Don’t Make Me Do It without My Fez On

Sometimes you just want to watch a silly Irwin Allen adventure, so I queued up Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). It fit the bill.

It stars Cedric Hardwicke as a Victorian inventor and aeronaut. He has invented a balloon that can fly without dropping ballast or releasing gas. The Jules Verne novel this is based on probably goes into a little more detail. With his pilot Fabian, he plans to fly across Africa, from Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. To get funding from a newspaper publisher, he agrees to take along the publishers playboy nephew, Red Buttons. Before they leave, the government asks them to plant the British flag at a spot on the Volta, to keep it out of the hands of slavers. They are required to take along a bumptious general, Richard Haydn.

In Zanzibar, Buttons frees a slave girl, BarBara Luna, which leads to them beating a hasty bon voyage. They pick up a chimp somewhere as well. Then they land in an imaginary kingdom where Billy Gilbert is Sultan. In case you don’t remember Gilbert, he was an old-time character actor whose signature bit was the extended sneeze (!). He is in no way African. Which is funny, because our aeronautics also run into Peter Lorre as an Arab slave trader, who is selling American schoolteacher Barbara Eden. Of course, they wind up with Eden and Lorre.

Now, we have Luna, who owes her life to Buttons, but is making goo-goo eyes at Fabian. Eden seems to be getting on well with Buttons. But nobody else is, because he keeps screwing things up. When they try to decide what to do with him, Lorre is always behind his back making throat cutting and hanging motions. Really, the best part of the movie.

No one will be surprised if I report that this is a deeply racist and generally fucked up movie. Ostensibly anti-slave trade, they don’t seem to mind Luna deciding the Buttons owns her because he saved her from slavery (?). There are very few black extras and not one with a speaking role (“Ungawah” doesn’t count). Also, the jungle is particularly unconvincing, and the stock footage boring.

On the other hand, the whole adventure thing is pretty well carried out. The balloon, with it’s ornate boat-like gondola and steam-punk hydrogen generator, is fun. I’m not sure how you feel about character actors, but we enjoyed Gilbert, incongruous as his role was. And Lorre was a hoot.

And finally, I got to watch this wearing my fez, which I put on for any movie that gives me the excuse. And that was all I needed.

A Crystal Darkly

We watched The Dark Crystal (1982) in case we want to see the new TV series. I had seen it way back when - late 80s - on TV, and Ms. Spenser hadn’t seen it at all. When I first saw it, I liked it but didn’t love it. I still feel the same way, and I’m not sure why.

The movie takes place on a world of puppets Skeksis, gross, decadent, evil creatures who use the cracked Crystal to extend their lives, and Mystics, ancient, benign, but maybe also decadent creatures who chant in resonance with all being. The Mystics have raised a gelfling, a small gentle being with pretty, fairy-like features. This gelfling, Jen, last of his race, will be our protagonist.

The Mystics decide that he will heal the crystal, once he gets the missing shard from an astrologer, who will let him know what to do. He gets his shard, but before he gets any more info, the Skeksi shock troopers arrive and he escapes.

On his way to the crystal, Jen meets another gelfling, Kira. They have a telepathic bond, and she can also talk with animals. They travel together with her pet Fizzgig on this quest.

The whole thing is beautifully put together, and the puppeteering is first class (since this is a Frank Oz production). The art direction is like Labyrinth without live actors. So why was I again underwhelmed? Was it excessively fey? (Like that would bother me.) Did it lack stakes, because puppets? Maybe it just wasn’t our thing for some reason. Ms. Spenser felt the same. We’ll probably give the TV series a shot anyway.

Be It Resolved

Resolution (2012) came before The Endless, even though we watched it second. They are very intertwined, possibly to the point that it doesn’t matter which you watch first.

It starts with Peter Cilella getting a video email of his friend frolicking in the countryside, shooting guns and smoking crack. This is Vinnie Curran, the tweeker gun-nut from The Endless. So Cilella heads up to help his friend out, telling his wife he’ll be back in a week - just before he heads out of cell range. When he gets there, Curran is friendly but psycho, and refuses to go to rehab. So Cilella hits him with a stun gun and handcuffs him to a pipe. He’s going to let him sweat our detox for a week, then either go to rehab or go to hell.

But while Curran is suffering cold turkey, Cilella keeps finding odd documents - books, slides, movies. They have cryptic information about the land around and even themselves. That email he got that started the whole thing wasn’t sent by Curran. It’s not clear where it did come from. And when they watch the file again, it has changed - and now shows the two of them from just minutes ago.

Also, Curran’s dealers come by - high school friends of the two of them. Curran owes them a lot of drugs or money. Then it turns out that Curran is squatting in the house he’s staying in - it belongs to an Indian reservation, and the Lou-Diamond-Philips-looking security guard is giving them 5 days to get out. (These scenes are cute because Cilella is gratingly P.C., prefacing every statement with a “no disrespect to your traditions meant.”)

So, while Curran is pretty much stuck on the suckitude of his detox, Cilella is getting more and more paranoid about the weird people he is meeting, and the inexplicable messages he keeps finding. Since we saw The Endless, we kind of know what’s going on. I’m not sure whether that is a good or bad thing.

We also meet the Frenchman in the RV trailer that we meet in The Endless, and even one of the directors, who is one of the main characters in The Endless, although we meet when he is younger, and in a different cult.

This isn’t actually much of a horror film. Like The Endless, it’s sort of a slow burn that seems to be about one thing, but turns out to be about something else. And both are equally good, and go well together. I wonder if this will be a trilogy?

Nothing to Conjure with

As we move into the spooky part of the year, we thought we’d try something from the James Wan-iverse:  The Conjuring (2013). It shares a lot of DNA with the Insidious franchise, but doesn’t really measure up.

It’s the story of two families: Lily Taylor and Ron Livingston and their four daughters move into an old house in Rhode Island. Livingston is a trucker who has put all their money into buying this place. The girls don’t love it, and are less than thrilled when they find a boarded up basement. Then things get really creepy. (The dog dies.)

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are supernatural investigators. They too have young children and live in an old house, with a museum of possessed objects. And here is my first problem with this movie - these two couples were just too similar. Although they don’t really look much alike, I kept getting them confused. For one thing, both were a little financially strapped - supernatural investigation pays no better than trucking, I guess.

Anyway, they are called in to investigate the haunting, bringing their assistants Shannon Kook and John Brotherton, who are no Tucker and Specs. Also, Wilson and Farmiga are no Elise, and we really wanted them to be.

Finally, this just isn’t as scary or surprising as Insidious series. It’s just a random haunting. When they track down the origin of the spirit, they also turn up about 20 other incidents, to the extent that it is almost funny - but none of it seems original.

And as far as Annabelle, the haunted doll, who gets a cameo, Ms. Spenser just said, “Creepy doll movies are stupid.” And there you have it.

Western Sunset

We queued up The Hired Hand (1971) partly because Peter Fonda passed away. But also, Verna Bloom, Ms. Spenser’s aunt, died not that long ago. So we were watching for her.

It starts with cowboys Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and the kid, Robert Pratt, sitting around a campfire, talking about what to do next. Pratt wants to go to California, and Oates allows as how he might like to see the ocean. But Fonda says he wants to go home and see his wife again. It’s been seven years since he’s seen her. But before Oates and Pratt can head off, Pratt goes into town and gets killed offscreen.

So Fonda and Oates go into town and shoot the foot off of Severn Darden, the man who killed their friend and head out.

When Fonda gets to the old homestead, his wife, Verna Bloom, isn’t too happy to see him. She finally agrees to let him stay as a hired hand, sleeping in the barn. She’s become a hard woman and bitter towards Fonda. Also, he hears that she usually sleeps with her hired hands. When he confronts her about that, she asks why she shouldn’t?

So, little by little, he gains her trust, and Oates heads off to California. But it can’t end happily, can it?

Fonda wears a beard in this, and seems to be doing Eastwood, although it’s probably just the style at the time. He’s pretty stiff, but maybe he’s supposed to be. Oates is always good, of course. But Bloom is truly great here. She’s plain and unglamorous, bitter and unapologetic. She’s quiet, expressive, and brave.

But I have to say that cinematographer Vilmos Szigmond is the best thing about the movie. It is full of dark scenes and sunsets, and long dissolves. One that I liked a lot was a dissolve between Fonda and Oates talking and a sunset, with them silhouetted at the bottom - so it was almost like three planes, the conversation over the sunset, with the silhouettes at the bottom of the screen. Very memorable.

In conclusion, RIP, Peter Fonda. RIP, Aunt Verna.

The Fast and the Colorful

Fast Color (2019) is a kind of film I’m just starting to recognize. It’s a “small” film, independently produced about someone with superpowers, but not a superhero film. It’s more grounded in character, and the lead characters are people of color. I’m thinking of Kin, Sleight, and maybe Midnight Special.

This one stars Gugu M’batha-Raw (Wrinkle in Time). We meet her coming out of an abandoned building, removing ropes from her wrists, and driving away into an America (or world?) where it hasn’t rained in seven years. At a diner, she meets a sympathetic man, Christopher Dunham, kind of an accountant type. She reluctantly takes a ride with him, and sure enough, he’s actually a government scientist, trying to bring her in for study. But she escapes and continues to make her way home.

For that is where she is headed - to see her mother (Lorraine Toussaint) and daughter (Saniyya Sidney) at their little Southwestern farm. Toussaint has a superpower - she can disassemble objects to dust and re-assemble them. The daughter can as well, but is still learning. M’batha-Raw, it turns out, has an anti-power - when she sleeps or loses control, it causes earthquakes. To skip ahead, when she was a teenager, she got in with a bad crowd, and got pregnant. She cleaned up for the child, but her seizures were a threat to her and she went away. Now she’s come back, sober and wanting to learn to control her powers. But will Toussaint forgive? What will her daughter think when she finds out this is her mother? And will they figure it out before the government gets there?

This synopsis might sound like a bit of an action film, or a dystopia, but that’s not how it plays. It’s about the three generations of black women more than anything else. A key scene shows them around the table, with young Sidney showing her power. She levitates a coffee cup and turns it into a whirling galaxy of dust. But as the camera circles the table, it stays focused on the faces of the women - the miracle is taking place at the top of the screen, almost out of view. Now, not all of the character stuff worked for me - I never felt like M’batha-Raw had a wild past, for instance. She seemed too together to be an ex-addict. Also, David Strathairn as sheriff doesn’t quite ring true to me.

But overall, this is a great film - the kind of mid-budget film everyone feels is missing these days. It also has a great song - “Germ Adolescents” by the X-Ray Spex. Wasn’t expecting 80s punk here!

Send Me an Angel

I feel kind of funny about this, but we liked Alita: Battle Angel (2019). Maybe you’ve already forgotten about it - it was that live action anime where Rose Salazar has freakishly huge eyes.

It starts in a huge scrap heap in a dystopian future world. Another, better city, the last of its kind according to the titles, is levitating above the heap, dumping their garbage below. Dr. Christoph Waltz is looking for spare cyborg parts, and comes across a head - still alive.

He puts the head on a spare cyborg body and that’s how Alita, Rose Salazar, wakes up. She doesn’t remember anything - including what food is. Waltz and his nurse Idara Victor take her out for a walk in the rather cool looking city. She meets a unicycle riding street punk (with good manners and a paying job), Keean Johnson. He later introduces her to the sport of Motor Ball (or Murder Ball - I’m not sure if I misheard or if it’s slang), a version of Rollerball.

But this city isn’t all fun and games - there are murderers roaming the streets, killing women and stripping them for parts. And the Hunter-Warriors, civilians licensed to hunt (and war upon) these murderers. And after a little misdirection (is Waltz the murderer?), it turns out that Waltz is a Hunter-Warrior.

As you can guess, Alita figures out who she is and gets to be a hotshot Motor Baller. It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that she doesn’t make it up to the flying city, but she’s headed there for the sequel, if any.

I guess we liked this for 1) the cool, fun dystopian city, 2) the appealing actors, and 3) the action. The action may have even been a little lower on the list - not as important as you might think. Also, Salazar’s weird eyes are off-putting at first, but after a while, we even got to like them. Maybe it comes down to Robert Rodriguez directing, with an assist from James Cameron on the writing and production teams. At least, that can’t hurt.

For the Hell of It

For some reason, we just didn’t get into Hellboy (2019). It wasn’t just the lack of  Ron Perlman, we kind of felt the same way about his sequel.

This one starts out in Days of Old, with Mila Jovavich as the sorceress Nimue fighting King Arthur et al. She’s pretty indestructible, but Excalibur could cut her up into little pieces, which were dispersed throughout the land. I guess you can figure out how that will go.

In the present day, Hellboy (David Harbour) goes to a Mexican wrestling match to retrieve an operative whose methods have become unsound. Turns out he has become possessed, and prophesies that Hellboy will bring about the End of All Things. As he runs around on various missions, he hears this from everyone, and begins to think that might be his fate, and what the hell.

He runs into a number of fun critters - giants, an ugly fairy, Baba Yaga (the old Russian witch, not John Wick), and a spiritualist whose life he once saved. This is Sasha Lane, a lovely woman who livens the proceedings up a bit.

But mostly is seemed like a grind. Like with Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, I felt like interesting things were going on, but I wasn’t taking them in. Maybe it was the grimness - although there was still some of that old Hellboy humor. This felt a little like that Vin Diesel movie, The Last Witch Hunter. That is, a little straight-to-streaming, although it had a real budget.

So, maybe it’s just me or just the mood I was in. Of course, it didn’t do too well at the box office, but what do they know?

Another Marvel

Shazam! (2019) is technically a DC comic movie, but doesn’t really feel like it. At least, it doesn’t have the gritty Zach Snyder/Christopher Nolan feel. It has a light, kid-friendly Disney feel, which makes sense, because they now own everything (note - this movie was made by New Line/Warner Bros., not Disney).

It starts with a boy in the backseat of a car, with his older brother and father in the front nagging him. He finds himself in a strange cave, with Djimon Hounsou asking him to become the world’s hero - if he can pass the test. The test is temptation, and he fails. He winds up back in the car, just in time to cause a huge crash.

Then we meet our hero - thank goodness, because that other kid was not fun. This kid, Asher Angel, is fun. He pulls all sorts of pranks on some cops, trying to find his mother. He got lost at a carnival when he was around five and has been running away from foster homes looking for his mom every since. As a last resort, he’s put in a group home run by a cool couple. His roommate is Jack Dylan Grazer, a nerdy boy with a bad leg.

Although he tries to stay aloof from this new family, he winds up helping Grazer avoid some bullies. While running away, he gets taken to Hounsou’s cave and given the test, which he somehow passes. So Hounsou turns him into Shazam - a hunky slab of adult man-meat (who looks oddly like Brad Garrett) wearing a caped costume, Zachary Levi

He returns and reveals himself to Grazer - and there’s a long fun scene where they try to find out what his powers are while Grazer videos everything. They also bumble around, doing what kids might do if one of them turned into a powerful adult: Trying to buy beer, then foiling the traditional convenience store robbery, and so forth.

But while Shazam is getting to be a bit of a dick with his powers and all, the boy from the start of the movie is all grown up, and has become Dr. Sivana, the evil head of a corporation dedicated to him getting that Shazam power. So he will be coming for Shazam, and his foster family.

I found this movie a fun. The kid actors were great, especially Faiths Herman, Angel’s hug-happy little sister. The section with Angel figuring out his powers was great, and convincingly modern. The basic setup may have had some flaws, but the denouement was perfect.

It’s weird to see Levi in this role - we watched a lot of Chuck, where he was a convincing schlub. And I’ll admit that we mainly watched because we had finished Limitless, and it was kind of similar. So, good for him, and I hope we see him in a sequel with the Rock as Black Adam.

Kind of a Hush

I didn’t have to blog Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), since it didn’t come from Netflix - I got it from the library. You see, Ms. Spenser watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane on a plane, and didn’t really like it, but wanted to see more of the genre (Wikipedia calls it “psycho-biddy”).

It starts with Charlotte, Bette Davis, in her old Louisiana mansion. The government is getting ready to bulldoze it to put in a highway, and she runs them off with a shotgun. This gives them a chance to give us the setup, and queue the flashback: When Davis was young, her daddy threw her a fancy ball. Her daddy, played by Victor Buono (who I always get confused with Bruno VeSota), is trying to buy off her lover, a married Bruce Dern. But when Davis goes to see Dern, she comes back to the party covered in blood - Dern has been killed, and everyone assumes Davis did it.

Now, she lives with shrewish white trash housekeeper Agnes Moorhead in seclusion, and most people think she’s crazy. But her cousin, Olivia de Havilland, comes to help get her packed up and moved out. She is helped by Davis’ doctor, Joseph Cotten. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy. A minor complication is insurance investigator Cecil Kellaway, from Lloyd’s of London, trying to figure out why Dern’s widow never collected on his insurance.

So, SPOILER - de Havilland and Cotten are driving Davis crazy. Their method is based on Clouzot’s Diabolique. Director Robert Aldridge (Kiss Me Deadly, Baby Jane) weaves a twisty tale and gets some ripe acting out of the cast. Overall, I liked this a lot, maybe more than Ms. Spenser - definitely more than she liked Baby Jane.

Simply Amazing

Amazing Grace (2018) has an amazing backstory. In 1972, Aretha Franklin went into a Los Angeles church and recorded a live gospel album, Amazing Grace. Director Sydney Pollack filmed it to make a movie, but they were unable to sync the sound. They solved that problem in 2007, but now Aretha didn’t want it released, so it had to wait until her death to be released.

It features Rev. James Cleveland as MC, piano player and singer. The band includes Chuck Rainey on bass and Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on drums. The audience included gospel luminaries such as Clara Ward, who wrote “How I Got Over”, and Aretha’s dad. Also, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts.

Aretha’s singing is also amazing, soaring, ecstatic. However, I have to say that I wish she spent more time on the straight song. Her “Amazing Grace”, for instance, stretched each line into an entire verse, filled with melismatic flourishes and swooping runs. Just sing the simple, swinging, funky song.

But I sure felt shivers when she sang those wild runs. The church, its preachers and singers, as well as Ms. Franklin made this Buddhist feel the Holy Spirit. And, while she did not talk much, or reveal much of herself, she looked radiant and sweet - at some times girl-like, although at ~30, she wasn’t really a girl. Glad this was finally released.

This is Us

Us (2019) is Jordan Peele’s follow up to the horror comedy Get Out, with a lot less comedy this time.

It starts in the 90s, at Santa Cruz. A mom, a dad, and a little girl are visiting, and the girl wanders off. In a creepy house of mirrors, she meets her mirror image. When her parents find her, she is traumatized.

That girl grows up to be Lupita Nyong’o. She has a husband (Winston Duke) and a young son and daughter. The family is going to Santa Cruz, to her deceased mother’s place, and this makes her very nervous. We aren’t sure if she’s the little girl yet, and she hasn’t told her family about it. Duke is obliviously bent on enjoying a vacation. He even buys a boat, partly to impress his white friends Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, also vacationing in Santa Cruz.

Then one evening, they discover four figures at the end of their driveway. Duke tries to run them off, but they come in - and they are doppelgangers for the family, except only Nyong’o’s double can speak, and they are all malevolent and violent.

That’s the set up - soulless doubles of some or all of us live underground in unused tunnels. They have a psychic connection to us, and want to replace us. And now they are coming out.

This works well as a plain old slasher or maybe zombie horror movie - it’s plenty bloody. It also is stuffed with cinematic references to other movies. In the opening scene at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, they mention that a movie is being made there - plainly Lost Boys, but I think they mention the Giant Dipper, which was in The Sting.

But mostly, this is a movie about privilege, class, and America. The underground doubles are clearly the underclass, the repressed id that will have to emerge. That the black family is well-to-do and fairly bougie lets you know this isn’t about race per se - except it is, because America has to be about race.

Then there is a twist at the ending. I am not going to spoil it except to say that we thought it was ambiguous - didn’t want to accept it, and didn’t think we had to. In retrospect, we have to accept the twist.