Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
So I bought this Ingmar Bergman box set from Criterion a while back in a half-price sale, a big ol’ thing with thirty-nine of his movies. I don’t think that’s 100 percent all of them, but it’s close enough. And I’ve recently started digging into it. So Smiles is the first film in the box, according to the way the discs are organized in the package, although it’s not chronologically his first. But it was his breakout film, the one that caught international attention for him, made a good profit, and more or less saved his heretofore commercially lackluster career. In terms of significance in Bergman’s career, I can understand it as the choice to lead things off.
It’s a sex comedy, not the introspective, brooding kind of thing that one might think of when Bergman is mentioned (The Seventh Seal was his next film, which was followed by Wild Strawberries). It brings together a variety of characters at a country estate for a weekend. Most impressive to me, there’s some good character work in the writing. Overall, I’m not as enthusiastic about it as a lot of folks are, but I’d still rank it as pretty good.
The Game (1997)
A mindfuck thriller by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas. Douglas plays a wealthy investment banker who’s given a strange birthday gift by his brother (Sean Penn)–a voucher for a mysterious “game” that seems to start out with a series of disturbing pranks played on him, with the whole thing snowballing into true horribleness as the story moves on. Recommended.
Fist Fight (2017)
I was kinda interested to check this out when it was released, just because of Charlie Day (big Sunny fan here). For whatever reason, I just recently got around to watching it. So nonassertive little guy Charlie’s a high school English teacher who, by way of messed-up circumstances, incurs the wrath of big, ill-tempered history teacher Ice Cube. Ice Cube challenges Charlie to a fight after school (yeah, that old trope, but with teachers instead of students), and Charlie spends the rest of the school day trying to figure out how to deal with the situation, knowing he’s going to get his ass kicked. Overall, meh. The ending is a bit “overdone” for my taste, and Christina Hendricks is completely wasted in a role as another teacher who hates Charlie (not wasted in the sense of intoxicated; it’s just that she’s very much underutilized and used poorly at that). Ice Cube is pretty good. I’m not saying avoid it, but I’m not all that enthusiastic about a recommendation either.
We watched 1937’s Double Wedding from TCM, one of the many enjoyable William Powell/Myrna Loy films. They have such a great chemistry and comic timing together.
Always weird to watch romance films from bygone eras. It’s like watching Vulcan mating rituals. I can sort of follow along, but I’m not quite sure what is gong on. My theory is that people said “I love you” to mean “I am ready to have sex now with you”, instead of, you know, actually being in love.
Though the ending did drag and sort of fall apart. Cut about five minutes here and there at the titular event, and it would be great.
Commenitng on above new posts, I love Ronin, but I thought The Game was cheesy. It’s one of those 'lead you around by the nose" films where any one little thing that didn’t go right (like you know, drowning in a sunken car) would ruin the whole ‘game’. Also, if my brother did that to me I’d throw him off the roof instead. Along with everyone else up there.
I don’t want to be irreverent, but I think you will all agree that whoever created sex certainly knew his business. Though everyone is crazy about it (those who are not are beneath contempt and will bear watching), the word itself, small as it is, seems to frighten more people than antidisestablishmentarianism, which as you all know is the longest word in the English language. Lyric writers, in particular, always delete that lovely little word and replace it with “love.” No singer (even a tenor) would dare sing “Sex Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” With this title the song would sell in the millions but the singer would be tossed in the clink by some morals committee. The charge? Inciting the public into doing what comes naturally.
I hate the premise of that movie so much. I mildly dislike practical jokes to begin with. If someone did that to me, I’d have sprayed them with real bullets in the aftermath. Or not, because I’m not insane . But I absolutely would have bitterly severed all ties with every family member and “friend” who participated in such an upsetting farce and would never speak to them again. Fuck that noise. The ending utterly, utterly ruined the film for me.
David Fincher made this between Se7en and Fight Club. It’s cute, but I also found the ending to be…questionable.
His next movie is a sequel to a Quentin Tarantino movie, written by Tarantino. Tarantino hasn’t written a full sequel* to his own movie yet. It’s called The Adventures of Cliff Booth.
Disappointed. Hugh Jackman plays an old Robin Hood who is adamant that all stories of Robin Hood are false and he and his colleagues were just bandits that were successful in that field.
The movie is dark. I mean…it is poorly lit. This is one of those films that makes you wonder what they were thinking when they not only shot the movie this dark, but approved its look in post production. In fact, I would not be surprised if this film was darkened in post…for reasons…
It’s kind of dull. Well, quite dull. Nothing here to see that is worth your time.
They tried something here, but nothing interesting happened and we ended up with a dark, boring movie.
Yeah, I won’t defend the ending. I mean, if you’re going with that premise, you kinda have to just go to extremes with everything once you hit act two and then hope for the best. I’m not sure it’s possible to have an ending to it that does the rest of the movie justice.
Oh, and I want to add one more to my recent list: Blazing Saddles
We did this one in honor of Mel Brooks’s one hundredth. Not much to say about it that hasn’t already been said hundreds of times by people who have said it better than I could. But this one, I’d put it in the US movie canon.
When listing the greatest comedic lines that get huge laughs, I always say that, “Hey, where’re all the white ladies at?” is one of the greatest lines in comedy history.
Maybe the best single comedic line in any film. Up there with “Well, nobody’s perfect…” from Some Like It Hot.
Yeah, I still can’t decide whether I like it or not. I think it depends on how much disbelief I can suspend at the moment. Lots of clever twists that don’t bear too much thinking about.
Finally got to see Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild: The Story of Steppenwolf. It’s been in post film-fest limbo for awhile but it’s available now on Amazon with a subscription to Qello (free one-week subscription available). The usual talking heads are in attendance but both John Kay, Nick St. Nicholas and Mars Bonfire tell the story from their own perspectives.
As threatened above I saw Pressure today. For war or historical movie buffs I recommend it. Despite knowing how it comes out in the end it keeps your interest as two meteorologists come to two different forecasts on the eve of D-day. Brendan Fraser sells Ike well as does Andrew Scott’s tightly wound Group Captain Stagg.
A few moments at the beginning show a bloody beach that was the disaster of Exercise Tiger, a D-day rehearsal in April, and on D-day itself a few minutes of the slaughter on the beaches, perhaps 5% of the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan.
Yeah, it definitely calls for that. The appeal for me is how life can get so badly fucked up so quickly. Sort of like After Hours, which is on my short list of all-time favorites. I showed it to my daughter, and I’ll blur her reaction as a sort of semi-spoiler: Papier-mache wouldn’t dry as quickly as it does when June encases Paul in it. That was the first thing she said at the end. She got hung up on that detail, but really, it’s beside the point. Give Marty that. The story needs it, and it’s minor.
But then again, I’d insist that AH is a far, far better movie than The Game, in large part because the stuff that happens in AH is all bizarre happenstance, whereas in The Game, it’s a meticulously conceived plot. That makes a big difference. (And as a character, Paul Hackett is a relatable, everyday kinda guy, more or less, who just wanted to get laid.)
Four-Sided Triangle (1953) – a very early Hammer science fiction film, directed by Terence Fisher, who went on to direct an awful lot of Hammer Horror movies, not to mention the often overlooked SF film Spaceways. Based on the novel by William F. Temple, which I recently found and read. I’d never seen the movie before, but dug up a used copy on the internet.
It simplifies the plot from Temple’s novel, which is too bad, because one of the things that made it interesting was the discussions and what they not only planned to do with the Matter Duplicator, but which they actually did. Also, the cast was too old – the scientists and the Free Spirit Lena are clearly very young – in their early twenties. But the cast of the film is in their mid-to later thirties. Lena isn’t the Wild Girl of the book, but a pretty conventional woman, and the scientists aren’t nerdy and passionate enough. It’s like they invented a Stodgy Duplicator and ran the entire plot through it. Interesting film, and worth showing at a con or something.
I felt that way when watching it originally, but the early part stuck with me, and on a rewatch it worked much much better. The dark times balanced out the rest. The early parties. Then the flipside of the hedonism. Once you know what you’re in for it works and a brave choice. Hard to watch first time, worth a rewatch second time.
. But I absolutely would have bitterly severed all ties with every family member and “friend” who participated in such an upsetting farce and would never speak to them again. Fuck that noise. The ending utterly, utterly ruined the film for me.