Quiet toward the start of the week, though, with just Pick of the Litter, which is cute enough, what with all the puppies being trained as guide dogs, but I didn't quite love it as much as perhaps I should. It was frustrating that MoviePass refused to reserve me a ticket, because if they're not going to get me tickets at Landmark, what are they giving me for $10/month?
(Okay, complaining about MoviePass still sounds kind of whiny, even though they're down to extremely limited options and tickets. Getting close to it not sounding really selfish, though!)
This week's series to finish my binge was Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and I was hoping for the best, although I've probably written before about finding myself kind of estranged from Clancy's series at some point, having grown more liberal while Clancy seemed to become more of a reactionary conservative, something which showed in his books more and more as they went on, with a special animus for the Middle East with the odd exception of the Saudis. His co-written later books seemed a bit better, but still had some ugly moments.
The thing is, there's not a whole lot of reason to do what Amazon and Paramount are doing here, and what Paramount did a mere four years ago with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which is to restart the franchise with a modern-day origin story for Jack Ryan, because Jack Ryan was never James Bond. Clancy's books were never about the hero or the villain, but the hook and then the momentum he builds. The trouble with the new series is that it doesn't really have any of that, in part because it's built as an eight-episode series that makes some effort in the direction of each episode being an individual unit, so it takes too long for the plot to really reveal itself and never really gets up the head of steam that had me unable to put the mammoth The Sum of All Fears down. There's a germ of an interesting idea here in how characters like its villain are rejected by their home countries, but it's not sort of great concept that leaps out at you the way the plot for The Hunt for Red October did, and the fact that John Krasinski is kind of perfect casting for Ryan can't really make up for the fact that the Amazon show misses the core appeal of the series.
But enough TV… There were movies to see this weekend. Lots of 'em, even though the Somerville had to call off the first night of their 70mm/widescreen festival because one reel of Starman got held up in customs. That would have been a nice warm-up for the weekend, but you might as well just dive in with the double feature of Brainstorm and Lifeforce, both blow-ups of kind of loopy 1980s sci-fi movies. I kind of love the all-out pulpy insanity of Lifeforce.
All the stuff at the Somerville had me spending packing the new releases that would probably only last a week into one afternoon at Boston Common, meaning a double feature of The Great Battle& The Road Not Taken, both of which are a notch or two above average but short of great. No time to hit the Fluff Festival around that, especially if I was to get back to Davis in time for Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which was shot on 65mm film and looks great in 70mm, even if it's thin as all heck.
They weren't able to get 70mm prints for Sunday's big movies, but the IB Technicolor print of El Cid was just incredibly colorful even if the movie itself didn't wind up a particular favorite. I loved Malcolm X, though, and I'm going to have to watch a lot more of Spike Lee's stuff.
More 70mm things this week, so watch my Letterboxd for some old-school film around the last baseball of the regular season.
Brainstorm
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 70mm)
Brainstorm is a messy, messy thing put together out of director Douglas Trumbull wanting to push some boundaries with filming it, the writers having a couple decent ideas that they couldn't quite link together, and Christopher Walken becoming the scenery chewing loony we have come to know and love since. Trumbull has a blast getting out the big cameras with the fisheye lenses to shoot the "Brainstorm" footage - imagine what a trip it would have been if he'd been able to play with high frame rates as well! - and though the computer graphics of the time are quaint, it's still unreal enough to get a viewer kind of excited and intrigued.
Story-wise, though, it's often too casual. That the filmmakers don't feel the need to explain every bit of character motivation is at times a relief, but it also sometimes means that they're taking obnoxious shortcuts to get to a payoff that's not quite that exciting. It leads to a weird, confused finale that plays up the worst impulses of 70s/80s adult sci-fi in how it wants to be both profound and gritty but can't make that essential connection..
Louise Fletcher still rules here, though.
Lifeforce
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 70mm)
Lifeforce always got mentioned for the Mathilda May nudity when I was reading rec.arts.movies back in college, which really undersells what great pulpy insanity it is. It's understandable; her doll-like appearance and the filmmakers' tendency to make sure she never bent or stood at an angle that altered her profile's curvy symmetry sells her as perfectly alien and exactly what gets teenagers' attention. Still, that glosses over how this thing is ten pounds of crazy in a five pound bag, with what sometimes feels like important bits skipped over so that they could do some great-for-1985 special effects in other parts, and some practical work that still looks very cool, though not realistic, now.
The cast is all over the place, from a playful Patrick Stewart to perfectly straight-faced Brits like Peter Firth to an admittedly terrible Steve Railsback as an American astronaut. It is, in this way, accidentally a perfect recreation of the Hammer films it's compared to - just straight enough to be taken seriously, just silly enough to be fun, and with plenty of sex and violence to keep your id in charge and not examining it too closely. The guys behind me for this 70mm screening were overdosing on irony - "this is terrible and I love it!" - and I guess it's that kind of movie now, but it's also perfectly enjoyable when met on its own terms rather than treated as something that's just tacky and kitschy.
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 70mm)
I don't know that this would be a three-star movie if seen at home, but on a big screen from a near-pristine 70mm print? This is a great-looking movie that shows what fantastic detail you would see in these elaborate, large-format productions, and while some matte work could be a little questionable, there is some fantastic aerial photography and meticulous recreation of 1910-era aviation. It's beautiful and sometimes eccentric, with an occasionally subversive idea on tap.
Unfortunately, once you get past "whoa, look at that!", there is really not much here - some basic stereotype jokes, a race that seems like almost an afterthought, and a love triangle that is so casual that I don't know whether to be grateful or let down - Sarah Miles is the most enjoyable performer in the movie, but the movie only lets her fully play the tomboyish gearhead briefly at the start, and though Stuart Whitman's working-class American is slightly more charming than James Fox's aristocrat, it's not enough to really create a rooting interest. It's made for a different era, when the likes of this sort of movie would come and go without much scrutiny, and it works well enough if you take it as a special visual treat and not much else..
El Cid
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 35mm)
El Cid is the sort of epic where, if one person displays some small amount of common sense, well, maybe things don't go differently in any sort of large-scale sense, but maybe that person lives a happier life. Like, don't force the woman who has come to despise you because you killed her father to marry you, even if she looks like Sophia Loren and was once the love of your life. Play nice with your siblings. Everybody, it seems, works a lot harder than they need to, and that's before considering the evil foreigner who rallies the troops like something is imminent in the beginning but apparently has a ten-year plan.
Still, that's kind of what makes this a bit more of an interesting epic than some others; it's kind of struggling with its morality, trying to advocate for forgiveness and unity but unable to resist the siren call of combat and conflict. It's a jumbled mess that way, not always the strongest of themes, but there's something honest to that, I think, although that's not the sort of introspection that Charlton Heston is great at - he's too naturally cynical and man-of-action for that.
It looks gorgeous, at least, the IB Technicolor print doing a great job of highlighting the blues, reds, and golds in the costumes.
Malcolm X
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 35mm)
I really need to shake off the thinking that Spike Lee's movies aren't really for me and see more when the opportunity presents itself, because it's very clear I've been missing out. I had wavered on seeing this one when the theater got a mere 35mm print rather than the expected 70mm blowup, but since I figured this wasn't going to get another theatrical booking any time soon, why not? It's just three and a half hours of time.
What makes it fascinating is how Lee uses that time. You might expect it to be concentrated at the end of Malcom X's life, where the events are most singular, but Lee spends a lot of time on the youth that is maybe like a lot of other stories of young black men, real or fictitious, but it's important that we see what formed this man, and that it not feel like just single crucial incidents. We all know it goes to hell in the end, just as Malcolm is achieving greater maturity by letting go of old hatreds and becoming a true leader as much as a follower, and the details of that aren't as important as the feeling of the walls closing in.
Denzel Washington is terrific here, in part because Lee brings out the best in him, allowing Washington to be a little theatrical even while his portrayal of Malcolm is respectful. It works in part because Lee himself isn't terribly bound by demands to be naturalistic. He'll not quite break the fourth wall but he'll weaken it, shift hard into a new style to make a point, be curt when it helps and appropriate old-school studio style to set a tone. It's often flashy but never a waste of time; this movie can be dense even when it's relaxed in pace, but it's always energetic and exciting.
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