MUCH GREENSCREEN!

Burning Blue. D.M.W. Greer. 2013.

Man, this is really not a good movie. Yeah yeah, it’s a low budget indie movie, and some of the performances are pretty good (especially Trent Ford and Rob Mayes), and the integration between (what I assume to be) stock footage of the ships and the film footage is pretty well integrated, and the audio’s not awful.

But.

It just looks so cheap. Most of the actors are awful. The lines are super dull. The characters aren’t even cardboard.

But one character does have an arc of sorts_ The obnoxious loud-mouthed guy has a really fun scene at the end of the second act. It’s like “yee-haw”.

Otherwise… man… it’s a depressing movie, and not in a good way.

Another Woman. Woody Allen. 1988.

Oh, this is the first Allen movie with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and it looks very Bergmanish indeed. Which I love.

But it’s more style than substance. This is part of Allen’s series about rich, cultured Manhattan denizens that made me abandon Allen in the first place. Gena Rowlands is great, but there’s a lot of dicey performances here, and basically all the lines are hair-raisingly artificial.

Rowlands saves the movie.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss. Alfred Zeisler. 1936.

This is another public domain movie, so it hasn’t been restored, and the audio is rather bad on this copy. But Cary Grant is Cary Grant.

This British movie seems a bit… basic. American movies of this era were more technically accomplished, I think? Yeah. There’s a lot of clumsiness when moving the camera around and some non-ideal blocking.

It’s a pretty classic storyline: Rich guy pretending to be poor to prove some obscure point. There’s so much fun to be had within that framework, but this feels so… abbreviated. They’ve got one fun scenario in, and then the next one is kinda really beyond absurd, and then it’s almost over. It’s really sloppy, lazy writing. I wonder whether the original 1920 movie was better, because the script to this one by horror movie writer Balderston is such a wasted opportunity.

It’s hard not to enjoy watching a Cary Grant movie, though.