Rightwing Film Geek

Centennial Project — Saturday Afternoon

A few weeks ago, I teased a friend about doing a 50th anniversary project, specifically watching and writing about movies from 1976. I told him “centennial or go home!” to which he replied “others are more qualified for that than I am.” I don’t agree with that assessment factually, nor did I get the sense he was specifically calling me out. But I have long been on the public record as saying the greatest year in film history was 1928 / the greatest period was the end of the silent era. But I say with no braggadocio that among those who don’t making their living as an archivist / programmer / preservationist, etc. … there are few people in the world more qualified to do a 1926 project (and 27, 28, 29) than I. It’s an era I genuinely love and love to champion … the medium having fully learned itself but on the cusp of death-by-talkies (and knowing that … SINGIN IN THE RAIN oversimplified things a bit)

So I made a plan for the year. All told, I’ve seen 66 features and shorts from 1926, with the majority of them (35) rated 7 or higher. I have chosen one or two films per month among those 35, matching their premiere months at the time, to re-watch and write about. Keeping ahead of the curve, I’ve already re-watched both the February films I chose and have sketched out the notes for a review of one of them. So let’s get to a film that premiered in January 1926 …

SATURDAY AFTERNOON (Harry Edwards [Harry Langdon], USA, 1926, 8)

I’ve already written a little about Harry Langdon, but about his sound films (at least some of which are great, contrary to their rep!). He was one of the four silent clowns celebrated in James Agee’s classic Life essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, with Langdon being the only controversial pick, the only one of the four whose standing can be seriously disputed. If there’s a Mount Rushmore of silent comedy, “everybody” agrees that it’s Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and someone else. With all due respect to Charley Chase, Lupino Lane, Larry Semon, Laurel and Hardy (whose standing relies just as much on sound work) and even Fatty Arbuckle (who’s helped by the martyrdom / “what might’ve been” factor) … none of whom would be “bad” choices, I hasten to add … I think Agee made the right fourth pick.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON was a 26-minute short that Langdon, director Harry Edwards and co-writer Frank Capra made for the Mack Sennett studio. Sennett was and remains best known for his Keystone Kops films and launching the careers of Chaplin, Arbuckle and Mabel Normand with that style of broad, knockabout physical comedy. I have to confess that this Sennett “house” style doesn’t appeal that much to me, which is why seeing Langdon feels like Mack was explicitly counter-programming himself, or “diversifying his portfolio” if you like. His comic style was not just different from, but practically the opposite of, the Keystone Kops. He did nothing. “Harry” was an infantile naif who never understood what was happening around him. The current therapeutic society would refer to a more realistic version of him as autistic/spectrum. But because this is a comedy, the social cluelessness and deep contemplation are cranked up to about 12. His character is a doormat who barely realizes it, the sort of man who, if he met a woman he liked, would spend two minutes figuring out how to say “hello.”

… which is part of what makes SATURDAY AFTERNOON so hilarious: It’s a film about sex, starring the most asexual protagonist imaginable.

This three-reel featurette’s basic story is that hen-pecked Harry and his best bro (Vernon Dent) plot an assignation with a couple girls after work on a Saturday afternoon. And things go badly. SATURDAY AFTERNOON is almost exactly the length of a classic-era TV sitcom and has a similar trajectory. Coincidentally, I happen to have recently re-seen an episode of THREE’S COMPANY in which Mrs. Roper‘s derision of Stanley’s manhood prompts him in anger to go out and pick up a woman, to prove he still can. That’s basically what happens here. Only Harry isn’t as effectual and deliberate and sexually hot as Mr. Roper (if that line doesn’t sell you on SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I don’t know what might).

Much of the early part of the film is Harry at home, trying to assert his masculinity against his shrewish wife. Some of the domestic scenes, on the print that I re-watched, are accompanied by cello-heavy “spooky horror” music. Mrs. Harry is less sympathetic than Mrs. Roper (this is a 1926 film, and a silent, so we don’t get Helen’s bedroom putdowns / related desperation), which sets up Harry’s pathetic attempts both at establishing patriarchy and the workarounds from his knowledge of those inevitable failures. She literally treats him like the figurative child he is, fretting about giving him a dime for popcorn that he actually spent it on tobacco — a parental attitude and a childish workaround. After handing over every cent, including what he had hidden inder the rug, Harry gives an elaborate speech putting his foot down as the man of the house, but not only is it the [intertitled] solilquy to nobody at all rather than to the only relevant audience, but that relevant audience then walks in to listen backstage. For a looooong time. My father once said to me about THE HONEYMOONERS and Ralph’s bluster about punching Alice POW!!!! all the way to the moon, “is she acting as if he’s ever laid a hand on her? Or she even fears he might?” Alice Ward plays it the same way here. There’s even a domestic violence joke here, though it’s funny because it’s FTM not MTF.

In my essay on Langdon’s sound shorts, I called him “the Tsai Ming-liang of silent comics,” meaning that his scenes constantly overstretch the comic arc past its breaking point, making the anticipation its own joke. In Langdon films, and not just this specific scene, it’s more than Harry’s glacial stock process but also the direction and staging. Ward stands so long in the unseen-to-Harry background while he continues to blather on, and I kept laughing harder as the shot continued and she kept listening without reaction. Silent film is ideal for this kind of glacial comic style because you really look at Harry’s face without the distraction of dialog and natural sound. It’s focusing.

Once the rendezvous has been made and Harry has escaped Domestic Hell, he goes out to the meet Dent and their hot chicks. But because of Harry’s inevitable delaying, Dent thinks that their girls have not shown, and an eager-to-please Harry goes off screen and finds two other girls. Between their dress and their gestures, it’s pretty clear, even in 1926, that he’s unwittingly picked up two streetwalkers (the lead art). The actual pickup, however, happened offscreen because while those mechanics COULD work on their own merit, for the sake of this punchline they don’t matter. SEINFELD supposedly mastered of the art of all punchlines / no set ups. No. Not-relatedly (but relatedly), one great thing about the pre-Sexual Revolution society is that these kinds of jokes were possible. The word “ho” or any equivalent is never breathed, even when Harry’s companion realizes what has happened and would have every naturalistic reason to use such words. If the society is innocent, the innocent can be comic.

And make no mistake,Harry’s innocence IS the joke. When he first meets “his” girl between the two with whom Dent has set them up, he shakes her hand with more formality and distance and nerves than two fighters touching gloves after the bell has just rung. Later on, there’s a scene where Dent and his girl coo and peck from either side of an outside mailbox with an Harry innocently framed between them politely and unwittingly accommodating them. Later still, Dent gets a car, he puts himself and the two girls in the cabin’s single bench seat, while putting Harry in the outside rumbleseat, eagerly peering into the cabin with a look somewhere between a toddler and a cocker spaniel. If Harry were at all convincingly masculine or had any self-awareness, it’d risk bathos.

Despite my heaving said that Langdon’s humor is not the typical Sennett style, there is a chase and a fight (turns out their two girls broke a date with two other men who show up in the third reel, angry at being jilted). It’s commonplace to say that silent comedies had an advantage in that naturalistic dialogue and sound effects made a lot of violent physical comedy too hard to take — consider as Exhibit A the iconic climactic scene in Lloyd’s SAFETY LAST with a near identical sequence to cap off his second sound film FEET FIRST. In SATURDAY AFTERNOON, this goes one step farther on that “unseen/unheard is better” hypothesis. While driving around town with his buddy and their girls, Harry suddenly sees his wife driving nearby, and, terrified, he pulls the outside rumbleseat over his head and basically hides inside the trunk. (I’m too inexpert on the designs of 1926 cars to know whether this would’ve actually been possible or purely a visual gag.) Anyhoo, the car hits several potholes, goes off-road and makes all kinds of violent maneuvers, as we not only don’t hear but also don’t see anything of what is going on inside the trunk. But we know. The others in the car think that Harry is missing … obviously having been thrown or jolted into the street … routine stuff for 1926, and gold for comedy. When Harry reappears, his clothes are torn, he’s as woozy as a KO’d fighter, and the trunk’s spare auto parts are garlanding his body like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Who cares about all the pain and screams he went through to get that way … we neither heard nor saw all that stuff and so that’s funny. All punchline: who needs setup?

Even the one eternal moment of physical comedy in SATURDAY AFTERNOON is the running board scene. A dazed and bewildered Harry sits between two cars, his butt on the running board of one and his feet on the running board of the other. They then both drive off. He betrays absolutely no awareness of what is happening, even though this is 1926 and there are no green screens or CGI to help Langdon the actor. There’s safety accommodations in the camera set up, obviously, but that only goes so far. Those are still really two cars, they are still really moving, and that’s still really his body straddling them. And this is why silent physical comedy is both funny and amazing, and why each feeds into the other. You can’t believe you’re seeing what you undoubtedly are seeing.

Because this is a 1926 movie, even an adultery drama has to end “happily.” But as befits an adultery comedy, the happiness is somewhat ironic. A dazed Harry is found by his wife driving their (or her) car and she takes him home, after having found him wrapped around a telephone pole (don’t ask). The family unit is restored, yes, but not only is it not clear that the marriage was ever “happy” … that’s easily baked into the setup, it’s also not certain that the wife ever knew Harry actually strayed even to the extent he did … she had explicitly told a girlfriend that she “called his bluff.” Nor is it really all that clear that Harry ever had immoral intentions … between his own infantilism and his childishly going along with Dent’s scheme, could he ever have any such intent? That THREE’S COMPANY episode ends with Stanley suggestively inviting Helen to bed (I think the only time ever). That’d obviously be impossible in 1926, even at the level of explicitness allowed 50 years later, much less what you could do now, another 50 years in the future. Instead, Harry sits in the passenger seat and curls up next to his wife, cuddling next to her, somewhere between a toddler and a cocker spaniel.

January 22, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2026 Sundance Film Festival

I just picked up my press credentials for Last Tango in Park City aka the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where I will be writing reviews daily for the Salt Lake City Weekly.

I’m gonna use this post as a Sundance log, updating it daily with grades for all the movies I see and links to reviews in the Weekly by me and colleague bud (and near-annual two-week boss Scott Renshaw). I also can’t exclude the possibility of adding a thought or two that I couldn’t get into my 200ish-word capsules.

And a Sundancin we go.

Glitch in the Matrix … there will be no updates for day one, during which I saw three films and liked two, because unlike in previous years, reviews from press screenings are embargoed until the public debut. All three films I saw did not make theirs and so their reviews must run later.

January 22, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Thoughts on scoring … (settle down, Beavis)

THE FIRST DEGREE (Edward Sedgwick, USA, 1923) 5 V

Though take that grade with one honking great caveat … it mostly isn’t about THE FIRST DEGREE itself and I’d happily re-watch it under a defined circumstance that will shortly become obvious.

THE FIRST DEGREE, which I watched on TCM late-night Sunday, concerns farmer Sam Bass (Frank Mayo) heading into a grand jury room, confessing to causing his enemy half-brother’s death, and lamenting that nobody will believe his account, which he proceeds to give in a series of flashbacks that constitute the bulk of the film. The half-brother had been blackmailing and exposing Sam’s past time in prison, which he kept trying to flee. In other words, an archetypal film-noir story, with undertones of the Javert-Valjean story … for a film set in 1923! Director Edward Sedgwick (known to me only as Buster Keaton’s early MGM director) clearly already was learning from the German Expressionists some of what film historians say was absorbed into Hollywood in noir, like heavy shadowing and this fate-heavy still of the judging jurists looking at the Sam. Mayo’s performance will not be to every taste but it’s certainly in the Expressionist style, and the story unfolds well through the flashback structure. So in several ways, DEGREE was a film ahead of its time and I’m glad it was found after being thought lost for decades.

So why the 5?

Simply put, this movie has the worst score I have ever seen (or heard, I guess) on a silent movie. About 90% of my notes consist of reactions to the score and wrestling through what I found so off-putting about it. In ascending order of importance: it’s music that I’m not intrinsically crazy for; it’s music that doesn’t fit the movie; it’s music that’s not fitted to the movie; it’s music that barely realizes it’s a movie score. It’s shockingly inappropriate on every level possible. Perversely, this experience was a worthwhile critical exercise for me because it made me think more about film scoring and what a film score does (or in this case “doesn’t”) and how it’s used than any film I’ve ever seen.

THE FIRST DEGREE was set in the then-present but the music is a bizarre melange of about eight or ten tunes in a variety of different styles, most from decades later. At various times I was reminded of prog-rock, cool or modal jazz, and Muzakized versions thereof. It’s like Kenny G Does Miles Davis. I also heard at various times drum machines or other synthesizers, electric guitars. Anachronistic scores can work. The very first silent film I ever saw (and liked) was the 1984 Giorgio Moroder version of METROPOLIS, which accompanied Fritz Lang’s 1927 film with electronic music and disco-dance songs. I also love the Alloy Orchestra and its avant-garde instrumentation and arrangements.

So that’s forgivable, except that it feels like the eight or ten themes are played through consecutively (or sometimes returned to) and switching as they end, paying no heed to what’s visually on the screen. One theme in Style X turns another in a different Style Y in the middle of a scene, without a dramatic reason for the switch. We’ve just reached the end of the song and onto the next. There was one moment when the score threatened to work (I noticed it like one notices a pearl in a sewer). The half-brother returns on a dark and stormy night to the farmhouse. The dramatic cue fits as Sam is threatened and the music at least sounds menacing. But it’s all a coincidence because the film segues back to smooth jazz in the middle of the quarrel.

Much of the time the music also doesn’t fit what’s going on dramatically. The film is a fairly broad melodrama with tense confrontations and suspense. The climactic scene is a wrestling-with-a-gun showdown, but there’s none of the “tension music” that even Bernard Herrmann’s nonunion Mexican equivalent could write by the ream and shrink-wrap to order. Hallucinations in Sam’s mind, in which Sedgwick is learning from CALIGARI, cry out for expressionist music but we get what Nick Nightingale’s pickup band was playing when Dr. Harford walks in on them in EYES WIDE SHUT. For a major public showdown at a railway station, in which Sam is threatened with being run out of town, there’s instrumental soft pop slathered all over it.

And when I say “slathered all over it,” I mean that fairly directly. There is no internal cutting of the music … turning it up or down or out as the film switches from one character to another, or as the tension rises or falls within a scene. You have a theme and you just hear it for three straight minutes, or however long that piece might be. A piece will be accompanying part of the flashback and then continue without missing a beat back into the present day, missing and even undermining the whole point of structuring a narrative this way.

For decades, fans of Judy Garland and Pink Floyd have watched THE WIZARD OF OZ while cued up to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and noted some coincidences. Watching THE FIRST DEGREE felt like that … listening to music composed separately without the film in mind, but occasionally sidling up against it and paralleling the action. And while the coincidences in the Pink Floyd lyrics and the film can make fun discussions on Internet forums, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON is not a real film score. This one isn’t either.

January 14, 2026 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 3

CIAO CIAO (Keith Albert Tedesco, Malta, 8)

Of all the films on these posts, this is the one I most want to highlight, because it’s not only excellent, but both underhyped and a type of film that rarely gets done well — a broad farce with the epigrammatic bitchiness of a Ben Hecht play. It divides into three parts: two families at dinner, two teens in a bedroom; and a suicidal man and his savior. Each is basically a one act play, but with connections between the three gradually getting revealed. One of the greatest pleasures for me was thinking late in act one “I don’t ever want the film to leave this house or this night,” only to have act two begin with different characters in the afternoon … but not having my wish denied. Downside is that the third part is the weakest as some of the connections get a little tenuous and underdeveloped. But any movie that starts with four cretins and gives them the fate that they have and basically IGNORES the “how” … you always have a special place in my heart. The first act is one of the best films of the year (think Polanski’s CARNAGE), and the second an excellent complement. The “Malta for export” elements (this is the first film from that country I’ve ever seen) are there, these homes look amazingly weird and we learn why, and like with BELOW THE CLOUDS, the daytime Mediterranean sun has a wonderful blanching look in black-and-white. And while this would only be catnip to language buffs like myself, I was constantly enjoying how much English is spoken without English ever actually being spoken (apparently it’s the defining characteristic of Maltese speech).

DUSE (Pietro Marcello, Italy, 6)

The closing title card of DUSE is one of the biggest and worst cheats ever. It says that Eleonora Duse left Italy for the U.S. and died there, having rejected the life pension from Mussolini. The film itself had shown La Divina meeting the great dictator and gladly accepting that pension, saving the national treasure from penury. There are many ways to handle this bit of bio in a biopic of the great Italian actress, but the one thing you literally cannot do is show the acceptance and not show the rejection. That rejection, however handled, should’ve been the climax of DUSE, particularly since Valeria Bruni Tedeschi portrays her (brilliantly and regardless of the actual history) as the sort of person/artist who would happily have fellow-traveled with Mussolini. Her acting as portrayed is pure fascist aesthetics; she is clearly of an aristocratic temperament whether she has a title or not; and she sees herself and is seen as the nation’s glory embodied (this is the point of the opening scene of her on the World War I front lines). Think Miss Jean Brodie with actual talent. So the title card betrays the film, which is a pity because it’s enormously enjoyable in a hothouse register until then. It contains only the end of Duse’s life which limits the wikirambling that sank A MAGNIFICENT LIFE. Tedeschi turns the role into one of the tastiest hunks of guanciale in recent memory, outdone only by the scene with Noemie Lvovsky as Sarah Bernhardt (Duse’s great foil) giving it the whole charcuterie. Duse’s path crosses d’Annunzio … his second appearance in this festival. However, the film mentions a break, which it wisely doesn’t detail and was almost certainly the result of the kind of uninteresting-to-outsiders theological squabbles that exist in every mass (which is to say, diverse) political movement.

YOUNG MOTHERS (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 8)

To quote the man with whom I saw this film: the haters can suck it. It is the least of their films and it does play like four short-film telescoped condensations of four heretofore-unseen features. But. … that’s four telescoped condensations of four DARDENNES features. Heretofore-unseen! YOUNG MOTHERS is about four teen women in various stages of crisis pregnancies, each dealing with people varying unsupportive, supportive and too supportive. The a-word is never mentioned except negatively and this is also the rare film that shows social workers actually doing good and both effectual and firm, which strikes this reactionary as a little idealized, but is still a breath of fresh air dramatically. The crises are varyingly dealt with and it ends … about as “happily” as any film they’ve ever made (coming immediately after their first film ever to portray a murder). Look, I know I’m the biggest Dardennes fanboy in the world, but how can people not SEE how much formal greatness they show off even from memory, and how much love they exude and display (a rare thing today), and how much their love and love itself does and does not matter. Sometimes love just ain’t enough in Patti Smyth‘s opinion. But Dardennes films are a pleasure to share a room with in a way that I don’t think any other filmmakers ever can say (and I do mean ever). Their stories are always morally fraught and high stakes without ever being didactic or melodramatic. The narrative always grip from sheer urgency. Their characters are always a rare mix of lovable (worthy of love) and varying degrees of dislikable. They always get amazingly naturalistic and TRUE performances from non-actors. You can say YOUNG MOTHERS is the least of their movies. You cannot say it’s a bad one without rejecting their other movies. There’s just too much here.

MOTHER’S BABY (Johanna Moder, Austria, 4)

A head-scratcher and not in a good way. I saw it with two friends and we spent much of our first post-film round wondering what actually happened at the end and why. Not even to speak of “how.” The premise itself is a bit unbelievable; no new parents would both be so cooperative about not-seeing their newborn. But it’s a better film than either of the two postpartum movies this fall — DIE MY LOVE and IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU. Give this film its insane premise, and the jump scares are definitely there … including what I’ll just call “falling off the shelf.” MOTHER’S BABY is clearly going for the “is this a nightmare or is the crazy chick just hysterical” vibe. The baby is clearly extremely bizarre in objectively measurable ways regarding its development. But it’s never a bother … but … isn’t that a problem? Don’t babies cry and keep you up at night, to your torment? Or is all this a mom problem. There’s bluntly subtle hints about Munchhausen syndrome … and worse. Who doesn’t name a baby FFS? The ROSEMARY’S BABY comparisons are so obvious that you needn’t have seen the Polanski film (I have not) to see the template. Marie Leuenberger convincingly handles the wild mood swings and tonal shifts, and Claes Bang is nicely handsomely creepy as the doctor (though the less said about Hans Low’s husband the better). But really, no movie can end with this revelation about what had been going on and then end so suddenly.

SMARAGDA: I GOT THICK SKIN AND I CAN’T JUMP (Emilios Avraam, Cyprus, 3)

The screening was really more memorable than the movie as the digital file had to start from the beginning three times before the subtitles began displaying. Waiting for them to start during the first two attempts, I began mentally testing something I’ve heard — that Greek sounds like Spanish as pure sound, only they’re not saying actual “real” (Spanish) words. And … yeah, it does. As for the film, it seemed both unfocused and out-of-date, the central character gaining social media clout by behaving like a ho while it apparently never occurring to her that it might reflect back on her “real life.” Cyprus can’t be THAT far behind the times, can it, Theo? The whole title is taken from a speech that’s way too lumpy a metaphor for my taste. And I really didn’t buy how the film resolves its many half-baked threads. The film put all chips on our identification with the heroine played by Niovi Charalampous. But she divests herself of what’s set up as her dream for no discernible reason, the medical drama around the eye condition is just sort of there in the Oakland sense, and what are we to make of the casual boyfriend and the not-so-casual consequences? Also, Mike, this film ends with a close-up of her face.

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 2

BELOW THE CLOUDS (Gianfranco Rosi, Italy, 6)

Kinda ashamed that I never really got on this movie’s wavelength because I generally like city symphony documentaries, the black-and-white stylization looks amazing, especially for a documentary, the resulting ghostly feel is perfect for a movie significantly about excavations and building a city (Naples) on top of a dead old one (Pompeii). The mix of inky nights, hot oozing mud, white dust and fog is never not-amazing to look at. Reading the good reviews, I recognized the film the critics are writing about. But watching the movie, I felt like I was watching one of Federico Wisuomo’s weaker efforts. The unionized American original was a master of getting institutions to reveal themselves in operation, finding conflicts, getting “holy moments” and the drama of life without the “voice of God” narrator or sit-down interviews. Here though, there were a couple of scenes where it seemed fairly obvious that characters (especially archaeologists) were talking to themselves or between each other specifically for the benefit of the camera, while never actually looking at it. There are some very good scenes though, primarily the lengthy call from a battered wife, the climax of several interspersed scenes at the 911 Call Center. A “mixed” for me, but if you’d ever be caught dead at a subtitled documentary at all, I advise you to ignore me.

DRACULA (Radu Jude, Romania, 7)

Yes, Jude tosses a lot of random shit at the wall, Mike, but he doesn’t do it randomly, if that makes sense. There’s a premise, signposting, and an overall structure. And the “director” of the “outer framing” material both keeps things grounded and is funny both in his own right and his material. The effect is rather like 170 minutes of SCTV being introduced by Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd. Like with any 170 minutes of SCTV and constantly cutting away to the Count, some of the stuff doesn’t work — dicks seem to be to Jude what boobs were to Russ Meyer or the n-word to Tarantino. Even if it’s morally defensible and sometimes hilarious, there’s just so much that it becomes an unpleasant fetish. Same with AI “bodies” and Coppola … I got the point and it continued and it continued and it continued and it continued. But Jude remains a great clown in a very black vein and he goes so bananas here that you eventually just roll with it, waiting in anticipation for the next bit of WTFery. A Romanian-born friend once told me that Vlad the Impaler is generally regarded as a national hero because he was impaling Turks … except when he wasn’t. The sequence in which this history is debated is accompanied by a bald man, the back of whose head with its smirking human-face tattoo is turned toward the camera the whole time. The “inner framing” story of the Dracula and Vampira performers becoming too real similarly pushes into “BARBARIANS”-style satire. The climax gets brilliantly and cheekily interrupted at the perfectly wrong moment (which makes it even better). The couple of moments where something resembling reality intrudes onto this troll show thus stand out even more … the references to the Dracula theme park (which is what this film essentially is) and the closing sequence, which is mystifying despite/because of the odd poignance of the garbageman father in a traditional Romanian neo-neorealism style and the stilted reading of national muthos. Quite deliberately stilted.

FIUME O MORTE! (Igor Bezinovic, Croatia, 8)

It doesn’t quite have the sharp and deep teeth of Radu Jude’s “I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS,” but it’s the same jawline, eyes and brain … experimental re-enactments, often by men on the street, in service of a surprisingly nuanced treatment of fascism’s role in history. It sounds pretentious … a narrated account of Giovanni d’Annunzio’s attempt to annex Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) to (an unwilling pre-Mussolini) Italy that mixes archival photos and newsreels with contemporary re-enactors in the same sites without hiding — indeed leaning into — how the city and world have changed around it. The narrators change, the contemporary re-enactments are filled with photobombs and cheerful anachronisms (my favorite: d’Annunzio’s use of a Fiat convertible … I sorta once owner that car), and the acting in new scenes is Straub-Huillet awkward. But it sold me right away with man on the street “have you heard of d’Annunzio” interviews that mix Italian (the Fiume dialect) and Croatian and betray who knows what according to what they’re speaking and their age (sometimes not in the obvious ways). I loved touches like “Marconi” being played by a Slav who barely speaks Italian, and also the late dressing down of an “Italian militiaman” by a Croat woman on the street … and how he responds. It’s a heady, alive film if you go with its bonkers premise (in which the juxtapositions of Rijeka/Fiume are astonishingly well executed, matchingwise.

SIRAT (Oliver Laxe, Spain, 6)

It ends so strong and has such an OMG!! moment in the middle with the truck that it’s easy to walk out on such a high that you forget how weak it had been early. First, a little of that kind of music goes a long, long, VERY long way with me, and there’s so much of it for so long with little else on screen/soundtrack that I was getting restless early. That’s a mileage-varying kind of thing, but what is not is the absence of well-drawn characters. That latter lack is attributable both to the lassitude of the plot — for more than an hour it’s MAD MAX without any fighting — and to the (mostly) inexperienced actors whom Laxe seems to have cast just for their looks/tattoos/disfigurements. They’re not hideously amateurish, they just don’t bring any depth or soul. Well, the music returns and drugs start getting synthesized, and my mind changes its snarky mental description from PACIFIST MAD MAX to TIMOTHY LEARY’S THE WAGES OF FEAR. But like this film, Leary would not have had the patience to set up and milk the hairpin turn in the Clouzot, which SIRAT weakly mimes. But that closing sequence … accompanied by a different kind of music that almost sounded like JOE 90 … achieved not only Hitchcockian suspense but also implied something cosmic in the midst of this mundane desert drudgery.

SOUND OF FALLING (Masha Schilinski, Germany, 1)

Michael Sicinski said that he (as had I) had read that there was four time frames on this “one house through history“ film but he could only discern three. TBQH, I’m not sure he’s wrong. That really tells you everything you need to know about SOUND OF FALLING. I have little to say about this antidramatic, incoherently jumbled melange of suicidally unhappy females because I was so stupefyingly bored that I longed for the concete coherence of recent Malick. Nothing is set up, nothing is signposted, none of the jumping around follows any logic. You could jumble the reels of this movie with no discernible effect. It’s the cinematic equivalent of confessional free verse “poetry,” emphasis on the “confessional” part.

SOUTHERN CHRONICLES (Ignas Miskinis, Lithuania, 4)

It starts off as at least potentially interesting, promising to be a version of VISION QUEST, but instead of wrestling, rugby (that’s popular in Lithuania?) is the appealing high-schooler’s sport. But it just meanders about, never really developing much tension or momentum or even comedy as the hero drifts between schooling, rugby, and petty dishonesty, and interacts with parents, a sidekick and two women, none of whom have enough personality in their own right. The closest we get to a meaningful arc is the books he reads. Lead actor Dziugas Grinys is likeable but clearly too old for a high schooler and distractingly like a real-life Slav athlete whom I could not think of. This isn’t a “visual” film, I realize, but it still looked amateurish and a bit ugly at times. The soundtrack is fun as a period piece (it’s set in early 90s … Sadeness FTW!) but has IIRC zero references to the cataclysmic political events of the time.

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2025 EU Showcase Part 1

I saw 16 films that played at December’s annual European Union showcase at the AFI Silver and I had something to say about all of them; some more than others. Once I finished writing, I realized this was far too much for one post, so I broke the films into three groups based on how I first saw them … first before the Showcase, second at the Showcase on my own (planned), and third at the Showcase with my visiting Pittsburgh buddy Russell. This produced as even a three-way breakdown as possible for 16. I also had posted about a few of these films on X and Bluesky immediately and used those posts as a base for these paragraph capsules.

KONTINENTAL 25 (Radu Jude, Romania, 7)

This has stewed in the mind wonderfully over the last several weeks, but it’s neither as comically demented as BAD LUCK BANGING or DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, and it’s not as intellectually pointed as UPPERCASE PRINT or “I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS.” A great series of environmental pillow shots to close (think Antonioni’s ECLIPSE) helps enormously as does Eszter Rompa giving a great anchoring performance as a good liberal humanitarian, in her own mind. Imagine a SEINFELD episode in which George or Elaine spend 100 minutes searching for validation from others for their acts in the first 10, only this is not nearly so broad/manic as that would be. Those first 10 minutes begin by following a different character who leaves the story having set up the existential crisis for an ethnic Hungarian social worker/bailiff, a crisis to which she seems almost addicted in order do buttress her self-image — specifically, her “failures” with a recalcitratant homeless guy and the city bureaucracy. She’s like the central character in TASTE OF CHERRY in her “please validate me” picaresque and the film is almost sincere if you can ignore the cosmic irony or identify too closely with Tompa. But the others’ varied reactions/non-reactions to her tour of Cluj are bone-dry funny, feeding into Jude’s long-term critique of liberal do-gooders. Certainly it’s the greatest “shot-on-iPhone during downtime of making a big budget movie” movie (DRACULA) ever made. And not a trace of shakiness or carelessness in framing despite that provenance. Already convinced myself I underestimated it.

LA GRAZIA (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 7)

It fits into a strange place in Sorrentino’s ouevre. By his standards, LA GRAZIA is almost sedate in its style — which makes sense as an aging story. As the lame-duck president (Italy elects a president but he’s largely a figurehead unlike the US or French presidents) Tony Servillo gives great stasis as a man called “concrete” behind his back (as if the point of a figurehead president is to be anything else). An MVP award goes to the art direction and set decoration, which leans into gigantist classicism that oppresses with its vast emptiness. I haven’t seen the Italian government look like this since Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST. Yet the few times the movie violates that tone are some of the most effective when viewed in isolation … receiving the Portuguese president during the rainstorm with the red carpet blowing everywhere while the techno music as the only soundtrack is approproately inappropriate, the dramatic world intruding on a pro forma irrelevance. The story is centered on Legacy, most particularly three “dilemmas” for Servillo’s last days as president — two pardon requests and a pro-euthanasia bill. “Should he sign or not?” Grace touches like the Italian astronaut and the dog hit more often than they miss; Milvia Marigliano is a total hoot as the kind of bulldozing Divina that Italy produces without limit; and the African pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin … who??) was terrific, worldly-wise and rode a moped. The three issues are fleshed out reasonably well, as is how a president who had been a jurist would approach them. But as a whole, I would’ve liked it better if even one of the three had gone differently. Just give some variety, Paolo. Particularly when combined with the modernizing daughter as his chief political adviser, the resolutions make the film play too much like pandering left-wing fan service. Or as American political conservatives once sarcastically referred to it … “growing in office.” I don’t insist on being pandered to; I do resent being anti-pandered to.

A MAGNIFICENT LIFE (Sylvain Chomet, France, 4)

If you watched TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE or THE ILLUSIONIST and thought … “what these films really need is a lot of English dialogue and a whole-life biopic-by-the-numbers plot” … HERE IS YOUR MOVIE!!! I saw the film at another festival dubbed into English and it was even shown that way at the EU Showcase, despite the partnership with the French embassy. But this dubbing job is trying something tricky … it gives some characters broad and low prestige English accents (like Oirish Blahrney) and it’s obviously meant to produce the same effect that the southern Marseilles accent / dialect has on native Francophones. But it just sounds weird, probably because the dialogue and the drama still center on that southern Marseilles accent / dialect … but we hear heavy accents in English. As for the plot, even by the standards of whole-life biopics, A MAGNIFICENT LIFE is still incredibly “skimmy,” rushing through Marcel Pagnol’s life highlights and credits while developing virtually no drama during or surrounding any of them. There are some good moments around the invention of cinema and I enjoyed the way actual Pagnol films’ footage find their way into the animation (think Gene Kelly, dancing with Jerry the mouse, only in reverse). I also like the caricature facial style of Chomet’s animation, person’s faces matching their characters. There’s actual invention and ideas in there, and I wish the story had some too.

MIROIRS No. 3 (Christian Petzold, Germany, 6)

Maybe the festival’s most crushing disappointment partly because Petzold’s last film (AFIRE) was my No. 1 film for its year, and partly because this slow-burn riff on VERTIGO was playing like gangbusters for its first two acts. A person falls into the company of an accidental family in a very immediate wake of a tragedy for her (as far as we know). But she fits in just a bit too well and you’re waiting for a PHOENIX ending or some other thematic explosion. This family (mother-father-son) is using Paula Beer’s character as the substitute for a dead daughter, which becomes fairly clear fairly early. Everything falls apart from the moment … the brother explicitly tells Beer (superb, as all four leads are) what’s going on in Marvin Gaye‘s opinion, but he does so as if it were a mighty revelation. The air has gone out of the balloon as much as when David slept with Maddy on MOONLIGHTING. Even worse though, everything after that is unbelievable, too-on-the-nose, or both. And the resolution is worst of all. Instead of the song in PHOENIX, imagine a basically happy ending that just more or less continues a bizarre status quo.

TWO PROSECUTORS (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia/Latvia, 9)

The only negative thing I’ve read about this movie that I find remotely convincing is that the end is predictable / foreordained. Well … yeah, I guess. To riff off a Bugs Bunny conclusion, what did you expect? A happy ending? But the fun (seldom is a noun correct but so wrong) is the how. Test case: what did you think of POLICE, ADJECTIVE … another lightly plotted but quietly and mordantly hilarious journey through a legal system by a single-minded crusader, lensed by a Romanian (though Oleg Mutu didn’t shoot POLICE, ADJECTIVE — that was Marius Panduru, the other big RNW cinematographer). Like the Porumboiu and other Romanian black comedies, this film is so static it becomes funny … the absurdly labyrinthine prison, the repetition-but-not in the justice ministry, the sheer number of guards, and the way the film grinds to a formal halt for the sincere speeches and the body displays. It’s funny until it isn’t. Which we knew wouldn’t last. We still hope. Because we must. And boy does Loznitsa stick the landing. I was praying “please let this be the last shot.” It was. The other caveat (I think my 9 will be an outlier) is that you have to enjoy shaggy dog black humor — a particularly Russian genre, a fact that even gets lamp-shaded in one of the train rides. The guy met Lenin … and … and … and … he met Lenin!

December 28, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hearts of Darkness

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, USA, 1991) 8 (was 7)

When Gene Siskel unveiled HEARTS OF DARKNESS as his #1 film of 1991 on their annual “Year Best” show, Roger Ebert immediately noted that this was higher than he ever had APOCALYPSE NOW, a film that Roger admired much more than his partner-antagonist did in 1979. Gene replied “that is absolutely right. I find that there is more drama in this documentary than I found in [APOCALYPSE NOW].” Roger gently (by his standards) demurred before circling back to how great he also thought HEARTS OF DARKNESS was, though it wasn’t in his Top 10. “Number 11” he told a disappointed Gene.

Seeing it again for the first time since it was in theaters, I see exactly what Gene meant. I was never the APOCALYPSE NOW skeptic he was (though he came around later), but the standard negative take on the film in 1979 was that the scale got too big, that the script was too loose and unfinished, and that the whole production got away from Coppola. Stipulate that, and yes, the actual making of the film could then become a better story than the film itself. Part of the greatness of HEARTS OF DARKNESS is that if you are, to this day, an APOCALYPSE NOW skeptic, your case is laid out for you. We see the grandiosity/pretentiousness. We see all the uncertainty. We see the production get away from Coppola. Most important of all, we see Coppola realize all these things.

The key is the existence of Eleanor Coppola’s backstage footage. In 1991, she narrates for HEARTS directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, but in 1979, she is very much Mrs. Francis, i.e., the one person around whom Francis can be fully naked. Because so much of this movie is in real time, we know this is not the performative print-the-legend enacting of a lot of “The Making of….” movies. There are some retrospective interviews of this general genre, with Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, John Milius, and the Coppolas. But it jibes with what we see in “real time” so it comes off much better. We hear Francis tell Eleanor that he’s making a terrible movie, that this movie will bankrupt him and that he’s even contemplating suicide. These are private calls that Eleanor surreptitiously recorded; not some celebrity appearance on Oprah.

This journey comfortably fits both Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS and the Vietnam War (or at least Millus’ conception of it). Both are journeys into the unknown, doing which an innocent (who isn’t quite as innocent as he presents himself) discovers, in tragic detail, both his inner soul and the meaning of the universe. One emblematic APOCALYPSE scene involve a tiger, and as unpacked in detail by Bahr, Hickenlooper and Eleanor, the literal (and hungry) tiger is shown being poked dangerously and closely for the sake of the shot. But you have to get closer. Look the Tyger in the eye, burning bright and framed by the immortal hand of Francis. And with Experience, a man, in the words of the film, cannot go back to the Innocence he was. “Just like Willard.”

Coppola comes across badly in other ways too. For example, in one scene, he openly contemplates Sheen’s death (he had a heart attack on the set that we pretty much see) in terms of “what’s this gonna do to my movie?” In a different sort of film, this would be either a classic villain “heel turn” line or a comic punch line by a Montgomery Burns type. In another scene, Millus describes one anecdote in an extended metaphor which casts Coppola as Hitler, and Millus is not the sort so prevalent today to engage in cheap Hitlerisms.

And yet …

In an early interview in HEARTS OF DARKNESS, Fishburne alludes to Truffaut’s famous maxim about it being impossible to make an anti-war film, because movies make war look like fun. But it helps to be a dope fiend., or look at a movie directed by Francis Coppola. The great paradox at the heart of APOCALYPSE NOW’s greatness is that so much of the film IS fun. There are a few if any more-thrilling scenes in history then the helicopter raid on the village, scored to Wagner. Surfing really is exhilirating, and made more exhilarating in this context by the danger.

One could dismiss HEARTS OF DARKNESS as a mere supplement, a “making of” documentary that really just belongs as an extra on the DVD of APOCALYPSE NOW. That’s not totally groundless — it definitely tags HEARTS OF DARKNESS in the correct genre, but it isn’t much of a critical criticism because of two things: one historicist and one eternal.

First, HEARTS was made in the pre-DVD era (Laserdiscs were around, but very much a niche luxury), and thus before this genre could became routinized and (arguably) calcified. The easy market didn’t exist yet. Bahr and Hickenlooper didn’t know they were making a cliched marketing device, and so they didn’t. And second, this film is about the making of APOCALYPSE F. NOW — one of the most troubled and notorious productions in Hollywood history. From the sacking of Keitel and Brando‘s self-indulgent behavior to the typhoon wiping out the sets and Coppola mortgaging his home, the very existence of APOCALYPSE NOW is kind of a miracle. And, to circle back to Gene’s words, APOCALYPSE NOW is one of the movies the making of which WAS its own drama. Or if you’d rather riff off something Coppola said about APOCALYPSE NOW and Vietnam, this movie is not about APOCALYPSE NOW; this movie is APOCALYPSE NOW.

December 2, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Connection

THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, USA, 1961, 6)

A movie done in by its gimmick premise. THE CONNECTION could’ve been a terrific film if it were just a straight-up play: Heroin junkies and jazz musicians (but I repeat myself) hang out waiting for their fix, then get it — consequences.

Instead, Clarke engages in some meta-messing, having the film supposedly be a documentary about junkies, only the subjects rebel against the auteur (who’s a real git) for demanding more real performances, the cameraman appears in front of the camera, POVs switch making the lights and other camera sometimes visible, and there is an unfunny would-be gag about the wiring and a chair.

I get this was 1961 and “it all” hadn’t been made yet, but you’ve still seen it all. The film also doesn’t commit all the way to the premise, instead often reverting to the stage play that it began as, but with the added twist, the only meta thing that works, of getting the director hooked on drugs himself.

It’s always trying to be both fish and fowl. SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM this ain’t.

But the more central problem is that documentary acting is a legitimate form of its own, and very different from live-theatrical acting. And not one person on stage is good at documentary acting. Look at something like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, or ZELIG to see how to do “documentary acting“ that is actually fictional. Or look at any film by Frederick Wiseman to see real people act around the camera. They do not look into it and recite polished speeches while the filmmaker or the lighting crew guy mess around the side.

In addition, the “this is found footage” opening title card was so overwritten that (you’ll just have to trust me) even though I didn’t know going in that this is a fake documentary, I immediately discerned it and was thus groaning for the first 20 minutes and intermittently throughout.

Still, this is a 6 film so it has considerable virtues, the prime of which is the jazz score, some of it the playing of records, others of it diegetic live performance (this is one of those junkie tenements with its own piano and drum set). Top marks go to sax player Jackie McLean (the other ensemble members were pianist Freddie Redd, bassist Michael Mattos, and drummer Larry Ritchie). None are very good actors, but Clarke doesn’t ask them to act much except through their music. It’s not just the music itself (though it’s very good), but that they get across a great deal in their manner of playing, McLean pitching both the sweat and the desperation in every riff.

When the film remembers it’s a stage play and forgets the meta messing and trying to be “cinematic,“ the material and some of the performers are strong enough to make me wish the whole film were this way. Carl Lee dominates the film as the titular non-French connection, and Clarke‘s staging/blocking of his entrance and his providing the drugs offscreen until he doesn’t are powerful. I’m not sure if Sister Salvation belongs in a non-comedy version of this premise, but Barbara Winchester resists the easy caricature, makes the naivete believable and earnest, and has the right relationship with the meta camera.

I was attracted to this film from having seen (and loved) a later Shirley Clarke film, PORTRAIT OF JASON, which is a film that commits to its premise — an interview that goes sour as the relationship deteriorates between the titular subject and the interviewers, Clarke and her boyfriend. With this film, a little wicked little voice inside me thinks that Clarke took a joke at her own failures with the two appearances of a hoop, one explicitly cinematic, the other ignored; the former an aggravating failure, the latter a perfect side gesture.

December 1, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hamnet

HAMNET (Chloe Zhao, USA, 2025, 4) 

I went through four stages of reaction to this film, about Mrs. William Shakespeare and the death of their son, Hamnet, which the opening title card helpfully tells us is a name interchangeable with “Hamlet.” Chronologically while watching:

(1) “This is really opaque except to the extent we can accept Anne Hathaway as some chthonic mythopoetic Woman, writhing on expressionistically colored trees or communicating with the animals” … which, I did not, partially for reasons I will make explicit next.

The film never wholly leaves this mode, helped by Zhao’s excellent if repetitive-by-now eye for nature photography. I’m not sure whether Hamnet sucked the bubonic plague out of his twin sister as atonement for being born first or simply caught it while being around her in the usual ways siblings are.* but I think the film wants us to believe it. There isn’t much else to cling to early, in part because so much of the dialogue is whispered that I could hardly follow the psychological dynamics going on. Except for that “dialog” that is Jesse Buckley screaming like she’s in a Safdies movie or a Wes Craven Final Girl.

(2) “If you think Oliver Stone should have made a film about Sissy Spacek, wife of Jim Garrison … have I got the movie for you.”

The core problem with the film, is that Hathaway’s only possible specific interest (especially given that so little is known about her otherwise) is being Mrs. William Shakespeare. Say what you like about the wholly fictitious SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, but at least Gwyneth Paltrow was inspiring him to write ROMEO AND ETHEL, THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER. For much of the middle section of this movie though, “Angie” is such a Liz Garrison-level pill, complaining about his absence and other domestic issues that you want him to tame that shrew.

(3) “Finally, some Shakespeare.”

I will admit that after the death of Hamnet, the film sort of worked for me, at least by giving us what matters … a sense of why Paul Mescal’s recessive, henpecked schmuck matters. And the actual premiere of HAMLET got some of the feels from me. While it couldn’t be Brian Blessed with Branagh, I got a lump in the throat as Shakespeare himself played the ghost of King Hamlet, talking from the beyond to his son, cast look like his late real life son. And the hands scene was so primal that you couldn’t not react. It had a Griffithesque simplicity.

(4) After the film … “wait a minute. That was horseshit.”

I’m willing to give the film some historical slack because it’s dealing mostly with material that is unknown rather than changing what is known. But on reflection, I simply could not accept three things. One, we DO know when Hamnet died and not only was it not even close to HAMLET’s premiere, but Shakespeare wrote several very differently toned plays in those intervening years. Two, people grieve differently, I understand. I do not understand why writing or performing in or watching a play with your dead son‘s name would be cathartic if that play is a tragedy in which he and nearly everybody else dies. And last, I cannot take seriously that the greatest speech ever written in English was, word for word mind you, extemporized in an internal monologue while standing on the edge of a precipice, even if it IS a speech contemplating suicide.

—————

* According to my mother, when my wee sister caught chickenpox, I spent hours with her in our bedroom, playing board games and cards and reading to/with her without ever catching it (and not because I’d already had it; “you must just be immune” she said).

November 30, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Train Dreams

TRAIN DREAMS (Clint Bentley, USA, 2025, 7)

In the context of tweeting about Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, I complained about the ubiquity of biopics set in the 1960s always having to have scenes set on the days of King’s assassination or the Kennedys’ deaths when (as in most cases) the person was not directly involved in such events. I obviously believe that politics is important, but the plain fact, an unwelcome thought in this hyperpolitical era, is that for most people, the most important events in their lives are not the historic ones. 

I was alive for the events of APOLLO 13 and the dominant memory I have is an annoyance that my cartoons were being preempted. (Come on … I was 3.) As an adult, I’ve lived through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and numerous other epochal events. But they didn’t affect my life trajectory in defining events of the V-Mort biopic (though there is an amusing story about my being trapped in Canada without a passport on Sept. 11). 

But the world has of course changed profoundly and in ways that ground the possibilities, like how a bank shapes a river’s flow despite not being part of the water. I am writing these words on a device that didn’t even theoretically exist when I was first learning to write formally (with ink) and is not even related to the first machine I used for that purpose (a Smith Corona electric typewriter).

TRAIN DREAMS is the first life-length biopic I’ve ever seen that understands that.

The film roughly runs from 1890 to 1970, the lifespan of Robert Grainier and it’s essentially the same kind of biopic that one might make about Springsteen or Marley or Winehouse, etc. But with the big difference that the person is not a celebrity and the huge difference that the great events of that era appeared glancingly or not at all. World War I is mentioned a couple of times to the extent that it affects the fortunes of the lumber industry in which Grainier works. World War II is not mentioned at all. And yet there is a late scene about the world having changed around him that parallels an all-time scene in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

I don’t know if Cesare Zavatini would approve of TRAIN DREAMS’ lengthy sweep but it’s as much a realistic portrait of a simple, uncomplicated man as BICYCLE THIEF. If neorealism could be applied to a life biopic, it would look like this, going through several “careers“ and ending in hermitude. Two or three events which I won’t spoil haunt Grainier throughout his life, but he doesn’t go loco or have his consciousness raised. He’s too pre-psychiatric and apolitical for that. There’s a line late in the movie about how this is the first time he’d looked in a mirror for decades — Lacanian and anti-Lacanian at the same time. The most important thing that happens to him is his marriage and his child. His greatest regrets concern the course of those two things and how he handled them. And TRAIN DREAMS makes it explicit (perhaps too explicit) that people like him are parts of God‘s plan too.

In one emblematic scene, a black man comes upon the camp of lumbermen that includes Grainier, looking for someone else. He shoots that person, explains his motive as revenge for a racist killing by his target, and asks “does anyone have a problem with that?” Neither Grainier nor anyone else does. Not from Critical Race Theory or because someone quotes DuBois (they’re working-class 1910s whites FFS), but because they’re working-class men who just wanna earn a living. This isn’t a representation of the great racial dramas of Grainier’s life, but a representation of how the great racial dramas of Grainier‘s life affected Grainier’s life (mostly not).

“Progress” does happen. The film notes that the gorge-spanning train bridge that Grainier helps build via his logging and related labor performs a huge public service, and is made obsolete a few years later, as wood is replaced by steel and concrete and thus by a new bridge elsewhere. A second woman comes into his life, a massive contrast by being an educated government worker, and just the way she talks marks her as a person from another or future world. Dislikers of this film will point to her speech about the Ice Age’s impact as too explicit. But the occasional moment like that does feel right as an occasional moment.

Director Clint Bentley also made the film JOCKEY, another unassuming movie about working-class stoicism, though it was hampered a little by the cliched sports-film formula plot into which the observationalism was shoehorned.

TRAIN DREAMS is better still but not quite a great film because, as gorgeous as it is to look at (especially to those with more of a disposition for nature than I have), it’s more of an illustrated novel than a real adaptation. It’s also one of the most voiceover-narrated movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t think the latter is fatal, though there were some parts, particularly early, that sounded more like what a 2025 person would say than a 1910 one. But it allows us to look more at Joel Edgerton, who is just about the perfect actor and physical presence to play a taciturn man who is neither “brooding” nor resentful. Just simple. It also gives the film the retrospective feel that a life story demands. Or in the words of the great philosophers Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley … “ain’t it funny how time slips away.”

November 9, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Plastic Age

THE PLASTIC AGE (Wesley Ruggles, USA, 1925, 7)

Bros before hos, amirite!

OK, that’s obviously reductive and unfair … but not false (until it is). 

THE PLASTIC AGE is the movie that made Clara Bow a star and you can really see why. Especially in an early scene of the college men invading the women’s dorm, she just owns the screen with an inter-related combination of self-assurance, sex appeal, agency and insouciance. She’s not only the star of this film, she’s the star of this world. She plays little role in the early part of the third act except reaction shots in the bleachers and the film loses something as a result.

It’s a basic college story, a bildungsroman in which The Boy, at the age of needing to be molded, learns to focus on his studies (which we never actually see) and his football (which we see a lot of, basically the whole third act) and put away childish things such as women. There’s also the male roommate who breaks up with him over romantic rivalry regarding The Girl. (Bros before hos, amirite!)

The football game takes as much time, relative to the film’s overall length, at the climactic football game in MASH, but it’s not terribly funny. Comparison with THE FRESHMAN is inevitable and not favorable (it should go without saying that lead male Donald Keith is no Harold Lloyd). TBF though, this film isn’t really trying for that, but until then I had thought it was actually quite funny. Again it’s not remotely at Lloyd levels and not even in his style, but it’s rather something more like one of the earliest film romcoms.

The coda mostly sees Bow crying on the side while Keith leaves campus after graduation and shares congratulations with all the bros. With what turned out to be about a minute left, I was saying to myself “is this film going to have the most radical romcom ending ever?” It doubles down on that in … a character looking at two others. Buuuuut … no.

November 8, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Kick In

KICK IN (Richard Wallace, USA, 1931, 6)

Interesting and entertaining pre-code film that was Clara Bow’s last at Paramount, but not at all what one would expect, either from her or the film overall. It’s really an ensemble crime film in which Bow isn’t the protagonist. She’s The Girl of the protagonist, an ex-con who tries to go straight, but the cops are busting his chops, especially after a jewel robbery by his associates.

Bow is fine — actually quite good in the moments she does get, which are mostly dramatic scenes and gestures not comic or romantic ones. It feels strange; the role doesn’t need ClaraBowness, but it does make you wonder what range she might have acquired had she liked making talkies. Introducer David Stenn said the film was shot while Bow was finally coming apart personally and confidencewise. But, with a stipulation that this is an ensemble piece that she doesn’t need to carry, you don’t see that onscreen.

There are other good supporting performers (though some of the acting is period broad) but the whole film gets stolen really by Juliette Compton as one of the women in the gang. I don’t mean this as a slam, but she’s like a middle class person’s Marie Dressler in her too practiced, but still owning-the-room hauteur.

The film is also shot quite well and fluidly for a 1931 talkie, and it was ahead-of-its-time in some ways  Stenn called it a proto-noir (and not wrongly; the plot especially) and there are memorably noir-lit shots, especially of the central couple with a giving-the-third-degree light shining on them. The early gunfight is a shocker because it’s dropped so suddenly and without warning. And the film grabs you right away with an edited scene of a man in a cell anxiously looking at a clock.

The fundamental lack at the center though is a stiff performance by Regis Toomey as the ex-con. The role calls for a Cagney or a Robinson (if Warners never remade this, I wanna know why). But we have the 20s poor man’s Timothee Chalamet, and a Chalemet who only learned how to recite his lines perfectly five minutes before the camera begin rolling.

November 8, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Popeye Altman

POPEYE (Robert Altman, USA, 1980, 8)

This may be the most amazing movie ever that doesn’t work as a whole. The very premise is misguided … you can’t make a cartoon in a world in which gravity exists. And yet so much is so unique, so wonder-full, so dementedly humorous even when not exactly hilarious that it hardly matters. You’re admiring even what doesn’t quite work.

Altman commits to making a live-action film as close to the cartoon as he (or anyone else given the technology of 1980) could make. It’s often brilliant … Sweethaven is one of the greatest movie sets ever and it behaves like a cartoon background, suffering comically-timed destruction while never seeming all that perturbed by it. And every detail and gesture is aimed for brilliance in a way that just put (and puts) so many other big-budget, existing-IP films to shame.

Setting aside the grandfatherliness that has Swee’ Pea steal every scene, Shelley Duvall owns the movie. It’s not just the physical casting but also the way she can move and act to make that eccentric look look natural. Or correctly and funnily unnatural, as when she dances through “He Needs Me.” Duvall is no Ginger Rogers, but Olive Oyl dances as if she is. And her voice nails both the “Popeye, save me” yells and the tender scene the two share with their baby. Her gifts as a comedienne are also on ample display, speaking and acting deadpan and bendy like the great silent clowns, yet without the affectation that sound can often add to attempts to duplicate them. She’s literally a cartoon come to life.

Robin Williams was the obvious choice for Popeye — that era’s greatest stand-up comedian as a performer, possessing a cartoon voice in every possible style or register, and an infinite talent for mimicry. His childish quality that made Mork so funny is also ideal for Popeye — an equally guileless outsider whose every other word is a malapropism coming out of a distorted face. This childishness made Popeye thoroughly asexual and so of course Swee’Pea just gets found, rather than … well, yes. In those sorts of ways, Williams’ is a better performance than Duvall’s but in other ways it’s a weaker one. His character is just less interesting once he is as perfectly embodied as Williams makes him.

At a director, Robert Altman would seem entirely wrong for a big-budget adaptation of a beloved cartoon character; he was a maker of realistic, adult communities in specific settings. (And I get why this film was a commercial bust.) What he brings auteurially though is another of his attenpts actualize a pre-existing environment, but rather than a Chicago ballet company or a country music mecca or an NPR radio show or a wartime medical unit, it’s a cartoon / comic strip.

As I said, the town looks amazingly real while keeping its comic-strip character. It also looks as jumbled and chaotic as Altman’s better known ensemble films. I loved the absurdly conveniently-present tax collector, how the townsfolk become a chattering Greek chorus, and the (re)scaling of such details as the horse races and the defeat of the unbeatable fighter. Even if familiar characters like Wimpy and the Oyls and (most especially) Bluto seem a bit thin, our pre-existing knowledge does some lifting, though an all-time masterpiece would not have relied on this.

I have to admit that music numbers took a while to grow on me (this is the rare musical when the best numbers are relatively backloaded) because the lyrics are so … childish? simplistic? elemental? cartoonish? (yes, all) “I Yam What I Yam” and “I’m Large” are nothing if not a declaration of simplicity, both lyrically and character-wise. That’s all that they yam. Some of the mumbling early, right though it is for “Altman sound mix,” doesn’t work for musicals. But when everything becomes crystal clear with “He Needs Me,” as lyrically … simple … as it is, it’s transcendant.

In a different movie, one might complain of the climax on multiple levels — the octopus is neither scary nor convincing, Popeye’s post-spinach transformation is even less impactful, and the choreography and editing are slapdash. I still do complain some (my grade is not a 9), but I found myself admiring for Altman nevertheless for getting what he could like the visual of Olive in the bulbous bow while sticking to his cartoon guns in service of something that could never come off in live action. All throughout, gestures like Popeye landing 20 consecutive punches on a baddy with a single revolving fist, or Castor Oyl being launched like a missile from a boxing ring, or Bluto spinning into the ground like a corkscrew — they look weird and aren’t as funny-haha as their cartoon equivalents. But they are so grand and inventive that, imperfection aside, we still love the gesture. Which is kind of my take on the whole movie.

August 30, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Ain’t nobody got thieves like us

THIEVES LIKE US (Robert Altman, USA, 1974, 9)

This is one of the most brilliantly perverse films I’ve ever seen. It basically tells the same superficial story as BONNIE AND CLYDE in the same era and milieu, and some of the garlands are even the same (talkatively funny kidnap victims, e.g.). But it could hardly be less like Arthur Penn’s masterpiece in its emotional impact, the things that interest it, and its refusal to glamorize the protagonists. 

Part of it is baked into the casting — instead of Warren Beatty and Gene Hackman, we have Keith Carradine and John Schuck; instead of Faye Dunaway, we have Shelley Duvall. With all due respect to Altman’s actors (who ARE terrific), none of them exude the glamour or the star power — and that’s deliberate. Another part of the deglamorization is the handling of the media attention the respective gangs’ rampages earn. Starting this write-up an hour later, I’m 90% sure we only hear about, but never see, the front-page headlines. (There is a photo of their mugs in a true-crime magazine.) And there was nothing at all like the photo of the Texas Ranger or Bonnie’s poem, i.e., criminals playing into their own celebrity; instead, it’s a threat, albeit not one they take terribly seriously. That would require that they be smarter

But it’s not as if Altman’s thieves are stupid in a comic way — see Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead along those lines. They’re more like ordinary people doing things ordinary … to them. They are committing crimes without the great effectiveness, the perverse genius, or the psychotic viciousness that often wins over our sympathies to criminals. We do sympathize with them (they are the protagonists and the title tells us that we are just like them), but Altman doesn’t take those shortcuts.

THIEVES LIKE US is largely about the things robbers do when they’re not robbing. Like Co-cola. It also actually has a couple of love stories that offer (or seem to offer) more of an out than Bonnie and Clyde could be for each other. Multiple robberies and one major character’s death are pointedly offscreen. There are two jail escapes, both surprisingly easy and unrisky. We only actually see one bank robbery and that from basically the objective, removed POV of a securitycam (forgive the anachronism; but I’m certain it was a deliberate angle on Altman’s part in 1974, when that invention did exist). And while that robbery is also funny (customers walking into the bank mid-crime) it also ends with a murder more gratuitous than anything in BONNIE AND CLYDE.

Instead, the most memorable “robbery“ is the play-acted scene with a couple of kids, real guns, and all-too-real sexual desire on part of one of the robbers. Tempers do fray and it is one of the most terrifying scenes Altman ever made. As for the climatic scene, Altman even altered the source book, in which the couple suffered the same fate as Bonnie and Clyde. Instead he gives us a screaming observer and an shot-to-pieces criminal who remains unseen while being shot to pieces (very unlike Penn) and only seen when the cops drag out his corpse and dump ir in the mud.

Another outstandingly perverse feature of this film is the radio. It is seemingly on all the time, diegetically or nondiegetically, sometimes pointedly commenting on the drama, sometimes pointedly ignoring it, but always coloring it. A couple couple for the first time to a radio broadcast of ROMEO & JULIET, which the announcer trumpets as one of the greatest love stories, as oblivious as the couple here to how it ends. Later, she listens to a domestic how-to show, and throughout, there’s crime shows like THE SHADOW or CRIMEBUSTERS.

It’s a soundtrack style one associates much more with Scorsese, Tarantino or PTA, but Altman does not use it in the propulsive manner that they do, inviting us to rock along with Dirk and the Emotions, or Henry and George Harrison. Here it serves almost as background noise to produce something like the Greek chorus feeling of “Altman dialogue” for a non-ensemble film where that isn’t really possible. (This may be the most straightforward, least-populated, least “Altman-dialogue-y” film he ever made.) The radio also gives Altman a tremendous walkoff, though it would make no naturalistic sense if it were diegetic. The films last surviving major character facelessly blends into a crowd as the radio makes explicit for the first time in words any notion of these characters as representing the working class, preached to as such … by Father Coughlin.

August 16, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Weekend viewing — past films

AFI Silver is running a number of amazing series in the late summer — Gene Hackman memorial, Robert Altman centennial, Francis Coppola AFI award, a second Godzilla series in two years, a Marcello Matroianni centennial, a VistaVision series, and others. They are of varying comprehensiveness obviously (I’m able to contain my grief that READY-TO-WEAR didn’t sneak into either the Altman or Mastroianni retros). In the last week I’ve been able to see some interesting work (if only one film I thought great) from those first three-mentioned gentlemen.

THE RAIN PEOPLE (Francis Coppola, USA, 1969, 4)

Maybe if I thought WANDA was a masterpiece, I could more tap into this protagonista. But I don’t.

Shirley Knight, like Eva Victor in SORRY BABY, please the sort of woman custom-designed to aggravate me — in its Me Generation (instead of Gen-wired) iteration. In this form, the passive-aggression, meltiung-stick-of-butterness expresses itself more in puzzlement about why she’s doing what she’s doing. “Why are you leaving me?” “I can’t say because I need to find myself.” A little of such cant goes a long way with me and Coppola handles it with tongs. (It didn’t help that I saw Altman’s THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK a few days later.)

The first substantive scene has wife Natalie leaves her husband over the phone on the run in another state, and a film is in real trouble if at the end of that conversation, you more associate with the husband and his puzzlement. This movie came out two years after BONNIE AND CLYDE, another movie about a woman’s boredom that causes her to take a long cross-country drive. But at least Bonnie teamed up with a guy and did some shit, sted of this Wanda Parker.

In her trip from New York to Nebraska, she does join up with two men … a brain-damaged man-child (“Killer”) played by James Caan and a redneck motorcycle cop played by Robert Duvall. Coppola would make stars of both men obviously, and there is one unqualifiedly great scene — Knight and Caan on the mirror, as she tries to seduce him while realizing that his slowness is more than shyness. Even Duvall plays his character well enough but I checked out when he took her home to his trailer to fuck and there’s a daughter of 7 or 8 played by a mouthy child actress who thinks she’s in DIFF’RENT STROKES.

There’s a potentially good trajectory about Natalie and Killer and how the former becomes a kind of unwilling mother because circumstances force her. But it throws it away at tend with a resolution that, while not narratively ridiculous, is a thematic cop out. It takes the heroine (sic) off the hook for the one thing that has complicated her character throughout the whole movie.

THE DELINQUENTS (Robert Altman, USA, 1957, 3)

Important in film history not just as Robert Altman’s debut but also as the movie in which Robert Altman touted “respect for civil and paternal authority” and the role of the church. And it has value for showing that experts will call anything a “disease” if that helps their ideological bottom line. But it’s just an auteurial curiosity otherwise. Between those campy opening and closing voiceovers that Jack Webb would’ve thought a bit much, DELINQUENTS is … well, better than REEFER MADNESS.

However, there is quite literally no indication whatever either that the director would go on to be one of his era’s most revered geniuses, or of the way in which he would do so. THE RAIN PEOPLE isn;t a much better movie, but it at least showed flashes of a great director and great actors. DELINQUENTS is just a lengthy public service announcement about bad juveniles and corrupted good juveniles, all played by actors and actresses who are clearly adults with some years to spare. The lead “Scotty” would grow up to be Billy Jack, but is a complete straight arrow here. It isn’t reasonable to demand COLD WATER, but shouldn’t a lengthy juvenile party scene at least SHOW more fun than this one does?

PRIME CUT (Michael Ritchie, USA, 1972, 5)

Can’t say I ever bought this film, a crime thriller that completely lacks a meaningful Maguffin. Hitchcock said it didn’t matter what it was, but its existence is essential.

Gangster Lee Marvin is given a contract to go collect the Chicago mob’s money from Kansas City’s slaughterhouse owner Gene Hackman after he had killed a previous collector in the film’s bravura opening scene. And to kill him. Which means the details of how it plays out make no sense. Why isn’t their first meeting the last? Or at the latest, the county fair? To put it another way the entire film is Ebert’s Talking Villain fallacy and there aren’t really enough complications to spin this out.

I also really didn’t buy what I’ll just call the foster-home coda. And I really REALLY didn’t buy perhaps the film’s most arresting image … the drugged-out, naked women lying on the hay in a pen next to naked pigs in the next pen over. That’s the stuff of horror grotesquerie, not an American independent film of the early 70s with this pedigree. I don’t think you can say this film actually is exploitation (and that I went into it with unreasonable expectations). Both Hackman and Marvin at least are acting like they’re in something for Boorman or Penn (or even the auteur of DOWNHILL RACER or THE CANDIDATE), not something by Craven or Hooper.

And yet … I can’t totally dismiss PRIME CUT because some of the bizarrerie really does work. There’s a Hitchcock-like love for violence in anomalous places (and not just the opening slaughterhouse scene). There’s a late shootout in a sunflower field that would be an all timer if I gave a shit about the characters. And I know the Hitchcock of NORTH BY NORTHWEST would’ve been cackling at the turkey shoot and the way Marvin uses an anomalous public gathering to get away from an assassin like Grant does … and then segues into what is very obviously a takeoff (can’t really call a parody; it’s not trying to be funny) of the cropduster attack.

THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (Robert Altman, USA, 1969) 8

See what happens when you use birth control!

To be more serious, the first words I have written in my notes are “VIRIDIANA or PERSONA?” Certain elements of both remain to the end — a rich person bringing a bum into her house to redeem him, and a two-handed chamber film with one of the characters playing mute as a protest. But that’s not the way COLD DAY turns out at all … it’s a bit more like TIE ME UP, TIE ME DOWN with the sexes reversed.

Altman centers his film on a bored rich woman (brilliantly embodied by Sandy Dennis) who takes in a soaked and mute bum off a park bench — he stood out a little in the film’s opening shot in which she was clearly furniture and then becomes … furniture in a different sense. Dennis surreptitiously falls for him and becomes increasingly controlling/insane. (We learn a little of his previous life in some escape scenes.) Someone on Letterboxd compared it also to Tennessee Williams, which makes total sense both as a texture,comparison and explanation for why I flipped for COLD DAY as much as I did.

Obviously I’m seeing this because “early Altman” but just as much as the juvenile delinquent movie, COLD DAY doesn’t resemble its aureur’s signature style, which appeared suddenly the very next year in MASH. However there was also one sequence that really REALLY stands out because it’s so clearly DOES foreshadow what Altman would become known for while just about nothing else in the movie does. It’s the visit to the gynecologist, which is mostly seen from outside the windows while most of the soundtrack is irrelevant, otherwise-unseen characters talking in naturalistic ways (over one another, incomplete sentences, etc). We get little observational details like how the group of three women talk about sex, while the son of one of them sits away, uninterested in anything but a SUPERMAN comic. But the heroine needs to go to the gynocologist, to get … armored for conquest.

July 21, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Weekend viewing – current films

SORRY, BABY (Eva Victor, USA, 2025) 4

Well, she does a public service by making a shit film. OK, that’s too cruel (if unavoidable) but what to do when a movie also lampshades LOLITA as a form-content disjunction? What is not too cruel is to say that this film is like a liturgy at the Church of the Therapeutic Society, a religion towards which I am very much a heretic.

But it’s also mystifying. I couldn’t abide such weird tonal disjunctions as the way the best friend acts during the rape examination, and every movement or word by total pill that Kelly McCormack is enacting. There’s a possibility the former is meant to be a joke, but I doubt it. And when the lead character (played by auteur Eva Victor) bids off a lesbian couple, one of whom is pregnant, with “go off to the lighthouse and make another baby,” is that also meant to be a joke on her.

I am simply not sympathetic to the sort of actions that here get packaged as trauma response (the thesis and the window, e.g.), but which also seem so much a part of the pre-rape Victor, a sort of person Victor can’t stand IRL — the recessive, passive-aggressive melting stick of butter whom Camille Paglia laughed off the stage decades ago.

But yet … I can’t simply dismiss SORRY, BABY as a heathen rite because there are two lengthy scenes that are genuinely great, in part because they both center around someone other than Victor. One concerns jury duty, one a sandwich. In some ways, they are the opposite, even. The former is about how others have to move on and react to you objectively and unsympathetically, while the latter is about the needed moments of grace and love from other others. But then I remember how it ended and I want to give the film the middle finger.

EDDINGTON (Ari Aster, USA, 2025) 4

Those of you who like this movie, your being manipulated. Gawd what an undisciplined mess this movie is, the second straight such offer from Aster.

It’s occasionally intriguing but all it really does for the first 110 or so minutes is throw “2020” signifiers at the wall. And then nothing after THAT and the appearance of a drone makes any sense or flows at all. Just two days later, I barely recall anything that happened after a certain killing rampage.

The ending has a Hawkingesque vegetable while Big Whatever chugs along and Kyle Rittehouse is in Congress on the QAnon platform, The Black Guy is firing off guns and Joaquin’s wife is with a guru … and … what the hell is the point of it all. The more I think about it, the less I like it.

Lord knows I want a movie to take the piss out of BLM activism and COVID Karens, but this movie has only punchlines with one very outstanding exception (“are you fucking [kidding]!”) and memento gestures that remind us that Aster was alive during the pandemic too. Nothing grows out of either a worldview on the pandemic or fron a sufficiently black heart to make something like DR STRANGELOVE.

Some people are suggesting that the real subject of the movie is not COVID for the lockdowns in the narrow sense but technology and how it has changed us in quite fundamental ways. One of which is apparently the scriptwriting craft.

July 20, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cut to the chase

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, USA, 1971, 9 R) 

Two things struck me more than in previous (all TV) viewings.

First, Popeye pretty much sucks as a cop, even though he is vindicated plotwise with the reciprocal wave to Rey and the now cliché “his hunch turned out to be right.” Nor is he a bad cop because he … does not … er … does not cultivate cooperative relationships with our marginalized communities. (Cutting out almost that whole scene is ridiculous on multiple fronts. It both establishes the cops as antiheroes AND indicates how successful this can be.) 

Nevertheless, everything manages to get botched for one reason or another, from his triggerhappiness to his obsession even before the closing “where are they now” montage. The failure of the first surveillance of the importee Lincoln Continental could be chalked up to dumb luck, but on two occasions (one seen, one unseen) he gets cops killed. And as exciting as the film’s most famous scene is … it can’t have been good interface for community relations. (Apparently some people consider the very end an example of police brutality; those people need to learn some policing history.) 

The other thing is the shockingly unsettling score by Don Ellis, both what it is and how it is used. Among A-list films by a major US studio (20th Century Fox), I can’t recall a score this atonal, dissonant, unmelodious and eccentrically arranged. I’m not gonna compare it to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but it is an even more radical version of some of Giovanni Fusco‘s scores for Resnais and Antonioni. It’s also used in appropriately unsettling ways. It’s the first thing at the start of the film, the images of which cut into the credits, of plain white letters on black background. And the closing is similar, the score crescendoing up and out over the gut punch ending and onto another blank, black screen. It does continue through the montage of fates, which isn’t as formally confrontational as the opening and closing, but is as morally unsettling. This is not a good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers (drug smugglers, OK) movie with a happy ending.

The film’s virtues are, of course, as undeniable as ever.

Gene Hackman’s performance is one of the most deserving of Oscar winners, making Popeye as likable and as dislikable as the situation requires and keeping him both as smart and reckless as the job requires without giving him too much “psychology“ or turning him into a therapeutic case. He just is. While the judgment come on the same basis, actors are just as much cast for their looks as are actresses, and Hackman just looks like a working-class stiff, who would scarf pizza on a cold street corner rather than sit down to escargot (that’s Fernando Rey obviously.* AFI is doing a Hackman memorial retrospective, the occasion for showing this, and I typed much of this review while waiting for a later show in the same series — PRIME CUTS. (Post-film addendum: a much-inferior character, though Hackman lends it inherent gravitas.) 

I gotta admit I was a little tickled when I knew from the story that the iconic chase was the next scene and realized as it started that it was beginning with a kid of about 3, peddling a toy tricycle. Because this 1971 movie predates the idiom, rather the possibility of the idiom, “cut to the chase“ it has a freshness and “innocence” (if that word should ever be used in re this of all movies) later chases lack. Among other things, it doesn’t end the movie and I’m 90% sure there were no fruit carts here. Technically, its age also helps it “play.” There have been chase scenes in the CGI green-screen era that probably outdo this one in terms of pure motion and “impossible” feats. But that ruins them. We’re not born when we go into a movie theater. When we see Chaplin in CITY LIGHTS, we don’t wonder why there’s no talking or why that idiot director didn’t correct the color properly. If you’re over the age of eight, you can’t not know the circumstances of production. Nor should you. THE FRENCH CONNECTION has no CGI, no green screen, no AI. Everything that you are seeing, whatever camera angles/speeds or cutting strategies there might be, is an actual thing. Stuff that breaks and runs into other stuff, men who bleed and breathe, space that exists in three dimensions. And that is why its chase between Popeye in a car and an assassin on a train will forever remain one of the all-time greats.

——————

* Strictly irrelevant aside, I noticed for the first time just how strong a Spanish accent Rey has when speaking French. And then I remembered that the two all-French films in which I’ve seen him both had fellow Spaniard Bunuel work around this. In DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, he played a Latin American ambassador. In THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, he was dubbed by Michel Piccoli.

July 19, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Bound for Glory

BOUND (Wachowskis, USA, 1996, 9 was 8)

Part of what made BOUND better on second view, first time in a theater, is that while (unlike they did Siskel and Ebert) the sex scenes didn’t turn me on, such scenes also usually bore me or turn me against the film. Here they didn’t for a perverse reason … they almost play like parodies of a certain sort of Skinemax sex scene. I found them amusing. The camera leers. The women’s bodies are objectified by the lighting and framing in exactly the way the radfems say pornography does. The lines are all double entendres or shockingly blunt (“because I want to”). The handshake with Caesar got a big laugh from me. The music sounds porny. The opening image of the film is an artificial drill FFS. 

One part of BOUND’s boldness is structural. I’m reminded of Burt Reynolds’ line in BOOGIE NIGHTS, about wanting to make a porn movie so good people will stick around to watch the plot. BOUND isn’t hard-core or even close but it’s still as if the Wachowskis decided to take on Reynolds’ ambition. Indeed the erotic scenes are so absurdly front-loaded, and irrelevant once the heist plot gets cooking (more anon), once the Man appears and then the Money … that it’s almost the structural reverse of the “elevated” porn that was the IRL equivalent of what Reynolds’ fictional character aspired. Rather than get the Social, Literary, Artistic or Political Signifiance out of the way early, so we can get to the screwing, the Wachowskis get the “screwing” out of the way early so they can get to making a great thriller.

Which. They. Do. 

BOUND is simply one of the most effective thrillers I’ve ever seen, the kind of movie where you’re constantly gripping your seat cover, though not from the kind of thrilling roller-coaster ride of which NORTH BY NORTHWEST is the apotheosis but from a minimalist tension machine.

Part of the enjoyment of BOUND (basically a heist movie; two lesbians steal mob money from one of their mobster boyfriends) is in significant part because it’s so obviously done on a shoestring. Its minimalism feeds into its impressiveness. The film largely takes place on one day and basically on just a few sets (mostly two neighboring apartments), those sets are sparsely decorated, and I don’t think I’ve seen many color movies with such little color — heavy on the shadows, sepia and mute tones. (That image is kinda misleading, though it’s a chance encounter that is the start of everything…)

Part of BOUND’s structural boldness is that Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) is the movie’s patsy but the whole second half of the movie centers on his machinations to get out from under Violet and Corky’s plot. By any rational screenwriter’s definition, he is the protagonist, i.e., the active character. And he’s smart and figures stuff out and plots his own plot that gets in the way of the two women, initially unwittingly. Further, for plot reasons on which I won’t elaborate, Violet and Corky are separated for most of the second half of the movie — Corky (Gina Gershon) is literally offstage in the next room while Violet (Jennifer Tilly), while onstage, is largely watching. And yet it’s as tense as movies get, thanks to, among other things, Chekhov’s Shears.

This is going to sound like more of a backhanded compliment than it is, but it’s the formulation that Gene Siskel once used to praise a thriller (I think THE BIG EASY) … these people are as smart as the stupidest people you know in real life. So many thriller plots don’t work because of (switching to Ebert now) “the idiot plot,” in which the moviw would be over in five minutes unless everybody the movie is an idiot. Here though, the plot is being pushed in multiple ways by multiple protagonists, all improvving. Which is why you can’t take your eyes off the screen.

June 11, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Out of Afrique

CAMP DE THIAROYE (Ousmane Sembene / Thierno Faty Sow, Senegal, 1988, 7)

There’s no denying that CAMP DE THIAROYE absolutely PLAYS like gangbusters. For a 154-minute movie, it flies by. Unlike many Third World art-house favorites, Sembene (with co-writer/director Sow) has no longueurs here … the story, the conflict, the characters, the subplots, the themes are all cleanly laid out and pay off. Even though the film has flaws, it is always a pleasure to watch, and I would happily put it before a Normie.

Sembene shows the attention to the telling detail and character touch of the novelist he had been (the lamb, the sunglasses, Pernod, the cook, the black American, the bookshelf). And his direction and dramatic sense are often spectacular. Consider the two scenes of visits from Diatta’s villagers and the scenes’ isolated quality, what’s said and unsaid, and how they complicate what might been merely a simpleminded anticolonialism screed. (Tho characters say “we are Africans“ once too often for my taste.) We never see the tanks’ markings, but we do get two very telling time-cue cards. The audience at my screening sat through the credits in silence and nobody left the theater until they were over.

There are problems though.

Some of the acting is quite bad and the few scenes in which English is used make me suspect Sembene’s direction of actors and casting instincts are shaky. Too many scenes have dialogue that seems calculated and on-the-nose. The use of a near-mute spastic as the character who Sees The Truth But (IRONICALLY!) Isn’t Heeded is the stuff of matinee serials or Saturday morning cartoons.

But most of all … I just never believed this story once the climactic plot, the insurrection over pay, kicks in. Speaking vaguely (tho this is a near 40-year-old movie dramatizing wvents that had happened another 40 years earlier) … what did the insurrectionists expect would happen? Particularly since the film specifically makes a point of telling us that these soldiers are hardened veterans already with good reason (some of events in the movie; some narrated memories) to distrust the white French. Imagine if, in POTEMKIN, which the Moscow-educated Sembene surely knew quite well, the mutineers had let the officers go off, partied the night away, and then sailed the ship out without ammunition. Or to pick other obvious left-revolutionary films, this film doesn’t have the unblinking hard-headedness of Pontecorvo’s BURN! and BATTLE OF ALGIERS.

May 24, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Wichita gunman … still with the gun

WICHITA (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1955) 6

I saw this film on a recent TCM late-night, programmed by the channel as part of “Night 4: Social Commentary in Disguise” in a series “The Defining Frontier: The American Character in Westerns.” Host Alicia Malone explicitly said the film was about “the difficult issue of gun control.”* Afterward, I looked up the Letterboxd reviews of friends and found lines like “Wyatt Earp vs. the NRA” and “Gun Control: The Movie.”

In a near-wholly fictional origin story, Joel McCrea plays Wyatt Earp’s entry into Wichita looking to establish a business but after multiple refusals gets drafted into being the boom town’s sheriff. There’s a bank robbery that Earp foils and a gun-toting bacchanalia/riot by a gang of cowboys, that becomes fatal, and continues until Earp stops it. He then initiates an anti-gun crackdown that includes an outright ban on bearing them. This rankles the town, dependent on various vice trades from toxically masculine cowboy types, until a final showdown.

So they’re not wrong. And the gun control angle is the primary interest in a movie that is otherwise a cookie-cutter Western story, including one of the most rote romantic subplots, involving McCrea and Vera Miles, that I’ve ever seen. Their picnic / first kiss scene is particularly embarrassing. The name “Bat Masterson” is said way too often for the relevance he has here. As for the gun ban, it doesn’t happen until the movie is half over, but because I was primed to see a contemporary “issue” story (and TCM being what it has become), certain other things in WICHITA began to register with me.

So allow me a dissent.

The first thought I had when the gun ban was announced is that it is not presented as a duly-passed law. Rather, the central disturbance happens and after it’s quelled, on the literal very next day, Earp begins putting up signs saying the carrying of guns is banned. There’s no indication of a new law or ordinance, and it’s hard to believe there already was a gun ban or anything more specific than “disturbing the peace.” The town was then explicitly selling itself as a place where “everything goes”; “Babylon on the Arkansas River” it also gets called.

In addition, those arrested for wielding guns in public are taken to the edge of Wichita and told to exit, never to return with basically no due process beyond a finding by the law enforcer himself (Earp). Kinda like being deported. And on the penalty of death (being shot, Earp says). An executive kicking people out of the polity based on no law or at best a new and arbitrary interpretation of a previous broad law … are there any recent examples of this not generally cheered by gun-control advocates?

Then there is the portrayal of Earp. Our first view of him is in extreme long shot, isolated, walking over the horizon toward a group of cattlemen who don’t know how to take him and whom the movie had been following to that point. It’s the entrance of an epic hero, as self-sufficient as a god. This continues throughout the film, as McCrea is often viewed from below, framed in isolation. Emphasizing his isolation, he’s also super-reluctant to take the deputy badge and does so only from necessity. And he gets called a “natural born lawman” by two characters in a conversation in which each is looking off to the side, semi-worshipfully. (I typed much of this while watching parts of MY DARLING CLEMENTINE out the side of my eye, in which Earp is specifically situated within a community.)

But WICHITA portrays his power as less like a hero than a superhero, only without getting any benefit from the yellow sun or having a green power ring. The scene in which Earp shoots the gun out go a bad guy’s hand, something that’s not a thing. My eyes were rolling at the central drunken rampage of dozens of cattlemen, which Earp single-handedly stops and jails everyone in the mob like he’s a gorilla facing a hundred men. Only he’s anything but a gorilla. My complaint is not about old cliches like only the good guys know how to shoot straight or always get off first. That’s fine.

However, THIS scenario is literally impossible to believe — that a gang of 20 or 30 men with guns, already portrayed as drunken and trigger-happy, would meekly submit to one man wielding a shotgun. The film even lampshades this by having McCrea saying that his shotgun buckshot can take out five guys at once. Yes, and that’s a point that might be persuasive against a totally sober mob of five. And I don’t think WICHITA is the kind of postmodern comedy that benefits from lampshading. Especially since it plainly traffics in unironic hero worship … of a dictator or strongman. Despite the misgivings of the press, even. If I were the sort to promiscuously use the f-word, I would say WICHITA is a fascism apologia in the name of gun control. Instead, I’ll just call it GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE for the Brady Campaign.

So why the 6? I don’t much hold ideological ideas with which I disagree against a movie (poorly dramatized ones, yes). But I think this film knows all of what it’s saying better than contemporary programmers. There is also one genuinely great dramatic scene, and it involves Earp’s brothers … to say more would constitute a spoiler. And though the story is basically a string of tropes, Tourneur handles and paces those tropes efficiently. It’s entertaining and watchable, if not exactly revelatory. And the drunken rampage gets across enough of the fun part of it all.

Then there’s this.

And this

And this

And this

And much, much more.

Tourneur is best known for films he made with Val Lewton and others at RKO throughout the 1940s — horror classics like CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE LEOPARD MAN plus the noir masterpiece OUT OF THE PAST. Even stipulating that much of that last title, by noir standards, takes place outdoors or during the day … could WICHITA be any less like the titles he’s known for?

Yet it’s still every bit as much of a visual stunner, albeit of a totally different sort. The exteriors are sweeping, the compositions dramatic, the spaces filled in, movement and busy spaces are threatening, the indoor lighting moody and the nighttime also threatening (OK, THAT it has in common with his 40s work). It’s a visually amazing genre piece that’s being drafted in causes much more straightforward than what’s actually on its mind.

——————–

* 90% sure that was the exact wording, but I wouldn’t bet my life.

May 16, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Broadway (lack of) Melody

BROADWAY (Paul Fejos, USA, 1929, 5)

Numerous critics in the early 30s like Rotha, Seldes and Beaton (plus such directors as Chaplin, Eisenstein and Vertov) thought that talking pictures were the death of cinema. Based on many of the first talkies from 1928, 1929 and even 1930, that opinion was entirely reasonable at the time. And BROADWAY provides an excellent time capsule.

Director Paul Fejos’ previous film was 1928’s LONESOME, a film teeming with visual invention, virtuoso editing, and handling of crowds and chaotic movement. It also has a couple of hastily inserted talking scenes that grind the movie to a halt, with their static camera, poor recording/reproduction and amateurish recitals. BROADWAY is that … but for a whole movie.

Despite what I say on these first graphs, some things about BROADWAY are in fact amazing and it’s the things that could’ve been done in 1926 just as easily. An adaptation of a play, it’s set at a nightclub that is one of the most amazing art deco spaces you will ever see — a cavernous stage area, and a backstage consisting of a couple of adjacent rooms. Fejos also developed an enormous crane that overcame the difficulties of combining camera movement and sound recording in 1929, allowing for sweeping pans and tracks. And does he ever show it off, flying around the multi-story performance area like a bird. The costumes of the chorus girls are also a total hoot, as for example in the lead photo, using the women’s bodies almost as an art-deco element.

But … everything wrong with early talkies is on display in spades here.

To call the acting variable is more than charitable euphemism. (After all, in literally every relevant movie ever, some actors and performances are better than others.) The performances are generally poor, but in such wildly different ways that it almost becomes charming. It’s as if direction of actors hasn’t yet been developed or thought through. Thomas E. Jackson (the detective) speaks like a mentally slow person in an early Bruno Dumont movie. Glenn Tryon (the male romantic lead) and Robert Ellis (the lead villain) made their moms so proud, reciting the every line perfectly. Paul Porcasi (nightclub operator) sounds like he’d be more comfortable speaking Sicilian for Visconti in LA TERRA TREMA. And everybody is just given too many lines, in too many complete and written out sentences. Only Evelyn Brent as one of the two most prominent chorus girls gives a performance that holds up today. Coincidentally (?) she gets the movie’s high point in a few intercut close-ups.

As virtuoso as the “Broadway crane” is, it also actually works against the staging of the musical numbers, trying to wow us with the size of the set and the number of extras in the audience. But in doing so it also reduces the performers and dancers on the screen to the spatial equivalent of goldfish in a tank. Some of the swooping around the club, especially in the last number, is just done too fast and so the images get framed poorly, and the clubgoers just don’t register more than the crowd members at a baseball stadium. The music is listenable and well integrated though not all that memorable. As for that last number, it is famously in color, but it’s two-strip Technicolor. Even though what I saw today was a 4K restoration from 35mm elements (so no “print issues”) it’s the visual equivalent of the era’s tinny sound recording — intermittent, flickering in and out, and too crude to really hold up. And considering how great Fejos’ editing was in LONESOME, it’s shocking how clumsy is the flow of image and sound and color are at the end of the film to the closing “Finis.” 

The sound recording also does the actors no favors. The overall tinny quality I could forgive, but the mixing I cannot. Right at the start, the soundtrack consists entirely of nondiegetic score with no background environmental sound. It gets a bit better afterward, but the frequent use of stock “crowd noise” for crowd scenes is … again, it reflects not yet quite figuring out the new talking medium. 

Indeed that really describes the whole movie.

This review probably reads harsher than I intend … like the review of an outright bad movie rather than that of a mediocre film resulting from failures to make a basically new medium work. This is a case where my grade (5) is more accurate than my review in calibrating my reaction. 

I’m obviously not against talking pictures. But I do passionately believe that the last couple years of the silent era, from 1927 to (the silents of) 1929 were the greatest era in the history of cinema and that the talkies were a step backwards that wouldn’t be overcome for several years. BROADWAY just exhibits all the reasons for that opinion in one film.

April 5, 2025 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Not watching CASABLANCA

… because I had to immediately write this post upon its being introduced just now by Alicia Malone.

“Now we all know this film,” Malone says.  Apparently not … though I’d prefer to think this is her scriptwriter, rather than her.

Two things. “French-occupied Morocco during World War II” would just jar on the ears as a piece of anticolonial wokery if it didn’t also erase … I dunno … the presence of another European power in the movie that kinda matters to the plot. It was also doing most of the occupying during World War II. Referring to Morocco as “French-occupied…during World War II” implies that the French are the bad guys, the occupiers in the war, which inverts the whole movie. Why sing “La Marseillaise” for occupiers?

That’s just inattentivess and defaulting to tbe political correctness you imbibed in college and never learned to question. But the other thing is unforgivable for the best movie channel in the universe.

“Ilsa … arrives with her new husband, the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo.” I’ll put this bluntly … how could someone who’d seen the movie refer to Laszlo as “new husband.” The whole frickin point of the movie is that he was her husband even before she and Bogie had Paris and that she wrongly thought him dead.

The venue also matters. This is Turner Classic Movies, the gold standard on TV for both showing this kind of movie as it should be and for curation and introductions/extras. Who cares about what gets said on Bravo or Nickelodeon? And if this were an obscure Japanese genre movie showing on TCM Imports that Malone might never have seen and few of her viewers will have … OK. But this is TCM and CASABLANCA. Do better, TCM.

December 1, 2024 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The lowhighbrow

While driving to the theater for a birthday triple feature, my iTunes was at the start of “C” and so I heard both the overture to CARMEN and Jessye Norman singing “La Habanera.” And as it does, my mind wandered to what was probably my first (unwitting) exposure to Bizet’s opera.

There was a sketch on THE BENNY HILL SHOW that was a kind of parody of “La Habanera.” Benny and an older man in drag (I think) had an over-the-top marital quarrel set to that famous aria. The dialogue is in nonsense “French“ lyrics while subtitles play, showing a series of caustic insults, played in as broad and farcical a manner as you’d imagine.

By any rational definition, Benny Hill sketches are as lowbrow as it gets. This was also made in an era when they were only two channels on British TV (OK … 2 1/2 … BBC-2 was on a half-day), meaning that this was ‘broad’cast- TV not ‘’narrow’cast. And yet, parodies of a canonical opera were considered fit for the masses. And my mind wandered further to where I first seen the most famous line in English language literature … “to be or not to be.” I saw a joke about it in graffiti on a Bash Street Kids strip in the Beano. (I don’t quite know how to analogize that in contemporary American.)

When did we lose the sense that you could make highbrow jokes and references in the lowest of lowbrow contexts?

June 6, 2024 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Japan World War II Apologist, redux

As I’ve already written here, I very much liked the new Godzilla movie, and so did the two people with whom I saw it, both Godzilla junkies. Since then I’ve had four independent conversations with non-critic friends about GODZILLA MINUS ONE, all initiated on the specifics by them, the most recent being Monday, and all of them liked it on more or less exactly the terms I describe in my review. And we know the film is generally popular, managing the amazing feat for a live-action subtitled film of being #1 at the box office the week it opened.

In that review, I noted that I jokingly call myself in my Twitter bio a “Japan WW2 apologist.” It’s an in-joke with a friend who called me that (sarcastically himself), because I could not bring myself to care that Miyazaki’s THE WIND RAISES is about a man who designs a fighter plane as a thing of beauty but leaves out all Japan’s WW2 atrocities (a point of criticism at the time, especially among the wokest Americans).

But in Monday’s GODZILLA MINUS ONE conversation with a co-worker, he told me about a dissent that he had read, in National Review. It’s bizarre, he told me. I said “by Armond White then?” (that meant nothing to him). After having now read it, I don’t know if the more bizarre thing is the review itself or the fact it wasn’t by White (I’m unfamiliar with author Michael Washburn).

Washburn does make one good critical point, that it shares a lot of similarities with JAWS, and he adds that here they get a plethora of bigger boats. But something tells me that his concern is more with something else.

My concern is more with the identity of the good guys in this action-adventure. Godzilla Minus One is set in 1946, and the heroes are Japanese soldiers and sailors who vocally resent their defeat in the war and its lasting consequences for Japan’s empire. …

From the opening, when the kamikaze pilot who could not bring himself to do his duty to the empire in the past watches the tragic deaths of his fellow soldiers at the hands of the monster, through the scenes in which Godzilla ravages the mainland, and defeat has deprived the nation of the means to fight back, to the later scenes when an officer who acts as if the war is still going on gives a rousing speech to members of the demobilized fleet, Godzilla Minus One is in the Japanese military’s corner. You might view the monster as the specter of Japan’s wartime enemies, haunting the psyche of a people, crying out for them to summon their heroic virtues and fight.

There’s not nothing here. I wrote in my GODZILLA review that:

Here is a film that, had it been made in … oh, say, 1954 … would have been taken as an apologia for Japanese rearmament and a social reconciliation with war veterans (as well as the obvious A-bomb trauma theme). It’s made explicit in this film that Japan can’t count on the US to defend it and it now needs war veterans and their military expertise to fight Godzilla. Pacifism isn’t an option socially and the human story is a coward recovering his manhood by fighting (I saw this with my MMA coach and his girlfriend).

But some of Washburn’s claims about the film are dubious. It’s not really the case, either in history or in the film, that the Japanese soldiers and sailors “resent” their defeat. They’re definitely humiliated by it and lament the ruin and death all around them, but they don’t “resent” it in the prideful, revenge-seeking sense the Southerners of 1866 or the Iraqis of 2004 did. IRL, the emperor going along with the surrender and retaining authority quelled a Japanese KKK or Fedayeen. In GODZILLA MINUS ONE, the subject just never comes up. The Americans are mentioned only to note their absence and there’s no blaming them for Godzilla, the latter despite the obvious fact that Godzilla was (and always has been in the movies) the product of the A-bomb attacks.

In Japan’s post-WW2 self-mythology, those attacks are an unthinkable metaphysical evil, the equivalent of the Holocaust to us, not something subject to debate (which they are here, and even opponents of them know this). If GODZILLA MINUS ONE were about vanquishing “Japan’s wartime enemies,” you’d expect at least SOME more anti-Americanism than “they won’t help us against Godzilla because they don’t want to upset the Soviets,” starting with something like “the American A-bombs created this beast.”

Indeed, the way I would put it is that GODZILLA MINUS ONE is about reclaiming the heroic virtues, at a very difficult time, in the name of better fights and of fighting better. On the former, these veterans are plainly using their skills to save Japan, not to rape Nanking. On the latter, there are lines about how careless the Empire had been with their lives, putting them in thinly armored tanks and in planes without ejector seats (all this is historically true), and this becomes a major plot point. And also … sets up the final denouement.

But those claims are just a bit misguided. Washburn’s true bizarrerie is the last 70% of the column. Of the piece’s about 1550 words, the 1100 beginning with “By a strange quirk of fate” are not about GODZILLA MINUS ONE or Godzilla movies at all but an essay about a book on Japan’s World War II atrocities. This is literally 2/3 of the piece:

[The Japanese were awful.]
[Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat…]

If a movie came out presenting recently demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers as heroes — and conveying the message that these Nazis may have taken a licking but still had some fight in them — audiences and critics around the world would rightly revile the film as the morally repulsive garbage it would be. Yet, in the face of all that [Gary J.] Bass documents in painstaking detail, Godzilla Minus One has grown into one of the most popular, lucrative, and, one might even say, beloved movies of the decade.

Something’s wrong here.

Yes, something IS wrong here, and it’s this kind of bedwetting-progressive pseudo-pacifism appearing in an American conservative journal.

Joking Twitter bio aside, I have absolutely no problem with noting that the Japanese fought in World War II like uncivilized barbarians indifferent even to their own survival. Or with cinematic depictions thereof, whether by whites (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI) or by Asians (DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP). I haven’t read the Bass book that fascinates Washburn, but whatever might be said of its systematicness and/or any specific new details, it really is no revelation during my lifetime that the Japanese fought like uncivilized barbarians. (I have a very vague memory of an extended family member whose name I can’t even recall now, having been broken by Japanese abuse after he was captured in Hong Kong or Singapore.)

But that doesn’t lead to two further propositions: (1) that the Japanese themselves must view their history as the work of uncivilized barbarians; and (2) that every representation of post-war Japan must center on being / having been uncivilized barbarians.

The first is simply a matter of national survival and national pride, two conservative virtues the rejection of which are central to the current Great Awokening. To put it simply and crudely, self-hatred is not a viable national self-image. It’s 1946 Japan … what are you supposed to do, going forward? And “going forward” means “don’t bomb Pearl Harbor” isn’t an answer. You have hundreds of thousands of blood-soaked soldiers and a whole populace that went along with every manner of atrocity.

Short of replacing the population (though keep in mind that this has been the norm of conquest for much of human history), you have to work with the “material” you have. Your only logical alternatives to national self-hate are to invent self-serving evasions — East Germany claimed it was the repository for all progressive elements in German history; Austria retreated into victimology and a kulturcentrism in which Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler a German. Or you can start at “Year Zero” like the Khmer Rouge. These courses are not recommended, the last “most” of all.

Every self-respecting country needs a usable national story, even about “last week.” By this, I’m not talking about lying about history, and the verb I chose in point (2) was deliberate — “center.” What is the most-important thing, the alpha and omega? The 1619 Project is not awful because, in one of the anodyne euphemisms often used, it “teaches about slavery,” something to which no sane person objects. It is awful because its aim is “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But a nation cannot respect itself, and will quickly collapse in self-hatred, if [Something Evil] is at its center. This would be an utterly uncontroversial point if applied to an individual. You can’t, for long, think you’re nothing but a sinner. Washburn is peddling the kind of anti-heroic nonsense once expects in Vox, but not in National Review.

Insisting that Japan’s uncivilized barbarism of 1945 is relevant in the face of an objective threat in 1946 (like say a fire-breathing, radiation-spewing giant dinosaur) is the kind of weird moral purism that masks the moral disarmament and practical delegitimization that one expects from the Wokest of the Woke. They are the ones who insist that some Israeli misbehavior(s) is the cause of Hamas’s October 7 massacre. I even remember way back a discussion board in which a leftist, on the night of September 11, fretted about being worried that he had heard somebody reacting to Bush’s speech that evening by yelling in a bar “get them towelheads” (or “Ayrabs” or somesuch). If only the sinless have a right to fight or use and nurture the martial and heroic virtues, then nobody does. Indeed, maybe this IS the hidden point of the bad-faith pacifist— again, a tactic I’d expect from many venues, but not conservatism’s historic flagship journal.

And to grab Washburn’s analogy by the horns, there’d be nothing in principle wrong with a movie about demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers as heroes and having the fight in them needed to preserve (West) Germany. As long as they’re not goose-stepping or Jew-gassing, what would the objection be? Only the mere fact they had been Nazis a few years ago, a group that’d be mighty hard to avoid in 1946 West Germany (or frankly East Germany or Austria either, but that’s another story). Unless a literal ethnic cleansing and population replacement is the remedy, you can only start from where you are and who you were yesterday. If a monster comes to destroy your capital, the fact you were uncivilized barbarians last year only means you shouldn’t fight the monster to those who are Peak Woke. Or in National Review apparently.

January 4, 2024 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Unseen 80s project 2 — When Harry Met Sally

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (Rob Reiner, USA, 1989, 5)

It’s the most famous scene in the movie, indeed one of the most famous in any 80s movie … and it exactly exemplifies why WHEN HARRY MET SALLY left me cold. I simply and flatly don’t believe for one second that any woman would fake an orgasm in a crowded deli … or any public place. Especially not for the sake of a debater’s point with a man she only intermittently knows. Noway. Nohow. Not unless she were Emma Stone in POOR THINGS where there are … extenuating circumstances. But a woman tolerably raised in any conceivable society, much less an upper-middle-class late-20th century American woman? Nope.

Nor is this isolated … I never bought anything in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, which is one long writer’s device masquerading as a movie. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are obviously both hugely appealing, but they are playing two of the most written characters I’ve ever seen. They don’t talk like people but like the Chat GPT for Romcom Epigrams (forgive the anachronism … and its cuteness; but if you love this movie, you’d better accept that much). Only their inherent charisma, plus Crystal’s relaxed comic flair (Ryan is trying too hard), keep the movie watchable rather than collapsing from all the preciousness.

Also let me make two comparisons with films that I love — Woody Allen and Richard Linklater’s BEFORE movies. Indeed between the plain white-on-black credits and the opening use of a pre-rock standard (they continue throughout) WHEN HARRY MET SALLY comes on like an Allen movie, especially once it settles into its Manhattan milieu. Woody’s dialogue is also epigrammatic by any standard, but his plots and characters often manage to surprise us and he varies tones within his films; Reiner is producing a straight formula that hadn’t changed since the 30s plus a fake orgasm. The endings of MANHATTAN and ANNIE HALL (or if you want a less-Olympian standard the “life goes on” in VICKI CHRISTINA BARCELONA) put this happy-end contrivance to shame. Speaking of “shame,” the BEFORE movies actually manage to convincingly portray a couple falling in and out of love amid coincidences and chance over the years, but is so much more minutely crafted and developed in its trajectory that … I wanted to be watching one of those movies.

I know that people treasure WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. And it IS very quotable and the characters have a lot of tiks that you could discuss and talk through — Ryan’s Karenesque restaurant ordering; Crystal’s phone messages; and the debates about CASABLANCA and opposite-sex friendship. OK OK … this is a romantic fantasy not a neorealist movie. I get that. And I can hear y’all saying “Victor, you sourpuss. It’s a movie romcom, not a slice of life — but a piece of cake, in Hitchcock’s formulation.”

But like with LOVE ACTUALLY (another treacly holiday confection that makes me sound curmudgeonly) there is a formal device that gives the lie to that excuse. After each break in the contemporary action, Reiner cut to a real-life aging couple giving a documentary style interview about how they met or got together. It’s a Woody-like device and at the end Reiner shows an interview with Crystal and Ryan. Exactly like the “love actually is all around us at Heathrow” montages and collages at the beginning and end of LOVE ACTUALLY, this device tells us that what we just saw IS real life. Er … no. Now TBF to WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, it doesn’t approach the level of toxicity that LOVE ACTUALLY does, if for no better reason than that there is only one inevitable and overdetermined happy ending versus 3627282 inevitable and overdetermined happy endings (number approx). And it is often superficially entertaining; just not a classic.

December 30, 2023 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Zac Efron. Wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?

THE IRON CLAW (Sean Durkin, USA, 2023) 5

So the Von Erichs are another thing that Jimmy Carter effed up.

More seriously … the opening subjective shot is amazing. And my gut was personally kicked (and “stiff”) watching this after a training day so shitty I cut it short in despair. The physical plant, looks and in-ring action are great and indeed pro wrestling, because it’s staged, might be the ideal “sport” for the movies to portray. The relationships and rivalries among the brothers sometimes work; but the problems … WHOOOO! That WHOOOO! is actually the only complaint I’d make about the wrestling, other than that there’s not enough of it. The guy who plays Ric Flair isn’t convincing. It’s not just that the voice is wrong, but he just hasn’t got … it. That’d just be caviling if THE IRON CLAW as a whole were great, but as it is …

The basic problem with this movie is that it’s just a lot of events over decades, or “biopic shapelessness.” The title of the post is a Coen Brothers joke, but I wish it weren’t applicable. If you walk in knowing the basics of the Von Erichs’ history (and I did as I was a huge pro wrestling fan — a mark probably — at the time and saw them wrestle on TV many times), you don’t need a roadmap. But all the film gives you is one. Such thematics as there are (besides “bad … <yawn> … dad”) are also just plopped in in a moment. THE WRESTLER told a story; depicting IRL events is not telling a story. The ghost of Chris also haunts the film and I’m just not convinced that his death would have been too much tragedy as Durkin has said. There’s already A LOT of that and the absence of one becomes a greater presence when it’s “only” be a matter of five brothers dying rather than four.

Despite its 132-minute length (the film blessedly doesn’t feel that long), there’s still just too many events to cover. Whole threads get reduced to one scene or asides … Kerry jumping to WWF, Kerry’s painkillers, Kevin wanting to sell WCCW, mother’s religiosity. Mike’s in-ring career is unbelievably (in the bad sense) brief and teleological — we go from him never having entered the ring to in consecutive scenes having one hard day training to his career-ending, near-fatal shoulder injury.

There are also TWO unforgivably sentimental happy endings. The earlier one is exactly the sort of cloying scene that makes atheists think Christians are deluded sugarcoaters, while the latter happens merely because it happens. Kevin is left “standing strong” alone for no reason, except that the death parade ended IRL so the movie now must too. The roadmap is over.

December 26, 2023 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

No camp, just fun

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Takashi Yamazaki, Japan, 2023) 8

Remember how TOP GUN: MAVERICK last year was “what if TOP GUN were good?”? And I joked below about AMERICAN FICTION as “what if BAMBOOZLED were a good and smart movie” Well, here is “what if GODZILLA were good?” It’s a pleasure to see a monster movie like this with first-rate production values, that takes itself seriously, has not a trace of camp or cheese value, and has a compelling human drama as its core (as well as a monster that is pure evil, not some misunderstood whatever).

I jokingly call myself in my Twitter bio as “Japan WW2 apologist.” Here is a film that, had it been made in … oh, say, 1954 … would have been taken as an apologia for Japanese rearmament and a social reconciliation with war veterans (as well as the obvious A-bomb trauma theme). It’s made explicit in this film that Japan can’t count on the US to defend it and it now needs war veterans and their military expertise to fight Godzilla. Pacifism isn’t an option socially and the human story is a coward recovering his manhood by fighting (I saw this with my MMA coach and his girlfriend).

I didn’t realize going in how much of a Godzilla fan Nicholas and Jessica were (I knew he was a genre film and anime fan). But both had seen numerous iterations of Godzilla. FWIW … they both thought it was amazing and he said he had a tear in his eye at the climax. It was Nicholas who told me afterward that this film is a return to the Toho original in portraying Godzilla as pure malevolence, while many of the subsequent films have at least somewhat “humanized” the character. He also told me that this is a return to having Godzilla move like a dinosaur (i.e., short, inflexible front limbs and stiff hips … occasioning a joke about my jujitsu) rather than almost human-like; which in the 1954 film was a result of the budget/technology necessity of being a human in a rubber suit. They were also both amazed when I told him the one thing I knew about the film going in (besides the generally positive buzz) … that it was made for $10 million. “Good gawd, what’s Hollywood doing with all its money” (or something close to that) was his reply.

December 26, 2023 Posted by vjmorton | Uncategorized | 1 Comment