Lady Bird. Greta Gerwig. 2017. ⚃

Time to see something modern! This one is just… er… three years old? That’s modern enough.

[ten minutes pass]

The opening scene was so brilliant, and I assumed that she was going straight to her senior year at university, but then… she’s… at high school? I’m still not sure.

This is the #1 point of confusion with American movies: The age range of the actors, especially the female actors, is so compressed. It basically starts at 23 (and they play roles down to 12), and ends at 42 (where they play roles as old as 70; mothers to sons played by 44-year-old men). You can never tell by just looking at the actors themselves to figure out what their deal is — you have to carefully piece together clues and then, in the middle of the movie, it’s “OH! SHE WASN”T AUTISTIC SHE WAS JUST PLAYING A 12-YEAR-OLD!”

I guess people who read recaps of movies they’re seeing before seeing them don’t have this problem.

Which reminds me of a review of Barren Corn by Georgette Heyer I read yesterday:

I probably would have liked it a lot more if I had some
idea what the outcome might be before reading it (the copy I got had
no plot description whatsoever).

(The book was really bad, by the way. I absolutely adore Heyer, but I get why she suppressed Barren Corn. I’d be embarrassed to have written that book, too.)

ANYWAY! She’s in high school! So she’s… like… 16? 17? That makes more sense.

*unpausing movie*

[ten minutes pass]

The casting here is just weird! I mean beyond my unhinged rant up there. What are all these sitcom actors doing in here? I mean, I like Laurie Metcalf, but… the other ones?

And the love interest? Why would somebody as good-looking as the protagonist even look at the Danny guy? And why are all the guys wearing clothes that are four sizes too big?

[thirty minutes pass]

Gerwig is doing short-hand for all these things… like the theatre rehearsals… like doing a three second thing and we’re supposed to go “ah, ha, ha, they’re doing that thing”, and I have no idea what they’re doing. Perhaps because I haven’t watched any of the High School Musical movies or hardly any Glee episodes?

But, *phew*, the protagonist is finally attempting to hook up with somebody more appropriate (i.e., Timothee Chalamet), so it’s not as awkward any more. On the other hand, the comedy is getting broader and more… er… stupid… with the gym coach taking over the theatre stuff:

I love silly, but that’s just stupid. I can see how that would totally have worked if the pacing had already been established as being more screwball, but it’s not, so it just seems odd.

[the end]

I really, really like the performances of Beanie Feldstein, Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, but some of the others are a bit iffy. There’s some hugely enjoyable scenes in here… and swathes of time that seems to pass by without anything much of interest happening.

But it’s an interesting movie. I hear that Gerwig’s next movie is really good.

The Desperate Trail. P.J. Pesce. 1995. ⚂

This movie was part of a quite interesting box set of Western movies:

Etc.

It’s probably the most obscure film on the set… and it’s a made-for-TV movie, which is why I haven’t seen it yet. But the other day, I watched Lost Boys: The Tribe, which is by the same director, so I thought “what the hey”…

And hey’s for horses, so here we are.

[ten minutes pass]

Hey! This is a lot of fun! It’s one of those “revisionist westerns”, which shouldn’t surprise me in this box set. It’s really cheaply made, but Pesce tries his best to make everything look all Peckinpah… and mostly failing, because you can’t do that on a made-for-TV movie: The aesthetics are completely different.

But the plot has taken some really fun swerves already, and the actors seem like they’re enjoying themselves, which always helps. Sam Elliott, of course, but Linda Fiorentino’s the most fun to watch so far.

[twenty minutes pass]

It’s… it’s got problems. Everything’s so dark. I mean, visually. Whenever they’re inside, the colour gamut goes from “dark brown” to “very dark brown”, making it hard to tell what’s even going on. Was Pesce trying to film this with natural lighting only or something?

Storywise, it turns out the happy-go-lucky outlaws kinda trigger-happy, which makes it less of a “yeee-haw!” and more “yeee… uhm… uhm… did she just kill five innocent bystanders and then we went to the next scene?” It seemed like they were setting up a fun, fantasy Western land with modern make-up and hair care and morals, and then it turned towards nihilism. (On the other hand, I may have misinterpreted what was happening in that saloon… so brown and dark…)

[twenty minutes pass]

This movie hit a brick wall once they went to the guy’s farm. Instead of fun pulp, we get deep character development.

Nobody wants that.

[twenty minutes pass]

I’m so bored now. Fiorentino is still fun, though.

[the end]

The movie never really recuperated from the descent into character development. There’s some good scenes here and there, and it tries so hard to make us feel the insanity of it all (the deranged lawman and the rest), but it’s just badly paced. There’s the nugget of a really special movie in here, but the pacing is so bad.

But I can totally see why they included this on this box set (besides being a “new” movie, and probably very cheap): It does enter into a dialogue with previous western classics.

Easy to Wed. Edward Buzzell. 1946. ⚂

Oh! This is a remake of Libeled Lady from 1936, which I saw the other er month.

The William Powell role played by er Van Johnson… But the Jean Harlow role is done by Lucille Ball! And there’s Esther Williams!

[fifteen minutes pass]

Oh deer. Van Johnson is no William Powell. Instead of being a fun raconteur, he’s a smarmy and somewhat creepy generic guy. Johnson has apparently done more than 70 films, and I don’t remember him in any of them.

[fifteen minutes pass]

It’s weird watching this, having seen the original just a month ago. It’s like I’m watching these scenes and I’m going “yes, that’s a more economical way of doing that scene”? Everything is like more streamlined? But it’s not Myrna Loy and William Powell, so everything is less fun?

It’s just an odd experience. I think if I hadn’t watched the original version, I’d enjoy this more, but I’m not sure. Van Johnson is a black hole of charisma: I can see what he’s trying to do, but I just wish he’d go away.

Which isn’t the response you want from a leading man in a romantic screwball comedy.

It’s like all the comedy timing is slower and less witty, even if they’re doing the same lines. I guess that’s the difference between the 30s and the 40s. The gags slowed down a lot…

[fifteen minutes pass]

I just don’t quite get why this movie was made. Libeled Lady was made ten years earlier, and was a huge success, and was a movie everybody surely had seen. So why make a version that everybody watching it would be disappointed by? I mean, it’s not even a cheap movie — the budget is substantial, so making money off of this isn’t a no-brainer? If this had been a no-budged knock-off, it’d be more understandable…

[more time passes]

This version is longer than the original for no good reason. There’s scenes here that just linger without anything of interest happening.

This is just a sad movie. Esther Williams is fun, and Lucille Ball is Lucille Ball, but the rest of them are sheer tedium.

This version seems more sadistic towards the “other wife” character than the first version.

[the end]

But the organ scene was fun.

I was going to ⚁ this movie, but the musical number upped it to ⚂.