26 DISCOVERIES
2. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) – An astonishing film, its great balancing act underlined by how acerbically destructive Anne Hathaway’s Kym is, yet how seriously she treats AA and everyone there. Her monologue in a meeting takes what could be melodrama and does something with it that is never going to leave me. So much of the film hits close to home, and usually in that case it serves only to highlight how false the material rings, but, just once in a long while, it does the opposite. Rachel Getting Married is that exception. Guilt. Addiction. Family. Truth. Fuck.
4. Letyat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957) aka The Cranes Are Flying – I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Who blocked and edited it, God?!
6. Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989) – What a writer Kevin Jarre was: his script for Glory is so nuanced in its characterisation, so unglamorous in its treatment of war and the grubbiness of duty, and so full of authentic and beautifully rendered dialogue. It was pointed out at the time, and has been regularly since, that he is a white writer focusing on a white colonel in this story of the Civil War's first Black regiment... but that is to puff up the reviewer's own progressive credentials at the expense of Jarre's achievement, and to do a disservice to the nature of the film, which draws (as the writer loved to do) from the best historical sources (in this case, the real-life letters of that white colonel), while allowing us to sit, repeatedly, with those Black soldiers. Yes, it asks us to sympathise with the wet-eyed guilt that the commanding officer feels at publicly flogging a Black guy, but it allows us also to understand the forces pressing down upon both men. The insights that we get from the letters themselves are small moments of revelation: not least the immediacy with which the Black soldiers could switch from drilling mode to their freer selves. Just now and then, director Zwick and a syrupy, overly conventional James Horner score take the film to somewhere less specific, yet that score comes into its own during the stunning climactic sequence, and it's Jarre himself, as a writer and actor, who gives us the most obviously Hollywood moment: the cry of "Give 'em hell, 54th!" that feels historically real, emotionally real and as calculated as something from a 1940s weepie. It is the most simply and deeply moving line in a picture that's hardly short of them. The cast, too, is superb: Freeman the veteran freeman, Braugher the bespectacled intellectual, and Denzel (in his breakthrough role) disfigured by repressed rage. His introductory scene is a masterpiece that turns on a dime, showing the unifying power of humour, and of a shared frame of reference. If Matthew Broderick is only competent as the colonel, his slight callowness as an actor proves a happy accident that fits the part.
8. Just Pals (John Ford, 1920) – “The boobs will all be at prayer meetin’, and it’s goin’ to be an easy job.” A stunning film: one of the Master’s greatest extant silents. The story is simple melodrama – featuring both an orphan, and a villain who steals the school memorial fund – but oh what Ford does with it. Even in 1920, he’s siding with the outsider against small-town hypocrisy: as in his immortal Stagecoach, the most heinous character on screen is a respected banker. Since the pals of the title are local layabout Buck Jones and a little urchin (who turns out to be goodhearted and yet fantastically untamable and rude), there are obvious parallels with Chaplin’s The Kid, which came out the next year, but this one is more bucolic and, critically and above all, about the quality of mercy. There are so many wonderful small moments here – what Ford called his ‘grace notes’ – a cascade of petals, a lens-flooding sunset, a sackful of kittens getting a last-second reprieve. No-one but Ford would have turned to those details, or rendered them with such unapologetic sincerity. This was the director’s first film at Fox, and his new lead, Buck Jones, proves himself as real star material (though at one point he does the signature arm-grab of the director’s usual muse, Harry Carey?!). The love interest, incidentally, is Helen Ferguson, later a powerful Hollywood PR for actors like Stanwyck. During those hazy, lazy shots of Jones in his element, Ford uses the hay loft as a portrait frame within the landscape one, placing the hero with his back to us, a shot that I can’t remember any other director ever using, creating a portal into a contrasting world, as at the end of The Searchers.
10. Sanshô dayû (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) aka Sansho the Bailiff – Last year I found myself watching Bird on a Wire, the much-maligned caper comedy starring Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn, and made a joke about how I was watching this shite but still hadn’t seen Sansho the Bailiff. There was a truth underlying it, though: I’d been skimping on international cinema for a little while: largely reading when I felt able to intellectually engage, then watching comfort movies and genre films when I didn’t. I couldn’t see Sansho as a teenager because like all classics of world cinema, the VHS was £17.49 in HMV, but I haven’t had that excuse for a while. So it felt great to finally commit, in this new year, to watching probably the best-known and most celebrated movie I’d never seen, and one that at least from the outside seemed challenging and demanding. Of course, once you’re into it, you remember that those distinctions are false: if a movie grips, it grips. As obvious and slightly snobbish as the comparison may be, though, the difference that I felt in watching this, compared to a mediocre John Badham movie, was broadly analogous to that between eating junk food and something that’s good for you. I’m keen to try to do both. Because this Japanese folk tale about suffering, slavery and redemption was truly glorious: painterly, emotionally complicated, and periodically profound.
12. Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977) – *SPOILERS* “Why do I always get stuck with crazy men?” “‘Cause that’s the only kind that’s left” A scintillating early Schrader script (rewritten by Heywood Gould) about a damaged Vietnam vet who winds up cleaning out a rats’ nest. Heard that one before? William Devane is the returning POW who, on the outside, is an all-American hero, and on the inside... well, there is no inside anymore. One remarkable thing about cinema is how poorly its worthy prestige pictures tend to age, and yet how much vitality, honesty and life there is to the genre trash that was largely derided upon release, but perhaps appealed to people’s truer instincts, and tells us so much more about the times. This one is astonishing, really, particularly in that near-perfect first half, which confounds you at every turn, while staying utterly true to a startlingly realised central character who, himself, seems utterly true. (Perhaps only those flashbacks – looking a little cheap, playing a little trite – land wide of the mark.) The remainder of the picture, a road trip en route to a bloodbath, has the odd misstep or slow stretch but also moments you’ll never forget, ending with Tommy Lee Jones blasting bad guys in a whorehouse, and an overt nod to The Searchers (an enduring influence on Schrader), in which he is Natalie Wood. (Jones's immortal line, "I'll just get my gear", manages to be quietly horrifying, deeply moving and just about the peak of bro cinema.) The varied score is way above average too, with one Tex-Mex theme that seems to anticipate Paris, Texas. A minor classic, in its periodically confounding, quasi-fascist Nixonian way.
14. The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) – I'd somehow seen half of this a couple of times, but I don't think I'd ever seen the whole thing. Beyond everything else, it's a truly great love story, done essentially in two scenes and two moments. The date sequence with McElhone, which begins in the library and ends on the beach, is so beautifully written, directed and played. And the film is daring in structure and form, timely and fairly prescient on reality TV and celebrity culture (check the complicity of the small screen audience, who cheer him on while keeping him in bondage), and quietly profound about escapism through media, the fetishisation of small-town values, and – most importantly – life itself. There's one particularly nice satirical moment in which Truman realises his entire life might be a sham, and all we can really focus on is the Ford logo on his car. My only complaint: Carrey’s performance feels too tied to its twin poles of fleeting, self-serious sincerity and his usual cartoonish shtick, though the final scene ties the two together with such panache that you wonder if that was always intentional.
16. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023) – *SOME SPOILERS* Nice: they fixed Dead Poets Society (kind of like how John Hughes fixed Pretty in Pink with Some Kind of Wonderful). At the moment of truth, Payne knows that selling out your fellow man is about the worst thing one can do, and there is always an alternative – though perhaps standing up is easier for an adult. The film is similar to Tom McCarthy’s Win-Win, and indeed to most of Payne’s mid-period movies, but it’s a lovely same, in its familiar, 2011-ish way. He doesn’t push too far, or expect his characters to transform themselves: a partial unfurling, sufficient to connect again, is enough. Then it's down to what was always there. When 'The Wind' by Cat Stevens kicks in, early in the second half, you feel that the song is making you feel in a way that the story hasn’t quite, save perhaps for during that Christmas dinner. But, by the end, the film has you.
18. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) – I felt a little queasy, and uneasy, about a Holocaust tour being used as the backdrop for a comedy-drama about a contemporary familial relationship; then I realised that Eisenberg is doing something remarkable here: not just combating generational trauma through the familiar defence of nebbish humour, and questioning the validity of modern pain in the shadow of unimaginable horrors, but purposefully reasserting a Jewish individuality, in its inevitably complicated and thorny nature, that is the antithesis of the Shoah. His film reminded me a little of The Darjeeling Limited, though with a much more coherent emotional background, and of Philomena, which offset the sins of the past with the same sort of shimmering wit. Though A Real Pain is apparently unambitious in its scale: a small cast, a small-ish canvas, its achievements are outsized. That extends to the photography. There's something about the visual framing of the Ghetto Heroes memorial at the start of the tour that took my breath away: its incongruousness in any setting, the idea that this should have happened anywhere at all, let alone where we're standing. Culkin's character, Benji, is showstopping, and he's very good in the role, but it does occasionally tip towards cliché (and I have the obvious reservations about a non-Jewish actor in the part). Where he really works is in keeping you on edge, and in the small moments: particularly that devastating intake of breath when he sees the shoes at the camp. Eisenberg's role is less showy, but he's even better, I think. His short speech about pain is a remarkable feat of writing and performance, but is there anything better than the moment of reconnection before the coming ordeal, which is nothing more than two men saying "Hey" to one another. The biggest laugh in the picture is probably the tour-guide, David, trying to share his facts about the oldest headstone in Poland while adhering to Benji's oppressive and almost arbitrary limitations, though I also loved that sequence at the grandmother's old house. Surely the only thing more Jewish than the ritual of leaving stones on her old doorstep is what happens next.
20. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003) – This left-wing polemic about Los Angeles on film is highly entertaining and valuable if you’re a film location nerd, interested in the movie colony and the city that surrounds it, or just want to understand 20th century America. At its best, it calls to mind Caro’s ‘The Power Broker’, and I have no higher praise than that. The passages dealing with Los Angeles’ (never 'LA’s', we are cautioned) forgotten public history, and its phony ‘secret history’, are just dazzling, and there’s a great sincerity to Andersen’s bristling anger at the erasure of working class lives, both in mainstream film and from the razed community of Bunker Hill. But while this video essay is intellectually stimulating, provocative, pedantic in an anal way that I really don’t mind, and even waspishly funny, it is also overly grouchy. Our host knows an awful lot about movies, but he really doesn’t seem to like any of them (the sole exceptions, across almost three hours, are The Exiles, the original Gone in 60 Seconds, two porn films, and the calling cards of the tiresome, The Long Goodbye and the films of John Cassavetes). I would simply devote my life to something I enjoyed. I would also like to explain to him that all cities are misrepresented on screen – racially, culturally, geographically – and that Notting Hill was not neorealism, but then perhaps Los Angeles here is a prism through which we are meant to see the wider crimes of mass culture, and not a special case. There’s some of the inevitable pretension of the form, too, which seems to bring out an academic’s nascent egomania. Andersen throws in some truly puzzling contentions: the first teenagers with cars were in Rebel without a Cause (surely only true if you’re employing the fun argument that Ray invented the teenager); that some stag film is a "gay porn masterpiece"; and that “the greatest ‘low tourist’ director is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock”. Oh, of course. It's pretty great, though. It made me look at these movies in such a different way, from Hal Roach to Double Indemnity to Blade Runner, and who doesn’t want that.
22. The Gallant Hours (Robert Montgomery, 1960) – A reverential but riveting, unsentimental drama about the lead-up to the battle of Guadalcanal, largely following around Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey (Cagney). The star is brilliant, obviously, and there’s one counter-intuitive scene between Halsey and a young flyer who wants to be relieved of command that is particularly special, explicitly disavowing speechmaking, and then offering something more profound.
24. Unfinished Business (Gregory La Cava, 1941) – This is so nearly a great film, and certainly one with dazzling passages of modernity and maturity, as Irene Dunne – fleeing the fate of a spinster – takes a train out of her small town, and, on that train, fucks the first guy she meets (Preston Foster). She thinks he’s sincere, he’s anything but, and yet this is no creaking melodrama but a picture that’s touching, often incredibly funny, and, at its best, genuinely profound. In its greatest, far later scene, Dunne and her estranged husband (Robert Montgomery, playing Foster’s brother) sit on the stairs in her boarding house, and she explains the tenets of female desire that give the film its title. Even if the film ultimately backs away, terrified, from the conclusions it has unearthed there, that sequence remains a masterpiece of counter-intuition and complexity, and still looks at least 30 years ahead of its time. There are numerous special moments, though: a song at a piano, and the softening it engenders; by far Walter Catlett’s funniest work on screen (as a thinly-veiled Billy Rose); and Eugene Pallette’s performance as a squeaky-shoed butler, which mirrors the trajectory of the film in seguing from comedy to something far more affecting. There is, occasionally, something of Remember the Night about this film, and that’s not just the highest praise I can offer, but about the rarest. And there is too, a moment of erotic expression that drew an astonished gasp from an audience in 2025, followed hot on its heels by a fantastic moment of revelation, and then an inspired Mamoulian-ish flourish from La Cava, who pans up and down and across to find a succession of faces, each one afforded a snatch of gossip as it spreads like fire though a room. Such startling invention, though, and such daring, is at times undermined by moments of contrived characterisation, and some terrible plotting. The film first stutters when indulging in one of those drunk scenes that La Cava (a self-deluding alcoholic – is there any other kind?) thought so amusing and important to story construction, yet has there ever been a funny drunk scene? For a film with as many laughs as this one (and no light opera virtuoso was ever half as good at comedy as Dunne), it’s also strange that it requires such frequent recourse to jokes about people being fat and ugly. And there’s no question that the director’s vaunted improvisational approach is a double-edged sword, leading to some fascinating dynamics and fabulously unresolved scene endings, but also some extremely uneven – and even unconvincing – sequences. I wanted to love Unfinished Business unreservedly, and for a half hour I did, revelling in its balance of elements, and at the rare sound of a Code-era woman exhaling with horniness, as Foster puts the moves on Dunne. If, once the leads start drinking, the film becomes conspicuously inconsistent, its most extraordinary moments are nevertheless housed in that erratic remainder.
26. Maman Calibri (Julien Duvivier, 1929) aka Mother Hummingbird – Why Are Men?: The Movie. The first 45 minutes of this one, climaxing with a kiss, are intoxicating, closer to Lubitsch’s Student Prince than Fannie Hurst. The rest is rather too drawn-out, beginning with finger-pointing melodrama and ending with mawkishness, though it still has great moments growing out of the showy direction and incredible Algerian location photography. Hollywood films in 1930 couldn’t have SKIES like these. There’s also one notably excellent little scene in front of a mirror that predates The Substance by 90-plus years, and ends with a moment of magnificent and horrible awkwardness, all the better for being so low-key. Its story is something like The Graduate from Mrs Robinson’s point of view, and so hews close to tragedy. Maria Jacobini is the socialite housewife who tires of her repressive family life and begins an affair with her older son’s friend (Francis Lederer, in his slightly goofy ‘Franz’ days). She goes with him to Algeria, where he proceeds to fall in love with a woman his own age (Hélène Hallier). “He is charming,” Hallier tells Jacobini as Lederer rides past, “is he your son?” I’m not so sure about the moment in the same scene where the heroine saves her future love rival from a bunch of African children by chucking one coin into the dirt, though I think Duvivier just wanted the automatic montage of faces and fabrics. I imagine those elements will fade from my memory fairly quickly, as the carousel of movement (and delayed gratification) in the ball sequence continues to waltz around my brain.
***
10 OLD FAVOURITES
2. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) – I watched this for the millionth time, but this time in the new Warner Bros restoration, which looks incredible, so well done everyone. I wrote 4,000 words on this movie in my youth, I've since gone the other way, trying to pare down its magnificence to just a couple of pars. This time, a few stray thoughts:
- The way Ford shoots Wayne here: I've never seen anything like it. Mythmaking on the most gigantic scale: Ethan on a rearing horse, shot from below, enormous before the sprawling vista. Then those two horrifying later close-ups.
- I really think Ebert missed or misunderstood the point of the second storyline: "This second strand is without interest, and those who value The Searchers filter it out, patiently waiting for a return to the main story line," he says a little presumptuously. But it has at least four purposes: to counterpoint Ethan's loneliness, to paint an alternate history of the burned homestead, to offer societal context and a broader palette of emotions, and to provide that astonishing moment of whiplash near the close, when we realise that Ethan isn't some deranged outlier: the sweet, fun, feisty frontier girl thinks and feels the self-same thing that he does, he's just the man of action carrying out the job.
- Only Ford would cut from the most overwhelming moment of redemption ever realised on film to a shot of Ward Bond having a bullet removed from his arse.
- Frank Nugent's script can get overlooked by critics amid the rust-coloured soil and the groping towards a reckoning on race, but it has everything: terse poetry in the dialogue, a fondness for allusion that gifts you a dozen brooding, action-packed prequels, and a playfulness with the form that climaxes with that letter set-piece. Even the few elements I could live without, like the comedy 'squaw' sequence, do pay off, usually in the most subversive way; making her final actions unknown and unknowable is an unusually literary flourish that gives the film such a richness. Going through Letterboxd now, blocking every 21-year-old who has posted, "this movie is way racist??"
4. One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932) – I always like to rewatch an all-time favourite on my birthday. Assorted virtues:
- Luminescent photography (seen like never before on the gorgeous Warner Archive Blu-ray): a film in which every shot is beautiful, but the travelling shots especially.
- The greatest ever second-leads in a movie. Frank McHugh doing his patented ‘one-two-three’ laugh – usually rationed to once per film – in virtually every scene. Aline MacMahon rat-a-tat-ing in Brooklynese. And yet the best scene in the picture is that masterpiece in which this ostensibly comic pair, essentially just doling out exposition, aided by brilliantly economical, flavourful dialogue, invest an eternity of emotion and beauty in their relationship with Bill Powell, a murderer about to be hanged.
- Francis’s softness.
- Powell raising a hand in farewell, then raising both hands with a gun in his back.
- Warren Hymer, cinema’s archetypal dumb, gurning crim, for once getting to be cool.
- The studio era's understanding that you don't need to bother going on location, you just need a song that sounds a lot like it comes from the country in question.
- That ending.
6. The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940) – This just looked close to perfect this time. Lubitsch’s delicate handling of the most sensitive subjects, using the grammar of his door gags at the darkest moment. His transparent love of Felix Bressart, a fellow Jewish German émigré possessed of vast warmth and exquisite comic timing. Peggy Sullavan entering the film and immediately saying “Yiss” at least three times, in that strange and wondrous voice of hers. That close-up of her through the PO box. The film’s disgust at yes-men. And an ending that always rather confounds me, eschewing simple sentiment in favour of something almost cruel, before letting the floodgates open; I think what Lubitsch is trying to do there is something truly ambitious and unusual, in placing the fickle mystery of in-person chemistry on a par with the reality of our deepest selves: no more but certainly no less.
8. Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) – "I wonder if I know what you mean." "I wonder if you wonder." Watched for the dozenth time, I guess. It was a weirdly hard film to see in the '90s, but I've made up for that since. I still get a buzz from being able to do so. Every line is remarkable – or at least aims to be. It has the best names around, riffed on endlessly ever since: Walter Neff! Phyllis Dietrichson! Barton Keyes! And it has three unforgettable performance, which reveal a little more each time you see them. Wilder uses Stanwyck so sparingly, which is so smart. This isn't her best turn, but it's perhaps her last great one (there was still My Reputation, the Fuller, and the Sirks, but they can't dream of touching what came before). Man, the ugliness of her mouth in the reveal, but also the way she disarms Walter, and us, with those flashes of familiar sincerity, all false except (or including?) the last. One thing I've always loved about Wilder, and that often gets missed, is his instinctive need to swing towards humanism; he does it back-to-back here, at the end of his sourest film, and it is, in the modern parlance, a hell of a swing. Murray's smug, fatalistic white-collar shithell is a joy too. The leads are, except when cannily weaponising their screen baggage, completely unrecognisable as the soft-centred lovers of Remember the Night (five stars, check it out). As their near-omniscient shadow, Eddie G. was never better; if the first half is a story about the lust between a man and a woman, the second is a love story between two insurance men. And within each scene, momentum keeps shifting, keeping you constantly disorientated. All that and the atmosphere. The perfect L.A. locations, to augment the studio stuff. The sweat on MacMurray's brow. And Stanwyck extinguishing all the lights, under orders, ahead of the climactic confrontation, like the very spirit of film noir. Debits? I suppose Richard Gaines can't act, the "twisted hopes and crooked dreams" line sounds like placeholder text, and there’s a bit too much score. Hard to give a shit, though, isn't it.
- Is the government warehouse the single greatest set ever constructed? Would love to see the request from Hal Wallis. “A brutalist art deco head fuck, please. Make it far too big on the outside, just unaccountably enormous. A Dali prison, from the afterlife.”
- Don Siegel montages, Gladys George as a lovesick Texas Guinan, Cagney finding such gradations and shadings and complexity in Eddie (his broiling anger engendered by pain), so much deft dialogue in the unapproachable ‘30s style. Glorious.
10. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950) – “Mabel Normand and John Gilbert must have swum in it, ten-thousand midnights ago.” Sunset Blvd. has a deep creepiness that nothing else has ever quite matched. It’s the flight from poverty into a world of rotting, Gothic glamour; it is rats in the pool, and Wilder’s revulsion at a 50-year-old woman bound for horny gaol; but it is also how inescapable Joe’s fate is, and how utterly we – and Waxman’s score – know it. In its way, it’s the most gruelling of the great films, so bitter and bilious, with the jaundiced shitheel as narrator, and Norma Desmond as spider (the way she pulls Joe in for that New Year’s kiss, fucking yikes): a fundamentally repulsive figure motivated by a deranged sexuality, and a corrosive, wounded vanity. There is pity here too. Yet while the sequence at Paramount – in which she is welcomed by the old-timers, before Wilder’s sick sense of humour kicks in – is so desperately moving, it is also warped by the writer-director’s hysterical ageism. His hero opines, in the shape of a belated olive branch, that there’s nothing wrong with being 50 unless you try to be 25, but what I mostly remember is Wilder getting misty-eyed at the idea of a sweet 17-year-old, and wanting to chuck his guts up at a menopausal woman with a baggy neck. And while there is some balance between the piteous and the monstrous, we land, always, on the latter; the final scene is no less ugly for being obliquely touched by God’s mercy. In it, Wilder breaks the fourth wall to make us all complicit in the raising and forgetting of icons, just as he has somehow twisted a Lubitsch door gag into the bleakest sight on earth (lights going off, through the holes of absent locks, removed because the occupant might otherwise kill herself). No one gets out of Sunset Blvd. whole: not Buster, Anna Q. Nilsson, Norma, Betty or Joe. But oh for those Gillis/Schaefer scenes, and the best insider references in Hollywood history.
***
SEVEN STINKERS*
2. Black Mama, White Mama (Eddie Romero, 1973) – It’s so funny and/or pathetic that MGM doesn’t own any of its pre-1948 catalogue but does own an online casino and *this*. 'Cheers, Louis B. Mayer’s crying x' It’s basically just a soft-core porn film, masquerading as a gender-swap Defiant Ones, filmed haplessly and for almost no money in the Phillippines. Atrocious, sure, but worse than that: just boring - almost impossible to follow, and with no real development in that central relationship. Even its nude scenes aren’t very good, just weirdly infantilising or sadistic. The murder on the bus is so funny. From an original story by Jonathan Demme (see Discoveries, #2)!
4. Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (Matthew Bright, 1999) – A remarkably terrible in-name-only sequel – so bad, in fact, that it makes you wonder if the original was a fluke. It’s loosely based, once more, on a fairy tale (this time Hansel and Gretel), and ultimately tries the same trick – seguing from bad-taste comedy to pathos – but trades for far too long in the former, which here is staggeringly thin and try-hard. From the moment John Landis appears in the first scene as a judge (because, lol, in real life he was contentiously cleared of killing three people), you know that the smugness:actual laughs ratio is going to be off the charts. I could list the other topics it ticks off in its episodic, audience-baiting way, but I’d rather just forget about a film this shit. Natasha Lyonne at least gives it her all as the riot grrrlish heroine, and if you do insist on watching the film, you may as well finish it, since its Taxi Driver-ish denouement is easily the best bit.
6. Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986) – Is the fuss around this one just a nostalgia thing? It's virtually plotless, and not in a good way. Its overpowering technical elements make it move as slowly as The Lady in the Lake (1944): so much of the film consists of characters just standing around on unconvincing soundstage sets. And it is quite profoundly unfunny, in a fascinatingly specific way, with the greatest incongruous regional Englishness this side of The Empire Strikes Back. What did I like? A few things here and there. The rocks that lined up to look like Bowie. A lovely teddy called Lancelot. The heroic, slow-witted monster, Ludo: undeniably good value. Little minions operating the terrifying death traps (a fun touch). The jump back to the bedroom. And Connelly's, "What have you done?", which has a strange power quite at odds with the rest of the film, and neatly circled back to with that touching apology and instance of forgiveness. I found the rest of it an almighty chore. It's like Return to Oz if it was a bit crap, a feeling that extends even to the ending, which junks a touching, promising melancholy for a party. This period of Bowie's career makes absolutely no sense to me.
7. Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) – Not, you would have to say, terribly subtle.
***
SIX RE-APPRAISALS
Because sometimes my opinions are bad.
THREE UP
2. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997) – It is, really, just a heist movie with incredible dialogue, and Tarantino – barely believing his luck – truly indulging himself, turning Elmore Leonard into a blaxploitation homage. It’s the opening tune (Womack’s indelible ‘Across 110th Street’), it’s the font, it’s Sid Haig, it’s even the last acting credit done in the genre style: “and CHRIS TUCKER as Beaumont”. It’s the interest in bad smells and the telephone gag lifted from Truck Turner, it’s actual dialogue lifted from Bucktown (“I’m serious as a heart attack”). And it’s Grier, who sang to herself in that movie, and does so here, lip-syncing to perhaps the greatest of all blaxploitation theme songs (only Gaye’s 'Trouble Man' may have the edge). I don’t – and probably never will – understand the argument that this is Tarantino’s best film. Dogs and Pulp still feel revolutionary, and hit me in the heart far earlier. Not for them, either, that weird and dated predilection for Kangol caps. But it was all, still, at this stage, so swaggeringly confident, and so easy. The two sequences of Grier just walking. The first in a side-on travelling shot, before the song swerves into its climactic desperation, and she starts to run. The second, cut to ‘Street Life’. The scene with her in the clothing store: perfect in its pacing, cutting, framing, scoring, circling camera and climactic punchline. So many great lines. At least four massive laughs. De Niro brilliant as a slightly slow thug – still the most underrated thing he’s ever done on screen. It just seems a little light on genuine human feeling, in a way that QT’s first two weren’t... until Forster, his waistband close to his nips, bids goodbye, and walks into the other room.
3. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) – Pretty good, innit? Particularly in the sweep of Harvey Dent’s story, and in Ledger’s nervy, edgy and exciting performance, which reminds me a little of Dean in East of Eden, trying something every moment even if, sometimes, ironically, that something can be a little the same as the previous thing. Bale sometimes struggles to get any genuine warmth into his performances (there’s just that one scene in Batman Begins where it really comes through, from somewhere), but Caine and Freeman each generate enough for two people in their scenes with him. The beats of the story are just right: it’s so well assembled, so neatly divided between its various elements, with enough surprises up its sleeve, and an antagonist so far ahead of his pursuers that you really start to wonder how they’ll get to him. The answer, it turns out, is sentimental, the sentimentality rather ladled on, and the coda cribbed from Ford’s Fort Apache. It all feels a little forced, and with it a little false, but I’d never champion cynicism over idealism. Other elements, I do find frustrating. Nolan will always prioritise what he thinks of as an arresting image over something that is true to the character (why is the Joker picked up by his fellow bank robbers with his anonymising mask in his hand?); the convoy chase has some nice moments but is really hard to follow spatially; the fight scene at the party looks like it’s from a 1980s TV movie, and the writing still tends towards the overwritten: the Burma story; that awful climactic speech from Oldman, so self-serious that it feels like self-parody. But I liked this so much more than when I first saw it. It’s really entertaining for the most part, has more substance than most superhero flicks, if perhaps less than it imagines, and gets a shot in the arm from Ledger and (particularly in the earlier reels) Eckhart. Also a big fan of Nolan breaking one law of cinematic grammar by shooting Ledger right-side up when he’s dangling upside down from a rope, the kind of, "Fuck it, let's do it" flourish we could use more of in movies.
THREE DOWN
2. 辣手神探) (John Woo, 1992) aka Hard Boiled – “You’re a woeful undercover cop.” “There’s no good or bad, just personal style.” A near-mythic John Woo actioner, now back in circulation. In perfect late-capitalist style, it had ended up being owned by a construction company who refused to license it – before being finally rescued by Shout! Factory, and shared with Tubi and Criterion. Woo is, of course, more interested in destruction. The film can’t perhaps match its reputation – inevitably burnished by becoming almost impossible to see – but its fagpacket plot, music-video visuals and elements of uninteresting villainy are offset by spectacular flashes of action, which include Chow firing away while (a) sliding down a banister, (b) whooshing out of a slot in a morgue, (c) holding a baby. Some of the stuntwork is just incredible, and if you found, say, The Raid or Dredd irresistible rather than repetitive, this is going to knock your brain out of your open mouth. The film’s attendant weirdness, and passages of monotony, were largely down to its troubled production. Woo’s initial concept was for a gritty, demystifying policier about detectives pursuing a baby poisoner. But after that story upset everyone who read it, and his regular screenwriter suddenly died (not poisoned), he served up, partly off-the-cuff, a live action cartoon that features Bond-ish villains hiding arms in a hospital, one of the Tony Leungs playing an off-the-chain undercover cop, and the director himself dispensing wisdom as a sagacious former policeman who appears to live in a jazz club. If the moral grubbiness of going undercover is evoked, there is little revisionism applied to Chow’s character, a one-man army who still finds time to put cotton wool in babies’ ears during a siege. Woo’s tongue-in-cheek approach extends to neat in-jokes at either end of the film, which begins in a bird-café, with none of his trademark doves in sight. When you’re wondering, near the movie’s close, just when they might turn up, his camera lingers for a moment on a poster of a dove on a hospital wall, its message of peace counterpointing the utter mayhem exploding around it. Hard Boiled isn't as good as I remembered, which of course is a little disappointing, but it's still essential for anyone halfway interested in action cinema.
3. The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938) – Barbara Stanwyck Nose Appreciation Club, sign in here. The Mad Miss Manton Appreciation Club, I'm afraid I've resigned. This one’s simply not the best use of Missy’s talents: playing the kind of dizzy debutante role you associate with Constance Bennett or Carole Lombard. In those moments where she and Fonda play it straight and soppy, it’s beautiful, but there's not nearly enough of that. The film is a curious confection made at RKO, and while both leads were unusual in the ‘30s in effectively freelancing across the different studios, it still feels weird to find them at this end of Gower Street, since Stanwyck had such a Paramount feel, and Fonda was pure Fox, the place where he eventually signed. Gotta love those insane RKO sets, though: did a cityscape and subway ever look more sanitised? What makes this all even odder, though (if you’re a massive fucking nerd), is that the script is by Philip Epstein, who spent almost his whole life at Warner, almost always working with his brother (they wrote large chunks of Casablanca). His script is, surprisingly, absolutely all over the fucking place, its central murder mystery being both hopelessly simplistic and unbelievably convoluted – the exact opposite of what it should be. Stanwyck’s ditzy sidekicks, meanwhile, are simply too trivial – one-dimensional characters whose decisions never seem real – and the film features an awful lot of people just screaming and shouting. I’ve always loved Sam Levene, and he’s quite funny in this when he’s not overdoing it, but that isn’t much of the time; ‘mugging’ barely does the rest justice. Thank goodness for the leads, then. Stanwyck, even miscast and at about half-power, has these moments that melt you, and that irradiating talent that has always rendered someone irresistible (also: that nose, man). Fonda didn’t like playing daft comedy, and rarely got a dafter part than this one, but did the doe-eyed dolt as well as anyone. Incidentally, Miss Manton’s lawyer here is called Hopsy, which perhaps gave Sturges the idea for The Lady Eve, the last and best of the stars’ three teamings. This one isn’t in the same league, even the same universe, with its choppy editing, slapdash use of stock footage (at one point mirrored, so all the shop frontages read backwards) and general noisy incompetence, but there are a finite number of pre-’45 Stanwyck films, and I do love them all in some way.
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FIVE OBSESSIONS
2. Stanwyck. The greatest screen actor ever to walk the earth (Gish second, Cagney third, thanks for playing). I'm on 75 films now, so just seven to go. Then I imagine we go round again. This year's six new watches were close to the dregs, but she's very good in her first major role, trapped behind The Locked Door.
3. Blaxploitation. It was March, I had OG flu, and once I’d got past the not-being-able-to-do-anything stage, all that seemed to help was pimps being roundhouse-kicked in the head. Coffy, Foxy Brown, Across 110th Street, Friday Foster, Truck Turner, Bucktown... It was quite a week, you cracker-ass mutha.
4. Denzel Washington. On the film-logging website, Letterboxd, users can see which actors they have watched the most since joining. The only actor in my top 40 who is in colour is Denzel Washington. Do I understand why he has now taken to essentially playing Jason Statham across the three increasingly silly films in the Equalizer franchise? No, I do not. But as long as he’s happy. I love that guy.
5. Margaret Sullavan. I have been bewitched: it was the voice that did it. I dove deep on Sullavan while researching my Blu-ray essay on Little Man, What Now? last year, and have kept diving. Back Street and Next Time We Love didn’t quite come off, but in The Shopworn Angel (see Discoveries, #23), she is little short of astonishing. She made 16 films. I have seen 11, and I’m coming for the rest.
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FOOTNOTE:
*'stinker' is a word I got from the great forgotten comedy of the 1940s, I Love You Again.
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Thanks for reading
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