I’ve never heard of this movie, but it was apparently a box office success and everything. It’s from 1965, but it’s very much a 50s Film Noir movie, so it’s all kinds of weird.

It’s one of those paranoid movies where you don’t quite know whether he’s lost his memory or something else screwy is going on. It’s nice and tense.

Walter!

Triple A.

It’s pretty good! I’m not sure the plot actually makes sense — there’s a conspiracy going on, but it seems to rely on things the people involved couldn’t possibly know. But it’s really tightly plotted — it’s like a clockwork thing.

It’s hard to really get into, though, because it’s just so weird.

Mirage. Edward Dmytryk. 1965. ⚃

Yeah, that’s not the right aspect ratio…

That’s better.

I was watching a couple famous Howard Hawks movies and I thought “well, I should watch them all, eh?” But many of them are pretty hard to find — this bluray was released in Italy, but fortunately the original soundtrack is on an alternate track.

The footage of the timber rafting is fascinating. I mean, it’s so unromantic — we don’t get pics of men heroically wrestling with the timber, but instead we get them dynamiting the timber whenever there’s a snag somewhere. So much dynamite.

The novel this is based on was all about how robber barons destroy nature, but Hawks changed the script:

Upon returning to the studio, Goldwyn viewed a rough cut of the film and was shocked to discover Hawks had shifted the focus from the unbridled destruction of the land to a love triangle in which brawling Barney Glasgow and Swan Bostrom vied for the affections of lusty Lotta Morgan. The character of Richard Glasgow, intended to be the second lead, barely was in the film, which was cluttered with Hawks-like improvised bits of business. When the director refused to comply with Goldwyn’s demands for major changes, the producer fired Hawks from the project.

[…]

Wyler never considered Come and Get It a part of his filmography and disowned it whenever he could, although it greatly pleased Ferber, who praised Goldwyn “for the courage, sagacity, and power of decision” he demonstrated by “throwing out the finished Hawks picture and undertaking the gigantic task of making what amounted to a new picture.

Wow, the history of the production of this movie is more interesting than the movie is…

Frances Farmer is fun, though.

Heh heh. That’s a shot all right.

Personal saunas.

Spencer Tracy was originally intended to play this guy, and I can totally see that. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Edward Arnold, but he’s, er, a bit lacking in the Leading Man dept.

Well, the wife looks nice!

Well, this is creepy! So he didn’t marry the first Frances Farmer character (because he married his boss’ daughter instead) but now (25 years later?) he has the hots for the daughter of his best friend and the first Farmer character (who’s also played by Frances Farmer).

It’s weird! It’s creepy! It’s weird!

He’s so horny.

But now the Farmer daughter has the hots for the Tracy son! Complications!

It’s not a very… compelling movie? Perhaps it’s the weird production history, but…

Such love triangle!

It’s just not very good, innit?

Come and Get It. Howard Hawks, William Wyler. 1936. ⚁

Yeah!

It’s a very advanced sitting position.

This movie is so close to being really enjoyable — it’s a zany thing about a woman running a sort of scam on everybody, but then doesn’t feel very good about it all. You know, the usual thing. And they try so hard! Especially Carole Lombard. But it never actually takes off? It remains a series of somewhat escalating but not compelling scenes?

It may just be me, though.

The director, William A. Wellman isn’t somebody I remember, but he seems to be a proper jobbie kind of director:

Etc etc. Starting in the 20s, he does like seven movies a year. And looking at this list, I have seen a few of his movies (The Ox-Box Incident, Beau Geste), and they’re pretty good?

Indeed.

Tough guy, see?

It’s fun, but it’s really odd. I wonder whether they didn’t quite know what to do about it all — it’s 1h13m long, which takes it into B movie territory — which is pretty unusual for such a big star as Lombard, I think? Or is it? Hm.

Anyway, it’s one of those “there’s some fun scenes” bits, so let’s go with:

Nothing Sacred. William A. Wellman. 1937. ⚃

The titles to this were so colourful that I thought “*phew* dodged the desaturated colour grading on this one”, but nope.

Paul Schrader… that name seems really, really familiar, but I can’t quite place it.

Oh, right, he directed (and/or wrote) a whole bunch of movies back in the late 70s/early 80s that seemed to be very much part of the zeitgeist back then: He wrote Taxi Driver and directed Hardcore (with George C Scott), and American Gigolo (which I guess made Richard Gere a thing), and er Cat People and Mishima…

So I think I’ve seen all his movies until the mid 80s, and after that, I’ve seen zilch. Eyeballing them, it seems like most of them weren’t well received. Like:

And:

This first five minutes of this movie are risible — Joel Edgerton (a very philosophical gardener) spouts deep-sounding but deeply moronic lines while the camera portentously follows him.

Oh, yeah, this is why I bought this movie.

Oh, yeah, Schrader is a total moron:

In 2022, Schrader criticized that year’s Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, describing it as a “politically correct rejiggering”, with its selection of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film of all time being the product of “distorted woke reappraisal”.

It seems really weird to go this grey in a film about plants and stuff. Perhaps they’re gonna go all Wizard of Oz when summer comes? I doubt it, though — this is just what all movies look like now.

Very ambiguous tattoos, Travis.

That’s some wallpaper.

Very cosy dinner party.

Oh, the gardener is boinking both his boss and her grand niece? Very Schrader I’m sure.

OK, so he takes off his shirt, revealing the tats, because he’s… writing… Writing is sweaty work.

See, by having sex with a Black woman, he’s absolved from his Nazi tattoos (and she’s making him remove them). He’s a fixer upper.

After having sex with the grand niece, the road somehow becomes CGI.

Nooo! They hurt the annuals! Vandals! *shakes fist*

This is barely a movie at all. Everything about it is risible. Well, except Sigourney Weaver’s brief performance (I’m guessing she was on set one single day).

Master Gardener. Paul Schrader. 2022. ⚀

It’s a super-hero movie that’s just 1h44m! I didn’t know that was allowed! I thought they had to be at least two and a half hours!

I didn’t watch the Ms. Marvel tv series (after the first ep), but it seemed like an OK series. But I was disappointed that she didn’t have her embiggening powers and instead seemed to shoot some kind of energy bolt out of her hands? It seems like she’s still doing that here.

And now we’re getting a recap of Capt. Marvel’s origins…? I think I’ve seen that movie, but I remember nothing of it. Still, I don’t really feel I need a recap — she’s a super-hero; they all have an origin and they’re never interesting.

But OK, that only lasted for a couple of minutes and now there’s stuff happening! And Captain Marvel has a cat on her shoulder!!!

And and…

Wow, this really moves fast. I like it.

And it looks kinda good? Much better than most Marvel movies, at least. I mean, it’s all CGI and greenscreen, but they haven’t colour graded everything into oblivion…

Oh, this is a Palestine/Israel metaphor…

This is so entertaining! I thought super-hero movies were over? But so far, this is one of the best ones I’ve watched.

Well, I’m still not sure why this wasn’t a box office smash. But it does tease you with all these continuity things that you may or may not know. I mean, I got about half of them, but I didn’t mind the half I didn’t get? It’s like “oh yeah, there’s a history here; sounds interesting” but that didn’t detract from enjoying this very enjoyable movie?

EEk!

And this movie really leans into the silliness of classic super-hero comics. It really captures the feeling of reading those comics.

Such Fury.

Oh, and they’re tying this into the Hawkeye series — the best Marvel TV series? Man. But I guess that’s never going to happen since this movie bombed:

I guess it’d have to gross around $400M to make a profit, and it didn’t do that.

Which is a shame. This movie really nails what a super-hero movie should be: Fun, action filled and inventive.

And… it looks great! So much better than most Marvel movies — it’s like if they don’t have to do 150 minutes, they can do proper CGI? And not colour grade everything into greyness?

The Marvels. Nia DaCosta. 2023. ⚄

Is that where that clan came from?

So, this is basically just a guy doing the way of the wu tang shaolin clan thing for 15 minutes — and it’s just not that fascinating? My mind started wandering and before you know it I had gotten a cheese board out, and that’s not a good sign.

Meditation on Violence. Maya Deren. 1949. ⚁

Huh! I wonder how Deren did this. Is it just inverted film stock?

But if so, why are so many of their faces so dark while their bodies are almost totally white? So it can’t be that… is it infrared or something? And they all have a pound of makeup on their faces so their faces become kinda blackface?

Huh:

Made in collaboration with Metropolitan Opera Ballet School,[5] the film was shot in black-and-white in the 16 mm format, and is projected as photographed in the negative.

So… were their bodies painted black, but their faces weren’t?

Anyway, it’s a gripping short.

The Very Eye of Night. Maya Deren. 1955. ⚅

The images in this short seem so fresh — it’s hard to believe that it’s from 1944. If I were presented this movie without any context, I would have guessed that it’s a modern movie made to look old, you know?

And I wonder whether Bergman ever saw this.

Anyway, it’s kinda enthralling.

At Land. Maya Deren. 1944. ⚄

This is very brief (just two minutes) but really cool.

A Study in Choreography for Camera. Maya Deren. 1945. ⚄

That’s a lot of birthin’. How many kittens is this cat gonna have?

I didn’t know that cats panted like this… perhaps this one was brought up by dogs.

Now there’s even more chatons! I think it’s like seven now? Is the entire movie just going to be a cat giving birth to way too many kittens?

WHAT HAVE I DONE

Family life.

Daddy’s home.

This is a very cute movie, but it would have been even better if the cats were in focus for like a millisecond.

This is a cute little movie (30 minutes long), but it’s basically just a litter being born and then growing up a bit. It’s very… unambitious?

The Private Life of a Cat. Alexander Hammid, Maya Deren. 1946. ⚃

I have no idea what’s supposed to happen in this short, but I like it.

Ritual in Transfigured Time. Maya Deren. 1946. ⚄

Is that an open-faced salt mine? No! It’s a glacier.

So evil!

This is apparently about the Armenian genocide (when the Turks were killing everybody in occupied territories). But more importantly, it’s the final movie in the Elia Kazan box set! After watching this, I’m free! Free, I tells you! I’ve now completed all the box sets I was watching! Except the Maya Deren one! Oops! Never mind!

(But that is a very small box.)

The Turks are so evil! You can tell by their glued-on moustaches.

(And by them killing old, nice Armenian uncles.)

I love me a good melodrama, but this guy… I dunno. I don’t mind that he’s a bad actor (that sometimes works very well in melodramas), but he’s just not that interesting? Whenever he’s on the screen, it’s like *sigh*.

He did do a handful of other things after this, though.

This was shot in 1.85:1, but cut down to 16:9 for this DVD. Or… wikipedia claims that it was 1.66:1? imdb and wikipedia are fighting! Bits of the movie are missing in any case in this version!

Comedy Turks. It’s pretty painful.

Oh, OK:

The faults are mostly at the beginning, (it’s worth sticking with it), and the scenes of peasant oppression and revolt don’t ring true. The casting of American players doesn’t help or maybe Kanzan was just too close to his material.

I was totally ready to ditch this movie, because it’s, well, awful, but this guy says that it’s going to pick up, so I’m giving it a go.

Heh heh:

The rest of the acting is very uneven and Giallelis is certainly no James Dean, (his career was short-lived).

OK, this is brutal. Brutally awful. I may not last until Constantinople (not Istanbul).

With a more compelling lead, this might have been OK, I guess? But it’s not.

You see, he wants to go to America America, so he ogles models a lot. I’m not sure whether he’s supposed to be developmentally challenged… I guess not, since it’s modelled after Kazan’s uncle or something?

No, I can’t take it any more. I’m ditching this movie before the halfway point. Perhaps the last half is the best movie ever, but I’ll never know.

America America. Elia Kazan. 1963. ⚀

I really like that Morgen didn’t interview anybody — it’s all snippets of Bowie talking, and footage of Bowie.

The first (I’d say) two thirds of this movie really work: It’s interesting footage, and Morgen lets the songs play to completion, etc etc. It’s all good stuff. But then when we get to the mid 80s, the film starts sagging, and Morgen’s lack of enthusiasm for Bowie’s 90s (and beyond) years make the last third a slog to watch.

Moonage Daydream. Brett Morgen. 2022. ⚃

Introducing!?

Oh yeah, he looks younger than usual here… for some reason I was thinking he was older.

But… they’ve cut this movie down to 16:9 from 1.85:1? WHYYYYY

Sex Ed ’61 Style

(But she’s talking about Lego, of course.)

Oh, the 24-year old Beatty is in high school. OK, now his behaviour makes more sense.

This looks like a very inefficient way to shower. I think they need more showers.

Oops!

Fancy.

You see, Beatty is really horny. I mean, really, really. But his father doesn’t want to let get married right away…

Now, that’s a plot.

So sarcastic.

Oh, is this gonna be one of those movies where the fun older sister is killed so that Warren Beatty can learn a lesson?

I guess it is!

OK, not dead yet…

Wow, finally we have AI to answer these questions that were totally unavailable on imdb before AI…

Heh heh. All the critics agree that the major weakness in this movie is that the script is inane. So of course that’s the one Oscar it won.

Because the script is so absurd. It goes for So Much Drama all the time, but nothing much happens?

But also because the performances are so over the top — going for Dramatic Teenager and landing at w t f.

She cut her hair — the surest sign of mental instability there is!

This movie is getting worse by the minute, and it didn’t really start of well, either.

Noo! No bathing!

Dramatic lighting.

Successful casting.

Yes… hehe…

This is a really bad movie — every plot development is cringe-worthy, the performances are over the top, and the direction just isn’t there.

Splendor in the Grass. Elia Kazan. 1961. ⚁

The reason I bought this bluray is because the cover looks like this:

How could I not buy it!!! But I assume that it’s probably the worst film in the universe, although… it’s got Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Julian Sands, Steve Buscemi, Park Overall and Peter Falk. How bad can it be!

Max 80s.

Why didn’t Lauper get the Oscars for this? She was robbed!

Hey! Isn’t that… er… that guy!? I think it is! From Buffy! This movie has all the people!

And there’s that guy!

I love these NY-ey shots.

Columbo!

This is such an odd movie. (But aren’t all movies odd?) But I mean, it feels (in some ways) like a straight to VHS release — it’s silly, it’s leisurely paced — but they really went to South America to film? And it just looks really good.

Oh, it wasn’t a straight to VHS movie! $18M was a pretty solid budget back then. But it seriously bombed.

(The gag is that he’s afraid of germs so he brought water from the US. Love the umbrellas on the water tank.)

He’s the bad guy.

Heh heh.

SPECIAL EFFECT IS OUR PASSION

Yeah, OK — the first two thirds of this movie was just really, you know, amiable? There were lots of jokes, and most of them missed, but then you’d get some more… and Lauper is fun to watch, and Peter Falk hammed it up to match, and Goldblum was Goldbluming away, as he does. It almost felt like some kind of lost treasure? In just how likeable, silly and easygoing it was?

But then we got to the dreaded third act, and Julian Sands shows up, and is, like, all Serious Actor, and it all goes down like a lead balloon.

I mean, it’s probably not Sands’ fault, precisely — presumably the script was bad — but…

It’s like Peter Falk was holding it all together, and then when they killed his character off, it’s *thud*.

OK, now things are looking up again…

True colours

Aykroyd was such a dick:

The movie was described as “Romancing the Ghostbusters in the Temple of Doom. It was originally meant to star Lauper and Dan Aykroyd.

[…]

Aykroyd met with Lauper and decided he did not want to do the film. Columbia Pictures stood by Lauper and Jeff Goldblum replaced Aykroyd.

Ebert was such a dick:

Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars and wrote: “Movies like Vibes appear and disappear like fireflies in the dog days of summer. Nobody seems to have made them, nobody sees them, nobody remembers them.

Wow, that’s quite a critic/audience spread.

Anyway, I did like this movie. The last third was a total drag, though.

Vibes. Ken Kwapis. 1988. ⚃

Oh! Lee Remick! There’s a name I haven’t seen in a minute…

This starts with a voice-over infodump about floods along the Tennessee river, and we’re apparently going to follow people working for the TVA who are buying land from recalcitrant people along the river? Or something? It doesn’t quite make the “elevator pitch” criteria (unless it’s a long and boring elevator ride), but it seems … er … It seems like a weird way to start the movie, laying out the concept like that.

Is there gonna be romance?

Hm… is the aspect ratio correct here? People seem a bit squashed? Vertically?

And that image up there is 853×364… (/ 853.0 364) => 2.34! I guess they just have some kind of squashed-looking faces?

Oh, that sounds wonderful!

Oh, Lee Remick… I was thinking of Lee Van Cleef!

Not the same kind of thing at all! But most amazing of all:

There’s somebody else in this movie with exactly the same name! Doooing!

Yeah! Take that, city slicker!

This is really entertaining. And quite unlike any of Kazan’s preceding movies. I think he’s hitting the beats he didn’t quite hit with Baby Doll? That was supposed to be funny, but instead was… confusing.

This movie has so many good lines.

*insert Beavis sounds here*

Subtle framing.

Clift’s performance is a bit confusing — he often seems diffident, but at the same time he’s being kinda heroic (here he’s talking to the local KKK boys (I think) who don’t want equal pay for the Black people)… It’s… it’s… almost like he’s trying to do a more serious version of Cary Grant? But not quite getting all the way there?

This woman does the best side eye ever, though.

Wow, this is a masterful performance. He’s managed to portray the most repugnant character in movie history.

This movie was unexpectedly really good. I guess perhaps Kazan wanted to go total melodrama, but he’s good at this.

Wild River. Elia Kazan. 1960. ⚅

Yes, that’s how to make your store cosy.

First you put the gun on the wall…

… then you distribute some pillows.

Oh, yeah, about this DVD:

But then I forgot to watch the other movie! Which I’m doing now.

Man, I’d forgotten how weird Greenlandish sounds… it’s like nothing else phonetically. Phonemically? It’s fascinating. Especially with the occasional Danish words inserted at random.

But… hm… Qaqqat alanngui had nerve from the start, and entertaining performances. This one starts off more ambiguously — it is a comedy? Is it a drama? Or are we gonna get some horror already?

(But kudos for the subtle camouflage shirt.)

It’s horror!

That’s the scary horror house!

Gotta have them shovels.

Having somebody yawn this much in a movie isn’t a good idea. That stuff is contagious!

Well, that’s scary.

But, nope, this movie just isn’t as compelling as the previous one. I mean, they’re both no budget tiny horror movies, but this one is mostly the two guys sitting around and then something mysterious happens once in a while. It’s just not that entertaining.

There’s original bits in here — like the thing with the rope? That pulled the guy into the Scary Basement? That was pretty cool (and properly nightmarish). But… on the whole, it’s not as much fun as the previous movie.

And I know, this is a no budget movie, made for fun, presumably, so it doesn’t feel fair to throw a die on this thing. But I’m going to, anyway, because I’m not fair.

There were several scenes I think worked well (by that I mean, they were scary), but overall:

Unnuap Taarnerpaaffiani. Malik Kleist. 2014. ⚁

Wut. This DVD is in 16:9? But nobody shot in 16:9 back then (and hardly any movies are shot in that aspect ratio today), so it’s been cut down, one way or another. I’m guessing they cut the top and bottom? TSK TSK this Kazan box set, dude…

Nope! They cut the left/right edges. Wrong again!

I hate 16:9 soo muuuuuch…

Hey, is that Mercator? Hm… it’s odd, whatever the projection is. And with Australia all the way up there in Asia? And all the islands in between all smushed into one land mass? Oh yeah! I didn’t notice that the Mediterranean was smushed, too! It’s a very land-centric projection.

Hey, it’s what’s-his-name!

This is very amusing. It’s old-fashioned (duh, from 1957) media criticism… but, man, it’s early for this kind of thing. The movie makes fun of the media in a way that feels staid now, but it must have been pretty radical back then.

I think! (And perhaps why it feels staid is because it’s been copied a lot?)

I mean, it’s meant to be over the top, but the problem is — why is this guy suddenly so popular? They try to establish him as popular by making him 1) not a racist, and 2) somebody who makes fun of (some) ads, but is that enough? On the other hand, people get famous on less than that, I guess… I think it would have helped if the songs he wrote were better?

And we’ve got more than half the movie to go — it the last half going to be about how the guy is discarded by the public? That’d be typical…

The power of aerials.

so critique

He’s so horny!!!

Yeah, as I expected — the last half isn’t as much fun as the first half.

I mean, the movie is, like, correct? Everything it says about TV and politics and everything? But… is it funny? No, it’s not. “It’s funny because it’s true” is the most incorrect thing ever.

He’s an influencer.

Heh heh.

My spellchecker doesn’t recognise “influencer” as a word! I’m proud of my spellchecker!

Yeah, that’s the correct reaction to the revoltin’ plot developmints.

Fighters For Fuller… Oh! KKK. Very subtle.

It ends with what has to be a reference to A Streetcar Named Desise (but “Marcia” instead of “Stella”), which is cool.

I dunno. I really liked like about half this movie? Then the rest not so much.

A Face in the Crowd. Elia Kazan. 1957. ⚃

Should they keep shoving his face this far up into the camera? I mean, they want to make him look like a dork, but…

Anyway, I’m watching this movie (even if I’ve kinda stopped watching super-hero movies) because it got so conflicting reviews that I kinda thought that it might be interesting? It flopped majorly at the box office, presumably both from super-hero fatigue and because the DC people said “we’re rebooting the DC universe, so whatever happens in The Flash ‘doesn’t count’. I MEAN IT”S THE MOST IMPORTANT MOVIE EVER!”. Which is confusing messaging.

Oh god. This movie started off pretty amusingly, but now we’re in bad, bad CGI land. It’s supposed to look awesome, but it just looks shoddy. Especially with the awful orange palette they’ve gone with.

I guess there’s gonna be a lot of this…

… and a lot of this.

I guess I see where they were going with this — it’s a fun madcap scene, but when you’re throwing ten babies out of the window, it’s a bit eh? Eh? Do we really need to have ten babies plummeting to their deaths (to be saved by The Flash in amusing ways)?

I dunno.

Heh, well that’s a nice touch.

Tada!

I think that was a lot funnier in the script than it turned out to be on the screen.

Nooo! Now we’re getting The Flash’s origin! And his childhood! Nooooo! Why can’t they just do the fun parts of super-heroing? When they have their powers and stuff? Instead we always get their traumatic, boring origins.

Oh, he was so sad that he broke into the multiverse! I hate multiverse stuff!

Well, it’s inventive…

*rolls eyes*

It’s classic multiversey stuff, and it’s kinda amusing.

That’s the problem with multiverses…

OK, now we get to the infamous final boss fight, rendered in a desert. But… it didn’t really look as bad as I expected.

And the CGI Nick Cage instead of the scenes he did for this movie.

Yes, exactly.

But… it’s not as bad as everybody says it is. It’s written mostly as a comedy, but that doesn’t really make it all of the way to the screen, I think. The goofy bits (and half of the film is goofy bits) are successful, but then you shift to these standard super-hero serious bits, and that doesn’t quite work.

Ezra Miller is really good in this; he can turn the goofy and silly up to ten at the drop of a hat. The movie is perhaps too long, but I wasn’t really bored at any point of the movie. It feels like it almost should have worked?

The Flash. Andy Muschietti. 2023. ⚃

Another Tennessee Williams play… Kazan kinda had a Tennessee factory going on there for a while?

But this is a movie I haven’t seen before! I think! So I’m excited.

Hey, Karl Malden…

I bought a Kazan box set some years back, and I’m finally watching the last handful of movies from the set. It’s a bit odd, because while the set is very handsome — there’s a huge book and stuff — the movies themselves look very unrestored. Lots of juddering and lots of dust on the film.

Oh, Tennessee.

Hey, she’s great. Carroll Baker? The name’s not familar…

Wow! I’ve seen Giant, but absolutely none of the other movies have names that ring a bell. There’s some bigger names among the directors… oh, and then she goes off to Italy? Based on the directors’ names. I guess her career didn’t really take off? (But she was Oscar nominated for the role in this movie.)

They were eating pizza down thar in the 50s?

This started off like distilled Tennessee Williams, but now it’s really not — it casts a wider net and is much weirder. So I had to pause and goole:

Although the film’s title card reads “Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll” and the film is based on Williams’ one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Elia Kazan claimed in his autobiography that Williams was only “half-heartedly” involved in the screenplay and that Kazan actually wrote most of it.

Yeah, that makes more sense.

Really!? Well, the characters are caricatured, but pure comedy? It doesn’t really seem to me like this is intended as a parody of these kinds of movies. It’s just really over the top, I think? Full on.

But I guess, if you take this as a serious movie, it’s incomprehensible why Baby Doll continues to confide in this sleaze ball after he’s made it pretty clear that he’s a sleaze ball.

Yeah, OK, it’s a comedy, I guess… But it’s less funny than horrifying.

Yeah, OK, this had to be meant to be parody, I guess, but it’s not funny.

Yeah, OK, it’s a harsh take-down of Tennessee Williams type movies? All southern angst and stuff? So Jonathan Rosenbaum was right after all.

Still, it’s not actually that funny. The last half hour was excruciating.

Baby Doll. Elia Kazan. 1956. ⚂

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before. But… not quite sure?

Heh heh. This is most amusing.

Now that’s some hat.

Heh heh heh.

Yeah, that’s right!

Oh oh oh. I remember this thing. Did I watch this movie in my childhood or something?

Horrifying!

The basic plot of this movie is, of course, something that’s been done a lot around this time, and several times by Cary Grant himself. (I.e., they’re divorcing, but… perhaps not!??!!) But it doesn’t follow the expected beats, and it ends with the Dunne character plotting to get them together in the most absurd way. It’s a very funny screwball comedy, and it’s so charming and odd.

Aha!

McCarey’s improvisational style was deeply unsettling to Grant, and at the end of the first week Grant sent Cohn an eight-page memorandum titled “What’s Wrong With This Picture”. Grant asked Cohn to let him out of the film, offering to do one or more pictures for free and even saying he’d reimburse Cohn $5,000 if he were released. McCarey was so angry at Grant that he stopped speaking to him and told Cohn he’d kick in another $5,000 to get Grant off the film.

The movie didn’t really have a script!

His working method was to ask his cast to improvise the scene, creating their own dialogue and blocking their own action before allowing cameras to roll. If a problem arose with a scene, McCarey would sit at a piano on the set and pick out tunes and sing until a solution came to him.

Sounds like quite a character, and that explains the lack of… well… plot. I mean, there’s a plot, but these things usually have a clockwork plot of fun things, while this movie is basically just a handful of funny scenes.

Anyway, it’s great.

The Awful Truth. Leo McCarey. 1937. ⚅

Is that Brando?

What have they done to his eyelids? There’s something odd going on there…

I’m 15 minutes in, and so far, this has been a ridiculously awful movie. Indifferent cinematography, risible performances, unbelievable dialogue…

But on the other hand, it’s got at 56% tomatometer.

And:

Senator John McCain listed Viva Zapata! as his favorite film of all time.

So perhaps it’ll pick up.

Such bourgeoisie.

That would be my response, too.

OK, I’m out.

I’m just not seeing it — this seems more like a parody of one of these movies than one of these movies.

Viva Zapata!. Elia Kazan. 1952. ⚁

I have an Elia Kazan dvd box set, but I started watching this movie, and I though “well, this looks so bad” so I aborted and bought a bluray version instead. Which I’m watching now. And… it looks better? But it still looks pretty odd, so I guess Kazan was going for that “everything looks kinda occluded” look? I mean “only use natural lighting”. (Well, I guess there’s nothing actually “natural” about his lighting, but there isn’t a lot of it.)

I’ve seen this movie at least a couple times before, probably on TV in the 80s, and I remember really liking it as a teenager, so I was exited to watch it now with better visuals, but I guess not. But I’m still exited!

UH-OH!

I’d totally forgotten the plot of this movie…

Wow. There are black people in New Orleans.

Whodathunk.

What a goof. Is he supposed to be developmentally challenged? I think I missed that when I saw this movie last time.

Couldn’t they have gotten a prettier baby!?

This movie is as terrific as I remembered. Is Stanley Kowalsky the most evil character in the history of movies? Has the Anti Polish Defamation League protested this movie? Or what?

It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s pretty amazing.

A Streetcar Named Desire. Elia Kazan. 1951. ⚅

This is a documentary made for TV, and it’s got a simple concept (as is often the case with Varda’s movies) — she interviews a bunch of widows who all live on the same little island.

They talk about their (dead) husbands and their lives and stuff. It’s pretty interesting.

And as usual with Varda, she doesn’t do “verité” but lets people present themselves as they prefer.

This is a really strong documentary — and it’s really touching. (Have plenty of mouchoirs ready.) But it’s also funny and endearing.

Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier. Agnès Varda. 2006. ⚅

And… I think this might be the last Varda movie in this box set? (I may be wrong and there might be a couple more shorts after this…) But in an case, let’s have a look at the box.

It’s got two covers, one with young Varda and one with old Varda.

The format is unusual as DVD box sets go — it’s an awkward size: Not so large that it becomes A Thing, but large enough that it’s not a cute little thing, either. If that makes any kind of sense.

The blu rays are housed in a cardboard book, and lists the major movies on each disc.

And there’s an accompanying book with essays and stuff.

There’s even stuff on the inside of the box!

So — it’s a kind of neat box, and… it’s exhausting! I mean… I love Varda’s movies, so I’m the kind of person that has to, by gum, watch everything on every disc. And there’s so much stuff! It’s wonderful!

What I’m saying is: I wish every director could have as fabulous box as this, but I probably didn’t watch it in the optimal way: When I start watching something like this, I feel a compulsion to be done with it before I start on the next thing? It makes no sense: I could sensibly watch one of these discs per year or whatever, but instead I ploughed through and watched it all, and for each hour of her “main movies”, there were (at least) two hours of shorts, documentaries and commentaries.

And I guess the reason that it’s possible to make a box set like this is because Varda had her own production company for most of her life (Ciné Tamaris), so she owned the rights to her own movies. And she was also interested in revisiting her movies, so when a new DVD edition was released, she sometimes made a documentary about that movie; seeing what had happened in the intervening years. And it’s fascinating stuff, much of it.

Compare with Criterion’s Bergman box — which is (physically) twice the size, but is not complete, and does not exhaustively include every TV appearance and discussion etc…

Er… did I have a point here? Uhm. Probably not. I have to make dinner now.

This is a series of very short films (I think they’re a bit longer than the announced “one minute”, though), each one about one photograph.

Varda does the “this makes me think of” school of commentary — we don’t learn a lot about how each photo was done (or about who did them)…

Some of these are more interesting than others, and I guess seen separately (shown randomly on TV, perhaps?) would be fun. But seen as a single 26 minute short, it’s hard to keep paying attention.

Oh, there were 170 of these? Wow.

Une minute pour une image. Agnès Varda. 1983. ⚂

As documentaries go, this is pretty odd. But then again, it’s Varda, right? Anyway, an exhibition featuring hundreds of pre-WWII pictures with teddy bears piqued her interest and she made this documentary about the person who mounted the show, and the show itself.

It’s pretty interesting, and there are, of course, twists. (Sort of.)

Ydessa, les ours et etc…. Agnès Varda. 2004. ⚄

Oh, is this another movie-from-stills…

No!

Heh heh.

(It’s the same guy as in the pic above.)

It starts off being a pretty straightforward documentary about a picture, but then it gets deeper. It’s fascinating.

Ulysse. Agnès Varda. 1983. ⚄

This is one of those still photo shorts — but it’s pretty long as these things go. The voiceover (both Varda and at least a couple of male voices) says that Varda went to Cuba and took pictures, so we’re presumably watching these pictures here?

So we’re getting all the usual tricks — zooming on the photos, rapid edits, lots of music, and narration that just doesn’t let up.

It’s not my favourite genre. I mean, the still-into-movie thing has been done brilliantly, like with La Jetée, but this isn’t that.

That’s what I always say.

I didn’t think this worked well as a film, but it’s kinda interesting.

Salut, les cubains. Agnès Varda. 1963. ⚂

So — this is a movie jointly directed by Varda and an artist called JR. Is this the only co-director credit in her career?

It’s a lot less exacting than Varda’s earlier movies — things go in and out of focus, and the blocking is pretty random (instead of meticulous).

Heh — the concept is that they drive around in this photo booth car (that has a huge printer built in, apparently)…

… and they take pics of people like this? Well, that’s fun.

Yes, that’s Varda’s toes.

This movie is très aimable, as the say. I mean, it’s less digressive than Varda’s movies usually are — there are fewer locations, people and encounters than you’d expect from something that’s structured kind of like a road movie. It’s more… efficient? So it’s not a masterpiece or anything, but there are glimpses of brilliance, and then the rest is very amiable.

Faces Places. JR & Agnès Varda. 2017. ⚄

That’s a lot of producers…

Oh, right! There was a section in the documentary Varda made about herself (I think) about his — Varda got a whole lot of money to do this movie (after the success of Jaquot de Nantes), and it features Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu… and everybody else. And if I remember correctly, it absolutely bombed at the box office, and Varda never got financing to do a “real” movie ever again. I guess The Gleaners and I is the closest, and that’s a documentary of sorts…

I may be confabulating, though; my intelligence is very artificial. Let’s see…

Wow. Just a single review? And what did it say?

And it’s from a blog! How useless! Nobody reads blogs!

There were apparently real reviews, but nobody at Rottentomatoes have bothered to integrate them:

Variety’s Lisa Nesselson gave a mixed review: “Agnes Varda, who has been making movies for 40 of the 100 years that motion pictures have existed, has put everything she knows about filmmaking and much of what she loves about the cinema into A Hundred and One Nights [sic]. But despite a star-decked cast and manifest good intentions, Varda’s self-described ‘divertimento’ soars in only a few spots.”

OK, let’s watch this thing…

That’s Mastroianni…

I’m quite enjoying this so far — it’s very whimsical, but it’s centred: It’s all about movies.

So I’m wondering whether that’s how it was sold to the investors — as a cross between 8½ and Cinema Paradiso: Broadly sentimental and amusing about being really into movies.

All of a sudden everything turned really boring… Dunno why.

Oh my god! Varda brought Sandrine Bonnaire’s character from Sans toit ni loi back from the dead! *sniff* I’m kinda tearing up…

Le bonheur…

Heh. She’s doing a nuit americaine with an American actor… how appropriate…

It’s brimming with Easter eggs — tiny references to other movies. But sometimes it seems like Varda doesn’t trust the nerdy audience to get the references. Like, in one ten second scene, a guy in 50s clothes and his boy shows up and steals a bike. That’s a fun reference to the de Sica movie, right? But then it’s spoilt a few scenes later when the guy goes “Italian neorealism strikes again”.

And, yes, it bombed.

I really enjoyed this movie. It’s so playful and amusing, but is also affecting. It’s almost, almost a masterpiece — but some of the scenes (especially some of the scenes with the most famous people (de Niro, Delon, Depardieu)) fell flat. (OK, the Delon scene was amusing.)

So I’m going with:

Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma. Agnès Varda. 1995. ⚄

The extras are fun, too.

I’ve never seen a movie by Winding Refn before (but I’ve seen his Mysterious Five adaptation now). I’m not at all sure why I bought this bluray — while his movies seem to look quite stylish and all, the hyperviolence of it all didn’t really seem my like cup of chamomile tea.

And, yes, this looks really stylish.

“It’s a sin”. The soundtrack is fun. And I’m enjoying this movie, but it’s like… it’s not as good as it thinks that it is? I may be totally misinterpreting it, and it’s all just a goofy goof, in which case: Mission accomplished. (But with extra violence.)

I suspect that Winding Refn didn’t quite have the budget to achieve the film he wanted, though. Let’s see…

Ouch. That’s a smaller budget than I guessed — I was thinking like $1M. In which case: Kudos; it looks more expensive than it is. And it raked in 10x the budget!

This guy is amazing.

It’s a compelling movie, but it does get bogged down in parts. It’s also kinda like somebody who only knows exploitation movies had seen one Godard movie and decided to make an art film? I wonder what the critics thought…

OK, pretty well-liked, but not universally so — I guess that’s what I expected.

I think… without an actor as committed as Tom Hardy was, there isn’t much of a movie here. I mean, I could see other actors in that part, but Hardy goes well beyond — and he manages to make this guy interesting without suggesting that he has any hidden depths? It’s an interesting performance.

But, like… I didn’t think it was totally successful, either.

Bronson. Nicolas Winding Refn. 2008. ⚃

Is this CGI?

It seems like the sun is directly outside these windows, no matter what angle the camera is shooting at? And it kinda looks fake, but then most films do these days, due to excessive colour grading…

Anyway, this is a Walter Hill movie? I guess I bought it because it features Sigourney Weaver, because she often picks fun movies to be in.

Hm. I thought this was somebody else? But who am I thinking of? Oh!

Walter Hill, Michael Mann… same same…

Walter Hill produced Alien and stuff. Hm…

Oh!

OK, then I guess I do remember who Walter Hill is.

Was this a really low budget movie?

Yeah, I guess. I mean, not super duper low, but…

Is that Sigourney with a beard? Everything here looks so fake…

Perhaps we’re supposed to notice the fake beard and it’s a plot thing?

I guess it isn’t Sigourney after all? But she’s accused of heinous human experiments, so perhaps this guy is an experiment? So far I’m liking this movie, even if everything looks so odd.

The oddest thing about this doctor is that she applies mascara to her patients.

Housekeeping!

Oh, it wasn’t Sigourney, it was Michelle Rodriguez! Plot twist!

Oops, spoilers.

As revenges go, it seems pretty elaborate — Sigourney (mad doctor) made a hitman into Michelle Rodriguez as revenge for killing her brother or something. It seems like a pretty large expenditure… and is that really an effective revenge, anyway?

Hey! Is this like a send-up of a thriller? That makes more sense…

Yeah… they’re just having fun with clichés and an absurd plot? And it is indeed pretty entertaining.

It’s an odd movie. Sigourney Weaver has a tendency to pop up in these movies, but I wonder how this movie came to be. It’s a low budget oddball movie, and even from the script it must be obvious that it wouldn’t have much of a general appeal.

And indeed, few people liked this movie:

“The Assignment” is an embarrassment all around, a murky, regrettable piece of gutter cinema. Next year’s Razzie Awards race starts here.

But no — it’s to odd to land on the Razzie Awards, too.

I liked it! I thought it was interesting, and both Rodriguez and Weaver are great here. It needed a higher budget, because that awful fake beard (and other er fake bits) gave away the gag straight away. But I like that somebody would put in this much work on a doomed film.

The Assignment. Walter Hill. 2016. ⚃

This movie is a companion piece to Jane B. par Agnès V — Birkin talks about a script she’s for a short film she’s written, and Varda says that they should expand it into a full film. Et voila. But the kids in this movie are played by Birkin’s and Varda’s real children, and it’s filmed in Birkin’s house, so while this is a fictional narrative, it a bit blurry at the edges…

Birkin explained in the previous movie what this is about — Birkin’s character gets the hots for a 14 year old boy, and tragedy ensues. So it’s kinda creepy, but… having Varda’s child play the boy makes it even more creepy? I think?

I think that’s Birkin’s real parents?

And then the movie takes a really bizarre turn — Birkin’s character’s mother tells her to take the boy to a remote island!?

OK, perhaps this is supposed to be a fantasy sequence…

It’s a good movie… and Varda foregrounds all the problematic things about a story like this — she doesn’t try to make it reasonable. The performances are good, it looks great, but there’s still something not quite gripping about it all.

Kung-fu master!. Agnès Varda. 1988. ⚃

Hey! Jane Birkin is a great actor.

This is a weird movie, and I like it.

Does Jane Birkin have a Birkin bag!?

It’s a kind of documentary movie — it’s a portrait of Jane Birkin, but we get fictional interludes and stuff. It’s got a nice flow.

That’s a nice kitchen.

The movie is kinda entrancing, but some of the tableaux are pretty… lame. I mean, everything looks so great, but we get a lot of these mini-dramas that aren’t that interesting. Semi-improvised, perhaps?

It’s really good. It’s got a kind of stream of consciousness flow, and is edited together incredibly well.

Jane B. par Agnès V. Agnès Varda. 1988. ⚄

I guess this is a pre-code movie? It seems uncensored.

But this is fantastic. It’s really melancholic. And no swelling orchestration, which is unusual for 1932.

That’s a nice set.

Is that a real dog?

Very Lynch.

It’s quite a strange movie.

The first fifteen minutes were ingenious, but now the tensions has kinda dissipated — it’s basically just going to be about this drunk who’s marrying this woman? And it’s about him being a drunk?

That’s no fun.

No! Now she’s starting to drink, too! They’re both going merrily to hell! Except for them both being depressed and not merry!

He said the line.

Hey! It’s Cary Grant! In a very small role.

Wise words.

Well… this started so well, and then it’s just kinda boring.

But all the critics like it, so don’t mind me.

Merrily We Go To Hell. Dorothy Arzner. 1932. ⚂

Let’s see… I’m guessing… 7 pieces (rooms), cuisine (kitchen)… er… s deb? Dunno. To let?

So — we’re shown a lot of empty rooms… and then an imaginary version of how they might look when they’re furnished?

But there’s also a narrative here…

Yum yum!

Heh heh.

Well, that is memorable.

Yum yum.

I think this might be a dream sequence.

It’s a pretty intriguing short (well, it’s a long short), but it feels a bit unresolved? There’s a number of striking images, but also some that don’t feel that successful. And the storyline is pretty vague…

It’s pretty good, I guess?

7 P., cuis., s. deb… (A SAISIR). Agnès Varda. 1984. ⚃

It’s a nice little short — beautiful shots, soothing kinda meta voice-over — but… It’s not really compelling.

Plaisir d’amour en Iran. Agnès Varda. 1976. ⚃

This is a very didactic short, and is probably more shocking today than in 1975 by the forthright images? It’s pretty good.

Réponse de femmes. Agnès Varda. 1975. ⚃

This is included as an extra on the One Sings, The Other Doesn’t bluray — but it’s not listed in the table of contents. I guess perhaps because it’s not been restored or something? It’s a movie made for TV in 1971, and it seems to be about the Fascist coup in Greece and refugees from Greece?

It’s an odd movie — large portions are straight-up interviews with Greek refugees, but then there’s a fictional narrative in between those bits (that’s also about Greek refugees, but also about this woman).

It’s good! It’s interesting stuff, so I wonder why it hasn’t been restored? Perhaps the extras on the disk will explain… (There’s no Wikipedia entry for the film.)

But it’s really unrestored — not just all the dust and stuff, but the film skips and jumps and it’s pretty annoying to watch in parts… Surely there’s a low cost option to at least stabilise a movie?

Oh, this was never shown — and it wasn’t completed, either. So this is a work print of the incomplete film? The liner notes in the booklet that accompanies the discs says it was “suppressed”, but it doesn’t say much more.

So it sounds like Varda was on the outs with the TV station?

But what happened with the fictional narrative? We haven’t seen anything from that bit for quite a while…

OK, now we’re back with actors, but … different ones?

Perhaps this was supposed to be edited differently.

Er… I think I missed who these people are…

And now… Hm. Well, OK.

Well, OK, it’s a work print. It looks like it may have become a compelling movie, but as it stands, it’s a sketch towards a movie, I guess?

So how do you throw the die on something like this… I mean, it’s unfinished. But it’s kinda interesting? Perhaps the end result could have been great? I’ll just go with what it was like to watch it now, which was both frustrating and occasionally riveting:

Nausicaa. Agnès Varda. 1971. ⚂

This is the movie that convinced a generation that Johnny Depp and Ricki Lake were cool. (Well, for a while.)

Hey! That’s Iggy Pop!

But this movie is pretty odd in that it doesn’t seem to have any of Waters’ usual actors? I mean, not even Mink Stole?

Oh oh wait — Mink Stole plays Hatchet Face’s mother…

But that’s it?

Hm… Oh, there’s more, but it teeny tiny roles. And Patricia Hearst. OK, there’s more than a couple.

This was even better than I remembered!

The last fifteen minutes are simply glorious.

Cry-Baby. John Waters. 1990. ⚄

Ethereum? This movie is ahead of its time!

Oh, there’s that guy…

And Christopher Walken!

I have no idea why I have this blu ray, but I do, so something must have made me buy it. It’s made by the distinguished director of Demolition Man (and who has apparently never done a feature film after this).

It’s a comedy? But it’s really unfunny?

Oh, there’s that guy… er… was he in Buffy? Oh, er, Will & Grace?

High praise:

I don’t think it was a fabulous film by any means but compare it to Batman and Robin? Speed 2? Its not as bad as that!

Well that’s odd — why isn’t there a tomatometer number here? It has more than 30 reviews…

All the negative ones are empty? Haven’t seen that before. Technical glitch?

This movie is really tedious, as you may have guessed from my googling…

Ah right:

This was the first film produced by Alicia Silverstone under her production company First Kiss. Benicio del Toro was handpicked for his role by Silverstone after she had seen his 1995 film The Usual Suspects.

This is so awful I have to bail at 40 minutes in.

Excess Baggage. Marco Brambilla. 1997. ⚀

This short is very nouvelle vague, but like the previous movie, it doesn’t really seem to be Varda’s aesthetics — it’s kinda gimmicky? But it seems more heartfelt, which is rather Varda.

Hey, it’s Maria Falconetti!

Well, I dunno. It seems like the movie’s heart is in the right place, but it doesn’t tell us why we should care about these people, and the artifice of it all just makes it rather annoying?

Elsa la rose. Agnès Varda. 1966. ⚁

Well, I dunno. I mean, I’m a huge Varda fan, but this seems like such a mish-mash… It’s less like a Varda movie than a Godard pastiche?

Lots of crabs. Must be symbolic.

And then all of a sudden that guy’s playing chess with er satan or somebody. But a very high tech satan — he’s got a 3D chessboard and surveillance cameras!

Which makes sense.

The other guy is on the side of lurve.

It’s a pretty good idea, I guess, but the resulting movie isn’t really that gripping.

Right:

Les Créatures was an official selection of the 27th Venice International Film Festival, though it received mixed reviews. The film failed commercially.

Well, I can see that. I don’t think it’s a successful movie, but it’s kinda interesting? But…

Huh:

There are no critic reviews yet for The Creatures.

Nobody has reviewed this movie for the Tomatoes? Perhaps it hasn’t been shown for a while? So I guess it was a real bomb commercially.

And it’s not a lost masterpiece.

The Creatures. Agnès Varda. 1966. ⚂

After watching perhaps the worst movie I’ve ever seen (see “previous” in this post), I had to watch something guaranteed to be good. And I’ve seen this a couple of times before, but it’s been a long time — and this is a new 2K restoration from Criterion. So it’s gonna be even better!

The only thing I remember from the plot is that these murderous sweet old ladies kill off a lot of people…

… so I’ve forgotten completely the Frankenstein guy and the Peter Lorre guy.

So it’s not all about those sweet old murderers!

Because these two are murderers, too, but of the bad kind!

This movie is so funny, and so over the top. And Grant is magnificent.

Arsenic and Old Lace. Frank Capra. 1944. ⚄

OK, I have absolutely no idea why I bought this bluray… I haven’t seen any other movie by the director or anything. But I see that I ripped this disk the same day I ripped movies by Jeff Baena, so perhaps he said that this was an amazing movie or something? (Those movies were disappointing, too.)

This is really, really bad. It’s like a metaphorical movie where they state all the metaphorical implications up front. But while high.

I’m so bored by this movie, and I’m only ten minutes in — I didn’t know that it was possible to be this bored.

I’m this bored.

Isn’t that that guy?

After a seemingly interminable 15 minutes which was Dave shouting at them not to enter the cardboard maze, they’ve finally entered the maze — this is where the movie should have started.

Spoilers: It’s bigger on the inside.

It’s still in-credibly tedious.

Actually, I’m not sure why I hate this so much. It’s an inoffensive little small budget whimsical horror/comedy movie… that I hate so much. Sooo much.

*sigh*

*sigh*

Yes:

I don’t know if the same person conceived the visuals and wrote the text, but the former are wonderful while the latter is unbearable.

I really, really disliked this movie, and the dislike was immediate — I loathed this movie from the first scene on. That sounds totally irrational, right? And I can’t explain why I hate this so much. I mean, the performances were bad, and the dialogue was horrible, but it looked pretty OK, and that usually counts for something, right? But nope.

Perhaps it’s the forced whimsy of it all — it’s fake whimsy.

Dave Made a Maze. Bill Watterson. 2017. ⚀

Gates of hell!? (I’m learning French, but I think that’s what it says…)

This Criterion box set feels like a cornucopia, and I’m sitting here wishing they’d give this treatment to other directors (I’m thinking Chantal Akerman, David Lynch or Peter Greenaway, say), but on the other hand, perhaps Varda is ideally positioned to have a box like this made. For one, she had her own production company, so there’s no problems with getting the rights to it all. But beyond that practical issue, her filmmaking also makes for a compelling box set: She didn’t do that many full feature-length movies, but when she did, she revisited them later and made documentaries about making them. So instead of having to sprinkle these disks with people-discussing-her-films, we get her discussing the films herself, which is more fun.

And she also did quite a number of short movies that revolve around the same issues as her main movies, so it all… fits. I’m not sure that there are that many other directors that had the same sort of output.

That said, this isn’t a very good short.

Le lion volatil. Agnès Varda. 2003. ⚂

This is a documentary about the shops on the street Varda lived in — and as usual with Varda, it’s very wistful and emotional. These hand-written signs… these are shops you know won’t last much longer — they’re remnants of an earlier time that would soon disappear. So it’s a movie full of nostalgia for something that hasn’t disappeared yet.

This is not one of those documentaries where you drop by with a camera un-announced. Everybody’s been warned, and are putting their best foot forward — everybody’s got their hair done up nicely, and are presenting their wares, so you get tableaux like this…

(But I’m guessing Varda herself arranged some of this scenery, which makes it even more artificial.)

Right:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry for this scene. And I have to ask myself if my life is somehow similar to her.

It’s a moving documentary — the couple in the parfumerie is just heartreaking… but some of the things Varda does here doesn’t quite work. They’re too artificial — like the scene with the magician? I just found that really boring, but that may be just me — I’ve got an antipathy towards magic… But moreover, the forced parallels between the stage magic and the “real” stuff was groan-worthy.

She already had gold with the less staged sequences! They’re ⚅ sequences, but I’m going with:

Daguerréotypes. Agnès Varda. 1975. ⚄

This is pretty amusing. I’m not really digging the colour grading on this (everything except the reds is given a greyish desaturated treatment), but it’s engaging.

So this is a comedy about a young criminal in Germany trying to avoid getting sent to Senegal by marrying some German… I guess it’s a screwball comedy?

Heh heh heh classic. It’s basically the same plot as the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Proposal, if I remember correctly… Or the Andie MacDowell movie Green Card? But with the twist that he marries a guy (and neither are gay).

Gotta adjust the decor.

This is not gonna end well! I think there’s gonna be a really depressing third act…

I think I kinda guessed right — it’s not as depressing as it could have been, but it’s pretty depressing. Gotta have that third act that All Serious or it’s not a Proper Movie.

In a way, it’s a surprisingly traditional movie — it reiterates the plot from the previous movie in that you absolutely can’t cheat the system (if I remember those previous movies correctly). And it also does some odd choices — like not having the guy try to get a job or something (no matter where he is).

The first two thirds of this movie are a lot of fun, but the third act, man…

Toubab. Florian Dietrich. 2021. ⚃

I’m guessing this is a Hong Kong movie? I really haven’t seen that many films from Hong Kong, for some reason or other…

Wow, this is so goofy… I immediately thought that this looked very 80s, but it can’t be. But it’s got that indie 80s fuck off attitude, that audacity — it’s very Aki Kaurismäki, in other words. But with judo and stuff.

So much product placement.

I laughed, I cried, and I was fascinated. It’s just so full on — it commits completely to its concept, and you get pure cinema. It’s all emotion.

I mean, I’ve seen more than a couple of movies in my life, but this seems totally original. But then again, I’ve not seen that many movies from Hong Kong, and perhaps this is just what movies are there?

It’s a masterpiece, anyway. And very silly. I was totally riveted. It looks gorgeous, the performances were so much fun, and it’s just totally original. And now I want to watch all of Johnnie To’s movies.

柔道龍虎榜. Johnnie To. 2004. ⚅

Yeah, totes.

This is a very shocking movie! I mean, such manhandling of the cat…

Well, it’s a movie with a series of striking images… but it feels pretty disjointed. I mean, it really feels like watching moving versions of still shots, sort of.

And Varda’s not being very generous with her subjects.

It’s a series of striking tableaux, but it feels pretty under cooked.

L’opéra-mouffe. Agnès Varda. 1958. ⚂

Oh, I thought this was gonna be a western… I’ve bought a bunch of Howard Hawks movies lately, but this isn’t that.

Instead it’s the only guy who looks like a director ought to look.

*gasp*

Noo! Jump the other way!

This is very noir (an early one; this is from 1941), so you gotta have Humphrey Bogart.

This is very early Bogart, isn’t it? I mean, he’d been hanging around for a decade, but he wasn’t really a star? But then:

This, Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca all in a row.

And that’s Ida Lupino, I guess? Who gets billing above Bogart here.

It’s a horribly racist caricature, but on the other hand, it’s an ingenious way to be lazy… But I guess that’s the joke.

I mean…

But that’s Willie Best, isn’t it? It is! I’ve seen him in oodles of movies, like The Ghost Breakers…

Now that’s scary! Bogey smiling!

That’s more like it.

YEAH! Over!

I dunno… It might just be me, because I sorta got distracted and started doing laundry in the middle of this, but I don’t think this is a very compelling movie. Lupino is just kinda… there… and Bogart is trying his best to make this movie happen, but it’s just a very, very silly plot, and nothing interesting happens, really. This movie is like they made a movie from the discards of a heist movie; collecting all the scenes that were cut from an exciting movie.

Actually, that sounds kinda interesting, but this isn’t that interesting.

This movie has it all — club-footed girls, annoying dogs, cross-eyed handymen… It’s so corny it could be Iowa.

But it also wants to be this super-dramatic movie, and it just doesn’t make sense.

Indeed. But:

It’s a well-regarded movie.

Indeed:

Time reviewed the film when released as having “less of realistic savagery than of the quaint, nostalgic atmosphere of costume drama.”

I dunno. I didn’t much like this movie? But I might totally be wrong.

High Sierra. Raoul Walsh. 1941. ⚂

I love the way she has two voiceovers — there’s the main one, who waxes lyrical about all these things at the Côte d’azur, and then there’s another voice that softly tells you where each shot is from… it’s kinda hypnotic.

Woolen bathing trunks!? Itchy!

Er… Dream… Hill?! That’s can’t be right.

Anyway, this is a lovely short. Beautiful shots and amusing, whimsical takes on being at the French riviera.

Hm… perhaps I should go there this winter…

Du côté de la côte. Agnès Varda. 1958. ⚅

Heh, I’m now watching the DVD extras — both this one and the previous short were financed by the Tourist Office. And they’re effective ads! I want to go all these places she’s been! Money well spent, Tourist Office!

Restored… and digitised! My French is getting so french.

Is that the most French tableau ever?

Untrue!

This is a wonderful short — they’re basically showing us all these fabulous French castles, and the voiceover talks about how they were created and what their significance are — but the movie doesn’t really explain why it exists. It just seems so random and whimsical: It’s a series of gorgeous shots of gorgeous castles with gorgeous models modelling in front of them — but why?

It’s mysterious. And great. I want visit all these castles.

Ó saisons, ó châteux. Agnès Varda. 1958. ⚅

This is a short included on the first disc in the Criterion Varda box set… and it’s the only thing listed (except the main feature), but there’s a whole bunch of documentaries included, too. It’s like a cornucopia, but it’s gonna take months to watch the box if all disks are like this.

Varda uses CGI extensively here…

The performances are fine, but the whimsy seems forced, and it seems more like a way to play with CGI elements than anything else.

Les 3 boutons. Agnès Varda. 2015. ⚂

OK, I’ve completed all the box sets I had going… so I can start a new one!

And I had to choose the Agnès Varda box set from Criterion simply because it has an oddball format and pokes out of the shelf I have the unseen movies on.

Makes sense to me!

Oddly enough (or perhaps not) the box sets starts with a film from 2019 — which is basically a talk Varda gave to present her movies. So we start the box set with an introduction… I wonder whether she made this with the box set in mind?

This isn’t just Varda talking with clips from movies — we get extensive bits from other “behind the scenes” movies Varda has done before, but it’s presented as if it’s part of the talk.

So it’s a kind of fictionalised presentation? Very strange genre.

Hey… that’s a different venue…

Oh, there’s a lot of different venues — she did a tour?

I dunno… I don’t think this movie quite works? Varda had a really interesting career, but this manages to make it seem kinda boring: It’s just one thing after another — first I did this, then I did this — without really telling us why we should be interested.

Yeah, that tracks: It’s just kinda boring. Which is something that Varda’s movies never are, usually.

(Well, she died a couple of weeks after the premiere, so perhaps that influenced the scores…)

Heh heh.

The final 20 minutes are really good, though, so let’s go with:

Varda by Agnès. Agnès Varda. 2019. ⚂

Very risque.

Is that a matte painting? Hm… Can it be?

That’s one weird-ass god.

I’m guessing that this is a pre-Hayes movie?

Well, I dunno… I mean, I haven’t seen that many movies with Clara Bow (the ‘it’ girl of the silents), and I guess that’s she’s fine here, but the movie kinda meanders weirdly — it seems so formless. We were presented first with one situation (which turned out to be her childhood, being attacked by Savages (I mean Native Americans)), and then another situation 18 years later (which I thought would be the movie), but then we move even later and that seems to be what the movie is really about?

That is, it took a long time to get to the actual plot, and by the time that happened, I’d rather lost interest…

It feels kinda clumsy.

The directory is John Francis Dillon who’s made dozens and dozens of movies — but this is one of his last movies (he died two years later).

Haven’t heard of any of those.

Oh, and Clara Bow only did one movie after this one.

Not only is it a gay bar (the first in a film, according to wikipedia)…

… but it’s a communist gay bar! Wonderful!

Well, I dunno. I don’t think it works? It’s kinda “eeeh” on so many planes at the same time.

Call Her Savage. John Francis Dillon. 1932. ⚂

I dunno… is that really the optimal posture for using a toilet brush in a toilet?

Anyway, I think I’ve seen all the other movies by the Wachowskis, but not this one. It’s starting off pretty well (except for the unrealistic toilet cleaning posture).

Hey, this is really good! It’s interesting and really tense and I think I know where this is going, but it’s very entertaining…

This movie looks great — that fight sequence was awesome.

Some home decor…

Those candles must have taken half the budget.

ANyway… I think this was a box office bomb? (I haven’t looked it up now.) I couldn’t understand why, because this movie kicks ass. But now I’m kinda getting… like… “uhm?” I mean, there’s several twists and several infodumps, but the main character here is just going “well, do you have some less dressy clothes I could wear?” instead of the gazillion questions you’d have… I think perhaps they were going against the “OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING” cliché you have to suffer through in most of these films (as it’s revealed that nothing is what you thought it was), but they kinda went overboard into catatonic instead.

That is, I think we’ve been through like nine doublecrosses and reveals and it’s not confusing or anything, but if I was that woman, I’d sit down with that guy for half an hour and just have him explain everything.

That might not make for a thrilling movie, though.

Instead this is what she chooses to say:

Which is so over the top not what nerdly expectations clamour for that I’m picturing the Wachowskis going HA HA HA THAT”LL LEARN EM

And suddenly we’re into a Brazilesque parody of bureaucracy. Has this movie been a comedy all along and I just didn’t realise it?

… wat

I think I speak for everybody when I say:

wat

And… it’s just… frustrating how the Mila Kunis character does one stupid thing after another, and this guy with the ears has to swoop in, time and time again, to save her. The repetition is annoying.

At some point it gets more “OK, if she’s that stupid and gormless, perhaps she shouldn’t be the Princess and Owner of Earth”.

I loved the first hour of this movie. Then it got progressively more “wat” with every scene, and… I dunno. It feels like the screenwriters just gave up at some point, which is frustrating, because it’s such a great concept and world to set a film in. And it looks great, and has fun performances, and…

So people hated this movie, and I wonder whether that was a brigading effect — I can totally see why Nazis would hate this movie. But no:

If it was brigaded, you’d have a huge number of people at 1, but since most people gave it 5/6, this means that people actually disliked it. And the critics hated it even more:

And it lost a lot of money.

I understand all that, because it’s a lot, and it’s a lot of “wat”. But I liked it anyway. I can totally see this being a cult favourite in 20 years time, because it’s so over the top.

Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis. 2015. ⚄

Wow, this is so meta. I love it!

Wow. Nick Cage is the only person I’ve seen who has total Botox Forehead and wrinkles on his forehead at the same time. That’s talent!

OK, now his forehead is moving, so perhaps it’s not botox? They just CGId his forehead in that scene? Or… HE”S SUCH A BRILLIANT ACTOR HE CAN ACT FOREHEAD BOTOXED

OK, this movie was perfect, true ⚅, until this moment, and now it’s cringe.

I don’t know… Well, I had to take a short break to make some leftovers into dinner, and when I came back, I found myself rather unenthused by the proceedings. I mean, it’s properly silly and stupid, which I like, but it felt like it was more random instead of being inspired?

Might just be me.

Well, OK, then the last third was insane again.

But does it, though, A. A. Dowd from Digital Trends? Does it?

Anyway, Cage had such a weird career: He started off doing the coolest movies imaginable, and then went on to do decades of the … worst movies possible. Watching the “making of” bits on this disk, I don’t think this is going to lead to a change in his career (as in — starting to do good movies again), because he sounds absolutely dissociated from reality in the interview snippets.

But then again, perhaps that an act, too?

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Tom Gormican. 2022. ⚄

Oh, I thought this was just going to be footage from the performance. But instead it’s more of a normal documentary, where they talk about how much of a disaster the festival was, and stuff like that.

Well that’s disappointing.

Actually… this is really good. It was a strange and hostile festival, and this really captures that.

Did anybody hear the music? The field is enormous.

Such a consummately professional microphone setup.

And… I think I was wrong? We got an introduction, but now we’ve been shown two songs in full without any interruption? I love it!

This is the tensest concert movie I’ve ever seen. What a fucking nightmare.

I’m not surprised that it took almost half a century to release this, because it’s *gngnngg*

This is seriously one of the best concerts movies ever. It’s so un-annoying — it doesn’t have three hundred people giving one line about how amazing Joni is. Instead it’s 90% straight up concert footage, 5% Joni giving some context to what we’re seeing, and 5% footage from around the festival.

It’s kinda perfect.

I mean, your mileage will vary — if you don’t like Joni Mitchell’s music, you won’t like this movie.

(My only nitpick: The original footage was presumably not in 16:9, so it would have been nice if this movie wasn’t either, but whatevs.)

Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now. Murray Lerner. 2018. ⚅

Oh right — this was edited into the Cléo movie, but it was originally a separate short. Very Buster Keatonesque.

Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald. Agnès Varda. 1961. ⚃

This is very Varda — it’s just basically about these figures on the walls, and it’s kinda cool.

Les dites cariatides. Agnès Varda. 1984. ⚄

Oh, it’s the Xmas story, but with three cowboys as the kings?

OK, this is pretty lame. It’s slathered in sentimental music, and the performances are thirsty for scenery. I mean, it’s an Xmas short, so both of those things might be perfectly fine, but somehow here it’s just annoying.

Finally we have Jesus’ parents. (They’re Mexican, as you can see.)

So this guy is an angel, huh?

It’s pretty absurd — they’re apparently not allowed to say that Mary I mean Maria is giving birth, so whenever this woman tells people that, she whispers into their ears so the audience can’t hear something as offensive as “she’s giving birth”.

It’s also a kind of … reversal of the Xmas story? Everybody that hears that Mary I mean Maria is giving birth, they do their utmost to help, which is kinda the opposite of the original story, isn’t it? So I guess this is just a kinda anti-Semitic movie, right?

I mean, it’s pretty affecting… But is it good? Eh.

Star in the Night. Don Siegel. 1945. ⚂

I guess this is a kind of coda to the original Nightmare on Elm Street series — they’d killed off Freddy several times, but in the 6th movie (named “Freddy’s Dead”) they were kinda more serious about it.

So if I remember correctly, this is a very meta movie, kinda about the Elm Street movie phenomenon, and done by Wes Craven himself, of course. There was a postmodern meta thing going on in the early 90s, right? Like with Last Action Hero… and like all these movies, it bombed at the box office. I think this one grossed the least?

Yeah. It probably didn’t make back what it cost? So after this one, it was over — not because they killed Freddy, but because Wes Craven killed the series.

(But of course, he tweaked things a bit, and made a slightly less meta Scream movie, and he was a star again.)

Very meta!

But it’s scary! It’s the scariest one since the first one!

That’s a very scary kid. And a very scary broom!

What makes this scarier than you’d expect is that you have no idea what the genre of this even is! Is this an Elm Street movie? Is she just imagining things? What’s going on!!!

So meta. And: Love that mobile phone.

Hey! It’s the actual producer! Bob whatsisname! Playing himself. This is so meta.

But what I wanted to say is: Those aren’t real Le Corbusier chairs — they look like knock-offs that done at 1.3x scale. Which I love! I want those! The real Le Corbusier chairs are way too small! People back then were tiny! Especially French ones!

Uh-oh!

As someone who has trouble falling asleep — I’ve never (well, after being 6 years old) dozed off on the couch, or while driving, or while watching an opera — these people just dozing off at the drop at the hat seem like science fiction to me. But I do know that they exist.

For me, falling asleep is, like, a lot of work.

It’s Wes!

OK, it’s less scary now — I’m not sure how, but somehow the tension dissipated all of a sudden…

It’s the longest of the Elm Street movies, and … it feels like it should be over by now, but there still 40 minutes to go.

Well, it’s the best Elm Street movie since the first one, but is it good? It starts off really swell, but then just wastes the fantastic tension that’s been built up. It’s not that there’s egregiously superfluous scenes here, but it just feels like it should have been a lot tighter.

And… this is the final movie in this box set. And this is the final box set! I mean, that I’m watching! I know it’s absurd, but once I’ve started a box set, I feel sort of… an obligation to finish the box set? I mean, it’s not giving me nightmares or something, but I had five different box sets going at the same time, and it feels good to have a clean slate.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 7: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Wes Craven. 1994. ⚃

This must be Jarman’s last movie or something? It’s included on the Blue DVD and I thought Blue was his final movie…

It’s quite like his 70s movies, in a way… no sound (but a Brian Eno soundtrack), and quick quick quick cuts.

This is really good stuff — it has the energy of his 70s movies. But it’s also rather sad, because it’s so … retrospective.

Glitterbug. Derek Jarman. 1994. ⚄

Hey, this starts off pretty cool… like something resembling a real nightmare.

Heh heh.

Anyway, this is directed by Rachel Talalay, who’d produced two of the previous movies, and been involved with the production from the start. I’m assuming that after the fifth (disastrous) movie, she went “fuck it I’ll direct it myself”?

The previous movie had a budget of $6M and made $22M, and this has a budget of $11M (and you can immediately tell) and made $34M. But oddly enough, it’s the final “real” Nightmare on Elm Street movie (although there’s one more movie in this box set).

Well, this movie started off very well, but the tension has kinda dissipated. I can see what they’re going for: More humour (and not just Freddy doing quips), and also a more dream-like atmosphere throughout. Which is a good idea. And this is definitely better than the previous movie, but…

I think we’ve all had that experience when using maps.

OK, that was the most original kill in the series.

Oh right, the last part of this movie is supposed to be in 3D… which this isn’t.

So they’re showing us these things that are supposed to be all 3D-ey, and it’s not as exciting in 2D, I guess.

Heh heh. (Uncredited.)

It’s one of the better movies in the series, I think? Or… I mean, it’s mostly kinda boring, but it really tries to make the whole “mythology” make sense, and to be original, and it kinda succeeds. It’s pretty entertaining. And also kinda boring.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddy’s Dead. Rachel Talalay. 1991. ⚃

The director is saying that since they had to shoot the end in 3D, they were severely limited in what kind of effects they could do… which explains why the end is kinda lame (while the first two thirds are kinda cool).

I guess this is what was expanded into a feature film? The shots seem quite familiar, even…

And it’s in Portuguese (I think? no some other language?), but it’s subtitled in French, and apparently I know enough French now (after Duolinguing for three months) that I understand the subtitles!!!

OK, I had to use Google translate for “ailleurs”.

Gotta agree with the sentiment.

Anyway, this is really good — fascinating imagery. And I can see why they wanted to expand this into a full movie.

Or is this a short version of the movie? It’s been a while since I saw it…

Tabatô. João Viana. 2013. ⚄

This short is apparently filmed in one long take? It takes place in a mostly dried-out swimming pool, and it’s full of these striking tableaux…

It’s non-narrative, I guess. It’s cool.

A piscina. Iana Ferreira, João Viana. 2004. ⚄

This is a really, really stylish short with a not totally clear plot. It’s fun.

To digress for a moment — I’m watching these shorts because they’re included as extras on DVDs and blurays I’ve seen, but is there a “real” distribution channel for shorts these days? I know that Wes Anderson released a batch of shorts on Netflix recently, but those were pretty long shorts, and it was “a thing”: They’re being pushed as if they’re a TV series, almost. I’m not very familiar with streaming services anyway, but I don’t think they usually carry shorts (and especially not experimental shorts)? That’s more of a … Vimeo thing, so unmonetised. I guess a wider distribution for shorts was one of the things people talked about when streaming was new, but I don’t think that’s happened, and it’s not difficult to see why: People either want A Big Chunk (i.e., a movie) that they can commit to for a couple of hours, or Something On The TV (i.e., a tv series episode) that they don’t have to pay that much attention to. And a short is a short thing you have to pay attention to, so it’s not… part of what people are interested in?

Anyway.

DVD extras. Might still be the place where people are actually watching shorts.

(Well, and film festivals.)

I like how everything grows more and more out of control — even the light levels.

It’s a good short.

Alfama. João Viana. 2009. ⚃

Hey, is that Futura?

I’ve seen some of the Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts before, but much, much earlier than this. Like late 20s/early 30s. This is from 1939, and it seems more… professional? And less funny. It’s basically just two gags, and that’s not enough for ten minutes.

But I guess it’s pretty amiable.

Duel Personalities. George Sidney. 1939. ⚂

This short is presented as an extended reportage of a somewhat paranoid woman… it’s interesting.

She gives a bunch of factoids about local history and stuff, while the interviewer keeps saying that that’s not what she wants to talk about.

But then there’s a huge plot twist!

It’s a solid short — it’s intriguing, and then we get a surprise. Class!

Stalin My Neighbour. Carol Morley. 2001. ⚄

There’s frequently shorts included on the disks I buy, but I usually don’t watch them while watching the main feature. Not quite sure why… it’s like “oh, I’m done with that! next!” when I’m watching a movie.

But I’ve marked all these films as “mostly-seen” instead of “seen”, meaning that there’s stuff I might want to watch later. So… why not start watching these things now? Right? Perhaps a couple of days of shorts. Or not, depending on whether I get bored or have other things to do.

So here’s the first one: A short included on the Alcohol Years DVD.

This movie is a bunch of short vignettes illustrating headlines from British tabloids? I guess that’s a concept.

Like this one is based on “Her husband was granted divorce yesterday after complaining that his wife was moving furniture around in their house for 30 years.” So it’s these slightly absurd things, many of which live on in memes.

And many of them seem like urban legends.

But it’s amusing, I guess… And it tries to add some gravitas.

Everyday Something. Carol Morley. 2002. ⚃

Uh-oh! Somebody’s in a shower! Somebody’s gonna get killed!

Ooops, nope.

Oh, they’re “expanding the lore”… this is about Freddie’s origin?

He’s apparently the child of a hundred insane guys and one nun. Well, that’s appropriate.

This movie looks pretty good?

I’m kinda bored already, and the Nightmare movies aren’t usually this boring. I wonder what happened here… Oh:

Director Stephen Hopkins has expressed disappointment with the final product, stating that “It was a rushed schedule without a reasonable budget and after I finished it, New Line and the MPAA came in and cut the guts out of it completely. What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”

And it’s the second-lowest grossing movie in the series, so people didn’t really like it either.

The movie looks pretty good for a movie with this kind of budget, but it’s just really boring, and doesn’t seem to make much sense. Even for an Elm Street movie.

ABORT ABORT

(See, she’s pregnant.)

Seems accurate.

I mean, making a movie is difficult and stuff. The first movies worked because they were indeed nightmarish. But this movie seems like it’s made by somebody who’s never even had a nightmare. Instead it just a bunch of… random tableaux that just feel silly.

He’s being sucked into a comic book, see? A common nightmare.

Nice matte painting.

Such Escher.

This movie is in-credibly boring. And it so weird, because it has a lot of fun horror concepts going, but it’s still just really tedious.

So I was going to give this ⚀, but I guess some of the special effects are kinda amusing, so:

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Stephen Hopkins. 1989. ⚁

As has been happening with this Elm Street box set, the documentaries are more entertaining than the movies themselves. They’re so… so… OK, the producer says she was burned out after doing a lot of Freddie movies, so she skipped doing this movie (and she also had to do Cry-Baby), and also because, as she said, this movie had the worst concept in the series.

You usually don’t get that level of honesty in these documentaries!

And then you get interviews with the writers and you realise why this movie is as bad as it is, and it’s because they’re totally moronic. Talking about “the collective unconsciousness” and “the imagination of God” as explanations for nightmares, and… they just let them spout this idiocy. It’s very entertaining, especially when intercut with the producer who explains how none of this works and nobody wants to see this (and that’s why the movie bombed).

(Well. It made money, but not as much as the others.)

This looks uncannily like a late 70s British movie… but it’s from 1999?

Wow, that’s some way to start a movie…

Well, I guess it’s set in the 70s, so there’s a reason it looks like a late 70s movie.

It’s grim up north.

The actors are absolutely amazing — even the actors manage to be period perfect — but this is a harrowing film to watch. Something horrible is gonna happen in every scene, it seems like.

I think the moral of this movie might be that kids should never be unsupervised, and that it’s probably better if they just stay in and play video games instead of mingling with each other.

Oh god, something even more horrible is going to happen!

I had to take a short break here to get dinner started, but mostly because I really don’t wanna see what happens next…

Yeah.

Well that was unexpected.

Look, this is obvious a great movie, but watching this is worse than watching Saw IV: It’s just painful. It’s brutal.

But great!

Which is almost the same reaction I had to We Need to Talk About Kevin (also by Ramsay). This is a better movie, and even more heartbreaking.

Ratcatcher. Lynne Ramsay. 1999. ⚄

Yes, I’m learning French at the moment…

So the story here seems to be quite simple (and presented by having people chatting at each other endlessly (which I like)): There’s a very “modern” mayor in this small village, and he wants to build a huge library in the village (because he’s got a vision of people leaving cities and working in the countryside when that becomes practical). But there’s a tree they may have to cut down…

That’s the tree.

Is that the same guy as in the previous movie?

I was fascinated by this movie at the start — but I’m getting pretty annoyed by all these scenes of people sitting like this and discussing er philosophy and stuff. It worked better when they were walking around outside in the pretty countryside.

And now we’re going even further into faux reportage land — we’re following this journalist who talks to the villagers about the proposed library and life in the countryside in general… It’s… just not that interesting?

OK, this guy was interesting — talking about how farming had changed and how cows that are allowed to run free in the fields are more healthy.

I’m guessing these are real interviews, sort of? I mean, she’s an actor playing a journalist, but I’m guessing that the people she’s interviewing are real people talking unscripted. (Well, most of them.)

OK, this guy is definitely an actor.

Her balloon!? I mean, I don’t know French, but ballon means ball, doesn’t it?

Yes, indeed! Man, I’ve been doing Duolingo for three months and I’m already more fluent than whoever did this translation! *gasp*

This scene is pure genius. And so funny.

I use similar glasses for drinking wine — those are Duralex Picardie, but I use the Duralex Provence ones.

This is the final movie in the Rohmer box set (which was sponsored by Agnès B).

It’s a very pretty box set, and the transfers of the movies are very well done. Or perhaps I should say “main features” — there’s so many extras on each disk — several hours of shorts, documentaries and things Rohmer did for TV, I think.

I say “I think” because I haven’t seen any of it, because… THEY ONLY PUT ENGLISH SUBTITLES ON THE MAIN oops caps lock features. Which just seems kinda perverse. I mean, it’s nice that they did do that, but it means that there’s a lot of stuff here that won’t be accessible to non-French speakers.

But! Like I said, I’m apprendring French, so perhaps I can revisit the box set in a couple of years and watch the extras…

Anyway! This movie… it’s a bit frustrating? There are scenes here that I think are absolutely wonderful, funny and amazing, and there were parts of this movie I almost gnawed my foot off out of sheer boredom. So:

L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque. Éric Rohmer. 1993. ⚃

That’s a very grey room.

Anyway, this is my next-to-last Rohmer movie, and it’s an unusually high concept movie for Rohmer — I mean, it’s pretty explicit in the (moral) dilemma it presents, instead of having it be slowly revealed over the course of the movie.

Finally, some real literature!

That’s a very hairy coat… very nice.

Finally, some real literature.

She’s got the best taste — Moebius and Herriman.

It’s a gripping movie in many ways, but it seems so… didactic? Rohmer’s movies are usually more surprising than this: Here he sets up a situation where everybody goes “well, that’s not gonna work”, and then at the end we see that, indeed, it doesn’t work.

It’s like he’s going “see? SEE!?!?!”

Still, it’s pretty compelling.

Full Moon in Paris. Éric Rohmer. 1984. ⚄

Oh, this is one of those Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies — they’re allegedly what led to the downfall of Western Civilisation — because kids in the 60s watched these movies and went “fuck this shit!”

If I understand things correctly. I’ve never seen one of these movies myself.

*gasp*

That must be Frankie and Annette… the opening titles for this are kinda like a TV series, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that this is part of a series of films with the same characters?

That’s a nice radio.

Such jinx.

I watched a couple of Carry On films a few years back — they’re sex farces from the UK from the 70s — and I had no idea that these beachy movies were going to have basically the same vibe.

Bad boys!

I’m guessing this is a recurring joke? He shifted over from the sidecar to the bike to not be left behind, but HA HA

So this must be even more of a movie series than I had assumed — recurring characters and jokes, I guess?

This is very, very silly.

Wow, it’s really… er… involved? That is, some of these gags are totally incomprehensible — the movie really assumes that you’ve seem the previous movies, I think. It doesn’t explain or recap anything about anything.

I kinda like that.

Frankie Avalon seems like a total dork, but Annette Funicello kinda seems too cool to be in this kind of movie?

I quite enjoyed the first two thirds of this — it’s relentless, and the stupid gags just keep on coming. It’s not until they try to add more drama and plot that you get bored enough to start thinking about what you’re watching: This is a music movie about pretty young people on the beach — and absolutely all the actors are white. I think. At least I can’t remember even somebody in the background not being white, and that’s just a kinds disgusting statement to be making in 1965.

But the main problem is that the third act is painfully boring, of course.

Beach Blanket Bingo. William Asher. 1965. ⚂

Should you put your towel on your head while showering?

Anyway, this looks great! I really haven’t seen that many movies by Vincente Minnelli — that I can remember. I mean, I probably saw a bunch as a child, but I haven’t seen more than a couple since starting to get back into watching movies about a decade ago…

So I’m hoping this movie’s gonna be awesome so that I can start watching all of his films. Or something.

It’s a fun concept — it’s about a woman running an answering service?

You can tell that Minnelli isn’t American by the way he has women… *gasp*… talking… TO EACH OTHER!!!

Heh heh.

Oh, Dean Martin’s in this? I haven’t really seen many movies with him either…

It’s the cops!

It’s the crooks!

It’s the gay neighbour!

Anyway, I love Judy Holliday here — I’m not familiar with her much, but she plays this slightly over the top, somewhat out of control character with such aplomb — it’s breathtaking. And very funny.

This was apparently her last movie — she died just a few years later.

Where 7th Ave meets Broadway.

The lighting in this movie is so… I mean, it’s extremely artificial, but in a wonderful way. Look at the shadow in the middle of that guy’s face…

Oh, Method actors…

Those cops!

I feel like Minnelli might be making fun of musicals…

It’s a pretty odd movie — it’s so unfocused. I mean, the point of the movie is the romance between Holliday and Dean, but it’s not really focused on that and doesn’t really adhere to the story beats you’re expecting. It’s so… knowing… and seems to delight more in just watching Holliday being silly on the screen instead of moving the plot forward. Which explains the 125 minute running time.

But it really is delightful.

Bells Are Ringing. Vincente Minnelli. 1960. ⚅

I don’t know quite what made me buy this bluray, but that’s not unusual. It’s on Criterion, so perhaps I just clicked “buy” at random…

Anyway, this is a very 70s American indyish movie (but apparently released by Warner Brothers)? I think I can see some Chantal Akerman influences here, but it really seems very American so far…

I mean, all these dramatic camera angles? (That I’m not sure works.)

And the over-the-top drama… So perhaps there’s no Akerman influence at all, really.

But I’m enjoying the movie so far.

Nice colour.

The cabbie tells it like it is.

The focus on this movie is just odd — the protagonist is usually slightly blurry… is that supposed to be symbolic?

Hey! She’s suddenly in focus! After she got a new hairdo.

Now it’s soft again, so perhaps it wasn’t symbolic.

You tell ’em!

Well, she looks very familiar.

Yum!

Yup, still random shots out of focus…

The story here is pretty normal — young, struggling artist in New York bla bla — but it’s really done in a convincing way. It feels very young and vibrant? I really liked it.

Girlfriends. Claudia Weill. 1978. ⚄

Noo! I hate the Decameron! But perhaps this’ll be a savage takedown!

Hm… still not sure…

Hey, it’s her!

I think it’s most of Baena’s troupe — so I guess he just got all his friends together and they went to Italy and made a little movie?

It’s pretty funny, and I have no idea where any of this is going. Which I like.

So… was this made by riffing on a few of the stories from the Decameron? It seems pretty improvised — that is, it has jokes, and they’re amusing, but they’re the kind any reasonably amusing group of people could come up with on the spot.

I’m so smart SMRT:

The screenplay is based on the first and second tales of the third day in The Decameron, a collection of novellas by Giovanni Boccaccio; however, the dialogue was improvised.

And it’s one of those films that the critics liked, but audiences loathed, I guess.

Yeah, I dunno. Perhaps you have to be Catholic to feel the sacrilisciousness of it all? It’s not that there aren’t fun bits, but… I’m also just kinda bored? I mean, it’s a goofy unpretentious little movie, but it could have had more zip. More and better jokes.

I almost feel guilty that I didn’t like this movie more, because it seems like everybody had a good time, and it’s got a lot of cute ideas. But nope — I was mostly bored. Sorry! I think it’d totally be a better movie if you were stoned.

The Little Hours. Jeff Baena. 2017. ⚂

The visuals are original and interesting, but this is basically one of those “two lines from that guy and then one guy from this guy” type of documentary (which I loathe). But Haynes manages to make it work — it’s pretty interesting without being fawning.

Velvet Underground. Todd Haynes. 2021. ⚄

The reason I got this movie is that I read an interview with the Pet Shop Boys, and they were so fascinated by this movie that they watched it multiple times. But they didn’t really say whether it was… good, I guess?

It’s not, really. I mean, it’s kinda interesting in that they allow themselves to come off as blithering morons, spouting stuff about “two rectangles coming together and forming a square” (right), but as someone who didn’t like Bros back then, this didn’t make me like them now.

But I guess it’s pretty well-made in many ways?

Bros: When The Screaming Stops. Joe Pearlman, David Soutar, Rupert Smith. 2018. ⚂