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Something for Thursday (Mitzi Gaynor edition)

Actress and singer Mitzi Gaynor has died. She was 93, and she was one of the very last remaining stars with ties to the great era of the Hollywood movie musical. Her biggest role was likely South Pacific, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein classic (which I may have never actually seen all the way through, it’s not lodged in my memory all that well at all), which is set in–of course!–the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.

This particular song is the one from that show which I know best, though I am abashed to admit that it’s not because of the song but because a teevee commercial for a hair care product used the theme as the basis for its jingle: “I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!” It was some years before I learned the truth.

Here is Mitzi Gaynor singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” from South Pacific.

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Something for Thursday

The Buffalo AKG Museum right now has an exhibit dedicated to “Op Art”. The museum describes the exhibit thusly:

In the 1960s, electronic media began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Unlike static paintings or sculptures, video and digital images are dynamic and interactive, made of abstract patterns of information that are manipulated, stored, and shared as electronic signals or numerical bits of data.

At the very same moment, an emerging movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) took art and popular culture by storm. Op artists use abstract patterns to create optical illusions that are dynamic and interactive, much like the electronic images of the time. Could it be more than coincidental that the curves of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest pixilated digital pictures? In fact, Op art emerged at the same time as video and digital art, and many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, just as many pioneering video and digital artists turned to Op art for inspiration.

I walked through this exhibit the other day, and it was absolutely fascinating, not just for the art itself, but because it is in many ways representative of the popular art that was culturally prominent when I was a kid. A lot of this stuff was like a time capsule. I already plan to return to that exhibit again. (I took a bunch of photos, but I haven’t edited any of them yet.)

One item was a film by John Whitney Sr. called Matrix III. This was projected on a large screen that was overhanging one of the exhibit rooms. It’s an abstract animation of geometic figures moving around a confined area. Whitney is viewed as one of the pioneers of computer animation, and I have to admit a certain nostalgic feeling for the days of early computer animation, when realism wasn’t even a goal and the whole mechanistic nature of the art was what made it art in the first place.

If you’re local, I strongly recommend this exhibit! It runs until January 27.

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Nobody talks about poor Pippet

We just watched JAWS last weekend, which is always a delight, so this sequence–the attack at the beach that makes everyone aware that a shark has taken up residence in the waters off Amity Island–is fresh on my mind. I’ve always loved the almost impressionistic nature of the shot of Alex Kintner’s actual demise, as someone on the shore might have seen it–just a glimpse of something big, caught from the corner of the eye in half a second. Apparently the sequence was originally intended to be more than that, though. This YouTuber went down the rabbit hole:

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Something for Thursday

Completing my small survey of music from the films of James Cameron, we have a short suite from the score to Avatar, written by James Horner. I like this score a lot, for its suggestion of an alien world that is still deeply beautiful, and the tie the people of that world feel to their surroundings. The film often gets ripped for being “derivative”, but I don’t know…I tend to think most films are “derivative”, and what they bring to the table in terms of creativity is how they blend all of their influences into something new and interesting. That’s how I see it, anyway.

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Something for Thursday

Continuing our little series here of music from the films of James Cameron, who earlier this year turned 70, we have the big one.

Titanic.

Wow, this movie is nearing 30 years old. I remember when it was dominating popular culture, totally and utterly. In 1997 Titanic was just huge. It’s hard to overstate just how big a phenomenon it was. Musically, it was carried by a stunning ballad sung by Celine Dion, one of the biggest hits of my entire life; but there was also its score, which sold a huge number of records all by itself. This was one of the few times a movie was so big that its composer actually entered the zeitgeist–in fact, when had the last one of those been? Probably Star Wars, twenty years earlier, with John Williams. Anyway, Titanic made James Horner a huge name.

Horner had already been a big name in film music for years prior to that. The man paid his dues, first with scoring low-budget Roger Corman flicks before he started getting bigger assignments; his first big break was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for which he turned in a classic score. My own relationship with Horner’s music was always complicated, but credit where due: A number of my personal desert-island filmscores that I love dearly are by James Horner.

For Titanic he turned in a surprisingly folk-tinged score, eschewing obvious approaches like a nautical sound or some kind of Edwardian-Elgarian sound. While I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Titanic score, I do think it’s very, very good, and concert performances of suites from this score abound. Here is one that I found quite good:

And while I’m discussing Titanic, one cue that is utterly magical in the film and was inexplicably left off the OST album (perhaps intentionally, as an extra enticement for the later Back to Titanic album) was the delicate solo-piano rendition of “My Heart Will Go On”, titled “The Portrait” on the record, which accompanies the scene where Jack draws Rose. If James Horner’s entire musical output had been limited to just this cue, I think his name would still be known, at least a bit.

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Something for Thursday

Continuing music selections from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a brief suite from True Lies. This movie answers the thought experiment of “What if James Cameron directed a James Bond movie?” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an American spy who maintains a boring family life by day (his wife and kid don’t even know he’s a spy) but does dangerous spy-shit by night (well, kind-of, he has a boring job where the “travels a lot”). But as he enters his most dangerous mission ever, his wife and kid suddenly become a part of the story. It’s a fun movie in its first and third acts, but act two is really hard to watch because there’s a weird subplot that has Arnold becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair or something so he sets up a bizarre sting operation to make her think she’s a spy and…it’s all very weird and honestly, not very comfortable to watch, to the point that when the movie’s main villain shows back up after having disappeared for 40 minutes, it’s almost a relief.

The score is by Brad Fiedel, who did the music for the Terminator movies. He’s not my favorite composer ever, but for a certain type of 90s action movie–say, the type directed by James Cameron–he’s fine. Here’s a short suite from True Lies.

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Something for Thursday

Continuing a few weeks of featuring music from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a selection from a score I don’t like all that much for a movie I don’t all that much care for. It’s Aliens, his mega-hit from 1986 that was a thrill-packed sequel to the Ridley Scott original horror film. I know that my reaction to these movies is deeply contrary to the geek culture in which I grew up, but hey, we all diverge from the norm sometime. For me, the original Alien is effective once, and after that it’s basically like riding Space Mountain with the lights on, when you know the gross-out stuff is coming and you can anticipate the jump-scares. It also didn’t help that I never found myself caring about the characters.

Cameron did get me caring about the people in Aliens, so that’s props to him. This film, though, is for me something else; when you give me all flow and no ebb, I eventually check out. My feelings for this movie turn out to mirror Roger Ebert’s almost perfectly, so I’ll just quote his original review of the film:

It’s here that my nerves started to fail. “Aliens” is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie’s less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it’s like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.

I don’t know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I’m not sure “Aliens” is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.

As for James Horner’s score, it’s not marked by memorable themes much at all; there’s some moody stuff that mostly mirrors the Khachaturian ballet music used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then there’s a lot of very intense action music that’s mostly rhythm and not a whole lot of build. The best cue is probably the one titled “Bishop’s Countdown”, so here it is. Sorry for my lack of enthusiasm, but I don’t think any artist has ever hit ’em all out of the park for me; after all, George Lucas did make More American Graffiti.

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Tone Poem Tuesday (oops, it’s Wednesday edition)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was cued up and ready to go and then the person responsible for clicking “publish” did not execute. Unfortunately that person cannot be sacked, as that person is also the person writing this and the content and everything else here. Requests for full refund will be ignored.

I’ve noticed an uptick in mentions of the movie Contact lately on social media. I’m not entirely sure why it’s come up, as this isn’t a notable anniversary year for the movie, but I suppose it is a pretty popular movie among science fiction fans, so I don’t grudge it being brought up. It’s never been a movie that I love, for reasons outlined below. I was going to write about the movie anew but then I realized I’ve already said what I need to say about the movie, so I’m just reposting. But first, music: the movie’s end credits suite, composed by Alan Silvestri, who may not be the most profound composer out there but who always turns in well-crafted and highly-listenable work.

 

And now, a post I wrote a few years back, which in turn includes a post I wrote ten years before that. I’m nesting posts! It’s posts within posts within posts!

—

The movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s one and only one novel, came out this month in 1997. Almost ten years ago I posted the following piece about the movie, a film that I’ve always liked and admired but not quite crossed over into loving. I’m not sure I totally agree anymore with what I write below, but thinking does shift and evolve, and I appreciate Contact more now than I used to; it remains one of the few major pop culture artifacts that endorses the Saganesque view that science should be our guiding philosophy as humans, and not spirituality. But I still think the movie hedges its bets too much, it drives its points home with too little subtlety (a fault often found in Robert Zemeckis films), and I think it undermines the feminist subplots by surrounding its main character with men without whose help and influence she would not succeed.

And yet…Contact is still a movie that says the right things about science and about the universe. It’s a movie that confirms that the proper response to this universe is curiosity and wonder, and my favorite moment is when Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is discussing the voyage into the Cosmos that is at the heart of the movie’s narrative and she describes the required quality as “a sense of adventure”.

(Oh, Contact‘s score, by Alan Silvestri, is really good–for all the film’s lack of subtlety, Silvestri brings the goods here. Here’s one cue, called “The Primer”, scoring a scene in which the secret of an alien transmission is revealed. This is really good stuff, excellent suspense music, and it shows why Silvestri ended up being the composer for the recent sequels to the original Cosmos series.)

Here is my old post:

As much as I love Carl Sagan, I have to admit that I never warmed to his one and only novel, a science-fiction first contact story he called Contact. I tried reading it a couple of times, and each time I only got about a hundred pages in before I stopped. I just don’t think that Sagan was really cut out for novel writing, no matter how great his gifts may have been for science writing. But in 1997, a movie adaptation of the book arrived in theaters, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was six months too late for Sagan to have seen it, alas.

I’ve had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Contact ever since it came out. On balance I like it a lot…but I don’t love it, and in truth, I never really have. I’ve never been entirely successful in putting my finger on what it is about Contact that vexes me, but after recently watching the film again on NetFlix, I think I have it: the movie is too unfocused. When the film is concentrated on telling its story and attending to that central story, it is a fine, fine piece of work. But too often I get the impression that Robert Zemeckis got distracted, often by something shiny, and there are way too many times in the movie that the story gets lost so we can follow something shiny.

Contact tells the story of Ellie Arroway, an astronomer whom we meet as a young child, operating her HAM radio under the guidance of her father. They have a wall map of the United States, on which she marks her radio contacts with push pins; after talking to someone in Pensacola, Dad comments that it’s her farthest contact yet. Ellie asks if a radio could talk to the Moon, or to Mars…or to her mother, who is apparently dead. Dad responds, “I don’t think they’ll ever make a radio that can reach that far.”

Grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster) turns out to be an astronomer, as noted, who is using her research time at the Arecibo Radio Telescope to look for, as she says, “little green men”: she is dedicating her career and scientific energies to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). This leads to her meeting a former priest (Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConnaughey), who despite being religious and spiritual where she is not, attracts her on a number of levels, and it also leads to run-ins with an older male scientist named David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt) who is snide and condescending to Ellie as he regards her chosen field of specialty as an utter waste of time. After a number of obstacles to her career – mostly owing to funding difficulties, as convincing people to part with money for something like SETI tends to be difficult – Ellie finally has a breakthrough when, while working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, her radio telescopes detect an unmistakable alien signal. The rest of the film follows the implications of such a discovery.

Or, rather, the rest of the film should do that, and when it does, it’s incredibly effective and thought-provoking and loaded with the grand “sensawunda” of all the best science fiction. The problem with the movie is that it too often wanders into less interesting stuff, or its steps away from subtlety to drive its points home with a jackhammer, or it does things that forcibly eject me from the world of the film.

Taking the less interesting stuff first: Ellie Arroway is too often portrayed in the film as the feminine voice of reason in a crowd of over-bearing, pompous, or downright dim men. Science and engineering are male-dominated fields, and it’s a well-established fact that women in those fields tend to have a tougher going just to overcome gender biases. The problem with Contact‘s approach isn’t so much that it points this out, but that it’s about other things, and thus it can’t really delve too intelligently into those topics which really do deserve higher scrutiny. Thus we have Ellie being treated like an outsider on her own project, or Drumlin stepping up to claim ownership over a project he’s derided consistently up until the moment it proved fruitful. Ellie is constantly on the defensive in the movie, and I think it hurts the narrative because the film can’t just gear up and take us where it wants to go. Instead we have to keep talking about God.

EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: Re-reading the above now, 13 or so years after I wrote it, I think I’d back off from this a bit. My objection is not to the film pointing out how women are marginalized in science and tech, but rather that the movie doesn’t really do anything other then use that marginalization to craft a few plot points along the way. It’s kind of a reverse of the frankly dishonest complaint that some people make about diversity in movies: “I don’t mind seeing X in a movie, but it has to serve the story!” Here, ALL it does is serve the story. Moving on:

And God is where subtlety just isn’t something that interests Robert Zemeckis. Contact is full of discussions of religion versus science, but the feeling is never that anything is really being debated; what happens is that opposite sides’ viewpoints are stated, and restated, and stated again. Ellie goes to a reception in Washington, where her first order of business upon approaching Palmer Joss is to immediately launch into a discussion on religion, without any preamble or preliminary; more than that, though, the script treats all such conversations – and many that aren’t on the topic of religion at all – as though Ellie has a sizable axe to grind, while everyone else (just about all of whom are male) is calm and collected in their disagreement. Coupling that with the several instances in the film where Ellie is betrayed by men – Drumlin’s taking of the credit, Joss’s posing of a question at the hearings when he knows that the answer is going to doom Ellie’s chances of being the one selected to go in ‘the machine’ – and the film seems to depict Ellie as someone who doesn’t so much achieve a lot but whom is given things, table-scrap like, by the men in her life. It’s an odd kind of feeling.

It also bothers me that the film ends right when it gets most interesting, and it feels to me like it takes the easy way out. To me, the most interesting thing is, What would human society be like once we know that we are not alone in this Universe? We may know next to nothing about who is out there, but surely knowing once and for all, without speculation, that there is someone or something living out there would be a staggering revelation for the human species. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with this notion – in fact, it backs away from it. We get lots of intrigue involving the contents of the message that is received from space, and then the construction of the transport “machine”, and so on. And this is all very compelling and entertaining…but at the end, the film gives us the old “Did it really happen?” gambit, reducing a momentous scientific discovery to something that will appeal to some people and not to others. Not unlike, say, the belief in God.

(Again, I don’t know to what degree the film’s story tracks that of the novel.)

I always find that the film deflates in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Ellie returns from her journey only to learn that, so far as anyone here knows, she never went anywhere. This leads to a Congressional hearing (which really drives home the film’s theme of “one woman versus a whole bunch of mean men”), at the end of which one Representative says, “Are we supposed to take your story…on faith?” And yes, he really pauses and puts big emphasis on those last two words, just in case we missed the irony of a scientist committed to objective observation being forced to admit the necessity of faith. Again, subtle, this is not. The movie does try to have it both ways by showing two government folks discussion the fact that the machine’s video recorder recorded eighteen hours of static (had nothing happened at all, there would have been about two seconds’ worth). But this is to be kept secret, apparently. They might as well seal all this information in a crate and store it in the warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: It continues to bother me that the big lessons are really only learned by Dr. Arroway in CONTACT. She’s the one who is basically forced to admit to a degree of faith underpinning her rational approach to the universe. I wish the movie had found a way to show Palmer Joss also learning a similar lesson in reverse, showing a way in which his own faith-based viewpoint is shaken or informed by the scientific discoveries depicted in the movie.

And the movie ends, on this state of affairs. What happens now, though? Does some kind of new religion start to accrete around Ellie and her scientific beliefs? Does Ellie somehow become an evangelist for a new blossoming of a scientific worldview? Does her experience have any effect on the human tension between science and religion? We never get any suggestions or speculations. All we get is the rolling of the credits. Contact tells a good story, but it stops just as its important story is just beginning.

Finally, I just have to note that all the cameos in the movie annoy the crap out of me. This was when Robert Zemeckis had just discovered that he could put people into lots of interesting situations, digitally; remember, he’d had Forrest Gump consorting with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So here we get loads of real-life CNN personalities, and even President Bill Clinton, with the film taking quotes from actual Clinton newscasts and editing them so that it sounds like he’s discussing the events of the movie. It’s incredibly distracting. Instead of being drawn further into the story, I find myself trying to think of what event Clinton was actually discussing in the speeches that were repurposed for this movie. Things like having Rob Lowe play a Christian conservative leader named “Richard Rank” are incredibly distracting, because of course it makes me think of Ralph Reed. Shoehorning in mention of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which had happened just months before the movie came out, is another example. Zemeckis seems to want his movie to seem ‘real’ and relevant, but all this stuff has the exact opposite effect on me: it forces me to keep the story at arm’s length.

Ultimately, I want to love Contact, because of my love and admiration for Carl Sagan, for the subject matter of the story, and for the view of the Universe as a place of wonder and of science as humanity’s greatest achievement. And there really is a lot to love about Contact. But the movie spends so much time getting in its own way that I inevitably end up just admiring it a lot.

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2024 in movies, 5 sentences each (January through June)

OK, I’m going to try this! I’m starting this post on December 31, 2023, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll publish at the very end of 2024. [UPDATE! You can see right now that this is dawning six months early. I’m doing this because the post has become awfully long already, and I figure nobody’s going to scroll through this entire thing if I wait until December 31 or so. I’m splitting it in two, basically.] This is a roster of the movies we end up watching this year, with a capsule review for each. Some movies will warrant more than that, depending on how I feel, so if I do an actual full post on a film, I’ll just link it from here. And these will be in the order that we watch them, starting with last night’s final film of 2023, which I’m doing on the 2024 post because as I write this I’ve already closed the blog on 2023. Does that make sense? Maybe, maybe not. But anyway:

::  The Feast of Seven Fishes. Slice-of-life drama-slash-romantic comedy about an Italian family living in an old town upstream of Pittsburgh, someplace. (The movie was filmed in two towns on the Monongahela River in West Virginia.) The focus is the youngest in the family who wants to go to art school but is expected to take over the family grocery. He is also deeply concerned about his ex-girlfriend, on the same night that he meets a new girl. Complications ensue. Warmly made, delightfully written with excellent characters, and as the film’s events center on a traditional Italian night of feasting, this movie will leave you hungry.

::  Love Hard. Cheesy rom-com in which a big-city woman (Los Angeles) goes to a snowy mountain town (Lake Placid) at Christmas to find love. Misunderstandings and hilarity ensue. And at one point, our heroine (Nina Dobrev) needs to fit in with the local crowd, so she eschews her normal attire and dons a pair of overalls. (I shit you not!) Frankly, there’s room in my life for cheesy Christmas movies in which the big-city woman goes to a small snowy mountain town for love and at one wears overalls to fit in. I liked this one a lot. It’s pure schmaltz cheese.

::  Moonraker. For more thoughts on Moonraker, check out my Ultimate Definitive Ranking of James Bond Movies. On this particular night, it was my week to pick a movie and I needed a comfort watch, so Moonraker it was–back to my personal beginning with James Bond, eh? And it was still a fun movie. Moonraker will forever hold a special place in my heart.

::  Lucy. The Wife picked this one out. Based on the first few scenes, I expected a crime drama about a drug deal gone wrong. And the movie is that…but not long in, it takes a strange sci-fi turn…and then…it leans hard into that turn the rest of the way through. The result is one of the trippiest and interesting thrillers I’ve ever seen, even if the central concept (a riff on the idea that humans only use ten percent of their brains) has long since been classified as nonsense. Excellent acting by Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman.

::  Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and La La Land warranted discussion in their own post, here.

::  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a short film by Wes Anderson. The Wife picked it one week when it was her turn to pick a movie; unbeknownst to her, it’s only 40 minutes long, so she ended up picking another movie (see the next one). This was my first ever Wes Anderson movie! I loved the visual invention, the constant spoken-word dialog as the entire text of the Roald Dahl story was acted out, and the sheer panache of this production. This film made me incredibly happy.

::  The Imitation Game: Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the wildly eccentric mathematical genius whose work developing code-breaking machines in World War II anticipated what eventually became the modern computer…and whose treatment by the British government, as a homosexual, eventually led to his suicide. It’s a moving and involving character study with a terribly sad ending. Western civilization’s treatment of gays is historically awful, but the British managed to do even worse by Turing than many.

::  The Fugitive showed up in January for free on YouTube, so I watched it on my lunch breaks over several days. Not the best way to watch a movie, but it still works! In fact, I wonder if The Fugitive has become more overlooked in recent years than it should be, given how good it is. The cat-and-mouse game between Kimble (Harrison Ford) and Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), who end up being two protagonists revolving around each other ever closer while the real antagonist is still out there, is as riveting as ever. The movie’s central mystery isn’t all that great, admittedly, but it really doesn’t matter a whole lot. One thing, though: in the scene on the El, why would Richard sit directly across from a guy who is reading the newspaper with Richard’s picture on the front page? And if the guy sat there, why didn’t Richard move? There’s nobody else on the car! Anyway….

By the way, it should be clear by now that the “No more than five sentences” thing is more a guideline than an actual rule for this post.

::  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was fun, and it had some interesting follow-ups on the previous film’s thoughts on the aging of old heroes. Here, Indy isn’t just old, he has pretty much aged out of the world entirely. I’m fine with an old Indy, a reluctant Indy…but this movie gives us a grumpy and embittered Indy whose life went to shit, and I had trouble with that. (See this old post quoting William Goldman for more on this point.) I also thought Dial went on way too long. I’m not sure where exactly I started being super-conscious of how long the movie was taking, but aware of it, I became. Did I like it? Sure, but as with Crystal Skull, I don’t think it worked as well as it might have.

::  This Is Where I Leave You is an entry in a genre that I tend to like a lot: a group of people who have known each other for years but drifted apart when they were younger are brought back together again after a traumatic event (in this case, a large family reunites after Dad dies in old age), and what results is a lot of dredging up of old stuff, reopening old wounds, fanning old flames, and so on. I love these kinds of movies when they’re done with heart and underlying warmth, as this one is. Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver (pre-Kylo Ren!), and Jane Fonda headline a really good cast. I really enjoyed this movie. It’s not surprising at all, but it doesn’t have to be.

::  The Sting showed up on Netflix (or, at least I was made aware of it) in February, and I had somehow never seen it before! I’m always one to love a good con artist/heist story, and this is a good one, with one of the sharpest, wittiest scripts I’ve ever seen/heard. Wonderfully made, terrifically acted–this movie deserved every one of the Oscars it won, and I wonder if it’s not an overlooked classic by this point. I did find the ending a bit easy and pat, and the way the movie wraps up its story and gets out of Dodge is interesting…but still, this thing is wonderful. Loved it.

::  Step Brothers. We watched this instead of the Super Bowl. I love this movie, but I fully grant that if you’re not attuned to Will Ferrell, you’re not going to like this one. Subtle, it ain’t: this is Ferrell and John C. Reilly in full-on raunchy, gross-out mode. I love the moxie of this movie, though: the state of affairs depicted in this movie couldn’t exist in real life for one second, but nobody cares, they just go with it. “Did we just become best friends?” “Yup!” “Do you wanna go do karate in the garage?” “Yup!”

::  Queenpins is an enjoyable diversion of a “dramedy” type about two young women who are struggling for money for different reasons who form a friendship, and then a partnership in crime when they escalate their “professional couponing” to levels that involve mail fraud, theft, and various other activities of a less-than-savory nature. It’s hard not to root for them because their money struggles are relatable and because they’re ripping off the Proctor-and-Gambles of the world, and nobody feels sorry for them, right? Their story is intercut with the loss-prevention specialist and the mail fraud investigator who are tracking them down, and the ending is oddly satisfying in the “they don’t get away with it…for now” kind of way. Not a great film by any means, but entertaining.

::  Apollo 13 remains one of my favorite films of all time. It is, for my money, the greatest movie about teamwork ever made. One time at work my managers solicited suggestions for movies about teamwork that could be screened at an upcoming management training event, and of course everyone tossed out sports titles–many of which are fine films!–but I got a few blank stares when I suggested Apollo 13. But think of it: it’s a movie about first of all, a crewed mission to the Moon, which is a deeply difficult thing that requires tons of teamwork just to get the mission to go off correctly; and then, quite famously, the Apollo 13 mission does not go off correctly, and the teamwork becomes even more critical as groups of engineers work with the small team of astronauts in the ship to get them home safely at all. This movie is nothing but teamwork from the first frame to the last, and I will shout it from the rooftops until I can’t reach the rooftops anymore because I’m actually in the ground.

::  Something’s Gotta Give is a romantic comedy featuring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton as the main couple, with helpful supporting work by Amanda Peet and Keanu Reeves. I’ve heard the film recommended many times by people I trust, but somehow it’s always eluded us, until finally I pulled it up on The Wife’s birthday. I was a bit surprised that it was made in 2003; somehow I thought it was a mid-90s movie, but it’s not. It’s probably the last real shot Nicholson had to be believable in a rom-com, too. It was also really good, a lovely look at two older people who aren’t terribly compatible but aren’t terribly incompatible either, finding each other despite not looking for one another and in fact spending a chunk of the film actively looking away from each other. Nicholson’s character is, well, a pure Nicholson character, one of those crusty guys with a dark side concealing the heart of…well, maybe not gold, but silver, anyway. And Keaton is the older woman who is happy where she is in life and isn’t much interested in romance. The romance doesn’t even so much happen in this movie as it emerges, which is a nice touch. I liked this one a lot. Oh, and Nicholson has one of the great movie lines: “I have always told you some version of the truth!”

::  If you’re wondering “Hey! Maybe the humor in Blazing Saddles isn’t that questionable, is it?” Let me assure you: it is. It most gloriously is. This movie’s raucous send-up of prejudice across the board is still hilarious, and you can’t help thinking–many times throughout it, actually–that “This movie couldn’t possibly get made today!” I still wonder about its ending, which not only breaks the “Fourth Wall” but basically stomps it into oblivion; I like to think that they were making this movie with no end in mind and just landed on the sudden shift into surreal absurdity that is the film’s climax. Oh, and special commendation for having a terrific pie fight! I especially like when the tour group on the movie studio heads inside because it’s next on the list, unaware that a pie fight is going on, and when they come back out to go to the next place on the tour, they’ve all been pied. Nice touch!

::  A struggling singer-songwriter in England is about to give it all up when a weird world-wide blackout happens, causing him to get hit by a bus on his way home. When he wakes up in the hospital, banged up but on the mend, he discovers that he and he alone remembers the music of The Beatles. So he proceeds to reconstruct The Beatles’ entire catalog from memory, thus achieving stardom. That’s the conceit of Yesterday, a delightful if “safe” musical fantasy. I can’t help thinking that a novel might have given this idea a much deeper look: when you really start thinking about pop culture since the 1960s, just subtracting The Beatles from that would leave a giant hole, not just of music but of influence and shaping what came after. But maybe it’s asking too much of this movie, which is more a rom-com fable than anything else, to delve that deeply into its big idea, and the movie does at least have the guts to not hit a cosmic reset button toward the end, restoring the rightful history of music. The movie is terrifically well-made and witty and the music is fantastic. Yes, it plays it safe, but that’s not the worst thing in the world.

::  How did I not see Mamma Mia until just this year? I’ve no idea, really…it’s been on my radar forever, what with loving the music of ABBA and having nursed a crush on Meryl Streep for equally forever and especially for this movie, half of which she spends rocking a hippie-like top under a pair of wonderful overalls. The movie is famously an adaptation of a Broadway show that scotch-taped the songs of ABBA into a story about a young woman getting married in Greece and inviting the three men who might be her father. The songs aren’t always totally convincing in their use in the story, but that happens in this kind of musical that uses pre-existing songs. The movie is a sunlit confection, and it’s a delight.

::  Also a delight? Barbie. I thought the conceit here might be terribly silly when I learned they were making this movie–the beloved doll lives in a Doll World but crosses over to our world!–but then the movie came out and everyone started finding it hilarious and moving and deeply affecting in how it argues against The Patriarchy. It took me all of about four minutes into the movie before I was pretty much in total agreement. I loved it.

::  “Hey, I haven’t seen that movie in…oh wow…at least 25 years!” The movie? Animal House. Which I had not, in fact, seen since watching it on TBS way back when we had cable. And there it was, on Netflix! So we watched it. And then, about 20 minutes in, I realized that I had only ever seen Animal House in its edited-for-teevee version, so this was my first viewing of the film in its uncut version. It’s still hilarious, though maybe not quite as much as it was when it was filmed, nearly (gulp) 50 years ago. You know what’s weird, though? I remember the food fight being a pretty lengthy scene! It actually ends almost immediately after Bluto shouts “FOOD FIGHT!”

::  Wanderlust is a frustrating movie because it has one of the best casts I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s beautifully shot, and its story is basically a long sitcom. Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston are a couple forced by economic reality to ditch their dreams in NYC and move in with family in Atlanta…but on the way down there they somehow end up spending a night at a hippie commune, and then they decide to live there. Hilarity ensues. There’s some nice character work here and the cast is terrific and to the film’s credit it doesn’t make the commune seem entirely lunatic–some of their beliefs are deeply odd, but others make total sense–but for all the warmth and terrific acting, the story doesn’t have a single surprising beat in it. If they set out to make a pleasant movie, they did! But it really could have been something special.

::  The 1993 version of The Three Musketeers isn’t what I would call good, honestly. But it’s fun and watchable and everybody in it seems to be having a good time making a somewhat watered-down swashbuckler, it’s a very nice looking movie, and the most beautiful swords in film history are to be found in this movie. And where it’s top-notch? Michael Kamen’s score, which is quite honestly one of the best adventure-swashbuckler scores ever written. Moreso because Kamen manages to avoid aping Korngold throughout.

::  The Holiday is an absolute delight. It’s a thoughtful rom-com, written and directed by Nancy Meyers (her follow-up to Something’s Gotta Give, which we had already previously watched!). The idea here is that Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz are women, living in London and LA respectively, whose love lives implode right around Christmas. They connect via the internet, both looking for a getaway, and they decide to swap homes: Winslet goes to LA and Diaz goes to London, and some fish-out-of-water stuff ensues before both meet intriguing men from the other’s circle of loved ones. This movie is wonderfully shot, beautifully acted, intelligently and wittily scripted, and it even boasts a lovely rom-com score by Hans Zimmer, whose rom-com music chops tend to be very underrated. And since this is technically a Christmas movie, I may make it part of our Christmas regimen moving forward.

::  I don’t have much to say about Tower Heist. If you like heist movies in which a group of people who don’t trust each other for various reasons (some of them good) get together to steal a whole bunch of money from someone who deserves to have a whole bunch of money stolen from them, then you’ll probably like this. There is nothing new here, structurally; Act One intros the players and establishes their need for money and who has it; Act Two has the forming of the group and the hatching of the plan; Act Three has the heist where nothing goes right and the plan changes on the fly. This ticks all the boxes, and it does so very well. If that’s what you want, check this out. (Oh, and it has a great cast: Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Tea Leoni, and Judd Hirsch, and that’s just the ones I remember off the top of my head the day after.)

::  My God, I can’t believe how badly Falling for Figaro faceplants at the end. It’s a rom-com about a woman with a successful finance career who rejects a lucrative promotion so she can go to a tiny village in Scotland (the pub is the village) and learn to sing opera from a cranky has-been singer. Of course, she has a boyfriend to start the movie; of course she incurs the enmity of the local young lad in Scotland, who of course happens to be a really gifted baritone who is also studying to sing and whose “career” is mired in the doldrums until his inspiration arrives in the form of this naive wanna-be. Of course they fall in love along the way, of course they have to sing against one another at the big vocal competition, and so on, and so forth. I love the cast, the music is heavenly, it’s gorgeously shot (it’s the damned Scottish Highlands, I could shoot a gorgeous movie there on my phone). But for one thing, the movie relies on the music too heavily to sell its story, and I can’t believe I’m saying that, but these characters get very few actual conversations to talk about music and why they want it and so on; for another, this is one of those movies that can’t figure out how to get to its desired ending organically so it just…cuts to the ending with a “Three years later” title card. Falling for Figaro could have been really lovely. Alas!

::  The Judge is really well-made. It has a fantastic cast, everyone in it is terrific, and it’s beautifully shot. I just wish it was better written. It’s a mash-up of several genres: the one where “Our hero who escaped the small town for big city success has to go back because of family reasons”, and it’s also a courtroom drama where Our Hero is a defense attorney and the defendant really really really looks pretty damned guilty. In this case, the accused is Our Hero’s father (Robert Duvall), who has been the court judge in this small town for 40 years, and his almost-estranged son, Chicago attorney Robert Downey Jr., has to represent him. Now, the court case does play out not quite in the way one expects, but much of the movie does play out exactly the way one expects: the run-ins with old girlfriends, the family secrets that have been town whispers for decades, and so on and so forth. The Judge is good and certainly worth watching, but it could have been great.

::  Wow, the critics and the Internet were really not into Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut, Unfrosted. I actually enjoyed it! I found it mostly entertaining and occasionally downright funny. This fictionalized story of the invention of the Pop Tart has a fantastical, “Willy Wonka” air to it, and I think it might have been hurt by some of Seinfeld’s own weird moves during the movie’s publicity phase, in which he did an interview where he trotted out the tired “you can’t be a comedian now because of woke” stuff, and he also indicated that he wanted this movie to be the “anti-Barbie“, whatever that might have meant. If Seinfeld had just let the movie come out and be what it is–a charming little movie riff on pop culture–it might have been better served.

::  May 25 was a Saturday. So we watched Star Wars, as one does.

::  A Simple Favor is aptly titled: a woman asks a simple favor of her neighbor–“Hey, I’m stuck at work, can you pick my kid up from school for me and I’ll come get him when I get home?”–and from this “simple favor” spins a story of hidden identities, faked deaths, decades-old murders, family secrets, and all sorts of fun whatnot. The movie stars Anna Kendrick (whom I adore) as the naive housewife and cooking vlogger who makes friends with a very high-maintenance power-lawyer type (Blake Lively, who is also fantastic). This story has twists a-plenty and is a pretty fun entry in the “trashy thriller” genre.

::  Irish Wish is a romance starring Lindsay Lohan, who is on her way to Ireland to take part in her friend’s wedding to a guy she has a crush on. Along the way she has a Meet-Cute with a photographer, and then she ends up making a wish at a magic spot: she wishes she was marrying the guy, not her friend. Along comes an Irish wizardress or trickster spirit or something; our heroine mistakes her for a colorful local, but the next morning she wakes up to finding that guy in her shower. Because he’s now her fiance. Is this movie good? Not really. But it’s pretty to look at, so there’s that. And it does have a few amusing moments along the way, and there’s a fun guest-turn by Jane Seymour, believe it or not. (I don’t know why you wouldn’t, actually…Jane Seymour is a perfectly fine actress.)

::  The Fundamentals of Caring gives us Paul Rudd as a guy whose personal life is falling apart: his marriage is failing after a personal tragedy (which isn’t initially spelled out, but is clarified throughout the film in flashback snippets that we have to slowly put together), and whose approach to his own problems seems to be to run away from them. Seeking to make a change in his life, he decides to change careers and become a personal caregiver. His first job is to care for an 18-year-old kid with muscular dystrophy who is possessed of a deeply sarcastic and dark sense of humor and whose main ambition in life is being able to pee standing up. (This actually becomes a plot point.) These two have a rough relationship, so of course the next thing is a sightseeing road trip during which two wounded people who barely get along bond at places both amazing and mundane. It’s the same formula as Rain Man, but again it works pretty well here. Part of that is Paul Rudd playing the usual Paul Rudd kind of character–the nice guy with a sad past who is willing to be mean occasionally if he has to–but it’s a well-written version of this familiar story

::  Slap Shot was never a movie that I wanted to see all that badly, though it’s always been on my list of “Sports movies I should watch someday”. Well, one night I spotted it on Netflix, just a few weeks before the third season of Shoresy was to debut, so I thought, “Might as well check this one off the list now!” And wow, what a movie. Now, even as I write this I’m not exactly much of a hockey fan. I don’t dislike hockey, I just don’t know much about it and as long as the local team is mired in year after year of being crappy, the incentive to learn more about hockey isn’t much there…except for these fiction properties involving hockey. Letterkenny, Shoresy, and now the granddaddy of all fictional hockey stories, Slap Shot. I loved this movie, and to my surprise, The Wife was laughing harder than I was, especially in one scene where our “heroes”, the gritty team from a fading steel town in Pennsylvania, drop their gloves and start fighting the other team during the anthem. I suppose if you’re looking for the kind of hockey that’s grace and speed on ice, this isn’t for you; this is the kind of hockey that gave rise to the joke “I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out,” and where all the players are battered bloody by the end of every game and more than a few teeth are lost along the way. Paul Newman is gold in this, but of course he is; he’s Paul Newman. Too bad they couldn’t figure a way to get Robert Redford in this.

::  Hitman is a sneakily delightful black comedy about a nerdy college teacher who moonlights for the New Orleans Police, when he’s suddenly asked to do something he’s never done: pretend to be a hitman for hire so that when people hire him (actually giving him the money and saying something direct like “Kill the bitch!”), they can be arrested on the spot. This starts to pose problems when he actually finds himself attracted to one of the potential clients, a young woman who is stuck in an abusive marriage and reaches out to a “hitman” in utter irrational desperation. After this, things go awry in a series of ways that are both expected and unexpected. And of course, along the way our initially nerdy teacher starts reflecting new self-confidence, prompting one student to whisper to the other, “When did he become hot?” Anyway, a fun movie.

::  You know, I really wish that Vinny Gambini, genius car mechanic-turned-attorney, had returned in a series of movies along the lines of the Knives Out series featuring Benoit Blanc. Alas, that wasn’t to be…but at least we have My Cousin Vinny, which I hadn’t actually seen in its entirety in many years. Clips a-plenty on YouTube, sure–who doesn’t like watching the “Two yutes” scene?–but never the entire movie. I remember being surprised to learn that actual trial lawyers love this movie for its actual accurate portrayal of the procedures of a criminal trial, and it’s a really effective courtroom movie, as involving as any great courtroom “drama” I’ve ever seen. What I especially liked this time is that the “fish out of water” stuff–the movie features a foul-mouthed rookie attorney from Brooklyn being sent to the Deep South to defend his first murder case–doesn’t make the “country bumpkins” endlessly the source of jokes. The humor arises from Vinny’s complete unfamiliarity with what he is experiencing down there and his efforts to deal with things he doesn’t get, but never does the movie feel like it’s mocking those people. That’s a tough line to walk, but My Cousin Vinny does it.

::  Crazy Rich Asians is a rom-com about a young, not-so-rich Asian woman who gets engaged to a very rich Asian guy and all the expected complications that ensue, including her entry into his social world (which involve first-class flights home to Singapore) and class-based disapproval from his family. Entertaining, emotional, and also an utterly gorgeous film to behold. It’s visually stunning. If you’ve never wanted to visit Southeast Asia, this will get you wanting to do just that.

::  Netflix recommended Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a 2016 comedy-drama written and directed by Taika Waititi. It’s a unique film, certainly: a teenage boy in New Zealand who has bounced from foster home to foster home is given his last chance, with an older couple who live on a farm in the mountains. The farmwife works hard to make the kid feel at home, but the farmer himself wants very little to do with the kid…and then circumstances arise which force the farmer himself to help the kid, and get to know the kid, and ultimately rely heavily on the kid. I don’t want to say more than that because this is the kind of movie where it’s best you don’t know what’s about to happen–and that being the case, some of the emotional beats in this movie hit hard–but it’s also wonderfully written, beautifully acted, and stunningly filmed. Yes, I know, you remember all the sweeping shots of the New Zealand landscape in The Lord of the Rings, but here you get more of the same…but they’re different landscapes entirely. There’s a lot going on in New Zealand, I assure you! Highly recommended.

And that’s all the movies for the first half of 2024! Tune in in six months for the second half! Well, tune in before that, for other stuff.

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Thoughts while watching ST ELMO’S FIRE (a repost)

I wrote this post over twelve years ago, but right now there’s a documentary about The Brat Pack on Netflix that’s getting some talk on Teh Socials, and that’s leading to people re-watching Brat Pack movies, including this one. Reaction I’m seeing to people revisiting (or visiting for the first time) St. Elmo’s Fire is pretty amusing, because I’ve seen nobody enjoying it. Almost uniformly, people seem to be reacting the way I did back when I decided to re-watch the movie on a whim.

But before I get to the actual text, St. Elmo’s Fire did give us two good things, at least: the theme song (which is just a rock-solid 80s banger) and the Love Theme (which is a rock-solid 80s instrumental that I’m sure played at many a high school dance). The rest of the movie? Umm….

OK, and now, the post:

I decided to watch St. Elmo’s Fire, the coming-of-age flick from 1985 starring quite a bit of that group of actors known as “the Brat Pack”. I vaguely remember watching the movie way, way, way back in the late 80s or maybe early 90s. And by ‘watching’, I mean, ‘being in the room reading comic books while the movie was on the teevee’. So my recollection is, shall we say, rather hazy.

Turns out I shouldn’t have investigated those memories, because…well, that movie is Crap On Toast. Seriously. What garbage. I decided to try to make it bearable by mocking it on Facebook. Here are the things I posted:

So I’m watching “St Elmo’s Fire”, which I may well have never seen in its entirety. I’m about half an hour in. My plan is to watch until I encounter a character who isn’t an asshole. I’m gonna have to watch the whole movie, aren’t I?

(This was answered almost immediately by two friends saying, ‘Yes’. Ouch.)

Oh god…a scene with a welfare queen. This isn’t a movie about actual young people in the 80s, it’s about what William F. Buckley thought young people in the 80s were like.

(Few things have the ability to INSTANTLY piss me off like the whole ‘Welfare Queen’ stereotype, and this was it, in spades. A white woman with her five kids with her, all of different races, who keeps responding to her case worker’s attempts to interest her in job training with “Just gimme my check.”)

Obviously my memories of the 80s may not be entirely reliable, but I don’t recall women dressing either like streetwalkers or underneath at least four layers and buttoned up to the lower lip.

(Seriously, just look at the Mare Winningham character. She dresses like an cast extra on Little House: The Ever More Chaste Edition.)

If ever there was a person who just can’t wear an earring, it’s Rob Lowe.

(It’s an awful earring.)

Rob Lowe tries to get his hand under her (the Mare Winningham character) skirt…but he has to pull up about eight yards of fabric to get there!

(This just cracked me up. He literally has to move his hand back down like three times to get the skirt far enough up that he can get a hand under there. It’s like she has to walk around on stilts, just so her skirt isn’t dragging on the ground. And this is seconds after she reacts to Rob touching her breast as though he’s just zapped her with a cattle prod.)

Sweaty Rob Lowe is faking the hell out of that sax solo, I tell you! I keep waiting for CJ to walk up to him and say, “Sam, get your ass back to the office. Toby’s pissed at you.”

(A Georgetown bar is full of people rocking out to Rob Lowe on the sax as though he’s Kenny G Van Halen or something.)

This movie is dragging my lifelong crush on Ally Sheedy outside, where it plans to beat my poor crush to death with a tire iron.

(Every time Sheedy was onscreen, I was reminded of Harrison Ford’s great line from Working Girl, which he says to Melanie Griffith when she shows up at a function in a gorgeous dress: “You’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these things who dressed like a woman, not how a woman thinks a man would dress if he were a woman.”)

Ahhh, the 80s…when eyeglasses were large enough to cover the vision span of four people!

(Holy shit, this movie has the Biggest Eyeglasses EVER.)

I have to think that anybody who has ever seen, oh, any movies at all takes one look at the city block that St Elmo’s Bar is on and immediately yelps out, “Hey! The Universal backlot!”

(Ayup. This really broke the illusion for me. All that location shooting, and they couldn’t do a couple of establishing shots someplace real?!)

Rob gets fired from his lucrative bar gig. Probably shouldn’t have attacked the guy who showed up with his wife.

But it’s all good, because he lets out a massive rant outside, gets kicked to the ground, and is well on his way to make-up sex within thirty seconds! Yay, him!

(This scene made no sense.)

Clearly the place to have a heart-to-heart with your friend is at the homeless shelter where she’s doing volunteer work. WHILE she’s doing volunteer work.

(Another really odd scene, with Demi Moore and Ally Sheedy showing up at Mare Winningham’s homeless shelter to give her life advice, which is basically, ‘Give in and make love to your boyfriend.’ OK then. Winningham is wearing a long skirt with a bib and shoulder straps, not unlike overalls, over a button-down shirt which is over a turtleneck. Were the entire 80s a study in layers?)

In this scene, Ally Sheedy is wearing a frilly bow tie under the incredibly frilly collar of a blouse that is in turn under a jacket that has a really frilly collar. Were the 80s the frill decade?

Rob’s having sex in a hot tub. Or at least he was. House owner got home early. Whoops. Hate when that happens.

(I thought that the producers had cast a Latino actor, named Mario Machado, as an Asian character. Turns out he’s of Chinese and Portuguese ancestry. So I was wrong.)

Emilio Estevez apparently believes, as do all movie men, that turning up the collar of their suit jacket has the same effect as opening an umbrella.

(I never understand this.)

Stalking Andie MacDowell is creepy on two levels. Because it’s stalking, and because it’s Andie MacDowell.

(Cheap shot, I know, but there’s just always been something about Andie MacDowell that’s just a bit ‘off’ for me. I have a terrible time with Four Weddings and a Funeral on that basis.

Wow…as Emilio goes in to confront Andie, we get the “Person who shot JR” POV shot, complete with people stopping and staring at him! Every movie should include a shot like that.

(Here’s what I’m talking about. This seemed a very odd stylistic choice for this movie.)

And for this she lets him go home with her?!

(I guess obsessive stalking wasn’t deemed creepy until that guy killed Rebecca Schaefer.)

Rob is starting to realize what a loser he is. Took him half the movie. Took me thirty seconds of the movie. Yay, me!

THIS is Emilio’s plan to win the heart of Andie MacDowell? Pretending to be rich?! Did we wander into a “Three’s Company” episode?

(Apparently she’s also stupid and will think that he’s become rich overnight. Great plan, this.)

I’d forgotten how in the 80s, all men wore neckties, but the men who weren’t to be taken seriously wore their ties so loose that the knot is eight inches below their collar.

(I hate neckties. They’re stupid.)

Ooh, I gotta stop. This movie is terrible. Ye Gods. I’m just gonna read the WikiPedia plot summary and call it a night on this one.

For the record, I gave up just after the party scene where Ally Sheedy accuses Judd Nelson of cheating on her. I just couldn’t even muster up enough emotional investment to make fun of the thing any more after that.

I really don’t have anything insightful to add about St. Elmo’s Fire. It just isn’t good. It’s annoying 80s fluff, the kind of thing that makes me wonder why so many people seem to fetishize that decade. I do like that title song and the synthesizer love theme, though. That’s good. But the movie? The Breakfast Club it ain’t.

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