Should they keep shoving his face this far up into the camera? I mean, they want to make him look like a dork, but…

Anyway, I’m watching this movie (even if I’ve kinda stopped watching super-hero movies) because it got so conflicting reviews that I kinda thought that it might be interesting? It flopped majorly at the box office, presumably both from super-hero fatigue and because the DC people said “we’re rebooting the DC universe, so whatever happens in The Flash ‘doesn’t count’. I MEAN IT”S THE MOST IMPORTANT MOVIE EVER!”. Which is confusing messaging.

Oh god. This movie started off pretty amusingly, but now we’re in bad, bad CGI land. It’s supposed to look awesome, but it just looks shoddy. Especially with the awful orange palette they’ve gone with.

I guess there’s gonna be a lot of this…

… and a lot of this.

I guess I see where they were going with this — it’s a fun madcap scene, but when you’re throwing ten babies out of the window, it’s a bit eh? Eh? Do we really need to have ten babies plummeting to their deaths (to be saved by The Flash in amusing ways)?

I dunno.

Heh, well that’s a nice touch.

Tada!

I think that was a lot funnier in the script than it turned out to be on the screen.

Nooo! Now we’re getting The Flash’s origin! And his childhood! Nooooo! Why can’t they just do the fun parts of super-heroing? When they have their powers and stuff? Instead we always get their traumatic, boring origins.

Oh, he was so sad that he broke into the multiverse! I hate multiverse stuff!

Well, it’s inventive…

*rolls eyes*

It’s classic multiversey stuff, and it’s kinda amusing.

That’s the problem with multiverses…

OK, now we get to the infamous final boss fight, rendered in a desert. But… it didn’t really look as bad as I expected.

And the CGI Nick Cage instead of the scenes he did for this movie.

Yes, exactly.

But… it’s not as bad as everybody says it is. It’s written mostly as a comedy, but that doesn’t really make it all of the way to the screen, I think. The goofy bits (and half of the film is goofy bits) are successful, but then you shift to these standard super-hero serious bits, and that doesn’t quite work.

Ezra Miller is really good in this; he can turn the goofy and silly up to ten at the drop of a hat. The movie is perhaps too long, but I wasn’t really bored at any point of the movie. It feels like it almost should have worked?

The Flash. Andy Muschietti. 2023. ⚃

Another Tennessee Williams play… Kazan kinda had a Tennessee factory going on there for a while?

But this is a movie I haven’t seen before! I think! So I’m excited.

Hey, Karl Malden…

I bought a Kazan box set some years back, and I’m finally watching the last handful of movies from the set. It’s a bit odd, because while the set is very handsome — there’s a huge book and stuff — the movies themselves look very unrestored. Lots of juddering and lots of dust on the film.

Oh, Tennessee.

Hey, she’s great. Carroll Baker? The name’s not familar…

Wow! I’ve seen Giant, but absolutely none of the other movies have names that ring a bell. There’s some bigger names among the directors… oh, and then she goes off to Italy? Based on the directors’ names. I guess her career didn’t really take off? (But she was Oscar nominated for the role in this movie.)

They were eating pizza down thar in the 50s?

This started off like distilled Tennessee Williams, but now it’s really not — it casts a wider net and is much weirder. So I had to pause and goole:

Although the film’s title card reads “Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll” and the film is based on Williams’ one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Elia Kazan claimed in his autobiography that Williams was only “half-heartedly” involved in the screenplay and that Kazan actually wrote most of it.

Yeah, that makes more sense.

Really!? Well, the characters are caricatured, but pure comedy? It doesn’t really seem to me like this is intended as a parody of these kinds of movies. It’s just really over the top, I think? Full on.

But I guess, if you take this as a serious movie, it’s incomprehensible why Baby Doll continues to confide in this sleaze ball after he’s made it pretty clear that he’s a sleaze ball.

Yeah, OK, it’s a comedy, I guess… But it’s less funny than horrifying.

Yeah, OK, this had to be meant to be parody, I guess, but it’s not funny.

Yeah, OK, it’s a harsh take-down of Tennessee Williams type movies? All southern angst and stuff? So Jonathan Rosenbaum was right after all.

Still, it’s not actually that funny. The last half hour was excruciating.

Baby Doll. Elia Kazan. 1956. ⚂

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before. But… not quite sure?

Heh heh. This is most amusing.

Now that’s some hat.

Heh heh heh.

Yeah, that’s right!

Oh oh oh. I remember this thing. Did I watch this movie in my childhood or something?

Horrifying!

The basic plot of this movie is, of course, something that’s been done a lot around this time, and several times by Cary Grant himself. (I.e., they’re divorcing, but… perhaps not!??!!) But it doesn’t follow the expected beats, and it ends with the Dunne character plotting to get them together in the most absurd way. It’s a very funny screwball comedy, and it’s so charming and odd.

Aha!

McCarey’s improvisational style was deeply unsettling to Grant, and at the end of the first week Grant sent Cohn an eight-page memorandum titled “What’s Wrong With This Picture”. Grant asked Cohn to let him out of the film, offering to do one or more pictures for free and even saying he’d reimburse Cohn $5,000 if he were released. McCarey was so angry at Grant that he stopped speaking to him and told Cohn he’d kick in another $5,000 to get Grant off the film.

The movie didn’t really have a script!

His working method was to ask his cast to improvise the scene, creating their own dialogue and blocking their own action before allowing cameras to roll. If a problem arose with a scene, McCarey would sit at a piano on the set and pick out tunes and sing until a solution came to him.

Sounds like quite a character, and that explains the lack of… well… plot. I mean, there’s a plot, but these things usually have a clockwork plot of fun things, while this movie is basically just a handful of funny scenes.

Anyway, it’s great.

The Awful Truth. Leo McCarey. 1937. ⚅