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.
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
This week I chose romantic comedies involving time travel.
The first film on my list, James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, tells the story of Leopold, the historical 3rd Duke of Albany, and inventor of the elevator ((at least according to the film) (Jackman)) who finds himself in modern day New York after chasing a time traveler off of the Brooklyn Bridge.
While he is holed up in the Stuart, the time traveler’s, (Liev Schreiber) apartment waiting for the portal to his original time. He meets Stuarts upstair’s neighbor Kate McKay (Ryan) Kate’s an ambitious market researcher with little time for a social life but she quickly opens up to Leopold’s Victorian manners.
Kate and Leopold was another one of those films I was aware of but never got around to, in fact, that the only reason it tripped my radar at all was that it was the first film I saw with Jackman not doing an action film.
He and Ryan have good chemistry and I enjoyed how his performance presented his culture shock of trying to make sense of the modern world. Also, looking at this movie as a science fiction fan I enjoyed how Stuart is easily spotted by Leopold in the past because of all of the mistakes he makes. Of course, there were just as many problems. For example, early in the movie, Stuart falls down an empty elevator shaft because Leopold isn’t in the past to invent the elevator, however, New York does not appear to be paralyzed by an “elevator plague”.
The next film on my list, Richard Curtis’s About Time starring Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, and Bill Nighy. Tim Lake (Gleeson) is an ordinary kid growing up in Cornwall with his very eccentric family. When he turns 21 his father (Nighy) takes him aside to tell him the facts of life. In this case, the fact is that all the male members of the family have the power to travel back in time.
Tim decides to use these powers to get a girlfriend. After a few false starts, he meets Mary (McAdams). Through trial and error, he tweaks his timeline to create the perfect life with her.
I don’t know why but this film really didn’t do it for me, which is a shame because it was quite sweet with great performances from everybody. (Nighy is particularly good as Tim’s Father.)
This week I watched movies satirizing the madness of war. In both of these movies I want to emphasize the difference between satire and flat-out parody since while both of these movies had its share of gallows humor, your amusement is not the creators’ first priority.
I started by watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers. Les Carabiniers tells the story of two poor men, Ulysses (Marino Mase) and Michelangelo (Albert Juross) who are seduced into joining the army. Not out of patriotism but with promises of anything they could possibly want and do and get away with it. They are encouraged by their wives, Venus and Cleopatra (Catherine Ribeiro and Genevieve Galea) who want to cash in on these rewards as well.
From there we watch their exploits as they commit war crime after war crime and atrocity after atrocity while enjoying every bit of it. This is all framed by the postcards they send home to their girlfriends. This can only last for how long.
My opinion about Godard’s work is mixed at best. And I won’t say this movie is even close to being one of my favorites of his. One critique I read after watching this film said the viewer is not supposed to like this movie because war is bad and it Goddard believes that all anti-war films, despite the message their message still make War seems attractive in a perverse sort of way. This is an opinion I have heard from many critics, but this explanation, at least as an excuse
The next film on my list Danis Tanovi?’s No Man’s Land. It the middle of the Bosnian War and a Bosnian patrol get lost in the fog only to discover that they had walked into no man’s land where they’re immediately slaughtered by an entrenched Serbians. Only one, Ciki (Branko ?uri? ) survives out of sheer luck falling into a small trench. The Serbians send soldiers to investigate a veteran and an extremely green rookie named Nimo (Rene Bitorajac ). Along with checking for survivors, the older soldier takes the opportunity to rig some of the corpses with bouncer mines. However gets Ciki drop on them, killing the older soldier and soon it is just him and Vino taking turns who are each other’s prisoner, stuck in the trench together not able to get out of the trench lest they add insult to injury it turns out the corpse who is rigged with explosives wasn’t quite dead.
The best way to describe No Man’s Land is kind of like Enemy Mine. Except instead of being trapped in the middle of nowhere, they’re trapped where everyone knows where they are and can’t do anything about it… and they have press coverage.
This is a comedy at it’s darkest showing the banality of war with everybody out of their depth bogged down by the chain of command. Neither the Bosnian or the Serbian care, the UN troops on the ground care but can’t do anything and their commanders aren’t letting them try and finally the army of journalists who may or may not care, but their producers are more interested in milking it for all the “human interest“ that they can get.
For the week’s selection, I went with films about pulp adventure, or more accurately films that parodied films like Indiana Jones and similar pulp films.
The first film on my list was J. Lee Thompson’s Firewalker, starring Chuck Norris, Lou Gossett Jr. and Melody Anderson. This tells the story of Max and Leo two down on their luck treasure hunters, who have had many adventures together. (We can tell because one of their arch nemesis shows up in the cold open)
They are hired by a beautiful woman named Patricia (Anderson) to help her find Aztec gold in Central America. Can they find it before the villains do?
This movie was unintentionally funny to the point of being a comedy in all but name. Strangely for eighties schlock, it was entertainingly charming with Norris and Gossett having good enough chemistry that I would be willing to watch a good version of it.
The next film on my list was an intentional parody of the genre, Robert Zemeckis’s Romancing the Stone, starring Micheal Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
Turner plays Joan Wilder a successful but introverted Romance Novelist. When she gets a call from her sister, Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor) who has been kidnapped by two smugglers, Ira and Ralph (Zack Norman and Danny DeVito) who want a treasure a map that Elaine had mailed Joan. Soon Joan finds herself lost in the jungles of Columbia, running from someone far worse than Ira and Ralph (Manuel Ojeda as the terrifying Colonel Zolo). Here she meets a real roguish hero, Jack. Now that she’s finding herself trapped in one of her own stories can she survive?
This is another one of those films I’d been hearing about for years and this time I don’t feel particularly guilty about it. It was okay, with a couple of funny bits, but otherwise, my general reaction was… meh.
So for this week’s them I chose movies about writers and the struggles of all writers who are fighting with the creative process. (Originally I thought I’d go with straight writer’s block but it wasn’t quite as accurate as I would have liked.
The first film on my list, Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, tells the story of writer Harry Block. He’s a bit of a jerk who has alienated most of his family by borrowing personal stories from everyone he knows as fodder for his stories.
Now he’s going to his old university to accept a reward.
It’s been a long time since I’ve watched any of Woody Allen’s film. First, because he’s been cranking them out so frequently, they become more and more ubiquitous. Also as more of Allen’s private life become’s more public, it’s doesn’t feel cool to like his work anymore.
Still this film all right. It has Woody’s usual level of wittiness with Harry as a brutal deconstruction of himself, but at the same time, it feels a little disjointed. It keeps going back and forth between Harry’s stories, the present day and flashbacks. Along with that Harry occasionally interacts with his own characters making it difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality and it’s hard to tell what the film is really about.
The next on my list was the Cohen’s brother’s, Barton Fink. Barton Fink (played by John Turturro) is an aspiring Broadway playwright who after his first successful playwright has been hired to write for Hollywood. Regrettably, his first assignment is to write a b rated wrestling film that is so out of his area of interest he can’t think of anything!
Barton Fink is very much John Turturo’s film. First and foremost the film is a portrait of the character and Tutor does a wonderful job of portraying Barton as an insular, obsessed hypocrite. He continues to go on about writing plays about the common man but ultimately doesn’t seem to care about them. Whenever he actually meets a “common man” he mostly ignores them.
He is supported by the Coen ensemble of eccentrics most notably John Goodman who plays Barton’s next door and confidant, who after Turturro has all of the best lines.
