Old and Dark

The Old Dark House (1932) was sort of leftover from Halloween. Since we've seen it more that once, we didn't prioritize. But, since it is very good, we got around to it.

It was a dark and stormy night. Raymond Massey, his wife Gloria Stuart, and their friend Melvyn Douglas are lost in the wilds of England, in a leaky car. They find an old dark house and take shelter. They are met at the door by a creepy butler - a mute Boris Karloff, with a beard and scarred face. The master of the house, Ernest Thesiger, lets them know that he is dangerous when he drinks. Thesiger is the nervous twittery type.

His sister, Eva Moore, is the fiery religious type, who condemns everyone as sinners, and lets them all know they can stay until morning, but "no beds!" These two, and their 100-year-old father, in bed in the attic, are the unfortunately named Femms. 

While they are sharing a meager and unappetizing dinner of potatoes and some kind of meat, two more uninvited guests arrive: Scottish entrepreneur Charles Laughton and his chorus girl companion, Lilian Bond. This completes the set, unless there is someone hidden behind that locked door that Thesiger seems so afraid of...

There is a little something for everyone here, but our favorite is Laughton. He's a successful man, who's living large, but really just mourning the wife he lost. His chorus girl confides to Douglas that he never tried "anything." You know what she means by anything? I've seen this discussed as gay-coding for Laughton, who, like director James Whale (and Thesiger and maybe Karloff, too) was gay. But also he is just a man dealing with his sorrow the best he can. 

Douglas is a bit that way as well - damaged in the war (WWI), he leads a frivolous life, since nothing really matters. At least until he finds out that Bond isn't really Laughton's girl.

All of this is full of Whale's beautiful black-and-white direction. There are some sweet scenes, like Bond dancing to cast a great shadow on the wall. There are also scenes full of tension and even mayhem, although this isn't much of a horror movie. 

We enjoyed it so much that the next night we watched The Suspect (1944), which I had purchased but not watched. Charles Laughton played a mild, kindly tobacconist in 1902 London. His wife, Rosalind Ivan, is a shrieking shrew, who even drives their grown son out of the house by destroying the research he had been doing for his law firm. Laughton meets up with Ella Raines, who is looking for work. He takes her out for dinner, helps her find a job, generally has a good time with her. But he doesn't tell her that he is married. 

When Ivan continues to nag Laughton and refuses to get a divorce, she turns up dead - an accident on the stairs, Scotland Yard determines. But what if, asks Inspector Stanley Ridges, someone, like her husband, tripped her? He finds out that Laughton had been seeing a younger woman. But Laughton lets him know that she could not testify against him - they had just been married.

So Laughton is now happy with a beautiful young wife - and Raines is radiant here, as always. But their drunken rotter of a neighbor Henry Danielle unsubtly starts blackmailing Laughton, well, what if he winds up dead? No one will feel bad about it. 

I had sort of expected Laughton to be sexless again, with a platonic friendship with Raines misconstrued. They actually only strongly hint that he murdered his wife, so I kept up that expectation for a while. But that wasn't the story. Still, Laughton isn't a villain here, truly, and there's a nice twist at the end.  

True Lies

Speaking of visually beautiful films: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). Ms. Spenser wasn't very interested in this one, so I watched it myself - except for the axlotls.

It starts with a desert, seen from above. We see the shadow of someone jumping, almost flying over the landscape. This made me think of the first scene in 8 1/2. The next scene is in a hospital. Griselda Siciliani is giving birth to her child with journalist/director Daniel Gimenez Cacho. But the doctor indicates that the baby didn't want to come out, so they put it back into Siciliani. This becomes Cacho sitting on an LA Metro train, holding a bag of axolotls. Ms. Spenser had a pet axolotl for a while, so I called her over for this. But the bag breaks, flooding the train, as Cacho begins swimming...

Yes, it starts with a dream. But the rest of the movie is filled with dreams and apparitions. Although a member of the Mexican intelligentsia, he has been living in LA, and is about to win a major prize - the first Mexican to win this prize. He is both proud of the work he is doing, and a little ashamed of going to the US to follow fame. 

He and his wife are also still grieving the death of a child - the child who decided to back into the womb (or the Bardo). So the symbolism is largely around his struggle with success, the state of Mexican/American relations, and his family trauma. He doesn't seem to struggle with infidelity or woman troubles at all. So that breaks the parallels with 8 1/2.

However, it ends with a kind of Dance of Death, with a jaunty circus tune. So, back in Fellini territory.

It was a lot of fun watching the surreal scenes of this movie, even when there is a serious emotional background. But I have to say, the axolotls were the best. Native to Mexico, these are neotenous amphibians - they never convert from water to air breathing. They always seem to be smiling, and they have sort of feathery antennae, which are external gills. They are very cute. All in all, the movie needed more axolotls.

Yep

Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) is a little different from his previous horror features. It's a little looser, and more... cinematic, I guess.

It starts a mysterious scene of a TV set full of bloody corpses, and a chimpanzee. But never mind that for now. It really starts on a ranch in the LA hills - Agua Dulce, it turns out. There is a neat, Victorian-style farmhouse, and a paddock where Keith David is running a horse through its paces while Daniel Kaluuya looks on. Something that seems to be hail kicks up, knocking David off his horse. He is rushed to the hospital, where he dies. He had been struck in the head with a high-velocity nickel. The "hail" had been small random metal objects.

Kaluuya keeps working. He takes a horse to a TV set - David's family business is wrangling horses for TV and movies. Kaluuya doesn't seem very good about the part of business that includes the show-biz patter, making rich white people comfortable. But his sister Keke Palmer shows up, and she has a much better line of BS. Unfortunately, someone spooks the horse, and they are let go - the show decides to go with CGI.

To keep the business going, Kaluuya has been selling horses to Steven Yeun, who has a little Wild West theme park near their ranch. Yeun was a child star in a western called Kid Sheriff. But he was also the only survivor of the sit-com from the start of the movie. The chimp who was the "star" got spooked and killed everyone else on the set. Yeun sort of takes pride in this, with a little museum room of mementos of the massacre. Oh, he's traumatized, but is still happy get status and money for it. 

One night, back at the ranch, Kaluuya and Palmer witness electrical disturbances, fleeing horses, mysterious wind storms, and, faintly, a UFO among the clouds. Palmer immediately starts planning to capture it on film to gain fame and fortune. So the next day they go to Fry's Electronics (RIP) and buy a major security system. The nerdy yet aggressive sales tech, Brandon Perea, makes sure can go out to do the installation - I think he just likes Palmer. 

The first attempt to film the UFO fails because of the electrical issues. So Palmer tries to get famed cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michale Wincott) out to capture it. He refuses, until he finds out that everyone at Yeun's park has mysteriously disappeared. Now they just need a plan. And Kaluuya has figured out that the UFO is not a machine, but an animal, a predator. And you can't train predators (see the chimp, and as Wincott says, "Just ask Sigfried and Roy").

The plan turns out to be a pretty good one, involving dozens of those flappy inflatable tube guys. It does get a little hazy here, with people running around, trying to get footage on a mechanical movie camera, and not get eaten. But it's a great third act, but the rest of the movie has less action, less of Poole's social commentary (although there's plenty of that), and more just awe of nature. There are many scenes of the landscape of Agua Dulce canyon, and the clouds overhead. We're looking for a cloud that doesn't move like the rest - but we're seeing a beautiful canyon. Note that Agua Dulce is the location of Vasquez Rocks, those tilted rocks where Kirk fought the Gorn. There are also some beautiful night shots (day-for-night using some interesting infrared techniques) of clouds and glimpses of the UFO.

There's also Yeun as a grown up child star, dealing with the trauma of his youth and life of mid-level fame. There's Perea, a hipster/slacker who gets totally into the hunt for the UFO, and hopes to get into the life of Palmer and maybe Kaluuya too. But especially Kaluuya. 

Kaluuya plays a real cowboy type, quiet and strong, but shy in society. Palmer can be pushy, gossipy, outrageous, but Kaluuya mostly seems to want to melt away. He maybe isn't confident like his dad was, or maybe that's just how it seems now that he's the "man of the family". I noticed his relation to the horses - he doesn't treat them like family or friends, but also not like products or resources. They are their own thing - maybe partners. (Or maybe Kaluuya himself doesn't really bond with horses, so there's a coolness.)

I've been aware of black cowboys since I learned about the Bronze Buckaroo and Oscar Micheaux's early black cinema. Also, Pam Grier has been twittering about her horses for a while now. It didn't start with "Old Town Road". It won't end with Nope.

Three Thousand Years of Beauty

Although Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) is the latest film from the director of Mad Max: Fury Road, We were expecting something more like Only Lovers Left Alive, partly because they both sounded lushly romantic, partly because they both co-starred Tilda Swinton.

Swinton plays a narratologist, a scholar who goes to conventions to talk about story. This one takes place in Istanbul. Even in the airport, a small bald man in a flamboyant coat tries to grab her luggage (but no one else sees him). Then, when she is trying to deliver her address, a strange, tall man (?) in fancy ecclesiastical garb in the audience keeps distracting her. She confesses to a college that she sometimes sees apparitions, hallucinations of supernatural beings. But she chalks it up to an over-active imagination.

She picks up a a bottle in a quaint old antiquities shop, and what do you think it contains? A djinn, of course, played by Idris Elba. He starts out enormous, filling the hotel suite, radiating heat and speaking Homeric Greek, the only language he shares with Swinton. But he quickly absorbs the internet and all of TV. He shrinks down to human size and starts talking English. And he must grant Swinton three wishes if he is to be truly free.

But Swinton studies stories for a living, and she knows what dangers a wish can bring. So she refuses to wish - even accuses Elba of being a trickster. So he tells her of the three or four times that he was imprisoned in a bottle. These stories, told in flashback, make up the bulk of the movie. The first goes back to Solomon and Sheba, and so on. I won't get into these except to say that they are lush and romantic, and sometimes silly. In one, the Sultan is a big, dumb baby-man who is kept locked in a harem with a dozen or so fat naked women. It's funny, but also beautiful - like a Goya, Rubens or Caravaggio animated.

Hearing these stories lets Swinton choose her first wish - that the djinn fall in love with her. She has been a solitary type, and her great love was an imaginary boy from high school. But now she has a great love, a powerful supernatural being. And it doesn't much change her life: she goes to work in the morning and comes home to her magical lover. But will he be able to stand up to modern life?

AS I've said, this movie is full of inventive, beautiful visuals. Now, I did feel a little like George Miller is not the best in the biz at this - some of the shots struck me as just a bit less than the best. There's a shot showing the blue glass bottle in orange tissue paper, folded almost like a bird of paradise flower. It's lovely, but possibly a bit flat. The movie has some action sequences that maybe suited him better. But I would never complain - if it isn't all perfect, it is all very good. And both Ms. Spenser and I asked, why can't all movies be so beautiful? Why can't they all be full of intelligent, interesting people talking about deep issues? Why aren't lush romantic visuals the default? 

I also liked Swinton's character, who is a solitary, unmarried (divorced) woman who dedicates her life to scholarship, but she is not a bitter or regretful old maid. She knows what she wants, and she has it in abundance. Why would she wish for anything else? The wishes must be her heart's desire, and maybe she already has that. I put this down to the original story, written by A.S. Byatt - who I haven't read for some reason, although she does look like my kind of thing. 

In conclusion, beautiful, engrossing, fresh, with two beautiful lead actors. Why doesn't everybody do this?

Pining Away

The best Pinocchio (2022) of 2022 is clearly the stop-motion one by Guillermo del Toro - we'll never know if the Tom Hanks one is any good. We're just not watching it.

In this telling, Geppetto (Dave Bradley) is a toy maker and sculptor in Italy ca. WWI. He has a devoted, obedient son, played by Gregory Mann. When the boy is killed by Allied bombers, Geppetto goes off the rails. After years of grieving, in a drunken fit he cuts the pine tree over his son's grave and tries to carve it into a new son. It is pretty much a botch when he collapses, but a good fairy (Tilda Swinton) with four wings covered in eyes like a biblically accurate angel, brings him to life and names him Pinocchio.

By the way, this story is narrated by the somewhat grandiloquent and learned cricket, Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor), who lived in a knothole in the pine. His home is now in Pinocchio's body. The fairy tasks him with looking after Pinocchio, which he is somewhat reluctant to do.  

This Pinocchio is not the obedient son that Geppetto once had. He's rambunctious and troublesome, smashing Geppetto's workshop out of sheer good spirits and the joy of being alive. Geppetto is horrified, and tries to lock him away, but Pinocchio follows him to church. The townsfolk are appalled by this monster, and the children bully him. Local Fascist leader Ron Perlman and his bully son, Finn Wolfhard, are the main instigators.

So when puppeteer and impresario Christoph Waltz recruits him for the show, Pinocchio is glad to go along. (It turns out the real talent and puppeteer is evil monkey Spazzatura, played by Cate Blanchett.) However, he is run over by a truck and dies - temporarily. Because he is not a real boy, he can't die, and Death lets him know he will be returned to earth every time he dies - but with a longer and longer time away each time. 

Meanwhile, Geppetto and Cricket have been searching for Pinocchio, and wind up inside a sea monster. Pinocchio can't rescue them, because he made fun of il Duce in the show, and got killed again.

There's a lot going on, visually and thematically in this movie. The stop-motion animation can be lovely and Pinocchio's character design is wacky and fun. Most everyone else is more grounded. I guess that emphasizes the more outrageous designs (see Spazzatura), but maybe reduces the fun a little. The themes of grief and parenthood, obedience and self-expression, the real and the immortal are interesting, but I thought the best part was Pinocchio's joy. He approached everything with an air of "Oh X, I love X, what is an X?" Whatever it is, he loves it and wants to live it. A good way for both puppets and real boys to live

Kicker

Believe it or not, I'd never seen Kick-Ass (2010). I missed a lot of the early 2000s teen comedies (never saw Super Bad, for instance). Also, I'm not much of a fan of Nic Cage. But Ms. Spenser wanted to see how Chloe Grace Moretz did as a kid actor.

It stars Aaron Johnson in the title role. He's an average loser high school boy - not strong, talented, or even the funny one in his friend group. But he decides to buy a costume and fight crime as Kick-Ass. He philosophically wonders why nobody ever does this. Later in the movie, the bad guy answers this question, "They'd get killed in a day, tops."

Anyway, he gets involved in a gang fight, which is widely caught on cell phone. Although he wins a moral victory, he also gets beaten badly, and then hit by a car. But when he recovers, he finds that most of his bones have been reinforced with metal and he has lost some of the nerve endings required to feel pain.

Meanwhile, Nic Cage is getting ready to shoot his 12-year-old daughter, Chloe Grace Moretz in the chest. This is to accustom her to getting shot wearing a bulletproof vest. He has been training her to be a killing machine to get revenge on the mobster who killed her mother. 

The mobster (Mark Strong) has a son, a Richy Rich type spoiled kid played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. When Strong wants to eliminate Kick-Ass as being bad for business, Mintz-Plasse decides to pretend to become another crime fighter, Red Mist, and befriend him.

Speaking of befriending, the girl of his dreams, Lindsy Fonseca, decides to befriend Johnson - but it's because she thinks he's gay, and she likes that in a guy. Although it's a bit degrading, it does let him hang out with her, so he plays along.

So there's your basic set up, although I guess I just could have said Johnson is a geek playin superhero, while Nic Cage and little Chloe are the real thing. It's pretty funny, in that early 2000's high school loser comedy way. Chloe Grace Moretz was a lot of fun to watch - her foul mouth wasn't as cute as they maybe thought, but her skills with a butterfly knife are sweet. So is her bouncy enthusiasm for mayhem. 

Desperate People

Here's an oldy - we might have seen this when it came out: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). It was a request from Ms. Spenser (though I don't remember why), but I sure didn't mind.

It stars Rosenna Arquette as the quietly bored wife of a successful Connecticut hot tub salesman. One of her outlets is reading the personal ads, and imagining the lives of the lovers who post in them. One she sees every now and then is "Desperately Seeking Susan", signed Jim with the address of a rendezvous.

It also stars Madonna, as a free spirited party girl. We meet her in a hotel room, rifling the belongings of a passed out paramour, snagging a pair of Egyptian earrings. She then heads into New York and posts her own personal ad, replying to Jim. (Easter egg - the personals clerk is No Wave guitarist Arto Lindsay.)

Through a cute set of events, Arquette goes to spy on the meeting, then winds up in Madonna's signature jacket. Jim (a scuzzy looking Robert Joy) has a gig and asks his friend Dez (Aidan Quinn - not scuzzy looking at all) to watch over Susan, who he's never met - he'll recognize her by her jacket. Then Arquette loses her memory.

So Arquette starts living Madonna's life with Quinn thinking she's an untrustworthy maneater. Meanwhile, her husband, his sister, and their dentist (Stephen Wright) are searching for her. Will she go back to her boring but safe life? Will she fall in lover with Quinn? And what about the creepy guy (Richard Hell) who is following her? 

All this is fun, but the movie is also full of New York demimonde semi-stars, like Lindsay, Wright and Richard Hell. Rockets Redglare plays a cabbie. John Lurie plays sax in the apartment across the way, and his co-star from Stranger Than Paradise, Richard Edson, offers Madonna a paper. These and a bunch more I didn't recognize, bring a nice punk energy that supports Madonna beautifully. Makes you think she could almost act. Arquette definitely can act, and is as sweet and yearning as you could want.

Should I watch any other of director Susan Seidelman's movies? Smithereen looks squalid and depressing, and I haven't heard much about any of the others.

First of the New Year

 Happy New Year, all! We are back from the usual visit-to-family holiday adventures. It was a fun trip, and we streamed a few movies (Glass Onion and Amsterdam - see prev post, as well as a few I won't bother blogging. On our last day, my sister tested Covid+, so that was a bit of a scare. But we tested and continue to test as negative as our attitude, so yay!

We got back to rain and storms in California, which we quite enjoy as long as we can stay dry. As usual, we started the year off with some Marx Bros. and Three Stooges, and finally, at long last, a New Year's post.

In some ways, 2022 was a lot like 2021 for our Netflix watching. We are doing a bit of streaming and finding it to be a bit sub-optimal. I can't quite explain what it is about streaming hits - it seems they are both lowest denominator bland, and also too indulgent of the director. The self-indulgence should result in flawed but interesting movies, not bland ones. Amsterdam was a fine example - it managed to be quirky and oddly paced, while still being boring (except the core performances, which had a lot of charm. Is that enough?).

On the other hand, we saw some very good streamers, like Bullet Train. OK, maybe that was a little lightweight, but real fun. It might be our favorite action-comedy movie of the year, although that might be recency bias.

I (because Ms. Spenser wasn't interested) watched a fair number of woman-led action movies last year, and so many were not good, I feel like swearing off them. But I know I won't keep that promise. Worst? Maybe The 355. For best, can I say Everything Everywhere All At Once? It does star Michelle Yeoh.

We had another year where I struggled to get good horror for Ms. Spenser. For best, I nominate Werewolves Within, even though Ms. Spenser wasn't entirely sold on it. It was a fun little horror-comedy with a good message about magic pixy dreamgirls.

It wasn't a big year for superhero movies, but we did see some good ones - lots of multiverse stuff from Spidey and Dr. Strange. I loved that they got horror goofball Sam Raimi to do Dr. Strange. I also loved the idea of having Chloe Zhao do Eternals, even though the results were not what I had hoped. 

It looks like we saw ~17 2022 movies in 2022, some on disc, some on streaming, none in the theater. This is the same as last year, and about the same portion of good, bad, and just acceptable. I didn't blog a lot about older movies, because I either bought the discs to own or watched them on Amazon Prime. The ones on Prime are fun - I usually start with The Kennel Murder Case and follow the "People also watched" suggestions to find something new. For a while, I was getting suggestions for all Old Dark House mystery-comedies, and every one had something racially offensive. Interesting trend? Maybe not, since I unironically love Mantan Morland, Willie Best, and the like.

OK, best movie of 2022 is still Bringing Up Baby, and we still haven't rewatched. I might just need to buy a copy.

For TV, we watched most of the first batch of Marvel shows, and especially enjoyed WandaVision and Loki. We'll watch some more soon. But we really enjoyed The Great British Baking Show - but we've watched all the eps and have to wait while they make more.

For cocktails, I will just say: Licor 43 (quarenta e tres). It's made with 43 herbs, but mostly vanilla. It goes great in coffee - called carajillo or barraquito. I drank many bottles last year, and will want to slow down in 2023. 

All that remains is to wish you all a happy, healthy, and wonderful new year. May it be batter than the last one.