Audient Audit: The Ref

This is the final installment in my 2019 monthly series where I've been checking my lists twice to see whether I was naughty by adding films I'd never seen to them. 

So I'm finally getting around to seeing my first Christmas movie of the season (second if you count Last Christmas way back in November, third if you count the 40 minutes of Die Hard I watched last weekend), and thereby writing my first Christmas post of the season, and it's one that doesn't even have a Christmas-related poster.

In a thing it definitely has in common with Die Hard, which came out six years earlier, The Ref appears to have been marketed in such a way as to downplay/entirely disregard its Christmas setting. That would never happen today. If anything, they'd want to play up any little Christmas association they could find. At the very least, you'd have this same picture with a Christmas tree behind Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.

But no, in 1994, apparently it was considered a bad thing that your movie might feature Christmas. And The Ref apparently was not successful enough to have generated even one alternate poster. When you google "The Ref movie poster," this is all you get.

But the reason there's no Christmas in this poster is the same reason there's no Christmas in the Die Hard posters: The Ref was not released at Christmastime. It was released on March 11, 1994, so putting a Christmas tree on the poster would have been a weird thing indeed. The big change today would be either it wouldn't have Christmas as a backdrop, or it would have been released at Christmastime. Gone are the days when movies that have a significant Christmas theme are released at any other time than mid-November.

The Ref had made it onto my various lists because I had seen at least a few scenes of it. I remembered the scene where Denis Leary tips Spacey and Davis over in their chairs, for example.

As it turns out, though, that was it. I didn't remember most of this film.Which means either my memory is bad, or I didn't see it.

Not remembering it is a good thing, because I came in with the impression that The Ref was a mediocre black comedy, one which others raved about but which hadn't worked for me at the time. I'm glad I'm remembering it wrong, probably from never having seen it at all, because I thought this thing was hysterical.

It's all about comic timing. The three leads are all masters of that, as the lines they spit out really sing because of their skill in this area. Then you've got legit comedy vet Christine Baranski, whose imperious and sarcastic line readings have always been her calling card. But some of the funniest lines come from Baranski's dopey husband, a "that guy" I recognized from numerous previous projects, whose name is Adam Lefevre. He's the straight man to all these sarcastic dynamos, asking in childlike naive surprise "Why?" when his brother and sister-in-law say they're getting a divorce. Despite a movie's worth of their bickering.

When all the performers are good, you have to credit the director. The late Ted Demme (I guess both Demme brothers are now "late," sadly) made a number of really solid films during his career, among them Beautiful Girls and Monument Ave., also with Leary. His career started early enough that he was still only 38 when he died eight years after this movie was released. We might have gotten a lot more great movies from him if a heart attack -- one likely fueled by cocaine use, an irony since his last movie was Blow -- didn't take him from us too early.

The thing that worried me about making this our Christmas Eve Eve viewing on our holiday to Tasmania was that it would be too acid, too dark. I liked the idea of watching something that wasn't soppy with holiday sentiment, but I was worried this would drive us to places we didn't want to go. (And as it happened, it was the second straight movie my wife and I watched involving marital strife, after Marriage Story.)

Well, lucky this film ends up having a lot of heart. Sure, Davis and Spacey bicker their way through the kidnapping/home invasion perpetrated by Leary's cat burglar, but there's no real violence in this film, and comeuppance is only waiting for characters who really deserve it. And, as it turns out, none of our three leads fall into that category. The issues Davis and Spacey argue about are not petty, but seem like real concerns of real married people -- while also managing to tickle our funny bones. And the fact that they both start to sympathize with Spacey, and vice versa, shows that decent people see the decency in each other even in a world that's marred by bitterness and betrayal.

A big win to end the series on.

I'd normally end this series with a kind of wrap-up along the lines of ranking the films from first to worst, but I'm not going to do that this time. Instead, I'll just give you a final count of the movies I saw, and which ones I had legitimately seen before. Here we go:

January - Roxanne (hadn't seen)
February - The Witches of Eastwick (had seen)
March - The Dollars Trilogy (hadn't seen)
April - Speed 2: Cruise Control (hadn't seen)
May - The Pink Panther (hadn't seen)
June - Modern Times (hadn't seen)
July - The Magnificent Seven (hadn't seen)
August - Breathless (hadn't seen)
September - Manon of the Spring (hadn't seen)
October - Heartbeeps (had seen)
November - Ran (had seen)
December - The Ref (hadn't seen)

So a pretty scant three titles I ended up pretty sure I'd seen before. Which makes me a pretty big liar ... but also pretty good at identifying when I might have lied.

I'm still weighing up two different options for my 2020 monthly series, but will decide in time to watch the first in January. Merry Christmas!

Audient Audit: Ran

This is the second-to-last monthly installment of Audient Audit, where I'm checking my lists twice to see if I was naughty by adding to them a movie I hadn't seen. (Should have saved this description for Christmas, probably.)

My November viewing of Ran marks Akira Kurosawa's second appearance in this series, in a manner of speaking. I haven't watched a Kurosawa film as one of my main 12 monthly installments of Audient Audit, but I did watch a film whose details seemed familiar to me because they were inspired by a Kurosawa film. The fact that John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven was based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, one of my all-time favorites, delayed how long it took for me to determine that I had, in fact, not seen it.

Interestingly, there's a similar thing at play with Ran, because Ran is inspired by something I'm familiar with. Kurosawa loved his Shakespeare -- Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth -- and his final Shakespeare adaptation was this 1985 film, his second-to-last overall, which is based on King Lear. So as I was watching, I wasn't sure if I was remembering the details of this film, or the details of the Bard's play about a mad king distributing his land among his three daughters. (Who are sons here.)

The reason I wasn't sure if I watched it in the first place, though, is that the thing I remember most about Ran was seeing it discussed by Siskel & Ebert. I don't think this discussion came in conjunction with the actual release of the movie, because in 1985 I would have been just a bit too young to have started watching the two critics who became my personal heroes for my own critical aspirations. But I clearly remember some kind of retrospective discussion of it, perhaps as part of a theme, maybe a best of the decade list, maybe even an appreciation of Kurosawa at the time he died. (I found their review of Ran on YouTube, but I do suspect it was a decade retrospective as Ebert ranked the film the 7th best of the 1980s.)

Whatever the case was, I clearly remember their video package containing a shot of horses carrying men in red armor as they flowed down the side of a hill. Why this image has lingered for me for something like 30 years is unclear to me. The brain is a mysterious organ.

But because that scene lingered as much as it did, over time I've wondered if I said I saw Ran just because I remember that scene that was part of the Siskel & Ebert video package. But what strange logic that would be, if indeed I did use it. That would have meant that at some point, when fine-tuning my lists or adding stray movies that had been missing, I would have consciously remembered the Siskel & Ebert bit but temporarily disregarded the origins of whatever familiarity I thought I had with Ran.

Fortunately, it does not appear that I used that logic. Over the course of this viewing I became convinced that it was, indeed, my second.

Perhaps the best bit of evidence is that I remembered the performance of Tatsuya Nakadai in the central role, which is also why I chose a Ran poster that features him prominently. He's a memorably distraught image, an old man with flowing white hair, with what seems almost like mascara to accentuate the wildness of his eyes. There's a scene where he's trapped inside a burning castle, staring straight ahead as he contemplates all his mistakes, as arrows fly by and miraculously miss him. I've seen similar scenes in other films involving samurai or the Chinese equivalent thereof (I believe there's one in Zhang's Hero, which I mentioned earlier this week), but as I was watching I felt quite sure I'd seen this scene in particular.

There are two other characters I distinctly remembered, the king's fool, played by Shinnosuke Ikehata, and the king's daughter-in-law of his eldest son, played by Mieko Harada. As is often the case in Shakespeare, the fool is the bearer of a deceptive amount of wisdom; in this case he's both openly challenging of the king's foolish gestures and blindly loyal toward him. Though what struck me as most memorable is this song he performs about the new king (the eldest son) swaying like a branch in the wind, an encapsulation of his weakness as a ruler. The sing songy quality of it definitely penetrated back into the deep recesses of my viewing brain.

Then there's the daughter-in-law, the equivalent of Edmund in King Lear, who is frightening in her capacity for deceit and violence -- though it should be said, she's seeking revenge for the king's killing of her family in the past. She has a huge amount of agency. I think there's also something unnerving about the makeup choice used for her, which I think is probably a traditional choice in feudal Japan, where she has what almost seems like a second set of eyes painted high up on her forehead. Since I don't know if I can convey what I'm talking about with mere words, here's an image for you:

Those may just be the equivalent of our modern painted eyebrows, but there's something not of this earth about them.

The film is, it probably goes without saying, incredibly impressive, as it has these majestic battle sequences involving an unfathomable amount of extras. The use of color is also distinctive, and as an interesting side note, the look of the film was something Kurosawa had to have translated from his personal sketches, as he was going blind and could not actually play the same oversight role he'd played in the past.

Kurosawa has always been strong with keeping the narrative easy to follow, and having Lear as its spine certainly helps with that. Still, there were plenty of narrative surprises, as my relationship to Lear is a bit rusty -- I read it back in college and don't know that I've seen another adaptation of it since then, other than this (though I probably would have seen this movie around the same time I read the play). For example, certain characters died at different times than I was expecting them to -- though those could also be Kurosawa's deviations from the play.

Okay, I've got just one more Audient Audit to go, and assuming I can source it, I plan to wind down the series with a Christmas movie, Ted Demme's The Ref. (Yes, I know it's got Kevin Spacey in it.)

Audient Audit: Heartbeeps

This is the tenth in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, in which I review my books to see if I've cooked them to include movies I haven’t seen.

When I’ve gone through my various movie lists and through Flickchart, there have been two movies I think of interchangeably, neither of which I’m sure I’ve seen. One has been Steve Barron’s Electric Dreams from 1984, and one has been Allan Arkush’s Heartbeeps from 1981. They do both feature artificial intelligence, but maybe the most salient common element was that I wasn’t sure either belonged on my lists.

Well, I should no longer confuse them, at least, and can now be certain I've seen at least one of them.

I was a bit bemused to find Heartbeeps available for easy download on iTunes. It seemed like the type of the movie that should have passed into general obscurity, no longer available for an audience that no longer cares about finding it. But there it was, along with a couple other randos from the same time period that I also considered for October, such as D.C. Cab and Unfaithfully Yours. I would have preferred Solarbabies, but that indeed has passed on to the Great Obscure. (And since I have plans for the last two months of this series, D.C. Cab and Unfaithfully Yours will have to wait indefinitely for their time of reckoning.)

Heartbeeps carried a fair bit of promise for something kind of outrageous and campy, plus it has a bit of genuine interest for comedy fans, as it stars Andy Kaufman. (And Bernadette Peters, a talented comic actress, but not someone whose presence alone would draw me to a movie.) I soon discovered it also features Randy Quaid and Dick Miller.

The story involves two malfunctioning service robots who fall in love on the shelves of the factor where they are waiting to be repaired. He’s Val Com 17485, a valet, and she’s Aqua Com 89045, who assists at poolside parties. They are naturally dutiful robots without a sense of rebellion, but they do effectively rebel by deciding to steal a company van to go investigate some trees they see off in the distance. They are accompanied by the robot version of Rodney Dangerfield, who smokes a cigar and adjusts his tie while telling bad Borscht Belt one-liners. On their way they make a small helper robot out of spare parts, who is effectively their child. They’re running from the hapless employees who let them escape on their watch and a proto Robocop who hasn’t figured out how to distinguish between criminals and parents pushing strollers. But their biggest antagonist may be the limited life of their batteries.

Heartbeeps is both better than I thought it would be and not as satisfying as I thought it would be. I had it in my head that it would be really weird, but it’s not that weird. Within its world it presents us a fairly straightforward road trip movie. Kaufman and Peters both commit to their roles and they have a really sweet chemistry.

My favorite part might have been the Rodney Dangerfield robot, though I should say he’s not voiced by Rodney Dangerfield. In fact, I told at least two of his one-liners to my kids, who appreciated them.

The thing that made me certain I had in fact seen it, though, was that I had a clear memory of two scenes, at opposite ends of the movie: the two main robots standing on the shelves and engaging in their innocent robotic banter, and the scene of them running out of batteries at the end (spoiler alert). Although the movie does not have particularly deep thoughts on its mind, there’s something kind of moving about its contemplations on mortality. These robots have become so advanced over the course of this film that it seems tragic to ponder their basic mechanical limitations, which undercut their evident humanity. Of course, that’s not the actual ending, which is far cheerier (spoiler alert).

I also enjoyed the confused police robot, which gets trapped in logical loops that it cannot reconcile and goes haywire. It might not be up to the Robocop level of satire, but there’s some funny stuff going on here with a dangerous robot who has the intellect of a child proud of the shiny silver badge he’s wearing.

It does seem like a bit of a strange role for Kaufman, though he may have taken it as a challenge. That consummate outside-the-box performer boxes himself in big time by acting within the confines of a pre-programmed machine, albeit one that is consistently breaking free of its own limitations. He gives an entertaining performance, but it’s probably not the one you would recommend to someone in search of “the real Andy Kaufman.”

Okay! Two more months to go before I put away my auditor’s pencil and transparent visor for good.

Audient Audit: Manon of the Spring

This is the latest in my 2019 monthly series trying to figure out if I’m lying when I say I’ve seen certain films.

You may recall that in August I did a bonus installment of Audient Audit that was inspired by watching Jean de Florette in a different viewing challenge. Having been assigned that movie made me realize I might have a movie that needed to be audited in a different way, in that it didn’t appear on my lists but should have. That was ultimately my conclusion about Claude Berri’s 1986 film.

Berri had another 1986 film called Manon of the Spring, the sequel to Jean de Florette. It came conveniently included in the Florette DVD I borrowed from the library. And like Florette, Manon was also a movie I thought I might have watched in French class a year or two after it came out. In fact, I remember being able to translate the title into French: Manon du Source. Imagine my surprise when it is now translated as Manon des Sources, which refers to multiple springs, somewhat confusingly. Maybe it was always translated that way, but to me, it’s Bicycle Thieves all over again. (Of course, the whole thinking seems to be faulty here, as "source" takes a feminine article, "la," which means it would have been Manon de la Source. "Du" is used when it's a masculine article, as "de le" is not a valid construction in French.)

But I digress. Even though this is another installment, a regular installment, of a series devoted to legitimizing movies that were illegitimately on my various lists, I decided to watch Manon in September before it’s due back at the library, and just take care of this month’s entry in Audient Audit. So yeah, that may mean that one movie I had tapped for this series will remain in limbo about whether it belongs on my lists, but watching movies can be a “catch as catch can” proposition, especially when you are returning from a three-week vacation and still vaguely dealing with jet lag.

The reason Manon should definitely have already been on my list – especially when compared to movies like last month’s Breathless, which it was immediately clear I had seen almost none of – was that I remember, back in the late 1980s, finding Manon dull in comparison to Jean de Florette. This certainly seems like proof that I had seen both movies, once I recalled it.

However, having watched Berri’s sequel, I’m now thinking that it was indeed assigned in a French class to get the teacher through a couple afternoons when she had otherwise been too lazy to plan something, but that perhaps I found it so boring that I tuned out. I felt pretty sure that I had seen the first half of the movie, but it was disappointing me enough that maybe I started doodling in my notebook instead of watching. And if you aren’t watching, listening is not enough to say you’ve followed the movie. Sure, we were taking French, but to say that we actually understood a lot of it without subtitles would have been a stretch.

What had disappointed me about Manon of the Spring, assuming this memory I’ve concocted is actually legitimate, was how passive the title character seemed to me. At the end of Jean de Florette, she witnesses Urgolin (Daniel Auteuil) and Papet (Yves Montand) do a little jig as they restore the water source to the land her father once owned. The thing they accomplished fairly easily, as a result of withholding key information from him, was the thing that killed him, as he died while trying to use explosives to identify the water source. (Oops, sorry, spoilers for Jean de Florette.) That she wouldn’t have sworn lifelong vengeance and risen up to kill them made her seem, to me, weak or disinterested. (Or maybe I’m just thinking this now because I was fresh off viewing the Australian historical vengeance movie The Nightingale the night before watching Manon.)

But Manon did indeed have vengeance in mind, heeding the wisdom that it’s a dish best served cold. That I didn’t realize that at the time is further proof that either I did not watch the whole movie, or that I didn’t comprehend what I was watching, which maybe is the same thing.

Manon does find the mysterious source for the water that bubbles up on her father’s land when it’s not blocked. It happens when she chases a stray goat (she’s a goatherd) into a cave. When she find that water, she’s finally ready to give the town a little dose of its own medicine, blocking the source the way Urgolin and Papet once blocked it for her father.

The funny thing is that I didn’t totally realize this was what was happening on this viewing either. I saw her find the source, but we don’t actually see her blocking it. We only see the water dry up for Urgolin and others and them starting to panic. Only by reading the Wikipedia summary afterward did I realize this is what happened.

I’m not slow, but as I mentioned earlier, I am jet-lagged. This means the nearly two-hour movie was a struggle indeed to get through. I could have waited a few days more, but I’d already renewed this and other movies I brought on my trip once, and I was planning to return them all to the library Thursday after work. It was watching Manon of the Spring on Wednesday night, or not at all.

I was again bothered this time by the comparative passivity, the mute passivity, of Manon. I had a bit of trouble believing her character, due in part to the blank performance of Emmanuel Beart, but also to the decision to have her rarely speak, and to float and dance around like some kind of fairy. She just didn’t strike me as a real person, which made her (initial) failure to seek vengeance on those who wronged her father seem more like a character flaw than perhaps just an instance of waiting for the right moment, or maybe just not being a vindictive person in the first place.

While Florette and Manon are both fairly minimalist in terms of story, it bothered me in Manon where it did not in Florette. I felt like a huge amount of time was spent covering a fairly small amount of narrative, making it seem like points were belabored this time that were not belabored in the first film. I also found that Berri’s work with actors was less distinctive, and I don’t think we can only blame the absence of Gerard Depardieu. Auteuil, a very good actor, did not impress me this time out, possibly because he is given a truly predatory attitude toward Manon that kind of skeeved me out. (Who runs after a woman, increasing the magnitude of his proposals the faster she flees? He’s proposing desperate marriage as she disappears over the top of a hill, scared out of her wits.) Montand also interested me less this time around.

Manon of the Spring is still a good movie, It’s just at least a full star lower than its predecessor, and something I definitely won’t watch again now that I’ve officially seen it once.

Only three months left to watch the 15 (!) movies I’ve still got on my list of those I initially identified as candidates for this series. Then again, two-thirds of those are generally unavailable, so it’ll work out just about right.

Audient Audit Bonus: Jean de Florette

This is a bonus installment of my monthly series Audient Audit.

I certainly didn’t intend to write more than the 12 monthly installments I had planned for Audient Audit, but a circumstance came along that screamed out for a bonus. Unlike all the other movies in the series, it has to do with a movie I actually did see, though it wasn’t on any of my lists. And that’s a big deal, because realizing I’ve seen a movie that I didn’t have on my lists is something that only happens every couple years these days.

First I’ll tell you how it happened.

I’m in a movie group on Facebook called Flickchart Friends’ Favorites Fiesta, which is an offshoot of the discussion group related to the Flickchart website. I don’t actually participate all that much in the original discussion group these days – something having to do with no longer getting the proper notifications to see the new posts – but I’m a loyal participant in this second group. The premise in the group is that each month, you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie you haven’t yet seen from somebody else’s chart. They get your highest ranked, or more likely, someone else does. (I’ve only been randomly matched up with the same person in the same month once.) You’d think it might be easier from a "drawing names from a hat" standpoint if they had people get each other, but I’m not the organizer.

Anyway, in August I got given Jean de Florette, which is the #1 movie on the chart of one of the other participants. As soon as I saw the title that had been assigned to me, I wondered why the hell this movie is not on my various lists.

As you know if you’ve been following this series, I tend to err on the side of adding a film rather than excluding it. If I have a vague memory of seeing certain random extractions from a film, I usually say I’ve seen it, though this series has proven that actually to be the case only one time out of eight total films. It’s not very common, obviously, for me to have seen most of or an entire film and decide that I probably didn’t see it.

Jean de Florette is a particularly strange case, because if you walked up to me and asked me if I’d seen it, I’d say “Of course.” In fact, I believe I watched it in French class when I was in high school. I may have also watched the sequel, Manon of the Spring, or Manon du Source, in the same setting. (I now see it listed as Manons des Sources, which sounds like some Bicycle Thieves shit if I’ve ever seen it.)

But neither Jean nor Manon is on any of my film lists, and I wonder if this points to a flaw in the original making of the list. My original film list was composed of films from a video rental catalogue around 1990, and only because that catalogue was so comprehensive did I consider it a good source (if you will) for a list that I’m still updating nearly 30 years later. I’ve of course filled in missing titles over the years, which is an inexact science. But rarely – as I said, only once every couple years – do I still think of titles that I’ve been missing. I guess it’s possible Jean de Florette did not appear in this original video catalogue, maybe because it wasn’t available for some reason, and that it simply never got corrected.

Anyway, it’s a pretty great film. Here’s what I wrote about it when I reported back on my viewing in the Flickchart group:

The story is surprisingly simple. It involves a tract of land near Provence, France, where grapes are cultivated for wine and other farming occurs. However, the area is tricky as the sources of water are few, meaning prospective growers rely on the rain to slake the thirst of their plants, and in the case of the title character, allow the plants to grow that will feed his rabbits. He’s inherited the land from his uncle, who died during a scuffle when his neighbors approached him to buy his land for their enterprise growing carnations. They wanted to buy the land because they know of a spring that can provide the water to make the land suitably verdant, but they’re not going to tell Jean, his wife and his young daughter about that. They want to see him fail spectacularly so they can buy the land for cheap.

I am sometimes amazed by how much fascinating content can spring, so to speak, from a story that is so straightforward and uncomplicated. Jean de Florette is just short of two hours long (and is in fact the first in a two-part series that ends with Manon of the Spring), but the performances and the small details in Jean’s struggle to breed his rabbits keep a viewer glued the whole time. Three French acting treasures shine in this film, from Gerard Depardieu as the title character to the mercenary neighbors, played by Daniel Autieul and the great Yves Montand. I enjoyed being in their company for two hours even as I balled my fists at the callousness of the last two. Depardieu’s dogged optimism helped balance that out. Jean is also a hunchback, which complicates the way the townspeople view him and support (or don’t support) his claim to the land.

There was a preamble and a little bit after that, but I’ve already included those thoughts elsewhere in this post.

The two-disk set I got from the library also includes Manon of the Spring, and even though I’m leaving on a three-week trip to America on Saturday, I may renew the rental and take it with me. In fact, it may work out that this is my regular monthly post for September, although I’ll have to see if I can justify it to myself. After all, the audits in this series are supposed to be movies I’m not sure if I’ve seen but are on my lists.

Maybe I’ll just watch it, you know, just to watch it.  

Audient Audit: Breathless

This is the eighth in my 2019 series Audient Audit, in which I'm checking the accuracy of my own records on films I say I've seen.

The first clue that I had not, in fact, seen Jean-Luc Godard's classic film Breathless (1960) was that I had no idea it was a film noir. It may not be a conventional noir, but it fits loosely into that category. If you asked me to summarize Breathless, I probably wouldn't have been able to, but I would have considered it a lot closer to something like Jules and Jim than to, I don't know, The Big Sleep. So it didn't take long for me to determine that I had added this to my lists of films seen in error.

So why did I think I'd seen Breathless?

There's a good chance I saw at least one scene from it, once. I remember a tangible sense of frustration related to this movie, because at the time I saw whatever percentage I saw of it, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate what it was doing. In truth, I still don't appreciate Godard all that much, though I'll get to the exceptions to that in a minute. But I'm guessing that if I did see a scene in it, I saw the extended scene where the two leads are rolling around in bed and talking about life and love. I liked those scenes okay now, but at the time I would have once seen them, at least 20 and probably more like 25 years ago, I wouldn't have liked them at all.

The funny thing is that I have a very specific image of a scene I associate with Breathless, and it is simply not in the movie. I don't know, maybe it's in the Richard Gere remake, though I'm quite certain I haven't seen much or likely any of that. I have this image in my mind of Jean-Paul Belmondo's character seducing Jean Seberg's character while she's lying on a diving board next to a pool. Nope. Not in the movie.

The thing that's so surprising about this story being fairly plot heavy, relative to what I was expecting, is that its lack of plot would have been one of my chief complaints about it ... and therefore has been, all this time, an imaginary chief complaint. In fact, I had no idea that Belmondo's Michel is wanted for murder, a murder he actually committed by shooting a police officer. I "remembered" the cigarettes he smokes incessantly, an affectation that still kind of bothers me, not because I'm some prude, but just because I think it's a pretty artificial attempt at seeming "cool." I didn't remember that he's a wanted criminal, and that's because, well, I never actually saw the movie.

Michel models his own persona on that of Humphrey Bogart, so I'm wondering if what percentage of this movie I did see also contributes to why I don't like Bogart that much. Kind of working this out as I type this, but French opinions of what's cool and what isn't cool don't align that much with my own. They worship Bogart, and I don't care much for him. They think womanizing is fab, and that's just not my style. And maybe I think Godard embodies this just as much as Belmondo does.

That said, there were enough things that I liked about the film that I can mostly co-sign its reputation. One of those is Jean Seberg, a personality who is kind of unknown to me. Reading up on her, I can see that this film helped make her an icon, and perhaps contributed to her early demise (suicide) at age 40. Although I was a bit distracted by her American accent while speaking French -- I don't like the French, but I also don't like when people who aren't French attempt to be French? -- I do find that she has a star presence and an iconic look, one that reminded me a bit of Mia Farrow before Mia Farrow.

I also enjoy the ways Godard is playing with editing here, particularly in shots of Seberg riding in Belmondo's convertible. We get one line of dialogue being delivered in little bursts, and with each burst Seberg's background changes. It's a cool effect and was probably pretty groundbreaking at the time. As this is a far more linear film than some Godard would go on to make, I appreciate it for its comparative restraint. He was probably a better filmmaker (in my opinion) before he figured out quite all the tricks he could do. Then again, I have to say I have only seen a handful of his films. Until I've seen more, I should probably keep my opinions to myself.

I'm uncomfortable with what I said about not liking the French. It's not true. However, I do think there are elements of the French New Wave that have bothered me when they have made it into other films later on, maybe some of the earliest films of Jim Jarmusch. To put it kind of broadly, I don't love films where men sit around apartments in wife beaters smoking cigarettes and exorcising their love-hate relationships with women. I feel like Godard is kind of responsible for birthing this. So while I don't like some of what Godard wrought, I can appreciate this early example of it for what it is.

I bet I'd find the Gere remake really annoying though.

September brings another movie. "Really Vance? You don't say."

Audient Audit: The Magnificent Seven

This is the sixth in my series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my personal engraved-in-stone viewing records and seeing if they are truly accurate.

I suspect the reason I thought I saw The Magnificent Seven is because I love Seven Samurai, the movie it acknowledges being based on in the opening credits, so I would of course have prioritized such a viewing back in the day. (In a sign of how they did things differently in 1960 than they would now, they say it’s based on “the Japanese film The Seven Samurai.” Today the filmmakers would be more likely to credit the director or writer and not get hung up on the geographical origins of the film, which seems just a tad xenophobic, though I can’t really pinpoint why.)

Having watched it for this series, I don’t believe I did see it, because I think I would have remembered how shoddy I found it.

I’m not going to say John Sturges’ film is bad, as I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd, which is almost a positive review. But it sure does feel slapdash. It has none of the grandeur of Akira Kurosawa’s original, feeling small and confined to a set, and the acting is as poor as poor can get. Sturges has made a heck of a lot of films, and in the only other one I’ve seen – The Great Escape, which I only just saw for the first time earlier this year – I didn’t notice that being a problem. (And yes, I am ashamed that I didn’t see my first Sturges film until 2019, although to be fair, up until this week I thought I might have seen The Magnificent Seven.)

So do we blame the actors or Sturges? The opening scene, in which we meet the village of Mexican farmers being terrorized by Eli Wallach’s Calvera, is particularly emblematic of their deficiencies. I was reminded of a hacky musical, where characters take turns shouting out (poorly written) lines so that everyone has something to say. I think it’s also just Hollywood at the time, which didn’t know/didn’t care about doing justice to non-white characters. That may be an oversimplification, but The Magnificent Seven gives evidence that it may be the case.

But it’s not just the supporting characters I thought were bad. I really didn’t like Yul Brynner in the central role. This is an Oscar-winning actor (The King and I), but I just didn’t get the ability, or the appeal. And here’s another guy to whom my exposure is minimal. Actually, if you can believe this, I may never have seen Brynner on screen before. His most famous roles (The King and I, The Ten Commandments, Westworld) had all eluded me so far, and I haven’t happened to see any of his more minor ones.

I should say that part of my concern with Brynner is the disconnect of having a guy whose native language is not English playing an American cowboy (named Chris Adams of all things, which is about as American as it gets). But I feel like I can get behind that more now than I would have been able to back then, as we make efforts to discount race or ethnic origin when casting roles nowadays, an initiative I fully support. So maybe the problem was more logistical. Because he uses a stoical clipped delivery in keeping with the character, rather than enunciating, I found it especially hard to understand what he was saying. That inevitably saps some of the profundity from the ending, particularly his line of dialogue that closes the film, which is so powerful in Kurosawa’s original.

As I was tired on Wednesday night when I watched it, I appreciated it wasn’t three hours and 27 minutes long like the original. But I can definitely see what is gained from the extra roughly hour and 25 minutes of running time. Kurosawa really allowed himself the time to develop those characters, such that they achieved distinct personalities, and that you mourned them when they died. Sturges does okay on the distinct personalities, but since you don’t spend much time with these characters, either individually or collectively, their deaths cause almost no impact. Of course, Sturges also just doesn’t have Toshiro Mifune. I tried to figure out who was supposed to be playing the Mifune role, and the closest is this actor who gets the “introducing” credit at the start, Horst Buchholz, who’s the guy, like Mifune, who desperately wants to be part of the team but is not considered up to snuff. Not only is his acting not up to snuff – he was considered the German James Dean but never really took off in the U.S. – but the character itself has a very different outcome. This film desperately needed a character with the arc Mifune’s Kikuchiyo has.

As I did in The Great Escape, I enjoyed watching the collection of charismatic stars, which include guys I got to know when they were much older: James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen. But they don’t seem to have much of a rapport with one another, just another reason this whole thing felt really flat to me. (Plus, where’s the action? There really isn’t any until the final shootout.)

I’m almost done dumping on The Magnificent Seven. But just one final thought. I didn’t think it was a great choice for us to get to know the lead bandito, played here by Eli Wallach. Perhaps it was an attempt to be progressive and give us a complex villain, but in a morality play like this, I think you need clear heroes and clear villains. If I remember correctly we don’t know much at all about the leader of the marauders in Seven Samurai, as they really are essentially faceless villains. Wallach’s character is given several scenes in which his motivations are revealed, and he’s allowed to show mercy, which he does most crucially toward the central seven near the end, just sending them away and giving them their guns back when they are presumed to be out of range of coming back to defend the village. Oops. I needed a more one-dimensional villain I guess. Also Wallach in particular does not strike me as very threatening, as I came to know him during his older years when he was always playing comic relief and always had a big smile on his face. In fact, it was a surprise to me that he would have been considered the right choice to play “the ugly” in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, another film I watched for this series. This predates that by six years, but I saw that one first. 

I don’t have my movie for August picked out yet. Care to make a suggestion? (Kidding; you have no idea what I’m selecting from.)

Audient Audit: Modern Times

This is the latest in my monthly series Audient Audit, where I question my own records about movies I say I’ve seen.

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times may bear the most embarrassing reason for why I thought I saw it. There are two, actually.

      1)      “I’ve seen that scene of Charlie Chaplin running through the gears of that machine, therefore I must have seen the movie.” (It was likely in some kind of Oscar clip montage.)

      2)      “I must have seen Modern Times just because it’s a classic and I must have seen it.”

Not great reasons, you will agree.

The second one is particularly faulty reasoning, as I have never been the kind of cinephile to devour silent films. I know there are many of us who eat up every example of the origins of cinema, but I am not one of them. So the idea that I “must have seen it” is silly, because I’ve seen only 30-40 silent films in my entire life, and nearly half of those were in the past few years, when I devoted one of these annual viewing series to the topic in 2016.

I think I figured I saw it around the same time I saw City Lights, a film I think of in the same breath as Modern Times, if you will allow that phrasing. I remember that viewing, which took place in my old apartment in New York City sometime between 1998 and 2001 (as those were the years I lived there), because I decided to smoke a cigar as accompaniment to it. And I remember that because I don’t like cigars, and that was one of fewer than ten of those I’ve ever smoked.

Modern Times is indeed a silent movie, but by rights it shouldn’t be. It came out in 1936, which is nearly a decade after sound was introduced to the movies. Chaplin was resistant to cutting over, of course, because he had thrived as a silent actor and was worried he could not make the transition to talkies. (Though 1940’s The Great Dictator, a talkie, might be my favorite of his films.) In fact the film functions as something of a metaphor for this sea change, which put a lot of actors (though not Chaplin) out of work. Chaplin’s character and his love interest/female friend, referred to as “The Gamin” (Paulette Godard), spend most of the movie looking for work. Although automation is the thing in the film that’s preventing them from landing a steady job, in the world it was this change in the way films were made that Chaplin perceived as his primary obstacle.

I should clarify that it’s not a silent film the way The Gold Rush (1925) is a silent film. It actually does have spoken dialogue, but that dialogue comes only from the boss in Chaplin’s factory, which is consistent with Chaplin’s complaint about The Man making his style of filmmaking outmoded. It also has Chaplin singing in his final number. There are sound effects and other diagetic sounds interspersed throughout. But there’s also silent film’s typical reliance on pantomiming and physical comedy, as well as title cards, though Chaplin doesn’t rely heavily on them, consistent with his show-don’t-tell approach. The fact that he used the title cards, but also included bits of dialogue that proved he didn’t have to, gives further heft to Chaplin’s perspective.

Modern Times has some great, laugh-out-loud set pieces. I think my favorite, mostly because I laughed out loud the most, was when he’s being fed by the automated feeding machine, which pushes food (and sometimes machine parts) into his mouth, and which goes haywire rotating a corn cob dangerously close to his mouth. Chaplin’s reactions are priceless, particularly his eyes, as his mouth is largely obscured by the corn cob. I also really enjoyed the blind roller skating right next to the department store dropoff. I'm not sure how he did it so convincingly without, you know, dying. 

The film doesn’t amount to more than the sum of its set pieces, though. Other Chaplin films I’ve fallen in love with in recent years have a fair amount of heart – I’m thinking primarily of The Kid, but even The Great Dictator has a huge amount of passion and heart in its final political speech. Modern Times doesn’t have this same feel to it and often feels like a loosely connected succession of bits. The bits really work, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

That of course still equates to a four-star (out of five) rating, as this is a substantial achievement and a fun watch. It’s just near the bottom of the Chaplin features I’ve seen, in part because the others are so superlative.

And to be clear, I definitely had not seen it prior to this week.

On to July. I don’t have my movie picked out yet.

Audient Audit: The Pink Panther

This is the fifth in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, where I go back and check whether I actually saw certain films that have made it on to my various lists.

"Dead ant. Dead ant. Dead ant dead ant dead ant dead ant dead annnnt."

That's the punchline to the joke "What did the Pink Panther say when he stepped on an ant?" and it's meant to be sung in the meter and tune of Henry Mancini's famous Pink Panther score. It was a very popular joke when I was in third grade.

And that, my friends, is likely why I have believed all these years that I saw Blake Edwards' 1963 film The Pink Panther.

Having watched the movie in 2019, it strikes me as a very strange property to have achieved the cultural prominence it did. The cultural prominence that allowed it to become a joke among eight-year-olds is why I assumed I'd seen the movie, but that prominence does not seem a very likely outcome for a movie that is more in the style of the May-December romantic comedies that were prevalent at the time than a franchise about an inept detective.

The May is Claudia Cardinale (then 25) and the December is David Niven (then 53), as he's a cat burglar trying to seduce her princess in order to relieve her of the world's largest diamond (which has a flaw that looks like a pink panther, hence the name for a decades-spanning franchise). It put me immediately in mind of Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, where Cary Grant (then 51) is the cat burglar and Grace Kelly (then 26) is his love interest, though that came eight years earlier so I guess Panther is the pretender in this case.

Sure, there's some inept detective stuff, but the weird thing is that it does not involve very much actual detecting. As Inspector Clouseau, Peter Sellers dons his trademark trenchcoat a couple times, but we see him more often in his pajamas, as much of the comedy related to him seems to revolve around methods of getting his treacherous wife to go to sleep. He's also got an extended bit where his hand is stuck inside a vase. The things we associate most with Clouseau were from later movies, it appears. And it's probably one of those that I might have actually seen some of, though which one, it would be impossible to say. (There were eight films, some of which came after Sellers died, even before the two reboots with Steve Martin.)

It strikes me that there was something going on in the early 1960s where massive franchises were being launched from films that ended up feeling very different from the films that followed them. Just a year earlier saw the release of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which is quite mild by the standards of the ensuing series, involving comparatively little action. Still, there had to be a germ in these movies that caused so much profitable offspring to blossom. They credit Jaws a dozen years later with the advent of the blockbuster, but things going on in the early 1960s seem to have been paving the way.

Of course, the real reason all of us third graders knew the Pink Panther theme was not this movie, but the fact that they made a Saturday morning cartoon out of the iconic character that appears in the opening credits of Edwards' movie. I'm wondering if this cartoon character itself had more to do with the series taking off even than Sellers.

As for the actual quality of the movie, I must admit I found myself somewhat disoriented within the story in the first 30 minutes, even to the extent that I checked Wikipedia to see if I'd missed something important. (I had.) It eventually rounded out into something for which I bore a small bit of affection, but not as much as I expected. I was kind of surprised at the characterization of Clouseau, who I thought would be a bumbler but maybe not a fool. I found it a bit unsavory that his wife of ten years is cuckolding him to multiple other men, and that the crimes of the cat burglar are ultimately pinned on him. (Oops, spoiler alert.)

June is the next month on the calendar.

Audient Audit: Speed 2: Cruise Control

This is the fourth in my 2019 monthly series revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.

The fourth movie in Audient Audit is not only a case of setting the record straight, it's a case of righting an injustice.

Speed 2: Cruise Control is the first movie in this series that I know, with 100% certainty, that I did not properly watch. Yet it made it onto my lists anyway.

What's more, I ranked it as the worst movie I saw in 1997 -- when by any reasonable standard I did not actually see it. And that's the injustice I'm trying to correct this month.

The circumstance is that I was on a plane with my family. Given the timing I suspect it was my cousin's wedding, since I'd already graduated from college and would not have otherwise regularly been traveling with them at that age. These were well before the days when you had your own seatback entertainment, so everyone was forced to watch, or not watch as the case may be, the same movie.

The choice on this particular flight was Speed 2: Cruise Control, a bit of an odd choice for the plane given that it involves a passenger vessel in jeopardy, and even finishes with a plane crash of sorts.

I landed somewhere between watching it and not watching it.

You had to pay for headphones, and I didn't. But I still watched most, if not all, of the movie. I just didn't hear any of the dialogue or the explosions.

Clearly I thought I devoted enough of my attention to the movie to say that I saw it, and film is, after all, designed as primarily a visual medium. It would be a successful realization of a film's mission statement if you could watch it with the sound off and still say you had seen and understood everything that happened.

But the reality is, you haven't really seen a movie if you haven't heard it. Things that seem vaguely ridiculous out of the context of their spoken dialogue -- which was most of Speed 2 for me -- may come across as much more reasonable when watched as they were designed to be watched. "Show don't tell" is a great guiding principle for making movies, but if you don't expect to be able to tell something, you make different choices about how you are going to show it. Speed 2 was not designed to be watched silently, and for this it cannot be blamed.

Besides, this movie is damn near two hours long. Is it really possible that I watched the whole thing?

What's likely is that I took in 60% of the images and 0% of the dialogue, which, in a flawed bit of math, computes to a movie that was 30% watched. But I must have been really desperate to get credit for it, and I felt I could assess its terribleness just from the images. So indeed, I ranked it that year, and I ranked it 39th out of the 39 movies I saw in time for my ranking deadline.

Once those year-end lists are finalized I don't ever touch them again, so I'm not going to go back and remove Speed 2 from the Microsoft Word file "1997 film rankings." But a second viewing might improve Speed 2's ultimate standing in my Flickchart, where its value is being periodically reassessed through random duels against other movies. It is currently ranked 4,557th out of 4,883, and it was time to determine if that was really fair or not.

For starters, I'd like to say that Speed 2 deserves points for cheekiness alone. The title Cruise Control is a bit of punning genius. Not only does it describe the plot of the movie in about as few words as you can imagine, but it riffs on a familiar setting in most cars that governs the vehicle's speed. The filmmakers had to have been laughing when they came up with it, and I appreciate that a lot more now than I did in 1997. It's even possible that they came up with the title before they came up with the script itself, though I'm not going to look that up for confirmation.

Secondly, I might have almost put Speed 2 in a position to not get a proper second watch. I chose to start it around 9:30 after getting home from another movie, Shazam!, which I watched with my eight-year-old on the Thursday night before our four-day Easter weekend. Suffice it to say that with naps factored in, I did not finish the movie until after 1 a.m. However, I did pause the movie every time I took one of those naps.

As I've spent so much time on preamble, and this is, in the end, a pretty undemanding and straightforward action movie, I won't give you a lot of detail about what works and what doesn't in Speed 2. I will say, however, that it's really no worse than a mediocre action movie, something I probably would have given two stars if rating it for the first time today. Indeed, when you just look up every once in a while and see things exploding without any context, you aren't really making an honest assessment of what the filmmakers have done. Which goes without saying.

I will say that the movie doesn't properly use Sandra Bullock, which may have been inevitable. Bullock broke out as one of Hollywood's most charismatic actresses almost entirely on the basis of her extremely winning performance in the original Speed. And sure, Keanu Reeves was doing all the heavy lifting in terms of the physical action, just as Jason Patric does here. But Bullock's role in driving a bus above 50 miles per hour at all times was absolutely indispensable to that movie. She was the stationary ying to Reeves' mobile yang, and one could not have existed without the other.

Here she's kind of left at loose ends, more making John McClane-style wisecracks about having been through all this before than playing a central role in the current scenario. Oh, she does some heroic stuff, like using a chainsaw (why is there a chainsaw on a cruise liner?) to open a locked door and free a bunch of trapped passengers from imminent death. She's also good at keeping a level head and corralling people where they need to go. But you don't get the sense she's the difference between the life and death of these passengers, as she was in Speed.

It might have been too obvious an approach to give her the same exact role, where her presence at the boat's controls made the crucial difference. But sequels often reproduce dynamics from the original wholesale without us taking them to task. When Speed 2 does decide to repeat a scenario from the first movie, it's by having the villain take her captive in the final 20 minutes, a choice that feels even less useful in our current age, where men saving women from peril is frowned upon to say the least. Sure, Bullock's Annie does show agency once she's in the clutches of Willem Dafoe's villain, but the ending of the original Speed is by far its weakest passage, and that's no less true here.

Let's talk about Dafoe's villain for a moment. Sure, Dennis Hopper rigged a lot of things to explode in the first movie, but Dafoe's control over every opening and closing door on the ship -- which he can manipulate through punching a few seemingly random keys on a control panel he wears on his wrist -- really stretches credibility. You might argue that credibility is not the strong suit of this series in general, but it's thrown out the window entirely in the second movie.

I did appreciate the climax for the most part, though, first the attempt to avoid ramming the oil tanker, then the collision with the Saint Martin port. There was a lot of production bravado, and I dare say money, in that finale, and there can't help but be something comical in the way the cruise ship plows through all the boaters and other pleasure seekers on the shore. I think this movie has its tongue in its cheek more than I thought it did.

I can't go back and rewrite history, but I did think it would be charitable to list the movies that came out in 1997 that I would rank lower than Speed 2 if I were ranking them today. I won't limit it to movies I saw at the time, as that will increase the number of movies Speed 2 is better than. Here they are:

Absolute Power
Addicted to Love
Air Bud
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
B.A.P.S.
Batman & Robin
Booty Call
Event Horizon
Fools Rush In
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Julian Po
Jungle 2 Jungle
Playing God
She's So Lovely
Trial and Error
Volcano

Congratulations, Speed 2, you're not nearly as terrible as I thought you were.

One final thought on my 1997 film rankings. I must have noticed this sometime before now, but if I have, I've forgotten. Both my favorite movie of the year (Titanic) and my least favorite movie of the year (Speed 2) are about oceanliners in peril. This exercise has proven the flaws in that initial assessment, but as I said, the record stands as it did in January of 1998.

Okay, on to a more typical "did I or didn't I?" choice in May.

Audient Audit: The Dollars Trilogy

This is the third in my monthly 2019 series devoted to revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.

It's only the third month and already I'm breaking the rules of Audient Audit.

I'm supposed to be "auditing" one movie per month that has made its way on to my various movie lists, even though I'm not sure I've actually seen it. This month, though, I've done three. Clearly because I have just so much time on my hands. It's almost the start of the baseball season, which has a large amount to do with why I haven't posted here in nine days.

But Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy, which I've called by its other name in the title for this post for the sake of brevity, represents a special case. Both A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) have made it on to various of my lists over the years. In fact, the only one of these movies I'm sure I hadn't seen was For a Few Dollars More (1965), the middle movie.

At the moment, only Fistful is on my lists. I decided at some point in the past few years that I definitely had not seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and promptly scrubbed it from the lists on which it appeared. I can't remember what caused me to definitively decide I hadn't seen it, but I now think the three-hour running time had something to do with it. I would have remembered watching a three-hour western.

So that's why you're getting the poster for Fistful above. Why I watched all three movies was because a) there still existed some level of doubt about TGTBATU, b) I was gifted all three movies on BluRay for Christmas 2017, and c) my wife is out of town this week, leaving me the opportunity to watch them on consecutive nights. I actually ended up taking a one-night break between FAFDM and TGTBATU, in part because I was just too tired on Tuesday to watch a three-hour movie. And yes, I do like referring to these movies by their acronyms.

One other interesting note: I have already seen two other movies whose titles were inspired by movies in this series. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is one of my all-time favorite documentaries, and I enjoyed The Good the Bad the Weird a few years back when watching it as part of my series Asian Audient. (It's Korean.)

Starting to watch AFOD -- don't worry, I won't always use the acronyms -- made me realize another reason why I'd probably included it on my lists despite an absence of compelling evidence that I'd actually seen it. I've seen two other movies of this same material. Fistful was caught up in a lawsuit about its similarities to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and is now considered a loose remake of that film. A more conscious remake was actually the first of the three I'd seen, the really terrible 1996 Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing, directed by Walter Hill.

It didn't take long, though, for me to decide that I definitely had not seen this. Part of it on TV, years ago, when all I knew was that it was a Clint Eastwood western I was watching, and not which one? Maybe. But other than that, the details of Fistful were not familiar to me.

The Man With No Name -- that poncho, that stubby little cigar -- has become so prominent in American cinematic iconography that I've certainly seen snippets of all three movies in Oscar clips packages and the like. But the real tip-off that I hadn't seen this movie is something that happens very early on. A couple of no-good ruffians take some shots at Eastwood and his horse to scare him off, and the horse bolts. Eastwood ends up jumping off and swinging on a wooden contraption of some kind, almost like a 19th century gymnast. He then looks at a guy looking at him out the window of a nearby building, and says a single word: "Hello."

I snort-laughed. The delivery was perfect, and obviously intended for comedic effect. Which was my first sign that I really didn't know The Man With No Name.

For years and years now, I have harbored this idea that Eastwood's iconic character was some kind of badass who is such a magician with the gun, so quick on the draw yet so essentially unperturbed in his manner and line deliveries, that there isn't a single moment when he doesn't have the upper hand. In fact, certain other Eastwood movies I've seen -- like the really disagreeable High Plains Drifter -- do feature such a version of this character. A man who is so in command that he's never even in danger not only struck me as dramatically uninteresting, but also as endorsing certain macho stereotypes that I don't like endorsed. In fact, this ill-informed conclusion was possibly the basis for why it took me so long to start watching Eastwood westerns, even westerns in general.

The Man With No Name is not that guy. He may have a mystique about him -- not having a name tends to do that -- but Eastwood's character is so repeatedly in trouble in these movies that he's almost more like a noir hero than the straw man I constructed in my mind. You know, the noir hero who's always getting beaten up and nursing his wounds while doggedly still pursuing his goals. In fact, in TGTBATU, he spends a significant amount of screen time being marched through a desert and nearly dying of thirst and heat stroke, his face looking like it had been held over an open fire for a couple minutes. He then spends a realistic amount of time convalescing from this near-death experience. He emerges seeming no worse for the wear, but still.

The other thing that surprised me about that "Hello" line delivery was that it meant he was a character with a sense of humor. I thought for sure he would be humorless, but the man knows how to crack a joke, how to self-deprecate, how to recognize the irony of a situation. He's no one-dimensional badass delivering gruff one-liners.

So watching the whole series was a refreshing deconstruction of my expectations. I'll give a little bit on each movie.

I found A Fistful of Dollars to be enjoyable, but quite straightforward. Although maybe that's not the right way to describe it, because I did have to consult the Wikipedia entry afterward to be sure I'd followed the plot. This is likely no fault of the movie, rather, the fault of the poor sleep I got the night before watching it. I did fall asleep repeatedly throughout the second half, always pausing it but probably losing a bit more of my orientation within the plot every time I awoke. I almost wonder if, 20 years from now, I will remember so little of it that I'll have to wonder again whether I've ever seen it. But I really enjoyed being in this town with Eastwood and the two warring factions that separated it. This is the kind of western that got made a lot at that time, with only a single set and relatively small ambitions.

That decidedly does not describe the next two movies Leone made. His artistic growth between Fistful and For a Few Dollars More is notable and measurable. I noticed a lot more risks being taken with camera setups and narrative, all of which paid off. My favorite part of the movie, though, was probably the introduction of Lee Van Cleef as a co-star for the next two movies. I'd heard Van Cleef's name before, and his appearance was certainly familiar, but I don't know that I remember extended exposure to him on screen. I fell in love instantly. What a presence! It was further undercutting the notion I had of the Man With No Name to give him a partner, and this movie almost feels like a buddy movie at times, their chemistry is so good. It's a bit more sprawling in its focus with a really dynamite villain (Gian Maria Volonte). I'm sure a part of the advances in this movie were budgetary. You can see that money was thrown at FAFDM once AFOD was successful, though I'm not looking it up to see if that's actually true or not. Spoiler alert, this was my favorite of the three movies. I can't imagine that's a particularly common viewpoint.

Van Cleef returns in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and this time is joined by Eli Wallach to make it a trio. Wallach is "the ugly" (introduced first), followed by Van Cleef as "the bad" and Eastwood as "the good" (though whether that means morally or with his gun is debatable). This movie, on the whole, was actually the least like what I was expecting it to be. I supposed I should have surmised that a three-hour running time would leave room for it to go all over the place … and it does. Having the movie set during the Civil War gives it a sense of specificity in an otherwise timeless genre, but then there’s actually a major battle that plays into the last hour, in addition to introducing some new characters. I’m not sure that all of the exceptionally sprawling nature of this film works, but it definitely does continue to point Leone toward what I consider to be his peak artistic achievement: Once Upon a Time in the West. I also really enjoyed the performances of the three leads, though I would have liked a bit more of Van Cleef. Wallach is great in this, and the three have really good chemistry. I suppose while I’m on the topic, it’s worth acknowledging that if this is the same character by Eastwood in all three films, then this is a prequel to those films, as he doesn’t don his signature poncho until the final scene. (I could look up all the discussions of this, but you likely already know what people say, or you don’t care.)

I can’t leave off in my discussion of these movies without making mention of their all-time-great music. Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most well-known in all of movie history – the mere sound of it conjures images of a tumbleweed rolling across a landscape as two frozen men stand, about to draw their guns. That was one of the reasons it surprised me that this movie is a bit less like the standard western than I thought it was, as I imagined everything about it would conform to some platonic ideal of a western. I really do like TGTBATU, but it’s not the movie I always assumed it was. I really liked all the variations on the signature theme Morricone used, and the theme from Fistful is also quite memorable. I’m not sure how much Morricone had to do with this, but the most memorable recurring music in For a Few Dollars More has got to be that tune that plays when El Indio opens his pocket watch, right before he’s about to blast someone.

One of the reasons I think I included as many as two of these movies on my previously seen list was the shame of not having seen them. That shame is now, thankfully, gone. 

I know for 100% certain that I could write another thousand words about these films, but baseball season calls.

In April I shall return to a single film for this series, but I don’t yet know what that film will be.

Audient Audit: The Witches of Eastwick

This is the second in my 2019 series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my own records to see if I really saw movies I say I saw.

Like the first movie in this series, Roxanne, The Witches of Eastwick is one of those movies I likely saw on cable at a friend’s house if I saw it at all. I knew I’d seen at least some of it as there were scenes I remembered clearly; which ones, I’ll get to in a moment.

My only disappointment in watching it on February 21^st is that I realized I might have saved it for October and gotten it to count as a Halloween-themed viewing. Similarly, I could have watched Roxanne as a Valentine’s Day-themed viewing this month. Regrets, I’ve had a few.

During the opening credits I was surprised to note something I should have already known, given that it was discussed a couple years ago, which is that the film was directed by George Miller. When Mad Max: Fury Road was such a hit a few years ago, I now remember this movie as coming up in discussion of the things Miller had done since his first run of Mad Max movies, always in the context of it seeming like a surprising choice for him. Hey, directors gotta eat too.

I was also surprised to learn, in researching the movie a bit, what a wealth of entertainment properties have been spun off of John Updike’s original novel. To my surprise, there were actually three attempted television versions of this material, though only one of them was picked up for a series and that was cancelled during its first season. Those attempts were in 1992, 2002 and 2009, the last one having gotten the farthest. Maybe it’s time for another. There was also a stage musical, and a follow-up novel that Updike wrote, The Widows of Eastwick. The film certainly leaves things wide open at the end, as I would later learn.

Given that I have this ranked at 2919^th out of 4792 on Flickchart (I’ve seen almost 500 more movies than that but have gotten way behind in adding them), I wasn’t really expecting much from this. Curiously, I hadn’t given it a Letterboxd star rating – a perfect demonstration of the conflict I’ve had about whether I’ve seen it or not, it appearing on one list but not another.

However, now that I know Miller was the director, I shouldn’t be so surprised to have really enjoyed the movie. It isn’t at all clunky, it’s well put together, and all the actors are really enjoying themselves. As a bit of un-PC side commentary, I’ve never really been all that attracted to Cher, but I found her really cute in this movie. Go figure. This is also the youngest I’ve probably ever seen Richard Jenkins, a favorite of mine.

And then there’s Jack. He really brings the gusto on his performance, as you might expect. He’s got some great monologues and some wonderful individual “Jack moments.” One indicator that I’d seen it is that I felt quite familiar with his outburst where he says, paraphrasing: “Women … were they God’s mistake, or did he DO IT TO US, on PURPOSE!” It’s likely that I’ve heard that quote in the meantime – not likely on an Oscars clips show, but something similar to that. But it did add more weight to the idea that this is my second legitimate viewing of this movie.

The other thing I remembered quite well is the ending, where Nicholson grows to giant size as his devil character rises up above the house, ready to kill the rebelling women inside. That’s my lingering impression of this movie every time I think of it, and since that undoubtedly would not have been shown in the trailers or anywhere else, that was the real decider that yes, indeed, I have seen The Witches of Eastwick before. I may not have remembered the scene where they play tennis, where Nicholson’s Daryl Van Horne does funny things with the flight of the tennis ball, but that could just be random forgetting of details over time.

It could also be that I operated under different rules back then, and might see the end of a movie without watching the rest of it. Today, I’d steadfastly avert my eyes in that scenario, but in the late 1980s that might not have been as important to me. In any case, if you remember any one part of a movie, and it’s the ending, that’s pretty good proof that you’ve “seen it,” for all intents and purposes.

Which brings me to a bit of a funny predicament.

Usually – and by “usually” I mean in the one-month history of this series – if I determined I’d already seen the movie, I would not add it in my diary on Letterboxd, which is the running log of new movies added in my viewing history. That’s also where I assign the film a star rating. Instead, it would go in my Letterboxd list of movies I’ve already seen. However, in this case, it’s a movie I think I’ve already seen, but it doesn’t have a star rating.

I’m being a bit cheeky as the solution is easy enough. I’ll just log a star rating without logging a date watched, which is what I’d do for any old movie before I started logging my viewings in real time on Letterboxd.

Isn’t it edifying to know this?

In March I believe I’m going to get out of the late 1980s and watch the three movies in the Man With No Name Trilogy. It’s terrible to admit that I haven’t seen any of these, especially since I’ve owned them on BluRay for more than a year (they were a Christmas 2017 present). Because I couldn’t believe I haven’t seen them, at some point I assumed I had seen A Fistful of Dollars, and added it to my lists. Next month we’ll find out whether that was correct or not.

Audient Audit: Roxanne

This is the first in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my own records to see if I’ve actually seen certain films I say I’ve seen.

Not ten minutes into my new monthly viewing series, I wondered what the hell I’m doing here.

Not only here here, but in this series in general. 

“Why the hell am I watching Roxanne?” I wondered. “Why does someone need to watch Roxanne in 2019? If I didn’t see it, who cares?”

To be fair, these thoughts were inspired by a particularly brutal first ten minutes of the movie. I don’t know what happened during production, but Roxanne’s first ten minutes involve a lot of really awful ADR – dialogue recorded later on, and in this case, not matching the action on screen – and a prolonged scene in which Steve Martin beats up Kevin Nealon and one other guy with a tennis racquet. I love that there was a phase of Kevin Nealon’s career when he was cast as a bully, but this scene is terrible. It doesn’t even sound like Nealon provided his own voice, though he was already on Saturday Night Live in 1987 when Roxanne was made.

However, at about the ten-minute mark, Roxanne becomes a normal movie. Charming, even. And I was back on track, for the most part.

No, this series will not be as consequential as watching a year’s worth of silent movies or pairs of films by great directors. But the anal retentive in me loves that at the end of it, 12 films that have made it onto my various viewing lists under dubious circumstances will be legitimate members of those lists.

I suppose I should tell you a little bit of my history with Roxanne, to let you know why I originally added it to my lists and why it might not have been deserving.

I was absolutely certain of having watched a bit of this movie at my friend’s house on cable within a year or two of its theatrical release, just before I would have started comprising my viewing lists. I remember particularly well the Romeo & Juliet scene (in a movie inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac), where Steve Martin, obscured by bushes, pretends he’s Rick Rossovich while pledging his love to Daryl Hannah on the balcony above. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible that I actually saw that part of the movie more than once.

I was pretty sure, though, that I had not seen the rest of the movie. Adding it to my lists was, I think, a recognition of the fact that I had “seen Roxanne” – in other words, it was kind of a wave of the hand saying “I get what Roxanne is and it’s fair to say that I’ve seen it.”

In trying to confirm how much of the movie I’ve seen, I’ve recognized a challenge that will run through this series. Given that we tend to forget the details of even movies we really like, it’ll be difficult to watch these movies and say for certain that yes, I saw them, or no, I didn’t. The details of a mediocre movie I saw only a week ago might already be gone, so what about a mediocre movie I saw 30 years ago?

That said, I didn’t even remember that Steve Martin plays a fire chief in this movie, which ends up being a fairly significant part of the action. There’s a lot of time devoted to his training of the bumbling volunteer firefighters in the ski town in which the movie takes place (one of whom is a young Damon Wayans!), and I feel like I should have retained at least some memory of that. In fact, I felt like I really only remember that scene on the balcony.

In the end, the thing that I thought would be a gimmick played just for laughs – Martin’s enormous schnozz – became a really useful prop. For all its gargantuan size, the prosthetic nose ends up looking pretty realistic, and it’s easy to imagine it only being a slight exaggeration on people who might exist in the real world with that kind of Pinocchio-like protuberance. The movie actually does a reasonably sensitive job imagining what it might be like for such a person, what defense mechanisms they might develop to make their way through the world. In short, the movie was far more intelligent than the opening scene prepared me for. That said, it still keeps certain whimsical elements, like the fact that Martin’s character has an unusual fitness for gymnastics that allows him to scale the sides of houses in a flash.

Speaking of whimsical bits, there was one random bit I loved that seems to bear no relationship to anything else in the movie. At one point Martin’s character is exiting a restaurant and stops to pay for a newspaper from one of those coin-operated dispensers where you open the door and (on the honor system) take only one newspaper. Martin does this, reads the front page, screams at the state of the world today, then pays another coin so he can open the door and put the paper back in again. Funny! It felt like something Charlie Chaplin might do.

Verdict: Definitely had not seen the whole movie before now, and am glad enough that I made the time to do so.

I’ve already borrowed The Witches of Eastwick from the library, so it looks like that will be my February movie.