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June 21 movie: Max Ernst. Skipping ahead a bit because I want to write about tonight's movie. It's a documentary about Max Ernst, which Georg thoughtfully rented before our trip, which will include the big Ernst retrospective at the Met.

So the movie was actually somewhat flawed as a biography. It tended to introduce characters and then drop them without explanation. People who seemed to me rather important, like Ernst's son and all his ex-wives. Also there was an unfortunate reliance on re-enactments. So much that the movie at times came off like one of those shows on Discovery about dogs saving lives or people having supernatural encounters. For instance a reading from Peggy Guggenheim's diary, about how when she first met Ernst he had hung his art from a tree to sell it, accompanies re-enacted footage of a mysterious hand lifting Ernst paintings into a tree. Dorothea Tannen's memoirs about living with Ernst in Arizona are read to endless footage of an antique car on Arizona roads, towing a trailer full of crated art. (At one point the car meets two men on horseback and you can faintly hear someone yell "Hi, Max!" Hilarious.)

On the other hand, the movie was chock full of images of Ernst's art. Which was why we watched it in the first place, so I can forgive the pseudo-documentary re-enactments. There were many pieces I'd never seen before, and also many that I'd only seen in black and white, in books. I'm already excited wondering how many of those pieces will be at the exhibit. According to the exhibit webpage they have Vox Angelica and The Robing of the Bride and the webpage also says they have copies of his 3 most important collage novels! Wowie wow wow. La femme 100 têtes, A little girl dreams of taking the veil and Une semaine de bonté. (Which I thought meant "A week of kindness," but in the movie they said it actually means "A week in which everything is cheaper." It must be slang, like "happy hour" in the US.) I can't wait to see them. I wonder if they removed and hung the pages so we can see the entire contents, or if the books are just in a case open to one page. I have a reproduction of one of the books (I think it's Une semaine de bonté) but it will be amazing to see an original printing.

The movie also had much interview footage of Ernst, both talking and working, which was interesting and made up for the interminable quotes from Tannen's rather pompous memoirs. ("The fact that we were both visionaries," she intoned, "was simply a marvelous coincidence to me.") There were even a couple of brief clips of that famous "Degenerate Art" show, including a photo of Hitler standing right next to an Ernst. That was creepy. Especially when they said that the painting in question was lost during the war.

June 15 movie: Mr. Skeffington. I love Bette Davis, and I love Claude Rains, and therefore I love this movie. But. The movie is seriously fucked up. Davis plays an utterly selfish woman who marries Rains for money, knowing he idolizes her but not caring, plays around on him for years, and eventually drives him away. She continues pretending to be the 18 year old belle of the ball for decades, until she's stricken with illness, loses her looks and finds out that none of her friends are really friends after all. Alone and unloved, she reunites with Rains. He's alone, penniless and blinded from a stint in a Nazi concentration camp so he can't tell that she isn't beautiful anymore. And she's been brought so low, so miserable and humiliated, that she's finally learned to appreciate him. Nothing like a happy ending.

It reminded me a lot of the ending of Jane Eyre. "Yay, you're blind and helpless and now I can take care of you!" What a screwed up concept of love! I didn't like it there and I don't like it here. I hardly want to mention the conceit of a Jewish man getting out of a concentration camp during the war and getting back to the US with nothing worse than blindness, as the movie was made in 1944 and Hollywood probably didn't know the truth yet.

But there are some great things about this movie: for one, excellent supporting work by Water Abel and Jerome Cowan. Also there's a very touching scene where Rains tries to convince his daughter to stay with her cold, unloving, Gentile mother, because he wants to protect her from anti-Semitism. I must say, though Davis gets more screen time Rains is really the best thing about the movie for me. His acting is so understated. The way he looks at Davis on the day they get married, when he realizes she doesn't love him at all, is heartbreaking.

June 13 movie: Kill Bill vol. 1. This is the third time I've seen this, and I was hoping I'd get off easy and be able to just link to my previous write-ups. But alas, both previous viewings were from before I started the movie list. Still, I find I have nothing to say. Everyone who's interested has already seen it multiple times.

Oh wait, I thought of something. Julie Dreyfus, who played Sofie (O-ren Ishii's lawyer) shows up as a judge on an episode of Iron Chef. I seem to recall that it was a battle with a major challenger, like Kandagawa or Ota. And Dreyfus shocked and appalled the rest of the panel by refusing to eat whale meat, which was served by the challenger.

June 13 movie: The Night of the Hunter. I had seen this movie before, but it didn't have the same impact on me the first time. I guess I just didn't get it. This time, oh man. It hit me with a wallop. Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish are all at the top of their games. Winters always blows me away. She's so vulnerable it's a little painful to watch.

The visuals are amazing. Almost expressionist (if I can say that without sounding too pompous). There are a few shots which have been haunting me since I saw it last week: the children's first encounter with Mitchum, when little boy's shadow is blotted out by Mitchum's shadow; Mitchum and Winters' final confrontation in a bedroom that looks like a chapel, and the way she lies in her bed like she's already dead; Winters' body sitting underwater in the car, her hair and the reeds flowing together; Mitchum futiley chasing the children's boat through the water, arms raised like some kind of wild creature.

[spoiler alert] The most shocking thing was near the end, when Mitchum is caught by the police. To show how badly I had missed the mark the first time I saw this movie, I remembered the end completely wrong: I remembered that after Mitchum was captured the children gave the money to Gish, and then they all lived happily and much more comfortably ever after.

Actually the little boy reacts exactly as when his own father (Peter Graves), the bank robber who set everything in motion, was captured at the beginning of the movie. When the boy yelled "No, don't! Take it; it's too much!" and threw the money on Mitchum's body, the hairs literally stood up on the back of my neck. It's rare to see such profound emotion communicated in so few words, by a child actor no less.

And that wasn't the only major issue to chew on in this movie: There was also Depression-era poverty: when the children beg for food as they travel along the river, they get lost in the crowds of other children also begging at every farmhouse. And Robert Mitchum's superbly creepy minister/sexual predator, first wearer of the oft-imitated "Love/Hate" knuckle tattoos. I don't know if the "evil preacher" was as much of a cliche in 1955 as it is now. But Mitchum's character avoids cliche by being, as far as I can tell, completely sincere in his faith. He seems to believe that God is at least okay with, if not outright approving of, him killing all those women so he can use their money to preach. Early in the film he prays "Not that You mind the killings. Your book is full of killings."

What really saves this movie from being an exercise in Christian-bashing is Lillian Gish. Her character practices what she preaches, having devoted her life to raising orphans. Talk about faith versus works! It's telling that Gish is the only female character, young or old, who isn't immediately seduced by Mitchum. She sees right through him and her force of will is stronger than his. (Not to mention her shotgun trumping his switchblade.) And I think her character narrowly avoids being overly saintly, despite the saccharine "they abide" speech at the end, due to the shot of her waiting for Mitchum with a gun in her lap.

The Night of the Hunter is not just a good, scary story with creepy visuals, but one of the best and most complex movies I've seen in a long time. Charles Laughton was a damned genius and I can't believe he never directed again.

June 11 movie: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Georg has already written about this so I'll just add that it was wonderful. The far future, sort of science fiction setting really played to Miyazaki's strength at creating fantastic, magical worlds. As Georg mentioned I did notice some visuals in common with Princess Mononoke. Notably the failed resurrection of the Giant Warrior reminded me visually of the death of the Spirit of the Forest in Mononoke. And as Alicia pointed out, we were bemused by the random glimpses of Nausicaa's bare behind. I keep telling myself that she was wearing cream colored leggings under that short skirt!

June 9 movie: Bells Are Ringing. I recorded this because I thought it was a Dean Martin movie. Actually it was a Judy Holliday movie in which Dean Martin has a small part. I'm not crazy about Holliday's singing and acting style; it's too slapstick for me. So having her front and center all the time was not such a good thing for me. Martin only had a couple of songs and only one good one ("Just In Time"). Overall a disappointment.

June 9 movie: The Ladykillers. This may be Alec Guinness' most famous Ealing movie (certainly since the remake), but I think it's also my least favorite. Maybe it's those creepy teeth. Or maybe just because it's meaner than the others. Then again, is The Ladykillers really more mean-spirited than Kind Hearts and Coronets? Hard to say. Oh well, I think All at Sea is still my favorite. Or maybe The Man in the White Suit.

June 8 movie: Wild Wild Planet. Will I sound as facile as a real movie critic if I say that Wild Wild Planet was wildly wildly disappointing? It was promoted as a mid-60s Italian sf movie about an army of inflatable women in miniskirts stealing the world's leaders by shrinking them. It sort of had all those elements, but was vastly less fun than that description makes it sound. It was MST3K bad. But not "so bad it's funny." Just bad.

June 7: The Incredibles. What fun! I enjoyed it immensely, and I suspect I would have enjoyed it even more if I were better versed with the superhero genre. At least I got the broad jokes, like the running gag about supervillains "monologuing." But you shouldn't be surprised that my favorite part by far was the Edith Head-esque superhero costume designer.

June 4: The Bishop Murder Case. Basil Rathbone plays Philo Vance, a private detective and an obvious knockoff of Sherlock Holmes. Vance goes around deducing all kinds of crazy things from the most minute observations, and is always right of course. I love Basil Rathbone but this movie wasn't very good.

June 4: Casino Royale. What a bizarre movie. David Niven plays James Bond as a stuttering prig trying to protect his virtue from a fate worse than death. Basically he spends the movie fighting off the ladies of Castle Anthrax. Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and a couple of other guys also play James Bond. I found the idea of this movie much funnier than the reality.

June 5: The Kennel Murder Case. Another Philo Vance movie. This one was moved to Long Island and starred William Powell as Vance. Powell was better than Rathbone in this part, the Sherlock Holmes vibe was toned way down, but it didn't make me forget Nick Charles. Like The Bishop Murder Case, this was one of those convoluted murder mysteries where every speaking role is someone shifty who seems guilty at some point. After awhile the identity of the actual killer seems random, like the writer drew names out of a hat. The setting (a big dog show) provided lots of cute doggies though. They showed several more Philo Vance movies on TCM, but each one had a different lead, and the star ratings got lower with each movie. So I didn't record any of the others.

June 5: Bathing Beauty. Red Skelton is spurned by Esther Williams when she runs off to take a job teaching at an all girls school. So he find a legal loophole and forces them to accept him as a student. With a premise like that, this movie should have been much funnier. Xavier Cugat (who everyone calls "Coogie") and Harry James costar.

May 20 movie: Sweet Charity. I didn't know it in advance, but it turns out this movie is based on Nights of Cabiria. Sanitized a bit of course: Charity isn't a prostitute like Cabiria, she's a "dance hall girl." Which is a Hollywood euphamism for prostitute (just like in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly was also a prostitute in the original and a dance hall girl in the movie). And I must say, I like Shirley MacLaine but she's no Giulietta Masina. The plot is basically the same although they mess around with a few things. For instance Sweet Charity begins with the ending of Cabiria: the heroine having her life savings stolen by the man she thinks is the love of her life. Except in Cabiria the guy threatened to push her off a cliff but eventually just ran off with the money. In Sweet Charity he pushes her off a bridge in Central Park, with no resulting injuries.

Still, Sweet Charity, like Nights of Cabiria, ends with the heroine giving up everything for love and then being dumped, left with nothing, but still not giving up hope. Except that, being Hollywood, they had to beat us over the head with it. You could see that Cabiria's spirit was unbroken just by the look in her eyes. Charity needed a title card that read "And she lived hopefully ever after" to get the message across. I heard that after poor audience response, they rereleased it with an alternate ending where Charity's boyfriend thinks better of it and takes her back. Ye gods! Remaking Nights of Cabiria as a musical was bad enough, but giving it a happy ending is a crime.

I recorded this for 2 reasons: Ricardo Montalban and Sammy Davis. Either one of them makes a movie worth watching, but both? Wowie wow wow! Too bad both parts are small, and they don't share any scenes. Montalban plays the Italian movie star who picks up Charity after his girlfriend walks out, then Charity ends up hiding all night in the closet when the girlfriend comes back. Davis played the preacher of a hippie church, a character with no equivalent in Nights of Cabiria. Well, maybe the hypnotist. Anyway Davis has to talk this idiotic "hep cat" dialogue, but he does get a fabulous dance number with his hippie flock.

I must be having some kind of mental block on writing up these last few movies. Maybe if I do them all at once, then it will be easier to keep up going forward.

May 6: All at Sea. Another Alec Guinness movie from Ealing. Guinness plays a seasick navy captain who buys an amusement park on a pier, in place of a ship, then defends it from the greedy town council who want to knock it down to make room for a crooked public works project. Like all Ealing movies it's very funny, and very sweet, but has enough nasty humor to keep it from being saccharin. Guinness also briefly plays the ghosts of his seafaring ancestors in an obvious nod to Kind Hearts and Coronets. Which is on TCM again this week, if anyone is interested.

May 8: Kung Fu Hustle. So! Much! Fun! The landlady and landlord were my favorite characters, especially that scene in the casino where they first confront the super villain. I loved this and I so badly want to see The God of Cookery now.

May 13: Predator. Sometimes nothing satisfies like a big dumb action movie. This is actually pretty good, though it gets a little ridiculous at the end, when it goes all A-Team and the alien bizarrely goes away and gives Schwarzenegger enough time to build all those spiked log traps and make a longbow and arrows out of twigs and vines and give himself war paint made of mud and then stand on a tall rock beating his chest and doing a Tarzan yell. That was stupid. But up to that point Predator holds together fairly well.

May 15: The Exterminating Angel. Another one of those "can't believe I hadn't seen this yet" movies. I found a review online that claimed the meaning of this movie was that the bourgeoisie are so stupid they would starve without their servants to feed them, and can't even walk out the door without the proletariat to guide them. Which seems like a slightly myopic interpretation of the movie. But then again, Bunuel was a Marxist so maybe there's something to it.

June 1 movie: June Bride. Good lord I'm behind in writing up movies. Actually I haven't watched hardly any in the past month, but still that's no excuse. I will get caught up at some point, but for now I'm skipping ahead to today's movie.

Which is June Bride, a Bette Davis comedy I'd seen before. Davis and Robert Montgomery are old flames who end up working together on a ladies magazine (actually she's the editor and he works for her), doing a story on a wedding in Indianapolis. The wonderful Mary Wickes has a supporting role as a stylist for the magazine. The movie is hilarious and I loved it up until the very end, when Davis throws away her career to "carry luggage all around Europe" for Montgomery so he can go back to being an unsuccessful foreign correspondent. I guess it was too much to ask that in 1948 they could make a movie about a career woman who gets to keep her job. Ugh. I want to rewatch The Sweet Smell of Success now.