Knowing Noir: Murder, My Sweet

This is the sixth in my 2021 series watching notable film noirs.

Now here is a Noir with a capital N.

After two of my favorite movies of this series (Gaslight and The Hitch-Hiker) were only questionable inclusions under the noir umbrella, and some of the more clear-cut examples didn't really do it for me (such as D.O.A.), I determined I needed some more definite specimens of the genre to get this series back on track in terms of its mission statement: to help me determine what I think of noir as a genre.

(Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Noir is not a genre, but rather a style. Discuss.)

I had hoped to do that with what seemed like quintessential noir: 1955's Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich. But just because something is a quintessential example of a genre (or a style) does not necessarily make it readily available, and for the life of me, I could not source Kiss Me Deadly. Hopefully that will change before the end of the year.

So in June, I pivoted to 1944's Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, not realizing that it's noir to the nth degree: It's actually the first film appearance of Raymond Chandler's famed detective Philip Marlowe. And Chandler pretty much invented film noir, even while not straying outside the pages of a novel.

The novel in question was 1940's Farewell, My Lovely, which I think is also a movie. (Yep, 1975, starring Robert Mitchum.) I now see on Wikipedia that Murder, My Sweet actually went by the name of the novel in the U.K. (which means probably also here in Australia), but since I'm U.S.-centric and I rented this from U.S. iTunes, there's no question of what I will call it here.

Murder, My Sweet predated Humphrey Bogart's first appearance as Marlowe by two years, making it particularly appropriate for this series, as Bogart himself is intrinsically intertwined in the mission statement of Knowing Noir.

In fact, since I've now seen Bogart as Marlowe twice (The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon), I was a bit taken aback to see Dick Powell playing the role, as he seemed too clean-cut for my tastes (even while using the same rapid-fire, quippy dialogue that characterizes Marlowe). Of course, checking into it now, I see that Falcon is actually a Dashiell Hammett novel and Bogart plays Sam Spade, but honestly -- what's the difference between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, really, or between Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade? (Purists would likely kill me.) 

In any case, it doesn't change the fact that whatever I thought of Bogart, he set the template for this hard-boiled detective in my mind, and Powell did not seem grizzled enough by comparison. Still, I ended up liking his performance more than I like those of Bogart, which continues to put Bogart behind the 8 ball in terms of ultimately converting me. (Incidentally, Powell was a very familiar name, but do you know how many of his other movies I've seen? Zero.)

Wikipedia also clearly credits Murder, My Sweet as being one of the first film noirs (along with Double Indemnity, which I have grown to really love) and crucial in the development of the genre, so it's clearly where I should have started this series rather than waiting until June to get to it.

But because I find Chandler's novels so densely plotted and serpentine -- not from reading any, only from seeing them adapted on screen -- I had a similar experience with this as I did with The Big Sleep, which is kind of my poster boy for why I think I don't like film noir. In a film like this, if you miss one character name or one connection of that character to another character at the start of the film, you're never going to recover. And so it was with Murder, My Sweet, which I watched mostly in ignorance of what was actually happening, leaving my only outlet for comprehending it in retrospect to read the Wikipedia plot synopsis after I was finished. 

Okay, I've just done that. It really didn't help. Though I can see why I was disoriented from near the start, and it wasn't just because I was on my second movie of the night, and clearly not at my most mentally acute. The story appears to have three different branches that come together over the course of the narrative, but when each one is introduced (in that most classic of noir tropes, a prospective customer arriving at the private dick's office), it seems unrelated to the previous one, and therefore, a sort of narrative error rather than part of a premeditated structure. That brought the "Now who's this guy again?" factor, which was already going to be present anyway, up to 11. To get any of the obligatory references to the plot in a piece like this out of the way, I'll just say that it involves finding a lost woman, recovering a missing jade necklace, jealousy, and multiple murders and schemes to murder someone that may or may not come to fruition. (Hence, the title.) 

Being lost in the plot should have been a surefire recipe for disaster, as it was with The Big Sleep, but in this case I got past it, because the other noir elements were so strong, and adhered so strongly to the dictionary definition of the genre (or style). In fact, I made reams of notes, including a series of quotes, mostly spoken by Marlowe in either dialogue or voiceover, that seemed part and parcel to what we now think of as noir. Namely:

"There's something about the dead silence of an office building at night."

"The joint looked like trouble, but that didn't bother me."

"A black pool opened under my feet, with no bottom. I dived in."

"There are a lot of things about this I don't know. Some things I'll never know." (How true! Ha ha)

And finishing with an exchange between Marlowe and Anne Shirley's Ann Grayle:

"I don't think you know what side you're on."
"I don't know what side anybody's on. I don't even know who's playing today."

Those last two moments were great encapsulations of what it feels like to be lost within the plot of a movie -- as lost as the movie's protagonist, apparently -- but let's use that "black pool" quote as a transition to something else I want to talk about.

In that quote he's referring to the moment when unconsciousness arrives, and that gets at one of the noir tropes I enjoy the most -- the fact that the noir protagonist (usually a private eye) is always getting beat up. Marlowe sinks into the "black pool" at least three times in this movie, the last of which involves a gun flash right next to his eyes that temporarily blinds him. You aren't really a private eye unless you emerge from the experience bloodied and bruised from multiple skirmishes, most of which you lost badly, and most of which were the result of your inquisitive nature, your failure to show proper fear of a massive hoodlum towering over you, and your acerbic wit. Marlowe also spends three days alternating between mania and catatonia in a sanitorium after being drugged by one of his adversaries, as an early twist on the detective-getting-beat-up trope. 

What's more, Dmytryk includes an on-screen graphic with these "dark pool" moments, where we see the screen being sort of covered by an encroaching black tar that eventually fills the whole screen. (But one whose viscosity is a bit thinner, so it can move quickly.) This was just one of the film's visual effects that I appreciated, which I frankly did not expect in a film made in 1944 -- and one of the first of its kind. In his frequent moments between states of consciousness, Marlowe has a couple dream sequences that feature superimposed imagery and hallucinatory moments like a series of imaginary doors leading off into oblivion. There's a time when he feels in a thick fog and likens it to the world being covered by a spider web, and the screen has such a spider web filter over the images.

I'm starting to go a bit long on Murder, My Sweet, but so as not to shortchange any of my notes, I'll finish with a few rapid-fire noir moments that I appreciated:

- Marlowe opens and closes the story by being interrogated under the hot lights by the police. That's both a classic noir moment and a classic noir narrative framing device, with the core story told in flashback, as part of a "confession" of sorts.

- There are a lot of shadows/silhouettes of men wearing fedoras.

- The film has not one, but two characters who could potentially function as a femme fatale -- the aforementioned Ann Grayle and Helen Grayle, played by Claire Trevor. 

- Marlowe wears a wife-beater undershirt at one point.

- There are slatted doors, though no venetian blinds that I noticed. 

Powell obviously didn't continue as Marlowe, as Bogart took up the role next. I'm not sure why that is, but I won't look into it because I've already done enough research for this piece. (You know I hate research!) I will say that iTunes, in its little write-up about the movie, described Powell's casting as "controversial at the time." I really should look into that, but frankly, I've got to get on to other things in my day.

I'll try to keep up with the more prototypical noirs in July, with Kansas City Confidential and Laura among my options. 

Perfect pauses: Luca and Murder, My Sweet

Haven't done one of these Perfect Pauses pieces in a while, so I figured, I might as well get in a twofer.

Of course, to do a twofer, you actually have to have two perfect pauses in the same evening, which I did Monday night.

The premise of this "series" -- which has had exactly five previous entries over nearly ten years -- is that when I pause a movie at a totally unpremeditated moment, and it captures a perfect frozen snapshot of some kind of sudden action or other fortuitous story moment, I consider that sufficient inspiration to write about it here. I think you can see what makes this one good, but let's get to that in a moment.

We got to our Luca viewing at the end of our first full day on holiday this week, after a lot of toing and froing about what night was actually best to project it on the wall of our holiday house. It was about 7:30 before we got started -- an hour later than we'd ideally like, so as to get our kids to bed at a reasonable hour -- but it did in fact work out best for the schedule, considering also our dinner options in the small town here where we're staying. Most of those places are dark Monday night, so eating frozen pizzas in front of a movie was the way to go. And I'd been planning to write about this screening here anyway, so now I can let this post take care of business.

The pause came during one of our many interruptions, to do things like check on the pizza and go to the bathroom. In this case I believe it was fetching ice cream. 

In any case, I think you can see why I considered it to be such a good pause. Giulia (left) is throwing a glass of water at Luca (right), and though I didn't know the actual reason she decided to do this -- I was distracted in the few moments before the pause, while working my way over to my computer to pause it -- I did know the consequences would be significant for Luca. Like Madison in Splash before him, Luca turns into his underwater form (a sea monster) when he's doused with water, and Giulia has never seen that form.

As it turns out, it wasn't quite as big a moment in the narrative as I thought it would be -- Giulia is the only one who sees the transformed Luca, and she's almost preternaturally accepting of the fact that he's a sea monster. But the pause is still great, as it catches the water in the air and Luca's hands up defending himself. In a way, it's like the final millisecond of innocence. 

Before we get to our second Perfect Pause, I'll spare a few moments to close the loop on the Luca viewing that I first mentioned in this post. 

As you will recall, my seven-year-old was inconsolable when it turned out he watched the first hour of a movie I had been saving as a surprise for this trip. I'm glad to say this did not impact the viewing whatsoever. In fact, I think he got a certain thrill from knowing certain things about the movie before we did. However, he was also really good about not saying "Oh, I love this part" or "This is the part when ..." In fact, I could see him actively resisting the urge -- a real sign of his budding maturity.

And here's a picture of him putting a smile on Luca's face:

After we finished Luca and shuffled them off to bed -- having to call them back once for a little post-credits sequence -- I left the projector up to watch my June installment of Knowing Noir. You'll get a full post on Murder, My Sweet tomorrow, so I'll only include the Perfect Pause here:

Nothing remarkable about what was going on on screen, of course. But if you look down in the lower left corner of the screen, you'll see something pretty remarkable indeed:

So yeah, when I had to pause this movie to get a Mini Coke from the fridge (I was pretty tired at this point), I happened to stop it on exactly the one-hour mark, down to the second. 

Did I time it? I might have if this were playing on my DVD player, where you can see the timecode running as you watch. I've actually been known to time a pause to an exact time landmark just for the fun of it. 

But in this situation, on an iTunes rental, the amount of time passed/remaining is not even visible until you actually press pause, at which point it jumps up on the screen. 

It puts one in mind of The Great Last Days in the Desert Pause of 2016, when I made an unpremeditated pause that exactly bifurcated the movie -- 49 minutes and 12 seconds on one side of the movie, 49 minutes and 12 seconds on the other. (Or whatever the case was. It's a 98-minute movie, in any case.) 

For some reason, I guess I did not see it fit to write about that. 

After a night of such twin perfection, I slept well. 

A copycat of Copycat

We already knew that The Woman in the Window, one of the worst movies of the year, was a copycat of Rear Window.

It turns out, it's also a copycat of Copycat.

I watched Jon Amiel's 1995 serial killer procedural thriller -- wasn't this the description of every movie released in the 1990s? -- on Saturday night, knowing that this might actually be the case. I didn't specifically put the film on my list of things to watch because of The Next Picture Show podcast, having already noticed it among the offerings on Amazon, but they did mention Copycat in connection with their discussion of The Woman in the Window. Tasha Robinson didn't say what the similarities between the two movies were, only that they were funny and unmistakable. Having heard that discussion, I bumped Copycat slightly higher on my priorities list, and it rose to the top on Saturday.

Yeah, The Woman in the Window looks even more lame by comparison.

Spoilers for The Woman in the Window and Copycat.

Both films have a central female character (the main character in Window, the co-lead in Copycat) who is severely agoraphobic and can't leave her extremely spacious apartment. 

Both characters became agoraphobic as the result of trauma, a car accident in the case of Window's Anna Fox (Amy Adams), a murder attempt in a bathroom in the case of Copycat's Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver). 

Both characters involve the police when they're concerned about a threat, who in both cases do not believe them because the characters admit to possibly having been confused as the result of a cocktail of prescription medication and alcohol. So both characters are sort of unreliable narrators.

Both characters must ultimately face their agoraphobia when they are forced to the rooftops of their respective apartment buildings, the perfect place for a climax, don't ya know.

In both instances there's even an effect of the camera zooming in on and swirling around them, to dramatize just how confronting they find this situation.

Both characters are being stalked by a baby-faced killer with whom they have to grapple on this rooftop.

The big difference? Well there are two, and one kind of leads to the other.

In Copycat, there is no scene afterward that shows that this episode of confronting her trauma has magically cured Helen Hudson of her agoraphobia. In fact, after she survives the rooftop confrontation, we don't see her again on screen. We do get a chilling closing shot of the man who tried to kill her the first time (Harry Connick Jr.) as he corresponds from prison with the next candidate he wants to send after Helen. On a metaphorical level, this shows us that trauma is not soon expelled and quite likely will come up again in the future.

In The Woman in the Window, Anna Fox leaves her apartment building behind and joyfully walks the streets of Manhattan that once so frightened her, a new woman. It's as though a second highly traumatic episode cured the first.

The second difference is that Copycat is really quite watchable and involving, and The Woman in the Window is a piece of steaming hot garbage. 

Mourning the loss of a surprise

I made my younger son cry yesterday morning.

Oh Vance, you cruel, cruel man.

No, it's not like that. It wasn't scolding him, yelling at him, or getting on his case.

I merely told him that he had jumped the gun on something and messed up my attempt to save it as a surprise.

Poor kid, he was just trying to watch some Disney+ because the power had dwindled down on his device and I told him he needed to let it charge for a while. Hey, I'm not magician, I cannot instantly zap a battery back to its full life.

I didn't notice what he was watching until I walked through the room almost an hour in, at which point it looked familiar -- and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

It was the new Pixar film, Luca.

"Oh no no no no no!" I said, realizing a grave error in the natural order of events.

See, we're going out of town next week, back to Nagambie, where my wife and I went for her birthday back in February. We both have to work, but we need a change of scenery after our recent lockdowns, so we'll just work remotely from a different place. We were supposed to actually go down to the Mornington Peninsula to stay at a friend's beach house while they were out of town -- even though it's not beach weather -- but they couldn't make their own trip interstate as a result of borders still being closed between states as there are more COVID outbreaks around the country. The falling dominoes left them in their own beach house for the first week of school holidays and us out of luck.

Enter Nagambie, where we will try to make it as much like a holiday as we can while we still both working. My wife works three days a week (Tuesday through Thursday) for her current job, then does freelance work on Mondays and Fridays, which means she'll have some flexibility to entertain the kids on those days, while I'll take Wednesday off and entertain them that day. I guess Tuesday and Thursday it'll be screens, screens and more screens for them. They'll be so disappointed.

But enough of our holiday logistics.

We like to incorporate a number of fun things into these trips out of town, and on this trip I'd planned to bring along our projector and have a family viewing of Pixar's latest. You may recall that we did a similar thing when Soul came out on a trip out of town over Christmas. 

My younger son loved that experience, which was scheduled for the night of his birthday, making it all the more special. And making this prospective projector viewing of Luca all the more special by association.

So when I told him I'd planned to have us watch it as a family out of town next week, he started crying.

Now, you might think I'm an unreliable narrator here, making myself look better than I actually was. You might think my tone of voice was all scoldy or annoyed, like he should have known better. 

In truth, that's not the case. He shouldn't have known better. We've never even talked about Luca, even though Disney+ is advertising it very prominently on the landing page for the obvious reason of its newness. Part of keeping a good surprise is not talking about the thing in question too much before you launch the surprise. 

But the risk of that is that your younger son decides to watch the movie on his own while he's waiting for his device to charge back up so he can keep playing Brawl Stars.

So I swear, the only tone in my voice was disappointment at my own failure to properly prevent this from happening. But that was enough.

He started crying and he was basically inconsolable for the next 15 minutes. My immediate attempts to console him were so strenuous that they drew my wife out of the bedroom where she was enjoying her morning tea. Neither of us could console him, as much as we tried, and even an hour later he was still looking miserable.

He stopped watching Luca and will finish the final 30 minutes when we all watch it together in a couple days. But it's a sign of how much he's enjoyed these movie-related surprises that he mourned this like he'd mourn the loss of a favorite toy. The only thing lost here was the ephemeral experience of consuming a possibly beloved new movie for the first time together. But that was enough.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that this may be the real cinephile among my children. The older one is the one I've worked on harder, just because he was the first one who became a sentient creature capable of consuming movies, and just because, sad as it is to admit, the older child tends to get more of your attention on any area where you are trying to indoctrinate them. He's also the one who always tells me that the latest movie we've seen is his favorite of all time.

But the older one does not gravitate toward the experience of watching movies like the younger one does. He would never fire up a movie during his free time, which the younger one does do, as evidenced by the current example. The younger one might be the one following in his old man's footsteps, who sees a couple free hours as the perfect chance to add a new movie to your list.

And like him, I'd probably be a bit crushed too if I'd inadvertently spoiled a movie-related surprise someone had curated for me.

Alas, I hear Luca is not so great. So maybe it wasn't even the right movie to have scheduled for this sort of surprise.

And you know what? I was actually going to sneak in an early viewing of the movie, even if he didn't.

I need to watch new movies as close to their release date as possible for the purpose of reviewing them for ReelGood. So I actually tried to get Luca on the books last weekend, just after it had been released, and long before any idea of watching it on our holiday occurred to me. 

My wife put the kibosh on this proposed Sunday night viewing due to the fact that we already had a busy Sunday afternoon hosting a play date for my older son. I was nursing a sore foot, so I thought there was a chance she'd take both of our kids out, plus my older son's friend, for a couple hours in the afternoon. She left the younger one back with me, as I should have expected, but if she hadn't, I was going to throw on Luca in order to write up my review -- not telling anyone I'd already watched it when we eventually watched it as a family.

If I'd shared this with my son yesterday, that I tried to watch it before he even did, it might have saved a few tears. 

But then my wife would have known that I had schemed to spoil our family viewing, and I can't have that. 

Ted Turner's legacy, lo these many years later

There are two things about today's post that I find to be a surprise:

1) Ted Turner is still alive, and somehow, he's only 82. I thought he was already 82 when he first came on my radar back in the 1980s, as the owner of the Atlanta Braves and the guy who was trying to colorize classic films.

2) You can still get colorized movies in 2021.

The example of #2 is Red River, which I watched Thursday night for a viewing series I'm doing through my Flickchart group on Facebook. I wouldn't have chosen to watch the colorized version, of course, but it was the one available on Stan, and the loss in the authentic experience was not enough for me to opt to pay for a rental.

This was actually my very first experience watching a colorized film -- that I'm aware of, anyway.

I had no idea they were still out there, really. Turner was so pilloried and satirized back in the day for his attempts to make older films "easier to watch" -- an admirable goal in terms of converting new cinephiles, if it didn't violate the core principle of appreciating art for what it is, at the time it was created. You can choose metaphors in almost any artistic medium, so I won't bother to provide them here.

Looking into it a little bit, I see that Turner Entertainment stopped pursuing this dubious enterprise because the process was too expensive. Adding to the cost were legal battles, such as the one waged by John Huston (and later his estate) over the attempt to colorize The Asphalt Jungle.

Wikipedia has a list of films that have been colorized, and there are hundreds of films on it. Handily, it also includes who was responsible for the colorization. And though probably half of the films on the list were, in fact, colorized by Turner Entertainment, Red River is not one of those. It was colorized by Color Systems Technology.

Why it's still available as the option a streaming service would choose to pick up is beyond me. My guess is that the color version, acknowledged now as the inferior if not the blasphemous version, has less value and costs less to license. 

So really, what did I think of this colorization thing?

Well for one, I thought the technique was well done. I saw when I first looked up Red River on Stan that it was listed in parentheses as the colorized version, but I'd forgotten by the time I sat down to watch. I didn't remember until about 15 minutes in. Once I remembered I started to notice what I thought might be small flaws attributable to the process, but I think it's more telling that it took me so long to notice. 

I was a 3 stars out of 5 on Red River, but that was a significant improvement from the gumpiness I felt toward it early on, when it looked to be a textbook example of the kind of western I don't like, John Wayne and all. As it went along I decided it was more complicated than I originally gave it credit for. 

It's hard for me to say what role, if any, the colorization played in my thoughts on the film. I think knowing beforehand that a film is colorized could bias you, but I think the greater impact of colorization on a person comes in terms of films you already cherish as favorites that undergo the process. That's where the claims of blasphemy are really most resonant.

I will say that having the film in color clearly went against Howard Hawks' wishes. On the Wikipedia page, the prospect of filming in color is discussed, and Hawks rejected it because he thought that Technicolor, which was the industry standard at the time, was too garish for the realistic style he desired.

It's the type of authorial intent Turner would have clearly trampled all over. 

I'm not sure yet whether I will actively resist my next opportunity to watch a colorized film. It will probably depend on the circumstances. In this case, I was under the pump to watch the film in June, and though I probably could have gotten a black and white rental through iTunes, I just opted for the Stan version instead. If it's a movie I could watch or not watch at my leisure, I might be more inclined to scrutinize the decision before making it next time.

I'll just finish by leaving this here:

All's Well That Ends Welles: Mr. Arkadin and The Trial

This is my third in a 2021 bi-monthly series cleaning up the rest of Orson Welles' feature films that I haven't seen.

My first month watching two Welles features -- a pace I have to keep for this month and August if I want to watch eight films in six months -- demonstrated the wide range of Welles' talents as both a filmmaker and an actor. 

Both films also go by two names.

The first I watched was his 1955 film Mr. Arkadin, which is also called Confidential Report. Technically, this represented the nadir of Welles' skills. The actors he cast are really quite bad, not a recognizable face in the cast other than his own -- and the bad acting includes him. But more on that in a moment.

The real technical issue with the film is its shoddy look. When I watched Welles' incomplete Don Quixote film that was cobbled together and released in 1992, I was aghast at the poor filmmaking on display. It reminded me of a bad student film, with amateurish camerawork, poor editing, and a post-dub of the voices that was simply ridiculous. Of course, this film was incomplete so we can't really know what Welles intended to do with any of it, and what's bad about it could be blamed on the guy who wove the footage into something vaguely resembling a narrative film.

That same excuse does not fly with Mr. Arkadin. Welles was fully alive for the entirety of its production, and though some of the problems that famously plagued his shoots -- which I haven't read up on in this particular case -- may be to blame for what we're seeing here, Welles ultimately greenlit these raw materials to go out as a completed film.

Although I found the camerawork (by Jean Bourgoin) mostly to be terrible, it was really the way Welles stitched it together in the editing room that drove me to distraction. Renzo Lucidi is the credited editor, though IMDB mentions Welles as an uncredited editor, and of course his massive ego would not have allowed anything he didn't approve of to go out without a knock-down, drag-out fight. Of course, that's what happened on a number of his films, which is why he had such a checkered career, with so many films released that were only some small percentage of his actual vision. 

The editing here is frenetic. Shots are layered upon one another to no end, often sacrificing the logic of the dialogue in the process. It looks like the editor was on speed and just kept on getting more and more worked up the faster the edits occurred. It looks like garbage.

I didn't like the story either, though aspects of it remind me of both The Lady from Shanghai and Citizen Kane. Like Shanghai, it's about a man who involves another man in an intricate plot intending to frame him or double cross him, and like Kane, it's an intricate mystery piecing together details about an unknowable personality. But Welles' script is so jumbled and garbled that I quickly stopped caring what was happening. (I guess it might have been clever at some point in there, at least according to Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who is quoted in the film's Wikipedia entry as saying it is one of the greatest films of all time.)

The single worst thing about the movie may be Welles in the title role. Yes, the lead (Robert Arden) is bland, and yes, the series of women with sort of interchangeable roles who traipse through the picture range from ridiculous to forgettable (with the lone exception of Katrina Paxinou in what was probably the film's best, and most successfully paced, scene). But Welles is just an overblown idiot here. First of all he looks absurd. This look would be better suited to one of his Shakespearean adaptations than a film that seemed to have been set in the present day in 1955:

He reminded me a bit of this guy:

Though of course that comes much later.

You can imagine the type of performance that goes along with that appearance, and you'd be right. I'd call it scenery chewing, but some of the sins Welles commits are of extreme interiority, like he's an insane person on lithium. Anyway, he's always the biggest person on screen, and I'm not just talking about his increasing body size. He's "big" even when he's quiet, as in all the choices he makes are to one extreme or another, and he's out of sync with all the other actors. It's laughable.

In terms of the techniques you would expect from Welles, given his past work, there were a couple. For one I noticed he's still very interested in depth of field, as there's a shot with a folder in the foreground on a bed -- the "confidential report" of the alternate title -- and the characters in the background that's quite striking. It almost looks as though it's a novelty oversized folder to create the effect, which I'd be able to confirm with one quick google search if I could be bothered. But Mr. Arkadin does not warrant any more of my time than I've already given it.

There were also a lot of high-angle shots, and different camera angles in general. In fact, my notes from the viewing read "Too many camera angles." The multiplicity of angles contributes to the sense of frenetic disarray created by the editing. This is a movie made by a person who has too many tricks and can't make tough decisions on which ones not to use. What's worse is that some of them are used badly.

The results were much better with The Trial, which came out seven years later in 1962. No, it didn't take him seven years to make his next movie -- though after Mr. Arkadin, I wouldn't be surprised if it had -- but I've already seen the film that came out between the two of them, 1958's Touch of Evil. I don't know if that was heralded as a comeback for him at the time (I believe it was) but it definitely helped point him in the right direction for his adaptation of the famous Franz Kafka novel.

Which I didn't realize this was until just a few days before I watched it. The Trial, despite its famous associations, is quite a generic sort of title and could have been used for any sort of movie, though likely one involving a trial. But Welles loved his adaptations, so I probably should have guessed.

Making this connection gave me a lot of additional excitement about my second June movie. I only just read this book for the first time about five years ago, and I really enjoyed it. "Enjoyed" is the wrong word. I found it intellectually stimulating and invigorating.

Alas, The Trial works better on the page. When you live with the tedium central to Kafka's themes over a series of weeks, it's enriching; when you live with it over a couple hours, it can make you impatient for it to be over. Which kept The Trial from landing higher in my estimation despite some very good filmmaking.

I noticed the difference right away. Although this was Edmond Richard's first feature as a cinematographer, his work is so much more crisp and purposeful than the work of veteran DP Jean Bourgoin in Mr. Arkadin. The first shot is of Josef K's bedroom, which the camera (and probably also the set) makes look impossibly undersized -- an early metaphor for the type of psychological imprisonment the story will saddle on its protagonist. (Who is played by Anthony Perkins, by the way, making this the second Perkins film I have seen this month after On the Beach.)

The set continues to be a masterstroke on The Trial, enhanced by Richard's photography. As one might expect if having seen later Kafka adaptations, the sets seem to be out of a dream space, either much bigger or much smaller than they should be, to further the film's themes. One unforgettable scene involves a giant warehouse-sized room that seems to be filled with a thousand people at desks on typewriters, none of them divided from their neighbor by more than a foot or two. There are strange court chambers and file rooms jammed with rows and rows of filing cabinets. The palatial office/convalescence room of the advocate, played by Welles himself, is absurdly grandiose, able to have rooms filled with what appear to be just random stacks of documents and old newspapers.

Let's take a moment to pause and discuss Welles himself as an actor. While his role here as the advocate is very similar to his role as Mr. Arkadin -- both characters are larger than life and inscrutable -- the effectiveness of the performances couldn't be more diametrically opposed. There's something truly chilling about his advocate character, not only the bizarre power he wields by rarely leaving his bed (and sometimes controlling things from under the covers). What I found most memorable was that he seems to speak almost without moving his mouth, all the subtle malice and menace contained in his wide-eyed stare. 

Here is what I mean:

As discussed earlier, seeing The Trial on film underscored for me how much better it works as a book than a movie, but that's no fault of Welles'. This is a very faithful adaptation, including all the narrative circumlocutions involving the women K meets -- one of whom is played by Welles' wife, Paola Mori. (Who also appears in Mr. Arkadin.) You get a sense of the Kafkaesque absurdity of it all for sure. 

It also allows him to really pursue his natural inclination toward amplifying his themes through extreme camera angles, though this time in a more restrained manner. Here's a shot of Welles the first time he is seen standing next to K, though in reality they are close to the same height:

A moment later we are shown that the advocate is indeed on an elevated surface, but as this is our first time seeing them side by side, it works as a symbol of how the strange bureaucracy that has ensnared K towers over him. 

A shot through tunnels under the city also reminded me of The Third Man, which Welles appeared in but did not direct. 

Another important point of contrast between The Trial and Mr. Arkadin: the use of black and white. It was likely a financial limitation for Welles in both instances, but in the former it serves his themes, while in the latter it feels like a shortcoming. It's the perfect film stock for the stark The Trial, but Mr. Arkadin has a number of scenes with large parades, colorful costumes (you would assume, anyway), and even a masquerade ball. It seems to scream out for the color that it does not have.

Oh, I said both films have two names. Even though The Trial is entirely in English, its credits appear in French, where the title is listed as Le Proces.

Welles himself bookends the film, speaking the opening parable "Before the Law" against a series of still drawings, as well as at the end concluding with "My name is Orson Welles, and I wrote and directed this picture." I'm starting to see the groundwork laid for the type of fourth-wall-breaking authorial role Welles played in his work, which was so richly parodied by Will Ferrell in the Funny or Die show The Spoils of Babylon. 

As a side note, I watched both films on YouTube, the first free and the second a rental. That's the first time I've ever done a rental from YouTube. It was perfectly smooth. Under some circumstances, that "landmark moment" might be the occasion for its own post, but since I'm already writing about The Trial here, let's just move on. 

Well it took me about four sittings to finally get through this post. Hopefully that's not what my next installment of this series will entail. August will be my second (and final) two-movie month with Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story.

Well done, America

I only just this morning learned that the U.S. had made Juneteenth an official national holiday. (It only happened two days ago, so I guess that's not so bad.) 

This after only learning last year there was a thing called Juneteenth, as a result of watching the movie whose poster I'm including here.

Just another reminder that while we can sometimes be slow on the uptake, it's never too late to make things right.

I don't blame myself, really, for not knowing what Juneteenth was until last year. You can't seek to acquire more knowledge about things you did not know were things. Maybe if I'd been a little more clued in in certain areas, I would have known about it, but alas, I was not.

It's much easier -- and fair, I think -- to blame the United States on the whole, specifically an education system that didn't think it was worth us knowing about June 19th, 1865, the day slaves in Texas were finally made aware of their emancipation by Abraham Lincoln three years earlier. Maybe it wasn't part of any of my curricula growing up because it's sort of an odd thing to celebrate -- not the day Lincoln actually emancipated the slaves, but the day the final slaves were granted their freedom. It tends to draw attention to the fact that thousands of Americans were enslaved three years longer than they needed to be. 

But it's another right step by the Biden administration to help redress those wounds, and continue to heal the new wounds created by the events of last year and the Trump administration on the whole. 

As for the movie? I wish I could say that it's a resounding success, but I can only give it a modest recommendation. If you'd like to get into more of my thoughts, you can read my review here.

I'll leave you with a photo that makes me smile, just as the people in this photo are smiling -- not because they knew the cameras were on them, but because Biden's signature authorizing Juneteenth as a national holiday was a great moment in modern American history.

A return to streaming at its streamingest

I stopped watching DVDs on Thursday night, then it was three straight nights of streaming -- including one digital rental, not quite streaming in the same sense as I had to pay for it.

I shouldn't have had to pay for the digital rental, only it was an instance of the Netflix regional distances we used to suffer from all the time, but which haven't plagued us for years. I'll get to that in a moment.

When I say it was a return to streaming at its streamingest, I mean it was three different but very common ways I use streaming, especially as distinct from DVDs: 1) a Netflix new release, 2) a terrible horror movie from the dregs of Amazon's collection, and 3) a not-so-recent Netflix streamer but one that everyone is talking about, only I had to rent it through iTunes rather than watching it on Netflix.

Let's go in chronological order.

Although I wanted to watch the third one first, what I actually watched on Friday night when I couldn't find it available was Netflix's first new movie in a couple weeks that wasn't some foreign language genre film they picked up on the cheap. And that was Awake, a movie with a dynamite premise, even if I was bothered that it had the same title as another movie on my list (the 2007 hospital horror of the same name).

This Awake stars Gina Rodriguez as the mother of one of the only people who can sleep after some kind of solar flare functions as an electromagnetic pulse -- and also robs human beings of their ability to catch some z's. As one character puts it, "There is no longer such a thing as an unconscious person. You're either on, or ... you're off."

A pretty cool idea for a movie, a race against time to find a cure to the sleeplessness epidemic, as human beings are estimated to be dead after a week (and insane well before that) if they can't sleep. Rodriguez' daughter, one of only two people our characters have identified who can still drift off, is obviously going to be key to this possible cure, but the best scientific minds are obviously significantly less than that after even one day without sleep, let alone three or four. 

It's a better idea than it's executed. There were some weird plot leaps where I thought I had missed ten lines of dialogue that would have explained where we'd suddenly found ourselves in the story. If I'd thought this were intentional, a way of putting the viewer into the foggy brains of the characters, I would have forgiven it better and even embraced it, but it seemed like a narrative failure at the script level. Still, director Mark Raso is obviously talented as there are a couple virtuoso sequences here involving camera placement and difficult single takes with impossible choreography, which put me in mind of Children of Men now and again. (There'll be a review of this up to the right shortly, possibly as soon as you read this, depending on when you read it.)

On Saturday night I decided to dive into Amazon's bottomless cheap-o horror section and go swimming.

You can literally go on forever passing over interchangeably terrible movies until you find the Platonic ideal of a terrible Amazon horror movie, but I didn't spend as long in that section as you might think. That's because I quickly found the 1993 movie Ticks, about mutant ticks killing people in the woods, and found its parts were less interchangeable than I might have thought.

Yeah, there were familiar faces here, from Seth Green to Alfonso Ribeiro to Peter Scolari to none other than Ron Howard's brother and father, Clint and Rance. Fun fact: I was not even aware this familiar character actor was Ron Howard's father until I saw his name listed next to Clint's in the opening credits and made the connection. Fun fact #2: Clint Howard has actually appeared in some films that did not have his brother attached in any way, shape or form. Never knew that.

So yeah, Clint Howard is one of the early kills -- a guy who is feeding some kind of growth serum to a marijuana plants in a secret manufacturing facility in the woods. The stuff, which looks like green toxic sludge, oozes out and infests the local tick population, causing them to grow to about the size of a human hand -- or actually, I should say, to spawn new ones birthed out of some kind of gross egg sac that are that size, and are particularly aggressive. And that's a problem for a trip to a cabin in the woods that's kind of like an outward bound program for wayward inner city youth. 

I was all ready to write this movie off entirely -- I knew it would be a surefire way to end my streak of 14 straight movies that I had given a positive star rating of at least three stars, and indeed, it did do that. But Ticks does find that perfect "so bad it's good" quality that we all seek in terrible horror movies, made all the more enjoyable by the familiar faces you never knew were involved in this movie (in part because you never knew it existed). There are some great practical effects here, and though the overall quality of the filmmaking is poor, it's poor in the right ways. I expected it to be a one-star experience on Letterboxd but I actually gave it two stars as an acknowledgement of the enjoyment I derived from it.

Okay, now the movie I teased at the start, whose poster you have already seen.

Sunday night was the third of a long weekend (it's the queen's birthday, don't you know -- though only observed, as she was born in April). So I settled in for another night of streaming schlock, the one with which I had hoped to open the weekend.

I heard about What Lies Below on an April episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. It's a sign of of how far behind I am that I just listened to it on Thursday. I immediately lined it up for my Friday night viewing, and since I knew it was on Netflix I thought it would be easy peasy. 

Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's only on Netflix in the U.S. It's gotten to the point where if I hear that a movie is on Netflix, it's because it's a Netflix original film, and it plays everywhere. I guess not everything falls into that bucket, even though on the podcast they talked about how it was the stated ambition of the director -- Braden R. Duemmler by name -- to make a movie that would get talked about and appear in the Netflix top ten, which it did. That truly is streaming at its streamingest.

As I hinted at the outset of this piece, we used to always bemoan the fewer titles available here than in the U.S., which is the reason we tried to watch Netflix through a VPN for our first few years here. (In fact, for about the first year we got here, that was the only way to watch it, as it had not yet debuted in Australia -- hard to believe Netflix wasn't available in Australia only seven years ago.) As an indication of how much has changed since then, I can't remember the last time I thought about whether there were movies available in the U.S. that aren't available here. At first we were precious about the titles that had been in our queues in America, which seemed like important viewing guidelines rather than just the dumping grounds they've become, where titles you're vaguely interested in go to die. To quote something we sometimes tell our kids, since then it's been "You get what you get, and you don't get upset."

Until Friday night, when I did get a little upset to hop on Netflix and discover that the movie I planned to watch that night just wasn't there. That was when I pivoted to Awake, which I'd been planning to watch this weekend anyway in anticipation of reviewing it.

Instead of giving up on the dream of What Lies Below entirely, I decided to just bite the bullet and rent it on iTunes on Sunday. 

Why a dream, you ask?

The reason it had been discussed on the podcast was because What Lies Below had attained a sort of zeitgeist breakthrough. Not only was there the director's stated desire to be a hit on Netflix -- a strange and very 2021 reason to make a film -- but there was how this movie was such an odd duck. It's kind of a 1990s throwback erotic thriller, which features throwback actress Mena Suvari as the recognizable face in the cast. One of the podcasters talked about how it feeds what he believed was a hunger for softcore pornography in an era where hardcore porn is always in our face, though really, it was more the promise of that material than actually containing it. He believed we sort of want to go back to a time when we referred to Cinemax as "Skinamax" because it hosted such content, even though What Lies Below doesn't actually deliver on that front as such.

What it delivers is far weirder, and though it was spoiled for me on the podcast, I won't spoil it for you. I'll just say that you will likely think of H.P. Lovecraft as you watch this movie, and leave it at that.

And though this is not a "good" movie by any stretch of the imagination, like Ticks, it succeeds at being a perfect specimen of the weird thing that it is. There's lots of bad technique, some good technique, and enough truly out-there surprises to make it a delicious viewing for the third night of a long weekend.

And now that I've had a long stretch of DVD viewing followed by a short stretch of deliberate palette cleansing, I will go back to just watching whatever movie is next on my slate, available through whatever delivery method presents itself. 

This will also end another lengthy stretch of movie watching in general, as I will finally rest on Monday night after watching at least one movie for 17 straight days. That's probably not a record given the flurry of activity that frequently attends the end of my movie-watching year in December and January, but I do feel pretty tired.

Lockdown DVD Fest: Closing Night (for reals)

If you've selected the best remaining DVD that you borrowed from the library for what may be the closing night of your lockdown DVD festival, when that festival extends a night, all you have left are the leftovers.

Fortunately, Honey Boy placed a close second to Wild Rose as my original selection for a closing night film. 

And Thursday night's viewing really would be the closing night, as Rose's win for DVDs pushed the availability competition between DVDs and streaming to a 5-5 tie that had to be broken on night #11. You'll recall that DVDs were getting a point if the DVD I watched was only available for free to me that way, but streaming got a point if I discovered afterward that I didn't need to watch it on DVD because it was already available on one of my streaming services.

Honey Boy was for all the marbles.

But first, Alma Har'el's film.

As you probably know, it's Shia LaBeouf's script based on his own life experiences, taking place in two time periods: one when he's a 12-year-old just starting to make waves in the industry, and one when he's a young adult not handling the pressures of fame and needing to check into rehab. He's played by the fantastic Noah Jupe in the first set of scenes, and by the equally fantastic Lucas Hedges in the second. In fact, Hedges does such a good impersonation of LaBeouf that it was almost uncanny.

Of course, it's best to keep a small layer of artifice in place here, though I don't know if I've ever found the end credits disclaimer, about any resemblance to real people being unintentional, to be more disingenuous. This is of course based on his life and his own father -- who LaBeouf himself plays -- but in order to keep up the "inspired by" pretense, LaBeouf calls his character Otis. And though it's not called a Transformers movie that we see Otis shooting in the opening scene, the familiar off-screen sound of whirring robot parts makes as much of a connection as we need.

I was on board with LaBeouf's script from the very start, when we also get a montage of all the movies Otis is shooting, but I wasn't sure about his performance as Otis' dad. Or not the performance so much, but the makeup/costuming used to make the 32-year-old actor look like someone maybe ten years older than he is. He's been given a pot belly and this hair style where he's balding at the top but long-haired in the back, like a mullet gone bad -- excuse me, like a mullet gone worse. Here:

At first I was distracted by this. I was like "This is a guy who is essentially still a boy, playing dress-up as a man." But it didn't last. Since starting out as an impossibly charismatic child actor turned young adult actor who was always a good guy, LaBeouf has carved out a far more eccentric place in the film landscape in recent years, and he's capable of real menace. He can really discomfit you. This abusive, white trash father is menacing indeed, and also pathetic, and also possibly someone you can pity, while still being a monster.

By the end I thought it was a really good performance, made all the more impressive by the fact that it's his own father. That may have made the emotions easier to conjure, but also makes it extremely personal and triggering for him. I really appreciated the vulnerability, especially since one of the things that become off-putting about LaBeouf was his cocksure and ultimately aggressive persona -- which Hedges nails. Jupe also does his part showing the far more sensitive child he once was, though one who obviously had to grow up too fast, as his own father was giving him cigarettes at age 12. Because one of LaBeouf's biggest fears was that he would become his father, him actually playing the role makes that all the more profound.

As Otis and his dad live in a seedy motel in what must be one of the worst parts of the San Fernando Valley, I also got a bit of a Florida Project vibe from this film. There's a lot of parental neglect and some sense of the dynamics of a small itinerant community like this. The filmmaking was reminiscent of that film in parts as well. 

Overall the film really worked for me. I'm not familiar with the work of the director, Ha'rel, but she brings a real perspective and skill to the filmmaking. Ultimately, of course, this is LaBeouf's movie. I was glad never to find it self-indulgent, as that's a criticism that has also dogged the actor. With a few more right choices like this one, he seems poised to be the kind of guy who could make a full comeback as a proper adult and become something of a Matthew McConaughey. Maybe that's shooting too high, but I think LaBeouf may be transitioning from pariah into someone we can root for.

It's no secret I was rooting for DVDs to win this competition. Not that the results of this competition would ever be binding -- I'm free to watch DVDs whenever I want, regardless of whether those movies are available on streaming. Often, borrowing a DVD is an excuse to watch something that might be available on streaming, though you'd never have a specific occasion to choose it. Having it on DVD gives you that occasion. 

Still, I wanted DVDs to win.

Did they?

Yes. Yes they did.

Honey Boy was not available for streaming on Amazon, Netflix, Kanopy, Stan or Disney+, meaning if I wanted to watch it right now, it had to be through my local library.

6-5, DVDs take it.

Satisfying result, especially as DVDs had to come from behind to win. It was a back-and-forth affair, actually, as DVDs at one point had a seemingly insurmountable 4-1 lead before squandering the entirety of that lead by losing four in a row. Then it finished with two wins in a row to take it. Exciting stuff.

Now I wonder: Would the results have been different if I'd chosen one of my other remaining films as the closing night film?

I'll exclude rewatches as candidates. One of the movies I borrowed from the library was Crimson Tide, but I already rewatched that on streaming a couple weeks ago, which was one of the things that prompted me to do this festival. Then there was The Lighthouse, and any suspense related to that was ruined when I saw it available for streaming before I even considered watching it. The only other possible rewatch was Zulu, which I've seen only once and really loved, ten years ago when my older son was an infant. But we'll just leave that to the side.

The Testament of Orpheus (1960, Jean Cocteau) - I'd first gotten to know Cocteau as part of my Audient Auteurs series a couple years back, and I really liked what I saw. However, I never seriously considered watching this movie for this series as it's the third part in a trilogy that stretches 30 years, the other two parts of which I haven't seen. I think they are only loosely related and it's not necessary to watch them in order, but the uncertainty surrounding that left this on the sidelines.

Availability on streaming: None.

A Hidden Life (2019, Terrence Malick) - I'm (unfortunately) a Malick completist and this is certainly a "film festival type film," but the 174-minute running time was, and continues to be, a stumbling block for me. Plus, I'm sick of Malick's shit. 

Availability on streaming: Disney+ (weirdly)

Little Women (1994, Gillian Armstrong) - This could have been a strong contender given how much I loved Greta Gerwig's version of this film, my first exposure to the story, two years ago. But any time I looked at the spine of the DVD in my stack, I passed over it.

Availability on streaming: None.

So if I'd chosen A Hidden Life, the results would have skewed the other way. Thank goodness I am almost never in a position to watch a three-hour movie -- even during lockdown. (And my God, if Malick is self-indulgent in a 100-minute film, I can only imagine how tedious I would find this.)

So what are my takeaways from this?

In any random selection of movies from the library, I can expect about half not to be available on streaming. Of course, that only relates to this particular sample, but if I'm including Crimson Tide and The Lighthouse in the above computations, that's eight of 16 movies available on streaming, and eight not. I guess at this point we might as well do another tiebreaker with the 17th movie. Zulu is, in fact, available on Amazon Prime.

So streaming might have the slight advantage, but it's only slight. And because most of us have no idea what's actually available on streaming when we're browsing through the library options, unless we happen to have recently made note of a particular title, that activity is likely to bear at least some fruit, depending on how good the library collection is.

And let's turn our attention to that topic of "good" for a second. 

Here, let me provide you a list of the 11 films I watched again, in the order that I watched them:

The Wife
Papillon
The Secret of Roan Inish
The New Mutants
First Reformed
Free Solo
At Eternity's Gate
The Other Side of Hope
On the Beach
Wild Rose
Honey Boy

Not a single one of those films did I give lower than three stars on Letterboxd. And only two of them were as low as three stars. So that means I liked all of them enough to recommend them. 

And it's reasonable to say that this may be the longest stretch of seeing films I liked in my own personal history. Since I also gave a positive review to the last streaming movie I watched before I started all this -- Cruella on Disney+ -- that makes 12 straight movies I gave a thumbs up. Tellingly, the last film I gave a thumbs down -- Army of the Dead, though it was a marginal thumbs down -- was on Netflix.

So it occurs to me that a good library collection is also curated to include mostly films of some worth. I'm sure there's plenty of schlock you can get from a typical library collection, but you're never going to find the dregs of the internet that you can get on streaming, and that you'll watch just because it's funny to watch something terrible. Viewings like that can be fun -- in fact, I can't wait to get to one tonight -- but if you're hungry for a cinematic meal rather than a fatty snack, borrowing DVDs gives you a better chance of getting one.

Ultimately, as I said earlier, the results of this little experiment are mostly academic. I'm sure I'll continue to borrow movies from the library as long as they keep providing them and as long as they continue replenishing them with titles I haven't seen. Fortunately, there will always be titles I haven't seen. And I probably would have kept borrowing from the library even if streaming had won this competition 10-1. 

In the end, it's good to know that streaming is not yet covering such a percentage of the landscape of films you'd want to watch that it feels like it could be your only solution.

I mean, it could be, but then you'd be missing out on some of history's great films.

Lockdown DVD Fest: Closing Night - or is it?

When trying to select what would be -- or might be -- a good closing night film for this little festival I'm doing, I had no obvious candidates that would seem specially curated to work as a closing night film. Then again, The Wife was not specifically an "opening night film" either.

So I just chose the film I was most certain not to want to leave unwatched when I return my DVDs to the library, which turned out to be Tom Harper's Wild Rose.

It only might be the closing night film, because if you read yesterday's post, you'll know that I've declared this a best-of-11 series, in sporting terms. I've been keeping a running tally of whether each film could only be seen for free by me on a DVD from the library, or whether I could also see it on one of my streaming services, checking on the latter only after I'd finished watching so as not to spoil the fun. If the former, DVD got a point. If the latter, streaming got a point.

Streaming led 5-4 going into night #10 of the festival, so that meant that if last night's film was also available on streaming, streaming would clinch the win, as it would no longer be possible for DVD to retake the lead on night #11. So night #11 would not be necessary at all and would be cancelled, as occurs in the professional baseball, basketball and hockey playoffs.

At one point I was considering watching all of the remaining DVDs I borrowed, which totals about four or five more. But lockdown officially ends in Melbourne on Thursday night, plus we may be let out of our close-contact isolation if/once our COVID tests come back negative today. So if this is truly a "lockdown" fest, it should end no later than Thursday's night #11.

Whether we'll have night #11 or not is something we won't find out until the end of this post.

In the meantime, let's talk Wild Rose.

I had sort of dismissed this film when it came out a couple years ago. Don't know why, really, but I can tell you that I was initially skeptical of actress Jessie Buckley. Don't know why on that front either. I know she didn't win any points with me by appearing in Dolittle, but this was before that. Sometimes when you get just a small taste of an actor from clips or a trailer or what have you, you don't "get" them yet. I definitely didn't "get" Jessie Buckley at first.

Boy has that changed since then.

I could swear I'm Thinking of Ending Things was not my only recent exposure to Buckley -- she's in the most recent season of Fargo, but I'm actually two seasons behind on Fargo. But I'm Thinking of Ending Things was enough. Simply put, I was floored by her performance in my #1 movie of last year. Figured it was time to circle back to the film where I'd first heard her name. 

She plays an aspiring Scottish country singer named Rose-Lynn Harlan, and we meet her when she's getting released from prison. She's that type, as you might guess from the adjective in the film's title. Her voice is about the only thing she has going for her, as she's neglecting two children under the age of ten (can't help but neglect children when you're in prison) and she rubs people the wrong way with her crude manner. Holding a job would seem to be a problem, but at least she's got a forgiving new employer in the person of Sophie Okonedo, who hires her as a housekeeper as Rose-Lynn tries to make the money she needs to go to Nashville to try to hit it big. 

Wild Rose does not deviate significantly from what you would expect -- the moments of optimism, the arguments, the big fall from grace, the redemption. It's all there and it's not particularly surprising. But the film is really solidly crafted, and Buckley is terrific. I looked up to see if Buckley is actually Scottish, and it turns out she's Irish -- which just feeds into my whole eternal confusion of whether something is a Scottish accent or an Irish accent when I hear it with no other reference point. Since this is set in Glasgow, obviously I have the reference point. But I've loved Buckley in two roles, and neither of them featured her native accent. That's talent.

I will say, there were certain points where I more got the gist of what was going on than followed it perfectly. English-born Julie Walters plays her mother, and she also does a very good Scottish accent. So when they're arguing with each other, I can really only pick out every third word, and there were whole passages I just sort of had to wave off as something I didn't fully understand. That's where the plot benefits from being fairly predictable.

Still, I want the lingering impression of this film to be only praise. It really got to me, especially in a powerhouse final song that nearly had me in tears. 

Now: the important business. Will we be having one final night of this festival?

Yes. Yes we will.

Wild Rose is not currently available on Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Kanopy or Disney+, so indeed, the decisive Game 11 will be Thursday night, when this tie is 5-5 tie is broken once and for all, and this 11-day festival comes to its end. 

Lockdown DVD Fest: From Hope to hopelessness

So I'm combining Monday and Tuesday because writing a post every day for this series is wearing on me. I haven't been blogging this regularly, or with this many words, in several months. And even in lockdown I have other things that consume my time.

Think I'll finish up Wednesday night regardless of whether this lockdown continues past Thursday, which it probably will -- but we have a good chance of being out of self-isolation, at least. They're sending us for another COVID test tomorrow, and if we pass that test, we may be able to walk down our front steps and onto the street again.

Oh, I'll probably keep watching about a movie a day, but it's nice not to have artificial parameters on what I watch, as enriching as this experience has been for me. Need to get back to watching some dumb horror I unearth on Amazon. 

I've watched a documentary, a prison break drama, an intimate marital drama, a children's fantasy, a comic book movie and several others, but no "film festival" is complete without a foreign film, now is it?

So due up Monday night was Aki Kaurismaki's The Other Side of Hope from 2017. It's my second Kaurismaki film after Le Havre. Michael Phillips put the Finnish director on my radar on one of his Filmspotting appearances nearly a decade ago now, but I've still only waded this far into his filmography. I think knowing that Le Havre was a bit of a shrug for me -- a good shrug, but still a shrug nonetheless -- made me slow to seek out a second film, but The Other Side of Hope made its way into my library DVD borrowings and into my DVD player on Monday night.

It was a bit of a shrug. A good shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.

Kaurismaki's films have kind of a dry humor that almost only registers as humor if you squint. To be sure, there were some moments that almost made me chuckle, but more because they were mildly absurd than out-and-out funny. He reminds me a little of fellow Scandinavian director Roy Andersson, though Andersson's films are far more absurd and far less tethered to an identifiable narrative. 

The narrative is clear enough here, or at least a narrative framework with a recurring set of characters. The film takes place in and around Helsinki, bringing a couple main characters into contact with each other. One is a Syrian refugee trying to get work in Helsinki while also trying to stay legally in the country, as he conducts a long-distance search for his sister, who was separated from him at a border crossing. His story can hardly be considered humorous, as we learn in an interview with immigrant officials that the entire rest of his family, totalling eight or nine people, were killed in bomb blast in Aleppo while they were lunching together. A laugh a minute, you will agree, but Kaurismaki presents it in a way that steers clear of the maudlin. He's not the sentimental type.

Then the other sort of main character is a man who leaves his wife, wins a lot of money on an improbable straight flush in an underground gambling establishment, and buys a restaurant. The workers at the restaurant are a quirky bunch and provide most of what is considered humorous about this film. 

That's pretty much the whole thing. However, it takes stabs at some real humanism toward the end, and it's one of those movies whose fullness only strikes you as it is winding down. That may not be a ringing endorsement but it's enough for a positive assessment of the movie. Kaurismaki may not really be my bag, but I'm glad I've seen both of his films that I've seen. 

The title is interesting, as "the other side of hope" would be, I guess, despair. Certainly, there's a lot for the characters in this movie to despair about, but that's not the feeling you get from this movie, and I think that is its greatest strength. Maybe "the other side of hope" is more optimistic than I'm suggesting -- like, maybe hope actually pays off when you come out the other side.

Hope was a lot more absent in my Tuesday night film. 

I'd wanted to watch On the Beach, the 1959 Stanley Kramer film, for several years now, as it is set in Melbourne. That wasn't the only draw about the film, though. No, this is a movie about the immediate days after most of the world is destroyed by "the atomic war" and the radiation that kills those who aren't in immediate blast zones. Due to its isolation and general distance from the conflict -- though the primary combatants are never named -- Australia is the last area of the planet to still be waiting for its dose of radiation on the wind. But oh, it's coming.

The film stars lots of big names from the time: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins. As I suggested, though, the main draws were not the stars. I was really curious to see what Melbourne looked like in 1959, and the film did not disappoint, giving us (my wife watched with me) a lot of familiar street views as they looked 62 years ago. We got all the expected highs such an experience might provide. (I thought she'd seen it before, but she hadn't.)

But what may have interested me more than that was what a cautionary tale about nuclear (or atomic) war would look like in 1959. This was years before I figured they started making movies like this in earnest. And in truth, a lot of the time it doesn't feel like that kind of movie, having more of the trappings of a romance than anything else, or a nautical adventure. (Peck and his crew pilot a submarine when they aren't in Melbourne.) There are some chilling shots of abandoned cities, but really, the way this movie is post-apocalyptic has more to do with the question of what people will do with the little time they have left.

At the start of the narrative, the radiation is projected to hit Australia in five months' time -- I don't know if that's scientifically accurate, and I suppose it would depend on the closest blast site to the country. But what this does is it sets up this uneasy tension between people trying to live their lives -- which they mostly can, though they're going through privations like a petrol shortage -- and preparing for the inevitable. In fact, we see much of this fragility of life through Perkins' character and that of his wife, played by Donna Anderson, who have a baby girl. There's a whole plot point about how Perkins is trying to acquire suicide pills to give to his wife, which she will give to their daughter and herself, if she gets sick before he returns from what is expected to be a two-month submarine mission. If that's not chilling, I don't know what is.

And so this film exists in sort of a suspended state of ennui, as Peck's and Gardner's characters consider the possibility of new love, as well as its futility. (In fact, Peck has a wife and two sons of his own who are back in America and presumed dead, a reality he at first denies before ultimately coming to grips with it in a powerful scene.) The whole thing is suffused with melancholy and I really got caught up in it. As a neat trick, there's also a fair bit of humor, which somehow does not seem out of sync with the rest of what's going on.

A few other unrelated thoughts. One was that dispiritingly few characters in this film even attempted Australian accents, as only a few side characters were played by actual Australian actors, though almost all of them outside Peck and his crew are supposed to be Aussies. Another funny detail was that "Waltzing Matilda" plays on the score about two dozen times, so much so that the only other thing I could liken it to was the frequency of "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

I also wanted to say that I don't think I've ever seen an Ava Gardner film before. I suppose I did find her somewhat fetching -- she's supposed to be fetching, right? -- but the one who really turned my head was Donna Anderson. She's a real beauty. Yes, is -- she's still going strong today at 81, only five days younger than my dad. 

Okay, cannot leave behind the discussion of these films without telling you whether I could have watched them on streaming.

Coming into these two movies, DVDs had been holding a shaky lead, 4-3, over streaming. By that I mean, of the seven movies I had watched in this festival so far, four of them could not be found on any of the streaming services I subscribe to, while three of them could.

I'm sorry to say that DVDs have lost that lead.

The Other Side of Hope is available on Kanopy, and On the Beach is available on Stan. 

Now that DVDs have fallen behind, 5-4, I'm questioning the wisdom of having only one more night of this series. If it ended in a tie that would be kind of a disappointment.

So let's say this. I'll watch a movie Wednesday night. If that movie is also available on streaming, the series will be over -- streaming wins 6-4 in a best-of-11 scenario. However, if it's only on DVD, it'll necessitate a tiebreak on Thursday night.

I started out this post weary, but now I'm kind of excited again.

Lockdown DVD Fest: A 2018-themed weekend

I decided to keep the DVD Fest going over the weekend, though not to devote an individual post to each movie. There's only so much value to that, and it gets tedious, even or perhaps especially for me, the one doing it. (I don't presume to know what you find tedious, and I suppose you have a high tolerance for tedium if you spend any amount of time reading my posts.) 

At this point I don't think I will watch all the DVDs I have out from the library, which I had once stated as an ambition, after all. That's in part because for one particular title, I already inadvertently spoiled the little supplemental exercise I've been doing, which is checking if they're available on streaming after I've watched them. While I was doing some light browsing on Netflix, I believe it was, The Lighthouse appeared on one of the landing pages. I've already seen this movie, of course, and when I was at the library a few weeks back, I thought it might be worth a second viewing to see if I responded to it a bit more strongly this time. Now I think I'll just kick that can down the road, especially since I know I can find it online. 

But I did watch one DVD each of the three nights -- or days, as you will see -- and not until I reached the end did I realize that an accidental theme had emerged: They were all released in 2018, even if one of them had a festival debut the year before that. 

Friday

First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)

I know my #1 movie of 2018 played at film festivals in 2017, and it actually first came on my radar from a "best of 2017" podcast where the podcaster admitted he was honoring it a year before anyone else would have a chance to see it. Since I usually try to disregard the year a movie started playing festivals, I continue to think of this as a 2018 movie. 

It's actually the fourth time I've watched it in total, making it only the second movie (after Tangled and Parasite) that I've watched again since rewatching all my best of the decade contenders in 2019. First Reformed landed at #9 on that list of my 25 best of the 2010s, so I guess it isn't surprising that I'm seeing it for the fourth time in less than three years since my original viewing. 

It may have been my first time watching on DVD, though. The first viewing was MIFF in 2018, the second was an iTunes rental (I'm pretty sure) and I believe the third was on a streaming service, though I'm going to wait on that portion until the end of this little write-up (and even if I saw it on streaming then, it might not still be available that way now). In any case, I did not recognize the DVD menu, which was a nice little repeating sequence involving a particularly memorable swath of the score, playing over an unmoving image of Ethan Hawke, his body split between his pastor's vestments and a suicide vest, with a peaceful external of his church over one shoulder and a toxic waste dump over the other. The clouds move in both images and there are some birds over the church. It's inspired by one of the posters, but it also has a metaphorical value, kind of like the angel and devil on your shoulder, as Reverend Ernst Toller is torn between hope and despair.

One thing I did not specifically remember about First Reformed, despite all my repeat viewings, was that it was shot in the squarish 1.33:1 aspect ratio. I mean, I had to have noted it previously, but the 20 months since my last viewing in October of 2019 were enough for me to forget it. This interested me this time around because it made me realize that at the time, it was my second straight best movie of the year that was shot in 1.33:1 after A Ghost Story in 2017. So in this case watching it on DVD was useful, as the DVD included a disclaimer that this aspect ratio was intended by the filmmaker and did not represent something being broken. 

As with any film you love, you have new takeaways each time out, but since I'm talking about three films in this post I will be brief. These also involve SPOILERS, so you may not wish to read any further if you haven't seen this film.

The ending of First Reformed has always been problematic for people, myself included, though only for about the first two minutes after I finished watching it for the first time, after which I loved it. The apparently "happy" ending of Toller ending up in the arms of Amanda Seyfried's Mary is always something that had multiple interpretations, and people have correctly pointed out it that it may not be "real," as Cedric Kyle's megachurch pastor had previously pulled on the locked doors of the rectory and had been unable to get inside to reach Toller. Magically, Mary appears inside his domicile moments before he's going to drink Drano, materializing almost like a spirit. If Kyle's character could not open the door, why could she?

So this time around, it occurred to me -- though again, I might have had this thought previously and just forgotten it -- that maybe he did actually drink the Drano that the film shows him dropping to the ground when he sees Mary. When they embrace and kiss and the camera swirls around them, this could be his "last thought" before dying -- a concept he considers earlier when pondering what Mary's deceased husband Michael thought in the last moments before he shot himself. So in a way, it's a thing of beauty that his last thought his one of hope, of embracing a woman/spirit, even in the darkest hour when he's dying of cancer and dying more immediately of poisoning by household chemicals. When the image of them kissing abruptly cuts off, it could be like that moment the camera abruptly cuts from Tony Soprano at the end of that series -- the lights going out for the last time, in a snap, as he takes two in the back of the head. Of course, that's not the only way to interpret the ending of either of these works of art, but I like that it is one of them.

Free availability on my streaming services: None

Running total: 4-1, DVDs lead

Saturday

Free Solo (2018, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin) 

Because of an expected streaming viewing of Nobody on Saturday night, I crammed in my DVD viewing in the late afternoon on Saturday. Second use of my USB DVD player on my laptop as I watched in the bedroom. We had to postpone the Nobody viewing and I considered a DVD double feature, but I wasn't in a great mood so I just stuck with the one.

Free Solo was not the reason I wasn't in a great mood. It was terrific.

I watched the previous movie a friend of mine raved about by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband/cameraman/daredevil, Jimmy Chin, last year. That was Meru, and it was really good. My friend prefers Meru but I'm a Free Solo man myself, just because climbing a rock like El Capitan in Yosemite without a rope is batshit crazy. 

Spoilers to follow.

Although Alex Honnold was the first person to do a free solo climb of El Capitan in June of 2017 -- I guess that's not a spoiler unless you think you might be watching a snuff film -- the feat actually has a cinematic precedent. Yes, all you Trekkies out there will know that none other than James T. Kirk was free-soloing El Capitan at the start of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, even though William Shatner was 58 years old at the time, and more than a little bit pudgy. In the real world, it takes an exceptionally fit young man of 32, who has practiced the climb with ropes dozens if not hundreds of times, to complete the feat.

So I did have Star Trek on the brain from the start of the viewing, which is all the more reason I found it funny when someone refers to Honnold as "Spock" at one point. This has nothing to do with Star Trek V, mind you -- it's because Honnold is emotionally withdrawn almost to the point of pathology. I thought it was funny, though, that there was this accidental connection. In that scene where Kirk is climbing El Capitan, Spock actually flies up next to him on a jetpack. Talk about your climbing distractions. 

Despite his shortcomings as an empathic creature, and his unwillingness to "maximize his lifespan" as he puts it at one point, Honnold has gotten himself a serious girlfriend. She lets him do what he needs to do -- he wouldn't be partnered up with her if she didn't -- but it's interesting to see how the film explores the danger of what he's doing and its emotional effects on her. 

The wonder of the feat itself is obviously the reason you watch this movie -- the beautiful cinematography, the sheer impossibility of what this man is trying to do -- but the film probably wouldn't be as special as it is if it didn't turn the lens inward on itself. A number of the crew discuss whether they want to be witness to the possible death of this man they have come to love and respect, and yet further, whether something they do in the course of filmmaking -- accidentally knocking rocks loose, crossing his path with one of their ropes -- might be the actual cause of his fatal plummet. Alex himself discusses his own ambivalence of being filmed, whether he wants it at all, or whether being filmed might cause him to take a risk he might not otherwise take. 

Anyway, this is the complete package, and we should all be thankful it had the happy ending it did. Because the movie also tells us how many of history's great free solo climbers have died doing what they love, I couldn't resist checking Wikipedia afterward to see if Alex Honnold had succumbed to that same fate since the film wrapped. Nope, still in one piece -- and now married to his girlfriend in the film, as of last year.

Free availability on my streaming services: Disney+

Running total: 4-2, DVDs lead

Sunday

At Eternity's Gate (2018, Julian Schnabel)

I wrapped up the weekend on Sunday night watching a film about an artist whose story has been a part of two films I've loved in the past few years. 

The first of those chronologically, in my own viewing sequence anyway, was 2017's Loving Vincent, the impossible labor of love that gives us a story shot on film, whose every frame was painted over by individual artists. That gives the final product a lovely watercolor vitality and sense of movement, something that Vincent Van Gogh himself would have dreamed up if he'd been alive today. I've seen it twice now actually, most recently last year.

Then there's Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which I watched last year, and which features a vignette starring Martin Scorsese as Van Gogh.

Loving Vincent was probably in my mind most as I watched, as a number of the same events and characters appear in both. Ultimately, I think I preferred that film's plot structure of unraveling the mystery of the last few weeks of Van Gogh's life, to this approach of trying to get inside his head and see the world more as the painter did. That speaks more to the strengths of director Julian Schnabel, who made the great The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which features two of the same actors we see here (Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Seigner). I could tell this was the same director as that film.

And while I found the camerawork, the use of color, and the use of filters to distort that color all to be quite engrossing, the film on the whole did not land for me nearly as strongly, ending up as a 3.5-star experience on Letterboxd. Willem Dafoe is great as Van Gogh -- he robbed an Oscar nomination from someone who got famously snubbed that year, but maybe it wasn't such robbery after all. I also enjoyed that Mads Mikkelsen and Oscar Isaac appeared here, basically in cameos. 

Still, maybe it was being Sunday night after a weekend in self-isolation on top of lockdown, but I found my thoughts drifting during the movie a fair bit. I think it's the type of movie that encourages drifting away into your own thoughts at the best of times -- it's designed to be felt and ruminated on -- but it's not a movie I suspect I will watch a second time.

One thing I found interesting was extratextual. As I was watching Dafoe I took at guess at how old he is, and decided that he was maybe 60. The internet told me he's 65, though he would have been closer to 60 at the time this was filmed. Given the age he is now, it was almost exactly half his lifetime ago when he played Jesus Christ, appropriately at age 33, just as Christ was when he died. That became relevant as I was watching At Eternity's Gate, because Van Gogh mentions Jesus multiple times throughout to multiple characters, and you get the sense he may have been a bit of a Christ figure himself. After all, the location of his gunshot is very similar to that of Christ's abdomen wound, and when he's laid out at the end in his coffin among his works of art, finally being appreciated by the public, the sense of him almost being crucified is impossible to ignore.

Maybe Dafoe is just typecast.

Free availability on my streaming services: Kanopy

Running total: 4-3, DVDs lead

So I think I'll do at least three more nights of this ... there's a chance we'll be out of both lockdown and self-isolation on Thursday, and if that's the case, I need to get out to the theater! A Quiet Place II awaits, among others.