So I’ll get to my November flicks later this week, but first it’s about time that I finally got around to posting about what I watched way back in October. I don’t have kidney stones to blame for my delays this time. Let’s go with ennui and a busy work schedule.
Anyway, I saw a pretty long slate of flicks in October, most of which fell into the “pretty good but not great” category. The best of these tended to be old horror flicks, including Mario Bava’s eye candy bug-out Blood and Black Lace, Francis Ford Coppola’s early 60s proto-slasher flick Dementia 13, and the original, truly creepy version of Island of Lost Souls.
I did see a couple of portentious, pretentious, big-ticket sci-fi spectacles on HBOMax, Tenet and Dune, neither of which was especially good but at least looked pretty. That’s a low bar to cross in these days of CGI miracles, though.
Onward and upward!
Best of the Bunch
Sudden Fear (1952) This sly noir stars Joan Crawford as a lonely playwright who falls prey to the slimy charms of struggling actor Jack Palance, only to discover that he’s up to no good and hiding a sexy side piece (the always fantastic Gloria Grahame). What sets this flick apart from most with similar plotlines is Crawford’s character’s reaction. Rather than cower in fear or run to the (undoubtedly unbelieving and unsympathetic) authorities, she decides to get the jump on Palance and his scheming gal pal—and starts plotting how she’s going to murder them! Crawford meticulously lays out a scheme to entrap her dastardly hubby in his own plot. It’s a really clever and fun flick, filled with quality actors in every role. Palance is especially great, really young but still every bit as unsettling as ever. His strangely menacing and untrustworthy screen presence is perfect. He can’t scare Joan Crawford, though.
Other highs and lows:
Tenet (2020) Let me preface this review by saying that I typically love the work of director Christopher Nolan. None of his flicks before this one was less than stellar. He’s a true modern auteur, putting his personal stamp and obsessions into films across the genre spectrum. With Tenet, though, he’s clearly entered the Realm of the Yes Men, that lofty Hollywood perch reached by a handful of uber-successful filmmakers, from which none of your ideas is ever questioned or edited. Think George Lucas walking into a room full of young employees and introducing Jar Jar Binks to universal nods of approval. An office building full of folks who owe their jobs to Christopher Nolan is the only way I can explain this baffling film.
Tenet is not good. Worse than that, it’s incomprehensible for the vast majority of its ridiculously long running time. The film drops you into an opera house siege in Kiev from the start, with no context and no clue who’s who or what’s going on. It’s hard to get invested in even the most brilliantly staged action scene if you don’t know or care who anyone on either side is — and this is far from brilliantly staged. Sadly, the film never gives you any reason to root for or understand the main character, played as opaquely as possible by John David Washington. Nolan’s lack of interest in developing the character extends to not even bothering to give him a name. He’s called the Protagonist in the credits, for god’s sake! When the center of your film is a complete cypher, the plot better be super-interesting, but Nolan’s confounding script at no point coheres into anything approaching a coherent narrative or even making sense.
The film is somehow about an advanced technology that causes objects to exist backwards in time. Doesn’t make sense, you say? Well, Nolan solves that problem by literally having the main scientist working on this say, “Don’t try to understand it.” Alright, then! The film lurches into a series of disjointed action scenes, many of which feature some of the protagonists moving backwards. It’s a cool effect, I guess, but not enough to justify spending two and a half hours in a bewildered haze.
Nolan doesn’t seem to have bothered editing his script, so I’ll continue with my own unedited notes, written as I sank deeper into this blatherfest: “I think Michael Caine’s character is named Exposition Dump… No one ever has a conversation, they just speak plot points at one another… Suddenly there’s a fake Goya drawing! Now it’s a tax dodge involving artwork? Why are they crashing this plane?… Kenneth Branagh as the villain exudes all the menace of Ricky Gervais on holiday, with a very dodgy Russian accent… Now we’re in a catamaran race! Now there’s a big arms deal! Gold bars!… OK, for real, what’s going on? Why is this chase scene happening? Did they ever mention what they’re trying to do?… The logistics of this semi-reverse chase make zero sense… Now I guess they’re all in Reverse World… This is a bad “Déjà Vu” rip-off… 90 minutes into the thing and they finally get to the gimmick of living backwards in time! It’s OK, but I have no idea why I care… Isn’t there an easier, fun way to get to this point, since it’s all just an excuse for flashy effects anyway? Like, just have someone say, “Dr. Cyclops invented this ray that makes me live backwards, and now here I am doing it!”… Then they have the balls to make the whole thing boil down to ‘Hey, this McGuffin has the capacity to destroy humanity’ …What is anyone’s motivation here? What is my motivation to keep watching?… He’s going to ‘activate the algorithm’! LOL!”
Right around the two-hour mark, I could no longer be bothered to take any more notes. Tenet is a truly terrible movie that seems to think it’s quite serious, when it’s actually quite silly.
A Quiet Place (2018) Heard a lot of good things about this flick, but it was pretty disappointing. Frankly, it should be titled Two Bad Parents, since the parents in this family are pretty sloppy in getting their kids to be quiet and stay safe from the noise-focused monsters. Pretty much every tragedy in the flick can be traced back to their poor decisions. The breaking point, though, was when Emily Blunt’s character gives birth in a bathtub while a monster lurks on the other side of the wall. Silently. About as stupid a moment as I’ve ever seen in a film.
Dune (2021) – Another bloated sci-fi spectacle that yearns to be taken seriously as art, but falls way, way short. It’s past time that filmmakers learned that shooting scenes in slo-mo doesn’t automatically lend them gravitas. After some exceptionally clumsy exposition at the start, the flick settles down into a typical ‘white savior’ narrative, with Timothee Chalamet as the pale, pouty protagonist who’s allegedly special because he dreams of Zendaya. Dune is another flick that has its baddies reside on a dark, foreboding planet full of menacing architecture, like the Death Star or LA Live. Quick question: Just because you’re evil, does that automatically mean you don’t like proper lighting? Did Hitler always sit in dark rooms? Anyway, this is a big, boring spectacle that plays too often like a bad music video, filled with callbacks to other, better flicks like Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now. It draws a lot of visual parallels with the war in Afghanistan, but to no real discernible purpose or point of view. I have no idea how Denis Villeneuve keeps getting jobs.
Hercules and the Haunted World (1961) Mario Bava’s technicolor freak-out of a ‘sword and sandal’ flick was lots of fun. Saturated in rich colors, the film follows Hercules and Theseus as they engage in a series of silly adventures, all in the name of toppling evil baddie Christopher Lee, in a great early role. Silly but eye-popping, and the ‘Stone Monster’ gave me the best laugh I’ve had in ages.
The Complete List for October (first-time viewings in bold):
Beat Girl (1960, Edmond T. Greville)
La Bestia debe Morir (1952, Roman Vinoly Barreto)
Blood and Black Lace (1964, Mario Bava)
Brighton Rock (aka Young Scarface) (1948, John Boulting)
Buchanan Rides Alone (1958, Budd Boetticher)
Comanche Station (1960, Budd Boetticher)
Decision at Sundown (1957, Budd Boetticher)
Dementia 13 (1963, Francis Ford Coppola)
Dolemite (1975, D’Urville Martin)
Dune (2021, Denis Villeneuve)
For a Few Dollars More (1965, Sergio Leone)
The Glass Wall (1953, Maxwell Shane)
Hercules in the Haunted World (1961, Mario Bava)
House (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)
I Walk Alone (1947, Byron Haskin)
Island of Lost Souls (1932, Erle C. Kenton)
Lady Snowblood (1973, Toshiya Fujita)
Magnet of Doom (1963, Jean-Pierre Melville)
Pigs and Battleships (1961, Shohei Imamura)
A Quiet Place (2018, John Krasinski)
Red Sun (1971, Terence Young)
Schizoid (1980, David Paulsen)
Seven Men from Now (1956, Budd Boetticher)
Sudden Fear (1952, David Miller)
Take Aim at the Police Van (1960, Seijun Suzuki)
Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)
This Magic Moment (2016, Gentry Kirby & Erin Leyden)
Previous Entries:
January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
April 2021
May 2021
June/July 2021
August/September 2021
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