Cover Girl. Charles Vidor. 1944. ⚄

Put the bass in your walk! Head to toe! Etc!

I guess Charles Vidor isn’t King Vidor? I’m so confused.

[twenty minutes pass]

This 2K version has been nicely restored, although they’ve gone a bit overboard with the film grain: The backgrounds look like angry bees swarming.

But very pretty otherwise.

Oh, and the movie? It’s a lot of fun so far. Very classic plot.

It’s kinda odd for a movie made in 1944 not to mention the war, even obliquely, though.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, Hayworth character got a telegram, and the Kelly character quips “perhaps it’s a draft notice”. That’s a reference.

[fifteen minutes pass]

This movie’s got a lot of charming little details, like the woman who answers the phone with “Sure, I’ll marry ya. Who is this?”

[the end]

This could easily have done with shaving off about half an hour. It’s not that any of the scenes are less than amusing, but it loses cohesion by just going on this long — the plot is super-basic and we know exactly where it’s going, so keeping things snappy is vital.

Still… there’s just some extraordinarily exuberant scenes in here, so I love it anyway.

Captive State. Rupert Wyatt. 2019. ⚁

[nine minutes pass]

This started off kinda fun, and then we got a five minute infodump while the credits were rolling, and… now I’m bored before the credits are done!? WHAT IS THIS MAGIC!

Oh, wow. This bombed hard at the box office.

[twenty minutes pass]

This is the kind of movie where people meet and say totally normal stuff like “hello, baby brother”, so that they’ll… er… know who they are in relation to each other.

I mean, to tell the viewer what’s going on.

Well, OK, that’s a massive improvement on the infodump in the start, but…

I’m so bored now that I’m just about ready to bail. The movie is kinda ugly, with boring cinematography and… well, everything is boring. As boring as it can be in a movie about an alien invasion, I guess.

[half an hour passes]

OK, it’s picked up a bit now. They’re cleverly using the “hey, if we film everything in the dark, we can save tons on the CGI!” to the max: Telling what’s going on whenever the spiky aliens are on the screen is pretty darn difficult.

[the end]

Well, I thought… I mean, it’s boring and stuff, and the “twist” (if you can call it that) at the end was what you expected… But it seemed to tease us with there being at least some sci-fi interest here. I thought there was gonna be something cool before the “twist”.

There wasn’t.

It’s as tedious at the start as it is at the end.

But it does make some interesting storytelling choices (it doesn’t focus on characterisation much, which is fun). But it’s just bad.

Blood Simple. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen. 1984. ⚅

[half an hour passes]

I’m watching this as part of my American Gothic re-watch. I watched all these 80s movies (on VHS) back then, and I was really into them as a teenager.

And… I’m still pretty into them! Near Dark was awesome, and this is really special, too. It’s either a really odd movie, or I’m reading it wrong.

Anyway, totes enjoying myself so far. It’s so… American.

[the end]

That’s even better than I thought it would be! It’s amazing that a movie that’s basically all morons and/or assholes can be this much fun. I guess the McDormand character the only one who’s not an asshole? And the bad guy is the only one who’s not a moron?

Anyway, it’s so … it’s so much fun. Sure, it’s got all these twists, but it’s all just unexpected structurally. I do think it starts a bit… not brilliant? But the last half is just whoa.