I have an inexplicable love for all those campy 1960s epic comedies, especially the one’s tapping into the weird Victorian obsession they had back then. Even more so for the really lowbrow beach films, 1966 Batman, Don Knotts vehicles, and silly crap like Munster, Go Home!. There’s just something fearless about how the filmmakers didn’t think anything was too broad or silly to throw into the mix. And the colors! I love the whole aesthetic.
I saw A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a few months ago. Sondheim’s music really makes it work though I thought Michael Crawford was a little too old as Hero.
I can’t be the only one who thought Mad Mad Mad World was not only popular when released, but also hugely popular years later and considered one of the great comedies of all time.
I had no idea people did not find it funny still, though I admit I don’t watch it often as I have seen it so many times, I kind of have it memorized.
My kids loved Madx4 World when they were little. We watched it over and over again. To this day when anything amazing or wonderful happens, one of us will sing “Double you…” referencing the moment when Spencer Tracy notices the palm trees.
I haven’t see It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in a long while but I remember finding it tedious.
For me, the tedious movie I grew up with was My Fair Lady. We thought that thing was 4 hours long.
It’s 2 hrs 50. Maybe we were seeing it on TV and it was at least 4 hours, though. What a grind to get through.
Funny thing about a Funny Thing – it really is based on a musical play (that Zero Mostel starred in in Broadway), but they cut out almost all of the songs for the movie and completely rewrote Larry Gelbart’s script (Larry Gelbart is the guy who brought M.A.S.H. to TV. Michael Pertwee, who wrote the screenplay (and several other screenplays and stage plays) is the brother of Dr. Who (Jon Pertwee – the Third Doctor))
I’ve seen the stage play (in amateur productions), and I really do think the movie works much better with the few songs they retained. Pertwee’s script gives Marcus Lycus (Phil Silvers’ character – the female slave-trader) a much bigger part. And, of course, gives space for much more slapstick. And he gave himself a little cameo.
The slapstick works in this film – even the outrageous gags, but it doesn’t (at least for me) in The Great Race. And I couldn’t give you a concise answer about why. Perhaps Leonard Maltin got it when he said that The Great Race suffered from “an incomplete understanding of slapstick” (quotation from the Wikipedia page on TGR).
Bob Marley: One Love - I had high hopes for this one but it doesn’t really deliver. The lead actors - Kingsley Ben-Adir (Bob) and LaShana Lynch (Rita Marley) are fantastic, even though Kingsley is much taller and, frankly prettier, than Marley.
As a mostly casual fan, I was familiar with some of the history and was looking forward to learning more. No such luck, although it did lead me to go home and learn more about Jamaica’s history and the history of Rastafari, so there’s that.
Some folks will definitely need to turn the subtitles on if they stream it. There’s some really thick patois being spoken and the shite sound in the theater didn’t help.
Sure, there’s an unending stream of their songs throughout but it kind of just feels like background music. The peace concert should have been triumphant. I had anticipated teary eyes and lip synching among the audience like I experienced in Bohemian Rhapsody but it just kind of ended. The clips of the actual concert moved me more.
I won’t fo so far as to say “skip it” but probably best to wait until it’s streaming.
But note that at least one of the interloping cowboys ends up going home with one of the dancers, so there is still satire, cringy or not.
Alien: Covenant
Recommended…if you’ve seen Prometheus
I think this was my favorite Alien movie in the franchise and it is kind of a shame they didn’t let Ridley Scott make the third movie he wanted to make to round this series out. Difficult to talk about without spoiling it, but I found that in the end I enjoyed Prometheus and Alien: Covenant more than anything that had preceded them.
My final Alien movie rankings are:
- Alien: Covenant
- Prometheus
- Aliens
- Alien
- Alien 3
- Alien Resurrection <–the only truly bad one
I watched The Nest with Jude Law and Carrie Coon. It was just ok.
You are so right about this movie! I caught the very last local theater screening last night, and was super impressed. What an “actor’s movie”, and what stellar performances from the actors!
Yes, it was a bit sentimental in spots IMHO, but that’s okay in a family drama. Yes, there was a certain amount of exaggerated caricature of the views it was lampooning, but that’s okay in a social satire.
The one thing I wish the movie had done more of was to lean a bit harder on the protagonist’s contempt for his own “totally crap novel”. I kept waiting for one of the other characters to say something about some more nuanced aspect of the book that causes Monk (the protagonist) to stop short and silently realize that oh shit, maybe he did accidentally do some quality writing in this piece of cynical trash whose subject and style and prurient sensationalism he thoroughly despises.
It was such a fun and thought-provoking premise for a movie, but I think it could have been even more so if it hadn’t remained so, er, black-and-white (or maybe red-and-blue, as in the Johnny Walker metaphor?) about a straightforward binary distinction between good books and trashy books.
I think it would have been really cool if the movie had probed deeper into the ways that skillful writing and manipulative trashiness interact, and how such interactions can contribute to the “smash hit” phenomenon. I mean, I think there has to be a reason why a lot of thoughtful readers, including the protagonist’s own girlfriend Coraline, liked the book despite its deliberate trashiness, and without knowing that Monk was the author.
And the reason can’t be merely “all the liberal-guilt white intellectuals are falling for this fake Black poverty-porn parody because they think it’s so ‘authentic’”, although that’s certainly a major factor. After all, Coraline, for example, isn’t white.
I came back from the theater and immediately bought the streaming version of American Fiction online, which tells you something about my expectations of finding it worth rewatching in the future.
The Zone of Interest (2023). Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and his family enjoy an idyllic life literally in the shadow of the camp. Haunting and understated but very effective, with the horrors of the camp portrayed mostly indirectly by distant sounds and household conversations. A worthy Best Picture nominee but profoundly depressing. It’s in German which is great for authenticity but most of us non-German speakers have to keep our eyes glued on the subtitles.
A few more points regarding the above movie. This is Sandra Hüller’s second film for 2023, the other one being Anatomy of a Fall, and both have been Oscar-nominated, while Hüller herself has been nominated for Best Actress for her terrific performance in Anatomy. In that film, incidentally, she spoke flawless English and French in about equal measure, while in Zone of Interest she spoke her native German. Quite the impressive lady.
For those interested, the Smithsonian Magazine has an informative historical backgrounder on the movie:
The Iron Claw
Great movie. And wow that was fucked up. They called it a “curse” but it was clearly all the direct result of toxic parenting.
Holt McCallany is an excellent actor. I don’t really have anything else to say about it, except that maybe Zach Efron looked remarkably like 70s The Hulk to me. I think it was the hair.
Drive-Away Dolls
Directed and co-written by Ethan Coen. A picaresque about two lesbians accident hijacking Marcellus Wallace’s soul (OK, not really, but the MacGuffin looks an awful lot like it). It has a lot of the Coen flair, but it is too short to really let the characters breathe. The leads are game and funny, so it’s not a waste of 90 minutes, but it’s definitely minor Coen.
And it did introduce me to a 1997 cover of a Muddy Waters song.
Interesting that Joel and Ethan seem to be doing solo work now, first Joel with the much-acclaimed Macbeth, and now Ethan with Drive-Away Dolls. I haven’t seen that last one yet but from what I’ve read about it, it’s more like classic Coen brothers. It’s not rated especially high but then neither was Intolerable Cruelty, and that’s one of my favourite Coen brothers films!
So I was just watching Goodfellas again and it just occurred to me that there’s no obvious reason for Tommy to borrow the kitchen knife from his mother. The reason he gives her is obviously a lie, and while it does prove useful in finishing off Billy Batts in the trunk, they already thought he was dead at the time he borrowed the knife. So why did he want it? Not that I have any first-hand knowledge, but I’m skeptical you can dismember a human with a knife like that, if that’s what it was for.
It is just about what literally happened in real life:
Taking off fingers? Disarticulating larger limbs with a bit of muscle? Making cuts to make it easier to whack up the body with the shovel? Just an overambitious “why not, it might be useful?” I dunno. But apparently stopping to get a knife among other things was exactly what they did.
Force Ten From Navarone 1978 Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, Carl Weathers and Barbara Bach.
It was fimed shortly after Star Wars. I’ve always enjoyed this movie. The story is a bit disorganized and slow paced. But it’s still pretty interesting. The 2nd hour is much better.
Guns of Navarone 1961 is a better movie with Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and David Niven.
Force Ten From Navarone is free on Amazon Prime. I recommend watching when you have a couple hours to kill.