Cinemania
A month or so into quarantining, and after the shock of the old abnormal (suck it, new normal!) wore off, I was determined to have something to show for living like an introvert (aside from the last thirty-six-plus years). I grew up wanting to be a film critic—by the time I got a job at Blockbuster in 2000, I’d already seen more movies on the AFI 100 list than all my co-workers combined—so tackling a bunch of classics I’d never seen along with a handful of revisitations [sic] seemed like a stellar idea. Since there wouldn’t be a Yankees season to enjoy (along with the numerous other sporting events I’d typically watch in place of film study), I could view motion pictures with my roommate/mother then finish double features on my own.
Beginning April 21st, I began sourcing movies with the primary criteria being that they could be seen for free. I’ve used Prime, Netflix (someone else’s account, natch), YouTube, the Internet Archive, and Blu-Ray quality files on a hard drive given to me by The Old Ball & Chain’s bud (gave him a giftcard to buy his favorite pizza as a thank you). You’ll be happy/appalled to learn that, as of this writing, I’ve watched one hundred and eight movies (dates spanning 1902-2020) in seven weeks (roughly fifteen of them short movies aka thirty minutes or fewer). My own best bud, Moore, became the sole recipient of my reviews. Upon discerning I’d watched forty in a fortnight he wrote back, “What the fuck is wrong with you?! Sick fuck!” This from a man in prison…for the second time!
Unable to summon any other worthwhile blog topics—nine hundred words about making banana puddin’ or Thousand Island-based macaroni salad would be a stretch even by my digressive standards—I decided to post my ten favorite reviews mailed to Moore. The following notes are imperative to understanding some of our tried-and-true friendship esoterica included below: Chicago Reader star system is in effect (four = masterpiece, three = must-see, two = worth seeing, one = has redeeming facet, DUD = worthless); critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a lifelong influence (and replied to emails I sent him in the late ‘90s about the movies Rushmore and Bringing Out the Dead along with a Stan Brakhage question); the blog photo is taken from Contempt (not reviewed but my mother hated it and still provided this hot take: “That movie was worth seeing for Brigitte Bardot’s ass”); Uncanny Man™️ is one of my nicknames for frequently referencing strange pop cultural items that Moore has somehow thought of/seen/heard/etc. just hours before said reference is made; the closing line is a play on MC Paul Barman’s “Cock Mobster,” a song employing perfect rhymes to describe sexual acts with famous women, a game Moore and I have been playing since the banger was released in 2002; all grammar is intentional.
Let’s all go to the mooo-vies!
Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) ***
This was Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout role. She plays a teen in charge of her younger brother/sister & sick mother also trying to save her house after her meth dealing father uses the home as collateral for bond. The movie is set in a poor area of the Ozarks in rural Mizzourah, which is captured in flawless detail: shirts w/ deer or wolves on them, skinning a squirrel for dinner, only one scene featuring a paved road, people named Teardrop & Merab, etc. Lawrence carries the film, which is quite a feat given the stellar supporting cast of John Hawkes, Garret Dillahunt (loved this guy in Burn Notice), Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks’s Laura Palmer herself), & Tate Taylor (director of comedy classic The Help [see the essay “Hall of Shame" in the LBS if this joke is lost on you—WHY HAVEN’T YOU READ IT YET?]). There’s a semi-suspenseful payoff, but simply watching these folks interact felt so raw & true from the get-go. I’m a sucker for quality independent movies like this. [Moore replied that the title would be perfect for a Jon Snow parody porn.]
The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962) ***
The director (a woman, which needed clarification) was also one of Iran’s most famous poets at the time this was made. Why did I watch this? Rosenbaum’s raved about it for years: it’s a twenty-two-minute short documentary about a leper colony, which was filmed to educate people & try to promote monetary assistance for what appeared to be a massive problem at the time. We see close-ups of lepers—their faces are something Pasolini wished his make-up team could’ve achieved in Salò—& hear them mainly talk about God/wishing to get to heaven. Rosenbaum’s praise stems from the fact that the film comes closer to functioning as a prayer than anything he’s ever seen, which is spot on. There’s a heaviness to the material that makes it genuinely moving almost sixty years later. While I’m not sure it would be sustainable at an hour or longer, this is a pretty potent doc for three reasons: informational tool, objective viewpoint, & the heaviness it carries off w/ its bare simplicity.
The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017) **
This has universal acclaim online, so naturally I wanted it to end w/ forty minutes to go. Filmed entirely on location at a pink & purple motel in Kissimmee—six miles from Disney World—it follows around a six-yr-old girl who hangs out w/ her friends, is a brat (her trailer trash mother influences her shittiness), & then as it progresses, we see how she’s a victim of terrible circumstances (the mom buys wholesale perfume to sell outside hotels to tourists & prostitutes herself while the girl takes baths). There’s great camera work—providing those views of staircases & hallways only cheap motels can offer—along w/ slice of life interactions w/ bursts of happiness (poor people birthday parties) & violence (moms fight after their kids burn down derelict nearby apartments). The mother is played by a first-time actress from Lithuania & she’s convincing as hell. (Loved when she took off a maxi pad & spitefully slammed it on the hotel office window.) Willem Dafoe’s one of only two name actors & while he’s likable as usual, the movie stalls out while showing more unseemly action as it goes along; DCF ultimately takes the kid who manages to (unrealistically) escape w/ a friend to the Magic Kingdom. My inability to find children endearing on principle hindered the seemingly cathartic ending that likely made everyone cry. Solid formal experiment at times—plotless, unpredictable, & containing raw energy—but at two hours, there’s a better movie here w/ the right editor.
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) ****
Fuck, this is funny! Everyone talks like The Micro Machines Man at some point, often simultaneously. Choice exchanges: “He’s got a lot of charm.” “Well, he comes by it naturally. His grandfather was a snake.” – “No certified check, no story. Get me?” “It’ll be certified. Want my fingerprints?” “No, thanks. I’ve still got those.” – “Albany’s a mighty good insurance town. Most people take it out pretty early in life.” “Yeah, well I can see why they would.” – “Walter! The mayor’s first wife, what was her name?” “You mean the one w/ the wart on her…?” “Right.” “Fanny.” – “You got the brain of a pancake. This isn’t just a story you’re covering. It’s a revolution. This is the greatest yarn in journalism since Livingstone discovered Stanley.” “It’s the other way around.” & on & on. Would love to see The Front Page, the play on which this is based, at a theater when events safely resume during Sean Hannity’s first term in 2025. This definitely has a claim to the era’s best comedic script & one of the most timeless comedic scripts. Have never liked Cary Grant more plus Roz Russell’s character is named Hildegard. What a great movie, especially knowing Hawks pulled off the layered, overlapping dialogue pre-Dolby.
The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942) DUD
Utter shit. This is maybe twenty minutes about Gehrig on the Yanks—w/ nothing matching the spectacle of who he was (two camera locations at Yankee Stadium used)—but more a chronicle of him being a momma’s boy & sheepishly falling in love w/ his wife. Harry & I wound up laughing at it long before the speech/abrupt ending, including (1) Babe Ruth’s massively sweaty ass center frame as he crosses the plate following a homer; (2) a ten-minute sequence of Cooper (terribly miscast/seeing him at forty playing seventeen-yr-old Lou is stupid, but his aw shucks-isms become grating quick) & his future wife seeing a concert—the camera stays on the string orchestra & dancers ninety-nine percent of the time for a ten-minute scene!; (3) Walter Brennan as a pointless recurring character/sportswriter who also fawned over Lou & was inexplicably (lotta explicable of the in variety in this thing) w/ him at every juncture of his life; (4) no regard for authenticity/this film was made w/ Mrs. Gehrig watching over the content; (5) the speech scene is followed by him walking into a shadowy clubhouse & then “The End.” I didn’t expect a classic, but this fails as a biopic, as a baseball movie, as a romance (it would be a TV movie at best nowadays), as a historical document (seeing Ruth in a handful of scenes is the only thing that tempted me to not rate this a DUD but he barely adds much other than his presence), & as a psychological study (wasn’t expecting Kubrick, but fuck). I wonder if our old college professor was high on this Cooper performance. [Note: Said professor told us his name was John all autumn until revealing late in the semester, during a screening of Sergeant York, that Cooper was his favorite actor because John was also named Gary! Huh?!]
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan, 1988) ****
The two words I’ve forever found laziest when someone wants to tell me a movie is abnormal (typically as a means to differentiate from Hollywood claptrap) are “different” & “weird.” Yet I cannot think of a better way to sum up this film, which is (a) a video memoir of the 90-yr-old communist Dutchman Ivens, who shot films all over the world throughout his life & told his mother as a child how he wanted to “film the wind,” which he set out to do in China (w/ “half a lung,” as he—a chronic asthmatic—tells us); (b) a fantasy film (several interludes involve interpolations of his previously enunciated ideas/wishes—one is of a poet drowning by trying to “catch the moon” reflecting off the surface of a pond); (c) bizarro historical Chinese document & commentary on their politics (the government won’t give him more than ten minutes to film eight specific angles of the seven thousand warrior statues guarding the emperor’s tomb along the Great Wall of China—he argues w/ them over the decision, specifically in relation to artistic integrity, for EIGHT DAYS to no avail—leading him to buy as many replica souvenir statues & recreate the scenes in the most glorious Crazy Old Guy/Fuck You manner!); (d) surreal tribute to cinematic history (there’s a fantasy scene w/ a nod to a Méliès movie/Uncanny Man™️ 2: The Skeptic Cuckoo Crew/what?); (e) oddly-empathetic-but-clearly-a-madman chronicle (Ivens sits in a fucking dinner table chair in the Gobi Desert w/ a crew holding microphones & cameras to record/film him embracing the wind & imploring it to take his asthma back as the unexpectedly cathartic conclusion); (f) magic/witchcraft—a woman given two electric fans in the Gobi to summon the wind mentioned in (e), which comes on like an Okie duster. I know this likely sounds pretentious/stupid/ unbearable as hell, but there are both lyrical & humorous qualities throughout, plus it’s the rare kind of cinema that somehow feels like poetry. A singular experience, I wish I could find it somewhere other than this (likely) early DVD rip on YouTube b/c a number of these shots deserve to be seen on Blu-ray.
The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951) ***
Dedicated to the Infantry, this first Hollywood movie about the Korean War begins w/ a gruff, racist sergeant being helped by a South Korean boy—he calls the kid a g00k more than once—before they encounter some other infantrymen & find shelter within a Buddhist temple. There’s a potent scene of one soldier playing “Auld Lang Syne” on a keyboard, which the boy mistakes for the Korean anthem, proudly singing the lyrics over it. After discovering a North Korean on the top floor—he stabs one American to death—it provides some agitprop dialogue (the NorKor talks w/ a black man about how the man has no freedoms at home but fights for them for his country & w/ a Japanese-American about how his family were put in camps/the man pretended to be Filipino to avoid internment himself!) that is a kick in the nuts. Ultimately, NorKors attack, half the men die (including the kid, a gut-wrenching reveal) but they fend off the commiez, & Sarge shoots the POW/the medic administers a transfusion w/ the bag of blood subtly hooked around a Buddha statue’s middle finger. This a bit stagey—clearly budget necessitated the isolated setting—& almost too short (eighty-four minutes), but I liked it more than I recall enjoying Fuller’s Big Red One. Choice dialogue: “Sergeant, I told you it was a waste of time.” “If I was right all the time, I’d be an officer.” As the film ends, the screen reads: THERE IS NO END TO THIS STORY… Some mind-blowing facts about this one: the film was such a success that it earned Fuller a 21st Century Fox contract; the American military was incensed by it, so Fuller, a vet, had Brigadier General George Taylor call the Pentagon to confirm friendly fire (“Hey Bullety!”) was common; Fuller insisted on casting no name Gene Evans over Marion Robert Morrison, pilgrim; it was shot in ten days w/ a ton of UCLA extras, a plywood tank, & El Lay’s Griffith Park standing in for Korea.
The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1990) *
Dude. The titular syndrome (asthenia = “abnormal physical weakness or lack of energy”) is presented in a forty-ish minute sepia-toned “half” (about a woman who becomes violent after the unexpected death of her husband) & a one hundred and ten-minute “color” (looks a step above sepia) segment—you could tell me this movie was shot in 1920 & I’d believe it—about a passive man who constantly falls asleep whenever conflicts arise. There are detours into animal abuse, prostitution, child abuse, a plethora of frontal male nudity, & a less than subtle commentary about how perestroika decimated the poor/rural population. I have no problem w/ a movie that purposely tries to make the audience uncomfortable—in fact, I admire this kind of S&M art, as you know (as always: see my obsession w/ tracking down Salò years ago)—but to present it unrelentingly, in such an ugly fashion, w/o any real empathetic characters, at such an uncompromisingly unpleasant length, etc. etc. is fucking pointless. I pick the movies I watch based on a handful of criteria: (1) Sight & Sound list; (2) Sight & Sound ballots of critics I admire; (3) movies I haven’t seen by directors I like; (4) stuff I think Harry might enjoy when we watch together; (5) nothing I have to pay for; (6) Rosenbaum’s alternate top 100 from his 2004 book Essential Cinema. I mention J.R. b/c for as many weird movies as he’s turned me onto, he’s also recommended too many that are clearly intellectually stimulating enough for him (aka transgressive/leftist ideas), which obfuscates their lack of actual pleasures as entertainment (I know you recall Bitter Moon). A few minutes before this ended, I said, “God dammit, Baumer, you failed me yet again!” Then, like the second half’s protagonist, I literally nodded out for thirty seconds at 3 a.m. & missed the last scene of the movie. Can’t think of a more fitting conclusion to watching this dreck.
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949) ****
After trying to break down why Asian cinema doesn’t quite do it for me throughout the last few letters, this thing packed a wallop. Granted, there are personal reasons it may have connected so strongly (which haven’t ever typically factored into my responses to movies/ it’s certainly at least in part a product of aging): focused on an only child who lives w/ her widower father, she’s uninterested in marriage & would rather spend time hanging w/ her dad. They enjoy a Noh performance, take a trip to Kyoto, & generally love one another’s company as she finds new ways to make their rice dinners more enjoyable. (Just white rice for dinner over & over, huh?) It’s the father, played by Chishu Ryu, who tells the greatest lie of his life by claiming he’s going to remarry, which prompts his daughter (Setsuko Hara in a flawless, amiable, smiling performance) to finally settle & get married too/getting married was SO SUDDEN back then. Like, snap your fingers & boom…nuptials. Where the grace of Tokyo Story was lost on me due to the theme-hammering, this one’s subtle power gets increasingly more effective as the movie continues, each new layer adding depth (Hara’s interactions w/ her cousin, said cousin’s husband/Hara declining his invitation to a concert b/c she thinks he likes her, Hara’s aunt trying to convince her that Hara’s father will be okay w/o her, etc.). Watching the father peel an apple alone to end the film is the second saddest thing I’ve seen involving apples in a movie (you win, American Pie, you always do!). The B&W cinematography, long takes, & eye for detail add up w/ everything above to a genuinely transcendent film.
Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985) **
Am I mistaken or do you hate this movie? I’d somehow avoided it all these years—which may explain my belief in your loathing it—but confess I was mildly entertained for the first hour or so, largely due to the quality ensemble: Tim Curry (playing the ideal T.C. role), Michael McKean (his hair part & glasses make him look like a ‘60s Brit), Martin Mull (the Bill Paxton of this cast), Christopher Lloyd, Lesley Ann Warren (a dead ringer for Susan Sarandon), Madeline Kahn (was Oscar-nominated for Blazing Saddles?!), & Colleen Camp as the maid possessing a pair of udders that could hold their own w/ a candlestick for a concussion-worthy bonk on the noggin. Not gonna recap it—the sets are quality, if nothing else—but it made me wonder how many other board games have been given the big screen treatment. All I can find that exist are Battleship, Jumanji (best ever use of “Locomotive Breath”), & Ouija (semi-recent horror flick). Fun fax: Tim Curry was cast only after the first choice, Leonard Rossiter, died before filming began. Rowan “Mr. Legume” Atkinson was the second choice, but director Lynn deemed him too unknown for the role. Carrie Fisher was slated for the Warren role but had to enter rehab. This must only be a cult classic solely b/c people like playing the board game. Board games I’d like to see turned into movies: Connect Four: Jews vs. Nazis featuring Liam Neeson & Ralph Fiennes (starring Ben Kingsley as the official), Scrabble (a touching story about a spectral genius, illiterate homeless man, & girl w/ Down’s Syndrome that morphs into a threesome/wait until you see where the blank tiles end up—yikes), & Backgammon (Will Ferrell as Jesus, Al Pacino as Beelzebub to determine who controls the future of the world). Collen Camp could make my tall peen cramp.
One final note: The best film I’ve seen during this incomprehensible run is Playtime. Please watch it. After three viewings, it’s easily gained entry to my personal top ten (never mind that I bought the Jacques Tati Blu-ray box set, an eighty-dollar investment to offset all the freebies).