Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.05: "Ragdoll Dance", Best Wishes to All, Fucktoys, and Escape from the 21st Century

Shorts People!

Honestly, there could have been two groups like this, but even when I don't do the Saturday midnight, I usually look at that Sunday noon slot and wonder if I'm going to be up for rolling out of the bed without an alarm, doing some crosswords, having a big ol' bagel or donut, and making it to the Brattle by the start. I don't pre-order in case there are folks who really want to see this particular "existential" shorts package, and I don't think I've made the first shorts package on time since the festival started having this scheduling template. Certainly not since the pandemic.

I did not take good notes for this, and IMDB lists a lot of producers for Fucktoys (hey, I think this is the first blog post with cussing in the title that might wind up in my teenage nieces' social media feeds!), so I apologize for saying this is a guy I don't know, writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram, someone else I don't know, co-star Sadie Scott, and festival programmer Chris Hallock.

It was a fun conversation, because this was obviously a very low-budget movie and there was therefore a lot of talk about just how much of it was thrifted in and around New Orleans, or shot without permits and the like. The film hit various pandemic and hurricane-related delays, but, one has to admit, there are times when you can't imagine it taking place anywhere else.

Sriram also spent a lot of time talking about how the heart of the film is how, when you're young, especially a young woman, you can sort of know danger but kind of blithely go ahead anyway, and this was about when a person's luck runs out, and how you recognize that and react.

And with that, BUFF is finally wrapped up, and I've blown right past IFFBoston. Here's hoping that is finished before it's Fantasia time!


"Lilly Visits the Hospital"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

"The Bum Family" shorts are kind of BUFF tradition by now - I feel like we've seen them at every festival going back to before the pandemic - and, honestly, they've never been my favorite things in the package, very much "I'm glad you guys had fun making this but I'd never seek this out on my own". As usual, it's got some fun gags and some that feel inside. I kind of feel like this one has the characters feeling a little more self-aware of their weirdness than previous shorts have - not entirely planning to be an agent of chaos instead of just being one while trying to be normal, but with more of that than usual.


"Les Bêtes"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)


I loved the heck out of this at Fantasia last summer, and seeing it a second time months later maybe shaves a little of the novelty off but sharpens the satire a bit - one goes from laughing at the darkly comic awful ways that the aristocrats treat the macabre but lively little animated performers that are brought into the castle to feeling the callousness, especially in the performative cruelty of the little impressario who thinks it will bring him closer to his human masters. No, guy, you're one of the creatures to them.

It makes for a delightful little short, though, as filmmaker Michael Granberry and his crew make a bunch of Weird Little Guys and have them perform, do nifty character animation on the aristocrats, and use the petty bourgeois envy of the folks in between as a catalyst to something more destructive that constantly moves between horrifically destructive and satisfying bits of small-scale revenge. There is something especially powerful about a stop-motion film that ends in flames; for all that one knows that there were probably multiple copies of each little figure made, there's a special horror to the destruction and sense of the miraculous in what survives.


"Peeping"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Four minutes of odd that kind of looks like either the hardware or software used for rendering could use an upgrade in a way that may be deliberate, to give it a bigger underground/raising a fist to the man feeling. The premise is pretty straightforward and not going to be misread - folks just trying to have fun and do picking themselves apart to please a censorious authority - but some of the designs are neat and it's not trying to do too much.


"Pocket Princess"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This one's a neat stop-motion tale that feels like it's adapting a lesser-known fairy tale, one which makes it pretty clear that the cruel priest uncle isn't just an unsympathetic taskmaster but almost certainly molesting his niece, which makes its Grimm-ish finale something between a horrible nightmare and an escape. I suppose that's what makes a lot of those original-recipe stories work sometimes - looking at the world's horrors and admitting that sometimes the only escape you can construct is mental.

It's also kind of nifty-looking, really knowing how to make its various characters have the right balance of innocence and malice, and also making the fantasy world that Anna retreats into both fraught and tight, even when it might seem relatively bigger.


"Pippy and the Typist"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Look, it's got a moment where the main character dropkicks the person controlling the world's actions from the magic typewriter, and that's quality physical comedy. I'm not sure its meta hijinks ever get quite that funny again, but it puts in the effort, very much dedicated to chaos and the idea that just because you're a cartoon character, you may not actually know the best way to deal with cartoon characters, especially if you're already vindictive about your prior bad situation.

"The House of Weird"

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, what you get when folks self-describe themselves as "weird" ever since the original Weird Tales ceased publication isn't great (yes, there's nuance to be had here, but this is a review of a 4-minute short), even if you can see folks having fun and want to applaud that. That's more or less what "The House of Weird" is - filmmaker Mark Reyes and friends screwing around with various tools to create series of funky looking rooms in a house that doesn't exactly open geometric law, and maybe trying to say something about how today's world is incomprehensible and like an escape room you can't exit, but mostly coming off as lightweight oddity for the same of oddity. But, hey, it's a first film, and maybe a learning experience.


"Poppa"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Hmm.

Yep, weird, but it builds up to the one joke you can fit into its two-minute runtime, and there's something really pleasant about its 1990s TV animation style that makes the gross bits work a little better.


"The Garden Sees Fire"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Another bunch of weird little guys, but drawn out trying to create a sense of importance. Mostly well done, I suppose, but 15 minutes is a lot of abstract weirdness.


"Red Thumb"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

An impressive dark fantasy that does nice work combining story, allegory, and world-building into a tight space.


"Demons in the Closet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

One-minute stop-motion horror story, riffing a bit on Army of Darkness, perhaps. Might have taken months to do, but works out pretty darn nice.


"A Walk in the Park"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

I can't seem to find the particular Jay Marks who made this one on IMDB but I hope folks in Hollywood are noticing this short because he certainly seems like a guy where you try and recruit him for something bigger, whether in animation or live-action. He's got a really good knack for building eerie atmosphere into blockbuster action, makes a twist into a deeper horror work, and inserts comedic bits in that don't undermine the sort of story he's telling.

It turns out to be the sort of big, slick banger that tends to be the grand finale for one of these blocks, except…


"Howl if You Love Me"

* * * ½ (out of four) Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This is also a great one, a zippy little cartoon where a couple manages to work around the lady's lycanthropy until the werewolf hunters come and make everything worse. It's upbeat and adventurous with a fine score and plenty of comic relief from their little dog, and despite the lack of dialogue and the cartoon character designs, there's a moment or two that really captures the best bit of werewolf stories, where someone is absolutely terrified of what their conditions will do to their loved ones. It's also built up in such a way that we can really enjoy the final rampage.

Genuinely fun note to end the package on.


Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)

Where to stream it (when available)

Best Wishes to All is quality Japanese "the world is somewhat askew from what you think" stuff, although very much the sort where I kind of want an argument to be raised with its premise at some point, even if it ultimately fails. This lady wants to push back on nihilism, but doesn't really get a chance to try.

The young woman in question (Kotone Furukawa) is visiting her grandparents for the first time in years while on break from college, with her parents and brother expected to join them soon. Something seems off, though, compared to when she visited as a child; there are strange noises, and a mysterious locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway. Eventually, what she finds shocks her, and the reaction of everyone around her but one childhood friend shocks her even more.

What she discovers doesn't really make sense, but that's exactly the point of this sort of Twilight Zone-ish story: Director Yuta Shimotsu and co-writer have a broad idea here, that the price of one person's happiness is another's suffering, and will generally always err on the side of the mechanism being vague and the feeling being authentic than trying to construct a perfect, detailed set of parallels. The discovery is a quality slow burn, though; the filmmakers have a nice way of raising flags right away so that the audience gets a feel for what they're in for but not the how, so the audience is kind of poking around the corners trying to see what's coming. When things get definitively weird, it gets more ominous.

It's also got quite the nice lead performance from Kotone Furukawa; she quickly sells the audience as a likable, down-to-earth student and recoils in horror well, but she's good at the middle part, too, where the heroine is between the horrible discovery about her world and anything she can possibly do about it, processing without looking blank. There are plenty of complementary folks to make it work, too: The too-friendly grandparents, the friend who knows what she doesn't and suffers more for it, the recluse who had the same reaction she did and had it drive her mad. The performances as a group sell the idea of a world that is (probably) different from ours in one very important way but can seem like it isn't twisted into unrecognizability, at least on the surface level.

It does kind of get scattered toward the end, sort of tossing in every sort of symbolic idea for how this works semi-randomly rather than building something that feels like it could actually be the case or has interlocking bits of meaning, which would be nice. It's effective for most of its hour and a half, though, and doesn't stretch out past that enough to undo it.


Fucktoys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Fucktoys is probably the most cheery example of this sort of proudly disreputable movie - the type where you can imagine the folks involved taking each gasping patron who flees the theater out of shocked propriety as a sort of victory - that I can recall seeing. It's all sex workers on the margins of a place that is pointedly already marginal, but is never really looking to make the audience feel like they're slumming it, even when it eventually gets to the point when the candy coating starts to wear off.

AP (Annapurna Sriram) is one of them, a sort of flighty young woman who has been able to earn all she needs to get by selling sex she kind of wasn't opposed to having anyway when she feels like it. The thing about trusting fate in that way is that a girl can wind up in a panic about what fortune tellers say, specifically that her recent run of bad luck is due to a curse, and that she needs to earn some money quickly in order to hire someone to get it off her. So, with the help of friend and lover Danni (Sadie Scott), who just got out of jail, she hops on her scooter and starts looking around Trashtown for ways to earn some quick bucks, though her scatterbrained nature means she often finds herself at the same place she started, if not further behind.

That the movie generally seems to be going somewhere is a neat trick, because it's a story that requires a lot of episodic bouncing and things sort of sinking to a slightly lower low that would kind of die if it stopped being fun despite the trajectory. Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram does impressive work in all three areas keeping the energy up, playing AP as the right sort of dim but scrappy-sweet girl who can keep forward momentum for 100 minutes without slowing down for the audience to question anything and keeping things upbeat despite the absurdity. Sadie Sweet is a good foil for her, harder-edged but on the same wavelength, and there are a few other one-off types who match the vibe, notably Danian Young as a politician too genuinely nice for his own good and François Arnaud as a high-roller who might be able to solve AP's money problems himself.

The film is often stripped-down to an extent that approaches surreal, never more so than when hanging out in AP's "bedroom" in the middle of a field - is this literal, the way AP perceives homelessness that includes freedom, or something else again? The film is full of stripped-down locations and characters that could fit some version of them. Sriram lets them move blithely along, suggesting that the inconveniences of living hand to mouth more than make up for being smothered under patriarchal, moralistic expectations. Even a square like me can understand where AP is coming from.

The film is, however, ready for the conclusion it winds up reaching, which delivers the right emotion for every moment after the twist that sets out on a new course. Sriram shows a really steady hand here to make a point without the topical moralizing, and the poetic license taken at that point feels earned even as it lets her not go into what could have been a lot of details about how things would play out that the audience neither need nor wants. The big twist is jaw-dropping for all that it's maybe been in plain sight despite how the vibe is very much anti-twist, and she shows as much skill turning a screw as she had deliberately not doing so.

Some folks are still probably going to opt out pretty quickly; Sriram is certainly not making any effort to include a big, mainstream audience here. It's good work, though, whether she intends to ever make movies for the more easily-upset or not.


Cong 21 Shi Ji an Quan Che Li (Escape from the 21st Century)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Even folks who like and watch a lot of imported movies often tend to forget about the foreign film filter - that they often look better or classier because, with only so much demand for them outside their native territory, only the best or most mainstream cross borders in any meaningful way. China produces a ton of movies, though, both for theaters and its big streaming services, to entertain its population of 1.4 billion, but it's a rare thing for something as decidedly odd as Escape from the 21st Century to push its way into North America in even the tiny way it's managing.

It opens in the summer of 1999 on "Planet K" (which is basically Earth but pointedly not so, which I imagine gets you a little more leeway with the censors), introducing the audience to fat kid Paopao (Kang Qixuan), his dumb friend Wang Zha (Chen Yichen) with a "Hong Kong" wig for hair, and their buddy Wang Chengyong (Li Zhuozhao), who is super-popular, dating the gorgeous and equally popular Yang Yi (Ma Fanding), and will fight anybody who tries to get between them. That's how they wind up exposed to a weird chemical that allows them to take the places of with their future selves while their teenage bodies are unconscious - but in 2019, Paopao is now not only a hunk (Leon Lee Chenhao), but he's the one dating Yang Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi); Chengyong (Song Yang) is gangster working for a mysterious Boss (Wen Zhengrong); and Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is a photographer partnered with reporter Liu Lianzhi (Elane Zong Chuxi). Worse, they find out that this dystopian world where they're at odds with each other may be their fault, and they may even be putting their past lives at stake!

Story-wise, this movie is wobbly as heck; there's a good sort of time-travel farce set up in the idea that Paopao and Wang Zha are determine to keep the extremely jealous Chengyong from finding out Paopao and Yang Yi wound up together in both the present and future, but it doesn't really work, both because Yang Yi never really becomes enough of a distinct character of her own to make the answer interesting (as is wont to happen to girlfriends in movies about three or more male buddies) and because that piece is mostly a way to get these kids to stumble around and get into bigger trouble, which could have dire consequences for planet K, although it's the sort of "paradoxes just sort of make things blow up for reasons" sort of time travel trouble as much as anything really clever.

Still, that all leads up to an absolutely crazy, apocalyptic climax, with Bonnie Tyler singing "Holding Out for a Hero", missiles flying, characters sneezing themselves between 1999 and 2019 to try and keep a henchman from becoming too good at Street Fighter, and even more ridiculous things. Writer/director Li Yang throws the whole kitchen sink at the audience at hyperspeed with visual effects that do their level best to pull off every gonzo thing in his head, and he mostly does it without the audience getting lost. That doesn't mean one necessarily knows what's happening, but you can keep track of what the various characters are doing and what their individual stakes are, with nobody getting left behind.

Of course, the whole movie is cranked up to eleven even before this The present and the past have different aspect ratios, the film will become animated when live action is simply not sufficiently trippy for what's going on, and why settle for larger-than-life when one can be absurdly larger-than-life? It's exhausting at times and often both over-complicated and without room for nuance, but it's seldom boring, and it really helps that the teenage and adult actors do an excellent job of staying in sync rather than letting the two time periods get away from each other.

It's weird, maximalist filmmaking that was probably lucky to hit the festival circuit and gather up people to tell their friends they won't believe how nutty it is rather than try to cram that into a high-pressure worldwide release.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.04: "Love to Love You, Maybe", Sister Midnight, Alma & the Wolf, and Re-Animator

Shorts People!

I often talk about how BUFF is scheduled tight, and that means there's not really any Q&A after shorts programs any more, and barely have time for introductions, so I didn't get names. I think the two folks at the right did "Banjo", but, otherwise we just zipped through this. I don't even recall seeing a YouTube Q&A this year like in previous years (although my YouTube feeds and the social media that might point them to them aren't great at the moment).

Didn't get the name of the emcee, but that's Alma & the Wolf Michael Patrick Jann on the right and his son Lukas Jann, who acted in the film, in the center.

Kind of an odd Q&A, in some ways. There were the usual interesting bits about shooting in the cold, and how cool it was to work with Ethan Embry, and a really sweet finish about working with one's dad/son, even if Dad keeps having you murdered. But father Michael Patrick really got into what he was going for right from the start, and there was a bit of a different vibe to it than Stefan MacDonald-LaBelle the previous evening. MacDonald-LaBelle had the vibe of someone who made a movie for fun geeking out about it with friends, but Jann's a pro (working mostly in TV since Drop Dead Gorgeous in 1999), and most of the time, folks in his spot are kind of cagey about what they want you to think about their movie. He didn't exactly get out diagrams or anything, but he wanted it very clear that there was no ambiguity and he meant to do that and this is what he was going for, rather than the typical bit where what's important is how you react to it as an audience.

And I get why he might do that; as I get to in the review, it's the sort of film whose ending can be very unsatisfying for certain viewers, and he's maybe trying to nudge us toward "this ending works" before we put our ratings and reviews on [festival sponsor!] Letterboxd or spreading word-of-mouth. He was probably not consciously trying to affect that rather than just reading the room, seeing people not wholly satisfied and either wanting to defend his work or make sure people understood what he was trying to say, both kind of natural impulses.

Interesting trend, though, and I wonder whether there might just be some sort of evolution, in that folks who are apt to make a case for their tiny indies rather than just casually cast them out are going to drive more and better word-of-mouth in an environment where not much else is going to surface their tiny movies.

Hey, it's Barbara Crampton and Michael Gingold, having a post-film talk about Re-Animator, which looks great and is going to have a super-nice 4K disc in a month or two. I'm not necessarily sure that there's a whole lot to say about Re-Animator that a lot of the folks not seeing it for the first time haven't heard - it's 40 years old, various labels have released anniversary editions with special features and associated anniversary articles showing up in print and online every five years since 1995 or so, with many of the folks involved participating over that time. Crampton has embraced the role of horror's cool aunt since coming back from taking some time off from acting about fifteen years ago, so she's probably talked about it and other things she's a lot: She said "don't ask about Chopping Mall", but someone asked about Chopping Mall, and there was a kind of groan when some guy asked about shooting the big finale where she's lying naked on a on a gurney while there's chaos all around her. I kind of wonder if it might have landed better from a woman, although maybe there's less "what's that like, I can't imagine" coming from that direction.

That does kind of play into how she got the part because some other actress dropped out when her mother got a look at the script, and then she and Bruce Abbot read for the part with Jeffrey Combs, not realizing he'd already been cast and this was a chemistry read for him. She also talked about how Stuart Gordon, primarily a theater guy then, had them rehearse a lot more than was typical for any film, much less a horror flick, and was exacting, to the point where one actor said he'd probably play every character himself if it was possible. Made me wonder where his head was at 30 years later, when he maybe could have done a lot of that with animation, motion capture, and the like.


"SexySweat"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Writer/director Luke Condzal pulls a bit of a trick here that I can't recall seeing very much before, where he starts the short with an effect you see a lot in shorts that play festivals like BUFF - roaring bass static that seems to shake the camera and blood-red lighting - to imply that Dr. Zabar is maybe primed to explode, but then having actor Len Bellezza play him as basically amiable and steady while Stephen Wattrus's Sandy Urethra (Condzal probably gave the character that name to see people write it like that in reviews, and who am I to deny him?) is playing it weird. It's like some sort of meta subversion of expected subversion when Zabar apparently knows how to keep that at bay and we don't get the "here's the real maniac" ending.

It does give a different energy to Sandy, aka "SexySweat", a disgraced gym owner, as he gets weird and twitchy and has a comically long monologue of drugs in his system turn into a sobbing breakdown. The audience is waiting for a twist that never actually comes and it pierces their cynicism even as things are darkly humorous.


"Catamaran"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Pound for pound, the action demo reel with comedy might be the toughest sort of short to really nail. "Catamaran", for instance, is pretty decent - the action plays, and writer/director Joseph Rocco Plescia has good instincts for subverting a specific sort of action cliché (the folks who somehow miss entirely at relatively close range with automatic weapons) - but it doesn't give itself the maneuvering room or moments with a plot to actually sell any joke other than "the actors are playing to the balconies and the characters are kind of dumb". I look at the descriptions on both the festival website and IMDB, and that stuff isn't in the movie much or at all.

Which is not a big deal, unless the folks involved were looking to use it to demonstrate how well they can handle the parts of an action movie that aren't straight-up stunts and maybe winking at the audience. They do pretty well with that here - I kind of wonder how tricky shooting a lot of the film on and around a boat made choreography harder - well enough to make me interested in what they can do with a bit more in the way of resources.


"Banjo"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Foreskin and circumcision-related jokes, even more than most dick jokes, is a weird sort of implied slapstick, all about dancing around some bit of physical comedy that the filmmakers may or may not use as a punchline. It's not entirely what the film runs on - it's central character Isaac (T.J. Sullinger) having weird paranoid escalation that's one half his college buddies (Alex Poletti & Hunter Torr) bringing him to a cabin so he can lose his virginity in the same place they did in high school and the way his adding foreskin to a dick joke earlier made everyone look askance and gets him good and keyed up when girlfriend Sarah (Claire Rice) arrives.

"Banjo" is the sort of thing that hits me in a blind spot because my brain is going to try and figure out what it is about repeating the word 'foreskin" that makes it a joke; the people being weird around it done well enough that I enjoyed the performance - director Cameron Poletti and the cast play it nicely frantic and eventually fully tip into sheer absurdity versus the bits that aren't quite jokes. I laughed a fair amount, but also spent time just recognizing the buttons they were trying to push.


"The Time Capsule"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Hey! I sort of know that guy (John Gholson)! Well, we follow each other on social media and occasionally exchange words, but, like, the one time we were in the same city at the same time I didn't say anything!

Kind of one joke here: A group of friends go down memory lane as they unearth a time capsule with various things from their Generation X childhood (and, yes, I had a couple "hey, that's kind of cool" moments), only to be occasionally interrupted by the one guy whose contribution was a Wendy's Value Meal deciding to eat it, leading to everyone being grossed out. It's not a bad joke, though, and filmmaker Michael Charron does all right at sort of letting things low-key roll so the gross-out can surprise a bit.

They shift into weird-but-deadpan to get out of the loop, and it's kind of fun, although a lot of the home stretch is "are we setting up something zany or is everyone being chill the joke?", so to speak. The whole thing is kind of enjoyably shaggy, though, the sort of thing that has the energy of improv even if it really can't be, folks given characters to play off each other with.


"But He's Gay"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

I'm not saying if "But He's Gay" goes this route or not, but you see a movie like this at an underground film festival and you think "this is going to take a sharp turn into murder" while it might instead veer to pathos in a more straight-laced festival. That's doubly so when characters are like "red alert - who invited Maeve?", begging for things to get violent.

Neither Meagan Kimberly Smith's Maeve nor the rest of the folks at this house party are really weird enough, though. The dialog is all fairly anodyne and vague, and there's nothing terribly specific to latch onto with any of these characters, and the tension of Maeve being there is something we're told is uncomfortable more than feel. Then when things finally come to a head, it's awkward but not funny or painful enough to work as any kind of gut-punch. This just sort of happened and it's weird.

Maybe if I was more a part of these sorts of phone chains and dinner party groups, this would hit a bit more square, but the jokes seldom jump from the off-kilter but not that funny background.


"Erection and Destruction"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Enjoyably goofy, this does a really nice job of doing "A leads to B leads to C leads to D" as things get more and more weird and frustrating before having someone pop off because, mentally, they're still back somewhere between A and B and this has all gotten out of hand. Filmmaker Eddie Mullins and his crew also do very well in terms of getting the audience to buy into this larger, kind of fantastical word even though it's clearly being made in the same three or four rooms with stuff the filmmakers have around the house.

That's not a bad thing, by the way; the way Mullis rotates through not just the same locations but camera placements to get the audience feeling like Chip (Joshua Burge) is cycling through similar problems even as things around him evolve, which is a neat way to keep the whole thing grounded in the depression that initiates the whole situation. In the middle of the absurdity and a connection to how this springs from something real, and how treating the biochemical part of depression doesn't actually make their situation better so much as giving them a higher ceiling, which I suspect must be a tremendous source of frustration even if the treatment doesn't have harsh side-effects. It's deadpan goofiness that connects directly to something in the viewers' brains.


"Handball"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

There's a fun sort of vibe to shorts like "Handball", in that a whole lot of the movie is very scripted indie-filmmaker talk, and it's not bad, really but you can feel how a lot of these films are calling cards: Writer/director Eli Beutel wants you to see how he's come up with an interesting situation and written entertaining dialogue about it; stars Ben Groh and Cassidy Rose Gyetvan want you to see how they handle it, getting their fingers on the pulses of these characters, playing off each other well, letting you see them in full and that they're sort of young and inexperienced and can't see how their desires to be happy are hurting their partner. They're all good, and it's a decent little film.

And then it turns out that they've taken their discussion to a neighborhood handball court where this older neighborhood guy Luigi is playing, kind of wiping the floor with some guy younger than him but maybe old enough to be Charley or Hazel's dad, eventually getting Charley to pay. And the thing about Luigi (who isn't listed on the IMDB page) is that if he's not some guy Beutel bumped into and decided to put in the movie and let him just be himself, then the actor is sure capturing that sort of guy. He wheezes and rambles in a way that feels unscripted, goes off on tangents, and his advice doesn't really have much to do with what Hazel and Charley were worried about, but there's something about him just wanting to play handball at this point in his eventful life that maybe says the kids should find what they want and commit to it or not worry so hard. He collapses the careful, methodical work that the filmmakers have been doing to that point.

Which is kind of the point, and neat because it both upends this sort of carefully-constructed conversation film while also very much being that sort of short film.


"There Will Be Womanly Wiles"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Sometimes these shorts will have a good oddball hook that they don't exactly fail, but doesn't necessarily hook the viewer Filmmaker Nicole Higgins and her co-star Will Madden seem to have some interesting takes on online sex-work, kink, virtual reality, and how weird it is for the real-life partner even though he tries to be good with it, but transgressive as it aims to be, this one vanishes from one's head just as soon is it's done and we're on to the next one.


"Make Me a Pizza"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

I wonder how often actual porn actually involved paying off the pizza delivery man with sex, or if it's just one of those things that's so easily mocked that the parody establishes the cliché. That's kind of where this one starts, but it continually finds ways to pull it in odd and surreal directions, with a ton of pure visual innuendo in between. Although it's not exactly PG-rated innuendo, much of the time; it gets earnestly sexy just as it gets weird.

But there's a sort of weird method to this film's madness. Woody Coyote (who also co-wrote) comes in looking goofy in his mullet and cut-off shorts, but his dopiness isn't really stupidity, and the puppy-dog earnestness works for him. It's also amusingly class-conscious without making it a thing and winking at the audience, just a rich woman trying to get her pizza for free even though she lives in a large mansion and maybe becoming a bit more aware because of the working-class guy who is showing solidarity with every person who contributes to the pie.

It gets much weirder - my notes say something about a "bizarre pizza god" - but the oddity of it plays.


"The Streetlight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)

Surrealism doesn't usually veer into sweetness as opposed to comedy like it does in "The Streetlight", and that's a shame, because there's something genuinely delightful about moving through the oddity of the world that we seemingly take for granted and coming out in a better place. Writer/director doesn't ask star James Milord to either take the strange events for granted or do a double take when a streetlight starts communicating in subtitled hums, including pointing out a chainsaw that just happens to be sitting nearby. She just lets him play it straight and gives the audience time to laugh in somewhat befuddled fashion.

And then, somehow, it gets to a point where you can see Milford's petty crook has maybe become a better guy and that the talking streetlight has had a glimpse of the wider world, reminding us of how most of us don't see far behind our horizon. It's an oddly positive and heartfelt ending for something that could be very screwy.


Sister Midnight

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available

Stop-motion reanimation - is that a thing?

Being able to ask this question is a sign of just how fun the fun parts of the movie are, which carries through well enough that it doesn't really matter that there's not really a story here, but a chance to riff on various ideas. Sometimes that's good enough.

It starts off introducing the audience to Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), a couple settling into Gopal's studio apartment in Delhi (though "studio" makes it sound much fancier than it is). It's no love match - neighbors say they married the village idiot to the village weirdo, and neither of them are particularly ready for married life: Uma has to get curmudgeonly neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Radam) to teach her how to cook, while Gopal seems terrified of touching his wife. Both wind up working long hours as much as to avoid the awkwardness of being together as needing the money, but becoming a creature of the night may just wind up making Uma a different sort of creature of the night.

The best part is probably lead actress Radhika Apte, whose Uma is delightfully cranky from the start, veering from curious to frustrated and back as she discovers her weird nature and explores it. She's funny and abrasive but has the knack for bringing that across without making Uma truly cruel. The movie takes a bunch of different directions, but she always seems to be on the right wavelength. There's a fun vibe where writer/director Karan Kandhari initially lets the audience assume Uma is smart because she is rebellious and unsatisfied, but average and abrasive women can feel that way too, and Apte turns out to be in over her head much of the time, but in a way that connects with the audience even if they're running ahead of her.

The supernatural material emerges roughly midway through and it's kind of enjoyably screwy, like filmmaker Karan Kandhari found a fun twist on vampires but didn't really find a vampire story to tell. Which is okay; Uma being a vampire of sorts means she never fits in and is never going to fit in but still wants to live some sort of life and there's something very relatable about how she might not figure out what being different means rather than being swept up into some community that is different in the same way. Story-wise things sort of go around in circles for a while toward the end; it's all neat takes, fortunately, but you can sort of see Kandhari kind of trying to figure out what she's going to do with these ideas without arriving at a final destination.

It looks nice, though, or at least the look is effective: The design crew finds ways for these tight places to work as spaces, and accentuate how drab some situations are without sinking into a bland brown. The soundtrack will often take a surprising turn into something bluesy or otherwise incongruous with the setting in a way that helps smooth things along. And the animation that shows up is kind of terrific, unusual and dynamic but not really showy - these creatures are a nuisance to Uma, so Kandhari and company make sure that they look neat but don't get big beauty shots.

Sister Midnight is kind of all over the place, but there's no denying the vibe is good, and when Kandhari gives Apte something interesting to do, it doesn't really matter how well the scene connects to the rest of the movie.


Alma and the Wolf

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)


Note: There's really no way to say anything worth saying about Alma and the Wolf without getting into stuff about the ending, so consider this a SPOILER WARNING and keeps scrolling down to Re-Animator if that's a deal breaker.

Anyway… There are movies with unreliable narrators, and there are movies with so much "here's what really happens" as to make most of the movie feel like a waste of time. I'm not saying this movie is firmly in the second category, but it sure tilts that way, and in the most obnoxious way possible. There aren't many details that remain unmolested by the end, and I'm not sure how well I would think this was handled if the director hasn't been unusually forthcoming on what he was going for at the end rather than saying "obviously, every viewer will have their own interpretation."

As the film starts, Deputy Sheriff Ren Accord (Ethan Embry) is annoyed that a call to deal with Alma (Li Jun Li), an alcoholic young woman he knew in high school who claims that some sort of giant wolf killed her dog and then attacked her, might delay him seeing his son (Lukas Jann) pitch in the big game. It doesn't, quite, but a couple days later, when he's scheduled to have his son at home, he instead schedules a date with Alma. The teenager has a little dog too, and whatever attacked Alma soon makes off with the kid, leaving Ren and partner Murph (Jeremie Harris) to track them down, but things get very weird in the woods.

Is Alma and the Wolf good enough in the moment to survive what comes later? Maybe. It's got a number of good bits and as a result the movie it's pretending to be is entertaining while it lasts. Director Michael Patrick Jann and his crew capture the vibe of a small town that's starting to decay but is hard to escape, capturing good details without being too fussy. The practical effects are pretty darn decent, as is the screwy, jerry-rigged mythology of it, as far as that goes. He's good at changing up genres with half a wink.

At least, until it's time to start getting serious and into what the film is really about, and eventually revealing that most of what the audience saw before was distorted at best and outright lies in other points, and while I know that, in real life, people will sometimes construct elaborate narratives where they're the hero that don't have any basis in fact, something about Abby Miller's script or how the rest if the team stages it doesn't make the audience sit up in interest when the truth is revealed: There's effort put into building the fantasy but the reality is expected to be compelling just because it's more realistic, and characters have traits exchanged too wholesale to feel there's a thread connecting them. There are moments of the sort that make one wonder if somebody imagining an alternate history is really going to come up with neat supporting characters and banter in retrospect, which doesn't feel right when you get a good look at the truth of how it's being made up. The revelations have one great scene amid a bunch that are pretty mediocre.

It probably doesn't help that I don't spend enough time around drunks that I can't really react to Ethan Embry's performance (someone has to give an award-caliber performance as an alcoholic for me to really have it resonate as great). His character really only seems lived-in rather than broad a couple times for me, and most of the rest of the cast is just fine. Jeremie Harris might be a bit too good, making Murph into a character who feels consistent even when he probably should be discordant.

Alma and the Wolf wouldn't be a great movie if the twist wasn't so extreme as to break it into pieces - it's low-budget capable more than truly solid - but I suspect that I'm not the only viewer who really needs a movie to justify lying to me better than this manages.


Re-Animator

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, 4K laser DCP)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon (though an updated edition is likely coming soon)

I don't really know enough about 1980s horror to know that Re-Animator is actually a cut above its contemporaries or just feels like it, but you can certainly see why it's getting a fancy 40th anniversary release with guests when you watch it now. It's gross and occasionally goofy, but also just really solid craft beyond how everything from a few decades ago looked nice because it was shot on film and lit well.

It's nothing fancy, in a lot of ways, really; it's the sort of movie where you can see the filmmakers holding back a bit until it's time to get to the good stuff, but all the jumps and nasty stuff is quite well-staged when it actually happens. Jeffrey Coombs (looking impossibly young) nails this sort of mad scientist just starting out, where the amorality and theatricality doesn't really have experience behind it yet, a hungry Frankenstein shorn of the noble veneer. It's a star-making role if you don't mind being this sort of B-movie star.

The practical work has a certain simplicity but the filmmakers know just what to hide and what to keep in shadow even as it gets weirder, and it unnerves in proper Lovecraft fashion even when it's doing spook-a-blast stuff. Gordon and his co-writers have an exceptionally keen idea of what their audience wants, and there's seldom a bit of their gooey, entertaining violence that doesn't also have a cruel edge to it. Relatedly, I weirdly appreciate how much the movie seems to loathe the pervy older man David Gale plays, in that his nasty attitude is going to keep you from leering along with him at the pretty naked girl, which is not something these movies always manage.

Stuart Gordon knew what he was doing here.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.01: The Surfer and Muerte en la Playa

I don't imagine there were a lot of guests scheduled for BUFF, especially the first night where the schedule was Sunday-evening tight, but I wonder how many are backing out. Nicole & Kevin might be joking about how the audience chooses the awards at this festival which means there's still democracy here, but the stories about people getting arrested by ICE folks trying to meet quotas at Logan aren't good, and film festivals sure seem like something where someone might come in on a tourist visa only to have someone who might have looked the other way before decide that was working. Like, I might not risk it.

Bleh.

Still, it was a fun night where the studio movie with indie roots and the restoration shared a theme of rage leading to murder in a sunny beach community. If you want more, The Surfer director Lorcan Finnegan's debut feature, Without Name, is currently sitting on my shelf in a disc released by Yellow Veil, a partner label of Vinegar Syndrome, who are apparently behind the restoration/re-release of Muerte en la Playa. The weird horror community crosses over a lot!


The Surfer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Huh, I don't think I've ever heard Julian McMahon's actual accent before (and maybe I haven't; if the Sydney-born actor is laying Perth on something thick). There's something kind of funny about how he's been playing [North] American folks for twenty-five years without really scanning as Australian while Nicolas Cage's character is supposedly Australian but they've got to spend a couple minutes claiming that a few years in California twenty years ago has him talking like Nic Cage.

Or maybe it was longer; whatever the length, he's back in Australia now, intending to take his son (Finn Little) to the beach where he surfed growing up, pointing out the childhood home that he is repurchasing from the crest of a wave, presuming he can put together the financing to beat a last-minute all-cash offer. Since then, though, the locals have been bullying any outsider who comes to the supposedly-public beach, led by Scott "Scally" Callahan (McMahon), a motivational speaker who whips the local men into a frenzy. As Cage's surfer continues to haunt the beach, various things start going wrong, and the only ally he's got is a bum living out of his car (Nic Cassim) who blames Scally and his crew for his son's death.

The Surfer is the sort of Nicolas Cage movie that makes you wonder what would have happened if Cage hadn't taken the role. it might have been more timid, or it might have been the same but more unnerving because we're not looking for him to Nic Cage it up. He's good at this, and good in this movie, but it's not necessarily going to take one by surprise; we can sort of track how Cage will play his escalation from seemingly reasonable everyman to deadpan sarcasm to manic violence from previous experience at this point.

I do like the compact setup, though, with director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin clearly establishing stakes and how the title character is trying to recapture things that are gone, in large part due to his own self-destructive action, and seeing up little bits of entitlement that keep him from being totally sympathetic and get him deeper and deeper in trouble. It's so keenly and carefully set out up front that what comes after is kind of drawn out as a result, stripping away everything he's rebuilt in maybe too finely granular a fashion, before a turn that maybe requires more or less of the movie, because there's a whole other basket of issues that demand a bit of attention after that, from the "localism" that seems to drive the folks on the beach to how Scally's guru status is likely more about giving people permission to be cruel than channeling aggression.

The film's got a look, though, a real way of getting across how Australia is unforgivingly beautiful (it is a place where dehydration can sneak up on you while you enjoy the sunshine and interesting plants and animals), and an eye for how the rich folks near this beach are kind of cosplaying at being hooligans enough for it to become real. The comic timing of each new bit of cruelty is impeccable, and the frustration and heatstroke making this guy feel even more unstuck in time is effective.

I hate to be a "cut 15 minutes" guy, especially since the grindhouse flicks that inspired this were often sort of padded themselves, but it does feel like there's a 90-minute version that attacks the viewer as ruthlessly as the opening does throughout rather than vamping because it's going to take a couple of days to wear this guy down. Maybe there's not quite a correct pace for this story, and you've just got to roll with how good many of the moments are.


Muerte en la Playa (Death on the Beach)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon or direct from Vinegar Syndrome

You never totally know about IMDB entries for filmmakers outside the English-speaking mainstream, but to watch Muerte en la Playa is to be surprised that this comes near the end of the career of Enrique Gómez Vadillo rather than the start; it's got the feel of a young filmmaker trying to get things out as an outsider rather than a veteran who has had a decade or so and plenty of opportunities to hone his craft. That's both good and bad; transgressive energy pushes the film through periods where there are awkward talent gaps between some of the folks involved.

It opens with a nastily sexual murder at a boarding school that will have it closed, sending student David (Andrés Bonfiglio) home to his wealthy mother Lorena (Sonia Infante) and her latest paramour, Paul (Rodolfo de Anda), who seems an honest and pleasant enough gigolo. Lorena figures this will be a good time to start teaching David the family business; although she is disappointed that he would rather spend time with a pair of male hippies and deaf-mute servant Ruffo (Antonio Eric) than the various "secretaries" she has recruited to show him the ropes and prove he's the sort of man she imagines him to be, even if Paul and the rest quickly suss out that he is gay. Eventually, he finds new friends Tony (Humberto Lobato) and Nubia (Angela Alaltriste), while Paul quietly makes sure that the unusual amount of dead bodies showing up near the estate aren't investigated too closely.

I am mildly curious about the sources of Vinegar Syndrome's restoration, because the very start and end of the movie look like they are sourced from VHS copies, priming the audience to see it as the sort of disreputable, shot-on-video underground cinema of the 1980s, except that it quickly shifts to 35mm film and the sort of pretty darn passable cinematography that comes from pointing the camera at people with good physiques in sunny locations and not messing up the framing or the lighting, even if the point of view often movies like someone who just got their first camcorder for Christmas. Much of the rest of the movie feels like they only had so much time and film, so there's not always a great take or two to when they got to the editing bay.

Or they might have been going for a certain level of camp from the start; there are lines that it's hard to imagine being written in sincere fashion, although the actors do a fair job of delivering them without winking or stumbling over just how the character is supposed to be feeling to say this. The film isn't delivering great performances, but everyone is a well-cast match of the sort of guy they're meant to be.

Mostly, the vibe is right; one can feel the movie riding the line between the characters who are cosmopolitan enough to accept David as gay and the ones who will view that with contempt or disappointment. Squint, and you can see the bodies piling up as Lorena refuses to see her son for what he is in more ways than one. Any sort of message you might try to get from the film might be mixed at best and the ending is a bloody mess, but you can't really argue that maybe there's an argument to make being in the closet less scary in circa 1991 Mexico.

Or maybe it's not that deep, but just a portion of sleaze just capable enough to be watchable while also being quite ridiculous.

The Time Masters

Not much to say about the moviegoing experience up here because I mostly want to have a review up during the week it's at the Brattle in a pretty great-looking restoration.


Les Maîtres du temps ([The] Time Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, 4K laser DCP)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and perhaps elsewhere

My eyes bugged a bit at the trailer for The Time Masters when it played before another film at the Brattle a week or two ago - cool animated French sci-fi, looks a bit more accessible than Fantastic Planet, and, man those designs look like they could come straight from a Jodorowsky & Moebius… oh, wait, it actually is Moebius! How in the heck is this restoration 40 years later somehow the first real US release? Well, it turns out that it's a lot of ideas and not a lot of story; not really a drag, but not all one might hope.

It opens in zippy enough fashion, with a spindly wheeled vehicle racing across an alien planet, driver Claude (voice of Sady Rebbot) making an interstellar plea to a friend; his wife has been killed by the planet Perdide's murderous hornets and they need to be evacuated. Crashing in an area presumed to be safe, the dying man gives his transceiver to his five-year-old son Piel (voice of Frédéric Legros), saying to hide in the woods and do whatever the voice that comes out says; Piel doesn't quite understand that it will be someone far away talking to him, and not the device itself. On the other end, Claude's adventurer friend Jaffar (voice of Jean Valmont) doesn't get the message right away; he's been hired to smuggle Prince Matton (voice of Yves-Marie Maurin) and Princess Belle (voice of Monique Thierry) and half the royal treasury to a new world after Matton was deposed, but immediately makes plans: He will have to consult with old friend Silbad (voice of Michel Elias), an expert on Perdide, and use the gravity of the Blue Comet to make his way there. Along the way, they pick up a couple of telepathic gnomes (voices of Patrick Baujin & Pierre Tourneur) as stowaways - they don't like the smell of Matton's thoughts - and try to keep a scared child safe as they don't know exactly what he is up to.

That opening is terrific, a fast-paced dash across a thoroughly alien landscape with enough great Moebius designs to make one's eyes pop anew every few seconds augmented by a cool, synthy score, and director René Laloux (co-writing with Moebius, who also does the art design) isn't exactly shy about trying to build the entire movie on this feeling: When things start to drag, get on a new spaceship, go to a new planet, or have Piel discover some new piece of Perdide life that can grab a viewer's attention, and hang around that until it's time to do this again. It's the same principle that Moebius often brought to his science-fictional bandes dessinées, and his style works exceptionally well here: He's a perfect blend of cartooning and grit under most circumstances, but given a space mercenary trying to rescue a frightened child, it's even better, especially as the innocent antics of the gnomes on Jaffar's ship and the ominous creatures surrounding Piel tie the whole universe together.

You maybe need a little more than that, though: After that exciting opening, there really isn't a lot for anybody to do; there are a few bursts of activity, but a lot of time spent observing and explaining as opposed to doing, and that has its limits, even with as much nifty stuff to observe as this movie offers. It's not necessarily a surprise that the actual Time Masters don't show up - or even get mentioned! - until almost the very end of the film, although there are a couple comments toward the end that make me wonder if I'd missed a reference looking at scenery rather than subtitles. Still, it's not uncommon for French sci-fi to drop the audience into a weird milieu and half-explain it later. Stranger, though, is that there are at least two or three major sequences that happen off-screen or at the other end of the communicator, which you shouldn't have to do in animation.

And maybe Laloux had intended to, but couldn't because of what a fraught production this could be: The French producers outsourced much of the actual animation to a Hungarian firm, and by all accounts the two groups did not get on well at all and collectively were not up to the challenges this movie faced; they maybe just couldn't animate a large, complex action scene given the resources available; even simple facial work and motion is often stiff. Backgrounds, design, and a few big moments are fantastic, at least; what could be done was executed with incredible love and skill.

Which is why, in a few months, I'll buy this on the fanciest disc its distributor makes available and pull it out when I'm in the mood for something mildly trippy and easy to follow; it's fantastic when it's on target and isn't going to frustrate at 78 minutes.

This Week in Tickets: 5 February 2024 - 11 February 2024 (Jean Arthur Week, Part II)

What a "living at the Brattle" week looks like, if you don't remember.

So, yes, as was the plan last week, I did that whole Jean Arthur series, and was kind of amused when I saw a review on Letterboxd for More Than a Secretary that read "Jean Arthur was gay, PERIODT!" because one looks at her biography and wonders if she wasn't somehow queer: One annulled marriage, one that produced no children, intensely private, died in the care of a female longtime friend/companion. More or less finished in Hollywood after her Columbia contract ended, though she'd work on the stage and teach.

And then there are the movies, where The Talk of the Town wasn't the only one that seemed to like a happy polycule was closer to the ideal conclusion than a couple. Obviously, you can't really tell much about an studio-period actor from the movies they're in, because they can't really choose projects, but sometimes it seems like the queer-coding and apparent comfort with it piles up - the best takes with her roommate being better than the best ones with her boyfriend, her biggest movies being the ones with unconventional chemistry.

No way to know, obviously, since if this was the case, she maintained her privacy very well during her life. More likely than not, she just lived a private life, wasn't nearly as romance-focused as the characters she played, and had a roommate when she was older. She definitely made some good movies during her time at Columbia, though, and the post-weekend portion of the Brattle's program got to some of the more offbeat ones: If You Could Only Cook, The Whole Town's Talking, More Than a Secretary, Too Many Husbands, You Can't Take It with You, The More the Merrier, and Adventure in Manhattan.

(Somewhere in there, there was a re-watch of Piranha for Film Rolls, but we'll just maybe link to that when that post is ready actually.)

After that came the Lunar New Year weekend, which is kind of a weird one here because it's big mainstream movies, but few have ever had a trailer, some of them come out day-of and some get picked up by North American distributors and wind up coming out months later, and some just disappear because the Chinese distributor doesn't figure there's enough audience in the USA to care. This year, it's backed up right up against Valentine's Day, too. Some years they take over the Imax screen with something huge like The Wandering Earth, other years, not so much I liked both Table for Six 2 (Friday) and The Movie Emperor (Sunday), but they're not "hey, they've got blockbusters in China too!" things.

(It looks we're missing two big ones - YOLO, from the director of Hi, Mom, and Zhang Yimou's Article 20, which will probably show up later.)

Also on Sunday: The first "Silents, Please!" of the year, the 1924 Peter Pan, which was quite fun. Given the mention of the next one tying to MGM's and Columbia's 100th anniversaries, I wonder if 1924 is going to be the theme for the year. The pandemic really screwed over what could potentially have been a good long celebration of silent centennials!

Sorry this showed up kind of late, but it's kind of a beast, and the next Film Rolls is looking like a beast too. My Letterboxd account continues to update if this is too long between missives.


If You Could Only Cook

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Available to purchase on DVD on Amazon; not steaming elsewhere at this moment

So here's the thing about If You Could Only Cook, in which a self-made millionaire (Herbert Marshall), having given an unemployed woman he meets (Jean Arthur) the impression that he, too, is out of work (rather than taking a week off before his wedding to a woman from a respected family he doesn't particularly love), agrees to pose as her husband so that they can take jobs as a butler & cook, only to discover that they were hired by a gangster: It seldom has the absolute best joke possible in a given situation, and it's got a bunch of set-ups it barely mines, but it rarely stumbles, while also packing everything into 74 minutes and fading to black at the very moment its business is done. This is how comedy B-movies are done. Solid as heck work all around.

Indeed, the filmmakers are often content to run off little more than the chemistry between Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall for long stretches, letting them be pleasant company so that you needn't have reservations about pairing them up despite the deception at the center, while a bunch of nutty folks around them escalate things. Arthur and Marshall play off each other so well that it's pretty easy to believe that Jim and Joan go out on limbs for each other. Meanwhile, we see just enough of Jim's best man cuddling with the bride-to-be to casually dispose of that as an issue, while Leo Carrillo and Lionel Stander are mobsters divorced enough from violent crime to be entertaining goofs.

There's a kind of temptation to let things get completely crazy, as they do during an entertaining final chase, but it's not that movie; as frantic and full of screwball misunderstandings as it is, it's pretty gentle. In some ways, it means that this is a comedy B movie that maybe could have been an A picture with 10 more minutes spent running down all the other things going on, and I'd kind of like to see the movie where they knock down everything they set up.

On the other hand, it works pretty darn well at this scale, and can you imagine remaking it? So much is positively quaint today that you'd have to spend time explaining couples' jobs and the like.

(Fun if surprising fact: F. Hugh Herbert, credited with the story, was not a one-off alias that one might use during the Great Depression! His career spanned 30-plus years!)


The Whole Town's Talking

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere, and to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

The first character we meet in this movie is named Seaver, and he survives to the end despite being kidnapped. Five stars.

Well, not quite, but it is tremendous fun to watch Edward G. Robinson not only spend a lot of the movie playing a sweet little nebbish but, as the word gets out that there is an escaped convict who looks just like him, seemingly have difficulty contorting his face into that of the gangster he sees in the paper. I'm not sure of the extent to which he'd really established his gangster persona at this early point, but it's a kick when the Robinson we know and love does show up. Joan Arthur is a fun foil, giving Miss Clark aggressive but honest-seeming charm that quickly wipes away how she initially comes off as a bullying opportunist.

John Ford directs, and it makes for a snappier movie than the ones with Frank Capra that started this Jean Arthur series, even as he's marshaling scenes that play big or tossing both the gags and the bits that move the story ahead around quickly. The parts with Robinson playing off himself work well, too, especially a couple that must be done with rear protection or quality matte work because the smoke from Killer Mannion's cigar wafts behind Arthur Jones rather than disappearing as it passes a central line.

i do, eventually, get a sense of what's kind of too much at points; the chaotic first half doesn't make a whole lot more sense than the second, when Mannion is setting things in motion, but it's quick and lots of fun.


More Than a Secretary

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Not currently streaming; available to purchase on DVD at Amazon.

It's the old, old story - the co-owner of a secretarial school (Jean Arthur) tries to give the demanding client (George Brent) who has fired a number of girls placed at his magazine a piece of her mind, but is mistaken mistaken for the new hire. He's handsome and charismatic, though, so she takes the job, even as she and her partner have lamented the extent to which their students see their training as a path to matrimony rather than independence.

There is some darn good screwball in here, especially as Arthur's Carol is initially thrown by just how peculiar Fred's healthy lifestyle and the workings of the magazine he uses to spread the gospel thereof are, with Lionel Stander especially fun as Fred's trainer and best buddy (he was also a scene-stealer in If You Could Only Cook and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, just a terrific character actor). The film loses a bit of momentum when the health-magazine goofiness starts to fall by the wayside, because Carol finding the whole thing weird is generally more entertaining than her being part of it. I do want to know what percentage of Dorothea Kent's lines as Maizie are double entendres that just aren't so well known 90 years later; she's a hussy and given that so many of her lines are clear come-ons or ones where you can see where she's going, I suspect the rest are just the same.

It's a slight movie, for sure, and at times feels like it's been cut to the bone to get down to its trim 77-minute running time: If the fact that Jean Arthur's character was actually the owner of the school was supposed to be something she was hiding, it's never brought up, and if the best friends are pairing off, it's just out of sight, a fuzzy piece of the background. But it's cute.


Too Many Husbands

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Not currently streaming; available to purchase on DVD at Amazon.

I wonder what the original stage play of this is like, because it certainly feels like the filmmakers took a look at the premise, saw the jokes, and decided that any attempt to make it go anywhere or say anything with even the slightest bit of weight would be working against their purposes, so they tossed it out. This is actually more than fine; it's 80 minutes of flustered absurdity as Jean Arthur's Vicky tries to figure out what to do now that her missing-presumed-dead first husband Bill (Fred MacMurray) has been rescued from a deserted island and found her married to his best friend and business partner Henry (Melvyn Douglas).

There's maybe the hint of something weightier here in Bill's realization that he took Vicky for granted or Henry's inferiority complex, but then something clicks with Vicky, and the look on Jean Arthur's face she realizes that she can make this work for her is delightful. Her glee at realizing that these two men will fight over her, and not because they see her as a prize but because she's obviously the best thing in their lives - kind of important, that! - seems like a chance for the movie to go in on how these two men have neglected her in different ways, but it's having way too much fun with the banter and bouncing around the apartment to slow down and talk about that.

Screenwriter Claude Binyon could maybe do with making a stronger argument for Melvyn Douglas's Henry; the film is almost all ping-ponging and banter, and while Douglas fills this sort of slot quite well, Fred MacMurray is really good at that sort of comedy, and I suspect that the guy who is quick on the draw is going to do better with audiences on top of the girl. MacMurray seems a lot like Arthur in that he was in a classic or two but didn't have iconic pairings or a body of work that became where he was the best thing in legendary pictures. But even if they didn't achieve places in the canon of their own, you can see why they're stars in movies like this as MacMurray in particular is giving you reason to enjoy it at even the silliest moments.


You Can't Take It with You

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Artthur, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime and elsewhere, or to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

Can you imagine if the internet had been around in Frank Capra's day? The level of snark at his seemingly facile earnestness, the immediate "let people like things" backlash, the attempt to parse whether he was actually kind of great at directing actors or if he was lucky to have James Stewart in parts calibrated to his strengths? The truth of it is probably somewhere in the middle, but you can picture the shouting over it, right, especially in a movie like this which doesn't always hit.

In it, banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) is trying to acquire a group of properties in New York on which he'll build a factory that corners the munitions business; the holdout, "Grandpa" Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) barely recognizes the attempt; he and his family and other oddballs he's collected have a sort of creative commune. Unbeknownst to either, Kirby's idler son Tony (Stewart), a do-nothing Vice President has Grandpa's granddaughter Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur) for a secretary and girlfriend, and she would like their families to meet.

There was a time, when I was younger, when I would have described the clan of eccentrics in this movie as worse than the banking family, although these days I'd mark the former as just annoying and inconsiderate while the bankers looking to build a monopoly on munitions manufacture are closer to evil. Progress, but, man, do I still get annoyed by all these guys working so hard to be zany. Capra fetishizes his misfits as much as he loves them, so the avalanche of screwiness seems a bit forced.

Some of the situations are pretty entertaining, at least, well-executed free-floating gags. Alice is a perfect fit for Jean Arthur, who throughout this series has been shown as good at being charming and elegant and then peeling that back to show something more brash and playful not far underneath, and that's often the center of her character here. Jimmy Stewart's do-nothing rich kind doesn't deserve her, really, and Stewart is at his best when he's letting the audience see how empty his rebellion is for most of the movie. There's a lot of charm to most of the cast, though, especially Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold: Barrymore runs a sort of brute-force assault to get the audience to see him as sincere, while Arnold convincingly lets his decency get dragged out.

85 years later, I must admit that a big part of what sours it for me is Grandpa's little rant against paying his taxes and how ready he is to abandon the neighborhood he'd told not to worry about selling as soon as things get a bit uncomfortable for him. You don't have to make these movies "balanced", but you should perhaps reckon with Grandpa's happy life coming from a place of privilege, even before getting to the Black servants who keep this little commune fed!


The More the Merrier

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime and elsewhere, or to purchase on DVD at Amazon

I wonder how many more movies like The More the Merrier got made quickly at some point and then sank into relative obscurity because they were so of the moment or local that their inspiration would seem alien just a few years later. Here, that's Washington DC as America enters World War II, beset by a housing crunch where Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) opts to rent out her spare bedroom out of patriotism, not planning on winding up with Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), who arrived a couple days before his hotel room was free, and who subsequently sub-sublets half of his bedroom to Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), with the intention of playing matchmaker.

It's a kind of unnerving little premise that requires one find Dingle whimsical and charming rather than, say, dangerously presumptuous about invading a young woman's space, and it's on Arthur and Coburn, and later McCrea, to sell that they can size one another up quickly and see more than irritants, enough so that they can go through bunch of clockwork physical comedy and being flustered because of how they've defaulted to farce rules where something is a secret to be kept rather than something to broach right away, with director George Stevens orchestrating things nicely.

Things really come alive when, after a few tossed-off comments about DC having eight women for every man, what with the draft and all the clerical work, the movie makes a sharp shift from cute to horny, like they shot the scene of everybody sunbathing on the roof and decided that was what the film was missing up to that point. The film is certainly at its most fun during that period, with Connie suddenly tiring of the milquetoast fiancé that one might be forgiven for thinking was a lie and rooms full of women eying JOe appreciatively. Admittedly, Joe needs to be pushed out of the way to really let the movie achieve its ready-to-go potential, but it doesn't really need him at that point any more.

It's kind of screwy for the rest of the time, but cute, with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea a very nice potential pair. They're something of an "inevitable, because they're the young and single characters we see the most" match, but filled with enough charm to make one believe it. Throw in Coburn, and the group has nice screwball energy even as they stop just short of frantic.

The whole thing can make you scratch your head a bit - I'm not sure I've seen this sort of movie so specifically built around so narrow a certain time and place before - but it's certainly genial enough for most of the time to be a charmer.


Adventure in Manhattan

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Available to purchase on DVD at Amazon

Adventure in Manhattan is just about complete nonsense as a mystery, really, the sort that either completely misses that a big part of what makes master detectives and criminals fun is the audience getting to see how the machinery in their brains works or realizes that there is absolutely no way for it to make sense and just pushes through anyway. The film all too often just asserts that these guys are brilliant and has them make random leaps, which keeps the movie moving but doesn't make the hero and villain much more than insufferable.

(The story involves a paper hiring "criminologist" writer George Melville (Joel McCrea) to investigate a series of daring robberies which he believes are the work of a presumed-dead European thief (Reginald Owen), while at the same time he crosses paths with unemployed waif Claire Peyton (Jean Arthur), who turns out to be an actress his fellow reporters have hired to prank him because he's obnoxious as hell and needs to be taken down a peg)

Of course, you don't necessarily need much more than that in a 72-minute movie, especially with Joel McCrea as the too-brilliant sleuth and Jean Arthur as the smitten sidekick. They bring sheer movie-star power to the very silly script and make the time passing pleasant. You might like and want more - a really clever heist, or brilliant detective work that falls into place as Melville explains it - but for movies as disposable as this was intended to be, sometimes you've just got to be satisfied with the vibe, and the vibe from McCrea and Arthur is pretty good.


Peter Pan (1924)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm with accompaniment)
Available to stream/rent digitally, or to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

This is the first official/authorized/known film version (although I wouldn't be shocked if someone had made one earlier), made with the direct input/control from J.M. Barrie, and it turns out to be really darn solid. Betty Bronsan & Mary Brian make a genuinely appealing Peter & Wendy, with Bronsan giving Peter the right sort of chaotic energy and Brian capturing Wendy being on the verge of growing up in a way that makes the end, where Peter can't join her, just the right amount of sad. Ernest Torrence really seems to set the standard for Captain Hook over the next century. Anna May Wong shows up, but, um, let's not get into that too much.

The set designers, art directors, and the like (or whatever they were called in those days) seem to have a field day as well, creating a great-looking Never Never Land that sometimes plays like a really spiffy stage production but also never feels bound by that medium; there's room to do special effects or zoom in to show Virginia Browne Faire's Tinker Bell interacting with oversized props. The pantomime animals have a perfect level of unreality considering this, too, in that their acknowledged artifice allows the audience to accept them rather than look for the flaws, with George Ali performing Nana the dog (and possibly the Croc). It's his only film credit, per IMDB, but he's listed first, making me wonder if he was a well-known specialist in this sort of role.

If it trips up at all, it's near the end, although (given Barrie's insistence that few liberties be taken), maybe that's inherent to the material, with things moving fast enough that you wonder how the implication that it's been some time works. It's also a bit of a shame that the only surviving print was a localized-to-America one, but all in all, this is a whole lot better than one might have expected.

This Week in Tickets: 29 January 2024 - 4 February 2024 (Jean Arthur Week, Part I)

Been doing this over a decade and still feel kind of weird about splitting Brattle rep series up like this. It's one thing when they're vertical, or something occasional like with the HFA/Coolidge/Alamo, but my desire to make a big post is often what gets things derailed.

So, last week was one of those weeks where showtimes just didn't work - temperature's low enough that I'm not hanging around anywhere before the movie, but there's not enough time to do anything at home before setting out, which is why there are two things seen at 8pm or so She Is Conann on Tuesday, which I quite liked, a bit more than I expected from the directors' previous films, and Poor Things on Friday, which left me about as cold as I expected from the directors' previous films.

After that, it was Joan Arthur time, as the Brattle started off their year-long celebration of Columbia Pictures's centennial with a tribute to one of the studio's biggest stars of the 1930s and 1940s.

Arthur is an interesting one; a friend mentioned being surprised to find that she was born in 1900, because it means that in her 1935-1944 heyday, she was making romantic comedies at an age when a lot of actresses were playing mothers and housewives. You would absolutely believe the sources that placed her birth in 1905 or even 1908, especially since her going blonde after leaving Paramount makes it easier to memory-hole her silent-movie years.

It's kind of interesting that she's not considered iconic in the way that others of her era are, maybe in part because her career doesn't extend much past 1944 - just two films afterward, some television, stage, and teaching - so she didn't pick up that second generation of folks who appreciated her work. She also didn't have the associations with other legends that would keep later generations coming back to her - though there are three films she did with Frank Capra in this series, she turned down It's a Wonderful Life, and she never worked with, say, Humphrey Bogart or Alfred Hitchcock. It made her legacy someone you'd occasionally come across when investigating some other group of films, but only rarely someone you know.

Which is fine; time filters the canon. But, gosh, she's fun, and I'm glad she's getting this spotlight. Anyway, the for films that played over the weekend were some of her better known ones, with major directors and two-hour runtimes: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Talk of the Town, and Only Angels Have Wings.

More to come, most of which are shorter, fluffier comedies, more typical of the period. They're already showing up on my Letterboxd account, of course, but they'll be here next week.


Poor Things

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream when it's available to stream

It's kind of funny to me that I'm composing this in the same space where Beau Is Afraid led off last week because, while I'm sure that there are a few of these every year, it sure seems like 2023 had more films than average that have relatively little interest to say but are sure given free reign to say it in very elaborate fashion. There's nothing terribly clever or insightful beyond the very ordinary here, but even that is muddled by the fact that director Yorgos Lanthimos has a tendency to abstract and exaggerate to the point where it's hard to recognize his characters as human. It's great-looking and there's bits of good in it, but there's also a lot of extravagance that perhaps suggests profundity more than actually containing it.

Victorian medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youseef) is our way in, taking a job with Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe) to monitor Bella (Emma Stone), whom he eventually discovers is a chimera, the body of a young suicide with the brain of her unborn child transplanted into her skull. Bella is learning at an accelerated rate, and is soon ready to run off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the rakish lawyer whom Godwin intended to prepare a marriage contract between Max and Bella.

You can see Emma Stone's Bella mature, because she stops using baby talk, but it plays as something that just happens as if it's automatic, not one thing leading to another, except in the most obvious cases. And yet, everything's drawn out, like somewhere between Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara, and novelist Alasdir Gray, they found each step of Bella's journey fascinating but didn't much care to dig particularly deep, and it often feels like she's growing without being challenged or engaged.

It looks gorgeous, though, and the work Emma Stone does is impressive as heck, especially toward the start where it's all face and body language; it's kind of amazing just how expressive she is. It's a shame she spends so much of the movie paired with Mark Ruffalo, who just isn't good here; his performance is smirkingly charmless, relying on other people to say that others find him amusing and charismatic, rather than being a deadpan version of it the way everybody else' is.

I don't suppose I'm ever going to like Yorgos Lanthimos; I think it was The Killing of a Sacred Deer that felt like he a movie about robots imitating human behavior where he didn't mention they were robots, and while this isn't that inhuman, it's just weird enough that I don't connect to it in any real way.


Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

What an odd way to build a movie - Mr. Deeds Goes to Town starts out with a fun concept - small-town man Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) unexpectedly inherits a fortune and travels to New York City to start managing it, with reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) insinuating herself by his side for the benefit of her readers - and a bunch of potentially good subplots: The lawyers are hiding malfeasance! There's a ne'er-do-well alternate heir! He's a commercial poet now expected to fund the opera and juxtaposed with the literati! Most of these are cast away because Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur being cute together is really all you need, but then the movie stops dead for a real clunker of an ending. It really feels like you could just ditch the whole last act for one more scene with Copper and Arthur after Deeds has discovered "Mary" has been deceiving him, except that Capra or someone felt weird making a movie about sudden wealth during the Depression.

That end picks up some of the pieces that were raised and dropped early on, but there's also something about the last act that doesn't sit right in how it sort of concentrates a sort of "it's not good to be mean to people unless you're doing it back attitude. Deeds also punches a lot of people in the nose, and that's okay (in retrospect, this probably makes for a better candidate for an Adam Sandler remake than we thought at the time). It also renders the sharp, active Babe to a wailing woman clutching her editor's shoulder when we've spent the whole movie seeing that this isn't her.

Of course, I wonder a bit of how I'd see this movie if it weren't playing as part of a Jean Arthur series, making me view it as her movie. She's great, shifting in and out of fast-talking lady newspaper reporter and fake working class gal modes in a way you can feel but not necessarily watch happen; there's no click as she code-shifts and it makes it easier to buy that Deeds is drawing something out of her. She's a sensible counter to Cooper's odd title character (honestly, he may be the manic depressive they try to smear him as being), though Cooper is a nice center, putting just a little bit of rural smugness into the sweetness of the character to keep him from becoming saccharine.

The center of the movie where it's mostly the two of them is pretty great - the first sign in the series that Arthur is really good at playing off a guy without subordinating herself to him in a scene - and makes her becoming a better person what the movie is about And, hey, that may make a finale of Deeds skewering others feel like the wrong ending, but at least the movie doesn't lose steam during it.

Plus, you can come out wondering, wait, it's this really the first time most people heard the word "doodling"?


Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

Wait - we're supposed to root for a filibuster here? Spewing constant nonsense because the Senate is lined up behind someone else's pork-barrel project? Obviously, that's an unfair description of the finale, but it's a different world today from when you could more easily make a movie where the problem in Washington is generalized corruption, although we often still tend to think in those terms.

Get past that, though, and it's kind of amazing that this movie balances its earnest seeming naivete and its cynical satire as well as it does, because it openly invites you to scoff at literal Boy Scout Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), appointed to fill out a dead Senator's term because he's well-liked but unlikely to learn the ropes well enough to actually do anything, but never really makes you feel bad about it so much as angry. The things being aligned against him in the back half, specifically the media consolidation and ruthlessness of those behind it, are pretty relevant today, and James Stewart's despair in the last act is exceptional.

And in a lot of ways, he's not the hero of the movie so much as Jean Arthur's aide and the rest of the folks who are deep inside the system but maybe can see a chance to be the people they were. Harry Carey's president of the Senate is a little delight as he sees exactly what Smith & Saunders are doing and clearly approves,and Claude Rains is really terrific as the mentor questioning just how far he's gone right up until the end. It creates a more believable connection between outright corruption, passivity, and certainty that sophistication means compromising one's values that can sneak in underneath the earnest crusading.

It's also a pretty terrific-looking film at times - the Senate chamber, for example, feels bigger than most sets in films that aren't specifically meant to be epic, and the lighting is allowed to accentuate the emotion even when there's not necessarily an on-screen reason. Cinematographer Joseph Walker and his crew get to work the darker shades of black-and-white here in a way that allows images to be very striking.


The Talk of the Town

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on DVD on Amazon, or elsewhere

Among the delightful bits of this silly-but-earnest movie in which escaped prisoner Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), Supreme Court-bound scholar Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), and schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur), I particularly love the little moment of Arthur doing a "hey, I look kind of cute in these" thing in the mirror right after the audience starts thinking she looks cute in her borrowed pajamas. I'm not sure filmmakers really know how to leverage that sort of movie-star charisma quite so well any more, especially in comparison to something like this, which has so much that you hope the characters can end up in a nice happy polycule.

It's kind of goofy on the way to that, admittedly - it opens with one of the longer spinning-newspaper montages you'll see to some genuinely ridiculous amateur sleuthing. In between, though, there's some great single-location farce, with the first half of the film where Nora has just stuck Leopold in the attic and is trying to find reasons to deal with both him and Michael while other people tramp through good enough to make one hope the whole film takes place in this one location over the course of a day or something. It's good door-slamming stuff, occasionally in a literal sense, although it does open up nicely for a while when it becomes difficult to move the story forward within those walls.

And, as mentioned, it's got a fun trio at the center, with a good part of the fun being that Cary Grant and Ronald Colman have as much chemistry with each other as either does with Arthur, perhaps more (if this isn't cited in The Celluloid Closet, especially considering the closeups of Rex Ingram as Lightcap's long-time assistant tearing up at the potential loss of their shred monastic life, someone made a major oversight). There's a sense of fun to all of that which makes the whole thing seem up to grabs despite one corner of the triangle being Cary Grant, and just enough screwiness to its screwball that the randomness of the plot fits right in.

The downside, perhaps, is that the chemistry between Grant & Colman undercuts the expected pairing a bit too much - the film does a fair job convincing the audience that Nora would trust and respect Dilg, and having her gripe about how she resents the attempts to foist her off on Lightcap, but romance is mostly in corners like his calling her the prettiest girl in town and her doting over him more than Lightcap in a spot where she has the chance. That's fine, but it doesn't entirely push the film into standard romantic comedy territory, even as it makes the effort.


Only Angels Have Wings

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

I watch Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in this movie and think of Fay Wray brought along for "love interest" in King Kong: Not really much reason for them to be there but you're glad they are anyway, even if it's kind of silly. It takes a bit of the macho idiot edge off, makes one contemplate the danger a bit more.

It uses Arthur's Bonnie Lee to get the audience into the film's world, as she arrives on a ship bound for Panama from somewhere else in South America, meets a couple of nice young pilots, and through them Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), the one partnered with local businessman Dutchy (Sig Ruman) to establish a mail route between their coastal town and the mines in the country's interior, over the mountains. He seems harsh, but charismatic, and she winds up waiting a week for the next boat. Meanwhile, the new pilot, MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess), turns out to be using a false name and to have history with Carter - as does his wife Judy (Hayworth), though MacPherson doesn't know that.

It's good soap set against the backdrop of a new, modern frontier - not quite an updated Western, but not that far off - whose main fault is that it doesn't really have a spot for Bonnie; there's a stretch where she's listening at a keyhole seemingly just to remind the audience that she's there, although it doesn't exactly go better when she's directly participating in the plot later (one could, I suppose, contrast the bravery of a woman traveling alone with that of the pilots, but movies didn't necessarily like to be so explicit about those dangers); it's also got a scene or two where one can't help but notice how explicitly the filmmakers are prioritizing MacPherson's guilty feelings over the question of whether or not Judy can trust him to look out for her. "Love interest" stuff, I guess, which is a shame, because there's good drama about physical and emotional courage here, and it plays across Grant's face wonderfully.

And, on top of that, there's thrills aplenty here, including a sequence built around landing a single-engine plane on top of a mesa and taking off again that reminds a viewer of just how real stunts in old movies can be. There's miniatures and matte work as well as impressive flying, but it's put together in a way that puts the more real stuff in context, augmenting it, crazy good and effective effects work for 1939. 85 years later, the surrounding performances are good enough that the aerial sequences don't have to rely on being something audiences rarely see, and the drama is straightforward enough to keep the movie going for a couple hours.