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Reviews
Mildred Pierce (1945)
ok, not great
The opening of Mildred Pierce goes down in my memory as
among the best openings I've ever seen. It begins with an
introductory sequence that shows a man being shot, a woman
(Mildred Pierce herself, as played by Crawford) walking across a
bridge in tears, making almost as if to jump off before being
stopped by a police officer, and then finding an acquaintance
(Wally Fay, played by Carson) at a restaurant and taking him to an
elaborate beach house-the one where the man was shot, where
his body still is. Mildred's response to Wally's suggestive
question about whether her husband is broadening his horizons
(a very cold "He's not home") tells us both who the body is and that
she at least knows that it's there. She surreptitiously locks all the
exits and sneaks out of the house (presumably on her way to call
the police), leaving him to discover the body alone. When he does,
the beauty begins. He runs around the house in a panic, trying all
the doors, running up and down a dramatically art-deco and
expressionist spiraling staircase. As he becomes more and more
panicked, the house seems to rise up around him, more and
more intimidating with every second, and the shadows become
more and more exaggerated, to the point where his own shadow
looms horrifically over him. The shadows cast by the railings of
the spiral staircase are beautifully nightmarish.
After this incredible scene, though, the movie kind of goes downhill
for me. Maybe it's just my preference for noir over melodrama, or
maybe large swathes of the movie are boring in both action and
appearance. I just couldn't work up any interest for Mildred the
bored housewife (which is odd, because bored 40s and 50s
housewives fascinate me), or Mildred the restauranteur, or Mildred
the sad mother with one dead child and one disgustingly awful
one. I couldn't. And movies don't bore me. One of my favorite
movies is Tarkovsky's Solaris, the slowest movie ever made.
Even bad, predictable movies don't bore me. This one did. I don't
know why. It's not a bad movie, as far as I can tell. It just bored
me.
The performances are all superb, especially (of course)
Crawford's. Arden's work as a friend/coworker of Mildred's is also
excellent, though it's a relatively minor role. And the twist ending,
while it's probably pretty predictable, took me by surprise. It was
great, and it actually made my memories of the rest of the movie a
little better. However, a surprise ending, even a rare good one,
doesn't change the fact that the actual experience of watching the
movie is boredom itself.
Recommended, with reservations.
Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
joyous & beautiful...AND woody allen
I still can't figure out my attitude towards musicals. I think they're a brilliant concept, that I know. Some of my very favorite movies are musicals. But I still hate most of them. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical, and it's one of my very favorite movies. I don't hate it.
The characters in the movie, as in most of Woody Allen's movies, are charmingly intelligent liberals living in New York City. They're wealthier than usual this time, though, in the way that they're always doing charity things and going to France, and most of them are members of two or three generations of the same family, the Dandridges, which is also unusual for Allen. Oh, and every once in a while there'll be an exuberant song-and-dance number, always to some standard or other-Makin' Whoopy, My Baby Just Cares For Me, the title song.
I know a lot of people really dislike Woody Allen movies. I love them. One of my favorite things about them is that they're their own genre. The Woody Allen Movie is a kind of movie just as surely as the film noir or the teen horror movie is a kind of movie.
This is great, because, rather than make the same movie over and over again, as some accuse him of doing, he makes his genre-his movie, if you must-make babies with all sorts of different ones. Manhattan Murder Mystery was the spawn of the Woody Allen movie and the amateur sleuth movie. Bullets Over Broadway was the result of the coupling of the Woody Allen movie and the Mafia movie. Love & Death was the bastard child of the Woody Allen movie and the Russian epic. And Everyone Says I Love You is the Woody Allen movie's baby out of wedlock with the movie musical.
What's so great about this is that all of Woody Allen's usual characteristics-the quick, smart, and utterly realistic dialogue, the neuroses, the long, long shots of multiple characters, just talking-are all there, mixed with the usual characteristics-singing and dancing-of musicals. So when Holden Spence (Norton) is proposing to Schuyler Dandridge (Barrymore) at the beginning, say, we see them walking through a park, singing about love, and we're far away from them. It's really cool.
The story barely need be mentioned. It's convoluted as all get-out, anyway, and has eighty thousand characters. Really, very little need be said about the movie at all, other than the fact that it's perfect in nearly every regard. It's joyous and beautiful the way the best musicals are. The way all the actors (except Barrymore, for some reason relating to her claim that she didn't know she was signing on for a musical) do their own singing, ranging from Allen and Alda's tinny warbling to Hawn's gorgeous loungey voice, but always just sounding like real people carried away by emotion and just _having_ to burst into song, is fantastic. And there's a scene towards the end, with Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn singing to one another, where she just starts floating through the air and gliding effortlessly across the ground in an utterly impossible fashion that is also utterly perfect and utterly beautiful, that it is by itself worth whatever money it takes to see the movie.
Detour (1945)
the perfect noir, except for the money
You know how, when you're watching a James Bond movie, you
sometimes think, "This is not the perfect James Bond movie. I
don't think the perfect James Bond movie exists. I know exactly
what's in the perfect James Bond movie, and this movie has a lot
of it, but it just ain't it"? If I were snooty, I would call that imaginary
movie the platonic form of the James Bond movie: the version of it
we have in our heads that is distilled to its essence.
The same thing applies for film noir. I love each individual noir that
I've seen, but none of them quite matches the imaginary, perfect
film noir that exists, fully-formed, in my head.
Detour does not match my perfect mental image of what a film noir
is and does. It comes pretty close, though. I might go so far as to
say that the only thing holding it back is its budget, which, judging
from appearances, was much less than the $786 Al Roberts
(Neal) finds in the pockets of the man who gives him a lift.
The movie opens after the story is over, with Al in a bar along the
highway, looking miserable, snapping at people for no apparent
reason. And then...the flashback. So, story told in flashback,
narrated by the protagonist...check that off on my list of platonic
archetypes.
It seems that Al was a piano player at a club in New York, in love
with Sue (Drake), the lounge singer. They wanted to get married,
but needed money first, so she decided to try her luck in
Hollywood, against his wishes. Eventually, he decides to go out
and join her and marry her no matter what. So he hitches from
New York to Los Angeles. Along the way, he's picked up by
Charles Haskell (MacDonald), who is wealthy, boorish, and,
eventually dead, of natural causes (or so Al tells us...he's _very_
adamant about it). Fearing the police will think he did it, and
needing money anyway, he steals Haskell's car, money, and
identity. Later on, he picks up a new hitchhiker, Vera (Savage),
who wakes up after a brief nap and suddenly shouts at him,
"You're not Charles Haskell. What did you do with him?" Turns
out she got a lift from Haskell before Al did. She is now in control
for most of the rest of the movie, trying to milk the situation for as
much money as she can, with the threat of a phone call to the
police to make Al go along with it.
The plot, admittedly, is kind of dumb, if you take it as you're given it.
Would anyone really think that the police would mistake a heart
attack for a murder by bludgeoning? Would anyone with a stolen
car and an assumed identity, thinking he's on the run from the
police, pick up a hitchhiker? I, however, tend to think that the story
Al tells us is the story he's telling himself-a kind of defense
mechanism, covering up for what he's done, even if only to
himself. At one point he goes out of his way to tell us that, try as
you might, you can't cut a memory out of your brain. I think he's
lying to us and himself, I think he's cut out two very specific
memories, and kept everything that surrounded them, and I think
it's killing him.
The movie was made on a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very
low budget. It was made in three days with almost no crew. Both
of those things...well, they show. But the other element that shows
is the large amount of serious talent that went into it. I mean, even
though the look of the movie is largely dictated by the lack of
money, you can definitely tell that, had there been money, it
would've looked great. When Sue and Al are walking around New
York City early in the movie, it's obvious that all the fog is there to
hide the fact that there is, in fact, no city around them, but it looks
wonderful, anyway...an expressionist nightmare. The scenes in
darkness are filmed beautifully. And the composition of just about
every shot is like a painting, just as it should be in film noir.
Interestingly, this movie's director, Edgar G. Ulmer, is one of the
few 100% direct links between German expressionism and film
noir: before coming to America, Ulmer worked in Germany as F.W.
Murnau's cinematographer, and he worked with Fritz Lang, too.
Besides the look of the film, which, in a film noir is, arguably, the
most important part, the line-to-line writing (leaving behind the
question of whether the plot itself is good) is brilliant, full of the
snappy dialogue and depressive monologue that film noir is
known for. Of a ten dollar bill given as a tip at the nightclub, Al
asks us, "What was it? A piece of paper, crawling with germs." Of
Vera: "She looked like she'd been thrown off the crummiest freight
train in the world." Vera, to Al: "If you act wise, well, mister, you'll
pop into jail so fast you'll get the bends." And one more: when
explaining his relationship with Sue at the beginning of the movie,
he Al tells us, "I was an ordinary healthy man, she was an ordinary
healthy woman. Put that together and what you get is an ordinary
healthy romance." (Our first hint that Al might not be telling us the
whole truth...)
As for the acting, it's...well, it's very one-note, I have to say,
especially on the part of Savage, who does not deliver a single line
without being a biting, sadistic hell-beast. As for Neal, he's the
put-upon, cynical noir anti-hero from start to finish. But hey, they're
both really good at it, and each is playing straight to that platonic
form I was talking about before.
Which brings me back to my point. Detour is, in many ways, the
perfect, platonic film noir...or would be, if only Ulmer had had some
serious money to work with.
The Sex Monster (1999)
i wonder if a worse film has ever been made...
Wow. Just when you think movies can't get any worse, you see Sex Monster (or, as it should be called, "I Became A Bisexual Sex Freak In Order To Obey My Husband"). It's basically about this guy, Marty (Binder), who really wants to sleep with two women at a time, and his wife, Laura (Hemingway), who is perfectly OK with his objectification. So she invites over a friend (Humphrey) they know is bisexual (because of course anyone who's bi will sleep with anyone-and the more at a time, the better), and BAM, they all get it on. But uh-oh, trouble in paradise: Laura realises she likes it!
Now she's addicted to crazy sex. Blah blah blah.
Not only is this film horribly offensive in every way possible, it's just plain old bad filmmaking. There are some directors I loathe (take, for example, Kevin Smith), but at least I can see that they are talented-it's just, to quote good ol' Mr. Ebert, they use their talent in an unworthy way. Not so here. Mike Binder has proved himself to be utterly inept in the directing business. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this movie. After we watched it, we ejected the video and passed it around so we could all punch it. And we did.
One more thing. Just to prove to you how profoundly evil this movie is, let me quote a little bit of the synopsis from the official website: "She changes and loves it. Marty, after first enjoying his new dream come true' freedom, comes to realize that his wife spends more time with the girls, has reached a new level of strength, freedom and happiness, and he's the odd man out in his own bed. Finally Laura comes to realize that she actually wants only her husband and they work to rebuild their marriage." Let's analyse this. She changes, and loves it. So far so good. She reaches a new level of strength, freedom, and happiness. Still good. But wait-she's just Marty's wife-a woman. And if Marty isn't happy, well then something's wrong-after all, he's the man. Men are more important. So, Laura realises that she only wants her husband, and they all live happily ever after. Good lord.
Rat Race (2001)
repulsive
there was nothing about this movie that was not repulsive. it disgusted me. it was not funny. it was a waste of immense talent (john cleese, whoopi goldberg, rowan atkinson...why?). i wish it had not happened.
Bedazzled (2000)
ugh
see the original. for the love of god, see the original. this...this wasn't a film, it was some sort of cruel joke played on us by the gods of cinema.
this "film" is a perfect example of the decline of cinema in recent years. and don't think i'm an old coot who just thinks that everything was better back when and kids today and all that, i mean, i'm 20 years old.
what i mean is, look at the original. it's subtle, above all it's subtle. look at the new one. all subtlety is gone. brendan fraser wouldn't know subtlety if it chopped his head off.
i tried, i tried so hard to watch this "movie" with an open mind and not compare it too much to the original, just to judge it on its own merits. i couldn't. it insisted on taking scenes and dialogue directly from the original, but removing what made the older one funny, and giving it a whole new interpretation that took any kind of humor, timing, or, as i've said, subtlety, completely out of it all.
see the original. for the love of god, see the original.