Twentieth Century. Howard Hawks. 1934. ⚂

[ten minutes pass]

I totally assumed that this was going to be a screwball comedy, and it’s not. I mean, it’s a comedy, but it’s not screwy…

*resets brain*

[fifty minutes pass]

I think this is all on me: I’m just sitting here wondering why I’m not finding this fascinating. I can see all the jokes fly by… and I’m not really feeling any of them. I mean, not in the slightest: I’m not even slightly smirking.

So either this is the least funny comedy ever, or I’m just not connecting. I think it might be the latter.

Barrymore is totally over-the-top; chewing the scenery in every er scene… but it’s just not funny? Carole Lombard is doing the “intense anger” thing in every other scene, and that should be funny, too, but… it’s not?

I don’t know; I just don’t understand why this doesn’t work for me. Perhaps I’m just in the wrong mode. A moody mode.

Yeah:

Twentieth Century’s box office performance was described as “dismal”.

[the end]

I admire Barrymore’s performance, but I’m just not finding it funny.

Neptune’s Daughter. Edward Buzzell. 1949. ⚃

Hey! Esther Williams and Red Skelton! Two actors I don’t really have on my radar, but I think I’ve seen them both in movies recently? Skelton was pretty funny?

[twenty minutes pass]

This is very odd. There’s barely been any swimming: It’s all been Skelton and Betty Garrett trying very hard to seduce each other in their nerdy ways.

It’s quite funny, but really odd. Is this a fixer-upper movie? Edited together from a few short movies or something?

[twenty minutes pass]

Now they’re doing the Baby It’s Cold Outside song. Did that originate here? It’s not like I remember it? I mean, Ricardo Montalban is doing one of the parts, and I don’t remember that.

And… “Say, what’s in this drink?” That’s probably always been there, but makes it even rape-ier than I remembered!

This is the original version:

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944 and introduced to the public in the 1949 film Neptune’s Daughter.

Oh! But then Red Skelton and Betty Garrett do some verses where Skelton tries to make Garrett leave! I didn’t remember that, either. “You really can’t stay / Baby it’s cold outside.”

[forty minutes pass]

It’s an odd movie. There’s a bunch of funny pieces in here, but, like why:

Why paint that poor horse’s forehead white? It just looks odd.

Speaking of which, the colour process used here is an early one, I guess, and it’s quite striking: Some things look very colourful indeed, while the not-so-colourful bits all look beige.

[the end]

It’s an odd movie… which I like! But it doesn’t fire on all cylinders. And there’s not enough swimming! The final scene is lovely, though.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Cathy Yan. 2020. ⚂

[twenty minutes pass]

Hey! I thought this was supposed to be awful? Am I getting this confused with something else? It’s… it’s very modern, what with all the meta and skipping back and forth and the visual overload. So totally the opposite of all the other DC super-hero movies.

Oh! People liked it?

It didn’t do great at the box office, but it probably didn’t lose money, either…

[an hour passes]

Well, the fun sorta evaporated. We keep getting all these backstories… Actually, the way we get the backstories are fun. But the stories themselves mostly drag. Draaaag. It feels like I’ve watched a couple of hours of this, and…

It’s just got massive pacing problems. The fun scenes are fun, but there’s too many scenes in between with no zip.

[the end]

It’s a bit frustrating: The movie has good bones, basically. The concept is good, the storytelling structure is entertaining, the performances are charming, there’s a number of funny lines in here… but it’s like it’s just badly edited. They frequently find it necessary to over-explain bits that we don’t really need to know, and that makes it drag here and there. And in a movie like this, it doesn’t take much to get distracted and lose interest.