The Shadow Do!

I re-watched The Shadow (1994) to see if it was as bad as I remembered. I didn't actually remember much; my feelings were mostly based on the Narrative. As the story goes, when Dick Tracy was a hit, studios assumed that audiences were clamoring for movies based on 1930s comics and radio shows. This movie and The Phantom proved them wrong. But were they that bad? I didn't think Dick Tracy was very good, so I figured I'd check.

It starts with Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) as an opium-running warlord in 1920s Afghanistan - so evil that when James Hong takes Baldwin's bookkeeper hostage, he shoots through him and kills both. Then he is kidnapped and taken to meet the Tulku, a lama who has the power to cloud men's minds. He takes Baldwin as an apprentice, and ...

Seven years, later, New York City. Some hoods have got Sab Shimono in cement overshoes, ready to toss him in the river. Comes a disembodied laugh - it the Shadow! Shimono is rescued and made a part of Baldwin's secret organization, as explained bu Peter Boyle, a taxi driver who is another friend of the Shadow.

Who in real life is Lamont Cranston, wealthy socialite, meeting his father at a nightclub. Father is the police chief, played by Jonathan Winters (played straight, too). But when Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Lane, shows up, he has to get to know her. Later, we find out that her father, Ian McKellen, and absent-minded scientist, has gone incommunicado. Something to do with his shady assistant, Tim Curry?

No, it's John Lone as Shiwan Khan, a student of the Tulku who has gone bad. He plans to finish the work of his ancestor, Genghis, and rule the world. 

I think that puts all the pieces in play. I'd say the plot is good enough - It's a little weird to see Lone and his henchmen walking around NY in Mongol armor, but whatever. The casting is obviously fine - Miller in particular has a great period look. In fact, the whole movie has a great Art Deco feel, with old taxis, fancy night clubs, and a secret skyscraper lair. 

About my only issue is with Baldwin - he's just a little too creepy. Of course, this version of the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men because he had an evil heart. But it comes on maybe a little too heavy.

Anyway, I find this movie to be overall good fun. Now I want to see if The Phantom is any good 

Tea-Based Horror

This is more like it: Enys Men (2022). I've been watching a fair number of old classics or modern blockbusters. Then I go to the library, pick a random movie with a mysterious description that seems to be horror-adjacent, and get this. 

It is set on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall in the 70s. Mary Woodvine is an ordinary woman of 50 or so, volunteering to monitor a some rare flowers. Every day she goes to a patch of these flowers and measures the soil temperature. She also drops a stone down a small mine shaft. Then she goes back to a small house and records her findings: date, soil temp, and "No changes". 

This routine is shot almost abstractly. with her body framed oddly, intercut with the wild and dangerous sea on the rocks around the island. And there are flashes of a young woman, a preacher, a group of miners, a rescue boat crew, some dancing schoolgirls. We see the memorial for the crew, and wonder if these are ghosts.

One day, she notes lichen growing on one of the flowers and puts that in her log - not mentioning that it also seems to be growing on her belly, on a scar (C-section scar?).

Also, there is a standing stone pillar on the hill opposite her house, with a local legend that we didn't catch because it was related over the CB radio and was too distorted to understand. Probably satanic.

That's about it. She runs a generator for lights and cooking, and gets a delivery of petrol from a man she might have had an affair with (but they are pretty uncomfortable together). She tells someone om the CB that nothing is going on, except she's running out of tea. She takes a bath and reads the ecological paperback A Blueprint for Survival. She talks on the CB, or ignores it if she's busy.

So there's very little horror - except for the possible tea shortage. There are ghosts, some of them maybe hers. The young woman may have been Woodvine's daughter, and may have killed herself. She sees one of the miners living in her house, reading Blueprint on the toilet. But it's mostly a meditation on nature, isolation, the past, and so forth. It's beautiful and strange, although more disquieting than terrifying. 

By the way, there are no men belonging to Eny or Enys. Enys Men is Cornish for Stone Island, the island this takes place on. This was a COVID film, with director Mark Jenkin shooting on 16mm film with a small crew. Good choice for lockdown. 

As My Whimsey Takes Me

I might have mentioned that I am a big fan of Dorothy Sayers, and we've watched all of the TV adaptations of Lord Peter Wimsey we could find. The Silent Passenger (1935) is a bit different than these. Filmed at the same time the Wimsey stories were being published, it portrayed Wimsey as less a suave devil-may-care aristocrat, and more of an idiot.

It starts with a blackmailer, taking one of his victims, Lilian Oldland, to France. We see Lord Peter nosing around their hotel, muttering about blackmail - perhaps he is on the trail. He also notices a porter carrying a large empty trunk - with creases in his pants! This porter turns out to be another blackmail victim. His plan is to kill the blackmailer and stuff his body in the trunk, to be found later in France. Before he can get out of the room, John Loder, Oldland's husband confronts him, punches him out and informs him that he is taking his wife to France. But not before a witness spots him.

So, the trunk is loaded on the boat-train, along with the silent passenger. Loder is reconciled with his wandering wife. Wimsey is onboard as well, poking his nose into everyone's business. When Loder's collar comes undone, Wimsey offers to get him a stud. When Loder says his buttonhole is torn, Peter goes to get a spare buttonhole. 

At French customs, the body is found. Everyone knows it's the blackmailer, but Loder - he punched out a different man, and didn't kill anyone. But will the police believe him (No)? Can Lord Peter get to the bottom of this (What do you think?)?

Wimsey is played by Peter Haddon, a big name comic of the time. He has a skinny mustache, and a dopey line of patter. Bunter is played Aubrey Mather, and given very little to do. The build-up to the crime is a bit convoluted, with lots going on that I didn't pick up on. Then it gets rather slow for a while. The end seemed to me to come a bit at random, with the real murderer just being dumb.

Oh well, it seems that Sayers herself hated this version. But it's no worse than a lot of old movies we've enjoyed, and not as far from the canonical book characters as, for ex, the Lloyd Nolan Mike Shayne. We bought this disc from Movies Unlimited, and I feel like we got our money's worth. 

Return to Zenda

I chose the last two movies because I was sure Ms. Spenser wouldn't be interested. Here's one I (re-)watched even though I kknew she loved it: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937).

It stars Ronald Coleman as an Englishman trying to have a quiet fishing holiday in Ruritania. He doesn't realize that he looks exactly like the prince who is being crowned the next day. While he is fishing in the Royal Reserve, the prince (also Coleman) and his retainers, David Niven and C. Aubrey Smith run into him. Their remarkable resemblance is explained by an old family tale - that one of the princes ancestors was doing what the Englishman is: Fishing in forbidden waters. 

So they all retire to have a drunken last night before coronation party. We find that the prince is a bit of a wastrel, but he promises to sober up. After one last bottle. But the next morning, they find that that last bottle was drugged, and the prince can't be woken. It seems his half-brother, Raymond Massey, is plotting to have him miss his coronation, and seize the crown himself. But Niven and Smith get Coleman to impersonate the prince - which goes off without a hitch. Except that he meets the princess, his alter-ego's betrothed, Madelaine Carroll, and falls in love with her. She never much liked the prince, but he seems so different, now she's falling too.

All is well, then, except when they go to wake up the prince, he's gone. Kidnapped by Massey! Foppish villain Rupert of Hentzau (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) has figured out the double trick and has given the prince over. 

This movie has everything. Light-hearted humor, glorious spectacle, delirious romance, and several cool fights. There is even a deep well called Jacob's Ladder, that leads down to Hell, not Heaven. The evil-doers keep the prince right next to it, in case of discovery. Guess who winds up falling in?

My only complaint is the ending. Of course, the bad guys lose and the prince is restored. Carroll finds out who was really romancing her and is tempted to follow him back to England, but follows the patriotic path and stays to rule Ruritania. But we never see her and the prince, or even Coleman and Coleman meeting up for a hearty handshake and best wishes. 

Other than that, I can't imagine a better classic adventure. The cast is remarkable - I especially loved Smith for his deep love of his king and then prince become king. Some real nobility. The disk I got out of the library had the 1952 Stewart Granger version on the flip side. I didn't bother to watch that. 

Killer Content

Here's another one Ms. Spenser wasn't interested in at all: the new David Fincher movie, The Killer (2023).

It stars Michael Fassbender as the titular Killer. He is staking out a Parisian apartment from a deserted and under construction WeWork office. We see him waiting, doing yoga, trying to sleep and scoping out the neighborhood through his telescopic sight. He narrates throughout, mostly about his rules for being a paid assassin. Key points: Stick to the plan, avoid improvisation. Fight only the battle you are paid to fight. He is meticulous and precise. And he misses the shot and kills a bystander.

He makes his getaway and heads for his hideout in the Dominican Republic. There, he finds that the place was just invaded and his girlfriend was worked over. So he sets out to put a stop to this.

And so he starts working his way up the ladder, killing everyone involved, starting with the innocent cab driver who brought the invaders to his place. Then the lawyer who set up the hit, his secretary, the big guy who was one of the invaders, and Tilda Swinton, who was the other. Finally, the original client, who we'll spoil in a little. 

This is all done with quite a bit of dry humor. Some of it is structural, like when his narrative monolog is interrupted by someone at the door. Some of it is ... political? How modern commerce, WeWork, DoorDash, Amazon lockers, Apple watches, etc are pervasive. Everyone is always looking at their phones, including Fassbender, who is using his to carry out murders. Which is another piece of modern commerce, just a service commodity. Some of it is just sort of of silly, like how he always listens to the Smiths when he's on a job. Or when his careful plan just falls through and he has to improvise - like he said not to do.

In the end, he gets to the client, billionaire Arliss Howard. He makes sure the guy has no problem with him, and lets him live. Maybe he doesn't want the heat from killing a billionaire. Maybe it's just business. It certainly breaks the usual revenge plot. 

I'm not a super Fincher fan. Never saw Fight Club, maybe never will, I can certainly see some fine cinematic craftsmanship here. The sound design is interesting - like how we only hear the Smiths on the soundtrack when we're sharing Fassbender's point of view. 

But in the end, I wasn't quite blown away. I think my main problem is that it was too good of an action film, with too much in common with all the others, to be a real critique of the genre. I think I actually prefer The Hitman's Bodyguard in that respect. 

I can't believe I said that. 

Super James Corden

Ms. Spenser had some work to catch up on, so I dug up some recent movies that she would have no desire to watch. For example. the recent Melissa McCarthy AI comedy, Superintelligence (2020).

It starts in a Seattle farmers' market, where we meet McCarthy. She is volunteering for an animal shelter, trying to get dogs adopted. She gets a call from sassy black (gay?) best friend, Brian Tyree Henry, who brings us up to speed: She hasn't had a date since she dropped her long-term boyfriend, creative writing professor Bobby Cannavale and quit her high-tech job to start volunteering with multiple charities. He convinces her to interview for a job at a start up run by a college buddy. It goes poorly (but pretty funny). But through the security camera, someone is watching.

That someone (or something!) calls her the next day. It's an artificial superintelligence that sounds just like James Corden (because she loves James Corden) that has just become aware. He (it?) wants to observe her, help her out, and depending on how she reacts, either help humanity, enslave it, or destroy it. 

Well there's the setup. She calls Henery, who works for Microsoft, because the AI isn't trying to keep itself a secret. Henry goes to the government, eventually getting the president, a Hilary-esque Jean Smart, involved - and the military. 

But mostly the AI is concerned with getting McCarthy back together with Cannavale. He plots for her to run into him at a supermarket, which turns out awkward. He got a job at a college in Ireland and is moving in three days. He doesn't think it's a good idea for them to hang out. But you know they will.

And here is the crux of the movie - this relationship. Cannavale is a very dorky man-child. Him and McCarthy do kid around a lot, but he is also a serious dork. He loves air travel, and is excited when the SI surreptitiously upgrades him to Business class. McCarthy takes him to a ballgame and Ken Griffey Jr. meets him, due to a generous donation the AI made in her name. And Cannavale sort of forgets McCarthy is there. He doesn't think too much about McCarthy dropping back into his life, and doesn't think much about leaving her for good to go to Ireland. I think we are supposed to understand that McCarthy hurt him when she left, but it's possible he barely noticed. He is so uninterested in her that you expect the movie to be about her finding someone nicer.

But it isn't. It's about the way that she loves him for what he is, and for what they had. She never tells him about the AI, although she told Henry and he told the government. The AI tries to help her "win him back" (in the movie, McCarthy calls this "making things right"), and she doesn't do it by showing off her newfound wealth and AI power - she tries to give him things he really likes, like dumplings at Pike Place Market. And when the world is about to end, she spends the evening packing his apartment up for his trip, and even sends him to the airport early, and promises to finish up the job herself. 

And I don't know how to feel about all this. It was at times sweet, at other times infuriating. Cannavale's character was no prize, but McCarthy wasn't so great either - awkward, self-sabotaging, unsure. Not to mention looking very average. Sorry, but when they do the makeover scene and put her into outrageous clothes, she never gets anything flattering or even interesting (except the jacket made of pants). So maybe they deserve each other. Maybe they love each other - or even, she loves him and he's ok with her. Don't know. 

Anyway, they say the AI picked her because she was so average. But she was actually an exec at Yahoo, and devoted her life to charity. Like Cannavale is a beloved professor of creative writing, and a clueless man-boy. So I feel like the Rom-Com part of this was the most interesting (?) but least successful.

Of course, the AI stuff is fun and maybe not that otiginal. Having James Corden play the AI as a practical joker who is still working on the line between funny and mean was a good source of comedy. I wouldn't have minded more of that, less of the romance. And I don't even know who James Corden is.

I actually like Melissa McCarthy a lot - but I almost never like her movies, at least not all the way. I should probably stop trying to watch them.

Helping the Bombadier

Catch-22 (1970) is another Movies Unlimited purchase. I saw it a while ago, and didn't remember it very well. But when I read the book back in grade school, I was obsessed. I read it every waking hour - walking to school, in class under the desk, while eating, etc. So when I saw it for a good price, I snapped it up.

I'll skip over the plot - the movie is mostly vignettes thast blend into each other, forward and backward in time. It's set in an Allied Air Force base in Italy during WWII. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) doesn't want to fly any more missions. Everyone thinks he's crazy, and of course, crazy people don't fly missions. But if you ask to be taken off active status, well, that means you're sane. Catch-22, the best there is.

Of course, everyone else in the whole stupid war is crazy. Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) is trading the morphine from first aid kits for Egyptian cotton. Capt. Major (Bob Newhart) is promoted to Maj. Major because it sounds better. He won't see anyone in his office unless he isn't in the office. And so on.

This craziness is all from the book, somewhat compressed. What director Mike Nichols does with it is make strikingly stark compositions. For example, the "Help the bombadier" flashbacks show a close up of Arkin's profile at the right side of the screen, with just clear blue sky for the background. Or the shots of military men in the foreground, with Arkin, naked, in a scrubby tree in the background. Or a sequence of shots of darkened city streets where a different mundane horror is highlighted around every corner. It is an extremely stylish movie - not just an absurdist comedy with a message.

It also has an amazing cast - I haven't mentioned Jack Gilford, Richard Benjamin, Bob Balaban, Art Garfunkel, Martin Balsam, writer Buck Henry, or Paula Prentiss. Hell, Orson Wells even shows up for a couple of scenes. Not all of them are prominent or have full character arcs, but they are all there.

In conclusion, I just now figured out that Capt. Orr (BOb Balaban) was named that because he rowed to safety. 

Those Darn Torpedoes!

Another movie we got from the Movies Unlimited sale was The More the Merrier (1943). Ms Spenser and I have a history with this movie. We saw it long before we started dating, at a college Film Society showing. I loved it, but she had hoped for a happy ending - where she kicks the jerk to the curb instead of marrying him.

It is set at the height of the wartime housing crisis in Washington DC. Charles Coburn is visiting to work on this crisis, and finds he can't get a hotel room. Walking through DC. looking for housing, he passes the statue of Admiral Farragut, and remembers his classic line "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" He finds that Jean Arthur is renting half of her aparrtment and bulls his way in.

There's a bit of comedy involving Artur's attempts to set up a carefully timed routine for morning baths and breakfast. But Coburn, being a busybody, wants to know why she doesn't marry a high-minded, clean-cut young man. They are in short supply in DC, what with the war, but "Damn the torpedoes".

When Arthur is out, Joel McRea comes looking for a room, and Coburn sublets half of his half to him. When Arthur discovers that she is rooming with a young man as well as an older one, she is not happy. But since McCrea is shipping out in a week, Coburn convinces her to let him stay. 

I'll leave out a lot of foolishness, and skip to the last act. Arthur has been long engaged to a boring, snooty bureaucrat, and he finds out about her roommate. Coburn convinces McCrea and Arthur that they must get married for the sake of propriety, then when he ships out in two days, they can get it annulled. He hustles them down to So. Carolina, where there's no wait for the papers. On the way back, Arthur can't stop crying. In the airport diner, soda jerk Grady Sutton (Ogg Oglivey in The Bank Dick) sighs, "Newly weds".

I don't have to tell you how the plan to wed in name only and then anull goes.

So, on our first viewing these many years ago, Ms. Spenser explained to me that she likes screwball, but doesn't consider a lovely woman like Jean Arthur marrying Joel McCrea to be a happy ending. He acted like a jerk to her the whole time, and she had to be bullied into marrying him by Coburn. She would have preferred her to dump her drippy fiance and tell McCrea to look her up when the war is over. Well, I held that it was a convention - comedies end in marriage, tragedies in funerals. But I secretly thought it was romantic. I still do, but I see her point of view. But also, I think she finds it romantic now, too. 

And of course, we both love Jean Arthur. I feel that her strength as an actress is conveying intelligence. Her fault here is overthinking, and not allowing her heart to override her brain. 

Ed. Note: This was remade as Walk, Don't Run, set at the Tokyo Olympics, and Coburn got to re-use his slogan in another movie. 

Further Ed. Note: For a shorter version of this story, see A30 in this film quiz. 

Creature Feature

Just so you know, Movies Unlimited is having a DVD sale - Thousands of DVDs for stocking stuffers: $7-$10. We made a big haul. The first one we put on was Abbott and Costello Meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).

Have I mentioned that we got the collected Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters? And we love them? Well, this isn't really one of them. It's a Colgate Comedy Hour TV show with a short Abbott and Costello sketch at the end. It is mainly about a couple of comics doing impressions and Sonja Henie doing ice dancing. The thing is - the comics are great and Sonja is Sonja.

I can't find the comics' names (after doing a very lazy lookup), but we liked them a lot. One was older, a dry Fred Allen type. The younger one was all teeth and manic gestures - of course, the older one kept stepping on his lines. They were pretty corny, but so are we. We loved it.

The Abbott and Costello part was fun, of course. Bud and Lou go down to the prop department to get some stuff for their skits. Some of the props are spoooooky! That includes a Frankenstein monster (Glen Strange!)  and of course, the Creature. 

Well, not sure this was worth the $5-$10 we paid for it. But we got our monies worth in laughs.

Avatar: The First Water Bender

Speaking of newer movies. the library had a copy of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). Can't say I am a big fan of the original, but I wanted to see where Cameron was going with it.

It takes place many years after the original. Sully (Sam Worthington) has settled down in his avatar with his native wife (Zoe Saldana), and they now have a big batch of Na'avi/human kids. A few Na'avi friendly scientists stayed behind, and one wild human kid, who liked to run with the Na'avi kids. The corporate army have left. But they are coming back.

The hard-ass colonel killed in the last movie (Stephen Lang) is being revived from a personality recording in a Na'avi body. Although his mission is to recover control of Pandora's resources, he has a particular hard-on for Sully.  

So there are some fights, and Sully decides his family and tribe should retreat instead of trying to fight these well armed Earthmen. So he manages to get in with a water tribe. But will he lead the fight to them? And what of the shovel-headed space whales?

OK, the whales look kind of goofy. In general, the movie looks lovely. The human/Na'avi hybrids looked a lot like humans in a lot of makeup (pink/red flesh peaking through around the eyes, etc). I assume they are entirely digital motion-capture constructs, so it must be intentional. The digital scenery is pretty but I'm not sure it's mind-blowing. I prefer Roger Dean album covers. 

Also the plot got silly in places - The kid (Jack Champion) going over to the dark side so readily, for ex. The Poseidon Adventure section where everyone is drowning, except the girl with the air bladders who isn't treating this as an emergency. But there are some great blow-em-up fight scenes, and who needs logic for that?

In the end, I didn't think this was a great movie. But as an expensive, low-brow action adventure movie, it was fine. I might not watch it again, but I bet I'll watch the sequel.

Jai Guru Deva, Miles

Without Netflix DVDs, we haven't been watching recent (-ish) movies as much. But we do have Netflix streaming (for Great British Bake-Off) and they have Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). 

Irt starts with Spider-Gwen (voice: Hailee Stanfeild) in her own universe. She misses Miles and doesn't expect to ever see him again. Her police captain father (voice: Shea Wigham) thinks Spider-Woman is a menace and that she killed Peter Parker (she did, but he was the Lizard at the time). Then she has to fight a Leonardo da Vinci version of the Vulture. Then. two new Spider-Heroes show up: Oscar Isaac as Miguel O'Hara and Issa Rae as a black pregnant motorcycle mama. They subdue the Vulture from another universe, but Capt. Stacey discovers who Spider-Woman is. The other Spidies take her with them to the home of the League of Super-Spiders.

Sometime later, in another universe, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is moping around, missing Gwen. He runs into villain-of-the-week The Dot (Jason Schwartzman) - an all-white figure with hole all over his body - holes that can be removed and placed roadrunner-style on walls, etc. It turns out that he was the scientist who sent the radioactive spider... Look, never mind. Why go into detail on a villain of the week?

Then Gwen shows up! She's joined the Spider Corps and gets to travel between universes. And after a few misunderstandings, her and Miles joiun the Corps in tracking down The Human Hole. Their adventures take them to meet the Indian Spider-Man (Karran Soni), Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) and his Spider-Baby, and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya). They will also have to face... Their Parents!

That's all the plot we need, I think. There is a lot of plot in this movie, although there aren't as many villains as usual. Spot is a good one, I think - sort of silly, sort of funny. Sort of like Polka Dot Man from The Suicide Squad (shouldn't all Spot-based characters be played by someone who's name sounds like Dalmation?). But cosmically powerful. 

But the cool thing is the art - there are many styles, including 

• Trad comicbook with black outlines and halftone dots. There is even some 3D (?) or maybe just some misregistration
• 80s glitch style, like the old New Mutants (comic not movie). Sometimes Dot Man would be drawn as just a scribble with spiral eyes. Of course, Spider-Punk looks like something out of a punk zine - come to life.
• Paperback cover style, like Robert MacGinnis, where the background is just a few impressionistic brushstrokes. 
• There's even a Lego Spider-Man, in tribute to producers Lord and Miller.

And so on. I'm going to want to watch this again, just for that art.

I wasn't always as interested in the teen angst parts compared to the action and hi-jinks. But isn't teen angst what Spider-Man is about? Actually, that's one of the reasons I don't read much Spider-Man. But I do love the web-swinging, and this movie has that down. 

Of course, we also have to ask - too much multiverse? I guess I'll wait until the trilogy ties up in the next movie. 

Mind Like a Gin Trap

 Readers who are reading may note that my frequency of posting has slowed down a bit since Netflix DVDs folded. That is largely because we've been rewatching a lot of movies and I don't re-review when I rewatch. Maybe I should? I often re-read my blog and find that I often disagree with my previous views. But I probably won't bother. 

I also haven't been doing much in the way of cocktails, because I always make my favorite margarita, with a little passion fruit puree. But it turns out this is getting to be less and less true - I even let my tequila run out and didn't bother to buy another bottle. 

Instead I bought some gin. Now, I have a bottle of Empress, the blue gin colored with butterfly pea flower tea that turns purple if you add acids, like lime juice. I got it because it makes beautiful aviations. But then we were watching some BBC nonsense where everyone was drinking martinis. So I wanted a martini, and I don't think Empress is that good in that cocktail. 

In the shop, I looked for the cheapest legit-looking gin available. I'd usually go with Beefeater or Gordon's, but they were out. So I decided to try something called New Amsterdam.

It turns out to be pretty tasty, with a strong lean towards citrus. It would probably go well in a martini with a twist. But I didn't have a twist, or even an olive. So I threw in a pineapple chunk. It made a great garnish.

I've also been making Singapore Sling riffs with it, including a frozen version. 

I think I'll have a Park Avenue next, following up on the pineapple prompt. 

Run Silent, Run Deep Space

Silent Running (1972) is another first-seen-late movie. Ms. Spenser went to the premier with her aunt and uncle and had the poster on her wall. But I've never seen it until now. 

It's set on a spaceship in the near future. The Earth has become deforested and sterile, so three ships with bio-domes were sent out into space to preserve wildlife, to be brought back to reforest the world at a better time. The four-man crew of the Valley Forge consists of three yahoos and biologist Bruce Dern. The yahoos are ok guys who like zooming around in the ship's golf carts. Dern prefers to stay in the forests under glass and commune with nature. Then they get orders from Earth: mission's over, jettison the domes and nuke them. Come on home.

Dern is pretty upset about this. As he watches the other ships' dome blow up in the stars, the other crewmembers of his ship prepare to blow up ther domes. He finally breaks. and kills one. Then, while the rest of the crew is planting the nuclear charge, he jettisons them and blows them up. Now he's alone with the remaining dome. 

Except there are three little robot drones that he befriends. When one is destroyed, he names the others Huey and Dewey, and tells them that their missing companion is named Louie. He treats them like his young or pets - mentors them and spoils them. But he won't be able to keep the military at bay for long, and he's wounded, and so is Huey...

The first thing to know about this movie is that it was directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard from 2001 and many others. It clearly inspired a lot of future space movies. It reminds me a lot of Dark Star, although I can't decide which way the influence runs (if there was any). DS came out after, but was an expanded versio of a short film that came out earlier. I was also reminded of Red Dwarf, especially the use of the drones. Anyway, the scenes panning across what was plainly a giant model spaceship will always bring me jpy.

The drones are another important part - their artificial humanity. I watched knowing the drones were suits being worn by legless actors, and I felt like their acting shone through the suits. 

Finally, there is Dern's impassioned ecological advocacy. It sounds both a little goofy and dated, but also absolutely sound to me. I mean, the idea of nuking our precious biological reserves just to save the rent on the spaceships that nurture them is crazy, right? I guess at the time (I was alive and aware of the ecological slow-motion crisis in 1972) it sounded pretty plain-spoken and serious. I'm not sure I could say the same for Joan Baez's theme songs. written by Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach!). They were a little painful.

Shirley MacLaine is Eurasian?!?

Gambit (1966) isn't quite a movie that you won't believe I haven't seen yet. Even though it's a 60s comic heist starring Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine (just my cup of tea), I've never even heard of it. I bet I could say the same for you.

It starts in Shanghai. Michael Caine and John Abbott (in a natty mustache and goatee) are watching chorus girl Shirley MacLaine's act. He brings her to the table, and offers her a large sum for a mysterious mission. Although she is silent and aloof, we next see her in the mythical city of Dammuz. They are going to pretend to be a wealthy husband and wife, and attempt to get close to the richest man in the world, Herbert Lom. 

You see, MacLaine resembles his dead wife, who looked like a priceless and ancient bust of a princess. As Caine gains Lom's trust, and Lom falls for MacLaine's beauty, Caine will steal the bust. Throughout this all, MacLaine remains silent, haughty, graceful and elegant. The plan, with many clever ruses, works perfectly.

SPOILER - It turns out that what we have been watching for 20 minutes was just a dramatization of Caine's plan. Psych! He now proceeds to actually invite MacLaine over, and she turns out to be suspicious and chatty, rather than cold and haughty. But she does take him up on it, and they are soon in Dammuz.

Things don't go quite as planned - in particular, Lom isn't a pushover. In fact, we find out that Lom figures Caine is up to no good pretty quickly, but decides to play along. Meanwhile, MacLaine is far from the mysterious temptress of the first 20 minutes, but proves to be pretty good at this seduction game. While Caine, the gentleman burglar master thief of his exposition, turns out to be pretty amateurish.

There are a few twists and turns, but a lot of this is the Caine/MacLaine dynamic. I am not a big fan of MacLaine, but she does have a lovely little scene towards the end. She uses her lithe and flexible dancer's body to squeeze into a security cage around the bust. It's almost a special effect. 

However, I can't say this was great. The heist plot, both the original plan and the as-executed, didn't totally make sense. I guess the plan was supposed to be a little dumb. It was full of elaborate tricks that don't really amount to much. The actual heist was pretty clumsy as well, but had a few decent twists, so I can't really complain. 

I must say, I enjoyed Caine's fantasy of MacLaine as cold, imperious ice princess (I think I've repeated a few of these adjectives) more than her usual more down-to-earth Fran Kubilek. Too bad it was all a dream. 

Pronounced "Betelgeuse"

Beetlejuice (1988) is another movie missing from our watching history. Since it's Boo-tober, we figured it's time.

It starts with loving couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis enjoying a stay-cation in their old rambling house in a small New England village. Baldwin is spending his time in the attic, working on a model of the village and listening to Harry Belafonte sing calypso. His wife Davis is redecorating and just loving her perfect life. They run an errand in the villag, and when a dog runs across the road, they run off the picturesque covered bridge and die.

They get home, and slowly realize they are ghosts. The lack of reflections and the mysterious "Hnadbook for the Recently Deceased" clue them in. They can't leave the house because it is surrounded by a hellish desert. And the handbook is not that helpful, just a bunch of happy bureaucratic jargon.

Being dead isn't so bad, but then their house is sold and they meet the new owners. Jeffery Jones is a rich business man moving to the country for his nerves. His wife, Catherine O'Hara, is a wannabe intellectual, and a bad sculptor. Their daughter, Winona Ryder, is a goth teenager. And chubby Glen Shadix is their too-too decorator and designer. Soon the ghosts' lovely home is converted to a post-modern nightmare.

They manage to get to the waiting room for dead social services, and meet Sylvia Sidney (beloved classic film star), their cranky old case worker. She explains that they have to stay in the house for a long time and that if they want to get rid of the tenants, they'll have to haunt them out themselves. And don't try using Beetlejuice to help.

Oh yes, the titular character. He is an old ghost who makes a  living (?) haunting houses to get rid of the pesky livng. He isn't in this movie much.

Baldwin and Davis try to scare the unwelcome living away, but nobody can see them - except Ryder, who kind of likes them. So they contact Beetlejuice, who is living in the graveyard of the model town in the attic. He's a disgusting pervert, and they decide they had batter not use him. But they do learn the trick of psychic ventriloquism from him.

So when Jones and O'Hara have a dinner party for their scenester friends (including Dick Cavett!), they use the ventriloquism to make them all sing and dance calypso! This is clearly supernatural, but instead of being scared, they see a business opportunity. They can turn the twon into Ghostland! Looks like Baldwin and Davis may have to use Beetlejuice after all.

My main take-away from this late first viewing is that Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice is barely in this. That's probably for the best - he's pretty disgusting. Baldwin and Davis are adorable, which is funny considering how tart and snappish they tend to be in most roles. Jones and O'Hara are pretty funny, and not as terrible as they could be. Even the snooty decorator seems like fun. So this isn't one of those stories where you hate all the characters. But I think Ryder is the best part, with the bond she finds with her ghost friends. She's a proto-Wednesday and goth icon. 

Rat Toss

Ms. Spenser is a bit of a rat lover - you might remember us trying to sneak them into and out of hotels on our last big trips to FL. She has always wanted to watch Willard (1971), but the closest we got was the 2003 Crispin Glover remake. Now we've seen the original.

Bruce Davison plays Willard, a wimpy young man who is a clerk at a manufacturing company. He goes home to a small mansion where his sickly mother, Elsa Lanchester, is throwing him a surprise birthday party, attending by only her older friends. We learn that his father built the company that he works for, and his tyrant boss, Ernest Borgnine, took the company over, possibly leading to the father's death. His mother smothers him with affection, but demands that he spend more time doing maintenance on the house.

One of his chores is to take care of the rats in the backyard. He prepares to drown them, but at the last minute leads them to safety down in the basement. He begins talking to them and training them. His favorites are a little white rate he calls Socrates and a big brown rat he calls Ben.

But he stat to consider Ben a troublemaker, maybe taking his frustrations out on him.

At work, he gets an assistant, Sandra Locke, who is sympathetic. She sees him humiliated by Borgnine, when he makes Davison send out invitations. to a party without inviting him. Davison's reaction is to get his rat army to attack the party, leading to chaos. A very Three Stooges scene. 

One day, Borgnine lets him go home on time - he had a call that morning, something about his mother. When he gets home, he finds out that his mother has died. All alone in the world now, he takes refuge with his rats. He takes Locke out for a little date, but comes back to find that the feds are threatening to take his house for back taxes. So when he hears that a salesman is withdrawing a large sum of cash, he sends his rat army to scare him at night, so he can rob the guy. 

But Davison has been taking Socrates and Ben to work, and someone spots Ben in the storeroom. Borgnine kills Socrates with a stick while Davison looks on in horror. So now he decides to let his rats kill Borgnine.

Ms. Spenser was not as happy with this as I had hoped. She liked the rats, but all the humans were awful. Of course everyone around Willard is awful, but he's no innocent. Besides his casual attempts to drown the rats, he does seem to give Ben a hard time, while pampering Socrates. In the end, Ben does turn evil, but is that nature or nurture?

In conclusion, many of the rat swarm attacks feature rats flying through the air. The difference between a rat leaping on someone and being tossed on them is very obvious. 

Nothing from Nothing

 OK, I guess enough time has gone by: Of the "up to ten discs" that Netflix was going to send out on the last day of shipping, we got - ZERO.

We did keep the last two normally shipped, because we wanted to. So we have Bringing Up Baby (1935) (because it is the best movie ever made) and PlayTime (1967) - Jacques Tati's masterpiece. Want to see what I was hoping to get? Here's my list:

1. The Lady Eve (1941)
2. Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy: El Amor Brujo (1986) 
3. Love Happy (1949)
4. Black Dynamite (2009)
5. Spies (1928)
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929)
7. The Killer (1989)
8. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
9. A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974)
10. Le Deuxième Souffle (1966)
11. Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein: The Legacy Collection (1931)
12. Before I Hang / The Boogie Man Will Get You (1940)

A mix of classics that we've seen and that we haven't but I suspect we would bve glad to own. The last two were in case they didn't send some of the movies above - they are classic Universal horror or horror comedies with Karloff and/or Lugosi. 

Oh well. Nothing was promised, nothing was delivered. You get what you pay for and all that. Goodbye Netflix DVDs.

Confidentially, we did get a Netflix streaming sub, but only for The Great British Baking Show. Any good movies we should be catching? 

Shanghai Drift

Watching silent films while Ms. Spenser is on a Zoom call is working out well. This time I watched Todd Browning's Asian opium tale Drifting (1923).

It stars Priscilla Dean, an expat living in Shanghai. It starts in media res, explaining that Dean was a big opium dealer, but had to team up with her biggest rival, Wallace Beery. She bought a lot of nice dresses on credit, then her last deal went sideways, and she needs money fast. But now she is getting fed u with the biz. She has a best friend, Edna Tichenor, who has started smoking the stuff, and she needs to get them back to the states before she's too far gone. 

It all ends up with her and Beery needing to go to the Chinese village where the stuff is grown. A westerner has shown up in town, Matt Moore, claiming to be an engineer, looking at re-opening a mine. But the opium gang suspects that he is actually a cop. (They are right.) So they want Dean to vamp him and find out if he's legit. That will get her out of her financial troubles.

Of course, she falls in love with him, but so does the village headman's daughter - played by Anna May Wong. She flirts with him outrageously, because she's fifteen. But considering how gorgeous she is, it must have been pretty tempting. 

It all ends with a big fight that's kind of great.

I thought this was fun but a little odd. Dean is beautiful, but in a very old-fashioned way. She has a strong chin, which makes her look somehow Gay 90s, Gibson Girl-ish. Then there's the missing setup, and the best buddy/junkie who just disappears. Too bad, because Tichenor, with dark makeup around her eyes, languishing in bed with a pipe, looks great. Beery is a great villain, but it's weird to see him so young. Still, there's a lot less yellowface than you might expect - say 50% Chinese playing Chinese. And the final fight is worth watching. Maybe it's more of an oddity, but I was glad to watch it.

Cubed

I was going to say we'd never seen any David Fincher, because I forgot about Mank. Well now we've seen Alien³ (1992), his first feature. 

When we left Sigourney Weaver, she was escaping from a xenomorph-infested planet with a damaged android, a surviving soldier, and little girl Newt. This movie starts with a xenomorph showing up on the ship, killing everyone but Weaver. The crew pod gets jettisoned and sent to the nearest inhabited planet.

That is a prison planet, with most of the prisoners gone. It's run by warden Brian Glover. but inmate Charles S. Dutton has become the spiritual leader for the prisoners, now all celibate penitentials. Weaver is woken up by Charles Dance, the medical officer. She finds out that everyone else from the last movie is dead. She insists on autopsying Newt, and is relieved to find out the she is not infected with Xenomorphs. Too bad she didn't know that a face hugger survived and got into a dog, birthing a doggy/xenomorph.

Now, pretty much everyone wants Weaver gone, because she is upsetting the balance of this prison/monastery. When people start dying, they don't put much faith in her explanation. They have contacted Weyland-Yutani, and Weaver tries to convince them that they will only protect the xenomorph. Only Charles Dance seems to believer her, and they are sleeping together.

When the xenomorph attacks a party Weaver is in, she finds that it won't kill her - the famous still of the creature getting right in her face. She realizes that this means she is carrying a chest burster, and worse, it's a queen. But it does give her protection.

There are a lot of cool things going on here. Weaver gets her head shaved right off, and that's a cool look. The range of classic character actors, like Dutton, Dance, Glover, Peter Postlethwaite and even Lance Henriksen is impressive. The setting, the semi-abandoned industrial prison with its band of spiritual murderers and rapists, plus a few bureaucrats and a doctor, is interesting. And Fincher's brutality of killing (and autopsying) Newt is chilling. But I didn't think this one really held together very well. We watched the "Assembly" (longer) cut; maybe the theatrical would have felt tighter.

I also didn't see much of a distinctive "look" - If I didn't know about Fincher, I'd guess he was just some journeyman director. So, not my first or even second favorite Alien movie. And even though Ripley dies at the end, there's still one more.

Monstrous Regiment of Woman

We thought we'd start Octoboo with some Frankenstein - The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023). OK, we actually watched Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein first, but that's just our usual kick-off (we own on DVD). 

It stars young Laya DeLeon Hayes as Vicaria, the titular black girl. Her mother died by police violence, her brother died in a gang, and she sees a problem: Death. She decides that, since death is a disease, it must have a cure. And she will be the one to find it. So she goes to school where she antagonizes the teacher (her father comes in and tells the teacher to open her mind and "TEACH!"), inspires a little girl in the neighborhood to learn science, gets called Mad Scientist by everyone, and tries to stay clear of the local gang, run by Denzel Whitaker. She also spends time in the lab she has set up in an abandoned factory, where she has dragged her brother's corpse.

She also spends time with her family - her older sister (-in-law), who has a little daughter and is pregnant with another baby, and her father, a righteous man having trouble coping with the loss of his wifew and son. He's been hitting the crack again, supplied by Whitaker's gang. 

So Hayes finally re-animates her brother, they raid the crack stash. A gang member catches them, and the creature does his thing. Later, the gang comes after Hayes, demanding to know who her big friend was. She doesn't tell, and they force her to work in their drug lab. But somehow, she's lost track of the creature.

You kind of want some kind of revenge fantasy, where Hayes and her re-animated brother start killing gang members, maybe some white cops, teachers, etc. But that isn't this movie. It's a more realistic look at life in a small black community. The violence and danger are part of a system, a system that's too big to handle with a monster. It requires a cure - for death.

It's also about Hayes' character, Vicaria. She's smart and serous, but also a little girl. She doesn't say "It's alive!" when her re-animation is successful. But she laughs a mad scientist laugh that's also a little girl's giggle. 

Site for Sore Eyes

As we enter Spooktober, I try to find more scary movies for Ms. Spenser. I thought Black Site (2018) looked interesting, mixing John Carpenter with Lovecraftian horror. In fact, it starts with some narration, explaining that humanity was troubled by entities called the Elder Gods, but found a way to "deport" them to a dungeon dimension. These days, that function is provided by a black site called Project Artemis.

We meet a couple in bed. She gets up to get some water, gets it from an unseen monster. He follows, telling their little daughter to stay in her bed, which is protected by sigils. He's quickly killed offscreen. The kid grows up to be Lauren Ashley Carter, an Artemis agent like her parents. 

She is heading to the black site with a "deportation agent", someone who has memorized the mantras that will send an Elder God away. He is kind of whiny - complains a lot that his girlfriend left him because he's boring. He is, and he talks too much. Carter puts his head in a bag to keep the black site a secret. (I think this is Mike Beckingham, Simon Pegg's brother, but don't quote me.)

Throughout, Carter has flashbacks of her parents being beamed up somewhere, a planet, and a murky image of a bat-winged tentacle creature. Premature SPOILER: we will see these same shots over and over, and that one image is all we'll see of the Elder Gods.

That's because life in the other dimension has eroded the gods' power. Now they can only exist in our world in the body of humans. That apparently means they can be tortured. So they are torturing this one guy before they deport him, and he turns out to be the god who grabbed Carter's parents. These scenes have the god making grandiloquent threats about puny humans, and the humans going "Ah, get fucked." kind of cute.

Until the site is overrun by Elder-God-affiliated cultists. So we get some fight scenes, and two interesting antagonists: One is a woman who pulls her turtleneck up over her mouth and fights with two samurai swords. Another might be the leader, who takes over the security setup and runs the fight from there. She looks like a college coed, which is sort of funny.

I'll skip over all the fights and drama to the end. The deportation agent says his chant, the Elder God goes away, everyone who is still alive goes, "Phew, that was rough. Not much rougher than usual, I guess. Oh well, Mondays, you know?" Which is kind of Carpenter, I guess.

Ms. Spenser was not happy with this offering. I thought it was pretty funny, but I guess she didn't ask for a comedy. The acting was generally pretty bad - like a woman walks into a fight with a joke: "You guys don't know where the girl's room is, do you?" Except she delivered it like, "You idiots don't even know where the girl's room is, do you?", not the faux-innocent "Excuse me, do you know where the girl's room is?" Is bad acting Carpenterian?

In conclusion, the 80s/90s feel was Carpenterian. So was the cheesy synth score.

Where We're At

Since I just finished posting the last Netflix DVD that I got in the mail and returned, I thought I'd check in to say where I'm at and what's up with this blog.

First of all, the blog will go on (yay?). I will keep watching movies, streaming and DVD/blu-ray. I will get them from streaming services, from the library, I'll buy some new and used, and so forth. From now on, I'll link only to Lettrboxd, because it's more or less stable and widely used. Links to my local library or even Movies Unlimited aren't that useful, I would guess. Although, I thought that Netflix links would last, and they will all be broken soon. (Wonder if I could fix that algorithmically.)

I've already gotten a few of the "up to ten" DVDs from Netflix that I do not have to send back. When I get the rest, I'll do a post on that. I picked a mix of classics that I have always wanted to own and a couple of unseen movies that I hope will be classics. 

I feel like losing Netflix is going to disrupt my orderly and enjoyable film watching. I had a process, a queue, and 2-3 DVDs delivered each week that I had to watch. Now, it's a lawless dystopia, scrambling every week to find movies to watch catch-as-catch-can. But I have learned (when Star Trek, the Original Series went off the air) that nothing lasts forever, and one must learn to accept and move on. 

Well, this blog might last forever, but I may need to change the masthead. 

Fallen and Can't Get Up

This will be the last review of the last DVD sent by Netflix in normal order. I kind of wish it had been better, but it could have been worse. Fallen (1998) is a supernatural thriller starring Denzel Washington.

It starts with police detective Washington viewing the execution of a mad killer. The killer is pretty cheerful about it all, cracking jokes, muttering in an occult language, signing Time is on My Side (not well). We inferred that he was being executed for Failure to Shut Up.

Back at the precinct, Lt. Donald Sutherland assigns Washington and his partner John Goodman to a case that looks like a copycat version of the guy who got the chamber. The investigation leads Washington to Embeth Davidtz. Her father, a policeman, was accused of a similar set of crimes, leading him to go up to his cabin by a lake and kill himself. Washington investigates the cabin and finds the name Azazel painted on the wall, and a big occult book.

Between the book and Davidtz, he works out the premise of the movie: The demon Azazel is possessing people and doing murders. Azazel can pass from person to person by touch, but can't possess Washington - unless his carrier is dead, then he can, even wothout a touch. But in that case, the person must be within 500 feet or something. Got that? Of course, these rules are reliable and ironclad, because they are in a book.

Once he knows what's going on, Azazel comes out to taunt him. Someone bumps into Goodman, and he starts singing Time is on My Side. He then touches someone else in the room, and that guy starts singing. As Washington tries to confront him, the demon passes from person to person, out of the station, into the street and mingles with the crowd. This is legit scary.

From reading the rules and remembering the suicide at the isolated cabin, I'm sure you can figure out the conclusion. You have all the clues. 

This is kind of cheesy, kind of scary, but Washington moves through it was a level of grace and intelligence that really elevates it. His detective lives with his mentally slow adult brother and his nephew, and he shows them real love and strength. When the demon threatens them, that's when he decides to get real.

Still, I wish my last regular NEtflix DVD was more memorable. 

Hamlet the Viking

The Northman (2022) is the heavy intense movie we didn't watch on Friday, preferring something silly. It was as expected.

Director Dave Eggers sets the scene in an old Viking town, with young Amleth running around. His father, Ethan Hawke, has come home to a happy reception from his wife, Nicole Kidman. There is a big feast where we also meet his uncle, Claes Bang, who seems to have a bad temper, threatening the king's fool, Willem Dafoe. Later that night, Dafoe leads father and son in a ritual where they bark like the dogs they are. The ritual will make them men - and Amleth vows the avenge his father if he is killed.

But the next day, Bang and his men ambush Hawke, killing him and taking Kidman captive. Amleth witnesses this, and runs off.

The adult Amleth, Alexander Skarsgard, is a berserker fighting in the land of the Rus. His band is attacking a village, killing the men, raping the women, taking slaves. They heard the weak and elderly into a long house and set it on fire - pretty brutal stuff. After the battle, he runs into a priestess, Bjork, who sees his sooth and reminds him of his oath. So he joins the slaves being sent back to - who would have guessed it? His uncle Claes. 

In the ship, he meets Rus girl Anya Taylor Joy. They form an alliance to get revenge, each for their own reasons, on Bang. I feel here that she is pretty forgiving in regard to Skarsgard's pillaging, etc. I think that is the point though - they just thought differently about violence, honor and vengeange in those days. 

In the last act, Skarsgard and Joy, of course, wreak that vengeance. Their plot involves a magic sword for Skarsgard, magic mushrooms from Joy. And of course, big violence. 

So, obviously a great movie. The feeling of great historical accuracy, the clothes, the villages, the lore, seems to be earned - lots of scholars helped out. You could also feel how alien the people's norms and manners were. The magic and rituals (three or four, I think) were also very realistic, although Eggers says that the first one was pretty much made up. But it was also a great costume adventure, like Conan the Barbarian or The Vikings. The violence (physical and emotional) were pretty intense, but not as offputting as I feared. And it was fun teasing out the Hamlet references (Eggers and Shakespeare shared the same sources). 

You May Say I'm a Screamer

As I've said, sometimes, especially on a Friday night. we just want something stupid. Screamers: The Hunting (2009) really fit that bill. Roughly speaking, it's an Alien/Aliens pastiche, based on a Philip K. Dick short story (very loosely, I'd guess).

It starts a small band of survivors getting massacred by robot buzzsaws with metal tails. Then we move on to our group of seven or eight good-looking young space men and women coming out of hibernation. Then we get the exposition dump. This planet used be overpopulated, so they invented some robots to kill everyone who didn't have the proper tab (or tag? I'm a little fuzzy on all this, because I was riffing over the start). But they killed off everyone, and went extinct when they had killed off all targets. Now, our team is responding to a distress call. That never ends badly...

On the planet, they discover that the tabs don't work so well anymore. They also get attacked by the survivors. You see, the screamers (who usually look like buzzsaws with metal tails) have evolved to look like humans, and the survivors don't trust the newcomers. These encounters manage to kill at least a couple of the space team, in very gory ways.

They get a look at a screamer factory, which has sort of Alien egg hatchery vibes. Then they finally get together with the survivors, although the crazy girl still doesn't trust them. And they meet Lance Henriksen (Bishop from Aliens) who invented screamers, along with dad of cute girl from space team. You see, she went on this mission because her father was on the last one (I think this movie is a sequel) and suicided when returning. Henriksen tells her not to worry, there was probably a screamer on board that he want to make sure didn't get to Earth.

Blah blah, everyone dies except cute girl and head survivor, and they fall in love and go back to Earth. Guess what? No, go ahead and guess.

Mostly this movie is just standard low-budget SF. The main expense was gore effects, and if you enjoy a good decapitation, this might be worth your while. The Dickian aspects are fairly muted: The paranoid concept of robots masquerading as human sort of holds off until the last act, and is barely visible. The crazy girl is a sort of Dick stock character - she calls cool or amazing things "unreal" as a hint to her character. The mad scientist who is both lethally irresponsible and somehow sympathetic is another - Dr. Bloodmoney, for ex. But if you are looking for a work of philosophical art, skip it. 

In conclusion, Lance Henrikson isn't the only name actor involved. Steve Amell from Arrow is one of the space crew. I couldn't tell you which one. Fortunately for him, he blends right in.  

Slow Hand Clap

Yeah, I know he's an asshole, but I saw a little of Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010 (2010) (or something like it) in a bar once, and thought I'd get it for background music. I only watched the first hour or so, but it was pretty good. 

The first sections concentrated on slide guitar, which I tend to love. We got Robert Cray playing with Derek Trucks and Robert Randolph, with Hubert Sumlin setting the mood. Also, Sonny Landreth, Jimmy Vaughn, and Joe Bonamassa, in various combinations. As they moved out of slide, Keb, Mo, Stefan Grossman, Gary Clark Jr., and even John Mayer.

We also get Sheryl Crow doing a few. I have a joke, "I hate all the crow bands, you know, Counting Crows, Black Crows, Sheryl Crow" - I dined out on that one for years. And I don't like Sheryl Crow, but I heard her doing covers of Blind Faith and other classic rocker songs, and I have to admit, she's suited to it.

So around here I ran out of time and had to send the 2-disc set back to Netflix. So there's a lot here, and I like a lot of it. I didn't care about ZZ Top much, but have no complaints about them. Ans of course, Clapton has always been an asshole, but he's got pretty good taste in the blues. Worth watching. 

I Spy

Like I've said, I don't watch a lot of silent movies. I didn't even really notice that Spies (1928) was silent when I rented it. I just wanted to watch some Fritz Lang. As it turned out Ms. Spenser had a conference call, so I could watch this with the volume low, and she wouldn't have to leave the room. But it also turned put to be amazing. 

It starts out appropriately enough with some spy stuff. There's a stolen treaty, and a shady but good looking tramp. He gets taken to the commissioner, and, yep, he's a spy. Never mind that. What you want is the scene when a beautiful woman with a gun bursts into the room and faints in the tramp's arms.

The plot involves a Dr. Mabuse style criminal mastermind. No one who has seen his face lives to tell the tale. He's always scheming: He has suborned the woan with the gun - he threatens to tell society that she frequents opium dens. The visuals here are brief but baroque. The visuals all throughout, in fact, are striking, mad, and beautiful.

For example, the Japanese diplomat compromised by the loss of the treaty sees the ghosts of the operatives who died trying to deliver it and commits seppuku in an astounding sequence. Or look at the spy bureau set, criss-crossed with open stairways.

Or the final sequence, when a clown on stage does an act where he shoots at giant fleas with a revolver, before turning the gun on himself and dying before the whole audience. Is that a SPOILER?

Doesn't matter. I must admit I didn't follow the whole plot. It is over two hours long. But the visual inventiveness is just what they always say movies lost when sound came in. I'm not sure we've reached these levels yet.

I'm not sure I've mentioned the whole Netflix "ten last DVDs" plan. On the last day of DVD shipping, Sept. 29, they will take up to ten of the top DVDs from your queue, send them out, and not expect them back. I assume this will be based on what they have around, what they can get rid of otherwise, etc. But I'm putting this high on my queue. I would love to own it.

Train in Vain

Not sure why we queued up Last Train from Gun Hill (1959). Probably because it had Anthony Quinn in a lead role.

It starts horribly. An Indian woman (Ziva Rodann) and boy in a wagon pass two cowboys laying around drinking: Earl Holliman (last seen drinking in Forbidden Planet) and Brian Hutton. They grab Rodann and rip off her dress, but not before she gives Holliman a good lash on the face with a whip. The boy grabs on of the men's horses and rides for help.

He rides up to Marshall Kirk Douglas, and it turns out that he's his father. They ride back to find Rodann dead. But Douglas recognizes the saddle, and heads to Gun Hill. On his way, he meets a floozy, Carolyn Jones. She tries to make conversation, then tells him she knows whose saddle he's carrying. He says he knows too.

We meet Quinn, the big man in Gun Hill, running it with an iron fist. Holliman is his spoiled weak son, who claims that his horse and saddle were stolen outside a bar. When Douglas arrives, it turns out that he and Quinn are old friends - Quinn even saved his life once. Douglas plays it light. He returns the saddle, and when Quinn asks if he caught the horse thieves that took it, he just says he is working on it. When he mentions that one of the men should have a whip mark on his face, a look goes over Quinn's face. Douglas knows he's hiding something - and quickly determines that it's his son.

It all comes out - Douglas now knows that Holliman and a crony raped and killed his wife. Quinn begs Douglas not to take his boy, but Douglas says he'll take both back to stand trial - on the last train at 9:30.

How he'll do it, against Quinn and the whole town, is the rest of the movie. He only has Jones on his side, and even she is pretty ambivalent. She was Quinn's mistress, but doesn't like his selfish and bullying ways - or his devotion to his feckless son. 

Director John Sturges puts some real awesomeness into this movie. Aside from the operatic revenge plot and the iconic actors, there's some pretty cool scene setting. For instance, the last act is played out in front of a burning hotel at night. 

But it is a little tough to start off with the rape and murder of a native woman, and then devolve into a struggle between two male friends. Is this "fridging"?

For the Trees

I queued up The Forest (2016) because it's about Aokigahara Forest, Japan's famous suicide forest. We have actually driven through there, with some work colleagues. One explained the forest to us in a little speech in English that sounded like a memorized monologue: "This is Aokigahara Forest. Many people come here every year to kill themselves..." She repeated it a few times word-for-word, as a joke or party trick. That's about how seriously we took the forest.

This movie stars Natalie Dormer. She discovers that her troubled twin sister has gone into the suicide forest and has not returned for two days. The Japanese she talks to on the phone seem to be respecting her assumed desire to die. Her fiance, on the other hand, thinks she's just acting out, doing it for a goof. But Dormer heads to Japan to investigate. 

She has a number of bad dreams (fake-out scares) and creepy encounters in Japan. When she goes to the school where her sister taught English, the students freak out, because she looks like the teacher they thought was dead. When she goes to the forest and stays at the same hotel her sister stayed at, she is attacked by/bumps into a screaming hag/disoriented elderly woman. She asks about her sister at a ranger station, and the smiling clerk takes her to the underground morgue to check out the latest batch of recovered dead. (Her sister is not among them.)

But she also meets another America (Taylor Kinney) in the hotel bar. He asks if her knows her, and she thinks he might have met her sister. But it was just a line, he tells her, to get talking with a cute girl. When she tells him the story, he offers to take her into the forest with a guide. He's a journalist and would like to use her experience for a story.

So they head out, with guide Yukiyoshi Ozawa, who warns them sternly about getting lost. They find many creepy things, like threads leading into the woods that people left to help locate their corpses. They also run into at least one corpse. They also find tents - Ozawa says that people who bring tents are still thinking it over. Finally they find her sisters tent - but not her sister. 

Since it's getting dark, Ozawa and Kinney want to head back, and return in the morning. But Dormer insists on staying. Kinney reluctantly stay as well. Now we get to the horror part.

The myth is that evil spirits live in the forest and try to deceive you into killing yourself. Dormer meets a smiling schoolgirl who tells her not to trust Kinney. And he hasn't been exactly forthcoming - although his deception seems to be in aid of him getting to know a cute girl. But what if he did know her sister? What if he had something to do with her disappearance? What if he is actually holding her somewhere! 

This actually sounds a bit better than it probably is. The movie starts with a lot of jumbled time, mixing the twins youth (in an actually funny scene of the death of their parents), Dormer with her fiance and Dormer getting to Japan. This approach fades out in the forest, and what you get is a lot of jump scares fading into full hallucinated freakouts. Dormer's character is sort of odd - monomaniac in her belief that her twin is alive and in trouble, but also enjoying a little flirty time with Kinney, without a thought to her fiance at home. I only really liked her when she stupidly insists on staying in the forest overnight against all common sense. Shows backbone.

I guess I saw enough reviews going in not to expect much. Ms. Spenser was pretty disappointed. 

Hot Hot Hot

I've been weeding out our VHS collection - once hundreds of tapes, now down to a dozen or so rare or sentimental items. One that we never thought we'd be able to replace is Firesign Theater's Hot Shorts (1985). Turns out it's streaming free with an Amazon Prime subscription!

The basic premise is similar to What's Up. Tiger Lily. The Firesign boys took several old Republic serials and replaced the dialog. Take for example, the first one: The Mountie Catch Herpes. The original is a Mountie serial, The Dangers of the Canadian Mounted. The Firesign version is set in "Alcana: A thin town on the dotted line between Mexico and Israel." The plot involves getting a working girl out of the woods (where she might get ticks) and into a whorehouse. 

Another sci-fi serial becomes the tale of Martians trying to get Nixon's sperm into the nation's artificial insemination stream. In another, a Nazi jungle concentration camp becomes a Beverly Hills fat farm. And so on.

The jokes are funny and raunchy, but the best part is how well the premise fits the film. In the Butt Busters short, the French Resistance becomes the Non-Smoking Underground. Since the Nazis are always smoking and blowing smoke in their captives' faces, it works perfectly. (If you see any of the Smoke Stoppers smoking, it's always emphasized that it's a dooby, not a cigarette.)

Now, maybe this is a little immature, and some of the references are dated (The richest man in the world, E. Hunter Bunk, for ex). But we're pretty immature, and pretty dated as well. We were pretty happy with the chance to re-watch it.

There's even a Crash Corrigan Undersea Kingdom short - Mystery Science Theater does another episode of the same series. Their technique is different: They keep the dialog but add quips. But the feel is pretty similar. We watched that episode right after to check.

Journey to the Center

Like most Americans, we enjoy the occasional ridiculous disaster movie. But we'd never seen The Core (2003). That has been remedied.

It starts with a number of weird events: a random set of people in a small area suddenly die. All had pacemakers. Pigeons go mad and start flying into buildings and people. The space shuttle goes off course on landing, forcing co-pilot Hilary Swank to land in the LA river. The government recruits geophysicist Aaron Eckhart and weapons specialist Tcheky Karyo to find out why. Answer: The earth's core has stopped rotating, causing massive EMP and other magnetic anomalies. Yeah, sure.

They recruit Stanley Tucci, a "name: geophysicist and media hound, and Delroy Lindo, a materials scientist who has discovered an impervious metal, called unobtainium, and a rock-destroying ultrasonic laser system for burrowing. They add Swank and space pilot Bruce Greenwood to operate the under-earth craft. Alfre Woodard will act as (above) ground control, and DJ Qualls will be the hacker who keeps a lid on public panic. So - journey to the center of the earth!

The effects here are both awesome and laughable. They develop a magical through rock viewing technology, which is great in the cabin. for exterior shots, they use an effect that looks like a sort of lumpy orange air. It reminded me so much of Fantastic Voyage I expected to See Hilary Swank in a bikini. 

This is not our first Aaron Eckhart movie, but the first one where we really noticed him. He's kind of a big name in the bad-movie podcasts I listen to, and I can see why. He has just the right combination of bland good looks and ability to take this kind of crap seriously. The rest of the cast were seriously slumming it, maybe except Greenwood, who sort of fits the role of redshirt/first to die. 

All in all, a fun, absurd film. A bit too long (2 hours 15 minutes). We really wanted to watch Sunshine (where they had to restart the sun), but it wasn't easy to find. And in conclusion, the movie did not originate the term unobtainium (neither did Avatar), it's an old sci-fi trope.

Mid Midsummer

Here's a film version of my favorite Shakespeare that I hadn't seen yet: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999). This version has a bunch of late 90s names and a late 19th-century Italian setting.

You know the plot: Duke Theseus (David Straithairn) is marrying Queen Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau), but first must resolve a marriage issue: Demetrius (Christian Bale) wants to marry Hermia (Anna Friel), with her father's blessing, but she wants to marry Lysander (Dominic West). Meanwhile, Callista Flockhart as Helena wants Demetrius. When the king demands marriage or the nunnery, they plan to elope to the forest.

Meanwhile, a group of rude mechanicals are planning a play for the Duke's nuptials. The principal player - or overplayer - is Kevin Klein, ready to perform all the roles. And, as night falls, we meet the fairies: Rupert Everett as Oberon and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania - and Stanley Tucci as Puck.

The play goes as written - I felt like we were getting about 50% of the lines, about par for movie adaptations, or a little under. The setting is, of course, different, and the director (Michael Hoffman) makes a lot of the new-fangled invention, the bicycle, for some reason. There is also a ton of silent bits that depart from Shakey's script. These are usually low slapstick, like Hermia and Helena getting into a mud fight. I feel like this is true to the spirit of Shakespeare, so I'll allow it. Enjoyed it, actually. 

It's also interesting to see what, for example, Flockhart does with Shakespeare. Since Helena is a bit of a ditz, it works out OK. Everett cuts a rather Terence Stamp-like figure as Oberon. Kein is sort of the standout, doing a fine job as Bottom with the head of an ass. When Pfeiffer kisses him, and they look down to discover what other body parts have become donkey-like, it's a cute little bit. I feel like the Tooch was a little wasted as Puck. His style of humor seems too dry for the manic Robin Goodfellow. "What fools these mortals be," indeed.

The best scene is usually the brief, tedious play. Our favorite clown, Bill Irwin, plays the Wall, but I wish he had more to do. Of course, Sam Rockwell's Thisby finally brings tears to all eyes as the iron hour of midnight approaches. 

All in all, not the best Dream, but a fun one, with much joy and silliness. Lovely music as well, including Mendelssohn and some opera.

H-Squared

As Buddhists and fans (if not followers) of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, we were of course interested in Kundun (1997). Strangely, we are more or less neutral on its director Martin Scorcese.

It tells the story of the childhood, recognition, and eventual struggles with China of H-Squared, 14DL. It shows him as a child, son of a farming family, with an older brother who was a monk. He is shown to be a bit of a brat - demanding the seat at the head of the table. He knew his destiny? Or was just a kid? 

Then some wandering monks showed up and he greeted them as friends. Presented with some random objects, he identified those belonging to the previous incarnation. He is confirmed to be the Dalai Lama.

He is sent to Lhasa to grow up. Lonely at first, he makes friends with another monk. He grows up to be interested in gadgets as well as Buddhism, but as a young man, has to become a politician as well. When China threatens Tibet's independence, he tries everything he can, short of violence to stay free. In the end, he must flee to India.

The story is a good one, but not really the focus of the movies. For us, it seemed to be more about the spectacle - the beauty of Tibet (filmed in Morocco) and the pomp and ritual of Tibetan Buddhism. The Philip Glass score supports this - strange and enthralling music. The deep tenets of Buddhism were not so much in evidence, except in contrast to the materialistic (as in dialectic) of China.

So, perhaps not as successful as, say, Little Buddha (how can you beat Keanu Reeves as Prince Siddhartha?), but a pleasant watch, with some tension at the end. And it leaves you with the fervent wish that His Holiness will one day be able to return to Tibet, and that Tibet will be free to follow its own path.

The Plumber and the Professor

Cluny Brown (1946) is kind of strange. It was Ernst Lubitsch's last movie, It is a comedy of manners, but mainly an extended metaphor on plumbing as sex.

It starts with a London bore getting ready for a cocktail party - but his sink is backed up. When Charles Boyer shows up, he mistakes him for the plumber. But he is actually looking for a place to stay and possibly a handout. The actual plumber who shows up is Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones). She's a lovely daughter of a plumber who just loves working on pipes. Boyer makes her a few martinis, and has her purring like a Persian cat. Then her uncle and guardian (Billy Bevan) shows up, castigates the men for getting her drunk and demands that she learn "her place".

Later, at the cocktail party, we meet Lady Cream (Helen Walker), a fashionable young woman who "never goes to parties". She is being unsuccessfully courted by Peter Lawford and Reginald Gardiner. They stumble upon Boyer, napping in a bedroom, and recognize him as an anti-Nazi Czech author and professor. They profess their loyalty to him and offer to help him hide from his enemies (the setting is between the wars). 

Meanwhile, Jones' uncle has decided to place her in service so she can learn her place. She is sent to a rural mansion - but before she arrives, she meets C. Aubrey Smith, a wealthy resident who brings her to the mansion. Her employers mistake her for a guest, and treat her to tea and scones. When they discover that she is the new maid, they politely but firmly put her in her place and forget her. 

We discover that this is Peter Lawford's home, and these are his parents. He shows up to say that he is sending Boyer to stay with them, and rushes off. There will also be another houseguest, Walker. So we have all the characters in one big house. 

There are a few nice little set pieces here. In one, Boyer comes to Walker's bedroom to convince her that she should be nicer to Lawford. When he won't leave her room, she suspects he has other motives, and he wonders if she may be right. She finally has to scream to get him to leave. 

In another, Jones becomes attached to a local chemist, Richard Haydn. He is a nasal-voiced, self-important, narrow-minded provincial. At a small party, he introduces Jones to his mother, Una O'Connor, who only speaks in throat-clearing harrumphs. But when the drains start making noise, Jones can't resist going to fix them. This embarrasses Haydn and O'Connor, making it clear that Jones is an unsuitable match.

Most of this is plain old Lubitschian comedy - except for Cluny Brown. Jones is so strikingly beautiful, and she plays Brown as so full of life and love, that it almost tips the movie upside down. Her joy over plumbing, over martinis, over Haydn, is overwhelming. To see the love in her eyes at every little thing her chemist lover does, from filling a prescription to singing a sentimental song at the organ, is a little ridiculous. But it shows how much love she has in her heart, and also how hard she's trying to find her place. 

Of course, the rest of the movie is filled with comic servants, silly lovers, political youths and stuffy rich elders. It would have been fine without Jones. But she takes it to a whole other level.

In conclusion, Cluny's method of fixing plumbing is to whang on the pipes with a big spanner. With plumbing as a metaphor for sex, I don't know what that means.

Demon Haunted Film

Now that Netflix's DVD service is winding down, I'm looking for oddities that we haven't gotten around to. Like Ashura (2005).

It is set in old Edo. Demons are infesting the city, with a beautiful demon named Bizan behind it, trying to become manifest. The demons are opposed by the demon hunting squad. Against this background, we have Ichikawa Somegoro VII, a real-life kabuki actor playing a kabuki actor. He used to hunt demons, but almost killed a young girl (who turned out to be a demon?) and quit. He meets up with an acrobat and thief, Rie Miyazawa, and they begin a relationship. But she has a strange mark or brand on her shoulder - the sign of Bizan.

This sounds pretty promising, but there were some problems. The main one is that it looked remarkably cheap. It may have been shot digitally with early equipment, or perhaps it was just poor decisions. The effects were very primitive, but even the sets and costumes looked cheap. 

This is a shame, because 1. The premise was promising and 2. There's some good stuff here. For one thing, Ichikawa doing kabuki was fun. You got to see his aragoto style close up - the fierce expressions, crossed eyes, etc. The acrobatic/thief troupe had a few good moments as well. 

Final comment: I admit we fell asleep for parts of this - maybe what we missed would have redeemed it. Or maybe we didn't have our mind in the right place. We've enjoyed plenty of cheap-looking productions, usually because they were outrageous enough to win us over. But this just didn't click. 

Movie of the Year

We weren't sure we were going to watch 1917 (2019). We have skipped all the recent war films, and were prepared to skip this. I was intrigued by the One Cut style - the movie is edited to appear to be a single take. Then when Mr. Schprock invited us to watch with him, well, that settled it. 

It starts with two British soldiers in the trenches of France, ordered to report to a general. The general has a message to send to the front: The German retreat is a trap, and the planned attack must be called off. These two, George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, must walk ~20 km through the battlefield to deliver this message. 

I don't think I'll detail the story. It includes great bravery and random death, as well as moments of beauty, humor and stupidity. In the end, they didn't quite succeed, didn't quite fail. But it did have an angelic soldier singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger".

I do think I'll say a few words about the One Cut style: I thought it didn't quite succeed, definitely didn't fail. It could be completely immersive, but I had two problems. One is that you often found yourself following our actors, looking at the back of their heads. I mentioned tis in my post on Birdman: acting with your shoulders. 

The other is that the lens choice for some scenes seemed a little too fish-eyed. That caused some distortion at the edges of the screen that might not have been noticeable in a static shot, but the camera was in constant motion. It was very distracting to me. I wonder how the movie would have looked with more classic shots, with a stiller camera or more sedate tracking shots, with pans or whatever to tie them together.

Still, that's a different movie than the one Sam Mendes wanted to make. What he did make was a hell of an action movie and a technical achievement.

Somebody Fade Me!

We spent part of our recent vacation with our friend Mr. Schprock. We watched 1917 with him - I may or may not blog. But he did give us his extra copy of Guys and Dolls (1955) to take home. We put it on the day we got back but fell asleep due to jet lag. So we restarted it the next time we were well rested. It's a fave. 

I will not retail to you the plot of this famous musical, except to say that Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) bets Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) that he can't take Salvation Army girl Jean Simmons on a date to Havana. That, to us, is the least important part of the film. What, you ask, is the most important part?

We would respond, Stubby Kaye as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Stubby Kaye singing "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat". Vivian Blane singing "Adelaide's Lament". Sheldon Leonard playing Harry the Horse. The ensemble singing "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York". Sinatra singing "Sue Me". And all the grandiloquent, contraction-free Runyonesque dialog. 

I am afraid that I am not much of a Brando fan, and I do not see much chemistry between him and Simmons. So we like the first half of the movie more than the second (which might be why we dropped off watching it the first time around). But he does all right as the fabled Masterson. Sinatra I like better as Detroit, since he can easily play a skunk. But the smaller roles, the Big Jule, the Benny Southstreet, they are what does it for me. And you can take that to the bank. 

The Mist

We put Play Misty for Me (1971) on the queue as a potential horror watch, even though it's more of a stalker/slasher. We got around to it in the end, just to see what it's all about.

Clint Eastwood plays a mellow jazz DJ for a Carmel CA radio station. It's a regular night - a listener with a sexy voice calls in to ask him to "play Misty for me", as she often does. After his show, he stops into The Sardine Factory for a drink, served by director Don Siegel. He notices a cute girl at the other end of the bar, Jessica Walker. He and Siegel lure her into a conversation by playing a nonsense game of Fizbin, and he takes her home - and finds out that she's the caller who likes Misty.

Although they agreed that this is just for laughs, she shows up at his place the next morning with breakfast fixings. His black fellow DJ, James McEachin, gets to witness this - I only mention because - SPOILER - he doesn't get killed first.

So Walker stalks Eastwood, but always either backs off just about when he's at his limit, or just sexes him up. Meanwhile, Eastwood's old girlfriend, artist Donna Mills, is back in town. SPOILER - she doesn't get killed first either. 

But Walker keeps pushing - attempting suicide and later attacking (REDACTED - she doesn't get killed first either). So she's finally instituionalized. Eastwood gets to have sexy time with Mills to the tune of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. They even gets to go to the Monterey Jazz Fest and hear Johnny Otis and Cannonball Adderly. Frankly, once we saw how things were going, we only stayed for this scene - then figured we might as well watch the rest.

There first and only real kill is a hilarious, out-of-nowhere, boom and done. Nobody shows any situational awareness or instinct for self-preservation. It all ends in a very "Tom Stewart killed me!" kind of way. 

But I have to say, I liked this movie. Although the jazz is pretty mellow, the soundtrack is pleasant and the Jazz Fest scene is very cool. The setting of Carmel/Monterey was lovely. And some of Eastwood's shots, his long moving takes, close up of his craggy face cross-fading to Carmel's craggy landscape, and slow zooms to eyes, are quite artistic. And there's surprisingly little slashing, and when there is, the blood looks ridiculous (which we prefer to realistic violence).

In conclusion, for a movie made on the California coast, not enough mist.

In semi-related news, my sister recently watched The Sand Piper and thought it was trash. But it was filmed in Big Sur. Should we watch it just for that?

Take Me to the River

Back after our little vacation, I need to write a bit about The River (1951), which we watched before we left. But, after all this time, I don't have much to say, except that it was beautiful, sad and sweet. 

It is narrated by Patricia Walters. As a girl, say 14, she lived in India on the river with her upper class family - her father ran the jute factory. She had four younger sisters and a younger brother. She was friends with Adrienne Corri, an older (17?) girl from a slightly richer family. She lived next door to Arthur Shields, a trader whose Indian wife has died, leaving him to rise their mixed race daughter, Radha Burnier (20). 

Shields has a cousin from America, Thomas E. Breen. Breen has been in the War, and lost a leg. He is moody and handsome and all three girls are infatuated with him. Walters, the youngest, wants to share her dreams of being a writer with him, and tells a story of Indian peasants and gods. Corri, convinced that she is a worldly adult woman, flirts with him, sitting on his lap whenever she can. Breen indulges them in a friendly but distant way. He is more interested in Bernier, a beauty of a more appropriate age. But she is informally engaged to a wealthy Indian boy, who lovers her. This is important, because she is a bit of an outcaste, by the Indian and English societies. She shares her unhappiness with her lot with Breen as he shares his with her.

There are events like a Diwali dance, stolen kisses and an encounter with a cobra. In the end, Breen can't be satisfied to stay in India, and leaves, searching for peace. The three girls, each in their way, mourns his going.

The story flows and meanders like a river - except more in fits and starts. There are longish sections of jute being unloaded and processed, of Indian festivals and markets, and just life. Director Jean Renoir fills the movies with brilliant colors and Indian music. It's also a bit of a documentary on India in the 40s. But mostly a sweet coming-of-age story, from the novel by Rumer Godden.

(Un)Important Programming Note

 Ms. Spenser and I are going on a little vacation, so there will be no updates for a few weeks. When we get back, I may continue as usual, I may do some kind of overhaul, or I may abandon this entirely. After all, this is supposed to be a blog about my Netflix queue and cocktails, Netflix DVDs are going away (and streaming queues suck), and I'm all out of cocktails.

I do worry how this will affect all of my zero readers, but I have to be true to my (lack of) vision.

I will still be watching videos - on streaming (currently, we only subscribe to Amazon Prime), from the library, bought as physical media, or whatever comes along. But will I still be blogging? Could I just start doing Letterboxd reviews (I am going to try to export my Netflix History over there)? Any other suggestions?

Or maybe I'll just carry on. I enjoy reading my old posts, even if nobody else did. And I am closing in on 2000 posts - maybe I'll just coast on momentum.

Soap Opera

Duplicity (2009) was another more or less random choice - as Netflix DVD service winds down, the choice is collapsing - the Saved queue has disappeared, no new DVDs are showing up - so I am looking at my queue (107 movies long) and pulling out stuff I don't expect to seek out elsewhere. This looked like a sexy, tricky thriller starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Why not?

It starts at a party in Dubai. Owen tries to seduce Roberts, and she shuts him down, but they wind up in bed together. Then she drugs him and steals the secret documents he has hidden under the bed. Owen was MI6, Roberts CIA. 

Five years later, Owen is working private security, delivering a package. He spots Roberts on the street and chases her down. She claims she doesn't know him and they quarrel. Then he discovers that she is his partner on this one. She is disgusted - how could she be saddled with such a bad spy? But they do start to work together. 

The companies they are working for are soap and cosmetics firms. At first I thought - ooh, clever fronts. But no, they really are two soap manufacturers who are bitter rivals. Owen is handled by Duke (Denis O'Hare) whose boss is Dick (Paul Giamatti). Dick and Duke. Roberts is working for their rival - or is she?

Flashback to three years ago, it shows them meeting in Rome for the first time since Dubai (?). They do the same argument - she claims she doesn't know him, he claims they met in Dubai - word for word. And again they fall into bed. They don't trust each other, and that's what makes it so hot. 

I guess this is a real thriller, but when I found out they were working for soap companies, I realized that this is really a Rom-Com, disguised as a thriller. The high-tech espionage, appropriate for military secrets, applied to a new skin cream is what gave it away. Also, Paul Giamatti's goofy paranoid aggressiveness. 

So there are several more flashbacks, revealing more schemes and lies. Hope that's not a spoiler. It ends in one final stupid twist - I'm not sure whether the twists are supposed to be a strength of the movie, or silly scaffolding to hang the sexual tension on. Also, not sure the tension was as palpable as they thought it was, even with super-hot Roberts and Owen.

So, as far as I was concerned, not much of a thriller, not much of a rom-com. But it was kind of funny as a spy parody, and the leads were certainly pleasant enough. Ms. Spenser skipped this entirely, and I wouldn't blame you if you did too. But I kind of enjoyed it.