A very Happy Birthday to Mr. Charlie Parker!
Let us celebrate with his version of, I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.
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This week I return to Shakespeare again, specifically Hamlet. Just to clarify, neither of these are technically adaptations of the play, as in they are not using the original script in any way. They are just modern versions… sort of.
The first film on my list was Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well.
This tells a story about a company mired in corruption. Soon things get worse as breaking news stories appear, board members are being arrested and committing suicide. It is not clear what is behind it. But most of the evidence points towards the Chief Executive’s secretary Nishi (played by Toshiro Mifune), who is gradually revealed to be the son of the company’s murdered founder, Who is now seeking revenge.
This film was only very, very loosely based on Hamlet. With Kurosawa only using the broadest strokes of the play to write a story about corporate corruption and revenge. However, the story beats that he uses work quite well.
I won’t say this will be my favorite Kurosawa film. To be honest none of his modern-day films have really worked for me so far.
But still, Kurosawa shows off his craft brilliantly with wonderful camera shots that rival all of his great films. I especially liked the scene in the middle where Nishi makes one of his targets believe they are haunted by the ghost of a colleague who is believed to have committed suicide. The way the Kurosawa stages this fake haunting makes me wish that he tried his hands on horror. (Depending on whether Throne of Blood counts or not)
The next film on my list was Let The Devil Wear Black. This one is much closer to the original material and does an excellent job of translating most of the notes of the play into the modern day. Now Jack, the Hamlet figure played by Jonathan Penner is a grad student with a history of mental illness inheriting his father’s company after his death and noticing something fishy going on in all of the usual places.
For the most part, this was a pretty good retelling, most of the elements of Hamlet work well enough in the modern day. I especially liked how a lot more screen time was put on the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship.
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As a lover of Broadway Musicals, having grown up on my grandfather’s Rodgers and Hammerstein collection, I was aware of one of their lesser-known plays, Carousel. I had always had mixed feelings about it. It had piqued my interest because it took place in Boothbay, Maine, a town that is just fifteen minutes away from where I used to spend my summers growing up. But because it was one of Rogers and Hammerstein’s darker plays, involving the protagonist committing suicide I never watched it beyond the first act. But I always liked the soundtrack.
In the meantime, I learned It was based on Ferenc Molnár’s play, Liliom. I also learned that while people know of Carousel, very few knew about Liliom.
This is what we call a challenge.
So here for this week, I watched different versions of Liliom.
For the first film, I watched was Fritz Lang’s Liliom, his only French film that he did on his way to Hollywood, running away from the Nazis.
Charles Boyer plays Liliom a barker for a carousel. He falls in love with and married a chambermaid named Julie( Madeleine Ozeray)However since he’s a lazy self-important wastrel, things go badly with both of them unemployed and destitute. In desperation, Liliom participates in a robbery, which he and his accomplice fail at. Liliom kills himself. He finds himself in purgatory but is allowed to return to earth for one day to try and make amends.
I had mixed feelings about this film. While I certainly consider Lang one of the greatest pioneers of film, this film was certainly not one of his masterpieces. But Boyer is very good playing Liliom as an arrogant, self-destructive jerk.
I especially liked the similarity between the police station Liliom is sent to, earlier in the film, to the bureaucratic afterlife he finds himself in.
The next film on my list was Henry King’s adaptation of Carousel. Carousel is nearly identical to the original play, except that Liliom becomes Billy Bigalow (Gordon MacRae) and 19th century Budapest is replaced with 19th century Maine.
I was pretty disappointed with this film. Because I’ve listened to the soundtrack so many times I couldn’t help but be annoyed by how much they cropped one of Rodger and Hammerstein’s most complex scores (It doesn’t help that Macrae’s singing ability does not even come close to the chops to carry one of the closest things Rodger and Hammerstein ever got to straight opera)
On top of this, this film feels like a checklist of how not to do a film adaptation of a musical. Never really taking advantage of the potential of film, even when shooting outdoors! This is most apparent in the dance numbers. They’re not technically bad, but it’s like the King and his choreographer never spoke. So despite there being what would have been great in the theater are completely ruined by the camera shots.
This week I I decided to watch comedies (yes, comedies) about spouses trying to kill their spouses.
The first film on my list was Elaine May’s A New Leaf starring May and Walter Matthau. Matthau plays Henry Graham, a spoiled rich man who has no knowledge of how to live any other way. He is soon shocked to discover that over the years he has spent his entire inheritance. He decides the only way to maintain his expensive lifestyle is to marry into money.., and then kill his new bride. He soon meets the perfect candidate, a klutzy and wealthy botany Proffesor, Henrietta Lowell (May) He successfully woos and weds her and now all he has to do is carry out the rest of this plan.
This is a film with a wickedly dry sense of humor. Matthau is great playing against type as a pampered, entitled twit who gradually grow as a human being as maintaining his act as the perfect husband for Henrietta requires him to actually exert his brain and May is wonderful as the wonderfully flaky Henrietta.
The next film on my list Lawrence Kasdan’s I Love You To death starring Kevin Kline, Tracey Ullman, Joan Plowright, River Phoenix, William Hurt, and Keanu Reeves. Klein plays Joey Boca who runs a pizzeria with his wife, Rosalie (Ullman) He’s an affable guy and a relatively good father. Regrettably, he’s also cheering on Rosalie with multiple women. Rosalie finds out, and since she’s a good Catholic who wouldn’t dream of divorcing her husband, plans his murder with her mother (Plowright)
Loosely based on an actual attempted murder in 1983, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, this is a fun comedy of errors with a hilarious ensemble of incompetent accomplices (For anybody who thought that Ted “Theodore” Logan was Keanu Reeves’s dumbest and flakiest character, this film will prove them wrong.) Klein’s performance as Joey is pretty good even if it does come off cartoonishly stereotypical. But he and Ulman have good chemistry.
I still think the ending is a bit of a copout, though.
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A very happy birthday to Mr. Louis Armstrong! Let’s celebrate with his version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” When I first heard about this one I was about to write this off as another retread of a show tune. But wow this one gripped me where it counts.
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This week selection I went back to science fiction. I wanted to do comedy. But since I mostly scraped the barrel for most of the obvious science fiction parities I needed to go deeper into the realm of satire. Going with something incredibly specific topic of transformation.
The first on my list, was a comedy that’s been in just about every text book about Science Fiction Media, The Bed Sitting Room. The Bed Sitting Room is a satire about the apocalypse. Four years ago, due to a “misunderstanding”, England, and presumably the rest of the world, has been destroyed in nuclear war.. Now what remains of human civilization wanders around a dumb trying desperately to maintain their dignity and their Britishness. We watch the stories of several people in their desperate, pointless and ridiculous effort to preserve their status quo and it would be tragic if you weren’t laughing so hard. Oh yes and some people were turning into bed sitting rooms.
This was an entertaining who is who of British comedy in the 60s. Including Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Arthur Lowe and many many more.. You could almost consider it the British equivalent of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, only far more cynical. However, there are wonderful performances from everyone. And it never allows you to take it too seriously.
The next film on my list Yorgos Lanthimos’s, The Lobster, features another dark dystopian setting where single people are forced to go to the hotel to find a new companion. If they don’t find true companionship and 40 days they will be turned into an animal. But don’t worry, at least we get to choose what kind.
When his wife leaves him for another woman, David (Colin Farrell) is sent to the hotel. He dreams of being a Lobster because they are long-lived and blue-blooded, like the aristocracy. At the hotel, he and his companions are put through a regimented hell of watching propaganda performances, being punished for minor infractions and oh yes, they have to hunt single people hiding in the woods.
The clock is ticking.
This is a dark stylized trippy film about the search for companionship (you really can’t call what even the successful couples get love) It’s one of those films that keeps you stuck in that weird place between laughter and tears…. But in a good way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AVBEwTIfDM
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