Muppets Most Wanted: James Bobin

James Bobin's Muppets Most Wanted is a vastly superior film to The Muppets (2011) if only by the virtue of the fact that the film is actually about the Muppets. Muppets Most Wanted is the Muppets film that I have been waiting for for years: smart, funny, inventive, touching, and full of great musical numbers (except for one bizarre duet between Miss Piggy and Celine Deon that leaves the audience wondering if the filmmakers accidentally forgot to edit in a crucial punchline). The film is a send-up of the Muppets caper films of the early 80s: the Muppets embark on a world-wide tour after Kermit is kidnapped and replaced by Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, who uses their shows as distractions while he and his subordinate, the "Lemur," rob Europe's greatest museums and vaults in an attempt to find hidden clues about how to steal the crown jewels of Great Britain. The various subplots are genuinely delightful: Kermit's attempts to escape from a prison in Siberia where he is mistaken for Constantine, the Muppets realizing that Kermit was what kept the show from collapsing into itself, and Sam Eagle teaming up with his European counterpart, Jean Pierre Napoleon, to catch Constantine (seriously, could we just have a movie of these two running around America and Europe?). The film's tongue-in-cheek (or is it mole-on-cheek?) nature helps keep its self-referential parodies from collapsing in on themselves. I've heard that some people thought that there were too many musical numbers. But if all of the musical numbers are excellent (barring the aforementioned Deon duet), what's the problem? I was a bit bothered by the film's use of CGI during sequences where Constantine danced around and used martial arts on hapless prison guards. After all, the Muppets are one of the last bastions of traditional special effects in all of Hollywood. But Bobin said in an interview that "if we are doing CG compositing...we always have puppeteers perform it. We never go down the road of having a full CG character, which you could easily do. It feels that the joy of this movie is the Muppets exist. They're real; you can touch them." And if that's the case, then I can forgive the film for that.

8/10

Million Dollar Mermaid: Mervyn LeRoy

Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman may have been one of the most fascinating women of the early 20th century. After overcoming a disability which left her legs weak as a child, she went on to become one of the first women to attempt swimming the English Channel, became a star of stage and screen, and helped popularize the one-piece bathing suit for women. It seemed predictable that Hollywood would one day make a film based on her life. But what I couldn't have predicted was that the ensuing film, Mervyn LeRoy's Million Dollar Mermaid, would essentially make Kellerman a supporting character in her own story. Here's the film's main problem: it takes a very interesting story about a woman overcoming a disability to become a super-star and a force for social progress and makes it a vapid love story. Kellerman's relationship and eventual marriage to James Sullivan, her American promoter, dominates most of the film. The scenes that actually focus on Kellerman, her life in Australia before traveling to Europe and America and the lavish synchronized swimming sequences (one of which I could swear I saw when I was a young child at my grandmother's house in rural Georgia), are fantastic. But the romantic side-plot turns a very fascinating, ground-breaking woman into a wistful puppy desperate for approval and affection. Perhaps the most nauseating moment is near the end when she is accidentally injured during a disastrous accident during a film shoot where she suffers a potentially career-ending spinal hematoma. And, incredibly, the film suggests that it was James who gave Annette the agency to recover. The reconciliation of their relationship at this point is treated as the film's emotional climax. What is this? A silent melodrama starring Mary Pickford? I might be more forgiving of the film's decision to frame Annette's life as a romantic melodrama if it wasn't for the fact that as a character James Sullivan is so boring that whenever he's onscreen (which makes up a considerable chunk of the film's run-time) almost all of the energy and enthusiasm is sucked away. So as a tribute to Annette Kellerman, the film is a failure. And as a piece of entertainment, it is also a failure.

5/10

Hellzapoppin’: H. C. Potter, Joseph A. McDonough, Edward Cline

Deep within the bowels of Hell, demons stuff victims dressed in lavish fashions into giant barrels labeled “Canned Guy” and “Canned Gal.” As they sharpen their pitchforks, turn women in expensive dresses on spits over open fires, and torment the eternally damned, they sing a happy song.

Hellzapoppin/Ol’ Satan’s on a tear
Hellzapoppin/They’re screamin’ everywhere
See the Inferno/of Vaudeville
Anything can happen/And it probably will!!

Suddenly a taxi appears and two beleaguered men fly out onto the ground after a tidal wave of ducks, dogs, and other animals inexplicably crammed into the back seat. One looks up and mutters to the other: “That’s the first taxi driver that ever went straight where I told him to!” These two unfortunates are vaudevillian legends Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. They have arrived in Hell for possibly the most nightmarish reason of all: making a Hollywood film. For they have been given the grim responsibility of making Hellzapoppin’, perhaps the most subversively anarchic comedy to ever spring from the forehead of the Hollywood studio system. Is it any wonder why at the beginning we are treated to a title card reading: “......any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental.”

Hellzapoppin’ was an “adaptation” of a musical revue written by Olsen and Johnson that had been a smash hit on Broadway, running for more than 3 years for 1,404 performances. At the time, it was the longest-running Broadway musical in history. The revue was a model of controlled chaos. As reporter Celia Wren recounted: “The smash hit "Hellzapoppin" was a smorgasbord of explode-the-fourth-wall nuttiness: sight gags; comedy songs; skits abandoned partway through; cameos by audience stooges; an absurdist raffle; and in a trademark stunt, a man who wandered through the theater hawking an ever-larger potted tree.” So Olsen and Johnson were confronted with a problem: how do you adapt a musical with no real plot that heavily relied on an interactive circus atmosphere?

The answer was to make a movie about Olsen and Johnson trying to make a movie of Hellzapoppin’. Confused yet? Let me explain.

After the opening number in Hell, it is revealed that it is all a Hollywood sound stage. They are confronted by a director (Richard Lane) and a nervous screenwriter (Elisha Cook Jr.) who want to pitch them a script for the film. The suggested film is about a love triangle between three “disgusting rich” aristocrats: “young fella” Woody Taylor (Lewis Howard), playwright Jeff Hunter (Robert Paige), and wannabe actress Kitty Rand (Jane Frazee). Kitty is putting on a Red Cross benefit at her estate and Olsen and Johnson are hired as prop-men. As Woody, Jeff, and Kitty play their game of romantic musical chairs, Olsen and Johnson run about trying to gather all of the outlandish props that the show will need. Later, when they realize that Kitty will marry the wrong man if the show is a success, they sabotage the benefit with a menagerie of pranks and tricks. Other notable characters include Hugh Herbert as Quimby, a detective and master of disguises who bounces around the film spreading chaos wherever he goes like a mythical trickster, Mischa Auer as Prince Pepi, a lecherous European aristocrat who poses as a fraud for free food and sympathy, and Martha Raye as Betty Johnson, Chic’s man-hungry, vivacious sister.

To add to the mayhem, there is another layer to the narrative: an easily distracted projectionist played by Shemp Howard who literally runs the film from his booth. Throughout the film he interacts with both Olsen and Johnson in the framing narrative and Olsen and Johnson in the film-within-the-film. Many of the film’s best gags come from their interactions: he repeatedly fails to keep the camera focused on the principle characters (instead turning the camera to beautiful women), he gets reels mixed up and throws the unfortunate duo into a Western, and, in the film’s most ingenious gag, gets the film stuck, thereby trapping half of the characters onscreen in the bottom half of the frame and the other half in the top half of the frame. These gags are not only effective; they also demonstrate the duo’s ability to appropriate the capabilities (and limitations) of the cinematic medium for comedic purposes.

It’s an unwritten rule that a musical is only as good as its musical numbers. So, thankfully, Hellzapoppin’ does not contain any musical misfires. Two numbers in particular almost knock the house down. The first is Watch the Birdie, an impromptu ode to photography wherein Raye almost steals the whole damn picture away from Olsen and Johnson. As she sings and swings with all of the skill and abandon that only a lifelong vaudevillian can muster, footage of people diving into a pool is paused, reversed, and played over and over again. The second number is a show-stopping Lindy Hop performed by the black employees of Kitty’s estate. Much like a similar sequence in the Marx Brothers classic A Day at the Races (1937), the Lindy Hop number gave a chance for otherwise disenfranchised black performers to demonstrate their ferocious talents.

Also like many of the Marx Brothers’ films, Hellzapoppin’ devotes a couple of musical numbers to the bland romantic couples who, for the most part, serve as dull straight-men (and women) to the madcap antics of the film’s stars. But surprisingly, Hellzapoppin’ managed to make these segments memorable as well. One early sappy love ballad is frequently interrupted by title cards announcing: “Attention Please! If Stinky Miller is in the audience -- GO HOME!”

Another ballad is intercut with sequences of choreographed synchronized swimmers, predicting similar numbers in future films starring Esther Williams. But even more fascinating is how the filmmakers transitioned between shots of the singers and shots of the swimmers: they would frequently take a close-up of an inconsequential object, like a white rose or a fan, and do a fade-in of the swimmers arranged in a similar pattern.

These sequences speak to the underlying genius of Hellzapoppin’: it is just as much a piece of cinema as it is an adaptation of a theatrical musical. Instead of simply moving from one to the other via an edit or a tracking shot, the filmmakers utilized a technique that would have been nearly impossible to replicate on stage. But in fact, most of the film could be described that way. I couldn’t imagine a film like Hellzapoppin’ existing (and succeeding) in any other medium. Ingeniously metafictional, distinctly cinematic, ruthlessly creative, joyfully anarchic, and most importantly, deliriously entertaining, Hellzapoppin’ is a treasure of the American musical comedy tradition.

10/10

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice: Yasujirō Ozu

Yasujirō Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a simple movie about appreciating the simple pleasures in life. The film centers around a strained, middle-aged married couple with no children. The husband, Mokichi Satake (Shin Saburi), works as an executive at an engineering company and enjoys living relaxed lifestyle. He loves traveling third class on trains, cheap cigarettes, and ochazuke, a simple dish consisting of green tea over rice. The wife, Taeko (Michiyo Kogure), finds Mokichi dull and unbearable. She seems to relish opportunities to lie to him so she can go on lavish vacations with friends to spas. Their lives are disrupted when Mokichi's family asks them to act as matchmakers for Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima), their strong-willed niece who resents arranged marriages. Soon Mokichi and Taeko have a falling out: Taeko won't speak to him, even when he is assigned by his company to fly to Uruguay on a business trip. After he leaves, Taeko comes to the realization that maybe Mokichi's outlook on life had some merit after all. The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a minor film by Ozu, but it should be of interest to scholars because of how often he moves his characteristically static camera. There are many shots that take place from the inside of moving vehicles. Additionally, a shot where Ozu slowly zooms his camera in and out on an empty domestic room is repeated several times throughout the film. In a sense, it almost acts as one of Ozu's trademark "pillow shots."

7/10

Love Affair: Leo McCarey

Leo McCarey's Love Affair is the second Irene Dunne movie that I've seen recently that I originally dreaded watching but ended up loving. The first was George Stevens' I Remember Mama, a melodrama about inner city immigrants living in San Francisco in the 1910s. Another similarity between the two films is that they were made by directors that I usually feel ambivalent about: I love McCarey's comedies but rarely enjoy his dramas and I find Stevens' work to be painfully hit-or-miss. But I was taken aback by how deeply Love Affair effected me. The film is rich in McCarey's trademark warm, subtle humanism (which, admittedly, I find weighs down most of his dramas instead of improving them). The film, about a Frenchman named Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer) and an American named Terry McKay (Irene Dunne) who fall in love during an Atlantic cruise and swear to reunite at the top of the Empire State Building six months later, is gentle and sweet. But it also contains moments of stunning artistry, usually thanks to the efforts of cinematographer Rudolph Maté, most famous for his work in such immortal classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932). Two early scenes where the couple meets with Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) on the island of Madeira are particularly stunning. First, they pray in a local chapel. The lighting, Maté's cinematography, and McCarey's careful editing helped turn what could have been a boring scene into a moment pregnant with the numinous. The second scene takes place right as they are about to leave the island. Janou wants to play them a song before they depart. As her shriveled hands stumble and trips over the keys, Terry begins to sing along with the music. By the end, Janou stops and collapses in tears. Is she mourning the loss of her talent? Is she happy that Michel has found his soul-mate in such a kind, loving young woman? Or is it something more intangible? I'm not sure. But I have a feeling that I will be revisiting this scene sometime in the future.

8/10

The Indian Fighter: André de Toth

André de Toth's The Indian Fighter is a proto-Revisionist Western that portrays American cavalrymen as bigoted, settlers as greedy opportunists willing to enslave Native Americans with alcohol in exchange for gold, and the Native Americans as completely justified in their fury and anger towards the White Man. Even its hero, the eponymous "Indian fighter" Johnny Hawks, an ex-soldier from the Civil War tasked with escorting a group of settlers through Sioux territory, is depicted as self-centered (he abandons his wagon train so he can "rendezvous" with an Indian woman) and dangerously possessive (early scenes where he effectively forces himself on the same Indian woman while the soundtrack blares romantic music are extremely cringe-worthy). At times I found myself wondering if De Toth was deliberately poking holes into the persona of the Western genre equivalent of the Great White Hunter. The Indian Fighter, with all of its cynicism, tasted like a bitter pill. But it does contain some incredible cinematography. I pointed out one fantastic example of the film's cinematography over here. But another is an Indian attack on a cavalry fort late in the film where the combatants seem to smash against the fort's towering walls that reach up and up into the sky. The film still suffers from yellowfaced actors and painful stereotypes such as Johnny Hawks being able to defeat Native Americans in one-on-one fights (thereby indicating that White Men are better at being Indians than actual Indians). But The Indian Fighter is a fascinating, and arguably important, film.

7/10

L'espoir: André Malraux, Boris Peskine

André Malraux's L'espoir, an adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical novel about the Spanish Civil War, deserves to be remembered as a vital (albeit romanticized) historical document but NOT as a good film. Jonathan Rosenbaum, the critic whose writings about the film made me seek it out, described its production as such:

"[The film was] started in Barcelona in July 1938...suspended in January 1939 after the Franco Nationalists seized Barcelona, completed in the French Joinville studios just ahead of the German occupation, and finally released only after the Liberation, in 1945."

As a result of its tumultuous production, the film was so disjointed that subtitles were frequently utilized to fill in missing plot points that were unable to be completed, much like how missing scenes are recounted in partially lost silent films with intertitles. The film concerns itself primarily with a group of Spanish Republicans who seek out and destroy a bridge in the Sistema Ibérico mountains via a bombing run in order to stop the advance of Francoist forces. And in all honesty, many of the surviving parts are exceptional: an early eulogy for a slain Italian pilot who is posthumously embraced into the Spanish community for his sacrifice, a suicidal charge at enemy artillery which cuts to birds flying in the skies at the moment of death, and the solemn funeral processions of the dead Republicans at the end of the film which seem to predict the seemingly endless columns of soldiers depicted in Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible: Part One (released in 1944 one year BEFORE L'espoir's release but several years after its principal photography was completed). And yet, for all its poetry, the film as a whole is an incoherent mess. For a film whose English title was literally Man's Hope and which supposedly praises the sacrifices of the Spanish Republicans, the film is incredibly pessimistic and paints their struggle as noble but doomed and their eventual failure as inevitable. Maybe if Malraux had been able to complete the film as he had originally envisioned it, L'espoir could have been more tonally consistent and less of a mess. But it isn't. And that's a great tragedy.

6/10

Monte Carlo: Ernst Lubitsch

It occurs to me that Ernst Lubitsch's Monte Carlo would make a great companion piece with Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932). Both films are charming American musicals by European directors that feature plots revolving around romance between members of different social classes. Both film feature a prominent reversal wherein the male protagonist "switches classes" in order to get closer to the object of his desire. But whereas in Love Me Tonight a tailor poses as an aristocrat, in Monte Carlo a count named Rudolph Falliere poses as a hairdresser to be with the Countess Helene Mara, a naive, temperamental young woman who fled to Monte Carlo after leaving her fiancé, Prince Otto Von Liebenheim, at the altar. Both films end with their respective couples confirming their love despite different social classes (although Monte Carlo's anti-class narrative is damaged somewhat be the inevitable revelation that Rudolph is an aristocrat and therefore suitable marriage material for Helene). And both films represent meteoric advancements in the evolution of the cinematic musical. The difference between Monte Carlo and The Broadway Melody (1929), billed as the first feature-length musical, is almost as stark as the difference between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Stagecoach (1939). Musical numbers flow organically from the dialogue, entire crowds join in the singing, and the audience feels like they are transported to the world of the Movie Musical where people spontaneously sing and dance to express their feelings (contrary to The Broadway Melody which ostensibly takes place in "reality" where performers, for the most part, save the singing and dancing for the stage). The sophisticated grace of the "Lubitsch Touch" is on full display here with its delicate, mannered humor. I'm reminded of one scene where Rudolph storms out of a room after an argument. Instead of going around a couch in his way, he steps on top of it. There is even an insert shot where his foot is shown in extreme close-up stepping on top of the fabric. It lasts for only a fraction of a second, but it is as characteristically Lubitsch as anything he ever did in his films: only a man truly at wit's end would dare step on top of a couch. Lubitsch knows this and he makes sure that his audience appreciates this faux pas of bad manners.

8/10

Yeelen: Souleymane Cissé

Watching Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen, I was reminded of another, more recent film from Mali that drew from its culture's mythological past: Adama Drabo's Skirt Power (1997). Both films engage legends with a cinematic language that is distinctly non-Western. In fact, to properly understand both films, extensive research is required on the part of the Western viewer into Mali's culture. But this isn't a fault. Instead, it represents the nascence of a distinctly African mode of cinematic storytelling. Yeelen may be difficult to watch for Western viewers what with its pacing described by one prominent reviewer as "funereal." But those willing to give Yeelen a chance, to parse out its imagery, and to explore the story within the context of modern Mali's political situation (the film seems to suggest in its ending that only through a child of all of Mali's kaleidoscopic cultures and ethnicities can the nation reach its true potential) will find an incredibly rewarding film. The film features a plot centered on a monomythic hero's quest: a young man with incredible magical powers named Niankoro must travel the world to find his uncle so he can get enough power to defeat his evil sorcerer father who is determined to kill him. Along the way he helps the unfortunate, becomes sexually initiated, and achieves his full potential as both a man and a magician. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the portrayal of Malian magic. Unlike Western magic where power resides in words (like "Abracadabra"), Malian magic relies on objects, fetishes, and crafts that must be built, carried, and controlled. During one scene where Niankoro helps a village fight off an army of invaders, he creates a magical item with a horse born hammered into a termite mound. When the invading army arrives, they are set upon by a massive horde of bees. Niankoro's father uses a giant magical log carried by assistants which he uses to channel the power of the gods. And Niankoro finally defeats his father in a battle where he uses a magical wooden post. This is only one example of Cissé's evocation of African culture. The rest are still there for intrepid viewers to discover for themselves.

9/10

I recently wrote about this movie over at Mubi. You can read my review here: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/more-than-a-malian-monomyth-close-up-on-yeelen/

Road to Morocco: David Butler

At their best, the Marx Brothers were comedic anarchists who directed their chaos towards any poor saps who just so happened to be in their general vicinity. Watching David Butler's Road to Morocco, I was fascinated with how the legendary team of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope seemed to echo that similar sense of anarchy: lightning-fast dialogue inundated with puns and wordplay, physical sight-gag routines, and a kind of stream-of-consciousness approach to comedy. But if the Marx Brothers directed their anarchy towards other people, Bing and Bob directed their anarchy towards each other. Stranded in the Middle East, Bing sells Bob into slavery in order to pay for a meal. Bob is then purchased by a princess who wants to marry him. But Bing is infuriated by Bob's good luck, so he tries to ruin the marriage. And so on and so forth. I had never seen a Bing and Bob road movie before and Road to Morocco didn't disappoint. The film is unfortunately full of very offensive stereotypes. I'm aware that the film was designed to be a parody of similar adventure films being churned out by Hollywood at the time, but a stereotype is a stereotype. But if one can stomach the plethora of political incorrectness, one will be amazed by one of the best comedies ever made by one of the greatest comedic duos in American cinematic history.

9/10

Black Tight Killers: Yasuharu Hasebe

Here's what you really need to know about Yasuharu Hasebe's Black Tight Killers: it ends with a couple of go-go dancing ninjas defeating an American businessman named 'Bill' in a kung fu fight on a mysterious island while on a search for $10 million worth of gold stolen from Okinawa during World War Two. The film's plot doesn't really make sense. But if that above description of the film's climax intrigued you, then I'm pretty sure that you will love Black Tight Killers regardless of its flaws. The film is an admittedly brilliant exercise in stylistic excess and abandon. It begins when Daisuke Honda, a war photographer flying home to Japan from Vietnam, meets with a plane stewardess named Yuriko Sawanouchi. They go on a date and appear to hit it off. But Yuriko is repeatedly threatened by a 5-woman team of go-go dancing ninja (yes, I was being completely serious about that) named the Black Tight Killers. It is revealed that Yuriko was related to a man who was involved with a plot and so on and so forth. Essentially, for much of the film Daisuke could just walk away. But his love for Yuriko keeps him digging deeper and deeper into the conspiracy until it's too late for him to escape. The film displays the same kind of stylistic anarchy that would get Seijun Suzuki fired the next year for Branded to Kill (1967): scenes of go-go dancing are spliced in almost at random, actors are frequently framed against brightly-lit backdrops of obscenely bright colors, and bizarre props are used in inexplicable ways (my favorite being an explosive golf ball used by one of the Black Tight Killers to free Daisuke and one of her comrades by hitting it into their room with a golf club from several buildings away). At first, I thought that Hasebe's style was deliberately parodying similar Japanese genre films, particularly with how each of the five Black Tight Killers are given dramatic, over-the-top death scenes in Daisuke's arms. But then I looked at Hasebe's filmography and discovered that one of his biggest hits was a film entitled Rape! 13th Hour (1977). So maybe parody played a lesser role in Black Tight Killers than I originally imagined.

6/10

The Mirror: Andrei Tarkovsky

Can a film be a religious experience? Can a film penetrate the very depths of the human experience and make us come face-to-face with our own thoughts, feelings, and mortality? Over the years, I have only come across a handful of such films. And now, having witnessed Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror, I can add another one to the list. Tarkovsky's films have always have inklings of the numinous about them: the sweeping gaze of Andrei Rublev (1966), the introspective mysteries of Solaris (1972), the unknowable enigma of Stalker (1979), and so on. But if Andrei Rublev explored the past, Solaris the future, and Stalker the mind of others, then The Mirror is an expedition into the mind of Tarkovsky himself. Not so much a "film" as a cinematic collage, The Mirror alternates between reconstructions of scenes from Tarkovsky's childhood, day-mares and night-dreams, and newsreel footage from various points of history. It switches between warm color and stark black-and-white cinematography. Yet all of these filming techniques maintain an air of the oneiric about them. Although this is a film gleaned from the mind of Tarkovsky, it is just as much cinematographer Georgi Rerberg's film as well. I know that film critics are prone to hyperbole, but I say without an ounce of exaggeration that The Mirror is one of the most beautiful films ever made, comparable with The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Red Shoes (1948), and Days of Heaven (1978). With the absence of a "plot," all that remains are images: a doctor standing in a windy field of grass, a mother levitating, a farmhouse burning down in the rain, and a million more that are testaments to the power of cinema. The Mirror has been described as Tarkovsky's most personal film. It might also be his greatest triumph.

10/10

My Little Chickadee: Edward F. Cline

Well! This was a shocking unfortunate experience! Edward F. Cline's My Little Chickadee, a collaboration between three of the greatest comedic geniuses of the early 20th century (Cline, Mae West, W.C. Fields), was extremely...underwhelming. As a comedy, there are a few scattered moments of brilliance. But as a star vehicle for Fields and West, the film never really gets off the ground. The film, written almost entirely by West, follows her character Miss Flower Belle Lee as she travels to Greasewood City to start a new life after being kicked out of the last town for fraternizing with a famous thief known as the Masked Bandit. She meets up with con-man Cuthbert J. Twillie (Fields) whom she immediately marries after falsely believing that he has a bag full of cash (which, she later discovers, is fake). So they arrive at Greasewood and...well...shenanigans happen. I have no qualms with the plot. After all, as with so many other comedies of the era (particularly those starring Fields), the plot is merely a flimsy excuse to get characters 'A' and 'B' to locations 'C' and 'D' so they can perform routines 'E' and 'F.' But here's the kicker: West and Fields are almost never onscreen together. In fact, Miss Flower Belle Lee spends almost the entire movie trying to avoid Mr. Twillie. So Fields and West are never given any real opportunities to develop any chemistry. There are two great moments where the geniuses of West and Fields are actually able to synthesize and play off each other. The first takes place on the train where they meet: a group of Native Americans attack, West effortlessly dispatches most of them by dual-wielding pistols, and Fields struggles to fight them off in another compartment (filled with those most loathsome of creatures that served time and again as the banes of his existence: young children) with a toy slingshot. In a modern context, this sequence is nauseatingly cringe-worthy, what with the beautiful white woman nonchalantly slaughtering numerous "savages." But as a simultaneous display of West and Fields' comedic persona, it works magnificently. The other scene comes at the very end when they coyly quote each others' most famous catchphrase: Fields saying "Come up and see me sometime" and West saying "My little chickadee." But other than that, My Little Chickadee feels like it is comprised of scenes from two very different comedies slapped together at the last moment.

6/10

Kung Fu Hustle: Stephen Chow

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle is the kind of film that makes me angry that I waited almost 25 years to watch it. The film is like if someone reversed rotoscoped a Looney Tunes cartoon. Combining elements of wuxia, musicals, cartoons, and general insanity, Kung Fu Hustle is a joyous experience. To sum up the plot as succinctly as possible, in 1930s Shanghai, the Deadly Axe Gang declares de facto war against Pig Sty Alley, a slum which unexpectedly houses five kung fu masters. There are a number of fantastic fighters such as two assassins who kill with a magical guqin, a psychotic killer who allows himself to be locked up in prison because there is nobody in the outside world who can challenge him, a cantankerous Landlady and her henpecked husband, and Sing (played by director Stephen Chow), a small time wanna-be gangster who is destined to become one of the greatest masters of kung fu in history. There is some fantastic commentary to be found in how the proletariat tenement-dwellers of Pig Sty Alley are initially able to fight off the forces of organized crime. Of course, this is ruined by the film's curious insistence that only a select few can become kung fu masters. Either you are born to be a master or you are doomed to always be a victim. When did kung fu masters become jedi? Regardless, Kung Fu Hustle is a wildly enjoyable film.

8/10

The Big Red One: Samuel Fuller

A few things dawned on me while I re-watched Samuel Fuller's late career masterpiece The Big Red One. Since I have already seen this film, I will not write a traditional review. Instead, I just want to go over my revelations.

- During the D-Day Invasion sequence, my friend pointed out that the attack was filmed so that we never really got a good look at the German defenders. "It's like they're fighting a force of nature," he said. And he was right. This stylistic choice on Fuller's part helped make the invasion seem even more panicked, frenzied, and immediate.
- The sequence where Sgt. Possum's squad hides from German tanks while in North Africa was incredibly beautiful in scope. Fuller's camera succeeded in driving home the sheer sense of scale that ordinary soldiers must have felt when confronted with a enemy division of tanks.
- Damnably, the subplot concerning Schroeder, the Nazi officer who follows Sgt. Possum's squad throughout their campaigns, hurts the film and keeps it from receiving a 10/10 score. Schroeder is supposed to be Sgt. Possum's foil, but the film isn't entitled Sgt. Possum, it's entitled The Big Red One. The film is supposed to be the story of the foot-soldiers as framed by Sgt. Possum. If Schroeder's entire unit had been depicted as the foils of the Big Red One, then the subplot may have worked better. But Schroeder's inclusion in the film is painfully unnecessary and one-note: he tries to set traps for Sgt. Possum's squad, fails, and kills somebody under his command for insulting Hitler. The reason why The Big Red One works is due to its episodic nature that emphasizes the everyday experiences of the soldiers. Including Schroeder was like if Coppola had devoted a considerable side-plot to Colonel Kurtz's Cambodian lover throughout Apocalypse Now (1979).

9/10

What’s Up, Doc?: Peter Bogdanovich

The infamous chase scene in Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? could not have come at a better time. Until the last thirty or so minutes of the film, it had been a delightful homage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s involving a host of hapless characters and four identical plaid overnight bags with very unidentical contents. The best scenes, of course, involve Bogdanovich's stand-ins for Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, the henpecked, neurotic musicologist Howard Bannister, Ph.D. (Ryan O'Neal) and the devil-may-care Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand). There are tolerable subplots involving government agents and two hotel employees trying to steal one of their client's jewelry (conveniently tucked away in one of the aforementioned plaid overnight bags). But by the beginning of the last third of the film, the shtick had begun to run dry. Thankfully, the madcap car/bicycle/Chinese dragon chase through the streets of San Francisco and the adjacent scene where all of the film's players are brought before a very beleaguered judge revitalize the film and help propel it from merely being an homage to being something original; something specifically Bogdanovich-esque. A riot from beginning to end (well...almost...), What's Up, Doc? is a breath of fresh comedic air. Also...I think I may have a crush on early 70s Barbra Streisand now...

9/10

Stars in My Crown: Jacques Tourneur

One of my favorite scenes from Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, a charming slice of Americana about a young boy named John living in the small town of Walesburg after the Civil War, involves Dr. Daniel Kalbert Harris, Jr., the son of the much beloved Dr. Harris, Sr. who had recently died. His Daniel has yet to be accepted by the townspeople due to his dour disposition and skepticism concerning religion. However, one of his first cases is a young boy who gets a fishing hook stuck in his leg. The young boy is terrified of the new doctor, but Daniel manages to calm the boy down and remove the hook almost painlessly by singing to him during the operation. It's a great moment that shows Daniel's true humanity. Up until that point, he had been portrayed as the polar opposite of John's adopted father, Preacher Josiah Doziah Gray (played with astonishing warmth by Joel McCrea, that old standby of adventure films and comedies), a man who helped make Walesburg a respectable community. Josiah is this film's Atticus Finch, a metaphor that becomes even more apropos during a scene where he almost single-handily stops a mob of Ku Klux Klan members from lynching a local black man (a character who was given an incredible amount of dignity by actor Juano Hernández). If Josiah is the representation of all that is good and righteous in small town America, then Daniel naturally should represent everything bad. But Tourneur argues that, no, he is a good man who has much to offer the community despite his doubts concerning faith. And therein lies the greatness of Stars in My Crown: it may be an idealized remembrance of America's past, but it is honest and earnest. The same community held together by Josiah's church gives birth to a lynch mob. An epidemic of typhoid sweeps the community and kills many people, and for a time it seems like Josiah is accidentally responsible for spreading it. But the community defeats the epidemic through science. Tourneur suggests that both faith and science (represented by Josiah and Daniel) are needed to keep a community together. Both have their strengths, both have their weaknesses. They need to work in tandem to keep Walesburg, and by extension America, alive.

8/10

Bhowani Junction: George Cukor

According to Andrew Sarris, the films of George Cukor can be summarized thusly: "The director's theme is imagination, with the focus on the imaginer rather than on the thing imagined." His adaptation of John Masters' 1954 novel Bhowani Junction is about not one dreamer, but three. The year is 1947, and the British are planning on soon leaving the sub-continent. Victoria Jones is an Anglo-Indian who serves as a WAC in the British Army. As a half-breed, she knows that once the British leave she will be rejected by Indian society. She dreams of finding her own place in the world. Patrick Taylor, another Anglo-Indian, despises his Indian heritage and dreams of somehow being accepted into the loving embrace of Great Britain. And finally, the third dreamer is India itself, desperate for emancipation for the British yet torn by ethnic and religious turmoil. Victoria, played with fierce power by Ava Gardner in a career-defining performance, seeks to rediscover her Indian roots after accidentally killing a British officer who tried to rape her. But during a ceremony where she is to be converted to the Sikh faith, she finds she cannot go through with it. The stories of Victoria, Patrick, and India are framed against the Indian people's attempts to force the British out sooner than they intended. The followers of Gandhi organize peaceful methods of protest such as clogging up train stations and delaying trains by laying down on the tracks (this leads to one of the film's best scenes where a number of high-caste Indians lying on the tracks are forced to move when the British make low-caste Indians throw sewage on them. This is comparable to forcing protesting Jews to eat pork.). But Communist forces want to throw the country into open revolution by sparking violent protests which lead to bloodshed. Bhowani Junction is a complex movie, but it never feels opaque or confusing thanks in large part to Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat's screenplay. Cukor's masterful handling of exterior shots with seemingly countless extras proves that the man had sincere cinematic clout and was not just a tired director of stuffy literary adaptations and women's films. Bhowani Junction is sumptuously beautiful and thought-provoking. It might very well be Cukor's masterpiece.

9/10

Abashiri Prison: Teruo Ishii

The yakuza film may be a common fixture of modern Japanese cinema, but before 1965 they were almost unheard of. Then Toei released Abashiri Prison, a stark prison drama directed by Teruo Ishii of tokusatsu and ero guro fame. It starred relative unknown Ken Takakura as Shinichi Tachibana, a criminal sent to Abashiri Prison located in the remote, snowy wasteland of Hokkaido. When Tachibana only has about six months left to serve, he is coerced into taking part in a massive escape attempt while handcuffed to an amoral, maniacal cell-mate. The central idea of the movie was that Tachibana was an honorable man who was forced into crime to take care of his mother and sister who were living with an abusive father-in-law. Throughout the film Tachibana demonstrates himself to be a man of integrity: he sticks up for newcomers, he alerts an older prisoner who will be killed the night of the escape so that he doesn't slow the rest of the escapees down, and he agonizes over being forced to betray the trust of the friendly prison warden who went the extra mile in trying to get him paroled. Perhaps impressed by Tachibana's unflinching sense of morality, duty, and honor, the Japanese public fell in love with Abashiri Prison. As a result, Takakura was rocketed to stardom, the Abashiri franchise would go on to encompass another eighteen films, and the yakuza genre was guaranteed a place in Japanese pop culture. But the film itself is also an expertly crafted piece of entertainment. Yoshikazu Yamasawa's cinematography expertly captures the crowded, claustrophobic environment of the prison and and barren expanses of Hokkaido. The script is razor-sharp, alternating between Tachibana's life in prison and flashbacks to his terrible childhood (watch how cleverly Ishii transitions between present-day and the past via sound cues or visual memes). At only about 90 minutes, the film's plot is tightly compact: the first third sets up the prison culture and its hierarchy, the second third dives into Tachibana's backstory, and the last third follows Tachibana's doomed escape. One of the best sequences is a chase scene on railroad carts that gives the mine cart scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) a run for its money.

8/10

Pina: Wim Wenders

Watching Wim Wenders' Pina, a documentary on the peerless contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch, I was reminded of Robert Altman's The Company, a film about the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Both films tried to bring attention to legendary dance troupes, but where The Company floundered under Altman's scatter-shot direction, Pina shines bright both in form and content. One of the great geniuses of Tanztheater, a German artistic movement that combined elements of dance and drama, Pina's pieces told stories and gave her performers chances to delve into their own psyches to explore their own inhibitions, fears, and dreams. So the film does not give a narrative of Pina's life per se. Instead, it provides footage of several of her most famous pieces (including her breath-taking rendition of The Rite of Spring where dancers performed on a stage covered in a thick layer of peat) and individual testimonies from many of her greatest collaborators and students. Each one of these segments gives the subjects a chance to describe Pina's impact on their lives and their skills as dancers as well as brief dance pieces set against the backdrop of Wuppertal, the city where her troupe was based. The result is a collage of tributes, reflections, and recreations of dance numbers that changed the face of modern dance. As such, Pina is a far superior tribute to dance than The Company could have ever hoped to be.

9/10

Office Space: Mike Judge

I had already seen Mike Judge's Office Space, a cult comedy about 90s software programmer Peter Gibbons who reaches the slacker equivalent of nirvana after a botched attempt at "occupational hypnotherapy," before. Well, that's not entirely true. I had seen parts of the film before on Comedy Central where it was heavily edited. It was during these viewings that I learned that few things are as annoying as gangsta rap songs edited for basic cable. But watching the complete, unedited version only confirmed what I have known to be true for quite some time now: Office Space is a comedic masterpiece. If you've never spent time working a dead-end job in an office, then you will never truly understand how spot-on Office Space captures the emotions and feelings that accompany such an environment (for the record, one of my many past part-time jobs was working as a telemarketer for the fundraising department of my undergraduate college). All of the pointless minutiae, the broken office supplies, the unbearably cheerful co-workers, the incompetent bosses...all of it is true. I've read that the producers wanted Judge to reshoot the film to make it more visually vibrant. Thankfully, he had the good sense to keep the visual look of the film dull, bleak, boring, and soul-deadening. Anything more overstated would have made Office Space a lie. And the film's greatest strength is in its ability to tell the truth.

9/10

Track of the Cat: William A. Wellman

[Spoilers Ahead]

William A. Wellman's Track of the Cat is an audacious Western that seems to draw from such sources as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. From Faulkner we have the hopelessly dysfunctional Bridges family, ranch owners in northern California in the 1880s who are led by a domineering mother with a tenuous grip on reality and an alcoholic father content to drink himself (and by extension his family) to death. Instead of a great White Whale, we have a great Black Panther, a savage beast who slaughters the family's cattle and forces their three sons into the snowy wastelands in pursuit. But the Panther (who is never shown onscreen) proves to be a formidable foe, picking off brother after brother in a kind of grotesque reflection of the in-fighting and squabbles consuming the Bridges' household. Robert Mitchum is brilliant as middle son Curt, a cruel man who openly lusts after his younger brother's fiance and takes pleasure in emasculating him in front of her. During production, Wellman collaborated with cinematographer William H. Clothier to utilize a color palette so subdued that almost the entire film seems like it was shot in black-in-white. Curt's vibrantly red coat is one of the only splashes of color in the film. Only two other things pop with such clear color: fire and blood.  My biggest problem is that Wellman's story of obsession (both violent and sexual) and madness (is there even a "black panther" to begin with) ends too neatly and sweetly. The surviving brother reunites with his belle, the panther is slain (again, off-screen), and the family line seems destined for revitalization. The emotional scope of the film is nothing short of Biblical and Wellman's ending capitulates to Hollywood conventions so violently that it could cause whiplash.

7/10

House by the River: Fritz Lang

[Spoilers Ahead]

Fritz Lang's House by the River is a Gothic noir gem haunted by ghosts both real and imaginary. There is no small dose of the Southern Gothic aesthetic as established by Faulkner and O'Connor. Edward J. Cronjager's camera creates universes of shadow worthy of Lang's early years in German Expressionism. And finally, Lang's trademark cynicism chokes the film with enough venomous bile to make it as powerful as any he made while in America. After accidentally murdering his beautiful maid after attempting to rape her in a drunken stupor (proceeded by a magnificent moment where Lang's summarizes his lust for her with nothing but the sound of bath water running down a pipe), novelist Stephen Byrne throws her body into the river next to his house after pathetically pleading for help from his crippled brother John. But when the body eventually washes back ashore, the murder investigation makes John the primary suspect...much to the delight of Stephen who wastes no time in exploiting the tragedy (and the community's suspicion towards John) to sell books. So John must team up with Stephen's estranged wife to clear his name before it's too late. I wasn't exaggerating when I called House by the River cynical. It contains some of the most cynical moments of Lang's American career: the town immediately accuses the murdered maid of being a hussy who deserved it, John's vindictive maid takes a perverse pleasure in making John look guilty of the maid's murder when she is called as a witness at the trial, and Stephen seems smugly joyful of the fact that he might get away with murder...even if it means sacrificing his brother. One of the cruelest moments of the film takes place during a courtroom scene where the public first begins to turn on John. As John proclaims his innocence, the sound of the courtroom audience laughing becomes louder and louder and louder until it is unbearable. Lang was always a master of using sound to progress a narrative (see: the whistling scenes in M). And his work in House by the River is no exception. But perhaps most fascinating is how Stephen almost gets away with pinning the murder on his brother. Only the ghostly interference of the dead maid keeps him from reigning victorious. Some may see that as a narrative cop-out. But I see it as Lang insisting that in such a world only something fantastical can truly prevent evil from winning. How cynical, indeed...

8/10

Oh! What a Lovely War: Richard Attenborough

The great tragedy of Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War isn't that it isn't remembered more fondly than his 1982 epic Gandhi. The true tragedy is that the film loses its focus and maintains only a fraction of its potential greatness. The film, based on the 1963 stage musical, has one of the most brilliant takes on World War One that has ever graced the cinema: a musical where the songs are revisions of real pieces sung by historical soldiers and the plot summarizes the war via allegorical characters. The opening scene, set in a fantastical version of Brighton's West Pier, has individuals representing entire countries act out the opening of the war: two actors representing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are given red roses and fall to the ground dead when all of the countries come together for a picture. Then the other actors arrange themselves on a giant map of Europe as "the game begins." But here's the film's main problem: it focuses much of its run-time on the Smiths, a nondescript British family who are pulled into the war. I can understand wanting to portray the horrors of the First World War as it was experienced by everyday British citizens, but the film is at its best when it deals with sweeping historical moments: Maggie Smith appears as a sultry music hall star who seduces hapless young men to join the Army when the War lasts longer than it was intended, the War itself is depicted as a carnival midway where soldiers collapse and die on merry-go-rounds, and, in my favorite moment of the film, near the end a delegation of American soldiers invade Brighton Pier to the tune of "Over There" and snatch the battle plans away from the incompetent British officers. Though I'm aware that the Smith's are allegories in their own way, focusing on them was like if George Orwell had devoted several chapters in Animal Farm to a random farmer living next door to Manor Farm. If the film had devoted itself solely to the major metaphor of the war as a midway attraction being organized by ignorant, stubborn, nationalistic aristocrats, then Oh! What a Lovely War could have gone down as one of the best war films of the 60s.

8/10

Nebraska: Alexander Payne

[Spoilers Ahead]

Films like Alexander Payne's Nebraska give me hope for the future of American cinema. Here is a devastatingly powerful film about hopes, dreams, and growing old set against the decayed industrial skeleton of the American Midwest. Payne seems to channel Aki Kaurismäki and Hsiao-hsien Hou with his sparse, deliberate pacing, stark shot compositions that embrace emptiness, and spasms of dark, absurd humor. The film follows David Grant (Will Forte) as he wearily accompanies his deluded father Woody (Bruce Dern) down to Lincoln, Nebraska after he receives a voucher in the mail saying that he won a $1 million sweepstakes prize. David desperately tries to explain to his father that it's a scam, but Woody, perhaps in the early stages of Alzheimer's, simply cannot comprehend that he was lied to. So the two travel down to Nebraska where they temporarily stop in Woody's hometown of Hawthorne to spend some time with his family. Despite David's pleas, Woody lets slip that he has "won" a million dollars while at a bar. The news that Woody's a millionaire spreads like wildfire and, much to David's horror, everyone believes the news. It isn't long before old acquaintances and family members come a-knocking to "collect" on "old debts." Perhaps the most tragic thing about Nebraska is that for Woody, collecting the million dollars isn't about the money. It's about feeling some kind of validation for a life spent slaving away for other people. When Woody tells the people at the bar about the sweepstakes, we realize that the overwhelming love, approval, and adoration thrown upon him by the townsfolk may be the first time in his life that he was treated that way. The dialogue, as brilliant as it is, only alludes to the emotional undercurrents in Nebraska. It is in moments of silence and contemplation that the film's interior meaning reveals itself. Case in point: near the end of the film the truth about Woody's winnings comes out and a local bully waves his stolen sweepstakes voucher around a bar while everyone laughs. When Woody comes in, the bully holds the voucher up and taunts him to come and take it. And in the most brilliant moment of the film, Woody does just that: he hobbles over to him and takes the voucher. Both the bully and the bar patrons are stunned and shamed. For in that moment, they realize what the audience has known all along: it might be a sham, but it is very real to Woody. And when they watch Woody take the voucher back without cowering, pleading, begging, or losing his dignity, they feel nothing but shame in their actions. And all of this is done in a couple of shots with no dialogue.

8/10

The Lego Movie: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

[Spoilers Ahead]

Why did I give The Lego Movie a ten-out-of-ten score? Because it was a brilliant comedy, a touching family movie, and contains one of the darkest, most devastating sub-texts imaginable. The big reveal of the film is that its story, wherein a generic construction worker named Emmet teams up with "Master Buiders" to stop the evil Lord Business from freezing the universe in place, is actually being thought up and told on the spot by a real life boy playing in his father's basement with his massive collection of Legos. Emmet is the boy, Lord Business is his father, and his playing is in defiance of his father's wishes to use his Legos as stationary models instead of toys. In itself, this is a brilliant mediation on the nature and purpose of toys: they are meant to be played with, not assembled, put on a shelf, and admired. But here's where the subtext comes in: all of the dialogue, all of the characters are figments of the young boy's imagination. So when Emmet says that he is not special and that nobody likes him, that's the young boy saying that. When Princess Uni-Kitty says that you need to bury your unhappy emotions deep down inside, that's the young boy saying that. Notice how Lord Business only appears to his subjects via brief television broadcasts at the start of every day. As madcap, colorful, and purposefully irreverent as the film is, it is the inner projections of a child trying to make sense of living with a largely absent father. Suddenly, the child-like humor (a bomb countdown that starts at '100 Mississippi,' the female lead saying "see you later, alligator," and even the seemingly random mishmash of licensed characters) takes on a new meaning. Even the nonsensical lyrics to "Everything is Awesome" become meaningful because they sound like lyrics that a kid would improvise if they tried to come up with a song off the top of their head. I've read that a lot of critics didn't like the third act because it was so frantic and "generic." I would respond: how else would a child raised on Hollywood resolve a story? If the critics over at Slant Magazine can overlook the narrative flaws and bad writing in films like Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) because they are supposedly "satires" or "condemnations" of American culture, then you better believe that I will defend the last act of The Lego Movie as a brilliant piece of meta-narrative. It's only fair.

10/10

The Scenic Route: Mark Rappaport

I feel hesitant to review Mark Rappaport's The Scenic Route because I know for a fact that all of the reasons that I will give to express why I didn't like it are also viewed as qualities that endear it to others. To discuss the film is to breach that ancient debate among critics: if something is bold and experimental, does that necessarily mean that it is good? To be certain, The Scenic Route has a distinct visual aesthetic heavily inspired by photography, painting, and kitsch. Every measured, meticulously framed shot resonates with the finality of its own apotheosis. Though people claim that the film has a story about two sisters who battle over the same man, each shot could very well be stolen from a completely different dimensional timeline. That they come together to form some semblance of a narrative seems more like a coincidence than the result of deliberate design. And yet, for all of its references, self-reflection, and tortured introspection, The Scenic Route is completely empty. It says nothing. The only thing it offers to the audience is a succession of strange, disjointed images. One could argue that Rappaport's technique is more than enough to warrant a viewing, but I feel one could enjoy a more rewarding intellectual experience by simply visiting an art museum. Another argument is that Rappaport's exploitation of other modes of art like painting (and I would also argue sculpture) make it an essential step in the evolution of cinematic language. But the experimental nature of The Scenic Route divorces it from its contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. The film is a means unto itself; a dialectical dead-end. The only reason one would view The Scenic Route would be to experience the film on its own terms. And unfortunately, the film is too marred by its own pretentiousness and esoteric intellectual grammar to make it a worthwhile experience for anyone who doesn't go into it having already made up their mind to love it. And believe me, this is precisely the kind of film that people decide to love or hate before they see it.

1/10

Down and Out in Beverly Hills: Paul Mazursky

There is a nagging inconsistency in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills that prevents it from being a bona fide comedy classic, at least in my opinion. Quite simply, the manner in which everybody reacts to Jerry Baskin, a homeless man that is "adopted" into the affluent Whiteman family, changes from scene to scene. For example, one moment their patriarch, David, displays genuine concern and compassion for Jerry. In the next, he is ready to strangle him. Even Jerry's characterization is widely inconsistent from scene to scene. At the beginning of the film, he tries to commit suicide after losing his dog. But later he displays a kind of zen-like wisdom that makes it hard to believe that he could ever be attached to something so desperately. At times he seems like a down-on-his-luck polymath. At others, he comes off as merely a bum. If the film had managed to portray him as all of these things simultaneously, then the film would have worked more. But for whatever it's worth, Down and Out in Beverly Hills is a decent comedy. The film concerns itself with absurdities: Jerry accidentally gives David's wife her first orgasm in years during a massage, David's daughter's eating disorder is suddenly cured when she falls in love with Jerry, and their dog has a knack for activating the home security alarm at the wackiest times possible. The film is based on René Fauchois' play Boudu Saved from Drowning which was adapted into a 1932 film by Jean Renoir. It has literally been years since I've seen Renoir's film, so I can't give a decent comparison of the two films. But I feel that whatever satire and condemnations of social hierarchies and classicism that may have existed in the play and Renoir's film are negated by an artificially sweetened ending in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

6/10 

Men in War: Anthony Mann

What do you do when you want to make a Korean War film but don't receive support from the US military because they don't approve of your story's content? You do what Anthony Mann did in Men in War and make a film that dives into the psychology of a group of infantrymen trapped behind enemy lines as they seek to reunite with the rest of their side's troops. Armed with his experience doing film noir and psychologically charged Westerns, Men in War is a remarkable examination of men under fire. If Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951) tried to create a more truthful depiction of the Korean War, then Men in War seems to almost predict Apocalypse Now (1979) in its feverish, fantastical atmosphere. While searching for reinforcements, Lieutenant Benson and his men encounter two shell-shocked soldiers driving a jeep in the middle of a war zone. One is a Colonel who has lost his mind after seeing almost all of his men massacred by North Koreans. The other is an unhinged Sergeant nicknamed "Montana" who treats the Colonel like his father. When asked what they were doing, they respond that they were driving "home." When Benson commandeers their jeep and forces the Colonel and Montana to join with them, Montana demonstrates an almost psychic ability to detect enemy snipers and booby traps like North Koreans dressed like American GI's. Later, one soldier is killed when, incredulously, he stops to pick flowers and put them on his helmet. This is a film where none of the soldiers act like they are quite well in the head. Also like Apocalypse Now, the enemy soldiers are almost never seen. This leads to the greatest sequence in the film where an unseen artillery unit bombards the American infantrymen, forcing them to charge across an open field two at a time in-between shell-bursts. Another fantastic sequence occurs near the end of the film right before the Americans attack a North Korean stronghold. For the longest time all we see are the soldiers loading their weapons and getting into position in complete silence. Such scenes are perhaps common enough in war films. But under Mann's direction and Ernest Haller's cinematography, it almost enters the realm of the surreal. The unsettling score by Elmer Bernstein is just the cherry on top of this excellent film.

8/10

Wings of the Hawk: Budd Boetticher

Budd Boetticher's Wings of the Hawk is just further proof that even great directors could direct duds. Film historians might find the film interesting as it contains a kind of proto-Zapata Western plot:a white miner gets caught up in the Mexican Revolution on 1910-11. When his mine is seized by the evil Colonel Paco Ruiz, Irish Gallager (played by the reliably reliable Van Heflin) falls in with a group of guerrilla revolutionaries led by the beautiful Raquel. This being an eighty minute Hollywood film, the two fall in love and Irish is convinced to help free Mexico from tyranny. The plot is serviceable enough. And to the film's credit, it does a fantastic job making the audience hate the villainous Ruiz, played by George Dolenz. But the film is neutered by incompetent cinematography. It's bad enough that much of the film is shot in day-for-night (including a sequence near the end where the rebels use gasoline to make a gold mine's water system light up in flames whose impact is annihilated due to the cinematography), but many shots are framed clumsily. I remember one particular conversation where a large chunk of the dialogue was filmed with Heflin's back towards the audience. In the hands of a director like John Ford or Stanley Kubrick, such a shot could be used to identify that character's state of mind. But here it's merely shoddy craftsmanship. There was only one shot where I saw the genius of Budd Boetticher shine through: Heflin and a group of rebels are forced to watch from a basement while Ruiz's forces round up and execute a number of local townspeople. The executions are witnessed through a barred street-level window that is held in a static shot that obscures most of the outside action. In a way, it almost seems prophetic of Roman Polanski.

4/10

The Odd Couple: Gene Saks

Based on Neil Simon's hit play, Gene Saks' The Odd Couple is a deliciously subversive comedy that is as remarkable for its humor as it is for its virtuoso performances by Jack Lemmon as the neurotic Felix Ungar and Walter Matthau as the slobbish, easy-going sportswriter Oscar Madison. This late 60s comedy may seem quaint and over-long to modern viewers used to the rapid-fire antics of more modern comedies. But the brilliance of the humor is that it builds, boils, and bubbles until it explodes in exasperated spasms. After Felix separates from his long-time wife, his friend Oscar takes him into his home until he can get back up on his feet. But Felix's obsession with cleanliness soon drives Oscar insane. This sounds like an all-too-common set-up, but I can only imagine that when it came out, The Odd Couple had few (if any) imitators. The film is as compact as only a movie based on a stage play can be. The film is almost nothing but dialogue that takes place in a small number of rooms and tight sets, but it never feels small or claustrophobic. Cinematographer Robert B. Hauser used a neat trick every now and then where he would keep the camera static with a deep field of view. Then he would have the actors race from the foreground to the background and back again, thereby endowing the sets with a more pronounced three-dimensionality than most stage productions. Indeed, a couple of the shots seem reminiscent of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939), of all things. Complete with a magnificent assault on gender roles and expectations, The Odd Couple is every bit the comedic masterpiece that so many generations of critics, filmmakers, and audiences have championed.

9/10

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Stanley Kramer

Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a comedy that is equal parts narrative as it is what Tom Gunning referred to as the "Cinema of Attractions," that is, a cinema which is defined by "its ability to show something." In this case, the "Cinema of Attractions" can be found in Kramer's endless parade of guest stars and incredulous stunts. The film, which follows a group of schmucks who become embroiled in a madcap race to discover the location of a buried treasure, is stuffed with more cameos than you can shake a stick at: Jerry Lewis drives over a hat, the 3 Stooges appear as firefighters for less than 5 seconds, and Buster Keaton shows up, flails his arms about, and disappears. These cameos serve literally no purpose in advancing the plot. But their very presence acts as Easter Eggs for modern day cinephiles. In any case, the film is at its best when it juggles several sub-plots at once, particularly the sequence that marks the end of Act One where different racers careen madly to their apparent doom. If there is anything that saved the film, it is the virtuoso editing. Goodness knows that much of the film, particularly the first hour or so, is painfully bloated and top-heavy. But when the action starts and the cameos begin to multiply, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World becomes a fine piece of comedy.

7/10

Tommy Boy: Peter Segal

I'm just going to say it: I loved Beverly Hills Ninja (1997). Throughout it all, Chris Farley was so infectiously enthusiastic and earnest that I couldn't help rooting for him. I can't say the same thing for his character in Peter Segal's Tommy Boy. The film is essentially a road trip movie following Tommy Callahan III (Farley) and Richard Hayden (David Spade) as they try to sell enough brake pads to save their company from bankruptcy after its owner, Tommy's father, unexpectedly dies of a heart attack. In hindsight, the film is almost shockingly reminiscent of the old Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies. Tommy is Lewis, the well-meaning, idiotic buffoon who can't help but get in the way. Richard is Martin, the put-upon straight man whose contempt for his partner at the start of the film is overbearing. But here's the thing: I don't feel that Farley earned my affection as a character during the film. Almost all of Richard's criticisms of Tommy are perfectly valid: he's loud, stupid, incompetent, spoiled, and has spent most of his life being lavished with rewards and praise by his father despite having no skills or talents. Farley only truly earns my empathy in the last third of the film when he miraculously gets his act together and manages to save the company. There are also quite a few plot holes that are almost unforgivable despite it being a comedy. For example: why wasn't Tommy arrested after he pulled that stunt at Zalinsky's board room? I know that he didn't actually have explosives strapped to his chest. But he still held innocent people hostage. Also, that was quite a coincidence that Michelle just happened to spot the film's two villains kissing at an airport. If I didn't know any better, I would think that that was lazy screenwriting.

6/10

Happy Gilmore: Dennis Dugan

Dennis Dugan's Happy Gilmore relies almost entirely on one concept and one assumption. The concept is this: what would happen if a hyper-violent hockey player became a professional golfer? Golf has been historically mocked for its pretentiousness and white-collar patronage, so subverting it with a hero who is abrasive, offensive, and decidedly blue-collar is a sound comedic set-up. But methinks that it would best be suited for a single short sketch on a variety show or sketch comedy program like Saturday Night Live or Chappelle's Show. And here's where that single assumption comes in: do you find Adam Sandler funny? If you don't, Happy Gilmore will annoy you to no end. If you do, then the film will be an enjoyable, if slightly repetitive (how many times can a random passerby be hit with a golf ball and still have it be funny?) experience. More often than not, I find Sandler's shtick to be too mean-spirited and unpleasant to enjoy. But in Happy Gilmore, we are blessed with a genuinely sympathetic character. Well...almost. Yes, Sandler's character Happy Gilmore is pathologically violent and confrontational, but everything he does in the film is in the service of helping his grandmother buy her house back from the IRS. It also helps that Christopher McDonald delivers one of his most memorable performances as the arrogant, smarmy, and dastardly Shooter McGavin, a pro golfer who is determined to get Happy kicked out from the sport because he is stealing his fame. If you can't give the audience somebody to cheer for, give them somebody to cheer against. And yes, the fight scene with Bob Barker is worth the price of admission.

7/10

Trading Places: John Landis

John Landis' Trading Places is a film that many people of my generation grew up with. But it was only recently that I finally sat down to watch this famous comedy about an upper class commodities broker and a street hustler who unknowingly swap lives as part of a $1 bet between two wealthy tycoons. What amazed me is how immediately relevant the film still is for today's society. Here is a film that hasn't aged a day in over 30 years. All of the commentary about nature vs. nurture, all of the moments of casual and blatant racism (like Dan Aykroyd screaming that Eddie Murphy has a gun when they accidentally bump into each other for the first time), the effects of wealth on the evolution of classicism and social hierarchies (best summed up in the scene where Murphy kicks out his party guests from his apartment when they start wrecking the place and putting cups down without using coasters), and the dehumanizing environment of Wall Street. For comedic antagonists, the Duke Brothers are legitimately terrifying. The moment when Mortimer yells "Fuck him" to his aides while his brother Randolph lays dying of a heart attack on the commodities trading floor near the end is one of the most viciously appalling moments in any film, let alone 80s comedies. It is also to Landis and his editor Malcolm Campbell's credit that the entire sequence where Aykroyd and Murphy bankrupt the Dukes is not only intelligible, but emotionally engaging for people who don't understand high finance in the slightest. It also helps that the film is, of course, hysterical. But I suspect that if Trading Places had been a straight drama, it still would be remembered as a classic.

9/10

The Dictator: Larry Charles

One of the reasons why Larry Charles' Borat (2006) worked so well was that Sacha Baron Cohen was able to travel the United States and react spontaneously with the people he encountered. In his 2012 film The Dictator, he plays Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen, a cruel, petty, maladjusted dictator of the fictional North African nation of Wadiya. You can't play an insane tyrant without the trappings of the office: lavish palaces, an army of guards and extras, and expensive costumes. And herein lies The Dictator's main problem: the increased production values result in a film that lacks the spontaneity of Borat. That's not to say that The Dictator is a failure of a film. Charles' film tracking Aladeen's attempts to regain his office after losing his identity and being forced to work at an alternative lifestyle co-op is shockingly hilarious and even more shockingly offensive. Anna Faris' performance as Zoey, the head of the co-op who falls in love with Aladeen, is one of the best of her career. She also has one of the funniest lines in the movie ("Because I majored in fem lit!"). Some of the comedic bits, especially the ones shared with the exiled ex-head of Wadiya's nuclear program named "Nuclear" Nadal, go on for too long. Did anybody else want that bit near the end with the zip-line to dispense with the shtick and just get on with it? The Dictator delivers the laughs that its concept and lead actor promise. But it also serves as further evidence that Borat was truly a once-in-a-generation film that captured lightning in a bottle. Truly, it can never be replicated.

7/10