My Week in Movies March 19-25, 2033

butch cassidy and the sundance kid poster

I watched ten movies last week, seven of which were new to me. Two of which were westerns that I will talk about later this week in more depth.

The Wild Bunch (1969): Sam Peckinpah made several westerns before this one, but this is his masterpiece, the culmination of his thoughts on the genre. It is brutally violent, dark, cynical, and pretty fantastic. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I write my full review.

Small Town Crime (2017): A small, twisty, noir-tinged thriller starring John Hawkes as a disgraced, alcoholic former cop who discovers a body on the side of the road. He convinces the girl’s father (Robert Forster) to let him work the case as a private detective. The case gives him a new lease on life to actually do something besides drink himself into an early grave. The plot is pretty standard stuff, but it is done well and Hawkes is great as usual. I’d love to see him in an HBO-type series where he solves crimes every week.

Double Indemnity (1973): A television remake of the classic film noir with Richard Crenna in the Fred MacMurray role, Samantha Eggar taking over the Barbara Stanwyck part, and Lee J. Cobb as Edward G. Robinson. It follows the original script pretty closely (though it does edit parts out to cut down on the total time), but pales in comparison.

But it isn’t as bad as it’s been made out to be. It is a perfectly serviceable TV movie. If the original didn’t exist this would be, well it would be completely forgotten as it isn’t good enough to really be remembered, but if you picked it up in the $2 DVD bin you wouldn’t think it was a waste of your money.

But since the original does exist there is no real reason to watch it other than to make you realize how perfect the original is in every way. I watched it because it came as an extra on my Blu-ray of the original and I was curious about it.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969): One of my favorite westerns. It feels like the opposite side of the same coin The Wild Bunch comes from. This is a lot more fun to watch and Paul Newman and Robert Redford have never been more charming.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927): Alfred Hitchcock’s first big hit and his first truly Hitchcockian film has been a gaping hole in my cinematic knowledge for far too long. I remedied this week and I can’t really fathom why it took me so long.

The plot follows a London family after they have taken in a mysterious lodger who might just be a Jack the Ripper-style killer. It is full of creeping dread and suspense while utilizing what would become many of the director’s trademark styles. Even without sound, he proves himself a master of camera placement and movement, and editing.

Barbarian (2022): A pretty terrific little horror film that I talked about in my Friday Night Horror piece.

Sabotage (1939): The Lodger got me into the mood for another early Hitchcock film. I’d seen this one before but it is so worth watching again. It is about a man who is enlisted by foreign agents to commit acts of sabotage in London. It follows his wife and a young police detective as they try to determine whether or not that’s actually true.

Strangely, this one doesn’t seem all that beloved by Hitchcock fans and classic movie nerds, but I love it. It is full of that classic Hitchcock suspense and it makes great use of its setting (the family runs an old movie theater.)

Excalibur (1981): I have this distinct little memory of my mother renting this movie when I was a kid. I was very excited to watch it because it had knights in shining armor and wizards and it looked really cool. But Mom watched it before me and decided that the nudity, sex, and violence were not appropriate for little old me. I was so disappointed.

That memory has stayed with me, but I somehow only got around to watching the film now. What a strange, long, freaky movie it is. The plot is a retelling of the King Arthur myth. It looks great, the set design is wondrous and the lighting and camera placement are all really interesting. But the story just plods along and the action is clumsy at best.

John Boorman directed it. He made Zardoz a few years earlier. It is just as weird and stylish but it‘s actually good.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933): Joan Blondell and Dick Powell star in this wonderful little musical with choreography from Busby Berkeley. The film opens with Blondell, Ginger Rogers and a host of chorus girls decked out in dresses made of gold coins singing “We’re in the Money” and it just gets better from there.

Every Secret Thing (2014): Two very young girls are convicted of kidnapping and then murdering a baby. Years later, just after they are released from juvenile correction another little girl goes missing. The story moves from the first crime to the next connecting how what we did in our past influences who we are and what we can do in our present and future.

Did you all watch anything interesting this week?

My Week(s) in Movies: March 5-18, 2023

the little foxes poster

I seem to have forgotten to write a movie journal last week, which is ok because I didn’t watch that many this week as I wound up binge-watching a show. Still, I’ve got a lot of movies to get through which means’ I’ll just touch on each one briefly.

The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939): There is a lot of talk these days about representation and appropriation and with movies like this it is perfectly understandable why. In the 1930s there were a number of film series about Asian detectives who were inevitably played by white dudes. The three main ones were Charlie Chan (initially played Warner Oland then Sidney Toler and later Roland Winters), Mr. Moto (played by Peter Lorre), and Mr. Wong (Boris Karloff).

I don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of why this was a popular genre back then, so I’ll just move on to this particular film. As I say that I realize it has been so long since I watched it and the film was so unmemorable that I don’t actually have much to say about it. It involves a jewel theft and some murders which take place during a house party where some folks enact a bad play. I’ve seen a couple of Wong mysteries and none of them are great. Karloff plays the character pretty stiffly, unlike Waner Oland as Charlie Chan who is at least somewhat humorous.

Stars in My Crown (1950): A movie I should have already talked about in my Westerns in March series. Joel McCrea plays a preacher in a small post Civil War town. There isn’t much to it, just a slice-of-life kind of film that’s a bit sentimental but also sweet.

The Little Foxes (1941): A bitter, brutal little film about awful rich people who will do anything and everything to get even richer. It is based on a stage play and the filmmaking doesn’t really do anything to expand it. Better Davis plays the lead, a conniving woman who married for money and is willing to stab everyone she comes across in the back to stay that way. She’s terrific in it and the entire film is quite wonderful.

Major Dundee (1965): I did write about this one for my Westerns in March series, you can read it here.

Gone in the Night (2022): Winona Ryder is good in this undercooked mystery. She spends the film trying to find out what happened to her boyfriend after he disappears one night that they spent in a cabin in the woods. The mystery isn’t particularly interesting and the twists can be seen coming from a mile away. But Ryder demonstrates why she’s been a star for a decade and Demot Mulroney is also pretty great as a guy who helps her solve the mystery.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980): I wrote about this one in my Friday Night Horror Movie post.

Young Guns (1988): Also wrote about this one in my Westerns in March series.

The Magnificent Seven (2016): Gosh darn it, I have been slacking with my Westerns in March series. I’ll do better this week, I promise. This film is a pale imitation of the original The Magnificent Seven (1960) which was itself a pale imitation of The Seven Samurai (1954).

Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019): A pretty good little mystery about a woman who tries to solve the kidnapping she witnessed as a little girl. The twists in this one are pretty good and it has a nice moody tone to it.

The Retaliators (2022): A not-very-good horror movie that I reviewed over at Cinema Sentries.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): A wonderful film from Martin McDonagh. On its surface, it’s about a guy (Brendan Gleeson) who is so tired of another guy’s small talk (Colin Farrell) that he’s willing to chop off his fingers just to get him to shut up. But really it is about the Irish Civil War and the true value of art. Gleeson and Farrell are terrific as is Kerry Condon.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022): Bob’s Burgers is one of those shows that I love when I’m watching it, but don’t actually follow. I think it started about the time we cut the cord so it wasn’t something I’d sit down and watch every week and I believe it only streams on Hulu which is a station we only subscribe to periodically.

I had originally planned to not watch the movie until I had caught up with the series up to the point the movie originally aired, but decided that was dumb as this is not the sort of show you need to know everything about in order to watch the movie. The film is like an extended version of the film, but a little spiffier, all of which is to its detriment. It is still hilarious, but I found that it overstayed its welcome and the better-looking graphics only made it look weird.

Little Women (1933): I’ve seen multiple adaptations of the book by Louisa May Alcott, and even ran lights for a musical production in college. To tell the truth, I don’t actually love the story, but my wife does and so I periodically throw it on as something we both can watch. This one stars Katharine Hepburn as Jo and she’s delightful.

Final Destination (2000): A pretty dumb horror flick from the early 2000s. I wrote a full review here.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): A completely nutso sequel to one of the all-time great horror movies. I wrote about it for my Friday Night Horror feature.

Piranha 3D (2010): I didn’t have high hopes for this film, but I liked director Alexandre Aja’s adaptation of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and Crawl (2019) was kind of fun in a dumb way, but this was terrible. It might have been fun had I seen it in a crowded theater on a late Saturday night, but watching it alone in my bedroom I found it to be dreadfully stupid and an utter bore.

Cheyanne Autumn (1964): Yet another western I need to write about. This one was John Ford’s last western and it centers on the plight of the Cheyanne Indians and their harrowing flight to their homelands. It is overlong and rather dry, but I’ll have more to say about that soon.

The World’s End (2013): Every single film in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy gets better with repeat viewings. This has long been my least favorite of the three, but it continues to grow on me. The beauty of these films, and what makes them work on repeat viewings is that the jokes build on themselves. Things happen early in the films that get payoffs later and that’s the sort of thing I don’t notice on first (or second, or third) viewings but that make me keep coming back.

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.

The Week in Movies: February 19-25

rio bravo

Had you asked me five minutes ago if this past week was a big movie-watching week for me I would have said no. That it felt about average. I just did the count and I apparently watched 12 movies this week. That’s kind of ridiculous, but now I’m gonna talk about them anyway.

Five Shaolin Masters (1979): A pretty average Shaw Brothers kungfu movie that I talked about here.

Roughshod (1949): Gloria Grahame is one of my favorite classic movie actresses. She’s mostly known for her work in some pretty terrific film noirs, but she had a long, fascinating career and made lots of movies in all sorts of genres.

Here she stars in a pretty good western about a couple of young cowboys on the run from some pretty nasty men. They come across a group of prostitutes (led by a Graham in a wonderful performance) who were recently kicked out of Aspen.

The film is more romance than action, but it is fascinating how modern it often is in its handling of these “fallen women” and the recognition of how difficult it was for unmarried women in the old west.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021): The Coen Brothers are some of my very favorite modern filmmakers. Joel Coen did this one alone with Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as his scheming lady. I’ve seen multiple cinematic adaptations of this Shakespeare play and I’m not sure they do anything new with the material here. But it sure looks fantastic (they shot it in beautiful black and white and almost all of was shot on a soundstage with some really interesting set designs.)

Washington and McDormand are both older than the typical actors who play the roles that give their performances an interesting weight. They aren’t ambitious young bucks looking for power but people closer to the end of their lives grabbing for one last chance.

The Amazing Adventure (1936): A very slight, but enjoyable early Cary Grant film that I wrote about here.

I Was A Male War Bride (1949): Another Cary Grant film, this one is a lot funnier. Directed by the great Howard Hawks Grant stars as a French soldier in Germany just after the war has ended. Ann Sheridan is the American officer he falls in love with and marries. The gag is that in order for him to be allowed into America he must be registered as a war bride (that is the foreign bride of an American soldier). Lots of silly misunderstandings occur. If you can look past the inherent modern difficulties with such a premise what’s left is an often very funny screwball comedy.

Possessor (2020): Brandon Cronenberg, much like his father David, is making a name for himself with complicated, often grotesque horror films. Andrea Riseborough plays an assassin who uses a science-fiction device to take control of another person’s body. She can then use that person’s body to kill her target then kill themself leaving no evidence of herself behind.

It gets really complicated from there and it is best worth watching no knowing anymore. It is a bold, fascinating film, that didn’t always work for me plot-wise. Or rather it offers up some really interesting ideas but then often drops them in order to shock the audience with images and horror. But it is very much worth seeing.

The Night (2020) A psychological horror that I wrote about here.

She Dies Tomorrow (2020): A woman becomes convinced that she is going to die tomorrow. Emotionally spiraling she calls her friend who at first tries to comfort her, but then she becomes convinced she is going to die tomorrow. She tells her family and like a virus, this idea spreads.

Made in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic Amy Seimetz’s film really grabs hold of the existential dread and deeply felt anxieties that stemmed from lockdowns and the horrifying unknown. It is a film that eschews narrative cohesion for a vibe. Scenes jump from one to another without providing any sort of conclusion but the atmosphere it creates is so well done, I never really cared.

Black Rain (1989): I watched this Ridley Scott thriller not long after it came out on home video. I would have been 13 or 14 then. I loved action movies and cop films back then but was disappointed in this one. I hadn’t seen it since then but decided to give it another shot this weekend.

I quite liked it. I can see why I didn’t like it all those many years ago as narratively it is a bit uneven. Michael Douglas plays one of those cops who doesn’t play by the rules but gets things done characters that were so popular in 1980s films.

He chases a killer to Osaka and buts head with a Japanese culture that always plays things by the rules and believes in working together as a collective.

But unlike those other movies Scott doesn’t allow his hero to get away with it. He must change in order to catch the killer. Well, sort of, but he definitely gives him a harder time of it.

The main reason to watch the film is its neo-noir lighting and set design which is just gorgeous.

Brimstone (2016): There are some westerns that attempt to portray what life would have really been like in the wild west. How harsh and brutal it could be. Others use those brutal conditions to tell a story that isn’t so much realistic as it is apocalyptic.

Brimstone tells the story of Liz (Dakota Fanning) a woman who has had a horribly hard and horrifying life. We first meet her as an adult living on a ranch with her loving husband, daughter, and stepson. She cannot speak as her tongue has been cut off (we’ll discover why later in the film). They live a hard, but good life. One day a new preacher (Guy Pearce) comes to town. He’s a fire-and-brimstone kind of guy and he swears vengeance upon Liz (we’ll discover why later in the film).

The movie then moves backward in time to tell us how she got to that farm and then will move backward two more times giving us the scope of her life.

Her life was hell. There is a moment, and it is here I must give a spoiler warning…

where a young girl is raped by her father. The film doesn’t show us the deed but it is clear that is what happened. Especially when we see the young girl run from her bedroom in terror. But then the camera moves inside the room to show her father curled up in the bed with the sheets pulled down. The camera then moves even closer so we can see the blood and other fluids on the bedsheet.

It was at this point I became angry with the film, for it seems to delight in showing us the horror. Now, obviously, I’m a fan of the genre. I’ve seen my fair share of gore in cinema. I can enjoy some blood-soaked horror in my movies. But I have reached a point where when a film just rubs your face in it, not to tell its story, but just because it can, that I tune out.

I did finish the film, but after that scene, I was really done with it.

Rio Bravo (1959): I’ve seen this Howard Hawks film a few times over the years and never really loved it. In my mind, I always expect a tight base under siege thriller with John Wayne and Dean Martin holed up in an old jail while the villains try to get in. And there are aspects of the film that are exactly that, but the film takes its time about it.

In some ways, it is more of a hang-out film than anything else. There’s Wayne as the sheriff who has arrested a man for murder. The man’s brother is forming a gang to bust him out. Dean Martin is a great gunfighter who has turned into the town drunk. Ricky Nelson is the young buck with something to prove and Walter Brennan is the cantankerous comic relief.

The film spends a lot of time with these characters just hanging out. Getting to know each other and learning from each other. This viewing, with changed expectations I learned to love it. I love spending time with these characters.

Tonight I watched El Dorado which is more or less a remake of Rio Bravo, also directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne. Technically I watched it tonight, which is Sunday, which is the start of this week, and therefore not covered in this post so I’ll have more to say about it in next week’s post. But I wanted to mention it here while it is fresh on my mind. The differences between the two films are fascinating. El Dorado is more action-packed and gets to where it’s going a lot faster than Rio Bravo, which is probably what I liked it more in previous viewings. But this weekend I appreciated Rio Bravo’s ability to pull back from the action to dwell on those characters.

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.