Gently Down the Stream

Ophelia (2018) was another library impulse. I didn't expect we'd get around to watching it, but Ms. Spenser wanted me to put it on (because she had to work and didn't want something on that would distract her). It is basically a retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia's viewpoint. 

It starts with Ophelia floating in a lily pond, mimicking the John Everett Millais painting that was on all of our dorm room walls in the Pre-Raphaelite 70s. In voice over, Daisy Ridley lets you know that you may think you know the story, but she wants to tell it her way.

It starts with motherless child Ophelia running around wild in Elsinore, but her father Laertes gets her a post as lady-in-waiting for Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts), to the disgust of the other ladies. She meets Hamlet, and they start getting close, but he has to go back to school. Then the king gets killed, by Claudius (Clive Owen) etc., etc.

The main difference between this and Shakespeare's version (aside from the dialog being modern or a modern paraphrase of Shakespeare)  is the addition of a witch (also played by Naomi Watts). She supplies Gertrude with stay-young potions (or dope, it's hard to tell), and also the poison that killed the king. But she also has one of those looks-like-you're-dead potions. Ophelia takes that and goes swimming, which explains how the movie continues after she should be dead. 

I have to say, I enjoyed this, but mainly for the sumptuous look - beautiful people in fancy clothes in classy castles is hard to beat. So as not to disturb Ms. Spenser, I kept the sound down low, so I missed a lot of the dialog. I don't think that was a problem. 

Wally World

Here's another Well Go special: Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024). We saw the preview in front of another movie, and it looked fine, so I gave it a spin (you probably guessed that Ms. Spenser worked through it).

It stars Raymond Lam, a poor refugee from the mainland in 1980s Hong Kong. He has a fight in an underground fight club to earn money for an ID card. When he wins, he goes to triad boss Sammo Hung. Hunng invites him to join the triad, but he just wants the money. When Hung cons him, he grabs a duffel bag from Hung's HQ and takes off, goons in pursuit. He ducks into the Kowloon Walled City, outside Hung's jurisdiction. 

The Walled City was a real place - a square block where police wouldn't go, or building inspectors, or pretty much anyone who isn't crooked. It's claustrophobic and crazy, with walls, floors and roofs built and demolished any which way. But Lam finds the people there are kind, willing to give him a meal and a job. He also finds that the duffel bag is just drugs, not money like he'd hoped. 

He meets the informal ruler of the Walled City, Louis Koo. He's a barber, a martial arts master, a criminal and a benevolent dictator. When he fights Lam, he knocks him to the floor, kicks him into the air around head height, then socks him across the room. 

Here's the odd thing about the movie. Parts are modern one-man-army fights, sort of like John Wick. Some are over the top comic style wirework fights. One character has spirit powers, so his skin can't be pierces. Then there's a scene where a pimp beats his drug addicted woman, and is later beaten by the rest of the gang for beating a woman. And that second part is played for laughs. 

The movie definitely has some great fights, in several different levels of realism. It also has a lot of well-known faces (although Sammo Hung is the only one I could have named). But the real star of the show is the setting, the chaotic, dystopian, but somehow cozy Kowloon Walled City. It reminded me of the best parts of the 2012 Total Recall - a very, very lived-in universal city. 

Withers with a Glance

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we'd gotten a bunch of DVDs from Movies Unlimited. Another part of our haul is the Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection. A long time ago, when I was taping (VHS) any old movie from cable, I saw Penguin Pool Murder (1932), and I got real excited when I saw this collection of all six in the series in the catalog. 

Miss Withers is Depression-era New York school teacher, spinster, and amateur sleuth from a mystery series by Stuart Palmer. Her Lestrade is Inspector Oscar Piper, a grumpy, cigar-chewing bachelor and homicide detective.  

Penguin Pool Murders is probably the best, because it includes Miss Withers' school kids. She is played by Edna May Oliver in this and the next two movies. She is taking her class to the New York Aquarium, where they discover a freshly murdered corpse in the penguin pool. Part of the reason I like this is that it shows Miss Withers with her kids, including adorable black and Jewish stereotypes. Anyway, the mystery involves a crooked stock broker (at the start of the Depression), his cheating wife, the boyfriend, a friendly shyster, and a mute purse thief called Chicago Lew.

Oliver plays Withers perfectly. She has necessary plain horse face and the astringent manner necessary to banter with Inspector Piper. Piper is played here, and in all six, by James Gleason (Max Corkle in Here Comes Mr. Jordan). Piper is a short, balding, cigar chewing guy in a bowler hat, so he fits perfectly. The best part is his relationship with Miss Withers. She is a snoop, of course, and loves to solve mysteries - and she lets the Piper know when she thinks the police aren't up to the job. He, of course, resents her interfering in official matters, but doesn't dismiss her help. He's known to say, "That ain't a bad idea, at that," to some of her suggestions. Although he does slip up and say "I solved," when he means, "We".

He even proposes marriage in the last scene, and we see them rushing off the marriage bureau. This is ignored in the next movie, but handled in the books. On the way to get the license, Piper got called into a crime scene, and they just sort of dropped the idea. They are both secretly happy - too set in their ways to change now.

The next two movies are set in Miss Withers' school and Catalina Island. For the fourth, we lose Oliver, and Helen Broderick takes over as Withers. She's a little softer, and even a bit more romantic than Oliver. The final two use ZaSu Pitts, who is a bit more comical, almost dizzy. Neither make a great Hildegarde Withers, but are great to watch anyway.

The movies all have some snappy back and forth between Oscar and Hildegarde, mostly right out of the books (which I also love). The rest of the characters are so typical of the Thirties RKO movies: clever and naive cuties, shady boyfriends, shysters with skinny mustaches, and colorful petty crooks. There's even a couple of cameos for Willie Best, credited as "Sleep 'n' Eat" in one case.

If you like this kind of thing, I'm going to recommend that you dig up the books or the movies and enjiy. 

Attack of the Bikini Ghost

In our quest to watch the worst of the Beach Party movies (that is, all of them), we watched The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). I guess we figured it used the same green-screen bikini gag as How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, so why not?

It starts with a framing story (added in post). Boris Karloff arises from a coffin, to be told by the much younger Susan Hart that:

1. He's dead.
2. He's not going to heaven unless he can do a good deed in 24 hours. But he can't leave the tomb, so Hart must do the work for him. 

They decide that his good deed will be to make sure that his lawyer, Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone) doesn't steal the inheritance, but lets the rightful heirs (people Karloff had cheated while he was alive) get what's coming to them.

The will will be read at midnight, and anyone not present forfeits their share. Rathbone brings in some henchmen to make sure everyone clears out: Jesse White as J. Sinister Hulk, Benny Rubin as the Indian that Buster Keaton usually plays, and his girlfriend, Bobby Shaw. 

The heirs are Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley, two teens destined to become closer, and Patsy Kelly, an older woman who is "with it". In fact, she invites her son, Goo Goo (Aron Kincaid) and a bus full of teen partiers, to hang out at Karloff's spooky mansion. One of the kids in Nancy Sinatra, in. love with Goo Goo. Also, the Bobby Fuller Four is there to give her a backing band. 

Hart shows up now and then as a green-screened presence in a bikini that shows the background through it. She does some kind of mischief that would have happened anyway and doesn't affect much, becasue, like I said, post-production. Since Rathbone's henchmen aren't doing a very good job scaring off anyone, they call in Eric von Zipper and the Rats. 

OK, most of this is just a shitty version of the regular Beach Party movies: Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley as cut-rate Frankie and Annette, Sinatra and Bobby Fuller Four doing less than their best, Buster Keaton missing for the racist comic character. Karloff shoehorned in any old how. BUT! When everyone is gettingready for bed, Kincaid puts on a striped nightshirt. If you've seen the MST3K version of Attack of the Eye Creatures, you remember one of the greasy drifters wearing similar bedwear. So we had a couple of good snickers at that. Then he opens a closet, and out jumps - an Eye Creature! 

So now it's our favorite. 

Squibb, No Squibs

We hadn't heard a bad word about Thelma (2024). Besides, Beekeeper but the old lady does the vengeance sounded like it couldn't miss.

Ninety-three year old theater veteran June Squibb plays Thelma, an independent grandmother living alone in LA. She lives on her own, but her slacker grandson, Fred Hechinger, visits to help out, especially with her computer. One day, she gets a panicked phone call, seemingly from Hechinger, saying he got into an accident and needs money. She is talked into sending $15,000 in cash to an LA address. 

When it turns out that Hechinger is fine, him, Squibb's daughter Parker Posie and her husband Clark Gregg get together with Squibb and advise her to forget it, and worry about whether she needs to be in care.

But she doesn't take their advice, and sets out to track down her money. She doesn't drive, so she starts out walking. She tries calling some friends, but they all are dead. She has lost track of everyone. But she does remember her dead husband's friend Richard Roundtree. He lives in an assisted living facility, and is very happy there - the lunchroom does a nice fruit tray, and he is acting as Daddy Warbucks in their presentation of Annie. He is also very proud of his mobility scooter. 

Which Squibb steals. With him on the back, they are soon tootling through the sleazier side of LA.

When they finds the scammers, it turns out to be Malcolm McDowell and grandson. Her vengeance on them is actually not so terrible. She does hold a gun on them and threaten to cut off McDowell's oxygen assist. She also tells him he's a terrible liar and could never be an actor. And she leaves him $500 just to be nice. 

She also needs her grandson's help to get the money back, because it's in a computer banking system. And so she admits she needs help from others, including Roundtree. And everyone goes to see his Daddy Warbucks.

The movie is directed and written by Josh Margolin in his first feature. He based it on his own grandmother, Thelma, who almost was scammed the same way. The movie has some well observed and played bits about the life of the very senior, especially with Squibb and Roundtree being the central characters. It was also Roundtree's final film, and he died before it was released.

But I'm afraid we were only mildly amused. It had plenty of laughs, but it was far less off the wall than Beekeeper, for ex. Of course, that's not what they were going for, and it would be pretty silly if they did. But, hey, like Tom Cruise, Squibb did all her own stunts for this.

Odd Bell

I have been sort of shortchanging Ms. Spenser on horror, so I thought I'd make an effort. Then I just grabbed Oddity (2024) off the shelf at the library. But it worked out.

We start with Carolyn Bracken, renovating a magnificent little antique stables. She finds one corner with cell phne bars and says, "We're connected!" (I missed the phone, and thought it was a philosophical comment. I was part right.) She talks to her husband, Gwilym Lee, a rather cold doctor at a mental institution, telling him she'll be there all night. She has a tent set up in the middle of an empty space.

A pounding comes at the door - she sees a horrible face with a milky eye through the peephole. He says he has seen a man come in, and tells her she is in trouble. He begs her to let her in, but she refuses, so he says he will run to find help. Shortly after this, she is murdered horribly in her tent.

Some time later, Lee has a new girlfriend, Caroline Menton, who doesn't much like staying at the stables. She asks him to invite his murdered wife's twin sister for a visit, as a gesture. He visits her at her odd curio shop. She is played by Carolyn Bracken again, a blind woman. She tells him that all the items in her shop are cursed in some way. He gives her the milky glass eye that belonged to the madman who presumably murdered her sister, said madman having been horribly killed at the institution.

She arrives with a house-warming gift, a kind of mummy mannequin, a life-sized wooden man. She also brings them a haunted call bell - ringing it brings a ghost bellboy. She explains that she can read the past of items like this through psychometry (don't think she actually says psychometry). After Lee leaves for his night shift at the institution, his girlfriend is stuck with Bracken. She seems inclined to stay, and everyone is too polite to outright kick her out. After awkwardness turns to terror, Menton wisely takes off.

Then Lee manages to kill Bracken remotely.

There's so much great about this movie. First, the stables - I'd live there, no matter how haunted. Then the game of wits between blind, beautiful Bracken and cold, calculating Lee. The comedy of manners when Bracken comes to visit and won't leave is cute, then gets very scary. The cursed objects are a little cheesy - the big wooden man was more WTF than OMG. The haunted bell seems almost silly. So, beauty, a little comedy, some twists, and a lot of scares. Ms. Spenser liked it. 

Bordering on Insanity

I went into Borderlands (2024) with no more knowledge than that Cate Blanchett was in it. I sort of expected it to be about urban fairies (I guess that's a different borderland). I also knew that it was universally hated, but that didn't deter me.

After an infodump about a planet and MacGuffin, we find soldier Kevin Hart on a space station, rescuing/kidnapping cute little girl Ariana Greenblatt. On the way out of the station, they pick up Florian Munteanu, a "psycho" - violent nutcases endemic to the planet below.

Across the galaxy, bounty hunter Cate Blanchett is in a nice bar with her living captive, getting a celebratory drink. When a man with a couple of gunmen approach her, she kills them quickly, not interested in their pitch. But galactic zillionaire Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) finally gets through to her. He wants her to go and rescue his little girl, Greenblatt, and will pay a lot. Since Blanchett was born on that particular shithole, it will take a lot to get her to go back.

On planet, she meets up with a small robot with a tough shell, and a dumb demeanor. This is Claptrap, played by Jack Black, but sounding exactly like Patton Oswald. Oh well, a lot of people sound like Patton Oswald these days.

When they find Greenblatt, it turns out that she was not kidnapped, but ran away, because her father had nefarious plans for her. So Blanchett, robot, Hart and Munteau now must battle their way to the MacGuffin. They also pick up a scientist, Jamie Lee Curtis, who was Blanchett's mother. They did not part on good terms. 

Oh, and Greenblatt is no maiden in distress. She loves blowing things up, and has a bunch of explosive teddy bears for people she doesn't like.

It's important to realize that this is an action comedy - even though Kevin Hart actually plays it straight. In the first scene, Hart appears in a storm-trooper helmet, breathing like Darth Vader -then taking it off and complaining about the lack of airholes. We get trope after trope: the planet's landscape is mostly modeled after Vasquez Rocks from the original Star Trek series. There are even sci-fi vans in some of the scenes. You've probably seen a lot of these in 1980s cheapo sci-fi: ordinary vans with some doodads and paint to look futuristic. For some people, this is tired and cliched. For me, this is fun.

In the end, it was just watching Blanchett being a gunslinging badass. I kind of expected her to be a side character, but she was front and center the whole time. She does really well - sort of like Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. OK, Blanchett is a much better actor, and Jolie's act hasn't aged well. But remember the thrill when it first came out?

One note - I'm not sure how much of the body acting was actually Blanchett and how much was stunt motion capture/CGI. Not just the action either: There's a scene where she stands hipshot with a hand on the hip that is so extreme, so comicbooky, that it must be faked. If not, kudos to Ms. Blanchett. 

Mask of the Devil

We start the New Year off right with a couple of noir or noir adjacent movies that I ordered last year from Movies Unlimited: Alias Nick Beal (1949) and Mask of Dimitrios (1944). I've had my eye out for these on streaming platforms, etc, but finally decided to get the physical media into my life.

Alias Nick Beal features Ray Milland as a gangster/fixer/tempter, who is literally the devil. Full name is probably Nicodemus Bealzebub. It stars Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy) as an honest DA who'd sell his soul to convict mob boss Fred Clark. As soon as he says this, out of nowhere, Ray Milland. He invites Mitchell to a low waterfront bar, where he hands him the books to Clark's criminal enterprise - the books that the bookkeeper was sure that he had burned.

Mitchell's coup leads his friends and other civic leaders to run him for governor. Milland picks up a tramp played by Audrey Totter and sets her up as a campaign donor and volunteer. She wants to play it like a sexpot (but classy), but Milland coaches her to be a prim society type - all the more alluring when she "falls" for Mitchell.

When Mitchell wins, Milland expects him to appoint some crooks to government positions - or to go to the Isle of Lost Souls if he forfeits. I won't tell how it comes out, but George MacReady is involved - and he's not a crook this time.

Mask of Dimitrios is based on a novel by Eric Ambler. It features Peter Lorre as a Dutch (?) detective novelists. At a party in Istanbul, be meets a Turkish policeman who tells him about this criminal, Dimitrios Makropoulos. He has been trying to catch him for years, but now he has been found, dead, washed up in a beach. Of course, no one knew what he looked like, but this corpse had his jacket and ID papers, so the case was closed. 

Lorre was interested in the man's story, and started tracing him back. We see much of this in flashbacks, with Zachary Scott as Dimitrios, In Smyrna, Dimitrios was a poor fig packer (or a fig packer's mate) who killed a money lender and let a friend take the rap. Next we hear the story of Faye Emerson, who took him in when he was starving and fleeing the police. When she sees him next, he's dressed in flashy clothes, and pays her back for the meal. In the end, he steals from her and takes off again.

As Lorre follows Dimitrios' trail across Europe, he meets up with Sydney Greenstreet, a shady character with an interest in Dimitrios. He doesn't believe in Dimitrios' death, and tries to rope Lorre into a scheme to somehow make half a million francs. 

Of course, they do eventually find Dimitrios.

Alias had a great premise - skip the metaphor, go right to horror/fantasy - and a great villain in Ray Milland. He was handsome, slick and cold as ice. The main character, Mitchell, was a bit cliched maybe, a bit to naive. I also could have done with more of Audrey Totter. She didn't really have much effect on the plot, and sort of disappeared in the last act. When she was onscreen, she was great, playing multiple roles. 

The best part of Mask might have been the simple pairing of Lorre and Greenstreet. Scott made a good villain as well, although Ms. Spenser thought he should have been played by Lee van Kleef. Like Milland, he had a way of suddenly appearing when you least wanted him to. A good double bill.

I'll let you in on the rest of our Movies Unlimited haul when we've finished them.

Happy (?) 2025!

Happy New Year - plus a few days. We took our time getting going this year.

I considered skipping this year. I was never planning to do Year End pieces; I think they are lame. But then I did one, and it took on a life of its own. Or at least I didn't stop. But I'm still missing the old reliable Netflix DVDs in the mail system, and it shows. I posted about 95 movies in 2024, down from a normal 100-150. Of course, I might have skipped a few because they were not notable, but it's mostly down to lack of a system. We're just not watching quite as much as we used to.

As far as new movies go, we watched 18 movies made in 2024. That may even be a few more than some years. That included the latest sequel/series entries, like Dune 2 and Furiosa, and lesser entries like Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire. I'm going to rate Deadpool & Wolverine as our favorite of the batch. It wasn't exactly fresh and new, but it was diverting and funny as hell.

There were also plenty of oddball indie and otherwise new pics on our screen. I'll give Abigail the prize as our fave one-off. But I want to note Jonah Ray Rodrigues' Destroy All Neighbors - a low budget, gross-out horror movie about the dangers of prog-rock.

The oddest of the oddballs was probably This is Me ... Now, J-Lo's surrealistic auto-biopic. I kind of liked it. 

We also watched our share of new action movies. I'm going to nominate two Ryan Gosling movies as worst and best. Worst was The Gray Man (watched late in 2023, I guess - oh well), a very bland and stale movie. Best was Fall Guy, also not especially fresh, but it just hit the spot. Maybe it was the drugged fight sequences, maybe it was just my mood. 

We didn't watch as much horror as usual this year. For one thing, Ms. Spenser, our household's horror hound, was busy in Oct, so we didn't have the Halloween month we usually do. But we did make our own double bill of Ghostwatch and Late Night with the Devil. These are two movies with roughly the same theme - a TV show investigates a haunting, and things get too, too real. Late Night made us solid fans of David Dastmalchian. 

For number one watch of the year, I'm going with another double bill: White Noise and Asteroid City. I liked Asteroid best, but seeing both in succession really worked for me. 

On the cocktail front, I've been trying to drink down my collection. It's tricky, because some ingredients go together - you need to drink Singapore Slings to get rid of Benedictine and cherry brandy, so you need to buy gin... So I'm also trying out odd combinations. On returning home after seeing the family over New Year's, I made an odd drink. I call it the Forest Fizz:

1/2 oz Zerbenz stone pine liqueur
1/2 oz St. Germaine elder flower liqueur
Flute of prosecco

The Zerbenz is really good with the fizz. I've had the bottle since at least 2007, and there's still enough left for a few drinks. 

The first movie of our year was the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts. It's out of copyright this year! And as always, the best movie of the year, nay, all time, is Bringing Up Baby.