Madame Web

Expectations can be difficult. I mean, everybody knows that this is the worst movie ever made ever (to summarise the reviews and the general feeling on Twitter)… and should give me low expectations, right? Noooo! That means that I’m now betting on this being some kind of genius, future cult movie, because people are usually wrong.

So I’ve got unreasonably high expectations for this, which means that I’m going to be disappointed, and then hate the movie, and then agree with everybody else, which I don’t want, so I’m trying to lower my expectations.

Which I’ve failed at!

Let’s roll the movie and see what happens.

Oh man, these “zooms” done in post processing are brutal. And they do it all the time! To add some excitement, but it looks so bad…

I am actually enjoying this this far. It’s been pretty charming, and they’re good at establishing the characters. And look! It doesn’t look like total dog shit! It looks like they actually filmed this scene on location? Instead of greenscreening it like everybody else does?

Hey! It’s a real cat! OK, a location shoot and a real cat — this is already better than 95% of other super-hero movies.

OK, not all the shots look equally good.

Dakota Johnson is really good.

Such web symbolism.

That was probably half the budget.

This is funny!

(And pretty exciting.)

Why did they give the blond(e) one such an unsightly and huge wig? It’s really distracting… Wigs are a lost art form — back in the olden days, they knew how to make ones that looked good on people, but now they just order Maximum Hair Ever and drop it on some poor person’s head in a way that will cover most of the places the wig meets the skin.

Dakota Johnson’s also wearing a wig? If not, they’ve somehow perfected the art of making real hair look like a wig.

OK, I can see why people are saying that Johnson is sleepwalking through this — there’s certain scenes where she could have done a bit more than “I’m kinda bewildered, bemildred and bemused”?

OK, there’s a couple fight scenes that are pretty risible, but on the whole, this is fine. It’s neither a future cult classic, and it didn’t deserve all the ridicule it got. It’s entertaining! It’s a bit oddly paced? Somehow it feels both rushed and too slow? But it’s fine. I’ve seen heaps of super-hero movies that have been worse than this.

So grading this on a super-hero scale, we get:

Madame Web. S.J. Clarkson. 2024. ⚃

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Wow, that’s some start.

Anyway, I got the final two of Greenaway’s 80s movies in the mail the other week. This 2K version looks pretty good — not overly restored or tinkered with.

I’ve seen this before — probably on VHS in like 1991? I did not remember it being this… stylised? It’s Greenaway’s big breakthrough movie, commercially, and I remembered it being more conventional? But perhaps that was just in contrast to his earlier movies that I’d seen at the Cinematheque by this point.

Yes, yes, hipsters, yes…

OK, I take back the thing I said about the transfer — shots like this have a lot of details, but there’s digital artifacting going on? That is, there’s pixels that, like, “shimmer” in the way old-fashioned CGI used to — when there’s too much information and the algo can’t decide on what the colour value for the pixels should be. Very odd. Haven’t seen that in a while. Could this be a very old digitisation? Did they even do 2K back in the olden days?

I’m so cynical… OK, the thing here seems to be that Helen Mirren is married to the most vulgar, uncultured crime boss ever, so she looks across the restaurant and immediately falls in lust with this nerd (because he reads a book).

And that’s definitely a fantasy nerds have — that if they display their culturedness (that’s a word), then a gorgeous woman like Helen Mirren will immediately want to have sex with them. That’s fine! But the casting! To make this a bit more plausible, couldn’t they have cast somebody who was even slightly attractive here? I know, I know, this is the fantasy of an older (not very attractive) man (I’m presuming), so that wouldn’t be their first choice, but c’mon. Didn’t anybody around Greenaway say “actually, more attractive actors exist”?

There’s the unfortunate whiff of cringe about “the vulgars”… She just asked about a bottle of Chianti with the “wrapping” so that she can take it home and hang it on the wall, and that’s just hilarious! So funny! Ha ha!

I’m beginning to think that Greenaway is a bit of a dick.

Very Last Dinnerish.

That’s what I want my toilet to look like.

Is that Ian Dury?

I can understand why this movie mad such a splash, both culturally and commercially. Greenaway keeps showing us this awful guy doing awful things, pointing at him “isn’t he awful? huh? isn’t he? look! he’s awful? see? *hee hee*”, i.e., The Sopranos Approach, and people love that.

I just found that bit tedious as fuck, and it goes on and on and on. Not to speak of the ultraviolence. It’s not a movie to watch while you’re eating.

Now, there’s other things here that are enjoyable — the staging (especially the kitchen), the music, the rotting trucks and some of the cinematography. And the colours! You can only dream about colours like this with recent movies.

But this isn’t as good as Greenaway’s good movies.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Peter Greenaway. 1989. ⚃

Red Line 7000

Last year, I watched a couple of classic Howard Hawks movies, and I thought “well, I’ve gotta watch them all”. And… when it gets to the 60s, these are movies I’ve never heard of before:

So this is one of them. I was only able to find this bluray in a Spanish edition, but it’s got an English sound-track, too.

But… I’m guessing this isn’t one of them there Howard Hawks classics.

Ah, James Caan… he was one of the biggest stars for a while, but I think he’s basically been forgotten now?

Er… I’m not even sure that’s him…

Man! She went to bed without removing the makeup!?

What happened! This is really bad! It’s written and directed by Hawks, but it seems totally amateurish — the shots are incomprehensively awkward, and it’s been super duper boring so far.

Hawks:

“To be serious I think there were some pretty good things in it but as a piece of entertainment I don’t think I did a good job. I think there were some individual scenes that were pretty good and there were a lot of great race scenes. But I’m not proud of the picture as a whole.”

Caan later called the film “a joke”.

People like it less than the critics (but there’s only six reviews).

It’s Sulu!

Man, this is so weird. Not just the boring plot and stuff, but just on a scene to scene basis — they splice in still photos showing what they’re watching, for instance, so it looks like a parody of a movie. (They couldn’t afford shooting the reverse?)

Nobody likes this movie — I think that’s the lowest rating Hawks has on any movie?

OK, I’m bailing. It’s rare that I bail on movies, but this is just dire. It’s amazing that somebody who made Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and The Big Sleep made something as awful as this.

Red Line 7000. Howard Hawks. 1965. ☐