Film Rolls, Round 5: Luca and Stage Fright

The top row is a weird place, because there's a point where you jump from very early western movies to fairly recent ones, and then soon after you jump from very recent ones to reasonably early. Like so:

That ten gets Mookie right at the end of the first row, which was (at the time) basically "stuff that didn't make it into theaters during the pandemic". And, yes, I bought a copy of Luca even though I've got Disney+ and don't really figure on dropping it any time soon, although it's kind of messing with my thought process on this.

Meanwhile, Bruce was already on the second row (remember Dragonwyck?) and has rolled a seven, so he's just dipping his toe into the 1950 and a Hitchcock I hadn't seen yet, Stage Fright.

So let's see how that went!

Luca

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

That Pixar would, to some degree, become simply one of several quite impressive animation studios was probably inevitable, and arguably a good thing overall: We want a lot of people out there doing good work, even if the top dog is not so restrictive in tone and style as one might fear. So it's okay for Luca to be a pretty good movie rather than one which pushes the technology forward or has a brilliantly abstract premise.

And Luca is, in fact, pretty good; the designs for the undersea society are more complete and creative than a DreamWorks "like New York but _____" while the town above the waterline is the sort of period construction that seems beautiful and nostalgic but never quite crosses the line of too good to be true. There's nice chemistry between the three main kids, who are all smart and focused in their own ways but also volatile in the way that tweens can be. There are entertaining adventure bits, the inevitable Terrific Pixar Chase, and an earnest and upbeat feeling even through the sadder material.

Does it have the sort of surprising gut punch that Pixar is often known for, or the ability to sort of get more out of its metaphor through its fantasy elements? Not quite, I don't think: There's nothing like how "When She Loved Me" has a million different ways to gut-punch you in Toy Story 2 and the absence of Alberto's family never quite reveals itself as the sort of hole director Enrico Casarosa seemingly intends it to. The film is ultimately a little glossier than its makers perhaps intend it to be.

Which is fine - Pixar's allowed to make films that are pretty good, if not necessarily special the way their greatest successes have been. I can imagine kids enjoying this and their parents being fairly charmed as they watch alongside, and that's not exactly easy!

Stage Fright

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I was mildly surprised to realize that I hadn't seen this particular Hitchcock when it showed up for pre-order on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive label; Hitch is a staple of the local repertory houses, after all, and I try to camp out there whenever one has a Hitchcock series. This one, though, falls between the silence and early English talkies that get programmed as his early days and the point when he was so well-established that he got big budgets and star-studded casts, everything he did being regarded as a potential classic at the time, both temporally and in feel.

Indeed, it's possible that seventy years later, being directed by Hitchcock works against it; with some journeyman director, a viewer might more easily appreciate how it's got elements of both film noir and a sort of classic British mystery. You can probably draw a pretty straight line between Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady and this, and if Jane Wyman's amateur sleuth isn't quite the delight that Ella Raines is in that movie, Marlene Dietrich is enough femme fatale to make up for it and Alastair Sim is the sort of cozy character actor whose very presence smooths out some of the film's more convenient contrivances. Not a bad little minor genre film, but the Master of Suspense never really did much in the way of the cozy mysteries this often recalls; indeed, his tendency was almost always to play them as comedy, at least until it was time to put the screws to someone.

Which is why the final sequence is so surprisingly good; no longer worried about having the audience get ahead of Wyman's Eve, he spends the final scenes putting her in genuine danger from a killer freed to be monstrous, setting the whole thing in the bowels of a theater among all the costumes, props, and other materials actors use to create characters for our entertainment and which the killer used to hide in plain sight even as Eve used them to go undercover. After an hour or so of playing nice, we're suddenly in the middle of a psychological thriller where Hitch is playing with people presenting false faces for the purposes of good and evil while playing a vicious game of cat and mouse.

Maybe it's better that he holds back and sort of springs it on us in the last act, plunging the audience into a darkness that lurks behind their safe, comedic murder mysteries, but the fact that the film feels relatively ordinary for so long likely keeps people from really associating it with the classics that appear around it in his filmography (it's a couple years after Rope and one before Strangers on a Train).


So that's a pleasant couple days in April, although they're evenly-matched enough to not affect the standings at all:

Mookie: 20 ¼ stars

Bruce: 22 ¾ stars

Bruce still leads, both in accumulated stars and on the path:

The next round, though, has a pretty major effect…

These Weeks in Tickets: 3 February 2020 - 16 February 2020

The Oscars now landing smack in the middle of the Sci-Fi Film Festival can make for some crazy time, especially when there's other stuff too.





With the Oscars just days away, I barely had time to catch the Nominated Live-Action Shorts before the ceremony, and it was a pretty darn entertaining selection compared to the previous year's resolutely grim group. A couple days later, with a busy weekend coming up, I figured it would be a good idea to check out Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which didn't quite feel like my thing at the time, but I was starting to feel a bit under the weather after what had just felt like a "you shouldn't eat the whole pizza" bellyache, so who knows?

Anyway, after that it was time for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, which I basically decided to attack on a film-by-film basis this year, rather than buying a pass and trying to hit everything. Although, surprise, the first weekend was full of good stuff - Eva Green in Proxima on opening night; the not-great Dustwalker, the new Moorhead/Benson film Synchronic, and Sea Fever on Saturday; and then Mattie Do with her new film The Long Walk first thing Sunday.

There was more at the festival that day, but I wanted to catch Downhill as part of the Hitchcock Silents series, and… Hmm, kind of problematic, although the HFA people would talk about how it's not so much Hitchcock being misogynistic, as much as a kind of messed up play star Ivor Novello wrote. That let me out just in time to get home, order a pizza, and watch the ceremony. It was fun to watch Parasite do well! I don't think anybody saw that coming, even those of us who really like Bong Joon-Ho and Korean films in general.

After that, man, my stomach just rebelled in a way I couldn't remember since whatever made me miserable after the flight home from Hong Kong last year, like my stomach was going to burst. I wound up going into CVS to buy some Pepto-Bismol but looked at how it is meant to treat nausea and diarrhea and thought, wait a minute, those things feel like they would relieve some pressure - would this make things worse? So I didn't take it and was better a day or two later. Weird.

I got out of work late-ish on Friday, so only got to the late show, Dead Dicks, which I'd missed at Fantasia, but liked well enough here. Saturday at the festival had a few that looked interesting and wound up different kinds of good enough in Volition, I Am REN, and Blood Quantum.

The next day would have been the Sci-Fi Marathon in previous years, but I opted out this year, instead opting to head to Causeway Street, which seemed to be the last place Uncut Gems was playing at non-ridiculous times. It didn't really do all that much for me, which is a shame, because I'd really liked Good Time and other movies where Adam Sandler actually made an effort. There was a framing thing meant to lead into a Q&A, but it's a long movie and I just wasn't in the mood for more Safdies & Sandler at the moment, so I hopped the Green Line to hit Donnie Yen in Enter the Fat Dragon, and I'm not gonna lie, I probably had more fun with that, even taking into account that Gems isn't really about "fun".

That brings us up to a week ago, with a couple things on my Letterboxd page since.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2020 in the ArcLight Boston #15 (first-run, DCP Wide Screen/Dolby Atmos)

Harley Quinn is a part of the DC universe that I've always liked more for the creative teams she got more than the character herself, and the current takes on her are kind of a lot more frantic than my favorites. The movie is like that too, a lot more mean-spirited and murderous than the animated series that spawned her, or the upbeat team comic that supplies this film's title and supporting cast.

That's not exactly bad, it just makes this movie much less my thing than it is others'. There's an awful lot to like about it, especially the dueling lunacy from Margot Robbie and Ewan McGregor; they turbocharge any scene they're in with Robbie able to actually make something of this impulsive, mentally unstable lady, even if the moments where the script remembers that she was a talented psychotherapist feel right on the border of being the wrong kind of forced. Robbie doesn't quite suck all of the air out of the room herself, but making the movie from Harley's point of view means the rest of the talented cast is going to have to wait for the sequel to really shine.

On the other hand, the action is poppy and fun, especially compared to the other recent DC movies that have been digital overloads even when not dour. The getting there is an issue - a pretty great sequence of Harley busting someone out of a police station starts too aburptly, to the point where it takes a couple minutes to appreciate the colorful mayhem being served up. It's second-tier superheroes done well enough that you don't need a lot going in, more than enough to work for a couple hours.

Downhill '27

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Bertrand & Susan Laurence)

In this film, Ivor Novello is sent further and further down the social ladder by a series of deceptive, scheming women but is eventually returned home by a group of people of color - though he doesn't actually stick around long enough to thank them - and is able to reclaim the only thing this upper-class wastrel can conceive of as important: the right to represent his school in the oldboys' rugby game.

I kid, a bit, but Roddy Berwick's journey is the sort that a certain sort of man imagines himself as being subject to, punished for being honorable or at worst flirtatious, and you kind of wonder what Novello and co-writer Constance Collier were thinking when they wrote it (heck, what does this thing look like without a woman working on it?). Novello slips into the role easily and brings plenty of charm to bear, and that's a big part of the film's charm: He starts the film with charming ne'er-do-well energy and brings a lot of charm to a part that could be nobly self-flagellating, but that's more or less saved for the last possible moment. There's some classist garbage in a lot of the early films Hitchcock made, and he never quite escaped that worldview, but this is one that looks especially ugly in retrospect, in quite a different way from how it was originally conceived of as being dark.

On the bright side, the accompaniment by the Laurences was a real highlight, bouncy and exciting to start with and able to make the roller coaster work.

Uncut Gems

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2020 in ArcLight Boston #5 (first-run, DCP)

Uncut Gems contains a genuinely great performance by Adam Sandler in the middle of a movie that brought me irritation far more often than the promised tension. It's a strange thing, perhaps bred in part due to expectations generated externally after a few months of both pre- and post-release coverage, but watching this movie, I could see all the things that seem like they should be raising my blood pressure and how the Safdie brothers are setting it all up, but it just didn't click the way it did in Good Time. Maybe it would help if there were some visible amount of good intentions to Sandler's Howard Ratner or something other than selfishness and self-destruction, but he's just a guy one wants to get away from.

Which is good work on Sandler's part - he inhabits this guy completely, using little bits of his screen persona to grab the viewer a little more quickly without ever seeming to coast or force him into a different mold. It's not easy to create a character that does frighteningly stupid and dangerous things and make him feel genuine, and I absolutely believed in him even as he kept digging his hole. There's not a member of the cast around him that ever feels off, whether it be non-actors in heightened versions of their own personae or solid supporting types getting the reactions to Howard just right so that one can see how he's stayed afloat and maybe had some success.

It's just a lot, and maybe I'm just fortunate in not having been close enough to this particular sort of dysfunction for the film to resonate with me. I spent a lot more time wanting the film to end than caught up in it, and when the pre-recorded post-film Q&A was about to start, I bolted for something else rather than stick around for more of this.

This Week in Tickets: 27 January 2020 - 2 February 2020

I hate the reason that it happened, but I would have run myself completely ragged going to movies if the Lunar New Year Movies hadn't all been cancelled/postponed.



It's fairly rare for me to run the table for a series at the Brattle these days, and I didn't really do it here (I skipped the previous Saturday and Sunday and left after the first movie on Thursday because I just saw Dr. Cyclops a year ago), but I did spend the first four days of last week at "Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema", catching The Man They Could Not Hang, The Boogie Man Will Get You, Just Imagine, L'Inhumaine, and Mad Love over four days. It's a crying shame that more big-budget sci-fi wasn't made during this period - I can't think of another blockbuster fantasy aside from The Wizard of Oz between Metropolis and Forbidden Planet - because the raw visual imagination was kind of stunning.

Friday night was back to Harvard Square for more Silent Hitchcock at the Archive, with The Lodger the first entry for the weekend. Hitchcock was really starting to become Hitchcock there.

On Saturday, I spent an afternoon doing Oscar-nominated shorts, starting with the Documentaries at Causeway Street - the only place playing them on the T this week - and then heading down the Green Line for Animation at Boston Common. There was just enough time to make that trip, but it was worth it. In a fun coincidence, both were showing on screen #7 in their respective buildings.

After that, back up the Red Line to Harvard, to catch the silent version of Blackmail at the Archive. I enjoyed it a great deal, and the introduction had me curious enough to come back the next night to see the talkie version. I think it might have been my first time seeing that film with sound, despite being told how rare the silent version was before each of the three or four times I have attended a screening in the past decade or so.

As always, keep up with my Letterboxd page, because I'm pretty sure I'll start falling behind soon, what with the first festival of the year starting on Friday.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)

There aren't enough characters in The Lodger to create an actual mystery around the identity of its serial killer, which means that when you see it now, there's almost a century of people playing with you, from Hitchcock to whoever is doing the accompaniment, emphasizing how obviously Ivor Novello's title character is bad news. It only makes the scenes of him and the girl that fits the killer's type sexier, especially when contrasted with the cop next door who is clearly talking their future together for granted.

I do kind of wonder how that guy would have delivered one of his last lines, "lucky I got here in time!", if this were a sound film. It's just the right amount of funny and twisted as an inter-title, but being spoken could have made it too important or silly or the like.

What I thought back in 2013, the last time the HFA did a Hitchcock retrospective

Blackmail

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)
Seen 2 February 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm sound version)

Though both are fine entertainments, I found myself liking the silent version of Blackmail more. It just feels right, especially considering how the elongated beginning of both is identical, with the missing dialogue feeling strange in the sound version, but more so because the camera feels a bit less restricted, though not always - having both Anny Ondra's heroine and Cyril Ritchard's creepy artist on-screen at once works better than the cutting in the silent version, even if it was done to show off Ritchard playing the piano and singing. It is, if nothing else, a fascinating artifact both for how the industry was scrambling to figure shooting with new, less mobile technology out and how Hitchcock immediately seemed to grasp how useful it might be to not have the music under the control of some random accompanist when he wanted chilling silence, or how he could choose what the audience heard to create subjectivity. Both of those are a huge part of why Alice's reaction to killing said artist in self-defense feels like a genuine state of shock

Alice's "dubbed" voice (provided by Joan Barry on the set but off-camera) threw me, not because I know Anny Ondra's (I don't), but for how working class it is. It seems like it wouldn't take long for those accents to become comedic as opposed to just how many Londoners talked.

What I thought in 2005, when I saw the silent version with the Alloy Orchestra accompanying

This Week in Tickets: 20 January 2020 - 26 January 2020

I think that this is the first time my employers have given us Martin Luther King Jr. Day off in the fifteen years I've been there. Did I make much use of the extra time? No!



Still, I had a pleasant day catching up on sleep and otherwise lazing around before heading to the Harvard Film Archive for Eve's Bayou, which probably was playing at the Webster Square 2-plex in Worcester or barely showed up in Portland, depending where I was when it was released, so I missed it. The 35mm print was gorgeous and I wish I'd been able to recommend this film for much longer. It's interesting that it does a lot of things well that I didn't particularly like in Lemmons's Harriet.

It was a busy work-week after that (plus, Thursday was set aside for Star Trek: Picard), so I didn't hit the theaters again until Friday, when I made my first trip to the Brattle for their early science fiction series, which kicked off with Mieles's "A Trip to the Moon" playing before H.G. Wells's Things to Come. A fairly appropriate way to start the series, in both cases, although the feature suggests that this whole sci-fi thing took practice.

On Saturday, I did a bit of Oscar catch-up by finally seeing Jojo Rabbit, which wasn't as bad as I feared, but which isn't really good, either. After that it was back up the Red Line for the HFA's Silent Hitchcock show, The Farmer's Wife", which is okay but makes one think that maybe straight comedy just wasn't Hitchcock's thing, because a director with that much talent should have been able to make that work with almost zero effort. After that, it was home, and Hugo, because when you see "A Trip to the Moon" on Friday, it's hard to resist the urge to rewatch this before the weekend is out.

Sunday was something of a repeat, just shifted up a few hours: Catching French Oscar nominee Les Misérables while it's still playing a couple of shows per day on the Coolidge's GoldScreen, the 66 bus back to Harvard Square for more silent Hitchcock - in this case, The Pleasure Garden - and then over to the Kendall for Color Out of Space, which was surprisingly busy for something kind of getting a token release. Folks around here apparently do like Nicolas Cage, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Stanley, or some combination of the three!

After that, more early sci-fi, which has dutifully been logged on my Letterboxd page, but that's next week's post.

Eve's Bayou

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (special presentation, 35mm)

Before getting to anything else, let me say that Kasi Lemmons impresses fast here. This is a flat-out gorgeous film, with lush detail that maybe you can get out of a digital camera now but certainly couldn't until recently, and even now you kind of have to use filters to put that character in. From the very start, it uses its setting and history to create the perfect atmosphere, one of heat and danger but also one where the young protagonist's belief in family mythology is both innocent and dangerous. It takes just moments to settle into a comfortable African-American community in 1960s Louisiana, no matter how far removed that may be from one's own background. It's also not long before one can see how Eve's innocence and petulance can be a dangerous brew.

(Coincidentally, I saw Little Women the night before and I suspect that they combine for a pretty good double feature on middle-child issues, and it's kind of amazng how naturally and easily the sibling relationships sort of line up)

Aside from just making a beautiful film, writer/director Lemmons builds something that's both impressively intricate but also with plenty of room for mystery. Between the weaknesses of human memory and the second sight that is allegedly passed down through Eve's family, there's a lot in this movie that could be on somewhat shaky ground, in terms of narrative, but Lemmons shows a real skill at making this something baked into the story without pushing it too far in the direction of fantasy. Things click into place throughout the second half of the movie, but without the push that supernatural gives feeling unfair. It's a Cassandra situation which basically means you can see disaster coming but can't prevent it, and that just makes the plot devices into local color.

It's sometimes a lot to lay on the shoulders of a child actress, but Jurnee Smollett proves to be up to everything Lemmons throws at her. Does it mean anything that she and on-screen sister Meagan Good both managed to carve out adult careers over the ensuing decades while other impressive child performers don't? Maybe not, as there's randomness to the process of growing up, but it at least means someone spotted talent. The film's also got one of Samuel L. Jackson's best roles, one that taps into his charisma without making a show of it the way many of his later movies would, letting him unite Louis's charm and weakness so as to make him tragic but not dour. Debi Morgan gets the sort of fun, showy role that would eventually be Jackson's specialty, and makes it a kick to watch without necessarily making it look like being this person is always fun.

I'd really love to see Lemmons and Jackson work together again; they seem to bring out the best in each other.

"Une Voyage dans la Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon")

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, DCP)

Is there more to say about this than what I said before? Probably not; it's a pure fantasy and trying to read too much into its explorers defying the stuffy scientific establishment who present themselves as wizards or the way they just run roughshod over the native life they find at the moon likely says more about how shallow my knowledge of turn-of-the-twentieth century Europe than anything really clever.

Still, just look at this thing. Consider that it was made at the dawn of cinema, and feels both freewheeling and dense, a few minutes of fast-paced mayhem that had to be planned precisely. It's partly happenstance that the man in the moon with a rocket in his eye became the image that defines early cinema to people, but also wholly reasonable, as this is something that burrows directly into the imagination.

What I thought of a Méliès "Ciné-Concert" a few years back

Things to Come

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2020 in the Brattle Theatre (Things to Come: The Birth of Sci-Fi Cinema, digital)

Time has been kinder to Things to Come than it might have been; a modern viewer can see an unfortunate believability in its villains and an arrogance to its utopian visions that were perhaps not intended at the time. The future we live in is strange and not what most envisioned, the types of progress that H.G. Wells and the filmmakers extolled has been revealed as a mixed blessing, and the film is lucky to be well-enough made that some of that emerges from the details.

Some things have come back around, though. The filmmakers' fears of an all-consuming conflict are likely darker than most in 1936 would allow themselves to imagine, and its idealized future feels real enough in terms of lived-in details, with one of he nicer bits of "grandfather explains old world to grandchild" bits. The anti-progress orator comes across as a strawman, but, well, look at 2020. The effects work shows some seams, but the design is nice and most of the execution is excellent.

It's dull, though, more so because there is often such bombast around the boring characters that the film cycles through, sometimes with the same actors playing descendants who don't differentiate themselves. There wasn't much like it at the time, so filmmakers likely had to go slower, but there's seldom the feel of a story being told, history being related, or a point being made, just a movie that lands slickly but uncomfortably between all the things it could do.

Jojo Rabbit

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

This movie isn't as completely ill-conceived as it seems from the first few minutes, but Taika Waititi is awfully timid underneath the flamboyant surface. There's room in the world for comedy about how Nazis are ridiculous and laughable as well as evil, as well as stories about how kids can wind up under the sway of monsters (but hopefully find their way out), but this movie and its makers never seems to have the guts to acknowledge that there's cruelty as well as absurdity for more than a moment or two. It has a scene or two of bullying early that's supposed to last us the film, but otherwise doesn't wrestle with how there are actual human beings making decisions there. Stuff just happens and the most effort they put into finding reasons for that is to set up a situation where Jojo can't actually do anything.

The production is slick as heck, with screwy whimsy and snappy pacing. Director/co-star Waititi does what he does extremely well, even if it always feels misguided to do so. I suspect that the movie's best work is done by Sam Rockwell, and that watching the film a second time will reveal a more obviously deliberate history of screwups disguised as incompetent evil on Captain K's part. And while Thomasin Mackenzie doesn't have the material to work with here that she had in Leave No Trace, the film would probably completely fall apart without her. She makes Ella scared and angry but a survivor while at least hinting at who she was before all of this.

The Farmer's Wife

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Robert Humphreville)

You can sort of see the shape of The Farmer's Wife from the start - the handsome widower determines to remarry, but none of the eligible women he woos measure up to his devoted housekeeper - and as such it's kind of a surprise when it's basically him screwing it up by being an entitled jackass. It's the sort of situation you expect to see capsize due to being in over one's head rather than through arrogance.

Oh, this farmer got reason to think he'll have an easy time of it, sure - star James Thomas was handsome as heck (and maybe a bit young to be playing a widower whose daughter just married, although generations happened fast a century ago), and seems generally decent, so you can see why he would begin this process so confident. It's just that the means by which he screws it up makes one wonder why he doesn't also wind up pushing housekeeper 'Minta away. It's a weirdly classist way of building the picture - a landed gentleman can be humbled, but not so much that the lower classes lose their respect.

The film is generally likable, though, with Thomas and Lillian Hall-Davis playing well off each other, and a supporting cast that gets to be weirdly eccentric without becoming objects of ridicule. Director Alfred Hitchcock doesn't leave a huge impression on this silent movie, but you can see him in the way that the final act becomes a smoothly-running machine, where what's going to happen next is obvious as heck but he and his cast still put it together into something the audience can nevertheless find genuine.

Hugo

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, 3D Blu-Ray)

If you had to total up the movie I saw most often in theaters during the 2010s, I suspect Hugo would wind up on top. It wasn't just that I loved it, but that the 3D was amazing and I was pretty sure that I'd never get a chance to see it like that again, since I'd only purchased an HDTV a couple years ago and wasn't figuring to upgrade anytime soon. Flash forward the better part of a decade, I got the last model of 3D/4K sets made for the U.S., double-dipped to get this on a 3D disc, and then when seeing "A Trip to the Moon" again created the desire to re-watch his, popped it in.

It is still a pretty fantastic movie from the word go - I love how Scorsese is willing to just jump right into Hugo being kind of abrasive and damaged rather than having it emerge, how there's room for a lot of interesting characters, and how even the self-indulgent moments don't veer too far. The 3D cinematography is still amazing, too, although it's only one factor in how this film wows me even beyond being built out of things I love.

Original review from 2011

The Pleasure Garden

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)

I am awfully glad that the accompanist told us the trick to telling the two leading ladies apart (though they look very similar, their hairstyles are mirror images), because otherwise it would be pretty confusing in the early going. It's odd that Hitchcock doesn't play with that more explicitly, even considering that this is his first silent feature and he was working as a director for hire. Sure, it's easy enough to see the parallels anyway, but imagine if Hitchcock had so obviously been Hitchcock from the start!

With that in mind, it's easy to see The Pleasure Garden as more than it is, right down to an ending that's some classic Hitchcock "screw it, there's nothing left to say, let's just wrap it up". It's a script filled with stock characters that don't necessarily fit together that well, and even considering it was released in 1925, it seems like it should be a lot sexier than it winds up being. There are some bits I really like, showing what the director could do, most notably a pan across a row in the audience that shows a different sort of lasciviousness on each person's face, but unfortunately cuts away from the woman who looks bored. Like a lot of his earliest films, it's pedestrian material that at least reveals him as knowing how to use his tools like a good craftsman, if not yet an auteur.

The print projected was a restored 35mm print that included tints and twenty minutes previously thought lost, and looked nice indeed. I do wonder if there's more missing, or if the filmmakers were just impressively ruthless about ditching threads when they were no longer useful, as a lot seems to be built up as important but set aside once it's no longer important to Patsy's story.

This Week in Tickets: 13 January 2020 - 19 January 2020

Not a catch-up! What I actually saw this past week!



Oscar nominations came out Monday, and though I probably should have done some catch-up - both for what was announced and what wasn't but might leave theaters quickly now that they aren't nominated for anything. But "I should" is tough and the new bus schedule combined with winter weather makes it trickier.

Still, Friday brought a new Makoto Shinkai movie to America, and Weathering with You is pretty darn good. Maybe not quite at the level of his best work, but if he's settling into a well-above-average groove, well, there's nothing wrong with that.

After a week of feeling kind of sluggish at work, I enjoyed some serious sleeping in over the weekend, mostly heading out to the Harvard Film Archive for the first couple programs in their "Silent Hitchcock" series: The Manxman and Champagne. Kind of liked the first, not so much the latter, looking forward to more this coming weekend.

The end of the second lined up nicely with getting back to Davis just in time to catch Little Women at the Somerville. I liked it well enough that I'm figuring that I'm going to have to go back and watch Lady Bird, even if it looked insufferable when it was out in theaters.

Probably not this week, but follow my Letterboxd page just in case.

The Manxman

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Robert Humphreville)

There's a weird moment in Hitchcock's last full silent that demonstrates how relatively little silent films relied on their title cards, as characters' lips move a great deal and the audience fully comprehends that the lady is pregnant by way of a man other than her husband, but it appears to be something one does not say aloud in 1929. Hitch isn't dancing around it, eventually - maybe he thought he was being coy - but you see how he could.

That aside, it's a fine, simple melodrama that tails off a bit toward the end but manages plenty of sympathy for the whole cast of characters and never feels like it's rushing through a very thick book. Anny Ondra is sneaky impressive as the object of two men's affections, never losing Kate's inner clarity even as the film had her go from playful to shattered and miserable (she was also, I cannot help but note, extremely attractive and looks like she would fit in perfectly pulled ninety years into the future). There's not much to it that isn't predictable in some way or other aside from how Kate will sometimes quickly move in a straight line when you might expect a little more hemming and hawing, but those moments are sharply dramatic while the filmmakers have a wry but respectful handle on how to make the bits in between work.

Champagne

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2020 in the Harvard Film Archive (Silent Hitchcock, 35mm accompanied by Martin Marks)

Well, I guess something's got to be Hitchcock's worst movie. I'm not entirely sure that this is it - there are films of his I still haven't seen and, of course, the one that's lost - but it seems likely. It's a screwball comedy plot that's never screwy or terribly sympathetic to the people caught up in that mania, acted out with a bunch of characters that may be recognizable 1920s types but just seem completely undefined a hundred years later. What, exactly, is the appeal of Jean Bradin's boy to Betty Balfour's girl, aside from him being fairly handsome, and what makes him so objectionable to her father (Gordon Harker)? Why should the older man she meets on a transatlantic crossing (Theo Von Alten) become more than just some random man?

There's probably a pretty good screwball farce to be found if one makes a bit of an attempt to answer those questions; Balfour is equally good at plowing through a scene with the momentum of the obliviously rich and pretty or pouting at being treated poorly by her lights, and the writers come up with some entertaining scenarios to drop her into. Hitchcock stages physical comedy as well as he does darker set pieces, and can wink at the audience as he does so: He knows that the audience knows he's shaking the camera to create the appearance of rough water, for instance, but that this knowledge makes both the people stumbling about and Betty able to walk through it in high heels like an old hand at sea travel even funnier. He knows how to use the big, multi-level set of a restaurant as a playground.

He and his co-writers just don't give themselves or their cast a lot to do with this skill. Hitchcock isn't bad at directing comedy - Mr. And Mrs. Smith is charming and his thrillers often contain big laughs - but he isn't the guy you want coming up with the jokes.

Little Women

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2020 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

Not that I've got any idea what girls their age actually like, or if they've read the original book, but I'll bet that my nieces will eat this up. Mostly because they're smart, and it's a really good movie.

It is, from the start, vibrant in ways that both period pieces and adaptations of beloved novels often fail to be, energetic and funny and able to add details in every corner of something people are sure they know, from the ink stains on Jo's fingers to the precise but ramshackle design of every house in the film. It jumps back and forth between childhood and adulthood with grace and occasionally tries to overwhelm the audience with all of these people talking at once and never slowing down because, after all, they know each other so well.

And we do too. The four sisters are clearly family despite being very different, and the way Jo and Amy drive each other absolutely bananas seems very familiar, it not hurting one whit that Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are two of the most talented young actresses working today. The way that writer/director Greta Gerwig handles these two really impresses, because Jo is the obvious center of the movie and Amy can be a piece of work, but Gerwig lets it feel like regular sibling rivalry rather than something bigger than life. I love the way Timothée Chalamet seems to be right on the line between kind of entitled and worth liking, believably in love with the whole family and the individual girls.

And then there's Chris Cooper, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep… If there's any fault to the film, it's that it gets a little arch in some of its last scenes, maybe just a bit too impressed with how cleverly it plays with the novel's ending to make it a little more modern. That is very clever, though, and there's joy to it that matches the energy that the movie has throughout.

This Week In Tickets: 25 December 2017 - 31 December 2017

If I make the New Year's Resolution to try and maintain this weekly round-up of what I've seen again this year, should I technically start today (1 January), or after that first week? It'd probably look cleaner if I went for next week, but more committed this way. Soooo...



Merry Christmas! As usual, mine involved traveling to Maine because that's where the brothers with the cute little girls live, and the brothers with the adorable nieces control where holiday gatherings happen. I made my way back to Boston on Tuesday morning, and then once I'd put by Christmas loot away, it was time to finally check out the new multiplex in South Bay with The Greatest Showman and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The verdicts: Acceptable theater, disappointing musical, sci-fi action that holds up to repeated viewings.

After that, it was too darn cold to leave the house once I'd already arrived home from work (I put doing laundry off until I could do it in sweet 20-degree-Fahrenheit daylight temperatures on Saturday), which made Friday a good night to start drilling into a pile of unwatched discs with Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions. Pretty good, although it won't be getting a blog post until that other Japanese movie I'd been intending to watch can be paired with it.

I did venture out on Saturday evening to catch The Liquidator, one of the weekend's two not-very-good Chinese releases, although it's certainly got a fair amount of potential. Sunday gave me the opportunity to end the week and year on a high note, as the Brattle closed out their Edith Head tribute with three of the movies she worked on with Alfred Hitchock. I saw the last two - Notorious and To Catch a Thief. Both are near-perfect.

And then, I came home and rang in the new year taping all those ticket stubs into the planner. I suppose I could work backwards and assemble these for the whole year, but, honestly, I've got a whole bunch of other projects like that. Instead, let me point you to my Letterboxd profile which has basically functioned as this part of the blog in real-time since March 2017, probably the longest I've kept it updating regularly. Indeed, you'll notice the reviews below are copied, pasted, and edited from there, although here is where you get them in a form that's not just raw "swiping around on the phone on the subway afterward" form.

Notorious

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Edith Head: Queen of Seam, 35mm)

This may not quite the "in too deep" movie from which all others are descended - there have been stories about people going undercover and over their heads forever - but it certainly feels like Hitchcock and Ben Hecht created a blueprint that other filmmakers couldn't help but follow because of its perfection, even when they weren't irretrievably lifting the plot. It's a perfect machine of a movie, not a piece out of place. Even though its story may seem simple and unadorned in the aftermath of seventy years of films that have filled the details out and added twists and layers onto the story, it doesn't feel primitive so much as primal.

More than many spy movies to come after it, Notorious perfectly captures the casual cruelty and blinkered pragmatism of the field, with the perfect central irony being that the person who cares about Ingrid Bergman's Alicia is much more cruel than the ones who don't. The people actually running the mission seem almost unaware of what they're asking, detached in a way that Cary Grant's Devlin finds impossible, and his lashing out is thus all the more hurtful. The sharp inhumanity of it makes the eventual confession of love even more tender and powerful, a scene Hitchcock, Bergman, and Cary Grant handle masterfully. It makes the lean efficiency all the more useful come the end, as there's no gear-shifting in a finale that moves from horrific cold-bloodedness to guileless romance to cold fury.

To Catch a Thief

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Edith Head: Queen of Seam, 35mm)

Every time I see this, I'm reminded anew just what a wonderfully odd and unique part of both Alfred Hitchcock's and Grace Kelly's filmographies it is. Not only is it about as laid-back as you can imagine Hitchcock being - the story is kind of a lot of spinning in place to get to the final rooftop chase - but it's really the only time Kelly has really seemed sexy on screen, someone who understands her attractiveness and doesn't mind using it as an asset, rather than this goddess to be admired in hopes of finding favor. She's a delight, and it's a shame she didn't do it more often in her short career.

The lack of plot doesn't really bother in part because it's an exceptionally enjoyable Technicolor trip to France, a joyous delight to look at, especially in 35mm. Not a perfect print, but when it's good, it's a reminder of why so many people prefer film to digital (even if I could probably be convinced to splurge on remastered 4K discs if Universal went there). Really, probably the only thing that keeps it from perfection is a scene of Cary Grant apparently slapping a panicking woman unconscious. What the heck, old movies?

Full review (from a Hitchcock series) on EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 23 September 2013 - 29 September 2013

Not a busy week, but makes up for it by being pretty good.



Stubless: We Are What We Are, Thursday 19 September 2013, 7:30pm, Regal Fenway #2

... Although, I suppose you could say I did have a stub for that, in the form of the piece of paper taped to a seat to reserve it for me because I'm an IFFBoston member. Disappointingly, it wasn't a packed house for this preview, despite all the local festivals and horror-oriented websites saying this was likely to be good and worth watching. I was surprised how good it was, just because I half-remembered the original as putting me to sleep, but Jim Mickle did a great job with the material.

It was one of two things this week where I didn't miss the bus on purpose in the morning but didn't complain, as it's a lot easier to put in a full day of work at get to a theater on the gren line in the 7pm hour from home than from Burlington. The other was Monday's screening of The Last Command at the Coolidge with the Alloy Orchestra. I thought I'd seen it with them before, but the only entry on the blog is from a Sterberg/Dietrich series at the Brattle almost ten years ago.

Between and after those: The surprisingly good last-minute-replacement Jose e Pilar as part of the Gathr screening series on Tuesday; my last show in the HFA's Hitchcock series, Suspicion, on Friday; straight-from-China prequel Young Detective Dee on Saturday; and Ron Howard's latest, Rush, on Sunday.

One per day is kind of short, but there's still baseball, and even though there's going to be more in October, I cling to the regular season because I don't want to let the summer go without a fight.

The Last Command

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2013 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Sounds of Silents, 35mm w/ live accompaniment)

I cringe to look at my original review of this movie, not just because the stuff I wrote nine-plus years ago is not very good (as you might expect), but because I openly admit that I arrived late and reviewed it based on that. Granted, back then I was just throwing this stuff up on the blog for my own amusement, but it was less than a month before I started writing for eFilmCritic and imported everything that thirty-year-old me didn't find too embarrassing. I've revised that review a bit.

I still like the movie an awful lot, though: For all that the bits with the aged, shaky Sergius Alexandr seems kind of blunt, the movie is a fine story of not judging a man's morality by his politics, and Evelyn Brent is rather fantastic in it. And, yes, it really does pay to see it from the beginning: Missing the first couple of minutes with William Powell the first time meant that I wasn't completely keyed into his character's potential for meanness when he reappeared later, and having it in mind that this former revolutionary has the capability to be so vindictive does affect the way one looks at the character.

Revised review at eFilmCritic

Suspicion

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Hitchcock, 35mm)

Given how certain an element of a thriller that the shocking twist has become, the way Hitchcock's Suspicion ends is kind of a surprise on its own; it not only doesn't end the way one has come to expect, but it's even more abrupt that the typical Hitchcock finale.

This isn't one of the greatest thrillers of its type - even considering that it's from 1941, it seems a bit generic, like the writers had the basic shell of a "did I marry a killer?" story but didn't really have a unique setting or character hook to run with. It's a workable enough story that actually does fairly well to keep certain things off-screen, and while it's sort of dated in spots, there's a lightness to much of the activity that makes the genuine threats that make their way into the movie that much more sinister.

That includes - perhaps primarily - Cary Grant, who plays his character in much the same way he'd play his comic roles, tossing off quips and showing a casual, insouciant charm even as he's being an utter jerk, with just the sort of twinkle that lets the audience believe that his wife will give him the benefit of the doubt even when the audience is past that. Joan Fontaine isn't quite so ideal here as she was in her previous collaboration with Hitchcock (Rebecca), but she has moments, especially when Lina is allowed to be confident. Nigel Bruce, meanwhile, is kind of charming as the dimwitted Beaky, although, man, this guy is dumber than his version of Dr. Watson.

Rush

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2013 in Regal Fenway #5 (first-run, 4K DCP)

I've never been a particular naysayer where Ron Howard was concerned, and am in fact usually pretty surprised when I see folks acting like he is a particular blight upon filmmaking - his stuff is mainstream, but generally fairly capable, and he's got a real knack for doing movies that are technically very difficult without ever letting the spectacle overwhelm the storytelling. (See: Apollo 13) So I'm kind of surprised that it's Rush, of all movies, that seems to be getting him some praise.

It's not a bad movie, by any means; Howard really does know how to present a story clearly, neither overweighing things nor allowing the movie to feel like it's just filling time. That's a good trait to have with this movie, where supporting characters are drifting in and out and the real-life story doesn't really allow for streamlining to a simple story. He gets good performances out of stars Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl, with Hemsworth especially having great movie-star charisma that makes the movie slow smoothly and pleasantly.

But, like I said, the competition between James Hunt (Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Bruhl) is in some ways too full of the complications of real life to make a good movie. Take how the first act introduces a girlfriend for Hunt who disappears off-screen, quite contrary to how her introduction is such a big deal. Or the structure of the 1976 Grand Prix season, which denies the audience a real feeling of head-to-head competition between the two. That may be how things went, but it's not dramatically satisfying. Plus, for all that Howard and company shoot some great racing footage, it's not great action storytelling. Getting so close to the action doesn't often give the audience a chance to see what Hunt and Lauda are doing in relation to each other during the head-to-head races.

It goes down pretty easy, and Hans Zimmer contributes a good soundtrack that becomes great as the closing credits roll. Rush is certainly no waste of time, but it's not going to be one that sticks in my head. It's filmed and acted well, but it seems like it skipped the step where writer Peter Morgan should have looked at it and decided it wasn't really a movie.

This Week In Tickets: 2 September 2013 - 8 September 2013

Shortish week because of the holiday, so I spent some time lollygagging at home and parceling my movie-watching out, for the most part.



Stubless: The rest of online screeners I watched fromt Fantasia: The Grand Heist on Monday morning, Horror Stories that night, and Across the River on Tuesday the 3rd. Plus, I gave Go Down Death another view on Wednesday, just to get names because I didn't take notes back in Montreal, and, wow, that thing makes a lot less sense when you're awake and alert

Theatrically, the work week went to indie/foreign stuff that got written up for eFilmCritic: Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster is pretty darn good, though I look forward to seeing the un-Weinsteined version; A Single Shot has its good points but doesn't quite have the nifty twists that make for a great bag-of-money film; and Short Term 12 is generally excellent.

That leaves the weekend, where I tried to fit moviegoing in around the Red Sox clobbering the Yankees on TV. Family Plot and Under Capricorn were the latest HItchcock movies I saw at the HFA, and they were better than OK. I was happy to get a new Riddick movie, even if it was kind of franchise servicing more than something great on its own. And though I didn't get to Somerville on time to see Harold Lloyd's The Freshman on Sunday, that did make it fairly easy to fit in Prince Avalanche.

That means I saw both Vin Diesel and David Gordon Green go back to what they do best on consecutive days. The means by which they did so were obviously different, although the results weren't bad in either case.

Baramgwa hamjje sarajida (The Grand Heist)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

For all the noir, caper, and pulp material I've consumed in my life, I don't know how many times I've ever actually heard someone refer to the jewels they were looking to steal as "ice", and I don't know if that's part of the vernacular in Korean. Even taking that as a given, the gimmick of The Grand Heist - a rag-tag group of thieves who are actually looking to steal big blocks of ice - still makes me grin. That it turns out to be a pretty entertaining caper movie on its own doesn't hurt.

After all, it does the two things an audience wants this sort of movie to do well: It sets up a robbery that is sufficiently complex to take up a full-length feature but whose parts can be grasped fairly readily - and which can be swapped out by last-minute snafus or hidden for double-crosses and surprises - and which the audience doesn't really mind happening. Then it assembles a team to do it which is a lot of fun, both in terms of the odd couple leading things and the entertaining array of specialists who help out. Add a smooth directorial hand like Kim Joo-ho's, and you're in business.

If there's a flaw, it's with how much time Director Kim and writer Kim Min-sung spend setting up the antagonists. While they may play much less confusingly to Korean audiences than Western ones, and they actually do a good job of making the actions of a nineteenth-century Korean monarchy an easy metaphor for the incestuous relationship between government and contractors in a modern democracy, it's actually some time before the good guys are teaming up and getting together, and the story only really needs one guy to serve as a target at the end. That's a quibble, though; the rest of the movie is pretty much the breezy fun it hopes to be.

Mooseowon Iyagi (Horror Stories)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

You could get a lot of horror anthology action at Fantasia this year, between this, Hong Kong's Tales From the Dark, and America's V/H/S/2. One thing that I find interesting, looking at the three, is that curation can in some ways be as important as individual scary segments. Tales had a common author's works as source material, and V/H/S/2 had a unifying feature that at least had room for variety. Horror Stories seemed to be four or five teams working separately and pasting things together, and while they avoided stepping on each other, the end result felt kind of sloppy.

There are certainly good moments throughout, whether in terms of being scary, gory, or what-the-heck?-inducing. One thing I found very problematic, though, was that every single segment seemed to include a "no, hang on, this is what really happened" moment, and while those can be great, the first was just so screwy as to make the whole thing unsatisfying, and by the end... Well, it's no longer shocking, is it? Someone, it seems, should have been told to play it straight.

Horror Stories has moments, though, and you only need one or two for a quality horror short, most of which deliver. That's not the greatest result, but it's not a bad one.

Oltre il Guado (Across the River)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia International Film Festival, Cinando screener)

I get the feeling that when the time comes to do a full write-up of Across the River, I'm not going to have a whole lot to say. It is, after all, a pretty minimalist movie - guy goes alone into the woods, weird stuff happens, and there's a real possibility that nobody is coming out again. There's almost no dialog and backstory is parceled out in miserly fashion toward the end.

It does pretty well in the atmosphere department, though. Start from how the woods is inherently creepy, add a crossing of running water that filmmaker Lorenzo Bianchini makes far more portentious than it logically may be, and give away so little that it's not even clear whether what's hidden in these woods is cryptozoologic or paranormal - or what the motives of the researcher we spend most of our time following are, and things get thoroughly unnerving. Bianchini knows what he's doing, though - he appropriates found-footage techniques without ever making it that sort of film, and he never feels like he's holding back just to string the audience along.

Would I like it if he were a little less stingy? Yeah, a bit, although he avoids the feeling of only having part of a movie that this sort of project often has. But I'll bet that if I'd seen it in the festival setting, I would have jumped more and been more thoroughly creeped out. It's got a good Blair Witch vibe to it, and could use the effect of people jumping.

Riddick

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 September 2013 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run, DCP)

So, what, am I supposed to move these movies from "R" from "C"on my shelves now? I already moved Pitch Black from "P"!

I kid, but this silly complaint demonstrates the sort of dilemma this movie inspires; like Curse of Chucky (which I'll be getting to relatively soon), it's built to be a sort of soft-reset of the franchise, although there's actually enough material that references the previous movies that audiences are either actively encouraged to find them on Netflix or are assumed to have already done so over the past decade. For a back-to-basics movie, it carries a bit of mythology.

And yet, I kind of like that it does, not just because I've absorbed that stuff and want to be rewarded, but because when you combine it with the narration the title character provides, the movie suddenly gets a film noir/pulp sort of atmosphere: Riddick (Vin Diesel) feels like he's losing a step, and while he's still big, powerful, and very dangerous, there is a certain amount of wear on him. Heck, Richard B. Riddick sounds like a film noir anti-hero, which is a pretty cool approach for a movie that doesn't ape that genre but instead throws its character into the middle of Aliens.

The end result does feel a little calculated - this is the movie that Diesel and writer/director David Twohy could make for $35M in the hopes that it will do well enough to make the big "Underverse" movie that was going to be Chronicles of Riddick II. It's not a bad movie at all - it looks pretty spiffy, it's got some quality monsters, a reasonably enjoyable cast of supporting characters (though the females could use some work; Katee Sackhoff is great but not exactly well-served here). It's just very much Pitch Black redux, with Riddick pushed into a lead role rather than part of an ensemble. And, hey, I liked Pitch Black and am glad to see more. I just hope that Diesel & Twohy get to finish the series the way they intend, because even this scaled-back entry shows that they've got a universe they want to grow and a story they want to tell.

Family Plot

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Hitchcock, 35mm)

It's kind of a weird thing to see Hitchcock rubbing against the present day like this. Family Plot, Hitchcock's final film, has a number of people involved that I think of not for how they're involved in classics but for how they're around in the present: Composer John Williams, for example. The cast of Barbara Harris, Bruce Dern, William Devane, and Karen Black. Now, they're all either aged or have recently passed (RIP, Ms. Black), but that 50-plus-year career is something kind of amazing.

And while it didn't end on a masterpiece, Family Plot is a very entertaining little movie. It's premise of dueling teams of crooks - one relatively benign, one being revealed as ever-more malevolent - sets things up in an entertainingly amoral fashion, and Hitchcock seems to have a good time getting the two groups to circle each other. It's a fun cast, too, and the master's trademark dark humor pops up in unexpected places.

It does feel kind of tired in some spots, though. There's a car chase toward the end, for instance, where Barbara Harris is panicking and climbing all over Bruce Dern that feels like a leftover bit from a screwball comedy decades older, and it never quite works with the modern style the rest of the production tends toward. It's interesting that Hitchcock's last movie, Frenzy, seemed to embrace the 1970s without any problem, perhaps because there were boundaries to push there, but he wasn't sure ow to be lighthearted in this new environment.

Prince Avalanche

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (The Complete Hitchcock, 35mm)

Remember a few years ago, when David Gordon Green was making stoner comedies with James Franco and we all (for certain definitions of "we all") wished he would go back to the quiet, character-based indies with which he made his name? There are moments when Prince Avalanche seems like an admonition to be careful what you wish for, because it's small to the point of being undetectable, and seems a bit like a conscious effort to be such.

And in some ways, it never really escapes that It's not quite the self-consciously limited thing Riddick is (to something this movie's makers probably didn't figure on being compared to), but there's a theatricality to how Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch both portray fairly obtuse characters who recognize what is ridiculous about the other but not themselves that works on stage but seems kind of artificial on film. Meanwhile, this is a fairly cinematic production, with Green and cinematographer Tim Orr shooting the heck out of Texas backroads. Odd combination, although something about it fits together and works, especially with the late-80s post-wildfire timeframe: It's just similar enough to be familiar most of the time, but without the cell phones and internet access that would have sped the story up too much.

For as good as Rudd and Hirsch wind up being, though, there is an element of frustration to this movie: A bit toward the end is screwy for the sake of being screwy, and the rest of the last act is kind of... I don't know, facile? Clichéd? Or just kind of annoying, in that Green sets up the question of how these two characters can get along if the connection that originally linked them is severed, and all they can come up with is "get drunk and throw stuff around". Maybe that happens in real life, but it just seems like a cop-out or shortcut, and leaves a bad aftertaste, like after spending an hour and a half putting pieces in place, all he needed to do was randomly smash them together.

Under Capricorn

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2013 in the Harvard F (first-run, DCP)

It was mentioned at the screening for Jamaica Inn that Hitchcock really didn't like doing period pieces, and he certainly did far fewer of them than one might expect given the time period when he was most active. And whether because of a lack of enthusiasm or as a trigger for it, Under Capricorn is definitely one of his lesser films; there's a spark that's missing that can be found even in movies that are more egregious failures.

What can't be avoided, I think, is that this one feels much like any other period piece, only mismatched. Michael Wilding's Charles Adare seems like a standard-issue fop, for instance, and though he's the character the audience shares the most perspective with, he seems to bounce through too randomly even through the events where he's a major actor. Ingrid Bergman has to play Hettie Flusky as a fairly theatrical alcoholic (with an accent that can generously be described as "not Irish"), and Jospeh Cotton has the bad luck of not being on-screen for the scene that defines his character.

That scene is pretty great, though - Bergman suddenly reaches out and grabs the movie, and she turns it into a viable romance almost through sheer force of will. The script takes that sequence and creates a conundrum that is interesting even if the way out isn't quite so much, though Margaret Leighton makes her chief housekeeper a heck of a Lady MacBeth. It becomes a serviceable-enough movie, just not quite what one would expect from the people involved.