Friday, December 23, 2022

A Fella's Got a Better Chance in the Dark

Me and My Gal (1932)
directed by Raoul Walsh
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched on the Criterion Channel

Spencer Tracy, who I never particularly liked, but who looked like my maternal grandfather (who I loved), pronounces "burlesque" as "burley-cue", nicely adjacent to a Charles Portis character ordering a "fill-it minion" at a steakhouse. Other poetry peppered throughout "Me and My Gal" includes "palooka", "bloater" (a smoked herring), "hoosegow" (for jail), "stewbum" (the local rummy), and the recurring expression "a pretty fresh bezark" (pronounced "bee-zark"). Nothing could make me happier than listening to a screwball-era beauty like Joan Bennett—whose last role was the vice directress of the dance academy in Suspiria—whisper such sweet nothings into my ear, and she's a pleasure in every one of her scenes.

This is one of those movies where the same four people keep running into each other a little more regular than they might outside of the pictures, but also a Depression-era gem in line with the great socialist rhetoric of the studios at the time. It begins with a touching, heartbreaking moment when a destitute stranger on the New York docks attempts to drown his dog—who he can no longer afford to care for—by tying a ship pulley to the dog's collar. Tracy promises to look after the poor pooch, and does, and later delivers a long soliloquy about what a great president Al Smith might have made.

From the lips of hair-trigger beat cops-turned-detectives to God's ears—Robert Caro would be proud. That, plus a Thief-esque bank job in which an acytelene torch is used to drop into the vaults via the floor of the family who lives above the safe. I guess it's only in the movies anymore that people eat at a place called Ed's Chowder House and tell the men they love to "park that wad of gum", so that's where I'll continiue to hang my hat.

"Married women don't cheat... much!"

Sunday, November 27, 2022

When You and I Were Young, Maggie

Daisy Miller (1974)
directed by Peter Bogdanovich
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan

The lovely animated credit sequence at the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel includes a special thanks to "our old friends", among them Polly Platt. I assigned Karina Longworth's Polly Platt: The Invisible Woman podcast in my class on New Hollywood, taught during the pandemic a couple of springs ago, but I could tell that my students were unconvinced by my insistence, at the end of the term, that the man who threw Platt over for Cybill Shepherd continued to make great movies without his first wife. 

I mention Platt's acknowledgment in Wes Anderson's 2014 film, released after her death in 2011, because the patron saint of this blog (ill-served as he may be by its slapdash commitment to the pictures) always cared about credit sequences. They are full of gratitude to cast (typically expressed in picture credits), crew, and residents of whichever corner of the earth hosted both for a period of weeks or months: Archer City, or McCracken, or the Plaza Hotel.

In "Daisy Miller", it's a straightforward, gracious 

WE ARE INDEBTED TO THE CITIZENS OF
ROME, ITALY
AND
VEVEY, SWITZERLAND.

In an interview included on the DVD, PB hits the highlights: Orson Welles anecdote, Cary Grant impression, tender recollection of dead pals and lost loves. As he usually does, he struck me as altogether sympathetic and decent in his understanding of life's injustices and disappointments, echoing the timbre of this wonderful film. 

There's no need to return to Wes Anderson, but I liked both "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and The French Dispatch so much for the qualities in each I can only describe as Lubitsch-adjacent, which I think (apropos "our old friends") came to Anderson less through the movies of Lubitsch himself than through Peter's mentorship and career.

The highlights here are Mildred Natwick sipping tea over gossip with Barry Brown in a communal heated pool between a floating sterling tea service, the easy swing of dolly shots Bogdanovich relies on to reframe conversations in the middle of long takes, and the extent to which those long takes serve both to reinforce the strength of Shepherd's bright and lovestruck (with the role, with herself, with Peter) performance and to underscore the artificiality of the entire production, waiting for days for the fog to clear from Lake Geneva in order to shoot a sunset over the promenade.

"It's only a paper moon..."

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Cousin Countin' Rednecks

Bernie (2011)
directed by Richard Linklater
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched on Tubi

There is no mention of sports at all in this movie, which to me is a testament to Linklater's inherent curiosity about Texas as a place beyond just the repository for his own memories and lived experience. His affection for 1997 slice-of-life East Texas masterpiece Hands On a Hardbody extends to casting himself in a cameo as the fastest deadbeat dad on the lot, but the filtered afternoon light through the pines as the camera cranes into the scene is beautiful—as is his loyalty to the great Sonny Carl Davis (named just plain "Sonny Davis" as he jokes through the credits about his St. Augustine neighbors "digging a hole in the backyard" to cook their dinner). Sometimes Linklater's projects completely baffle me, and sometimes there's no one better.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

The Love Song of Sheriff Nat Bell

The Hardest Working Cat in Showbiz (2020)
directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched on Vimeo

"We name and love our pets as a protest against the anonymous extinction of countless forgotten animals. Does the legend of Orangey ultimately lead us back to the nothingness it was intended to keep at bay?"

A movie I regularly show my Intro to Film students because of the beautiful way it frames what movies do best: retain the transient gesture, expression, or face against forgetfulness, decay, and time. Additionally, it's a lovely tribute to Dan Sallitt's cat Jasper, who I never would be able to meet, of course, but take comfort in knowing is somewhere, and loved, in the world.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Where's a Mike Mandel Selfie in Dodger Stadium When You Really Need It?

Los (2001)
directed by James Benning
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan

It isn't that Benning's compositions are cold; there's plenty of sun and movement, and a marble-run pleasure in watching each section play out. But people, not industry, make cities compelling, and I saw a tourist's perspective in the director's shyness in only framing LA at distances that favor vehnicles, grids, and construction. Is he better in rural spaces in part because natural surroundings can't help but overwhelm faces and gestures?

(He's attentive to Los Angeles voices, at least: the soundtrack, recorded in an eavesdropper's earshot, is warm with the accents and languages of the city.)

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

New York Metropolitans

An Autumn's Tale (1987)
directed by Mabel Cheung
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD through University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan

Rescue from an apartment gas leak, a ride to the station to meet your louse of a boyfriend, late night screenings of "The Beyond" and "The Fly": who better to share it with than the gentle man "with a chin like Richard Gere's"?

If "a country is as good as its people and its people as good as their food", as Chow Yun-fat tells Cherie Chung, then what's nicer than seeing his Figgy drink a can of Coca-Cola next to the bookshelf he made for her Sis 13 in her New York City apartment as an afternoon train rolls by? Heaven is pals (watchband salesman, gambling buds, seagulls on the pier).

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Love Parade

Double Team (1997)
directed by Tsui Hark
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Green Snake (1993)
directed by Tsui Hark
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched on YouTube

Shanghai Blues (1984)
directed by Tsui Hark
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched on YouTube

"How much can you actually change a film in five days?"

"We can actually recut the film entirely."

Tsui Hark has spoken of his editing style as a response to pre-release midnight screenings of his movies in Hong Kong, suggesting that nervous anticipation of a negative audience reaction ("They would yell, scream, throw chairs, stuff like that") results in frenetic films. Whether or not that's true, and as much as I love imagining A-list Hollywood talent editing pictures in fear of physical retaliation, I respect a director who plays fast and loose with final cuts. For one reason, it underscores the collaborative, sometimes absurdist nature of telling the story of, say, an anti-terrorist agent forced to fight a shirtless Mickey Rourke and an angry tiger in a mined Roman amphitheater.

In 1986, Hark funded A Better Tomorrow, the film that brought John Woo international acclaim, resulting in his eventual emigration to the United States to direct Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target. Double Team was Hark's American directorial debut and also stars Van Damme, although of course any movie with Mickey Rourke is Mickey Rourke's movie to lose. Van Damme is not my favorite action star but he can move with a physical grace that he is not asked to demonstrate here (as when working out in his room with a claw-foot bathtub overflowing with water). He is confined to that room when Double Team detours for half an hour into the plot of No Escape.

All of that sounds like fun, and generally is, but without any of the lightness that characterizes either Green Snake or Shanghai Blues. Every door frame or floor or swimming pool is booby-trapped in Double Team and everyone is always armed to the teeth with automatic pistols and laser sights. Poor Rourke is barely ever allowed to crack that gentle smile. There is only one woman in Double Team with anything to do, and once she gives birth, her son replaces her at the center of the antagonist's fruitless plot.

Shanghai Blues and Green Snake both excel in the portrayal of friendship between female characters; the first is a romantic comedy and the second a subversive fantasy film. The prominent male characters in Green Snake--monks and scholars--see only themselves at the centers of their respective worlds and, being men, call down destruction and embarrassment before admitting the many ways they are wrong. They are funny characters, full of life, but ultimately buffoons, wholly undeserving of the two sisters who take it upon themselves to experience human love after centuries of living as spirits.

As in Double Team, editing choices come out of nowhere but feel exuberant in the context of a romantic mood. Shanghai Blues is nearly slapstick, as in one scene where the male protagonist interrupts a pickpocket while playing the tuba before being robbed in turn. There is color and fog machine effects to spare in Green Snake and Shanghai Blues, as if that and not a tiger, not guns, were all you needed. Van Damme practiced ballet for five years and surely, in another universe, there's a midnight Hong Kong screening where Double Team looks a little like Barfly and the audience leaves the theater in happy tears.