Ah, one of these old films with Liza Minnelli and Grace Kelly… or something like that.

Paris! This movie may be paid for by the French tourist board.

Grace!

Hey! That’s Leslie Caron! I saw a movie with her just the other day… what are the chances… And that was with Fred Astaire. So she only needs to do a movie with Ginger Rogers now.

That’s how I always read my books.

Minnelli was having fun with the framing here.

And in general, everybody’s goofing it up to the max.

*gasp* Modern art!

Did I Got Rhythm originate with this movie? Sounds unlikely.

Ah!

MGM executive Arthur Freed bought the Gershwin musical catalog from George’s brother Ira in the late 1940s, since George died in 1937. Some of the tunes in this catalog were included in the movie, such as “I Got Rhythm” and “Love Is Here to Stay”.

Yeah, I thought that was an older song…

This is most amusing. It’s got a more solid storyline than these things usually have — there’s at least a couple love triangles and stuff, and a struggling painter and a struggling composer and a struggling dancer.

Such very film trickery.

But… while this is amusing and exceedingly well made (it won All The Oscars of the year), it’s more than a bit staid. It started off so well, with zany bits, but it’s seriously lost its zip and panache.

The final ballet thing was nice, though.

An American in Paris. Vincente Minnelli. 1951. ⚃

Heh heh. This starts with this shot for a couple of minutes — like a cheeky comment on Akerman’s way of filming. Then a rumble that we understand is an elevator, and then Akerman appears. It’s fun.

“And a camera there? Oh my god.”

Yay. She said “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” the correct way! People never do that.

Heh, they’ve just told her she can’t smoke here. “Don’t worry.”

So this is basically just a filmed interview. The questions he asks are inane like “what is cinema” and “how do you do framing” — reading them up from a sheet of paper, obviously, one after another, and not engaging in any kind of conversation. I think if we’d get a closer shot, we’d see Akerman’s eyes rolling all the time, but she gives really good answers, about not being interested in naturalism, and ways of making a movie as tense as a Hitchcock movie without anything much happening.

It’s a fun conceit — doing an interview that tries to mimic an Akerman film, but they mostly manage to illustrate how difficult it is doing this sort of thing in the way Akerman does it and make it have tension.

And he’s really a kinda bad interviewer. Akerman soldiers through and says interesting stuff, and that saves it.

Chantal Akerman, From Here. Gustavo Beck & Leonardo Luiz Ferreira. 2010. ⚃

What’s Studiocanal’s deal anyway… they’re involved in a lot of stuff like this — restoring random movies. I mean, they’re French, after all, so doing a 4K restoration of an 80s Stephen King horror movie seems so… random. Did I mention random?

It’s the Stephen King Cinematic Universe!

Seem accurate.

Is that accurate, though?

This is very odd. I think I must have seen it before, but I have no recollection of the film. I assumed it was a straight-up horror movie, but it seems very broad — I guess it’s meant to be funny? Did the scene where they electrocute the cat bring down the room, though?

More crossover action!

So the gag here is that James Woods signed up for an anti-smoking treatment — and the treatment is, basically: They’re watching him, and if he lights up, they’ll torture his family.

I have no idea how the cat and the ghost doll ties into all this.

It’s very meta.

Director Teague didn’t do a lot of directing — his most famous contribution up there, Death Race 2000, was for second unit stuff. He’s directed a bunch horror/action films in the 80s, basically.

Oh! This is one of them there anthology movies? With the cat doing the link segments?

So I guess there’s gonna be three of these Twilight Zone/Roald Dahl-ish half hour things?

I guess Teague’s second unit career really shows in the cat scenes — they’re really good.

This one is really scary! Eeek!

Well, that was fun!

This reminds me… there were a number of these anthology horror movies in the 80s, weren’t there? I wonder why… I mean, it doesn’t seem like a natural format for something you watch in the movie theatres, and these films weren’t meant for the straight-to-video market, either.

50s nostalgia amongst 80s filmmakers? They all just want to do Twilight Zone and there’s no network that wants to do them?

Oh, that’s Drew Barrymore? (I had a sneak peek at imdb.)

This film is a lot of fun. It’s not exactly perfect — the bits are 30 minutes long, but seem padded. As TV episodes, they’d have been 22 minutes long (with ads added), and perhaps that would have been better?

Still, a lot of fun. It’s a bit weird, though — what was the cat doing in the first two bits, anyway? (It’s a major character in the third bit.)

Oh:

Against the director Lewis Teague’s wishes, the studio cut out a prologue that explained the cat’s motivations. They considered it “too silly.” As a result, many viewers were confused by the connection between the three stories.

Heh heh. This is a still from the intro that was 86’d by the studio. I can’t imagine why!

*phew*:

The DVD commentary is supplied by director Lewis Teague. He states during it that in the ‘Quitters Inc’ segment (when the cat is being shocked while standing on the electrified floor) the cat is actually leaping around wildly because the animal handler (hidden under the floor) is blowing compressed air on it to surprise it. The cat is not actually being shocked.

Cat’s Eye. Lewis Teague. 1985. ⚃