Amazingly enough, this movie has good reviews — it has a 92% tomatometer.

The imdb rating is more realistic.

It’s a really, really bad movie — nothing makes much sense, and the characters’ motivations seem totally random. I was going “wha? wha?” throughout the entire thing.

The only thing here that worked was the ending, which I guess was trying to reference Beau Travail, perhaps?

The Swimmer. Adam Kalderon. 2021. ⚁

Even as a cigarette girl Marlene has the best lighting.

Nice drapes.

While watching the movie, I kept wondering whether the governor was that funny guy from all the movies, and:

It is! I didn’t know that Edward Everett Horton had done even slightly straight roles like this. But he’s excellent here, too.

This really isn’t that much of a movie — it’s mainly a vehicle to watch Marlene Dietrich being pretty on the screen. But even so, von Sternberg makes the most of it, and we get a very amusing little movie where Dietrich is The Bad Girl; the Baddest Girl Ever In A Movie.

The Devil is a Woman. Josef von Sternberg. 1935. ⚄

Is that John Lurie or that guy that looks like John Lurie? Hm… Ah, the latter.

This movie has a bunch of really accomplished actors. Harvey Keitel had even starred in a couple movies Auster had done with Wayne Wang, so you’d think this would be easy peasy — but the performances are really off. It’s weird that a bad/inexperienced directory like Auster could somehow make Keitel act amateurish, but there it is.

But it’s a pretty good movie overall, and it certainly has that Austerian mystery going on — you never know exactly happening, and it’s fascinating. And the ending could be seen as a groaner, I guess, but I really liked it.

Lulu On The Bridge. Paul Auster. 1998. ⚃