moon_custafer | Entries tagged with movies

I gather from anecdotes that part of Grey Gardens’ power as a documentary is that the same person, on different viewings, can feel wildly different reactions to the Beales and their intertwined and literally messy lives. Yesterday I watched it for the first time, and one of my reactions was curiosity about Jerry Torre, the young handyman Little Edie called the Marble Faun. I googled him and it turns out he’s still alive, and a stone-carver. As a teenager he really did look like the statue from the Hawthorne novel.

This morning Andrew had the last of his assessment video interviews with the CAMH doctor. Her advice: tweak his meds (comparatively easy, with her say-so); try and get him more social interaction (trickier), and psychotherapy (she’s going to get us a list of psychotherapists covered by OHIP, and with video sessions becoming the norm, this may be easier).

Afterwards I walked up to Bloor and Runnymede to do some grocery shopping, only to discover the area closed off and evacuated due to a bomb threat at the local TD bank branch. Had to walk back down and take a bus to the Sobey’s near the Humber Loop. Decided that after all that we deserved pre-cooked sweet-and-sour pork and lemon chicken from the deli there, which wasn’t superlative, but it was a meal I didn’t have to prepare.

Yesterday I continued my current David Lynch hyperfixation by rewatching Blue Velvet; it was only the second time I’ve seen it, and the first time was back in the ‘90s for a Cinema Studies course. One thing that struck me this time is that most recent takes I’ve seen on the “idyllic small town has a seamy underside” trope really overplay the initial “idyllic”impression, often to the point where it’s scarier than the eventual reveal— the manicured lawns and identical colour-coordinated houses owe more to gated suburbs and tv advertising than they do to Norman Rockwell.

Meanwhile Lynch and his crew, by the looks of it, go find real small towns and do location shoots without exaggerating or prettying things up. Those famous opening shots of “Lumberton” show a sunny neighbourhood, but also one that looks genuinely lived-in, and despite the soundtrack it’s very definitely the 1980s, not the 1950s— the school crossing guard is an older woman in a hi-vis vest; she, the kids, and the fireman waving from his engine are probably actual local locals hired as extras. As a result I kept having flashbacks to my late-childhood/early-teens memories of Sackville, New Brunswick and Amherst, Nova Scotia, which was likely not the intended effect, but then with Lynch you never know.

I also found a pdf online of what’s said to be the original script, which differs from the finished movie in giving a lot more backstory and explanation. I think Lynch was right to pare this down (we all know by now he’s more interested in the mystery and atmosphere than the explanations), but I was sorry he didn’t leave in this bit:

Jeffrey leaves and Aunt Barbara moves about tapping on the walls. She moves into a dark area and taps. Something falls. She reaches down.

In EXTREME CLOSEUP we see a termite walking by her shoe on the thick carpet. Then in EXTREME CLOSEUP we see Aunt Barbara's fingers pinch the termite and bring it up in front of her thick glasses for a look. She looks at the termite, then looks back at the walls.

and this:

The house is very dark and quiet. Jeffrey finds a note by the one table light is on.
The note is from his mother. It reads, "Jeffrey hope you enjoyed yourself. See you at breakfast. Love Mom." A postscript is written on the note by Aunt Barbara. "Jeffrey, honey, I found these. Love, Aunt Barbara."

Jeffrey sees that Aunt Barbara has left him two dead termites. He picks one up and studies it.

Again we see a huge CLOSEUP of a termite in the half-light. Jeffrey shakes his head in amusement.

because not only would it have fit in thematically, it would have made Aunt Barbara’s line “I could never do that. Eat a bug, I mean,” while looking at the robin even funnier and weirder. (As it is, it turns out my takeaway from the movie and its ending is basically “You CAN and SHOULD Eat Bugs” and I’ve been smiling at that.)

Felt a bit listless most of this week— not sure if it was the weather or if the past year is finally getting to me. I don’t feel too bad emotionally, just physically.

Continuing with the knitting and the fanfic-writing. Also the David Lynch movies— today I finally watched Inland Empire. I’d previously heard this one described as weird and incomprehensible even for Lynch, but until I saw it I could not truly comprehend that this movie is two hours and forty-five minutes long, and at least 60% of the run time is Laura Dern’s face making ‘WTF is going on?!!’ expressions, and actually, I can respect that.

...for sixty-seven minutes of The Mummy’s Hand (1940).

If one were to reboot the Mummy movies in the spirit of the 1999 version, you could do worse than adopt this one’s starting premise: our grad-student hero has the expert opinion of exactly one respected archeologist on his side, but the only financial backer he and his comic sidekick are able to find is stage-magician The Great Solvani, so naturally the old vaudevillian and his beautiful daughter/assistant Marta come along on the expedition as well. Imagine the fun a remake could have with Solvani and Marta using their sleight-of-hand or escapology skills in the course of the movie’s adventures. You could also use a streetwise Marta* as the cisswapped version of Rick in the 1999 Mummy, with archeologist Steve as the adorable nerd. Steve’s sidekick “Babe” is annoying in the way of 1940s comedy relief, but not unfixably so. His love interest is an eight-inch-tall windup doll he calls “Poopsie.”

The mummy Kharis is powered by tanna leaves and can only move around by the light of the full moon, which adds a quasi-werewolf theme to the story that a modern screenwriter might be able to link up to the location being called “The Tomb of the Seven Jackals.” He’s controlled by Prof. Andoheb, secretly the high priest of Karnak, who’s supposed to just use him to destroy trespassers who find the tomb, but who oversteps the bounds of his duties as soon as he gets a look at Marta.

As noted above, the movie’s only a little over an hour long, so you’d need to build a second half — making Kharis harder to kill and giving him some characterization would be a good start. I hadn’t watched this one in years and had forgotten the plot, so I spent the last fifteen minutes waiting for Kharis to turn on Andoheb the moment he realizes the latter is less interested in guarding Princess Ananka’s tomb than he is in kidnapping American stage performers and obtaining immortality, and there you go— at least twenty-five-per-cent more plot you could throw into your remake.

*1940 Marta starts off strong, pulling a pistol on the men she thinks have swindled her father, until they manage to prove they really are archeologists; but unfortunately she gets shoved into the damsel-in-distress role once they’re out in the desert.

This morning Andrew found 1970s tv adaptations of Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Dain Curse (1978) on Tubi or someplace. The former was pretty good, although fairly substantial changes had been made from the Chandler novel, which disappointed me a little, as I’ve always liked the chaos of the original plot. Robert Mitchum’s always fun to watch, although slightly too old to be Marlowe in this story; Harry Dean Stanton by contrast is about sixty years younger than I’m used to seeing him; Charlotte Rampling does a good pseudo-Bacall and Jack O'Halloran (Zog’s cohort in Superman and Superman II) is quite affecting.

The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn, had good acting and production values, but about halfway through I began wondering if I was particularly stupid today or if the plot was particularly hard to follow. A few more scenes and it was clear that the dialogue was referencing major events we hadn’t seen happen, which is when Andrew checked IMDb and confirmed that this had originally been a six-hour mini-series, and the version we were watching was three hours, seven minutes.

It wasn’t just that half the footage had been dropped — I think the abridged version kept all the scenes in which a character spends several days detoxing from morphine, unless that sequence was even longer in the original; and while it was interesting to see the recovery process handled somewhat realistically instead of being skimmed over, that was a part of the plot that the re-editing could have afforded to shorten.

Instead, going by what I could infer from the courtroom scene at the end, they cut out the whole middle section of the story, including a marriage, a kidnapping and at least three or four murders — I’m still not sure whose blood was on the knife the heroine was found, and I think one of the victims was a character we never even met in this cut. Also the big villain reveal, and a subsequent further bombshell that might partly explain the motive, may have been foreshadowed in the original broadcast but they come out of absolutely nowhere here. We spent the courtroom scene yelling what?!

If you’ve ever thought “Man, I’d kill for a feature-length film that’s just ninety-year-old Harry Dean Stanton wandering around, smoking, and having philosophical conversations with people about mortality,” I just watched Lucky (2017) and it delivers on that like gangbusters.

Spoilers, cw — if you’re worried, nobody dies during the course of the movie, although there are mentions of animal death, civilian deaths in wartime, etc. Also Lucky’s language sometimes includes slurs, though his heart generally seems to be in the right place, and if you’re prone to seizures from flickering lights, close your eyes when he starts to look at the flashing “12:00” on the clock on his coffee-maker.

Finally gave in and rented this on Apple iTunes. It’s one hour and thirty-eight minutes of everything you could ask for in a low-budget ‘80s Sci-Fi/Action thriller, including:

Car chases
gunfights
gross SFX
a rockin’ soundtrack which occasionally turns out to come from something within the diegetic frame
Claudia Christian in red thigh-high boots and a gold cowboy-fringe jacket
lots of mid-‘eighties LA location shooting
a post-Blue Velvet pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan
Chekov’s flamethrower
a minor character spooning cocaine from a tiny die cast model of a Ferrari
Chekov’s presidential candidate
an extremely good performance by an animal actor
a split-second appearance by Danny Trejo that made me exclaim “It’s Danny Trejo!”
a slightly ambiguous ending

I learnt about this movie because Kyle Mclachlan mentioned it in an interview. I sort of got the impression he may feel about it the way Shea Whigham feels about Wristcutters: A Love Story (which I also need to see)— one of those films that aren’t well-known but the people involved consider it some of their best work.

Well this is just neat: a 2018 documentary on several hundred silent films excavated in Dawson City in 1978, and how they’d ended up buried there, which involves recounting the history of Dawson City and the history of movie-distribution, and also the flammability of celluloid. ETA: trailer here

This, meanwhile, is worrying: a cyber-attack on the health agency that runs the hospitals in the west end of Montreal. During a pandemic.

Absolute mad lad Rene Magritte, his wife Georgette and some friends in a Surrealist home movie

Absolute mad lad David Lynch interrogates a torch-singing monkey

A few weeks back I heard John Cooper Clarke’s “Post War Glamour Girl” on radiooooo.com, and I’ve been listening to it ever since. Something about the Lancashire accent makes it feel like an R-rated version of “Albert and the Lion” or “Sam Goes to It.”

Yesterday I looked up the lyrics, and googling the opening words “Expresso (sic) Bongo” revealed this as the title of a 1959 film directed by Val Guest and starring Cliff Richard, which I’ve now watched on YouTube.

Apparently even several years before The Beatles became famous, the British music industry’s search for home-grown teen rock idols was already heated enough to prompt this sharp musical satire in which a never-lucky, ever-hopeful agent (Laurence Harvey) discovers a handsome kid (Richard) playing bongos in a Soho coffee shop. Cynical hijinks ensue.

Everybody’s accent, but especially Harvey (born Zvi Mosheh Skikne in Lithuania, according to Wikipedia)’s slides around fascinatingly depending on the situation or whether they’re singing the usually-brief musical numbers or speaking ad the speed of Hollywood Pre-code comedy. Sylvia Syms is adorable as the agent’s long-suffering girlfriend desperate to be a British Judy Garland (The first line we hear her say once she’s off the burlesque stage is “How’d you like my new voice?”). Yolanda Donland is oddly touching as an aging American star desperate to hitch her wagon to Richard’s “Bongo Herbert” but also, I think genuinely fond of the innocently heartless youth. I know everyone for decades has assumed Richards to be closeted, and I’ve no idea what his orientation is in real life, but here he really comes across as a beautiful young man who much to everyone’s confusion is genuinely aroace. Meier Tzelniker is a record-producer with an ulcer, who really wishes classical music were still where it’s at but knows which side his bread is buttered. I think Bert Kwok is a teenage passerby in the opening credits sequence.

The other day on Tumblr I reblogged this Australian mental-health PSA that at least some viewers found way more sexy than it was probably intended.

This week, people on Tumblr keep:

1. Seeing this movie poster,

2. Watching the trailer for the movie it’s supposed to advertise,

3. Coming back and looking at the poster again, and

4. Declaring their disappointment that they’d thought someone had finally filmed an erotic Regency romance, only for it to turn out on closer examination to be a contemporary horror/psychological thriller.

(There are now at least four fics on AO3 that specify they’re for the poster, not the movie)

Somebody’s enough of a fan of Night Ride/Night Walk (1980s Global TV late-night filler show that consisted entirely of downtown-Toronto street footage scored with smooth jazz, like a noir film without characters or plot) that they’ve not only created a YouTube channel, they’ve been making their own new episodes.

Brief fanfic for Night Nurse (1931): Take Me for a Ride

The True Story Behind Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Her Mixed-up Files About the author, her kids, the Met and a disputed Leonardo. Also shows a clip from the 1970s movie with Ingrid Berman.

Dreamcast ideas for an Arsenic and Old Lace remake:

Mortimer Brewster: Chris Hemsworth-- he's the contemporary Cary Grant, in that he's got that "I'm so handsome I have to play it for laughs" thing going on.

Elaine Harper: ? It’s a thankless but crucial role

Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha: ?? (I almost want to go with Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon)

Teddy: ? (Jack Black is way too obvious)

Cousin Jonathan: Michael Shannon

Dr. Einstein: Doug Jones, out of makeup

Yesterday I watched Laura (1944), which you’d think I would have done before now, since I’ve been aware of the film for decades, and it has Vincent Price in it.

I notice most descriptions call it “a film noir classic.” I don’t think it’s film noir. For one thing, if it were (spoilers ahoy),( Read more... )

Sometimes I wish I were selfish and amoral, because that seems to be what gets rewarded, but I don’t even know where to begin. That’s not humblebragging about how moral I am— I just don’t know how to switch off the part of my brain that always feels worried and guilty. I wonder, if I were to deliberately commit really minor crimes, say, shoplifting one single grape each time I went grocery shopping, I could build up a bit of brazenness?

I admit the paragraph above is sort of hypocritical, in that I don’t really have any qualms about watching pirated media. I suppose this is partly because doing so feels less like taking a physical object, or plagiarizing somebody’s work, and more like looking over somebody’s shoulder at the magazine they’re reading (especially when it’s one of the many movies where I don’t want to watch the whole thing, I want to fast-forward to see the one supporting-cast member I like get their ≤60 seconds of screen time*). The other part is that these days I almost feel less guilty about watching a bit-torrent site than subscribing to Amazon Prime or Disney Plus.

* Seriously, I already paid my dues back in the ‘nineties, tracking down, renting and sitting through tepid 1960s feature-films to see Buster Keaton in two scenes.

Because for some reason, I began wondering what’s going on with César in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari? He’s described as a “somnambulist,” but he appears to be a catatonic – Cagliari has to spoon-feed him when he’s not on stage or out committing murders at his master’s bidding. I suppose the idea is that the doctor put him in a trance and has kept him in that state for months or years, but how did he come by his subject in the first place? If César was one of his patients, he must have been brought to him for some medical reason.

Which is why I spent a couple of hours looking up stuff on the sleeping-sickness pandemic. I always associated it with the early ‘twenties, but apparently it began to be show up around 1917, so it predates/coexists with the ‘flu? (which is part of the reason they now doubt a cause-and-effect association, like I’d always heard). The Fading Trail of the Sleepy Wraith includes Caligari in its chapter on literary and film portrayals of Encephalitis Lethargica, but by the time I read that I wasn’t sure it was so simple— even if EL was known to neurologists, I’m not sure it had mainstream coverage by 1919. However, there’d been a outbreak of some similar illness (“the Nona”) in 1890s Italy, which passed into semi-legend in subsequent decades; and () suggests that possibly sparked by this, turn-of-the-century sideshows exhibited “sleeping beauties,” beautiful, ostensibly comatose women, sometime in glass cases. César seems to me to fit into this tradition.

(unfinished because cats demand attention)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758910/

https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc7121633

Alternately, a 1919 audience might perhaps have read César as a shell-shock victim, though there’s nothing military about the character’s appearance or manner, only, perhaps, his name.

Watched online. After Midnight Special and The Shape of Water, this was another movie co-starring Michael Shannon, this time with Shea Whigham, and seems to have been pitched as “Shannon and Whigham glare suspiciously at each other for two hours,” which is not quite the case— there’s more suspicion (Shannon) and conscience-stricken anxiety (Whigham) than open glaring.

Whigham plays “the Man,” a fugitive who kills a preacher travelling to his new assignment in the tiny West Texas town of Bevel, then takes his identity. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the starting premise. Shannon is the local police chief who thinks the new preacher is a bit weird, but who doesn’t really pay any attention until a hastily-hidden body turns up in the titular quarry. They’re both great, in a very low-key way, and so are the rest of the cast, especially Catalina Sandino Moreno as the new preacher’s landlady who is sleeping with the police chief and is also the cousin of the two drug-dealing brothers (Bobby Soto and Alvaro Martinez) whom the chief thinks did the murder (Bevel is a really small town).

It was the ending that dissatisfied me; thinking it over, my objection is that the chief disappears from the narrative about ten minutes from the end, and is conspicuously absent while everyone else’s story gets wrapped up. Not that his story has to be— in a movie so unabashedly laden with symbolism, I think it’s possible to go for a metaphysical reading in which Bevel is some kind of weird Purgatory where the chief remains trapped while the other characters, one way or another, eventually depart— but I’d still like a definitive final scene of him reacting to the events that have happened.

So, 8/10: great cast, beautifully shot, but didn’t stick the landing for me. YMMV, of course.

I keep seeing people point out on Tumblr that Shape of Water and all versions of Hairspray take place in 1962 Baltimore and could potentially crossover, so tonight I watched the 2007 musical adaptation of Hairspray. Which also parallels Shape of Water in that it was shot in Toronto; I kept recognizing locations, primarily Lord Lansdowne Junior and Senior Public School.

Stray thoughts (spoilery)—

( Read more... )

This morning I finally watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was wonderful. I don’t think I’ve watched any other Wes Anderson — his style struck me as somewhat like Kubrick but funnier (except when it’s not). Googled Stefan Zweig afterwards; should probably try reading some of his works.

Other movies I hope to getting around to viewing while I’ve got the time:
The Shape of Water, Yellowbrickroad, Knives Out, Fast Color, Annihilation.

Andrew’s back has been bothering him worse than usual, so he asked me to get us a new shower-head that’s supposed to provide more pressure. Purchased it by phone from Canadian Tire then went downtown for curbside pickup. Lineup was maybe forty minutes, which was actually slightly better than I’d feared— I kept worrying that when I reached the corner of the building and turned I’d see the line continuing to the end of the block and doubling back, or that I’d discover the line was actually for Best Buy and have to begin again at the back of another line; but there was the door at the corner and they had my purchase ready. Went up to the Bloor line and got groceries on the way home. Also shawarma, but I got mixed up and forgot to say “no” when asked if I wanted hot sauce. Managed to eat my first half of the wrap anyway (I usually end up saving the rest for the next meal).

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Stuff and Moonshine

Entries tagged with movies

Grey Gardens

Tuesday Report

Weekend Update

Took a Break from the News

1970s TV (some spoilers for Chandler and Hammet adaptations)

Is realism a thing?

The Hidden (1987) (mild spoilers but not the one every other review gives)

Devil's Night

Couple O’ Links

Expresso Bongo

What a Girl Wants, Apparently

Links Round-up

Spitballing

The Face In the Misty Light

Confession

So Naturally, I’m Researching Early 20th-century Epidemics

The Quarry (2020)

Quarantine Movie-watching

Annihilation (2018)

Friday Update