This Week in Tickets: 26 February 2024 - 3 March 2024 (Slow Week)

Very slow new release weekend, very lazy get-out-of-the-apartment mid-week.

This week kicked off with one of my favorite Boston-area moviegoing experiences, the kind of disreputable movie at a fancy institution. In this case, it was Cotton Comes to Harlem at the Harvard Film Archive. In this case, it was shown in conjunction with the University's Houghton Library, which has acquired star Godfrey Cambridge's papers and has some of them on display in the lobby. He was a writer and journalist as well as being an actor, and the slide-show before the (very fun) movie was interesting.

I believe there was some weird train nonsense that made getting to things harder during the week, but I forget which color of weird train nonsense it was. Then on Friday, scheduling was weird/off, so both the big releases got hit on Saturday - Dune: Part Two as the afternoon matinee in 70mm on the Somerville's main screen and The Moon Thieves that evening, which was a pretty good day at the movies.

Sunday's train nonsense was definitely the Red Line - I came up just short of the one meant to get me to Kendall Square for some Oscar shorts and the next one wouldn't be for fifteen minutes, too late - so I wound up getting groceries and then catching Anatomy of a Fall at night, so I at least got a little Oscar catch-up done.

This week promises a little more on my Letterboxd account, although short packages probably won't be on in and Sunday's Oscar night, so I'll be watching that.


Cotton Comes to Harlem

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Godfrey Cambridge, 35mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD at Amazon

Cotton Comes to Harlem is just top-shelf pulp filmmaking from Ossie Davis, the sort where you maybe expect to cut it a little slack for its pioneer status but instead find a movie that feels like something more assured and confident in how its genre works than a lot of later Blaxploitation films. The term didn't exist yet, but it is that, and maybe a top example of the genre.

It's adapted from one of a series of books starring two Harlem NYPD detectives, "Grave Digger" Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and "Coffin Ed" Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) who, from their nicknames, are likely not known for de-escalation and bringing suspects in quietly. To start, they're assigned to watch a rally by Reverend Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart), and ex-con running Johnson is certain is a scam as he convinces neighbors to invest in his Back-to-Africa program. The event is robbed, and O'Malley's people are nearly as aggressive toward the cops as the crooks during the chase. The guys decide to surveil Deke's girlfriend Iris (Judy Pace), though he opts to shack up with his late second-in-command's wife Mabel (Emily Yancy). During the chase, a bale of cotton falls from the robbers' van, and neighborhood character "Uncle Budd" (Redd Foxx) picks it up, not knowing that the stolen $87,000 is inside and everyone is looking for it.

It's worth noting that the initial car chase is kind of terrific, not just because it's the sort of old-school chase that is quite frankly terrifying if you think about it, just cars that are all sharp metal speeding through streets where one shouldn't be going that fast, without modern crumple zones or airbags, gunshots that feel like every stray could kill a bystander, etc. It's in the classic "do more, say less" mode that it reveals a lot of the story without spelling it out (it's very clear that Deke is in cahoots with those robbing him but also not something Grave Digger and Coffin Ed can present as certain), great storytelling on top of great stunts. At the other end, there's a climax where a curtain falls in a way that's maybe more symbolic than the movie really merits, but is too good to not do. Davis and co-writer Arnold Perl know the power of the image and will do all they can to let it elevate a B-movie filled with secret passages, broad characterization, and maybe a little more nudity than is strictly necessary, at least a little.

The comedy at times gets a little broad at times, but it's notable that Davis and company already have their leads kind of cracking jokes about the sheer number of slogans and comments on authenticity that various activists are using, at the time even as they're doing it (consider the earnest performer talking about how she has to do something important that speaks to Her People toward the start and how that winds up being burlesque in the end). It kind of feels like the sort of self-aware thing that comes at the end of a cycle, tweaking the things that had gotten so serious over time, rather than at what's arguably the first blaxploitation film, but, then, sometimes things do start out that way and have it stripped out only to get more sophisticated later.

Also, the Archive had a gorgeous print of a great-looking movie - Colors really pop when everybody's outside during the daytime, and there's a sense of Harlem being both kind of run down and on the way up that the palette and Gerald Hirschfeld's cinematography really heightens.


Dune: Part Two

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

Like its predecessor, Dune: Part Two is absolutely impeccable as a "just look at this thing" epic, especially on the Somerville Theatre's 70mm screen, chock-full of absolutely astounding feats of design, cinematography, and every other technical element of making a movie. It may not be the best possible realization of Frank Herbert's book, but it will certainly be daunting for someone considering another adaptation 20 years from now (as that appears to be the cycle we're on).

Although, speaking of Astounding (or was it Analog by then?), you can kind of see the original serial structure here, I think, as a lot of the focus changes suddenly around the midpoint, and it's bumpy, in part because director Denis Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts compacted a novel that took place over about five years to one that doesn't quite last the length of a pregnancy. That not only robs of the series's first creepy little kid, but it means that the Fremen seem a little more credulous about Paul's Chosen One status, and his eventual turn more forced than tragic. There's also a sense that the filmmakers are a bit wobbly on how they deal with prophecy and mysticism, not quite hitting that sweet spot where there's human frailty driving the sci-fi plot devices. The royalty, eugenics, and propaganda the story rails against work too well.

Crazy good cast, at least. Timothée Chalamet does a really nice job of making a character who is such a product of a weird environment as Paul into someone a viewer can genuinely connect with before turning on the afterburners, and while I'm not sure I've yet seen Zendaya in the role that makes one sure she's this sort of single-name superstar, one can certainly see where she's capable of being that actress. Rebecca Ferguson is a force, and it feels like it's been too long since I've seen Christopher Walken in anything.

And, did I mention it's gorgeous? They seem to have refined a lot of things that were only pretty good the first time around, such as the Harkonnen planet and royal family; there are more cool details to their standard black-leather bad guys this time around, and whoever came up with the black fireworks deserves some sort of raise.

So, yes, I'm looking forward to Dune Messiah (or Dune: Part Three, if they go that route), whenever they get around to that.


Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2024 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase on Prime and elsewhere and for pre-order on Blu-ray at Amazon

Anatomy of a Fall is a pretty darn good movie, but I think it's also the sort of movie that benefits from being the sort of thing that writers, actors, and other folks who really appreciate such things love. It's got a script full of ambiguity and chewy dialogue that actors and critics quite reasonably fall in love with, often enough to forgive when it gets a little too caught up in those things, even before the story itself is centering writing as so crucial. It wants you to know it's clever, and that it mostly is doesn't always help when it's maybe too clever by at least a little bit.

The first half is great, at least, sort of brilliantly uncomfortable in its depiction how opaque and being part of a police investigation must feel from the inside, placing the viewer right in the middle of what could be a suicide, murder, or accident, with director Justine Triet and her co-writer Arthur Harari at once presenting it as a mystery that leaves room for the victim's wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller) to be culpable but also highlighting the tension of being in her position and knowing that an inquiry is necessary but possibly dangerous rightly or wrongly. It's full of tension, with her lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud) trying to work this case with detachment and her son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) possibly convincing himself that she couldn't have done it. It's here that the stuff that often unnerves during courtroom dramas - the way that every kind of evidence, from eyewitness to forensic, is far more subjective than believe - plays out.

Once the film jumps forward a year to the trial, the second half can't quite avoid how much fun this stuff is for writers, actors, and lawyers, and that's before you get to the a recording being entered into evidence that is a performer's dream for just how many words it contains about just laying out the facts of a relationship and the grievances within, no matter how convenient the whole thing is, and how Triet and Harari are putting "Sandra is complex and maybe difficult to like even if she is innocent" out from. Then they pin the whole thing on Daniel being a kid who is so absurdly perceptive in retrospect that it stretches belief. Add that to the combativeness and insinuations from the prosecutor that are barely pushed against (folks used to American courtroom dramas and courtrooms are going to wonder if French ones are really like this a lot!), and the natural, discomfiting situations of the first half are replaced by a lot of people trying just a bit harder than they seemingly have to.

On balance, I think the upsides of this setup outweighs the pitfalls that the movie happily springs, and by a fair amount. It's never less than compelling, and for all that one can easily point out how the second half isn't quite so interesting as the first, Triet is pretty darn good at walking right up to the point where you roll your eyes but not quite getting there. Actors and critics don't go for this just because they're self-interested, but because there's so much good work that can be (and is) done with it.

Spare thoughts: First, everyone saying that Messi deserves all the awards for Best Supporting Animal is correct - he is just an extremely good dog. Second, this look at the French legal system does nothing to shake me of the idea that trial by jury is like democracy - the worst possible way to arrive at a fair result, except for all the others.

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

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

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

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

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

Downhill '27

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

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

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

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

Uncut Gems

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

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

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

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

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

Blackmail

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Eve's Bayou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things to Come

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

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

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

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

Jojo Rabbit

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

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

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

The Farmer's Wife

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

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

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

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

Hugo

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

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

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

Original review from 2011

The Pleasure Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

The Manxman

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

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

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

Champagne

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

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

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

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

Little Women

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

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

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

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

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

This Those Weeks in Tickets: 15 April 2019 - 5 May 2019

Just posted the pages for BUFF, so obviously the ones which include IFFBoston 2019 are next.







This three-week period actually started off with heading out to another series, the Belmont World Film Festival, for Asako I & II on Monday, 25 April. It's a neat little movie in a neat little series (at a venue I kind of dig), although in some ways the thing I remember most is the guest talking about how it was weird, leading me to think that my idea of Japanese films being weird must be awful skewed, because this was barely odd. Or, alternately, she needed to see the anniversary screenings of Audition at the Brattle that weekend.

I didn't; instead, my next bit of Japanese film was finally making it through Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Saturday, as the Harvard Film Archive had a subtitled 35mm print for one of their family matinees. Good, obviously, and I just hadn't seen it at the right time before. A much better choice than the thoroughly ill-considered new version of Hellboy than I saw later that evening.

The next evening, I would head to the Kendall for a split double feature of Little Woods and Wild Nights with Emily, liking them both, although the latter is the one that probably sticks in my head more, just because it is so unrelentingly odd and peculiar even as it is kind of ruthless in getting what it was going for across.

That was a good warm-up for IFFBoston, where did a (mostly) full schedule:

• 24 April 2019: Luce
• 25 April 2019: Them That Follow and The Death of Dick Long
• 26 April 2019: Pizza: A Love Story and Not for Resale
• 27 April 2019: We Are Not Princesses, Ms. Purple, When Lambs Become Lions, and In Fabric
• 28 April 2019: One Child Nation, The Pollinators, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, and For the Birds
• 29 April 2019: Shorts Exeter and The Rusalka
• 1 May 2019: The Farewell

Posts for those were all over the place as I tried to finish writing BUFF up first but bumped things to the front of the line as they got released. And, yes, I did kind of wind up taking a day off, mostly because I got held up on the MBTA and sometime around Charles, I knew that I would not make it to the Coolidge in time for The Sound of Silence and decided to get off, watch Avengers: Endgame in 3D, and figure that the stuff that plays the Tuesday night shows at the Coolidge usually wind up getting regular releases anyway. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case for either movie playing there that night, but I'd at least get to see The Art of Self-Defense at Fantasia.

It's enough to make you want to do something else for a few days, but there's new stuff every week, and I hit Always Miss You and Savage on the weekend, even if they weren't exactly the two Chinese films I'd been hoping would open in Boston that weekend. Neither were particularly great, but there's at least something interesting in Savage that could have been really good but for the inevitable censorship.

I wasn't going to see them on back-to-back days, but getting out to Danvers to see Bolden is a tricky four-legged process if you use public transportation, so I had to divert on Saturday before finally making it on Sunday. On the one hand, not exactly a good enough movie to be worth that sort of day-eating effort; on the other, I'd been waiting almost nine years to see the dang thing after having it teased at the Apollo Theater in 2010, so I wasn't going to miss it on the one chance I had to see it on the big screen.

As you can see, it's especially important to follow my Letterboxd page during festivals, because they will just take forever to write up.

Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (Weekend Matinee, subtitled 35mm)

Does it count as a rewatch if I've put the disc in the player two or three times and then nodded off before it was done? I swear, I've chosen the worst times to try and watch this movie before jumping all over the HFA's subtitled 35mm matinee.

Obviously, I should have seen this sooner; it's a downright terrific movie which establishes its science-fiction bona fides from the opening frames and is grounded in Miyazaki's particular environmental take on the genre throughout. Miyazaki draws no line between world-building and adventure, and sketches out a larger world casually, without ever losing his focus on the title character and her village.

It's obviously an early work - the animation is a little rough at points, the villains are sometimes a little too casually sketched, and there were more than a few comments from the audience about how much of Nausicaä's bottom we were seeing. It's almost never less than intriguing, though, and I likely would have been astounded if it had played Portland, ME/been a thing my parents would have brought me to when I was 11. It still seems like an insane practically out-of-nowhere achievement, and I'm mildly curious to know whether a shot early in the movie of Nausicaä walking to the forest from her glider inspired an iconic image from Akira, vice versa, or if they were pulling from the same source.

Avengers: Endgame

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Funny how the better part of a year gives me an odd perspective on this particular movie - maybe no longer so keenly caught up in the hype to praise it as effusively as I did back in May, but also keenly aware of how Disney's Star Wars guys didn't quite stick the landing to their grand saga the way the Marvel team did. It is, as I figured after a second screening, one of the most satisfying movies of the year even if it's not the best.

I think it obviously being a piece of corporate IP hides a bit of what it does well: It's a smart story about wrestling with failure, on a super-hero-sized grand scale, and a fitting final evolution for what Robert Downey Jr. has been doing as Tony Stark for a decade. The plotting is shaggy when it can afford to be and clever when it needs to be, and for all that the grand finale is a bunch of CGI craziness, it's built and scaled to a sort of perfection, getting the audience caught up in the fight for it to actually feel desperate enough before reinforcements show up that you forget that's a possibility, even though it's been the point of much of the movie, and almost getting there again so that the audience can go "oh, right, Carol" when she shows up. The audience whooped and applauded for that, and it's tough to blame them.

I'm sure that Disney and the other studios are all trying to plan something as big and loyalty-generating as Marvel's Infinity Cycle (or whatever we wind up calling this stretch of Marvel movies when they're knee-deep into something else five years from now), but it may be a one-time thing. At least it ended as well as it could.

What I wrote back in May 2019

This Week in Tickets: 18 November 2019 - 24 November 2019

I'm not going to lie, I'm disappointed in myself for how my moviegoing plans didn't match with my achievements this week



This was the first of a couple weeks working from home because my massive employer didn't arrange things so that we'd be able to go straight from one office to another, and it messed up my rhythms in some ways - a lot more screwing around in the morning and then working late to make up for it because it's not like I have to worry about catching a bus. On the other hand, it meant I could actually not cut out early but still make it to a 6pm show of Warrior Queen of Jhansi on Wednesday. Not necessarily a great decision, but sometimes you go to what looks like a bad movie because you're really curious to compare it to another, in this case the Indian Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. Devika Bhise not being quite so accomplished as Kananga Ranaut is just the start of that movie's issues.

It also lets you get to a 6:30pm screening of Frozen II and be mildly surprised it's not crawling with kids. I guess folks really don't like 3D that much here, which is a bit of a shame; the stereo work is nice and while the film isn't as great as the first one, it's got some challenging themes and is pretty darn decent.

I wanted to get to that early because I planned to hit the repertory theaters hard over the weekend, and made a decent start with Friday's double feature of Daughter of Shanghai & Phantom of Chinatown at the Harvard Film Archive, but whiffed on the Hollywood Whodunits at the Brattle. Early errands bit into the first parts of double/triple features, and it was rainy enough that I really didn't feel like walking to the T.

At least, not until a little refreshing pages in Chrome led me to see that the new Arclight on Causeway Street - long-said to be opening in late November but not showing signs of life as the month wound down - actually had showtimes. Obviously, I had to check it out, and while the complex is not quite 100% done, 21 Bridges was actually better than I'd be led to expect, if not all it could be.

I whiled away some of the weekend by watching the two features on the 3-D Film Archives "3-D Nudie Cuties" collection, Adam and Six Eves and The Bellboy and the Playgirls, which, despite the work of a young Francis Ford Coppola on the second, are quite bad indeed. On top of that, I didn't realize that most of the second was a dubbed version of a German film, so I was screwing around with the AV Sync to try to get that to line up.

I wrapped that just in time to get to the local theater for The Irishman, paying, what, two-thirds of the price of a Netflix monthly subscription to see one of their movies. It's pretty good, although mob stuff was never really my thing and I found it kind of hard to separate the actors from the parts in a lot of cases, and I kind of wonder how those two things interact.

Anyway, bookmark my Letterboxd page and if you're a member, consider paying the $19 for Pro. The ability to filter out "Person A liked Person B's review of Movie C" has made it so much easier to pick out the amount I can actually digest.

The Warrior Queen of Jhansi

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2019 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)

I wasn't a particularly big fan of the year's first film about Rani Lakshmibai, but its faults that needed to be remedied didn't include "British characters who were too unsympathetic". Badly acted, yes, but it's not like this story felt incomplete without Queen Victoria (Jodhi May) very concerned about the excesses of the British East India Tea Company, a sympathetic soldier who was the Rani's childhood friend, and so on. And even with some more recognizable names here, the bad acting is still a problem. I seem to vaguely recall Rupert Everett once being a guy I looked forward to seeing in a movie, but he's impressively awful here, and most of the rest aren't much better.

The performance of Devika Bhise at the center isn't bad - she also worked on the script and produced, with her mother directing - and she is youthful enough to capture that this is a woman who was married at 15 and is as such both in a bit over her head and impressively defiant. She is mostly isolated, though, with this script switching characters for her rani to interact with in and out that it's hard to measure her against them in a meaningful way, and there's just so much of her life packed into the film that large bits have to be covered as part of narration in the first five minutes and others sketched out quickly.

Like that other film, this one falters mostly in trying to assert its queen's greatness rather than demonstrating it, and it's hampered by a budget that doesn't give the filmmakers much room for spectacle or even well-choreographed action at a smaller scale. The film feels small when it needs grandeur, spending a lot of time on details not shown to matter and historical footnotes.

One thing that's interesting about seeing both this and Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is how, between them, they've got an interesting bit of symbolism, with Manikarnika opening with a shot that implies the rani was born from the waters of India while Warrior Queen finishes by having her vanish into them rather than definitively dying on the battlefield. It's an odd symmetry, one which you'd expect to see in the same move rather than spread across two.

Frozen II

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 November 2019 in AMC Assembly Row #9 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

Though there's ultimately only one name on the screenplay, this movie reminds me of how the stories for animated Disney films used to come about from absolutely everyone in the company tossing in an idea or a bit of concept art or storyboarding or what have you, the whole thing being synthesized into something that works exceptionally well. Here, that's not quite the case - the competing themes never quite gelled, resulting in something that's kind of The Fifth Element for kids with a side of war crimes, except that, being a sequel, it's got to toss in a whole bunch of explanations that the first movie did quite well without.

(Also, I find myself darkly amused that, having already killed off Anna and Elsa's parents in the first film, the filmmakers had to go back to kill their grandfather to create a motivating tragedy, although the whole thing becomes something different eventually.)

It's still fairly entertaining - Disney can throw a whole lot of manpower at an animated movie to make it pretty, if nothing else, and this movie is gorgeous, even if the new models for Anna and Else seem a bit odd in how they don't seem to feel quite so mimic the classic animated Disney Princess look quite so much. There may be too many bits of story to this, and some weird inconsistencies in tone, like how the power-ballad spoof is good, but maybe not quite a fit for an otherwise sincere movie. Still, that's a case of how it never really becomes a mess, since even when it gets close to the point where it's too self-aware, it never quite crosses a bad line.

I don't figure my nieces will love it as much as the first, although maybe they'll get that Anna is the hero of these movies (even if Elsa has the superpowers) by the end, and be just as eager to cosplay her as the other.

Daughter of Shanghai

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (The B-Film: Low-Budget Hollywood Cinema 1935-1959, 35mm)

A couple of scenes toward the start of this movie show to just what extent it's not messing around, and that sort of pulp cruelty helps it push through moments when it might otherwise get a bit sloppy. Fortunately, at an hour long it doesn't really have time to go off on tangents that lead nowhere or really get mired in the stupider bits of its plot, and director Robert Florey shows a nifty touch toward the end, making the last act an unusual combination of light wisecracks and urgent action that doesn't work nearly so often as people have tried it - even now, when it can often seem like the default.

It's also got a pretty appealing pair of Asian-American leads in Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn, who have a nifty chemistry that doesn't feel particularly romantic despite a tossed-in final scene; their characters are just smart, determined people who respect each other. It's the sort of B movie that benefits from having folks who would on occasion break through to bigger and better things in the cast - Cecil Cunningham is great switching from open-minded friend to ruthless villain, and she's got Buster Crabbe and Anthony Quinn as henchmen - as well as some special effects work that admittedly looks dated but not slapdash.

It's also a bit weird to look at from a modern perspective, with a story built on protecting borders but mostly-immigrant heroes and little attempt to reconcile this; it builds up roles for its Asian-American characters but plays to pretty broad stereotypes for black and Irish people. It's a strange sensation of people almost realizing that their fondness for individuals and generally racist attitudes are in opposition, but maybe not quite getting there.

Phantom of Chinatown

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 November 2019 in the Harvard Film Archive (The B-Film: Low-Budget Hollywood Cinema 1935-1959, 35mm)

A rare - perhaps singular - Asian-detective movie which actually featured an Asian-American star, this isn't nearly as good as the film the HFA paired it with (Daughter of Shanghai), but it makes up for a lot of that by being kind of delightfully self-aware, making jokes about the predictable structures of mystery movies or occasionally undercutting expectations where Asian characters were concerned with glee, though it's never actually breaking the fourth wall and winking at the audience. Keye Luke and Lotus Long are both kind of delightful even if most of the Caucasian cast is not, like their downright thrilled to have leading roles even if their co-stars feel like they're slumming.

Still, there's an awful thin line between being clever about the tropes your subverting and hoping that hanging a lantern on them will convince the audience to let them slide, and Phantom spends a lot of time on the wrong side of it. It's never a terribly compelling or coherent mystery, it still trades in a bunch of tacky stereotypes, and it eventually runs out of charm, with the "I'm just a simple American detective" character especially grating.

Adam and Six Eves

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 November 2019 in Jay's Living Room (3-D nudie cuties features, Blu-ray)

You buy the disc that has the girlie movie where Francis Ford Coppola directed some scenes, you also get this, shot in 3D but not released that way until this new disc. It's gorgeously preserved/restored/presented, quite possibly looking the best it ever has, seeing as those shots composed for 3D to make sure that it feels like a lady's nipple could stab you in the eye must have looked really awkward flat even before you take into consideration that this probably did not play in the theaters with the best projectionists in a given town.

On the other hand, it's more or less a five page fumetti stretched out to an hour of live-action, the whole of it dubbed over with narration from a donkey, which is, admittedly, actually peppered with good one-liners. Complaining about the story for this film is kind of pointless - it exists to give topless girls a reason to walk around and pose, with a few giggles on the soundtrack, although the fact that it's dubbed over people talking makes one wonder if there was an attempt at a plot and it was just too bad for even this sort of thing. Like, even for a bit of pure exploitation, it looks cheap and lazy.

I kind of wonder what happened to some of these girls; IMDB doesn't show them credited for anything else, for the most part, and one especially looks really uncomfortable with the whole thing at times. Does something like this get treated as a funny story or a dirty secret?

The Bellboy and the Playgirls

* (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2019 in Jay's Living Room (3-D nudie cuties features, Blu-ray)

Well, that's not good. That's not good at all. That was so bad that I was spending large swathes of it fiddling with my phone and whatnot, waiting to get to the 3D scenes, when I wasn't fiddling with the settings because I didn't realize that the black-and-white segments were dubbed into English from German.

Give Francis Ford Coppola credit, though - for a thankless job done quickly and cheaply, he does decent work in making it look like the original German footage and the new American stuff actually belongs as part of the same movie. He can compose a shot pretty well in this first feature, and gets decent-enough work out of Playboy model June Wilkinson that it's too bad there wasn't really a good way to actually make her the lead character or just make a farce about her lingerie designer and her goofy models getting into wacky hijinks in the hotel.

The 3-D content was pretty lousy, though - nice depth, but just girls walking in and out of frame and sitting down to talk.

The Irishman

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 November 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

It's kind of funny that Martin Scorsese has gotten himself caught up in an apparent beef with superhero-movie fans, because aside from it being kind of canny publicity - it's reminded people that he's got a movie in theaters when a lot of the usual theatrical promotion hasn't been done because Netflix produced this movie - it's also bigger than life and meant to draw in people for their favorites all appearing together in a grander tale than their usual. Sound like anything familiar?

To a certain extent, it's using these iconic figures that makes the film a bit distancing for me; it is hard not to see Robert De Niro or Al Pacino rather than Frank Sheeran or Jimmy Hoffa, often reducing what could be fascinating looks inside these two real-life figures' heads and histories to examples of De Niro being working-class fussy and Pacino being larger and louder than life, things that they are exceptionally good at but also examples of playing the hits. It makes Joe Pesci's playing against type more noteworthy and fascinating - even in de-aged flashbacks, he's allowed to carry his age, look worn down, making Russell Bufalino be thoroughly conquered by his own corruption. He's not quite seductively reasonable, instead feeling like someone with a sort of moral cancer; it won't get you right away, but eventually there's nothing else left.

Scorsese and writer Steven Zallian are still awfully good at telling this sort of story. There's an early scene where Scorsese shows that moving through different time periods effortlessly doesn't mean doing it invisibly, letting the characters tell the audience that there's going to be some nostalgia and sentimentality to the next segment so that we can interact with it more certainty and understanding of what all these characters are feeling both as they experience and recall events. The lengthy film doesn't feel drawn out until the end, when it's supposed to, when you realize that the reward for surviving in and around the mob for this long is to be isolated because either your close friends in that life are dead or their deaths have taught you that their loyalty is conditional and the inherent violence is eventually going to drive everyone else away. It drags a bit, but not enough for it to reflect the experience of watching the movie as opposed to what the movie is trying to show.

That's pretty good. Not quite masterpiece-level, and I wonder what it would have been like with other people. I also wonder how many people will take this 210-minute movie as it comes, letting the weight of it settle so that last portion works, rather than breaking it up or pausing it for a bathroom break and thus resetting the clock, since it will be mostly be seen in living rooms rather than theaters.