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January movies
Feb. 5th, 2023 04:20 pmI’ve started using Letterboxd to track my movie watching. Incidentally—if anyone knows how to make the list private, let me know.
I always want to write up the stuff that I watch, but I usually have a thousand word essay in my head about them, and even if only watching one or two a week…it is too much. So here is an attempt to write something shorter.
Also, for how I choose what to watch—I like watching old movies of whatever quality. Often you find the wackiest shit in the mediocre and forgotten ones. And even the famous ones, if they were forerunners of their genres, will not go where you expect them to.
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – This is considered one of the granddaddies of the noir genre, and I’d never seen it. I’ve concluded that it has that status for being a forerunner and for Lana Turner’s enormous eyes, because…Choices were made. To quote another movie, the main characters are just dumb. There’s a point where the DA summarizes what he thinks the crime was, and that would have been way smarter than what actually happened. I’m maybe spoiled by Double Indemnity (based on a work by the same author), but this movie seemed like a series of unrelated events. The entire last act made zero sense. I mean, there is a key plot point around a cat climbing up a ladder and electrocuting itself on a fuse box. Five minutes from the end, I paused it, turned to S, and said, given the Hayes code, I have no idea how they’re going to end this. And then my answer was, the Catholic League reached straight through the screenwriter to pen a closing speech about justice and heaven. Wacky.
In January, I got on a bit of a Paul Newman, Robert Redford kick, so—
The Sting (1973) – Was a great film when I was a kid and still is. Highly recommended. Newman and Redford have such charm that characters that on the page could be completely despicable end up being terribly endearing. Eileen Brennan is fantastic as a madam who has no fucks left to give. Every movie I’ve seen her in, she always acts like she just woke up and has a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, whether or not she does at the time. S and I decided that Johnny Hooker (Redford) is the favorite of all the whores in the whorehouse because—even though he has no idea what a clitoris even is—he flirts with them all just the same, even though they’re a sure thing. Also, there is a small but excellent amount of fic for this film.
All the President’s Men (1976) – The classic Woodward and Burnstein break the Watergate scandal film. Rewatching it now, it strikes me just how much the movie assumes you already know about it—it doesn’t hold your hand at all. And also the level of film making skill that has to be applied to make a film about people cold calling strangers for days interesting to watch. It’s maybe not the best way to teach about Watergate (I was shown this in history class in high school), but it’s also very obvious how influential the movie was on later media, particularly the X-Files. Highly recommended.
Barefoot in the Park (1967) – One of Redford’s first films. A Neil Simon play about newlyweds getting cold feet about their relationship (barefoot in the park—get it?). There isn’t so much a plot here as a series of incredibly entertaining scenes. The ending is therefore the worst part. The newlyweds get a sixth floor walk up near Washington Park and there’s a recurring gag about the wife’s mother barely being able to make it up the stairs. Neil Simon proves again that he is a master at writing realistic arguments. There’s a fight in this where the wife (played by Jane Fonda) really should just drink a glass of water, take an aspirin, and sleep for eight hours, and instead works herself up into thinking she needs a divorce, while Redford’s husband just does not understand why this is happening at three in the morning. Very much a minor work, but still fun.
The Candidate (1972) – What a weird artifact this is. This is a movie about a candidate, played by Redford, running for senate in California. The screenwriter worked on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968 (not the McCarthy you’re thinking of). The film is therefore a series of scenes of what it is like in a political machine, more like a documentary than a work of fiction. You get no insight at all into what the main character is thinking. You just watch him get surrounded and handled by the chaos of campaign. There are standard beats of a political movie now, and none of them are there in this. There are instead scenes of things like a meeting to plan a parade where the presenter is trying to go through the logistics and everyone else is talking over each other to the room service guy about their dinner. The best moment is one where they’re in the car between appearances and Redford is muttering mad lib political talking points to himself “The country cannot feed its foodless…cannot white against poor…and remember…and remember…” In a post-West Wing world, it’s hard to imagine viewers that don’t know how the machine works. What was viewed cynically at the time is almost hopelessly naïve by modern standards. I mean, it was made just at the beginning of the Watergate scandal.
The Color of Money (1986) – A team up movie between Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, directed by Martin Scorsese, seems like a sure bet, but I honestly don’t know what they were going for here. It’s a character portrait I guess, but both Cruise’s and Newman’s characters are terribly unlikeable. And there are some really baffling directorial choices? There’s a freeze frame of Paul Newman swimming that dissolves into a shot of him getting an eye exam. Why. Also—though this has plenty of montages of trick pool (as in billiards) shots, you never get a whole game. I’m assuming because they’re pretty much impossible to fake. Skip it.
The Hustler (1961) – The Color of Money is actually the sequel to this film, and watching the sequel first, I’d have never guessed that the antecedent would be this. The Hustler’s excellent, though spends a lot of its time just dwelling on Newman’s character, and how someone can be outwardly pursuing success with everything they have but always guaranteeing their failure. It’s a bit of a rough watch, but the pool in this one is a lot more tense, and it’s just a better movie. I found the first half really slow, though.
I always want to write up the stuff that I watch, but I usually have a thousand word essay in my head about them, and even if only watching one or two a week…it is too much. So here is an attempt to write something shorter.
Also, for how I choose what to watch—I like watching old movies of whatever quality. Often you find the wackiest shit in the mediocre and forgotten ones. And even the famous ones, if they were forerunners of their genres, will not go where you expect them to.
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – This is considered one of the granddaddies of the noir genre, and I’d never seen it. I’ve concluded that it has that status for being a forerunner and for Lana Turner’s enormous eyes, because…Choices were made. To quote another movie, the main characters are just dumb. There’s a point where the DA summarizes what he thinks the crime was, and that would have been way smarter than what actually happened. I’m maybe spoiled by Double Indemnity (based on a work by the same author), but this movie seemed like a series of unrelated events. The entire last act made zero sense. I mean, there is a key plot point around a cat climbing up a ladder and electrocuting itself on a fuse box. Five minutes from the end, I paused it, turned to S, and said, given the Hayes code, I have no idea how they’re going to end this. And then my answer was, the Catholic League reached straight through the screenwriter to pen a closing speech about justice and heaven. Wacky.
In January, I got on a bit of a Paul Newman, Robert Redford kick, so—
The Sting (1973) – Was a great film when I was a kid and still is. Highly recommended. Newman and Redford have such charm that characters that on the page could be completely despicable end up being terribly endearing. Eileen Brennan is fantastic as a madam who has no fucks left to give. Every movie I’ve seen her in, she always acts like she just woke up and has a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, whether or not she does at the time. S and I decided that Johnny Hooker (Redford) is the favorite of all the whores in the whorehouse because—even though he has no idea what a clitoris even is—he flirts with them all just the same, even though they’re a sure thing. Also, there is a small but excellent amount of fic for this film.
All the President’s Men (1976) – The classic Woodward and Burnstein break the Watergate scandal film. Rewatching it now, it strikes me just how much the movie assumes you already know about it—it doesn’t hold your hand at all. And also the level of film making skill that has to be applied to make a film about people cold calling strangers for days interesting to watch. It’s maybe not the best way to teach about Watergate (I was shown this in history class in high school), but it’s also very obvious how influential the movie was on later media, particularly the X-Files. Highly recommended.
Barefoot in the Park (1967) – One of Redford’s first films. A Neil Simon play about newlyweds getting cold feet about their relationship (barefoot in the park—get it?). There isn’t so much a plot here as a series of incredibly entertaining scenes. The ending is therefore the worst part. The newlyweds get a sixth floor walk up near Washington Park and there’s a recurring gag about the wife’s mother barely being able to make it up the stairs. Neil Simon proves again that he is a master at writing realistic arguments. There’s a fight in this where the wife (played by Jane Fonda) really should just drink a glass of water, take an aspirin, and sleep for eight hours, and instead works herself up into thinking she needs a divorce, while Redford’s husband just does not understand why this is happening at three in the morning. Very much a minor work, but still fun.
The Candidate (1972) – What a weird artifact this is. This is a movie about a candidate, played by Redford, running for senate in California. The screenwriter worked on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968 (not the McCarthy you’re thinking of). The film is therefore a series of scenes of what it is like in a political machine, more like a documentary than a work of fiction. You get no insight at all into what the main character is thinking. You just watch him get surrounded and handled by the chaos of campaign. There are standard beats of a political movie now, and none of them are there in this. There are instead scenes of things like a meeting to plan a parade where the presenter is trying to go through the logistics and everyone else is talking over each other to the room service guy about their dinner. The best moment is one where they’re in the car between appearances and Redford is muttering mad lib political talking points to himself “The country cannot feed its foodless…cannot white against poor…and remember…and remember…” In a post-West Wing world, it’s hard to imagine viewers that don’t know how the machine works. What was viewed cynically at the time is almost hopelessly naïve by modern standards. I mean, it was made just at the beginning of the Watergate scandal.
The Color of Money (1986) – A team up movie between Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, directed by Martin Scorsese, seems like a sure bet, but I honestly don’t know what they were going for here. It’s a character portrait I guess, but both Cruise’s and Newman’s characters are terribly unlikeable. And there are some really baffling directorial choices? There’s a freeze frame of Paul Newman swimming that dissolves into a shot of him getting an eye exam. Why. Also—though this has plenty of montages of trick pool (as in billiards) shots, you never get a whole game. I’m assuming because they’re pretty much impossible to fake. Skip it.
The Hustler (1961) – The Color of Money is actually the sequel to this film, and watching the sequel first, I’d have never guessed that the antecedent would be this. The Hustler’s excellent, though spends a lot of its time just dwelling on Newman’s character, and how someone can be outwardly pursuing success with everything they have but always guaranteeing their failure. It’s a bit of a rough watch, but the pool in this one is a lot more tense, and it’s just a better movie. I found the first half really slow, though.