Wow, that’s some start.

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

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

Yes, yes, hipsters, yes…

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

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

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

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

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

Very Last Dinnerish.

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

Is that Ian Dury?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Er… I’m not even sure that’s him…

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

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

Hawks:

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

Caan later called the film “a joke”.

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

It’s Sulu!

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

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

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

Red Line 7000. Howard Hawks. 1965. ☐

For a Godzilla movie, this has a lot of drama about surviving in Japan after WWII…

I understand the enthusiasm this movie had, because it’s like… a real movie? It’s not like those annoying American Godzilla movies? But… it’s hampered by the a low budget, I think. I mean, this looks better than most $200M American super-hero/monster movies, but it still doesn’t look, like, actually good.

Overbite Godzilla.

It’s not the special effects that show the lack of money the most — it’s the action scenes, where there’s supposed to be hundreds of extras running around, getting chomped, but instead there’s like four.

It’s a 99%/98% tomatometer — is that unprecedented?

OK, I wasn’t expecting them to fridge the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to motivate The Failed Kamikaze Pilot to Actually Do Something, and that’s on me — it was pretty obvious that that’s where this was going from the start.

I understand the enthusiasm for this movie. It’s a scrappy little movie that hits all the right notes. It’s quite moving, and it feels like the stakes are on the right level, and the action scenes are really effective — and all those things are things that US action movies usually fail at.

But.

There’s like an hour in the middle there that’s really (content warning: hate speech) boring. Sorry! It’s boring!

The fun parts are really fun, through, and it tugs at all the heart strings in a very effective (i.e. manipulative) way. So… it’s the movie for 2023? But is anybody gonna watch this in the years to come? Dunno.

Godzilla Minus One. Takashi Yamazaki. 2023. ⚂