Well, this is very different from all other Rivette movies I’ve seen. It’s a costume drama? And the dialogue seems very un-improvised.

OK, I take back what I said about this seeming non-improvised.

Oh, that’s where the scary music was coming from!

The choice to have a band apparently improvising music while the shoot is going on is a bold one. Must make editing scenes after the fact virtually impossible.

It’s nice music, though. Very AMM.

The Pirates of Brittany.

This is good, but… there’s so many characters (and many of them look quite similar) that I’m having some problems understanding quite what’s going on. I mean, the plot probably isn’t the point of the movie anyway, but it’s still slightly frustrating.

That is, it’s partially riveting and partially frustrating.

The audio on this movie is really important — the use of music and natural sounds is so interesting. It’s a rather hypnotic movie… but only in the second half. The first half is rather a jumble of stuff and is hard to get into. But the last half! Geez. Fantastic.

I guess a reasonable rating would be ⚃, but I’ll go with:

Noroît. Jacques Rivette. 1976. ⚄

Whee.

Nice.

Very thrifty.

Hey, that’s… that’s… William Demarest! I love him.

And there’s Lucille.

Ooh

I’ve been really impressed by these early Bob Hope movies, and this one has a lot of good gags, too. However, it’s feeling a bit staid? If this had been ten years earlier, there would have been twice the number of jokes and four times the number of lines.

Director Sidney Lanfield didn’t do many movies after this, but moved onto TV.

The concept of the movie isn’t quite clear, either — at first it seemed like the Bob Hope character was a destitute bookie, but then it turns out that he’s just a very… frugal… bookie. (Possibly.) And then it pivots from being a movie about racketeering into being a very uncomfortable Kid-N-Hope kind of thing?

Yeah, exactly — that’s what this movie feels like: A short story that has been through the wringer. So many writers involved.

Ohhh!

Sorrowful Jones was a remake of a 1934 Shirley Temple film, Little Miss Marker.

I thought this seemed familiar! I’ve seen that one! The new kid is plenty cute, but she’s no Shirley Temple.

This movie, unfortunately, just goes Full Schmaltz for the second half of the movie, and it’s really tedious. So while it looks good and stuff, it’s not worth watching, really.

Sorrowful Jones. Sidney Lanfield. 1949. ⚁

Could this be the best movie ever!?!

Oh, this is a romcom! I wondered why I had this, but I read an article or something about romcoms and why the genre had gone out of fashion, but that this was supposed to be a good new one. I mean, they still make them, but they used to be some of the biggest box office draws since basically the beginning of movies, but that’s not really the case now.

Unfortunately, while this movie is cute and stuff, and has some good running gags, it could have been funnier, and the rom bit of the romcom could have been rommier.

It’s fine! There’s a lot here to like! It’s very likeable. And I can’t really claim that it should have been cut down significantly — all the scenes were fine. But…

Somebody I Used To Know. Dave Franco. 2023. ⚂