Cinema on Wednesday

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

April 7, 2021 by Rob

Many years ago, pre-Pandemic, I was in New York City for the weekend. It is something I do rarely, but SHE WHO WILL NOT BE BLOGGED has a deep and abiding love for Broadway and that’s where we were headed. Pre-show, we had drinks at a roof-deck bar at one of the W hotels. On an otherwise sunny spring day, the space between the buildings was shaded; the hotel was projecting, with surprising clarity, The Maltese Falcon.

I would have stayed at that bar all night, straight through the play. The Maltese Falcon is one of those movies that, when it comes on, I have a very hard time turning it off. But I value my life, my marriage, and, besides, I have the film on DVD.

Trailer…

[Read more…]

Too Late (2015)

March 24, 2021 by Rob

I am a strong proponent of California Noir, especially the subset LA Noir. My memory of my family’s brief time in the City of Angels is piss-yellow and grainy, like the intro to James Gardner’s The Rockford Files or Emergency! Not the Kodachrome Los Angeles of mid-century musicals. Not the jewel-toned love letter to “trying to make it” of La La Land.

Noir pictures, and novels, fit this memory. So I seek them out, have my favorites. Chinatown… L.A. Confidential… both the movie and the novel, but for different reasons. He’s a right-wing wackadoodle, but James Ellroy can set a scene with a few words and write wicked dialogue. Widely panned by the Twitterati, I thought the second season of True Detective hit all of the beats of an L.A. Noir… I liked the story and characters, even though Vince Vaughn played a gangland version of his stock character… I still don’t understand the hate.

Violence against women at the hands of powerful men is the recurring theme in noir stories. The old “dame in distress” trope: murdered hooker, socialite in crisis for getting some of the same action any of the male characters take for themselves. As my hair goes gray, I find it harder to excuse this trope. I try to find stories where it’s subverted/turned on it’s head.

Too Late, starring John Hawkes, isn’t that story. It dives head-on into the trope, like a hophead into the shallow end of an empty pool.

[Read more…]

High Noon (1952)

March 17, 2021 by Rob

Following up on my thoughts on Silverado, a 1980s film dripping with nostalgia for Westerns and serials the filmmakers watched in their Boomer youth, I decided I wanted to watch an ur-Western, preferably something without The Duke¹ A palate cleanser, if you will; a film to set my understanding of the genre in the right direction. I chose High Noon from my Amazon Prime queue. Many reviewers on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes called this movie “the greatest Western of all time.”

Theatrical Trailer

The epithet is certainly a bit of hyperbole. Perhaps modern reviewers have warm and fuzzy memories of watching it as children, and it has won a bunch of awards, but there are certainly more nuanced Western films. Reading about the production, many see the film as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist: a man, with his life and livelihood at risk, standing up for what is “right,” is abandoned by the community that he helped to build.² Helping him in a time of need, they believe, will end their good lives. That theme resonates today.

[Read more…]

John Wayne made a good movie or two in his time. He was also rabidly racist and an arch conservative. His film, The Searchers, is a about a man who spends years trying to find his niece, who’s been “captured” by the Apache. Not to return her to her family, of course, but to murder her. She’s been defiled by a savage, he says. ↩
the writer, Carl Foreman, was run out of Hollywood and the United States after production wrapped after refusing to name names to the HUAC ↩

To Catch a Thief (1955)

February 24, 2021 by Rob

My favorite part of To Catch a Thief – Alfred Hitchcock’s diamond heist film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly – is the first 10-15 minutes. We know the movie is set in the South of France because the titles and credits are shown over the window of a Travel agency, advertising the glamour of the Cote d’Azur. At the end of the titles, a woman screams. As the camera moves through the 5-star hotels and ornate villas of Nice Cote d’Azur, more women shriek in horror. A black cat creeps over roofs.

Jump to a villa on a hill, surrounded by grapevines. There, too, is a black cat, very much like the one prowling Nice, sitting on a chair, eyeballing Carey Grant. Grant plays John Robie, a “retired” jewel thief. A car is climbing the hill. Robie loads and places shotgun near his desk. They are police and it seems like he’s not going to go easily… but this is a diversion. He sneaks out of the house and the police follow his auto through narrow streets.

Another diversion: it was his housekeeper driving the car. Robie hitched a ride in a bus out of town.

We don’t need a second of exposition to understand what is happening. Hitchcock and the actors have shown us. Women are being robbed of their jewels late at night and the Police believe that Cary Grant’s character is involved in those thefts. Maybe he is? As a viewer, we’re not sure. And we’re never really sure, at least until the very end. All of this is accomplished with images and sound. There is little to no expository dialogue.

His vineyard is the life he’s earned for both his crimes and his good deeds. Robie was jailed by the Nazis. When his prison was bombed by the Allies, he and the other escaped prisoners joined the French Resistance. After the war, the French government made them all citizens and cleared their criminal records, as thanks for their service. He and his Resistance pals (who all work at one beach-side restaurant) do their best to stay legit. It’s not easy and they live under the eye of the gendarmerie.

With this new “Cat” on the prowl, the police are sure that Robie is up to his old ways. His friends are furious; the police have been visiting them, questioning what they know.

Rather than leave France (as urged by Bertani, owner of the restaurant and reformed criminal, and Danielle, the forward daughter of Foussard, another Resistance fighter) Robie decides to find the new “Cat.” He teams up with the insurance guy, H.H. Hughson, played by John Williams¹ to identify possible future victims. Robie chooses to stake out the wealthy, baudy, middle-aged American woman, Jessie Stevens, and her daughter, Frances Stevens, played by Grace Kelly. Because: Grace Kelly.

I don’t know what a gentleman thief looks like so I don’t know why I don’t believe he would look or sound like Cary Grant. He is certainly believable as a man with great confidence who effortlessly inserts himself into the lives of these two women. Jessie wants a husband for her daughter, and Frances is DTF. Both agree Robie is the right guy, even though they are very aware that he is not the Portland-based lumber magnet he pretends to be (I mean, the accent is a clue).

She’s supposed to be a teenager… he’s in his 50s.

Incidentally, Jessie, a widow, is closer to in age to Robie than he is to Frances; Jessie is appropriately aged to be the mother of a 25 year old. Brigitte Auber who plays the supposed teenage Danielle, is at least 5 years Kelly’s senior. Everyone in this moving looks at least a decade older than they really are. Goes to show you that sun damage is real. Please wear sunscreen.

Driving, especially reckless driving along narrow, rural roads, is common theme in many of Hitchcock’s films. In this scene, Frances takes Robie on scenic drive through the hills, driving recklessly and ultimately dropping their police tail.

She’s a pretty cool lady.

During this viewing, this scene immediately reminded me of end of Suspicion, where Joan Fontaine tried to get out of Carey Grant’s car and over a cliff But like I said, the driving theme pops up often in Hitchcock’s movies. Here’s a short playlist:

Crazy Drunk Drivers…

My least favorite scene is near the end: to catch the thief impersonating the original Cat, Robie, Frances, and her mother attend a masquerade at a villa that will their host ostentatiously bejewelled guests overnight. How can the new Cat stay away?

Mother and daughter are in period ball gowns, escorted by a man – perhaps Robie? – done up in Moorish blackface. One can try to explain to modern viewers that that blackface was just as racist then as it is now, but that 1950s moviegoers and filmmakers were more comfortable in their own racism. Yes, there is a reason in the story why the man’s costume needed to be head-to-toe, and black, but Hitch certainly could have made a different choice.

Although I’m partial to Hitchcock’s earlier, black and white films, whether produced in London or Hollywood, of his color Hollywood films I’m truly fond of Rear Window with Jimmy Stewart, which was released a year earlier than this one. Grace Kelly is the star of that film, even though it’s Stewart’s face is on all the advertisements. Same for Princess Grace in Dial M for Murder. If you have not yet seen either of these movies, please do as soon as humanly possible.

To Catch a Thief, though, is worth your time, particularly the first bit and the later car chase. And Grace Kelly. I give it 3 and 1/4 Hitches out of 4.

Williams acts mostly with his face, with who has appears in a ton films, including Dial M for Murder. His last role was on the original Battlestar Galactica. ↩

Twilight (1998)

February 17, 2021 by Rob

After college, I lived alone in a tiny apartment in Allston, MA where I watched a lot of video tapes I rented from an independent video store. The store was at the corner of Allston and Commonwealth Avenue. Ultimately, the shop was was sold to Hollywood Video. Hollywood Video went bankrupt in the early 2000s, obviously.

If you’re of a certain age, you too may remember visits to the video store. If you don’t (drugs, booze, youth), VHS tapes and DVD cases took up a ton of space. Once demand for a title dried up, they were stacked on a table and sold, three or four for $20. So sometimes I bought tapes instead of renting, because, if I’m being honest, I never return anything on time. In the end, $5 was a deal, in the end, even if you ended up that copy of Waterworld no one wanted to permanently borrow.¹

Twilight was one of those. No, not the silly vampire movie that’s inspired so much fanfic and enforced many ill-considered gender roles. This Twilight was made when Kristen Stewart was a wee baby and stars Paul Newman as private investigator Harry Ross.

In the first act, Harry is down in Mexico looking for Reese Witherspoon‘s character, Mel. She’s (presumably; we never really know) living it up with her much-older boyfriend Jeff (Liev Schreiber) and Harry’s been hired to bring her home to her parents. While he’s dragging her out of the resort, Mel manages to get hold of Harry’s gun. She drops it, it discharges, and the round finds a home near his balls. This is important.

Jump forward a few years, Harry is now living with Mel and her family, doing odd jobs around their mansion, as he recuperates from his physical and mental wounds. Mel’s parents are Catherine and Jack Ames, 1970s-era Hollywood Royalty, played, respectively, by Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman. No one really says why they keep him around, but one suspects Harry’s there foe Jack to take advantage of and for Catherine to tease with nude swims in their giant pool.

One day Jack, who has terminal cancer, asks Harry to take an envelope of money to a woman across town.

“It’s not a bribe,” he tells Harry.

Of course it’s a bribe.

And, of course, at the drop-off, instead of a woman with the goods on Jack and Catherine’s shady past, Harry finds another terminal man, retired cop Lester Ivar and, also, the business end of Lester’s .38.

Seems that Lester was the lead on the investigation into the disappearance of Catherine’s first husband. Was Lester really getting the bribe to keep quite about a 30 year old disappearance? Lester’s death and nearly getting his own ticket punched twice in as many years – not to mention his lust for Catherine – sets Harry off on his journey to find out.

Don’t come at me with your Steve McQueen. Newman, Hackman, and James Garner (Raymond Hope, Harry’s lifelong frenemy) are my idea of cinematic cool. Even in their 70s, they were tougher than you. At 71, Hackman bopped a guy in the face over a fender bender on Sunset Boulevard. The accident was was likely Hackman’s fault anyway, but so it goes…

But it’s not just the old dudes. I like Schreiber a lot here as a bumbling idiot with a rambling dick, in way over his head, and especially as a woebegone spy in The Sum of All Fears or as Ray Donovan in Ray Donovan.² Giancarlo Esposito, super young in this movie, is good in everything he does. I’m partial to his work on Homicide, but you probably know him from Breaking Bad. You can check him out in The Get Down, too, because that show was good and could have stuck around.³ And then there’s Margo Martindale, who played Gloria ‘Mucho Tits, Mucho Ass’ Lamar. She’s been in almost everything, but I know her best as the character Mags Bennet in Justified, a gangland matriarch who kills her enemies by putting a little poison in their mason jar before they take a sip of her moonshine.

They all do a good job of delivering the dialogue written by Richard Russo, even if the overall story is a bit workmanlike. The tale is one we’ve seen before, including the femme fatale who is MORE THAN SHE SEEMS and sleeps with our hero to keep him OFF THE CASE.

[Harry turns away when he sees Catherine swimming nude.]
Catherine Ames: Honestly, Harry. Did you see me in “The Last Rebel”?
Harry Ames: Yeah.
Catherine Ames: And you saw me in “The End of Desire”?
Harry Ames: Yeah.
Catherine Ames: Then I think you’ve seen everything there is of me to see.
Harry Ames: I also remember a movie your husband made. He shot 12 guys with a 6-shot revolver. I ain’t gonna argue with that kind of marksmanship.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119594/quotes/qt0105608

There’s also a weird exchange between Harry and Raymond. After Ivar’s murder, Harry’s old girlfriend, Verna Hollander (Stockard Channing), a police lieutenant, arrests him and brings him to the local station house. After she releases him, Harry runs into Raymond, who notices the Verna.

Raymond Hope: You tell Verna if she ever gets the urge to hump an old man… she can hump me. I’m in the book.
BOTH: Under “Hump.”
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/t/twilight-script-transcript-paul-newman.html

When they both say “…Under ‘Hump'” they act like it’s a joke I should get but I don’t think anyone born after 1940 could understand why this was HI-LARIOUS.

Twilight is not a perfect movie. The savvy viewer will see the red herrings brightly. The foreshadowing darkens every scene. The tough guys aren’t really that tough and the seemingly easy going have been scheming from frame one. No one lies, but if they try, we know and Harry knows that they are lying.

It’s not Hallmark Mystery Channel light, but it’s pretty close.

James Garner essentially plays “James Garner” in his movies and this was the least interesting iteration of “James Garner.” Except for the “Hump” quote, naturally.

Still, as Paul Newman is pretty cool, even at 73 years old and the dialogue is snappy, it’s a perfectly fine movie for a night in, with an overstuffed sub or greasy Chinese takeout. A solid 7 out of 10.

Oh, I lost track of the cassette an apartment move ago and the DVD is hard to come by. I watched it on Amazon Prime.

Waterworld was one of the most expensive films every made because the first set sunk in a typhoon. The $ is not reflected in the script or the acting. I prefer The Postman which is essentially the same movie. ↩
Although I had to stop watching as they gave Jon Voight more screen time. It’s not just his politics. He’s creepy AF. ↩
Also, check out his bio: “(Esposito) was one of the chorus of children who sang the theme song of The Electric Company” !!! ↩

Prospect (2018)

February 10, 2021 by Rob

Prospect is a small budget film from 2018 that just showed up on my Netflix queue, so I decided to give it a shot. It reminded me of a good episode of a science fiction anthology series, or an extra long episode of Firefly, with dialogue written by Elmore Leonard or David Milch. Prospect clearly falls into that Space Western sub-sub-genre.

No time is spent on explaining What is Happening and I’m fine with that. I prefer it, actually, to the omniscient, invisible narrator or a series of title cards that tell us what has happened/is happening when we drop in as viewers. I’m looking at you Highlander 2 and Chronicles of Riddick and literally dozens of other SF films produced since George Lucas broke all of our brains with his Space Wizards and Lazer Swords.

Relatively new actor Sophie Thatcher plays Cee, a interplanetary vagabond riding the rails with her widowed father, Damon, played by the perpetually boring Jay Duplass. She’s seeking escape from the itinerant life; he’s seeking an escape from life – full stop. The two are prospectors on a galactic hunt for valuable jewels that gestate in the bellies of acid fungi; sort of like flesh eating oysters.

When we get there, Cee is holed up in her own private corner of her father’s microscopic spaceship, a glorified steel drum with rockets and TI86 navigation computer, which is itself attached to a larger transport vessel that carriers them around the cosmos. Out the window is an unnamed, very green planet. Still, Cee is looking much father off into space to a place she’d rather be. Literally, anyplace.

Their plan is to make a quick stop planet-side to find one more killer jewel, a biggie, But that routine expedition starts to look like a suicide mission when Cee learns, over ship-wide PA, that the transport company is ending the route past the green planet; after one more orbit, the vessel will push off and never return. That is, if they don’t get off the planet before one complete orbit, Cee and her father will die on a sparsely inhabited planet where the everything (plants, animals, other humans, the air) is trying to kill you. That’s far too much risk for Cee.

But Damon is resolute. He’s an addict in debt. He implies that one last drop is their only chance to make it out of an endless cycle of subsistence and poverty. They can find a home. Reluctantly, Cee agrees.

Planetside, Damon addiction pushes him to make further reckless choices. He didn’t tell Cee the entire plan, of course, because he knew she would not agree to until she had no other option than to go along with his fool’s errand. Damon is a less charismatic version of Bogart’s character in Treasure of Sierra Madre, willing to sacrifice everything, including his own daughter, for the bigger score.

Pedro Pascal’s Ezra, a smooth talking scoundrel with a mute sidekick, comes along and gums up the work. Ezra sees Damon as an easy mark. And he is.

But Cee is not.

Even as his daughter begs him to leave it be, Damon’s greed predictably turns the situation pear shaped. He’s killed in a shootout with the mute. Cee is forced to rely on Ezra to help her get off the planet; Ezra eventually realizes he needs Cee just as much, if not more. They work together, like a real family.

I liked Pedro Pascal as Ezra. His language, jargon and slang, is really well written, like I mentioned earlier, right out of Deadwood, the kind of language one could believe that could come out of the mouth a prospector. There are gaps, words and concepts that aren’t clear at first. They’re not spelled out for you (he doesn’t call anything a “space shovel” or talk about “Andorian Brandy.”) Context clues fill in the gaps. If you’re watching, you will get it.

Like comments, I don’t read reviews, especially for genre films. Fanbois, trolls, professionals in big periodicals don’t seem to actually like movies. I’m not always sure what they look for in a film, but they don’t often appreciate character development, plot, relationships, ideas that touch on everyday experience. Explosions, maybe. What ever “production values” are. Soundtrack? Movies talking only about male experience?

So I still can’t rightly understand a 6.2 out of 10, especially when I consider:

Or:

So like a chump, I dug in.

The dozen 1-2 point reviews I read were remarkable in their consistency: there’s no plot, no story, no action, no character development, no special effects (or so they claim). Many questioning whether the film even qualifies for the science fiction label. They don’t seem to believe that a film that looks at desperation and a our desire to not just survive but prosper event at great personal risks are “worthy” subjects of a SF film.

No, Prospect is not a perfect film but its plot is certainly as well constructed as any superhero or Star Wars film that some of these guys get hard for. The story progressed logically and believably (considering future space world with air poisoned by gem-yielding fungus) from A to Z. Reading some of these reviews, I’m not sure some of these reviewers understand how stories work.

Women aren’t often main characters in SF films. If they are, like Ripley in Alien and Aliens or any movie with Milla Jovovich or ScarJo, they are conventionally attractive Western women who kick ass. It shows the limits of my film knowledge, but I can think of few other SF films with an introspective and resilient female character who used her wits to resolve the films conflicts, rather than violence. Amy Adams in Arrival, maybe, another film that discusses love and relationships and choices we make even if they will hurt us. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the lead character was a young woman – completely covered in a space suit, responsible for her own salvation – played a part in these relatively poor reviews from dudes.

For me, Prospect was successful and worth the watch. If you want to give it a preview, Prospect started its life as a short film. You can see it in it’s entirety here: