The Lady Eve. Preston Sturges. 1941. ⚅

Oh right! This is a Preston Sturges movie! I made an effort to buy his movies a while ago, and then forgot all about it.

I watched Sullivan’s Travels the other year and was absolutely bowled over by it, so I wanted to watch all his other films, too.

[half an hour passes]

This is such a delight. Barbara Stanwyck is amazing and Henry Fonda somehow seems… sexy? in his nerdishness, which is very unusual. William Demarest as Fonda’s minder is a perfect hard-nosed guy.

I’m not sure the plot makes that much sense — why is the grifter daddy so shortsighted and working against the daughter? It seems like he’d be able to fleece Fonda a whole lot more by not making waves.

But it makes for really fun scenes, which is the point, I guess.

[the end]

It’s not a perfect movie (it’s a bit flabby in the middle), but it’s fantastic. I laughed out loud several times at the antics in the last fifth of the movie, but it was thoroughly amusing throughout.

I find it fascinating how much the movie was on the side of Stanwyck (as the grifter) and not on the side of Honda (as the patsy): He’s a nerd, and not a very likeable one. She’s smart and funny, and the movie leans so hard into this that it’s not always clear why Stanwyck really wants to get into his pants this much. I mean, besides the money, which really doesn’t seem like a motivating factor after a while.

It’s such an original set-up: Any other director would have made the Honda character more active, but Sturges leaves all the action up to Stanwyck.

Ad Astra. James Gray. 2019. ⚁

For a moment, I was worried that this was going to be one of those interminable real space movies instead of sci-fi. *phew* It’s sci-fi!

Brad Pitt is getting a scraggly face, and it suits him. Especially in 4K, where you can see all the laugh lines and tiny wrinkles.

[twenty minutes pass]

Well, OK, the cinematography is very… modern… That is, every scene is colour-graded to an inch. It’s not that it doesn’t look good — it does — but it’s a bit boring visually. It’s so… controlled.

The actors are really working at making everything all modern and sombre, too. Nobody speaks in their natural register, but pitch their voices as low as they will go.

[ten minutes pass]

Oh, now it’s just stupid. A highway robbery on the Moon? This is not a past-scarcity movie or where major sci-fi technological breakthroughs have been made (I think), so just getting all those resources up to the Moon, and then staging a moon buggy ambush, just to… er… rob them? When any tear in their suits mean that they’re dead? It’s almost unbelievable moronic. I mean, by the filmmakers. And of course almost everybody dies, because that is what would happen in a situation like that. I guess that’s realistic?

[five minutes pass]

This is in-credibly boring. So of course:

If all the reviewers like a sci-fi movie, you pretty much know that it’s going to be pure tedium: All character development (i.e., daddy issues, because that’s the only character development allowed) and no fun.

[ten minutes pass]

This may be the most moronic movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and I watched Scary Movie 2 yesterday. He opened up the door to vacuum and the primate exploded? I thought they’d stopped doing that a couple of decades ago. (Because that’s not a thing.) And, yes, the primate had… crushed the space helmet of a guy? What?

Why is there zero G on the ship, anyway? On all the shots, it looked like it was under acceleration?

This is a sci-fi movie for people who’ve never seen, or wanted to see, a sci-fi movie, I guess.

[the end]

It’s really a ⚀ movie: It’s unimaginably boring and it’s stupid as nothing you’ve seen, and it’s pretentious and portentous.

But it’s got some nice shots.

Scary Movie 2. Keenen Ivory Wayans. 2001. ⚃

[four minutes pass]

Oh deer.

I liked the first Scary Movie er movie — it was very focused. It was basically a parody of Scream with some drop-ins from other movies, and it worked very well.

I’m guessing this is going to be more of a hodge-podge. I mean, it’s The Exorcist, but they do a really big poop joke, and that could have been pretty much anything. So I’m calling it: I think this is just gonna be a bunch of unrelated skits doing famous scenes from a bunch of horror movies, with a bunch of scenes of randomness.

[four minutes pass]

Oh, that was just the introduction? And then we’re into another Scream parody!?

I didn’t see that coming. Anyway, the Exorcist parody was really gross, but I like lol-ed out loud, so…

I’m not proud of it!

[twenty minutes pass]

OK, so I think I was right the first time? It’s the cast from the first Scary Movie er movie, but it’s got nothing to do with Scream. I’m not quite sure what it’s riffing on… everything just seems to random. Or… is this a parody of those Paranormal Activity movies? I haven’t seen any of those.

It leans hard into being gross, but none of it lands. Most of the bits have some potential, but they’re just so lazily developed.

The cast is still good. Anna Faris, in particular, is perfect in all her scenes (so charming and engaging), but there’s so little for her to do… it feels like such a waste.

[the end]

Wow! That took a turn. The last, like, half of the movie was really funny! Really stupid, really silly, and really funny. It’s like it was suddenly a different movie where they actually gave a fuck about following through on the bits.

So odd.

So how do you rate something like this? It’s funny (in part), but it’s so sloppily made. Half of it was like the worst movie ever, and one quarter of it was hilarious. I’m going with a ⚃, because anything that’s actually funny is a good thing. But I can totally see why people would hate this.

I think the audience is right here.

Ouch.