Definitely not my favorite Chaplin.
Chappaquiddick (2017). I thought it was well done. I appreciate that it was not overly dramatic.
Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore
Shame. The first movie in this series was really sweet and fun. I liked it quite a bit. The second one was terrible, a total snooze. This was better than that, but still quite bad.
Just kind of goes everywhere and nowhere ending with a very dull climax.
Skip it.
It was made hard for him to return from the U.S.:
But, as I wrote in my last post, it was about his supposed sympathy with communism and his relationships with younger woman.
Watched Game Night last night. One of the most fun movies I’ve seen in a while. Good mystery, good comedy, great performances from everyone involved. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are the main characters as a married couple but I really liked Jesse Plemons playing a creepy police officer who lives next door.
We love this movie, and agree about Jesse Plemons. I’m always a bit surprised by the mediocre IMDb rating, and critical scores, for this movie…though my sense is this might be one that grows on people.
This article captures some of my feelings about Fantastic Beasts as a series. Not just the “let it die” mentality, but the reasons. They massively messed up by trying to force everything to be about Grindewald, the previous Voldemort who honestly is not as good or interesting.
Agree. We watched it one night when nothing else appealed, and we were pleasantly surprised. It’s not a great movie, sure, but it was well-acted and interesting.
I saw Chaplin’s City Lights a few years ago with the score played live by the Cleveland Orchestra - a funny and touching film, and a wonderful experience.
Aaaaahhhhh! I meant to return to the U.S.
One of the great final scenes in cinematic history: https://youtu.be/ZJKfmsuvGHg
I’ve seen a boatload of movies since I last posted, so I’ll just hit the highlights. The following are highly recommended:
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Just a fun movie, all around. Nic Cage does a great job of both portraying his public persona and lampooning it. The rest of the cast is up for the fun as well. And, as a bonus, the movie reveals the three best movies of all time.
Petite Maman
A sweet tale of time travel (of a sort). Memory, reconciliation, and the depth of a child’s feelings are all covered in a compact hour and three quarters. The child actors are very much center stage and pitch perfect. It will also play well in streaming, but should be appreciated on a large screen and in high def, as the cinematography is part of the charm of the film.
Montana Story
The Big Sky state is as much a character of this movie as the actors are. Not a film for those who need slam bang action. More a film that you take in moment by moment as the characters become exposed and the story proceeds from that. As some reviews have noted, it is very reminiscent of the work of Kelly Reichardt, who is a director that some love, while others find impenetrable.
Other movies I enjoyed more that usual (I try to pick movies that I will enjoy to go see, and I have a high hit rate, but only a few hit me hard enough to recommend)
7 Days
The Lost City
Midnight
The Northman
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Operation Mincemeat
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was Robert Aldrich’s follow up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which I recently re-watched and loved. H…HSC is next on my re-watch bucket list. Bette Davis has always been a favorite actress of mine. She was one of the greats.
I just watched the Duplass brothers film, Cyrus (2010), starring John C. Reilley, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill. It’s billed as a comedy, which is misleading. It’s a drama, with a few comedy elements thrown in. It’s the story of a lonely, good-natured man who gets involved with a woman (Tomei) who has an odd, toxic relationship with her son (Hill). I wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. The story is compelling and the acting quite good, especially Reilleys performance.
If you haven’t seen the “Feud: Bette and Joan” series yet, I highly recommend it. While obviously dramatized, it really fills in a lot of the behind-the-scenes animosity between the two. The filming of Baby Jane and HHSC are covered in the series. And Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange absolutely nail the leads.
I grew up watching this over and over on WPIX’s Chiller Theater (Channel 11 out of NYC). I think Chiller Theater must have owned some of the movies, because they showed them so often. This one was actually in the opening montage for the show.
It really is a wonderfully bad film, with the Muppet-like ping pong ball eyes that the aliens wear to make them look creepy (they freaked me out as a kid, but now I mainly notice that it was hard for them to keep both pupils pointing in the same direction), the overused stock footage, and the desperate attempt to make nature-film footage of insects look like they’re enormous and scary. I especially like the way that the atomic explosion at the end, when the hidden alien base explodes, only serves to rattle the venetian blinds.
As I’ve grown older, I have more sympathy for the filmmakers, and try to look for the good and clever stuff. I do have a soft spot for the geeky sci-fi shots of futuristic cities and planets, which is actually pretty cool. The space ships travellin on rectilinear ourses on wires are pretty dumb, though, and it’s embarrassing that their “space platforms” are actually platforms in space. Someone should tell them it’s a metaphor. And the Head Alien is clearly much older and fatter than the other aliens. It loks like they paid the actor in beer. The form-fitting body suits they wore don’t help.
The ex-MST3K crew did a parody of this before they started Rifftrax, in a short-lived direct-to-video series called The Film Crew. In the one where they did this film, they reverse the “backward masking” that’s used when one of the aliens sends in a report from the bomb blast, so you can understand what he’s saying. And they suggest new lines for him.
If you get hold of a copy of another great making-fun-of-old-monster-films direct-to-video thing called Zacherly’s Horrible Horror (hosted by long-time monster movie host John Zacherle) you can watch some outtakes from the “giant lizards” portions of this movie, where the handlers are trying desperately to get their torpid lizards to look scary, or at least interesting.
Over the weekend I watched two 3D science fiction films from the 1950s. I hadn’t seen one of them in 3D in ages, and although I’d seen the other, I’d never seen it in 3D.
It Came from Outer Space was directed by Jack Arnold, who made several science fiction films in the 1950s (and also directed The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D). Ray Bradbury wrote the story and, it’s said, the initial version of the script, although Harry Essex is the credited author. Doing a science fiction film in 3D in the 1950s was challenging, in that the effects had to “work” in 3D, too. Arnold did a great job in this. I think that It! and Creature! are two of the best 3D movies eve made – Arnold really knew how to effectively exploit the medium’s strengths. The story is a straightforward one, but unusual for the time – the aliens aren’t invaders, but effectively crashed and need to repair their ship. They “take over” the bodies of people in the town in order to get hold of the materials they need to do this. (I watched an abbreviated silent 2D version of this over and over as a kid, because I owned the Castle Films 8 mm version).
It’s hard not to MST3K the movie, in spite of its good features. ("The aliens are from What Not to Wear! I exclaimed when Richard Carlson finds that they came to his house and emptied his closet) It’s also really annoying the way women are basically treated like children in this and the other film. When the alien impersonating Barbara Rush’s character is trying to lure Richard Carlson along, she’s wearing a sexy strapless black gown that Barbara Rush’s character definitely wasn’t wearing when she was abducted. Maybe they found it i Carlson’s closet.
The other movie was Gog, a virtually forgotten 1950s sci-fi film that I first saw on the same roster of early Sunday afternoon features where I first saw Them! and The Thing. This was actually the third in a trilogy of science fiction films made by Ivan Tors in the early 1950s. Tors is probably better known today for the movie and TV series Flipper and similar animal-themed TV shows of the 1960s, but he got his start with science fiction. He made three films with his "A-Man productions , all involving the fictional Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI) The first two, The Magnetic Monster and Riders to the Stars, starred Richard Carlson (from It Came from Outer Space), but the third one, Gog, didn’t. It was, however, filmed in color and, I learned only a few years ago, in 3D. The 3D version was long thought lost, but it was screened a few years ago on the West Coast, and I was sorry I couldn’t go. But I found it recently on DVD in anaglyphic (red-and-blue glasses) form. For once the anaglyphic version of a color film isn’t too bad.
Tors’ films, which he wrote the stories for, weren’t exactly great science fiction. More “science fantasy”. This one has research at a secret underground research complex being sabotaged, and scientists being killed.
I get the feeling that Michael Crichton must have seen this movie, and it made a deep impression on him. The “Wildfire” research facility in The Andromeda Strain looks like it was lifted from this film – a multilevel secret circular underground research lab out in the desert with a central shaft around which it’s organized, and an atomic device at the base that could blow the whole thing up. In this case the underground base is completely controlled by a computer, NOVAC ( Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer ). And, it turns out, a high-flying airplane from a Hostile Foreign Power (Pretty clearly the USSR) is broadcasting commands into a receiver built into the NOVAC core, remotely killing the scientists. Although some of the deaths are by automatic controls, some are caused by two roving robots, Gog and Magog.
The idea is interesting, but to modern eyes Gog and Magog look – well – stupid. They have caterpillar tread movement and a small-cylinder body with a number of clumsy-looking arms coming off the top and, for no good reason, a flame thrower attachment. They look like bad first drafts of Daleks. Or less attractive R2D2s. They look as if they could easily be defeated by getting behind them. Or tipping them over.
As I say, this one treats women especially badly. When the heroes are battling Gog, who has pulled out the Control Rods on the reactor and threaten a meltdown (shown in the film by shots of what is clearly a carbon arc), she doesn’t do the obvious thing and push the control rods back in. She isn’t doing anything except cowering away. It has to be one of the men who does this with one hand while fighting the under-bad-guy-control robot.
Interesting, but cringe-worthy. Here are some choice images of the robots:
It Came From Outer Space was good fun when I watched it a long time ago. Haven’t heard of Gog but might give it a go some time. 1950s sci-fi stuff interests me because there was an awful lot of it in that decade with movies, books, comics and radio shows going down the sci-fi road more than before. As you mention the experimenting with 3D along with other gimmicks as well as advances in color cinema made it more popular. And especially because it was also to some extent the last decade in which the creators could go into it with a total blank canvas in the sense that scientific findings that were confirmed as a result of human space exploration kicking off in the 1960s would have been considered fiction in the 1950s - at least for most of the decade. I know perceptions changed a lot when the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik into orbit towards the end of the 50s which itself was probably seen as outlandish at the start of the decade. It also goes without saying that even with all the knowledge we have learned in the near seven decades since we still know very little about space today and in the context of sci-fi content that allows still a great deal of imagination and supposition.
We finally watched Free Guy. It’s fun to watch and they interwove the love story and philosophical stuff into the plot very nicely. It’s clever how the bad guy is the least real character in the movie.
The kids were gleeful about the Youtuber cameos.
By far better than Ready Player One. I’ll definitely watch Free Guy a second time. The background stunts going on throughout the movie are hilarious.
I’ve noticed that the high production values and realistic CGI so common in superhero blockbusters have become more common in mainstream movies. I’m not complaining. Realer is generally better.
I watched Due Date, starring, Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis. It’s sort of a re-hash of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I thought it was very funny and well-acted, but the hyper-realistic action shots of Due Date compared to PT&A was almost jarring. And that’s a 12-year-old film. There has been a real paradigm shift in movie-making in the digital world. Used properly, it’s fantastic. Used poorly, it takes you out of the story.
I saw this movie when I was a kid, and I found it weirdly upsetting. Not really scary. But it creeped me out. I didn’t remember the name. Duh. Gog.
Someone mentioned the the Duplass brothers which reminded me that I watched their documentary on Tony Hawk recently (Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off). I found it interesting, but if watching skateboard tricks is not your thing you might not. I also was inundated by a huge wave of nostalgia with all the old video of the Southern California of my childhood and adolescence.
Three Charlie Parker documentaries I’ve seen recently:
This one from 1987 looks very interesting but is dubbed in Italian. Kind of frustrating, because most or all of the interviews are in English but the voiceover makes it nearly impossible to understand what they’re saying.
Bird Now
I’ve also seen this one, made much more recently.
Bird: Not Out Of Nowhere
I didn’t watch the first, I enjoyed the second, and I like this one the most of the three:
Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker
Released in 1989 as part of the American Masters series, the documentary covers the life and times of the troubled genius with ample testimony from wives, friends and followers. I’ve just seen that a book was published two years earlier with the same title. Very well done, IMO. I’ve seen reviews online that say it lacked detail or something (paraphrasing). My opinion is that tragedies like this have to be told very carefully, out of respect, and that the 58-minute running time limits its coverage of said detail. Many images of him I hadn’t seen before, and the testimonies are worth hearing. In particular, Chazz Parker’s account of the circumstances of his funeral make a deep impression. I don’t know much about Parker, and I don’t know how his family and community feel about this documentary, but I’d like to think that those involved in its making, especially those interviewed, are proud of a job well done.
ETA: I’ve just noticed that Chefguy posted upthread about this third documentary.