This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 13 July 2020 - 9 August 2020

This is what you might call an extremely lockdown-inspired chunk of movie-watching, from "I can do this big project" to "I don't want to do anything" to virtual theater streaming to stuff you've always meant to get around to. It's a roller coaster, sort of.









It kind of starts off with the sort of online shopping spree one gets vulnerable to when you're spending so much time inside and on your computer, as I took advantage of a sale to pick up not just the newly released The Rise of Skywalker but most of the movies that came before on 4K. I'd mostly planned to just do the Rise review I'd punted back in December, but instead decided to watch the whole Star Wars saga, one per night. It not only holds up as a whole well enough to not be hurt by a disappointing finale, to the point where I'd like more right now.

In the middle of that, I took a couple of cinematic trips to Hong Kong for a double feature: The Inspector Wears Skirts was the back end of a double feature with The Empire Strikes Back on night #2, and it turned out to be not great. I found myself fairly fond of Denise Ho: Becoming the Song on night #6, though - it's a pretty good starter for folks who would like to know what's going on with the protests there.

I took a night off between the main saga and the "extra" movies, both of which were part of two-movie days with stuff that was playing in the local virtual theaters. Amulet, sad to say, was a pretty disappointing horror movie, the sort where you can see the good pieces but where the whole just doesn't come together. The next night's, Relativity, was one that grew on me as I wrote about it.

Then, after that, it was a pretty sluggish week as I tried to write up the Star Wars stuff and watch baseball and get stuff done for work. There's only so much baseball to watch, but the Red Sox have decided to start the games later, which makes no sense because fewer people are trying to get to the park or even home from work to watch it, and stink and play poorly and not even leave a lot of time for a movie afterward. Bleh.

By the time I was ready to go again, I was looking for 90-minute movies, which led to two early ones by Ann Hui, Zodiac Killers and The Story of Woo Viet. It's an interesting thing to look back after only having seen some of her later, more acclaimed and less genre-infused works - I came in with a lot of different expectations that both were and weren't met.

After that, there was some more time to pull some discs off the shelf - Blood Simple, Legend of the Wolf, and Hopscotch to start the week, and then Memoirs of an Invisible Man at the end. You're never going to believe this, but the two that I got as part of Criterion Collection sales were better than the ones which I bought because they were movies from guys I usually like that maybe aren't big deals like they're classics. Crazy, right? Who'd've thought?

Next one of these will probably be in another month, since I've started watching Fantasia screeners and part of covering them as press is agreeing to embargos, which specifically includes when they can go on one's Letterboxd page. Congrats, ya crazy kiwis, you've built a platform that's a big enough deal for festivals and publicity people to make rules that mention you specifically!

Ba Wong Fa (The Inspector Wears Skirts)

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

They made four of these things, for some reason, shedding characters as they went until only two of the original ensemble cast were left a mere four years later. It must have been a hit, and I suppose that if you come at it looking for a light girl-power take on Police Academy, it does that well enough for its period, and it's partially my fault for expecting more action and sharper wit both times I saw it.

It's tough for the film to not be a let-down after the extremely fun action piece that opens it, with Cynthia Rothrock showing up as a guest star to fight alongside Sibelle Hu, but the film doesn't help itself in a lot of ways: That bit puts the instructor at the center, but she's pushed to the side through the rest of the film, and while the students are fun, there's maybe too many of them with only the slightest story connecting them. The filmmakers position Sandra Ng as "the stocky one", which she's not, really, although she is the one who is putting the most effort into being funny (quote-oddly-unquote, the guy she's paired with, who actually does look sort of heavy, never becomes the butt of jokes for it). It doesn't always work, and maybe wouldn't until filmmakers started putting her into films where everybody was trying as hard. The brief action bits before a messy finale are so formal that they never get to be fun.

The lesson here, I guess, is not to buy movies and have them shipped from the other side of the planet without checking your own blog. I apparently didn't like this much 16 years ago, and while some of that was walking home disappointed after a midnight show, a fair amount wasn't.

What I thought back in 2004

Blood Simple

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

When I watched the copy of Blood Simple that I got from the latest B&N Criterion sale, I wasn't sure whether I'd seen it before or not, and afterwards I still wasn't sure - it seemed familiar in a general sense, but not in any particular scene. That's not to say it felt generic, just that it's a well-oiled machine of a movie; the Coens made a heck of a modern noir without getting winky or meta and if that means it doesn't have quite the easy hook to file individual bits away that the more obviously self-aware thrillers that they and others would make, it's fine. The movie just works.

That simple, machine-like nature is a big part of why it sucks the audience in; there's a remorseless order to how every step just a little further outside the usual bounds leads to the next, and even as each man further compromises himself, they're not really ready to handle the person who has gone a step further (Frances McDormand's Abby isn't an innocent damsel, but she mostly avoids the sort of descent the men undergo). It's a small enough world that it can handle a few coincidences and near-misses, along with a finale that emphasizes how small steps can explode into something that destroys the whole circle in highly visible fashion.

It's never just low-key and heads-down, though. Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh are quite enjoyably scummy men, with John Getz the sort of handsome and earnest counterpart that maybe wouldn't take all that much to sink to the others' level. I'm a bit curious about how the Coens (making their first feature) managed to hook up with Barry Sonnenfeld (shooting his first feature); it's a great pairing, especially since the Coens are still coming from the same place as Sam Raimi in how they stage action. You don't necessarily expect to see noteworthy folks on the same project that early, but they're a great match.

It's entirely possible that, the next time a local theater has a Coen Brothers or modern noir series, I'll see "Blood Simple" on the calendar, not be sure whether I've seen it before, and have more or less the same experience I did this time, only with an audience and a bigger screen. It's not yet as idiosyncratic as the Coens would later become famous for, but it's awfully effective genre work.

Chin long chuen suet (Legend of the Wolf)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

How old is Donnie Yen's character supposed to be in the "present day" segments of Legend of the Wolf? 80-ish? He doesn't look elderly, and rooting him specifically in the mid/late 1990s seems like an odd choice, given how timeless the flashback material that makes up the bulk of the story is. There's fun bits there, to be sure, from the perfectly blue and sleazy look of the city to how the guy looking for "Wolf" is doing so via perfectly realized 1997 computer bullshit, but what happens "now" is never as important as "then" and the winking acknowledgment that the story being flashed back to is maybe embellished doesn't really gain the movie anything.

Of course, one can kind of understand the need; Donnie Yen was a great screen fighter but not yet much of an actor, and the script he and his collaborators come up with makes his character a blank slate. It doesn't make a lot of sense or give the audience a lot of reason to invest in him or hypothetically wonder how he became the mysterious fixer in the 1990s, but his performance doesn't actually clank here, so... fine? It's a set-up that acknowledges Yen's limits and gives him a little chance to get better.

That all that does, eventually, is get the movie to a couple of highly impressive fight scenes, including a creative sort of "running melee" that I really liked: It's one of the few times I can remember a foot chase becoming a fight scene without regularly stopping to plant, putter around a "ring", and then start back up again. Arguably its most memorable bit of bonkers action plays into this, a ridiculous and likely impossible redirection of a knife that keeps the action literally moving.

Eventually, Yen would find the right sort of screen personae and collaborators to actually be a quality leading man between the punching and kicking. Legend of the Wolf doesn't have him there yet, but the action is enough fun to be worth a watch on its own.

Hopscotch

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Has anybody, aside from maybe Peter Falk, benefited more from getting older and having a few wrinkles than Walter Matthau? He was a few years from playing old here - he's more the sort of rumpled and weathered middle-age that later fitness trends would make less visible - but he's got a wry wit that comes from experience that only got better with age.

Hopscotch is all leaning into that, with Matthau playing a senior spy being put out to pasture because he is all too well-aware of how much better he knows his job than the people above him, and while he's got a chance at a soft landing (Glenda Jackson as a former lover who has married a wealthy man and been widowed but not lost any interest in Matthau's Miles Kendig), he can't stop being a spy. It's who he is. Even as he decides to write his memoirs and use their publication to taunt his former masters, he's almost certainly getting more of a kick out of finding a new use for his old skills than causing actual harm.

That's a large part of what makes it so much fun; aside from it being a good 100 minutes of Matthau walking about with a twinkle in his eye, with only Ned Beatty's blustering blunt instrument really opposing him actively (Sam Waterston and Herbert Lom are detached, appreciative pursuers), it's generally light. The secrets in Kendig's book are clearly more embarrassing than dangerous, and his level of pettiness stays more or less exactly where it should. It's an impressive sort of balance throughout, a breezy comedy that never loses sight of both how unproductive and wasteful the Cold War tended to be but also how dangerous the folks who wanted it to to be ruthlessly fought were. It's obviously a product of its time, but the human beings involved are real and likable enough for it to still work 40 years later.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Memoirs of an Invisible Man feels like it was an entertaining book whose adaptation got run through too many drafts by too many screenwriters until any sort of satire that might have made studio executives uncomfortable was gone, along with anything they figured the punters wouldn't understand, and what is left is a shell of a movie, a standard story of an ordinary man on the run from an ordinary CIA killer. It looks especially bad when put up against 2020's version of The Invisible Man, which has a pointed idea of what to use invisibility for compared to the half-hearted take on conformity this movie tries to make into a theme.

There is still some fun to be had; Daryl Hannah is in it, and even if she's got kind of a nothing character, she's charming enough to drag Chevy Chase's milquetoast up a notch or two in likability when they play off each other. It never hurts to have Michael McKean and Stephen Tobolowsky around, and while Sam Neill is given a pretty standard-issue villain, it's not hard to spot the moments when he finds something he can work with. He gets to run with one of the shockingly few bits of invisible-man physical comedy as he mimes getting dragged around an office with a gun to his head, and I feel like few people do a much better switch between nastiness and smiling insincerity when called upon. Director John Carpenter would work with him again in his next feature, In the Mouth of Madness, to much better effect, suggesting that none of the talented people here were ever on the same page.

Truth be told, it seems like a strict paycheck job for Carpenter - consider how viciously his previous movie, They Live, went after capitalism and complacency compared to how this one never really has an alternate route for its stock-trading main character - but he still does a solid, professional job as director, though he can't get more out of the script than was put in. He and the folks at Industrial Lights and Magic really seem to get a kick out of creating the various invisibility effects, squeezing the most they can out of the relatively new CGI technology and also putting together some impressive matte painting work. For all the other faults, "Memoirs" has more than a few moments when, even 28 years later, someone might sit up a little straighter and say something is a really cool special effect a few times; it hits the sweet spot where you can see the level of effort and the creativity that led to a striking image as opposed to pure grinding (either virtually or in the real world).

Movies where the best thing is the cutting-edge special effects don't always age well, and this one's no exception. It's still John Carpenter, a good cast, and some striking visuals, and that's worth watching once.

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 6 July 2020 - 12 July 2020

Love not feeling great at this particular point in history!



I mean, I knew I wasn't sick in any sort of dangerous way - something on the pizza I made one night had probably been in the fridge too long after being opened (a thing that happens when you live alone and try not to hit the grocery store every other day), so it had me feeling lousy after eating it and watching Shanghai Triad, I slept lousy, thought I was doing okay the next day but had to lay down for a while, then had to make those hours back up at work later in the week. Totally knew that was what it was, but you can't help but get a little more tense about such things right now.

The movie? Good! After all, even lesser Zhang Yimou is pretty good, and this was him in his early Gong Li-starring run, with a sting you don't notice until you've had a bit of time to sit with it. I'm more than a bit curious how Zhang's films will get rolled out once China gets serious about re-opening theaters - some things have had whole year delays, others have gone to VOD, and who knows how getting released in China will translate to coming to North America, as Zhang's last, Shadow, skipped its National Day day-and-date and got a more mainstream release.

The only other movie-watching I did over the weekend was to drop Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse into the player for the first time. Surprise, it is still pretty great.

Sunday, I got the PUZ files of the last three years of the Boswords crossword tournament, and I have no idea how well I did on solving them. I got mostly scores in the 3000 range, according to Across Lite, but have no idea if that's "OK for someone who hasn't been solving much in the past few years", "respectable", or "contender". Guess I'll find out in a week and a half!

Got something a bit more ambitious planned for the next couple of weeks, so there will be stuff on my Letterboxd page, even if it's mostly just logging. Wish I could be in Montreal!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I think that this is the first time I've seen the movie flat, as both times I saw it in theaters were in 3D, and it's a thing that I couldn't help thinking about while watching it, because the animation style is very much designed so that you will notice where things are in terms of distance even without the glasses. On the 4K disc, the sharpness and bold color accentuates that, giving a feeling of depth. It also just highlights how gorgeous a movie it is: Detailed while still being cartoony, packed with creativity and detail despite never being too overwhelming, able to make deliberately different styles work together.

Some of the details show a little more wear on multiple viewings, although far less so than one may expect from this sort of fantasy - you can more often see the elegance of how Miles having a supervillain uncle is not just an ironic coincidence. I like the material with Peter B or Miles making fools of themselves with women less and less each time, but that's the sort of cringe-y stuff that I never really go for, and it's a part that gives the movie something for everyone.

It's telling, I think, that while ordering other stuff on Amazon that day, I stumbled on a decently-priced copy of the 3D disc from the UK and ordered that. As much as I know 3D has become a complete niche item in the USA (for no good reason! 4K sets have the high frame rate and Bluetooth needed to manage 3D!), it's still annoying that I have to double-dip across continents to get both the hi-res and 3D versions of a movie, although this is definitely one where it's worth the extra money and shelf space.

What I thought the first time and the second

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 29 June 2020 - 5 July 2020

Holidays are weird in general right now, but this one seems like it was just set up mess with me.



So, the actual holiday is on a Saturday, so my employer gives us Friday off, and then has an early end-of-day on Thursday, but it all feels like a long regular weekend because all the stuff that would usually go with the Fourth aren't happening because nobody is crowding onto the Esplanade yet. I don't know to what extent a lot of people are for a "USA, yeah!" festival given how we're kind of not in great shape right now and the reasons for that.

That early day on Thursday without necessarily needing to get up the next morning gave me plenty of time that evening to go for a double feature I'd been planning for a while: City Without Baseball & Dealer/Healer, just under the wire before the Red Sox started their "summer camp". It turned out not to be a particularly clever one - though they share a director, he's not exactly an auteur, as likely as not just brought in to be a steady hand for rookie filmmaker Scud. It's interesting, at least.

Friday evening's movie was part of the "don't let it even make it to the 'unwatched' shelf" effort, in this case the new Blu-ray of Narrow Margin, which I hadn't seen for years but quite liked when I first saw it on video in high school or college. I may have only just watched the original version for the first time about eight months ago (and am somewhat shocked to see that the only way to purchase a physical copy is a discontinued noir box set), but they turn out to be a nice pair, both high-quality examples of b-movies for their period.

That gets us to Saturday and the Fourth of July, and obviously that night's movie is going to be Jaws. Normally, the Brattle would be building a week of "nightmare vacation" movies around showing it on 35mm film, but that's obviously out the window. Which means that, yeah, watching a movie about people dying because the government insisted on opening the economy in the face of an obvious threat would be kind of on the nose even if there wasn't video coming in from the UK of the pubs being open and crowded because their Prime Minister has said the mayor is the real hero of that movie and apparently decided to emulate him. But, counterpoint, there is never actually a bad time to watch Jaws.

The week then wrapped with Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, since I'd finished the third series earlier in the week (on one of those blank days) in anticipation of this arriving in the mail. Kind of a disappointment - setting sail for new locales means leaving behind all the things in the show's Melbourne setting that allow it to run smoothly, and the filmmakers don't find adequate substitutes - but it's still another couple episode's worth of the frisky/cozy series, which can't be a complete loss.

I would have been leaving for Montreal this Thursday if not for all this (gestures at everything), so I won't be putting my Letterboxd page under quite the strain I might have otherwise, though hopefully it will get a few more entries than normal..

Narrow Margin

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I'm not sure why, exactly, this one grabbed me when I pulled it off a shelf of a video store when it was a relatively new release; maybe as a 20-year-old I just hadn't seen a whole lot of movies that were pitched to adults and turned out to be relatively low-key. Heck, seeing the Carolco logo on something that wasn't blockbuster-style threw me a bit - they were the studio of things like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Cutthroat Island, not this sort of modest thriller!

Revisiting it for the first time in a while (and having seen the film it remade recently), I can see that it is, in fact, good. Not great, but like its predecessor, awfully darn solid, a bit better than expected in every area, from the terrific group of character actors that writer/director/cinematographer Peter Hyams surrounds Gene Hackman with to stunt/green screen work that is awfully convincing for 1990, really only leaving a moment or two when one clearly sees a seam during the climax - the sort of movie where one might say, yeah, folks are pretty clearly being doubled here, but the stunt work itself is exceptional. Hyams was clever in remaking a B-movie that demonstrated a strong foundation but hadn't quite attained classic status, and not quite keeping it at the same scale but doing the late-80s equivalent and dialing it up a notch or two. Gene Hackman is Gene Hackman, just exactly what the movie needs.

Seeing it close to The Narrow Margin, I almost think that this is the platonic idea of what a remake should be - upgraded but not wiping out the feel of the original, remixing the original ideas in such a way that it has a surprise or two for fans who know the story but doesn't sell things out, feeling of its time. If studios are going to raid the vaults for new takes on proven material, this is the way to go about it.

Jaws

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

This is, somehow, Steven Spielberg's second theatrical feature, despite being ridiculously assured in a way that seems like it would suggest a veteran. Instead, Spielberg and a great cast take something that could be little more than a B-movie and make it a classic through sheer force of doing everything right even when the actual shark is clearly not able to pull its weight. The resources poured into that shark and the shooting on the open sea probably keep it from ever being a real "B", but after a number of times re-watching this film, you don't necessarily discover new layers so much as you see just how well the layer it has is put together, with neither cut corners nor waste.

Part of that is John Williams, of course; I've spent a fair amount of the past half-year pointing out how Williams's work inspires a knee-jerk reaction by now, but unless his disaster-movie scores have penetrated the public consciousness more than I realized, this is his first one that really just wormed its way into the general public's heads enough to really have meaning and trigger something for almost anybody who hears it. On the day I write/post this, we're mourning the loss of Ennio Morricone, and there's probably nobody else who fits quite the same slot as Williams in terms of how their collaborations have become iconic in this way.

It sounds good coming out of the new 4K UltraHD disc that Universal released last month, although the picture for me is the part that is really eye-popping. It's distractingly good, like something this high-quality really shouldn't be shrunk down to fit in one's living room without compromise, a reminder of just how great an image 35mm film could capture and how home formats are still lagging behind even after several waves of new formats that have amazed people in just how good these films they'd only seen in some lesser way could look.

What I thought back in 2012

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 22 June 2020 - 28 June 2020

Ah, summer, so it looks nice out the window.



Kind of a quiet week, writing up previous reviews, watching season 2 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, doing a bunch of crosswords, the usual. Eventually, I was able to get a couple things off the shelf, with Taza, Son of Cochise the latest restoration from the 3-D Film Archive to see release. It's… Well, we haven't gotten entirely beyond this sort of cross-ethnic casting, but it seldom looks as bad as this. The next night was from the "unwatched Hong Kong Blus" shelf, grabbing The Moon Warriors off there and realizing that I'd seen it before. But, it's been over fifteen years, and it's an example of how you can wind up viewing something with new eyes.

Saturday night, I rented something from the Coolidge, and then when I tried to hook it to the TV… nothing. Just a dark-ish blue no matter what input I selected. The middle of a shelter-in-place situation is no time to find oneself without that working! Especially when there's no more 3D models on sale in North America, which would mean looking at a projector, which I'm not opposed to, but, well, then you're talking on a screen and trying to convince the landlord to let you bolt stuff to the walls, and let's just say I was glad that unplugging and then plugging things in a couple of times did the trick.

So all is good, and Sunday night I can watch Sometimes Always Never and The Audition via the Coolidge's virtual screening room, and it was a pretty darn good pairing. The Audition is the better movie, but the other one being an attempt to stretch a scene-stealing Bill Nighy character's story out to the length of a feature with a lot of Wes Anderson to it isn't wholly a bad thing.

Holiday weekend coming up! Would love to be able to put something on my Letterboxd page from some sort of outdoor thing, but it doesn't look likely.

Taza, Son of Cochise

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

(Quickly checks IMDB to avoid getting "actually..."-ed)

Oof, but this is some awkward, obvious "white people playing Apache" material, and I'm not sure I understand the point of it being so obvious, other than the straightforward "audiences wanted stories about Native Americans but wouldn't go to a movie without stars, none of whom were Native". The dissonance of it just is bizarre to see 65 years on, though, one of the tackier "products of its time" you'll see. It's never convincing and makes every strange line-reading an awkward coin-flip between "deliberately racist" and "trying their best but somehow even worse".

Put that aside, somehow, and you've got the movie, which is just decently-enough mounted to be frustratingly bad. Maybe there's some actual history in there, though I doubt it, and the script made of it is ridiculous, with characters displaying an amazing ability to jump from one idea to its opposite mid-conversation. The film is lucky to have Douglas Sirk in the director's chair, about to rattle off a string of classics but still grinding out genre product at the moment, and able to squeeze a decent pace and some nice visuals out of the script. Russell Metty's Technicolor cinematography doesn't do any favors for the make-up jobs on Rock Hudson and Barbara Rush (still with us at 93!), but he works with the scenic locations well, and the 3D disc shows he gave audiences who paid a bit extra for that back in '54 their money's worth without making it look like a tacky gimmick.

The restoration by the 3D Film Archive looks nice, but there's no avoiding that sometimes buying these discs because you like 3D can get you some stinkers.

Tin san chuen suet (The Moon Warriors)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Been long enough that I didn't realize I'd seen this one before until I saw the orca, but even among batshit crazy Hong Kong films that might otherwise run together, some details make a movie stand out.

And this movie is... Well, it's something. It's such a familiar sort of thing that director Sammo Hung and writer Alex Law can basically start at least a few scenes later than many movies do, just cutting out rote setup completely, and have the audience not feel like it is too far behind. They never let it get boring, with a few genuinely odd bits of action and enough impressive ways of setting the scene to make the film genuinely striking at times. Characters are introduced fleeing a flaming castle, implying that the whole idea of government/royal stability is gone (ultimately only existing as a tomb), while the fishing village is open but also built to pull a viewer in, centered on the big communal cooking space that emphasizes the locals being so tight-knit. The film looks lovely even when it makes little sense or is depicting something horrible.

I suspect I had less patience for romance in my kung fu when I first saw this in 2004 (looking at the old review, I was also just learning that Andy Lau was kind of a big deal), but it's a huge part of what makes this particular movie work, even though many of the axes it turns on are kind of clunky. The thing I wind up liking about that is that, sure, the attraction between Lau's fisherman and Anita Mui's princess happens awful fast, but so does the sudden bond between the fisherman and the prince said princess is betrothed to. It's maybe not quite queer but it's intense enough for jealousy, and as such it heightens the melodrama deliciously, even as it feels like something few American movies of the era would manage in quite so sincere a fashion. And even if they did, they certainly wouldn't handle the melodrama that it leads to nearly as well.

What I thought back in 2004

These Weeks in (Virtual) Tickets: 1 June 2020 - 21 June 2020

Not many movies over the past few weeks, but sometimes you just feel good about accomplishing something.







In my case, it's finally finishing up the last of my Fantasia Festival reviews from last year, with nearly a whole month to spare before the 2020 edition would have begun! It stretched out a bit because this batch included things I could watch on disc or Prime, thus refreshing my memory and maybe going out strong with better reviews. The batch included a re-watch of Promare (and the related shorts on the disc); G Affairs (from a Hong Kong import); Miss & Mrs. Cops; Why Don't You Just Die! (and the shorts by the director included on the disc); The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (which I couldn't fit into my 2019 schedule); and Lifechanger (which I couldn't fit into my 2018 schedule). A mixed bag, but it's weirdly nice to be done and not be behind on some other festival thing. It won't last, even with other festivals in delay/cancellation mode, but for now, I'm going to relish not feeling behind.

What's filled the time since? Season 2 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, which has been exactly the comfort food I've wanted while waiting things out, as it's very much in the same style of the imports PBS used to regularly show Thursdays at 9pm as part of the Mystery! anthology (which has now been reabsorbed into Masterpiece) and a genuine delight. I kind of love how the title character could be thirty-ish or forty-ish, which could have been a major difference but isn't, and how sidekick Dot has matured in believable but not flashy ways over the course of the series (I think I've seen Ashleigh Cummings in several un-Dot-like roles in Aussie horror movies, but not so that I can recognize her in one from the other). One more run to get through before the movie arrives on disc (amusingly, I think that I was in Oceania when it played its brief special show in Boston). I've also happily allowed the contents of the daily crossword links newsletter to eat a bunch of time, with the newspapers in the morning and the indies in the evening.

I did finish this last week off with a few movies, though - Tokyo Godfathers was a recent re-watch on disc, thanks to a new Blu-ray; L.A. 3-D S.P.A.C.E. has another streaming fest; and I got Stand-In off the shelf. The last one arrived as part of a Twilight Time/ClassicFlix sale and was an interesting curiosity, picked up because of Bogart in a supporting role as he was just about to become a leading man at the time. One of the things that I found myself scratching my head over, though, was the trailers - they look like genuine 1930s/1940s previews except that the text is clearly digital, and I genuinely wonder whether ClassicFlix was trying to recreate the original trailers with their restored footage or just something like them.

With festival stuff in the rear-view, time to really start working on my shelf, even if much of it will hit my Letterboxd page after EFC or the blog.

Tokyo Godfathers

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Wow, I've been doing this so long that I've got a review up from when I saw it back in 2004! The really funny bit about it is that, looking at that, I wasn't exactly all-in on filmmaker Satoshi Kon, but apparently would be by the time his next (and final) film came out, enough to be gutted by his early death and frustrated that nobody has stepped up to finish the one that was in (pre) production when the cancer took him.

Rewatching this one, I'm kind of impressed by just how willing he is to make every character off-putting and not pretty, even though he could have found a spot or two to do so. It's something that really grounds the characters in their milieu and doesn't let him use appearance as a way to signal goodness, even ironically. The most memorable moment when he could - when Miyuki is shedding the layers one needs to survive on the streets and revealing that, underneath, she's still someone who can return to the life she fled - doesn't go for that. It's a thing that might have hurt the film commercially on its first release but sticks out as honest and committed now.

I suspect that I like it more now than I did then in part because of this; in the middle of a run of films that often included flights of imagination or fantasy, this modest one sticks out for how it seemingly refuses to do so even if the broader story is one of outright fantasy as everything clicks into place via fate and happenstance. It's a really fascinating case of being a film that doesn't seem to fit with the rest but actually works just fine

Full review from 2004

Stand-In

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

This isn't a great movie, but it's good enough that I found myself wondering various things while watching it. For instance, what was Humphrey Bogart's level of fame in 1937? Clearly not a star yet, but well-enough known and respected to be given first below-the-title billing with a slightly larger font size than everyone else (folks who watch old movies recognize this hierarchy). Sure, maybe it's just looking back from eighty-odd years later where we expect Bogie to be great but only half-remember everyone billed before him here, but there's little question that he's one of the most dynamic parts of the movie, enough so as to make one wonder why there's not more of him in it.

Other parts land in interesting ways, too - for instance, a villain intending to buy and dismantle a troubled but not necessarily failing film studio, for instance, although in the 1930s Americans were less reflexively anti-socialist, enough that a film could involve the workers seizing the means of production in response to a play that looks an awful lot like modern private equity. Leslie Howard's accountant sent in to save the studio plays as someone on the autism spectrum today, although that term might not have been around then, but it's interesting that he's not treated like a caricature or a monster, and it feels weirdly progressive that he can be like this and not need to be explained or justified.

It's a shame that the rest of the movie seldom lives up to its most interesting bits. There's not a lot for Joan Blondell to do as the stand-in teaching Howard's accountant about the movie business, even when they contrive to find more, though she's obviously charming enough that you can see why she was a star at the time. The bits with the grifters who are killing Colossal Studio all land with a thunk, and the revelation that things are as bad as they are because Bogie's producer is an (apparently high-functioning) alcoholic don't really fit at all. They come out of nowhere.

It's a mess, probably lucky to have gotten a Blu-ray release because it's got a pre-superstar Bogart in it, but it is at least frequently funny and its attitudes age better than is often the case

These Weeks in (Virtual) Tickets: 18 May 2020 - 31 May 2020

Putting a ticket to a ballgame that wasn't played in because I'd like to see the page broken up a little and to remind me later that all of this doing nothing wasn't entirely a choice. I might very well have been weak given the option.





I got a late start actually watching movies a couple weeks ago because I wanted to spend evenings writing up the really good movies I'd seen the week before, and I try not to write and watch at the same time. Heck, I may still have been writing when I decided to grab The Great Wall off the shelf. It's still one of the most bizarre productions I can remember seeing, like nobody between Universal and Legendary and the Chinese co-producers and the cast was on the same page. The next night I pulled Night Train to Munich off the "unseen recent arrivals" shelf, figuring that maybe I'd to a Charters & Caldicott binge, only to discover that I had seen it before, although I certainly appreciated bits of it more this time around, even if I do find a long stretch rough.

The rest of the weekend wound up being 3-D stuff, with Saturday's show being one that I thought I might have seen - Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain. Not only had I not seen it, but I grumbled about not having the chance to see it during its tiny North American release, and while five years later I'm probably a little more leery about this sort of Chinese "main melody" movie, I really would have liked to see Tsui Hark doing these big action-adventure things on the big screen. Then on Saturday afternoon, L.A. 3-D SPACE had another Online 3-D Movie Festival, with a much more solid line-up of movies than the one from three weeks earlier. Afterward, I followed up with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, mostly for a little bit more 3D although as I was starting it clicked that the spelunking documentary short was my favorite part of the earlier program.

A couple days later, I started dipping back into the local theaters' offerings with Lucky Grandma, a nifty little bag-of-money movie that feels different with an elderly woman at its center rather than the usual hapless young men. Then on Thursday, I finally got around to watching Up from the Streets on its last day streaming via the Coolidge, and wished I'd enjoyed it a little more.

Friday… Well, Friday was a crazy day in America and after refreshing Twitter and news feeds all day, and that wasn't great, so I capped it off with Mad Max: Fury Road, which really never fails to hit the spot, and then I pretty much spent the weekend on crossword puzzles and more scrolling social media to see what insanity was happening.

Gonna try not to do that this week, with some things planned and some things likely to show up on my Letterboxd page on a whim.

The Great Wall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

As I mentioned above, and in my original review, this thing feels like nobody outside of Zhang Yimou really had a handle on what sort of movie they were making, with much of the cast either trying to be too serious or mailing it in because it was a silly thing, while Zhang just has a blast, using that Hollywood special effects money as best he can, never really to elevate or add extra weight to a script that hits all the marks but never really finds good moments in between them. Nobody on set seems to have the heart to tell Matt Damon that his ability to do an accent ranges from Somerville to Southie and his British is weird.

But it's still a lot of fun, in part because it is so utterly absurd, with the Chinese half of the cast taking it completely in stride while the westerners are freaking out, although William's impossible skill with a bow puts him in the same movie. The visual effects that were a little rough in 2016-2017 haven't necessarily aged better than others from that era, but there's just enough creativity and artistry to how they're used that what they're getting across still looks great.

One thing that's kind of funny about rewatching it for me is that the score is one that has been on my tablet and cloud music selections for the past three years, to the point where seeing action with familiar motifs is kind of strange. It's also fairly clear watching it that some bits of action were clearly built for 3D, to the point where I may order a disc of that sort from Hong Kong should it drop below $15 or so.

Full review from 2017

Night Train to Munich

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Night Train to Munich is not quite so good as The Lady Vanishes, but on third viewing, it has some awfully impressive pieces. I really love the first half of this movie, with miniatures and matte paintings that give the adventure a sense of scale that it might not otherwise have had. One also can't help but be impressed by the filmmakers' visceral revulsion at the Nazis, which seems to go well past the party line. The final action bit is genuinely nifty as well, drawn out and built out of the heroes being much better shots than the villains though it may be. They cut it together exceptionally.

Unfortunately, there's a lull in the second half that swaps a little too much tension for comedy, too confidently playing the spy game like a game. That very much includes Charters & Caldicott - the reason why this movie will forever be compared to Hitchcock's; they were fun oddball bits of an ensemble in their first appearance but too active here, perhaps the first in a long line of characters who were so well-liked at first that they were subsequently given bigger parts than they deserved.

What I thought way back in 2004

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

What I said back in 2011 still holds; this is a documentary that earns both its extra length over the typical science-museum fare and its third dimension for how it really brings out the shape of the cave and its walls. It's a film full of honest wonder that doesn't need further embellishment, and sometimes it almost seems to throw director Wener Herzog - there's not that much to look at from an odd perspective, really, and trying to be more philosophical can get into a strangely abstract position.

Still, just look at it. It's not quite the only tour you can have of one of the world's most ancient cultural artifacts (I saw an amazing reproduction at the Montreal Science Museum once), but it's certainly the most accessible and most impactful

What I thought way back in 2011

Up from the Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

It sometimes feels a bit like missing the point to review a documentary like one is grading an English paper, but somewhere about two-thirds the way through Up From the Streets, I noticed that a half-dozen people had referred to "Mardi Gras Indians" as an influence on various musicians but aside from the occasional cut-away, the filmmakers never get into what that group's deal is. It's even stranger when you consider that this 105-minute movie has at least 18 chapter titles, so maybe there would have been a spot for that. I get it - it's a thing that comes across as tacky and appropriating i contrast to the rest of the movie - but it's also an indication that writer/director Michael Murphy could have done much better in drawing up his plans for how to cover so much history in so little time.

Instead, those 18 chapters are each only able to give a quick look at some particular aspect or figure from New Orleans's musical history, and it creates this odd sensation of a high-level overview that you still have to be somewhat familiar with the material to appreciate. It's pleasant enough to watch - it's still New Orleans and it's still great music, even if there aren't showstopping numbers to highlight how great this is.
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There's probably a terrific Ken Burns-style miniseries to be made from this material (if Burns's Jazz isn't NOLA-specific enough), but at 105 minutes, very little gets enough spotlight to fire the imagination, or even make one fall in love.

Mad Max: Fury Road

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I've purchased this movie on disc twice (one 3D, one 4K) but may not have actually watched it at home yet because it's had enough repertory screenings and re-releases to scratch the itch on a big screen; in a number of ways. Still, none of that's happening right now and the events of the day put me in the mood.

It's a little odd to see something that you'd seen exclusively in theaters alone at home; Fury Road being a crowd-pleaser and something that builds up ambient emotion has become so much a part of how I've experienced it (along with the soundtrack as part of a rotation as mentioned with The Great Wall) that having it all to myself seems a little strange. It's still flat-out great, but seeing it like this makes one focus a little more on how it's precise and planned, rather than just getting caught up in it. One does still get caught up - it's that good - and marvel at just how well it stick together.

The 4K disc looks incredible, as much for the HDR colors as the actual resolution (it's an upconvert from a 2K source/intermediate). As much as I found the "black & chrome" version fun and a nifty way to re-experience the movie, it will probably never be my preferred version; the color is so beautiful in this movie that I can't really treat it like an afterthought. I do kind of wish that the 3D and flat versions would use alternate shots/renders in some cases, though; for as gorgeous as this disc looks, there are some bits that mostly seem built for 3D. They don't all quite look odd flattened - some show off extreme foreground/background well, like the flares - but a few don't quite the format and are distracting.

What I wrote in 2015

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 11 May 2020 - 17 May 2020

I think this is the first week of lockdown where I went in with the goal of actually watching a movie every night, and I think it went pretty okay.



I started out by noting that the Brattle recommended Dave Made a Maze as their #BreakYourAlgorithm selection on Monday, and since I don't know that I'd seen it since it ran at BUFF, it seemed like a good thing to dive into. It is, as you might expect, still a bunch of fun, even if it's not quite the same when you're watching it in your living room by yourself, knowing what you're in for, versus getting hit by it with a crowd, but what is?

I actually tried to to watch a second movie Monday night but conked out, and decided that if I was going to do an "RIP Twilight Time" post, it would be with another movie, so I went with Model Shop, a Jacques Demy movie they put out which seems like it really should be in the Criterion Demy set since his early films have Marvel-style continuity, which I suspect might be a fun way to introduce today's binge-watcher to him as a filmmaker.

Wednesday night, I pulled an impulse-purchased disc off the shelf and did a double feature of Deluge & Back Page, although it was mostly about seeing the first after having seen clips posted and figuring, well, better see the whole movie. Not necessarily great stuff, but interesting since Deluge might be the first American post-apocalyptic movie, at least in terms of how we think of the genre, and I am kind of fascinated by sci-fi in the golden age of cinema. I'm going to have to dig into saturday serials sometime, since that appears to be where most of the action was.

Thursday evening I went with Knives Out, in part because I was falling behind in my blogging and figured sprinkling some stuff I'd already seen in there would slow that down. Besides, what's the point of buying these 4K discs if you don't occasionally marvel at how good this stuff looks.

The weekend wound up bringing a pretty decent slate of movies, or at least ones I wanted to see. I kicked that off with Free Country via the Coolidge and Geothe-Institut, which turned out to be a remake of a Spanish film I saw at Fantasia a few years ago. I'm guessing it's not quite so strong, but it's been long enough that I didn't immediately recognize everything. Saturday night, I started with Driveways, which is kind of terrific, and then decided to finish the double feature with On a Magical Night Turns out that the second would be a more natural double feature with Alice from the Somerville Theatre's offerings, although to be honest, Night was going to suffer in either pairing because both Driveways and Alice are really terrific.

Not nearly as much getting seen this week, but re-watches will probably show up on my Letterboxd page before here, though I'm not sure what the rest of the week looks like

Dave Made a Maze

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

This was easily my favorite film from the Boston Underground Film Festival three years ago, and it's still kind of fantastic. It's impossible to get knocked flat by discovery and creativity the second time around, but some of the ideas and performances are still strong - it's a genuinely fun set of characters, from the most to least nuanced, and it's kind of a shame that Meera Rohit Kumbhani doesn't seem to have had any sort of breakout since. The craft is really great for something that was made on a fairly insane schedule.

The theme of it sits a little easier with me on a second viewing, with the inconsistency working a little more. At first, the film seemed to be wrestling a bit with not necessarily knowing how to say "some people just aren't artists, no matter how much they want to be, and that's okay". This time through, I get a bit more of a sense of the filmmakers talking about getting started - it can take a lot of false starts to find your medium, you maybe don't necessarily want to share those first attempts with others, and while it's important to finish, just so that you know you can do it, you may wind up losing or burying those first attempts. And, to repeat, that's okay

I think there's a bit of both in there, and maybe that makes for a muddled metaphor, but getting started is messy.

Full review from 2017

Knives Out

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

This 4K disc is pretty dang good-looking, the sort of thing that reminds me that what sits on my shelf is really competitive with what I saw in the theater. Just really gorgeous.

It's hopefully not too spoilery at this point to say that what filmmaker Rian Johnson does here makes it a bit more rewatchable than it might otherwise have been; he's pointed out that the plan was to put a Alfred Hitchcock movie inside of an Agatha Christie novel, so you don't get quite so caught up in either spotting where Johnson was trying to trick you or getting bored because scenes don't work if something isn't being held back. The movie is, in many ways, enjoyable the second time around in the same way it was the first.

And it's still great, full of fun characters and witty exchanges, and Johnson is really great at just knowing what he's doing. His movies aren't full of flashy camera moves or stylization, but they move quickly and feel slick and stylish without ever coming across as generic. The film may have a couple of spots where it hits a bump - although I kind of suspect that the Trump conversation will come across a bit more as a useful time capsule than an awkward attempt to be topical when we watch it ten years from now - but I really appreciate the way he knows how to use his tools well enough that he doesn't have to show it off.

What I thought last fall

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 4 May 2020 - 10 May 2020

A lot of "other stuff going on" this week



I believe I actually started the week early, watching "Das Foto-Shoot" and "Being Flat" in the morning before "commuting" to work at the other end of the apartment, probably figuring on actually getting the Deerskin review they were attached to written while waiting for queries to run or meetings to end, but even in sane times, everything takes longer and I miss writing on the bus and, yeah, I just sort of suggested that I missed taking the bus to work but, hey, it was a good environment for me!

And then, in the evenings… Not much movie-watching, because NESN was re-running the 2004 Red Sox postseason, and, hey, that was pretty great, although watching it fifteen years later in a more sane fashion - that is, not DVRing it, going to the Brattle for their first stab at a Boston Fantastic Film Festival, and then starting it when I got back to the apartment at 11pm only to discover that these games were five hours long - obviously wasn't the same.

One thing I found myself considering as I watched them was that the only editing they did was cutting out some ad breaks and skipping innings to get down to two hours, to the extent that they still had on-screen advertising for channel 25's newscast at points, which makes sense in one sense but in another, why do it this way? Sure, a lot of people want to re-experience it the way they did the first time, or the way their father did, but I found myself wondering what a good post-production staff could do with everything that Fox and MLB shot during the game, the best upscaling algorithms available, and maybe a scripted play-by-play that's not Joe Buck and Tim McCarver doling out generic patter, conventional wisdom, and incomplete analysis. The people who direct and produce the telecasts live events like these do downright amazing work, but it's obviously not the best possible version of it. Maybe letting top editors loose on the production would create something that feels fake, and I suppose that in normal times, there's little market for the "World Series Director's Cut" that it would be a money-loser, but I'd still kind of like to see it.

Which makes for an contrast with the night I didn't watch old baseball but instead caught The National Theatre's presentation of Frankenstein, which they were streaming on their YouTube channel for a week, with different productions taking the spot every seven days for the duration of the pandemic. I intended to watch both versions, but messed up dates and time-zone issues, so only caught the one with Johnny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor. It's still a pretty great production, although you kind of need both to get the total experience.

Saturday, I caught Thousand Pieces of Gold, the first "virtual screening room" engagement that really made me regret that I wasn't seeing it on the place's actual screen. It's a fine restoration of a movie that seems to have been badly overlooked the first time around, one that I'm happily ordering on Blu-ray in addition to having kicked the price of a ticket the Brattle's way.

Sunday wound up being errand day, with laundry needing to be done and groceries needing to be fetched, and I was all excited to try out my pizza oven, but I had a comical time actually starting a fire using "firestarters" in this metal box designed to contain burning wood. Literally ran out of matches trying to light it and had to make a third trip out of the house of the day to get a lighter from CVS and I felt guilty by the time I was at Davis Square for having been out of the house so much. By the time the additional "conditioning" burn was done, there really wasn't time to make a pizza, so that would be a challenge for later in the week, and I just opted to try and get some stuff off the DVR that night instead.

Stuff's appearing here before my Letterboxd page these days, because as I said earlier, I miss the bus and the subway, which is where I would write up first impressions, but it's still fun to follow that and like stuff and put it on your to-watch list, if that is what you use the platform for!

NT Live: Frankenstein (Miller as the Creature, Cumberbatch as Victor)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (NT Live, YouTube via Roku)

As much as I've grumbled about wanting this on disc since first seeing this version in 2011, finally getting to watch it in similar fashion, though by streaming rather than physical media (2011 was a while ago; Netflix Watch Instant was kind of a new thing at the time), instead made me realize that it's kind of out of place in the living room. You're supposed to be in an audience for this, so that it can be larger than life or human-sized or…

Well, maybe we just have a tendency to calibrate "right" for these things to the scale at which we first experience it, even if we later see it in a different light at a different scale.

Either way, this is still a terrific production and one that I hope to catch in theaters again sometime. It's a pair of great performances and a nifty staging, and it cuts right to the heart of the themes that make Mary Shelley's work so memorable in all iterations.

What I thought seeing this version in 2011
What I thought seeing the version with the cast reversed in 2014

This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 27 April 2020 - 3 May 2020

I've got to find something to do to make these pages a little more interesting, just for myself looking at them. Maybe screenshot the theaters' virtual cinema pages or cut up the little advertising cards in some of the discs.



I kept a little busier this week, kicking things off on Monday with Pahokee from the Somerville's virtual screening room. It's the sort of documentary that may have you a little fidgety during the film but is pretty good stuff once you settle in and let it turn over a bit. It's a 2019 IFFBoston selection that I watched during the week we should have been at the 2020 edition, and the specific sort of film that makes one miss festivals like that.

On Wednesday, I hit up the Brattle's selections for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sticks a fun idea for a supernatural sex comedy at the end of a lot of stuff that's not that entertaining, especially 40 years later. That makes it kind of an interesting double-feature with A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the Coolidge's Lee Grant series, though: You kind of have to wrestle with what constitutes an acceptable sort of scoundrel now versus decades earlier to watch both.

I received a new Blu-ray in the mail during the week, and part of getting stuff off the too-watch shelf means not letting other things get there, so I did a double feature of Shatter & Call of Heroes (for two bits of Hong Kong action), and while the first not being a great Hammer/Shaw collaboration was a bit of a bummer, the second being more fun that I anticipated was a great surprise.

No more movies until Saturday, when I was back in the Brattle's virtual screening room for Deerskin, the latest from Quentin Dupieux and probably his most grounded, in that you can sort of track what's making its weirdo do weird things from real things rather than just being an artifact of being in a world slightly off-kilter. I also hit the grocery story to try and get good pizza-making stuff for my new pizza oven (it actually arrived in February, but who is setting a pizza oven up in the tiny backyard then?). Sunday afternoon, I discovered that I apparently can't start a fire in a metal container designed to hold burning wood chips that were marketed for the sole purpose of being set on fire, which is probably good for safety but leaves me with a lot stuff to make pizza in the fridge. Dejected, I went back in to watch the L.A. 3-D Space 3-D Movie Fest (and Ape). Some of that was rough, technically, but interesting, and, circling back around to missing festivals, it was surprisingly exciting to have to be at something other than a work call at a certain time.

Mostly quiet since then, but hoping for activity on my Letterboxd page this weekend.

A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant, Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room/internet)

Lee Grant's documentary from 2005 gets misty toward the end, figuring the end is likely near for 88-year-old Kirk Douglas, unaware that he's got another 15 years in him. Those are some hardy genes, especially considering how well Michael has aged in the meantime.

I can't recall any specific instance of Grant working with either Douglas as an actress, although I suspect it happened at some point. There's clearly enough familiarity there to get very relaxed interviews, and while one probably does have to be wary of whether documentaries about performers contain performance, there's a lot of enjoyable back and forth between the pair. I suspect that Kirk still not entirely being over Michael casting Jack Nicholson when producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had become a bit they go through on a regular basis, but even if it is, there's something genuine to it. I similarly wonder about them mentioning Lonely Are the Brave and Falling Down as respective favorite roles - it makes sense, as they're both striking movies with meeting parts, but they rhyme so well that it's almost too good, right?

There's also a bit of an issue in how to give the pair equal weight. For as much as both talk about how in many ways Michael might have had a harder time of it, trying to live up to how people saw Kirk, he almost comes across as too nice, too thoroughly adapted to his time and place to give half the movie a spark at points while the father can't help but hold on to some problematic aspects of his personality. The allegations that he assaulted a co-star were not well-known at the time of filming (though someone in Grant's position might well have been aware), but listening to him talk about women, it sounds uncomfortably plausible even as he seems to be quite a decent man in other respects. Even without that context readily available, it gives the audience something to unpack even in a doc that wears its fondness for its subjects on its sleeve.