funnystrange.com

April 30 movie: Starship Troopers. Georg and I watched this with our friends in Baltimore, and then on the drive home the next day, had a very long discussion of whether the movie is fascistic, as I remember hearing at the time, or whether it was a critique of fascism, as director Paul Verhoeven claims. We came to the decision that it was probably both. On the one hand, there's no way the Nazi overtones of the society in Starship Troopers were an accident. The TV ad with the smiling children touching the gun? The black leather coat Der Doogie wears? Clearly this is intended to mock, not glorify. But on the other hand, when it gets going the movie does seem to revel or even wallow in the "us vs. them" mentality, which tends to overwhelm whatever social critique is in there.

Lest you think I had a purely dry, intellectual response to this movie, I should mention that my main thought while watching the movie was trying to place the actor who played Carmen, the fighter pilot/love interest. Finally I got it: she was the other girl in Wild Things. After figuring that out, I couldn't see her face on screen without thinking of her getting it on with Neve Campbell and/or Matt Dillon.

April 30 movie: Hellboy. I can't comment on this movie's quality as a translation of the original comic because I haven't read it. But I did enjoy the movie very much. It was fun, exciting, pretty to look at, and kept me too engaged to nitpick or look for plot logic problems. I did wonder why David Hyde Pierce wasn't credited.

April 29 movie: Pirates of the Caribbean. I already wrote this up once before, so this time I'll just say that it's really fun to watch with two hip girls who know the movie really well.

April 29 movie: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Due to my extreme tardiness on posting the movie list, there's not much for me to say about this. Except, wow! I loved it. I had some trepidation going in, but it was hilarious from beginning to end. I wasn't too concerned about changes to the story (especially after Georg mentioned that with a radio show, book and TV show in HGTG history, there really is no one canonical story).

April 27 movie: Three Sisters. Bette Davis plays one of three sisters who endure a series of melodramatic events around the turn of the century. I'd heard good things about this but I found it kind of a snoozer. I might have liked it more if I had read the book.

April 27 movie: Objective: Burma! Speaking of war movies which focus on one person. This one practically makes it seem like Errol Flynn pulled off the invasion of Burma single-handedly. In fact the British aren't involved at all according to this version. Which so pissed off the real British, who very much were involved in the real invasion, that this movie was banned from Britain for years after the war. Don't you hate the way Hollywood does that? American GIs are always solving Enigma or saving Leningrad or some such nonsense. Do they think we won't watch a movie about anyone but us?

April 19 movie: Edge of Darkness. This 1943 movie about a Norwegian fishing village who revolt against their Nazi overlords was an Errol Flynn vehicle, but in my opinion Flynn was one of the weaker actors in the picture. It's just too grim to be a good movie for him. He never gets to display the rakish humor that is his main appeal. Fortunately the supporting cast (Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston, Ruth Gordon, Judith Anderson) are all very good. Many war movies focus on one person, or maybe a small team, in isolation. This one creates a whole community. No small feat in my opinion.

April 18 movie: Monsoon Wedding. I confess, this didn't leave a lasting impression with me. There's a big wedding in India, and the groom is from America, and I don't think they had met each other beforehand, and the bride kind of almost cheats by the groom forgives her, and someone on the bride's side is tormented by memories of childhood sexual abuse by a family friend. That's about it.

April 18 movie: Grand Illusion. This was billed as a legendary antiwar movie by Jean Renoir, but it seemed to me to have at least as much to do with class as with war. It's about French airmen held in a German prison camp during WWI. The ranking officer of the prisoners (Pierre Fresnay) is an aristocrat who has more in common with the German camp commander (Erich von Stroheim) than with his fellow prisoners. Both recognize that they are of a dying breed, that the war marks the end of their era, and the future belongs to common men like Jean Gabin (another French prisoner). Religious conflict also surfaces: a Jewish prisoner's well-off family support all the prisoners with lavish care packages, but anti-Semitic sentiments appear when things get tough later on in the movie.

I enjoyed this a lot, and I think it belies the old saw that it's impossible to make an antiwar film. By never showing any battle scenes Renoir manages to avoid the trap of glorifying the violence that is ostensibly being condemned. Even the escape sequence is fairly restrained.

Trivia note: Roger Ebert claims that the tunnel digging and sandbags-in-the-trousers dispersal method from The Great Escape were inspired by Grand Illusion. But in fact, the sand dispersal techniques in The Great Escape were drawn directly from the real life incident the movie was based on. I guess the idea of escaping prisoners hiding bags of soil in their clothes wasn't a new one. Ebert also claims that the defiant singing of "La Marseillaise" from Casablanca comes from Grand Illusion, and I have no idea whether that's true.

April 16 movie: Horse Feathers. This is the Marx Brothers movie set in a school, and one of the best in my opinion. The scene in the classroom, with the spitball fight, the prim pinup poster, and Harpo burning the candle at both ends, is possibly my favorite Marx Brothers scene ever.

April ? movie: All This and Heaven Too. Bette Davis plays a governess who falls tragically in love with her employer, wealthy Frenchman Charles Boyer. Classic melodrama with lots of fun historical costumes and so forth. Virginia Weidler plays one of the children, and every time I see her I wonder why she was so great in The Philadelphia Story and so saccharin in every other movie.

April 6 movie: Sullivan's Travels. Excellent Preston Sturges movie about a director (Joel McCrea) who poo-poos moves that merely entertain, and wants to make a highbrow film called Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? But through a series of misadventures he ends up on a chain gang where he learns the value of movies as escapist entertainment. That description makes the movie sound overly heartwarming and even moralistic. But being Preston Sturges, there's a harsh edge to the film, especially the humor, that protects it from sentimentality.

April 5 movie: Marked Woman. Bette Davis plays a hostess in a nightclub run by the mob, who leads the other nightclub girls to take a stand against their mafia overlords after Davis' sister is killed. It's a good part, not typical for Davis. Humphrey Bogart plays the good cop who helps her.

April 3 movie: Sin City. What can I say about this that hasn't already been said? It was spectacularly violent, stylish, Frank Millerish, and the only good thing I can say about the portrayal of women is that the portrayal of men was almost as bad. I really enjoyed it. Although I could have lived without the misshapen lump they made of Mickey Rourke's face. Come to think of it, I could have lived without Mickey Rourke's character altogether.

April 1 movie: Tokyo Godfathers. I loved this! Wonderful story, sweet without being schmaltzy, about three homeless people in Tokyo who find an abandoned baby during winter. I was drawn in by the characters, really cared about them. This would be a good movie for people who think they don't like anime.

March 31 movies: Zatoichi and the Chess Expert, Zatoichi's Vengeance. It's been way too long, I don't remember anything about these movies. So I will take the easy way out and link to Georg's write-up instead.

March 30 movie: The Secret Fury. Now I remember, it was Claudette Colbert night. This was a noirish suspense movie about Colbert being driven insane and tricked into thinking she committed murder. I didn't really enjoy it. They made the mistake of putting Colbert in a mental hospital, thus removing her from a big chunk of the film. Plus she really shines in melodrama or comedy, which this was neither.

March 30 movie: Tomorrow is Forever. They must have been doing a special on long-lost spouses coming back from the dead. Orson Welles plays an idealistic young man who leaves his wife (Claudette Colbert) to join up in WWI. When he's lost and presumed dead, pregnant Colbert marries business magnate George Brent. Twenty years later Welles, now an Austrian scientist, returns to work for Brent.

This was an excellent weeper, with both Welles and Colbert in fine form. Also nice to see a very young Natalie Wood in one of her first acting jobs, as Welles' adopted daughter.

March 29 movie: My Favorite Wife. Seven years after losing his wife (Irene Dunne) in a shipwreck, Cary Grant has her declared legally dead so he can remarry. Lo and behold, just as they depart for their honeymoon, Dunne comes back from the dead!

This was funny but not the best outing for Grant, or Dunne, or Grant and Dunne together. The treatment of Grant's second wife is pretty cold. Gail Patrick, the villainess of My Man Godfrey, is good at playing unsympathetic characters. But I still felt really sorry for her.

March 28 movie: The Prodigal. Has it really been over a month since I wrote up a movie? Yikes. Well at least I have a good one to get me back into it. The Prodigal is one of the best Biblical movies out there. And by "best," I mean "flimsiest excuse to string together endless scenes of sin and debauchery." It's the story of what happened to the prodigal son, before he came back and became all prodigal and had a party thrown in his honor. Apparently he ran off to the big city and fell for Lana Turner, high priestess of Astarte. Who was the pagan goddess of sexy ladies. There's not much to this movie except Turner in her skimpy high priestess outfits, but isn't that enough? Turner also gets the line of the movie: "I've never known so useful a body slave."