Yeah, they basically just add some grey to everyone’s hair.
Father of the Bride (1950), on our local PBS station’s Saturday night old movie of the week. With Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. Constance Bennett as the mother of the bride is given very little to work with. The director over-played the “chaos” scenes (reception setup, rehearsal) with too much shouting and overlapping dialog. But on the whole it’s sweet and charming.
I particularly liked the engagement party, where Tracy is trapped in the kitchen taking custom drink orders. He’s made pitchers of martinis which no one wants – the father of the groom says “it’s too early for a martini…how about a Scotch?” I’m not sure I follow the logic, but 1950 was a different time.
And good god, 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor is stunningly beautiful.
For no reason, I riffed through Amazon Prime and landed on “Killers from Space”, a 50s monster movie with preFury Peter Graves. I knew going in it would be bad, but I was unprepared for the total suck of this flick. It’s not even good for laughing at. The aliens were Star Trek TOS level- black coveralls and white balls cut in half with pupils painted on for eyes. I guess the drive-ins needed material regardless of the quality.
I watched a very entertaining whodunnit called The Mirror Crack’d a few days ago. It is based on an Agatha Christie Miss Marple story. It’s a good mystery with some silly but fun sideplots. Being Miss Marple it is also set in a very pictureseque British village with eccentric characters. Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple and did it brilliantly. Take into account this movie was in 1980 and the age of the Miss Marple character as Christie wrote it would be closer to the age Lansbury is now in 2022. The movie also has some other big names including Rock Hudson who was superb in the character of a flustered movie director and his two rival and bitchy movie stars played by Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor - the latter who is his on-screen wife as well and who essentially just played herself in the movie.
We watched The Fifth Element which came out 25 years ago. I think it aged remarkably well, for a popcorn adventure movie. It has a nice retro-future vibe. The plotting is scattered; don’t think about it too much. The characters are fun and the visuals are engaging. The Chris Tucker (best performance in the movie, in mine opinion) character looks prescient in terms of social-media celebrities.
We watched House of Gucci. I don’t know how accurate it is (per Wikipedia, it seems more accurate than say Bohemian Rhapsody) but it was an enjoyable film. Lady Gaga is a surprisingly good actor. Adam Driver looked exactly like me in the 80s. I think I had that haircut and glasses. Don’t know if that’s a good thing, or not…
Thought I’d re-watch Ten, the Blake Edwards flick about male menopause. Dudley Moore is just as funny in that role today as he was back in 1979. His physical comedy is perfectly timed and rarely overdone. I know that Bo Derek got a lot of press from that film, but she really sucked at acting and disappeared fairly quickly.
The motive involves a medical issue that was probably not widely known by the general public when the book was written but is now universally known which makes the mystery a little too easy for modern audiences to solve.
I generally find Tucker’s OTT caterwauling grating (hence my dislike of the Rush Hour films despite being a Jackie Chan fan), but it absolutely fits perfectly in that film.
Last night THESE GUYS sold me on Unsane (2018, Hulu) with this:
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Steven Soderbergh’s 2018 psychological horror thriller Unsane stars Claire Foy as Sawyer Valenti, a young woman who is involuntarily committed to a mental institution in what she suspects is an elaborate plot orchestrated by her stalker. Shot entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus, the film is tense and claustrophobic, with visuals composed primarily of close-up shots that place stark emphasis on Foy’s frenzied performance. If you’re looking for genuine mind-screw of a psychological thriller, Unsane is it.
It was pretty good. A solid 4 out of 5 stars. The film work was clever but nothing revolutionary, you’ve seen most of it before, however the characters were interesting and the acting was phenomenal. I don’t need to see it again, but I’m glad I watched it and would recommend it to someone looking for a thriller in the ‘scared woman in a mental ward’ area.
French Exit for some reason I thought his was another Meryl Streep film, and I can only take so much of her, but it’s Michelle Pfeiffer, an actress I like but had long since forgotten about. It was really rather fun, rich Manhattan woman runs out of money, sells her last bits and moves to Paris to die with her son and her cat who she thinks has her dead husband inside. Pfeiffer plays it well.
I have never watched a Charlie Chaplin film before, so last night I watched City Lights (1931). Absolutely brilliant. Excellent story, acting, direction, etc. The physical humor and choreography are second-to-none. I laughed out loud many times.
I first saw City Lights back in the days when you couldn’t see any of his feature films in the US (I can’t remember why exactly – if it was his choice or a govt ban). A travel agent had access to the films and ran them in a meeting room behind his office. The night he ran City Lights it was pouring rain which was the perfect ambience. I remembered crying buckets at the end.
It was fun to recognize the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in the background of several shots!
He was unpopular with a lot of people between approximately 1952 (when Limelight was shown very little in the U.S.) and 1972 (when he was given a honorary Oscar). He was accused of being a communist for being against the McCarthyism of the time. The fact that he had relationships with much younger women was another reason for his unpopularity.
I’m still working my way through Limelight, which at 145 minutes long is a slog. The story is about an aging actor who revitalizes a young dancer’s career. It’s kind of dreary and definitely not a comedy, like a non-Chaplin Chalin film. I’m not sure if I’ll watch the final 30 minutes; I feel compelled to do so just for completeness.
