
Roughshod (1949)
Five Shaolin Masters (1974)
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967)
Capricorn One (1977)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Titane (2021)
Crimes of the Future (2022)
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
One on Top of the Other (1969)
The Osterman Weekend (1983)
A Study in Scarlet (1933)
Dark Alibi (1946)
Mr. Wong, Detective (1938)
Cujo (1983)
Fist of Fury (1972)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
Hellraiser (2022)
Tampopo (1985)
Pig (2021)
Nostalgia (1983)
Ride Lonesome (1959)
The Tall T (1957)
Biutiful (2010)
Micmacs (2009)
Run (2020)
C.H.U.D. (1984)
Bicycle Thieves (1948)