Rhythm in the Clouds. John H. Auer. 1937.

I think I got this on a 50 DVD public domain DVD box set, so I didn’t have very high expectations. But it’s fun! The actors are really engaging and it moves has and everything is silly and wonderful.

Now, the gags aren’t really top notch or anything, but it’s just so amiable. I was smiling most of the time I was watching this.

The cinematography is surprisingly ambitious for this sort of trifle. Some nice dolly moves and some good larger scenes, but, of course, virtually all of the scenes are just a couple of people in a small room.

The songs are a bit on the lame side, though.

The Machine That Kills Bad People. Roberto Rossellini. 1952.

I had no idea I had this movie: I had it ripped as “Fear” (1996) by James Foley…. which this isn’t. It’s by Rossellini (who also had a movie called “Fear”, which this isn’t.)

Very confusing.

Roberto Rossellini is probably more known for being the father of that other, more famous, Rossellini these days. And I have to admit (well, I don’t have to, but I’m doing so anyway) that I’ve seen very few of his movies. Stromboli… and that’s probably it.

A lavender print!?

Anyway, I don’t really get this movie. I mean, it’s a picaresque comedy with all the standard elements: Topless women, peeking-tom youths, priests, politicians… and a camera that kills people.

There’s a lot of great shots here, but even on a scene-by-scene basis, it just doesn’t cohere. Any scene may start out great and then just sort of dissolve into unsightly nonsense.

If anything in here had been actually funny, instead of being replete with signifiers of HERE THERE BE FUN, it would have helped, for sure. But even as non-funny as this is, it just should have been better.

It feels like I’m watching a parody of something I have no knowledge of.

Because this movie is so non-thrilling I’m kinda sitting here pondering other things… like whether anybody in, say, fifty years, will regard Italian movies from this era as just quaint artefacts, just because of how they were made. I mean, they were filmed without audio, and mostly without the actors knowing what the lines were (or were going to be), and then they had voice actors doing the lines afterwards, in the studio. So nobody’s lips ever match up with the audio, and sometimes the audio goes on for the double amount of syllables as the lips in the video.

I mean, I’m used to it and I don’t mind, but I can totally see people not being able to get past that simple thing…

Blackkklansman. Spike Lee. 2018.

I haven’t seen a Spike Lee movie in a while. Like a couple of decades. His early movies were really fresh and fun and really interesting on all levels (cinematography, story, style). He was like the US Lars von Trier for a couple of years. And then he made one boring movie, and then another boring movie, and then I stopped watching him.

But now I’m watching this, and loving it. It’s not very fresh or new or anything, but it’s a solid, interesting drama that’s not annoying in any way, which makes a change. It moves a long at a good pace, and it looks great, and it’s just very… well made. It’s like a movie that should win all the Oscars.

OK, that sounds like I’m totally slamming this movie, but I really like it, despite it not being very special. And that’s really special.

It’s really solid.

The only thing I had a hard time getting past was the wig the main character wears. There’s a lot of wigs in this movie, but they mostly look like, but the lead wig?

Dude

“John David [Washington]’s wig was made by myself and Chantell Carrtherol,” Pierre-Weston said. “She ventilated a few inches of his hairline and I just tracked the rest and colored it, picked it out. Shaun Perkins is my key. He really helped to shape the wig and give it that perfect roundness that we wanted.”

Yeah, that perfect roundness may have been what you wanted, but it screams FAKE in every scene.

The next-to-last bit (with the bomb plot) seems pretty contrived; it’s like they really wanted to have something super-dramatic, so they just dropped it in at random.

But then there’s the documentary coda.

Dude.