Radio Days. Woody Allen. 1987.

Rewatching all these Woody Allen movies, I’ve generally felt somewhat disappointed: None of them were as good as I remembered from when I was a teenager.

This one I do remember not liking very much… but I don’t understand why now. It’s so cute! OK, the gags aren’t as absurd as in his 70s movies, but they’re funny.

And you can’t but help enjoy the vicarious nostalgia on display here. The actors are having a good time, the look is right, and it’s got the right digressive structure for this sort of thing.

It’s an unassuming little delight, I think.

Check and Double Check. Melville W. Brown. 1930.

Yet another movie from the public domain DVD box. So this is an Amos’n’Andy movie? The only thing I know about them is that bit from that Public Enemy song you know.

I guess I was surprised to see that the main characters are white actors in blackface? The other surprising thing is just how lame the humour is. The jokes are few and far between. And weak.

Oh geeze:

The director did not want to give audiences the impression that Ellington’s band was racially integrated, and was worried that two band members were too light skinned. So valve trombonist Juan Tizol, who was Puerto Rican, and clarinetist Barney Bigard, a Creole, wore stage makeup to appear as dark as Amos and Andy on film

Dude.

Rock Rock Rock!. Will Price. 1956.

I thought I might as well continue to watch some more public domain DVDs. From the name of this I thought that it was going to be just a bunch of performances with some dopey kinda-sorta-like-a storyline between the performances…

… and it starts out that way.

It’s cornier than a field in Iowa, but who cares. It’s absolutely without pretension: It’s the equivalent of watching 90 minutes of MTV back in the 80s. It’s just some music videos strung together, and the music’s pretty fun.

And the way they’ve devised to bring in all these black performers into a movie about white teenagers is er uhm fun? Basically, the teenagers watch them on TV, and we watch along with them.

Simple!

(They manage to turn it into skit, sort of, as the father who watches the show with the teenage girls gets more and more into the rock music they’re playing on the TV.)

In the second half, you get a lot of plot that’s… not… good. That bit rather drags. It’s all about banking and stuff.

This is kinda hard to rate. The music bits are great. The movie bits are really bad. It’s like two movies badly spliced together, and the people who made the bad bits probably thought they were saving the movie.